Saturn Run

17.

Fang-Castro sat back in her easy chair, drank her morning tea, gazed at the curved horizon of the earth displayed on her giant wallscreen, and sighed. She’d moved to new, single-room quarters and no longer had the pleasure of her living room window.

As part of the weight-saving measures for the Nixon, the design teams had reworked the living modules for more efficient use of space, paring them from their original hundred-meter length down to seventy. Compared to what was being done in the power modules, this was unglamorous reengineering, but eliminating the excess living space would cut the dry mass of the ship by twelve percent. It wasn’t a lot by itself, but it cut the requirements for power, heat disposal, and water for reaction mass, reducing the final size of the ship by a thousand tons.

For all that, it wasn’t asking a lot to give up a window, and her new quarters did have a wall-sized high-resolution 3-D screen, totally state of the art. But it wasn’t real, she thought sadly. It was like the sound system in her new quarters; recorded music sounded wonderful and was a delight to listen to, but nothing like a live performance. Unfortunately rank, along with its privileges, had to set a good example.

Fang-Castro had sent most of the crew ground-side, starting two weeks earlier at the end of January. After the non-essentials had departed the station, construction crews installed temporary bulkheads thirty meters inward of the front ends of the modules. They’d stripped the furnishings from the forward thirty meters and bled the air back into the station’s reserves.

Then they’d fabricated and attached support pillars between the axle and the modules just rearward of the cutting line. In the final preparation for the trimming, each module’s forward elevator shaft had been cut free and moved off to a safe distance. That final bit of prep had finished up yesterday, two days ahead of schedule, Fang-Castro noted. Everybody was working hard: no slackers allowed.

Her slate chimed: John Clover. “You called? I was in the bathroom.”

“Are you close by my quarters?”

“Yeah, I’m in mine. Just got back.”

“Stop in if you have a minute.”

And a minute later, her door chimed, and she said, “Come in,” which released the door.

Clover stepped in, with his cat sitting on his shoulder. He put the cat on the floor, and Fang-Castro got up, went to a drawer, took out a pack of salmon jerky, and gave a strip to the cat, who was expecting it.

Virtually everybody in the station was a technician of some kind: Clover wasn’t, and didn’t much care about tech. He was a thinker, and a conversationalist. Ever since their clandestine late-night dinner, they’d been meeting a couple of times a week, to chat. As might have been expected of a leading anthropologist, he was both intelligent and observant.

“Sit down,” she said.

He took his usual chair and said, “So—do we have an agenda, or are we ruminating?”

“Ruminating—I’m waiting to give them the go-ahead to start cutting up the place,” she said. “Let’s assume there are aliens at the station—a resident crew. Do we need to take weapons with us? If we do, what kind?”

“I’m not a shrink,” Clover said. “But we’ll need a few weapons on board, not for the aliens, but for the humans. As we get further out, there’ll be a lot of stress, and there’ll be some personal conflict. There may even be some good old-fashioned mating-ritual violence… too few women, too many alpha males. We’ll need some electrical stunners…”

Fang-Castro waved him down. “Let’s stick with the aliens. We’ve got the crew problems covered, I think.”

Clover nodded. “Okay. First—”

He was interrupted by a computer voice: “Incoming priority for Fang-Castro from Joe Martinez.”

Fang-Castro held up a finger, and took the call: “Joe?”

“We’re ready to go out here. We need you to give the order.”

“Recording with time-note: I’m ordering you to commence the quarters trim.”

“Thank you, ma’am. We’re starting now.”

Back to Clover: “So, do we need a weapons system to deal with the aliens?”

Clover said, “Basically, no. I’ve talked to Crow about this, and there are only a few ways to fight in space. Some of them are suicidal, so we rule those out. I haven’t been able to think of a situation in which we’d destroy our own ship as a method of attacking the aliens. There are some movie scenarios out there—the aliens are an evil life-form that preys on humans. Or they take over our minds and turn us into zombies with some kind of infectious virus and the only way we can save Earth is to blow up our own ship. But if the aliens really want to do that, why haven’t they done it? That’s the critical question. Why haven’t they done it? The fact is, we know they could have destroyed all life on Earth if they’d wanted to, long before this. Or even with this arrival—we only saw them by mistake. If they’d simply accelerated an asteroid into Earth, and we know they can do that, given the size of their ship, we probably wouldn’t even see it coming until too late. From all of that, I’d deduce that they don’t want to destroy us. Simply because they could have, anytime, and didn’t. So, we ignore the movie scenarios.”

“What if they don’t actively want to destroy us, but want to keep us away from their station?”

“That’s what I’ve been talking to Crow about. They’re a century ahead of us, maybe more. I can’t begin to guess what they’d have to stop us, but they’d sure have something! They might warn us off… or we might not even see it coming.”

“Bottom line, we can’t defend ourselves against them, if they get aggressive.”

“No. We can’t. That’s my feeling. We anthros are very good at war—maybe even better than they are. The overriding fact, though, is there really isn’t a very good way to fight in deep space. Fights would lead to annihilation, first of the fighters, and then later, of the warring ships or bases, or even the warring planets.”

“Not desirable.”

“For either side,” Clover said. “Suppose we get out there and find a station. The existence of the station as a stopping point suggests that they really need the place. So what happens if we go out there, and they do something to piss us off? What happens when the next starship shows up, and the gas station has been burned down? They may represent a danger to us, but we also represent a danger to them. It seems to me, it behooves both sides to act with some… courtesy. Some rational approach to contact.”

“You’re suggesting we do nothing.”

“Nah. That’s not safe, either. They might be territorial and want to see how far they can push us. So, they give us a little whack. We give them a little whack back—but only once.”

“The problem with that is, the little whack could be the end of us.”

“I don’t think so. Look, once a planetary civilization reaches a certain point—the generation of radio waves, say—a lot of other things just naturally fall into place. Radio waves suggest a command of electricity, of course, and everything that comes out of that—internal combustion engines, airplanes, and advanced understanding of practical physics. They know we’re here. Even if they didn’t before, they know now. They could have been watching our TV programs all the way in. So if they give us a little warning shot, it’ll be small: I think. It’s not likely to happen at all. I think. I don’t really think they’d even take the chance. We could have detected these ships coming in fifty or a hundred years ago, but we didn’t. Why not? Probably because their visits are extremely rare. If they destroyed us, or our ships, then the next time they show up, we could have a nuke waiting for them. A nuke they wouldn’t even see until it would be too late to do anything about it. So there are reasons for them not to annoy us, just as there are reasons for us not to annoy them.”

Fang-Castro nodded. “I buy most of that: the aliens probably don’t want to kill us. You understand what our biggest problem could be…”

“The Chinese.”

“Yes. It seems to me that we’re getting in a bind here. They would have a problem with our getting exclusive use of an alien tech. That’s something we’ve got to work through.”

“Are you going to weaponize the Nixon to fight the Chinese?”

“I doubt it. We have to see what the big brains on Earth think. But if we did—and if the Chinese already have—I think what you’d have is mutual assured destruction. If we don’t arm ourselves and the Chinese attacked us, I’m pretty sure Santeros would destroy their ship in retaliation. And vice versa. There wouldn’t be a huge war, or anything, but nobody would be able to put anything out in space—or more to the point, get it back. At the same time, exclusive use is pretty tempting.”

“Lot of ugly possibilities growing out of those fears,” Clover said.

“Yes, there are.” Fang-Castro glanced at her view screen and said, “They’re cutting up the hulls. I’ve got to go check on things. Listen, John—we’ve got to talk more. Read some twentieth-century stuff on the way the Americans and Russians managed the Cold War. Tell me what you think about that—their management techniques.”

“I will do that,” Clover said. “I’ve got to tell you, though, you’ve got me a little puckered up here.”

“I’ve been puckered up ever since I found out the Chinese were going to Saturn.”

Trimming the living modules wasn’t technically difficult; it just had to be done carefully and in a coordinated fashion so it wouldn’t throw the station out of balance. Industrial lasers could cut through the frothy walls in minutes. After the cutters sliced off the excess thirty meters from each module, crews would build new proper front ends, reattach the front elevators, and remove the temporary supports.

Clover had just gone, with his cat, when the station computer pinged Fang-Castro to move to the command module. She relieved the officer on watch and checked the external monitors and status displays; the four industrial cutters were in position.

“Mr. Martinez, how’s everything out there?”

“We’re good. We’re about through the first one, the tugs are positioned to get it out of the way.”

In carefully coordinated action, the four laser operators had fired up their beams and begun simultaneously cutting through the inner and outer walls of the two living modules, just forward of the temporary bulkheads. Grooves had appeared in the four walls and deepened into narrow cuts; otherwise there was little to see besides a faint purplish glow.

The excimer laser cutters projected intense shortwave ultraviolet light, invisible to human eyes. The high-energy photons didn’t burn their way through materials; they directly broke apart molecular bonds. Foam and fabric simply disintegrated into vapor where the beam hit, cold-cutting that the laser crews controlled with surgical precision.

It took most of an hour to cut through the first two pairs of walls. The job could have been done in half the time, but Martinez was being careful. He periodically called for work stoppages while status readings were checked. Were the station’s stabilizing computers keeping everything in balance? Were the brackets doing their job of keeping the forward sections from breaking loose prematurely? Any stray debris flying around, something blown off by the lasers?

After January’s failed radiator test, Fang-Castro was being super-careful about creating space junk. That hadn’t just been embarrassing, it’d been expensive. Nobody had been prepared for such a spectacular failure, and the station personnel were only able to recover about three-quarters of the chaff created by the uncontrolled radiator ribbons.

Interops, the International Orbital Operating Commission, had levied a fine whose size was described as “astronomical” by almost every punster on the Internet. Space junk had made low Earth orbit space almost unusable by the mid-thirties, and it had taken a decade of concerted and costly international effort to clear out the big stuff. A lot of the small stuff was still circling the earth, and now the space nations were talking about who’d pay to clear that.

The cutting proceeded, carefully, until the forward thirty meters of modules were severed from the rear seventy. The cutters shut down the lasers, a final systems check came up green, and Martinez spoke an authorization into his workslate. The operations computer simultaneously released the locking clamps on the module sections and a millisecond later fired the engines on the pair of robotic tugs.

From the command module, Captain Fang-Castro watched as the now-superfluous forward sections were moved to a safe distance away from the station. Some of their materials would be recycled into the Nixon, but most of it was scrap, possibly recyclable to a new station. She checked the status reports: the station was stable and the temporary forward bulkheads on the truncated living modules were working perfectly. The whole operation had gone off with exemplary smoothness.

She realized she’d been tensely hunched over the console and consciously relaxed her shoulder blades. The rest of the reconstruction wouldn’t take more than the remainder of the day. Crews had pre-fabbed new front ends for the modules with all the fittings, docking collars, and brackets they needed to smoothly hook them up to the living modules and reattach the free-floating front elevator shafts to them and the new axle hubs.

“Mr. Martinez?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Outstanding work. Pass that along to everyone who had a hand in this. I just spoke to the President, and she is extremely impressed, and she is not an easily impressed woman,” Fang-Castro said.

“I will pass that along, ma’am. Thank you.”

She hadn’t spoken to Santeros in a week, at which time they’d agreed on two possible statements: congratulations for a job well done, and a second, “The responsibility for this problem is mine, not the men and women who did the work.”

“Mine,” as in Fang-Castro’s, not Santeros’s.

Fortunately, she thought, as she headed back to her room, the second statement wouldn’t be needed.

As yet, anyway.

Sandy and Fiorella had stayed up, when most of the crew had gone down, because they were documenting the reconstruction. Sandy had been outside, and had just gotten back, when Fiorella pinged him.

“We need to talk to you. Privately.”

“Uh, where are you?”

“My cabin.”

“I just got in, I’m in Engineering. I could stop by…”

“Please do. Soon.”

Was she now using the royal “we”? Sandy wondered, as he dropped down the shaft to the habitat. Or was there more than one person waiting for him? Whatever, Fiorella definitely sounded conspiratorial. Of course, she was of Italian heritage; the Medicis, and all that.

He got to her cabin, tapped the call bell, and the door popped open. “Come on in,” Fiorella said. John Clover was sitting in the single chair, and nodded. Fiorella sat at one end of her bunk and patted the other end for Sandy.

“So what’s up?” Clover asked.

Fiorella looked at Sandy. “Despite our personal differences, the people on this ship believe that you and I are destined to sleep together.”

“Fools,” Sandy said.

“I would agree,” Fiorella said.

“Although you are not totally unattractive,” Sandy allowed.

“I would have to say the same about you,” Fiorella said.

Clover said, “Excuse me. I don’t think I want to hear this conversation.”

Fiorella said, “Yes, you do. Wait until I finish.”

Clover subsided, and Sandy, curious, asked, “What happened?”

“I was sitting in an egg, not going anywhere, checking out a possible internal shot. That feature we were talking about, showing the groundhuggers how you control an egg. Anyway, your friend the handyman walked into the garage, with a tech, and they were talking about us. They were being sneaky about it. Joe kept glancing over at me, making sure I couldn’t hear.”

“You turned up the gain on the external mike,” Sandy said. All the eggs had external microphones and speakers. They were useless in space, but convenient when two people were working on an egg repair, one inside and one out.

“Yes, I did,” Fiorella said. “Anyway, it seems that the crew has a pool, on the day we fall into bed together. The pool is still open. The buy-in is one thousand dollars.”

That didn’t seem like much to Sandy, but Clover grunted. “There are what, ninety-plus people going on this trip? More or less? That’s ninety grand, if everybody buys in. Nice. That’s three months’ salary for a poor man like me.”

“Much nicer than that,” Fiorella said. “Because these guys are a bunch of scientists, they all think they’re statistical savants. They weren’t happy with a simple, pick-your-day pool. They set up a market.”

Sandy: “A market? You mean like a political market?”

“Exactly. You buy a date that you think it’ll happen. If you start to feel your pick was weak or if your date goes by without any action, you can buy back in, any date you want—but you have to pay the market price, which is set by consensus. Everybody who already has that date won’t want you to buy in at all—they’ll want to keep all the money to themselves. But if you have the right to buy in, they’ll want to jack up your reentry price as high as possible.

“On the other hand,” she continued, “people who don’t have that date, and don’t believe it will happen, will want other people to buy in—because the money stays in the pot if it doesn’t happen. So they want the buy-in price to be low enough to encourage people to buy in, but also high enough that the pot gets fatter downstream.”

“Okay,” Sandy said. “I got that.”

“Once the market price is set, you can put your money in,” Fiorella said. “Say that it looks like we’re going to get together on Friday. Okay, the price to buy in on that Friday could be quite large. With a basic, say, hundred thousand dollars on the scale, you might have to kick in another five or ten thousand dollars, or even more, to buy back in, if the event looks likely. If we’re all kissy in the corridors. The amount would depend on how many people already have that date… The market price for the gamble.”

“I don’t entirely understand that,” Sandy said.

“Look. Say there’s a hundred thousand in the pot, and only three people have that date,” Fiorella said. “If you can buy back in for, say five thousand, the pot is then a hundred and five thousand. Split four ways, that would be”—her eyes rolled up as she worked it out—“twenty-six thousand, two hundred and fifty each, a profit of twenty-one thousand, two hundred and fifty dollars on the five-thousand-dollar buy-in. But only if we get together that day.”

“Tell me again why the three original buyers let him buy in?” Clover asked.

“They don’t have any choice—the buy-in is by consensus of all the bettors,” Fiorella said. “And the people who don’t think it’s going to happen on one particular day, would always be a majority, and they can force the buy-in price down to an acceptable level. Because they want other people to buy in.”

“Because the money stays in the pot if it doesn’t happen, and they don’t believe it will,” Sandy said.

Fiorella: “Yes!”

Clover: “If Sandy doesn’t nail you on that Friday—”

“Please, John,” Fiorella said.

“If you and Sandy don’t have coitus on Friday—”

“Coitus? That’s even worse,” Fiorella said. “Anyway, to get to the point, the money stays in the pot and the action moves to the next day.”

Clover scratched his chin. “Hypothetically, if you and Sandy were to stretch this out, running hot and cold along the way, raising hopes, then disappointing them, the money could get… large.”

“I wouldn’t say large. I would say huge,” Fiorella said. “Actually, as the retained pot gets larger and larger, the amount will tend to snowball. It could go to, who knows? A million? More? If Sandy and I had a really loud argument on the morning of the day it happened…”

“The buy-in on that date would be really low,” Clover said.

“And if we picked a fight date that nobody had bought, and then jumped in bed later in the day, someone who bought in would keep it all,” Sandy said, his eyes narrowing.

“You and Sandy couldn’t bet on this, because then everybody would know that you could fix it,” Clover said to Fiorella. “But if a third person were to know the actual date, you and the third person could move things around so…”

“We could make a fuckin’ fortune,” Fiorella said. “Excuse the pun.”

Sandy said to Fiorella, “You have a criminal mind. I admire that in a woman.”

“So do I,” Clover said. He rubbed his hands together. “Who do I talk to about getting in the pool? The handyman?”

A few days later:

Becca said, “If this doesn’t work, I’ll kill you.”

Mark Vaughn, a computer tech safely ensconced on Earth, said, “It would have stopped the last one, or anything like that. We won’t have the same fault, I promise you that. Other faults—well, it’s your design, sweetie.”

“Call me sweetie again and I’ll kill you.”

“Anyway, Becca, ma’am, sir—you’re good. That last batch of code looked great if you didn’t look too hard, but basically, it was marginal, in my opinion, and you probably ought to burn down that code farm and switch all the contracts to us. This batch… this batch is the cleanest, most robust stuff in the world. I mean that literally. In the world.”

“If this batch blows us up again…”

“I know, you’ll kill me.”

“That’s correct.”

“Let me know what happens,” Vaughn said.

“Don’t worry about that: it’ll be all over your screen, one way or the other.”

A few days after that:

The other marines all looked at Sergeant Margaret Pastor, who said, “I know. I’m the smallest.”

“It’s not much of a leak,” said one of the guys.

“It’s not ‘how much.’ It’s what it is,” Pastor said.

What it was, was human waste, a brown trickle that could be seen spattering the floor. What was happening was a leak in a pressurized sewer pipe, and the fastest way to get to the leak was to send somebody down a cable tunnel, not meant for human access, with a laser cutter. That person would cut a hole in the wall of the cable tunnel, and then reach up and seal the leak in the sewer pipe with an epoxy injector.

“A shit job,” said one of the guys, and the rest of them, with the exception of Pastor, fell about laughing.

“I didn’t join the Marine Corps to clean up somebody’s poop,” Pastor said.

“No, but you volunteered to be cross-trained in maintenance, and none of the rest of us can fit into that pipe.”

“Give me the fuckin’ cutter. And get a garbage bag. I’ll wrap myself in the bag.”

The job took an hour: fifteen minutes to carefully cut through the cable pipe, another fifteen to plug the leak, during which time Pastor got liberally spattered with the effluent, another fifteen minutes to vacuum the crap out of the cable tunnel.

When she finished, she scooted herself backwards, until her feet were sticking out of the tunnel, and then the guys grabbed her by the ankles and pulled her out.

She was still on the floor, unwrapping the plastic bag that hadn’t done much to protect her from the waste, when Fang-Castro turned the corner and asked, “What’s that smell?”

When the explanations were finished, Fang-Castro told Pastor, “We’ve got a seat going down on the shuttle tomorrow. You want it, it’s yours.”

Leave was getting scarcer, especially for the military people. Pastor said, “Ma’am, I’d really love to see my mom one last time, before we go.”

“I’ll fix it with Captain Barnes. And thank you for this.”

A few days more:

Vintner was not quite asleep, his feet up on his desk, when he heard the heels snapping down the subbasement’s concrete floor, coming fast.

Women’s heels had different sounds. Most of the higher-ranked women in the White House wore chunky heels because they wanted to look dressy, but knew they’d inevitably spend a lot of time on their feet, and their days were long. Women of lesser rank tried to emulate the dressiness of those higher up, wearing the chunky heels some of the time, but many, on the days when they didn’t expect to do anything important, took a step down and wore flats, or disguised flats. Those of still lesser rank, who generally were making deliveries—mail, policy statements, budget documents, and so on—usually wore running shoes.

The chunky heels went clunk-clunk-clunk; the flats went clack-clack-clack; the running shoes went flap-flap-flap.

The shoes coming down the hall toward Vintner’s office were going peck-peck-peck on the concrete, which meant that they were high-heeled dress shoes, and very, very few women in the White House wore them, and those who did would not be coming to Vintner’s subbasement office… with one exception that he could think of.

The President.

A really, really angry president.

Santeros didn’t get angry when dealing with disaster, or plotting a disaster for somebody else—in those cases, anger was inefficient. But when she was pissed, usually about some stupidity, she tended to get physical.

Vintner kicked his feet off his desk, grabbed a bottle of water, poured some in his hands, rubbed the water across his face and up through his thinning hair, then wiped his face on his jacket sleeve. One second later, Santeros burst into his office.

She started by shouting, “Twibbit!”

Vintner popped to his feet. “Mr. President! I mean, Madam—”

“Grabaddibbit!”

“Ma’am, I can’t understand…”

Santeros’s face was a fiery red, but she slowed, took a deep breath, and when her voice came back, it was icy cold and totally comprehensible, which was worse.

“Jacob: your man Johnson Morton. Unless it’s Morton Johnson…”

“Uh, I’m sorry, ma’am, I don’t recognize the name.”

The volume increased: “Do you recognize the name ‘Center for Psychological Policy Studies’?”

“Well, uh, sure, it’s a think tank, we contract out some policy studies to them when there might be a psychological component to whatever… the military sometimes… ma’am… what happened?”

“This happened!”

She fired a stapled wad of paper at his head. He managed to grab it, and unwadded and flattened it on his desk. The title said “Psychosexual Aspects of the Flight of the Nixon,” and beneath that, the author’s name, Johnson Morton.

Vintner’s mouth dropped open: “Psycho what? I never heard of this.”

She was shouting: “Morton! Or Johnson! Thinks we ought to put hookers on the Nixon, to take care of the crew’s sexual problems.”

“What?” Vintner would have laughed, if he hadn’t feared for his life. And job.

“Two each, male and female, bisexual for efficiency, to haul the ashes of those unable to pair up!”

“What?”

“Honest to God, Jacob, if you say ‘What?’ one more time, I’ll strangle you!”

“Ma’am, I know nothing about this. I’ll track it down, we’ll—”

Shouting some more: “Look at the bottom of the last page. The small print. What do you see there?”

Vintner looked and saw a typical block of small print, with some handwritten numbers. He looked more closely. The study had been sponsored and paid for by the federal government, under the handwritten grant number.

“Oh, shit. Well, ma’am… we can still bury it—”

“No, we can’t! No, we can’t! You know how I found out about this? I found out on PBS! I had Gladys download the doc, and they’re right. You know how much we paid for the study? One-point-two million. Morton! Or Johnson! According to the doc, INTERVIEWED some candidates for the job. Did he fuck them, Jacob, with OUR one-point-two million? If he did, how many did he fuck? Look at page seven: he says… Give me that goddamn thing.” She ripped through the pages, and then, “I quote: ‘obviously would require sexually desirable physical characteristics…’ What’s that, Jacob? A big fat cock? Is that what we’re talking about? Grabaddibbit, Twibbit…”

It would be difficult, in the best of circumstances, to tell a president that she sounded like a gerbil, and these were not the best of circumstances, and Vintner stood and took it until the spit stopped flying through the air, and she slowed down again.

“I swear to you, on my life, that I didn’t know about this,” he said. “I never heard about it. I never had a hint or a suggestion of it, and if I had, I would have stopped it and fired Johnson. Or Morton.”

She stared at him for a moment, then said, “I’m gonna rip somebody’s heart out.”

“I believe you. Do you want me to ask around—”

“No. I’ve got people who can do that better than you can. I just wanted to make sure you weren’t involved.”

“I was not.”

“Good. I really didn’t want to can your ass. But somebody will die.”

“Maybe nothing will happen…”

She snorted: “Jacob, this will be in history books. When they write the history of the Santeros Administration, this will be the third item. It will go viral, worldwide. They’re already cracking up in Beijing and Moscow. If I handle it just right, it will cost me only one percent of the vote in the next election. One-point-two million dollars, and there are underclassmen who work all day for eighteen dollars an hour. Jesus H. Christ.” She took a deep breath, then said, “Thank you for letting me scream at you, and not getting up in my face. I need to calm down.”

“A little yoga…”

“Yoga? Yoga? Gzzibit! Magrabbit!…” And she was gone.

Vintner turned on his office vid screen, which was tuned to CBSNN. He’d intended to click over to PBS, but that was unnecessary. The talking head—actually it was more of a talking-head-and-body, a woman so beautiful that she must have come from a different planet, possibly with the aliens—was saying in the most somber tones, “So we asked Johnson Morton what he meant by that, ‘obviously would require sexually desirable physical characteristics,’ and this is what he told us…”

Cut to Johnson Morton, a fleshy young man with black hair combed straight back from his forehead, and eyebrows like woolly bear caterpillars; Morton knitted his fingers together and said, “We did a comprehensive study of the most desirable physical…”

From up and down the subbasement hallway, where the President’s temper tantrum had been overheard, people started laughing. Roaring with laughter. Back-slapping belly laughs.

Vintner closed his eyes for a brief prayer, that Santeros was in fact gone.

Then he started laughing himself, laughing until the tears came.

If Morton hadn’t gotten fucked in the course of his studies, he thought, that was about to change.

Early May.

Fiorella was in an EVA suit, floating next to a construction worker who was re-forming a wedge-shaped piece of the station’s superstructure on the habitat side of the reactor; Sandy was in an egg, twenty meters away, working his cameras.

The worker, whose name was Everett, and who came from Tacoma, Washington, gave a ten-second explanation of what she was doing, and then Fiorella moved away from her, just a bit, so that Sandy could keep her working in the background, but also close on Fiorella’s face.

“With two months to go until Nixon’s launch, this former space station is an around-the-clock hive of activity. With the whole world following the Celestial Odyssey—the Chinese ship has just passed the orbit of Jupiter—space has stopped being routine for a large fraction of humanity, for the first time in a century. Anyone with a pair of binoculars or even a small telescope can watch as dozens of construction workers like Everett finish the American ship.”

“I don’t like that sentence,” Sandy said on his direct link to Fiorella. “I think it should be, space has stopped being routine for the first time in a century.”

They talked about that and Fiorella reworked it, and when it was done, they headed back inside.

The work outside was now so intense that getting egg time and suit time was becoming difficult; they wouldn’t get it at all, if the President hadn’t spoken directly to Fang-Castro about it. “This will either be a triumph or a disaster. If it’s a disaster, there’s nothing I can do about it. But if it’s a triumph, I want the credit, goddamnit, and that means you put the news people out there anytime they want to go. I’ll talk to them about keeping it to a necessary minimum, but if they think it’s necessary, you put them out there.”

The news links now had countdown clocks on their screens, and England’s Daily Mail announced a new construction disaster at the top of every cycle, along with rumors of zero-gravity orgies, secret contacts with the aliens (with photographs of Santeros talking with a meter-tall large-eyed silvery alien in the Oval Office), and rumors that the whole trip was a fraud by the Americans and Chinese, just as all twenty moon landings had been.

For the general public, what Fletcher had characterized as “the most important scientific discovery in history”—Sandy’s discovery of the starship—was increasingly lost in the noise: there wasn’t any starship, not anymore, just some scientists announcing there’d been one. There were no little green men coming to visit, no “To Serve Man” landings on the White House lawn or in the plaza of the Forbidden City. The starship was an abstraction that fascinated folks for a few weeks and then got pushed out of consciousness by the humdrum minutiae of daily life.

But when you could look up in the sky and see a spaceship being built, that was real.

Back inside, Sandy tracked Fiorella as she floated down the length of the center shaft, through Engineering. Sandy was floating as well, but behind him, one of the engineers, who was off-shift, was standing on the “floor” with gripping pads on his shoes, holding Sandy upright and at the same time backing down the shaft, as Fiorella, given a shove by another volunteer, who had then slipped out of sight, floated toward them. Every minute or so, air resistance would start slowing Fiorella down, and they would start over.

“This all became very real for us with yesterday’s one-hundred-percent burn, our first full-fledged engine tests,” Fiorella said to the cameras. “The Nixon has four VASIMR engines, two coupled to each reactor/power subsystem. Each engine, full on, gobbles down over two and a half gigawatts of electricity. Combined, they suck up more juice than many major cities. What the Nixon gets for all that juice is thrust. For those of you with scientific minds, at launch, the VASIMRs will deliver over two hundred thousand newtons of thrust. That sounds like a lot, except each of the Chinese’s ten nuclear thermal engines produces five times as much thrust as Nixon’s entire complement.

“The Nixon is not a sprinter. At launch, it won’t even manage half a percent of a gee. The Chinese ship took off twenty times faster, the rabbit to the American tortoise. It couldn’t keep that up. After a handful of hours of that, the Odyssey had exhausted its reaction mass and was coasting on its trajectory to Saturn—as it still is.

“The Nixon is a marathoner. The nuclear-electric VASIMR system won’t shut down after a few hours or even a few days. It can run nonstop for months, accelerating the ship to the halfway point near Jupiter’s orbit and then continuously decelerating it until it arrives at Saturn. The VASIMRs will only add a handful of centimeters-per-second velocity to the Nixon every second. But there are a lot of seconds—more than eighty thousand in a day, two and a half million in a month. That adds up to a lot of velocity.”

“I think we might be getting too technical,” Sandy said.

“Hey: let me do this, you just run the cameras,” Fiorella said. “I’ve written in optional cuts. Some people will get the comic-book version, some of them will get the science.”

“If you say so.”

“I say so. How does my lipstick look?”

“It’s okay so far, but stay away from that left corner.” Fiorella had a tendency to chew the lipstick off her lower left lip. “Keep going.”

“I will have to say,” Fiorella said to the camera, “that as important as the tests were, they were spectacularly boring to look at. The engineers who were in charge of making the reactor play nice with the cooling vanes were successful, but once the sails were out, they didn’t look like much of anything but sheets of tinfoil, and the plasma exhaust from a VASIMR engine produces only the faintest of glows. You can barely see it even on the nightside.

“But make no mistake: this was a critical test and the Nixon passed it with flying colors. This was our first real space flight. We only raised our orbit by a hundred kilometers or so, but it was our first step, if only a baby step, toward the mysterious moons of Saturn.”

Sandy looked away from his cameras: “Moons of Saturn?”

“Well, we think we’re going to a moon.”

“But most people don’t know that, they think we’re going to the rings.”

“Sandy…”