On a flattish disk of asteroidal rock a mile across, engineers of the past generation had raised a tower of metal rings. The electromagnetic cannon had been firing ships from Earth orbit since A.D. 2004. Today it was used more than ever, to accelerate the self-transmitting ships partway toward the orbital velocities of Mars, Jupiter, Mercury.
Jerryberry studied the tower of rings, wider than any ship ever built. "Is it wide enough for what we've got in mind?"
"I think so. We'd fire the rescue ship in sections, then put it together in space. But we'd still have to put a transmitter hull around it."
"Okay, we've got the accelerator, and we'd use standard tanks. Beyond that-"
"Now hold up," said Gem. "There's an easier way to do this. I thought of it this morning. If we do it my way we won't need any research at all."
"Oh? You interest me strangely."
"See, we've still got this problem of building a ship big enough to make the rescue and then decelerate, and a drop cage big enough to take it. But we already know we can build self-transmitting hulls the size of Phoenix. What we can do is put the deceleration fuel in Phoenix hulls. We wouldn't need an unreasonably big drop cage that way."
Jerryberry whistled. He knew what Phoenix had cost. Putting a rescue ship together would be like building a fleet of Phoenixes. And yet- "Robin was wrong. We could do that. We've got the hardware."
"That's exactly right I figure maybe twenty Phoenix hulls full of slurried hydrogen, plus a Phoenix-type ship for the rescue, plus a couple more hulls to hold the drive and the rigging to string it all together. You'd have to assemble it after launch and accelerate it to a seventh of lightspeed, using a couple hundred standard tanks. Then take it apart, stow the rigging, and send everything through a Lazarus II drop ship one hull at a time."
"We could do it. Does Robin know about this?"
"Who's had time to call him? I only just thought of this an hour ago. I've been working out the math."
'We could do it," Jerryberry said, his eyes afire. "We could' bring 'em back. All it would take would be time and money."
She smiled indulgently down at him; at least she always seemed to, though her eyes were level with his own. "Don't get too involved. Who's going to pay for all this? You might talk your bemused public into it if you were extending man's dominion across the stars. But to rescue six failures?"
"You don't really think of them that way."
"Nope. But somebody's going to say it."
"I don't know. Maybe we should go for it. Those self-trammitting hulls could be turned into ships afterward."
"No. You'd drop them on the way back."
Jerryberry ran a hand through his hair. "I guess you're right. Thanks, Gem. You've done a lot of work for something that isn't ever going to get built."
"Good practice. Keeps my brain in shape," said Gem.
He was at home, doggedly working out a time-and-costs schedule for the rescue of Lazarus, when Karin Sagan called. She said, "I've been wondering if you need me for the broadcast."
"Good idea," said Jerryberry, "if you're willing. We could tape an interview any time you're ready. I'll ask you to describe the circumstances under which you found Lazarus, and use that to introduce the topic."
"Good."
Jerryberry was tired and depressed. It took him a moment to see that Karin was too. "What's wrong?"
"Oh...a lot of things. We aren't just going to forget about those six astronauts, are we?"
His laugh was brittle. "I think it unlikely. They aren't decently dead. They're in limbo, falling across our sky forever."
"That's what I mean. We could wake them any time in the next thousand years, if we could get to them."
"That's my problem. We can."
"What?"
"But it'd cost the Moon, so to speak. Come on over, Doctor. I'll show you."
Lazarus cost N$ 2,000,000,000
Lazarus II cost N$ 500,000,000
Phoenix cost N$ 110,000,000
Colony (six ships adequately equipped) cost N$ 660,000,000
Support systems in solar system N$ 250,000,000
TOTAL COLONY PACKAGE, IN CLUDING COLONY AND
PHOENIX AND SUPPORT SYSTEMS IN SOLAR SYSTEM: N$ 1,520,000,000
Twenty-two self-transmitting hulls cost N$ 1,540,000,000
(One self-transmitting hull costs N$70,000,000)
Interstellar drop ship costs N$ 900,000,000
Phoenix-type rescue ship costs N$ 110,000,000
R & D costs nothing
Support systems in solar system N$ 250,000,000
TOTAL COST OF RESCUE N$ 2,000,000,000
"...which is just comfortably more than it cost to build Lazarus in the first place, and a lot more than it cost us to not colonize Alpha Centaurus. It wouldn't be impossible to go get them. Just inconvenient and expensive."
"In spades," said Karin. "You'd tie up the Corliss accelerator for a week solid. The whole trip would take about thirty four years starting from the launching of the drop ship."
"And if it could be done now it could always be done; we couldn't ever forget it until we'd done it. And it would get more difficult every year because Lazarus would be getting further away."
"It'll nag us the rest of our lives." Karin leaned back in Jerryberry's guest chair. His apartment was not big: three rooms, with doors knocked between them, in a complex that had been a motel on the Pacific Coast Highway thirty years ago. "There's another thing. What are we really doing if we do it Whyte's way? We're talking the public into not backing a space project. Suppose they got the habit? I don't know about you-"
"I just plain like rocket ships," said Jerryberry.
"Okay. Can you really talk the public into this?"
"No. Lazarus didn't even cost this much, and Lazarus almost didn't get built, they tell me. And Lazarus failed, and so did the colony project. So: no. But I'm not sure I can bring myself to talk them out of it."
"Jansen, just how bad is public support for the Space Authority?"
"Oh... it isn't even that, exactly. The public is getting unhappy about JumpShift itself."
"What? 'What for?"
"CBA runs a continuous string of public opinion polls. The displacement booths did genuinely bring some unique problems with them-"