Energized (9 page)

“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 type 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 child care arrangements so she could return to work at the observatory. The few scattered 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 called it. 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 we 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 D.C.-style, stultifying
meeting
.

Phil Majeski's simulation team would have its hands full in the coming weeks.

Valerie Clayburn was among the nomads, leaving Marcus to wonder how they would sync up for dinner. Whenever she popped in he treated her like anyone else—this was work, not a date, and her coworkers were all around, too—while second-guessing himself whether he was being too distant.

Why, but for a getting-back-on-the-horse-that-threw-you theory, had he asked her out?

Because Lindsey—the horse who
had
thrown him—was three months gone. Because life went on. Because Valerie was smart, intriguingly intense, and, despite her apparent efforts not to show it,
hot
.