Storiesonline.net ------- Landing by Gina Marie Wylie Copyright© 2011 by Gina Marie Wylie ------- Description: All through the ages forward-looking people have gone to the great and powerful (read: wealthy) and asked for their support for a great idea. From the earliest times the most common reaction has been "That's not possible!" and a bum's rush out the door. However as any casino manager will tell you, "intermittent reinforcement" is a powerful motivator -- let the mark win now and again, and he'll never quit. Thank heavens for progress that the naysayers don't always have the last word! Codes: ScFi ------- I David Cross laughed, shaking his head as he watched the computer monitor. "Imagine that! The first major success of our business is dropping its largest and most expensive asset into a hole and burying it. Good thing we didn't put that in the business plan!" Elaine Norman, the sole woman of the trio, joined with her two partners in laughing. She turned serious a millisecond later. "The regolith looks like it has the consistency of cat litter. Works for cats." "There's bound to be gold there someplace," the third person in the room quipped. "Although my daughter would probably prefer a pony." Sean Ferris tapped his finger on the screen, as he too got serious. "Elaine's right. Friable, but coarse grains. It supports the weight of the vehicle adequately, with only slight deformation." "When I was a girl I watched the movie The Music Man." Elaine said, bending to look at another screen showing yet another view from the surface of an asteroid millions of miles distant in space; seconds away by radio. "I watched it twice, because I thought it was cool. I had to wait three years for someone to explain the scam to me. "I never dreamed you could cheat people by making their dreams come true." "We should be so lucky," Sean told the others. "I keep hoping this is practice at camouflage." He waved at the main screen. "Politicians are even more obsessive about covering up than cats. With luck, they will dig, find the surprise and quit, thinking 'Who needs this?'" David Cross nodded. "That's the plan. Like Russian Matryoshka dolls, with another, smaller, doll inside. And then smaller and smaller ... Of course, being geeks, we put the larger ones inside the smaller ones." "We're getting pretty far afield with metaphors," Elaine reminded them pragmatically. "We need to buckle down and get on with the program. Deploy the two rovers, and get them going." The three were relatively young, David Cross the oldest at thirty-seven years and three months, ranging down to Elaine's far younger thirty-six years and ten months. The three had been friends since they were freshman together on their first day at Caltech, nearly twenty years before. "Who'd have thought after all these years, we'd be back to computer games? Playing Bolo over the internet?" Sean asked, pushing controls, making things happen a hundred million miles away. After a few minutes his rover crawled out of its travel container, started up the slope of the crater the vehicle had landed in. "The feed is still going out," Elaine reported, checking a small TV monitor. "No one is carrying this live, although NASA channel is thinking about it. I expect that some of the networks are taping the feed; we won't know for sure until we see them roll some of the tape later." "I never thought we'd get this far," Sean mused while playing with the rover, running it towards a significant boulder about sixty meters from the crater rim. "I mean, this is like the biggest scam in the history of the exploration of space -- maybe the biggest scam of all time. No one is even curious; no one cares. I think we could tell people and they'd yawn and tune us out." "Not if we told them the truth," David said bitterly. "Oh no, they would have ten million reasons why it won't work; they know it couldn't possibly work. They'd force us to stop, or failing that, won't let us send additional resources -- even if we have those resources bought and paid for, and the launches covered as well." They were silent after that. In fact, that had been the first plan and hadn't worked for just that reason. "Sometime, someone is going to run the math," Sean had observed critically. "Just remember I picked the year 2023 for our pool of when the morons finally figure out what's going on." Elaine giggled. "And you got pissed as hell when I insisted they'd never figure it out -- I wanted a 'never' option." "Too many ways to get there; not to get there," David told them. "We could tell someone; we have to have people working with us. Someone will blab; I'm sure of it. The question will be if they are going to believed. I think I agree with Elaine. Likely no one will figure it out on their own, but someone we tap for help will spill the beans. Then again if someone does figure it out, odds are the discoverer will be someone with an above average curiosity and drive. Might work for them; it did for us." They watched Sean's rover start a series of close ups of the large boulder. David sat down at his own console and began a second series of check offs; a few moments later a third rover "landed" on the asteroid. ------- II General Andrew Kostias picked up the radio mike, looked at the tech who nodded that everything was ready. "This is General Kostias," he told the man on the other end. "General, this is David Cross. I'm not sure how well you follow things down here, or up there before your tenure on the ISS began, but my company ran a deep space probe through the station a few months before you assumed command. I wanted to talk to you about that." "It's your dime, Doctor Cross," the general told him. "What can we do for you?" "We proposed an extension of our mission to NASA several months ago. They don't seem responsive; I thought I'd lobby you." The general laughed easily. "Of course, Doctor Cross. What is it you need?" David wasn't fooled at all. The man was a major roadblock to half the projects going on in Earth orbit. The stupid ones. The partners' project was something else again. "Well, we'd like to resupply our asteroid base. We have two hundred kilos of this and that we'd like to send out to Eros -- basically some minor adjustments to our original payload specs. NASA doesn't even want to listen. I was thinking, perhaps I could bribe you." The general looked at David carefully. "Bribe me?" "So to speak, of course. In the beginning the ISS was going to electrolyze water to get hydrogen and oxygen; the powers that be decided not to do that, so you run an H2O surplus which you tank. You also have to import O2 from Earth. That's expensive as hell; a kilo per person, per day. Bringing that up from Earth ... well, $11,000 a kilo was the last number I saw of how much it cost to lift to orbit. "I'd like to trade you water, which you have, for liquid O2, which we have. We'll offer to trade at a ten to one ratio initially." The general laughed and shook his head. "You think I'm a fool? Ten kilos of water for a kilo of oxygen? Crummy bargain!" "Oh no, General. Ten kilos of O2 for a kilo of water. I understand you have about 4 metric tons of surplus-to-needs water; we would deliver 40 tons of liquefied O2 to the station, in exchange. Metric tons -- 40 thousand kilos -- and we'll provide the shipping and packaging." The general blinked. That was, for the six people currently aloft, more than thirty years supply. And the cost of shipping that much oxygen to orbit was just a shade less than half a billion dollars. David pretended that the general's pause to think about it was more significant than it was. "We would be willing to throw in the packaging with our part of the deal -- that's about ten kilos of chrome steel for each 100 kilos of oxygen. Oh, about ten percent of the tanks are titanium; you can have that too, but the titanium tanks only run about four kilos per 100 kilos of gas. "Further, we'd also be willing to process your CO2 scrubbers, in situ. We can regenerate them; you could save on recycling those, too." "And NASA turned this down?" the general asked, not very surprised. "Yes, sir. They said that returning our probe to the vicinity of the ISS was too risky -- even though we told them we'd give op-con of the trajectory to you there on ISS. They said that they didn't see a need for four tons of high quality steel and titanium on the ISS; that they didn't see a need for processing the scrubbers in orbit; they can bring them down and send them back up, almost forever we were told." Aside of course, from the fact that shuttling the scrubbers was about 5% of the cargo capacity of the lift to orbit. The oxygen was another 10%. "How would you process the scrubbers?" the general asked, curiously. "A two step process where we run potassium through the cells, then take the resulting carbonate and use process heat to break down the carbonate. Our probe has a solar mirror, the process heat comes from that." David's thoughts strayed -- and of course, if then had a solar mirror, they wouldn't need the partner ... but they don't. "This won't do the plastic boxes the scrubbers are in much good," the general said drily. "Well, we would exchange the plastic boxes for ones made of titanium. Not much heavier, but significantly stronger and immune to the heat involved. It's a pretty simple box and the temperature only gets up to about 175 degrees Celsius." "Potassium, oxygen, iron, titanium. You have a little something out there on Eros, Doctor Cross?" David looked at the man steadily. "As stated in our mission objectives, we are experimenting with industrial mineral extraction processes in solar orbit. We've had some success, yes, sir." "And the cargo you want to haul out to Eros?" the general asked David. "Well, the water of course is the major item, plus about a 70 kilos of calcium chloride; we've hardly found any halogens on the asteroid. Twenty kilograms of sodium nitrite, a kilo of platinum, a kilo of miscellaneous other catalytic metals; a raft of computer hard drives, CPUs and the like. Those are the bulk of the cargo -- about a hundred kilos. There is another fifty kilos or so of miscellaneous computer equipment." "What percentage packing?" the general inquired, knowing what they went through. "Well, into orbit, about 20%. We were going to donate that stuff to you. With the estimated payload mass our puller would crank about a hundredth of g heading out to Eros. That's not exactly pushing anything's structural limits; we won't need much in the way of packaging for the last, long leg of the journey." "And fuel for your, ah, puller?" "Well, the first time we used water from the station. That was an awful waste of the stuff. We've switched to regolith; we sifted about sixty tons of very fine powder; we took out the free metals and what's left is mainly olivine and pyroxene dust. We zap it with a strong electric charge and then shoot the resulting ions into a rhenium combustion chamber that has the solar reflector aimed at it. That heats the ions to about 10,000 degrees C -- we get an impulse around 300 when we kick the ions out the back. Nothing to write home about." "Three hundred," the general whistled. "And this is the same vehicle that left here two years ago?" "Well, more or less. It consists of a propulsion module on one end of a boom, a control and sensor module on the other end. We lengthened the boom, increased the area of the solar panels and added the solar reflector. A very simple design that we've made just a few small changes to." "And for all of this largesse you simply want me to lobby NASA on your behalf?" the general questioned, turning brisk. "Yes, that and of course, we really would like to make this deal." "And if you don't make the deal?" "Halogens are rare on Eros; it would add a year or so to our timetable without them. The water, well, we could parallel that a bit, run a few different branches of the production chain. Call it eight or ten months lost. We can parallel some of that. "The big thing is the calcium chloride; that allows us to do electrolysis on a number of Iron Group metals. The sodium nitrite is used in electrochemistry of stainless steel; after waiting two years to get this far, it is -- painful -- to contemplate another two years before we can go to the next stage. This resupply cuts 75% of the process time from the plan over the next several years." "I'll take a look at your proposal," the general responded. "I'll be back to you shortly -- perhaps a day, most likely, less." The next day David took a call from the general. "NASA says, more or less, it's not going to happen," General Kostias told him. "They absolutely refuse to give you the lift." He shook his head. "I dunno what they've got against you, but it goes pretty deep." "That's too bad, General. I'm sure you'll be able to get as much use out of the next several hundred kilos of high school science fair projects." The general shrugged. "I don't know about that. I might have made things worse for you. I told them for that much O2, I'd sell my soul, not to mention let two years worth of science fair projects come up without further comment. Now they are unhappy with me too." The general grinned. "I don't suppose you'd like to make a side arrangement? You send me a list of what you need; I assemble it here, one way or the other. We make the swap, as planned. Screw the ground." "That would be acceptable. I'll email the list to you in the next few minutes." "And when would we be looking at accomplishing this?" The general asked, obviously interested in finding out how long he had to get what he needed. "I'm afraid we were a little previous with this, General. I mean, the probe was there on Eros, the stuff was there and ready; we launched about six weeks ago. Of course, the orbit is 192 days; so there's some time left -- about five months." "Agreed," the general said quickly and positively. "I'll just show them the damn O2 in my inventory, and let them piss and moan." The general paused. "It is going to be another couple of years before we get that much water back." David grinned; the man's statement was exactly what they'd been looking for. Sean and Elaine had already been trading high-fives. This was going to make them all dance the happy dance. "Probably," David said mildly, certain now the bass would strike at the fly, "they'll decide that since you have so much oxygen, they'll send up some extra hands instead of supply, so that you can actually catch up on the experiment backlog. That way it won't take as much time to fill the water tanks." "That would be nice," the general agreed. "Of course, downside of that, they might pooch the resupply. I don't suppose you have any more spare O2 in your process cycle?" "Well, a lot of the processes we use entail oxides that we reduce to metal plus O2. We're pretty much surplus to needs on about 95% of what oxygen we produce. Since we don't have anyone up there to breathe it, we thought about just venting it. But that would screw up the local region. Heh, it might even be a fire risk releasing so much oxidizer near all that powdered rock. So we decided that tanking it was a lesser nuisance. We figured that at some point someone out here could use it. "We have begun work on another puller; but we'd need another fifty or sixty kilos of materials not on the current wish list to complete it. Sensors, CPUs, that sort of thing. Process control really sucks up the cycles; we never seem to have enough process heat either." "I think we could do something like that. How soon could we get another dollop of O2?" "Well, to be honest General, there's a window about seven months from now for a quick return to Eros, if we were willing to wait a bit. The puller would mass considerably less on the return trip. We could probably sustain about a tenth of a g on the outbound orbit. We figure, perhaps two or three weeks on the return. "We could turn the current puller around fairly quickly. Call it eighteen months from now we until could deliver another load to you. Perhaps double the first batch. Obviously, we'll be using Moore's law; probably we won't need nearly as much water next time either. Maybe a hundred to one swap; maybe even a better ratio than that for you." There were a few technical details, but afterwards the three partners were sitting in the darkened meeting room, just themselves. "He's going to buy into it," Elaine whispered in disbelief. "Gosh, you were right, David." "Simple Economics 101. We can make the stuff for practically nothing. We do have a long pipeline, and in truth we're still about two years away from the time we can reliably deliver a few tons a couple of times a year. But the technical hurdles are out of the way," David reassured the others. Sean leaned back. Even here, even now, no names -- they all knew it. "Marduk and Dagon say they can get the special stuff loaded in lieu of a couple of science fair projects." With the unspoken knowledge amongst them that Dagon would also be in position to get those materials actually out to the puller at the ISS. Another hundred kilos; this time top grade machine tools, if a little small. David knew what the others were thinking about. "NASA has done so many stupid things over the years. They kill experiments because they don't want to store the data. They could have kept the NEAR probe -- instead they landed it. Or rather they crashed it so they could get a couple of really close pictures of the asteroid. So many experiments that they've shut down!" Sean smiled. "And if it was still in orbit? We'd never be able to hide what we're doing. As it is, there's a risk someone will try to bounce some radar beams off Eros. If they do it at the wrong time of the year, and they are going to be a little surprised." "But they won't," Elaine said, shaking her head in sorrow. "They aren't interested." ------- III General Kostias turned to Fran Saunders. "Well, Saunders, you're the fuckin' genius. What have they got? Are they bull-shitting me?" Fran was short, a little heavy; with long straight hair that had to be kept in a damn plastic bag all of the time. She met the general's eye. "The numbers they quote -- that provides a baseline on what they've done, and that tells us what they can do. The single most revealing number is that the stuff is already going uphill. I checked the orbit; Earth was uphill from Eros at the stated launch date -- but it was at a very low value -- about four a half kilometers per second. "The tonnages involved, the time frame..." Fran stared at the general. "They are understating what they can do. They practically have to be." "How can they afford so much metal? They aren't stupid -- they have to know that that stuff is like gold up here." She shook her head. "I looked up the composition of Eros, from the NEAR data. All they are doing is refining regolith; odds are they are using magnets to sift iron from the dust..." "They said they did that," the general said, interrupting her. "Yes, sir. You have to wonder, General, just what it is they are hiding, when they told us so much about what they are doing." "Maybe they are stupid, just telling us what they've done." "Oh yeah, stupid people send a mining probe out to an asteroid, succeed beyond anyone's wildest dreams and start offering to share a cornucopia of goodies with us. Sure, they are stupid, stupid, stupid." "Oxygen and steel? Titanium? And they need water ... That doesn't sound that successful." Fran Saunders sniffed in derision. "You know what they want? The stuff on their wish list. That stuff is like gold at Eros; at least until we get out to the far belt, out close to Jupiter's orbit." She stopped and grinned. "I bet they don't give a rat's ass about the water." Another pause, then, "I'll be damned! I bet that's what's going on!" "What's going on?" "Well, the stuff they want -- they told us they want to make another puller. I listened, General. They never once said they were going to send it here; the one they've got is going to give us more than we need for a long time to come. "Even with two year turnarounds, we'll be getting more supply from them then we do from Earth. Certainly more O2. No, the new puller is going on a long mission. How far, I can't say. But, if they're smart, and I have to say they are, that puller is going to get close to Jupiter's orbit or beyond. Where volatiles aren't evaporated by the sun. Jeez, then they'd have everything. Those asteroids have a lot of chlorine and fluorine. Everything. Carbon, water..." She shook her head, thinking. She blinked. "That puller! Jesus! He snuck that right past us!" The general looked at her in surprise. "He said it aloud, in pieces. Christ on a crutch! They're bringing us forty tons of oxygen; couple tons of tanks, potassium. -- and sixty tons of rock dust for fuel. Jesus! A hundred and twenty tons of space ship! That's something like five or six semi truck loads!" She sneered, "Oh yeah, pretty much just like when it left here. A longer boom!" she sniffed in derision. She was silent for several more minutes. "I wonder..." Fran whispered, "I wonder." She looked at the general. "Is there any way we can sneak a peak at Eros with something large?" "Why?" "The numbers don't add up. The processes they talk about, to get that much oxygen, they would have had to produced a lot more iron than oxygen. A lot. If they have 40 tons of oxygen, they have to have about twenty or thirty times that of iron. Probably short of carbon, for steel making..." She was staring into space, her lips moving. "That's why so much titanium, they don't need to alloy it." She met the general's eyes. "Odds are, there is something a whole lot bigger being built in Eros orbit than a simple cargo puller." "They want a lot of computer equipment," the general reminded her. Saunders nodded. "Yeah, they'd need it. I think they are running remotes, too. A human brain, even if applied for a few hours a day, can replace a prodigious amount of silicon. Prodigious." "Then why all the CPU's?" the general asked, curious. She grinned. "Humans can deal with unexpected situations -- all sorts of things. But put a human, day in and day out, fitting round pegs into round holes -- they can't keep it up for very long. They get bored, they get fatigued, and they lose concentration. Teach the job to a computer and it won't get tired, it won't get bored and won't lose focus. Day in and day out. Not stopping for days or weeks at a time." She shook her head. "It takes a while to get it right, but once it's right..." She sighed. "We really need to look at Eros, General." There was a sudden intent look on her face. "Oh, cool! Really, really cool!" She murmured. "What?" The general asked, stumped. "All that orbital shit. All they showed us was where Eros was when they launched, when the puller gets here, and when it starts the quick trip back." She typed into her computer for a few minutes, and then nodded. "Absolutely! Oh, they are so cool!" "I haven't a clue what you are talking about -- I haven't for a while," the general responded, unable to keep up with her leaps of insight. "Look," the scientist told him, pointing at the computer screen. "Do you know where Eros is right now? Just about 150 degrees ahead of us, damn near as far away as we can get -- and it will keep getting slowly further away for another couple of months. Odds are, even if we look, we won't see anything. It's probably worth a look anyway, in case they are bluffing." "A year or so, until it's close again?" General Kostias asked and she nodded. He laughed. "And of course, probably by then one or two things might have happened; that's a long time to sustain an interest in something so minor as a peek at a rock a couple of million kilometers away." "You got it, General." He waved at the computer. "I want you to work up a baseline on what they have to have done to get the numbers they've reported. How many tons of iron, titanium, all of that, that they've produced. How much raw material they must have refined, their energy budget -- the whole nine yards." ------- IV Later Fran was sitting at her worktable, getting a start on the numbers, when she was surprised that Keith Trimble sat down next to her. "What does the pride of the Astronaut Corps need now?" Fran said to the tall black man, a small grin on her face. He ignored that. "You working on the Eros stuff?" he asked. Fran smiled back at him. "What Eros stuff?" she replied. "Once upon a time I was a boy watching Neil Armstrong put his foot down on the moon. Watched that live, I did." He said, "Right then, I looked at my parents and said something like, 'Me's gonna do dat ones day.' My mom laughed and told me I had to learn English first. "You know, that was some of the best advice I've ever gotten, from anyone. I did learn English; then I learned a whole lot of other things. I grew up, too. The moon? Been there, done that! Like who cares? A dry ball of rock, not hardly worth the time and trouble. "Nope, I decided I wanted Mars. I spent my college years preparing; I flew in the Air Force, I got all my tickets punched. And now here I am; I'm here as a spare bulb, in case the mission commander on a shuttle flight has indigestion or you forget to change your socks for six months, and we have to do a hasty evac, when you finally do." "And your point is?" Fran asked, giving him a finger. "I'm not going to Mars. None of us are going to go, unless something changes. Right now, all it will take is one fat turd of a congress critter to put us out of business. He looks at the ISS budget, sees a couple four, five billion dollars he can spend on a gross of congress critter toilet seats instead and zip! Some conference committee meeting, 3 AM in the morning, and manned space flight dies. No fuss, no muss -- and no publicity." Fran shrugged; he was right, all of them knew it. They all prayed it wouldn't happen, but as the years passed and there weren't billions of dollars of new products coming out every year based on research at the ISS. It was, she was sure, just a matter of time. It was why the general was ready to go to the mat for the O2 David Cross had offered; that would save a billion dollars in lift costs a year, the scrubbers half that. And the metal -- that was any beyond price here in orbit. There were a million things they could do with it. "And your point is?" Fran repeated, but her voice had changed. "I'm never going to Mars. Right now I have a son, studying at Caltech. In five or ten years from now -- he'd be ready. I'm not going. But, by God, someone is going to go! No price -- none -- is too high a price to pay for that opportunity!" "And what kind of price are you looking at, Keith?" she asked gently. "Like I said, the sky's the limit. If you have a brain, a heart..." He looked at her for a second, "You'll understand. Get on board." He pulled a wad of paper from around behind him; he had to have put those in his shorts, Fran thought wryly as she took them. Well, in zero-g, as good a place as anywhere else to stash something you didn't want to carry in your hands. Of course a lot of them suffered from gas in orbit -- hopefully Keith had less than she did. "These are the numbers you're looking for. All of them." He grinned, turned around and left. Fran looked at the stack, contemplating it. Were this not the policy of the United States, it would be close to treason to look at what he left with her. But, the ISS was official policy, and he was just looking to help save money. Oh, what a wickedly tangled web men weave! And a few of us of the softer persuasion do our own weaving! She reached down, picked the folder up and started reading. The next day she sought out Keith; he was alone at his workstation. "I want to show this to the general," she told him. He shook his head. "You can't. Politics," he replied succinctly. "I missed you there," Fran told him. "Right now if they pulled Kostias back and asked him what was going on, he could look the suits right in the eye and shake his head and tell them, "I don't have a clue -- but it does look interesting, though, doesn't it?" "I'm not a sneak, I'm not a plotter. I don't do politics," Fran said with great firmness. "Oh, sure, sure. Neither did I. But, little lady, I changed my mind. There are things in the universe worth risking your life for; there are even things worth risking even more than that. Careers, even." "What do you want me to do?" "Give the general the numbers he wants. Just leave out the 'why' part of the equations and where you came up with the numbers. You'd have done that anyway; now your numbers will just be more accurate." "And you're sure they are accurate?" He grinned, nodded at his computer. "Once you start down the slippery slope you're on, pretty soon, everything you do gets easier and easier. You find less and less trouble trying to justify anything. "I justified, to myself, a periodic reprogramming of one of the small radio telescopes. Now and again, at the right time of day, it points to Eros, and I cut in on their feed. They use TIDRAS to get their data to them; they just don't tell NASA." He spun the computer around, pressed a few keys and she saw a slow scan starting at the horizon. Bare ground, asteroid version, with a gray rise in the distance. Just inside the gray rise, a shiny dome. The camera kept panning, until it stopped on a long object, sitting on the ground. "That's the new puller," Keith told her, speaking in a whisper. "Like you read, just a little out of nominal on the specs. 2200 metric tons empty, mostly tankage. It'll launch in about eleven months for the one of the main belt asteroids, out beyond the frost line. It will mass, at lift, nearly 20,000 tons. Most of that will be regolith propellant. Just like they told the general, it will have a specific impulse of 300. The thrust of the whole thing will be about 5,000 tons." "It can accelerate at a quarter G?" Fran asked and he nodded. "For how long?" "Until the tanks run dry -- call it four weeks. That, obviously, isn't the plan." She blinked, and then she ran the numbers on her own comp, not wanting to believe the rough numbers her intuition had given her. "That has a delta V of 12,000 kilometers a second?" He nodded. "Well," she said drily looking at the numbers, "At least they won't have to wait long for it to get out to asteroids." "They are more cautious than you think; that is the result of three years work. They will take it slow and easy. The next one will take half a year -- after all -- time is money." They both laughed and Fran looked at the older man curiously. "And you trust me?" "And the reason you're here?" He sneered, waving in the direction of Earth. "You could have had a lot more input in a unmanned project." "Oh sure, sure. Except half, Keith, half of those projects get cancelled before they ever go. That number is trending up, not down, no matter what the bullshit stories are, about how unmanned flight is cheaper, faster, and more bang for the buck. The space science projects are just numbers on budget spreadsheets, and get whacked without hardly a thought when they need to cut some dollars. "I know people who worked on projects for five, and six years. Then bam! They're riffed, the project cancelled. Most of them just quit and start new careers in something non-technical." He nodded. "The reason you're here is the same reason I'm here: this is where it's at. Knowledge is wonderful, don't get me wrong, but the reason man is in space is to acquire that knowledge. Sitting on your can in your office at the University of Arizona might suffice for some, but not me, and not for you. Am I right?" Fran nodded. "So, I lie, cheat and steal," he said with a good-natured grin. "I take liberties with the system. Why should I care about a system that doesn't care about me? Explain that to me?" Fran held up her hand. "No mas! I surrender!!" "Give Kostias the numbers. The honest numbers -- no one is asking you to be dishonest. Leave a few things out, sure. But how long would it take them to put you in a padded cell if you told them that someone was building a ship on Eros that can get to Jupiter in a few weeks, Pluto in a few months?" Fran looked at him for a second shrugged. "I hate politics." "Learn to love it, girl, or go back down on the next shuttle. Because this is for all the marbles." "I'm just pissing and moaning," Fran told him. "I still get to do that, don't I?" "Oh yeah, and if you need a few pointers, I'm the guy." Something he said the day before popped into Fran's head. "Keith? These ships aren't man-rated." He smiled. "Of course not. Near as I can figure, the current procedures on the NASA books would cost about five billion dollars to man-rate a new spacecraft. So they are unmanned. No problem, right?" "Twelve thousand tons would be a lot of a spaceship." Fran said quietly, "Bigger than most cruise liners, back on Earth." He grinned sardonically. "And what is that spaceship going to do out there in the asteroids?" Fran asked. "Why, they'll be past the ice limit. The rocks out there should have a lot more volatiles than those like Eros, which is close to the sun. "Three years, Fran. Three years from now, that puller will be back in the inner system, ready to do the trip again. Turn around? Call that six months. In five years, Fran -- in five years -- someone could ride one of those pullers out to the first base. They would find a shirtsleeve atmosphere, supplies up the yin-yang. Oxygen, nitrogen, the whole nine yards." He grinned, "And even a few other surprises." "I can hardly imagine," Fran told him drolly. "Imagine this," he told her, a huge grin on his face. "Some of the science fair projects; you'd be amazed. Simple little things, from a bunch of kids in a various inner city schools around the country. Groups of students from a number of schools are each going to send up something like ten pounds of various vegetable and flower seeds. We're supposed to store them for a year on the ISS, and then return them. They have an identical group they're going to keep down on the ground. The idea is to see what effect micro-gravity and space radiation has on germination rates." Fran looked at him, staring. "They are going to get a bonus, a real bonus. It's the least we can do because those seeds are going on to Eros, then out to the asteroids. We'll do the germination tests out there. And we're going to lose a decimal point too, oops, shipped a seeds from a hundred schools, not ten. Another oops, we were confused, used metric not British. Kilos, not pounds. Not fifty kinds of flowers and vegetables, but two hundred. One great huge screw up. Even worse than the Mars Prospector mission." He actually giggled. "Then we mislay them and they get sent out towards Jupiter. Triple oops. Who would have thought NASA scientists could be such fuck-ups?" Fran laughed with him. "All those kids -- they could get Nobels." "Not very likely," Keith told her. "But, like the lotto, you just never know when your number will come up." "And all I have to do is give the general these numbers? No lies?" "Omissions, girl. Lots of omissions. The general needs to be able to look the suits in eye and say, 'I saw those numbers. They are just so much wishful thinking and bullshit. You don't believe them -- why should I?'" "Good God!" He laughed. "Stay with me, girl! I'll recommend you to teach a class at Caltech on 'Lying to Politicians While Keeping a Straight Face.'" Fran shook her head, still bemused. He went on, "It would help, though, if you'd take a more proactive stance, a more active part in fact in this. I have about four hundred kilos of stuff to move over to the puller. I could sure use another set of hands. We have a couple of months to get in shape." "I need some time to think about this," she told him. She saw the flash of disappointment and she stopped in her tracks. "Keith, I'm jerking your chain. I made up my mind hours ago -- whatever these folks are doing, I was going to help with. You might be an overweight old black man -- I'm skinnier than you are. I think wisdom correlates better with weight than age." "I'm disappointed you brought my -- weight -- into this." "I do need to get in shape. We all know white girls ain't got game." "Not from my point of view. You got to get away from this obsession about -- weight -- girl." "If you stop being such a sexist ageist, I'll stop obsessing about your age as well." The two laughed and he clapped her on the shoulder. "You'll do, Fran. You'll do! Do you know what sold me on this, at first?" "I have no idea." "It never would have flown as a project. Everyone knows it wouldn't work. So they scammed people with lowered expectations. I looked at it and realized the truth. So I went all in." She cleared her throat. "If I hadn't seen the results, I'd have said 'No' as well." "Human ingenuity is the true engine of advancement of our species. The naysayers produce great sound and fury, but there are people out there who just don't care if someone else says, 'This will never work!' They are going to do things with or without the help of the rest of us. It's been true since the beginning. "I tell you true; in a couple of years, David Cross and company are going to need a good pilot to take them out there to the asteroids. Experienced space hands are going to be in short supply. Fran, stop thinking you don't have game and start thinking about how you can play your cards to win." ------- The End ------- Posted: 2011-02-20 Last Modified: 2011-02-21 / 08:33:18 am Version: 1.20 ------- http://storiesonline.net/ -------