Launch Pad (35 page)

Rob smiled.

“I knew it,” he said.

“How do we handle the press?” Doug asked.

“Leave that to me,” Rob said, smoothly. “I’ll send out a general release lauding all the Verley astronomers’ input to the upcoming launches – but leaving his name out.”

O O O

Over the next few days, Doug winced every time he checked in with social media. Spectromancy was indeed trending all over the net. The press babbled about the possibility of problems, shrieking that ATSA was about to send innocent human beings off into the great unknown based on occult science. He reassured anyone who posted that everything was fine.

When he boarded the shuttle for Earth, the speech he planned to make at the conference ricocheted around in his mind. The rest of the astronomers boarded silently behind him.

No one talked during the hours-long flight as the craft spiraled down, homing in on Mother Earth. Most of them were working, listening to or viewing entertainment, or just staring out of the portholes. All of them were thinking hard about the upcoming conference.

The moment they stepped out of the shuttle in Jerusalem spaceport, everyone’s tablets went “ping!” with newly received messages. Doug glanced at his own list. At the top was one from Rob, who was waiting on the pad outside.

Doug found him next to the ramp leading up to the open-air boarding area with the blazing, dry heat of the Israeli desert. They hurried to get in under the terminal roof.

“Doug!”

Christie came running after them and drew them aside from the passing crowd. She beamed at them.

“It’s published!” she whispered. “I can tell you now.”

Doug held up a finger.

“No, let me tell you.” He held out his tablet and beckoned the others to look. “The interstitial data came from wobbles. You discovered a tremulus that was not present or visible at other times. Just these.” He showed them the timetable.

Rob pointed at the list. “I remember this one. I was here for that. And that one.

Was it something to do with me?”

“Yes!” Doug said.

“You’re kidding—my presence during observation indicates the habitability of an exoplanet?”

“Not exactly,” Doug said with a cocked eyebrow. Rob grinned ruefully.

“No, but what happened while I was present? Those stars weren’t occluded by other intermediary bodies. Space is a little dusty, but otherwise clear.”

“Nothing.”

Then Rob smiled broadly.

“What happened before?” he asked.

“The shuttle docked!” Doug said. “Every time the shuttle attaches itself to the platform, there is a minuscule wobble. Several of us have noticed it. It’s a damned nuisance. Jake told me he had to throw out tons of calculations that were scotched when the platform moved. All the telescopes have to be recalibrated every time.”

“Right!” Christie said, astonished. “How did you know?”

“It’s that simple?” Rob asked.

“It had to be,” Doug said. “We’re all using the same telescopes, and what looked like identical readings. But they weren’t.”

“No one else was using what they saw as junk data,” Christie explained. “We’re all looking for the obvious, emissions and broadcasts, as well as atmospheric data, to indicate whether one of those planets has an advanced civilization or not. Clouds and things change the profile of the planet, make some people think they have a population when they don’t. I found that when the platform jiggled, it also moved the telescopes slightly. The others threw out that data. I didn’t. What I saw in the times everybody else saw as wobbles told me whether or not the anomalies were signs of advanced life or not. And when they weren’t, I passed those along to ATSA as possible sites for settlement.”

“So why didn’t you tell anyone about this right away?”

Christie looked sheepish.

“I thought everyone else already knew. The technique has been around since the 21st century. Dr. Nicholas Cowan called it ‘rotational unmixing.’ I added it on top of the method originated by Dr. Jeff Cooke at Swinburne University in old Australia for examining distant supernovae. We all received the same data from the telescopes and spectrographs. I was surprised that no one else came to the same conclusions I did. Then I realized no one else was paying attention to the interim data. I had something I could write a paper about. You have no idea how nice it was to be the first name on an abstract for a change.”

“They all deleted the wobbles,” Rob said. “So you made it look like magic.”

She looked rueful.

“Yeah, about that. What do we do about Conrad raising doubts about superstition and all that? I’m not used to being ashamed of my work.”

Doug drew her along the corridor toward the exit with a grin on his face that he couldn’t suppress.

“We’re all writers. There’s nothing wrong with your science. Let’s divert the attention back where it belongs. Change the narrative. Interpret the data for your audience. Rob and I have been talking. If you don’t mind me taking a page from your own book, so to speak, I think we can make this seeming PR disaster into a big success.”

He transferred a small file from his tablet to hers. She read the scant paragraphs and her eyes widened.

“What a great idea,” she said. “I can do that on my head.” For the first time she seemed her old, quietly enthusiastic self. She looked around at the crowds passing by. “I’ve got to find someone. I’ll see you on the panel tomorrow.”

She strode away from them and disappeared in the burst of sunlight from the terminal door.

“I knew it,” Rob said. “This is going to be a great conference.”

O O O

The enormous amphitheatre was overflowing with humanity: scientists, reporters, bureaucrats, pundits, politicians, and thousands of fans of the space program. Doug passed among the crowd, trying to ignore the unfamiliar feeling of being jostled. He was surprised how many faces he knew. Some were colleagues, but many he recognized from their pictures on the Internet.

Crowds had formed around the astronauts. He spotted Captain Ready towering over the circle of admirers, and assumed the others must be close by. But by far the largest group was around Conrad Barlow. For the first time he had a devoted audience.

For the last time, Doug hoped.

The chronometer function on his tablet went off. He excused himself from his conversation and made his way up toward the dais. Throughout the audience, he noticed small colored lights. Each attendee was furnished with a light to identify him-or herself when they wanted to ask a question. In a room as huge as that, it helped the moderators spot them.

The first panel was on the colony ships themselves. Between themselves, engineers tended to talk in a language that laymen found it difficult to follow, but like the astronomers, the techs employed a public relations director to translate for them. Graphic after graphic followed, showing the living quarters aboard the ships. They were enormous vessels, about half the length of the Verley platform. The graphics on the gigantic retina screen behind them spun in and out, showing an exploded view of the interior in detail.

All three ships employed the same drive system that had been created to boost the Landis probes through the wormholes. Matthew Rotundo and Matthew Kressel, two slender men, one dark-haired and one fair-haired, inventors of the Matt-R/Anti-Matt-R™ engines, avidly fielded questions about their acceleration system, power sources and plant shielding. The Suma ships also featured an emergency drive, the Wasserman “Ruby Slippers” runway system that laid out a series of diborene pellets in space to give the starships the power they needed to attain acceleration to leave orbit in case of trouble. The “Ruby Slippers” drive was intended to be used in future to return cargo ships, which would be built in the colonies, to Earth on a semi-regular basis once the settlements had been well established.

Doug almost felt that to have the astronomers’ panel after the tech panel was anticlimactic, but the crowd grew even larger as he and his staff took their places on the dais.

Conrad got there first, sliding into the center seat until he was told to move by a member of the convention staff, a dark-haired woman in her fifties, who pointed at Doug. Very grudgingly, Conrad rose. Doug took the middle position. Conrad deliberately plunked down beside him, daring the T-shirted organizer to shift him again. The woman shrugged and swapped the name plates. Tiffany, Jake, Christie, Amir and Farah joined them. Christie sat as far from Conrad as she could. The dark-haired woman brought them pitchers of water and bowls containing small snacks. Doug spotted Rob down in the front row among the reporters and their cameras. Director McDonald introduced them, and turned the floor over to Doug.

“I’d like to thank everyone for coming today,” Doug began, only glancing down now and again at his notes. “We’re taking the next step toward the stars. I’ve been looking up at them all my life, but now we’re sending people out to live among them. The Verley staff is proud to have been a part of that.”

He warmed to his topic, finding the words he had so carefully crafted coming easily to his memory. He described the early days of the project, how the platform had come to be constructed, and how the astronomers had formed a community in space.

“I’ll let everybody on the panel tell us about their work,” he said. “Thank you.” He sat down to loud applause, and grabbed his water glass.

Amir at the far end of the table, started off the discussion. His field was interstellar radiation. Doug had read his papers, and admired how well he explained the perils of travelers once they were outside Earth’s protective atmosphere. A bunch of audience lights went on, showing they had questions for him. Doug called on a few, then went on to Christie.

“My field of study is exoplanets,” she began. “I’ve been on the Verley platform since it became operational. Some of my observations have added to the data that ATSA used to choose the systems that we will colonize.”

“You’re pulling them out of your crystal ball!” bellowed a man holding a blue light up above his head. Christie hesitated.

Doug leaned into the microphone before him.

“We’re not taking questions yet, sir.”

“Why not?” a woman with a red light just behind Rob shouted. “I read that the whole Verley project is mumbo-jumbo! It’s all fake, like the moon landing!”

Doug glanced to his left. Conrad was positively triumphant. These people had to have been plants of his.

“I’m sorry, but what did you hear that led you to believe that?” Doug asked, with a friendly smile at the woman. “There are hundreds of scientists working on the settlement project. Why concentrate on what Dr. Yant did?”

“She practices spectromancy! That’s not science,” said a man with a green light. “How does it work? Do you use a telescope, or do you see them in your head?”

“She’s a fake scientist! They’re sending astronauts out into nothing!”

“All right!” Christie shouted, her face red. Doug sent a glance of worry toward Farah and Tiffany, but they signed back that they had it under control. She pounded her palm on the table for quiet. “All right! I guess my secret’s out! I couldn’t have kept it much longer anyhow.”

“Secret?” Doug asked.

“That she’s been stealing other people’s research and making it look like hers,” Conrad boomed into his mike.

“No,” Christie said, with a little smile. “That’s not it at all. Dr. Barlow, I assume you didn’t have time to read my paper on rotational unmixing and overlapping imaging data? Every time a shuttle arrived or departed from the Verley, I found an unusual phenomenon: a burst of several highly accurate scans, all focusing on the same star. I guess you threw out that data, but I kept it, and it allowed me to have this breakthrough. And that was what enabled me to scientifically draw my original research to find that these planets are viable for human settlement. Both are centuries-old techniques, but sometimes the old ways are not bad.”

“Exactly,” said Jake. “I’ve run the data myself. I saw it.”

Tiffany nodded. “I confirmed her hypotheses, too. It’s all there.”

Doug turned to look Conrad full in the face. “Don’t they use this technique in X-ray astronomy as well? We can always send you the material so you can be brought up to date.”

“Did you have any further questions, Dr. Barlow?” Christie asked, innocently.

The room fell absolutely silent. None of the thousands of people in the room made a sound. All eyes turned to Conrad Barlow. He stared down at his hands without even blinking.

When the silence became overwhelming, Christie bent over her mike and smiled at the audience. “But Dr. Barlow did me a favor by creating a public awareness of spectromancy. And now that we have established the scientific basis of the work I have been doing, let’s talk about something fun.”

She put a hand down on her tablet. Brilliant colors erupted behind them. Doug turned to see.

On the retina screen, a rectangular graphic shimmered into being. Doug recognized the rainbow effect as a reading from a spectrograph, probably the image of the element neon. Across the center was a single word: Spectromancy. It looked like a book cover. Doug grinned. It was a book cover. In just a few hours, Christie had put one together. And he bet that she had the whole pseudoscience worked out.

“I wanted to wait until the ships actually launched before I published this,” Christie went on, “but Dr. Barlow made me jump the gun. I believe in giving to science, not living off it. Just because I’m good at this doesn’t mean I am bad at my profession. Astronomy is my life. Fortune-telling is my hobby, and a lucrative one it is, too.” Guffaws echoed throughout the room. Beside him, Conrad squirmed, and Doug enjoyed his discomfiture. “Director McDonald, I apologize for interrupting a science conference with a commercial message, but I would like to show you a few details from my next book. We’re all so excited about the colonization project that I came up with a new form of divination.

“Spectrographs are used by astronomers for determining the composition of stars many light years away. Each element presents its own color pattern. It can work on human beings, too.”

A few technicians wearing Turzillo Labs jumpsuits pushed rolling carts into the room.