Boundary b-1 Read online

  "I still say I'd just go for it. Hit 'em with the truth and to hell with the rest."

  "Oh, how I wish. Apparently, when it comes to professional status, your field works differently than mine."

  "Well, yes, that's true. In my trade, there are those who are good, those who are excellent, and those who are divine. I have sufficient worshippers to qualify for the third category."

  "And you're the most modest person you know, too."

  He laughed. "Damn straight! So no one caught on?"

  "Well… The director did ask about the name. But either he didn't quite get it, or he was really working hard on ignoring it."

  "Maybe everyone else will do the same."

  "Ha. I laugh. And I laugh again. Everybody at the museum is friendly. Some of the people in this field are long-standing professional rivals of mine. Outright enemies, in the case of at least one or two. And they'll all have lots of time to read over my paper, once it comes out. For that matter, plenty of them will be reading it already.

  You can bet copies will get circulated ahead of publication, no matter what the rules are. Oh, they'll be ready for me and Bemmie, A.J., don't you worry about that. Come along to the conference next fall. You can see me get burned in effigy. It'll be a big bonfire, too, with them having almost eighteen months to pile up the firewood."

  "I'd love to, but it'll probably be impossible." A.J.'s voice sounded sincerely wistful. "Especially since I'd gladly roast anyone trying to light flames under you, and-if I do say so myself-I'm damn good at roasting people. 'To Serve Man' is my favorite bedtime reading."

  Helen laughed herself at that. A.J.'s cheerful delivery made the whole conversation lighter. "So come on, then! The conference next year will be held in Phoenix, which isn't even that far away for you."

  "No, it isn't-even allowing for the fact that New Mexico and Arizona are both big states. Hell of a scenic drive, too. But the problem isn't the travel time, it's the time I'd have to spend at the conference. Alas, though it devastates me, dear lady, I fear I cannot, for duty doth call."

  A.J. had put on a very exaggerated Ye Olde English accent for the last sentence, but promptly lapsed back into his usual Wiseass American. "We're kicking into high gear over at Ares, and I've been given the green light to go all-out in designing my sensor gear. You're talking to the man who's going to be first on Mars. Well, at least by proxy, but I get to design and run the proxies. And, who knows, maybe I'll actually get sent myself. Still, by next summer I'll be working round the clock and I doubt very much I'd be able to go attend a paleontology conference. Send me lots of pics and a transcript, though."

  "You want pictures?"

  "Of course. Mostly of you, though, not the stuffy old professors."

  A.J. was too hearty with the flirty approach. But he segued back into the dry humor that Helen thought fit him much more comfortably. "Though if you can get some pics of people about to explode with outrage when you read your paper, I'd enjoy that also. By the way, thanks loads for the 3-D model you made of Bemmie. I have him as my wallpaper at work."

  She heard a voice in the background. "Whoops! Gotta go, Dr.

  Sutter. Hey, hope you enjoy the e-mail I just sent! Bye!"

  "Goodbye, A.J." she said, but he'd already cut off. Her portable pinged, signaling that A.J.'s message had arrived. She saw it contained an animation file, which she opened.

  A flying saucer floated down the screen, disgorging a rather disquietingly cute Bemmius: squat, overly short, with exaggerated eyes and a completely anatomically wrong smiling mouth under the three forelimbs.

  Bemmie scuttled in its odd way across a simple landscape, coming upon a bunch of similarly overcute raptors. Bemmie held up a sign: TAKE ME TO YOUR LEADER. The raptors leaped at him, there was a struggle, and over the now unconscious body of Bemmie one of the raptors held up another sign: LEADER? I THOUGHT HE SAID LARDER!

  She laughed again, even though the joke was pretty lame. He'd clearly put some work into that one. Bemmie might have been given a sort of face against his anatomical realities, but it had taken some thought to create a cartoon version of his actual locomotion style.

  She dictated a quick, appreciative thank you, and then stood up. It was time to start working again. For the next year and a half, she wouldn't have much chance for relaxation.

  Eric Flint Ryk E. Spoor

  Boundary

  Chapter 7

  Jackie Secord gripped the frame of the observation port tightly, staring at the strange assemblage of spherical tanks, tubing, and massive bracing structures within the almost unbelievably huge enclosure before her. Behind, a calm voice continued the countdown. "Five… four… three… two… one… Firing."

  From the center of the assemblage a monstrous tongue of flame reared up. Even through the soundproofing and vibration-absorbing material of the test facility, there came a deep-throated, thundering roar that shook the room. The sound went on and on, an avalanche of white noise that overwhelmed even her shout of triumph. It also wiped out the continuing counts and updates of the engineers, who had to resort to electronic communication rather than attempt to make themselves heard over the force of that unbelievable sound.

  Finally, when it seemed to Jackie that even her bones were vibrating from the unending song of power, it cut off. Then she could hear the yells, the whistles, and leaped into the air herself with a cowboy whoop.

  "It worked, it worked!" she shouted, ears still ringing with that impossible noise.

  "And why should it not?" the deep, sonorous voice of Dr. Satya Gupta inquired calmly. "The concept was proven decades ago. It was merely a new design that needed to be tested."

  "Dr. Gupta, you can't stand there and tell me you didn't feel anything-any nervousness, any anticipation-while we were counting down to the first firing!"

  The dark eyes twinkled. "Well… Anticipation, certainly. The success of such a project, this is the reward of an engineer."

  Jackie loved that considered, deliberate delivery, with the exotic combination of Indian and English accents flavoring Dr. Gupta's precise and well-crafted speech.

  There was nothing unusual about Gupta's appearance-dark skin, black hair, symmetrical and well-molded face with a hooked nose over a brilliant smile, and he always dressed as though attending a formal dinner. Nothing unique at all, unless you counted the sharpness of those black eyes. It was Satya Gupta's voice that caught one's attention.

  Everyone remarked on it, sooner or later. When A.J. Baker had met Gupta, he'd said: "So that's what Saruman is supposed to sound like."

  Being A.J., he'd said it right in front of Gupta, too. Fortunately, the Indian engineer had a good sense of humor and hadn't been offended.

  "So you never worried about something going wrong?"

  Gupta gave an elaborate shrug. "It is always possible for there to be a failure, of course. Why else do we engineers always try to allow for all possibilities-and then add more reinforcements, just in case? On the other hand, a machine that is designed correctly should work. It will work. On this premise, Ms. Secord, our entire civilization depends."

  Jackie almost laughed. Coming from anyone else, Gupta's little speeches and saws would just sound pompous; coming from him, they were simply right.

  "Still-a nuclear rocket, Dr. Gupta! We just fired the first nuclear rocket since NERVA shut down!"

  "Speaking for myself," Dr. Philip Moynihan said from his chair near the observation port, "I knew perfectly well it would work, and I still feel the same way Jackie does." The very elderly researcher was the only living man in the room who had participated in the original NERVA tests in the 1960s. "It's wonderful to see the new rocket fired for the first time."

  Steven Schiffer, as was his way, added a cautionary note. "If the scrubbers don't make the outside air as clean as it was before the firing, it may be the last firing, too. The licensing hassles to permit this were something hellish. If one of the counters outside the range so much as hiccups, they'll probably come in and seal the who
le complex." Gloomily: "With us in it, under a million tons of cement."

  "And if they do that," Dr. Rankine said from his position at one of the analysis stations, "We'll just fire Zeus up again and blow a hole in the cement. Peak thrust of four and a half million newtons-call it just over a million pounds."

  "Sweet! That'll give us something to fly from here to Mars on!"

  "I still prefer 'Old Bang-Bang,'" grumbled Dr. Hiroshi Kanzaki.

  Jackie rolled her eyes. The Japanese engineer's attachment to the old Orion design had always struck her as just barely short of obsessive.

  "Oh, sure," she jibed. "That would be a lot easier to get authorized. 'Hi, we're going to take this huge honkin' plate of steel, put our ship on top, and then light off a chain of nuclear bombs under our asses to get us moving. In your back yard.'"

  Kanzaki was never one to take a jibe without a rejoinder. "Well, you can't argue that us going for the nuclear rocket hasn't taken the heat off your boyfriend."

  "A.J. is not my boyfriend!" Jackie replied automatically, for what was probably the three thousandth time.

  The rest of what Kanzaki had said was true enough. The Ares Project also needed nuclear reactors to pull off some of the projected stunts, like generating new fuel on Mars for the return trip. If the government hadn't already been planning to make extensive use of nuclear technology in space for its own projects, A.J. and his fellow Nuts would have had hell's own time trying to convince anyone to let them fire off something loaded with fissionable materials into the sky.

  "No doubt. I'm sure they're all grateful for that minor favor. Still, it means we get the real drive system while they're playing with bottle rockets."

  That was greeted with another euphoric roar of agreement. Ever since they began, the space programs of the world had been stuck using chemical fuels to catapult loads into space. While that was perfectly acceptable for simple small orbital work, the fact remained that to explore the rest of the solar system demanded some other method of propelling a spaceship.

  Many alternatives had been proposed, but they all had one of two disadvantages. Either, like solar sails or electric drive systemssometimes called "ion" drives-they provided miniscule amounts of thrust. Or, they required a power source of such magnitude that only something like a nuclear reactor could provide the oomph needed.

  In the case of Orion-"Old Bang-Bang," in their parlance- the design cut out the middleman entirely and detonated nuclear explosives like firecrackers under a tin can to kick a truly impressive payload upwards. However, with the paranoia against all things nuclear-even controlled reactions like NERVA-no such design had ever really been given a chance to get off the ground, so to speak.

  But with the impetus to get to Mars suddenly in overdrive, it was clear that some superior drive system would be needed for the projected spaceship that NASA intended to send to Phobos and, thence, to Mars. With that demand, the NERVA program-Nuclear Energy for Rocket Vehicle Applications-had been reborn. Even in its prototype stages two-thirds of a century before, NERVA had demonstrated the immense thrust of two hundred and fifty thousand pounds. The specific impulse, which meant the amount of time that one pound of propellant could be used to produce a thrust of one pound of force, had been over eight hundred seconds-far greater than that which could be obtained from chemical sources.

  While other theoretical systems, such as VASIMR, offered superior overall performance, they remained theoretical. All of them required major technological breakthroughs, such as controlled commercial fusion-still eternally twenty years away-or specialized materials design. NERVA was in fact the simplest overall concept available. It used nuclear power to heat reaction mass to tremendous temperatures and pressures, and then let it squirt out. Simple, but with proper design reasonably efficient and vastly powerful.

  "What was our specific impulse?" she asked.

  "Eight hundred ninety-two seconds," Rankine answered smugly. "Pushing the calculated limits already. I'll bet with tuning we can crack the nine hundred second barrier!"

  Jackie's phone pinged. "Yes?"

  A.J.'s image appeared in front of her, courtesy of her VRD. "Congratulations, Jackie! Looks like you hit a million pounds of thrust there!"

  "How the hell do you know that? You didn't play Tinkerbell with me, did you?"

  A.J. gave an exaggerated look of wounded pride. "How could you even consider such a thing, Jackie?"

  "Because it's just the kind of thing you'd do!"

  He waved a finger in the manner of a prissy teacher. "Certainly not. Planting unapproved sensors inside that complex would be illegal, and the last thing I want is to get hauled up before the law."

  He paused a moment, obviously fighting a grin. "Now, monitoring it from outside and performing my own unique analyses on the data, that's a different matter."

  A.J. made a theatrical frowning glance to the side, as though consulting some very complex and important display out of her range of vision. "And it looks like you can tell your friends not to worry about having your tests cancelled. According to my data, the air you're venting is actually coming out below ambient rad levels."

  "Showoff."

  "Well, true. Let me make it up to you-meet Joe and me in Alamogordo and we'll buy you dinner. We both have something to celebrate!"

  "You too?"

  "Yep. Ted's Steak and Lobster, how's that? Meet you there at eight? Great. See you!"

  "Hey, wait! What-" But A.J. had cut off. "Oooh, he is so…"

  "Your boyfriend annoying you again?"

  "He is not my boyfriend!"

  Eric Flint Ryk E. Spoor

  Boundary

  Chapter 8

  "I'm not?" A.J. pulled an exaggerated sad face.

  "No, you're not," stated Jackie firmly, as she slid into the booth seat opposite A.J. and Joe. "And stop pouting. You look cuter when you smile."

  The sensor specialist brightened. "I'm cute!"

  Joe shook his head. "She said you're cut-er. All that means is that you're less annoying when you smile than when you sulk. She's the precisionist type, don't forget."

  "So," Jackie said, ignoring their byplay. "Obviously everyone knows what I'm celebrating. What about you guys?"

  After A.J. filled her in on the latest news, Jackie jumped up and hugged him, nearly spilling water all over Joe. "Congratulations! That's wonderful news!"

  "Dammit, Jackie, watch out." Joe blotted up the spill with a handful of napkins. "Or you'll get in trouble for consorting with the enemy."

  She resumed her seat. "Yeah, right. Like they don't already believe I'm consorting. Do you know how often I have to repeat the fact that A.J. and I are not dating?" Jackie studied the menu and her eyes widened. "Holy sheep, as my dad used to say. Celebrations shouldn't leave people broke!"

  "Don't worry, I'm paying." A.J. spoke before Joe could even respond.

  "Oh, A.J., you don't have to-"

  "It's no biggie, guys. Seriously."

  Joe raised an eyebrow. "Paying for Jackie, I can understand, but I doubt I'm that good to look at."

  "No, you're ugly. I'm paying for you out of pity."

  "You are funny, A.J. That is why I'll kill you last."

  There was a break in the banter as the trio considered the many options on the menu. The ordering process was delayed as Joe interrogated the waiter sternly on the precise methods of cooking employed, the spices, and a number of other issues. Jackie saw A.J. roll his eyes.

  Joe was a gourmet; and, quite possibly, the most ungodly picky eater either of them knew. Apparently, however, the waiter's answers satisfied him, because he finally leaned back and selected stuffed portobello mushrooms with lobster and king crab for an appetizer, with grilled swordfish marinated in red wine sauce for his main course.

  A.J. had taken all of three seconds to make his choice of calamari followed by a broiled lobster. Jackie wasn't quite that fast, but she'd still managed to order her grilled vegetables with dipping sauce and surf-and-turf combo in far less time than Joe to
ok.

  "I can see why you said you don't go out to eat with Joe very often."

  Joe gave a tolerant smile. "Oh, you complain now, Jackie, but that's because you aren't in Ares."

  She looked quizzically at A.J. "Just what does Joe's mania for cuisine have to do with the Project?"

  "Well, everyone in the Project has to wear more than one hat. It so happens that Joe is in charge of the consumable supplies aboard the ships."

  "Ah. Light dawns."

  "Which," A.J. added, "is one of the reasons I pay for his meals. He's going to be picking mine when we go."

  "So you're actually going?" Jackie couldn't keep her voice from rising on the last part, nor exclude the envy.

  "About ninety-five percent chance. I'm in training already."

  "Not that he really needs much," Joe said. "A.J.'s always been in good shape. I'm the one who has to really work."

  "Don't tell me you're going, too!"

  "Not all that likely. But possible. I'm a candidate, but nowhere near the front of the pack like A.J." Joe shook his head. "Basically, for me to go up, some of the others have to either get disqualified or quit. Or else something new has to turn up that gives me some special qualifications that other people don't have."

  He eyed Jackie sympathetically. "What about you? The Nike is going to be big. We've heard it'll have a crew as large as ten people. Maybe even more."

  Jackie knew she didn't look very optimistic. She didn't feel optimistic, either.

  "Maybe. There's hellish competition. I'm going to be starting training next week, but I don't think they'll want more than one drive systems engineer aboard, and Dr. Gupta isn't about to step down. If the crew size was maybe half again larger-leaving enough room for an assistant drive engineer-then I'd have a real chance."

  "You're a good electrical and micro-electro mechanical systems engineer, too."

  "Thanks, but they've got qualified specialists for that. Again, the problem is the crew size. I'm everybody's favorite second banana, but with a crew of only ten there's just no room for any second bananas. If the Nike were twice the size-" She shrugged. "But it isn't. So all I can do is hope."