Analog SFF, June 2011 Read online

  When the administrator of NASA called, you went. Still . . . “Isn't that task force all career civil servants?”

  Which Marcus was not. He was a SETA contractor: systems engineering and technical assistance. Fortunate SETA contractors got involved in everything their government counterparts did. Unfortunate SETA contractors took meeting minutes and fetched coffee. Lucky or not, they spent most of every workday stymied and snubbed by the contractors from the big aerospace corporations who did most of the actual R&D.

  If you had to have a supervisor, Ellen was as good as they came. Kendricks Aerospace, prime contractor for the demonstration powersat, balanced the scales. Most Kendricks engineers on the project detested Marcus. Not personally, or even professionally—they would have hated anyone looking over their shoulders. Asking questions. Making suggestions. Auditing their work. Highlighting risks. He got the disdain they would not dare exhibit toward Ellen.

  When had he last been able to do, not merely review?

  “Trust me,” Ellen said. “You won't be the first support contractor to sit in.”

  “What's my goal?”

  “Answer questions and take notes. Beyond information exchange, these meetings don't have specific goals.” She paused. “If anyone tries to pin you down to something uncomfortable, you can plead lack of authority.”

  Because he had no authority. God, he loathed meetings.

  They exited the service area into a carpeted corridor. A wall sign pointed the way to the main lobby. They continued walking. “Okay,” Marcus said, “where is this meeting?”

  “DOE in Germantown. Nancy Ramirez's office.”

  Reflexively, Marcus began guesstimating the miles added to today's commute. He must have winced.

  “I'd reimburse you for the gas if I could,” Ellen said.

  But more than that, she had the look that said I wish there were something I could do for you. At least she had stopped asking if he “wanted to talk about it.” Because he really, really did not.

  As for NASA reimbursing him for the gas, he understood: Her hands were tied. Space Systems Science, Marcus's direct employer, had bid for the SETA contract at Goddard Space Flight Center without reimbursement for local travel. Shifting local travel costs onto the staff kept the hourly rates a few cents lower. It hadn't much mattered, when Marcus took this job. He had lived only a couple of miles from GSFC then. He told himself he might not have a job if SSS had pursued the work less aggressively.

  He told himself lots of things. Other things he just refused to think about.

  “But maybe,” Ellen added hopefully, “your car charged up during the meeting.”

  “I wouldn't complain.” Even at the hotel's exorbitant parking-plus hourly rates.

  But in the two hours he had spent at the town meeting, his car would not have taken much of a charge. The Jincheng was overdue for a battery-pack replacement—which would run him about half of what a new car would cost. New car or new battery? He would put off buying either for as long as he could, rather than support the lithium cartel. Bolivia and Chile, curse them, controlled half the world's lithium supply. Every lithium-ion battery bought anywhere propped up prices for the cartel.

  Supporting the Russian oil cartel this morning felt just as crappy.

  In the hotel garage, the eight panelists fanned out toward their various vehicles. Coming straight from home, only three had managed to carpool. “Have a good meeting,” Marcus said as he and Ellen paused by his car.

  “You too,” she said. “And don't do anything I wouldn't.”

  “You should have thought of that earlier.”

  Smiling, she kept walking.

  Marcus's car had accepted scarcely a tenth of a recharge, about what he expected. The car would switch to its little gas engine well before he reached his meeting.

  “Destination: Department of Energy, Germantown complex,” he announced, backing out of his parking spot. The console beeped and a reasonable-looking map appeared in the main dashboard display. He tapped the ACCEPT key.

  Once he merged into the clotted traffic of I-695 he activated autodrive, and the car guided itself to the rear of an auto platoon. He found himself nose-to-tail with a late-model blue Toyota. Seconds later, a white cargo van filled his rearview mirror. The van was too close to make out the company logo on its hood.

  He had more pressing things to read than logos. Marcus dismissed the map to check e-mail, and Ellen had already forwarded the information he needed. But he had driven for too many years before autodrive to concentrate while cars not two feet apart joined and departed the platoon, and when to both sides, bumper to bumper, eighteen-wheelers blotted out the sky.

  With only the ride to prepare, he opaqued the windows and began skimming.

  He had also been around long enough to expect recession to reduce traffic. Not since the Crudetastrophe. Without funding for maintenance, highways crumbled faster than traffic diminished.

  Marcus began reading Ellen's annotated meeting minutes. He stopped noticing swerves (Around accidents? Potholes? The chicken crossing the road? Through the opaqued windows, he could not tell.) and ramps from one freeway to the next. The traffic noises faded. . . .

  A pop-up usurped the dashboard screen. Blinking red letters announced: Power alert. Smaller text, scrolling, gave the particulars: a high-voltage line severed from the Nantucket Sound wind farm. Terrorism neither indicated nor ruled out.

  Marcus rapped the screen to acknowledge and again to retrieve a list of related headlines. The list expanded faster than he could tap through to even a smattering of the articles. Scattered secondary outages across Massachusetts as generators, distribution stations, and power lines overloaded and shut down. Sporadic blackouts predicted throughout New England, possibly rippling down the East Coast, while the grid rebalanced, or until the wind farm's underwater high-voltage line could be repaired. The schedule of preemptive brownouts. Talking heads blathering about unsafe, indefensible infrastructure. Resetter groups saying the same, more nastily. Predictions, into the tens of thousands, how many cars would fail to recharge overnight. The certain spike tomorrow in East Coast gas prices, a buck or more per gallon, when all those cars headed for the pumps. The stock market tanking.

  Multiple groups and causes claimed responsibility.

  Cursing them all, he went back to Ellen's notes. Too soon, the dashboard trilled: time to disengage autodrive. He took back control and made his way to the DOE parking lot. The charger-equipped slots were all occupied.

  Sighing, Marcus got out of his car. Another damned meeting. He wondered if ever again he would get to do something.

  * * * *

  Wednesday, April 12

  “Good afternoon,” Dillon Russo told the latest earnest entrepreneur to pass through his office that day.

  They were all earnest. It took more than earnest to set yourself apart. He had been merely earnest once. Then he had gotten savvy. And shorted a portfolio of mortgage-backed securities before the markets realized that sub-primes were toxic. And so, became very rich.

  And so, here he was. . . .

  Who is this woman? Courtney something. One more engineer and MBA, yadda yadda yadda. Dillon had already forgotten her last name. If it mattered, he could find the name in her leave-behind or on his calendar. He did not foresee it mattering.

  Speed dating, venture-capital style was a lot like speed dating of the social kind, only even more demeaning. Dillon allotted each petitioner a half hour: fifteen minutes for the pitch, ten for Q&A, and five alone, afterward, to organize any notes he had taken. The lone note for Courtney read not on your life, jotted down before, earnestly asserting her appreciation for his time, she all but backed out of his office.

  He dropped her leave-behind into a drawer. She had brought the day's fifth pitch for enhanced cellulosic biofuel production. Her process involved platinum nanoparticles, lots and lots of them, employed as catalysts. As though, even in a world starved for energy, that could make any kind of economic sense.
/>   It hardly mattered. Fail or succeed, anything anyone could hope to accomplish with biofuel synthesis was mere tinkering at the margins. He only cared about opportunities that could make a real difference.

  Another make-us-both-a-pile-of-money pitch would come through his door in about four minutes. He used a half minute to get out from behind his desk and stretch. The rest he would spend admiring Central Park, thirty-eight stories below.

  At least the biofuel types had done enough homework to know that his interests lay in eco-friendly opportunities. Ditto Noah, the gangly, pinch-faced man pitching virtual-reality tools for high-end telecommuting and Suresh, with a new wrinkle in fuel cells. Those who had not done their homework, who wasted his time with trivial visions for the next big social network or junk food, got the hook. Fast.

  Dillon watched a line of mounted police watch a mass gathering down in the park. In theory demonstrations were legal in Central Park, but permits remained hard to come by and the crowd swirled and surged in a pretense of spontaneity. He never could judge crowd sizes, not even from his bird's-eye view. A thousand? Two? It did not help his estimating that the crowd shifted restlessly. When, all but inevitably, the cops dispersed the demonstrators, a new flash mob would simply converge elsewhere in the park.

  Permit or no, frequent arrests notwithstanding, the Resetters demonstrated daily in the park. Applauding, if not the Crudetastrophe itself, the resulting economic slowdown—and, with it, the reduced use of fossil fuels—as benefits to the environment and the planet. Opposing new energy infrastructure as only repeating past environmental insults.

  Dillon could sympathize with their opinions. But to expect civil disobedience and petty vandalism to change anything? Such naiveté sadly amused him.

  Someone rapped firmly on his door.

  “Come in,” he called.

  A blond woman strode in, wearing a severely tailored dark-blue suit. She was short, compact, and very serious. “Mr. Russo,” she began, speaking quickly, not yet halfway to his desk. Very focused. Focused beat the hell out of earnest. “I'm Kayla Jorgenson, of Jorgenson Power Systems. Thanks for seeing me. You won't be sorry.”

  I'll be the judge of that. “Have a seat, Kayla.”

  Handing him a brochure, she launched into her pitch. “What the world needs, more than anything, is clean, affordable electrical power generation. We had sporadic petroleum shortages before the Crudetastrophe. Electric cars—not that anyone can produce them fast enough—help only to the degree there is electricity to recharge their batteries. Too often, there isn't.”

  Focused and aware. Dillon began leafing through her brochure.

  She did not let his page flipping distract her. “Why I'm here, in a phrase: ocean thermal energy conversion. OTEC is conceptually very simple—and a vast untapped resource. Any heat engine turns heat energy into mechanical work by exploiting a temperature differential. Steam engines are heat engines, the high temperature that drives them coming from fire heating a boiler.

  “Now consider the ocean. The tropical ocean's surface can approach human body temperature, and yet around a half mile below, where sunlight never penetrates, the temperature is scarcely above freezing! Tremendous power-generating potential exists in the differential between the hot and cold layers of the ocean—and with no energy source involved but sunlight.

  “I would guess you've been pitched concepts for harvesting wave power. The energy OTEC can theoretically harvest is greater by an order of magnitude. The challenge is in efficiently and affordably . . .”

  Did Kayla ever stop for air? His wife, while playing her French horn, did something she called circular breathing. What, exactly, Crystal did eluded him—surely the windpipe worked in only one direction at a time—but somehow she could sustain a note indefinitely.

  Just as, somehow, Kayla kept up her patter. “. . . and while the theoretical efficiency of a heat engine operating with such a small temperature difference is about seven percent, past OTEC trials have achieved only one or two percent. With our proprietary technology, we can . . .”

  Dillon took down his first note. This could be real. He did not begrudge Kayla her full fifteen minutes. “So you're going to save the world,” he probed.

  “Hardly. We need many ways to generate power, Resetter fanatics notwithstanding. OTEC can be one method. It should be one, in the tropics, anyway.” She rattled off more of OTEC's virtues. Finally, she took a breath. “Will Russo Venture Capital Partners back us?”

  “I'll have to touch base in-house.” That was a stall, because as principal partner Dillon's was the only opinion that mattered. He only took aboard investors cowed by his reputation, being especially partial to the pension funds of small towns in flyover states. Well, there was one exception, but Yakov's interests were . . . different. Yakov was different: fascinating and worldly-wise. If Yakov sometimes demanded more involvement than Dillon's usual partners, he also brought resources none of Dillon's other partners could offer.

  Kayla persisted. “If you have further questions . . . ?”

  “But I will admit to being intrigued.” Dillon spared her the briefest of smiles. “Perhaps sometime I could tour your prototype.”

  “Absolutely! Her discipline finally slipped. With a grin, she whipped a folded datasheet from her jacket pocket. “Let's set that up now.”

  “We're about out of time,” he countered. “I'll be in touch.”

  She all but floated from his office—at the last, as naive as any of the day's supplicants. As naive, in her own way, as the Resetter activists whom she disdained.

  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.