She went on for a while, but the thrust was clear: a solution would have to be found for eliminating the contamination of the Nixon. The world could not risk the introduction of a new alien organism… or any other organisms that hadn’t yet been found.
Later that evening, after another performance, she said hoarsely, “Damn, my voice is shot.”
“Yeah, well, I’m pretty sore from bouncing that cot up and down. I’m thinking the real thing is a lot less work.”
“Probably, and neither of us will likely get an Oscar for our performance…”
“Your moans were pretty convincing…”
“…but you can’t fault the pay scale.”
“Amen, sister.”
Clover was taking high fives in the Commons. He had a spaghetti pot under his arm, stuffed with currency.
Fang-Castro glanced around her bare quarters.
Saturday, December 1, 2068. She’d remember this date, the day she gave up the command of the Nixon.
The Chinese had been prompt and efficient. They could, in fact, have launched and arrived a day earlier than projected. It was the personnel on the Nixon who’d held to the original schedule, transmitting every last bit of their work to Earth… in native English and math… through a Chinese relay.
Not a lot of trust there. Not a lot of trust, anywhere.
Three Americans and two Chinese had died in her ship, though Admiral Zhang was probably dead by the time he arrived. There were four bodies in cold storage, and one was still sailing, in a broken egg, toward the outer planets. The thought of Becca Johansson, on her lonely voyage, still made Fang-Castro tight in the throat.
They’d also lost one cat on the trip: Mr. Snuffles had died of a heart attack three weeks out. John Clover had been devastated, but had said, “He never would have made it back on Earth, anyway. The gravity would kill him the first day. Better this way.”
The living Americans—and the former crew members of the Celestial Odyssey, as well—would be going through meticulous body scans before they’d even be allowed in the Chinese facility, and then they’d be confined to the Level 4 biocontainment area until the docs were absolutely, one hundred percent sure that they’d eliminated the last of the…
Measles.
A mild, attenuated, fast-developing form of measles genetically designed to produce the raw material for a measles vaccine, should that ever be needed; and though it was attenuated, it nevertheless produced the blotching pink rash of regular measles. The only place where the regular disease occasionally popped up was the wilds of Marin County, California. If a few hundred parents hadn’t resisted, it would have been eradicated there decades earlier. This outbreak had been brought up by the first visitor to the Nixon, a cheerful, politically reliable doc from the CDC.
With both the Chinese and American propaganda machines denying that there was any real danger from the “alien” virus, at the same time they used various ignorance-bathed celebrities to spread fear and misinformation through the Internet, most of the world had become convinced that the Nixon was a death machine.
A long-forgotten film from a century earlier, The Andromeda Strain, resurfaced on the Internet. Medical personnel—so they claimed to be—called and texted late-night talk shows, citing research that had shown how microorganisms could survive under the most extraordinary conditions. They reminded listeners how diseases on Earth had jumped between species, given the right set of chance mutations. Organisms that might normally infect an alien host might, and they emphasized the word “might,” be able to make the jump to human beings.
Probably not. But maybe.
Santeros said it most plainly, in a talk on public television:
“Humans have encountered aliens. No one knows, for certain, what the Nixon might have brought back with it in the way of pathogens—germs. We are confident that we can eliminate any pathogens in the human body itself, but with the Nixon, that’s a much different situation.
“We have consulted with the Chinese, European, Brazilian, African Union, and Indian governments. As much as it breaks my heart, the decision has been taken to destroy the Nixon in a way that will remove any doubt that rogue pathogens have been destroyed with it….
“The only things to be brought back from the ship are eight alien machines, which will also be thoroughly decontaminated, and from which we hope and expect to derive much information about their computer technologies. As an act of goodwill between the U.S. and its many foreign allies, the machines will be distributed among the major states represented on the UN’s Security Council. We hope, however, to develop a mutual research program.”
But what to do with the Nixon?
De-orbiting the ship was unthinkable. It was far too large to entirely burn up; something might survive and contaminate the world. Crash it into the moon? It’d have to be monitored as a hazardous waste site indefinitely.
The only smart place to send the ship was to the ultimate incinerator. The sun. The Divine Wanderer, the Celestial Odyssey’s successor, could do the job; a ship that was designed to carry over a thousand tonnes of cargo wouldn’t have any problem pushing around the four-hundred-and-fifty-tonne Nixon. A little extra water reaction mass from some strap-on tanks, some newly fabricated attachment mounts, and the Martian transport became the world’s biggest and fastest tugboat.
The operation took a week.
On its second, and final, trip to the Nixon, the Divine Wanderer brought along service eggs, graphene cable, and sensor-laden tie-downs, and a full complement of riggers and jockeys. They’d only be pushing the poor Nixon at a few percent of a gee, but that was still several times more acceleration than the ship had been subject to before. A little extra rigging, just to make sure nothing broke loose. It was cheap insurance.
At six o’clock in the morning, Beijing time, President Santeros and General Secretary Hong jointly issued the orders to proceed.
The Divine Wanderer, grappled to the Nixon’s cold, dead VASIMR engines, began to push. Its nuclear thermal rockets thrummed at a comfortable one-third power for the next day, as the Divine Wanderer pushed the Nixon away from the earth and against its orbital motion about the sun. When it was done, twenty-seven kilometers per second of fresh delta-vee canceled out all but a few kilometers per second of residual orbital velocity about the sun.
The Nixon’s new course was confirmed. The Divine Wanderer released its grapples, turned tail, and headed back to Earth. The Nixon continued on, in a tight elliptical track with a perihelion of less than half a million kilometers. It would never complete a full orbit; the sun’s radius was seven hundred thousand kilometers.
In just over two months, the Nixon would hit the sun at over six hundred kilometers per second, at least those few refractory bits that hadn’t vaporized millions of kilometers out.