That mood was not shared by all, however.
A side door to the National Aeronautic and Space Administration’s DC headquarters burst open and released a furious, embarrassed Gordon Elliot Lee upon the city. He stormed out of the building, muttering to himself and glaring at the knots of ill-attired tourists walking along E street. Gordon strode forward with purpose, his own dark mood unrelieved by the joyful colors and pleasantly fragrant air everyone else seemed to bask in. He brushed past stupefied Washingtonians and stalked toward the nearest garbage can he could find, right at the intersection of E and 3rd. Reaching the can, he ripped open his slim briefcase.
As Gordon began to stuff page after page from his briefcase into the brown steel mouth of the can, the door to NASA’s concrete and glass offices burst open again. Lydia Russ scanned up and down E street and blanched when she saw what he was doing. She hurried as fast as her stylish pumps would allow her, and reached Gordon just as he ran out of paper and began to sort through the golden rainbow of data disks he had brought with him. She drew to a halt and tried to catch her breath, crying out, “Gordon! Stop this right now!”
He looked back at her and frowned. Apparently deciding the garbage can was no longer worthy of his offerings, he instead flung the disks outward into the four lanes of traffic heading up and down E street. The BlueROMs made excellent Frisbees and they shone and flashed beautifully as they bounced off cars and up from the blacktop. The drivers were somewhat less appreciative of his thoughtful gift, however. Everyone heard the familiar dissonance of screeching brakes, squealing tires, blaring horns, and one final movement of crunching metal.
Gordon grimaced and looked back to Lydia. His fine-boned, vaguely Amer-Asian features appeared unreadable, lost in a tumult of emotion. “Looks like my reputation’s not the only thing I’ve wrecked today.”
She approached and snatched the briefcase from him. Looking inside, she saw the only things left were some pens, flash drives, and Gordon’s ultra-expensive, ultra-thin business tablet. She wondered if his tantrum would have extended to throwing that into the street.
Raised voices and slamming car doors rose above the din of traffic resuming. Lydia saw the two drivers whose Lexus-on-Mercedes ballet had ended so abruptly. Each gentleman gestured wildly to the other, intent on fixing blame upon their obviously guilty counterpart. Then one picked up a battered BlueROM and they both began scanning up and down the street. Lydia took Gordon’s arm and pulled him away, hurrying down 3rd street, away from the accident.
He followed her lead only grudgingly, still in a huff over whatever had precipitated his fit. She glared at him. “Gordon, what the hell were you thinking?”
He looked at Lydia, remembering when they had been much more than industry associates. Her shoulder length, light brown hair whipped around her face in the building spawned wind, and he felt an unexpected pang of regret cutting through his pique. They had parted ways so long ago, but he thought their reunion had gone well until this. He had burned many bridges in the intervening years in order to make his mark in the world, yet he had to admit to himself that it hurt to think he had burned his final one to her. “I figured if I couldn’t even get you to listen, then all my work belonged in the garbage. The disk thing may have been a bit much, but it’s not like I didn’t have provocation.”
“That’s not what I’m talking about. What were you thinking, going to the NASA with … that?”
He pulled his arm free of her grasp and stopped on the sidewalk, his anger resurging anew. “I’ve earned the right to tell NASA anything I damn well please! I’m Gordon-god-damn-Lee, not some wacko in a tinfoil hat. Who did you come to when you lost your little satellite constellation? And when Samuels threatened to drag you in front of the Senate for that thruster explosion, who did you get to explain it all away? Me! Every time me, so I think that entitles me to a little benefit of the friggin’ doubt.”
Lydia looked back to the street. One of the drivers stood on the sidewalk now, looking at the knots of tourists and business people for his quarry’s face. She turned back to Gordon and motioned for them to continue walking. He followed alongside and she hissed in a stage whisper, “You’re right. You’ve earned at least a fair hearing, but all benefit of the doubt is forfeit when you start talking about alien invasions. We get too many crackpot ideas pitched at us to not be a little sick of that sort of thing.”
His face grew hot as his fury was joined by a twinge of embarrassment. “I never said anything about invasions! That was that little toad with the narrow glasses—Evenrude, or Evensly, or—”
“Evanston,” she sighed. “The Associate Deputy Administrator for Policy and Planning. You also had the deputy directors from Ames, Marshall, and Goddard in there, but Evanston’s the one guy you really needed to convince if you wanted to get any real support from us.”
“Yeah,” he said, the heat in his voice sheepishly dampened. “Evanston. Damn it, Lydia, how can they look at everything I showed them and just refuse to see it for what it is? It’s damn near irrefutable!”
“No, it’s not. It’s preliminary: neither refuted nor vetted. You only have five months of data from a single, non-NASA observatory. That’s barely enough to get decent parallax, so that throws your distance calculations into question. Your velocity estimates are extremely tentative, and calling your acceleration figures a fair guess would be pure charity on my part. Your spectral analysis is questionable, and your conclusions, well, I believe I’ve already mentioned the word ‘crackpot’, right?”
Gordon grimaced and spun about, searching the bright lip of the horizon. Finding his bearings, he jabbed an accusing finger due south. “Someone or something is coming, Lydia, and griping about the quality of my data isn’t going to change that! I only have five months of data because the light only showed up five months ago, which is more or less what has me so damned concerned in the first place. It’s a turnaround!”
Her face showed her confusion, and that only made him more exasperated. “A turnaround flip! Kinematics! Newton’s damned laws! Weren't you listening?"
"Do not yell at me, Gordon! I'm your friend, not your employee."
He visibly tried to restrain his emotions. "Okay, I'm sorry, but listen to me now. Delta Pavonis is 19.9 light-years away. Call it even twenty, and now that little yellow sun—a sun just like our own—has started turning blue. But stars don’t just turn blue. No, there’s something else there, some bright blue light in front of the star, covering it up a bit, a bright blue light which is ten rather than twenty light-years away and on a direct line to us. Essentially, the light’s shown up at the exact halfway point between Delta Pavonis and our solar system, and if my blue-shift guesstimate is to be believed, it’s moving at 46% the speed of light. That means only one thing to me.”
She shook her head. “It leads me to any number of possibilities, of which ‘turnaround’ is the least likely.”
“You keep denying what’s so obvious, and you’re going to cut yourself on Occam’s Razor. We're dumb monkeys, barely out of the trees. When we go to space, we do these high thrust, low efficiency, short burn Hohmann transfers. It's all we have the technology for, but it’s slow—deadly slow. We could never reach another solar system that way.
"If you’re an advanced, space-going culture, on the other hand, then the fastest way to get from one star to another—without cheating with a wormhole—is to apply thrust the whole way. You point your exhaust towards home for half the journey, accelerating to some ungodly speed, and then flip around and accelerate in the opposite direction until you match speed with your target system. It’s called a brachistocrone trajectory and it’s only possible with something that can thrust for a long, long time. And using this super-rocket, you wouldn’t see any engine flare until it was at the half-way point, exactly what we are seeing.”