Saturn Run (11 page)

“No problem, then,” Sandy said. “I don’t watch much screen, but I’ve been told you’re very good at this. As long as you’re good, and you pay attention when I’m telling you camera stuff, we can do it. I’ll pay attention to what you say about your reporting requirements. You take care of the talk, I’ll take care of the pictures.”

Fiorella nodded. “Fine. Now. How did you make that shot of me, at the window? I’ve never seen anything quite like it. My camera guys all have Reds, the same equipment you have.”

Sandy shrugged. “I was an arts major and I’ve looked at a lot of paintings, and I actually did quite a bit of painting and color studies myself in the studio courses. When I saw that dark window, and the light on the people walking by, I saw a painting, a Caravaggio, that deep, dramatic lighting,” Sandy said. “The other thing is, most photographers want sharpness. That’s most of what they think about: sharp, sharp, sharp. But people can look too sharp—a little softness can really pop with a naturally sensuous face. The thing is, I was shooting you through the glass on the egg, and then through the view-port glass, and that degraded the sharpness enough to give you the glow. Instead of re-sharpening in-camera, I left it that way.”

“You’re saying I look better if I’m fuzzy?”

“I’m saying you look better if you can’t see every single pore,” Sandy said.

She nodded: “Did you learn that with Naked Nancy?”

Sandy smiled and said, “Did you know Naked Nancy once had an emergency appendectomy?”

“No, I didn’t.”

“None of her viewers know, either. It’s a very fine scar, like a white hair, but thinner than a hair, a half centimeter long. Anytime you get a full body shot of her, it’s done with a special soft-focus lens. It softens her imperceptibly, so that she looks perfect. Which she almost is. You see everything else, but you won’t see that scar, or any little skin blemishes.”

“Why doesn’t she just go with makeup? On the scar?”

“That would be sort of . . . anti–Naked Nancy. The word would leak. Her viewers have an aesthetic, you know. They want her naked. That’s why she doesn’t have any hair.”

Fiorella said, “I gotta tell you, that never occurred to me. The aesthetic thing.”

Fiorella was acting as a pool reporter. Her own services got an hour head start, but after that, it was on to three dozen networks—if the networks wanted it. “That’s why I was so worried about you screwing it up,” Fiorella said. “Right now, if you were to make a list of news stars, I’d be a Senior Star—maybe—but nothing like an Ultra. When I get done with this, I want to be an Ultra. I’ve got a shot at it.”

Sandy rubbed his nose. “How bad do you want it?”

“Real bad,” Fiorella said.

—

The first broadcast was to be twenty-two minutes long, leaving eight minutes for commercials at each end and the middle. With an Earth-side recording, there’d usually be three cameras, but Sandy would have to work it with two, one stationary, one on his StabileArm.

The whole production took six hours on their second day in the station, squeezing out the twenty-two minutes of airtime.

Fiorella had written a script before she left Earth, had edited it the night before, to take into account actual conditions, and then they cut it up into shooting segments.

And they argued about costuming, they looked at colors against her skin and against the colors of the pipes and ducts inside the axis tube, against the blackness of space, against the white/beige colors of the eggs.
They settled on her green-black jumpsuit with a gold-chain belt for the “reporting” shots, and a pale army-green blouse with a narrow V neck for her “commentary” shots. She wore a simple gold necklace that showed off her endorsement charms, and gold earrings, with both sets of clothing.

She had to do her own makeup, though they found a crewwoman who could help with her hair. When they were ready, she took an egg out, slaved to Joe Martinez’s egg, while Sandy orbited around her.

And they shot the first five hours.

At the very end, sitting in a conference room looking at the vid on big high-res screens, Fiorella said, “We got most of it: we really did. The editors down there will turn it into gold. But: we need to reshoot the window.”

“What? The window shot is perfect,” Sandy said.

“Perfect Caravaggio—I looked him up,” Fiorella said. “Then I looked up a whole bunch of other pictures from the Renaissance, and you know what? I think we go for Sandro Botticelli. I’d like to make a costume change for the window shot . . . just for the window shot. We leave the green blouse for the other commentary.”

“What costume change?”

Fiorella said, “I got a blouse from Caroline. . . .” Caroline was the hair helper. Fiorella dipped into a gear bag and produced the blouse and handed it to him.

Sandy shook it out and said, “I don’t think so. It does have a nice casual look, but it’s so sheer that you’d see the brassiere lines under it and . . .”

Fiorella was shaking her head. “No brassiere.”

“No brassiere? You’re going to Naked Nancy?” Sandy was as shocked as a neo-Victorian. “You’re
not
Naked Nancy.”

“No, I’m not. But. I’ve looked at all the vid, and it’s very, very cool. I’m very, very cool. I’ve always been that way and I need to heat it up a little. Everything in pop culture is about sensuousness now. That’s worldwide. Sex. Food. Perfume. AR games. MassageSilk. RhythmTech. I don’t want porn, or anything like it, but I need to add some heat. I’m
looking for the hot librarian. We don’t have to send it—we can dump it, if it’s too much.”

Sandy looked at her for a moment, then said, “You wanted Ultra Star.”

“I do.”

“Okay. But you’re walking on a scary edge here. Go too far . . .”

“We won’t.” Fiorella went to change, came back a few minutes later. Sandy checked her out and said, “You’ll need some double-sided tape: you’ll need to stick the edges of the neckline to your skin, or you’re gonna show off a little more than you want. Not that that’d be a tragedy.”

“Maybe not from your perspective, but like you said . . . I’m walking on an edge. I’ll get some tape.”

When she’d taped the blouse down, she asked, “What do you think?”

Sandy said, “Uh, Fiorella . . . you know, redheads, in my experience . . .”

“Which I suspect is extensive . . .”

“. . . may tend to have somewhat pale nipples.” He put up his hands to fend off objections, then continued. “If you have in your makeup kit something with a touch of rose to it . . .”

“Go get in the fuckin’ egg,” she snapped.

They worked for another hour, a windup shot that would last perhaps two minutes on the broadcast vid. Sandy didn’t want to quit, but Fiorella started to lose her voice, even with saltwater sprays. Back inside, they reviewed the footage.

“You are so . . . venal,” Fiorella said, as she watched herself at the window. The gauzy blouse showed the finest, subtlest flashes of rose, almost as though they were part of the viewer’s imagination. “You are fundamentally an immoral, manipulative snake.”

“So you like it,” Sandy said. “I had to kick up the red channel, and believe me, after I did that, it was hard to keep your red hair under control.”

“We’ll send it down, see what my exec thinks,” she said.

The exec called her the next morning and said, “Unbelievable. Unbelievable. You’re a fuckin’ ice cream cone, Fiorella. They’re gonna eat you
up all over the world tomorrow night. Uh, the guy who shot this . . . is he around?”

Fiorella looked at Sandy: “He’s standing right here. We were going to see if you needed another shot or two.”

“Won’t be necessary. We’re good. Ask Randy . . .”

“Sandy . . .”

“Ask Sandy how much they’re paying him to take this trip . . .”

DAY THREE:

Becca was called into Fang-Castro’s suite on the morning of the third day: “They couldn’t find a better solution,” Fang-Castro told her. “They’re going with your idea, they think they can do something with the reactors that I don’t entirely understand . . . you’ll have to talk to them.”

“I’ve been thinking about it ever since we talked the first time,” Becca said. “I’ve got a lot of work to do. Boy, do I have a lot of work. I’ve got to get back down. Like right now. Fabrication is gonna be a bitch. Gonna make 3-D carbon-printer heads look like a kid’s crayons. I’ve been having nightmares, thinking about it.”

“But it’s not impossible.”

“No—but right there with the hardest things anybody’s ever built.”

Five plus a cat went up, four came back down.

Clover asked for, and got, permission to stay up, with Mr. Snuffles. “I wasn’t doing anything down there, anyway, that I can’t link into from up here. If somebody can throw out the garbage, lock up my house good, and send me up the rest of my clothes and some culinary supplies . . .”

“We’ll see that it gets taken care of,” Crow told him.

Crow talked to the President: “Fang-Castro and I spent six or eight hours talking about it, all told. It’s coming together: I think we’re good. And she’s better than good. Now we just have to screw down the security. If we can get six months, it’s a done deal.”

Fiorella’s broadcast on the first night got a six-share nationally, and a two-share worldwide, as the first comprehensive on-site vid from what would become America’s first interplanetary ship. For her blog, a six-share was terrific. A worldwide two-share was even better.

From there, it should have dropped off fairly sharply. But at midnight, Pacific time, she was running a twelve-share worldwide, meaning that twelve percent of the people in the world who were watching television were watching her.

Vid Ultra Stars were lucky to get an eight. An analysis by Public Analytics implied that it was the cross-breeding of Serious Science News with the sensuality of the photography that kept people looking. A hack collective had blown the images to one thousand percent in an attempt to isolate actual nipple pigmentation, and had reported that it may have been some kind of chemical composition overlaid on Fiorella’s epidermis. It wasn’t clear whether the hackers had ever heard of makeup.

Becca didn’t notice any of that. She got back to Georgetown and took up residence at the National Center for Mathematics. Somehow, the designs would go better, she thought, if the supercomputer were in the next room, so she could yell at the support techs if necessary.

Clover learned that there was a twenty-two-pound underage on the next Virgin-SpaceX flight up, and got Crow to send up a cold case with a giant sack of raw medium shrimp, an uncooked chicken, a bag of rice, a box of smoked pork sausage, bottles of olive oil, Worcestershire sauce and New Mexican red sauce, onions, garlic, a couple of green bell peppers, celery, tomatoes and bay leaves, some chicken stock, sea salt and three kinds of pepper and a variety of other spices. Fang-Castro and Tomaselli were invited to the Midnight Special, as Clover called it, a secret dinner out of sight in the back of the cafeteria, and when they were done, Fang-Castro said, “Okay, we’re going to need some extra freezer
room for specialty cooking . . . what would you call it? Can’t say, ‘Jambalaya for Important People.’”

“Rations,” Clover said. “Special rations for morale purposes.”

“Exactly. Rations,” Fang-Castro said. “God, this could kill my waistline.”

Sandy bought two more Reds on his own, and had a long talk with Leica about optical glass for the new vid ports on the egg. Leica could produce the glass over the next six months or so and guarantee that it would meet stress requirements. They also offered an endorsement. Sandy turned it down; not that he wasn’t flattered, but he didn’t like the idea of wearing labels, and didn’t need the money. After being turned down, Leica offered the loan of a half-million-dollar ultra-zoom, which he took. He called Martinez with the glass specs. Martinez said, “Yeah, I can do that, but they’re quite a bit bigger than I’d expected.”

“Believe me, it’s been thoroughly worked out by some of the top guys in the vid field,” Sandy said.

By that, he meant Gunnery Sergeant Cletus Smith, who told him, “As a rule of thumb, figure out how big you need them. Then double that. Then double that again. You’ll wind up using all of it.”

Outside the eggs, in space, he would carry his Reds in a special housing, adopted from dive housings. He got in touch with a French dive manufacturer and made arrangements to pay for three housings, to include battery-driven heaters and Leica glass. The housings would cost him forty thousand dollars each, but Sandy didn’t care: it was faster if he paid himself, rather than wait for government approval.

The dive manufacturer offered an endorsement. Sandy almost turned it down, but then thought of his surfer friend pushing brooms in Caltech’s Astro building. “Listen, if you endorse a friend of mine—he’s big in the surf world—I’ll talk about your dive gear when we get back and maybe we could do a vid on the equipment we use up there.”

The deal was done; Sandy was walking down the hall the next morning when the surfer/janitor exploded from a machine room, off a crowded corridor, and wrapped him up in a hug and kissed him on the cheek. “Man . . .”

“They’re looking at us strangely,” Sandy said.

Sandy also needed every picture he could get, and every analysis he could find, of the environment in Saturn space. What was the light like? Would there be dust problems?

His best secure access to the information on Saturn’s environment was through the Astro center, and Fletcher, with Crow’s encouragement, unhappily gave him a closet-sized office with nothing but a shaky wooden table, an uncomfortable chair, and a computer port.

“The thing is, he’s got to look at this stuff, since he’ll be spending so much time out in the environment,” Crow told Fletcher. “We can’t have a guy who’s going to Mars being caught doing in-depth research on Saturn. He needs a computer with your security shield on it.”

Sandy left the crappy furniture in the hall and brought in his own. He was working there late one night when he heard people running in the hallway, and looked out and saw an Astro Senior Star go by—a fat guy, running like an Olympian, really pumping his knees—and out of simple curiosity, followed.

The fat guy knew Sandy was cleared for Saturn work, and so didn’t shoo him away as he called Fletcher, and sputtered into the secure phone.

—

Crow’s wrist-wrap had a nasty urgent alert that sounded like a frog in agony: “
BREET BREET BREET . . .
You have an urgent phone message. Do you wish to hear it?
BREET BREET BREET
. You have an urgent phone message. Do you wish to hear it?
BREET . . .”

“Okay, okay, goddamnit, I’m awake. Shut up. Who is it? What time is it?”

“Five o’clock in the morning, March twenty-sixth. Call from Sanders Darlington listed Most Urgent no details . . .”

Two in the morning on the West Coast. Whatever was happening there, Sandy didn’t think it could wait until later.

“Answer.”

Sandy came up: “Crow?”

“This had better be good.”

“Sorry to bust you at this time of the morning, and you would have heard in the next couple hours anyway, I think, but I thought since I had the direct line—”

“What the hell is it?”

“The starship’s leaving.”

“Shit!” Crow fumbled for the bottle of stim pills on the nightstand. “You mean it’s gone?”

“It’s going. It fired up its engines about twenty minutes ago. It’s already got enough velocity to break orbit, and it’s looking like it’s vectoring well out of the plane of the solar system. The smart boys think it’s leaving for good.”

“And now everybody and their cousin can see the goddamned thing?” Crow popped three stim pills, one more than the max.

“That’s what they’re saying. Well, not exactly that. They’re saying that at Saturn’s distance it’d only look like about a twentieth-magnitude star. You’d need several meters’ worth of telescope to detect it.”

“So maybe we’re going to get lucky, again?” Crow didn’t much believe in luck, not the good kind, anyway.

“No. Listen, I don’t know the details about this stuff, but they’re saying that it’s burning a lot hotter than when it came in. It’s putting out a load of 511 keV gamma rays. I asked one of the other grad students. That means—”

“Shut up, kid, let me think for a sec.”

“But 511 keV—”

“SHUT UP!” Crow took a breath; sleep deprivation and stim pills weren’t conducive to clear thinking. Calm down.

Sandy kept his mouth shut.

After a moment Crow said, “Sorry I yelled at you. We’ve got gamma ray satellites and detectors up the wazoo to ferret out any evidence of folks playing with Bad Things. So does every other major power. Some of those systems will see this. At first they’ll just think it’s another false alarm from some gamma ray burster out in another galaxy, but they’re going to figure out pretty fast it isn’t. Five hundred and eleven keV, that’s the signature of electron-positron annihilation, and you bet
we look hard for that. We do not want anyone screwing around with measurable amounts of antimatter on Earth.”

“So, what?”

“So no change in what we’re doing. We still need to find out what the hell the little green men have been doing at Saturn, and what they rendezvoused with and what they left behind.”

“And how they’re making a whole lotta antimatter, apparently.”

“Yeah, and how they’re storing it. Hey: thanks for the call. Keep your ear to the ground out there. I gotta call Santeros and a few other people.”

Crow disconnected and thought for ten seconds, then put in an urgent call to Fang-Castro. USSS3 kept to the same time as Washington, D.C. She was unlikely to be happy to hear from him.

The moment her bleary-eyed face appeared on the screen, he said, “Sorry about the early hour, Captain, but there’s been a sudden change of plans. The starship has departed Saturn, and if the entire world doesn’t know that already, it very soon will. Accordingly, I’m upping the security level at USSS3. I need to take some immediate steps.”

While he was talking, he was thumbing instructions into his phone.

Fang-Castro was now fully alert. “I imagine so, Mr. Crow. What exactly are you planning?”

“Within the next few minutes, we’ll be locking down your computer systems and Earth links. Everyone except you will need a new password, which we’ll provide as we finish vetting your personnel. In order to keep essential station functions running, nobody currently logged in will be kicked off yet, but they will be in thirty minutes. You will have admin status and can assign new 6V passwords to personnel you deem necessary and absolutely trustworthy, to keep the station running. Please keep it to a minimum. Any passwords you assign will also have to be updated every twenty-four hours, until we get the personnel completely vetted and permanent new passwords assigned.”

“Are you expecting trouble, Mr. Crow?” She was tapping the pad by the phone. “I’m rousing our security detail, such as it is, right now.”

“I don’t know about trouble,” Crow said. “I mean that literally: I
don’t know. That’s why I’m casting such a broad net. We need to isolate and remove all foreign nationals and non-citizens from the station. I have a list of those personnel . . . sending it to you . . . now. Until we can ferry them off the station, make sure that these people are always in their quarters or under the visual supervision of your security people or mine. Under no circumstances are they to be allowed access to the computer systems, not even for personal business. If they have personal or research files on the computer, I’ll see that they get forwarded to them promptly and in full once they’re groundside. Nobody in particular is under suspicion. Anyone I had doubts about was reassigned off the station weeks ago. This is purely precautionary.”

Fang-Castro gave him an appraising look. “So noted, Mr. Crow. I appreciate getting the heads-up before you shut down my station.”

Crow was not oblivious. “I hear you, Captain. The station remains under your authority. I apologize if I implied otherwise, but this is a bit of an emergency. Now I gotta talk to Santeros. I’ll be in touch again, soon as I can.”

Crow checked the time: 5:20. The President normally rose at 5:45. Good. He thumbed her private direct access number. It was a necessity of the job, rousting the high and mighty out of bed.

Nothing would ever get him to admit that he enjoyed it.

By the time Crow made his prediction that everybody would soon know about the aliens, that fact was already history. Near-Earth space was filled with an assortment of civilian radiation telescopes and a multinational network of radiation-detecting arms-control satellites.

Simultaneous with the Sky Survey Observatory seeing the starship engine’s ignition, the arms control array had picked up a faint but statistically significant increase in the 511 keV background. Near-instantaneous analysis by security computers did not point to a terrestrial origin so, following a tradition that went back the better part of a century, the data was passed on to the astronomers’ computers.

Some of those instruments were already on top of it. Their “first alert” radiation scopes talked directly to a slew of fast-response telescopes that
covered everything in the electromagnetic spectrum from ultra-high-energy gamma rays to long band radio wavelengths. The new gamma ray source was identified and localized in less than a minute.

In less than five, phones started ringing in the offices and by the bedsides of any astronomers who had the faintest interest in this kind of astronomy. The telescopes were looking at something new. This source wasn’t showing anything like a normal time vs. brightness curve in any wavelengths. It was unlike a gamma ray burster or supernova or any other known astronomical object.

It took only a few more minutes for the position of the new source to be refined enough to be able to tell that it was moving and that it had obvious parallax—telescopes on different parts of the earth and in different parts of the sky were seeing it in slightly different locations relative to the background of stars.

The difference was a lot bigger than experimental error. Though the source might be extraterrestrial, that meant it was damn close by astronomical standards. It not only
looked
like it was close to Saturn, it
was
close to Saturn. It took even less time to determine that the motion was changing. The source was accelerating.

The ball finished dropping twenty minutes after first detection. By then, no fewer than five different astronomers’ working groups had back-extrapolated the trajectory, which is what they were already calling it, having stopped thinking of it as a natural object. The source had departed from a specific point in Saturn’s rings.

The International Astronomical Union had clear protocols for how to handle detection of extraterrestrial intelligence (DETI). Everyone with enough brains to call themselves an astronomer agreed that if this didn’t qualify as a plausible detection, then nothing would, until they were shaking hands with the little green men themselves.

All of that instantly became the worst-kept secret in scientific history.

In another hour, a dozen different astronomy departments at a dozen top universities had figured out that what was going up must have previously come down. The data-mining began in earnest. There was a lot to be mined; the assortment of sky survey and space watch telescopes
generated zettabytes of new imagery across a wide swath of the electromagnetic spectrum every day. It was exactly like looking for a needle in a haystack.