The Getaway Special

6

“It’ll take three jumps to put us back in orbit,” Allen said. “I already figured out how to do it weeks ago. I call it a ‘tangent vector translation maneuver.’ ”

“That’s kind of a mouthful,” Judy said. She and Carl were looking over his shoulders again as he programmed the coordinates into his computer.

“It’s descriptive,” Allen replied. “When you’re in orbit, your vector is always tangent to the point you’re occupying at the moment. So to slip into a particular orbit, you have to translate your current vector into one that’s tangent to the orbit you want. What we do is jump to within a few thousand miles of Earth, where we’re close enough to use the tracking satellites and ground radar to establish our vector but far enough away to keep from hitting anything if we’re aimed the wrong direction. Then once we know how fast we’re going and what direction we’re headed, we jump to the right point over the planet for gravity to warp our trajectory into the right one for where we want to be, and then we pop into low-Earth orbit with just the right vector. It’s a piece of cake.”

“Famous last words,” Carl said.

Allen ignored him. “First translation coming up.” He pressed the “Jump” key.

The radio beacon beeped. Judy looked out the forward windows just in time to see Saturn vanish like a switched-out light, and Earth pop into existence to the right of where it had been. It was much larger, filling about sixty degrees of view, which meant they were closer than the Moon, but still way beyond normal orbital altitude.

“Checking our position…” Allen said slowly. “Hah! I was less than fifty kilometers off target.”

“Good for you,” Carl said in a voice that said just the opposite. He turned away and pulled himself past Judy into the copilot’s chair.

“What are you doing?” she asked when she saw him reaching for the radio controls.

“I want to find out how much damage we’ve done on the ground.”

Judy wasn’t sure she wanted to know, but she supposed there was no point in delaying the inevitable. “All right,” she said, “but no transmissions just yet. Let’s find out how much trouble we’re in before we let them know we’re back.”

“They’ll spot us quick enough with radar,” Carl pointed out.

“If they’re looking out here. We must be ten thousand kilometers up.”

“Twelve,” Allen said.

“Won’t matter,” Carl said, but he set the radio to receive only and started sifting through the commercial frequencies, switching on the cabin speaker so all three of them could hear.

There weren’t many stations with the power to punch a clear signal that far into space, and there was a lot of static from stations that had just enough signal to create interference, but Carl managed to tune in an English-language station long enough to hear the end of the Beatles’ “Yesterday.”

“Appropriate,” he sneered. The deejay came on and told them that the weather was partly cloudy and fifty-seven degrees out with a slight chance of rain in the higher elevations. Judy chuckled as she always did when she heard that phrase from space, but her breath caught in her throat at the deejay’s next words.

“Here’s an update on the new computer virus that…”

Whatever else he had to say was lost in static.

Judy felt her heart lurch. “Get that station back!” she ordered.

Carl tried, but atmospheric conditions had apparently changed enough to block it. He tuned on across the spectrum until he heard another snippet:

“…extremely virulent email virus has apparently mutated into three different forms already. The original ‘hyperdrive plans’ form hit less than an hour ago, but the Internet Virus Watch Consortium has already detected two variations, one with a subject line reading ‘Wait, it’s real!’ and another one reading simply ‘Hoax.’ These are very dangerous virus programs that can apparently cause irreparable hardware damage to your computer if you even open them, so the only safe course of action is to delete them unopened, even if it appears that they were sent by someone you know.”

Judy looked over at Allen, whose mouth was open wide enough to stick his foot into. “Impossible, is it?” she asked.

“It—I—how could they do that so fast?”

“Like I said earlier, they’ve probably had contingency plans for something like this ready to go for years. A real virus they can rename to mimic your email and send out from thousands of sites all at once; it would overrun the entire net within minutes.”

“It wouldn’t be a virus,” Carl said happily. “It’s an email worm. Reads the address book on the target computer and sends out more copies of itself to everyone listed there.”

She glared at him. “Virus, worm, whatever; the important thing is that somebody’s managed to do an end-run around Allen’s email.”

“Yes, they have, haven’t they? They’ve given us a second chance.”

“Second chance, my ass! This is a power grab, pure and simple. Whoever did this is trying to keep it all to themselves. You don’t really think they’re going to tuck the plans away and never use them, do you?”

Carl shook his head. “Of course not. There’ll be controlled experimentation, cautious exploration, and—”

“By whom? The CIA? Carl, do you really want them to be the ones who lead humanity into space?”

That took a little of the wind out of his sails, but not enough. “It’s a moot point,” he said. “They’ve won.”

“No they haven’t,” Allen growled. He tapped at his keyboard, the radio beacon beeped again, and Earth shrank to a third its former size.

“Where did you take us?” Judy asked. “Geosynchronous orbit.”

The communication satellite, like practically everything the shuttle carried into orbit, looked like a cylindrical tank with solar panels and antennas attached to it. Judy had seen dozens of them in her time as a pilot, but never from her current vantage point: just behind one in orbit 36,000 kilometers from Earth. In normal operation the shuttle never got that high; the satellites were released in low orbit and had to use their own engines to climb into position.

It had taken Discovery another two jumps to reach it, but that was just to fine-tune their orbit. The extra velocity they had picked up during their fall toward the Moon had been almost exactly what they needed.

Now Allen was outside in a spacesuit, tethered to the end of the shuttle’s manipulator arm while he plugged his computer into the satellite’s diagnostic port. Judy, watching through the payload bay windows, could see him tapping the keys with a screwdriver off his tool belt because his gloved fingers were too thick to type with.

“How’s it going?” she asked over the intercom.

“Just about got it,” he replied. “I’ve got all five hundred channels ready to accept my input when I give the command, so now all I need to do is hook up the video stream.”

The black-and-white screen beside the back windows was showing an old rerun of Space Rangers at the moment. Normally it was used to watch the manipulator arm at work, but they could patch any signal they wanted to it. Allen had strung an antenna out in front of the satellite so they could monitor its broadcast, and Judy had tuned through the microwave channels until she had found an unscrambled show. “I can’t believe it,” she said. “You can just plug in your computer and take over an entire communications satellite?”

He laughed. “Well, it helps if you’ve got the control program already loaded.”

“And where did you get that?”

“Friends in high places.”

Carl, who’d been glowering from the copilot’s chair all the while, laughed derisively. “Another nut case from INSANE, no doubt. I hope he hangs alongside you when the Feds catch up with him.”

Allen didn’t bother to reply. Neither did Judy. She was just as tired of shutting him up as she was of listening to him. The only reason she hadn’t locked him into a bunk alongside Gerry was because she knew he wouldn’t do anything to stop her or Allen from what they were doing. He’d lost the argument, but he wasn’t the type to try forcing his way. He would wait for the courts to exonerate him, and in the meantime he would snipe at them and make them feel guilty.

Judy would have felt guiltier if she believed him, but she still didn’t buy his rationale. There might be some economic disruption as people got used to the idea that they weren’t stuck on one planet anymore, but throwing the internet into chaos to stop the plans had probably caused more financial damage than the hyperdrive would. And as for the personal consequences, she might lose her job for failing to follow orders, but she couldn’t believe she’d be in any real danger when they got home. This wasn’t the seventeenth century, after all, and unlike Galileo, neither she nor Allen would have to recant their beliefs on pain of death. Once the secret was out, scientists everywhere would confirm it, and when that happened the government would have far bigger things to worry about than prosecuting Judy and Allen for giving it away.

“Okay, I’m ready,” Allen said. “Here goes.” The notebook computer was dangling at the end of its data cable; he grasped it in his left glove while he pushed the “Enter” key with his right index finger.

Space Rangers whirled into static, replaced by a bright blue screen with white words: “Emergency Alert. If you have videotape equipment, set it to record the following program.” Allen’s calm, classical-station-disk-jockey voice read the message aloud, then the screen cleared to show Allen himself, dressed in a white spacesuit liner, in a sequence that Judy had filmed just minutes earlier with one of the shuttle’s public relations cameras. They had stored the image digitally on his computer’s hard drive, and he was playing it back now through the video interface.

“By now you may have already heard that the Space Shuttle Discovery has demonstrated a revolutionary new device, a faster-than-light engine for traveling through space. I am Doctor Allen Meisner, the inventor of that device, and I’ve interrupted your program today to give you the plans for it.” He smiled wide for the camera, and Judy winced at how goofy he looked. Nobody was going to believe him. People all over the world were no doubt switching channels already, sure that he was selling something.

But then, he was on all the channels. They could switch satellites if they wanted, but even then they would probably encounter him on at least half the channels there. All the communications satellites were linked these days, relaying signals around the globe. Even the European satellites were part of the system. They could be taken off-line from the ground, but Judy knew not all of them would be. Not in time, anyway. The ones under private control—like the one they had hijacked—probably wouldn’t go off-line at all. After all, this was news, and none of the networks would want to be the only ones not carrying it.

The video zoomed in on the computer screen, which showed an image of the circuit diagram that Allen had attempted to email to everyone. In a voice-over, he described how to assemble it and how the finished engine worked. The whole thing took less than ten minutes, including the last-minute addition that he had hastily cobbled together to explain the distance calibration. The presentation looked like a bad high school physics film the way he—or more often just his hand—pointed out various parts of circuit diagrams, but as Judy watched him describe how to build and operate a hyperdrive engine, she couldn’t help but be impressed. Some people, anyway, would record it, and that’s all that mattered. It wouldn’t take long for them to realize it was genuine, and once the secret was in private hands, it would spread throughout the world just as fast as an email virus.

The radio came alive with frantic calls from Mission Control the moment the television broadcast began, but Judy switched it off. She already knew what they would have to say. Her skin prickled as she waited for a laser blast from the defense satellites, but she didn’t really think that would happen. This was an international communications satellite, and unlike the automatic shot that hit the shuttle’s tail fin, shooting at them now would take an executive decision to authorize. She was willing to bet nobody would stick their neck out to do that, not without thinking it over very carefully, by which time Judy and her crew would be gone.

They let Allen’s video repeat once before they unplugged it and let the satellite resume its normal programming. Judy brought the arm and Allen down into the cargo bay again, then moved the shuttle away with the maneuvering engines as soon as Allen was in the airlock. A few minutes later he had removed his spacesuit and joined her on the flight deck. “Where to now?” he asked, taking his position at the hyperdrive controls.

“The space station, I guess,” Judy said. “I think we’ve done about all we can do from out here.”

Carl snorted. “Believe me, you’ve done more than enough.”