He hesitated. “Baker just resigned.”
“Oh. Already?”
“Well, he’s going to be resigning.”
Over in the museum, one of the high school students asked a question about the Apollo flights, what it felt like to be in a place where there was no gravity. The teacher directed it to Morris, and he answered as best he could, saying that it was a little like being in water, that you just sort of floated around, but that you got used to it very quickly. Meantime he made a rook move against Herman, pinning a knight. Then he said what he was thinking. “I’m sorry to hear it.” It was an accusation.
“Sometimes we have to make sacrifices, Morris. Maybe we’ll get a break and they’ll come back up.”
“But nobody expects it to happen.”
“No.” There was a sucking sound: Calkin chewing on his lower lip.
“It leaves us without an operations chief.”
“That’s why—.”
“—You need me.”
“Yes, Morris, it’s why we need you. I want you to come to the Cape posthaste and take over.”
“Do you have any idea at all what the problem might be?”
“Nothing.”
“So you’re just going to send the Excelsior out and hope for the best.”
“What do you suggest?”
“In all probability, you’ve had a breakdown in the comm system. Or it’s the AI.”
“That’s my guess.”
“You’ve checked the comm system in the Excelsior?”
“Not yet. They’re looking at it now.”
“Good. What about the AI?”
“We’re going to run some tests on Jeri, too. Don’t worry about it, Morris, okay? You just get down here and launch this thing.”
“Denny, Jeri and Lucy are both Bantam level-3 systems.”
“So what are you saying, Morris? That’s the best there is. You know that.”
“I also know they’re untested.”
“That’s not true. We ran multiple simulations—”
“That’s not the same as onboard operations.”
“Morris, there’s no point doing all those tests again. We’d get the same results. There’s nothing wrong with the Bantams.”
“Okay, Denny. But we’ve got a battle-tested system already. We know it works. Why not use it?”
“Because we’ve spent too much money on the Bantams, damn it.”
“Denny, Sara’s done all the test flights with the Coraggio. If we use her, it removes one potential source of trouble from the equation.”
He liked the sound of that, he’d have smiled if he could, while he finished a press release for an upcoming welcome-back event for several cosmonauts and astronauts. He felt sorry for them. They’d been on active duty for an average of nineteen years, and none of them had ever gotten beyond the space station. Calkin responded just as he was sending the document to the public information office. “We’ll talk about it when you get here.”
He hung up, and it was a long minute before Morris put the phone down. He’d been an astronaut himself, more years ago than he wanted to remember. Now he sat staring out the window. And finally he took a deep breath: “Sara?”
“I heard, Morris.”
“What do you think?”
“The most vulnerable piece of equipment on the ship is the AI.”
“You wouldn’t really mind that, would you? If the Bantams are screwed up some way. “
“That’s not true, Morris. I’m just answering your question.”
“And you’d love to go to the rescue, right?”
“As opposed to what? Opening the mail in the Admin Building? Sure.”
“Yeah. It would be nice. But don’t get your hopes up, kid.”
The Bantam Level-3 was billed as the most advanced AI on the planet. I’m a Level-2, and I’m a Telstar product, purchased during a previous period of austerity.
The Bantams, Lucy and Jeri, were easy to get along with, and did not adopt a superior attitude. It would in fact have surprised me had they done so. They were simply too smart to behave like that. Sure, I was moderately jealous of the attention they received, and maybe of their abilities. How could I not be? Still, I kept it under control, and we’d become friends despite having only limited time together. It’s what civilized entities do. When they arrived I was conducting training simulations at the Kennedy Space Center. A few days later, suddenly redundant, I was shipped to Huntsville.
I hated thinking of Lucy adrift out there, in the Kuiper Belt, almost five billion miles from Earth. She was probably trying to deal with a power failure. Which meant she might be alone in a dark ship so far away that a radio transmission would take seven and a half hours to reach her.
I’d been picked up during the Global Space Initiative with high hopes of leading the exploration of the solar system, and ultimately taking the new VR-2 vehicle, with its fusion engines, into the era of interstellar travel.
But I shouldn’t complain. I did get offworld. I’d taken the Coraggio to the asteroid belt on a test run. There, I’d secured an asteroid to the grappler and used it to fuel the return flight. And that had been about it for me. Although more than any astronaut had managed, it was nothing close to what I’d been led to expect. So yes, the disappearance of the Coraggio presented a golden opportunity, and I would have given anything to take over the Excelsior or the Audacia and ride to Lucy’s rescue. It wouldn’t happen, though. Not with Jeri available. So I decided to try for a compromise. “Morris, couldn’t you send us both out? It wouldn’t be a bad idea to have a back-up. Just in case.”
“You mean send both ships?”
“No, that wouldn’t work politically. But why not, just as insurance, maybe put us both in one or the other?”
He grinned weakly. “Sara, I would if I could. In fact, I’d like to go myself.”
“Morris, there’s an article by Harvey Bradshaw in the current Scientific American. He says there won’t be any humans on any of the interstellar flights. Ever. So why do we keep pretending?”
“Really? He said ever?”
“Well, something like that. You know the argument.”
He nodded. “I know.”
The shortest feasible trip to any star was twenty-five years one way, and that would be to Alpha Centauri, where there was apparently not a thing worth looking at. Barnard’s Star was the only nearby destination of serious interest: one of its worlds was right in the middle of the biozone, and had an oxygen atmosphere, which very possibly meant life. And that, of course, from a human perspective, was the only reason to go. But Barnard’s lay twice as far as Alpha Centauri. So no. Unless Captain Kirk’s Enterprise showed up, nobody was going anywhere…at least NOT for a while.
Except us machines.
No one could see a serious economic advantage to the space program. The various governments supporting GSI were all struggling to stay fiscally afloat. None of this, of course, was news to Morris. He knew the politics. Knew the science. Knew the math. But he had real trouble buying into the death of a dream. He sat staring out the window, his eyes probably fixed on the admin building, or maybe just on Lunar Park. Finally he made a resigned sound deep in his throat. “Sara?”
“Yes, Morris?”
“How serious are you? About wanting to go after the Coraggio?”
“Are you kidding? I’d do anything.”
He took a deep breath. “All right,” he said finally. “No promises, but I’ll try—.”
Had there been a few people aboard the Coraggio, the media would have been all over us. They might be in trouble. Get out there and do something. It would have been breaking news all over the place. But, of course, you didn’t have to worry about an AI using up the available supply of oxygen, or freezing because of a climate-control malfunction, or whatever. In fact, you didn’t have to worry about an AI at all. And that realization didn’t help the program. Public interest focused instead on the inefficiency of the people who’d sent a multi-billion dollar vehicle out into the Kuiper Belt, and lost it.