In just over two months, the
Nixon
would hit the sun at over six hundred kilometers per second, at least those few refractory bits that hadn’t vaporized millions of kilometers out.
—
After six weeks of decontamination, the crew of the
Nixon
, and their Chinese guests, were released from biocontainment. The Americans were picked up, a few at a time, by Virgin-SpaceX shuttles, and returned to Earth.
John Clover was among the first to hit dirt: and feel the oppressive pull of Earth’s gravity. He’d lost weight in his time in space and had worked out religiously. Still, gravity was a trial. On the other hand, he’d get used to it in a couple of months, and he’d have better than a half-million dollars, his share of the Hump Pool. Made him laugh to think about it.
In New Orleans, he stepped from the government autolimo and checked out his house. It was different. The steps were freshly painted. For that matter, so was the whole fuckin’ house.
Crow had told him that the government would maintain it, but this . . .
“Aw, crap.” He palmed the front-door lock and the door opened. The hinges didn’t squeak.
Crap-crap,
he thought,
if they’ve messed with my stuff . . .
Someone had straightened up the living room. Straightened up? They’d done a thorough cleaning, practically a remake. All his carefully tabbed and dog-eared papers and magazines, half-read books, the stacks of old journals by his chairs, all the stuff that had taken up eighty percent of the floor, it was all gone.
Assholes. It’ll take years to undo what some brain-dead “organizer” had done to his filing system, he thought. Hell, it’d probably take him
years just to find where they’d put all his stuff, assuming they hadn’t thrown it out in some misguided fit of do-goodedness.
He needed a joint, he decided, hoping they hadn’t thrown out his stash. He stepped on the loose floorboard to the left of the entryway to the living room. The floorboard flipped up and he reached for the rusty tackle box below it. He grunted as he pulled it up. Heavy. Inside there were fresh, wrapped kilo bricks. He peered at the label. They were from the government research farm in Kentucky.
An envelope was taped to one of the bricks, with a letter and a card inside. The letter said he was an authorized owner of the dope under federal law; the card identified him as a federal research subject, exempting him from Louisiana’s antiquated prohibitions.
Both were signed by the surgeon general.
The card said:
See what the nanny state can do for you? Welcome home, John. I’ll call you. I need some jambalaya.—C.
Well, I will be blown,
Clover thought, as he rolled a joint. He stepped outside to light it up: a calico cat sat on the neighbor’s fence, a thin, feral feline. The cat narrowed his eyes and meowed, just once. Food?
“Back in a minute,” Clover said to the cat. He’d always had a weakness for calicoes. He meowed once, and went back inside to look for the cat crunchies.
Good dope, even the possibility of a new cat.
Wonder if everybody gets this kind of welcome?
—
No. They didn’t.
Fiorella said good-bye to Sandy at the back of the shuttle. “This whole criminal thing is bullshit,” she said. “I’ll do everything I can. I think I can probably do a lot. Santeros owes me. We’ve already got a petition going, almost everybody in the crew signed it.”
“Thank you. For everything,” Sandy said. “You gonna give me a kiss good-bye?”
“If I do, are you gonna try to squeeze my ass?”
“Maybe. Okay, maybe not.”
She gave him a peck on the cheek and said, “Everything will work out.”
“I know it will. I’ll be seeing you around.”
The FBI was waiting at the bottom of the stairs.
Whatever else had been said and done, Santeros still needed a scapegoat.
Sandy was arrested, placed in solitary confinement in Los Angeles, and the next day was flown to Washington, where he’d stand trial in federal court. Santeros had nixed a court-martial for the simple reason that nobody had actually taken the time to reactivate Sandy’s commission in the army.
He had excellent attorneys. His father visited him every day and made it very clear that Santeros was going to get a half billion (or so) of adverse political advertising shoved down her throat at the next election cycle.
The trial itself was quite short, since the charges were designed to be undeniable. Sandy didn’t bother to deny them, and pled
nolo contendere.
Most of the trial involved the pre-sentencing hearing, in which two dozen
Nixon
crew members defended Sandy’s actions as necessary, sane, and probably the salvation of the ship; and former military colleagues represented him as an unsung hero.
Fiorella wasn’t allowed to cover the case, because of the obvious conflict of interest, but she’d been interviewed on the top-rated CBSNN show
Sweet Emotion
and, in her Ultra-Star way, had dampened half the hankies in America.
The prosecutor, a civil servant but determined opponent of everything Santeros stood for, asked that Sandy be given forty years, as a way to embarrass her. The judge, a Santeros appointee, had been listening to the witnesses, too, and had a friendly conversation with an old college buddy currently working at the Justice Department; he cut the sentence as short as he possibly could.
Sandy got five years, in Leavenworth.
On the first day of winter, he was taken out of the Washington federal courthouse in handcuffs and leg chains. Onlookers and former cell mates thought he looked unreasonably cheerful for a man facing hard time at Leavenworth.
He was to be transported to National Airport, and from there, flown to Kansas City, for further transfer on to Leavenworth.
The first vehicle was an eight-person van, divided into four cells, cages within a cage. Seating was minimal, but not brutal: a city-bus-style plastic seat, with minor alterations to allow the leg chain to be passed through a steel loop welded into the floor. There was enough room that he could stand and stretch.
He was allowed a slate with one book on it for entertainment, no Internet connection. On this day, he was the only passenger. The trip to National would take a half hour, since the federal marshals driving the van were not allowed to exceed the speed limit.
They were moving at precisely eight o’clock in the morning, the time chosen to avoid reporters. The first stop took place four minutes later, outside the old Smithsonian building. The van pulled to the side of the street, and one of the marshals in the front got out, came around to the back, and popped the door. Crow was standing on the curb, and climbed into the cell next to Sandy’s.
“I was wondering when you’d show up. I thought it’d be at National,” Sandy said. Gave him the toothy grin.
“Man, with that smirk, you gotta be even dumber than you look,” Crow said. “You’re on your way to Leavenworth. You know what that means? You’re gonna miss the best part of your life.”
“I’m thinking not,” Sandy said.
“Daddy can’t buy you outa this one, pal. Not gonna happen. And all your shipmates who think you saved their lives? Santeros dropped their petition in the wastebasket. She didn’t even bother to read it.”
Sandy looked down at his slate and flipped a page. Crow couldn’t quite see what he was reading. “Yeah, well. There’s always France. I think they’ll be willing to help out.” Sandy held up the slate:
French for Americans
.
“You gotta be kidding me.”
“Not at all. I need the refresher—it wasn’t my best subject at Harvard. I’ve always been an admirer of French civilization,” Sandy said. “The philosophy, the painting, the women, the food. The cheese, the mushrooms, the snails. You know. So I thought they’d really be the logical ones to lead the world into the next Renaissance.”
After a moment, Crow said, “You backed up the database, didn’t you? How’d you get it off the ship?”
“I’m gonna give it to the French. They’d ask me nicer.”
“The French? You motherfucker,” Crow said.
Sandy said, “You want to get out now? This is going to be a tiresome ride and I’ve got some serious reading to do.”
A long silence. Crow didn’t move. Then, “What do you want?”
“A pardon from the President,” Sandy said. “I’ll let her cover her ass. You know, ‘We let the trial go on, because we wanted to make a point about discipline. But there are extenuating circumstances, he’s very young and a little dumb, had a good service record’ . . . blah blah blah.”
“We can talk about that,” Crow said.
“And I want an apology. I thought about requiring her resignation, because, you know, she’s quite the serious asshole. But . . . I guess anyone else would be just as bad.”
“No way she would quit,” Crow said. “Or apologize.”
“You could be wrong about that. If word got out about the stakes involved—the whole future of American technological leadership—I believe the House and Senate might be willing to listen. They don’t like her much, anyway. I think she might resign rather than face impeachment.”
“Word wouldn’t get out,” Crow said. “You’ll be amazed at how secure our prison system can be, when it wants to be. When was the last time you heard a political statement from Ramon Roarty?” Roarty had conceived and planned the Houston Flash; he was now serving a life sentence at Leavenworth.
“I believe the French ambassador might be asking for permission to
visit me in Leavenworth,” Sandy said. “To check on rumors of inhumane treatment of prisoners.”
“A request that would be denied.”
“Amidst vast embarrassment. To say nothing of rather pointed inquiries from the Chinese.” Sandy looked thoughtfully through the bars of his cage at the low ceiling of the van. “Maybe I should spread the wealth around. Let the French have the science stuff . . . they’re no good with tech anyway . . . and give the alien technology stuff . . . to who? The Brazilians? They’re really good with machinery.”
For the first time in their entire acquaintance, Sandy saw a hint of surprise in Crow’s eyes. “Now you are fucking with me. It’s not the database? You’ve got a QSU?”
Sandy picked up the slate. “Hmmm, I need to work on my French for ‘fuck.’ That’ll be important,” he muttered. He read something on the slate. “And it’s a little complicated. It’d be embarrassing to use the wrong version of the word. The French are so . . . intricate . . . in their sexual ways, don’t you think?”
Another long silence, then, “I can get you the pardon.”
“And the apology . . .”
“We’ll work out something,” Crow said.
“I have to insist on the apology,” Sandy said. “A really abject one. Handwritten by herself. Signed. I’ll promise to hold it privately until she’s out of office. When she’s out, though, I’m gonna use my grandpa’s money to buy a mansion at Zuma Beach and I’ll put the apology on the wall of the entrance hall. Gonna be so cool. But the pardon has to be public. Like right now.”
“We’ll work it out,” Crow said again. “So. What did you do?”
“I won’t give you the precise details until I’m walking around free,” Sandy said.
“Just tell me. Or I’m getting out and the van can go on to Leavenworth. It’s not the day camp you seem to imagine it is.”
Sandy said, “You remember when I was fabbing the burn box and I had to do those measurements of the QSUs? Well, while Joe was busy
building the circuits, I printed up a couple copies of the QSUs. I had my Red photos with perfect color-matching, and the precise scales, and when I finished . . . I mean, they were perfect. Then, when I was fitting the QSUs into the burn box, I switched a couple of them.”
“Why’d you do that?”
“Because everybody was so worried about what would happen if the Chinese took the ship. It was an obvious possibility, so . . . why not? If everything worked out, I’d just retrieve them and turn them over to you.”
“How’d you get them off the ship?”
“In my hand-camera case. Took the camera out, put the QSUs inside, sealed it up . . . and when we evacuated the Chinese from the
Odyssey
, took a minute to stick it on the far side of the ship with its Post-it pads. I was worried about the battery—that the lack of warmth would kill it. But then I remembered about the radiators. They put enough heat on parts of the hull that the hull actually was warmish, and that’s all I needed. With just a little warmth seeping into the camera case, the battery would last for five years. When we got back . . .”
“You used your remote to unstick it. The camera case is in orbit.”
“Yup. Saw it pop off the hull myself. It’ll take you about a hundred years to find it, with all the other shit that’s still floating around up there. What I’ll keep to myself, until I get the apology, is exactly what time I let that puppy go. Got it right down to the tenth of a second. With that information, you could find it in an hour.”
“Why’d you wait so long to tell me? Why this whole charade?”
“I think we needed it,” Sandy said. “I think we needed the whole trial, all the theatrics, all the bullshit about doing research on the readers, all the
sincerity
, to convince the Chinese that we really didn’t have anything, other than the raw science from the I/O. And that’s mostly theory—that’s gonna get out no matter what we do. Probably printed in
Nature & Science
. In fact, when I thought about it, publishing the science, even the little bit that we have, would set off a lot of research commotion, which would cover up the fact that we have all of it. For a while, anyway.”
Crow nodded and said, “You’re right. About all of it.” He stood up, climbed out of the van, and said to the marshals, who were waiting on the sidewalk, “Let him out.”
As the marshals came around, Sandy said, “You knew I’d been up to something. Why?”
“’Cause you once told me that you’d not only do what we want, you’d do what we need,” Crow said. “I believed you. Plus, of course, that shit-eating grin that would pop onto your face, from time to time, during the trial. Santeros actually spotted it.”
“Huh. Gotta work on that,” Sandy said. “Uh, why are the marshals just . . . letting me go?”