Saturn Run

2.

He was running late.

Severely late, though he didn’t much care. The warm, soupy aroma of marijuana hung about his shoulder-length blond Jesus hair. The van found an approved space, parked itself, and he climbed out, grabbed his pack, threw it over one shoulder, and ambled toward Astro, taking his time.

He was a large young man, barefoot, wearing damp burnt-orange board shorts and an olive drab T-shirt. When he came out of the ramp, he flinched: movement on the roof of a building down and to his right. A microsecond after the flinch, he recognized it as a Pasadena parrot, rather than a sniper. That was good. He moved on, detouring around the traditional Caltech drying-lumps-of-dogshit in the middle of the sidewalk outside Astro, sighed, and went through the door.

He no longer had implants and so wore a wrist-wrap, which cleared him through Astro’s security gate. Inside the lobby, he took the fire stairs instead of the elevator.

At the fifth floor, he peeked through the window on the fire door, to make sure that Fletcher wasn’t standing in the hallway. He’d been through a lot of trauma in his short life, and trauma, he thought, he could handle. And he’d thought he could handle Fletcher’s pomposity, but he was no longer sure of that. Sometimes, he thought, bullshit was worse than bullets.

Fletcher was not in sight, and he went on through the door and trotted down the hall toward his cubbyhole at the far end of the building, also known as the ass end, where the lowest-status people worked.

The main thing that everybody knew about Sanders Heacock Darlington—besides the fact that he had three last names, no first names, and showed remarkably little ambition—was that in two years, when he turned thirty, he would inherit money. Lots of money. More money than anyone in the Caltech Astrophysics Working Group had any chance of making in a lifetime.

And he was hot. His eyes were the same deep blue as the Hope Diamond, he had big white teeth, and a dimple in his chin, all original. He had that Jesus hair, a terrific surfer’s physique, and an easy way with women.

In the Astro context, that made him extraordinarily annoying.

But he had, said the women who got to know him—there were a steadily increasing number of them in Astro—an absolutely black side that never showed at work.

Where that came from, they didn’t know. Drugs, they said, may have been involved. There were hints of violence, that whole untoward incident at the Santa Monica Pier, and some odd scars on his otherwise flawless chest, back, and buttocks. When they probed, they were politely put down. But there was something dark and werewolf-ish behind those perfect teeth….

Best not to pry, they agreed.

As he turned the last corner, he nearly ran over Sarah McGill.

Sandy hadn’t tried to hustle McGill, though she’d been more pleasant than most of the people in the working group. She wasn’t a beauty—he tended to favor beauties—but she was prodigiously smart, and she didn’t treat him entirely like dog excrement. He’d lately noticed a certain languor about her, and the languor was sending signals to his hormones.

McGill dodged him, said, with a thin rime of sarcasm, “Right on time,” and was about to continue on her way, and he called, “Hey, you got a minute?”

“About ten seconds, Sandy,” she said. She had a full set of implants and he saw her eyes narrow as she checked the time. “Group meeting in nineteen.” She had a turned-up nose with freckles, and kinky dishwater-blond hair, cut short. She’d bagged Samsung as a sponsor and had a dime-sized Samsung logo on her collarbone, along with smaller and slightly less prestigious tags from ATL and Google, as fractional sponsors.

Sandy nodded. “I was wondering… you wanna get a steak and salad some night? Catch a show?”

“Stop there.”

“Hey, I’m just being human,” he said.

“Right. Thanks, Sandy, but I’ve got—”

“Listen, you’ve been nicer than most of these assholes. I kinda owe you. I’ve got tickets to Kid Little at the Beckman.”

Kid Little. She was tempted, he could see it in her eyes.

“Sandy…”

“I just want to go out and shake it a little,” he lied.

“Let me think about it,” she said. “I gotta go.”

“Yeah, the group meeting. Say hello for me.”

She twiddled her fingers at him and disappeared down the hall. Sandy was satisfied. One small step, he thought, as he continued on to his cubbyhole.

A janitor was coming down the hall with a push broom and they slapped hands as they passed, and the janitor said, “Tomorrow at dawn.”

“If I can,” Sandy said.

The janitor was a semipro surfer. Semipro surfing paid mostly in free burgers and beer.

Sandy was popular enough with janitors and maintenance men. His problem was with the academics. His status hadn’t been helped by the fact that his father had purchased the job for him. The senior Darlington had hinted to Caltech’s president that he would be extremely grateful if one of the working group professors would take his son under his wing. His son, he said delicately, was troubled: but not in some fractious, embarrassing way. He simply… didn’t do much.

Dr. Edward Fletcher, respected and thoroughly tenured astrophysicist, had been happy to fall on that sword. Darlington Senior had already given Caltech not one, but two research buildings, and was a major financial backer of Chuck, the congressman who got the money for Chuck’s Eye.

Fletcher could use a new building. Hungered for one. Preferably one called Fletcher Hall.

And it wasn’t as though Sandy was an idiot. He had a perfectly good degree, his father pointed out. In American Arts, from Harvard. He’d even taken the non-required science elective, called Calculus and Physics for Poets, by those who took it, and had gotten a B. That didn’t score any points among the astrophysicists.

“American Arts” was also known informally as the “College of Dilettantery,” and those who left with degrees could reliably identify both a Masaccio and a Picasso, manually expose a photograph, make a short film, discuss both Italian and Scandinavian furniture, dance, make him/herself understood in French, Italian, and Spanish, and play the guitar and piano. Orbital calculations, not so much.

As one of the Real Scientists put it, “He couldn’t change a fuckin’ tire,” which, in Caltech terms, didn’t literally mean he couldn’t change a tire, it simply meant he couldn’t reliably explain the difference between a Schwarzschild radius and Schrödinger’s cat.

There had been a stir of interest when the Astro group realized how much money was about to arrive in the shape of an intern, but a few minutes of research on the Internet revealed that Sandy had been through a number of career changes since leaving Harvard, and none of the jobs would have interested anyone in Astro.

He’d worked for Federal Mail for a while, but had apparently been unable to deliver, and had been fired. He’d been a vid-reporter with a marginally respectable independent news-and-porn blog, but that had ended badly, when Sandy threw an unclothed producer off the Santa Monica Pier, at low tide.

Lately, he’d been a surf bum and rhythm guitarist with a mostly girl-group called the LA Dicks. When asked by a leading Young Astro Star what he was going to do when he grew up, Sandy told him after he got Grandpa’s money, he planned to become a philanthropist, or a philatelist, or a philanderer, or perhaps a flautist?

“It’s one of those things,” he said, with a toothy grin. “I’ve never been, you know, a big vocabulary head.” The Young Star left with the feeling that Sandy had been pulling his weenie, which wasn’t supposed to happen to Stars; he’d had to look up “philatelist.”

Six months into the job, Sandy’s insouciance had begun to seriously wear on Fletcher, just as Fletcher’s pomposity wore on Sandy. Sandy couldn’t be fired—there was all that Darlington money out there. Fletcher did the next best thing: gave him make-work.

Sandy recognized the job for what it was, and so went surfing.

When he wasn’t surfing, and partly in revenge for the treatment he got from the Real Scientists, he was screwing his way through the department. So far, he’d had hasty relationships with seven of the seventeen single women in the research group. (One of the Young Astro Stars, holding court in the cafeteria, pointed out that both seven and seventeen were prime numbers, and if Sanders wanted to stay on course, and yet maintain that kind of fine arithmetical symmetry, he’d have to screw four more women, since eight, nine, and ten were not prime. A woman who overheard the comment said the Star’s erratic sense of humor was part of the reason that Sandy had managed to sleep with seven out of seventeen, while the Star was striking out. She added, before picking up her lunch tray, “You fuckin’ dweeb.”)

And the women who’d slept with young Sanders confessed to each other, over hushed lunches, that while it was possibly true that Sandy might not match their knowledge of advanced physics and astronomy, sex was one area in which young Darlington definitely knew how to change a tire. Even, on occasion, multiple tires.

So virtually all his male colleagues, and a considerable (but shrinking) fraction of the female contingent, loathed him. Not that their loathing amounted to much: rudeness, mostly. They cut him out of grad student meetings.

Which made what happened all that much worse.

The interns’ room was a windowless hall, a nearly perfect cube of yellow limestone, divided into sixteen tiny cubicles; it had once been a storage room.

There were four interns present when Sandy ambled through the door. Three of them were peering at computer screens, and the fourth had her head down on her desk. She snored.

“Man, you smell like pachuca weed,” one of the interns, Ravi Chandrakar, said, as Sandy passed.

“Yeah, well, you smell like chili-cheese wieners. Given a choice, I’d rather smell like dope,” Sandy said.

“That’s the goddamn truth,” said another of the interns. “You keep eating those fuckin’ chili-cheese wieners, I’m gonna drag you to a window and throw you the fuck out.”

“Yeah, right, like where are you gonna find a window?”

The sleeping woman stirred, but didn’t awaken; the hostility had been simulated.

Sandy took his desk, touched the ID pad with his index finger, and the screen popped up.

He had been assigned to nursemaid Chuck’s Eye. The work was not hard. Or, maybe it was, but the computers did it. Sandy was the human eye that double-checked the results, to make sure the computers hadn’t missed anything unusual enough that it fell outside their analysis parameters. And the computers would tell him if that happened, so he could alert a Real Scientist.

The current program didn’t even hold the possibility of uncovering an event of astronomical interest: it was a calibration run on a new camera module. The idea was to take a well-known, and therefore uninteresting, part of the sky and make simultaneous exposures with all the different-wavelength cameras. Superimpose them and make sure that all the little points of light aligned properly and that the spectra looked more or less normal.

Repeat that three times, at half-hour intervals, and make sure that those later stacks of images matched the first, so you knew that the tracking was good. Nothing in deep space changed rapidly, unless you were so amazingly lucky as to catch a supernova or gamma-ray burst, and the computers would recognize those things. Absent such a rarity, the four sets of stacked images should match up pixel for pixel.

It was a job made for a computer. But Chuck’s Eye was a seriously valuable resource, and the Real Scientists felt the same way about their time, so it fell upon Sandy to babysit it. It seemed the perfect place to park a guy who’d written a senior thesis on “Movement Art as Planetary Drive.”

To do his job, Sandy was required to push three keys on a computer keyboard to bring up a string of associated photos, then put his finger on the screen and drag them together, and then pinch them, and the computer would compare the images to see if anything untoward might be happening.

All this, in revenge for being a rich, good-looking, unemployable arts major. And, of course, that whole serial womanizer thing… to say nothing of the way he ran his mouth.

So he brought up his computer, put his feet on the desk, pulled open a drawer, unfolded a practice-guitar neck, and began running scales; it was a mindless activity that allowed him to maintain his left-hand calluses while he formulated his next move on McGill. He’d been doing that for twelve seconds when the computer pinged and produced a line of type:

That hadn’t happened before. Dating rituals forgotten for the moment, Sandy put the guitar-neck aside and frowned. “Hi-ho, Watson, the game’s afoot.” He touched a menu that had popped up on the side of the screen, selecting the word “Describe.”

The computer said:

Sandy dropped his bare feet to the floor and said to the computer, “It’s not just afoot, Holmes, it’s a whole fucking leg.”

“What’s that?” Chandrakar asked over a cubicle wall.

“Talking to myself. It’s the pachuca weed.”

“Told ja.”

Celestial objects do not decelerate, not even for Harvard graduates.

Sandy touched another menu item—Report—and the computer prepared a short report. The computer said:

What the holy hell? When had the test series been photographed? He checked: okay, mid-morning, about three hours earlier. About the time he should have gotten to work. Sandy tapped a few more keys, and the computer ran its virtual clock forward to the present time, extrapolating where the object would be if its behavior remained unchanged.

He checked the status board for all the SSO’s scopes and saw that none of them were in use at the moment. The various researchers had held off on scheduling observations in case the servicing of the SSO took longer than expected. Good. He walked down the hall and looked in Fletcher’s office, which was empty, along with most of the others.

Ah, he thought. The group meeting, to which he wasn’t invited. Okay, no witnesses.

Sandy punched in Fletcher’s authorization—he paid more attention to computer use than his coworkers suspected—and told Chuck’s Eye to grab another set of comparison frames. The anomaly was probably a camera failure in that new module, he thought. Really couldn’t be anything else.

He thought about it for another moment, checked down the hall again, and then retargeted the Medium Eye, which had never given them any trouble, to the extrapolated coordinates. He instructed the Medium Eye to send down three short-exposure images separated by five-minute intervals. That should confirm that nothing was at the target site: both cameras wouldn’t be wrong, at least not the same way.

But what was that thing the computer said, about “the object is real ~ 99%”?

Real? And decelerating?

Ten minutes to kill. He went and made fresh coffee, one of his assigned tasks. Anything that kept him from watching the clock. There must be a glitch. A major glitch. Because if it wasn’t, he’d found an impossibility. “The object is decelerating?”

Time’s up.

Sandy downloaded the files and ran them through the comparator. The new Chuck’s Eye image showed the same anomaly, same weird-ass spectra, not quite where the computer had projected it would be, but close enough for the Medium Eye to catch it. He pulled up those frames, superimposed them, centered on the anomaly at maximum magnification, and,

There. It. Fucking. Was.

Three little dots in a row. If this was an instrumentation glitch, then both telescopes were hallucinating exactly the same way.

Sandy punched in a new group of commands: calculate the current deceleration rate and position, combine it with those from three hours earlier, extrapolate an orbit.

EXTRAPOLATION: THE OBJECT WILL ACHIEVE SATURN ORBIT IN 13 HOURS.

The supervisory working group was meeting to argue about targeting priorities, when Sandy knocked on the door and stuck his head in. McGill was up at the whiteboard, writing down lines of mathematical symbols. He caught the words “synchrotron radiation” and “anomalous jets.” Whatever that meant—whatever it was, it seemed to impress the working group. As they turned from the whiteboard to look at Sandy, Fletcher rolled his eyes back into his skull. Then, with an effort, he controlled the reaction and said, with poorly concealed impatience, “What is it, Sanders?”

Sandy, knowing precisely how much he’d begun to irritate Fletcher, put on his best toothy smile and asked, “How’s it going, big guy?”

Fletcher ground his teeth. “I’m in a meeting here, Sanders, as you can see. If you could come back in an hour, or maybe tomorrow…”

“The computer found a critical anomaly in Chuck’s Eye and Medium Eye images,” Sandy said. “I thought I should tell you before I called the LA Times.”

In the momentary silence, one of the postdocs said to Fletcher, “He’s looking at the test images from the vibe fix.”

Fletcher muttered something to himself, which might have included the word “prick,” and asked Sandy, “Well, Sanders… did you get a report?”

Sandy peered at the piece of paper in his hand, as if he were having trouble reading it, and said, “The computer said there’s a critical anomaly. It says there is an object approaching Saturn, that it is real, that it is kilometers long and across, that its spectra is UV-rich-hot, and that it is emitting hydrogen.”

Slight pause for effect; Sandy knew he was now the center of attention and didn’t mind milking it for another fraction of a second.

“Oh yeah, it’s decelerating, and it will achieve Saturn orbit in thirteen hours.”

The Real Scientists all looked at each other, and then Fletcher said, “Give me that paper.”

A minute later, he said, “We need to run a confirming series.”

“Done that,” Sandy said, holding up a second sheet.

Fletcher looked even more annoyed, started to snap out something, and thought better of it. He took a deep breath. “Okay, and what did that tell us?”

Sandy handed him the second sheet of paper.

The working group stampeded down the length of the table to crowd behind Fletcher’s rounded shoulders, as they all read the paper together. After a minute, somebody said, “Sweet bleedin’ Jesus.”

Fifteen hours later, Fletcher, exhausted from hyperactivity and lack of sleep, scrubbed his balding pate with his fingernails, looked around at the others in the room—the working group plus a couple of Astro Ultra Stars, plus a thin, dark-eyed man from Washington who had managed to scare the shit out of everybody in Astro—and said, “So, what we’re saying is… Sanders Heacock Darlington made the most important scientific discovery in history? That asshole?”

“He couldn’t change a fuckin’ tire,” somebody said.

“Maybe not,” said the man from Washington, who scared them all. “But he found an alien starship.”