The guard studied both boys. Finally he said, “See that it is over. Now go back to your classrooms.”
They did, but halfway down the hallway Paul turned to shout at the guard, “Cameras in the bathrooms are illegal! I’m telling my father about this!”
Colin slipped quietly into his classroom. His chest didn’t hurt much, but his stomach did. The drawing of the zoo was finished and people were cleaning up. Colin picked up his crayons, clutching them so hard that one snapped in two, sounding just like the pop! that plants made when they really, really needed watering.
Even if Marianne had continued with the Star Brotherhood Foundation, its major mission became pointless. The United States government formally discontinued work on the spaceship it had been building from the Deneb engineering plans. The ship, badly damaged by the superstorm three years ago, had been the center of political problems since its beginning. Now it became a casualty of budget shortfalls, congressional delay, party politics, and virulent opposition from the voting blocs that believed anything bequeathed by the aliens could only harm humanity. Some Americans still believed that the Denebs had caused the spore cloud; a larger percentage believed that the aliens knew the cloud would wipe out mice and had not told Terrans this.
“It’s so shortsighted!” Marianne raged to Tim as they watched the late-night news. “Christ, the statistics are right there! In seventy-five years—less if we keep going on the way we are—CO2 in the atmosphere will reach seven hundred parts per million. You’re looking at a devastating effect on the oceans, and possibly a near-total ecological collapse!”
“Uh,” Tim said. He lounged on the sofa beside her, a beer in his hand. When she glanced at him, he added, “But we have more private spaceships building, right? Besides Stubbins.”
“Yes.” He should know that already. Didn’t he ever follow the news?
Six years ago, everything known about space travel had become outdated. All the programs in development or nearing completion were suddenly horse-drawn barouches in a world of Ferraris. Space agencies in the US, in Russia and China and India and the European Union—all had gone into shock. Some had folded, some had stubbornly continued with “human” rocket plans, and some had fast-tracked the building of ships according to the alien plans. The EU, China, and Russia were building “Deneb” spaceships.
In the United States, the Boeing ship, half built, was stalled by fiscal problems.
SpaceX had thrown all of its resources behind a ship being built in California, now two-thirds done. Blue Origin was farther behind.
Sierra Nevada chose to continue with its old technology, on the reasonable grounds that it was comprehensible.
The newest company, Stubbins’s Starship Venture, was reported to have the ship closest to completion. Although since the reports issued from Stubbins’s PR machine and the site was closed to everyone else, it wasn’t known how true this was. Fantastic salaries and freedom from government politics had lured some of the best talent in the world to the Venture building site in Pennsylvania. As CEO of his perfume company, Stubbins had had the reputation of trusting the project heads he hired to get their goals met, without looking too closely into their methods. Stubbins’s word was always the final arbiter, but he listened more closely to his scientists than to his accountants, and that alone was such a novelty that he attracted people who otherwise might have shunned his unsavory reputation. If you were American and wanted to go to the stars, Jonah Stubbins looked like your best bet.
Not everybody wanted to go to the stars. The anchorwoman’s next story covered an ugly, violent protest in Pittsburgh, the closest big city to the Venture site. Citizens to Save Earth, yet another anti-alien group, smashed windows and burned cars. A dozen people were injured.
During the last year, public attitudes toward Stubbins’s ship seemed to have settled into an unexpected—by her, anyway—bimodal distribution. Marianne had expected a division along religious lines, since seven years ago the spore cloud had been demonized by fundamentalists as the End Times, or God’s cleansing, or one of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (usually but not always Pestilence). She also expected that those who had lost family to R. sporii would most oppose the expedition to World. Certainly her experiences giving lectures had created that impression.
But lecture-goers, it turned out, were not a typical sample. The bimodal distribution was neither religious nor familial. It was economic.
Those who had recovered from the economic collapse, or whose jobs had never been cut by it, mostly approved of Stubbins’s private foray to the stars. They liked it because it was adventuresome, or because it wasn’t costing taxpayers anything, or because it might produce new technology or additional markets for Terran products. The second group, those hardest hit by the collapse, opposed Stubbins and thought the government should stop him. These people hated the aliens and wanted no more contact with them.
There was a third group, small but very vocal online, who both hated Denebs and wanted Stubbins to travel to World. They wanted revenge, to hit World as hard as the spore plague had hit Earth. In this they were closer to opinion dominant in Central Asia than to most of the United States.
Tim drained his beer. Marianne twisted her lips in disgust at the TV screen. “Look at them. The destructive idiots. They have no facts, but that doesn’t stop them.”
“Uh,” Tim said.
She turned to him. “Aren’t you at least a little bit interested in all this?”
He sat up straighter on the sofa. “You know I am.”
“Then why don’t you act like it?”
“Not everyone feels your need to spread emotion all over every last goal, Marianne. Some people just act.”
“Are you implying that I’m not acting enough?”
His eyes glittered. He crushed his beer can with one hand and thumped the can onto the coffee table. “When I came aboard the foundation it was because of Sissy, but I believed in it, too. In building the government ship. But that’s over now, and you’ve gone from giving speeches to just writing Internet stuff praising Stubbins.”
“It’s a different means to the same end.”
“Is it? Maybe. But just because I want us to go to the stars doesn’t mean I want Stubbins to take us there.” He stood and got another beer from the kitchenette.
By the time he’d returned, Marianne’s face was expressionless. She said, “The group at Columbia has isolated the genes that have been spore-activated and may cause the changes to the auditory parts of the brain.”
“Hey, great!”
He didn’t ask anything about the genes, or what the discovery might mean. Marianne knew she was testing him, and disliked herself for doing it, and did it anyway. “Also, there are verified reports now of mice in the wild that are immune to R. sporii.”
“So things are looking up? That’s good.”
“Don’t you want details?”
He drained the second beer—third? Fourth? Tim’s capacity was astonishing. He said quietly, “Sure. Here’s a detail I want. Did you get all these research updates from Harrison Rice?”
“Yes.”
“By e-mail?”
“Some of them. Some in person.”
“You went to see Rice. You two still have a thing for each other?”