Saturn Run

12.

Captain Fang-Castro looked from the visitor sitting across the desk, to the screen on the wall opposite. The screen was divided into chunks, the chunks growing or shrinking depending on who was speaking. The occupants of the screen’s real estate were scattered across the U.S., the best and brightest geeks that DARPA money could buy. Which was pretty damn good, she’d found out back when she was a DARPA liaison.

They were the reigning heavyweight champions of design, putting together a system that would kick her station across 1.5 billion kilometers of empty space, to a rendezvous with who-knows-what.

The geeks were not happy.

Their unhappiness was focused on the challenger, a short, round blonde who was part of a team ferried up by Crow, who’d told Fang-Castro that the blonde, Rebecca Johansson, was probably the best in the world at what she did, which was designing power and heat flow management systems.

Fang-Castro was still getting a read on the engineer; she mixed the soft-spoken style of a well-raised Midwestern woman with the social graces of an engineer, which was to say, not all that many.

She was quiet, pleasant, and blunt.

Johansson was wrapping up her spiel. “That’s about the size of it. Literally. If we try to run ordinary low-temperature heat radiators, they will be so many kilometers in size that the mass will kill us—they’ll be larger than the mass budget for the entire ship. We need to go to high-temperature radiators, I’m thinking around six hundred Celsius, with molten metal heat exchangers. Then I can pump the heat from the reactors fast enough, and get the waste heat into the radiators fast enough, to dump all of that waste heat into space with a radiator that’s a few percent of the size we’d need otherwise.”

One of the earth engineers started to jump in, but Johansson cut him off. “I know the reactors are up to it, don’t tell me they’re not. You can get a lot better than a gigawatt out of a ton of core, and I can siphon it off with pressurized liquid sodium at around two thousand Celsius. You can either boil that directly or run a secondary boiling sodium cycle to run the primary turbines at nineteen hundred Celsius and a downstream supercritical water vapor turbine to get the exhaust down to six hundred and fifty Celsius, and I can take it from there.”

The face of one of the earthbound engineers, Harry Lomax, ballooned in size on the view screen, as he waved his hands in frustration. “Are we really supposed to consider this? It’s nuts. There’s no possible way.”

From the corner of her eye, Fang-Castro saw Johansson about to jab back. Without taking her eyes from the monitor and the engineer, she waved one hand at the blonde in a way that said, Wait. I’m the referee. Let me ref.

“Harry,” Fang-Castro said, “you’re saying it’s literally impossible? Because if it is, if this is simply a dreadful mistake on Ms. Johansson’s part, I’ll be happy to dismiss our new engineer and request someone better suited to the task.”

The blonde opened her mouth, Fang-Castro waved again, and the blonde closed her mouth.

Lomax paused a moment, disconcerted by the opening he’d been handed. Fang-Castro waited patiently.

“Okay, maybe the wrong choice of words,” Lomax said. “It’s not physically impossible: it doesn’t violate any known physical laws and it doesn’t require materials we haven’t invented yet. But it’s completely and utterly unrealistic.”

“So what you’re saying is, it’s a possible solution in a terribly difficult situation, you just don’t have the wherewithal to do your part of the required design.”

“That’s not exactly what I was saying…”

Fang-Castro pointed to Becca, who said, “I agree with Dr. Lomax that the whole mission timetable is ridiculous and unrealistic, but it is what it is. Dr. Lomax, you can design all the reactors you want, but if they melt, they ain’t going to Saturn. We gotta get rid of the heat. That’s not optional. Run the numbers yourself. If you’ve got a better suggestion than mine, I’d be delighted to hear it.”

Fang-Castro jumped in: “Harry, I agree with Dr. Johansson here. We’ve got to get rid of the heat. I also agree with you: this solution does strike me as unrealistic. Come back to me with a better idea. Quickly, if you please. Orders need to be cut.”

Lomax wasn’t ready to let it go. “Dr. Johansson’s scheme wastes huge amounts of energy. We’ll need to scale up the entire power plant by fifty percent to compensate, and we still have to stay within our weight budget. I don’t see how.”

“That’s why I’m giving you options,” Fang-Castro said. “You can come up with a different way to handle the heat management, or figure out how to upscale the power plant. Give me a call when you get that figured out. Tomorrow would be good.”

Fang-Castro shut down the conference window and turned back to her guest.

“So, Becca: Will they come up with a better idea? And if not, can they build the power train you need?”

Becca chewed the end of a stylus for a few seconds, then her eyes flicked up to Fang-Castro’s. “I don’t believe there is a better idea. The DARPA guys are really smart, and maybe I’ve overlooked something, but I don’t think so. I want to be clear: I’m not saying my solution is optimal, but there is some basic thermodynamics at work here, and my solution is as good as it gets, with the timetable that’s been imposed on us. I’m pretty sure I can handle my side of the engineering. As for them handling theirs, I don’t know. I’ve seen refractory ceramic composite turbines demonstrated that ought to do the job, but that’s not really my expertise. Maybe they’ll find they can’t do it. I’m not sure there’s anything else. So, no: they won’t find a better idea.”

“Good enough, Becca.” Fang-Castro sighed. The whole mission was right on the bleeding edge of insanity. “I’ll get someone to take you down to Engineering so you can get a feel for our current environment.”

John Clover didn’t have to take pictures of the station, or set up news reports about it; he didn’t have to worry about anything but his brain. And the cat.

Chapman, the tall, thin woman, led him to the elevator-equivalent that took them to Habitat 1. “We’re having a get-together in the Commons in fifteen minutes,” she told him “An informal affair, open to anyone who wants to come, but there were already quite a few there before you arrived.”

“The Commons. That sounds a trifle ominous,” Clover said. “Like the place where the aliens touch their heads together while they’re getting Roto-Rootered by the Leader.”

“Okay. Call it the cafeteria,” Chapman said. “It’s that, too, at mealtimes. Anyway, we can drop your stuff and the cat at your cabin—the cat should sleep for a while yet, and we’ve already set up a cat pan and so on—and let you wash your face or whatever.”

“I do have to whatever,” Clover said. “But I don’t want to hold people up. I hope Mr. Snuffles is okay.”

“I’m sure he is. We’ve had a couple of cats up here before, you know. They were subjects of various experiments. They adapt quite well.”

“Good. I’m a little worried.”

Clover took a leak and washed his face, and Chapman escorted him to the Commons, where twenty-five or thirty people were waiting. They stood and applauded, which made Clover smile, and Chapman led him to a lectern, gave a brief introduction, and Clover said, “I have no prepared comments. I didn’t know they might be needed. The main reason I’m up here is to see if I can stand it… being up here. So far, so good. I just keep saying to myself, ‘Put your foot down, John.’ Anyway, maybe I’ll give a talk some other time, but right now, I’ll put it on you-all. Ask me questions: ask me anything.”

They did. They asked about the probability that Earth-like evolution would be working on an alien planet. Clover said, “High. Unless the beings were created instantaneously by their own biblical God, they probably proceeded from simple organisms to complex ones. I also suspect it’s probable that they grew up in a gaseous atmosphere rather than a liquid environment, and that they have sight, that they hear sound. All of those things have been invented several times on Earth, and are critical to an evolved tech state, in my opinion. Note that I don’t say their eyes are necessarily like ours—they could be like insect eyes—but they can see. Note that I also don’t specify that they see the same wavelengths as we do, only that they can see. In my opinion.”

They asked about the possibility that aliens would be so culturally unlike Earth people that communication would be impossible. Clover said, “Depends on what kind of aliens you’re talking about. Exo-bacteria would fit the definition of alien, and we can’t communicate with our own bacteria. But if you’re talking about technological beings, we should be able to communicate because communication involves the manipulation of symbols, and we should be able to build a dictionary starting with basics. For example, no matter how alien the aliens might be, hydrogen is hydrogen, and iron is iron, and light travels at the same speed for both cultures. With a highly evolved species, we should be able to create the equivalents of The Physics Handbook, and compare them, and that in itself would provide leads to sophisticated symbol manipulation—or language. The place where we might have problems would be understanding highly evolved cultural tastes based on physical differences. For example, we have rather inane performances called ‘light shows’ on Earth. Given an alien species with different eyes, that respond to much wider wavelengths than ours, they may have evolved a terrifically sophisticated ‘music’ based on vision, rather than hearing. We might never understand that. On the other hand, there are millions of people on Earth who don’t understand jazz—so those kinds of differences can be dealt with.

“But that doesn’t mean we’d be compatible. They sure wouldn’t look like us, they sure wouldn’t think just like us. Think about how many wars have been started on Earth over misunderstandings, and we’re all the same species, evolved on the same planet. Would we have lots in common with aliens? I expect so. But we’d probably have lots of ways to piss each other off without even knowing it, so if and when we meet the little green guys it’ll be ‘step lightly, people.’”

They talked for two hours, the questions ranging from high-school basics to postdoc details. Chapman called a halt when the food service started opening up at a shift change.

“Lot of smart people here,” Clover said, as Chapman took him back to his cabin.

“Yes. And that was probably less than a third of the people who actually wanted to come, but couldn’t because of work assignments or sleep period. The fact is, half of us are up here because we got interested in space and aliens when we were kids…. But I have a question for you. I didn’t want to ask it during the meeting, though I thought it might come up.”

“Go ahead,” Clover said.

“Why are they sending an anthropologist to Mars? There aren’t any aliens on Mars.”

Clover smiled and said, “I asked the same thing. Promise you won’t tell?”

“I won’t.”

“Because the President wanted me to go,” Clover said. “She’s a fan, she’s read my books. She was one of those kids who wanted to know about space and aliens. She sent me a note and said she hoped that actually living in a space environment would inspire me to new insights.”

“Really,” Chapman said. “Well, she’s the President, I guess she can do that.”

Clover suspected that Chapman suspected that something was up.

When Clover shut the cabin door behind him, Mr. Snuffles meowed before he had a chance to sit on his bunk and look around. The cat was still in its nylon carrying case, and Clover put the nylon case on the bed, sat beside it, and unzipped it.

Mr. Snuffles stuck his head out, tentatively, looked around, and then hopped out onto the cabin floor. That was odd enough. Five minutes later, the cat launched himself halfway up the fabric-covered wall, dug in with his claws, and hung there, turned and looked at Clover, and meowed, something beyond a standard meow. More like a meow combined with a purr.

Five minutes, and the cat had gone through a rebirth. His weight was one-tenth of what it had been in New Orleans; his heart didn’t have to work as hard, his arthritis didn’t hurt as much when it landed. He could jump again. In fact, he was jumping all over the place.

After a while, Clover stretched out for a nap, and the cat snuggled on his chest. The cat, Clover thought, was thanking him, and that made him want to cry, although former WFL tackles didn’t do that.

Hardly ever.

Crow spent two hours with Fang-Castro, locked in her bedroom with all the security measures up. “We’re going deep on all your crew members. I’m sure you’ve noticed that you’ve had a few unexpected transfers down. Those were obvious security problems. I’m not saying they are guilty of anything, I’m just saying that we’re not going to take any chances at all.”

“I understand. I’ve been told that you’ll be the security chief on the trip.”

“That’s not quite right. I’ll be your security chief. You’re the boss, I’m the underling. I’ll make that work: I’ve been employed by two presidents, both of whom are assholes of a magnitude you can’t even begin to imagine. But. I need you to pay attention to me. When it comes to security issues, I am rarely wrong.”

“And if we have two conflicting issues, one involving security, the other the safety of the ship…”

“Just like a ship’s captain to come up with the immovable-object problem,” Crow said with a grin. “If that should happen, I’ll give you my best advice and even urge it on you. But you’re the captain. I’m paid to give advice, you’re paid to make decisions.”

Fang-Castro said, “Then we agree.”

DAY TWO:

Fiorella took Sandy aside, as they geared up for the first recording session. “I have to tell you, if we’re going to work together, that I probably will never like you very much. I grew up in the underclass and there’s something about rich people that causes me to itch.”

“What are you talking about?” Sandy said. “You gotta be rich yourself.”

“I’m affluent—now—but I don’t work with the assumptions of the people who are born rich. People like you. But: I can work with people I don’t like. I do it all the time. I just don’t know if you can handle that kind of relationship, without cutting me up. I don’t want to be cut up: this is my career. This is my life.”

“No problem, then,” Sandy said. “I don’t watch much screen, but I’ve been told you’re very good at this. As long as you’re good, and you pay attention when I’m telling you camera stuff, we can do it. I’ll pay attention to what you say about your reporting requirements. You take care of the talk, I’ll take care of the pictures.”

Fiorella nodded. “Fine. Now. How did you make that shot of me, at the window? I’ve never seen anything quite like it. My camera guys all have Reds, the same equipment you have.”

Sandy shrugged. “I was an arts major and I’ve looked at a lot of paintings, and I actually did quite a bit of painting and color studies myself in the studio courses. When I saw that dark window, and the light on the people walking by, I saw a painting, a Caravaggio, that deep, dramatic lighting,” Sandy said. “The other thing is, most photographers want sharpness. That’s most of what they think about: sharp, sharp, sharp. But people can look too sharp—a little softness can really pop with a naturally sensuous face. The thing is, I was shooting you through the glass on the egg, and then through the view-port glass, and that degraded the sharpness enough to give you the glow. Instead of re-sharpening in-camera, I left it that way.”

“You’re saying I look better if I’m fuzzy?”

“I’m saying you look better if you can’t see every single pore,” Sandy said.

She nodded: “Did you learn that with Naked Nancy?”

Sandy smiled and said, “Did you know Naked Nancy once had an emergency appendectomy?”

“No, I didn’t.”

“None of her viewers know, either. It’s a very fine scar, like a white hair, but thinner than a hair, a half centimeter long. Anytime you get a full body shot of her, it’s done with a special soft-focus lens. It softens her imperceptibly, so that she looks perfect. Which she almost is. You see everything else, but you won’t see that scar, or any little skin blemishes.”

“Why doesn’t she just go with makeup? On the scar?”

“That would be sort of… anti–Naked Nancy. The word would leak. Her viewers have an aesthetic, you know. They want her naked. That’s why she doesn’t have any hair.”

Fiorella said, “I gotta tell you, that never occurred to me. The aesthetic thing.”

Fiorella was acting as a pool reporter. Her own services got an hour head start, but after that, it was on to three dozen networks—if the networks wanted it. “That’s why I was so worried about you screwing it up,” Fiorella said. “Right now, if you were to make a list of news stars, I’d be a Senior Star—maybe—but nothing like an Ultra. When I get done with this, I want to be an Ultra. I’ve got a shot at it.”

Sandy rubbed his nose. “How bad do you want it?”

“Real bad,” Fiorella said.

The first broadcast was to be twenty-two minutes long, leaving eight minutes for commercials at each end and the middle. With an Earth-side recording, there’d usually be three cameras, but Sandy would have to work it with two, one stationary, one on his StabileArm.

The whole production took six hours on their second day in the station, squeezing out the twenty-two minutes of airtime.

Fiorella had written a script before she left Earth, had edited it the night before, to take into account actual conditions, and then they cut it up into shooting segments.

And they argued about costuming, they looked at colors against her skin and against the colors of the pipes and ducts inside the axis tube, against the blackness of space, against the white/beige colors of the eggs. They settled on her green-black jumpsuit with a gold-chain belt for the “reporting” shots, and a pale army-green blouse with a narrow V neck for her “commentary” shots. She wore a simple gold necklace that showed off her endorsement charms, and gold earrings, with both sets of clothing.

She had to do her own makeup, though they found a crewwoman who could help with her hair. When they were ready, she took an egg out, slaved to Joe Martinez’s egg, while Sandy orbited around her.

And they shot the first five hours.

At the very end, sitting in a conference room looking at the vid on big high-res screens, Fiorella said, “We got most of it: we really did. The editors down there will turn it into gold. But: we need to reshoot the window.”

“What? The window shot is perfect,” Sandy said.

“Perfect Caravaggio—I looked him up,” Fiorella said. “Then I looked up a whole bunch of other pictures from the Renaissance, and you know what? I think we go for Sandro Botticelli. I’d like to make a costume change for the window shot… just for the window shot. We leave the green blouse for the other commentary.”

“What costume change?”

Fiorella said, “I got a blouse from Caroline….” Caroline was the hair helper. Fiorella dipped into a gear bag and produced the blouse and handed it to him.

Sandy shook it out and said, “I don’t think so. It does have a nice casual look, but it’s so sheer that you’d see the brassiere lines under it and…”

Fiorella was shaking her head. “No brassiere.”

“No brassiere? You’re going to Naked Nancy?” Sandy was as shocked as a neo-Victorian. “You’re not Naked Nancy.”

“No, I’m not. But. I’ve looked at all the vid, and it’s very, very cool. I’m very, very cool. I’ve always been that way and I need to heat it up a little. Everything in pop culture is about sensuousness now. That’s worldwide. Sex. Food. Perfume. AR games. MassageSilk. RhythmTech. I don’t want porn, or anything like it, but I need to add some heat. I’m looking for the hot librarian. We don’t have to send it—we can dump it, if it’s too much.”

Sandy looked at her for a moment, then said, “You wanted Ultra Star.”

“I do.”

“Okay. But you’re walking on a scary edge here. Go too far…”

“We won’t.” Fiorella went to change, came back a few minutes later. Sandy checked her out and said, “You’ll need some double-sided tape: you’ll need to stick the edges of the neckline to your skin, or you’re gonna show off a little more than you want. Not that that’d be a tragedy.”

“Maybe not from your perspective, but like you said… I’m walking on an edge. I’ll get some tape.”

When she’d taped the blouse down, she asked, “What do you think?”

Sandy said, “Uh, Fiorella… you know, redheads, in my experience…”

“Which I suspect is extensive…”

“…may tend to have somewhat pale nipples.” He put up his hands to fend off objections, then continued. “If you have in your makeup kit something with a touch of rose to it…”

“Go get in the fuckin’ egg,” she snapped.

They worked for another hour, a windup shot that would last perhaps two minutes on the broadcast vid. Sandy didn’t want to quit, but Fiorella started to lose her voice, even with saltwater sprays. Back inside, they reviewed the footage.

“You are so… venal,” Fiorella said, as she watched herself at the window. The gauzy blouse showed the finest, subtlest flashes of rose, almost as though they were part of the viewer’s imagination. “You are fundamentally an immoral, manipulative snake.”

“So you like it,” Sandy said. “I had to kick up the red channel, and believe me, after I did that, it was hard to keep your red hair under control.”

“We’ll send it down, see what my exec thinks,” she said.

The exec called her the next morning and said, “Unbelievable. Unbelievable. You’re a fuckin’ ice cream cone, Fiorella. They’re gonna eat you up all over the world tomorrow night. Uh, the guy who shot this… is he around?”

Fiorella looked at Sandy: “He’s standing right here. We were going to see if you needed another shot or two.”

“Won’t be necessary. We’re good. Ask Randy…”

“Sandy…”

“Ask Sandy how much they’re paying him to take this trip…”

DAY THREE:

Becca was called into Fang-Castro’s suite on the morning of the third day: “They couldn’t find a better solution,” Fang-Castro told her. “They’re going with your idea, they think they can do something with the reactors that I don’t entirely understand… you’ll have to talk to them.”

“I’ve been thinking about it ever since we talked the first time,” Becca said. “I’ve got a lot of work to do. Boy, do I have a lot of work. I’ve got to get back down. Like right now. Fabrication is gonna be a bitch. Gonna make 3-D carbon-printer heads look like a kid’s crayons. I’ve been having nightmares, thinking about it.”

“But it’s not impossible.”

“No—but right there with the hardest things anybody’s ever built.”

Five plus a cat went up, four came back down.

Clover asked for, and got, permission to stay up, with Mr. Snuffles. “I wasn’t doing anything down there, anyway, that I can’t link into from up here. If somebody can throw out the garbage, lock up my house good, and send me up the rest of my clothes and some culinary supplies…”

“We’ll see that it gets taken care of,” Crow told him.

Crow talked to the President: “Fang-Castro and I spent six or eight hours talking about it, all told. It’s coming together: I think we’re good. And she’s better than good. Now we just have to screw down the security. If we can get six months, it’s a done deal.”