“Not just one bomb,” Liu said, unperturbed. “Several. A whole stream of them, thrown behind the pusher plate and detonated-”
“Project Orion,” Gordo snapped.
With that as the key, the others began digging into the electronic archives.
Holle quickly found that Orion had been run from 1957 to 1965 by General Atomic, a division of a company that had also built nuclear submarines and Atlas ICBMs. It was a time of extravagant dreams driven by the new technology of thermonuclear detonations, the energies of the sun brought down to Earth. One “dimensional analysis,” pushing the idea as far as possible, predicted that it would be possible to have sent humans to Saturn by 1970. She flashed the report to the whiteboard.
“This is serious stuff,” Kelly said, wondering. “They got support from Los Alamos, Livermore, Sandia. And look at all these technical papers: ‘A Survey of the Shock Absorber Problem.’ ‘Random Walk of Trajectory Due to Bomb Misplacement.’ Some of these are still classified!”
Gordo said, “So would this have worked?”
“You bet,” Mel Belbruno said. “I mean, you bet, sir. They never quite wrestled the technical details to the floor, as far as I can see. But the concept was surely sound. And they did fly a few demonstration models with conventional explosives.”
“So why weren’t we at Saturn by 1970?”
“Because,” Liu Zheng said, “to get to Saturn, you must first leave the Earth.”
Growing opposition to nuclear weapons through the 1960s caused the Orion concept to be viewed with suspicion. The final straw was an unwise presentation to President Kennedy of a model of a spaceborne Orion-technology battleship, bristling with nuclear missiles. Kennedy was disgusted.
“So the concept was mothballed. But it was never abandoned,” Liu said. “You will see that NASA later developed a successor design called ‘Extended Pulsed Plasma Propulsion,’ with a greater distance from weapons technology.”
“I guess it was always a good concept to have in the library,” said Gordo. “If you ever needed to get something big off of the Earth quickly.” He rubbed his eyes. “I think I remember a novel from when I was a kid. The aliens attack, and we use Orion to get at their mother ship. Footfall — something like that. Shame it isn’t a bunch of aliens we got to beat now. Xenobaths or newts or aquaphibians. By comparison, that would be easy.”
“There is, or was, a nuclear weapons plant close to Denver,” Jerzy Glemp said. “At Rocky Flats.”
Gordo laughed. “Why ain’t I surprised you know that? But if President Vasquez won’t back the idea of another antimatter factory in the middle of Denver, how do I get her to endorse building a whole fucking spaceship out of nuclear bombs?”
“And the fallout,” Patrick said earnestly. “If such a thing is launched anywhere in what’s left of the continental US-there is nowhere empty of people, certainly not in Colorado.”
Jerzy said grimly, “If we launch in 2040, or 2041, or 2042, that will no longer matter, Mr. Groundwater. And nor, I am afraid, will those left behind.”
The paramedic who monitored Jerzy had been following the discussion. Holle had never seen such bewilderment, such shock, on any human face, as they discussed spaceships driven by nuclear fire. Holle wondered if they had all gone insane.
23
Holle had grown up with the flood. She had no memories of life before, how politics used to be. But even so she was surprised by the speed of President Vasquez’s decision-making.
Just two days after Gordo’s session, Vasquez appeared on TV and the web. Once the funerals and proper commemorations were done, she said, Project Nimrod would continue. The Ark would fly, if it was humanly possible to make that happen. That was her promise to the crew and those who were working on the project. And she promised further that there would be no repeat of the Byers accident, that the safety of the public would be paramount. (“Until launch day,” Kelly Kenzie muttered cynically.)
But there was a price to pay. It seemed that the President had had to make considerable concessions to win over dissenters about Project Nimrod within her own administration. She, Vasquez, would not stand for a further reelection at that fall’s election. It would have been her sixth term. She would step aside and endorse her vice president as a candidate.
And Jerzy Glemp would be removed from the project he had initiated, and face charges relating to his culpability for the Byers accident.
In the Academy, Holle was oblivious to the reaction of the students, their whooping celebrations, the way Harry Smith pushed through the crowd to get to a stunned Zane Glemp. All she could think was that the project was on, that the Ark would be built. That she might yet get to fly.
24
December 2038
After one last night in the Boulder training center they were bundled into the chunky biofueled bus that was to take them up into the Wilderness for the shuttle crash sim: Holle, Kelly, Susan, Venus, Mel, Zane, Matt, and DPD officer Don, here in his semi-regular role as unofficial shotgun. Don took his place up front, at the driver’s position, though the bus was automated and knew its own way to the training site. Kelly sat up front beside Don.
Holle made her way to the back of the bus, where Mel was waiting for her. She shuffled down the bus, clumsy in her bright orange environment suit. They had already been in the suits for three days in the training center set up in the old National Center for Atmospheric Research, with hoods up and face masks and goggles in place throughout. They looked like medics heading for a plague zone, she thought vaguely. Even Don had volunteered to live in a suit for the duration of the exercise, even though he was never going to have to wear such a thing in anger. As she sat down Mel grinned and took her hand. His face was all but invisible behind his breathing mask and scuffed plastic goggles, and his human warmth didn’t penetrate the glove layers.
The massive door closed with a hiss of hydraulics. The bus pulled out of the NCAR parking lot, flanked by a couple of light armored vehicles. Like most government vehicles, the heavy bus was plated with armor heavy enough to absorb a small artillery shell, and the bulletproof windows were so thick they turned the outside world blue.
The little convoy headed up Table Mesa Drive and turned left onto Broadway, the old Highway 93, past the refugee-processing center on the University of Colorado campus. Holle saw threads of campfire smoke lifting to the sky from the area of the Pearl Street Mall. Now nineteen years old, she sometimes wished she could have seen cities like this as they had been before she was born, the way they were in Friends and Frasier. They turned left again onto Arapahoe Avenue, heading west out of the city. Rough wire barriers, already rusting, had been thrown up along the sides of the main roads, for otherwise the highways, now little used by traffic, would have long ago been colonized by the lean-tos and tents of the dispossessed, and the city would have ground to a halt.
As they drove by, Holle saw people pressed up to the fences, rows of faces, children dressed in clothes faded to the color of the mud, or the gray of the overcast December sky. Kelly Kenzie had the nerve to wave a gloved hand. The Candidates were still celebrities. A couple of children waved back. But the adults stared back, as if the Candidates in their environment suits were visitors from some other star. Some held up improvised placards, a single name scrawled on bits of card or plastic or cloth: VASQUEZ. After withdrawing from the 2036 election former President Vasquez had become an outspoken champion of the nation’s dispossessed. Conspiracy theories had been proliferating since Vasquez’s assassination in her home, just a week ago.
There had recently been a new influx of eye-dees. When the sea-level rise had topped twelve hundred meters the flood had at last started to impinge on Colorado itself in a serious way. The waters had got as far as Burlington on the I-70 and Lamar on the I-50, and the great rivers, the South Platte and the Arkansas, were now tidal in their lower reaches. There was salt-poisoning in the aquifers, and, it was said, of some trees and crops even in Denver. A fresh, panicky relocation was going on, as eye-dees in the sod-house communities on the plains were moved up to the higher, poorer land of Monument Ridge or the Rockies. But anybody who could break out of the official corridors made for the sanctuary of the cities. And meanwhile, some of the Project Nimrod workers were drifting away, making an early claim for a place on the remnant high ground.