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Analog SFF, June 2011
by Dell Magazine Authors
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Science Fiction

Dell Magazines
www.analogsf.com

Copyright ©2011 by Dell Magazines

NOTICE: This work is copyrighted. It is licensed only for use by the original purchaser. Making copies of this work or distributing it to any unauthorized person by any means, including without limit email, floppy disk, file transfer, paper print out, or any other method constitutes a violation of International copyright law and subjects the violator to severe fines or imprisonment.

Cover art by Vincent DiFate

Cover design by Victoria Green

CONTENTS

Reader's Department: EDITORIAL: OVER THE RIVER AND THROUGH THE WOODS by Stanley Schmidt

Serial: ENERGIZED: PART I OF IV by Edward M. Lerner

Reader's Department: IN TIMES TO COME

Science Fact: NANOPARTICLES FOR DRUG DELIVERY by Carol Wuenschell

Novelette: CITIZEN-ASTRONAUT by David D. Levine

Department: THE ALTERNATE VIEW: THE GREAT MISSILE MYSTERY OF 2010 by Jeffery D. Kooistra

Department: BIOLOG: DAVID LEVINE by Richard A. Lovett

Short Story: TAKE ONE FOR THE ROAD by Jamie Todd Rubin

Short Story: STONE AGE by Alastair Mayer

Novelette: KAWATARO by Alec Nevala-Lee

Reader's Department: THE REFERENCE LIBRARY by Don Sakers

Reader's Department: BRASS TACKS

Reader's Department: UPCOMING EVENTS by Anthony Lewis

* * * *

Vol. CXXXI No. 6 June 2011

Stanley Schmidt, Editor

Trevor Quachri, Managing Editor

Peter Kanter: Publisher

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First issue of Astounding January 1930 (c)

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Reader's Department: EDITORIAL: OVER THE RIVER AND THROUGH THE WOODS
by Stanley Schmidt

As Thanksgiving 2010 approached, travelers bound for Grandmother's house (or wherever) anticipated their journey with more than the traditional holiday trepidation, for two reasons. The agonies of autumnal holiday travel may seem irrelevant in midsummer, but they're anything but. The same problems seem more than likely to recur, quite possibly in more severe form, the next time around; and now is the time to do something about them—if anybody really wants to. In any case, the actions and reactions of both sides—government and protesters—provide an instructive illustration of a larger and more general danger.

And it just may be relevant to another holiday that does occur in summer.

The first concern facing travelers on the day before Thanksgiving was the array of unprecedentedly intrusive security procedures that had been recently instituted at airports, which many travelers would be experiencing for the first time. The second was the threat—much heralded and advocated on the internet, though not much happened in reality—of massive protests against those security measures.

The new antiterrorist procedures, in case you've been hanging out with Rip Van Winkle and missed hearing about them, involve (a) full-body scanners, which use one of two types of low-level radiation to show inspectors a detailed image of a passenger's body unobscured by clothing, and (b) full-body patdowns, at a level previously regarded as appropriate only for medical exams or couples who know each other very well, as an alternative for passengers who object strongly to (a).

No third alternative was offered, except, “If you don't like it, don't fly.”

Not surprisingly, many people did object strongly to both (a) and (b), saying that the Transportation Security Administration had gone too far—especially after watching widely circulated online video clips of things like TSA agents tormenting three-year-olds lest their teddy bears turn out to be bombs. At least one columnist, Al Lewis (of Dow Jones Newswires), suggested that the TSA itself had in effect turned into a terrorist organization. And a movement grew on the internet urging travelers to insist en masse on having detailed patdowns rather than detailed body imaging—which, since they take longer, would have resulted in a massive clogging and disruption of air travel on the busiest day of the year.

That didn't happen, but John S. Pistole, head of the TSA, was concerned enough about the prospect to call Joe Sharkey, who writes a travel column for The New York Times, to try to justify his agency's position and head off the threat. His concerns sounded admirable: he did not want some people's holidays ruined by other people's protests. He acknowledged that the new procedures were invasive, but also reminded everyone that “the threats are real.”

Indeed they are. Anyone who remembers 9/11—and that means pretty much everyone—knows that. But is it possible to protect against every threat? Or does there come a point at which the protective measures are worse than what they purport to protect against? In other words, is there a point at which “enough is enough"? If so, does that point still lie ahead of us, or have we already passed it?

We've all heard, so often that it has become a cliché, the argument that, “If x saves even one life, it's worthwhile and we should do it.” But is that always true? Let's think this through to its logical conclusion.

The more a security inspection can detect, the more chances it has of finding a weapon that might be missed by some less thorough technique. Therefore, clearly, either a full-body scan or a full-body patdown is better than the quaint approaches of bygone days, because they can reveal more kinds of objects than those more timid methods. But why stop there? When the currently new methods were announced we heard cries of, “What's next? Cavity searches? Requiring everybody to fly naked, with no luggage?”

Well, why not? Those would certainly reduce the uncertainty even more. And if it saves even one life . . .

Of course, if we really want to eliminate every possible risk and save every possible life, we'll have to insist that these things be done for everybody. Never mind bleeding hearts who fear that that three-year-old will be too traumatized ever to fly again. Somebody could plant a bomb in a teddy bear, so we'll have to check every one of those. And we can't draw a line at three-year-olds—not even the youngest babies can be trusted. True, they're not likely to concoct diabolical plots on their own, but diabolical adults could plant something on them. So they, too, must be searched thoroughly. (I'll leave it to wiser heads than mine to figure out the exact logistics if there are no exemptions for diapers.)

And why stop with physical searches? Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and positron emission tomography (PET) can already tell us something about what specific parts of a brain are active at a given moment, and better neurological scanning technologies are being developed all the time. When they improve to the point where we can tell specifically what a person is thinking or feeling, don't we owe it to ourselves to take full advantage of that, to detect malevolent intent before it can be translated into action? If it means that people have to get to the airport days instead of mere hours before their flights, and if fares have to rise astronomically to pay for all this, surely those are just minor inconveniences, if even one life is saved.

All this may sound too farfetched even for discussion, and I'll grant you that hardly anyone would accept these extreme measures if somebody proposed implementing them all at once, right now. But as I've pointed out on numerous previous occasions, people will accept astonishingly huge changes if they're imposed not all at once, but as a series of little steps, each of which seems innocuous or even desirable in and of itself—and people's idea of “innocuous” and “desirable” can change radically when they're operating in a state of induced panic. To many people now, suggestions of cavity searches and nude travel without luggage seem unthinkable—but they thought the same thing five or six years ago about the measures now in use. Twenty-five years ago they thought the same thing about much milder measures that we now take for granted, like the “liquid limits” and the requirement to put shoes and coats on the conveyor instead of wearing them. (Don't believe me? Go digging in your archives and reread my editorials “Acid Raindrops” [February 1985] and “Softening Us Up” [September 2005].)

So when a TSA spokesman tells us that they don't plan to do anything more intrusive than they're doing now, I consider that meaningless. They may be telling the truth, in that they have no such plans now; but that doesn't mean that they won't in another four years, after somebody finds a new way to scare them.

If and when that happens, I consider it highly likely that people will protest, just as a few did last Thanksgiving—but then they'll go along with the latest round of “unthinkable” measures, just as they have in the past. Pistole told the Times, “When somebody gets on a plane, they want to know that everybody else—O.K., maybe not themselves but everyone else—has been thoroughly screened.” I haven't seen any hard numbers to convince me that he's right about most people thinking that way, but I do know that some do. I've seen enough human behavior to believe that the same individuals are quite capable of demanding maximal screening for everybody else, even as they grumble about it when they're on the receiving end—while blissfully unaware of the inconsistency of their position.

So on my more cynical days, I suspect that not only are full-body scans and patdowns here to stay, but cavity searches, “check your clothes at the door,” and brain scans are only a matter of time. But on less cynical days, I sometimes dream that eventually a more balanced view will prevail—that significant numbers of people will realize that if they want absolute safety for themselves, they must be prepared to accept the same indignities they wish on others.

And that even those will never be enough, because no matter how many dangers you anticipate and guard against, nature or your fellow creatures will always manage to come up with another one. Flying, even with the present level of terrorism, is one of the safest things we do; but any sane person who boards a plane must accept the reality that freak weather or mechanical failure could bring the plane down. The probability is small, but it's always there; so you do what you reasonably can to minimize it, expect airlines and governments to do the same, and simply live with the slight residual risk.

Maybe, in the last analysis, terrorism is just another risk like those others. Certainly we want to take reasonable precautions against it; but we may have to realize at some point that not all precautions are reasonable, and that if we insist on fanatical and unrealistic pursuit of freedom from the slightest imaginable risk, we may have to give up far too many other freedoms.

The cumulative effect of large numbers of small steps can be hard to undo, and periodically along any such path it's a good idea to ask, “Is this trip necessary?” and “How far do I need, or want, to go?” I realize this is a complicated problem—and it's just one of many. But in this or any other, seizing on any one thing as The Answer, without thinking through where it would really lead, is asking for trouble on the grandest scale.

Copyright © 2011 Stanley Schmidt

[Back to Table of Contents]

Serial: ENERGIZED: PART I OF IV
by Edward M. Lerner

Even—maybe especially—when problems have become overwhelming, don't expect agreement on what to do about them. . . .

PROLOGUE

Saturday, February 22, 2020

Earth hovered, almost at full phase, breathtakingly magnificent. Distance concealed the works—and blights—of man, and the globe seemed pristine. Its oceans sparkled. Its cloud tops and icecaps glistened. And it was huge: The natural moon, had it been visible, would have appeared only about one-hundredth as wide.

Earth seemed close enough to touch through the exercise room's tinted dome, but Gabriel Campbell held firmly to the handles of the stationary bicycle. Not that he relied on the strength of his grip: He wore a seatbelt, too, and straps bound his feet to the pedals. This world had too little gravity to notice.

His eyes alternated between the vista overhead and the image of Jillian, his fiancée, which he had taped to the bike's digital readout. Strawberry-blond hair cascaded down her neck and shoulders. Freckles lay scattered across that most adorable, pert little nose. Her clear green eyes—and more so, her smile—all but outshone the Earth.

He was here, on Phoebe, to make a future for both: the Earth and the love of his life. In just one more month, he would go home. Then he and Jillian would marry and they would never be apart again.

Basking in earthlight, his legs pumping furiously on the bike, Gabe was pleasantly tired, professionally fulfilled, emotionally satisfied—unaware that before two hours had passed, he would be dead.

Phoebe completed an orbit around the Earth in just less than six hours, and as Gabe pedaled, darkness crept across the face of the world. The changing phase of the Earth told him he had been working out for almost two hours.

Sweat soaked his Minnesota Twins T-shirt, and still ahead of him was a stint on the not-quite weight machine: the resistive exercise device. Without exercise, muscles atrophied and bones lost mass in Phoebe's minuscule gravity. Four hours of daily workout were mandated, but he would have worked out anyway. He patted Jillian's picture. “I'll be plenty fit for you when I come home.” Fit, and horny as the devil.

And with no way up here to spend a dime, he would have banked six months’ salary with which to build their future. The pay was damned good, too, much higher than anything he could get on the ground. He tried not to think of the premium as hazardous-duty pay.

The bike whirred. A damper rattled in the ventilation system. Voices, indistinct, blended with dueling music players. And then, from the comm unit clipped to his sleeve, soft chimes. Gabe tapped the unit. “Campbell.”

“We've got a bot in trouble,” Tina Lundgren said, her voice throaty. She was deputy station chief of Phoebe base and in command on the night shift. Not that day or night had any meaning here. The station followed Eastern time for the convenience of folks on the ground. “In sector twelve.”

“And it's my turn to go outside.” Hell, Gabe was happy to go out. Only a handful of geologists had ever left Earth, and he was one of them. Had there been any way to get Jillian up here, he would want to stay forever. “What's the problem?”

“Stupid bot tangled itself up in a rock jumble. Otherwise, it's healthy.”

Likely a thirty-second task, after an hour or so to suit up and trek halfway across the moonlet. Good deal.

Tina contacting him meant that he was in charge of the excursion. But no one went outside alone—too many things could go wrong. Gabe asked, “Who else is on call tonight?”

“Thaddeus and Bryce. Shall I give one of them a holler for you?”

“I'll take Thad. Newbie could use the practice.” Gabe eased off his pedaling. “And no, don't call. I'm in the gym. I need to cool off first.” Outside was not the place to get stiff and inflexible.

After winding down for a few minutes, Gabe unstrapped his slippers from the pedals, unbelted, and, carefully dismounting, firmly planted a slipper on one of the deck's Velcro strips. Trailing damp footprints, he crossed the exercise room, the Velcro pads on the soles of his slippers zip-zipping with each step.

At the hatchway he took hold of the handrail that ran along the corridor ceiling. The Tarzan swing was the quickest way through the station. Many of his crewmates would be asleep, and he kept a Tarzan yell to himself.

Thaddeus Stankiewicz was not in his quarters, the tiny common room, or the even tinier sanitary facilities. When Gabe tried the machine shop, the hatch squeaked on its hinges.

Thad was new to Phoebe and micro-gee; his surprised twitch launched him from his stool and scattered whatever he was working on. Gabe saw cordless soldering pistols, metal tubes, metal rods, wire coils—and, writhing free at the end of its oxygen and acetylene hoses, a cutting torch tipped with blue flame.

Gabe leapt, catching the torch by a hose and with his other hand giving Thad a firm shove clear. The push—equal and opposite reactions—brought Gabe to a near halt at mid room, above the deck. About a foot: Call it thirty seconds hang time. That was plenty long to give Thad a tongue-lashing for his carelessness.

Newbie looked so flustered that Gabe relented. He killed the torch and merely glared as Thad, who by then had grabbed a bench edge, began gathering parts (of what?) and cramming them into his pockets. Stankiewicz was short, broad-shouldered, and intense. His thick black eyebrows and deep-set eyes made him seem perpetually brooding. He wore a standard station jumpsuit, the royal-blue version, with its integral Velcro slippers.

Finally touching down, Gabe slid his foot until it engaged a Velcro strip. “What are you working on?”

Thad shrugged, looking uneasy. Embarrassed? “Personal project.”

The station offered precious little privacy, so Gabe let it go. “A surface rover got stuck. You and I are up to extract it.”

“Okay.” Thad kept grabbing and stowing the scattered pieces of his project. “Almost done.”

“Leave that, Newbie. We have a job to do.”

They made their way to the main air lock. The closer they got, the more dark streaks and splotches marked the gray metal panels that lined the corridor. You couldn't help but track Phoebe's dust and grime into the station, and once inside, the stuff found its way everywhere. The crew vacuumed endlessly, but it was a losing battle.

Their spacesuits were filthier than the interior halls and no longer permitted in most of the station. Once you couldn't change in a closet-sized cabin, bracing yourself between opposing walls, the best place to suit up was inside the air lock.

In the air lock, back to back and studiously ignoring each other, the two men stripped. Even more studiously they ignored jostling and brushing into each other.

The body suits fit snugly against bare skin. Donning a very elastic body suit in the all-but-nonexistent gravity was like squirming into a sausage casing—underwater. Every nudge and bump sent them careening off bulkheads and decks and each other. Still, these mechanical counterpressure suits beat the hell out of bulky, pressurized spacesuits. Gabe had tried an old-style suit once in training. It was easier to get into, but way more massive. Inertia varied with mass, not weight, and fighting that much inertia was exhausting.

Gabe finally wriggled into his suit and helped Thad finish getting into his own. “Check me out,” Gabe said. He launched himself, with a bit of practiced footwork, into a slow, midair pirouette.

“You look fine,” Thad said.

The answer had come too quickly. Anywhere that the suit failed to settle securely into place, fluid would pool beneath. Gaping was the major issue with the skin suits, with the crotch area especially problematical. It wasn't as if Gabe wanted another guy checking out his crotch, but he wanted even less to have blisters down there from an ill-fitting suit. “Check it again,” he snapped.

Done properly, spacesuit checkout took time. Eventually, though, their suits were wrinkle-free and without sags or pouching. They mounted and sealed the compression neck rings to which their helmets would attach. They slipped on their backpacks and checked readouts for everything: oxygen, heating, sensors, radio, batteries. Their helmets and air hoses were locked into place.

They stowed their indoor clothes, Thad's pockets clanking, in lockers near the air lock; they buckled on tool belts and tether reels, stuck emergency maneuvering guns in their holsters, and pulled on gloves and boots. Ready at last, Gabe configured the air-lock controls for surface access.

“Oscar, end-to-end system check,” Gabe said. Status messages, the text all green, scrolled down the inside of his helmet visor. He had named the voice-activated user interface Oscar as a nod to the suit in Have Spacesuit, Will Travel, a book he had loved as a child—and because, crammed into this suit, he knew how a sardine must feel.

“Comm check, Thad,” Gabe radioed on the public channel.

“Back at you,” Stankiewicz said.

Gabe called, “Tina? Two robot wranglers set to go outside.”

“Happy trails,” Tina answered, yawning. “Stay in touch.”

“Roger that.” Gabe tapped the airlock control panel. Pump noises faded as air was sucked into holding tanks. He felt the first stirrings of warmth from the heating elements in the thermal layer of his suit. Light poured inside as the outer hatch opened. Shrunken to a crescent, the Earth still shone more brightly than a full moon. For now, the moon itself remained hidden behind the Earth.

Newbie gestured at the ladder. “Age before beauty.”

“Pearls before swine.”

Gabe grabbed the ladder rails and climbed. He paused on the third rung, with only his head and shoulders above the surface. The horizon was freakishly close. Despite earthlight, the landscape was only a dim presence, less reflective than asphalt. Without its coat of rocks, soot, and hydrocarbons, Phoebe's ice—the ice they were here to mine, the ice that could change everything—would have streamed off as a spectacular comet tail.

His grandparents still talked about where they were, what they had been doing, when they first heard that President Kennedy had been shot. For his parents’ generation, and even for some of Gabe's own, the event seared into the collective consciousness was 9/11. The World Trade Centers crashing down had marked Gabe too—he had been sixteen that day—but the news that had truly marked him, had changed everything for him, even more than 9/11 or the Crudetastrophe, had come a mere five years ago.

As though it were yesterday, he remembered: a rumor at first, run rampant on the blogosphere, then the hastily called presidential address. A space rock, a big one, was headed Earth's way. It was not dinosaur-killer sized, not quite, and the likelihood it would hit Earth was only one in a thousand—but no sane person would leave home against those odds, let alone bet the future of civilization. The rock had to be deflected, and despite its many woes only the United States had the capability to tackle the job.

But the excitement, the game changer, was this: Rather than deflect the rock away, NASA would undertake to aim it more precisely at Earth. To ensure capture of the object. To exploit its resources and forever change space exploration.

And to hell with whether anyone else thought this was a bad idea. Gabe had never encountered much in the way of presidential leadership. It was exhilarating.

He had long ago lost his youthful interest in the space program. Decade after decade of pointlessly circling the world, scarcely skimming the top of the atmosphere: What was the point? No one cared anymore.

But suddenly there was a reason. Saving the planet. Maybe, in the process, pulling the country out of an economic abyss. And to be honest—adventure. Faster than the president could finish speaking that night, Gabe had vowed he would be an astronaut. Somehow.

That rock—only it had turned out to be far more complex and interesting, a dormant comet—was now Earth's second moon. Was Phoebe. And once again, he was about to explore its ancient surface.

“The view here is less interesting,” Thad radioed from the bottom of the air lock.

“Sorry.” Gabe unreeled four feet of tether, clipping its carabiner around the staked cable labeled “sector twelve.” He clipped a second tether to the guide cable before grabbing handholds outside the hatch and pulling himself up and out. He waited ten feet along the cable until, gopherlike, Thad's head and shoulders appeared.

“Two tethers,” Gabe reminded the newbie.

It was easier by far to fall off this toy world than to cross it. Phoebe was roughly a sphere a mile and a quarter across—where rough better described the body than sphere. It was round in the sense that a popcorn ball was round, with stony lumps taking the place of popped kernels and veins of frothy ice—and in spots, only vacuum—taking the part of molasses. And in the sense that a popcorn ball remained a ball after it had been whacked a bit, dented here, flattened there. Phoebe was less a single object than a rubble pile loosely bonded by its mutual gravity. If its orbit had dipped much lower, the tidal forces from Earth's gravity would have ripped the little moon to shreds.

“Two tethers,” Thad repeated. “Done. After you, Pearl.”

Gabe pulled himself hand over hand along the cable, coasting above the inky surface. His eyes insisted he was soaring up a cliff face. Gravity's feeble tug told his inner ears he was falling into the cliff face. His gut wished eyes and ears would come to some agreement.

After twenty yanks Gabe stopped pulling. “Coasting,” he radioed the newbie.

“Thanks. The view from behind is unattractive enough without climbing up your butt.”

Gabe slowed with gentle hand pressure against the cable at the first glint ahead of a piton anchored in the rock. Carefully he unclipped one carabiner and snapped it back onto the cable on the opposite side of the ring. He did the same with his second tether. He made sure Newbie followed the same fail-safe procedure before resuming the trip to sector twelve.

The surface lights, antennae, and trash dump of the station dropped behind the too-close horizon. But a status icon in his HUD shone a steady, reassuring green, confirming connectivity with Tina and the command center. The metal guide cable did double duty as an antenna.

Every hundred or so feet a piton interrupted their glide, and in such short increments they made their way toward sector twelve. After ten minutes Gabe checked in with Tina. Twice he saw survey robots—their silvery, octopoid shapes unmistakable—creeping along the surface. The second bot's instrument suite must have sensed a buried ice seam, because the machine was staking a radio beacon. Had Gabe cared to tune to the proper frequency, he would have heard soft beeping from the marker.

Ice meant water. Water meant oxygen and hydrogen. And water, oxygen, and hydrogen already in near-Earth orbit—not lofted from Earth's surface or the permanently shadowed polar craters of the distant moon at the cost of thousands of dollars per pound—were dearer than gold or platinum. So, too, whatever mineral wealth could be wrung from the rocks of Phoebe. On scheduled outings, he continued to survey for exploitable resources.

It was said: low Earth orbit is halfway to anywhere in the solar system. That was a metaphorical truth, almost poetic. Half the work of going anywhere in the solar system was expended fighting Earth's gravity. Building powersats with Phoebe's mineral resources, beaming down solar energy to an energy-starved world, would be only the beginning. Phoebe would be the gateway to the planets.

Away from the station the moonscape dissolved into a shadowy sameness. They passed the pilot distillery sited at a safe distance from the habitat. Parallel glints revealed pipes snaking across the dark surface, delivering water, oxygen, and hydrogen to the base.

Gabe played tour guide, pointing out the little world's interesting features. “On our left, the thermal nuclear rockets that nudged Phoebe into orbit.” He glanced at his Geiger counter, even though workers had long since recycled the uranium fuel rods in the base power plant. No matter how many powersats got their start here, Phoebe, forever behind its sunshield, would stay nuclear. “And on our right, the Grand Chasm. It's no great shakes by Earth standards, but relative to Phoebe, it's huge.”

“Uh-huh,” Thad said.

Newbie had been moody since they left the station. As for what preoccupied him, Gabe could only guess. Maybe no more was at work here than that Thad—like most of the crew—was an engineer, without interest in Phoebe itself. When Thad deigned to interrupt the travelogue, it was always with practical questions. About pressure suits, their related gear, and how soon anyone would come after them if comm should break down . . .

Fair enough. Knowing the limitations and vulnerabilities of the equipment could save a person's life. Although Gabe wished he could share the excitement of discovery, the rocks were not going anywhere. Maybe Newbie would lighten up after he got more comfortable with his equipment.

They glided past the infrared telescope. Good, Gabe thought: we're halfway there. About all he understood about IR astronomy was that hot objects emitted infrared, so you wanted your infrared instruments kept cold to minimize their own intrinsic thermal noise. Behind its sunshield, Phoebe was about as cold as anywhere in Earth's neighborhood ever got. The ‘scope's cryocooler, powered by the base nuclear reactor, kept the IR sensor colder still.

He slowed or stopped whenever a surface feature caught his eye, but even a cursory look said most of these rocks were yet more carbonaceous chondrites and silicates. Two bits of stone he could not immediately identify went into his sample bag, for tests back at the station.

He was curious about this tiny world, even if there was no point in discussing it.

Isotope dating of previous samples said Phoebe was more than four billion years old. So why did it still exist? Its desiccated, rocky crust was not that impressive as an insulator. Had it always followed the orbit in which it had been discovered, swooping inside Earth's own orbit, Phoebe's ice would have sublimated long ago, its rocky remains dispersed into a short-period meteor shower. Of course if it had always followed that orbit, the Near Earth Object survey would have spotted Phoebe years earlier. Or Phoebe would have smacked Earth before anyone even knew about death from the sky.

So Phoebe had had another orbit, an orbit more distant from the sun. Planetary astronomers had yet to work out Phoebe's original path and what planetary close encounter might have sent Phoebe diving at the Earth. Gabe guessed there was a Nobel waiting for whoever figured it out.

As the Earth waned and the landscape faded into darkness, he had Oscar project a topo map on his HUD. The blinking red dot had them most of the way to the green dot representing the stranded bot. Pits and ravines, ridges and rocky jumbles leapt out of the map image. He tugged his tethers once, twice for reassurance.

“Let's stop for a minute,” Gabe called. New Earth was imminent, and Newbie was in for a treat. “Watch the limb of the planet.”

Earth's crescent became the thinnest of arcs, then disappeared.

A pale, shimmering arch—part rainbow, part oil slick—emerged from the darkness. Phoebe's sunshield. The free-flying Mylar disk that hovered above Phoebe warded off the sunlight that might yet boil away precious ice as boots and robot tentacles and, eventually, mining operations scraped through the insulating surface layers. The shield's sun-facing side reflected most of the light that hit it. What little sunlight penetrated the shield—the bit they could see—was scattered by the backside's granular coating.

For an endless moment the arch, large but faint, was the brightest object in the sky. Then the trailing edge of the shield, too, slid into the Earth's shadow, abandoning the sky to stars like chips of diamond.

Now the sole clue to Earth's presence was a hole in the star field. Even with eyes fully adjusted to the darkness, from this altitude Gabe could not spot any city lights. He could pretend that all was well below, that the world was not divided between energy haves and have-nots.

“Show's over,” Gabe said. He switched on his helmet lights. An instant later, Thad activated his own. “Pretty cool, though, don't you think?”

Thad only grunted.

“So, Thad. What were you making in the shop?” Gabe was just making conversation. Skimming the pitch-black rock face in the near-darkness was eerie.

He felt a tap-tap on his calf and twisted around. Thad had only one hand on the guide cable, waggling his other hand. Two fingers were raised.

“Oscar, private channel two,” Gabe ordered. “Okay, Thad. What's going on?”

“Private channel two,” Thad repeated. Finally, he added, “You'll keep this to yourself, right?”

“If that's what you want.”

Hand over hand, they went. A rim of sunshield reappeared just before the Earth returned as a new crescent. Gabe doused his helmet lights. On his HUD the red and green dots were converging. Another few minutes and they would veer from the guide cable.

Eventually Gabe prompted, “Well?”

“Okay. I put my life in your hands.” Thad sighed. “I have a thing for Tiny.”

Tina Lundgren was big for an astronaut, even a male astronaut. The nickname was inevitable—and you used it within her earshot at your own peril. Gabe had to admit that, in an Amazonian kind of way, she was sexy. And she was one of only two women, and the only unmarried woman, on Phoebe. Gabe understood Thad wanting this conversation on a private channel.

Having bared his soul, Thad went on and on about Tina's womanly charms.

“Uh-huh,” Gabe finally interrupted. “And you were cutting pipe as an outlet for your unrequited love?”

“Not exactly.” A rueful laugh. “I'm making a still. Whether or not homebrew appeals to her, I figure it won't go to waste.”

“Does she know how you feel?” Gabe asked.

“Not from me! Not yet. Frankly, the woman scares the crap out of me. Maybe that's why I have to have her.”

To their left, a ghostly plume: an ice pocket flashing to steam bursting from the ground.

Behind its sunshield Phoebe should be colder than the night side of the moon: For two weeks out of four, every part of the moon but a few deep polar craters felt sunlight. But shield or no, some sunlight did reach Phoebe. No software was perfect, and occasionally the sunshield—tugged by Earth, Moon, and Phoebe, pushed by the solar wind and by sunlight itself, balancing the many conflicting forces with its own feeble thrusters—drifted out of position. Whenever that happened, sunlight beat directly on the surface. Even when the shield balanced perfectly, the traces of sunlight penetrating the shield scattered in unpredictable ways. Earthlight and moonlight were, in the final analysis, echoes of sunlight. And heat leaked from the underground base and its nuclear power plant. All that energy mingled, meandered, and reradiated in unpredictable ways.

And so, seemingly at random, little geysers. The vapor was too diffuse to do any harm. Most times. If you were unlucky, a geyser could sweep you right off Phoebe.

“A still,” Gabe repeated, his thoughts divided between the plume, already trailing off, the topo map on his HUD, the landscape sliding by inches beneath his visor, and the conversation. Ethyl alcohol boils at a lower temperature than water, so alcohol fumes waft up a still coil before water vapor. You separated out the early condensate. But up comes of having gravity. “Will a still even work in Phoebe's grav—”

Too much happened at once, the sequence unclear:

—A sharp tug on Gabe's backpack.

—Thad saying, “Wrong answer.”

—A power alarm.

—A second yank.

—Helmet lights and HUD going dark.

—A hard shove forward.

Gabe twisted around. Earthlight showed Thad a good twenty feet away, receding. Just staring. And bulging from the mesh pouch of Thad's tool belt: two battery packs.

Without power for his suit's heating elements, Gabe would freeze within minutes. Already the cold seeped into him, body and thoughts turning sluggish. He got his feet beneath him, even as he ripped lengths of tether from their reels. He leapt.

His right foot slipped on loose gravel and he sailed far to the side.

The shorter tether pulled him up short. Its yank started him spinning even as the tug started him back toward the surface. Too slowly. He took the maneuvering pistol from its holster—but it slipped from fingers already numb with cold. As he drifted down he managed to grip a rock outcropping.

All the while, maintaining his distance, Thad watched. Stared.

“Why?” Gabe screamed. Not that his radio worked without batteries. Not that his shout could cross the vacuum. “Why are you doing this?”

Maybe his murderer read Gabe's lips. Whatever the reason, Thad shrugged.

Gabe advanced. Thad retreated.

As cold became all, as consciousness faded, the last thing Gabe saw was the waxing crescent Earth.

* * * *

Earth no longer seemed close enough to touch.

“He just went nuts!” Thad said once more.

With minor variations the words had become his mantra. First with Tiny, when he had called in from across Phoebe about the “accident.” Over and over with Bryce Lewis and Alan Childs after they joined Thad on the surface. And now hopefully for the last time, in the station's comm-gear-packed command center, with Lyman Hsu, the dour station chief.

“Details, please.” Hsu rubbed his pencil-thin mustache as he spoke.

Thad ignored the request. “You should have let me go with the other guys. You can't imagine what it was like.” I damn well hope you can't imagine it. He struggled to understand it.

“You'd been outside long enough for one day. You know the rules.”

Because their utility craft were little more than flying broomsticks: compressed-air bottles, saddles, and minimal controls mounted to latticework frames. A counterpressure suit was your only protection.

“But I don't have to like the rules,” Thad said. Which, emphatically, he did not. What if he had overlooked something? Joining the rescue team might have given him a chance to cover his tracks.

“Details,” Hsu prompted.

“You heard Gabe switch to private channel two.” It had all come down to Gabe taking his cue, because everything on the public channel got recorded. Sooner or later, he would have figured out what Thad was building. Certainly the bullshit about Tiny and making a still for her would not bear scrutiny. That fable was all Thad could come up with on the spot, blather to occupy Gabe's mind until they got farther from the station. “When I linked in, Gabe was already mid-rant. He missed Jillian, unbearably. He knew—but couldn't explain how—that she was cheating on him. He loved her and needed her and couldn't bear for anyone else to be with her. He would show her. And then"—Thad paused dramatically—"he unclipped his tethers.”

“And you . . . ?”

“What do you think, Lyman? I tried to talk sense into him, damn it.”

“And not a word of this reported to base.”

“I didn't dare switch channels! There was no telling what Gabe might do if I wasn't on. If I didn't respond when he expected an answer.”

“And he jumped anyway.”

“As I keep telling you,” Thad said.

He had never been much of a basketball player. On a good day, his vertical leap was two feet. On Phoebe, that was more than enough leg strength to vault two men and their gear past escape velocity. He had let go of the body, untethered, before coming to the end of his own fully unrolled tethers. After the ropes pulled him short with a jerk, Thad had watched the corpse recede into the darkness.

Hsu tipped back his head, staring through the command-center dome. “He had second thoughts.”

“What do you mean?” Thad asked.

“Every indication is that Gabe froze to death. But when Tina and Lewis found Gabe, the suit heater was on. He must have been in late-stage hypothermia by then, half delirious. It's a marvel his suit still recognized his voice.” Hsu sighed. “By then it was too late.”

The heaters kicked back on once Thad replaced the batteries. Not done till Gabe was unequivocally dead.

“It's a shame,” Thad said, meaning it. Gabe was not a bad guy, only in the wrong place at the wrong time.

“A damn shame.”

Silence stretched awkwardly. After a while Thad said, “It's been a hell of a day. I'd like to . . . hell, I don't know what.” Except that he knew damn well. He had to finish what Gabe had interrupted, and get everything stashed away. At least then the man would have died for a reason. “Something other than relive this disaster.”

Hsu nodded. “Sounds like a good idea. Get some sleep.”

“I will,” Thad said. And wondered if he could.

* * * *

CONVICTION

2023

Monday, April 10

Marcus Judson slipped into the back of the downtown Baltimore hotel ballroom more than an hour late. Though the room was packed, it did not seem like anyone was having a ball. Certainly not his colleagues huddled at the speakers’ table at the opposite end of the room.

He surveilled from behind a freestanding sign that read The Power of Powersats: a Town Meeting. From the way Jeff Robbins, one of the EPA representatives on the dais, blotted his face with his handkerchief, the townsfolk bore, however metaphorically, torches and pitchforks.

The PowerHolo orientation spiel (of which Marcus was thoroughly sick, after many such gatherings) ran about thirty minutes. That meant the Q&A session had just begun. It did not bode well to find Jeff already wound so tight. Plenty of head-in-the-sand types in the crowd, then. Damned Luddites.

Marcus hated being such a cynic—but he was more this way every day.

This could have been any public meeting room anywhere. High ceiling. Cheap carpet and cloth-covered walls to muffle the audience noises. Sidewalls comprised of narrow segments that, folded into accordion pleats, would open into other, similar rooms for additional space. Recessed ceiling lights. Amplifier and loudspeakers deployed across the foot of the dais. Holo projection console.

Men and women filled the rows of chairs, and yet more people had queued up in the aisles for turns at the audience microphones. At the right-hand mike, a tall, balding man, his sleeves rolled up, was gesturing grandly. Marcus had arrived too late to catch the man's point. If he had a point. They often didn't.

“. . . would be a better use of public land,” the balding man finally concluded.

“Thank you for your comment,” Lisa Jackson began. As she—as all the panelists—had been trained. “We agree that parks are important. That said, so is a sufficiency of electrical power. We at the Department of the Interior must consider both.”

The novelty of powersat town meetings was long past; the room's lone tripod-mounted camera might feed only the municipal Internet server. With no media visible the protocol would have been the same, because half the audience sat holding comps or phones or datasheets. Any slip-up would be on YouTube within minutes. So all panelists were trained in changing the subject. Better a non-answer than an impolitic one.

If inconvenient questions were to be evaded, what was the point? Why hold these town meetings at all? Marcus had asked, and his question, evidently, was also impolitic. “It's policy,” a long-ago boss had once told Marcus in similar circumstances. “It doesn't have to make sense.”

But coaching by a NASA spin doctor was not what had made Marcus a cynic.

He half listened, half pondered how and when to move to the front of the room. On the dais, behind the long, skinny table and its billowing, ruffled skirt, sat eight chairs: two places each for Interior, Energy, the EPA, and NASA. The lone unoccupied seat was Marcus's.

With Lisa expounding from five chairs away from the empty seat, this seemed as good a time as any for Marcus to claim his spot.

He edged through the least crowded aisle, murmuring apologies as he went, answering dirty looks by tapping the NASA ID badge clipped to his suit lapel. I'm with the government. I really am here to help.

Once through the crowd, he slid into the empty chair at the speakers’ table.

Ellen Tanaka, NASA program manager for the powersat—and Marcus's boss—looked weary. They all did. Her eyes, too myopic for LASIK, were owllike behind thick, round lenses. She covered her mike with a hand. “Good of you to join us,” she whispered.

That he had texted ahead changed nothing. Everyone had made the drive that morning from somewhere in metro DC. She would not want to hear about the rain, the line at the gas station, or signals flashing red throughout Fairfax County because the traffic management system had crashed or been hacked. He would not have, either.

“Car trouble,” he mouthed. “Sorry.”

Lisa was still answering the balding man. “We'll be using property already dedicated to power generation, in this case for ground-based solar power. In particular, we'll retrofit selected solar farms with arrays of short antennas suited to receiving power downlinks. Land recycling, if you will—very environmentally correct. The antennas will be vertical, scarcely blocking any sunlight to the solar cells on the ground. So, you see, the powersat demonstration does not preempt any parkland.”

“But that land shouldn't be wasted on—”

“Thank you for your comment,” Ellen interrupted. “I'm afraid that's all the time we have with so many others still waiting.” She pointed to the head of another line, where a middle-aged woman, rail thin, her face tanned and leathery, clutched a folded sheet of paper. The woman wore the judgmental expression of a Resetter. “Yes, ma'am?”

Marcus and Ellen took turns moderating these meetings, because NASA's part of the solar-power-satellite project drew the fewest questions. Public comments mostly concerned public safety, energy policy, and land use. Never mind, Marcus thought, that Powersat One, the full-scale demo system nearing completion, would be the largest structure ever built. Or that NASA was constructing PS-1 in space, where neither night nor weather could interrupt the sunlight streaming onto its solar cells.

But all that dependable—and desperately needed—solar energy became useful only when it reached the ground. And once brought to Earth, the power had to be distributed far and wide. Terrestrial solar farms already had connections to the national power grid. Siting the downlink antennas amid the ground-based solar farms just made sense.

To Marcus, anyway.

“About that downlink,” the thin woman began, frowning. “'Downlink’ sounds like an Internet connection, and that's more than a little disingenuous. Your downlink is nothing so benign. You're talking about microwaves. A gigawatt or so of microwaves. If you turn on that satellite, it'll roast anyone unlucky enough to encounter the power beam.”

“No, it won't,” someone muttered from down the table—and a mic picked it up.

Marcus leaned forward to see who had gone off-script. Apparently Brad Kaminski, from DOE. He was clutching his mike stand, and a bit red in the face.

“Um, thank you for your comment,” Brad backtracked. “Yes, downlinks from the power satellite will use microwaves. That's for a good reason: Earth's atmosphere is transparent to microwaves. By beaming microwaves, we can harvest most of the power on the ground.

“But as for safety, ma'am, there is no cause for concern. The beam is strongest at its center. By the edge—”

“How strong?” someone in the crowd hollered.

“About like direct, overhead sunlight,” Brad said. “By the edge of the—”

“Like a second sun beating down on you,” the woman at the mike said. “That should be healthy.”

Brad persisted. “By the edge of the collection area, a zone miles across, the beam has attenuated to well within public safety standards.”

The woman laughed humorlessly. “You expect the birds to mind your fences?”

From deep within the crowd, a snort. “Lady, do you have any idea how many birds get chopped up by wind generators?”

“Forget the damned birds!” someone shouted back from across the ballroom. “Just keep the lights on and my car charged.”

Taunts and insults erupted, on every side of the issue. Cameras big and small pointed to memorialize the chaos. It took Ellen several minutes to restore order—

In order that more decorous criticisms could resume. That powersats were: unsafe, unnecessary, or poor investments. That if only everyone conserved, instead of wasting resources on foolishly audacious projects, it would be better for the United States and the entire Earth, too. That the country could extract additional energy from the tides, or build more wind farms, or re-shingle more roofs with solar cells, or grow more biomass, or . . . do anything other than the powersat project.

And from the opposite end of the opinion spectrum: That the wind did not always blow when people need power. That—duh!—the Sun did not shine at night or do much for snow-covered roofs. That sunlight beating down on Arizona did nothing for New England. That people shrieking “energy sprawl” against a few square miles to be used for East Coast microwave downlinks fooled no one by suggesting new high-voltage power lines could be built across the continent from solar farms in the southwestern deserts. That the NIMBYs had even less credibility proposing huge new storage systems to save solar power for exploitation at night. And that if the tree-huggers did not wise up, civilization would grind to a halt. Shivering in the dark.

Since the Crudetastrophe, oil was scarce and painfully expensive. That did not make gasoline any less essential. There simply was not enough electrical power generation to cope with the hurried—and ongoing—switchover to plug-in cars; if there had been, the overburdened power grid could not reliably distribute the added load. Marcus did not bring up any of that. No one on the panel did. They were not permitted to say anything verging on politics, geo- or other.

Do it all, Marcus wanted to shout, but that was yet another truth no one on the panel was permitted to speak. Any other means of power generator, distribution, or conservation was someone else's project.

From time to time it was his turn to field a harangue. He dutifully thanked whomever for their comment and, all too often, parroted some preapproved, eminently inoffensive platitude. And began to wonder if there was any way he could not have become cynical.

If he hadn't been already.

A young woman in a Johns Hopkins sweatshirt reached the front of a comment line. An engineering student, Marcus suspected, because she asked about the radiation environment in space gradually degrading solar cells. When he thanked her for the question, he really meant it. He was an engineer too.

He talked about radiation hardening, on-orbit repair methods, and opportunities for in-space remanufacturing. He reviewed the deleterious effects of weather on terrestrial solar cells. This, finally, was a question he could answer without breaking protocol—not to mention an interesting topic—and he pretended not to notice his boss's sidelong glances until she tap-tapped her mike to cut him off. It was almost noon and they were, “regrettably nearly out of time.”

Two more danced-around questions and the ordeal was over. Until two days hence, in another city. Marcus forgot which, and it hardly mattered.

This was no way to save a country.

Long after Marcus and his colleagues had collected their things and were ready to hit the road, many of their audience still milled about, arguing in animated clumps. The stragglers showed no sign of clearing the aisles.

The wall behind the dais had two camouflaged service doors. Marcus opened one a few inches and peeked out. He found the service hallway empty and, apart from the distant, muffled clatter of pots and pans, quiet. “Shall we?” he suggested to his colleagues.

No one argued.

In the austere corridor, her shoes clicking on the tile floor, Ellen limped along beside Marcus. She had not quite recovered from a skiing accident the previous winter. Ellen was tall to begin with; in heels, she was almost his height. “Not fun, Marcus, but we need public support. It's going to be a big change.”

“Understood,” he said. And still a waste of their time.

“Not everything can be as fascinating as radiation-hardening techniques for solar cells.” With a laugh, she changed the subject. “What's the car problem?”

“The circuit breaker in my garage tripped overnight.” The overtaxed grid, sagging and surging, was beyond anyone's ability to predict—and with every new electric car on the street the load became a little greater, a bit more mobile, and that much less predictable. “The breaker must have popped right after I got home and plugged in the car, because I had about zero charge this morning.”

“And you had to buy gas? Ouch. Well, you must have had ration credits left. That's something.”

Double doors swung open into the service corridor, the kitchen noises swelling, and waiters rushed toward them bearing lunch trays. Marcus stepped aside.

Twenty bucks and change per gallon. That ridiculous line at the pump. Ration credits he had been saving for a vacation. None of it bore thinking about.

“And Marcus . . .”

The pregnant pause. Her charcoal-gray power suit. Heels. She was way overdressed for the morning's public flogging. “Where are you off to, boss, and what do you need me to cover for you?”

She grinned. “Clearly we've worked together too long. The administrator called last night. He wants a program update today. Hence, you'll be taking my place at this afternoon's interagency coordination session. I'll mail the minutes from the last session.”

When the administrator of NASA called, you went. Still . . . “Isn't that task force all career civil servants?”

Which Marcus was not. He was a SETA contractor: systems engineering and technical assistance. Fortunate SETA contractors got involved in everything their government counterparts did. Unfortunate SETA contractors took meeting minutes and fetched coffee. Lucky or not, they spent most of every workday stymied and snubbed by the contractors from the big aerospace corporations who did most of the actual R&D.

If you had to have a supervisor, Ellen was as good as they came. Kendricks Aerospace, prime contractor for the demonstration powersat, balanced the scales. Most Kendricks engineers on the project detested Marcus. Not personally, or even professionally—they would have hated anyone looking over their shoulders. Asking questions. Making suggestions. Auditing their work. Highlighting risks. He got the disdain they would not dare exhibit toward Ellen.

When had he last been able to do, not merely review?

“Trust me,” Ellen said. “You won't be the first support contractor to sit in.”

“What's my goal?”

“Answer questions and take notes. Beyond information exchange, these meetings don't have specific goals.” She paused. “If anyone tries to pin you down to something uncomfortable, you can plead lack of authority.”

Because he had no authority. God, he loathed meetings.

They exited the service area into a carpeted corridor. A wall sign pointed the way to the main lobby. They continued walking. “Okay,” Marcus said, “where is this meeting?”

“DOE in Germantown. Nancy Ramirez's office.”

Reflexively, Marcus began guesstimating the miles added to today's commute. He must have winced.

“I'd reimburse you for the gas if I could,” Ellen said.

But more than that, she had the look that said I wish there were something I could do for you. At least she had stopped asking if he “wanted to talk about it.” Because he really, really did not.

As for NASA reimbursing him for the gas, he understood: Her hands were tied. Space Systems Science, Marcus's direct employer, had bid for the SETA contract at Goddard Space Flight Center without reimbursement for local travel. Shifting local travel costs onto the staff kept the hourly rates a few cents lower. It hadn't much mattered, when Marcus took this job. He had lived only a couple of miles from GSFC then. He told himself he might not have a job if SSS had pursued the work less aggressively.

He told himself lots of things. Other things he just refused to think about.

“But maybe,” Ellen added hopefully, “your car charged up during the meeting.”

“I wouldn't complain.” Even at the hotel's exorbitant parking-plus hourly rates.

But in the two hours he had spent at the town meeting, his car would not have taken much of a charge. The Jincheng was overdue for a battery-pack replacement—which would run him about half of what a new car would cost. New car or new battery? He would put off buying either for as long as he could, rather than support the lithium cartel. Bolivia and Chile, curse them, controlled half the world's lithium supply. Every lithium-ion battery bought anywhere propped up prices for the cartel.

Supporting the Russian oil cartel this morning felt just as crappy.

In the hotel garage, the eight panelists fanned out toward their various vehicles. Coming straight from home, only three had managed to carpool. “Have a good meeting,” Marcus said as he and Ellen paused by his car.

“You too,” she said. “And don't do anything I wouldn't.”

“You should have thought of that earlier.”

Smiling, she kept walking.

Marcus's car had accepted scarcely a tenth of a recharge, about what he expected. The car would switch to its little gas engine well before he reached his meeting.

“Destination: Department of Energy, Germantown complex,” he announced, backing out of his parking spot. The console beeped and a reasonable-looking map appeared in the main dashboard display. He tapped the ACCEPT key.

Once he merged into the clotted traffic of I-695 he activated autodrive, and the car guided itself to the rear of an auto platoon. He found himself nose-to-tail with a late-model blue Toyota. Seconds later, a white cargo van filled his rearview mirror. The van was too close to make out the company logo on its hood.

He had more pressing things to read than logos. Marcus dismissed the map to check e-mail, and Ellen had already forwarded the information he needed. But he had driven for too many years before autodrive to concentrate while cars not two feet apart joined and departed the platoon, and when to both sides, bumper to bumper, eighteen-wheelers blotted out the sky.

With only the ride to prepare, he opaqued the windows and began skimming.

He had also been around long enough to expect recession to reduce traffic. Not since the Crudetastrophe. Without funding for maintenance, highways crumbled faster than traffic diminished.

Marcus began reading Ellen's annotated meeting minutes. He stopped noticing swerves (Around accidents? Potholes? The chicken crossing the road? Through the opaqued windows, he could not tell.) and ramps from one freeway to the next. The traffic noises faded. . . .

A pop-up usurped the dashboard screen. Blinking red letters announced: Power alert. Smaller text, scrolling, gave the particulars: a high-voltage line severed from the Nantucket Sound wind farm. Terrorism neither indicated nor ruled out.

Marcus rapped the screen to acknowledge and again to retrieve a list of related headlines. The list expanded faster than he could tap through to even a smattering of the articles. Scattered secondary outages across Massachusetts as generators, distribution stations, and power lines overloaded and shut down. Sporadic blackouts predicted throughout New England, possibly rippling down the East Coast, while the grid rebalanced, or until the wind farm's underwater high-voltage line could be repaired. The schedule of preemptive brownouts. Talking heads blathering about unsafe, indefensible infrastructure. Resetter groups saying the same, more nastily. Predictions, into the tens of thousands, how many cars would fail to recharge overnight. The certain spike tomorrow in East Coast gas prices, a buck or more per gallon, when all those cars headed for the pumps. The stock market tanking.

Multiple groups and causes claimed responsibility.

Cursing them all, he went back to Ellen's notes. Too soon, the dashboard trilled: time to disengage autodrive. He took back control and made his way to the DOE parking lot. The charger-equipped slots were all occupied.

Sighing, Marcus got out of his car. Another damned meeting. He wondered if ever again he would get to do something.

* * * *

Wednesday, April 12

“Good afternoon,” Dillon Russo told the latest earnest entrepreneur to pass through his office that day.

They were all earnest. It took more than earnest to set yourself apart. He had been merely earnest once. Then he had gotten savvy. And shorted a portfolio of mortgage-backed securities before the markets realized that sub-primes were toxic. And so, became very rich.

And so, here he was. . . .

Who is this woman? Courtney something. One more engineer and MBA, yadda yadda yadda. Dillon had already forgotten her last name. If it mattered, he could find the name in her leave-behind or on his calendar. He did not foresee it mattering.

Speed dating, venture-capital style was a lot like speed dating of the social kind, only even more demeaning. Dillon allotted each petitioner a half hour: fifteen minutes for the pitch, ten for Q&A, and five alone, afterward, to organize any notes he had taken. The lone note for Courtney read not on your life, jotted down before, earnestly asserting her appreciation for his time, she all but backed out of his office.

He dropped her leave-behind into a drawer. She had brought the day's fifth pitch for enhanced cellulosic biofuel production. Her process involved platinum nanoparticles, lots and lots of them, employed as catalysts. As though, even in a world starved for energy, that could make any kind of economic sense.

It hardly mattered. Fail or succeed, anything anyone could hope to accomplish with biofuel synthesis was mere tinkering at the margins. He only cared about opportunities that could make a real difference.

Another make-us-both-a-pile-of-money pitch would come through his door in about four minutes. He used a half minute to get out from behind his desk and stretch. The rest he would spend admiring Central Park, thirty-eight stories below.

At least the biofuel types had done enough homework to know that his interests lay in eco-friendly opportunities. Ditto Noah, the gangly, pinch-faced man pitching virtual-reality tools for high-end telecommuting and Suresh, with a new wrinkle in fuel cells. Those who had not done their homework, who wasted his time with trivial visions for the next big social network or junk food, got the hook. Fast.

Dillon watched a line of mounted police watch a mass gathering down in the park. In theory demonstrations were legal in Central Park, but permits remained hard to come by and the crowd swirled and surged in a pretense of spontaneity. He never could judge crowd sizes, not even from his bird's-eye view. A thousand? Two? It did not help his estimating that the crowd shifted restlessly. When, all but inevitably, the cops dispersed the demonstrators, a new flash mob would simply converge elsewhere in the park.

Permit or no, frequent arrests notwithstanding, the Resetters demonstrated daily in the park. Applauding, if not the Crudetastrophe itself, the resulting economic slowdown—and, with it, the reduced use of fossil fuels—as benefits to the environment and the planet. Opposing new energy infrastructure as only repeating past environmental insults.

Dillon could sympathize with their opinions. But to expect civil disobedience and petty vandalism to change anything? Such naiveté sadly amused him.

Someone rapped firmly on his door.

“Come in,” he called.

A blond woman strode in, wearing a severely tailored dark-blue suit. She was short, compact, and very serious. “Mr. Russo,” she began, speaking quickly, not yet halfway to his desk. Very focused. Focused beat the hell out of earnest. “I'm Kayla Jorgenson, of Jorgenson Power Systems. Thanks for seeing me. You won't be sorry.”

I'll be the judge of that. “Have a seat, Kayla.”

Handing him a brochure, she launched into her pitch. “What the world needs, more than anything, is clean, affordable electrical power generation. We had sporadic petroleum shortages before the Crudetastrophe. Electric cars—not that anyone can produce them fast enough—help only to the degree there is electricity to recharge their batteries. Too often, there isn't.”

Focused and aware. Dillon began leafing through her brochure.

She did not let his page flipping distract her. “Why I'm here, in a phrase: ocean thermal energy conversion. OTEC is conceptually very simple—and a vast untapped resource. Any heat engine turns heat energy into mechanical work by exploiting a temperature differential. Steam engines are heat engines, the high temperature that drives them coming from fire heating a boiler.

“Now consider the ocean. The tropical ocean's surface can approach human body temperature, and yet around a half mile below, where sunlight never penetrates, the temperature is scarcely above freezing! Tremendous power-generating potential exists in the differential between the hot and cold layers of the ocean—and with no energy source involved but sunlight.

“I would guess you've been pitched concepts for harvesting wave power. The energy OTEC can theoretically harvest is greater by an order of magnitude. The challenge is in efficiently and affordably . . .”

Did Kayla ever stop for air? His wife, while playing her French horn, did something she called circular breathing. What, exactly, Crystal did eluded him—surely the windpipe worked in only one direction at a time—but somehow she could sustain a note indefinitely.

Just as, somehow, Kayla kept up her patter. “. . . and while the theoretical efficiency of a heat engine operating with such a small temperature difference is about seven percent, past OTEC trials have achieved only one or two percent. With our proprietary technology, we can . . .”

Dillon took down his first note. This could be real. He did not begrudge Kayla her full fifteen minutes. “So you're going to save the world,” he probed.

“Hardly. We need many ways to generate power, Resetter fanatics notwithstanding. OTEC can be one method. It should be one, in the tropics, anyway.” She rattled off more of OTEC's virtues. Finally, she took a breath. “Will Russo Venture Capital Partners back us?”

“I'll have to touch base in-house.” That was a stall, because as principal partner Dillon's was the only opinion that mattered. He only took aboard investors cowed by his reputation, being especially partial to the pension funds of small towns in flyover states. Well, there was one exception, but Yakov's interests were . . . different. Yakov was different: fascinating and worldly-wise. If Yakov sometimes demanded more involvement than Dillon's usual partners, he also brought resources none of Dillon's other partners could offer.

Kayla persisted. “If you have further questions . . . ?”

“But I will admit to being intrigued.” Dillon spared her the briefest of smiles. “Perhaps sometime I could tour your prototype.”

“Absolutely! Her discipline finally slipped. With a grin, she whipped a folded datasheet from her jacket pocket. “Let's set that up now.”

“We're about out of time,” he countered. “I'll be in touch.”

She all but floated from his office—at the last, as naive as any of the day's supplicants. As naive, in her own way, as the Resetter activists whom she disdained.

Nodding welcome to yet another earnest entrepreneur, Dillon thought: That's how I can do what I do.

* * * *

Thursday, April 13

Valerie Clayburn glowered at her datasheet. Neither it nor the wildly colored globe it projected deserved her wrath—but they were here. Telecommuting was fine in its place, but much of her job demanded the personal touch.

And with that moment of resentment, she felt rotten, as though she were shortchanging the sick little boy in the next room.

Not that Simon sounded sick. He was making the deep-in-his-throat revving and growling noise that all little boys make—to the amusement and consternation of their mothers—whether playing with cars, G. I. Joes, or toy dinosaurs.

She had three sisters. None of them ever made sounds like her son and his friends did.

She had once found Simon galloping in circles “flying” a toy stuffed rabbit, its floppy ears bent sideways like wings, making those same annoying/adorable noises. Something she and her sisters would never have thought to try. He had been about three. Smiling at the memory, she went to check on him.

She found him deep in his toy box, playthings strewn about his bare feet. From the doorway to his bedroom, the little-boy noises sounded a bit different than usual. Deeper. Phlegmy. “Back in bed, kiddo,” she commanded.

“But Mom. I was only—”

“Doesn't matter,” she said. “Pick a toy and get back under the covers.”

He emerged from the toy box, one hand clutching little cars and the other action figures. Testing the limits. She let it pass. “Bed. Now. Move.”

He dumped his double handful of toys on his blanket. “I have to go to the bathroom.”

Predictable. As he passed her in the doorway she felt Simon's forehead: still warm. His blond hair was dark with sweat. The jungle-camouflage pajamas (little boys!) he wore were snug and inches too short, but he would not give them up until she replaced them. If he would only stay in bed, the bare ankles and wrists would hardly matter.

Heading off an “I'm thirsty” stall, she topped off the orange juice in the glass on his nightstand while he dawdled in the bathroom.

With a struggle, she got him into bed. “Tuck me in?” he asked.

“Sure, pumpkin.”

Simon made a face. He was nine, too old and rough-and-tough to be anyone's pumpkin.

Not so. She half tucked, half tickled until he giggled. “Now stay in bed,” she ordered.

She returned to the kitchen. Elbows on the table, chin in her hands, glower reemerging, she resumed her staring contest with the slowly turning globe.

Saturn's largest moon: Titan.

This was not how any human would—or could—behold Titan, its dense atmosphere all but opaque to visible light. Only radio-frequency waves pierced the perpetual shroud to reveal the tumultuous surface of one of the most interesting—and, in some ways, most Earthlike—bodies in the solar system.

The holo orb was all swathes, indeed layers of swathes, like a world made of papier-maché. Each strip was a separate radar study, some undertaken from Earth, others from fly-bys years earlier by the late, lamented Cassini probe. Swathes varied in color, a distinct hue assigned to represent each radar wavelength. Dark and light shades showed what polarization had been used, the choice optimized for sensing smooth or rough features.

Despite appearances, the mosaic was not constructed from photographs, because radar did not “see” as a camera would. Behind the imagery lay complicated mathematics, embodied in even messier software, that reconstructed topographic features from Doppler shifts, the slightest differences in round-trip signal delays, and echo strengths. (Not that the echoes were strong: At their closest, Earth and Saturn were about eight hundred million miles apart.) Fortunately she had reached the stage in her career when grad students handled the programming scut work.

All those swathes and the riot of colors would have suggested to most people that Titan had been well mapped. Not so. Valerie was no casual observer, and her eyes went straight to the problem areas, mostly adjacent swathes that failed to align. Oh, nearby swathes might appear to match, were meant to overlap, but that could not just be assumed. Scanning a particular bit of Titan from across the solar system was tricky.

Stuck home for the day, if not the rest of the week, eyeballing strips for common features was something she could do. And deucedly difficult.

Titan was a dynamic place, its surface sculpted by erosion and weather, its methane lakes ever shrinking and expanding, its orbit tweaked and tugged in a complex dance by sixty-plus lesser moons, the entire world tidally flexed by Saturn's immense gravity. Software tried, with mixed success, to align radar images. Human eyes were still the best at matching multiple views of a canyon or lakeshore or hill captured at different resolutions, at different times, from different angles. Nor did the hills always stay put between radar studies. Dunes hundreds of feet tall and hundreds of miles long—dunes not of sand, but of exotic hydrocarbons (looking, the one time a probe had landed to look, like wet coffee grounds—drifted with the seasons. The marvel was that Valerie and her grad students had stitched together even this poor semblance of a topo map.

Here and there, maddeningly, areas remained pitch black. Not yet scanned. Titan Incognita.

Water bottle in hand, she stared at the tan layer—what there was of it. The latest survey had produced hardly any data. No data she might have chalked up to bad aim, but the bit that had come in confirmed proper aiming, and diagnostics confirmed correct operation of the receiver.

So what had happened? A software glitch that somehow discarded the radar echoes? Always possible, but she had seen nothing indicative of mishandled data. Radio interference that perfectly canceled the signal but did not reveal itself? Very implausible.

It took a while for the penny to drop. It took an hour of calculations, punctuated by two quick peeks in on Simon, asleep amid a jumble of toys, to work out the geometry and confirm her suspicions.

There had been interference, all right: The signal bleeping blocked, after a round trip of almost two billion miles. By Phoebe's sunshield.

Of course the Moon, the first-and-real Moon, sometimes got in the radar telescope's way—but on its stately orbit Luna crossed the plane of the ecliptic, potentially blocking the line of sight to other targets in the solar system, only once every couple weeks. Phoebe and its sunshield whizzed around the Earth in less than six hours! Damnation, she knew that. Phoebe and its shield were small, but her luck was bound to run out.

As it had.

Valerie sighed. She could plan future observations around them, but what a nuisance. Long-term, the observatory needed to reprogram ASTRID—astronomer's integrated desktop—to keep Phoebe-compromised observations from ever getting scheduled. And—

And it had not been a penny that had dropped before. Wrong metaphor. A shoe had dropped. No, a big honking boot. And now, so did the other one.

Phoebe was not the big problem. The big problem was everything that Phoebe portended. . . .

* * * *

Marcus loitered in a vending room, sipping a cup of lousy coffee, savoring the break from an interminable meeting. Sunlight streamed through the room's window wall, which offered an otherwise uninspiring view of an interior courtyard.

A predisposition to fog from off the Potomac had given this neighborhood its name, but diplomatic obfuscation was what preserved the label. To most of the world, Foggy Bottom meant the State Department, in whose blocky headquarters Marcus had unhappily spent his afternoon. Ellen had gotten a call just as the meeting started. She left, giving him only a you-know-how-it-is shrug for explanation.

Today was nonetheless a change of pace, because this meeting involved international whining. As the demo powersat approached completion, more and more countries were objecting to powersats as weapons of mass destruction.

And so Marcus had gotten to explain microwave downlinks to a roomful of Foreign Service Officers. Yes, the beam carried a lot of power. That was the project's purpose: bringing power to the ground. And of course the beam was concentrated, to minimize the dedicated collection area on the ground.

Then it had been on to safety interlocks. Every collection station had a guide beacon that the power satellite used as its target. If a collection station detected the power beam slipping off-center, off went the beacon and the satellite ceased transmission.

“Target?” an FSO had repeated.

“A poor choice of words,” Marcus had answered. He wasn't a diplomat. Aimed would be no better. “Directed. The satellite directs the beam at the collection station.”

“And beams only at collection stations?” another FSO had asked. “My online identity has been hijacked twice, and you wouldn't believe what a pain in the posterior that was. So you'll understand that I'm just a tad skeptical about how secure any system is.”

“Yes, only at collection stations.” In his mind, Marcus had added an exclamation point. And speculated about birthdays and children's names used as passwords. “Downlink coordinates are hard-coded into the powersat. By design, we can only update coordinates physically, on PS-1 itself. To update the list of authorized collection stations, we'll dispatch a robot probe.”

“Switchable on and off. The downlink point commanded from the ground.”

Who wants a system that can't be turned off? “The idea,” Marcus had explained, “is to deliver power where it is most valuable, and that varies. It could be the DC area in summer, and maybe only in the hottest part of the day when the use of air conditioning peaks. It could be Fargo in winter, during a cold snap, when the demand surges for heat. Or filling in when some wind farm lacks wind. Or anywhere an equipment failure creates a power shortfall. And by beaming to the downlink station nearest the point of need, we reduce stress on the national grid.”

“If I may summarize,” the first FSO had jumped back in. What the hell? Were they tag-teaming him? “A gigawatt of focused energy ‘directed’ at the ground. Steerable beams. It could be a weapon.”

“And any satellite launch could become a ballistic missile aimed at the ground,” Marcus had snapped in frustration, only to be told he was not being helpful.

To the degree Marcus had ever had control of the session, that was when he lost it. From then until the break, the FSOs had revisited, with painful circumlocution, perhaps every criticism anyone ever made about the U.S., back to those (idiots, in Marcus's opinion) who had objected to American unilateralism in the capture of Phoebe. Diverting a space object, let alone using a nuclear-powered thruster for the dormant comet's final orbital insertion, could be construed as a violation, at least in spirit, of the Outer Space Treaty. (Excuse me: the Treaty on Principles Governing the Activities of States in the Exploration and Use of Outer Space, including the Moon and Other Celestial Bodies.)

In what universe was doing nothing, and maybe having Phoebe hit Earth, the preferred course? The same universe, evidently, where one listened to members of the energy cartels, and the cartels’ most dependent and coercible customers, and Third World ankle biters who did not care how bad things got for them as long as they could get in a dig at the United States, and—

Marcus stopped himself mid-mental rant. Reliving the experience accomplished nothing. Besides, his geopolitical opinions were doubtless as well-founded as the engineering opinions of a roomful of diplomats.

“Hey, Judson.”

Marcus turned around. One of the FSOs stood in the break-room entrance. Somebody Ryerson. No, Ryerson Smith. “Yes?”

“We're ready to resume,” Smith said.

Yay! “Okay. I'll be right—”

When Marcus's cell rang, the caller was not in his directory. He did not recognize the number that came up instead of a name. Not even the area code. “I should get this,” he said.

“You know where to find us.” Smith headed down the corridor.

Taking the call, Marcus did not recognize the face projected from the cell display. She wasn't someone he would forget, not with those high cheekbones, chiseled features, hazel eyes, and full lips. Her hair, a rich brown, worn shoulder length, nicely framed her face. Forty-ish: about his age. And she looked mad.

Mad about what? he wondered. He said, cautiously, “Hello.”

“Marcus Judson?”

He nodded.

“Valerie Clayburn. I'm calling about the powersat.”

While she spoke he had queried her area code. West Virginia? “Did you see me on the 3-V news?” he guessed. Damn town meetings.

“Hardly,” she snipped. A bit of glower added, aren't we full of ourselves. “I Googled ‘powersat NASA program manager’ and got your boss. She gave me this number.”

“I'm due back in a meeting, Ms. Clayburn. May I ask what this is about?”

“It's Dr. Clayburn, and I'm calling to schedule a meeting.”

Doctor of what? But Ellen had vetted the woman, supposedly, and he had a flexible day coming up. “I have some time open next Monday morning. Will fifteen minutes suffice? Telecon, or will you be coming to my office in Maryland?”

“Fifteen minutes?” She laughed. “Not even close, and anyway, you need to come out here. But Monday works.”

“Why there—and where is that, by the way?”

“Here is the Green Bank Observatory. And why here? Trust me, it'll make sense when you see the place.”

Could she be any stingier with information? He had neither the time nor the inclination to play twenty questions. “I've got to go,” he told her. “I'll get back to you.”

“I'll be here,” she said, and broke the connection.

* * * *

His datasheet folded in quarters because that took less effort than clearing the table, eating (and trying not to taste) a nuked frozen dinner, Marcus sampled the news. In one window headlines scrolled, an all-too-familiar litany of scattered blackouts, spot gasoline shortages, and layoffs. The Russian-led cartel had announced a production cut, sending oil futures up ten dollars a barrel. A credit-rating service and a large hospital chain were the latest to disclose that hackers had compromised their customer files. Across the Middle East and Central Asia, more terrorist bombings and sectarian slaughter. In a streaming-video window—for the third day, but still telegenic—squadrons of Resetter activists disrupted construction of a new offshore liquefied-natural-gas terminal near Newark.

Enough, he decided. A few sharp taps on the periphery of the datasheet banished the depressing news and put a virtual keyboard in their place. He started to surf.

The Green Bank Observatory was in Green Bank, West Virginia, which was in the middle of nowhere. Deeper into the middle of nowhere, nonsensical as that was, than he had guessed. Run by the National Science Foundation.

And Valerie Clayburn, Ph.D.? He found her, too. More than enough to beg the question what an up-and-coming astronomer wanted with him. Presumably not for any insight he might offer into distant galaxies or dark energy, or whatever was the hot topic in radio astronomy these days.

Marcus went for a walk to clear his head. The evening breeze was pleasantly cool. Lawn sprinklers muffled the drone of traffic. In most front yards, the cherry trees were in bloom, just past their peak. Even in the many yards with for sale and foreclosure signs. And overhead . . .

Urban glow and the crescent moon had all but washed the stars from the sky. Phoebe was too dark to see even during the rolling blackouts. Phoebe's sunshield was for the moment essentially edge-on to him, and so also invisible. But The Space Place sparkled, the brightest “star” in the sky; it put even Venus to shame. The orbiting hotel complex, its surface silvered for cooling, was its own best advertisement.

When he won, say, two lotteries, or struck oil in his backyard, he would be sure to book a stay.

As for the nearly completed powersat, Marcus searched in vain. Alas. He would have welcomed some evidence that his life entailed more than meetings and talk.

When he had called Ellen from his car to ask about her curious referral—and to vent about that afternoon's waste of time at State—his boss, in very few words, speaking more in sorrow than in anger, had shocked Marcus into silence. Hours later, her rebuke still stung: “Have you considered the possibility that someone else might know something?”

Yeah, he had. Only cynic that he had become, it had been a while. Since Lindsey.

By the dim glow of a neighbor's post lamp he texted the enigmatic Dr. Clayburn. CU Monday a.m. around 11.

* * * *

Monday, April 17

The road trip to Green Bank began painlessly enough, the morning warm and sunny. The observatory banned electric vehicles because they might cause interference, so Marcus had a government motor-pool car and full tank of gas. The car's data link kept dropping out. After twenty miles he gave up on his e-mail.

The first half of his drive, more than a hundred miles, was Interstate, and autodrive did all the work. Leaving behind the DC-area sprawl the scenery was gorgeous, especially as he crested the Blue Ridge, the Shenandoah Valley, lush and green, stretching before him. The sky was a beautiful clear blue. Radio blasting, he drummed on the dashboard to the beat of the music, trying to ignore the many tasks he could, and perhaps should, be attending to at the office. He wondered what he would do when he arrived early.

He got off the Interstate near Harrisonburg. Almost at once he encountered the billboard: not digital, but an old-style, ink-and-paper signboard, sun-faded.

—

The sky, the Tower,

We lust for power.

The Flood, the Burn,

We never learn.

Reset.

Repent.

—

“The Burn” was not bad—poetically speaking—for the Crudetastrophe. Marcus could not come up with a biblical-sounding term for powersat, either. “We never learn” rang all too true, although his take on the lessons to be learned and the poet's clearly differed.

US 33-W narrowed to two lanes, soon ran out of embedded sensors for autodrive, and lost its shoulders to narrow some more. Sturdy trees crowded right up to the pavement. He slowed way down, and his fretting changed to showing up late. The “towns” along the “highway” became smaller and smaller, and the houses scattered between towns ever shabbier.

Until there were no towns. He guessed he had missed the West Virginia border. By then he was well into the Appalachians, deep within the George Washington National Forest. Negotiating switchbacks. Up and down steep grades, many of them miles long. As were—whenever gaps opened among the trees—the luxuriant wooded vistas. Stunning. Fantastic.

The Blue Ridge? By comparison (at least where he had crested it), that was a speed bump.

And despite Marcus's best intentions, he thought, Lindsey would have loved this drive.

* * * *

For a long time, he and Lindsey had been great together.

Almost always they had fun. Even when they didn't, when the world made one of them sputter, the other would find the silver lining, or the amusing absurdity of it all, or a way to put matters into perspective. They both liked scenic drives and country inns. They liked hiking and canoeing, classical music and experimenting with exotic cuisines. They learned together to scuba. They mocked the same bad movies.

More than anything, she always knew the right thing to say.

“I know your brother is a slacker,” she had once said, driving home from a miserable dinner out with his parents.

Had Marcus not already loved Lindsey, those few words would have done the trick.

It was nothing against Sean. His older brother was who he was. Sliding through life on charm and modest ambitions somehow worked for him.

But growing up, “It's not what you know, it's who you know,” had suited Marcus about as well as, “Why can't you be more like your brother?”

As a kid, Marcus could never understand why their parents tolerated Sean's mediocre grades and goofing off. The folks did not much like their jobs, but they were far from lazy. Dad was a lawyer and the Washington lobbyist for a national association of rural electrical utilities. Mom was a realtor and had an MBA. Not until well into high school had Marcus seen the bigger picture. Wheedling legislative favors, unloading money pits onto unsuspecting buyers, and coasting through school had something in common. All were ways to game the system. And that apparently was what impressed his parents.

Marcus could never bring himself to see things their way. He wanted to learn, not just make good grades. To make a difference, not a living. To change the world, not game it.

Sean put in four years in general studies at a party college. He went on to become the one-man HR Department at a small company—gloating, to parental approval, that the position lacked quantifiable responsibilities.

Marcus earned a math degree at the University of Virginia and a Master's degree in systems engineering from MIT. He went on to do contract work at NASA where, with luck and if he did things right, maybe he could change more than one world.

What he could not change was his parents’ attitude. Their only feedback on Marcus's choices was that he worked too hard, that he let Space Systems Science and NASA take advantage of him. Sean said the same, only more bluntly: “You're a sucker, bro.”

But Lindsey got him. He thought he got her.

Ready to move in together, the big question had been: where? His apartment was in Greenbelt, Maryland, near Goddard. Hers was in the City of Fairfax, Virginia, near the insurance company where she worked (and not far, as it happened, from the house where he had grown up). Neither apartment was big enough for two, not unless at least one of them shed a lot of possessions. Nowhere in the middle appealed to either of them.

He suggested they find a place near her work, and she countered with moving near his. She was so solicitous about what his commute might become, so sympathetic, that it drove him to insist on northern Virginia. Together they found the townhouse in Reston, a beautiful place with a private dock on Lake Anne. He bought a canoe. It was going to be her moving-in present.

Reston would mean an easy twenty-minute commute for Lindsey, and he was thrilled for her. “To return the favor” she insisted that he buy the townhouse solo. The equity growth would all be his—the slow, grinding decline in house prices had to end someday—and she would spare him the complications of entwining their finances. Though he did not follow her logic—there was no hurry, but marriage was the obvious next step—he went along. That Marcus own the place was obviously important to her.

Because for Lindsey, moving in together had become Plan B. Because she was in the running to open and manage a new regional office, in Seattle. She kept that possibility to herself until, two days after closing on the townhouse, her promotion came through. By the end of that week she was off to the Left Coast, for the opportunity she “couldn't not take.”

You understand, Marcus. Right? And you own a house now, so be glad.

It hadn't helped Marcus's newfound cynicism that Lindsey's manipulations impressed Sean. As in, “You're a sucker, bro.”

* * * *

West Virginia Route 28, when Marcus finally came to it, was as isolated and unused as the crumbling road that had preceded it. For no discernable reason the national forest he had yet to leave had changed names from George Washington to Monongahela.

He knew he was close when radio reception went to hell. Guessing what he would find, he checked his cell: no service. So he must have zipped past a second road sign unawares: announcement of the National Radio Quiet Zone.

GPS satellites paid no heed to a terrestrial ban on transmission, though, and his nav system worked fine. He spotted the modest sign for the National Radio Astronomy Observatory where he expected, just before the unincorporated town of Green Bank.

A few low buildings clustered near the observatory entrance. As he passed the Science Center, the two cars and one yellow school bus in its parking lot seemed forlorn. He parked outside the L-shaped building Valerie Clayburn's acknowledging text message had indicated.

He was a half hour early.

Bright white dish antennas, one after another, receded into the distance. None stood close enough to offer any sense of scale. So how big were they? Rather than kill time at the Science Center among grade-schoolers, why not find out? He could not have asked for a nicer day for a stroll.

His first stop: the trio of signposts abutting the parking lot. Ambling over, curious, Marcus found placards for the sun, Mercury, and Venus. Earth had a sign not far away. Touring the scale model of the solar system would take him out to the big antennas. He walked to “Mars,” only a few steps from “Earth.”

Past “Mars” he came to a tollgatelike barrier across the road. Boldly lettered signs announced Diesels only beyond this point and Turn off your digital cameras. A well-trodden footpath circumvented the gate and he kept going. By the time he spotted the Jupiter sign, the first big antenna had caught his interest. It had a descriptive sign too. The dish was forty-five feet across! How big were the antennas in the distance?

Marcus understood the scale of the solar system—intellectually. Hiking it, even at a 1:3,000,000,000 scale, was something else again. “Pluto” and the last of the big dishes were still more than a mile away. He turned around without ever seeing the sign for Uranus.

* * * *

Valerie's office in the Jansky Lab overlooked the parking lot, and she glanced out her window whenever she heard a car. First-time visitors tended to arrive very early or very late. No one's intuition about the drive was any good until they had made the trip once. Twice cars came, and both times technicians she knew got out. A third car brought one of her grad students.

Rapt in her work she must have missed a car, because the next time she checked outside a man wearing a suit and tie was striding toward the building. Looking down from the second floor, she could not see his face, but it had to be Judson. No one but govvies dressed so formally, and then only on a first visit.

Scientists dressed casually. Today she wore jeans, a random T-shirt, and a plaid flannel overshirt. When the Nobel Committee called, she would shop for a dress. Maybe.

Shutting her office door behind her, Valerie bounded down the stairs. The man with the charcoal suit was in Reception, signing for a visitor badge. “Marcus?” she called out.

The man turned, and she recognized the face from last week's conversation. Judson, all right.

He had clear blue eyes, wavy black hair (at the moment wind-stirred) gone gray at the temples, a strong jaw, and, despite the early hour, hints of a five o'clock shadow. A bit guarded in his expression, perhaps, but fair enough: She had been less than forthcoming. Forty or so, she estimated. Not Hollywood handsome, but handsome enough. Not that that mattered. He was about six-two and broad-shouldered. Maybe a few pounds over his ideal weight, but he carried it well. Other than overdressed, he seemed, all in all, like an everyday sort of guy.

“I'm Marcus,” he agreed, extending his hand. “Hello, Valerie.”

“Thanks for coming.” She hesitated. This was a person in front of her, not some bureaucratic abstraction.

But neither were powersats abstractions.

“Valerie?” he prompted.

“Right.” She took his hand, casting off her doubts. “Welcome to the National Radio Astronomy Observatory, NRAO. We'll start with a tour. The things we need to discuss will make more sense with some background.”

“What else have you planned?”

“The weekly technical lunch discussion among the professional staff, always fascinating, and we'll wrap up with a quiet conversation in my office.” A long and pointed conversation.

“Okay. Lead on.”

Following her outside, he seemed surprised at her beat-up old Volkswagen Jetta.

“Because it's a diesel model,” she explained. “We only take bikes and diesels near the dishes. Anything else would mean RF from spark plugs or electric motors. And the older the car, the better. New cars have electrical everything, from locks to clocks to seat positioners. Makes them noisy.”

“The instruments are that sensitive?”

Wait till you see the dishes up close, she thought. A short drive brought them to the internal gate. She got out of the car to swipe her ID badge through the reader. Just past the gate, she pulled onto the shoulder. “That's one of our smaller telescopes. Forty-five feet across.”

“I know. I walked around for a bit.”

“How far did you get?”

“Half past Saturn before I turned around. Any farther and I would have been late.”

She pulled the Jetta onto the shoulder near each telescope to share some of its background. Near one dish, bikes leaned against a trailer: the mark of grad students at work. She took Marcus inside the cramped maintenance trailer for a peek at the equipment—and at the quarter-inch steel walls shielding the dish from the electronics.

Back in her car, as she started to describe the first eighty-five-footer, the Science Center's white diesel tour bus lumbered past. “This is part of a three-telescope interferometer. An interferometer—”

“Synthesizes data from multiple instruments into one image. The composite has the resolution of an instrument the size of the separation between instruments. Same principle as synthetic aperture radar.” He grinned. “I'm an engineer, and I come prepared.”

Valerie knew the former. She had hoped for the latter—and that he would be open-minded. Only then did it occur to her to ask how open-minded she was.

It was not the time to second-guess herself. And anyway, he would get much the same message from many of the staff. All the more important that she get him to lunch on time. . . .

“Let's skip to the main event,” she said. Because the big dish will knock your socks off.

When she next parked, Marcus, his eyes round, rushed from the car. Everyone did. She gave him time to take it all in: the world's largest birdbath, atop an intricate lattice pyramid, above a round trolley base with sixteen enormous wheels. In addition to a standalone trailer, a built-in shielded room high above the ground held many of the onsite controls. The instrument arm, jutting out from and over the dish, made the telescope that much more impressive.

“The Green Bank Telescope,” she began, pointing up at the enormous paraboloid dish. “Completed in 2000, the GBT replaced the smaller big telescope that collapsed under its own weight from metal fatigue in 1988. The dish's signal-collecting surface measures one hundred meters by one hundred ten meters—longer in both dimensions than a football field. Only that's not a surface, but 2,004 small aluminum surfaces. Automation tilts and warps each panel in real time as the structure moves, to compensate for sagging, thermal gradients, and wind.”

“Damn, that's big. What happens if lightning strikes?”

“It happens about four times a year, without incident. The GBT weighs more than sixteen million pounds, about the same as nineteen loaded and fueled jumbo jets. When lightning does strike, that's a lot of metal, with all its metal wheels firmly pressed against the well-grounded steel track. The track is lots of metal too: a circle sixty-four meters in diameter.”

She resumed her script. “When tipped such that the instrument arm reaches its highest position, the GBT stands taller than the Statue of Liberty. This is the world's largest fully steerable radio telescope.”

Hand to his forehead, shading his eyes, Marcus countered, “Surely Arecibo is bigger.”

Because everyone knew the observatory at Arecibo, Puerto Rico. Filmmakers loved it. The first time she remembered seeing the Arecibo dish was in some old James Bond flick. Goldeneye, maybe.

Arecibo's dish was three hundred meters across, its aluminum panels suspended over a mesh of steel cables to form a single surface: way too massive to move. To aim the Arecibo telescope—to the extent it could be aimed—you positioned its suspended instrumentation module using the cables that spanned the dish. None of which mattered. If she failed, Arecibo would face the same problems as Green Bank.

Valerie limited herself to, “Bigger, but not fully steerable.” She pointed at the GBT's base, where the mammoth wheels engaged the circular steel track. “As opposed to our big scope. This whole structure can rotate up to forty degrees a minute, versus one-fourth degree per minute needed to keep pace with Earth's rotation. The dish can tip up and down at as much as twenty degrees per minute. That instrument turret at the end of the arm holds up to eight independent instrument modules, each—”

“Back up,” Marcus said. “Those tipping and turning rates. You're telling me that the GBT can track planets, asteroids, even close-orbiting satellites. Stars and galaxies only move with the Earth's rotation.” She must have looked surprised because he added, “Remember who I work for?”

“Right. And sorry.”

“Except asteroids and most planets don't emit radio waves. In the middle of the quiet zone, where my cell phone has no service and NRAO won't even permit digital cameras up close, I can't believe the observatory is pumping out radar pulses so you can read the echoes.”

He was quick, which was promising, and he seemed engaged in what she'd had to show him. But around the eyes she saw a touch of . . . something. Suspicion? Was she that transparent, or was it something else?

“You're correct,” she said. “Arecibo transmits and Green Bank reads the faint echoes. We could transmit ourselves"—she pointed up at the instrumentation arm—"by replacing one of the receiver modules with a transmitter, but that would hardly be radio quiet. My work involves the radar mapping of Titan, and we partner with Arecibo to do it.”

“Titan? Just how sensitive is this scope?”

“If there were a cell phone on Titan, with the GBT I could listen to the call.” Barring other complications, and that topic was coming. “We need to move along, Marcus. The weekly science lunch is not to be missed.”

Especially because you are on deck.

* * * *

Patrick Burkhalter toted his cafeteria tray to the residence hall's second floor, where he found the social lounge half filled. Many of his colleagues were already seated and eating. Others surrounded Valerie Clayburn and her guest, meal trays in hand, intercepted before they could find a table. With maybe eight thousand people in the entire county, everyone welcomed new faces. But visitors and outsiders comprised very different categories, and after eight years here Patrick remained an outsider.

“Hey,” he offered as he took an empty seat. Tamara Miller glanced his way, nodded, and went back to her conversation with Liam Harris. Something about intergalactic dust.

Patrick went to work on his country-fried steak, mashed potatoes, and gravy. His choices would do nothing for his waistline or his cholesterol, but who did he have to impress?

Or to live for? That was a thought depressing enough to make him set down his fork.

Their guest got perhaps two minutes with his lunch before Valerie began tapping her water glass with a butter knife. “Hi, everyone. We have a visitor, as you may have noticed.”

Not to mention that she had put out the word to make sure the tech staff all came today. Would she get the outcome for which she so obviously schemed? In Patrick's experience, manipulating scientists and engineers worked about as well as herding cats.

“Hello,” the chorus rang out raggedly, from around the collection of short, narrow tables arrayed in a U.

Valerie said, “Our visitor, Marcus Judson, works at NASA Goddard on the demonstration powersat project. I'm hoping he'll tell us about it.”

Patrick refocused on his lunch while others murmured their encouragement.

Judson kept his response short, and Patrick approved. You didn't know you were today's featured attraction, did you?

“So what do you think, folks?” Valerie prompted. “How will powersats affect us here?”

And the games began.

“A powersat is a huge noise generator,” Aaron Friedman said. “And because it's sky-based, that's noise from which we can't hide.”

“The power beam is focused.” Judson slid away his tray, the meal all but untouched, clearly perceptive enough to see what was coming. “The downlink won't come anywhere near here.”

“Doesn't matter,” Aaron persisted. “Well, aiming will help, but not enough. The satellite shapes the beam with phased-array techniques, right? So there are unavoidable side lobes to the main beam. That's basic math. Even sixty dB down, there'll be a lot of noise.”

Engineers and astronomers set aside lunches to argue about phased arrays: their pointing accuracy and failure modes, the frequency distributions apt to show up within the noise, and whether sixty decibels was the expected attenuation for a side lobe. Of course even sixty dB down from one gigawatt left a kilowatt of noise.

Judson kept thanking people for their comments. Mostly he let the staff argue among themselves, jotting notes on paper napkins—and looking ticked off.

This was not a mugging, exactly. More like an intervention, or maybe an inquisition. When Patrick tried to catch Valerie's eye, she looked away.

Patrick knew all about inquisitions by the tech staff. That had been his introduction to Green Bank, too, if for a different reason. Judson would go home with only bad memories to show for the day. Whereas he . . .

He still bore the scars. Patrick was more than qualified to coordinate routine maintenance and teach visiting astronomers to operate the gear, so it hadn't been entirely a pity appointment. More like an I'll owe you one arrangement between execs at the apex of Big Science.

After the Jules Verne probe went missing, JPL wanted Patrick gone. NASA did, too, but even more, they wanted to put a halt to the embarrassing publicity. No matter what anyone suspected, they could only prove that he had cut procedural corners to upload an emergency maneuver. That the distant probe went silent days later could have been pure coincidence.

And so Patrick had made clear what would keep him from giving interviews and suing for wrongful termination. He required ongoing access to a big dish—somewhere.

Without too much torture of the English language, Green Bank was somewhere.

And so he went in one not-so-easy step from the principal investigator of a major interplanetary probe to lowly observatory staffer. Training and maintenance offered plenty of opportunity to use radio telescopes without grant applications sure to be rejected.

He used the big dishes every chance he could get.

After the divorce—no way would Anna move here from Pasadena—what else did he have to do?

He had sworn to Anna that things would turn out all right. That maybe this had happened for a good reason. He would not have trusted him, either, especially given how little he had been able to explain, but it still hurt that she hadn't. More than anything, he missed the kids. He wondered if Rob and Clarissa would ever understand, or forgive him for the divorce.

When Patrick tuned back to the present, Judson remained in the hot seat. Only the objections varied: from powersats, miles across, getting in the way of observations, to the heat they would reradiate as infrared, to minutiae of RF interference. Some people argued for the joy of arguing. Par for the course here, but Judson could not know that.

Along the way, an admin slipped into the lounge and handed Valerie a folded sheet of paper. Another joy of life in the quiet zone: runners instead of cell phones. Valerie grimaced at whatever she found written, dashed off her own note, and handed it to Judson, then rushed off.

By the time the hyperbole reached, “Powersats will mean the end of astronomy until"—yeah, right!—"someone builds an observatory on the far side of the moon,” Patrick had had enough.

“There's more to life than astronomy,” he snorted. Too bad Valerie had left. If anyone needed the reminder, she did. But for Simon, she might never go home. “And life takes power, people. Lots and lots of power.”

Turning, Tamara gave Patrick an Et tu, Brute stare, but from across the room a couple of engineers nodded.

“We learned to live with DirecTV,” Ernesto Perez conceded.

To which someone snapped, “Yeah, by giving up listening on those frequencies.”

Rekindling the debate, from which it took the tech director noisily sliding back her chair to bring a halt.

* * * *

At least, Marcus thought, tucking his notes from the lunch into his shirt pocket, one secret of the Universe had been revealed. Town meetings were not the worst way to spend a day.

If he had correctly parsed Valerie's scrawl, she was retrieving a sick kid from school and going home for the rest of the afternoon. One scribble might have said “single mom,” to explain her disappearance. It was too bad about her son, but Marcus was happy to make a quick getaway.

Only driving home, as much as he tried to enjoy the Appalachian scenery, he couldn't. Ellen's recent rebuke kept nagging at him: Have you considered the possibility someone else might know something?

If he could get past Valerie bushwhacking him, she had given him a lot to ponder.

* * * *

Wednesday, April 19

Marcus poked at a telecom console, setting parameters for the upcoming conference call, and thinking: all meetings are not created equal. He was in a mundane conference room at Goddard, deep within suburban Maryland, but this call was out of this world.

Whatever grief the week might bring him, the progress review reminded him why everything else was worth it.

Landscape undulated over the conference table, sliding past as a distant camera swiveled on its post. Somewhere behind the camera, the full moon was about to set; Phoebe's hills and structures cast long, knife-edged shadows. To his right, in the tourist-bot preserve, the Grand Chasm gaped: a vast, inky blackness. The dazzling “star” just above the eerily close horizon was The Space Place, almost two hundred miles ahead of Phoebe in its orbit.

Ellen limped into the telecom room, bearing Starbucks. Despite physical therapy, her leg still bothered her. She set a cardboard cup on the table beside him.

“Thanks,” he said, concentrating on the final link left to configure. “That said, you have no respect for tradition.”

She laughed. “Okay, who confirmed for today's session?”

He gestured at the holo. “The usual folks on the far end, though Darlene Stryker is at the powersat. She'll call in from there.”

“How far is the far end today?”

As distant as it could be. “As the neutrino flies"—right through the Earth, without noticing—"it's about thirteen thousand miles. Relayed through two geosynch comsats and then down to Phoebe, call it a half second.”

She closed the door and settled into a chair. “Who's joining from on the ground?”

“Phil and Bethany.” Phil Majeski was the prime contractor's program manager. Bethany Taylor was Phil's chief engineer. Both disdained SETA contractors. “Phil's netting in from corporate. Bethany called to say she's stuck at a subcontractor's facility. Resetter picketing, unrelated to us—something about shale-oil gasification in Wyoming. I'm linking her in now.” Marcus waved a wireless key fob at the sensor in the comm console. The authentication LED blinked green. “Ready.”

“Let's go.”

Marcus shrank the Phoebe image to one-fourth size, then switched views from the surface to the base's little common room, where three men sat waiting. As they and Ellen swapped greetings, Marcus connected the other locations.

“Everyone have the agenda?” Ellen asked. She started through her list.

The comm console took notes, but speech-recognition software glitched under the best of circumstances. These weren't. Merely this many people in one conversation sometimes confused the software. With the comm delay between Earth and Phoebe, people spoke over each other as often as not, and echo suppression was less than perfect. Noise suppression filtered out the drone of Phoebe's ventilation fans, but not the random clatters of—well, Marcus did not always know what.

So Marcus took notes, too.

Lots of notes. Hydroponics yields in Phoebe's still experimental gardens. Performance data on the thrusters that would slowly lift the powersat, its construction now almost complete, to its operational orbit. Final integration tests on the microwave transmission arrays. Production data on Phoebe's automated factories, churning out solar cells (and in smaller quantities, other electronics), structural beams, and water and oxygen for the construction crew. Defect and repair rates. Assembly anecdotes—but not many, the process having become routine. Assembly statistics.

PS-1 had just topped two million pounds! How amazing was that? The late, unlamented International Space Station had massed only about one third as much, and its on-orbit assembly had required more than a decade. But the ISS had been lugged up to orbit piece by piece, battling Earth's gravity all the way—for more than a thousand dollars for every pound. For a powersat fabricated on Earth, launch costs alone would rival construction costs for a coal power plant of equivalent capacity.

But most of PS-1's ingredients came from Phoebe's mines. And that was why—while there would never be another big tin-can space station—tens of powersats would join PS-1. Even combined, all those powersats would scarcely touch Phoebe's trillion-ton mass.

Motion in one of the four holos kept drawing his eye. Darlene Stryker, in her skintight counterpressure suit. She floated above the vast plain of the powersat, the nearest safety-and-inspection camera following her as she drifted at the end of her tether. As the camera tracked her, coworkers—most many-tentacled robots, one human and spacesuited like her—passed in and out of the background. He did not see any of the hoppers that shuttled workers the fifty miles from Phoebe to the construction site on the powersat.

Two million pounds was an abstraction. But two miles square, more or less: that was real. That he could feel. Marcus admired the plain of solar cells aglitter in the moonlight. PS-1 seemed to stretch on and on forever.

“Okay,” Ellen said at last. “Good session, folks. Bethany, I'll look forward to your update on getting the backup water recycling system back to nominal. For next week's meeting?”

“No problem,” Bethany said. “Chances are you'll have something in your e-mail by the day after tomorrow.”

“Excellent.” Ellen stood. “That should do it, then.”

“One thing,” Marcus said. The words just popped out. Something about PS-1 stretching into the distance. Something about defects, and big engineering, and his subconscious at work.

Phil Majeski scowled, putting his whole face to work: brow furrowed, eyes narrowed, lips pursed. Phil was no fan of support contractors.

“What is it, Marcus?” Ellen sounded surprised. He usually held any comments until after the meeting.

What indeed? Big engineering. What else was big? The solar farm he and Ellen had toured. Square miles there, too, of solar cells, plus the rectifying antennas newly added to receive the microwave downlink from PS-1. The Green Bank Telescope, the collection area of its dish a “mere” two-plus acres. Eavesdropping on phone calls out near Saturn.

Then he had it: the flip side of the powersat, from this vantage unseen. The microwave transmission arrays. No one had ever deployed such a large phased-array transmitter, whether using solid-state masers or tube-based amplifiers coupled to microwave antennas. Nothing ever built even came close. PS-1 incorporated both types of arrays, each in several design variations. The separate arrays would operate standalone or in unison, allowing side-by-side comparisons. In every case, many thousands of transmitters . . .

“The failure rates on the klystrons and masers?” Marcus began cautiously.

“What about them?” Bethany said. “We covered that. They're all testing well within contract specs.”

“Understood. But when won't at least one tube or maser be out of spec? Pumping out microwaves at unintended frequencies?” Because the focused, steerable power beam resulted from exactly controlling—individually and in real time—the many thousand transmitters. The math of phased arrays was a thing of beauty, the choreography of constructive and destructive interference among transmitters. Only waves at the wrong frequency would not interfere properly, would not aggregate into a controlled beam. Wrong frequencies were just . . . noise. “A single misbehaving klystron—out of thousands—is like a whole TV satellite transmitting on an unauthorized frequency.”

“Which is why,” Bethany snapped, “when a klystron goes out of spec, we'll power it down. Powersat-resident maintenance robots and spare parts, remember?”

And if, in the meanwhile, the interference obliterates an interstellar observation years in the planning, or the faint echoes of a radar beam bounced off Titan?

“Maybe the radio astronomers have a legitimate concern,” Marcus said. “How soon will PS-1 detect and adapt to an out-of-tolerance transmitter?”

“Soon enough,” Bethany came back, only without her usual cockiness.

Ellen heard the uncertainty too. “As I recall, Kendricks signed up to a requirement to minimize RF interference with ground-based systems.”

“We all have a schedule requirement,” Phil rebutted. Schedule was the blunt instrument with which Congress beat up NASA, and NASA the contractor. But deadlines could work both ways. “Surely schedule takes precedence over hypothetical failure modes.”

“And suppose that such a hypothetical failure occurs?” Ellen persisted. “What operational tests do you have planned to demonstrate PS-1's corrective action?” Pause. “Marcus, would you check that for me?”

“Sure, Ellen,” Marcus said.

He was all but certain that the test-case database contained nothing relevant. And that Kendricks's award fee for the calendar quarter would take a hit if Ellen wrote up the finding as a critical deficiency. And that Phil, who as the Kendricks program manager got a slice of the award fee, would share the pain.

Phil sighed. “It won't be necessary, Ellen. Transmitter failure and response sounds like another set of simulations we should run.”

“And also,” Marcus added, “simulations with randomly spaced pairs of transmitters gone rogue at the same time.” Twisting the knife, but also being practical. “Dealing in such large numbers, two near-concurrent faults are bound to happen.”

Because what the hell. Phil hated him anyway.

* * * *

Toe tapping aimlessly (and occasionally kicking the ethernet cable), Valerie pondered an empty screen. She was so tempted to roll up her datasheet, but at week's end the application window closed for observing time on the big dish. Miss the cutoff—or fail to make a strong case—and she would have to wait four months to reapply.

She and a few hundred other needy applicants.

By her side at the dinette table, Simon worked on a school assignment. Or, to judge from his fidgeting, not. At least while she sat there, the IM window on his datasheet remained closed. “How's the assignment coming?” she asked.

He countered with, “What's for dinner?”

Not encouraging while Simon still toyed with his midafternoon snack, and with a big stack of homework due the next day. “Want me to take a look? Need some help?”

“Nah.” Fidget, fidget.

She looked anyway. The top window in his datasheet was a social studies unit called The Great Oil Shock. There had been, she read furtively, “an unexpected drop-off in production among some of the world's largest oil suppliers.” Very PC: Something had happened. Not something anyone caused to have happened.

Not that she would want to try explaining the Crudetastrophe to a nine-year-old, but it was no mere “drop-off,” and someone had most definitely caused it. Even though who, and what had happened October 12, 2014, remained a closely held secret of the Restored Caliphate.

But far more was known than the sanitized children's lesson Valerie was surreptitiously skimming. . . .

* * * *

Oil prices surged in the weeks following Simon's birth. Valerie scarcely noticed, let alone registered that the jump supposedly was a big deal. With a colicky newborn to care for, who had time to sleep, much less to surf?

Or, for that matter, to drive? She had nowhere to go for the next few months, and work, when she did go back, was in biking distance. And hallelujah for teachers: Keith had the summer off too. If the world chose to have a crisis—and when was it not on the verge of one?—she figured the world could muddle through without her. And, anyway, didn't energy prices yo-yo every few years?

The world did have a crisis without her.

That August the Caliph's Guard declared to the world that it had deployed atomic devices deep within the country's main petroleum reservoirs. To deter aggression by its enemies—variously: counterrevolutionary elements, apostate neighboring regimes, the Zionist entity, and hostile Crusader powers—the Guard vowed to deny their oil for all time if blasphemers impinged on the Caliph's holy sovereignty.

Still, she scarcely noticed. Simon was all of three months old. Keith was up to his eyeballs in last-minute lesson plans. After two years as a substitute, he had just gotten an appointment to teach economics at the Pocahontas County High School. She and Keith both struggled to make childcare arrangements so she could get back to work at the observatory. The scattered few minutes she could spare from family, if only to clear the cobwebs from her brain, she spent poring over the latest exosolar planet surveys.

If none of that had been happening in her life, she still would not have understood what insanity drove the Guard to trigger its nukes. To this day, perhaps no one knew outside the regime's inner circles. And maybe not even them. After the explosions, Guard factions had turned on one another, and on foreigners, in an orgy of blame, purges, and executions.

But however mysterious the Crudetastrophe's origins, its consequences were all too clear:

—Radiation tainted petroleum reserves measuring in the billions of barrels, the contamination spreading into neighboring states’ oil fields. Whether the reservoirs were always linked deep underground or the atomic blasts had opened fissures between once distinct reservoirs—experts disagreed—petroleum exports abruptly ceased from across a wide area.

—Regional antagonisms erupted into open warfare.

—Oil-field destruction and shipping blockades spread far beyond the Restored Caliphate's borders. Economies collapsed across the Middle East.

—The price of petroleum tripled.

The supply and price shocks plunged most of the world into deep recession. Unlike the oil embargos of 1967, 1973, and 1979—their extent and duration limited, ultimately, by the suppliers’ dependence on oil sales—the Crudetastrophe was irreversible. Many onetime exporters could not resume production as fervently as they wished to.

China's and Japan's export-driven economies collapsed further and faster than most. Almost overnight, China and Japan were selling U.S. treasury bonds rather than buying them. Interest rates soared, currencies deflated, and countries reneged on their debts.

Stagflation, Keith said. Stagnation and inflation together.

Nine years later, The Great Stagflation still raged. But not everywhere—

The Crudetastrophe explosions had not affected Russia's vast oil and gas reserves. Russia emerged from the crisis as a petro-superpower, controlling unprecedented wealth, snapping up American treasury bonds at fire-sale prices, and vying for global economic hegemony.

And as chaos spread across the Middle East, Keith's Marine Corps reserve unit was called up. . . .

* * * *

“Mom. Mom. Mom!”

Valerie shook off the old, sad memories to find Simon squinting at her suspiciously. “What is it?”

“What is for dinner?”

She was in no mood to cook. “Frozen pizza.” As Simon beamed approval—not exactly a compliment to her culinary skills—the phone rang.

Life without cell phones was liberating. But only corded phones? Shaking her head at the primitiveness of it all, Valerie took the three steps to her ancient, corded landline phone. Simon was squirrelly today. If she took the call on her datasheet he would be out of his chair like a shot to mug for the webcam.

“Valerie?”

She could not place the voice. “Yes?”

“Marcus Judson.” Pause. “Is this a bad time?”

In hindsight, she had not handled his visit very wisely. It was hard to imagine this call ending well. “Now is fine. What's up?”

“You and your cronies gave me something to think about. And the thing is . . . you're right. There might be a problem.”

The well-stretched cord would reach well into the dining room. She went; Simon followed; she shooed him back. “Your assignment,” she mouthed. “Go on, Marcus.”

“It's not like I think we should stop work on the powersat, but there could be complications. There might be problematical failure modes we need to work around.” When he started explaining phased arrays to her, she interrupted. “Remember who I work for?”

“Touché.” He coughed. “I meant to ask, Valerie. How's your son feeling?”

“Thanks for asking. Simon has progressed to the malingering stage.” And unless he is bleeding from the ears in the morning, he's going back to school.

“Okay, here's the thing. We never had our one-on-one discussion, and I'd also like to collect input from specialists there to fold into a failure-mode simulation. What if I come back out, say, Friday the twenty-eighth?”

“That would work.” But there was something else in his voice. A hesitance. He wouldn't. Would he? “Was there something else?”

“Yeah . . . I wondered if I could take you out to dinner afterward.”

Crap, he would. She hadn't dated but once or twice since Keith died. For the longest time, she hadn't been ready. After, Simon and work consumed her time. Anyway, she was content with things the way they were. Or was it resigned?

Had she wanted to, who was there to date, anyway? Coworkers? Uh-uh.

If she told Marcus no, then what? A sudden loss of interest in radio astronomy? He did not seem like the punitive type. Hell, she had sandbagged him. Maybe he meant only a dinner of colleagues.

As her thoughts churned, the silence stretched.

“Or not,” Marcus said. “I thought we might hit it off, but maybe you're seeing someone. Or whatever. Forget I asked. It has no bearing on my returning to Green Bank. I do need to talk with the experts.”

“No,” Valerie said, surprising herself, “asking is fine.” Reassuring which of them? “And dinner does sound like fun.”

* * * *

Friday, April 28

Astronomers, engineers, and programmers wandered in and out of the Green Bank social lounge, where the atmosphere was more like an after-hours bull session than an inquiry. For long-scheduled observing time or to handle other commitments, Marcus told himself every time someone left. But despite the informality—or, perhaps, because of it—the notes file on his datasheet grew voluminous. His fingers ached from so much typing on its virtual keyboard. One thing this gathering was not: a DC-style, stultifying meeting.

Phil Majeski's simulation team would have its hands full in the coming weeks.

Valerie Clayburn was among the nomads, leaving Marcus to wonder how they would synch up for dinner. Whenever she popped in he treated her like anyone else—this was work, not a date, and her coworkers were all around, too—while second-guessing himself whether he was being too distant.

Why, but for a getting-back-on-the-horse-that-threw-you theory, had he asked her out?

Because Lindsey—the horse who had thrown him—was three months gone. Because life went on. Because Valerie was smart, intriguingly intense, and, despite her apparent efforts not to show it, hot.

“. . . until they're in the way.”

They? Marcus had let his mind wander. Again. “Say that again?”

“Are we going too fast?” Tamara Miller asked. “Moving targets. How will we know where they are until they're in our way?”

Going too fast would serve as an excuse. Marcus opened a datasheet window for the auto-transcription function. With everyone chiming in at will, the voice-recognition output was half gibberish, but half was more than he had processed over the past few seconds. He skimmed. Aha. Migration.

All powersats, not just PS-1, would be built near Phoebe and its mines and factories. After completion and checkout, the powersats would be boosted—slowly, because they were so massive—to their final destinations. In geosynchronous Earth orbit, GEO, they would be all but stationary overhead.

“So your concern,” Marcus inferred, “is the trek to GEO, with the powersat's orbit spiraling out till it arrives.”

Tamara nodded. “Yeah. How will I know when and where it's going to get in my way? Or maybe they, if there may be more than one powersat migrating at once.”

“Not just us,” Valerie said, back again. “Optical astronomer, too. And pity the poor Earth-based infrared astronomers. A structure that's miles square soaks up a lot of sunlight.”

“Kind of the idea,” Marcus said, getting laughs. “But I see your point. You need a way to plan around the powersats even before they settle into geosynch. I can recommend an Internet application anyone can access for tracking and orbital predictions. And real-time position, too, as determined by GPS. Okay?”

“What about flight plans?” Tamara countered. “Shouldn't powersats be in FAA files?”

Marcus took notes. “Probably a good idea.” And around Phoebe and The Space Place, essential for safety too.

“Real-time access,” Ernesto Perez added, “so we can input the powersat orbital predictions into our scheduling software.”

When Valerie disappeared again, around four p.m., Marcus thought maybe she had left to change clothes. (He planned to change, but after his first visit he had known to leave coat and tie in the car.) When she reappeared half an hour later, though, she still wore the same blue jeans and tan sweater. Even in sneakers, she was almost his height. He guessed she was about five foot ten.

She could wear a flour sack and be gorgeous. As for his coat and tie, they could stay where they were.

Five-ish, Aaron Friedman left with a parting shot of, “See you later, Valerie.”

Marcus waited for her to correct her colleague. She did not. He thought he had asked Valerie out. On a date. Had “can I take you out to dinner?” somehow changed meanings during his time with Lindsey?

Shit, he was not ready for this.

The two of them finally had the lounge to themselves. “Ready for dinner?” he asked.

She smiled awkwardly. “Sure. That'll be nice.”

“I'll need you to suggest someplace to eat.”

“Not hard.” She smiled again, and this time it came across more sincere. “We don't have many to choose among.”

They headed in his car for Durbin, only slightly less tiny than Green Bank. Instead of making get-acquainted chat (not that he seemed to remember how), he focused on the narrow, twisty roads. The ten-mile, thirty- minute drive took most of his attention.

Unless dimness counted as décor, the family restaurant and bar had none. Several people he recognized from today's meeting, including Aaron Friedman, occupied stools at the bar. Banter with the bartender suggested they were regulars. That was one mystery solved, anyway. As for Valerie's expectations for the evening? Time would tell.

Compared to the afternoon's free-for-all, the conversation once he and Valerie were seated felt stiff. His scars were too fresh. Her scars, whatever they were, seemed to run deeper. He called it a toss-up who felt more ill at ease.

Ruling out shoptalk might have been a mistake. What did people talk about on first dates? He couldn't remember. The short menus, when the waitress brought them by, offered few possibilities to eat or discuss.

“How old is your son?” he asked as they waited for their appetizers. “Simon?”

Getting the name right got him another of those too-rare natural smiles. “Simon. He's nine. Precocious guy, in a mischievous kind of way. Reminds me . . .”

Of his father, Marcus filled in the blank. It felt too soon to ask. All he came up with, gracelessly, when enough time had passed was, “What have you read recently for fun?”

She named two novels he had never heard of, but he asked about them anyway. The waitress arrived with their entrées and the conversation trailed off again. This evening was a disaster.

Valerie told herself she should be home with her son. Only she knew that for a lie: Simon did just fine with babysitters, had more or less adopted Brianna as his big sister. Lying to yourself is never a good sign.

* * * *

Her head was not in the game.

She found little to say when Marcus asked about favorite movies and music, or volunteered his own. When he launched into gadgets—about which, as an engineer, he was predictably enthusiastic—she shot that down too. Sorry even as she said it, she disgorged some inanity about devices that would not function in the quiet zone or were a pain tethered to an ethernet cable.

And when he unintentionally brought Keith to mind, she shut down even more.

She should have asked around about first-date topics. Clearly, she would not need to ask about second dates. “Will you excuse me? I should check on Simon,” she said.

“Sure.” Reflexively reaching for his cell, Marcus laughed at himself. (She liked that in a guy. Too bad she was such a failure at this.) “I guess the restaurant has landlines you can use.”

“For regulars, the house phone. It's behind the bar.” She stood. “I'll be right back.”

She found Patrick Burkhalter holding down a barstool. The rest of the Green Bank regulars appeared to have left.

Patrick must not have shaved that day. She thought he had worn the same pants and shirt the day before. He was heavier every time she saw him, his clothes tighter, his gut bulging over his belt. The mound of buffalo wings in front of him would do nothing to reverse the trend. And he drank alone far too often. Poor guy: No one to go home to.

“How's the big date going?” Patrick asked her.

“Just colleagues,” she said. After the fact, if not by original intent. “Hand me the phone?”

To judge by the giggling in the background when Brianna answered, Simon was doing fine.

Patrick was nursing a beer with one hand, prodding his datasheet with the other. An ethernet cable snaked behind the bar from the datasheet. Something about Patrick tickled at the back of her mind.

Damn! Maybe she had gadgets to share after all. And they were wireless in a big way.

* * * *

Black, sterile landscape hung in a shallow arc before Marcus. Up close, churned ground. In the left distance, a range of low hills. Straight ahead, receding into the distance, a pockmarked plain. In the right distance, rippled terrain that blended into more hills.

Phoebe, as he had never experienced it.

He and Valerie sat side by side on her living-room couch, an ordinary game controller in front of each of them on the coffee table. “What do you think?”

Marcus hardly minded being invited inside after dinner—but he was more than a little surprised. She had insisted she had something to show him. What was this about? “Interesting,” he offered neutrally.

“Give it a shot,” she said.

He glanced down at his game controller. Landscape shifted as his head moved. Infrared laser beams shining into his eyes and sensors tracking eye motions from the reflections. He looked up and the landscape shifted again. “The hills to my extreme left and right look alike.”

“Identical, in fact. The bot's full-circle view is compressed into ninety degrees, because you, unlike the bot, can't see three-sixty. To your far left and far right, about ten degrees of landscape overlap for continuity. You get used to it.”

Marcus had never seen the attraction of the Phoebe tourist bots. Moon bots, maybe. Over the years robotic lunar landers had deployed those to far-flung and quite varied terrain. The catch was cost: Lunar bots were expensive. Once an armchair explorer sent a lunar rent-a-bot over a cliff or into a crevasse—that was that. And because of the comm delay to/from the moon, accidents did happen. And so, time on lunar bots did not come cheap.

Lose a bot on tiny, nearby Phoebe—much less likely, anyway, given the shorter comm delays—and often someone could retrieve it. Recoverability made armchair exploration of Phoebe affordable.

But Marcus “saw” PS-1 and Phoebe almost daily, with clearance to operate the surface-camera systems. (Not bots, though. For security purposes, work bots could only be accessed with much higher clearance than he had, and then only from local terminals.) He had come to think of the rent-a-bots creeping about parts of Phoebe's surface—when, from time to time, they strayed outside the tourist zone—as so much optical clutter.

Still . . .

He swept a hand across his controller. Gesture-sensing logic read the motion—more clever processing of infrared reflections. With an all but imperceptible delay the landscape slid to his right as the bot turned. Motion somehow emphasized the duplicated scenery at the extremes of the holo.

If he recalled correctly, and the fast response suggested he did, Phoebe was all but overhead at the moment. He swept his hand back—and nothing happened.

“Hold your fingers together,” Valerie said, “so you don't clutter the IR reflections. Fingers don't control individual tentacles.”

Walking by gesture would be a great user interface. If his hand had eight opposable fingers. If the round-trip delay, ping-ponged through comsats, though far more manageable than in the lunar case, did not sometimes approach a full second. “Walking” involved a joystick and then only indicated a general direction. The bot's onboard nav software figured how to locomote across the landscape.

He swept his hand again, keeping his fingers straight, still, and together. This time, the landscape shifted as he expected. “I don't get it. Exploring Phoebe seems like the last thing that would interest you.”

“Patrick, a guy I work with, was into these bots right after Phoebe rentals came online.” She seemed about to say more, and to reconsider. “I tried to interest Simon in remote-controlled exploration. Any kid his age is going to spend time in VR, and this seemed much more civilized than the usual shoot-'em-ups.”

“How'd that go over?”

“About as well as you'd expect.”

Marcus kept gesturing, the landscape swaying in response. “Am I ready to take a step?”

“Uh-huh. Let's find a pair of bots somewhere interesting.” She did something with her controller and a translucent pop-up materialized over the landscape. “Okay, here's an idle pair of bots near the Grand Chasm. You take bot 327.” With a gesture, she changed the scene.

He had seen the Grand Chasm often enough, but never like this. Never so vast. What had changed?

The horizon was way too close.

“These bots can't be more than a foot tall,” he said. “I'm used to watching from the safety cameras, atop eight-foot posts.”

“Size isn't everything,” she said. And blushed.

Marcus pretended not to notice, guessing the words had just slipped out. If Valerie was one for flirting or double entendres he had yet to see it.

He waggled a tentacle at her bot. “So, come here often?”

Laughing, she managed to make her bot shrug. “Only twice, both times long ago.”

“Hmm. Maybe this can be our place.” The line felt hokey, and yet like the first uncontrived comment he had managed all evening.

They each arched a tentacle over the railing to peer into the abyss, where scree piles dotted the dark, undulating depths. He saw bots stranded partway down and the tentacle tips of others peeking out from beneath piles of rubble. Trapped before the barrier went up, or did tourists climb their bots over the railing?

The chasm sides looked unstable, but exactly how treacherous were they? Marcus needed several tries to grasp and drop a stray pebble over the railing. Under Phoebe's scant gravity, the rock more floated than fell. Finally, picking up speed, it struck a canyon wall and triggered a slow-motion rockslide.

Few people had ever entered the Grand Chasm, and—as much as geologists ached to explore Phoebe's most prominent feature—none had gone down very far. Too dangerous, the risk assessments always concluded. Even flying in, a hopper's exhaust could start an avalanche. Some day, perhaps, when mining was less of a priority, the staff could tunnel into the bottom of the rift.

Someday remained distant.

Marcus had long suspected an excess of caution after the early—and unrelated—incident during the establishment of Phoebe base. One geologist had already died on Phoebe, and NASA was determined not to see more.

Now, in eerie silence, as the slo-mo rockslide went on and on, Marcus reconsidered.

Only how was he seeing this? Not sunlight—ever. Not earthlight, given the minimal comm delay. Phoebe had to be more or less overhead at the moment, deep inside Earth's shadow. Moonlight? The Moon was just past first quarter. The light it cast would strike obliquely, the shadows pointing in one direction—only the shadows around the bots pointed every which way. That suggested artificial lighting, yet he saw neither lamps nor spotlights.

He gave up trying to work it out. “I'm confused. Where is our light coming from?”

“Not light. Not as you mean it, anyway. The bots use lidar.”

Like radar, only based on laser beams. “So this is all computer-synth imagery?”

“Uh-huh.” She stood and stretched. “I feel like coffee. How about you?”

“Sure.” He followed her into the kitchen, where a pair of binoculars sat on the counter near the back door. “Wildlife?” he guessed, pointing.

“Stargazing.” She finished putting up the pot of coffee and grabbed the binocs. “Come outside.”

The night was cool and cloudless. After the moon, waxing gibbous as he had remembered, The Space Place, playground of petrocrats, kleptocrats, and the other superrich, was the brightest object in the sky. Only this was a sky unlike any he had seen in a long time. Far from big-city lights, the stars blazed. Thousands of them.

“Try these.” She handed him the binoculars—

Through which countless more stars shone. And there, aglow in infrared from the residual heat of their last passes through sunlight, tiny shapes: an oval, a rectangle, and, the brightest of the three, a not-quite-round pearl. Phoebe's sunshield and PS-1, seen at a bit of an angle, and The Space Place. Phoebe itself was too dark and cold to spot even with thermal imaging.

Her hand was on his back, turning him. “Now look. No, up a little. A little higher.”

“At what?”

“You'll know it when you're there.”

The Milky Way looked like spilt milk—with a scattering of diamond chips.

“Wow,” he said. “Thanks.” He slowly turned, taking in the grandeur of the night sky. He eventually thought to offer Valerie her binocs. To the naked eye the night now seemed blacker than ever. “It's very dark out here.”

“Oh, crap!”

Huh? “What's wrong?”

“You didn't plan to drive back tonight, did you? If you think it's dark here . . .”

Think how dark it will be in the forest, crossing the mountains, he completed. “Not a problem. I have a room for the night in the observatory residence hall. You don't need to chase me off just yet.”

“That's good.” A sudden, unexpected peck on the cheek suggested she meant it. “And if you'd like, how about you come by in the morning for breakfast?”

Turning, slipping his arms around her waist, Marcus said, “I'd like that a lot.”

* * * *

Monday, May 8

From the secluded anonymity of a black stretch limo, shared only with a longtime assistant, Yakov Nikolayevich Brodsky watched urban streets slip past.

He always enjoyed visiting Chicago. With its extensive expatriate community, he dined well here, on everything from blini to borscht to stroganoff. The finest elaborate banquet cost less than a passable snack in Moscow—Because few here could have afforded Moscow prices.

And so, in a very different way he relished the signs of America's decline. The weed-choked medians. The empty stores and shuttered factories. The would-be day laborers milling about in a 7-Eleven parking lot. Most of all he enjoyed the waiting lines and per-gallon prices as they passed neighborhood gas stations.

What a difference a decade could make.

The limo sped downtown amid an escort of blue-and-white Chicago police cruisers. Lights flashing, they crossed under the rickety elevated-train tracks that demarcated the Loop.

“We're almost there, sir,” the driver announced soon after. “Five minutes.”

A driver! How quaintly decadent. But doubtless the driver with whom he had been provided also spied on him. “Very well.”

Yakov savored, too, Chicago's distinctive architecture. Perhaps his favorite example was the masterpiece that came into view as the motorcade turned onto Jackson Boulevard.

For decades the Chicago Board of Trade Building had towered over everything else in this city. From the speeding car, alas, Yakov could not fully appreciate the edifice's art deco distinctiveness. He could scarcely even see the three-story statue of Ceres, goddess of agriculture, which crowned the building's peak.

This building projected a confidence and a presence, embodiment of a bygone era, of an American century. Not so the many modern glass-and-steel skyscrapers: Their drab and boxy exteriors served only as metaphors for the hollowed-out American economy.

Police had cleared the street and sidewalk in front of the Chicago Board of Trade Building and were keeping scores of picketing protesters behind sawhorse barricades. American grain for Americans many placards read. Stop burning food another popular sign demanded.

Inwardly, he smiled.

As the limo pulled up to the curb, eight serious men and women in somber garb marched from the main entrance. Yakov waited for the driver to open his door.

“Welcome, Yakov Nikolayevich!” one of his greeters declared, a hand outstretched. “You honor us by your visit.”

“Hello, Roland,” Yakov acknowledged. Roland Johnston was chief executive officer of the CBOT. Yakov would deal with no one lesser.

“I trust your flight was satisfactory?”

“Very comfortable. Thank you.” Washington, to which Yakov was posted as Deputy Trade Representative, was only a short hop away. Shorter, in fact, than he would have wished. He so seldom found the opportunity to fly his Learjet. “My assistant, Irina Ivanovna Chesnokova.”

“Ms. Chesnokova.” Roland introduced his aides and hangers-on, and then, with a quick gesture toward the protest, suggested proceeding inside. “I apologize for the ruckus.”

“Democracy,” Yakov said. They could decide whether he intended sympathetic understanding or ironic dismissal. “Very good. I would like to see the trading floor.” The pits of the original trading floor, alas, had been filled with concrete, the new area turned into mundane offices. A travesty, Yakov thought. “And the electronic trading facilities, of course.”

“Naturally,” an aide agreed. The corner of a folded datasheet peeked from a pocket of her jacket.

The Americans would give him the grand tour, fawn over his every word, then wine and dine him. When he completed his business, their limo would whisk him back to the airport. And between?

Between—to the certain dismay of the demonstrators outside, and countless others of similar opinion—his hosts would do everything in their power to expedite his purchase of corn and wheat. Two million metric tons of each, with intimations of yet larger purchases to follow.

They would bow and scrape and cut corners on his behalf, because he did not need their help. He could, he would suggest obliquely, shift much of his purchasing to the Canadians and Australians. His minions could quietly accumulate much of his stated need in smaller lots, through Internet trading and via pliant third parties, before anyone would see the pattern.

Only he wouldn't. Visibility, not secrecy, suited his purpose. That so rarely happened.

Ethanol substituted for gasoline. Higher grain prices made ethanol more expensive and less competitive. The mere specter of higher grain prices would spook oil markets around the globe. Whatever few extra dollars he might spend on grain—which, with great magnanimity, Russia would distribute to her friends in the Third World—would be more than repaid in higher energy prices.

Roland Johnston was by then extolling the virtues of some recent upgrade to his organization's electronic-trading mechanism.

Yakov just nodded. If anything important came up, Irinushka could summarize later for him. She had already asked several probing questions about the measures taken to assure the integrity of data in their computer systems.

The men among Johnston's staff crowded around her, drawn to her classical beauty, vying to impress. Some must suppose she frowned in concentration at their wit or wisdom, or struggled with English jargon, for their speech had gotten louder and slower. And she, never giving any sign, would despise them for their vanity and condescension.

She had been born deaf. She had neither heard nor spoken until she was five, after receiving the cochlear implants masked by her long, flowing, red hair. When too many people spoke at once, or in chaotic environments like the trading floor, the din sometimes confused the implants’ noise filters and speech-discrimination circuits.

Despite everything, she understood more than the fawning, self-important young men could imagine.

“Are you seeing what you wanted?” Johnston asked.

Yakov nodded. “This is a very worthwhile visit.”

How strange it was to accomplish grand strategy by means as prosaic as buying corn. Because deputy trade representative was only his cover for his true position: a senior agent of the Federal Security Service.

Russia's interests often required methods more subtle—or far more dramatic.

* * * *

Saturday, May 13

“What do you think, Professor?” Eric the bartender asked.

Patrick looked away from the 3-V in the corner. “I think the Yankees will win in a blowout.”

Eric laughed. “That's a given. No, I wondered if you were ready for another.”

It was Patrick's turn to laugh. “No, that's a given.”

“I like the way you think, Professor. Be right back.”

Three people sat along the bar and a few couples at scattered tables: Saturday night in Outer Nowhere. No families with children, thankfully. He still found families hard to take.

Eric reappeared with a fresh, foaming pint. “Your beer, Professor.”

“Thanks.” Taking a long slow sip, Patrick returned his attention to the ballgame.

He took no offense at Professor. Eric called anyone from NRAO that. In the winter, when this ski-resort bar would be hopping, Eric's patrons were “Sport.” Except any ski bunnies who Eric was hitting on. Them he promoted to “Sportette.”

Snowshoe was far enough from Green Bank to keep Patrick's coworkers to a minimum. Alas, because the resorts offered most of the area's finer dining, that minimum was not zero. As, captured in the behind-the-bar mirror, the approaching man and woman reminded him.

“Hi, Patrick,” a familiar voice called cheerily.

Swiveling on his stool, Patrick thought Valerie Clayburn and her NASA friend made a cute couple. Both wore casual slacks and knit shirts: dressed up for her and down for him. “Hi, Valerie.”

“Marcus Judson. Patrick Burkhalter.” To Patrick, Valerie added, “You remember Marcus visiting us for a staff lunch?”

The name? That, Patrick had forgotten. But Marcus himself, after the reception she had arranged for him? No way. The wonder was that Marcus had gotten past it. Hopefully he had seen through to the good person underneath. Though maybe he just had eyes in his head.

Too much information. “Of course. Hello,” Patrick said.

“Pleased to meet you. You're the guy who put Valerie onto Phoebe bots, right?”

Patrick shrugged. “You make it sound like I encouraged her.”

Eric sauntered over, a napkin over his arm. “What can I get you, Professors?”

“Two glasses of the house Merlot, Eric,” Marcus answered.

“You've been promoted to a regular,” Patrick said. And quickly: Valerie's ambush had been only four weeks ago. “Feel honored.”

“Patrick is an astronomer too,” Valerie said.

“Astrophysicist,” Patrick corrected.

Marcus rubbed his chin, brow furrowed. “There's a difference?”

“A big one.” Valerie grinned. “Say I'm on a plane. If I feel sociable, I'm an astronomer. Everyone loves astronomy. When I want to read in peace, I'm an astrophysicist.

“Marcus, I'll get us a table. Patrick, will you join us for dinner?”

Which part of astrophysicist was unclear? “I don't plan to stay late tonight,” Patrick lied.

Besides, Valerie did not need a chaperone. Patrick wondered if Judson would become a regular with her too. Everyone would know when Judson stopped getting a room in the Res Hall for his weekend visits. Green Bank was a small town, and the observatory staff was even tinier.

“If you change your mind,” Valerie persisted, then strode off for the dining room.

Eric ambled back, setting down two wineglasses. “I started you a tab, Professor.”

“Thanks.” Judson picked up the glasses, took a step away from the bar, and stopped. “Tough break,” he said softly.

The Tigers had just left two men stranded on base. “Jankowski is on fire this season,” Patrick said. “ERA of what, around two-nine?”

“That's not what I meant.”

“Aren't you on a date?” Patrick asked. He turned, pointedly, back to the Yankees/Tigers game.

If there was one thing Patrick could not abide, it was sympathy.

* * * *

Valerie slid back her plate, pleasantly full. “That was excellent.”

“That was a salad,” Marcus said, as though disagreeing. He had had a sirloin with a loaded baked potato, and all that remained on his plate was a sprig of parsley. Maybe only half a sprig. “How about some dessert?”

He ate like a force of nature, but if she skipped dessert so would he. “I'd split one.” One bite was splitting.

“What do you recommend?”

“Pretty much any of the desserts.” As in: you pick. Because you studied the dessert choices before you ever looked at entrées. And because you're going to be eating most of it.

Why was dating so complicated?

“How about the death-by-chocolate cake, then. With a scoop of ice cream?”

“That sounds good.” And maybe two bites.

“So, about Patrick.”

She had wondered when Patrick would come up. “He's a planetary astronomer. I think you two would get along. He's not always so . . .”

“Cranky? Surly? Belligerent?”

“I was going to say gruff.” The waitress came by to clear the dinner plates and took their dessert order. Valerie figured she could change topics. Patrick was so . . . sad. “Simon came home from school today with the funniest story.”

“Hold that thought. I have a question about him. Patrick, I mean. What was with the disclaimer when I mentioned Phoebe bots?”

“Honestly? I don't know. It's odd. He used to rent bots quite often. But it's true that he didn't encourage me to try bots myself.”

The waitress returned with their coffees, their dessert, and two forks. Marcus moved the plate into the center of the table. “What does he do at Green Bank?”

“Mostly maintenance, and some training of visiting astronomers. With authorization you can schedule observations over the Internet, but we don't give out those codes to anyone till they've trained onsite.” Three bites, she decided, taking a fork. “Do you know his history?”

“Yeah.” Marcus's eyes widened with his first bite of cake. “Not the kind of incident I would forget. Ex-JPL. Broke basic ops protocol, and in the process lost a deep-space probe.”

“I think that's oversimplified.” She fidgeted with her napkin, searching for the right words. Patrick had confided in her, just a little, once when she had really needed the distraction. “Suppose he had gone through channels, that he had submitted a proposed maneuver. Suppose that while he waited for a review committee to approve, the spacecraft got whacked by an oncoming rock.” The inward-streaking pebble that, Patrick had said, could not be found in what remained of the final telemetry after his hasty upload. “Would that be better?”

“No one second-guesses waiting for channels.” Marcus, wearing a sudden sour expression, set down his fork. “And when something was everyone's responsibility, that makes it no one's fault. Okay, I might have acted too. More carefully, I would like to think. And without wiping the comm buffer afterward to try to cover my tracks.”

“He's my friend, Marcus.” And loss of Patrick's family, career, and the respect of his peers was too steep a penalty.

Patrick had been in her office the day two marines in full dress blues showed up. As Patrick had been there for her for long days after. Merely, quietly, there, not driven off, as were so many, by the embarrassment of not knowing what to say.

A good man hid beneath all that rancor. She felt Patrick's pain.

And in a rush, her own. She still missed Keith terribly. She wished her son could have known his father, taken away when Simon was just learning, stumblingly, to walk. But in an instant, a roadside bomb in Afghanistan had changed . . . everything.

What was she doing on a date?

Keith would want her to get on with her life, but she felt miserable. She tried to keep the turmoil off her face and knew she had failed.

“Sorry,” Marcus said, looking confused at her mood swing. “Are you all right?”

“Just . . . distracted.”

“Do you want to talk about it?”

“No,” she insisted.

Marcus took the hint. “So Patrick doesn't observe anymore?”

She wrung her napkin some more. “Not officially.” Because Patrick's proposals for time on the scopes seldom got approved. “But training involves targets, and he picks the aim points. His students end up tracking lots of objects in the outer asteroid belt.”

“Outer belt,” Marcus repeated. “Meaning?”

“Beyond the ice line. Distant enough from the Sun that ice doesn't melt or sublimate.”

“Listening for the beacon of the Verne probe, you mean. After, what, eight years?”

“Nine,” she corrected. How absurd were the odds Patrick would ever hear it? Space was big. And who knew if the lost spacecraft even still functioned? “I know. It's sad.”

“Poor guy.”

The waitress topped off their coffees. Valerie wrapped her hands around her cup to warm them. Not that the room was cold.

“I think I should be getting you home,” Marcus said. “You look . . . tired.”

She opened her mouth, but an explanation refused to come. Dragging out the evening would not be fair to him. “You're right,” she managed at last. “Sorry.”

The drive home to Green Bank continued in awkward silence. She broke it by babbling about how in 1960 Green Bank hosted one of the first academically respectable SETI meetings. SETI was one of Patrick's avowed passions, and she launched into describing the transmitter module—never installed, of course—that he had designed and built in his spare time for the big dish. He often puttered after hours in the electronics shop.

Only no one she knew believed Patrick gave a flying fig about SETI, or that he had spent months getting ready to send a reply to some hypothetical aliens. What everyone understood—and no one would ever raise with Patrick—was the thing for which he did prepare: the day he detected the Verne probe's beacon. Each year, as that hope seemed more forlorn, he spent less time tinkering with the idle transmitter.

Her voice trailed off. She and Marcus completed the drive in uncomfortable silence.

They finally turned into her driveway. Light flickered in the windows, Brianna watching 3-V. Then a little figure bounded past the living-room window: Simon, wide awake. Valerie fancied she heard little-boy engine noises. The dashboard clock, as she sneaked a peek, read 8:46. She was pathetic.

“I'm sorry,” she told Marcus, yet again, as he walked her to her door. “I'm not fit company tonight. May I call you in the morning? Maybe we can go for brunch.”

“Sure. I can stay till noon or so. Big meeting Monday to prepare for.”

He didn't offer details and she didn't ask. The powersat, quite accidentally, had brought them together. It would not keep them together. It was, like Keith, a subject they did not discuss.

The two unmentioned elephants in the room.

On the porch, Marcus gave her a perfunctory kiss goodnight. “Will you be okay?”

“Sure.” She forced a smile. Someday.

* * * *

Thursday, May 18

Slicing the tops off whitecaps, a sleek, thirty-foot hovercraft raced along the Santa Barbara Channel. In the distance, rugged and pristine, stood one of the islands of Channel Islands National Park. Santa Cruz Island, if Dillon correctly remembered the map. The sky was almost painfully bright. Sun sparkled off the waves.

“Southern California hardly counts as the tropics,” Kayla Jorgenson shouted over the roar of the engine. Her tan Dockers, starched blue blouse, and L. L. Bean windbreaker might as well have been a business suit. She had pulled her hair back into a short ponytail. Only white knuckles as she clenched the handrail betrayed nerves. “This time of the year surface-water temperature only approaches sixty degrees, so the test bed won't reach the output levels the system would achieve near the equator. We still get a temperature differential, with respect to the bottom of the intake pipe, better than twenty degrees. The results we're measuring match our simulations quite well. That said, to unambiguously prove the technology, we would like to deploy a full-scale demo system somewhere warmer.”

If we get the money, she managed to convey without uttering the words.

Dillon tugged his cap lower. Despite Ray-Bans and the cap's long visor, he squinted against the glare. He was a captive audience on the small boat, and Kayla was not one to waste face time. He remembered his first impression of her: focused.

They could have choppered to the demo site a lot faster, but after crisscrossing the country, flying from one cash-hungry start-up to the next, Dillon had opted for sunshine and sea breezes. His face turned toward the afternoon sun, closing his eyes, he thought tanned thoughts.

He was exhausted. Already that week he had toured a lithium-ion automotive battery plant in Saginaw, a superconducting-cable company outside Chicago, a scale-model geothermal power plant in Nevada, and, only the day before, a Silicon Valley semiconductor design shop with some ideas for improving solar cells. The score so far for the week: dud, promising, dud, and scary. Cortez Photovoltaic used chemical dopants and industrial processes that made him nervous as hell. An anonymous tip to the EPA should slow that bunch for a while.

“Besides the convenient location,” Kayla kept going, inexorably, “reusing the drilling rig really slashed our upfront costs. All we had to do was lower pipe, something any oil platform is already configured to do. If we extend this concept to . . .”

When Dillon next opened his eyes, the platform, which had been only a dot on the horizon, had swelled into a massive, looming construction.

Oil drilling in the Santa Barbara Channel: madness. Merely to see this oil rig filled him with rage, but he bottled the anger. He could almost wish the Crudetastrophe had tainted the reservoir deep beneath his feet.

Like the drilling platform itself, ocean thermal energy conversion was an enormous undertaking. He felt the throb before he heard it. As they raced toward the old oil platform, the pulsing grew and grew.

“You'll want these,” Kayla said. Her left hand came out of her jacket pocket with two pairs of earplugs. “Anti-noise. They cancel repetitive low-pitched sounds like what our big pump makes.”

Not much use to fish, porpoises, or whales. They were screwed. One of the staff engineers Dillon had tasked to vet Jorgenson's pitch had brought up the noise issue. Her guesstimate was that underwater noise from an OTEC plant would exceed ambient levels for a good mile from the platform.

The Santa Barbara Channel was summer home to about ten percent of the world's blue-whale population. What about them?

But Kayla was right about the earplugs. The throbbing all but disappeared once Dillon had his pair in place.

She was still pitching OTEC when the hovercraft, settling into the water, coasted up to the platform's floating dock. The oil platform—an all-but-incomprehensible maze of girders and pipes, catwalks and steel plates—loomed over Dillon. High above, enormous derricks reached far out over the channel.

Twenty feet above the waves, where a spidery catwalk hugged one of the platform's massive support posts, a worker in hard hat and orange coveralls stood waiting. Projecting outward and upward, held almost vertical by taut steel cables, was what could only be a raised gangplank.

Kayla shouted out a string of numbers, and the roustabout released the brake of a winch. With a whirr of gears the gangplank pivoted and began to descend. The floating dock bucked and slued as, with a thud, the foot of the ramp struck.

“Nice drawbridge.” Dillon gestured at ocean all around. “And one hell of a moat.”

“We don't want uninvited guests, obviously,” Kayla said. “We change pass codes daily.”

As the dock's wobble dampened out, Coverall Guy loped down the gangplank to meet them. While he and crew secured the hovercraft, Dillon kept looking around. A wire-mesh cage bobbed nearby, buoyed by pontoons at the corners. Peering over the hovercraft's side, wondering what the enclosure was and how deep it extended, he was startled by dark, darting shapes within. They had to be two feet long, at least.

“What are those?” he asked, pointing.

“Alaskan sockeye salmon,” Kayla said, grinning at his double-take. “Some of the cold water we've brought to the rig gets vented through the aquaculture units. That should be good for some extra income from the local seafood joints. We're thinking we might farm Maine lobsters in another cage.”

While the chilled water spewing from the rig did what to the indigenous species? Fish farming was not the insult to nature of many ventures he saw, and the shadow of an oil platform was hardly a native habitat, but still the caged salmon saddened him.

Dillon followed Kayla up the gangplank, rising and falling with the floating dock, to the lowest catwalk. From there their route was hand over hand, rung by rung, straight up the massive pillar. When they reached the bottom deck he tried not to look through the metal grating to the surging waves far below.

The next visit, if there was one, he would take the chopper!

From the bottom deck they climbed endless flights of stairs, not stopping until the helipad level. Barrels and bulky gear lay scattered across the helipad. To deter unauthorized landings? “You really don't want visitors, do you?”

Kayla just shrugged.

He grabbed his cap as a wind gust snatched it from his head. Vibrations his earplugs would not let him hear crept up his legs, shaking his entire body.

The California coast sprawled in the distance. Kayla, who had saved her breath for the long climb, resumed her spiel. “Lots of oil platforms are like this. Near enough to land for easy resupply. In water deep enough to offer a significant temperature differential. Generating power by dropping pipe here is less disruptive than laying pipe from shore out to deep water.”

Compared to some projects Dillon had assessed, this was environmentally sound. Sun would heat the surface waters no matter what. It would be better that obscenities like this platform had never been built, but at least with OTEC the platforms might contribute clean power.

Except that nothing built on a scale this monstrous could ever be benign...

“This pilot project will generate, if I remember correctly, five megawatts?” Dillon asked. “How do you deliver the power to where it will be used?”

“Converted to microwaves.” She gestured across the helipad to a sturdy metal tower studded with antennae directed to points around the compass. “The small dishes will beam power to nearby drilling platforms, which will no longer need diesel generators to have electricity. The big dish"—which was not all that big—"will beam to the receiving antenna under construction on Santa Cruz Island. I guess visitors at the Nature Conservancy's research center aren't ready to give up supercomputers and hairdryers.

“The microwave tech isn't much different from how the NASA powersat will transmit power to the ground, except that we aren't pushing the state of the art. We're dealing with megawatts, not gigawatts, and sent over a much shorter distance.”

Powersats: The most mega megaproject of them all. If Kayla understood what mattered to Dillon—and, of course, she could not possibly—she would have picked a different example. Likening her endeavor to powersats had turned his stomach.

In her ignorance, she kept talking. “Of course not every OTEC facility will use beamed power. Where we lack a line of sight to land, and maybe for really large-scale generators, we expect to run marine power cables. You know, like the big offshore wind farms use.”

And Dillon suddenly knew exactly what monkey wrench to throw into these particular works. “I have interests in a superconducting-cable start-up.” Even though the bunch in Illinois did not yet know it. They had been eager enough to get some of his money.

“Zero-resistance underwater cables to the power grid on shore. Of course, that would be great.” Kayla hesitated. “At the capacities we'll need, superconducting cable is experimental at best. We've got a lot on our plates as it is.”

“No, this could work,” Dillon said firmly. “Look, I'll put my cards on the table. One-of-a-kind investments aren't worth my time. I look for synergies, win-win situations. Here we have one. The other bunch would get an impressive, real-world demonstration. You would get first crack at a more efficient way to bring OTEC power ashore.”

“Does this mean my company has your backing? That you will invest?”

Dillon gazed out across the Santa Barbara Channel, saying nothing, the breeze whipping his hair. She could do the math.

She straightened, squaring her shoulders. “If you back Jorgenson Power Systems at the funding levels we've discussed, we'll assess our fit with your other company.”

“That's all I'm asking.”

Because commercializing technology of this scale would involve several more rounds of capitalization. Getting follow-on investments was all but impossible without the tangible endorsement—second-round buy-in—of the earlier investors. So: Kayla's people would factor the new technology into their plans. Just as, when Dillon called to dangle a bit of venture capital, the Chicago bunch would swallow hard and agree to a marine deployment—despite the complexities that would introduce—for their first big field trial.

With a few million bucks of other people's money, he would tie both ventures in knots.

To be continued.

Copyright © 2011 Edward M. Lerner

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Reader's Department: IN TIMES TO COME

Our July/August double issue takes full advantage of its extra spaciousness to bring you an extra-wide variety of fiction, fact, and special features. Kristine Kathryn Rusch leads off with another novella in her “Retrieval Artist” series, though this one is “off to the side” of what you've seen before, focusing not on a Retrieval Artist but on something new and different. Richard A. Lovett appears twice, with a novelette, “Jak and the Beanstalk,” bringing a decidedly novel twist to an idea familiar to SF readers if not the general public; and another article in his popular series about fiction writing, this one dealing with narrative voice. James Gunn, an important force in getting science fiction some respect outside its “ghetto,” has another special feature examining a science-fictional view of our digital future.

We'll have not one, but two science fact articles: one by C. W. Johnson on the fascinating physics up to string theory (and what may lay beyond), and one by astronomer Kevin Walsh on the unlikely-sounding subject of why Proxima Centauri may not be the nearest star after all.

Plus all our usual columns, still more stories by writers including Kyle Kirkland, Scott William Carter, and Ernest Hogan—and, last but far from least, Part 2 of Edward M. Lerner's serial Energized.

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Science Fact: NANOPARTICLES FOR DRUG DELIVERY
by Carol Wuenschell

The use of nanoparticles as vehicles for delivery of medications to appropriate sites in the body is an area of active current research. These particles have some interesting properties, although they are a far cry from the “nanobots” of science fiction. We do not have nanoscale factories in which we can simply build nanomachines. Instead, we must rely on the natural proclivities displayed by atoms and molecules when mixed together and subjected to achievable conditions of temperature, pressure, pH, et cetera, in macroscale laboratory settings. One consequence of the fact that we cannot make nanobots is that “targeting” of nanoparticles in the body is a matter of selective binding or retention of particles that circulate passively in the blood. The chemical nature of nanoparticles also imposes limitations on their capabilities and creates some rather unique toxicities that could limit their usefulness in medicine.

Nanoparticle drug delivery systems are, nevertheless, being studied for treatment of a variety of diseases and conditions—everything from tuberculosis to irritable bowel disease. They have been considered for pain management and are promising candidates for therapeutic penetration of the blood-brain barrier that blocks many drugs from acting on the central nervous system. A large proportion of the work on these systems has, however, been in the area of cancer treatment. This research bias is perhaps not surprising, since cancer is a major killer that is yielding only grudgingly to medical science. In addition, anti-cancer drugs are notorious for being only moderately more toxic to cancer cells than they are to normal cells and tend to have rather nasty side effects. Nanoparticles seem tailor-made to improve this situation and drugs delivered this way show improvements in therapeutic index (the maximum non-toxic dose divided by the minimum effective dose).

* * * *

Advantages of nanoparticles

A nanoparticle drug delivery system usually consists of at least two components: the drug or therapeutic agent, and the particle, which is a vessel or vehicle for the drug. Such systems can, of course, have more than the minimum two components, since additional molecules can be attached that modify the behavior of the system or add additional desirable properties, such as improved biocompatibility, increased half-life in the circulation, or targeting to a specific site in the body. A natural advantage of two-component nanoparticle drug delivery systems is that the drug itself does not have to possess all of the characteristics that would be optimal for its use as a therapeutic agent. The drug might be insoluble or very toxic to cells in general (as is the case for many anti-cancer drugs), and the particle could provide a water-soluble carrier to mask the drug's toxicity until it reached its target. Or the drug might have poor chemical properties for passing across cell membranes and the particle could circumvent this by having surface characteristics that cause it to be readily taken up by cells. Another possibility is that a drug may be too rapidly broken down by the body to be effective. In this case, the use of an enclosing nanoparticle can protect it from degradation long enough for it to have a therapeutic effect. In a situation where the drug needs to be taken up by a target cell, the particle can persist inside the cell, resisting breakdown by the cell's protective enzymes and releasing the drug slowly over an extended period of time, resulting in superior timed- release behavior.

A major attraction of nanoparticle delivery systems is the enhanced ability to target a drug to a specific cell type. Antibodies directed against cell-surface molecules that are specific to a given cell type can be attached to the surface of the particle. In addition, some types of cells have receptor molecules on their surfaces that will bind to a specific ligand molecule and cause it to be taken into the cell's interior. While it may be possible to physically link a targeting antibody or ligand directly to a drug molecule, the physical linkage can interfere with the desired action of the drug. Attaching the targeting molecules to the nanoparticle instead of to the drug itself has the obvious advantage of preserving the drug in an unmodified condition.

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Size and physical characteristics

For the purpose of drug delivery via the blood, particles should preferably be no more than 100 nm in diameter, because larger particles are more rapidly removed from the circulation by stationary macrophages in organs such as the liver, spleen, and lymph nodes. These macrophages are phagocytic cells whose purpose is to engulf and digest particles floating around in the bloodstream that might be harmful, such as viruses or clot-initiating debris. Surface characteristics are important in enabling nanoparticles to avoid capture by these cells. In general, the surface should be hydrophilic rather than hydrophobic, and biologically derived polymers are often used. Hydrophobic and non-biological materials are more likely to attract the attention of the phagocytes due to a process in which various molecules, termed opsonins, bind to the particle's surface and act as flags marking the particle for destruction. The synthetic polymer polyethylene glycol (PEG) is apparently not “seen” by opsonins or by phagocytic cells, and nanoparticles are often coated with PEG (PEG-ylated) to “stealth” them so that they will not be cleared so rapidly from the circulation.

To put the size of nanoparticles into perspective, a water molecule is about 0.16 nm in its largest dimension, buckminsterfullerene (C60) is about 0.73 nm in diameter, a naked DNA strand is a little less than 2 nm in thickness, and a molecule of hemoglobin is about 6.4 nm across (dimensions from Faraji and Wipf). The lower end of the nanoparticle scale thus overlaps the size range of biologically important macromolecules. The size of nanoparticles is potentially adjustable, which is part of their appeal. Particles must be large enough to accommodate useful amounts of drug, but smaller particles have higher surface-to-volume ratios than larger particles. If a therapeutic agent is stored in the interior of the particle and released at the surface, varying the particle size allows some control over the rate of drug release from the particle and the length of time the drug will be available in the body.

* * * *

Types of nanoparticles

A number of types of nanoparticles have been investigated or considered for use in drug delivery. These include solid, hollow, or porous inorganic particles; carbon-based particles such as fullerenes or carbon nanotubes; various types of lipid-based particles; virus-based nanoparticles; and polymeric nanoparticles or micelles. In a 2008 review article, Cho et al. provide examples of all except the first type (inorganic particles) for use in treatment of cancer, although most were at that time either in clinical trials or still in development. Liposomes, a kind of lipid-based nanoparticle, containing the anti-cancer drugs doxorubicin and daunorubicin have been approved by the FDA for treatment of metastatic breast cancer and AIDS-related Kaposi's sarcoma.

* * * *

* * * *

Inorganic nanoparticles can be composed of silica, metals, or metal oxides or sulfides. Such particles could be solid, with the drug attached to the outer surface. Gold nanoparticles have been prepared for use in this way. Inorganic drug carriers could also be a hollow shell with pores opening to the inside or a solid particle with interconnecting pores passing through it. Such inorganic nanoparticles are very stable with respect to temperature and pH, but they are not biodegradable and dissolve only very slowly and so may present problems of toxicity, especially if used for long-term treatment. Gold particles are non-toxic and very biocompatible, but must still be cleared from the body since they do not biodegrade. For these reasons, inorganic nanoparticles do not seem as promising for drug delivery as the other types of particle discussed below in greater detail.

* * * *

Fullerenes (Figure 1)

* * * *

* * * *

Fullerenes are molecules composed entirely of carbon atoms covalently linked in lattices of six- and five-membered rings. They are structurally related to graphite, which consists of flat sheets of six-membered carbon rings. A carbon nanotube is formed by rolling such a sheet into a tube and connecting the edges to form a continuous cylinder. Typically these tubes are several mm long and 0.7-1.5 nm in diameter. The other fullerenes are spherical or spheroidal molecules that are formed when some of the six-membered rings are replaced by five-membered rings. The smallest spherical fullerene is C60, the classic buckminsterfullerene, consisting of twenty six-membered and twelve five-membered rings arranged in a very specific pattern that resembles a soccer ball or the geodesic domes created by Richard Buckminster Fuller. While fullerenes can be synthesized with difficulty in the laboratory, they are easily produced by burning simple hydrocarbons in a fuel-rich flame. The space inside open-ended carbon nanotubes is generally too small to accommodate drug molecules, and the cavities inside the completely closed fullerenes are not accessible. Therefore, drug molecules would have to be bound to the outside of these structures. The carbon atoms of which they are composed readily accept such chemical modification, which is fortunate considering that fullerenes are completely insoluble in all solvents and are only made water-soluble through surface modification. Toxicity is a potential problem for fullerenes, although the data are ambiguous. Some studies have shown inflammatory effects or oxidative stress in cultured cells exposed to some types of fullerenes. Platelet aggregation has also been seen, which could lead to blood clots if it occurred inside a human body.

* * * *

Lipid-based nanoparticles (Figure 2)

Lipid-based drug carriers include both solid lipid particles and membrane-bounded liposomes, with the latter being more extensively studied. Liposomes resemble tiny cells in that they have an aqueous fluid interior surrounded by a lipid bilayer membrane. As such, they are non-rigid and relatively fragile compared to inorganic nanoparticles or fullerenes. The lipid bilayers are generally composed of phospholipids just as in cell membranes, although the specific phospholipids used to make liposomes may not be naturally occurring. Phospholipid molecules are amphiphilic. That is, the phosphate head at one end of each molecule is hydrophilic whereas the lipid tail at the other end is lipophilic (or hydrophobic). Phospholipids tend naturally to form bilayers in aqueous solution in accordance with the well-known principle that oil and water do not mix. The molecules orient with their lipid tails pointed inward towards each other and the hydrophilic heads on the outside facing the aqueous environment. Liposomes will therefore self-assemble under appropriate conditions, and the most straightforward way to load a drug into them is to form them in solutions that are saturated with the drug, if the drug is water-soluble. There are other ways, involving organic (non-aqueous) solvents and solvent exchange systems, or lipophilic drugs.

* * * *

* * * *

Liposomes present excellent prospects for drug targeting because it is easy to add additional molecules to the outer surface of the bilayer. A major drawback, however, is that liposomes are comparatively large, about 400 nm in diameter, and, if unprotected, are rapidly cleared from the bloodstream. For this reason all serious efforts to employ liposomes for drug carriers use PEGylated liposomes, and this strategy significantly improves their half-life in the circulation. As already noted, there have been two FDA approvals of liposomes as nanoparticle drug carriers. Despite these successes, however, liposomes have not yet made a major impact in medicine, although they have been used more widely in cosmetics. In a more recent development, researchers are also investigating solid lipid nanospheres, or lipospheres, as alternatives to liposomes. Lipospheres do not so neatly self-assemble, but can be made smaller than liposomes and are less fragile. Solid lipid nanospheres are composed of various types of lipids (triglycerides, fatty acids, or waxes) that are solid at body temperature. These nanospheres are bio-compatible and biodegradable, but have the disadvantage that they can only carry lipid-soluble drugs.

* * * *

Virus-based nanoparticles (Figure 3)

Viruses are, in effect, naturally occurring nanoparticles that are exquisitely designed to deliver their payload into the interior of a target cell. In the case of natural viruses, of course, the payload is the viral genetic material and the result is to commandeer the biosynthetic machinery of the target/host cell and use it to crank out more copies of the viral nucleic acid and capsid proteins, often resulting in the destruction of the host cell in the process. If a virus could be modified to exclusively target the cells of a tumor, such a result could potentially be beneficial. This approach is indeed being investigated, although care must be taken to make sure the virus is unlikely to mutate in the patient's body into a form that can cause disease or be passed from the patient to other people. Adenovirus, measles virus, and canine parvovirus are among those being studied as “oncolytic” viruses for cancer treatment. The virus’ destructive effects can be targeted to the tumor in various ways, including modifying the virus with surface molecules that make it able to infect only tumor cells, or genetically engineering it to be unable to reproduce in normal cells. In practice, however, it is difficult to achieve complete tumor-specificity, and the best that can be done sometimes is to make the virus more likely to kill tumor cells than normal cells.

* * * *

* * * *

In the case of oncolytic viruses, the virus is both the vehicle and the therapeutic agent. Researchers have also been actively investigating viruses as vehicles for other kinds of genetic messages besides the viral genes. Primarily the purpose has been gene therapy, which is beyond the scope of this article. There is also interest in using modified viruses, or viral-like particles, to deliver more conventional drug payloads. Bacteriophage viruses (ones that naturally infect only bacteria) are being studied for this purpose. These viruses are not infectious in humans and have advantages over some other types of nanoparticles in that they are biodegradable, come in very uniform sizes, are fully self-assembling, and can be grown and harvested from large cultures of laboratory strains of the common intestinal bacterium E. coli. A major obstacle to the use of any type of virus particles for human therapy, however, is the fact that they evoke an immune response. At best this response can mean that the virus particles are destroyed by the body's defenses before they can be effective, and at worst it can threaten the life of the patient. The surfaces of viral particles can be modified to reduce their tendency to trigger the immune system, but this may interfere with infectivity in the case of oncolytic viruses, for example, and it may be necessary for patients receiving some viral therapies to simultaneously be given immunosuppressive drugs.

* * * *

Polymer-based nanoparticles (Figure 4)

Polymer nanoparticles vary widely in composition and structure and are a very active and promising area of research. What they have in common is that they are composed of molecular subunits, or monomers, that are covalently linked together to form larger molecules. In some cases these larger molecules function as nanoparticles, in others they undergo further assembly. The advantage of polymers is that constituent monomers can be chosen that are biocompatible and biodegradable, and that offer versatile opportunities for surface modification of the resulting particles. Naturally occurring polymers such as albumin (the major serum protein) and chitosan (chemically modified chitin) have been used, as well as synthetic polymers including PEG, polylactic acid (PLA), poly(lactic-co-glycolic acid) copolymer (PLGA), and [N-(2-hydroxypropyl) methacrylamide] copolymer (HPMA). Synthetic polymers are created through standard methods of chemical synthesis. A drug can be either covalently bound to the polymer or physically trapped within the structure of the particles, and the particles can be in the form of capsules, core-shell micelles, or hyper-branched “dendrimers.”

Core-shell micelles are formed by self- assembly of amphiphilic block copolymers, each consisting of a stretch or “block” of hydrophilic polymer joined to a block of hydrophobic polymer. Spontaneous assembly of micelles occurs in aqueous solutions at higher concentrations of block copolymers as the molecules coalesce into clusters, aligned with their hydrophobic ends inside and their hydrophilic ends outside. Dendrimers are so named because of their treelike structure. They are synthesized starting from a core that can accept two branches at each end. Successive generations of subunit branches, each of which can in turn accept two branches, are then added so that there are four branches in the first generation (G1), eight in the second (G2), and so on. By G3, the resulting macromolecule approaches the form of a spherical particle. Drug molecules could be sequestered in the spaces between the lower-level branches, but are more commonly attached to the branch tips at the surface, where targeting molecules can be attached as well. Dendrimer-based drug carrier systems have been the subject of clinical trials, and an albumin nanoparticle-based formulation of the anti-tumor drug paclitaxel has been approved by the FDA for treatment of metastatic breast cancer.

* * * *

Targeting disease with nanoparticles

In some cases it may be possible to inject a drug/carrier directly into the diseased target tissue or organ. In this case it would be desirable for the nanoparticles to remain close to the injection site and not enter the bloodstream until after they have delivered their payload or have undergone degradation. Other methods of drug administration are via injection into a vein or artery, through oral administration, or by inhalation. A drug that is swallowed has direct access to the cells lining the digestive tract before it may cross into the blood, and orally delivered nanoparticle drug carriers could be used to treat disorders affecting the intestinal mucosa, such as irritable bowel disease. In addition, substances like nutrients and drugs that cross the intestinal mucosa into the bloodstream are routed first to the liver, offering the potential to target this organ. The tendency of the liver to filter out small particles could make nanoparticles good candidates for treatment of liver diseases. Similarly, an inhaled medication potentially has contact with the cells lining the respiratory tract all the way from the mouth or nose to the alveoli, the tiny air sacks in the lungs where gas exchange takes place. Obviously, inhaled nanoparticles could be used to treat the cells lining the nasal cavity and sinuses as well as the trachea, bronchi, or the tissue of the lungs. It may be less obvious that they could enter the blood, but there is clear evidence that nanoparticles are able to reach the bloodstream by this route.

In most cases, the circulating blood is the route by which a drug is expected to reach its target. Nanoparticles in the blood are carried throughout the body, and for some diseases such systemic distribution would be sufficient. For example, if the aim is to supply insulin to a diabetic, no further targeting would be necessary because all the body's cells need insulin. In other cases, however, targeting would require that nanoparticles come to lodge preferentially in the location where the disease process is active, or that they be able to selectively release active drug close to, or inside, the appropriate cells. If you were trying to treat an infection, like tuberculosis, you would want the nanoparticles to preferentially come to rest at the foci of infection, or to selectively be taken up by infected cells or by the disease-causing bacteria themselves.

The problem of targeting nanoparticles to cancer cells provides a good illustration of the issues involved in treating disease with nanoparticles. Such targeting can be passive, in which the drug delivery system takes advantage of natural characteristics of the tissue or of the tumor. Using the particle-trapping characteristics of the liver to passively target liver cancer would be an example. Nanoparticles can actually pass through the cells that line capillaries, or they can pass between the cells to enter the surrounding tissue. It turns out that tumors (and also inflamed tissues) have leakier blood vessel walls than normal healthy tissue, causing circulating nanoparticles to preferentially accumulate inside tumors in what is termed the “enhanced permeability and retention effect.” Tumors also have a higher metabolic rate due to increased cell division and may be poorly oxygenated as a result, so that the tumor becomes more acidic than the surrounding tissue. This fact can be used to enhance release of an anti-cancer drug at the site of the tumor by designing nanoparticles that release the drug in an acidic environment.

Often the objective is to have the nanoparticle internalized by the target cell. Binding to cell surface receptors often results in internalization as a result of the receptor's normal function. Cells will also engulf particles by the process of endocytosis without the involvement of a specific receptor. Active targeting can improve specificity but requires that the tumor cells express some molecule on their surface that is either unique to the tumor cells or is expressed more highly on tumor than on normal cells. If the molecule in question happens to be a receptor, then that receptor's natural ligand can be attached to nanoparticles to produce active targeting. Receptors for the vitamin, folate, and the iron-carrier transferrin have both been studied for tumor targeting. Alternatively, antibodies can be generated and attached to nanoparticles to target other types of cell-surface molecules. The technology has long existed to produce large quantities of antibodies that bind to a molecule of choice.

* * * *

Nanoparticle toxicity and clearance from the body

Nanoparticle drug delivery systems pose a number of toxicity issues. There may be residual toxicity of the drug being delivered, which may not be completely masked by the nanoparticles. In this context, the rate of release of the drug and the conditions under which it is released may be relevant to nanoparticle design. There is also the matter of the body's response to the particles themselves, and finally there is the question of what happens to the nanoparticle drug carriers after they have served their function.

Obviously it is undesirable to make nanoparticles for drug delivery out of materials that are themselves toxic, but even materials that seem relatively inert may pose a health risk if present in the blood in the form of nanosized particles. This concern is raised by research on the health risks of particulate air pollution. Ultra-fine particles that are inhaled don't just cause problems in the lungs; they also cross into the bloodstream, and there is substantial evidence linking exposure to nano-sized particles in the air with atherosclerosis or “hardening of the arteries.” Presumably the particles can become lodged in atherosclerotic plaques that are forming on the walls of blood vessels and exacerbate the inflammation that is part of the disease process. This problem may be avoided by choosing materials for nanoparticle construction that are more “familiar” to the body—biologically derived polypeptides, lipids, and polysaccharides—or by altering the surface characteristics of the particles. Particles with negatively charged surfaces cause fewer problems than positively charged particles, for example.

Little is known about potential long-term health effects of using nanoparticle drug carriers. For a person receiving a single small dose, the risk may be minimal or may be outweighed by the benefits. For large doses and long-term treatment of chronic conditions, however, it becomes increasingly important to know how the nanoparticles will be cleared from the body. Particles that are less than 30 nm in diameter can be cleared by the kidneys, passing from the blood into the urine. The issue then remains of what impact the excreted nanoparticles might have in the environment. Larger particles will remain in the body unless they are broken down. Not surprisingly, current research runs heavily toward biodegradable nanoparticles. In many cases the particles are designed to be digested by the cells that take them up, and this may be planned as part of the mechanism of drug release. The trade-off for drug carriers that are too biologically “fragile” is that they may break down at inappropriate times and places in the body, causing toxicity or reducing their effectiveness. Despite these lingering issues, the great potential of nanoparticle drug delivery systems to improve drug effectiveness relative to drug toxicity means that research on these systems will surely continue, and in the future we are likely to see more use of nanoparticles in clinical applications.

* * * *

Bibliography

Amir H Faraji and Peter Wipf. “Nanoparticles in cellular drug delivery.” (review) Bioorganic and Medicinal Chemistry 17: 2950-2962, 2009

Wim H De Jong and Paul JA Borm. “Drug delivery and nanoparticles: Applications and hazards.” (review) International Journal of Nanomedicine 3 (2): 133-149, 2008

Kwongjae Cho, Xu Wang, Shuming Nie, Zhou (Georgia) Chen, and Dong M. Shin. “Therapeutic Nanoparticles for Drug Delivery in Cancer.” (review) Clinical Cancer Research 14 (5): 1310-1316, 2008

Yogeshkumar Malam, Marilena Loizidou, and Alexander M Seifalian. “Liposomes and nanoparticles: nanosized vehicles for drug delivery in cancer.” (review) Trends in Pharmacological Sciences 30 (11): 592-599, 2009

Stephen J. Russell and Kah-Whye Peng. “Viruses as anticancer drugs.” (Review) Trends in Pharmacological Sciences 28 (7): 326-333, 2007

Andrew K. Udit, Christian P.R. Hackenberger, and Mary K. O'Reilly. “Chemically Tailored Multivalent Virus Platforms: From Drug Delivery to Catalysis.” (highlight) ChemBioChem 11: 481-484, 2010

Anupa R. Menjoge, Rangaramanujam M. Kannan, and Donald A. Tomalia. “Dendrimer-based drug and imaging conjugates: design considerations for nanomedical applications.” (review) Drug Discovery Today 15(5/6):171- 185, 2010

M. Talelli, C.J.F. Rijcken, C.F. van Nostrum, G. Storm, and W.E. Hennink. “Micelles based on HPMA copolymers.” Advanced Drug Delivery Reviews 62: 231-239, 2010

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About the Author:

Carol Wuenschell originally set out to be a biological illustrator with a B.A. degree in biology and art (double major) from Occidental College and an M.A. in biological illustration from Cal. State University, Long Beach. Before even finishing the Master's, however, she had decided she wanted to be a scientist and went on to earn a Ph.D. in biology from UCLA. After postdoctoral work at Caltech and USC, she joined the faculty of the USC School of Dentistry. There she maintained an independent laboratory research program for seven years, working on nicotine receptors and the effects of nicotine exposure on fetal lung development in mice. While at USCSD, she also helped teach basic biomedical sciences to dental students by serving as a “facilitator” of small-group learning in the Dental School's problem-based learning program. Currently Dr. Wuenschell is employed as a scientific writer at the City of Hope National Medical Center in Duarte, California.

Copyright © 2011 Carol Wuenschell

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Novelette: CITIZEN-ASTRONAUT
by David D. Levine

* * * *

Illustrated by Laurie Harden

* * * *

Is honesty always the best policy? Think twice before you answer. . . .

I was trying to fix my kitchen garbage disposal when my phone trilled. I put it on speaker. “Gary Shu,” I said, wiping my hands on a rag.

“Mr. Shu, this is Nnamdi Okonkwo from UNSA.” A low voice, cultured.

“UNSA? Really?” Why would anyone from the UN Space Agency be calling me? I was just a second-string newsblogger.

“Really. This concerns your application for the Citizen-Astronaut Program.”

“Oh, that.” I'd made it as far as the semifinals, but when the finalists had been announced my name hadn't been on the list. That had been over a year ago. I picked up my screwdriver and resumed poking at the clog. “What about it?”

“You have probably heard the terrible news about Kim Yeun-ja.”

“Yeah.” She was the Korean painter who'd been selected as the first Citizen-Astronaut. Two weeks ago, less than two months before her scheduled launch, she'd broken her neck on a recreational hike in the Alps. She'd recover, but she wouldn't be up for a trip to Mars any time soon. A tragic story, and an excellent hook for a fundraising call. I kept trying to pry the whatever-it-was out of the disposal's blades.

“You are probably also aware of the difficulties we've been having with funding and public opinion.” We'd had people on Mars continuously for over eight years now. The initial discoveries of water and life—frozen, subsurface water and fossils of microscopic, long-extinct life—had been newsworthy, but after that, interest had declined steadily. And with declining public interest came a declining willingness by the UN's various governments to fund the ongoing mission.

“Uh-huh,” I said, squinting down the disposal's throat. By now I was just waiting for the pitch so I could hang up on the guy in good conscience. “So what's the purpose of this call?”

“My superiors have decided that the loss of Ms. Kim provides an opportunity for us to . . . reprioritize the Citizen-Astronaut Program. Rather than call on Ms. Kim's backup, we have been instructed to bring in someone who is in a better position to influence public opinion. Someone such as yourself.”

The screwdriver clattered to the floor. “Guh?” I managed.

“Can you come to Geneva right away?”

“Uh?” I swallowed. “Uh, for how long?”

He chuckled. “In Geneva? Thirty-seven days. But after that it might be quite a bit longer. . . .”

Thirty-seven days? I checked my phone's calendar.

Thirty-seven days was the time until the Kasei 18 spacecraft launched for Mars.

* * * *

The sixty-five-day voyage to Mars was about as exciting as a long bus trip, bracketed by the thundering, shuddering terrors of launch and aerobraking. Though I did what I could to make the trip interesting to my viewers, my ratings dropped steadily the whole time. I was handicapped by limited bandwidth—I couldn't embed even a single Spin or Jumbo3D frame in my reports, and was reduced to plain text and flat, still images—and by the fact that every day was the same. Although we were going almost two hundred thousand kilometers per hour, from inside the ship there was no way to tell we were moving at all.

But as I lay on my back after touchdown, heart pounding and sweat pooling in the small of my space-suited back, I knew everything had changed. I was on Mars! I couldn't wait to step out of the lander, to see the endless red desert spread out before me, to feel the dry, lifeless dust crunch under my boots.

The exit protocol was one of the things we'd had plenty of time to negotiate during the long trip out. The commander of our craft, the American-born Flemish climatologist Lynne Ann Morse, had graciously ceded her commander's prerogative to me as Citizen- Astronaut. I would be the first one out of the lander: the sixty-seventh person to set foot on Mars.

But before I could even unstrap myself, the hatch clanged open and Nam Dae-jung's scratched helmet poked in. I recognized his face immediately—he was one of the three members of the current crew who would be staying on, and with our arrival he was now commander of Expedition18. A Korean geochemist, he was a small man, built like a fireplug, and his face was just about as red as one. “Get your butts out here,” he shouted. “We've got a leak.”

We four new arrivals got ourselves unstrapped and tumbled out of the hatch as quickly as we could, bouncing and stumbling in our haste. We immediately saw the problem: A pipe on the lander's underside had split open, and a white jet of steam and ice crystals was spewing out into the thin Martian atmosphere. Frost was already building up around the gap. I activated the camera in my helmet and began snapping pictures of the dramatic scene for my blog. Finally some excitement!

“That's just water,” said Kabir Abuja, our Nigerian engineer, and scuttled to the back of the lander where the main valve panel was located. A moment later the stream of vapor cut off.

Kabir, Lynne Ann, and Dae-jung ducked under the lander to inspect the damage. I joined them, mindful of the descent engine's bell-shaped nozzle, which was still nearly red-hot.

I saw a dusty red streak leading up to the damaged pipe. “Look at that,” I said, pointing. “Looks like a rock got kicked up by the descent engine.” I took pictures of that too.

“Easily repaired,” said Kabir, and started backing out of the confined space. “It's only water anyway. No shortage of that.” Even through his faceplate I could see the confident smile that almost never left his dark, handsome face.

We'd brought a stock of liquid hydrogen and a cunning little chemical plant that would combine it with carbon dioxide from Mars's atmosphere to produce the methane rocket fuel we'd eventually use to leave the planet. This chemical process threw off water as a byproduct, some of which was cracked into oxygen and more hydrogen.

“Don't be so sure,” said Dae-jung.

We all looked at him. My breath was loud in my helmet, which was beginning to fog up.

Dae-jung looked right back at us, his flat face defiant. “We've been having some plumbing problems.”

Lynne Ann stepped up to him, their faceplates practically touching. “There was nothing about that in the daily reports.”

Dae-jung turned away from her. “There are things we don't tell Mission Control. Come on now, let's get you unloaded. We've only got a few hours of daylight left.”

While Kabir and Suma Handini, the current crew's Pakistani engineer, set up the insulated hoses to pipe our hydrogen into the habitat's buried tanks, the rest of us set up a bucket brigade to transfer the tonnes of food and other supplies from the lander's cargo bay. Our lander had set down right between the current crew's four-person lander and the two-person emergency ascent vehicle, less than fifty meters from the hab, and the boxes and canisters weighed only a third what they would on Earth, but their mass was unchanged so it was still a lot of work to move them around. By the time we got everything shifted my space-adapted muscles were screaming with fatigue. “Why do we have to get all this stuff inside so quickly anyway?” I asked Li Huang, the current crew's Chinese climatologist, as we struggled with a case of dehydrated meats. “It was fine in hard vacuum for the last two months.”

“They used to leave everything in the landers,” he said, “to save space in the hab. But a couple of expeditions ago a lander fell over right after landing, and all the supplies were inaccessible until they could get it jacked up again.”

“The lander fell over?!"

“Subsidence under the landing pad, I think it was.”

That hadn't been in the official reports either.

We got everything shifted inside, took off and stowed our suits, and gathered in the wardroom. This half-circular room, eight meters in diameter, took up half of Deck 2 of the cylindrical hab. The largest enclosed space on Mars, it would serve as our meeting room, work room, dining room, and living room. It had one long table and with ten people seated around it, we were all bumping elbows. We knew we'd have to get used to the crowding, though, as it wasn't going to change for the next 107 days.

Each new ship from Earth brought four new crew. The usual procedure was that four of the old crew would depart almost immediately, leaving a crew of six: four new crew members, and two experienced ones to provide continuity. But the inexorable mathematics of orbital mechanics dictated that on this particular rotation the old crew could not depart until 107 days after the new crew had arrived. This 107-day period, long for a turnaround but short for an expedition, was my personal territory—I had arrived with the new crew and would be departing with the old crew. Until then, ten people would have to share a space designed for six.

The ten of us introduced ourselves around the table—purely for etiquette's sake, of course, as we were all familiar with each other's dossiers. When it came to me, I told them how much I looked forward to posting my first blog from the surface of Mars, and showed off some of the exciting photos I'd gotten after the landing.

“You can't post those,” Dae-jung said.

I stared at him. “Doesn't the habitat have at least as much communications bandwidth as the ship?”

“Not bandwidth,” he said, raising one finger. “Politics. We don't let the public know about small problems that don't seriously impact the mission.” All of the current crew nodded their heads in agreement.

I wasn't happy about the situation, but rather than provoke a conflict in my first day on Mars, I acquiesced. That night I posted a blog about our aerobraking, descent, and landing, emphasizing the noise and vibration; it wasn't bad, but I really felt that it lacked something.

It wasn't until hours later, lying on my hard narrow bunk with a gluey rehydrated meal in my belly, that I realized I had no idea who had wound up being the sixty-seventh person to set foot on Mars.

* * * *

The next day, once we had breakfasted and unpacked our few personal items into our tiny, Spartan quarters, we found out we had a lot to learn.

It turned out that all the training we had received before departure, and the manuals we had read on the trip out, were almost completely worthless. Just about every system in the habitat, from the surface suits to the sinks, had been repaired, modified, or updated. “Do not under any circumstances touch this button,” Dae-jung said, pointing to the toilet's FLUSH button, which was crossed with an X of tape. He and the four new kids—as he called us—were all crammed into the habitat's one tiny bathroom. “We don't flush urine at all, and when it's time to flush feces you wash it down with one liter of gray water.” On a shelf glued to the wall stood a scarred plastic pitcher, above which a tap hand-labeled GRAY WATER protruded from a hole that looked like it had been melted through the plastic wall with a soldering iron.

“What happens if we push the button?” Lynne Ann asked, quite reasonably.

“We call it the Blue Spew. And whoever pushes the button has to clean up the mess.”

Kabir looked dubious. “So why don't you just disconnect it?”

Dae-jung gave a little smirk and pulled a panel off of the wall, revealing a disordered nest of variously-colored wires, conduits, and pipes. It didn't look a thing like the tidy pictures in the training manuals. “The last time we tried it, we lost power in the kitchen for half a week. Best to leave well enough alone.”

Despite the close quarters and hassles of the hab, I was excited by actually being on Mars after the boring months of travel. Just about every day I got to put on my surface suit and tromp around on the surface of Mars—Mars! Lifeless and airless though it might be, it had a desolate beauty to it; the low-gravity mineral formations were spectacular and their colors changed from hour to hour as the sun passed across the sky. We'd brought a supply of new weather balloons, ultra-light hydrogen-filled spheres that carried tiny instrument packages high into Mars's thin atmosphere, and they brought back more great pictures and interesting scientific data. I supplemented the limited number of photographs I could post each day with text: moments of personal drama and exciting new findings in biology, climatology, paleontology, and geology. My blog's ratings started to climb.

You might think that science is inherently dull, but personally I was fascinated by the question of why Mars's climate had changed from hospitable to inhospitable all those millions of years ago. I agreed with Secretary- General Zirinowski, who'd declared over twenty years ago that only through study of our dead sister planet could we find a way to reverse the climate change that was threatening to kill our own. I was thrilled by the opportunity to share my enthusiasm with the public, and I think that passion came through in my blog.

We new kids made a lot of mistakes in our first few weeks in the habitat, though. Lynne Ann forgot to plug in her backpack after her first EVA, so the battery ran down overnight and she couldn't go out at all the next day. (We called our outings EVAs because the hab was, technically, a vehicle—the first crewed vehicle to land on Mars, in fact—even though it wasn't going anywhere anymore.) Audra Miskinis, our Lithuanian paleobiologist, was the first of us to do a Blue Spew, but all four of us made the same mistake at least once in the first two weeks. Even Kabir the engineer managed to mess up, damaging the pressurized rover's gearbox the first time he tried to shift it into reverse.

I managed not to break any of the hab's systems, but the error I made was much worse.

The day Kabir stripped the rover's gears, I was riding in the shotgun seat. When the horrendous grinding noise came vibrating through the rover's frame, we looked at each other in horror, but it soon became clear what had happened—the exact same kind of boneheaded mistake any teenage driver might make with the family car. The necessary parts were just steps away in the hab, Kabir and I worked together to repair the damage, and by dinner that day the rover was again ready to go, and we were both laughing our heads off at the whole incident. It made such a good story that I led off with it in my daily post that evening, and I was still chuckling about it when my head hit the pillow.

Nobody was laughing the next morning, though. While we'd slept, my humorous blog story had turned into a political scandal. A US senator, one who'd been opposed to the Kasei program since its inception, had seized on the incident as yet another example of waste and mismanagement, with a racial slur for Kabir thrown in for good measure. Mission Control had managed to blunt the public-relations damage, but they were none too pleased with Kabir for breaking the rover or with me for mentioning it in my post.

Dae-jung's face was dark as a storm cloud when he came thundering into my narrow little room. “Give me one good reason not to shut you out of the network right now,” he said through clenched teeth.

I looked him straight in the eye. “I was just doing my job!” I said. “I'm here to represent the average citizen and increase public interest in the mission. All I did was report a minor incident in a humorous way.”

He didn't back down. “I told you there are things we don't share with Mission Control, never mind blabbing it all over the public nets! Your little blog has undone years of careful political maneuvering in the UNSA Council.”

“It's not my fault some senator used my blog to grind his own well-worn axe!”

“It's your fault for not thinking!” He slammed his fist against the cracked plastic wall. “Everything we do is being analyzed by people who want to shoot us down, and we can't hand them any ammunition!”

I had to look away. He was right—I'd been foolish to forget about how many political enemies the program had. “I'll be more careful in the future.”

“You'll be more than careful,” Dae-jung said. “From now on, you will not mention anything in your blog that could cast this program in a negative light.”

“Now wait just a—”

“I will review your entries before they are posted.”

“You can't do that!”

He straightened, and even though he was at least ten centimeters shorter he managed to look down his nose at me. “I am the commander of this expedition,” he said. “You will obey my orders or you will be subject to discipline.”

“I'll go over your head!”

In reply he gave me a smug little grin. “I'm sure Mission Control will give your protests the full attention they deserve.”

I matched his grin with a level stare, jaw clenched and breathing hard through my nose. But he had the authority, he had the administrative passwords, and I was as certain as he was that in case of a dispute our superiors would side with him. They were already upset with me, and insubordination wouldn't help my case.

“All right,” I said after I had gotten my temper under control, “I'll let you review my posts. For a while.”

“We will see,” was all he said. He shut the door behind himself, leaving me seething in my narrow little stall like an angry bull with no rider.

* * * *

I came back to my quarters after a grueling geological EVA to find a blinking video-message indicator on my display. Even though I had red dust caked in every crease of my body, I played it right away—it wasn't often anyone back home cared enough to spend the money on sending a video all the way to Mars.

It was my agent. “I'll get right to the point,” she said. “The syndicate isn't happy.”

Of course they weren't. Dae-jung insisted that anything negative, controversial, or unprofessional—in other words, anything of interest to the average viewer—be removed from my blog, and that the scientific content be accurate and complete. Thanks to his careful editing, my blog had turned into the same snooze-inducing stream of technical bafflegab that all the non-Citizen Astronauts had produced before I'd come along. After almost two months of this, my ratings were in the toilet.

“They're giving you three weeks. If your ratings don't improve substantially by the fifteenth of next month, they're moving you off the front page.”

I sighed and put my head in my hands. They couldn't drop me completely—I had a contract through the end of my mission—but if my blog didn't appear on the syndicate's front page my already puny ratings would vanish off the bottom of the chart. I'd come home to a tiny paycheck and a smoking hole where my career used to be. I'd have to start over from scratch.

I sent my agent a text message reminding her of the censorship I was facing—not that it should be a surprise to her; I'd kept her in the loop all along—and promising that I'd do everything I could to make my blog more interesting. But after I'd sent the message I found myself sitting and staring disconsolately at the blank screen.

I'd said I would do everything I could. But I'd already tried everything I could think of, including arguing with both Dae-jung and Mission Control, and nothing had helped.

Just then came a knock on the door. It was Kabir. “Hey, can you give me a hand with something here?”

I was still grimy and exhausted from my EVA, as well as depressed, but I knew Kabir wouldn't ask for help unless he really needed it. “Yeah, sure,” I said.

It was the electrical system again, of course.

The small nuclear plant on the other side of Bathtub Ridge provided more than enough power for our needs. But the omnipresent dust, ultraviolet light, and extreme temperatures made insulation crack, switches short, fuses blow, and backup batteries fail, adding up to a rickety mess that could barely meet our needs on a good day.

And today was not looking to be one of the good days. We'd lost power in half of Deck 2 and none of the usual tricks had brought it back.

Kabir's legs protruded from an access panel in the ceiling of Deck 1. “Try again,” came his muffled voice.

I flipped the circuit breaker. It immediately tripped again. “Nope.”

Kabir cursed and squirmed around, still looking for the short circuit. While he searched, I peered at the tangle of conduits leading upward from the panel. I was trying to figure out where the problem wire came from and where it went, but they were all the same color and it was almost impossible to trace each one visually. “Hang on,” I said.

“Mmph?”

I ran my eyes along the wire again. “That wire you're looking at isn't even connected to anything. It just loops around.”

Kabir pulled his upper torso out of the access panel. His hair was filthy with red dust. “So where's the short?”

“I don't know, but . . .” If that wire was just a dead loop, then the short had to be on this one. I followed it away from the panel, peering closely as it snaked along where the wall met the floor.

Then something caught at the back of my throat. “Huh.” I closed my eyes and sniffed.

Yep. Burnt insulation.

“Here it is.”

“You're kidding.”

“No. Look.” I pulled the conduit away from the wall, revealing a blackened spot and exposed wires.

“How the hell . . . ?”

I smiled and tapped my nose.

Kabir shook his head in admiration.

Now that we'd found the short, fixing it only took about ten more minutes. Everyone cheered as the lights and fans came back on.

But what we'd learned disturbed me. “If that whole conduit is just a dead loop,” I said, pointing, “that means the main and backup power systems are both routed through the main panel. Single point of failure.”

Kabir shrugged. “Dae-jung told me the secondary panel blew out a couple years ago and they had to rewire it. But the systems are still completely separate . . . they're just in the same place.”

I sighed. Just another one of those things we didn't tell Mission Control about. “It'll have to do, I guess. Let's get everything closed up.”

After we finished, everyone who happened to be in the wardroom when we reported our achievement toasted us with tea, heated up with the newly restored power.

“Gary's got the Magic Nose,” Kabir said.

I waved a hand dismissively. “I was the super of my apartment building for a few years in grad school. I didn't get a lot of sleep, but the rent was cheap. I never dreamed I'd be using those same skills on Mars!”

Just then Dae-jung came in, and we told him we'd fixed the electrical failure. He humphed and nodded. “Good work.”

I decided to press my advantage, small though it was. “So can I blog about it?”

He stared at me across the scuffed plastic table, while Suma and Kabir and the others looked on. Finally he blinked. “Very well. But you must emphasize the solution, not the problem, and I will still review your work before submission.”

“Of course,” I said, and tried to be glad of the small victory. It wasn't much, but it was a small note of human interest that I could use to leaven the usual scientific blah-blah-blah.

* * * *

It helped, but not as much as I'd hoped. Three weeks went by—twenty-one days, twenty-four-and-a-half hours each, filled with clambering over rocks in my sweaty spacesuit, sifting through endless samples looking for microfossils, and constant battles with balky, malfunctioning equipment—and though I emphasized the positive enough to get some of the interesting bits past Dae-jung, my ratings remained less than stellar.

At least I'd been able to make myself useful. After the incident of the Magic Nose I'd gradually taken over more and more of the small repair and maintenance tasks that took up so much of Kabir's and Suma's time, leaving them free to perform some major system upgrades that had been put off for far too long. It wasn't how I'd planned to spend my time on Mars, but I found it more satisfying than working on posts that I knew were going to get edited into mush and then ignored by most of my potential audience.

On Monday night, washing dishes after yet another bland rehydrated meal, I reflected that when I woke up I would probably find my blog pulled from the front page and my ratings reduced to the low single digits. “I'm going out for a walk,” I said to Suma and Audra after I'd dried and put away the last plate.

Technically, we weren't supposed to go out on EVA alone, for safety's sake. But that rule had been relaxed to the point that you could solo as long as you didn't get out of sight of the hab. I suited up, got Suma to check me out, and cycled out to the surface.

The thing about being on the surface of Mars is that it's quiet. I'd grown accustomed to the many sounds of the hab, from the whir of fans to the hammering thud of the water pump; in fact, I'd gotten to the point that I noticed immediately if the sound changed, indicating that something wasn't working the way it should. But out on the surface, even with the echo of my breath and the soft clack of valves in my helmet, I felt something relax in my neck and jaw and I realized just how badly I'd needed to get away from the constant barrage of noise.

It was dark out there too. I climbed a slight rise a couple hundred meters from the hab, switched off my headlamp, and looked up at stars scattered thick as salt spilled on a dark tablecloth. Twinkling just slightly in the thin atmosphere, they burned bright against a background blacker than any on Earth. Even through my scuffed faceplate they were awe-inspiring.

Then, as I turned back to the hab, it struck me hard that the few dim lights that shone from its windows were the only lights on the entire planet. We were alone here, entirely alone, and farther from home than any human beings had ever been before.

That's when I saw the flash.

It was brief and silent, but quite bright, and for a moment after I couldn't see anything at all. But then the stars gradually reappeared, and I realized what I was seeing . . . or, more to the point, what I wasn't seeing.

The hab's lights had gone out. There was nothing but blackness below the horizon.

“Hello?” I called. Suma was on comms duty.

No response came on the radio.

I switched to channel 8. “This is Gary, on EVA, to anyone in the hab. Do you copy?”

Nothing. Not even static. Digital comms give you perfection or nothing at all.

I stood blinking into the endless dark. Heart pounding. Waiting.

Communications on channel 8 were automatically routed to the main speakers. Everyone in the hab—every single human being on Mars—should have heard my call. If no one was responding . . .

I switched on my headlamp and headed down the slope toward the hab, moving in a tiny rust-colored ellipse of illuminated soil. My breath was very loud in my helmet and I had to remind myself to take it slow and careful. Tripping and cracking my helmet would only make the problem worse. Whatever it was.

When I got close enough to illuminate the hab with my headlamp, I couldn't see any damage. The lights were still out, but as I walked around to the side where the main airlock was I could see flashlights moving around inside. That simultaneously reassured me and deepened my fears—some people at least were still alive, but what kind of failure could knock out both the primary and backup power systems?

Then the answer appeared around the curve of the hull.

A big elliptical hole, two or three meters long and maybe half a meter wide, slashed diagonally across the hab's skin and part of the airlock door, ending in a fresh one-meter crater in the dirt. Meteorite strike.

Jets of gas spewed silently in several directions from the edges of the gash, showing where the meteorite's grazing path had cut through pipes carrying water, air, and other fluids and gases. Nothing came out of the gaping void in the middle of the hole, though, indicating that whatever compartments the damage had breached had already lost all their air.

Fighting down panic, I forced myself to focus on the problem at hand. Which compartments were behind the damaged sections of wall? The main airlock, of course, and the EVA prep room next to it. What was on the other side of the prep room's back wall?

Aw, crap. The engineering workroom.

No wonder the power was out. The damage cut right through the main power panel. Where the main and secondary systems came together.

Single point of failure.

As I tried to visualize the Deck 1 floor plan, I realized the problem was even worse than I'd thought. If the EVA prep room and engineering workroom had both lost pressure, anyone left alive inside would be cut off from both the main airlock and the engineering airlock—and those were where the spacesuits were stored.

The two upper decks were equipped with survival balls, airtight spheres that could keep one or two people alive for a few days. But once you crawled into one of those you were dependent on someone in a full-service spacesuit to fix the problem or haul you to safety.

And that came down to me.

I realized I was hyperventilating. I adjusted my air mix and bent down, hands on knees, until I got my breathing under control.

Okay. Priority one was to assess the situation. Did that. Priority two was to ensure my own safety, then that of others. Priority three was to prevent further damage, then initiate repairs.

I was in no immediate danger. My suit had power, air, and water for almost seven hours, though heavy physical activity would reduce that. How about the rest of the crew?

I peered up at the windows in Decks 2 and 3. Flashlights still moved there. At least two, maybe three, maybe more.

There were handheld radios in the same emergency kits as the flashlights. I called all the handheld frequencies but got no response. Why?

After I gave up on that, I stepped back and waved, but got no reaction—probably nobody was looking out the window at the moment. Even throwing small rocks at the windows didn't prompt a response.

Well, they'd be okay for a few hours at least. Even if there were nine survivors and they were restricted to the top deck, that was still over a hundred cubic meters of air. Without power that air would get cold and stale pretty quickly, but the gouts of steam from the meteorite scar had slowed and stopped—they weren't losing any more of it.

The situation was stable, but it wouldn't improve by itself. After one more radio call—still no response—I headed back to the hab to see what I could do.

The main airlock's outer door was too damaged to open.

The gash made by the meteorite was too narrow and ragged to risk slipping through.

The engineering airlock door, around the back of the hab, appeared undamaged but wouldn't open. I hauled at the handle, but it simply refused to budge. I peered through the small porthole in the outer door with my headlamp. Nobody was in the airlock that I could see.

I stopped to think. If both airlock doors had been closed at the time of impact, and the engineering workroom was open to Mars's near-vacuum, then the engineering airlock would be an island of air between the vacuums of the exterior and the interior. That air was doing nobody any good, and preventing me from opening the door.

I pried open the emergency manual depressurization panel and opened the valve I found there. Air jetted out—I regretted the loss but couldn't think of an alternative—and soon the pressure was equalized; I was able to open the door with no problem.

A long, hard look through the porthole in the inner door showed nothing moving inside the hab. There wasn't any visible damage, though papers and other lightweight objects were scattered everywhere. After a reflexive check to make sure the outer door was shut—probably pointless, but by now it was a deeply ingrained habit—I tried the inner door. The handle moved easily, indicating no pressure differential, but the door itself met some kind of resistance.

I pushed against the resistance and felt something fall away with a soft thud that reverberated through my feet. With a sense of dread I pushed the door the rest of the way open and stepped through.

Oh, God. It was Suma. She'd made it as far as the airlock door. Now she lay still, eyes open and blood red, dark skin peppered with red blotches.

“I'm sorry,” I said aloud. The sound of my own shaking voice in my helmet made hot tears spring to my eyes, but I blinked hard and tried to sniff them back. I had no way to wipe my eyes.

I checked out the rest of the lower deck as quickly as I could. All the airtight doors had sprung shut as the pressure dropped, but with the hole slashing across so many compartments there was no air on either side of any of them. The main power panel was as badly damaged as I'd feared. And in the EVA prep room I found Audra halfway into her suit. She'd managed to get the helmet on her head and the air turned on full, but it hadn't been enough.

Damn. Damn, damn, damn.

The only good news was that all eight remaining suits were in their racks and appeared undamaged.

Okay. Time to head upstairs.

The airtight hatch at the top of the ladder was sealed and wouldn't budge. That was good news—it meant there was pressure on the other side. But there was no window in that hatch, and I still had no radio communication with the survivors for reasons unknown. I tried pounding on the hatch but got no response; even when I pressed the top of my helmet against the hatch I heard nothing. That didn't mean too much, though. The hatch was heavily padded on both sides—I myself had bashed my elbows and knees against it many times and welcomed the padding—so the sound might not be audible.

How to get them out, or get the suits to them, with no airlock? How to even let them know I was here and trying to help?

I clung to the ladder, breathing hard. The indicator on my wrist said I had enough air for another four hours at this rate. Damn.

Okay. Think, think.

From the top of the ladder I looked down, passing my headlamp beam over scattered papers and equipment and . . . oh God, Suma's body. I swallowed. Think. From the bottom of the ladder it was just ten or twelve steps to the engineering airlock and its emergency suits. Not far, but too far to walk in vacuum, and donning the suits would take much too long.

But still . . . it wasn't far to walk. In fact, it wasn't a very large space at all.

If I could force open the hatch, air would flood down from the upper deck. Shared between the upper and lower decks it would thin out dramatically, but might still support life, at least long enough to get to the suits and don them.

The claustrophobic tightness of the hab might save us all.

I scanned my headlamp around the space, considering my plan . . . but no, damn it, it wouldn't work. There was still a huge hole in the wall behind the damaged power panel.

I climbed down the ladder and examined the hole. It was about one and a half square meters all told, with ragged edges of torn metal and plastic. Heavy power cables and conduits crossed the gap, blocking easy access. Some of them might still be live.

How to seal it? Even temporarily?

We had expanding foam for small holes. This was far beyond what that could cover.

But we also had something else that expanded. . . .

I let myself out through the engineering airlock and ran to the rover. The box still held six weather balloons. I grabbed three, just in case, put them in my thigh pockets, and ran back inside.

I put one of the folded packages on the floor about two meters from the damaged power panel and pulled the inflation tab. It inflated rapidly, and in less than a minute it had nearly filled the space, bulging out tautly between floor and ceiling.

It wasn't a clean seal by any means. The taut plastic film was tough, but far from immune to punctures. The balloon was full of potentially explosive hydrogen.

It would have to do.

I went to the EVA prep room and hauled all eight suits to the base of the ladder.

There was just one more thing to do.

I went back outside and flung a few rocks at the windows, then inflated another weather balloon. As it rose gently into the black sky I played a flashlight beam across it, hoping someone inside would notice.

It worked. A flashlight from one of the Deck 2 windows caught me in the eyes. Behind it I saw a waving hand. Still nothing on the radio, though. At least they knew I was here.

I ran back inside. I checked that the balloon was still in place. I made absolutely sure that every airtight door on the lower deck was closed and sealed. I climbed the ladder.

And then I put my shoulder against the hatch and pushed.

A hundred kilopascals of air pressure pushed back. It was like lifting a car. It was impossible. It didn't budge at all.

I pushed harder.

The plastic and metal of my suit's hard torso creaked as I put every bit of my strength into the effort. The edge of the neck ring bit painfully into my shoulder. I found myself grunting “Nnnnngh . . .” through gritted teeth.

I kept pushing.

A jet of air hissed across my helmet, letting me know I'd managed to open the hatch by just a crack. I was elated, but the pressure didn't let up at all. I kept pushing.

And then, just as I feared my trembling legs and back would give out altogether, I heard/felt a scraping noise in the hatch. I looked up and saw the scratched metal tip of a pry bar probing at the gap.

I took a deep breath, gathered my strength, and heaved.

The pry bar made it through the gap, caught, and began levering the hatch upward. The jet of air turned into a hard wind, then a wash like a waterfall as the press of the hatch on my shoulder lessened and then evaporated. The hatch swung back with a clang, revealing Kabir's smiling face.

I clung, shivering, to the ladder rungs. It was all I could do to just stay in one place as the air rushed past me. Soon everyone would be safe.

The flow slowed . . . slowed . . . and then, with a whump, it sped up again.

I looked down.

The weather balloon was gone. Only a few scraps of torn plastic fluttered in the gap where the air was rapidly escaping. The sharp edges of the hole had punctured the balloon.

I looked up. There were Kabir and Lynne Ann, hair whipping around their heads as they moved to close the hatch again.

If that hatch closed it would shut off all hope. I didn't have the strength to push it open again.

But I had one last weather balloon in my pocket.

I pulled the tab and, as the package began to inflate, lobbed it underhand toward the hole in the wall.

The growing wad of plastic and gas struck the hole and stuck. It inflated for a moment, like a kid blowing bubble gum . . . then suddenly deflated. It had been punctured.

But this time it was only half-inflated. The plastic was not stretched taut under pressure. It didn't tear.

The punctured balloon caught in the hole . . . and stuck like a glob of gum. It bellied out, away from me, growing more and more taut as the air from the upper deck filled the lower deck.

But it held. For now.

“Come on!” I shouted, clambering down the ladder, waving my arm to reinforce the words they probably couldn't hear through my helmet. “Get in your suits! Hurry!”

Down the ladder they came, Kabir and Lynne Ann and all the rest. I counted them as they passed me, joining the mob scrambling to find and don all the pieces of their suits in the crowded space. Four. Five. Six.

Only six. “Where's Dae-jung?” I asked Kabir over radio as soon as he sealed his helmet.

“Still upstairs,” he gasped. “Fell down the ladder when the lights went out. Broke his leg.”

We made a bucket brigade, passing Dae-jung's helmet and torso and boots and all the rest up onto Deck 2. It wasn't easy getting him into the suit with a broken leg, and it must have hurt like hell, but though his eyes clenched tight shut and his skin was pale and sweaty he didn't make a sound.

I dogged down his helmet and turned on his backpack for him. As soon as the suit's cool air hit his face his eyes opened.

“Thank you,” he said.

* * * *

It took nearly three days to get the hole repaired and the pressure restored and the power back on. When we finally contacted Mission Control they tried to maintain their usual bureaucratic detachment but, reading between the lines, you could tell how frantic they'd been during the days of silence.

There were a lot of lessons to be learned. One, re-route the power systems to avoid a single point of failure. Two, store emergency suits on all decks. Three, deploy analog radios as a backup. Digital radios were great, but the hab's metal structure had blocked enough of the signal that they'd refused to communicate at all; the more primitive analog radios would provide at least some communication in situations of weak signal.

We buried our dead. We worked hard, eighteen and twenty hours a day, getting the hab functioning and stable. And we started to think about what we were going to do next.

Our launch window for return would open in ten days. We'd lost two people, including our most experienced engineer, and a lot of air and water and other resources. Even worse, public confidence in the whole mission had been shaken by the incident. Mission Control strongly recommended we use both landers to abandon the station and return all eight of us home. They'd try again soon with a more robust hab.

But we knew that “soon” for UNSA almost certainly meant “next decade” and might mean “never.”

Defying Mission Control's recommendation, we decided we'd stay on Mars until the next crew arrived in six months, then reassess the hab's status. Mission Control didn't like it, but there was nothing they could do about it.

We knew we were taking a risk, but Kasei 19 was already on the launch pad, its crew trained and ready. If we managed to fix the hab and do good science under these circumstances, it would be a public relations triumph. Mission Control would have no choice but to continue the program.

But we couldn't all stay. Dae-jung's leg was too badly broken for him to work at all. He'd need surgery to walk again, the sooner the better. And getting the population of the hab down would make our narrowed resource margins a lot more comfortable.

In the end my own decision wasn't as hard as you might think.

“I'm staying,” I blogged, “because I can't leave now. There's a lot of work to be done to get the hab back in full working order . . . more than Kabir could possibly do alone. I'm not a professional engineer, but I know I can do the work. And humanity needs this program to succeed. We've made some amazing discoveries already, but there's far more to be learned from Mars. That's why Lynne Ann and Huang are staying as well—to keep the science going. Two engineers and two scientists isn't a full crew, but it's enough to keep the dream alive.”

After that post my ratings shot through the roof.

Which was nice, but it wasn't really important any more.

* * * *

The four of us stood and saluted as the lander rose silently into the salmon-colored sky. But we returned to the hab before its vapor trail had cleared.

We had a lot to do.

Copyright © 2011 David D. Levine

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Department: THE ALTERNATE VIEW: THE GREAT MISSILE MYSTERY OF 2010
by Jeffery D. Kooistra

You remember the mystery missile launched off the coast of California, don't you? It happened back last November, offshore of Los Angeles, and it left this spectacular contrail in the sky that everyone could see. And yet no one knew who launched it, let alone why.

Or so we were led to believe.

The initial reports came from KCBS in Los Angeles and it sounded like ordinary straightforward reporting. When was the missile launched? Around sunset on Monday, November 8, 2010. Who saw it? A news helicopter spotted it and had the launch on video, and you could watch it online. Where was the launch? “. . . 35 miles out to sea, west of L.A. and north of Catalina Island.”

But who launched it? This is where the real mystery lay since “officials” were being “tight-lipped” about the whole thing. But that didn't stop rampant speculation on the part of people whom one might expect were either “in the know” or, at minimum, knowledgeable about missiles. For instance, CBS8 in San Diego showed the video to former U.S. Ambassador to NATO (also a former Deputy Secretary of Defense) Robert Ellsworth. He suggested it might be a test-firing of a submarine launched ICBM (one of ours), just to remind some folks over in Asia (read that as North Korea) that we can do things like that.

Now if you're me, the images in your mind that appear upon learning of this missile launch, but without having seen the video, are of an SLBM breaking through the surface of the water, firing the rocket engine, and swiftly arcing away into the sky, contrail billowing out behind. So it was more than a little bit disappointing to actually see the video and find out that there is no launch shown at all. There is a contrail, and there is an object at the front end of the emerging smoke that could be a missile, and there is a bright light flickering at the tail end of the contrail creator that might be from a rocket motor. But there isn't any actual connection of the contrail to a specific spot on the ocean from which the supposed missile was supposedly launched. But the contrail does connect with the horizon so it wasn't unreasonable to assert that the missile emerged from the sea at the spot where the ocean meets the sky.

It wasn't long after the story appeared that it became clear that either the military really had no idea who launched this alleged missile, or that they were selectively disavowing knowledge of specific aspects of said alleged missile in alleged sky. You know how this goes—the Navy says it isn't one of theirs but neglects to say they actually do know who it belongs to. Or Vandenberg AFB (which is northwest of L.A. and launches lots of stuff) says it hasn't launched any missiles in the area, but doesn't volunteer information about who actually did.

If the military really does know all about the missile but isn't talking, and is pushing off the questions with a not-so-subtle nudge nudge and wink wink, that's all well and good. We can just wonder why they launched a missile they can't talk about out in the open where everyone can see it. But suppose the military is telling the truth and they really don't have any idea who this missile belongs to? That's pretty scary. NORAD is supposed to keep track of stuff like this. If the scenario is as presented, of a missile launch 35 miles off the coast of the US, and no one in the US military knows who did it, well, you do the math. On the other hand, it might also be the case that, although they don't know what it is, they are really confident that they know what it is not. In other words, that the public is suddenly going gaga over a viral video of a supposed missile launch is not a big deal to people who know for sure that if it really was a missile, that they would have seen.

It wasn't long after the reports appeared about the missile that an alternate view of the event arrived. Some claimed this wasn't a missile at all and that what the video showed was just an ordinary jet flying in from the west, viewed at a fortuitous angle. The contrail was just an airplane contrail, and the bright spot that looked like a burning rocket engine was just light from the setting sun reflecting off the aircraft. As hoots of derision went up from newsrooms across the nation and vitriol erupted from outraged occupants of Internet chat rooms, I couldn't help but sympathize with those backing this unpopular explanation, being no stranger to derision myself.

Twenty-four hours into the mystery, the set of explanations settled down to three possibilities. The first was that it was, indeed, a missile or rocket of some kind. The second was that it was, indeed, just an airplane contrail seen from just the right angle and at just the right time to look like a rocket launch. The third was that it was, indeed, a secret military test; among other things a craft known as the Boeing X-51 “WaveRider” was implicated as the culprit. Under each explanation were a number of sub-possibilities. For example, if it was a rocket, was it foreign or domestic, accidental or intentional, secretly known by the military or a genuine mystery to all except those who launched it? Part of me really rather wished it was a rocket launch by a gang of amateur rocketeers—some of those guys launch birds that would put the sounding rockets of the ‘50s to shame. But why would they build such a big bird and then drag it (or float it) out someplace where they'd never launched before? Why would they risk the inevitable Federal prosecution that would come from failing to secure the proper permissions? It seemed to me that a bunch of rocket scientists wouldn't be stupid enough to launch a rocket there.

Also by this time, anyone who was at all interested in the mystery had seen the video on the Internet, and excerpts of it were still being shown on every news outlet in the country. Along with the video, numerous experts were called in to offer their cogent comments on the true nature of the mystery missile. On one network I heard Michio Kaku, physicist and science explainer extraordinaire, expound very convincingly that, appearances to the contrary, this really was just an airplane contrail seen from such an angle that it looked like a missile launch. One fact he brought out that I personally hadn't heard from others was that the so-called missile wasn't accelerating, as freshly launched missiles are prone to do. But then later that day I heard on another network from a general whose opinions I had come to trust over the years from his analyses of assorted military issues. He said he'd seen hundreds of missile launches, was absolutely sure this was a missile, and pointed to a “kink” in the contrail and said it was the obvious telltale of a course correction.

There was also much discussion about the missile amongst my fellow SIGMAns. (Learn about SIGMA at /www.sigmaforum.org/.) I, having grown up in Grand Rapids, Michigan, never having seen a missile or rocket launch not framed by the sides of a TV screen, stayed in my cyber-corner with my cyber-mouth shut and just listened. Some of those folks have spent their lives in and around aerospace, military and civilian, and seen lots of missile and rocket launches. All of them are accomplished, none of them are stupid, and all of them understand both logical and critical thinking. Yet even this esteemed group of deep, creative thinkers failed to arrive at a consensus about what the missile was. Some were absolutely certain it was a missile, basing this on their real life experiences with real missiles launched from where they could see them. Others with the same experience were just as convinced that it must be an airplane contrail. A few thought it was likely a secret test that the military (for assorted reasons) didn't want to admit to.

But other experiences also played a part in the analyses. A writer living in the Los Angeles area pointed out that apparently none of the millions of potential eyewitnesses reported seeing anything strange. Catalina Island is populated and no one reported seeing a nearby missile launch. It was rush hour in L.A., yet nobody on the highways saw a contrail enough out of the ordinary to report it. This led another writer to chime in that his experience with L.A. rush hour traffic was such that looking at the sky was precluded. But my experience with that traffic is that it often isn't actually moving, during which time looking around is exactly what I did.

Such point and counter-pointing could go on forever. Who do you trust when the people you are used to trusting disagree with each other?

* * * *

Is there a fair witness in the house?

I assume most Analog readers know what a fair witness is, but if you don't, Heinlein described a fair witness in Stranger in a Strange Land. Heinlein had his character Jubal Harshaw ask his secretary (and fair witness) Anne, “That new house on the far hilltop—can you see what color they've painted it?” To which she replied, “It's white on this side.” Most people would look at that house and say it was a white house, even though the basis for that assertion exists in their own minds and not necessarily in reality. But a fair witness is trained to not infer from the observation, but to report reliably exactly what she observed.

Returning to the mystery missile, the real problem in identifying it was not a lack of people with great experience observing missile launches, but that none of them had actually observed a missile launch. What they observed was a video of a contrail, still in the process of being created, purported to be a missile launch. Relevant questions about lighting conditions, where the sun was, the angle of the camera, the specs of the specific camera used, and so on, were not asked nor answered prior to the headline being written and the video shown. Most of the on-air experts proceeded on the assumption that the video and the words surrounding it faithfully presented the reality they would have encountered had they been there in person to witness the event.

And that is an assumption as yet invalidated.

Personally, I was rather quickly won over to the airplane contrail explanation. Some airplane contrails do look like a missile made them, and you can find lots of nice contrail images at contrailscience.com/, and even a discussion about the mystery missile. Kaku's pointing out that the supposed rocket wasn't accelerating, and the dearth of eyewitness accounts, cinched that explanation for me.

The old adage is right; when you hear of something alarming or controversial, you must always “consider the source.” But frequently, you must also consider the source's sources.

Copyright © 2011 Jeffrey D. Kooistra

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Department: BIOLOG: DAVID LEVINE
by Richard A. Lovett

* * * *

Photo by Kathryn Cramer

* * * *

David Levine has been toastmaster of the Nebulas and spent two weeks on Mars. He's also won a Hugo, been nominated for a Nebula, and won the Endeavor Award for best Pacific Northwest science fiction book of 2008. Not to mention a smorgasbord of other honors.

Okay, so the Mars visit was in a simulated Mars station in the Utah desert. But the others are real.

If someone was ever born to write science fiction, it has to be Levine. “My father was an avid science fiction reader,” he says, “and the stories he told me growing up turned out to be the plots of Hal Clement's Mission of Gravity and A Fall of Moondust by Arthur C. Clarke.”

As the son of a physicist turned computer professor, Levine was also exposed early to science and computers. “My father gave me calculus lessons when I was a little kid,” he says. “I didn't know it was calculus, but I recognized it when I was in college.”

In college, he initially majored in theater then switched to architecture—though he also took a science-fiction writing class where Algis Budrys was a guest lecturer. Graduating during a recession, however, he found few opportunities in architecture, so he took a job as a technical writer. For the first fifteen years, he wrote computer documentation, not fiction. “Writing fiction was too much like my day job,” he says.

Then in 2000 his employer offered a seven-week sabbatical . . . which he took at the Clarion West writing workshop. A year later, he sold his first story. Since then, he's averaged about four a year.

“The thing that makes an Analog story,” he says, “is that somewhere buried in it is an equation. It doesn't necessarily appear on the page, but there is that sense that, as with nature itself, deep down underneath are equations that explain how it works. The universe is logical and comprehensible, and the fact of that is an important part of the story.”

Computers—and efforts to portray realistic computer security and hacking—often play a role in his fiction ("You can't break into an alien computer in minutes, like Jeff Goldblum did in the movie Independence Day,” he says.) But to date, architecture hasn't figured directly.

Still, that early interest might not be completely dormant. “The idea of building an environment for other people to live in was always something I wanted to do,” he says. Which, when you think about it, sounds a lot like science-fictional worldbuilding.

As for the Mars station? “It was like an Analog/Astounding story from the 1950s,” he says. “The commander was an Air Force guy. The astronomer was a college football player. The biologist was our smoldering Latin lover. The nurse was the only girl. And the journalist [myself] was the newbie who had to explain everything to the audience [by blogging].”

The experience fueled this month's story “Citizen-Astronaut.” “One of the most important things I learned is that in space, everything is improvised,” he says. “You are thrust back on your own resources and required to improvise because things are always breaking and unexpected situations always coming up.”

Copyright © 2011 Richard A. Lovett

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Short Story: TAKE ONE FOR THE ROAD
by Jamie Todd Rubin

The most important part of a spacecraft—and the hardest to control—is the crew.

There was only one person on Earth who knew what really happened on that mission to Mercury. So shrouded in mystery was it, that I didn't even know there was a mission. It had happened a few years before I was born, and I didn't learn about it until a few years back when my wife and I bought our first home. We'd moved into a picturesque small town in upstate New York, where a real postman still delivered the mail and where our next-door neighbor turned out to be none other than Simon Hollander, sole surviving member of the crew that once walked on the surface of that innermost planet.

I got to know Simon pretty well after we moved in. For years, he and I would spend Sunday evenings on his back porch, drinking beer and gabbing about small-town gossip. He was a neighborly fellow, more than twice my age and probably twice my weight. He ran a local handyman business and was nothing like the image you'd expect of someone who'd bounded across the plains of the Caloris basin. I'd found out about that through the town rumor mill not long after I'd moved in, but I quickly got the sense that it wasn't something Simon wanted to talk about and so I never brought it up and neither did he.

Not, at least, until one memorable Sunday evening a few months back.

It was on that evening, sitting on Simon's rickety back porch and sipping bottles of Old Specked Hen that Simon told me he was dying.

“Cancer,” he said finishing off his bottle and jettisoning it like a spent rocket into the plastic bin to one side of the porch. It clanked softly against its empty siblings, each one a mission of exploration and discovery.

“Jesus Christ, Simon,” I said, “when did you find out?”

“Monday.”

“And it's that bad? They can't do anything?”

Simon opened another bottle between the splintered railings. “They'd like to, but their treatment will only slow things down, it won't prevent the inevitable.”

“Jesus,” I said again, sipping my beer. It tasted bitter. “How long—?”

“Six months with the treatments, one month without.”

“When do the treatments start?”

“They don't,” he said, looking at the trees that lined the edge of his property. “I'm not going through that for an extra five months.” He polished off the beer and discarded the bottle. “I've made my peace with it, and I don't want to spend whatever time I've got left in some anonymous hospital bed being poked and prodded by overeager interns. I've been through that shit once before.”

He was referring to his training prior to the Mercury landing, a subject he usually avoided.

“So what are you going to do?”

“When the time comes, I'll take care of things myself. Got that Springfield over the fireplace that never gets used. You can't go wrong with a rifle like that, now, can you?”

I started at Simon, speechless. In that moment, he reminded me of my grandfather, strong, certain, and stubborn. Considering our age difference, I was surprised I'd never made that connection before. Granddad fought valiantly against the Alzheimer's, but in the end the disease consumed him, and like a star spiraling into a black hole, all his strength and certainty, all his mulish pride, everything that made him who he was was ripped apart and sucked away until all that remained was a dark, empty husk. There had been no Springfield above granddad's mantle, and even if he'd had one, he'd have forgotten how to use it.

“Of course, I'll need someone to look after Nelson and Jeanette,” Simon said, referring to the pair of greyhounds he'd raised from pups. “Think you could do that for me, Rick?”

“Certainly,” I said. What else could I say? It's not like I could have begged off in order to check with Anna. And besides, I'd admired the old man's courage in the face of this unfortunate situation.

“There's one other thing I'd like to ask of you, if you don't mind my imposing,” he said, “but for this you will require another beer.” And like magic he produced one for me, cold and fresh.

“It's about Mercury,” he said.

* * * *

After the rumor mill turned me onto the Mercury debacle, I tried to learn as much about it as I could. I made use of the library at the small university where Anna worked as a professor, and despite having the best resources at hand, there wasn't very much to learn.

The mission took place a few years before I was born. It was listed as a science expedition carrying a crew of four into orbit around Mercury, where they would then land on the surface to explore, set up some equipment, and return with samples. But somewhere along the way something went wrong. The ship successfully put into orbit, the crew descended to the surface of the planet and even walked around down there. But then they left abruptly. Only three crew members returned to Earth. And in perhaps the most bizarre twist of all, the surviving crew would not talk about what happened. Each one of them resigned from the program, refusing to speak of the mission, refusing to speak even to one another.

And there had been no more manned spaceflights to other worlds in all of the years since.

But that was it. No matter how much I dug, that was all of the information I could get. Conspiracy theories were rampant, of course, but I ignored those. Instead, I tried some older sources.

I called an uncle and asked him what he remembered from the year of the mission.

He laughed at me, gave me a wink, and said, “Ah, you must be talking about when the Cubbies went back-to-back on the World Series.” It's true. The same year that Simon Hollander walked on Mercury, the Cubs won their second Series in a row. It was an enormous upset and led to major changes in the algorithms for predictive baseball models.

I called a friend of my father, a lawyer specializing in post-mortem digital avatar rights. At the time of the Mercury mission, he was a prosecutor in Arlington, Virginia. “That's a long time ago,” he said, tugging at his white mustache, “but if memory serves, that was the year that some serial killer was going around knocking off the elderly and infirm. Had some kind of crazy name for him, but I don't remember what it was. Heck, I can't even recall if they caught the sonofabitch.”

It was like that with everyone I spoke to. Other news events loomed large, and people only recalled the Mercury mission when I mentioned it to them, and then with only the most elliptical recollections. The only ones really willing to talk about it were the conspiracy theorists, but I avoided them. I'd read some of their ideas on what happened on the mission, and while some were interesting, there was not a shred of evidence in favor of their theories. Forty years later, only one man knew what really happened out there, and that man was my next-door neighbor.

* * * *

“It was not our intention to derail the space program,” Simon said. The Sun had gone down and in the crisp air, the beer gave me chills. “In fact it was just the opposite. We were trying to protect it.

“The entire point of the mission was to test out a solar sail, but the media ignored that and focused on the fact that these brave astronauts were conquering another world in the name of God, country, and Coca-Cola. The original profile didn't even have us leaving orbit, but someone in media relations said that we'd never sell the mission unless we walked on the goddamn surface.”

By now I had a pleasant buzz. Simon seemed completely unaffected, although he'd put away an entire six-pack. He sat there in the encroaching darkness, his considerable corpulence placing an audible strain on his lawn chair. If anything, he seemed calm, and that Springfield 30-06 mounted on the wall of his living room seemed about as far away as Mercury.

“Thing you've got to understand, Rick, is that it's a pain in the ass getting to Mercury. It's common knowledge among the rocket scientists that it takes more energy to escape the solar system than it does to put in orbit around that planet. You're approaching ever closer to the Sun's gravity well and fighting a losing battle. Think of it like riding a bike without any brakes down an ever-steepening hill. At the bottom of the hill you've got a wall of thermonuclear fire and a few meters before the fire is a flag pole. Your job is to ride the bike down the hill and end up pedaling a tight circle around the flag pole without zipping off into the flames.

“That's where the solar sail comes in. The Sun, she puts out a lot of solar wind. This solar wind could, in principle, carry a properly designed spacecraft out to the edge of the solar system, requiring the vessel to carry substantially less fuel. We were testing out just such a solar sail, using the solar wind to slow us down as we approached Mercury, and don't think the irony of the situation was lost on us: going so close to the Sun in order to see just how far away from the Sun we could get.

“So we unfurl our sail, gyrate through elaborate maneuvers to get us into a stable orbit, and for an encore, we drop down onto the surface and perform a goddamn entrechat like a bunch of circus performers.” Simon shook his head, smacking his lips as if he suddenly acquired a bad taste in his mouth. “It's got risks, but what endeavor doesn't? You get the right crew involved, people you trust, and let physics take care of the rest.”

“And you had the right crew?”

He snorted gently, looking up into the nighttime sky. “Me, Ezekiel Cartwright, and Oliver Wynton.”

But there was one missing. What information was known about the mission was that four people were sent and three returned. He'd named three of the four. With what courage I could muster, I said, “That's three. There was a fourth.”

In the darkness an owl screeched as if prodding Simon along. Simon's face was hidden in shadow.

“Maggie Estrada.” He whispered the name, and I recognized it as soon as he spoke. She was the one who never came back.

A series of short barks from within the kitchen broke the silence. Nelson and Jeanette stood there, tails wagging, tongues drooping. Simon pulled himself up. “Time to take the dogs out before they grow cross with me. Looks like we'll have to continue this discussion. See you next week, my friend.” He slid open the door and the dogs jumped him. He pointed to the tub of beer, and said, as always, “Take one for the road.”

I said nothing to Anna about the conversation, but that night, while she was fast asleep, I thought about what Simon had told me and was reminded of a conversation I'd once had with my granddad. It was just after my Aunt Ruth had died. She'd been in a coma for months, and it seemed to unsettle him. “Don't ever let that happen to me,” he said, his breath issuing the rich scent of cigar smoke. “If I'm ever incapacitated like that, I want you to roll me to the nearest window and push me out.”

Simon was the same way, and I thought once again of that Springfield mounted above his fireplace. That damn disease had incapacitated granddad, and I never once thought of pushing him out a window like he'd asked. I felt as if I'd somehow let him down. It made me feel better knowing that Simon could take care of himself. At least he wouldn't suffer.

But when would that time come?

I lay there most of the night looking forward to next Sunday the way you look forward to a long-anticipated vacation. I didn't get much sleep. I was too busy worrying I'd hear the devastating report of a gunshot before I learned the whole truth of what happened on Mercury.

* * * *

There was no gunshot that night and the following Sunday, Simon and I took up our respective positions on his porch, a fresh bucket of Old Speckled Hen between us and a crisp autumn chill in the air. Simon didn't look well. His skin had a pastiness to it, as if he was molting. His eyebrows were like wild vines. He seemed to move more slowly, but perhaps it was all my imagination. I was hypersensitive to his condition and maybe I was looking for things that weren't really there.

He cracked open a beer and gestured toward the sky. “Maggie Estrada,” he said as if toasting her, and it was eerily like watching my granddad toast my dead aunt. “That's where we left off last week. With Maggie, right?”

I nodded, sipping at my own beer and shivering from its chill.

“Maggie was perhaps the smartest person I've ever met, but to this day I don't know how she managed to qualify for the space program.

“Now, Zeke, he came up through the military ranks and we never saw eye-to-eye on anything, but he never disobeyed an order and there was no one in the world that had more space experience than Ezekiel Cartwright.

“Ollie, on the other hand, he and I got along famously. He was a deeply religious fellow and prone to quiet reflection in times of crisis, but he was just about the best damn pilot I'd ever seen and the shit he could pull off with a lander convinced me he had some kind of personal connection to God.

“But Maggie, bright as she was, didn't really have the . . . instinct for spaceflight. She was what they called a mission specialist, and what I called a freeloader. Whereas Zeke, Ollie, and I all had formidable responsibilities on the mission, Maggie didn't. She was in charge of mission science and had lots of little responsibilities, none of which were particularly relevant to the safety of the mission, except maybe the data collection for the solar sail.

“The biggest problem was that she missed out on crew bonding. Me, Zeke, and Ollie spent most of training at mission headquarters running simulation after simulation of critical mission events. It was us against the simulators, and we bonded in our efforts to defeat whatever those bastards could throw at us. Maggie, on the other hand, was running off to facilities all over the country, getting trained on this experiment, learning how to deploy that experiment, taking crash courses in surface geology and God knows what else. She was always off somewhere, and the only time she was with us was for a couple of weeks getting trained in mission recovery. That she missed out on all of that bonding was key in what was to happen later.”

Simon paused to get himself a fresh bottle. He seemed to be going through the beer faster than normal and I tried not to read anything into that. Despite the cold air, his skin looked clammy and I could see the sheen of a mild sweat on his forehead. He swallowed half of the beer in a gulp and shook his head as if in disgust. “That's not true. I'm not even sure why I just said that. Even if Maggie had been there for all of the training, she wouldn't have bonded with us. Something was off with her. I'd get this feeling around her, the kind of feeling you get around a dog that's turned mean with rabies. One minute she's sweet, tail wagging, eyes bright—and the next minute her ears are back, teeth are bared, and she's issuing forth an unearthly growl from some dark place inside.

“I made excuses for her. We were all married men at the time, but Maggie was single. Her file said that she'd been married once, for a short period when she was quite young, to a much older man. Her husband died shortly after they were married, and she'd been single ever since. I figured that had to affect someone and I tried to cut her some slack. It didn't help.

“On the way to Mercury, Maggie and Zeke got into some flap about something or other—I honestly can't remember what it was about—but it ended with Zeke calling her a small-town whore. After that, there was a glimmer in Maggie's eyes and she turned mean like those dogs we were talking about. She grew passive aggressive. It was subtle at first, but some of her antics started to put the mission at risk. It was always little things, never big things. The solar sail unfurled perfectly and Ollie maneuvered us into just the orbit we were hoping for. But we all had to work harder than we should have because of Maggie.

“It was there, in orbit around Mercury, that things began to fall apart and I suppose I should have seen it coming. I—” All at once Simon lurched forward and vomited in a series of spastic convulsions across the weather-worn floorboards. There was blood in his vomit, and the pungent smell of beer, bile, and iron came floating up on the autumn air, engaging my own stomach in a churn of sympathy.

I grabbed an elbow and started to pull him up. “Simon, we've got to get you to a doctor.”

“No!” he said, pulling away from me. His face looked like blank paper, his eyes tiny beads. He wiped pink foam from his chin and said, “Look, I'm fine. It's this goddamn disease. I don't need a doctor to tell me what's happening. I just need some rest. Can we call it a night?”

“Of course,” I said. I tried to follow him into the house, but he shooed me away.

“Go home to your wife, Rick. And take one for the road. I'll see you next week.”

* * * *

When I arrived at Simon's the next Sunday he was not out on the porch and all at once I grew concerned. I peered into the sliding glass door, but it was dark inside. I tapped on the glass and was immediately greeted by the sound of barking, followed by nails scampering across tile. In a moment both Nelson and Jeanette stood on the other side of the door, wagging their tails.

“That you, Rick?” Simon's voice came from somewhere out of sight. “Door's open, come on in.”

Relieved, I made my way into the house. I found Simon in the living room. He sat on the couch facing the front windows, wrapped in blankets, sweating and shivering. He looked like he'd dropped twenty pounds. There was a pained smile on his face, and he motioned me to the empty chair, next to which sat a small bucket of beer. It was the last thing I felt like drinking, seeing Simon as he was, but Simon merely grinned and pulled a glass of his own out from beneath his blankets.

“Home remedy,” he said, swallowing the golden liquid. He pulled out a bottle—some kind of cheap scotch—and poured himself another glassful. “Just a cold,” he said.

I tried to protest, but he waved his hand at me and changed the subject.

“You once told me that your granddaddy died of Alzheimer's, isn't that right?”

His question stopped me in my tracks. “That's right,” I said.

“Did you know that around the time I went to Mercury there was a big to-do about someone going around killing off folks like your granddad, merely because they were old or sick?”

It was the serial killer my dad's lawyer friend had mentioned to me. “What about him?” I asked.

“How would you have felt if someone had offed your granddad like that? Now think about it before you go answering, Rick. Knowing what he was going through, knowing that maybe you wanted to put him out of his misery but just didn't have the guts to go through with it, how would you feel if someone else did it for you?”

I felt a sudden rush of adrenaline. I glanced at the Springfield over the fireplace, which I hadn't noticed until that very moment. Simon must have seen my glance because he coughed out a short laugh and said, “I'm only asking because it's got everything to do with what happened down there on Mercury—and nothing to do with that.” His eyes shifted to the rifle.

“I suppose I'd be horrified,” I said.

“But you'd be relieved, too, wouldn't you?”

I couldn't bring myself to say it, so I just nodded: yes.

“Of course you would,” Simon said, “You'd be free of the guilt of having to do something to end his suffering—and free of the guilt of having done nothing to stop it. Of course you'd be relieved.”

We sat there in silence, the three of us, Simon, myself, and the Springfield.

“By the time we were in orbit, I didn't trust Maggie, and that's when I made my first bad decision. Each time we went down to the surface, one person was to stay aboard the spacecraft in case we couldn't make it back. It would be their job to head back to Earth without us. There were three landings planned and we'd rotate. Maggie was first on the list to stay behind.

“'We're all going down together,’ I said, ‘or we're aborting the mission and not going down at all.'

“'Breaks protocol,’ Zeke said in his brusque, direct way.

“'Noted,’ I replied, and then added, ‘But it's an order. For everyone's safety.’ I glanced at Maggie and there was hate in her eyes.

“We made it down to the surface safely, had a good landing spot in the shade of a long sloping hill. It was morning and the Sun—more than twice as large as what we see here in the morning—was peeking halfway above the horizon. Given the length of a day on Mercury, we'd spend our entire stay in the relative shade of those long shadows.

“We were getting ready for the scheduled rest period. That's when Maggie said something that changed everything, the crew, the mission. Hell, I'm affected by it right down to this very day, and yet I still don't know why she confessed what she did. Had she kept her mouth shut, we might not be having this conversation right now, and people might be walking on Mars and Mercury and a dozen other worlds instead of robots.

“On the other hand, more people would have died.”

“What did she say?”

“She killed that husband of hers,” Simon said, and when he said it, I felt as if I knew it all along. “He was much older than her and, like your granddaddy, had the Alzheimer's. I guess she couldn't take it, because one night, while he was asleep, she just covered his face with a pillow. . . .

“She told us all this with an almost whimsical smile on her face, and that served only to make it all the more terrible. That someone like her could have slipped through the screening process and made it out to the surface of Mercury—and that wasn't the end of it.

“'There was something comfortable about killing him,’ she said to us. That was the word she used, ‘comfortable.’ She'd eased his pain. And she grew to like it. He was her first but not her last.”

All at once I saw where this was going and I felt the hairs on my neck vibrate electrically. "She was the serial killer?”

Simon nodded.

“But how—?”

“The killings took place all over the country and other than the fact that the victims were always old or infirm, there was no discernible pattern. But remember that during our training, Maggie was being trained at various facilities throughout the country. And she was a brilliant girl. Each of the murders took place in a small town, one or two towns away from a facility where Maggie was trained. In searching for patterns, I guess the detectives never thought to look for nearby space program facilities.”

At that point I made another realization: “She was never caught,” I said.

And Simon smiled—and for a brief moment, he had the strength and vitality of the Simon Hollander that I met years ago. “Oh, she was caught,” he said. “Maybe not by the police, but she was caught. But that's a story for another time. This medication makes me sleepy. I need to rest.”

I rose to leave and Simon stopped me.

“Can you do me a solid and let Nelson and Jeanette into the back yard. I'll let them back in later.”

“Of course,” I said. “You look better, you know.”

“It's a weight off my chest,” Simon said.

I took one for the road. That was the last time I ever saw Simon Hollander alive.

* * * *

I woke the next morning from a night of dreamless sleep to Anna's voice. “What's going on over at Simon's?” she said.

The Sun was shining brightly into the room, making it difficult to open my eyes. “What you mean?” I said.

“There's an ambulance in the driveway and two police cruisers out front.”

I dashed to the window, but of course, I knew what had happened. Despite the fact that I never heard the gunshot, I knew that Simon was gone.

* * * *

Two days later I received the letter, hand-delivered by the postman. It had a canceled stamp and the return address was my next door neighbor's. I waited until Sunday evening and then I stuffed it into my jacket pocket, along with a couple of bottles of Old Speckled Hen, and took Nelson and Jeanette for their evening walk. I let the dogs loose in Simon's back yard and settled into my chair. Simon's chair remained empty. I took out the letter.

Simon wrote the way he spoke, and the letter read as if he sat in that empty chair next to me, just like any other Sunday evening.

“Rick,” he said, “I'm sorry I never got to finish the story in person, but I think you can guess the rest. I was worried that Zeke wouldn't go along with me, but for a wonder, he and I were on the same page. Ollie wouldn't have understood, and so we never let him in on what we had planned.

“While Maggie was out on the surface collecting soil samples, I initiated an emergency abort-to-orbit. Ollie wanted to know what the hell was going on. ‘What about Maggie?’ he kept saying, ‘She's still out there.’ He pleaded with us, but Zeke and I just looked at one another and rushed through the abort-launch checklist. Maggie was somewhere over the horizon by the time we lifted off and made our way back to the command module.

“I thought I was preventing a double tragedy. I knew that Maggie would never kill anyone else again, and at the same time, I hoped that I was saving the human spaceflight program from a PR disaster from which it might never recover. Ollie was furious with us, but I think he eventually understood. He never spoke to either of us again by choice. Zeke and I never spoke again either, but that was by necessity. I was a murderer and he was an accomplice. And just like Maggie, I found that one murder was not enough for me. I destroyed the ship's AI. It recorded everything that went on during the mission and even if we didn't talk, it would have had to.

“It didn't work out as I had hoped. I look at this damn disease as my penance for what I have done, and now it's time for me to face the firing squad. While Ollie and Zeke were still alive we didn't dare tell the story. Now that all of us are gone, maybe the time has come for the world to know. I'll let you decide that.

“Thanks for taking care of Nelson and Jeanette. I know they've got a good home with you and Anna. You're a good man, Rick. Don't let anyone ever tell you otherwise.”

He signed the note, “Cheers, Simon Hollander.”

There was still only one person who knew what really happened on that mission. Whether it would stay that way, I couldn't yet say. I pulled out a beer, cracked it open, and gestured toward Simon's empty chair. “Cheers, Simon. Safe travels.” I took a swig and up-ended the beer on the floorboards just in front of where Simon used to sit.

“Take one for the road, my friend.”

Copyright © 2011 Jamie Todd Rubin

[Back to Table of Contents]

Short Story: STONE AGE
by Alastair Mayer

Sometimes the really big things are little things. . . .

“We've found something!”

Dr. Hannibal Carson looked up over the heads of his men to see a ridge, or perhaps a wall, extending into the jungle on either side of the trail they had hacked from their landing spot. The vegetation was thick here on the southern continent of Delta Pavonis III. The wall, perhaps four meters high, was overgrown with moss and vines. A scattering of pale blue starbursts of tiny flowers punctuated the green. Carson pushed his way to the front. “Let's clear a wider space here. Let's get a good look.” Together the four men cut away at the tree branches until they'd made a small clearing.

“Is this it?” asked Brian, one of the two workers Carson had hired back in Verdigris City. The eager note in his voice reflected Carson's own hope.

Carson's gaze took in the wall curving away on either side, the upper surface arching over into a dome. His shoulders slumped. “This has curved sides. There's nothing unusual about it.” He slipped his omni off his wrist and unfolded it into a slate, then accessed the radar map. He checked it, then looked up and around. The thick vegetation made it impossible to see more than a few meters. “We're a bit off course.” He faded the slate and held it up at arm's length, looking through it at the virtual track projecting through the jungle. “All right, the one we want is about forty meters that way.” He gestured at an angle from the path they'd come. “Sorry, gentlemen. Not much farther now.”

He closed his omni and wrapped it back around his wrist as Brian and Gregor, the other hired hand, powered up their machetes again. Rajesh Gupta, their ship's pilot, came over and fell in beside him to talk.

“So it is the shape, isn't it?” Gupta said. “The square tomb. That's why we're out here two-hundred klicks from the city when there are plenty of ruins closer.”

“That's part of it. Close to the city the structures have already been explored. Most have been picked over and looted.”

“And the shape?”

Carson paused, debating how much to tell. “I think it's a pyramid. Pyramids have been found on nearly every planet that ever showed signs of intelligent natives, but most of the burial structures here are round.”

“But the pyramid is a basic shape. Is it not just coincidence?”

“No, I don't think it is. I don't believe in coincidence. Tetrahedral pyramids, a triangular base, would be a more basic shape, and no planet has them. Nobody constructs cubes, or cones. And the dating—all the pyramids we've found on other planets are ten to twenty thousand years old.” As he spoke, Carson noticed a slim green ribbon ripple out of the jungle canopy ahead. It glided toward them and settled on Gupta's shoulder. A jade ribbon snake.

Carson reached over and flicked it to the ground, then stomped on its head, hard.

Gupta flinched, then looked down. “Flying snakes are only mildly toxic to humans. You didn't need to do that.”

“Flying snakes on Earth, perhaps,” said Carson. “This is a jade. Its venom compares to that of a krait, or a taipan.”

Gupta paled. “That deadly?”

“Only if you let them bite you. Come on.”

Gupta looked up at the branches above them, then down at the body of the snake. He shook his head. “Thank you, Hannibal.”

“Nothing,” Carson said.

“You were talking about pyramids,” Gupta reminded him a few moments later.

“Only that we've seen their like on many different planets, with not a lot of difference in age. There must be a connection.”

“Spacefarers?” Gupta shook his head. “Come on, I like a good story as much as the next person, but there's no evidence for them.”

“Says the man walking on a planet that was terraformed long before humans got here,” Carson said, and grinned.

“The Terraformers have been gone for over sixty million years. They don't have anything to do with ten-thousand-year-old pyramids.”

“No, of course not.” Carson took a moment to wave away a tiny flying insect that whined around his head, then cursed and swatted one that was biting his neck. “Speaking of Terraformers, what possessed them to import mosquitoes to this planet?”

Gupta just shrugged.

“Anyway,” Carson continued, “I have a theory, but I'm looking for more evidence. My dean will have me back cataloging arrowheads if I don't turn up something concrete.” Dean Matthews had been emphatic about that at their last meeting, calling Carson's theory of a recent, non-human spacefaring species “crackpot” and even “Von Danikenism.” He'd threatened dire consequences if word of it tarnished the university's reputation.

“So what do you think was the reason for making this tomb a pyramid?” Gupta said. “If that's what it turns out to be.” The thick canopy blocked any direct view from the air, and on the mapping radar image their target showed as little more than a blurred square.

“I don't know. There may have been something special about the person it was built for.” That was Carson's hope, anyway.

“Ah. I just wondered . . .” Gupta's voice trailed off.

“Wondered what?”

“Oh, nothing. When pilots get together they swap tall stories, some of them quite strange.”

“Like what?”

“Nonsense stories, old spacer tales. Seeing ghosts out the window in warp, signs of a spaceship landing too big for any possible ship, flying pyramids. Most of it bullshit.”

“Flying pyramids?” Carson wasn't sure he'd heard that right.

“As I said, bullshit stories,” said Gupta, straight-faced.

Carson was trying to figure out if Gupta was serious or just pulling his leg when Gregor, now in the lead, called out, “I think this is it!”

Carson came forward to the wall Gregor had reached. This too was covered with a growth of vine and moss, but it had straighter, flatter sides. Could it be?

“Let's take a look.” Carson eased a patch of moss away from the sloping surface to reveal mottled stone beneath. “So far, so good.” He peeled away another strip of moss, then another and another. His heart beat faster when one of the patches lifted to reveal that the chiseled edge of one stone abutted the next perfectly. Constructed, not natural.

By the time he'd uncovered about half a square meter of the underlying stone, it was obvious that this was part of a larger stonework wall. The individual blocks had been carefully shaped and fitted together. “Yes, this is it.”

The others surged forward and began to rip vegetation from the wall, their earlier fatigue gone.

“Wait, stop!” Carson waved them back. “Take it easy, we don't want to damage anything. Spread out. Remove it in strips, just enough to see what's underneath.”

They did so, every man moving a meter or so from his neighbor, removing a handful of vegetation, enough to see the smooth rock beneath, then moving further along the wall. After some minutes of this, there was a shout from Gregor.

“Dr. Carson, here! I've found a carving.”

The group scrambled over. Carson examined the sculpted surface of the bared patch of stone.

“Gupta, would you set up the recorder? The rest of you, when he's set up, we will carefully peel back the moss.” He gestured to outline an area about two meters square. “Let's say this area here.”

With the recorder running, they set to it with such enthusiasm that several times Carson had to remind them to slow down. He was as eager as they were, but training and experience forced him to be methodical. When they'd cleared the section, they all paused and stepped back to look at what they'd unveiled.

“Wow!” someone said in a hushed tone.

“Excellent!” said Carson, as he gazed at the relief carving of a face. The face was humanoid in that it had two eyes, a nose, and a mouth, but then so did any vertebrate. The eyes were too far apart, and wide open, showing slit pupils like a cat's. The nose was a pair of thin vertical ovals. The effect would have been reptilian if it weren't for the mouth, which opened in a big “O” nearly a meter across.

Carson pulled out his omni and panned its camera across the face, speaking his observations into it as he did so. As he closed the omni and stuck it back on his wrist again, he looked around at his team and saw that Brian had his own omni out.

“Hey, Dr. C.” Brian called. “Stand beside it and I'll take your picture.”

“You don't need to . . .” Carson began, then yielded. “All right. Make it quick, though.” He was impatient to get to work.

When Brian was done, Carson called to get the others’ attention. “All right!” He pointed to the tangled vines and moss that still adorned the wall and said, “Let's get some more of this stuff cleared away and see what we've got.”

* * * *

A half hour later, they had removed enough of the vegetation to completely clear the face and the adjacent gray stone wall, recording it all as they went. Carson waved the workers back and bent to examine the face more closely. Its expression was, if human ideas of facial expression applied, one of somebody shouting or screaming. A thick stone rim outlined the wide circle of its mouth. Perhaps it was just laughing.

He got down on his knees and examined the mouth more closely, probing the dirt still left in the recesses. He'd studied the construction of Verdigris tombs. If this was like others, there should be . . . there. As his fingers pressed in, he heard a muffled “clunk” and the round slab that formed the inner circle of the mouth settled backwards, just enough to clear the inner rim. Cool air wafted out of the gap.

“Got it!” said Carson, triumph in his voice. “Here, help me roll it out of the way.”

Brian and Gregor knelt down beside him and they all worked their fingers into the gap. It was awkward with the three of them together in the close space, but they managed to persuade the heavy stone to roll back behind the wall, leaving a clear opening. Carson used his omni to check for toxic gases; it was clear. He shone a light into the hole, then stuck his head in and looked around. In the middle of the small chamber was an oblong, roughly coffin-shaped bundle atop a raised platform. Small piles of artifacts—trinkets, primitive though artistic weapons, jewelry and the like—surrounded it. It was a body, possibly the tomb's sole occupant, except for a few bugs and spiders, but if Carson was lucky the raised platform itself might hold another. This was fantastic.

“Wonderful! It hasn't been touched!” Carson called back. He crawled in a little further, then paused at an insistent warble from his omni.

“What is it?” he heard Gregor ask from behind him.

“Radiation warning. Hang on.” Carson pulled out his omni and checked the reading. The radiation was at very low level. “It's probably just radon build-up, or the rocks this thing is made from,” he said. Radon gas often accumulated in poorly ventilated structures, and rocks on this planet had a slightly higher concentration of natural radioactive elements than Earth. “A bit odd for this kind of rock, but it's a low reading, nothing to worry about,” he called back to his men. He turned off the omni's rad sensor to silence the warning.

He backed out of the entrance and turned to the others. “All right, get the recorders in, I want it recorded from here first, then we'll go in and image everything in detail.”

* * * *

An hour later, they had begun to stack carefully documented artifacts outside the tomb entrance. Carson was alone inside the pyramid. The other two workers—there was barely room in the tomb for three people, four if you counted the original occupant—had stepped out for fresh air, taking some more artifacts with them. Carson was examining the slab that the body lay on when he heard a shout.

“Dr. Carson! Dr. Carson, come out here please!” one of the men called from outside.

“All right, all right, just a moment.” Carson crawled back through the entrance hole. “What is it?” he said as he poked his head out, but the answer was obvious.

In the cleared area around the tomb there were a half-dozen men: his three, and three others he'd never seen before. What fixed his attention, though, was the very lethal-looking assault rifle pointed at him. Glancing about, he noticed the other automatic weapons the strangers were holding, aimed at him and his men. Worse, one of his own, Brian, was standing with the newcomers. “Bloody hell,” he muttered, “tomb raiders.”

“Dr. Carson, I presume.” The tallest of the newcomers took a step forward. He was better dressed than the others, something Carson wouldn't have thought possible in bush wear. “Tomb raiders? You're the one who opened it. Myself, I prefer the term ‘art collectors.'”

“Collectors? Dealers, more likely,” said Carson. “You know my name. Who are you?”

The man paused, then grinned. “Just call me John Stephens.”

Carson snorted at the name. “The real Stephens is better than you in two ways. Even though he was an amateur, he was a fine archaeologist.” John Lloyd Stephens had been pivotal in uncovering Mayan ruins in Mesoamerica three centuries earlier.

The tall man, Stephens, raised an eyebrow. “And the other?”

“He's dead.”

Stephens frowned, angry. “That's enough. Come on, first slowly hand over your weapon, and then get up.”

Carson reluctantly surrendered his pistol. The odds were not in his favor, but perhaps they'd leave his group unharmed if he cooperated. His group. He looked over at Brian, the turncoat. That's why he'd had his omni out. He must have sent a signal when they'd found it, and probably sent the picture too.

Brian caught his glare. “Sorry, Dr. C.” he said with forced cheeriness. “They outbid you.”

“I didn't realize you were up for bid,” growled Carson.

“All right, cut out the chit-chat.” Stephens turned to his men. “Rico, Smith, keep them covered. Brian, search them. No weapons, no omnis. Come on, make it snappy.”

Carson and his two loyal men grudgingly stood to, hands on their heads, while Brian patted them down. Carson had already turned over his gun; Brian relieved him of his omniphone. He patted down the others, taking their omnis, and from Gregor a rather wicked-looking sheath knife. He brought the goods over to Stephens.

Carson sneaked a glance at a machete leaning against a nearby tree. If he could reach it and power it up while the others were occupied . . .

One of Stephens’ men must have seen him look. The man strode over to the machete and yanked its cable from the power pack, then looked around and did the same with the other one.

“Good catch, Rico,” said Stephens. “Okay, dispose of the weapons, smash the omnis and recorders.” He was taking no chances on communications.

Carson started at this. “Hey, wait a minute, you can't—”

“Carson.” Stephens waved his gun. “Of course we can.” He smiled, looking amused. “What's the matter, don't you make backups?”

Of course Carson did. Every hour his omni backed itself up to the net. That wasn't the point. “I don't care about the omnis, they're low bandwidth. The recorders are high-resolution multispectral, and they're not backed up. The data is irreplaceable.”

“Why should I care?”

Good question. Carson thought fast. “You're joking, right? Those artifacts are worth far more to a collector if their provenance is established.”

“True enough. So?”

“Leave me the data and I can publish a report on the findings. Not the same quality or level of detail as if I had the artifacts to examine more closely. Can you at least leave me some?” It was worth a try. “If I publish on them, any collector will know they're the real thing and not something fabbed in a workshop.”

“I can fake my own provenances. It wouldn't be the first time.”

Fake? The thought disgusted Carson. “Professional journal articles? I don't think so. Think how much more you could get.” And you'll need me alive to write them, and if you need me alive, you'll leave my men alive.

“You have a point.” Stephens didn't say anything else for a few moments, evidently weighing the options.

“It's not like we have anything on the recordings to identify you,” Carson added.

“Why would you publish? Why do me that favor?”

“You know academia, ‘publish or perish.’ I'll get some credit for it.”

“Okay.” Stephens turned to his men. “Go ahead and smash the omnis, but don't damage the recorders. We'll take them with us.”

“What?”

“Don't worry, Carson. If you behave yourselves we'll leave them at your ship. I just don't want anyone to get funny ideas about recording us before we're gone, or making calls until we're well away.”

“What about leaving me some of the artifacts?” Carson was emboldened by this accession.

“Don't push your luck. We'll leave you the tomb. We can't carry that.”

* * * *

Stephens organized the gathering and packaging of the artifacts, then took a quick look around the interior of the tomb, noting a few more items to take.

“Okay, last item. Rico, go cut a couple of branches and make a stretcher. We're taking the body.”

“Got it, boss.”

Carson's gut wrenched. “Leave that at least! What good will it do you?” That body was his main hope. If this tomb was unique, perhaps so was the occupant.

“Are you kidding? Some collectors love this kind of stuff. Bit weird, if you ask me, but you didn't.”

“Collectors!” Carson's anger overcame his caution. “That's all you care about? A few dollars for what could be priceless scientific information? Dammit, we don't know much about this species, or why this tomb is different. Let me—”

“I'm not going to ‘let you’ anything, Carson. Your scientific information isn't priceless, it's worthless. Maybe you haven't noticed, stuck in your ivory tower—”

“I don't—” Carson tried to interrupt.

“Shut up!” Stephens gestured with his pistol. “You have no concept of the real world, you with your university benefactors paying your way. You think living out here on the frontier is easy? There's damn little to trade that Earth wants and is worth the effort to ship, and—”

“But what about biologicals?” Carson said, thinking of the main local industry.

“They have a trading lifetime of a couple of years before some bright boy in a lab figures out how to synthesize them or genetically modify them to grow on Earth. Look at what happened to Kakuloa: two years of a thriving trade in squidberry extract and then the bottom falls out when General Pharmaceuticals learns to synthesize it.

“No, don't be stupid, doctor. You know that the trade in alien antiquities is about the only thing that brings hard currency out to the colonies. I'm doing my bit to support human expansion into T-space. You'd be more useful if you figured out where the Terraformers went, and if they're coming back. Where do a few scholarly reports on long-dead stone-age aliens get us?”

Carson was taken aback. He knew the economic situation wasn't as bleak as Stephens, or whatever his real name was, painted it, but Carson recognized Stephens’ point. His anger ebbed. It was then he noticed that Stephens’ pistol was still pointed at him. Was there an edge of xenophobia in Stephens’ voice? What would he do if he thought there'd been spacefarers back when humans were barely into their own neolithic civilizations? “All right, damn it. Let me at least take a sample, do a DNA check.”

Stephens looked at him, an eyebrow raised. “A bit out of your line, isn't that? But okay.” He lowered the pistol and turned to the body, looked it over, then broke off its equivalent of a little toe. He tossed it to Carson. “Here.”

Carson's hands shook with another surge of anger, and he fumbled the catch. He swore. “I hope the bloody tomb is cursed, you bastard.”

Stephens grinned. “None of them have been yet,” he said.

Carson carefully bagged and pocketed the toe.

Just then Rico came back with a makeshift stretcher, and they carefully transferred the body to it and maneuvered it out of the tomb.

Carson looked around the chamber, now empty save for the raised stone platform in the center. “There's nothing left,” he said, although he knew that perhaps there might be.

“We'll see,” said Stephens. “Brian, help me move the lid off of this.” He started to push on the slab that formed the top of the sarcophagus.

Damn, this Stephens knew the tricks. Knew that sometimes the body on top is a guardian or decoy for the important one inside.

Stephens and Brian had shoved the lid a couple of feet to the side, and Stephens shone his light in. “Damn, it's empty. What's the point of an empty crypt?”

“What?” Carson looked in and saw by the light of Stephens’ torch that it was indeed empty, nothing but dirt and a few loose stones. Now that's interesting. Perhaps the body is special.His pulse quickened but he kept silent.

“We're done here. Everybody out,” Stephens said.

Outside Stephens turned to his gang, who had finished packaging the artifacts for travel. “Gather up the recorders.”

“You promised to leave those!” Carson protested, wanting to keep Stephens distracted.

“Oh, don't worry, doctor. I told you, if you're good and give us a head start, I'll leave them at your ship. Now, you three,” he pointed to Carson, Gupta, and Gregor, “you're going into the tomb.”

“What? We're not going back in there.” None of them wanted to just disappear in this jungle.

“Don't worry, I'm not sealing you in. But you won't be getting out quickly either.” He turned and shouted, “Rico!”

“Yes, boss?”

“You stay here and give us the usual head start. If anyone pokes his nose out of that hole before that, shoot it off.”

“Got it, boss,” Rico said and grinned. He picked up his rifle and found a tree to lean on. It was about twenty meters from the tomb; too far to rush, but close enough to make shooting easy.

Carson was convinced he'd do it, too. He knows his stuff, Carson thought. That's a pity.

It took a few more minutes as the bad guys gathered up packs, double-checked for anything left behind, and herded the prisoners into the tomb; then they were ready to go.

“Hey!” Carson called from within the crypt. “You will leave the recorders, right?”

“Don't worry,” Stephens called back, amused. “You will write a report, won't you, Dr. Carson?”

Carson just cursed.

“Back inside, doctor!” Rico raised his weapon to the ready position for emphasis.

* * * *

Carson waited ten minutes, then tried hailing. “Rico? You out there?”

There was no answer, so Carson took off his hat and extended it out of the entrance. He heard the crack of a gunshot and felt a tug on his hat. He snatched it back inside. There was a bullet hole through it.

Five minutes after that, Carson heard footsteps fading back along the trail. He edged toward the tomb entrance, and there came another shot. This one sounded more distant, probably a last warning shot, but Carson waited five more minutes before he stuck his hat out again. It drew no response this time.

Sure that they'd gone now, Carson led the others out of the crypt. “Gregor, get back to the ship. Bring back a spare omni and a recorder. We should see if there's anything left in there.”

“I'll go,” said Gupta. “I want to check my ship.” At Carson's nod, he took off at a quick jog.

“Something left? With us crowded in there?” asked Gregor.

“It was dark. Maybe in the sarcophagus.”

“That was empty. If somebody took a body, why leave everything else looking untouched?”

“There may never have been another body.” Carson hoped there had not. It would increase the odds that the body Stephens had stolen was special, and Carson had a sample of that. “But who knows what alien motives might be?”

“Fair point.” Gregor changed the subject. “Are you really going to publish a paper on these findings?”

Carson's jaw clenched. He growled the words out. “Sure. In a year or two. Let Stephens stew about that.” He picked up a small branch from the ground and worried it, twisting the bark off. “The first thing I'll do is hand a copy of the data over to law enforcement. If any of those artifacts ever show up, maybe they can be traced back to him. Bastard.” He whipped the branch against a nearby tree trunk.

Gregor shook his head. “Remind me never to get on your bad side.” He paused a moment. “You realize if you ever cross paths again he'll have it in for you.”

“I hope we do cross paths again. As long as I see him first.” With a jerk of his arms, Carson tore the branch in half and tossed the pieces aside.

* * * *

Gupta returned about thirty minutes later. “The ship is okay. Here's the gear.” He handed the recorder and omni to Carson. “So, why are we still here?”

“I wanted to check it completely before we left. Stephens may have missed something.”

He got down and crawled in through the opening. Once again, as he got inside the omni sounded its warning, surprising him. I thought I turned that off. Oh, right, this is the one Gupta brought back from the ship. Stephens had destroyed the other.

“Are you getting radiation again, Dr. Carson?” Gregor called from outside. He must have heard the warning.

“Yes, which is odd. Radon should have dissipated by now.” Carson checked the sensor setting. “Definitely some slight radiation inside, though.” He held the omni near the roof of the chamber, then near the floor. “It's stronger on the floor, so it's not the rock that the pyramid is made of.” He moved over to the sarcophagus. Near the edge of the lid the radiation reading jumped again. “More here. Very interesting.”

He called back to the others. “It's safe enough. Low level. Come on in, I'd like some help with this slab.”

They moved the sarcophagus lid to one side, and Carson examined the interior. He leaned in and swept the omni back and forth. Near one corner the radiation reading spiked. Looking closer he found a small, flat object, broken along one side, the edge looking crushed. Dirt covered it and it had looked just like a rock in the beam from Stephens’ flashlight.

Carson double-checked that the radiation wasn't harmful and picked the object up. It was half of a rounded square, with markings and what might be inlaid gemstones on one side. Carson examined the broken edge. Was there something metallic in there? He was about to brush the dirt off, then remembered the radiation and stopped.

“What is it, doc?” asked Gupta.

“I'm not sure. Some kind of talisman perhaps. Looks like it got caught on the edge of the sarcophagus, then damaged when the lid was put down. There must be dust from it scattered around the floor.”

“But radioactive?”

“Not that unusual in the rocks on this planet. It might be these gems. I'll know more when I have it analyzed.” He bagged it and put it in a different pocket from the DNA sample. He checked the other pocket to be sure the toe was still there.

They inspected the sarcophagus and the rest of the chamber but found nothing else. “Come on,” Carson said as he took a last look around. “We're done here. That bastard Stephens cleaned it out. Let's take some final recordings and get back to Verdigris City. Stephens, or whoever he is, is probably off-planet by now, but we need to report it.”

* * * *

“I have the preliminary results, Dr. Carson.”

Carson had taken his specimens to be analyzed as soon as he'd returned to civilization.

“Great. What can you tell me about the sample?” This was it.

“The bone is mammalian. The structure looks the same as the indigenous Verdigrans, which isn't surprising considering where you found it. Preliminary DNA tests confirm that.”

Carson slumped. “You're sure?”

The technician nodded. “Yep.”

Damn. He'd been so certain that there was something special about that pyramid. He'd been hoping that the body had been a spacefarer. Even if Stephens had made off with most of it, this sample should have been enough for Dean Matthews to give him another chance, to keep on looking. But now . . .

“Oh, okay, thanks,” Carson said. It was almost an afterthought when he added, “What about the stone fragment, the talisman?”

“Sorry, we must have messed up the analysis on that.”

“What do you mean? It was radioactive. Was that a problem?”

“Oh, no. Well, no and yes.” The technician looked a bit sheepish. “We get radioactive specimens in all the time, so that wasn't a problem. It's the source that's messed up.”

“I thought it might be the gems. What do you mean, ‘messed up'?”

“Not the gems. The thing contains several grams of technetium-99.”

“What?” Carson said, straightening.

“A beta-emitter. If the talisman weren't broken you'd never have noticed the radiation; it wouldn't get through the case. Technetium-99 betas are low energy.”

“What's the half-life?” Carson wasn't sure what the significance of the technetium was, but it was something that could be dated.

“About 211,000 years. It's artificial, of course. Technetium isn't part of any natural decay sequence, and geologically speaking, all its isotopes are short-lived.”

Carson felt his heart pound. This meant a technological origin. With the provenance corrupted it wasn't scientific proof, but he was sure the origin was alien, not human. Had there been another body in the sarcophagus after all? Retrieved by comrades, perhaps? They might well have left the other artifacts alone.

“So, not a product of a primitive civilization, then?” Carson wanted to be sure.

“What? You're joking. You need a reactor to make technetium. In this it's part of a betavoltaic battery. I've never seen this specific design, and the whole thing looks like carved rock except where it's smashed, but there's some kind of circuitry inside. That battery will put out a couple of milliamps for a hundred thousand years.”

“How old is it?”

“That's the weird thing, sir. I wasn't going to bother running isotope ratios to determine the age—”

“What? Why not?” To be this close . . .

“Well, I mean, how old could it be? Twenty, thirty years tops? I ran them anyway. I'm sorry, but the original sample must have been contaminated. I don't trust the results.”

“Just tell me.” Carson felt a knot growing in the pit of his stomach.

“About fifteen thousand years. As I said, it makes no sense.”

“Oh.” There was a ringing in Carson's ears, and the room seemed to sway a bit. It wasn't proof enough to publish, not yet, but it should be enough to sway Dean Matthews. He'd get his second chance.

He realized the tech was waiting for something more from him. “Right. Well, thank you. Just e-mail me the reports.”

Carson thought about what the technician had said. If the case hadn't been broken he wouldn't have noticed the radiation—and it would look just like a primitive talisman. If there was one, there might be another, possibly intact. He'd have to review the artifact databases, perhaps run an image comparison search, then request and examine anything it turned up. A lot of grunt work. Carson chuckled to himself. Dean Matthews was going to be amazed at Carson's sudden interest in cataloging, not arrowheads, but talismans.

Copyright © 2011 Alastair Mayer

[Back to Table of Contents]

Novelette: KAWATARO
by Alec Nevala-Lee

Most things do make sense—if you know how to look at them.

I.

The kawataro stood at the side of the road. Hakaru saw it for the first time as he was trudging along the highway, suitcase rolling behind him in the rain. It had been half a mile by foot from the train station, and although he had been looking for the turnoff to the village, it was so narrow, less than six paces wide, that he was on the point of walking past it entirely when the statue caught his eye.

He halted. The statue was about the height of his chest, sunk into the ground near the remains of a gate. It had been carved by hand from some hard, dark material, either stone or very dense wood, and depicted a vaguely humanoid figure, its face flat and stupid, the dome of the head bald except for a fringe of hair. A few flecks of old paint, nearly obliterated by time, gave an impression of yellow, scaly skin. Beneath the chin, the throat was puffed out and distended, like the vocal sac of a frog.

Hakaru, uneasy, was about to continue along the road when he saw three other figures lined up nearby. At first, through the curtain of rain, he thought they were statues as well. It was only when one moved slightly that he realized he was looking at a group of three children standing about ten yards away. The oldest, a boy who seemed no more than twelve, was wearing a raincoat, once red, that had been spattered with dark mud nearly up to the sleeves.

“Hi there,” Hakaru said, giving them a friendly wave. “Is this the way to Hana?”

The children said nothing. Hakaru had a good idea as to why they didn't respond, but still found it faintly unnerving. As he resumed his walk, moving past the silent group, he sensed that their eyes remained fixed on his back.

A moment later, climbing over a rise, he came into view of the village itself. Off in the distance, he could make out a handful of fishing boats casting their nets on the gray swell of the ocean. Pausing to catch his breath, he took in the lighthouse on the jetty, the silver thread of the river, and the main street that ran through the center of the village. As the street climbed higher, the drab rows of black tiled roofs gave way to a cluster of modern houses. Beyond that point, the land rose steeply in a line of rocky bluffs, their crests carpeted with forest.

He was about to descend to the village when he noticed that the children had followed him. Now they were standing a few yards off, lined up in a neat row, regarding him with the same lack of expression as before. He waved again. In response, one of the children, a girl, turned to the boy in the red raincoat, making a series of gestures with her hands. The boy signed back impatiently, as if telling her to wait, his eyes never leaving Hakaru's face.

Turning away, Hakaru headed down the road. Each time he glanced over his shoulder, the children were still there. When he reached the inn at the edge of the village, he looked back, meaning to give them an ironic farewell, then halted. Behind him, the street was empty.

Unsettled, he went into the inn, which was small and dark. Through a sliding screen at the far end of the entrance hall, he could see into a rock garden. A second later, hearing the quick sound of footsteps, he found himself looking into the gaunt face of the innkeeper, who bowed and led him over to a desk. When Hakaru gave his name, the man smiled. “You aren't from around here, are you?”

“I'm a graduate student at Osaka University,” Hakaru said. “I was born in Canada.”

The innkeeper's smile widened, but something else closed off in his narrow eyes, as if he had already marked Hakaru off as an outsider. “And how long will you be staying with us?”

“I'm not sure,” Hakaru said, signing the register. “At least two weeks. Perhaps longer. Do you know Dr. Nakaya?”

“Of course,” the innkeeper said, glancing over Hakaru's shoulder. “In fact, here she is now—”

Hakaru turned to see a woman entering the hall, umbrella in hand. She was close to his own age, with a pair of sensible glasses and an air that could charitably be called severe. “Hakaru Hashimoto?”

He set down his bag. “Yes. I've been looking forward to working with you—”

Dr. Nakaya broke in. “Don't thank me yet. We may not have anything to work on at all.” She studied him with a critical eye. “If you have a jacket and tie, put them on, then get back here. You and I have an appointment.”

Something in her expression told him not to waste time with questions. A few minutes later, they were walking together down the sodden road. Hakaru did not see the children from before. “We're going to the village school,” Dr. Nakaya said. “A local councilman, Miyamoto, is there now. Knowing what he thinks of me, the meeting might go better if I bring a man along.”

Hakaru heard a note of bitterness in her voice. Around them, the rain had slackened. He stepped aside to make way for a pair of women who were coming up the street, signing rapidly to each other. “What do you need me to do?”

“Nothing. If he asks who you are, just say that you're affiliated with the university. When I give you a signal, get up and talk to the schoolteacher. It doesn't matter what you talk about, but try to make it look like you're discussing Miyamoto's performance.” She looked over at him for the first time since leaving the inn. “What do you know about the situation here?”

“Only what I saw in the articles you sent. I know, obviously, that this is an historical burakumin village—”

She shot him a glance. “Careful with that word. Make sure you don't use it around Miyamoto. The locals don't mind, but the townspeople across the river can be sensitive about these things.”

“Of course,” Hakaru said. Discrimination against the burakumin, the descendants of outcaste undertakers and leatherworkers, had been illegal for more than a century, but old prejudices still remained. Many burakumin still lived in separate, impoverished villages or neighborhoods, but most Japanese reacted to the situation by refusing to acknowledge it. “So what does this have to do with us?”

“The burakumin on this side of the river have been isolated from the rest of town for a long time, both geographically and culturally. At the moment, there's a proposal before the town council to merge the entire village with another town a mile away. A merger wouldn't change the lives of most villagers, but it would mean that the children would be bused to a larger school.”

Hakaru understood the problem at once. “Including the children in your study.”

“Exactly.” She quickened her pace. “As soon as I heard about the merger, I rushed back, which is why my usual cameraman wasn't available. I understand you've had experience with child development studies. We'll be taping subjects of all ages, but without the children, we have nothing.”

They reached the school. In the dingy playground, which was still damp, an afternoon class was at recess. The students, dressed in matching white shirts and kerchiefs, ranged in age from six to eleven. Most laughed and shouted as they ran, but a few were noticeably silent, and even the loudest ones were signing at the same time, with nimble, fluent gestures of their hands.

Going inside, they entered a classroom lined with tiny desks. At the front of the room, a teacher in her twenties was seated next to a man in gray slacks and a pink collared shirt. The councilman, Miyamoto, appeared to be going over some records, a stack of folders on the desk by his elbow.

As the newcomers entered, the teacher and the councilman rose. After a round of the usual pleasantries, Dr. Nakaya got down to business. “We need to talk about this merger. I've petitioned the council several times for an audience, but haven't received a very receptive response.”

“This is a busy time,” Miyamoto said, taking a seat as the teacher excused herself, moving to the other side of the classroom. “Perhaps we can schedule something for after the merger—”

Dr. Nakaya sat down. “At that point, it will be too late. The vote needs to be postponed. I don't think the council understands what it has here. If the merger goes ahead as scheduled, a unique opportunity will be lost forever.”

“I was born here,” Miyamoto said. “I think I know something about this place.”

“I'm not sure you do,” Dr. Nakaya said. “Let me remind you of the situation. Two centuries ago, this neighborhood was founded by an outcaste fisherman. We don't know much about him, except that his family was very large, and nearly every resident on this side of the river is descended from his sons. We also know that he was deaf. More specifically, he was a carrier for a form of recessive deafness that has been passed down to a substantial percentage of his descendants.”

“This is common knowledge. You don't need to lecture me about my own village.”

“I'm not finished. Because the village was an outcaste community that was shut off from the surrounding population, it became endogamous, with a high rate of intermarriage. As a result, of the thousand living residents, nearly five percent are deaf. And in just the past few generations, they've spontaneously developed a functional language for signing with each other and the rest of the village. A new language, with nothing in common with existing sign systems.”

“Once again, you aren't telling me anything I don't know,” Miyamoto said. “We're all aware that this village is special—”

“More than special. It's extraordinary. I've been a linguist for my entire professional career. We have theories about how languages grow and develop, but almost never have a chance to observe it in the field. This is the only place in Japan, perhaps in the world, where we can watch a new language evolve. The first generation with a large number of deaf villagers, born seventy years ago, signed with a simple pidgin, which the second generation turned into a real language. And the children who are alive today have given that language form and complexity. No one taught them how to do this. They did it themselves. And it needs to be studied.”

Miyamoto's smile had grown increasingly forced. “So what is it that you want?”

“I want to document this language properly. We need to videotape conversations with deaf children and adults, analyze the recordings, and compile a dictionary and grammar. We've already begun the process, but it takes time. And if you send these students to the school across the river, the unique properties of this language will be altered at once. They'll be taught all day in Japanese and standard sign language, and the culture they've created will be lost.”

“All right,” Miyamoto said impatiently. “You've made your case. Now let me tell you my own point of view. There's no question that this merger is good for the town. I also happen to believe that it is best for these children. You see, it's our responsibility to help people like this—”

As the councilman spoke, Hakaru felt a gentle pressure against his leg, and realized that Dr. Nakaya was pressing her foot against his calf. He remembered that he was supposed to go up to the teacher. As he rose, Miyamoto broke off for a second, watching him warily. Walking across the room, Hakaru approached the teacher, who was looking out at the children in the yard. “Hi there.”

“Hello,” the teacher said, smiling nervously. “Is there anything I can do for you?”

“I wanted to speak with you about arrangements for taping,” Hakaru said, glancing at the councilman, who was watching them with poorly disguised concern. “You've worked with Dr. Nakaya before?”

“Yes, several times over the past year,” the teacher said. She led him into a short corridor that ran alongside the classroom. At one end, an open door looked out at the schoolyard. The wall was covered in children's drawings, a grid of bright pictures in crayon and watercolor. “We usually put the camera here.”

Hakaru checked the spot, confirming that there was an electrical outlet and room for his equipment. When he was done, he wanted to ask the teacher what she thought of Dr. Nakaya, but something held him back. Instead, to delay his return to the classroom, he made a show of studying the drawings on the wall. There were many pictures of fishing boats. Elsewhere, there were a number of drawings of the school itself, with stick figure children playing outside, and—

He paused. Set among the other pictures was a rough drawing in crayon, barely more than a sketch. It showed a figure with a yellow face, its head bald, its throat a distended pouch. The creature's mouth was a black, screaming hole. He pointed at the picture. “Do you know what this is?”

The teacher frowned. “I'm not sure. It was done by a child in the morning class.”

“I see,” Hakaru said. As he spoke, however, the teacher turned her eyes away, and he had the sudden impression that she was lying.

Before he had the chance to ask about this, he heard something bounce lightly across the floor of the hallway, followed by a set of footsteps. A large plastic ball came to a stop at his feet. Running a few steps behind it was a tiny girl, pigtails flying, chasing the ball with her arms extended.

Hakaru picked up the ball. Handing it back to the girl, he said, “What's your name?”

The girl said nothing. Holding the ball, which was nearly the size of her head, in both hands, she glanced into the adjoining classroom. Following her gaze, Hakaru saw that she was looking at Dr. Nakaya, who was speaking in a low voice to the councilman, her face tense and angry.

The teacher smiled down at the student. “Her name is Amaya. She is six years old.”

Turning back to the girl, Hakaru found himself pointing to the drawing of the yellow face. “Can you ask her what this?”

The teacher seemed bothered by his request, but finally signed the question. Amaya turned away from the other room, then looked up at the drawing. Reaching up with one hand, she made a curious gesture, as if shaping a pouch under her chin. Then she ran back outside. Hakaru watched her go. “What did she say?”

“She said it was a kawataro,” the teacher said. “I should have known, of course—”

Hakaru was about to ask what this meant when he saw that Dr. Nakaya had risen, leaving the councilman behind, and was walking in his direction. “Come on. We're leaving.”

“Now?” Hakaru thanked the teacher, then followed Dr. Nakaya outside, passing the councilman without a word. “What did he say?”

“He promises that the council will take my advice under consideration,” Dr. Nakaya said coldly. “Which means that nothing will happen. The council won't dare to interfere with the merger.”

They left the school, heading back toward the inn. After they had walked for a moment in silence, Hakaru remembered what he had meant to ask. “At the school, I saw a drawing on the wall. It reminded me of a statue I saw on the way here, by the side of the road that leads to the village—”

“The kawataro,” Dr. Nakaya said. “Yes, of course. It's a kappa. A river spirit. They say it drags children under the water and sucks their blood.” She gave a short laugh. “I've noticed some of the children talking about it. I'm not surprised that they believe in such a thing. They're burakumin, and they're deaf. The world is more than ready to suck them dry—”

They turned the corner that led to the main street. Behind them, at the school, Miyamoto stood at the door of the classroom, watching as they left. He waited until they were out of sight, then closed the door.

* * * *

Miyamoto headed back to the desk. The encounter with that unpleasant woman had left a bad taste in his mouth. No matter what either of them wanted, the merger was bound to take place. The government, loaded down with debt, was pressuring villages to merge. Refusing to do so was not really an option. But he knew that the woman would never understand this.

When the students returned from recess, Miyamoto took the records into an office next door. He worked silently and patiently for another two hours, taking notes on class size and each child's history. As evening fell, he finished up for the day. Going back into the classroom, he saw that the students were gone. He handed the files to the teacher with a word of thanks, but as he was about to put his notes away, he frowned. “Have you seen my briefcase?”

“Your briefcase?” The teacher looked around the room. “I thought it was with you.”

“No, I left it here, by the desk. Brown leather, brass hinges.” Miyamoto checked the desk, looking around it on all sides, but the briefcase was not here. Neither was it back in the office he had just left.

As they searched the classroom without success, he grew increasingly annoyed. The teacher seemed worried as well, an uneasy smile fixed on her face. “Perhaps you left it in your car.”

“It's possible,” Miyamoto said, although he was sure he had brought it inside. Leaving the classroom, he went out to the street, where a light rain had resumed. His car was parked where he had left it, not far from the entrance to the school. He was nearly there, keys in hand, when his attention was caught by an unexpected movement out of the corner of one eye.

He turned. Standing in the schoolyard was a boy in a red raincoat. The briefcase was in his hands.

“Hey,” Miyamoto said, heading for the playground. “Where did you find that?”

The boy in the raincoat said nothing, but only stood in silence, the briefcase clutched to his chest. As Miyamoto approached, the boy continued to look straight ahead, staring vacantly. “All right,” the councilman said, feeling his wet shirt adhering to his body. “I want you to—”

Before the councilman could finish the sentence, the boy turned, the raincoat flaring around his legs, and ran off, heading for the rear of the schoolyard. Miyamoto stood there for a second, too surprised to move, then ran after the boy, puffing and cursing under his breath.

At the rear of the playground stood a fence meant to keep the children from wandering into the woods beyond. As he ran clumsily forward, feeling foolish, Miyamoto saw the boy dash through the gate, which had been left unlocked, and continue up the path under the gray trees.

“Stop!” Miyamoto shouted, his lungs already aching. He was not used to running like this, and could already feel a cramp in his thigh. Going through the gate, he found himself on a path that led into the forest. Up ahead, he saw a flash of red as the boy vanished around the bend.

Miyamoto swore again and continued up the footpath, damp needles squelching beneath his feet. The path was at an incline, rising as the ground climbed toward the bluffs. Glancing down, he saw that his shoes and the cuffs of his slacks were already covered in mud. As he rounded the bend, bringing him out of sight of the school, he found himself thinking that this behavior could only be the fault of the outcaste animals who had raised such a child—

Something closed around his leg. Miyamoto cried out, as much in surprise as in pain, and nearly fell onto his face. Regaining his balance, he looked down, a fresh wave of agony passing along his right calf.

Beneath the blanket of needles, someone had planted a metal trap with two sprung jaws, and he had put his foot right in the center of it. The jaws had snapped shut around his ankle, too tightly for him to pull himself out. Bending down, he tried to wrench the trap loose, but it had been set too firmly into the ground, and the effort only brought tears of pain to his eyes.

A sound came from up ahead. Miyamoto looked up. Standing twelve yards away, in the middle of the path, was the boy in the red raincoat, the briefcase in his arms. He had been joined by two other children, a boy and a girl. They stood there together, watching him without a word.

“Help me!” Miyamoto said, his voice cracking. “My foot is caught. Find someone—”

The children did not move. They continued to watch him blankly, as if they hadn't heard him at all, which, he realized, they probably hadn't. He tried to remember the little sign language he knew, a few words and phrases, but none of it seemed relevant to his current predicament.

Miyamoto bent down again, trying to pry the trap apart with his hands. The jaws were studded with blunted teeth, and it was hard to find a grip for his fingers. He pulled, straining as hard as he could. Nothing. Clenching his teeth, he tried a second time, but the trap gave less than a millimeter.

He heard a footstep. Another. Something was coming up the path behind him, its pace slow and shuffling. His first thought, as he listened to those dragging steps, was that it was some kind of animal. Something with claws. A bear, perhaps, although he wasn't sure if there were still bears in these woods—

Miyamoto turned. Standing before him was a dark, hunched figure, hard to make out in the shadows. There was something in its hands.

As the figure took another step forward, a shaft of light fell across its body. Its face was sickly yellow, its skin scaly and dry. Except for a fringe of long, stringy hair, its head was bald. Beneath its chin hung a massive, distended pouch, swollen like the vocal sac of a toad.

Miyamoto opened his mouth to scream. There was a flash of silver in the creature's hand. He felt a set of strong fingers grip the top of his head, then a strange pulling sensation as his throat was torn open. His last conscious thought, as he fell wetly to the ground, was that the children were still watching him.

* * * *

II.

The police came to the school the following morning. Hakaru had set up his tripod in the rear corridor, where he was filming a boy of eight, along with a teacher who was serving as an interpreter. As far as he could tell, though, Dr. Nakaya, who was standing just out of camera range, seemed to need no assistance.

As Hakaru recorded the proceedings, he watched the boy through the viewfinder. Although he could not understand what Dr. Nakaya and the student were signing, the boy struck him as animated and intelligent. He recalled that while there had yet to be a true genetic study of the village population, its deafness was believed to be nonsyndromic, with intelligence tending to be average or higher.

Withdrawing his eye from the camera, he saw that a man had entered the room. The stranger wore a police inspector's peaked cap, which he removed, and a navy vest with a radio harness. Hakaru glanced back at Dr. Nakaya, who had not noticed the inspector yet. As usual, her eyes were fixed intently on her subject, studying the boy closely as they signed back and forth.

As the conversation wound down, she saw the inspector for the first time. For a second, her face darkened, but she managed to hide it as she signed to the boy, signaling that they were finished. The boy signed back, giving her a broad smile, then slid off his chair and ran into the other room.

Hakaru paused the camera. Before he could say anything, Dr. Nakaya had already approached the inspector. “What do you want?”

The inspector held up his badge. “I'm from the prefectural station. Mr. Miyamoto—”

“Did he ask you to come here?” Dr. Nakaya demanded. “If he told you to shut down our work, he has no legal grounds to do so—”

The inspector broke in. “Mr. Miyamoto never came home last night. At first, his wife assumed that he'd gone out with friends. When he wasn't back this morning, though, she called the police. His car is still parked outside. I understand that both of you saw him yesterday?”

“We spoke with him yesterday afternoon,” Hakaru said, coming forward. “A teacher can confirm this. Then Dr. Nakaya and I left the school together. That was the last time we saw him.”

The inspector made a note of this. “And you can verify your whereabouts last night?”

Hakaru glanced at Dr. Nakaya. “We walked back to the inn together, but didn't meet up again until this morning. I had some materials to review, so I had dinner alone and spent the rest of the night in my room.”

The inspector turned to Dr. Nakaya, his expression polite. “And where were you?”

Before she could reply, there was a commotion from outside, as if a large number of people were moving up the street. Without a word, the inspector headed for the source of the noise, with the others following close behind. The classroom next door was already empty. Going up to where the children had rushed to stare, Hakaru saw a crowd heading along the main road, talking and signing excitedly.

As one of the villagers passed, Dr. Nakaya signed to ask what was going on. The man signed back, then pointed in the direction that the throng was headed. Hakaru stood back as they passed. “What's happening?”

“It's Miyamoto,” Dr. Nakaya said flatly. “They've found his body by the river.”

They joined the crowd. After a minute, they found themselves near the river that cut the village in half. The river was crossed by a single bridge, barely wide enough for a single vehicle, and it was here that the mob had gathered, coming to a halt at the riverside. Hakaru inched forward to get a better look. As he did, he noticed a statue that had been mounted at the head of the railing, as if posted there to guard the bridge. It was the grinning head of a kawataro.

Before him lay the river itself. Beyond a narrow street, a rocky embankment sloped down to the water, which was edged with black silt. Lying on the riverbank, not far from the bridge, was the body of a man.

The inspector pushed past Hakaru, shouting for the others to get out of the way, then began to pick his way down the embankment. As he did, Hakaru got a better look at the body. Although it was lying with its face down, he recognized its pink shirt from the day before. Its right ankle was bloody and torn.

When the inspector had reached the riverbank, he took the dead man by the shoulders and raised it a few inches, giving him a look at its face. The crowd groaned. It was Miyamoto. His cheeks and forehead had been covered in mud. A pale gash, like a second mouth, was visible at the base of his throat. At the sight of its bloodless edges, Hakaru felt sick.

Lowering the body to the mud again, the inspector unslung his radio. As he watched the inspector call for backup, Hakaru noticed that Dr. Nakaya was standing beside him. Around them, the crowd was whispering nervously. He was about to suggest that they go when he saw a child standing a few yards away, clutching her father's hand. It was the girl he had encountered yesterday at the school.

The girl turned in his direction. When she saw him standing with Dr. Nakaya, a look of recognition passed across her face. She tugged at her father's sleeve. At first, he didn't react, but when the girl tugged again, more insistently, he looked down. The girl signed and pointed in Hakaru's direction. Her father glanced at Hakaru, then signed back to the girl, who nodded empathically.

Hakaru nudged Dr. Nakaya, indicating the girl and her father. “What's she saying?”

Dr. Nakaya studied the father and daughter, who were still signing. “The girl remembers us. She saw me talking to Miyamoto.”

As they watched, the father whispered to the woman beside him, who reacted with visible surprise, then looked at Dr. Nakaya. Before long, an entire knot of villagers was staring at them, speaking in low whispers. Something in their eyes made Hakaru uneasy. “What's going on?”

Dr. Nakaya turned away from the group, her face tense. “They think I did it.”

At first, Hakaru thought she was joking, then realized that she was perfectly serious. “That's ridiculous.”

“Of course it's ridiculous. But you know how rumors can spread in a place like this. Especially about outsiders—”

The villagers were still watching them. After a beat, Dr. Nakaya spoke softly. “We'd better cancel the rest of the day's tapings. It's probably best if you aren't seen with me for a while.”

Before Hakaru could reply, she pushed away from him and plunged into the crowd. Countless eyes followed her as she moved away from the river. He watched until she had gone, wishing uncomfortably that he had done something more, then turned back to the scene by the bridge.

As the minutes ticked by without incident, the crowd began to disperse. Hakaru was about to leave as well when he saw the innkeeper standing a few paces away. He walked over. “Strange, isn't it?”

“Yes, very strange,” the innkeeper agreed. As the crowd thinned, they headed back to the inn together. Hakaru sensed that the other man had something on his mind. Finally, when they were out of sight of the river, the innkeeper cleared his throat. “How well do you know Dr. Nakaya?”

“We'd spoken on the phone a few times,” Hakaru said. “But I only met her yesterday. Why do you ask?”

“Oh, the people here find her interesting. There are a lot of rumors about her—”

Hakaru remembered how the villagers had whispered. “What kind of rumors?”

“Oh, you know.” The innkeeper smiled evasively, then lowered his voice. “They say she isn't married and has no children of her own. Some think she can't have children at all. Which is why she is so interested in ours. And why she was so worried about them being taken away.”

Hakaru had no trouble believing that such rumors could circulate around a young, unmarried woman, especially one who did not go out of her way to endear herself. “You think she killed Miyamoto?”

The innkeeper chuckled nervously, as if he felt that Hakaru was being too direct. “No. Not her. If it were just Miyamoto, that would be a different story. But there are things that happen here that nobody likes to talk about.”

Hakaru halted before a noodle shop on the main road. Across the street, among a few other villagers, he noticed one of the children, the girl, who had followed him on the road the day before. “What do you mean?”

The innkeeper hesitated. “There have been other deaths. People don't mention it because they don't believe it could happen in our village. We've come a long way over the past few years—”

“I understand,” Hakaru said. He knew that burakumin, who had long been regarded as a criminal underclass, were sensitive about how they were perceived. “You can tell me. I have no reason to judge you.”

They continued on their way. Now that the topic had been raised, the innkeeper seemed eager to speak. “The first one took place about three years ago. A teacher named Mrs. Tanaka disappeared, along with a boy she was tutoring. The boy, Kenji, was deaf and from a bad family, so he was unpopular with the other kids. Anyway, they found her body a week later, in the woods by the river. They never found the boy. The police seem to think he did it—”

Hakaru kept an eye on the innkeeper as he spoke. “But that isn't what you believe.”

“It makes no sense. The police say he killed the teacher, then ran away. But consider it. Kenji was not even eleven yet. He was deaf, with no money, and knew little Japanese. And we're supposed to believe that he could vanish forever without being found?” The innkeeper smiled grimly. “No. Mark my words, his body is still somewhere in the woods. Or in the river.”

Hakaru felt an unexpected chill, as if the back of his neck had been touched with ice. “What else?”

“A year later, another woman, Mrs. Yukawa, was found dead under the docks. She had moved here with her husband a few months before. They were rich, from across the river, and had bought one of the new houses. Some of us thought they were conceited. Anyway, the police seemed to believe that she drowned by accident, but no one could explain what she was doing there in the first place. Perhaps she was pushed into the water. Or pulled in—”

Hakaru saw a yellow face in his mind's eye. “Have you mentioned this to the police?”

They arrived at the inn. Sliding open the door to the vestibule, the innkeeper shook his head. “No point in getting involved.”

As they passed into the entrance hall, the innkeeper seemed embarrassed, as if he feared that he had said too much. Before Hakaru could ask anything else, the other man strolled to the far end of the hall, heading for the door that led out to the rock garden, and stepped onto the verandah. Hakaru followed him into the rear yard, where a few distinctive stones, eroded into intricate shapes, had been mounted on the ground, surrounded on all sides by gravel, which had been raked into neat lines and spirals. Statues of guardian spirits stood to either side.

The innkeeper indicated the garden. “You like it? At first, I wanted to grow vegetables here. Tomatoes, turnips, that sort of thing. But it was no good. Too much iodine in the soil—”

Hakaru broke in, sensing that the innkeeper was trying to change the subject. “Listen, I'd like to know more about the deaths you mentioned. Maybe we can talk about it over dinner?”

“I have plans.” The innkeeper eyed him curiously. “Why are you so interested?”

“A man was killed. Based on the rumors I've heard, it's going to be hard for us to do any work until this is cleared up.”

The innkeeper sighed. “All right. I'll meet you here, on the verandah, at ten. Then we can talk more.”

“Good,” Hakaru said, going back into the entrance hall. “I'll see you here tonight.”

* * * *

Hakaru spent the rest of the day on his own. When night fell, he found himself at a standing bar a block away from the inn, below framed pictures of fishing boats and record catches, talking with a group of fishermen in coveralls and parkas. After the usual discussion of prices and hauls, the conversation inevitably turned to the murder. “I saw someone who spoke to the coroner,” one of the fishermen said. “The councilman's throat was cut with a funayuki knife.”

Hakaru, a glass of beer in hand, had to shout to be heard. “What's a funayuki knife?”

“What, you don't know?” The fisherman outlined the shape with his hands. “Wooden handle, thick blade. Used by fishermen in the old days. Gut fish, chop off heads, even cut rope and nets. Like that, see?”

The fisherman pointed to something on the wall. Hakaru turned. Hanging above a sepia photograph of a fishing trawler was a framed drawing, fragile and faded, of a creature clutching a knife in one webbed hand. It had only a fringe of hair, with a bald dome in the center, and beneath its yellow chin was an inflated pouch. Hakaru recognized it at once. “Why would a kawataro need a knife?”

There was general laughter at the bar, most of it directed at the outsider who knew nothing about kawataros or funayuki knives. “The kawataro lives in the river,” the fisherman said. “It lures children into the water, then drinks their blood. It needs a knife for that, doesn't it?”

“But if you encounter a kawataro, all you need to do is be polite,” an older fisherman added. “At the top of its skull, you see, there's a hollow dish filled with water. If you bow to it, it will bow back, spilling the water on its head. Then it loses its power and agrees to serve you for the rest of its life.” He looked at Hakaru with amusement. “You really don't know this?”

Hakaru finished his beer. “As you can probably tell, I'm not from around here.”

Another fisherman asked why he was in the village. Hakaru tried to tell them what Dr. Nakaya was trying to do, although he sensed that they were still suspicious of her intentions. When he had wound up his explanation, he looked around the table. “So what do you think of Dr. Nakaya?”

A fisherman who had been seated in silence signaled that he wanted to speak. He had been following the conversation through the older fisherman, who had quietly provided a translation. As the deaf man signed, the older fisherman interpreted aloud. “She's polite to deaf people. She's always respectful. But he finds it strange that she takes such an interest in the children.”

When Hakaru asked what this meant, the older fisherman translated his question, then interpreted the response. “Most of the children are fine, but a few are trouble. They keep to themselves. He can't understand half the things they sign to each other, so he thinks they're up to no good.”

Hearing this, Hakaru wanted to press him for more information, but the deaf fisherman refused to say anything else. As the conversation drifted to other topics, he paid his bill and headed back to the inn.

Inside, the innkeeper was nowhere in sight. Going upstairs, he was about to return to his room when he saw that the door across the hall was open a crack. On an impulse, he went up to it. “It's Hakaru. Can I come in?”

After a beat, Dr. Nakaya's voice came from inside. “All right. But watch your step.”

Hakaru slid the door open. Dr. Nakaya was seated on the floor, surrounded by books and files. A laptop was plugged in nearby. Hakaru lowered himself to the ground. “How are you doing?”

“Fine, I guess.” Removing her glasses, she rubbed her eyes. “I'm trying to work, but I'm worried, I suppose—”

“The police can't possibly think you had anything to do with Miyamoto's death.”

“That isn't what I'm worried about. It's my research. This could end it for good. And it was always a race against time.”

Hakaru glanced at the laptop, on which a video of the day's taping had been paused. “What do you mean?”

She put her glasses back on. “The factors that made this village unique for so long are disappearing. There's been too much movement into the area over the past few years. The culture of the deaf is breaking down. And the villagers feel it. That's why there's so much tension with newcomers—”

“Like the murder two years ago?” She seemed unsure of what he was talking about, so he briefly outlined what the innkeeper had said. When he was done, he saw that she had gone pale. “What's wrong?

“It's something that one of the children told me.” Dr. Nakaya opened her laptop and searched for a file, her fingers moving quickly across the keyboard. Finally, she clicked on the video that she wanted, opening a new window. “Each session includes a personal narrative, a story that I can analyze on a linguistic basis. A few months ago, one of the students mentioned that woman. Look at this.”

The subject appeared on screen. It was the boy in the red raincoat. He was seated in a chair, looking blankly into the camera. After a prompt from his teacher, he began to sign, slowly at first, then gradually picking up speed.

Dr. Nakaya translated. “He's telling a story about a woman, Mrs. Yukawa. Apparently she caught him and his friends playing in her garden. She yelled at them and said she would send them away. When I asked him what happened next, he said that she never bothered him again.”

Hakaru felt a chill creep across his body. “The teacher didn't tell you that she died?”

“I don't think she knew about it. She moved into the village after the murder, around the same time I did.” Dr. Nakaya paused the video. “I've heard of the teacher who was killed too. The children didn't like her. Evidently she tried to stop them from signing in their own language—”

“So let's look at what we have here,” Hakaru said. “Three, maybe four, unexplained killings. One is a teacher the children disliked. One was an unpopular classmate. One was a woman who threatened to send them away. And the latest one, Miyamoto, was in favor of a plan that would result in them being bused to different schools.” He hesitated. “But I still can't believe it. These are only children—”

Dr. Nakaya closed her laptop. “Maybe they're only children to you, but look at how the world sees them. Until a few decades ago, the deaf in this country were treated as minors or mentally deficient. Like it or not, that perception hasn't gone away. And to top it all off, these kids are burakumin. For most of their lives, they've been treated like dirt. So what do they do when they grow up? They become criminals. They join the yakuza. Only a few make it to college. And if they want to get anywhere in life, they have no choice but to hide what they are.”

She extended the fingers of her right hand. “This is the traditional sign for burakumin. You know what it means? Four fingers stand for the four legs of an animal. So don't tell me that these children couldn't have done it. When you treat someone like a monster, a monster is what you get—”

A light went on in Hakaru's head. He spoke without thinking. “You're a burakumin?”

Dr. Nakaya only turned away. Hakaru sat there, ashamed, sensing that he should say something more, but unable to find the words that he wanted. He found himself wondering what her life had been like. Many burakumin, he knew, were forced to hide their identities if they wanted to be considered for the best jobs or schools. And he was painfully aware that even his own parents, who had fought discrimination their entire lives, would never have allowed him to marry one.

After an uncomfortable silence, Hakaru coughed, then checked his watch. “Look, it's nearly ten o'clock. I'm supposed to meet the innkeeper to talk more about these cases. If you like, you can come along—”

When Dr. Nakaya turned back to him, her eyes were dry. “Yes, I will. One second.”

Hakaru rose and left the room. A moment later, Dr. Nakaya joined him. He could tell that she was embarrassed by her recent display of emotion, and she did not look at him as they went downstairs.

When they reached the ground floor, the hall was deserted, but the door that led to the yard was open. Outside, the garden was very quiet. There was no one on the verandah. Hakaru looked at the time again. “That's strange. He said that he'd meet me here at ten. Maybe—”

He broke off as Dr. Nakaya took him by the elbow, pointing to the ground. “Look.”

Hakaru glanced down. At their feet, the bucket that held water for handwashing had been overturned, a dark puddle staining the boards of the verandah. It had not yet soaked into the wood.

Raising his eyes, he found himself looking at the gravel of the rock garden. Where the verandah ended, the gravel, which was neatly raked elsewhere in the yard, had been disturbed, the lines of the rake obliterated, as if something had been dragged across the garden from the house.

Hakaru stepped down from the verandah, the gravel crunching beneath his shoes. The trail led from the house to the fireproof shed at the rear of the yard. The door of the shed was ajar.

Feeling as if he were watching himself from a distance, he slid the door open the rest of the way. Inside, the shed was very dark. As his eyes adjusted, he saw the outlines of old furniture, cushions, heaps of seasonal clothing. Taking another step, he found that the floor was sticky beneath his feet.

Then he saw something on the ground. It was the innkeeper. He had been stuffed face down into the shed, his clothes stripped away, his limbs tucked beneath him like a frog's pale legs. In the faint light from outside, Hakaru saw a pool of something black and wet on the floor beneath the body.

He backed out of the shed. Behind him, Dr. Nakaya fumbled for her phone. “We need to call the police.”

“I know,” Hakaru said. He tore his eyes away from the shed's interior. “Tell them—”

He stopped. A sound had come from nearby, soft, like a footstep against the gravel. Turning in the direction of the noise, he moved away from the shed, looking out into the garden.

At first, he saw nothing. In the darkness, the yard was perfectly still. Straining to see what was there, he could make out nothing but a few decorative rocks, dwarf pines, statues of guardian spirits—

Then one of the statues moved. As it rose slowly from a crouch, he saw that it was a figure no more than five feet in height, hunched and misshapen. Hakaru tensed himself in case the figure came forward, feeling a cold hand take hold of his heart, but in the end, it only turned away.

Just before it reached the wall at the rear of the yard, it passed beneath a cone of light cast by the lamp on the verandah. For a second, Hakaru had the impression of a yellow face, a bald head, a hideously swollen throat. A funayuki knife was clutched in the figure's right hand.

Then it passed out of the light and climbed over the wall. A second later, it was gone.

* * * *

III.

Against the back wall of the inn leaned a carpenter's adze, with a flat iron head for squaring logs. Picking it up, Hakaru hefted it in his hands. It wasn't much, but it would do. He turned to Dr. Nakaya. “Call the police. Tell them where you are. Then get inside and lock all the doors.”

Dr. Nakaya was already back on the verandah. “And what are you going to do?”

“I don't know,” Hakaru said. Before she could respond, he was heading for the wall at the rear of the garden. Looking over it, he saw that it led to a slope covered in brush and tall grass. Beyond it ran a narrow road to the forest. And when he listened, he heard soft, dragging steps making for the trees.

He tossed the adze over the wall, then dropped down to the other side. The adze had fallen into the brush a few feet away. He picked it up and headed for the footpath. A second later, he was running through the forest.

It was a cold night, the dots of fireflies blinking at the level of the grass. The ground was uneven, swelling and falling in low hills, and before long, Hakaru was sweating. He ran forward, trying to pace himself, keeping one ear tuned to sounds from ahead. Faintly, he heard labored breathing, as if the figure in the distance was not used to moving so quickly.

Hakaru rounded a bend in the path. Ten yards away, silhouetted against the night sky, a hunched figure was standing on the crest of the hill. Then it disappeared down the opposite side.

Sensing that he was on the verge of overtaking it, Hakaru quickened his pace. He sprinted easily over the top of the hill, but when he began his descent, he found that he had taken the slope too fast. As the loose dirt and pebbles began to skate beneath his feet, he realized that he was going to fall.

He toppled forward, coming down hard, then slid to the bottom of the hill. At the last second, he had the presence of mind to toss the adze aside, afraid that he would bury it in his body. He tumbled at a bad angle, twisting his ankle beneath him, and finally skidded to a halt, palms bleeding.

Hakaru looked up. Ahead of him, the figure had paused at the top of the next rise. It was looking back at him. Hakaru groped for the adze, heart juddering, but it was nowhere in sight.

The figure stood there for a long moment. Hakaru could see its shoulders heaving, its breath coming in harsh, ragged gasps.

It took a step toward him. Another. A knife was still clutched in one spindly hand.

Then the woods were flooded with light. Hakaru, startled, wasn't sure what was happening, then saw that they were within range of the lighthouse. As the white beam swept across the land, circling back toward the water, it illuminated the forest for a fraction of a second. In that bare instant, it lit up the figure on the hill, giving Hakaru a good look at it for the first time.

The figure looked at Hakaru. Hakaru looked back. And recognized it for what it was.

Then the light faded. Hakaru, his night vision gone, strained to penetrate the shadows, but saw nothing but darkness. He heard more footsteps, this time growing softer. A moment later, they had faded into silence.

Hakaru lay where he was for a few heartbeats, then forced himself up. The adze lay on the ground several feet away. Bending down, he picked it up, then took a few experimental steps forward. His ankle was too badly twisted for him to run. Limping, he turned back the way he had come.

It took twice as long, with many breaks, to cover the ground back to the inn. When he reached the wall that led to the garden, he tossed the adze over, then followed it, landing heavily on the other side. At some point in the past few minutes, rain had begun to fall again.

He went up to the verandah. The wooden shutter was bolted, but through the windows above, a light was shining. When he knocked, he heard the paper screen behind the shutter slide back. “Who's there?”

“It's Hakaru.” He glanced back over his shoulder at the empty yard. “Let me in.”

The shutter slid open. Dr. Nakaya was standing inside, holding a walking stick like a club. “What happened?”

“I lost him.” He stepped into the hall, closing the shutter. “Did you call the police?”

“Yes. The inspector said he'll be here soon. He wants us to lock all the doors and stay where we are.”

“Okay.” Hakaru bolted the shutter, adze still in hand, then limped around to the other doors, testing them one by one. When he was finished, he headed for the stairs. “Come on. I need to check something.”

Dr. Nakaya followed him up the narrow steps to the floor above. “What is it?”

“I know what's happening here. It isn't a kawataro. It's something else entirely.”

Going into his room, Hakaru leaned the adze against the wall, then limped over to the pile of books on the floor. Picking up a volume, he flipped through it rapidly, looking for a page he had read the night before.

“Here,” Hakaru said, finding the place he wanted. “As far as I understand it, there's never been a genetic study of the village, so we aren't entirely sure what kind of deafness this is, right?”

“Right,” Dr. Nakaya said, lowering herself to the floor. “If it were part of a syndrome, we would have seen ear abnormalities, issues with the retina or kidneys, but we've found nothing. It's nonsyndromic.”

“I think you're wrong. These people are suffering from Pendred Syndrome.” Hakaru showed her the page. “It's an autosomal recessive condition, which is consistent with the distribution patterns you've seen. It's caused by a mutation of a single gene encoding for a protein that transports iodine into the thyroid gland. This affects the development of the inner ear, which results in deafness. In the majority of cases, it also leads to thyroid disease.”

Dr. Nakaya studied the book. “And what makes you think this is happening here?”

“Because the killer we saw tonight is suffering from the advanced stages of hypothyroidism.” Hakaru picked up a diagnostic manual and quickly found the relevant page. “You see? In severe cases, the victim's hair falls out. The skin becomes scaly and puffy. It may even turn yellow. And it leads to goiter, which explains the swelling under the killer's neck.”

“But if all the deaf villagers have this syndrome, why haven't we seen more cases of hypothyroidism?”

“Because of their diet,” Hakaru said, trying to remember his undergraduate medical classes. “A Japanese diet, especially in a seaside village like this, is high in iodine. It's full of fish, seafood, seaweed. Which means that even if the deaf villagers have trouble processing iodine, their diet has enough of it to offset the worst symptoms of hypothyroidism. And this explains something else. The innkeeper told me that the soil here is full of iodine, which makes sense. We have generations of people in this village consuming high levels of iodine, but they can process only a fraction of it, which means that the rest passes into the ground.”

Dr. Nakaya looked at the book. “And if someone was forced to change his diet, symptoms of hypothyroidism would soon appear. The goiter. The yellow skin. Which explains why the killer looks the way he does.”

“And it may explain something else,” Hakaru said, scanning the article. “Another side effect of advanced hypothyroidism is psychosis. Myxedema madness. It can cause delirium, hallucinations, dementia. Which means the killer may even believe that he's really a kawataro—”

He broke off. Outside the inn, below the steady rhythm of rain, he had heard a noise from the garden. It had been soft, furtive, as if someone were walking cautiously along the gravel bed.

Hakaru turned off the light and went to the window, which faced the rear of the inn. Sliding it open, he looked down at the yard. At first, he saw nothing, just a uniform surface of gravel, broken up by decorative stones and illuminated by pools of light from the lamps.

Then he saw movement. Someone was standing in the shadow of the shed. He leaned forward, trying to see who was there, then finally noticed what the figure was wearing. It was a red raincoat.

Dr. Nakaya joined him at the window. “I don't think we should stay here.”

“Neither do I.” Picking up the adze, Hakaru went out into the corridor. Dr. Nakaya crept close behind, walking stick clutched in one hand, and followed him to the stairs. They reached the hall, then continued to the vestibule, where Hakaru unlocked the front door.

Outside, the street was deserted. They left the inn, looking up the road. A block away, the door of the standing bar cast a rectangle of white light. “We'll go there,” Hakaru said. “Then we'll call the police.”

They moved toward the safety of the bar. Hakaru, feeling as if his nerves were about to snap, glanced at Dr. Nakaya. She seemed calm enough, but her face was pale, and she gripped the walking stick tightly.

Behind him, he heard footsteps. Turning, he saw the boy in the red raincoat, who was watching them from the entrance to the inn. As Hakaru looked on, the boy was joined by the same boy and girl he had seen before. Hakaru, pulse rising, was about to call out to them when he felt Dr. Nakaya stiffen at his side.

He turned back to the street. Standing in the middle of the road was the figure from the garden. Its head was bowed, rain running down its body. In one hand was the knife. He could not make out its face. In the silence, he could hear the soft push and pull of its respiration.

“No,” Hakaru said. He found that he was terrified. The image flashed across his mind of the councilman's slashed throat, like a second mouth, and the innkeeper's body, a shapeless heap on the floor of the shed. His fingers grew cold. Then, gathering the shreds of his courage, he raised the adze.

“Wait,” Dr. Nakaya said. He felt her fingers on his arm, holding him back. “Not yet.”

As Hakaru watched, astonished, she went forward until she was nearly close enough to touch the darkened figure. She looked it in the eye. Except for the steady rise and fall of its shoulders, it did not move.

Then she clasped her hands together in her lap, lowering her gaze, and bowed.

A second later, the figure bowed back. As it did, the rain that had gathered on its head spilled down its face, as if a vessel on its skull were being emptied. When it had lowered its head all the way, it kept it there.

There was a shout from up the street. Hakaru saw that a handful of men at the bar had noticed what was happening. As they ran forward, a set of headlamps lit up the night as a car pulled up to the curb. The inspector emerged, holding a flashlight, which he directed on the shadowy figure in the road.

Hakaru stared in surprise. The figure standing before him was barely more than a boy. His condition had aged him, yellowing his skin, taking away his hair, inflating his throat like a balloon, but when he looked up, blinking, he seemed no more than fourteen years old.

“Kenji,” the inspector said. Hakaru recognized the name. Opening his hand, Kenji, the boy who had disappeared, let the knife fall, then turned to the crowd that had gathered on all sides. His eyes were dull and vacant, like those of a child awakened from sleep. Dr. Nakaya picked up the knife, then fell back as others pressed forward. Going up to meet her, Hakaru looked over his shoulder. Behind him, the street was empty. The children had vanished.

* * * *

“As far as we can tell, only three children were involved,” the inspector said, taking a sip of tea. “Most of them are good kids, but those three, especially the oldest, were bad news. Over time, they've created their own little world. One of them, the girl, could even hear, but they were inseparable. And they wanted to make sure that they would never be forced apart.”

They were seated in the noodle shop off the main road, bowls and cups nearly empty. Dr. Nakaya looked thoughtfully at the remains of her ramen. “So they forced Kenji to kill anyone who got in their way.”

The inspector nodded. “As far as we can tell, they began by electing him to get rid of a teacher they hated. Kenji was an outcast, unpopular, who could be easily manipulated. His mother is dead, you know, and his father was a drunk. We're still trying to track him down. In any case, they arranged for him to kill the teacher, then helped him to escape to the woods.”

Hakaru finished his tea. “So he's been hiding in the forest for the past three years?”

“That's how it looks. We've even found where he was living. It's a hovel on the most thickly forested part of the cliffs. The other children brought him food and other necessities whenever they remembered that he was up there. Leftover tofu, cabbage, that sort of thing—”

“Thyroid inhibitors,” Hakaru said. “Which would have made his symptoms worse.”

“And it appears that he slowly went crazy,” the inspector said. “The children had him kill that woman, Mrs. Yukawa, when she threatened to send the oldest child away. Then they went after the councilman, who was going to force them to change schools, and the innkeeper, whom the girl heard telling you about the other deaths. By the end, Kenji believed that he really was a kawataro. He even drank the blood of his victims, which might have been due to his thyroid condition as well. I'm told that it can lead to salt craving and anemia—”

Dr. Nakaya set down her teacup. “So what's going to happen to him now?”

“He's being treated for hypothyroidism. Most of the physical symptoms will go away in time. His psychosis may diminish as well, although it's possible that his nervous system has been permanently damaged. Once he recovers, if he ever does, we'll decide what to do with him. But it's no longer my concern.”

After a few more pleasantries, the inspector put on his cap, which he had set beside him on the table, and headed for the door. Hakaru watched him leave. “So what happens next?”

Dr. Nakaya sighed. “Probably nothing. If word of the killings gets out, it will only make it harder for the villages to merge. My guess is that it will be hushed up. Japan is very good at looking the other way.”

“I know.” Hakaru settled the bill, then rose from the table. “And your research?”

“It's over. If you ask the villagers, they'll say that this whole mess has convinced them that assimilation is more important than ever. That these children should never have been left on their own for so long. So the merger will proceed. They won't want me here in the meantime.”

They left the noodle shop. Outside, two young girls were walking up the road, their hands clasped, laughing loudly. “Before long, the local language will change forever,” Dr. Nakaya said, watching as the children passed. “It's only a matter of time before it's gone for good.”

“I'm sorry,” Hakaru said. “I'd hoped we'd have a chance to work together again.”

Dr. Nakaya turned aside, but not before he saw her face. It was the first time he had ever seen her smile. “Don't worry. There will be other projects. And perhaps it's all for the best—”

Following her into the road, Hakaru was surprised to hear this. “What do you mean?”

Dr. Nakaya only looked away. Following her gaze, Hakaru saw a ball bouncing along the street, pursued shortly afterward by the girl he had seen at the schoolyard. She caught the ball in both hands, then glanced up at him. Hakaru waved. The girl stared, then ran up to where the two other girls were waiting. Laughing, the children set off together, walking hand in hand toward the river.

Copyright © 2011 Alec Nevala-Lee

[Back to Table of Contents]

Reader's Department: THE REFERENCE LIBRARY
by Don Sakers

Military science fiction is one of the most dynamic and commercially successful areas of the field. There's nothing odd about that; fiction is usually based on conflict, and war is the ultimate form of conflict. War stories are instantly accessible; there are usually bad guys and good guys for the reader to identify with, the world of the military is a familiar one, and there's plenty of occasion for action.

In addition, no matter how little we may want to admit this, trends in science fiction parallel those in the wider culture. In our current era—unlike, say, the late 1960s or 1970s—war is a popular topic. (And even in the most pacifist age, war is a concern of fiction. The most ardently antiwar novel is still a novel about war.)

In the beginning there was no separate genre of military SF; as with other themes that later grew into their own genres, war and military personnel were just occasional parts of SF stories. Jules Verne's Captain Nemo carried on his own war to end war. John Carter was a former military man who moved to Mars and achieved the rank of Warlord. H. G. Wells's Martians came to Earth for—guess what?—a War of the Worlds. E. E. “Doc” Smith's Lensmen were players in a millennia-old war between implacable enemies.

In the wake of World War II—and subsequent anxiety about possible imminent nuclear armageddon—SF writers frequently addressed war and military matters. Some of the direct precursors of modern military SF included Robert A. Heinlein's Space Cadet and Starship Trooper, Gordon R. Dickson's Dorsai books, Fred Saberhagen's Berserker stories, and Poul Anderson's tales of Sir Dominic Flandry and his standalone novel The High Crusade. The Vietnam War brought a different sensibility and works like Joe Haldeman's The Forever War (a direct response to Starship Troopers), Gregory Benford's Deeper Than the Darkness, and David Drake's Hammer's Slammers series.

Experts point to the 1975 reprint anthology Combat SF, edited by Gordon R. Dickson, as helping to establish the concept of military SF as a separate genre. This remarkable volume included a Berserker story, an early Hammer's Slammers tale, one of Keith Laumer's Bolo stories, a Forever War story, Poul Anderson's “The Man Who Came Early” (an early story of a military man who brings modern war technology into the past), and other tales by Harry Harrison, Jerry Pournelle, and Dickson himself.

If Robert A. Heinlein and Gordon R. Dickson are the grandfathers of military SF, then David Drake certainly deserves to be credited as the genre's father. In the mid-1980s, his Hammer's Slammers series paved the way for the resurgence of military SF that has lasted to this day. While these books are firmly in the tradition of modern military SF, Drake (a Vietnam vet) has stated that one of his motivations was to educate nonmilitary readers about the horror and inadequacy of war. In this way, he bridges the gap between Vietnam-era antiwar feelings and today's more pro-military attitudes.

Military SF exploded (no pun intended) in the late 1980s and early 1990s with the arrival of Chris Bunch & Allan Cole's Sten series, David Weber's Honor Harrington series, Larry Niven's Man-Kzin Wars anthologies, and the ascendancy of Baen Books (then and now a chief publisher of military SF). The next two decades brought more superstar names like Dan Cragg, John Dalmas, William C. Dietz, David Feintuch, Eric Flint, John Hemry (aka Jack Campbell), Elizabeth Moon, John Ringo, John Scalzi, and David Sherman.

Before diving into this month's books, I'd like to mention a few SF genres that are related to (and often confused with) military SF.

First is the venerable Space Opera, which I've defined as “grand, melodramatic SF stories with great scenery, anguish, death, and an occasional fat lady.” Space Opera often includes war and military elements, but it is properly a distinct type of SF. Readers who like one may not necessarily like the other—although publishers have a tendency to call any SF with military elements “Space Opera.”

Similarly, stories of Galactic Empires often involve wars and the military, but are not necessarily military SF. (Poul Anderson's Dominic Flandry novels are a great example.) Far Future and Hard SF stories might feature battles and wars, but aren't technically military SF. Many stories of aliens, either in space or visiting Earth, are cast as war books—and many military SF stories involve wars against aliens. While it's possible for a book to be both, a good rule of thumb is to look at the main focus of the story. Is it more concerned with the biology and culture of the aliens, or with the technology and tactics of the war?

Finally, there are stories of independent agents such as spies (Harry Harrison's Stainless Steel Rat), diplomats (Keith Laumer's Retief), couriers (Robert A. Heinlein's Friday), and the like. These operatives may move through a landscape of war and deal with the military, but they are not necessarily examples of true military SF.

So what is this stuff called “military SF” that we've been talking about? I'd like to spend the rest of this column talking about some recent examples that demonstrate the variety of the genre.

* * * *

Children No More

Mark L. Van Name

Baen, 393 pages, $22.00 (hardcover)

Baen Webscriptions: $6.00 (e-book)

ISBN: 978-1-4391-3365-1

Series: Jon Moore and Lobo 5

Genre: Military SF

* * * *

C. S. Forester's Royal Navy officer Horatio Hornblower has had a tremendous influence on science fiction. In particular, he has inspired an entire subgenre of books that follow the developing career of an officer in a future space force.

Mark L. Van Name's hero Jon Moore is no Horatio Hornblower. The product of a horrific childhood, Jon learned to fight as a teenager and has been fighting ever since. With his best friend, a sapient warship called Lobo, Jon has fought the good fight through four previous novels. For Jon Moore is a soldier with a conscience, a man struggling to remain moral in a universe full of tainted and corrupted souls.

Jon's fifth adventure is based on a stunning premise: a former comrade enlists his help to free a group of children who have been turned into brutal killers in service of a rebel regime on a backwater planet. The fight to save the child soldiers is bad enough, but then Jon faces the challenge of what to do with this bunch of kids who have had their childhoods taken away.

Action, likable characters, and a genuine moral problem with real implications for today's world—who could ask for more?

* * * *

In Fire Forged

edited by David Weber

Baen, 336 pages, $25.00 (hardcover)

Baen Webscriptions: $6.00 (e-book)

ISBN: 978-1-4391-3414-6

Series: Worlds of Honor 5

Genre: Military SF

* * * *

David Weber's heroine Honor Harrington, of the Royal Manticoran Navy, is easily SF's most successful heir to the Horatio Hornblower legacy. In fact, her career parallels Hornblower's (with a large dash of the real-life Lord Nelson), and her universe is recognizably based on the Napoleonic period.

Honor became so popular that after eight novels, David Weber opened up her universe, inviting other writers to produce short fiction set in Honor's world(s). This current volume is the fifth in this “Worlds of Honor” series.

In Fire Forged contains novellas by Jane Lindskold and Timothy Zahn, as well as one by Weber himself that features Honor in a previously unpublished adventure. As if that's not enough, there's also a faux-nonfiction appendix on the design of starship armor.

Weber's books have always appealed to history buffs as well as readers who appreciate the hardcore nuts-and-bolts of military SF. If that's you, and if somehow you have not yet made the acquaintance of Honor Harrington, this book is an easy place to start.

* * * *

Citadel

John Ringo

Baen, 400 pages, $26.00 (hardcover)

Baen Webscriptions: $6.00 (e-book)

ISBN: 978-1-4391-3400-9

Series: Troy Rising 2

Genre: Military SF

* * * *

Some military SF focuses more on interstellar strategy, tactics, and action rather than the course of a single officer's career. One of the masters of this sort of story is John Ringo. His Legacy of the Aldenata series tells of Earth's long war with the alien Posleen. Live Free or Die, the first book of his new Troy Rising series, brings a near-future Earth into contact with the alien Galactic Federation. All goes well until the arrival of the Horvath, a nasty bunch of extraterrestrial extortionists after Earth's heavy metals. By the end of the first book, Earth had created the mighty battlestation Troy and defeated the bad guys.

But the adventure has just begun. The galaxy is a big, bad, dangerous place, with plenty of enemies and endless opportunity for war. With Troy, Earth has entered the galactic struggle; when the Rangora Empire defeats our only allies, there's nothing for it but to go in with all guns blazing. It's rollicking fun with scrappy Humanity against the rest, and you know who's going to win in the end.

* * * *

The Battle for Commitment Planet

Graham Sharp Paul

Del Rey, 384 pages, $7.99 (paperback)

Kindle, Nook: $6.39 (e-book)

ISBN: 978-0-345-51371-7

Series: Helfort's War 4

Genre: Military SF

* * * *

On a slightly less cosmic scale, Australian Graham Sharp Paul's Helfort's War series is no less action-filled. Here the focus is on a crew of multitalented individuals, in the mold of classic World War II movies (David Drake's Hammer's Slammers series is perhaps the most prominent example of this type). Michael Helfort serves the cause of the Federated Worlds, aka the Good Guys. He and his people fight against the tyrannical, despotic Hammer Worlds, aka the Bad Guys. In battle after battle, Helfort and his compatriots have triumphed over every challenge the Hammer Worlds have thrown at them . . . but this time might be different.

In The Battle for Commitment Planet, the Hammer Worlds are holding Helfort's old sweetheart, Anna Cheung, as prisoner on their stronghold known as Commitment Planet—and they're demanding Helfort's surrender. Well, that's not going to happen; instead Helfort and his crew fly right into the face of the enemy, on a bold mission to set Anna free (along with all the rest of the POWs on Commitment).

Against all odds, Helfort and his crew go in, guns blazing—and before you know it, 350 pages are gone, the story's over, and you're looking forward to Helfort's next exciting battle.

* * * *

Written in Time

Jerry & Sharon Ahern

Baen, 644 pages, $7.99 (paperback)

Baen Webscriptions: $6.00 (e-book)

ISBN: 978-1-4391-3399-6

Genre: Alternate History, Military SF,

Time Travel

* * * *

For an SF writer, the idea is irresistible: take a military force armed with modern weapons and throw them back in time. As mentioned above, Poul Anderson pulled the trick in “The Man Who Came Early,” and other writers have been doing it ever since. Among the notable examples are Leo Frankowski's Cross-Time Engineer series, John Birningham's Axis of Time series, and the 1980 movie The Final Countdown. By far the biggest name in this area, however, is Eric Flint, whose Ring of Fire series tells of the contemporary town of Grantville, West Virginia, which is somehow thrown back to Germany in the 1630s. The Ring of Fire series has spawned a vast number of follow-up books by Flint and various other writers.

Add Jerry & Sharon Ahern to the list.

In Written in Time, a present-day Nevada family is transplanted back to 1904 by unknown hostiles. But they come prepared with modern weapons, and battle rages between the Naile family and a time-traveling army intent on conquering the world. Things look bad, but the Nailes have some unexpected allies: the Seventh United States Cavalry and Teddy Roosevelt.

Part alternate history, part military SF, Written in Time is all fun.

* * * *

Mass Effect: Retribution

Drew Karpyshyn

Del Rey, 368 pages, $7.99 (paperback)

Kindle, Nook: $5.00 (e-book)

ISBN: 978-0-345-52072-2

Series: Mass Effect 3

Genre: Games & Gaming, Military SF

* * * *

We're used to novelizations of SF movies; a more recent phenomenon is novelizations of hit video games. With so many games based on fighting, it's not surprising that such novelizations would be a good fit for military SF.

Drew Karpyshyn was lead writer on the game Mass Effect, and he does a good job of translating a rather complex story to the novel form. In the previous two books, Humanity discovered ancient alien technology on Mars and joined the galactic community. Scientist Kahlee Saunders, working for the Ascension Project to help so-called “biotics"—children with exceptional abilities—survived several run-ins with a covert organization called Cerberus.

Now there's a new enemy on the horizon: Reapers, horrific aliens who harvest human organs for their own vile purposes. Only Paul Grayson, a human implanted with Reaper technology, holds the clues to help defeat the Reapers.

There's only one catch: Grayson is being held in a hidden Cerberus facility, and the Reaper tech is slowly taking over his mind. Kahlee enlists the aid of a former war hero to rescue Grayson.

If you know nothing about Mass Effect or video games, don't worry . . . just tell yourself that you're reading another military SF novel, and you'll be fine.

* * * *

Galaxiki: A Fictional Galaxy That Anyone Can Edit

www.galaxiki.org

* * * *

If you're sick and tired of battles, action, and endless destruction, why not take a vacation and build something up?

Galaxiki isn't a book, it isn't a game . . . but it is science fiction. Sort of.

Created by Joopita Research as a nonprofit project, Galaxiki is a cross between Wikipedia, Facebook, and your favorite Galactic Empire. It's a fictional galaxy that claims to have 1.1 million planetary systems open for exploration—all of them generated according to some principles of astronomy and astrophysics.

Just looking around would be interesting enough, but there's more: users can edit those planetary systems, giving the planets names, inhabitants, whole ecologies. Many systems are community property that anyone can edit, a la Wikipedia. For a nominal charge ($1 as I write this), one can purchase a planetary system for one's exclusive use.

There are all the usual social media accouterments: one can communicate with other members; share lists of your favorite books, movies, music, etc.; or discuss topics (including science fiction, of course) in forums. There are also options to buy a planetary system as a gift for someone else, or to “liberate” one for use by the community.

Currently Galaxiki has over 5,000 members and over 15,000 registered stars (only 1,085,000 left!), and seems to be a fairly lively place. It seems to be a place that any SF reader would appreciate; certainly worth a look.

That's about it for this month. Take it easy, and may all your battles be successful ones.

* * * *

Don Sakers is the author of All Roads Lead to Terra and The Leaves of October. For more information, visit www.scatteredworlds.com.

Copyright © 2011 Don Sakers

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Reader's Department: BRASS TACKS

Dear Stan,

“Enigma,” by Sean McMullen in the January-February issue, had me a bit concerned. First, there was the crew from Earth who had DNA from rats and wolves—who would want to do this?

But the almost pure oxygen atmosphere had me scratching my head. The crew descended in a parasol filled with hydrogen! One spark and the hydrogen and oxygen would explode! Then samples were sent up to the orbiting mothership by rocket. Flames from rockets, in an oxygen atmosphere?

Then there was “shots from a plasma weapon” and one of the crew shooting himself with a “beacon mortar.” All they had to do was light a match. To be sure, there has to be fuel present for the oxygen to burn, but a human body would be just fine.

And remember the Apollo I capsule disaster in 1967, when Grissom, White, and Chaffee died in a pure oxygen atmosphere due to a spark.

Frank Coulter

Pauanui Beach

New Zealand

* * * *

The author responds:

I do understand that pure oxygen is a risky environment to be in, but humans have a tendency to get their engineering as good as can be managed, then wear the risk. I commute to work precariously balanced on two wheels with 15 liters of petrol between my legs. It's called a motorbike. Even though my brother's motorbike caught fire some years ago, I wear the risk. NASA astronauts climb up beside a couple of enormous tanks of liquid oxygen and hydrogen, then light a fire underneath. Even after the Challenger disaster showed that this is not entirely safe, they continue to do so. A flame in a pure oxygen atmosphere is fine as long as it is kept away from combustibles. Pure oxygen and combustibles co-existed fine in the Apollo capsule until some worn electrical insulation provided a spark within range of both. A hydrogen-filled parasail is fine unless you mix some oxygen with it and provide a spark. That happened with the Hindenburg, but before that airships were circling the world without catching fire. My premise with Enigma is that exploring it would indeed be a risky business, but that we would do our best and then wear the residual risk. There would certainly be a vastly increased scope for corrosion in Enigma's atmosphere, but I assumed that the engineers of the future took this into account in their choice of materials.

Regarding the use of DNA splicing to enhance animal traits in humans, why not? Engineering one person to be the alpha and the rest to followers would certainly reduce conflict and enhance loyalty on a long mission. Tailoring someone else to be very curious yet ultra cautious should also produce an explorer who is not going to get herself killed when faced with unfamiliar dangers (I used to look after two thousand rats when I was a lab assistant, and they were cautious, curious, and great explorers). Is this any sillier than hiring the second-best candidate for a job because he is likely to fit the company's culture better than the very best? I have seen it done quite often.

In general there are plenty of boundary areas that I blurred in “Enigma.” Current theories regarding the size of Oort Clouds are very rubbery. Some say that they are smallish, with discrete boundaries due to galactic gravitational influences. Others say they are huge and diffuse, and that the Oort clouds of neighboring stars overlap. I chose to assume that they are smallish, with discrete boundaries. If I were able to prove that this was true, I would be publishing in Nature, as well as Analog. Then again, the echo tech I postulated would require petabit/second data transfer rates. This seems a bit of a fantasy, but when I first studied computing I was told by my tutor that megabit/second transfer rates would only ever be possible in science fiction. Today, at work, I'm drawing up plans for a system with data transfer rates speeds in the hundreds of gigabits/second, and that system has to be operational in a few months. The wisdom of a few decades ago can look just as silly as speculations about a few decades into the future.

As far as I am concerned, SF is about telling a good story based on reasonable projections from known science. Demand rigorous proof for everything and SF ceases to exist, leaving you with elves, fairies, and vampires. Nothing wrong with that, of course—some of my best friends are elves, fairies and vampires (and a couple of them are scientists when they take their costumes off), but I also like stories that make me think as well as just providing entertainment. That's why I read SF.

* * * *

Dr Schmidt,

I very much enjoyed your March editorial ("Adjectives that Aren't"). However, and perhaps I'm being a bit pedantic here, it's quite a leap from “a word that qualified or describes a noun or pronoun” to requiring that such qualification describe an “inherent characteristic.” A subjective qualifier is still a qualifier (adjective). Your larger point—that the structure of our language does not differentiate between subjective and objective qualifiers, and perhaps influences our thinking and culture, is well taken. Perhaps you might take a look at the influence of sentence structure in a future column—for example, the common observation that placing verbs at the end of a sentence (as in Latin and German) predisposes a culture to taking orders, vs. languages with a subject-verb-object structure (as in English) making it far easier for listeners to go off in their own directions, without waiting for the end of a sentence.

Miles Fidelman

Newton, MA

* * * *

P.S. Your editorial prompted me to do a little research. It's pretty amazing how many distinctions linguists and grammarians now make between types of “noun modifiers” (e.g., determiners vs. adjectives) and types of each. Not that this makes much difference to those of us who simply have to craft documents that make sense, read well, persuade, etc. (in my case, in the form of proposals, reports, the occasional non-fiction piece).

Actually, my point is that a “subjective qualifier” is nota qualifier—it just looks like one. It's presented as if it describes only the noun that follows (or precedes, in some language) whereas it really refers to the relationshipbetween that noun and somebody who is not mentioned. That's an important distinction, not “quite a leap."

Incidentally, in simple sentences German uses the same subject-verb-object order as English, as in “Ich lese das Buch” (I am reading the book). The “verb-at-the-end” effect only happens when an auxiliary verb is involved, in which case partof the verb moves to the end, as in “Ich habe das Buch gelesen” (I have read the book). How much effect prevailing sentence patterns have on thought patterns is an interesting subject for speculation; I don't know how much actual research has been done on it. (But I'll bet some of our linguist-writers have.)

* * * *

Dear Stan,

I enjoyed reading your thought-provoking (as usual) editorial “Adjectives That Aren't” (March 2011).

You wrote “The problem is exacerbated by widespread teaching that we should try to avoid saying ‘I’ whenever possible.” This reminded me of the book Anthemby Ayn Rand in which the word “I” had been outlawed and everyone was required to use the word “we” instead.

It also reminded me of the Buddhist teaching that although the world appears to be composed of individual entities each of whom refers to himself/herself as “I,” in reality the existence of an individual “I” separate from other individuals is an illusion. The habitual use in probably every language of a word meaning what “I” does in English makes it difficult to see that we are all one in some sense. People from Jamaica use the Rastafarian phrase “I and I” to indicate the oneness of everyone with each other and with God (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rastafarianvocabulary). When I listen to contemporary teachers of nonduality (also called neo-Advaita), I find it paradoxical and amusing when they frequently use the word “I,” but really it's very difficult to avoid using it.

A couple of months ago, after perhaps 55 years of buying Analog, Asimov's, and F&SF in the bookstore each month I finally subscribed to all three magazines!

David Savage

Vienna, VA

* * * *

Yes, in some senses we're all connected—but in some senses we're all separate, too. We need linguistic structures that reflect both those realities.

* * * *

Dear Mr. Schmidt,

I love a story that makes me grin and laugh with delight, and that's exactly what you gave me with “Betty Knox and Dictionary Jones in The Mystery of the Missing Teenage Anachronisms” by John G. Hemry (March 2011). I found the tale wonderfully enjoyable right from the beginning, and I absolutely adored the unexpected but magnificently perfect resolution! Thank you so much!

Rachel Bexell

Coon Rapids, MN

* * * *

Dear Dr. Schmidt,

Edward M. Lerner's articles are always interesting and I treasure several for the information they contain. His March 2011 language ruminations spark me to comment.

Firstly Esperanto was never meant to be adopted as a first language by anyone. (Although it has been by some families.) Its general use would enable any group to retain their distinctive language and culture but still enable them to communicate without learning other, often very difficult, languages. I think its spoken use will always be limited to enthusiasts but the written form could be very widely used indeed.

There is pressure to have it adopted as a standard European language. Imagine the advantage of being able to give a speech in your own little spoken tongue with only the need to have one translation—into Esperanto. For myself as an engineer it would be a great advantage if all technical articles were also presented in Esperanto. It would not be difficult—I was reading books within three months of starting to learn Esperanto.

Secondly: Edward missed one important mode of communication here on Earth now. Some insects, particularly moths, communicate by detecting waves at infrared frequencies. The male moth, with its Yagi-like antennae, homes in on the female moth but is not detecting its pheromones chemically—as school children are still taught—but by the infrared signals given off by those pheromones when activated by sunlight.

This is one of the findings of Dr. Philip S. Callahan, one time professor of entomology at the University of Florida, Gainsville. His fascinating story is told by Peter Tompkins and Christopher Bird in their book Secrets of the Soil, Chapter 20. This chapter would make a worthy Science Fact article. Callahan has also published books of his own.

After 65 years reading Astounding and then Analog the stories still displace whatever else I am doing whenever the magazine arrives.

Henry Broadbent

Australia

* * * *

The author replies:

Thanks for the kind note. Doubtless I omitted more than one esoteric sensory mechanism. As biologists are reminded each time they look anyplace new, life on Earth is endlessly adaptive and inventive.

Imagine how fascinating extraterrestrial life is apt to be when we finally encounter it.

* * * *

Dear Analog,

Dr. Schmidt, you have outdone yourself this time. I laughed out loud at the Probability Zero by Mr. Prestridge. Too happy? We'll schedule a toothache and a couple of IRS Audits. That'll knock those silly happy feelings right out of you. I had to laugh. But then Bud Sparhawk bummed me out with Geologic Times inevitability. Bad Bud, bad. But John G. Hemry saved the day again. Betty Knox and Dictionary Jones will save the world from itself and we all—Lived? Will live? Are about to live?—happily ever after. Thank you. Thank you very much.

Bill Seiler

Chambersburg, PA

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Reader's Department: UPCOMING EVENTS
by Anthony Lewis

1-4 July 2011

WESTERCON 64 (Western North America Science Fantasy Conference) at The Fairmont, San Jose, CA. Guest of Honor: Patricia A. McKillip; Artist Guests of Honor: Kaja & Phil Foglio; Fan Guest of Honor: Mike Wilmoth. Membership: Attending (as of January 2011): $65, more later, supporting $25. Info: www.westercon64.org/; westercon-sj2011-info@sfsfc.org; PO Box 61363, Sunnyvale, CA 94088-1363

8-11 July 2011

NORTH AMERICAN DISCWORLD CONVENTION (Conference highlighting Sir Terry Prachett's series) at Concourse Hotel, Madison, WI. Guest of Honor: Sir Terry Prachett. Membership: until 1 March 2011, more thereafter $85 (12+), $45 (3-12), $30 (supporting). Info: www.nadwcon.org/index.html; info@madwcon.org; NADWCon, Post Office Box 259411, Madison, WI 53725-9411.

14-17 July 2001

READERCON 22 (literary SF-oriented conference) at Burlington Marriott, Burlington, MA. Guests of Honor: Geoff Ryman & Gardner Dozois. Membership: $55 until 15 June 2011; more thereafter. Info: www.readercon.org/; info@readercon.org; PO Box 65, Watertown, MA 02472

29-31 July 2001

PULPFEST 2011 (pulp-oriented conference) at Ramada Plaza Hotel & Conference Center, Columbus, OH.Membership: $30 in advance, $35 at the door. Friday/Saturday $15 each, Sunday $5. Accompanied under 15 free. $20 supporting. Info: www.pulpfest.com/; jack@pulpfest.com; 1272 Cheatham Way, Bellbrook, OH 45305.

17-21 August 2011

RENOVATION (69th World Science Fiction Convention) at Reno-Sparks Convention Center, Reno, NV. Guests of Honor: Ellen Asher, Charles N. Brown, Tim Powers, Boris Vallejo. Membership from 1 October 2010 until some later date (see website for latest details): Attending Adult: $180; Attending 17 to 21: $100; Attending 0 to 16: $75; Supporting: $50. [Ages as of 17 August 2011]. This is the SF universe's annual get-together. Professionals and readers from all over the world will be in attendance. Talks, panels, films, fancy dress competition—the works. Nominate and vote for the Hugos. Info: www.renovationsf.org/, info@renovationsf.org, PO Box 13278, Portland, OR 97213-0278. Facebook: www.facebook.com/ pages/Renovation-The-69th-World-Science-Fiction-Convention/112169025477179?ref=ts; LiveJournal: community.livejournal. com/renovationsf/

26-28 August 2011

CONTEXT 24 (speculative fiction and related games, comics, and films conference) at Columbus, OH. Membership: $45 until 15 August, $50 at the door; $20 Friday, $30 Saturday, $10 Sunday. Info: www.contextsf.org/; chair@contextsf.org; PO Box 163391, Columbus, OH 43216

Running a convention? If your convention has a telephone or fax number, e-mail address, or web page, please let us know so that we can publish this information. We must have your information in hand SIX months before the date of your convention.

Attending a convention? When calling conventions for information, do not call collect and do not call too late in the evening. It is best to include a S.A.S.E. when requesting information; include an International Reply Coupon if the convention is in a different country.

Copyright © 2011 Anthony Lewis

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Analog Science Fiction and Fact (Astounding), Vol. CXXXI, No. 6, June 2011. ISSN 1059-2113, USPS 488-910, GST#123054108. Published monthly except for combined January/February and July/August double issues by Dell Magazines, a division of Crosstown Publications. One-year subscription $55.90 in the United States and possessions, in all other countries $65.90 (GST included in Canada), payable in advance in U.S. funds. First copy of new subscription will be mailed within eight weeks of receipt of order. When reporting change of address allow 6 to 8 weeks and give new address as well as the old address as it appears on the last label. Periodical postage paid at Norwalk, CT and additional mailing offices. Canadian postage paid at Montreal, Quebec, Canada Post International Publications Mail, Product Sales Agreement No. 40012460. (c) 2011 by Dell Magazines, a division of Crosstown Publications, all rights reserved. Dell is a trademark registered in the U.S. Patent Office. Protection secured under the Universal Copyright Convention. Reproduction or use of editorial or pictorial content in any manner without express permission is prohibited. All stories in this magazine are fiction. No actual persons are designated by name or character. Any similarity is coincidental. All submissions must be accompanied by a stamped self-addressed envelope, the publisher assumes no responsibility for unsolicited manuscripts or artwork.

Visit www.analogsf.com for information on additional titles by this and other authors.