Although it was an odd thing, she thought, that his very hard-nosed, almost cynically robust thinking, which made him so valuable to her, also made him very opaque. She really knew very little about what he thought and believed, deep inside. Sometimes a faint worry about that gnawed at the edge of her awareness. She must get him to open up, she thought, get to know him better. But there was never any time. And in the meantime he was just too useful.
So hows the reaction?
Markets down seventeen percent, Nicolaus said. As a snap reaction goes, thats not as bad as we feared. Space and high-tech stocks are booming, needless to say.
Miriam marveled at such a response. She supposed the impulse to get rich was natural enoughindeed, the global economy wouldnt work without it. But she did wonder what those eager investors imagined they might achieve if their financial feeding frenzy hindered the ability of the aerospace companies and others to actually get the job done.
Still, it could be worse, she told herself. At least the Presidents speech was being made. Even getting the project this far had been a close-run thing.
In the worlds grandest councils, there had been a lot of heated discussion about the wisdom of the solution Miriam had pushed. The shield project would absorb the economic energies of the participating countries for yearsand for what? Even the energy the shield was bound to leak through would still add up to a devastating disaster.
And were you really going to bust your balls to save the whole world? Including the Chinese who were refusing to take part, and the Africans who, recovering from the disasters of the twentieth century, were becoming newly resurgent? Couldnt you just save America, Europe? The military chiefs had even started to develop scenarios for what might follow the sunstorm, when Eurasia and America, if they were the only industrial powers left standing, began to move out from their fortresses to aid the remnants of a shattered world. It really would be a new world order, Miriam was earnestly advised, a restructuring of geopolitical power that might last a thousand years
It had taken some deep conversations with Siobhan McGorran before Miriam had been able to wrap her own limited politicians imagination around the magnitude of the problem. The sunstorm wasnt another June 9; it wasnt Krakatoa or Pompeii; it wasnt a plague or a flood. And you just couldnt see this as an opportunity to seek petty advantage. The extinction of humankind, indeed of all life on Earth, was possible. This really was a case of all or nothinga message Miriam had, at last, managed to batter into the heads of the rest of the worlds decision makers.
President Alvarez spoke on, calmly.
It had to be Alvarez up there on the worlds screens, of course. It had been Miriam who had so far led the political effort behind the shield project. It was she who had firmed up a solid industrial and financial base for the project, she who had gathered together the political will in her own fractious Eurasian Union and beyond to make this unlikely project happenand she who had used up a good deal of her own political credit in the process. But by common consent, in situations like this it had to be the President of the United States who had to give the world the bad news, and the good, as it had been for generations.
Alvarez is doing a good job, Miriam said. Were lucky we got somebody like her in the hot seat at the right time.
Nicolaus snorted. Shes the best actor in the White House since Reagan, thats all.
Oh, shes more than that. But she might raise false hopes. Whatever we do, she said grimly, people are going to die.
But far fewer than might otherwise, Nicolaus said. And whatever we do, dont expect medals. Remember, this is engineering, not magic; no matter how well this works, people are sure to die, in great numbers. And in hindsight people will blame us. We will be called the worst mass murderers in history. That is certainly the Polish way! He grinned with an odd sort of cheerful gloominess.
Youre too cynical sometimes, Nicolaus. But her mood was mellow, softened by the whiskey. She sipped it sparingly, letting Alvarezs warm voice wash over her.
The shield will be immense in size. But most of it will be made of a vanishingly thin film, and so its mass will be kept to the minimum. The bulk of its substance will be launched from the Moon, where the lower gravity allows space launches many times easier than from the Earth. The smart components that will be required to control the shield will be manufactured on Earth, where the most sophisticated manufacturing processes are available.
All our resources must be dedicated to this project, and other dreams put on hold, for now. That is why I have decided to recall the Aurora2, the second of our Mars spacecraft, already bound for the red planet. It will serve as our work shed, if you will.
Born on ripples of electromagnetism, the Presidents words washed past the Moon and, some minutes later, reached Mars.
To Helena Umfraville, the voice in her helmet speakers was tinny. But it was her choice to hear Alvarez like this. To watch the flyby of Aurora2 she had decided to go EVA, to be immersed in Martian nature. Even a presidents speech couldnt compete with that.
So she had clambered into her EVA suit. It was an isolation suit that you left docked to a hatch of your rover or your hab, and then crawled in through the back, so that you never came into contact with its outer surfaceand Mars, with its putative native ecology, was never touched by the oily, watery, bug-ridden mass that was you. And now she stood beside her rover, with her feet planted squarely in crimson dirt, as close to Mars as she was allowed to get.
Around her a rock-strewn plain stretched away, unmarked by humanity save for her own tire tracks. The ground was pinkish brown, and the sky was a yellowy butterscotch color that gathered to orange around the shrunken disk of the sun, almost like an Earth sunrise. The rocks on the ground, scattered at random by some long-gone impact, had been in place so long that they had been polished smooth by windborne dust. This was an old, silent world, like a museum of rocks and dust. But there was weather here, sometimes surprisingly violent when that thin air stirred itself.
And on the horizon she could make out an outcrop of layered rock. It was sedimentary, just like a sandstone bed on Earthand just like terrestrial sandstone it had been laid down in water. You could search the dry Moon from pole to pole and not find one formation like that unspectacular outcropping. This was Mars: the thought still thrilled her.
But Helena was stranded here.
Of course the Aurora1 astronauts had known basically what the President was going to say long before she had opened her mouth. Mission control at Houston had broken the news of Aurora2s wave-off gently and carefully, well in advance.
Aurora2 was actually the Mars expeditions third ship. The first, labeled Aurora Zero, had delivered an unmanned factory to the surface of Mars, which had patiently labored to turn Martian dirt and air into methane and oxygen, the fuel that would send home the human crews that followed. Then Aurora1 had made the mighty journey, powered by thermal nuclear rockets and carrying six crew. Footprints and flags had come at last to Mars.
The plan had been that once Aurora2 arrived the first crew would head back to Earth, leaving the bigger second team to expand on what they had already builtan embryonic settlement that marked, everybody had hoped, the start of the continuous human habitation of Mars. The tiny beachhead had already been christened, a bit grandiosely, Port Lowell.