SpaceCorp (17 page)

“There’s no landing gear,” the short man said. “Won’t they get torn up on the return?”

“Sometimes, but only a bit. They pass over an open field at a few hundred feet, then deploy a parachute. The prop is protected by a shroud. Damage to the airframe is minimal. We can usually fix it with duct tape. Turn-around time is about an hour with a good crew.”

“So we’re agreed?” the tall man said. “End of year?”

“Yes, yes of course. But you didn’t ask the price.”

“We’re guessing that if we have to ask, we probably can’t afford it,” the short man said. “So we don’t ask.”

“Strange logic, but we can work with it,” the host said, big grin.

“We’re strange people,” the tall man said. “Don’t you worry about your money.”

“Very well. How do I reach you?”

“You don’t,”
the short man said.

C
HAPTER
T
WELVE

Two days later

Mess Hall, Quad I,
SCS Pelican

Monica sat at a table in the main mess hall with the three watch leaders. Bill Traynor had been leader of First Watch for four years. A swarthy little man with furtive eyes, he was the closest thing to a captain the
Pelican
had. Joe Alvarez had hitchhiked all the way from South Bronx when he was a teenager just so he could join SpaceCorp’s astronaut corps. He’d run Second Watch for two years. Frieda Oh, oldest of the three, was a middle-aged woman born and raised in San Francisco’s China Town. She’d run Third Watch for six years. She’d been offered First Watch four years ago but turned it down. Publicly she’d said, “Third Watch is my family.” But everyone knew First Watch came with two things she wanted no part of: visibility and Smitty.

“Well?” Monica asked.

“Well what?” Frieda asked.

“You know... can I count on you?” Monica asked.

“Of course you can count on us,” Bill said, voice taking an edge.

Monica looked down at the half-filled coffee mug and swished it around before taking a sip. It wasn’t very hot anymore. Then she lifted her eyes to meet Bill’s gaze. “I know I can
count
on you but I have to know your heart’s in it.”

“If you mean did we buy Mack’s speech,” Bill said, “I think most of us are still processing. We thought
achieving things
was what we were up here for. Now Mack comes up here and says it’s not.”

“It was a pretty provocative idea,” Joe said.

“Yeah,” Frieda said. “We’re metal heads, robot people, designers—not farmers. I mean c’mon,
algae
? Seriously? That’s groundie work. We’re not groundies.”

“I don’t see what’s so bad about building space stations the way we do right now,” Bill said. “What’s so bad about metal? Why algae?”

“That’s where we get the nanocellulose,” Monica said.

“Whatever,” Bill said. “The fact remains, we’d be working with green slime.”

“Nanocellulose has eight times—”

“Yeah, yeah, we get that,” Joe said. “But why is it so much better?”

“We don’t have to fly it up from Earth,” Monica said. “You ever see an aluminum mine on Earth? Or a refinery? They aren’t cheap and there’s no way we’re going to build something like that up here, especially the mine.”

“I guess most of us figured we’d do that out around the asteroids,” Joe said.

Monica looked at him, her left brow raised.

“You and Mack aren’t the only ones who think about the future,” Bill said. “We got lotsa time on our hands between shifts and we don’t spend it all playing pinochle.”

“One day we will mine the asteroids,” Monica said. “We’ll start with the Sun’s asteroids, but they’ll just be for practice. Eventually, we’ll be asteroid miners out among the stars. You see, the stars are not so important for their habitable planets as the conventional wisdom goes. They’re a lot more important for their asteroid belts. Habitability goes way beyond being able to maintain water in a liquid state... You sure you want to hear this stuff?”

Frieda signaled a mess orderly, “Hey, hon! Can you bring us a pot? We’re going to be awhile.”

“Okay, for starters,” Monica began, “the Earth is way more unique than we give it credit for. We’re the only one of the terrestrial planets that still has an active magnetic field. Without that magnetic field we’d be fried by incoming gamma radiation from the rest of the galaxy. Radiation is the ‘hot’ problem of interstellar travel. LEO, where we are right now, is around ten rems a year. Interplanetary regions are twenty-five rems and interstellar regions are seventy rems. The industrial standard for human radiation workers is five rems. You guys get to stay longer than a year because you’re inside most of the time.”

“How are we going to solve the radiation problem?” Frieda asked.

“We don’t know yet,” Monica said, “but it won’t be with shielding—too much of a mass penalty. We’ll never make it to the stars if we can’t accelerate up to half the speed of light, .5 c. That takes a lot of time or a lot of oomph. More mass means more time or more oomph. So radiation is a problem we’re still working on.”

Monica paused to pour herself some more coffee. “Some people think engineering a new kind of human is the only way... one better suited to space travel. One that can tolerate radiation better and maybe not eat so much. There’s bacteria that can do the radiation part.
Deinococcus radiodurans
can handle huge doses that would kill one of us in a couple of weeks.  I’m sure ol’
D. radiodurans
would lend us a gene or two if it’ll get us interlopers off his planet.”

“What would you call this new human?” Joe asked. “He sounds like he’d be a new species.”

“Yeah, he probably would,” Monica said. “I doubt he’d be able to interbreed with his parents’ generation. So yeah, that’d be a new species.”

“
Homo galacticus
!” Frieda said. “We’d call them galacticans instead of humans.”

Monica sat with her mouth open for several seconds. “Wow, you guys do have a lot of time on your hands.”

“We dream the Dream up here, just like you guys do,” Frieda said.

“We have a lot of clubs that meet to kick around ideas,” Joe said. “They’re real popular.”

“Any chance those clubs keep minutes?” Monica asked.

“Yeah,” Frieda said, “but go on about the uniqueness of Earth.”

“Well, we have a huge moon compared to the mass of the planet. A lot of folks think that if we hadn’t been hit by a Mars-sized planet 4.5 billion years ago, life might never have formed here. Some folks say that the impact caused us to have a much larger, heavier metal core which is why we still have an active magnetic field. Some even say that the very center of the core is not nickel-iron but heavy metals like uranium.”

“Oh, yeah,” Bill said, “I read about that. Most of the Earth’s internal heat comes from isotopic decay of uranium, thorium, and potassium. So you think there might be a big blob of it at the core?”

“Well, I haven’t looked personally, but yeah, maybe. Anyway, Earth is right on the inner edge of the Sun’s habitable zone. They say the expanding Sun will need another billion years or so to put us inside the habitable zone and start boiling off the oceans. But as global warming has shown us, we don’t need boiling oceans to make the place uninhabitable. Another hundred million years should make this world a desert.”

“A hundred million years,” Joe said. “So why the urgency?”

Monica smiled. “You watch the news feeds. Humans are overrunning the planet. And the more they crowd one another, the nastier and less tolerant they get. And I’m not talking about the obvious awful places like the Middle East and Africa. I’m talking about our own back yard. Would you want to live in one of the hate states?”

“You think asteroids are going to be an improvement?” Frieda asked.

She took a sip of coffee and added some more sugar. “Most likely, you wouldn’t want to live on one. I’m talking about little ones we can harvest. But you raise a good point, Frieda. We need to do some social engineering before we send colonists to the stars. We have to learn how to get along with one another. And we have to learn to live with the resources we have. We can’t go around the stars slashing and burning like we do down on Earth.”

Her audience exchanged stares with each other but showed no signs of disinterest. “Go on,” Joe said. “Tell us more about habitable planets.”

“Okay,” Monica said. “One thing is that most habitable planets we know of don’t have oxygenated atmospheres. We think some of them may have oceans and temperate climates and a few may have magnetic fields, but without oxygen in the atmosphere there’s no ozone, and the planetary surface will get baked with UV radiation—just like Earth was several billion years ago. Anyway, that would mean all life would have to live underground or underwater. If we did find a planet with an oxygenated atmosphere, it could mean that cyanobacteria had formed and used photosynthesis to create an ‘oxygen catastrophe’ like we had on Earth several billion years ago. Without that so-called ‘catastrophe,’ there’d likely be no life on land.”

“Why is it called a catastrophe?” Bill asked.

“It was great for aerobic life forms like you and me, but most life forms back then were anaerobic. For them, oxygen was poison. Huge die off.

“Anyway, the point is that truly Earth-like planets are damned few and far between. So that means if we arrive at a new star, the asteroid belt is going to be a lot more important than the planets. We can use asteroids to replenish our stores of water and metals and whatever else we can find. And the smaller ones are easy to dock with and maneuver around. Imagine finding a house-sized block of nearly pure uranium! I bet you could find asteroids like that. That would be a lot easier to refine into U-235 and a damn sight easier than trying to land on a planetary surface and dig the stuff out of the ground.”

“But aren’t you just itching to explore around on the surface of an alien planet?” Joe asked.

“I’d love to,” Monica said, “but it would probably be a one-way trip. For one thing we already know how hard it is to leave a planet’s gravity well and get up to low orbit. A star ship might have those kinds of resources—payload mass comes at a severe cost in fuel on a starship. Even so, it would not be a routine operation. Second, there’s the biohazard problem. Imagine bringing an alien microbe up to the star ship and it turns out to be hostile and infects the whole crew or maybe destroys the hydroponics.”

“Or
we
contaminate the planet surface ourselves,” Frieda said.

“Right!” Monica said. “Then there’s the problem that not all stars in our galaxy are habitable. The interior of the galaxy is radioactive beyond belief. The habitable zone of the galaxy is just the fringe out here where we are—27,000 light years from the galaxy’s rotational center.

“So do you think there are other civilizations out there?” Bill asked. “I mean advanced civilizations like ourselves.”

“If you limit your search space to just our galaxy, extremely doubtful,” Monica said. “If you apply realistic—which usually means pessimistic—values to the factors of the Drake Equation, most estimates come up with something under ten operating right now. My personal favorite is that there is only one and we’re ‘it.’”

“What do you mean by ‘it?’” Frieda asked. “What’s your definition of an advanced civilization?”

“That would be one that was smart enough to invent a television—something that broadcasts a signal that will leave its planet and go into space,” Monica said. “But also one that hasn’t destroyed itself by war, overpopulation, climate change, or...” Monica shrugged.

“You mean like we’re in the process of doing,” Joe said.

“Yeah, pretty much,” Monica said. “But having said that, I think there might be millions of planets with microbial life—they call that the Rare Earth theory.”

“Wouldn’t those microbes be valuable?” Bill asked.

“How do you mean?” Monica asked.

“Well, pharmaceutical companies used to send scientists into the jungle to hunt for rare plants and bugs and stuff just so they can harvest their chemistry for medicines,” Bill said. “Today, genomes are even more valuable. Seems like it’s still cheaper to copy a genome and harvest its genes than it is to develop a new gene from scratch.”

“Yeah,” Joe said, “you could send a rover down to the planet surface to hunt for microbes and when if finds one, it sequences the genome into its constituent nucleobases and sends the pattern back to the orbiting star ship where they parse it into genes to see what kind of proteins it makes. Only they do it in a hazmat lab, maybe a robotic one that operates off-ship so it can’t possibly contaminate the crew.”

Monica raised both eyebrows in a high arch this time. “I feel like I should be taking notes.”

“What about generation star ships?” Bill asked.

“Next watch,” Monica said. “Are you guys in or out?”

“Oh, we’re in, sweetie,” Frieda said, “always were. We just wanted to know what we’re
in
for.”

“Some advice?” Joe said.

“Of course,” Monica said.

“There’s a schedule of Dream Meetings posted on the B-Board along with the members’ names and the names of the coordinators. Get in touch with the coordinators and start floating the various meetings. The other members would love to hear what you have to say. And who knows, you might learn something.”

“That’s the most important thing you can do right now,” Joe said. “Sprinkling star dust in everyone’s eyes and maybe getting sprinkled back... hell, that’s way more important that you running around acting like you’re supervising.”

“Just make sure we have your build sheets and blue prints,” Frieda said. “We know how to make space stations and that’s all this really is... just another space station.”

“Okay, I’ll do that,” Monica said. “But there are a few things that make this more than just another space station.”

“Go on,” Frieda said.

“Nuclear rockets on the hub, eight of ‘em. Four up and four down. This baby will scoot.”

Bill bristled, but didn’t say anything.