Analog SFF, June 2011 Read online

Only driving home, as much as he tried to enjoy the Appalachian scenery, he couldn't. Ellen's recent rebuke kept nagging at him: Have you considered the possibility someone else might know something?

  If he could get past Valerie bushwhacking him, she had given him a lot to ponder.

  * * * *

  Wednesday, April 19

  Marcus poked at a telecom console, setting parameters for the upcoming conference call, and thinking: all meetings are not created equal. He was in a mundane conference room at Goddard, deep within suburban Maryland, but this call was out of this world.

  Whatever grief the week might bring him, the progress review reminded him why everything else was worth it.

  Landscape undulated over the conference table, sliding past as a distant camera swiveled on its post. Somewhere behind the camera, the full moon was about to set; Phoebe's hills and structures cast long, knife-edged shadows. To his right, in the tourist-bot preserve, the Grand Chasm gaped: a vast, inky blackness. The dazzling “star” just above the eerily close horizon was The Space Place, almost two hundred miles ahead of Phoebe in its orbit.

  Ellen limped into the telecom room, bearing Starbucks. Despite physical therapy, her leg still bothered her. She set a cardboard cup on the table beside him.

  “Thanks,” he said, concentrating on the final link left to configure. “That said, you have no respect for tradition.”

  She laughed. “Okay, who confirmed for today's session?”

  He gestured at the holo. “The usual folks on the far end, though Darlene Stryker is at the powersat. She'll call in from there.”

  “How far is the far end today?”

  As distant as it could be. “As the neutrino flies"—right through the Earth, without noticing—"it's about thirteen thousand miles. Relayed through two geosynch comsats and then down to Phoebe, call it a half second.”

  She closed the door and settled into a chair. “Who's joining from on the ground?”

  “Phil and Bethany.” Phil Majeski was the prime contractor's program manager. Bethany Taylor was Phil's chief engineer. Both disdained SETA contractors. “Phil's netting in from corporate. Bethany called to say she's stuck at a subcontractor's facility. Resetter picketing, unrelated to us—something about shale-oil gasification in Wyoming. I'm linking her in now.” Marcus waved a wireless key fob at the sensor in the comm console. The authentication LED blinked green. “Ready.”

  “Let's go.”

  Marcus shrank the Phoebe image to one-fourth size, then switched views from the surface to the base's little common room, where three men sat waiting. As they and Ellen swapped greetings, Marcus connected the other locations.

  “Everyone have the agenda?” Ellen asked. She started through her list.

  The comm console took notes, but speech-recognition software glitched under the best of circumstances. These weren't. Merely this many people in one conversation sometimes confused the software. With the comm delay between Earth and Phoebe, people spoke over each other as often as not, and echo suppression was less than perfect. Noise suppression filtered out the drone of Phoebe's ventilation fans, but not the random clatters of—well, Marcus did not always know what.

  So Marcus took notes, too.

  Lots of notes. Hydroponics yields in Phoebe's still experimental gardens. Performance data on the thrusters that would slowly lift the powersat, its construction now almost complete, to its operational orbit. Final integration tests on the microwave transmission arrays. Production data on Phoebe's automated factories, churning out solar cells (and in smaller quantities, other electronics), structural beams, and water and oxygen for the construction crew. Defect and repair rates. Assembly anecdotes—but not many, the process having become routine. Assembly statistics.

  PS-1 had just topped two million pounds! How amazing was that? The late, unlamented International Space Station had massed only about one third as much, and its on-orbit assembly had required more than a decade. But the ISS had been lugged up to orbit piece by piece, battling Earth's gravity all the way—for more than a thousand dollars for every pound. For a powersat fabricated on Earth, launch costs alone would rival construction costs for a coal power plant of equivalent capacity.

  But most of PS-1's ingredients came from Phoebe's mines. And that was why—while there would never be another big tin-can space station—tens of powersats would join PS-1. Even combined, all those powersats would scarcely touch Phoebe's trillion-ton mass.

  Motion in one of the four holos kept drawing his eye. Darlene Stryker, in her skintight counterpressure suit. She floated above the vast plain of the powersat, the nearest safety-and-inspection camera following her as she drifted at the end of her tether. As the camera tracked her, coworkers—most many-tentacled robots, one human and spacesuited like her—passed in and out of the background. He did not see any of the hoppers that shuttled workers the fifty miles from Phoebe to the construction site on the powersat.

  Two million pounds was an abstraction. But two miles square, more or less: that was real. That he could feel. Marcus admired the plain of solar cells aglitter in the moonlight. PS-1 seemed to stretch on and on forever.

  “Okay,” Ellen said at last. “Good session, folks. Bethany, I'll look forward to your update on getting the backup water recycling system back to nominal. For next week's meeting?”

  “No problem,” Bethany said. “Chances are you'll have something in your e-mail by the day after tomorrow.”

  “Excellent.” Ellen stood. “That should do it, then.”

  “One thing,” Marcus said. The words just popped out. Something about PS-1 stretching into the distance. Something about defects, and big engineering, and his subconscious at work.

  Phil Majeski scowled, putting his whole face to work: brow furrowed, eyes narrowed, lips pursed. Phil was no fan of support contractors.

  “What is it, Marcus?” Ellen sounded surprised. He usually held any comments until after the meeting.

  What indeed? Big engineering. What else was big? The solar farm he and Ellen had toured. Square miles there, too, of solar cells, plus the rectifying antennas newly added to receive the microwave downlink from PS-1. The Green Bank Telescope, the collection area of its dish a “mere” two-plus acres. Eavesdropping on phone calls out near Saturn.

  Then he had it: the flip side of the powersat, from this vantage unseen. The microwave transmission arrays. No one had ever deployed such a large phased-array transmitter, whether using solid-state masers or tube-based amplifiers coupled to microwave antennas. Nothing ever built even came close. PS-1 incorporated both types of arrays, each in several design variations. The separate arrays would operate standalone or in unison, allowing side-by-side comparisons. In every case, many thousands of transmitters . . .

  “The failure rates on the klystrons and masers?” Marcus began cautiously.

  “What about them?” Bethany said. “We covered that. They're all testing well within contract specs.”

  “Understood. But when won't at least one tube or maser be out of spec? Pumping out microwaves at unintended frequencies?” Because the focused, steerable power beam resulted from exactly controlling—individually and in real time—the many thousand transmitters. The math of phased arrays was a thing of beauty, the choreography of constructive and destructive interference among transmitters. Only waves at the wrong frequency would not interfere properly, would not aggregate into a controlled beam. Wrong frequencies were just . . . noise. “A single misbehaving klystron—out of thousands—is like a whole TV satellite transmitting on an unauthorized frequency.”

  “Which is why,” Bethany snapped, “when a klystron goes out of spec, we'll power it down. Powersat-resident maintenance robots and spare parts, remember?”

  And if, in the meanwhile, the interference obliterates an interstellar observation years in the planning, or the faint echoes of a radar beam bounced off Titan?

  “Maybe the radio astronomers have a legitimate concern,” Marcus said. “How soon will PS-1 detect and adapt to
an out-of-tolerance transmitter?”

  “Soon enough,” Bethany came back, only without her usual cockiness.

  Ellen heard the uncertainty too. “As I recall, Kendricks signed up to a requirement to minimize RF interference with ground-based systems.”

  “We all have a schedule requirement,” Phil rebutted. Schedule was the blunt instrument with which Congress beat up NASA, and NASA the contractor. But deadlines could work both ways. “Surely schedule takes precedence over hypothetical failure modes.”

  “And suppose that such a hypothetical failure occurs?” Ellen persisted. “What operational tests do you have planned to demonstrate PS-1's corrective action?” Pause. “Marcus, would you check that for me?”

  “Sure, Ellen,” Marcus said.

  He was all but certain that the test-case database contained nothing relevant. And that Kendricks's award fee for the calendar quarter would take a hit if Ellen wrote up the finding as a critical deficiency. And that Phil, who as the Kendricks program manager got a slice of the award fee, would share the pain.

  Phil sighed. “It won't be necessary, Ellen. Transmitter failure and response sounds like another set of simulations we should run.”

  “And also,” Marcus added, “simulations with randomly spaced pairs of transmitters gone rogue at the same time.” Twisting the knife, but also being practical. “Dealing in such large numbers, two near-concurrent faults are bound to happen.”

  Because what the hell. Phil hated him anyway.

  * * * *

  Toe tapping aimlessly (and occasionally kicking the ethernet cable), Valerie pondered an empty screen. She was so tempted to roll up her datasheet, but at week's end the application window closed for observing time on the big dish. Miss the cutoff—or fail to make a strong case—and she would have to wait four months to reapply.

  She and a few hundred other needy applicants.

  By her side at the dinette table, Simon worked on a school assignment. Or, to judge from his fidgeting, not. At least while she sat there, the IM window on his datasheet remained closed. “How's the assignment coming?” she asked.

  He countered with, “What's for dinner?”

  Not encouraging while Simon still toyed with his midafternoon snack, and with a big stack of homework due the next day. “Want me to take a look? Need some help?”

  “Nah.” Fidget, fidget.

  She looked anyway. The top window in his datasheet was a social studies unit called The Great Oil Shock. There had been, she read furtively, “an unexpected drop-off in production among some of the world's largest oil suppliers.” Very PC: Something had happened. Not something anyone caused to have happened.

  Not that she would want to try explaining the Crudetastrophe to a nine-year-old, but it was no mere “drop-off,” and someone had most definitely caused it. Even though who, and what had happened October 12, 2014, remained a closely held secret of the Restored Caliphate.

  But far more was known than the sanitized children's lesson Valerie was surreptitiously skimming. . . .

  * * * *

  Oil prices surged in the weeks following Simon's birth. Valerie scarcely noticed, let alone registered that the jump supposedly was a big deal. With a colicky newborn to care for, who had time to sleep, much less to surf?

  Or, for that matter, to drive? She had nowhere to go for the next few months, and work, when she did go back, was in biking distance. And hallelujah for teachers: Keith had the summer off too. If the world chose to have a crisis—and when was it not on the verge of one?—she figured the world could muddle through without her. And, anyway, didn't energy prices yo-yo every few years?

  The world did have a crisis without her.

  That August the Caliph's Guard declared to the world that it had deployed atomic devices deep within the country's main petroleum reservoirs. To deter aggression by its enemies—variously: counterrevolutionary elements, apostate neighboring regimes, the Zionist entity, and hostile Crusader powers—the Guard vowed to deny their oil for all time if blasphemers impinged on the Caliph's holy sovereignty.

  Still, she scarcely noticed. Simon was all of three months old. Keith was up to his eyeballs in last-minute lesson plans. After two years as a substitute, he had just gotten an appointment to teach economics at the Pocahontas County High School. She and Keith both struggled to make childcare arrangements so she could get back to work at the observatory. The scattered few minutes she could spare from family, if only to clear the cobwebs from her brain, she spent poring over the latest exosolar planet surveys.

  If none of that had been happening in her life, she still would not have understood what insanity drove the Guard to trigger its nukes. To this day, perhaps no one knew outside the regime's inner circles. And maybe not even them. After the explosions, Guard factions had turned on one another, and on foreigners, in an orgy of blame, purges, and executions.

  But however mysterious the Crudetastrophe's origins, its consequences were all too clear:

  —Radiation tainted petroleum reserves measuring in the billions of barrels, the contamination spreading into neighboring states’ oil fields. Whether the reservoirs were always linked deep underground or the atomic blasts had opened fissures between once distinct reservoirs—experts disagreed—petroleum exports abruptly ceased from across a wide area.

  —Regional antagonisms erupted into open warfare.

  —Oil-field destruction and shipping blockades spread far beyond the Restored Caliphate's borders. Economies collapsed across the Middle East.

  —The price of petroleum tripled.

  The supply and price shocks plunged most of the world into deep recession. Unlike the oil embargos of 1967, 1973, and 1979—their extent and duration limited, ultimately, by the suppliers’ dependence on oil sales—the Crudetastrophe was irreversible. Many onetime exporters could not resume production as fervently as they wished to.

  China's and Japan's export-driven economies collapsed further and faster than most. Almost overnight, China and Japan were selling U.S. treasury bonds rather than buying them. Interest rates soared, currencies deflated, and countries reneged on their debts.

  Stagflation, Keith said. Stagnation and inflation together.

  Nine years later, The Great Stagflation still raged. But not everywhere—

  The Crudetastrophe explosions had not affected Russia's vast oil and gas reserves. Russia emerged from the crisis as a petro-superpower, controlling unprecedented wealth, snapping up American treasury bonds at fire-sale prices, and vying for global economic hegemony.

  And as chaos spread across the Middle East, Keith's Marine Corps reserve unit was called up. . . .

  * * * *

  “Mom. Mom. Mom!”

  Valerie shook off the old, sad memories to find Simon squinting at her suspiciously. “What is it?”

  “What is for dinner?”

  She was in no mood to cook. “Frozen pizza.” As Simon beamed approval—not exactly a compliment to her culinary skills—the phone rang.

  Life without cell phones was liberating. But only corded phones? Shaking her head at the primitiveness of it all, Valerie took the three steps to her ancient, corded landline phone. Simon was squirrelly today. If she took the call on her datasheet he would be out of his chair like a shot to mug for the webcam.

  “Valerie?”

  She could not place the voice. “Yes?”

  “Marcus Judson.” Pause. “Is this a bad time?”

  In hindsight, she had not handled his visit very wisely. It was hard to imagine this call ending well. “Now is fine. What's up?”

  “You and your cronies gave me something to think about. And the thing is . . . you're right. There might be a problem.”

  The well-stretched cord would reach well into the dining room. She went; Simon followed; she shooed him back. “Your assignment,” she mouthed. “Go on, Marcus.”

  “It's not like I think we should stop work on the powersat, but there could be complications. There might be problematical failure modes w
e need to work around.” When he started explaining phased arrays to her, she interrupted. “Remember who I work for?”

  “Touché.” He coughed. “I meant to ask, Valerie. How's your son feeling?”

  “Thanks for asking. Simon has progressed to the malingering stage.” And unless he is bleeding from the ears in the morning, he's going back to school.

  “Okay, here's the thing. We never had our one-on-one discussion, and I'd also like to collect input from specialists there to fold into a failure-mode simulation. What if I come back out, say, Friday the twenty-eighth?”

  “That would work.” But there was something else in his voice. A hesitance. He wouldn't. Would he? “Was there something else?”

  “Yeah . . . I wondered if I could take you out to dinner afterward.”

  Crap, he would. She hadn't dated but once or twice since Keith died. For the longest time, she hadn't been ready. After, Simon and work consumed her time. Anyway, she was content with things the way they were. Or was it resigned?

  Had she wanted to, who was there to date, anyway? Coworkers? Uh-uh.

  If she told Marcus no, then what? A sudden loss of interest in radio astronomy? He did not seem like the punitive type. Hell, she had sandbagged him. Maybe he meant only a dinner of colleagues.

  As her thoughts churned, the silence stretched.

  “Or not,” Marcus said. “I thought we might hit it off, but maybe you're seeing someone. Or whatever. Forget I asked. It has no bearing on my returning to Green Bank. I do need to talk with the experts.”

  “No,” Valerie said, surprising herself, “asking is fine.” Reassuring which of them? “And dinner does sound like fun.”

  * * * *

  Friday, April 28

  Astronomers, engineers, and programmers wandered in and out of the Green Bank social lounge, where the atmosphere was more like an after-hours bull session than an inquiry. For long-scheduled observing time or to handle other commitments, Marcus told himself every time someone left. But despite the informality—or, perhaps, because of it—the notes file on his datasheet grew voluminous. His fingers ached from so much typing on its virtual keyboard. One thing this gathering was not: a DC-style, stultifying meeting.