“I can’t. Not with any certainty. But I’m optimistic.”
“Okay, then. We’ll do it.”
“You should be aware, though, that if it doesn’t perform as expected, there could be a catastrophic result.”
“Destruction of the vehicle?”
“Yes.”
“Okay.”
“Still, if it succeeds, it will be one hell of a payoff.” Paul lounged in a leather chair, wrapped in an oversized gold sweater. He allowed himself a smile. “Look, Rudy, I’d like to see you try it. Because I’d like to be around to see it work. And maybe that’s clouding my judgment. But it’s worth backing.”
Thomas Macelroy High School was the home of the Explorers. It was named for the commander of the first ship to travel beyond the solar system.
When Matt arrived, he paused, as he always did, to look at the lander standing outside the main entrance. It was an AKV Spartan model, the kind routinely used on the old Academy ships, manufactured in 2229 by Starworks. It had at one time been aboard the Bill Jenkins when that ship found the nascent civilization at Lookout in 2234. The lander had descended on 117 worlds, four of which, including Lookout, had supported biosystems. Its history was inscribed on a bronze plaque mounted beside the hatch. The hatch itself remained closed and locked to protect the interior from the weather and the vagaries of the students. And, probably, old star pilots who’d get in and not want to leave.
He’d had one of these aboard the Resnick.
ACADEMY OF SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY was emblazoned in black letters on the hull, along with the familiar logo, Socrates’ scroll circled by a star. The after section carried the school’s name, with the seventeenth-century four-master that served as their motif, along with their sports designation EXPLORERS in script. A sudden gust of wind pulled at the trees, and he drew his jacket around him. A car eased into one of the parking places. An older woman got out and marched into the school building. A parent, he thought. And judging by her expression, the kid was in trouble.
Some things never change.
He followed her inside, signed in at the office, and collected a teenage escort who took him to the library. Julie was there, talking to a small group of students. She saw him, smiled brightly, and came over. “Good to see you, Matt,” she said. “You’ll have two eleventh-grade classes to start. They’ll be here in a few minutes.”
“Okay.”
“Can I get you something?”
They had fresh-squeezed orange juice. While he sampled it, bells rang, the room emptied, the hallways became active, and a fresh batch of kids began pouring into the library. Some of them looked curiously in his direction, but for the most part they were preoccupied with each other. Julie gave them a couple of minutes, asked if he was ready to go, strode to the lectern, and called them to order.
They settled in, and she introduced him. Matt Darwin. “He’s a retired star pilot.”
Not really retired. Unemployed. That sounded better.
Matt never used lecterns. They got between him and his audience. He’d been seated on a tabletop, and he stood upright as the audience’s attention swung his way. “Mr. Darwin flew Academy missions. You know what the Academy was, right?” A few hands went up. Julie looked at a tall, dark-eyed girl in back.
“They used to do exploration missions,” the girl said.
In front, a male student rolled his eyes.
“Very good, Sylvia.” Julie looked down at the male. “Mr. Darwin, Harry, has been farther from Alexandria than anyone here could imagine.”
She took a seat along the side where she could watch Matt and her students.
Matt thanked her and looked around at the audience. “You have a lander out on the lawn in front of the school,” he said. “I’d like to tell you a little about it.”
The people who argue that we confront a vast unknown, that it has already shown itself to be dangerous, and that therefore we should hide under our beds, do not speak for me. Nor do they speak for the Prometheus Foundation.
That’s not to say there’s no risk involved in exploration. We don’t know what’s out there, and we don’t know what we might blunder into. But there’s a risk in just sitting home, as well. For one thing, if there are predators loose, we’ll be better off if we find them, rather than the other way around.
Moreover, if we decide to wait things out, our technological progress will slow. What’s more important is that we’ll lose any claim to greatness. We’ll become an embarrassment to our grandkids. Eventually, a generation with some courage will show up, and they’ll hold us in contempt.
Chapter 7
Rudy and Hutch looked at four interstellars and settled on a Grosvenor 352, the Happy Times, which the Foundation bought from Orbital at auction. The ship was forty-two years old, had hauled freight and passengers out to Serenity and the other stations, and on one occasion had been immortalized by Whitmore Covington in his Quantum Dialogues, conversations on the state of the human race supposedly conducted on the ship during a flight to Nok, whose idiotic inhabitants continued to kill one another over dwindling resources with early-twentieth-century weapons.
Despite its claim to fame, the cost was minimal because the ship’s Hazeltine engines were inoperable. That was, of course, irrelevant to Rudy. So he saved substantial money, and in addition picked up a vehicle whose historic value, if the Locarno Drive went nowhere, would allow it to be resold later. “Of course,” his occasional companion Ellen Simons told him, “if the Locarno’s a flameout, the Foundation’s going to have to shut down anyhow.”
Mouths of babes. Ellen was a pessimist, and was always ready to explain why something wouldn’t work. It was the reason she and Rudy would never get serious. But about this, she was right. The Foundation was on its last legs. Poking around the vast unknown with one Hazeltine ship wasn’t going to get anyone excited. They needed the Locarno.
Paying for the Happy Times, as well as financing the installation of the new drive, drained the Foundation’s resources. Silvestri virtually moved onto the station to assist the work of a team of technicians. That part of the operation didn’t go well. The technicians didn’t really need him, and they quickly took offense at his presence. “We’ve got the basic unit,” one of them complained to Rudy. “All we have to do is tie it in to the ship’s systems. We just don’t need him looking over everybody’s shoulder all the time.”
So Rudy arranged a series of public presentations for Silvestri. He’d be doing guest appearances at colleges and universities and talking to Rotary groups and press associations and whomever else Rudy could round up. When he presented the package, Silvestri smiled. “They’ve been complaining to you, haven’t they?”
“Yes,” he said. “Come on home. We can use the PR.”
In fact, Rudy would have kept the project quiet had he been able. He’d have preferred to present the world with a successful test rather than hang himself out there to look silly if the Locarno fizzled. But with so many people involved, word would inevitably leak out, so he called a press conference and announced what they were trying to do. It became a big story for about two days. But other events, a grisly murder in a Chicago teknopark, followed by a fresh bribery scandal involving several congressmen, pushed it aside. Meanwhile, several physicists gave interviews. All admitted they saw no reason to suppose a better drive was impossible. Nonetheless, they were uniform in predicting failure. Eliot Greeley, the renowned cosmologist from the University of London, remarked that, “Hell, anything is possible, unless it’s specifically prohibited. But that doesn’t mean you can do it.”