Analog SFF, June 2011 (6 page)

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.