Boundary 1: Boundary (6 page)

He'd also been a solid fieldworker, early in his career, though he hadn't done any fieldwork in many years. For at least a decade, now, he'd been generally considered one of paleontology's top theorists. He had, in fact, been one of Helen's instructors for her graduate work—and probably the best.

If Glendale did decide to weigh in against Helen's work, she could really be in for trouble.

Helen saw the wince and smiled wryly. "You finally get it. And no, my chivalrous friend, there's nothing you can do about it. If you were thirty years older and at the top of the profession, maybe. But then you'd most likely be on the other side, anyway. If things work out well, don't worry. You'll all get the credit you deserve. I'll shout it from the top of the library building, if I have to."

"I'm not worried about that!"

"Maybe not, but
I
am. That's the part that rankles most about not putting your name—and Jackie's, Bill's and Carol's—on this paper. I feel like I'm cheating you, even while I'm trying to keep you out of the mudslinging. The only reason A.J. is listed is because his field won't care about ours, and it's really our only payment to him for the work he did."

"Well, then, don't worry, okay? None of us think anything like that."

He glanced at the sheaf of papers that summarized the many months of work Helen had done at the dig. Joe himself, along with Jackie, had only participated that first summer before their engineering careers made any further such time-consuming sidelines impossible.

He grinned as he once more read the name in the title. "And Jackie, at least, is getting her credit right there."

". . . of
Bemmius secordii
."

Helen finished and looked up. She tried to maintain a detached and professional expression, but it wasn't easy. Half of her wanted to burst out laughing at the expressions around the table, and the other half wanted to dive into a foxhole.

The room was silent. For a long time.

Finally, one of the visitors cleared his throat and said: "The study of the raptors is brilliant. But I noticed that you don't speculate on the holes in the skeletons. Or on the—ah, pebbles—that you found scattered about the site."

"That's true," replied Helen. "I simply reported the facts. People can draw whatever conclusions they choose. I don't feel I'm in a position to do so. Michael Jennings feels he has an excellent explanation for them, however, and he will be describing his theory in a separate paper."

Silence.

Another visitor spoke.

"Your treatment of the new species is also very restrained. The description is excellent, and I personally found your analysis of the presumed shape and locomotion quite convincing. But again, you draw no general conclusions. You don't even attempt to locate the animal within any established phylum."

"You're right. Where would you put it?"

Silence.

After another long pause, Director Bonds spoke.

"One small point, Helen. I'm a little puzzled by the name you've chosen for this new species. The species name is for the Secords, of course. But why the generic name?"

Helen managed to keep from smiling. "Oh, I don't know. I needed a name, and that one just came to me."

Fortunately, none of the people in that room were regular readers of science fiction. So she got away with it.

That was the easy one,
she thought to herself an hour later, relaxing in the chair of the borrowed office. The museum had supported the dig, was getting the skeletons, and had every reason to accept whatever they got. But the peer-review process was bound to get interesting. By the time the paper came out publicly, months from now, the whole field would be alerted to the gist of its content. That would generate an instant academic brawl, which would reach a climax at the major conference next year.

The phone rang. Startled, she stared at the warbling instrument for a moment before finally picking it up. "Dr. Kamen's office, Dr. Sutter speaking."

"What's up, Doc? How'd the grilling go?"

Even over the phone, Helen recognized the exuberant voice. She was startled to hear it, though. She wouldn't have thought that, after more than a year, A.J. Baker would have still been following her work. She knew from Joe Buckley that his friend Baker was up to his eyeballs in his own project at Ares.

That's . . . kind of intriguing, actually.

She shook off the thought. "Not too badly, A.J. They knew I was dancing around certain subjects, sure. But they didn't want to go there either, so that works out pretty well for me."

"I still say I'd just go for it. Hit 'em with the truth and to hell with the rest."

"Oh, how I wish. Apparently, when it comes to professional status, your field works differently than mine."

"Well, yes, that's true. In my trade, there are those who are good, those who are excellent, and those who are divine. I have sufficient worshippers to qualify for the third category."

"And you're the most modest person you know, too."

He laughed. "Damn straight! So no one caught on?"

"Well . . . The director did ask about the name. But either he didn't quite get it, or he was really working hard on ignoring it."

"Maybe everyone else will do the same."

"Ha. I laugh. And I laugh again. Everybody at the museum is friendly. Some of the people in this field are long-standing professional rivals of mine. Outright
enemies,
in the case of at least one or two. And they'll all have lots of time to read over my paper, once it comes out. For that matter, plenty of them will be reading it already.

You can bet copies will get circulated ahead of publication, no matter what the rules are. Oh, they'll be ready for me and Bemmie, A.J., don't you worry about that. Come along to the conference next fall. You can see me get burned in effigy. It'll be a big bonfire, too, with them having almost eighteen months to pile up the firewood."

"I'd love to, but it'll probably be impossible." A.J.'s voice sounded sincerely wistful. "Especially since I'd gladly roast anyone trying to light flames under you, and—if I do say so myself—I'm damn good at roasting people. 'To Serve Man' is my favorite bedtime reading."

Helen laughed herself at that. A.J.'s cheerful delivery made the whole conversation lighter. "So come on, then! The conference next year will be held in Phoenix, which isn't even that far away for you."

"No, it isn't—even allowing for the fact that New Mexico and Arizona are both big states. Hell of a scenic drive, too. But the problem isn't the travel time, it's the time I'd have to spend at the conference. Alas, though it devastates me, dear lady, I fear I cannot, for duty doth call."

A.J. had put on a very exaggerated Ye Olde English accent for the last sentence, but promptly lapsed back into his usual Wiseass American. "We're kicking into high gear over at Ares, and I've been given the green light to go all-out in designing my sensor gear. You're talking to the man who's going to be first on Mars. Well, at least by proxy, but I get to design and run the proxies. And, who knows, maybe I'll actually get sent myself. Still, by next summer I'll be working round the clock and I doubt very much I'd be able to go attend a paleontology conference. Send me lots of pics and a transcript, though."

"You want pictures?"

"Of course. Mostly of you, though, not the stuffy old professors."

A.J. was too hearty with the flirty approach. But he segued back into the dry humor that Helen thought fit him much more comfortably. "Though if you can get some pics of people about to explode with outrage when you read your paper, I'd enjoy that also. By the way, thanks loads for the 3-D model you made of Bemmie. I have him as my wallpaper at work."

She heard a voice in the background. "Whoops! Gotta go, Dr.

Sutter. Hey, hope you enjoy the e-mail I just sent! Bye!"

"Goodbye, A.J." she said, but he'd already cut off. Her portable pinged, signaling that A.J.'s message had arrived. She saw it contained an animation file, which she opened.

A flying saucer floated down the screen, disgorging a rather disquietingly cute
Bemmius
: squat, overly short, with exaggerated eyes and a completely anatomically wrong smiling mouth under the three forelimbs.

Bemmie scuttled in its odd way across a simple landscape, coming upon a bunch of similarly overcute raptors. Bemmie held up a sign: TAKE ME TO YOUR LEADER
.
The raptors leaped at him, there was a struggle, and over the now unconscious body of Bemmie one of the raptors held up another sign: LEADER? I THOUGHT HE SAID LARDER!

She laughed again, even though the joke was pretty lame. He'd clearly put some work into that one. Bemmie might have been given a sort of face against his anatomical realities, but it had taken some thought to create a cartoon version of his actual locomotion style.

She dictated a quick, appreciative thank you, and then stood up. It was time to start working again. For the next year and a half, she wouldn't have much chance for relaxation.

Jackie Secord gripped the frame of the observation port tightly, staring at the strange assemblage of spherical tanks, tubing, and massive bracing structures within the almost unbelievably huge enclosure before her. Behind, a calm voice continued the countdown. "Five . . . four . . . three . . . two . . . one. . .
Firing
."

From the center of the assemblage a monstrous tongue of flame reared up. Even through the soundproofing and vibration-absorbing material of the test facility, there came a deep-throated, thundering roar that shook the room. The sound went on and on, an avalanche of white noise that overwhelmed even her shout of triumph. It also wiped out the continuing counts and updates of the engineers, who had to resort to electronic communication rather than attempt to make themselves heard over the force of that unbelievable sound.

Finally, when it seemed to Jackie that even her bones were vibrating from the unending song of power, it cut off.
Then
she could hear the yells, the whistles, and leaped into the air herself with a cowboy whoop.

"It worked, it
worked
!" she shouted, ears still ringing with that impossible noise.

"And why should it not?" the deep, sonorous voice of Dr. Satya Gupta inquired calmly. "The concept was proven decades ago. It was merely a new design that needed to be tested."

"Dr. Gupta, you can't stand there and tell me you didn't feel anything—any nervousness, any anticipation—while we were counting down to the first firing!"

The dark eyes twinkled. "Well . . . Anticipation, certainly. The success of such a project, this is the reward of an engineer."

Jackie loved that considered, deliberate delivery, with the exotic combination of Indian and English accents flavoring Dr. Gupta's precise and well-crafted speech.

There was nothing unusual about Gupta's appearance—dark skin, black hair, symmetrical and well-molded face with a hooked nose over a brilliant smile, and he always dressed as though attending a formal dinner. Nothing unique at all, unless you counted the sharpness of those black eyes. It was Satya Gupta's
voice
that caught one's attention.

Everyone remarked on it, sooner or later. When A.J. Baker had met Gupta, he'd said: "So
that's
what Saruman is supposed to sound like."

Being A.J., he'd said it right in front of Gupta, too. Fortunately, the Indian engineer had a good sense of humor and hadn't been offended.

"So you never worried about something going wrong?"

Gupta gave an elaborate shrug. "It is always possible for there to be a failure, of course. Why else do we engineers always try to allow for all possibilities—and then add more reinforcements, just in case? On the other hand, a machine that is designed correctly should work. It
will
work. On this premise, Ms. Secord, our entire civilization depends."

Jackie almost laughed. Coming from anyone else, Gupta's little speeches and saws would just sound pompous; coming from him, they were simply right.

"Still—a nuclear rocket, Dr. Gupta! We just fired the first nuclear rocket since NERVA shut down!"

"Speaking for myself," Dr. Philip Moynihan said from his chair near the observation port, "I knew perfectly well it would work, and I still feel the same way Jackie does." The very elderly researcher was the only living man in the room who had participated in the original NERVA tests in the 1960s. "It's wonderful to see the new rocket fired for the first time."

Steven Schiffer, as was his way, added a cautionary note. "If the scrubbers don't make the outside air as clean as it was before the firing, it may be the
last
firing, too. The licensing hassles to permit this were something hellish. If one of the counters outside the range so much as hiccups, they'll probably come in and seal the whole complex." Gloomily: "With us in it, under a million tons of cement."

"And if they do that," Dr. Rankine said from his position at one of the analysis stations, "We'll just fire Zeus up again and blow a hole in the cement. Peak thrust of four and a half million newtons—call it just over a million pounds."

"Sweet! That'll give us something to fly from here to Mars on!"

"I still prefer 'Old Bang-Bang,'" grumbled Dr. Hiroshi Kanzaki.

Jackie rolled her eyes. The Japanese engineer's attachment to the old Orion design had always struck her as just barely short of obsessive.

"Oh, sure," she jibed. "
That
would be a lot easier to get authorized. 'Hi, we're going to take this huge honkin' plate of steel, put our ship on top, and then light off a chain of nuclear bombs under our asses to get us moving. In your back yard.'"

Kanzaki was never one to take a jibe without a rejoinder. "Well, you can't argue that us going for the nuclear rocket hasn't taken the heat off your boyfriend."

"A.J. is
not
my boyfriend!" Jackie replied automatically, for what was probably the three thousandth time.

The rest of what Kanzaki had said was true enough. The Ares Project also needed nuclear reactors to pull off some of the projected stunts, like generating new fuel on Mars for the return trip. If the government hadn't already been planning to make extensive use of nuclear technology in space for its own projects, A.J. and his fellow Nuts would have had hell's own time trying to convince anyone to let them fire off something loaded with fissionable materials into the sky.