The nights were worst of all, when he lay in his bed in one of the big communal dorms, and heard the patter of feet and the giggling, and the soft parting of lips.
Zane was afraid, all the time. He felt as if his personality was nothing but a rag of bluffs and pretensions that at any moment could be torn aside like a rotten curtain to reveal the dark, miserable truth that he was no good at anything and of no value to anybody. Maybe all sixteen-year-olds felt like this at times, even when the world wasn’t threatening to end. But if Holle or Kelly or Wilson had such doubts, they never betrayed them, not for a second that he could ever see. Only Zane, alone with his doubts and inadequacies and torments.
Mel had run down his argument, and it was Zane’s turn to speak. He settled his laptop on his knees, brought up figures and notes, and focused his thoughts on what he was supposed to say.
“I hear your arguments, Mel, but it remains the case-” Ugh, he sounded like his father, like a fifty-year-old man, how he hated that in himself, but he couldn’t help it. “It remains the case that we’re going to have to rely on at least one brand-new technology, which is the Alcubierre drive. We haven’t actually created a warp bubble yet, but we believe we’re coming close.”
He tapped his screen and fed their computers with images he’d taken from his father’s files. They showed progress in building an atom-smasher in a suburb of Denver.
“We relied on scavenged equipment to build the thing, from the CERN Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland, and Fermilab in Chicago.” Divers had descended hundreds of meters to a seabed that had so recently been the Midwestern prairie, to bring up linear accelerators and superconducting magnets and X-ray sources, and tons of high-quality metals and cable. “We use a new technology, plasma accelerators, to deliver a comparable performance to the CERN LHC from a machine a fraction of the size. But unlike with the pre-flood colliders we’re not interested in studying exotic products of high-speed proton collisions; we’re not doing physics here, just trying to make antimatter. We accelerate protons to within a whisker of the speed of light, and smash them together, six hundred million collisions a second. The result is a trickle of antiprotons which are in turn stored in what we call the Antiproton Source, a magnetic bottle…”
If they came into contact, antimatter and matter enthusiastically annihilated. Only magnetic fields would do to keep the twin forms of matter entirely apart. But antimatter was worth the trouble. Fusion reactions typically turned only a few percent of the available fuel mass to energy; matter-antimatter reactions converted it all. As a result matter-antimatter was the most compact energy source known, yielding, as Jerzy liked to tell his son, as much energy from a gram or so as the Hiroshima bomb.
But the antimatter was only a step in the process. Once enough antimatter was created and stored it would be used to drive the even higher-energy collisions you needed to create a single point of such energy density that the fundamental string-fabric of matter and energy would be twanged and pulled tight, and spacetime’s narrow hyperdimensional throat would be squeezed until it burst, and a warp bubble was born.
Zane spoke on about the engineering tweaks which his father had had to devise, and how he had labored to contain the costs.
Nobody was listening. You were supposed to listen. Here in Cortez, sealed off from the world, with their phones and net connections blocked, they were expected to feed themselves by working in a small indoor garden, to maintain the air-cycling system that mimicked the environment support of the ship, to figure out and divide up other essential chores-and, most importantly, to learn from each other. These isolation exercises were intended to help the Candidates develop the skills they would need when they faced the even deeper confinement of a long-duration spaceflight. So it paid to listen. Well, Don Meisel watched from his perch at the back of the room, and Mel Belbruno was assiduously making notes. But among the others the decision point was coming, something was passing between the core group in looks and nods and furtive grins. And now, like a breeze passing over a cornfield, a bunch of them unfolded their legs and stood up.
“We’re going out,” Kelly Kenzie announced. “Fifty days without sunlight is enough. Come if you want.” She announced this to the outsiders, Mel, Zane. But she looked challengingly at Don.
Don folded his arms without standing up. “How will you do that?”
“We found the exit you blocked up.”
“It’s on the other side of the shop,” Holle said with a laugh. “My father said that in places like this they always made you go out through the shop.”
“Won’t this count against you in terms of the exercise?”
“Not necessarily,” Kelly said. “We’re rewarded for initiative. I think Gordo Alonzo will be disappointed if we don’t try busting out.”
“My orders are to keep you safe,” Don said. “Not to stop you making assholes of yourselves. Do what you want.” His face was blank. It seemed to Zane that since being reassigned to DPD he had become very good at hiding his emotions, but he never spoke to the group about his experiences, what he had seen and done.
Kelly grinned. “Let’s do it.”
They all piled into the remains of the museum’s small shop, with its bare shelves and faded labeling. Wilson had figured out where to break through the fake paneling that had been used to conceal the shop’s main door, and he used a modified taser to disable the magnetic locks that held it shut. As the door swung open an alarm sounded, and they laughed nervously. But there was daylight beyond, a street, a slab of blue sky. It was irresistible.
They all hurried out, pushing and giggling in the doorway in their bright uniforms. Zane too was pleased to be out, to feel the sun on his face, and to breathe deeply of crisp uncirculated air.
“You look happy,” Holle said with a grin. She linked her arm in his.
“I always feel more real out of doors.”
“I know what you mean. But on the ship we’ll be cooped up for years, not weeks. I sometimes wonder how we’ll cope… Oh, that’s my phone.” She dug in her pocket.
All their phones were ringing. The museum’s fabric had been laced with conductors to turn it into a Faraday cage, a block against transmissions. Cora Robles now had the largest fan base among the Candidates, or so she claimed, and she wasted no time, working her handheld with jabs of her thumb, replying to weeks of messages. Zane, vaguely guilty, turned his own phone off without looking at the screen.
He became aware of the people watching them.
The town of Cortez was a small place, once devoted to ranching and farming and catering for the tourists who had come to see the mountains and the river valleys and mesa tops where people had lived for thousands of years. Now the town was overwhelmed by the eye-dees’ shelters and tents and shanties of cardboard and corrugated metal, crowding the sidewalks and every open space. And the people were everywhere, standing on doorsteps, or poking their heads out of tents, or walking the sidewalks and traffic-free streets, some dragging ancient supermarket carts, looking at the Candidates. But the Candidates, intent on their phones and handhelds, barely registered the staring locals.
A little girl came walking up to the Candidates. Aged maybe nine, she wore a faded adult T-shirt tied around her waist with a bit of old electrical flex. Don watched warily, his hand on the heft of the nightstick at his belt. She pointed at Kelly. “I know you. You’re Kelly Kenzie.”
With a smug glance at Cora, Kelly smiled. “How do you know that?” “My dad works at Gunnison. He has a computer that lets you watch what you’re all doing and read your blogs and stuff.” She smiled. “I like watching you. I like the pretty colors you wear. I don’t live here.”