“Sandia, can you read me?” he repeated. “This is Todd Severyn transmitting from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena.”
Tibbett’s gruff voice came out of the shortwave speaker. “Todd, we read you! I take it you made it down to Los Angeles? Over.” A squeaky background hum accompanied her transmission.
“I arrived just fine. Our locomotive was destroyed by a gang down here, but Casey Jones and I are safe and unharmed.”
“That’s good news Todd,” Tibbett replied. “Over.”
“Could you…” Todd said, then paused. “Uh, could you make sure that message gets passed along to Iris Shikozu at the Altamont settlement?”
“We’ll send it with the next courier that comes down. Over.”
“And tell her…” The words clogged in Todd’s throat. He made a silent excuse to himself that he just had stage fright, but deep inside he knew that wasn’t really what stopped him. “Just tell her I’m OK. We’ll be taking the satellites and setting out for New Mexico. Wish us luck.”
“Good luck, Todd,” Tibbett answered. “We’ll all be keeping our fingers crossed for you. Over.”
“Over and out.” He signed off.
Henrietta Soo stood behind him with arms crossed over her chest like a stern grandmother. “Sounds like you should have rehearsed your words a bit, Mr. Severyn.” She smiled. “Come on. Let me show you the smallsats. Maybe that’ll give you an idea how to transport them, if your friend doesn’t find anything today.”
Casey Jones had gone out by himself that morning to see if he could find any solution to hauling the satellites. The wide-faced man had used the water trickle and a little bit of soap to shave his entire head so clean that it glistened even after he toweled it dry. Obsessed again, Casey set out to see what he could find in the chaos of Pasadena.
Todd could not talk openly with his partner, though they had come hundreds of miles together and narrowly escaped death. The man who called himself Casey Jones had some sort of parasite of guilt inside him, chewing away.
Casey had been all right when he was moving, bringing supplies down to Los Angeles, taking direct action to alleviate his conscience. The moment they stopped and ran up against a problem, though, he became restless as a lion in a cage. Todd guessed he would have done the same thing. In some ways, he and Casey were a lot alike.
Henrietta Soo led Todd deeper into the laboratory complex, away from the offices and conference rooms. The partially dissolved linoleum on the floor left hard cheese-like remains in strange patterns on top of the plywood underfloor.
At the end of the corridor an emergency exit sign marked a red-painted door. Banks of gun-metal gray lockers lined the left side of the hall, like a high-school corridor. On the other side, dark windows gazed in on a warehouse-sized clean room.
“This is where we assembled the smallsats,” Soo said. “It’s a Class 1000 clean room. The air inside was filtered and refiltered so that it had a thousand times fewer particles than outside air. Even that couldn’t stop the spread of the petroplague, of course, but twenty of the solar smallsats were already finished, packaged and sealed, ready for launch. The original plan called for constructing nearly a hundred of them, but Lockwood’s project was on a shoestring budget and we had to go one step at a time. We probably have the components and spare parts to complete another twenty smallsats, though. In addition to these.”
Through the glowing lights of luminous power sources inside the clean room, Todd could make out the hulks of the twenty packaged solar satellites like meter-long pods on the tables.
“Have you spoken to Dr. Seth Mansfield?” Henrietta asked. “He got interested in this work after speaking with Spencer Lockwood over the wireless—Seth has a lot of admiration for that young man. Seth still comes in here, helps us brainstorm last-ditch solutions. Did he put you up to this?”
Todd shook his head. “No, Ma’am. I just heard on the radio that the White Sands folks needed someone to transport these sats and that it could be a big payoff to the country’s recovery. I was tired of sitting on my butt.” He refrained from saying anything about his part in the Promethus spraying.
Henrietta leaned closer to the glass, jabbing her stubby fingers at something Todd couldn’t see.
“Each smallsat is about the size of a large scuba tank, weighing nearly a hundred kilograms. It uses solar electric propulsion for attitude control and has a supercomputer brain the size of a deck of cards. It’s got a microthin array of solar power panels accordioned into a layer a few centimeters thick, but once extended the panels cover several hundred square meters of collection area.”
Todd put the edge of his hand against the glass and tried to peer inside, but he saw no further details. “Sounds delicate,” he said. “Are we going to ruin these things by carrying them a thousand miles cross country?”
She shook her head. “Everything’s been hardened to withstand over ten thousand gees of acceleration during launch, standard stuff for this type of equipment. If Dr. Lockwood hadn’t specified using silcon sealants, the petroplague would have done them in.”
As they walked back toward Henrietta’s office, he looked around; the other rooms were empty. “We saw a big meeting yesterday when we came in. Where is everybody? How many people still work at JPL?”
Henrietta Soo shrugged. “Quite a few, actually, but most of our people have thrown themselves into practical problems, trying to develop technological band-aids for crucial city services. The big one is the Emergency Broadcast Network. It’s linking more and more as people build short-wave radios.”
As she stepped into her dim office, Henrietta flicked the light switch out of habit. She frowned at herself when nothing happened. “It’s really not as bad out there as we thought at first. PVC seems to be unaffected, the hard plastic pipe that most of our underground conduits are made out of. Same with natural rubber, though synthetic rubber gets all spongy and doesn’t function well. Bakelite, that old amber-colored plastic you find in antique stores, resists the petroplague. It’s brittle, but it still holds up pretty well. Some nylon even managed to survive.”
He knew that was good news, but he could not get too excited about it. “Yeah, but if we don’t have the industry to keep making this stuff…” Todd let his voice trail off.
“Ah, but that means we can find substitutions—given time—but it’s going to be hell to survive the transition.”
Later, when Henrietta convinced Todd that he should contact the group at White Sands, he grabbed the microphone with much less trepidation and waited for Spencer Lockwood to acknowledge his transmission. “Lockwood here,” said the man’s voice. “Who am I talking to?”
“You’re talking to the guy who’s going to deliver your solar power satellites from JPL.”
“What!” Spencer’s voice was suddenly high-pitched with childish excitement. “Hot damn!” Then he dropped off again. “I hope we’re still ready to receive them when you get here. We might be having a few minor problems with the military. Some big bully wants to take all our toys. We hope we can hold out.”
“We’ll get there as soon as we can,” Todd said.
“Good luck. We’ll be waiting,” Spencer said.
After they exchanged a few more details, Todd signed off. He felt the sense of urgency bubble through him again. They had made it all the way to Pasadena, but practical matters had brought them to a screeching halt.
Todd was still pacing the floor when Casey Jones returned from his day’s search. The grin on the burly man’s face made Todd stop in his tracks. “You find something?” he asked.
“Maybe,” Casey answered. He held out a battered old book. “I got a map of all the main lines and spurs of railroad tracks in the southwestern United States. From here, we can hook onto the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe line, which will take us east to Barstow, Flagstaff, and straight to Albuquerque. From there, another spur heads south, right into White Sands.”