The Tranquillity Alternative (7 page)

“Yeah, she is.” Jay and Lisa had a fifteen-year-old daughter. “It took a little bit of begging, but her principal finally let her out of classes to see her daddy go to the Moon.”

“Gee,” Parnell muttered, shaking his head. “Used to be that a kid whose dad was an astronaut didn’t need permission to skip school.”

Jay shrugged as he picked up his coffee mug. “Times have changed, Commander. I think her bus driver gets more respect.” He took a sip as he added, “Better job security, that’s for damn sure.”

“I guess. Well, if our young hacker is running late, it gives us a chance to eat, at least.” Parnell nodded toward Ray Harvey, the mission director. He was seated at the far end of the table, tapping impatiently at his leather folder as he entertained questions from the two other civilian passengers. “Speaking of food, I’m sorry you missed my barbecue, Cris. We had a good time … wish you could have been there.”

I bet you do
, she thought to herself as she spread marmalade on her bagel.
What’s a good party without the token queer?

She reflected, not for the first time, that there were probably as many closet homosexuals working at NASA as there were African-Americans with astronaut wings, but at least Jay was protected by the Civil Rights Act … and no one would ever call him a nigger to his face. “I’m sorry I wasn’t there, Commander,” she said diplomatically, “but I had some family matters to take care of before I left.”

Trombly coughed loudly as he hid a smile behind his hand. “I thought you were divorced, Captain Ryer,” Kingsolver said, keeping a straight face. “You mean you’ve found someone else?”

Cris ignored him; any reply she might make would only add fuel to the fire. She was gratified to see both Parnell and Lewitt pretending to study their notebooks. Farther down the table, however, Ray Harvey was openly glaring at her. He hadn’t wanted to keep her on this mission. Given the chance, he would have yanked Cris two months ago, when the IAO presented their report to NASA’s Astronaut Office. By then, however, there was little he could do about it; she had already been more than halfway through training for this mission and there was no one else qualified to take her place. The rest of the astronaut corps rated to pilot
Conestoga
had either been reassigned to other jobs or had resigned from the agency; a couple had even taken jobs in Germany for Koenig Selenen.

For this last NASA mission to Tranquillity Base, she and Parnell were the only NASA lunar astronauts available on short notice. Ray Harvey knew that. He was stuck with an old fart and a dyke, and at least one of them disturbed his shit.

Suddenly removing her from the mission, though, would have raised too many public-relations questions from the man and woman sitting next to him. Noticing the silent exchange, Berkley Rhodes and Alex Bromleigh glanced Cris’s way. She smiled for their benefit; Rhodes beamed back in response and Bromleigh gave her a short, professional nod.

Cris kept smiling as she returned her attention to her breakfast.
Well, okay, so he’s got five minority members on this mission. An old guy, a black, a lesbian, and two TV reporters. How politically correct
…

“Our media darling,” Lewitt murmured out of the corner of his mouth, smiling in Rhodes’s direction before he glanced back at Parnell. “Y’know, I think she actually put on makeup for this.”

“I wouldn’t doubt it.” Parnell pulled a pair of bifocals out of his breast pocket as he studied his notebook. “Cronkite would have had a duck if he’d ever met her …”

“Now, don’t you start with the stories again.”

“It was back in sixty-four,” Parnell began loftily as he turned a page, “and I was aboard the Wheel when Walter—Ol’ Walt, we used to call him—came up to interview us for …”

He stopped as the door swung open and a plump young man strode into the mess hall. “Ah, and I see the prodigal son has finally arrived.”

Cris looked up as Paul Dooley, dressed in astronaut blues and carrying a laptop computer in his right hand, walked toward the table. She hadn’t seen very much of Dooley at the Cape—he had spent most of his training period at Koenig Selenen’s facility in Bonn—but she noticed that he seemed to have lost a little weight.

Well, everyone did … but Dooley still came off as the stereotypical computer geek, despite his attempts to communicate an air of cyberpunk raffishness. He goggled at everyone from behind the round lenses of his wire-rim glasses as he stalked toward the last remaining place at the table.

“Okay, okay, so I’m late,” he said impatiently. He knocked over a salt shaker with his computer case as he placed it on the table, and didn’t bother to set it upright; so much for good luck, Cris thought. “Fucking traffic on the road … can’t believe this shit …”

“Good morning, Mr. Dooley,” Ray Harvey called out. “How nice of you to join us.”

“Wouldn’t have missed it for the world, Ray.” Dooley nervously tossed back his thin black hair with his hand. “Look, I’m really fucking sorry for getting here so late, but … I dunno, where can I get some coffee?”

Parnell tipped down his bifocals, stared at Dooley, and silently pointed toward the buffet table. Bromleigh, in his dual role as ATS cameraman and network news producer, pulled an industrial Sony camcorder from beneath his seat and stood up, apparently getting ready to grab a shot of
Conestoga
’s crew eating breakfast together before their historic mission. Berkley Rhodes automatically primped for the camera as Dooley, apparently miffed that no one was catering to him, shuffled over to the buffet table in search of caffeine juice. The two ferry jockeys continued to watch Cris as if she’d come from another galaxy with the intent of exterminating all male life-forms on planet Earth.

“Having fun?” Parnell whispered to her.

“Loads,” she replied just as quietly.

She was mildly surprised when he reached out to pat her arm. “Don’t worry about it,” he murmured. “A short trip up, a short trip back … it’ll be a milk run.” He removed his hand and picked up his coffee mug. “Might as well enjoy it. After this, you’ll need to learn German to go to the Moon again.”

“Uh-huh,” she said.
And maybe the Germans won’t throw me out for what I do in my private life
….

Ray Harvey cleared his throat and stood up. Conversation at the table died as he opened his notebook. “Gentlemen, ladies … if I can have your attention, we’ll start the briefing. Liftoff is currently scheduled for 0730 hours….”

Transcript:
The CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite;
broadcast September 30, 1963

Cronkite:
Good evening. If this doesn’t look like my usual desk in New York … well, it isn’t. Tonight, we’re transmitting live from Space Station One, in orbit 1,075 miles above Earth, which was officially completed two days ago.

If we pan our television camera slightly to my left, you can see out a porthole window in the station’s circular rim … and, yes, there it is, the planet Earth, over a thousand miles away. If you look carefully, you can make out the Florida coastline beneath a cloud formation. We won’t be able to look at it for very long, because the space station is rotating on its axis and soon this window will no longer be pointing toward Earth, but it’s a magnificent sight for you folks back home.

With me now, in our temporary CBS studio in the station’s mess compartment, is General Chet Aldridge, the United States Space Force commander in charge of Space Station One. General Aldridge, how does it feel to have the Wheel finally operational?

Aldridge:
It feels great, Walter. It’s been seven years since this project was begun and four years since the first sections were launched from Cape Canaveral, so we’re mighty glad to have the job done at last, and mighty proud of the men who built Space Station One.

Cronkite:
When President Nixon made his televised address to the nation yesterday, he said that the purposes of the Wheel were not entirely military in nature. As a military officer yourself, can you comment on that?

Aldridge:
It’s not for me to dispute the words of my Commander In Chief, Walter, and so I’m not going to get into a fight with the President …

Cronkite
(chuckling)
:
No, sir, I’m not asking you to do that …

Aldridge:
… but the President is quite correct. Although Space Station One has the primary military mission of maintaining surveillance over … uh, countries who may pose a threat to the security of the United States, our goals are also scientific in nature. Now that the Wheel has been completed, our next major task will be the construction of the three lunar spaceships which will be sent to the Moon by the end of this decade. That’s our next goal, sending men to the Moon, and we plan to accomplish it just as well as we did with the building of this station.

Cronkite:
You mentioned surveillance, General. Can you tell me exactly what you’re looking for down there?

Aldridge:
I’m sorry, Walter, but that’s classified information, and I’m also sorry that I can’t show you the Earth Observation Center. However, I can tell you that, even as we speak, Space Station One is passing above Cuba. If Premier Castro happens to be watching this program right now, this should give him something to think about.

Cronkite:
On the lighter side of things, the network has received some interesting mail from our viewers over the past few days, since we announced that we would be doing a live telecast from the Wheel. One letter in particular comes from a young man, Michael Walsh of Baltimore, Maryland. Mike tells that he’s a fan of a science fiction TV show on one of our competing networks, and he says that everything he has seen on that program looks just like the pictures that the Space Force has sent from the Wheel. To quote him, General, he says, “How do I know this isn’t just a fake?”

Aldridge
(laughing)
:
Well, Mike, we watch that show up here, too, and to borrow a favorite phrase used by one of the characters, Dr. Spock, “It just ain’t logical, Cap’n …”

Cronkite
(chuckling)
:
At risk of supporting a rival network …

Aldridge:
Didn’t mean to do that, Walter. The Space Force doesn’t want to play favorites. Anyway, Mike, I’ll show you something they can’t do in Hollywood. Here’s a pitcher of water, you see, and here’s a glass on the table. Now, if I were to pour water into the glass down on Earth, it would fall straight into the glass, right? But up here, we’ve got something the scientists call a Coriolis effect, which involves the physical properties of objects within a rotating environment, like the Wheel.

Cronkite:
Bring the camera in a little closer, Bill …

Aldridge:
That means everything inside Space Station One is spinning, but since objects close to the floor are spinning a little bit faster than objects higher up, it means nothing is moving at quite the same rate. So, if I raise the pitcher just a little bit higher above the table and pour a little bit of water toward the glass …

Cronkite:
Whoa! Watch out there!

Aldridge:
Sorry, Walter, didn’t mean to splash you … so you see, Mike, the water goes kind of sideways and misses the glass entirely …

Cronkite:
And lands in my lap instead. Thank you for the demonstration, General.

Aldridge:
My pleasure, Walter … sorry to make a mess.

Cronkite:
We’ll return for a tour of Space Station One after station identification….

2/16/95 • 0414 EST

T
HERE WERE TWO
men named Paul Aaron Dooley.

One of them was a young man born in Austin, Texas, in 1962, whose life coincided with the rise and fall of the Space Age and the coming of the Digital Age. Something of a prodigy, at least by his own reckoning, he was sixteen when his father gave him an Apple I as a high-school graduation present; he was twenty when he graduated from the University of Texas with a B.S. in computer science and had made a modest reputation for himself within the fledgling hacker subculture on the Internet, where he had established himself as Thor200.

Several years later, while he was working on his doctorate at MIT’s artificial intelligence lab, Paul Dooley was one of a handful of darkside hackers who were investigated by the Secret Service in connection with a series of break-ins on Milnet, the Department of Defense computer network. He had only been peripherally involved with the Milnet intrusion, but Thor200 was a well-known logon in the hacker subculture and Dooley was therefore easy to trace; when the Secret Service began making raids, his was one of several doors broken down by federal agents. Although he was questioned for several hours at the agency’s Boston office, he was never charged with anything—mainly because, in exchange for legal immunity, he narked on the real perpetrators of the Milnet break-in. Several self-styled cyberpunks went to jail as a result, but Paul Dooley remained free, although Thor200 maintained a much lower profile on the net after that.

Following that close shave with the law, Dooley concentrated on his true interests, the development of advanced AI programs for semiautonomous teleoperated robots. It was Dooley’s contention that many of the jobs on the Moon currently performed by astronauts could be accomplished, with greater safety and at less expense, by robots guided by Earth-based operators using virtual-reality technology.

Dooley’s work gained the attention of the German aerospace corporation Koenig Selenen GmbH. The Germans were interested in using lunar resources for the construction of solar-power satellites, an idea first proposed by American scientists but largely ignored by U.S. government and industry, which were backing away from space exploration in the wake of the
Challenger
disaster and the gradual dissolution of the American civil space program.

For Dooley, at least, this was just as well. By the time he was getting ready to receive his doctorate from MIT, his prospects for future employment were limited to designing computer games for consumption by a generation whose idea of adventure was booting up a new Sega cartridge … or, perhaps, teaching a new group of hacker wannabes the technical skills that would make them employable by a European or Japanese company. On the other hand, Koenig Selenen offered him an opportunity to develop his theories to their full advantage. The young cyberneticist was on the Koenig Selenen payroll as soon as he received his doctorate; the company allowed him to remain in the United States, working as an “independent consultant,” although, in fact, he was one of its leading researchers. Several years later, when the company successfully negotiated with the U.S. government for the sale of Tranquillity Base, the person it turned to for upgrading the moon base’s obsolete computer systems was Paul Dooley.