Something in Gordo’s continual emphasis on the dates was working in her head. To her the flood had always been remote, something that happened to other people. Now she felt as if the world was closing in on her. In four years, when the flood waters would be lapping in this very room, she would be just twenty-one. Suddenly it wasn’t some abstracted future version of herself who would have to cope with all this. It was her who would have to face the future, and if the Ark failed it was her who would have to deal with the ultimate nightmare, the washing away of the very ground under her feet. A deep fear bit into her belly, like a fear of falling. She glanced across at her father, wishing she was nearer to him.
Kelly was watching her. “Hey. It’s OK. We’ll get through this. We’ll fly yet.” And she turned back to listen to the arguments, serene, confident, strong. Just for a moment, rivalries put aside, Holle could see why she was so popular with the public who watched the Candidates’ progress, their daily lives.
Gordo folded his arms, and silenced the room. “Then this is the crux. The way you have been progressing this project has led to delay and ultimately disaster. There’s no way I’m going to endorse the kind of launch schedule you put together here. It was always a fucking joke, and it’s certainly unachievable now. Unless you can come up with some new way forward, now, then the Ark don’t fly. So who speaks next?”
“Holle Groundwater,” said Liu Zheng.
22
Holle said, “What?” Liu seemed quite calm. He even smiled. “Ms. Groundwater. Once, in my class, we were ruminating on a design problem that at the time seemed insuperable.”
“I-”
“The size of the warp bubble.”
“Yes. I remember.”
“On that occasion, you raised a question. Not a solution, but it provoked a chain of thought that ultimately led to a solution. It was a good question. Perhaps that is your particular talent.” His smile widened, encouraging. “Now would be a good time to ask that question again.”
Patrick said, “What the hell are you doing, Liu? What kind of pressure is that to put on a seventeen-year-old kid?”
“It’s OK, Dad,” Holle said, though it wasn’t OK, not at all. They were all staring at her, her father with anxiety and pride, Liu with intensity, Edward Kenzie with bafflement-Kelly with frank envy. She could feel her heart hammer, the blood sing in her ears. She thought she might faint. What a situation. Speak. Say the right thing. Or else in five years you’ll either be dead, or starving on a raft made of plastic trash. “It’s just something my father always said. If the answer’s not the one you want, maybe you’re asking the wrong question.”
Liu Zheng closed his eyes and spoke rapidly. “Yes. OK. Now we have two apparently insuperable obstacles. First, the antimatter. We can’t make what we need. Then what’s the alternative to making it?”
Jerzy growled, “If you can’t make it, go find it. Mine it from somewhere.”
“Yes,” Liu said, nodding. “The question is, where and how? And second, the multiple launches. We don’t have the time to launch the Ark in fifteen pieces. Surely you are right about that, Colonel. Therefore we will have to send up a single package, a single launch, the whole Ark. Eighty people with everything to sustain them, and all the aspects of the ship’s propulsion system. All to be launched at once. How do you launch so much to orbit, in one shot?” He opened his eyes and started to hammer at the keypad in the tabletop before him.
Jerzy was smiling, a twisted gesture under his covered eye. “I see what you mean. Those are good questions. And I think I know where you can mine antimatter.”
Gordo had to grin. “Is this a setup? You old showboater.”
“I am younger than you, Colonel.”
“Where?”
And Jerzy said, “Jupiter and Io.”
Jupiter, a monstrous world with the mass of three hundred Earths, so huge it was almost a star. And Io, moon of Jupiter, circling so close to its bloated parent that tidal forces kneaded it into continual volcanism. As Io circled through Jupiter’s powerful magnetic field it created a “flux tube,” an electric current connecting Io to Jupiter’s upper atmosphere, a current that gathered up charged particles and caused them to slam into the Jovian air.
Kelly, racing through material retrieved to the screen before her, saw the point quickly. “The flux tube is a natural particle collider.”
Jerzy said, “And as such it is a natural source of antimatter particles. Of course in nature such particles will annihilate with matter very quickly, but it is believed that some finish up in belts around Jupiter, analogous to Earth’s Van Allen belts. And if they could be harvested-”
“How?” Gordo snapped.
“With some kind of superconducting magnetic scoop, possibly,” Liu said. “A ship with magnetic sails that could waft through the flux tube and filter out antiprotons. The amount of antimatter is small-only three or four tons of antimatter per hour are created by such processes across the solar system-but the amount we will need to harness is small too…”
And the discussion spun on as the scientists, running with the idea, explored the resources available through their computers. Even Kelly and Mel joined in, exhilarated to be released from the closure and intensity of the post-accident discussion.
Holle just sat back, bewildered. She tried to follow the swirling discussion, the bare outlines of a new mission strategy emerging from the heated speculation. Jupiter’s environment, saturated with radiation, was pretty lethal for humans. That plucky ramjet, swooping in around Io to filter out antiprotons, would have to be unmanned. But it might be controlled by a manned craft in a slow, remote orbit around Jupiter. So you would spend years in orbit, living in a tank, years in a place of huge, lethal energies where the sun was reduced to dimness, years waiting just to collect the antimatter needed to begin the mission proper. It seemed horrible to her, repellent, utterly inhuman. And yet, as the scientists talked, as Gordo let the discussion run on, this was the consensus that was emerging.
But how would you get to Jupiter in the first place?
For answer, Liu Zheng produced a video clip which he projected onto the big whiteboard at the front of the room. It was only half a minute long, and looped over and over. Scratchy, blurred, ghosted from having been copied across many formats, it showed an old man sitting in a rocking chair. He cradled some kind of model. It looked like an artillery shell, maybe a meter long, a third of a meter wide. The old man displayed the features of the gadget. That bullet-like cowl was made of fiberglass, and was pocked with holes where, it seemed, some kind of sensors had once been placed. At the base was a curved plate of aluminum, like a pie dish, or maybe an antenna. The dish was connected to the main body by a system of springs, a kind of suspension.
“This is how we may launch,” Liu said.
Jerzy Glemp cackled. “In a Jules Verne spaceship?”
“It has nothing to do with Verne,” said Liu. “But it is a spaceship-or a demonstration model of one.” He froze the image. “It was driven by explosives. You set off a charge under your pusher plate, there. The plate is driven up into the suspension system, which in turn pushes the main body forward. And you set off another charge, and another.” He mimed this with his hands, his curved left palm catching the imaginary detonations, the back of his hand pushing his right fist up in the air. “Boom, boom, boom. With this model, the charges were the size of golf balls.”
Gordo covered his face with his big hands. “Oh, shit, I heard of this. My father showed me a scratchy old film, of this thing put-putting into the air… What was it called?”
Edward Kenzie said, “Are you suggesting this might be the way to launch our Ark? What kind of explosions would you need?”
“Thermonuclear,” Liu said simply.
“Jesus Christ,” Kenzie said, and he looked at his daughter, horrified. “You’re seriously suggesting we load the last hope of mankind on top of a nuclear bomb?”