He nodded stiffly.
“I can imagine how you’re feeling. Really I can. Getting thrown out of your cushy berth, the wonderful expensive program they’re running back there. Thrown down into the pit, here on Delaware. That’s how it feels, right? And I know what you think your life will be like now. Policing food riots and battling eye-dees with TB.
“But it’s not all like that. This is still a city, it’s still populated by American citizens who are still preyed on by corner boys and touts and pimps and drug slingers and all the rest. And we’re still professional cops. I’m talking about ordinary, old-fashioned policing, of which the challenges have only got worse as wave after wave of refugees have washed over this town of ours.” She looked deep into his eyes, challenging him. “Think you might find some satisfaction in that kind of work? You’re a smart kid, I can tell by the files they sent over from the Academy. It’s still possible to build a career in this department. Just focus on the job and we’ll see how you prosper.”
Don said nothing.
“OK, Meisel, your training starts as of now. Down the hall to the left, ask for Officer Bundy. I asked him to find you a berth in the squad for the first couple of days, and a partner. He’ll show you where to get a cadet badge and pick up a uniform. You seriously need to get out of the Spider-Man outfit.”
“Thank you,” he said. “Ma’am.”
“Oh, and Meisel. Ask Bundy about lodging.”
“I don’t need lodging.”
She sighed. “Yes, you do. You’ll get no more support from the Academy. Look, it’s not so bad. One time you had to be a Denver resident to be a cop here. Now it’s switched around, if you serve as a cop you have a residency entitlement. A rookie cadet like you has a right to a quarter-share in a dorm room. Bundy will give you the paperwork. Go, go, get on with it.”
He walked stiffly into the building, ignoring the stares and grins of the officers he encountered.
18
September 2036
The morning’s class debate in the isolation camp was between Zane who had to defend the Ark’s latest draft design model, and Mel Belbruno who argued for the tough engineering disciplines that had been brought into the project by veterans of NASA, the USAF and the Navy.
The Candidates were in the Cultural Center at Cortez, a small museum once run by the University of Colorado in this tiny little town in the southwest corner of the state, maybe five hundred kilometers from Denver. Within the walls of this hundred-year-old building, the Candidates in their gaudy scarlet-and-blue jumpsuits looked vivid against the drab background. Zane was on the stage, facing Mel, listening intently. Mel, though a fully fledged Candidate, had always been subtly excluded by the rest since being forced on the project by Gordo Alonzo four years back. But Zane knew Mel was no fool, and he had powerful allies.
Mel said forcefully, “In the Ark you’re looking at a single machine big and complex enough to keep humans alive, that’s going to have to function to something like its optimal parameters for years, decades even. In the military and aerospace we’ve been doing this for a long time. Look at the B52, fleets of which we kept flying for fifty years and more. Or the space shuttle, which lasted over three decades from first test to final operational flight, and which despite its problems had a safety record in terms of human flight hours per casualty that was second to none-”
“Poor examples,” Wilson Argent snapped back. “B52 missions lasted hours, shuttle missions maybe weeks, and even then you had ground support for maintenance.”
“But my point is that there are precedents of technologies being maintained for long periods-even across multiple generations, even centuries. We can look at these cases and abstract those features that enabled them to endure. A continuing purpose, for instance, as with medieval cathedrals in Europe-”
That earned him guffaws. Kelly said, “Are you seriously calling a cathedral a technology? Aqueducts are a better example of what you’re talking about, engineering intended to do something. There were aqueducts built by the Romans and kept functioning in southern Europe until the flood finally washed them away.”
Mel regrouped. “OK, I’ll take that point. But what kept the aqueducts working? You need to ensure your machine has clarity of purpose and a compelling need to exist. You need to design on a basis of supreme reliability and low failure rates. And you need to build in ease of maintenance, redundancy, robustness of components. All of which argues against some of the fancier stuff you folks cook up. Nanotech. Self-replicating machines. Autonomous AIs, a ship that can run itself. These are things which we don’t know how to do. The experience of decades of space missions is that you use stuff that’s no more complex than it needs to be, and is proven in flight. No fancy, unproven technologies. No magic tricks.”
And that, of course, was a jab directly at Zane and his father, and the whole warp-drive development effort. But more indirectly it dug into a split in the philosophy behind the whole project.
There were test pilots working on Nimrod now. If you were an ambitious American flyboy in the year 2036 there was really only one show in town, one place to be, and that was Nimrod. There had even been a test launch of an Ares booster from the new launch facility at Gunnison, a thrilling, startling sight, despite the surrounding perimeter fences against which resentful IDPs pressed their faces.
But as if in reaction to all this nuts-and-bolts work a whole raft of alternate schemes continued to be floated among the more fanciful thinkers. Maybe the whole project had started off in the wrong direction. If you took actual humans into space, lumpy bags of water, most of your ship’s mass would necessarily be devoted to plumbing. But maybe there were ways to save weight. Kelly often loudly advocated taking just women and buckets of frozen sperm. Better yet, you could take frozen zygotes and let the first generation of colonists be raised by machine. All such schemes had eventually been ruled out, partly because of technical implausibility, and partly because there was something distancing about them for those who had to build the ship. The Ark was an expression of dreams, as much as logic; better to send a single living child than a million frozen geniuses.
But still the debate went on, and when Mel was done Zane was going to have to defend the fact that even the baseline design relied on at least one technological miracle, in the warp bubble.
Even as Mel spoke, Zane was aware of the muttering among the leaders: Kelly Kenzie, the big glamorous star of the Candidate corps, and Wilson Argent, brash, impatient, bossy, and sharp, intense Venus Jenning, and Holle Groundwater, unassuming, bright and loyal, who Wilson had labeled “the Mouse”-even soft, motherly Susan Frasier. Zane had heard enough to know what was going on. Kelly and some of the others were planning a breakout today, Day Fifty of their latest isolation exercise. Kelly’s core group, bonded years ago, always dominated things. Once Don Meisel would have been in with them. Now, distanced, he sat away from the rest in his drab DPD coverall. Not for the first time Don had been called away from his regular duties and thrown back into a group from which he’d been arbitrarily excluded, to provide a minimum security cover while not disrupting the group’s dynamics with strangers.
Whenever they put their pretty heads together like this, Zane felt a kind of deep panic. He was always left out of such discussions. Oh, Holle always took care of him, ever since her own first day at the Academy, when Zane had taken care of her. But that wasn’t enough to give him a way into the core social network of this bunch of bright, attractive, intensely competitive sixteen- to eighteen-year-olds.
Nor was it much better for Zane in the outside world. His father was too deeply immersed in project politics and the intricacies of his own work on antimatter production to pay much attention to the adolescent angst of his son, save occasionally when he turned on Zane for some perceived failure or other. Zane did have the tutors, and in particular Harry Smith, but Zane was always uneasily aware of deeper levels to Harry’s regard for him.