Dr. Rebecca Johansson hurried past her workstation, grabbed her coat, let her implants turn her computer off—
do not look at the waiting e-mails.
The implants were already talking to the door and clicked the rems app. The radiation monitor flashed green, which meant she wasn’t noticeably radioactive this evening, and that was a good thing.
She indicated the “out” app and the door popped open after registering her ID. In the hall she clicked on the elevator app, waited impatiently for the car, said, “Station,” when it arrived, and dropped six floors to the Northfield nuke’s underground shuttle station.
The ten o’clock train arrived three minutes after she walked onto the platform. She scampered aboard, sank into a seat, and sighed. She was twenty minutes from downtown Minneapolis, not much to see on the way but endless tracts of suburban houses. Way too late for sanity’s sake, and Senior Star power engineers didn’t get overtime.
If only,
she thought. With double and triple time on her usual hours, she’d be retired in five years.
But then what? She actually liked the work. Liked the action.
Two minutes out from the Nuke, too tired to read, Becca stared into the window at her own ghostly reflection. A door opened between her car and the second car and a young man moved up and took a seat across from her. A doctor, she thought, a surgeon, heading north to the Cities from the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, where the shuttle tracks ended. He glanced up briefly and she quickly flicked her eyes away, hoping he hadn’t seen her seeing him.
People were always trying to chat her up. It wasn’t always a half-baked mating ritual. People simply found her approachable: Partly it was that pure Minnesota-Scandinavian look, and a plump, finely featured face with a fresh-scrubbed pale pink complexion. She was, she sometimes thought in despair, “cute,” like a doll you won at the state fair. Combine that with being both short and . . . plumpish . . . and the whole
ensemble screamed, “I am sweet and I am inoffensive, and I am no threat, and so I don’t have to be taken seriously because no one this cute and plump ever is.”
Becca did not like being dismissed. She did not like to be thought of as inconsequential. She’d worked too hard to get where she was, through a grueling Ph.D. program at MIT, and now was known as one of the best-trained and cleverest high-density power engineers ever to come down the pike.
The young man was still there, sitting across from her, a pleasant smile fixed on his face, and she thought,
Enough! Time for a positive thought or two.
Work was going well. The hours were way too long, but the intellectual challenges were irresistibly seductive. Designing power flows for a reactor core that had one-quarter the volume and ten times the power density of anything previously used in a commercial plant was . . . exciting.
She was doing great and novel work; better still it was
conservative
work. Power utilities liked conservative thinking. Their job was to reliably deliver electricity twenty-four hours a day, not get Nobel prizes for innovation.
There were no new tricks in her flow designs. The cleverness lay in how well she’d been able to optimize and integrate so many different techniques. Massive-scale heat pipes with fractal fluidic passages to pump the energy from the fissioning fuel into the boiling superheated fluids that drove the generator turbines. Thermomagnetic liquids and magnetic pumps and transformers to siphon the waste heat. Micro-evaporative heat exchangers to dump it into convective radiators and, ultimately, the air.
That was just a fraction of what she’d thrown at the problem. No one technology, not even two or three, could manage so many gigawatts of thermal energy in a confined space. The core would’ve melted down in minutes. Put them all together, get them all tuned up, and get them all working in concert. It was the difference between an instrumental solo and a full symphony orchestra, engineering-wise.
Her mood was lightening as the train rolled through the old airport site, now a condominium complex, made a quick stop, and then out the other side and on toward the downtown towers where Becca lived.
The doctor—or maybe he was a nurse, or a technician—was still sitting across from her. Glancing at her from time to time.
He would, she thought, wait until they got off the train, then he’d hit on her. But her mood had lightened, and her stop was always busy, so there’d be no threat. She’d be nice to him, she thought, and maybe—he was good-looking, although, come to think of it, his neck was a little thick—hold out some hope. A cup of coffee in the morning? But she had to be to work at six . . .
Maybe she should find just a sliver of life outside work? Time for coffee with a good-looking surgeon?
Twenty minutes and twenty seconds after leaving the Nuke, the train rolled into the Hennepin Avenue station under downtown Minneapolis. Becca got to her feet and headed for the door. The surgeon—yeah, right—shuffled off after her.
On the platform, she half turned, expecting him to be there, with an approach. And he was. He smiled and held up an ID pack. He said, “I’m Robert Klipish with the FBI. We didn’t want to startle you or attract attention, but we have some people who need to talk with you.”
She felt her mouth hanging open as she winked her implant at the ID. A green light ticked in a corner of her eye: the ID was real. “Some people?”
He gestured across the platform, where two men and a woman were moving toward them, in a V formation, the woman at the point. She was neither chubby nor cute. She was athletic, and the three moved in a way that you might expect a school of sharks to move. As the woman came up, Becca noticed that sometime in the recent past, she’d had her nose broken.
“What did I do?” Becca blurted. She grasped for something, anything.
“You didn’t do anything, as far as I know,” Klipish said. “I was told to make sure that nothing happened to you, after you left work. I was
told that if you got a hangnail, I’d be reassigned to Texas.” He twinkled at her.
“Not that,” Becca said, putting a hand on his sleeve.
The woman who was coming up said, “Bob, stop twinkling at her.” The woman held up her phone and flashed her ID. “Dr. Johansson, my name is Marla Clark. Pleased to meet you. You have a meeting.”
“A meeting? Right now?”
“Not exactly right now, but first thing in the morning, in Washington, D.C.,” Clark said. “By the way, we assume you’ll need a moving company, though you don’t really have all that much. We’ve contacted two that have been approved by Homeland Security.”
Becca: “A moving company?”
And how did they know she didn’t have that much?
The next morning, Becca was fifteen hundred kilometers from home. She’d been snatched, politely but firmly, and shoved into a private hopjet that had delivered her to the D.C. airport barely an hour later, a little after one o’clock in the morning, EST. Her “entourage”—she decided to think of them that way, instead of as her “handlers” or, worse, “captors”—had been pleasant, solicitous of her comfort, and entirely uninformative.
They’d hustled her off to a terrific hotel, where she was deposited in a luxury suite that contained a fresh change of clothes, which were her size and even her style, which struck her as efficient, considerate, and creepy. Clark had come with her. She recommended a hot shower before going to bed. “I’ve put in a seven o’clock wake-up call for you, so you won’t be late for the meeting.”
“What meeting?”
“The meeting,” Clark said with a shrug.
Nine hours after getting on the train in Northfield, Minnesota, she was sitting in a White House waiting room decorated with paintings of former First Ladies. Clark was no longer with her, but another woman, this one named Marsden, from the same tribe as Clark, handed her a cup of coffee and said, “Relax.”
“If you were in my shoes, would you relax?” Becca asked.
“I don’t know exactly what shoes you’re wearing,” Marsden said. A navy officer was walking across the room toward them, and she added, in a low voice, “But if this guy is coming for you, my answer would be, ‘No.’”
The officer was coming for her. His name was Rob, he was a lieutenant commander, and he shook her hand pleasantly and said, “You’re up, you can bring your coffee,” and to the escort, “I’m told she’ll be half an hour or so.”
Santeros was on her feet, talking to a fat man, when Becca was ushered into the Oval Office. Santeros smiled at her and waded across the carpet, extending a hand.
“Dr. Johansson, Rebecca,” she said. “Good of you to come, on such short notice.”
“Happy to,” Becca said, biting back a less polite reply:
Did I have a choice?
Santeros gestured to the fat man. “This is Jacob Vintner, my science adviser. We’re going to have to make this quick. I brought you here because the United States needs your skills. We want you to design the power management system for a twenty-thermal-gigawatt reactor, and we need it rather quickly. Might you be interested? We want you badly enough to have rushed you here like this, but you’re free to decline. We do have other candidates.”
“I’m currently committed to a project with Minnesota Power—”
“We’ve already talked to your employer and they’re happy to give you an indefinite leave of absence, with no loss of position or seniority, in the national interest,” Santeros said.
“What kind of power plant is this?”
Vintner said, “We can’t really go into the details because of national security. All I can—”
“Wait a minute,” Becca said, jabbing her finger at Vintner. “This has got to be for the Mars mission! You need a big honkin’ reactor, I bet. Hot damn. Okay, I’m in, on one condition.”
Santeros asked Vintner, “Why do all these people have conditions?”
Vintner said, “Because they’re important enough to have them, I guess.”
Santeros was amused. She turned back to Becca and asked, “What’s yours, Rebecca?”
“If I build your power plant, I get to go along.”
Santeros nodded: “Okay.”
Vintner, the bureaucrat: “Before we give you any more details or address your speculations, which we cannot confirm at this moment, we’re going to need you to sign some documents.” He handed her a slate.
“If this is about clearance, I’m already cleared for nuclear work,” Becca said.
“We know that. This is a higher level of clearance. You were vetted for it last night,” Vintner said.
Santeros walked around behind her desk, sat down, looked at a screen, tapped it a couple of times, and said to Becca, “Sit and read it.”
Becca sat and gave it a quick scan. Boiled down to a few words, it said that if she talked out of turn, she was going to jail. She signed it, touched the ID square with her thumb, and handed it back to Vintner.
Santeros offered up the barest of smiles. “So we can give you a detail—and please remember what you just signed. We’re not going to Mars—we’re going to Saturn.”
“Saturn?” Becca was dumbfounded. “Why Saturn? You can’t just be one-upping the Chinese. Jupiter’d be closer. What’s at Saturn?”
Santeros said to Vintner, “You’re right. She is pretty smart.” And to Becca: “More by accident than anything else, one of our astronomical observatories saw what we believe to be an alien starship going into Saturn—and we believe there’s something else there, possibly a station.”
“Holy shit!”
“Exactly. I’m sure you can work out the implications.”
“But . . .” Becca rubbed her forehead with a knuckle, thinking, then said, “It’ll take us years to get out there.”
“Not with the power plant you’re going to design,” Vintner said.
Crow had never allowed himself to get tired, when he didn’t have to. Other people could get tired, but not him: he’d taught himself to sleep, anytime, anyplace. He’d slept on helicopters on combat missions, he’d slept in fighter planes, he’d deliberately put himself to sleep in the President’s private office, waiting for her to return from a meeting.
His wrist-wrap tapped him, and his eyes popped open. The limo was easing through the narrow, rotting streets of the Ninth Ward, reading the address sensors buried in the street. Crow popped a piece of breath-cleaning gum, poured a palmful of water from a bottle, wiped it across his eyes, checked the time: he’d gotten a solid forty-five minutes rolling in from Louis Armstrong International.
A minute later, the limo eased to a stop outside a dilapidated faux-Restoration house. Crow picked up his slate, stuck it in his jacket pocket, got out, walked up the badly cracked sidewalk, pushed the doorbell, and stood back to look at the moss.
Moss everywhere, including fine tendrils advancing across the windows. The Restoration style became popular after Hurricane Clarence flooded the city in 2044. New Orleans had been submerged three times in the first half of the century, and each time, the levees were built higher, the pumps made bigger, and the city fathers swore that once and for all they’d solved the problems born of rising seas and eroding deltas.
The residents hadn’t believed them in 2044, any more than they had the two previous times, but that hadn’t stopped them from rebuilding. Now, with almost a quarter century gone since the last wipeout, houses that had been new in 2045 were beginning to sink into the landscape.
There was no response to the doorbell. Crow leaned on it again, and this time, heard a muffled bellow from inside; unintelligible, but not panicked or in pain. Crow tried the doorknob, which was unlocked, and as the door swung open he heard a more intelligible bellow: “. . . open, let yourself in!”
“Mr. Clover?”
“I’m in the kitchen. Come on back. Don’t kick the cat.”
Crow stepped inside, closed the door, stepped over an old, scruffy gray cat sleeping on the floor next to an ottoman, and threaded his way through a mass of paper—books, magazines, journals, legal pads—that occupied all visible surfaces but one: an easy chair.
The kitchen was at the rear of the house, and the man in the kitchen, his wide back to Crow, called, “Who is it?”
Crow found the question interesting: first, “Come in,” followed by “Who is it?”—he’d never in his life done things in that order. The man hadn’t even turned to check him out: he was stirring something on a stove, and whatever it was, smelled wonderful.
“My name is Crow,” Crow said. “I work for the President. We’ve been trying to get in touch with you.”
Now Clover turned, a wooden spoon in his hand. He was a heavyset man, but not overly fat. He’d played pro football for a couple of years, a tackle, and had stayed in okay but not great shape. He had a beard and was wearing eyeglasses; the combination suggested a taste for anachronism.
He looked at Crow for a few seconds, then said, “Sonofabitch, you’re real? I thought you were a spammer.”
Crow began, “Maybe you should have—”
“Give me a minute. I just started sautéing the tomatoes and I don’t want them to burn. Take that green wooden chair there—not the red one, that’s for the cat.”
The air was faintly blue with smoke, and smelled of cumin, pepper, oregano, and marijuana. Crow picked up a copy of
Nature
that was sitting on the green chair, sat down, looked for a place to put the magazine, and finally put it on the cat’s chair. Crow’s stomach rumbled; he hadn’t had a decent meal since Darlington had taken him to a Mexican restaurant in Pasadena.
He said, “So . . . do you usually assume the Office of the President of the United States is a spammer?”
“Well, wouldn’t you?” Clover asked. “You’re sitting in a restaurant in
the French Quarter, your mouth is open, you’re about to stick the most delicate cream puff into it, with the flakiest butter crust, your computer dings, and it says, ‘Greetings from the President of the United States.’ What would you do? I deleted it and ate the bun.”
“I see a certain logic in that,” Crow admitted, “which is why we have authentication certificates.”
“Yeah, well, my neighbor boy could produce one of those in about five minutes.”
“Anyway, Mr. Clover—”
“Call me John.”
“We’d like you to go to Mars with us.”
Clover didn’t say anything, but turned and gave Crow a long, steady look, then said, “Bullshit.” And, “One more comment like that, I’ll kick you out of here and eat by myself. So don’t lie to me anymore. Just tell me the truth about what you want, and we’ll work from there.”
Crow crossed his legs and said, “That was the truth.”
“Bullshit . . . well, hmm. Give me a minute. What you’re telling me is, the reason the Chinese are going to Mars is that you’ve all found out that Deimos is a hollow shell left there by the LGMs, and so the race is on.”
“What’s Deimos? What’re LGMs?”
“Deimos is the smaller of Mars’s two moons and has some oddities. LGMs are Little Green Men. If you really don’t know what Deimos is, then you were lying to me. Actually, you’re lying to me either way—either you know about Deimos, or you don’t want me to go to Mars.”
“You’re confusing me here.”
“You don’t look confused. By the way, do you have a badge?”
“Sure.” Crow took an ID out of his pocket, held it up. Clover had a wrist-wrap on the kitchen counter and picked it up, waved it toward the ID, and a line in the wrap turned green. The ID was real.
“Okay, you’re something,” Clover said.
“Tell me why I’m lying,” Crow said.
“Because there are two things I’m known for. The first is my studies of ancient Mayan hydraulic technology. It’s brilliant work, if I do say so myself—and I often do. But it wouldn’t be of much interest to the
President of the United States.” Clover took another sip of the jambalaya, swirled it in his mouth, swallowed, and continued. “The second is my entirely hypothetical work on how technologies and cultures might develop in alternate ways from ours, especially given different starting points, culturally, psychologically, and even physically. In other words, how alien civilizations might turn out. Mars has no LGMs. Mars doesn’t even have living bacteria, as far as we know. We’ve mapped everything on the surface bigger than a baseball, and there are no hatches, doors, portals, ducts, or discarded pizza boxes. So there’s no reason for an anthropologist to go there.”
“All right.”
Clover picked up the remnants of a joint, touched it to a flame from a burner, took a drag, adding to the mix of aromas in the room. “So what do you want, Mr. Crow?”
“We want you to sign a bunch of security regs that say you’ll go to prison if you talk about what we tell you. Believe me, if you talk, you go to prison. If you don’t talk, you become, in due time, the richest and best-known anthropologist on Earth.”
“Wait: something popped out of the ice in Antarctica . . .”
“No. Nothing popped out of any ice.”
“You found something on the sea floor?”
“No.”
“Shit. I don’t need the money—I mean, what could be better than this place?—but I wouldn’t mind being famous,” Clover said.
“That could happen,” Crow said.
“You want some jambalaya?”
“Yes.” Crow did; his meal schedule was leaning heavily on McDonald’s.
“You want a hit on the joint?”
“No.”
Clover carefully stubbed out the joint, saving the best for last. “Although Louisiana is one of only six states that outlaws weed for anything but medicinal purposes, I want you to know, I don’t use weed for medicinal purposes. I use it strictly to get stoned.”
“That confirms our research in choosing you for the Mars trip,” Crow said. “We’ve got a specific slot for a weeder. Without that qualification, we’d have approached Jeb Rouser.”
Clover bristled. “That charlatan? Let me tell you about Mr. Rouser, Mr. Crow. Anthropologically speaking, Rouser couldn’t find his own asshole with both hands and a searchlight. He thinks—”
“He’s the Morton K. Brigham Professor of Anthropological Research at Yale University.”
“Fuck Morton K. Brigham and Yale University,” Clover said. “You ever been to that place? You have to have a pole stuck up your ass before you’re allowed to walk on campus. Seriously, they have a booth with poles. Before they hire you for a job, they stick a second pole up there.”
“We were told you were perhaps the better choice, but there was an argument—”
“I’m better by a very wide margin, especially if this involves LGMs,” Clover said. “But enough about me.” The jambalaya smelled so good that Crow thought he might faint. “Give me what I need to sign, and fill me in.”
Crow reached into his inside jacket pocket, extracted a mini-slate, and pushed it across the table to Clover.
“You can read them if you want, but I gotta tell you, they’re pretty boring.”
Clover was already flipping pages, dating and thumbing them. “Doesn’t matter. I want to hear the whole story, and you know I want to hear the whole story, and if I don’t sign our little tea party never happened and you don’t exist. Anything else important?”
“Nope. That’s about it.”
“It’ll be a while before the jambalaya is just right,” Clover said. “I’ve got some chairs in there, somewhere.” They moved into the other room, where Clover made another overstuffed chair appear out of the clutter. “So what’s up?”
They sat down and Crow laid it out. Fifteen minutes later, Clover
pushed himself out of his chair and asked, “You want a large bowl or a gigantic bowl?”
“Gigantic.”
“Good man.”
—
Clover came back two minutes later with the jambalaya and two bottles of beer, and said, “If I didn’t miss anything, the short version goes like this: something you think is a starship came and stopped in Saturn’s rings and rendezvoused with some kind of ‘whatever.’ You haven’t had any evidence of communication between your starship and the ‘whatever.’ Neither of these artifacts has made an attempt to contact or communicate with us—”
“We don’t know that,” Crow interrupted. “We don’t know if we’d recognize an attempt to communicate.”
“They haven’t. At their level of tech, they could if they wanted to. In any case, you don’t have an indication that there are any alien beings at Saturn, all you know is that the visitor’s apparently extra-solar and artificial. You want my considered opinions? Of course you do, that’s why you’re here.”
“And I’m listening closely,” Crow said. The jambalaya was really good. Clover might be goofy, but he could cook.
In the other chair, Clover fired up the remnant of the joint, took a drag, and said, “My first opinion is that if there actually are aliens there, they don’t want to talk to us. Showing up on their doorstep might not go over real well. I mean that as understatement. What little information you’ve got—the fact that there was already a station at Saturn—suggests that they are not new to this game, which means they’ve probably got good reasons, from their perspective, for what they’re not doing. Like communicating with us.”
He continued: “My second opinion is that there probably aren’t aliens there, that it’s just a space probe. No LGMs, no ‘take-me-to-your-leader.’”
Crow was getting a contact high from the dope; either that, or from the jambalaya. “Okay. Our problem is, sooner or later, this cat is going to get out of the bag. We know for sure that these . . . beings . . . are more technologically advanced than we are. We don’t know by how much, but we do know that we don’t want that tech falling into the hands of the Chinese before we get it.”
“Ahh . . .” Clover blew smoke toward the ceiling. “I’m beginning to see.”
“And it’s probably not a probe. We’ve had some people thinking about that, and the ship’s simply too big to be a probe, for beings that advanced. Right now, we could build a computer and sensory package not much bigger than a soccer ball, stick it in a probe, run out to the Centauri system in a couple of decades, and the computer would radio back everything we need to know about the system. No need to build a starship the size of an asteroid.”
Clover shrugged. “Well, I’ve told you what I can, at this point. If you get more information, I’ll be happy to advise—and I’ll think about what you’ve told me so far, and get back to you with some ideas. If you get out there, and get more information, I will look forward to hearing about it. With more information, I can probably give you better opinions and better evaluations of what your options are. Leastwise, I can probably keep you from making boneheaded mistakes.”
“John, I didn’t actually want to throw this out there before I heard your opinions. . . . The President would like you to join the crew on the Saturn run.”
Crow took some small pleasure in the surprise on Clover’s face.
“You mean . . . go out in space?”
“Well, yeah.”
“Jesus, Crow, who’d take care of my cat?”
It took Crow a moment to realize that Clover was serious.
“John, we’ve got bigger problems than your cat.”
“Maybe you do, but I don’t. Mr. Snuffles is sixteen years old. He’s been my best friend all that time. I mean, we’ve dug in Mayan ruins
together. We’ve fought snakes, mano a mano. No way in hell I’m going to leave him now. He’s only got a couple of years left.”
Crow took a second to rub his forehead. “Let me check to see if the cat could go.”
Clover leaned back: “That would put a different complexion on it. If the cat could go, well, yeah, I could see making the trip. It’s still a crappy idea. I don’t trust aliens.”
“You don’t know any aliens.”
“Yeah, and they don’t know me. Seems like a hell of a good reason for not trusting them.” He took a hit on the joint. “What are the chances of getting back?”
“Don’t know. Assuming the aliens don’t turn out to be hostile, probably ninety-nine percent. The other one percent, everybody dies.”
“You mean, some massive failure.”
“Yeah.” Crow leaned forward. “John, the last thing we want to do is get anyone killed. That would defeat the whole purpose of going out there. As far as the aliens go, our Pentagon people don’t think there’s any reason that they might be hostile.”