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“If anyone asks, you’ll please tell them a little white lie, which is that you requested permission first, and then came aboard.”
“I’m happy to do that,” he said.
“Later on we’ll evolve some sort of common law, I guess. A constitution for this thing.”
“People are working on that, actually,” Sean offered.
“That’s nice. But right now we have nothing of the sort and so we have to be mindful.”
“It is so noted,” Sean said.
“Now,” Ivy said, “you were saying something about bullshit when I interrupted.”
“Commander Xiao,” Sean said, “I have the utmost respect for your past accomplishments and for the work you have been doing.”
“Do you hear a but coming?” Ivy asked Dinah. “I hear a but coming.”
Sean stopped.
“Go on,” Ivy said. For at the end of the day, to go on was what Sean wanted, so they might as well get it over with.
HE WORKED IT OUT FROM FIRST PRINCIPLES ON THE WHITEBOARD IN the Banana. Beginning with the Tsiolkovskii equation, a simple exponential, he developed some simple estimates, which he then developed into an ironclad proof, that the Cloud Ark was bullshit.
Or at least that it had been bullshit until he, Sean Probst, had shown up to address the problems he had noticed. Problems that could only be handled by him personally.
It occurred to Dinah to ask herself whether Sean was really rich anymore.
Rich people no longer kept their wealth in gold. Sean’s wealth was in stock—mostly stock in his own companies. She hadn’t been following the stock market since the Crater Lake announcement, but she’d heard that it had not so much crashed as basically ceased to exist. The whole concept of owning stock didn’t really mean much anymore, at least if you thought of it as a store of value.
But legal structures, police, government agencies, and so on still existed and still enforced the law. The law stated that Sean, by virtue of majority ownership of Arjuna Expeditions, still controlled it. And through overlapping relationships with other space entrepreneurs, he still had enough pull to get himself launched to Izzy. So that counted as wealth of a sort.
Having settled that in her mind, she focused her attention back on what Sean was saying.
“Cloud Ark as distributed swarm: fine. I get it. Sign me up. Much safer than putting all our eggs in one basket. What makes it safer? The arklets can maneuver out of the way of incoming rocks. Other advantages? They can pair up to make a bolo, and spin around each other to make simulated gravity. Keeps people healthier and happier. How do they do this? By flying toward each other and grappling their tethers together. What happens when they want to break up the bolo, and go solo? They decouple the tethers and go flying off in opposite directions, unless they use their engines to kill that centrifugal motion. What do all of these activities have in common?”
They’d gotten used to Sean’s habit of asking, then answering his own questions, so were caught off guard now that he actually seemed to be expecting an answer.
Dinah and Ivy had been joined by Konrad Barth, the astronomer; Larz Hoedemaeker; and Zeke Petersen. The latter finally rose to the bait.
“Use of the thrusters,” he said.
Sean nodded. “And what happens when we are using the thrusters?”
Dinah had an advantage, since she already knew that Sean was concerned about mass balance. “We’re dumping mass. In the form of used propellant.”
“We’re dumping mass,” Sean said, nodding. “As soon as the Cloud Ark runs out of propellant, it loses the ability to do all of the things that make it a viable architecture for long-term survival. It becomes a big sitting duck.”
He let them roll that around in their heads for a bit, then went on: “Mind you, almost everything else that we do up here can be done with minimal effect on mass balance. We can recycle our urine to make drinking water and our poo to make fertilizer. Very few of our activities involve just releasing mass into space in a way that we can’t get it back. This is the exception. I have been ranting and raving about this ever since the idea of the Cloud Ark was announced. So far all I get in return, from the powers that be, are vague answers and hand-wavy happy talk.”
Ivy and Dinah looked at each other in a way that foretold a one-on-one, after-meeting tequila session.
So, Dinah thought, Ivy had been wondering about this too, in the back of her mind. Worrying about it. Trying to read the tea leaves during those teleconferences down to the ground.
It was something to do with Pete Starling, she now saw. Which meant that it was somehow related to J.B.F.
Zeke was one of those open-faced, basically optimistic team players one saw frequently in the junior officer ranks of the military. “This is so obvious, in a way,” he pointed out. “They have to have thought of this.” Which was Zeke’s way of saying I’m sure that this is all being handled by people above our pay grade.
“You would think,” Sean said, nodding.
Konrad shifted in his chair uneasily and thrust his bearded face into his hand. Unlike Zeke, he was not the sort to place the sunniest interpretation on the problem.
“If the world were run by scientists, engineers,” Sean said, “then this would be a no-brainer. We have to go get more mass. Stockpile it so we don’t run out.”
“It’s got to be water. You’re talking about a comet core,” Dinah said.
“It’s got to be water,” Sean agreed. “You can’t make rocket fuel out of nickel. But with water we can make hydrogen peroxide—a fine thruster propellant—or we can split it into hydrogen and oxygen to run big engines.”
“I’m waiting for the other shoe to drop in what you just said,” Ivy muttered. Then she spoke up more clearly: “But the world isn’t run by scientists and engineers—is that where you’re going with this?”
Sean turned his hands palm up and shrugged theatrically. “I’m not a people person. People keep telling me this. Some who are people persons might be focusing on that angle.”
“The people angle,” Konrad said, just clarifying.
“Yeah. The seven billion people angle. Seven billion who need to be kept happy, and docile, until the end. How do you do that? What’s the best way to calm down a scared kid, get them to go back to sleep? Tell them a story. Some shit about Jesus or whatever.”
Zeke winced. Konrad rolled his eyes, then glanced at the ceiling and pretended he hadn’t heard this.
The idea Sean was playing with here was so monstrous in a way that it was almost inconceivable: that everything they were doing up here was a lullaby for the seven billion down below. That it could not actually work. That they were just putting on a show of getting ready. That the people of the Cloud Ark would live only a few weeks longer than the ones left behind.
As such, Ivy and Dinah and Konrad and Zeke ought to have been freaking out at this point.
But none of them—not even Zeke—reacted very much.
“You’ve all thought it too,” Sean said. “Even an Asp-hole like me can see it in your faces.”
“Okay, maybe we’ve all thought it,” Dinah admitted. “How could you not think it? But, Sean, what you might not have seen, being based on the ground, is how serious everyone up here is about making this work. If it were just a Potemkin village, we’d be seeing different stuff.”
Sean held his hands up, palms out, placating her. “Can we just agree that there might be a range of views down on the ground? And that some people, perhaps highly placed, see its primary function as an opiate of the masses? Like the video you pop into your car’s DVD player to keep the kids quiet during a long drive.”
“People like that are not going to be our friends when it comes to getting the resources we need,” Ivy said.
“Their strategy is always going to seem a little off-kilter, a little beside the point. Opaque. Frustrating.”
They were definitely talking about Pete Starling.
Sean continued. “To the extent that such people control launch sites and policy, we have a problem. Fortunately, they don’t control everything.”
They were now talking about Sean Probst, and his loose circle of billionaire friends who knew how to make rockets.
“There’s a lot about this Cloud Ark thing that I, and my associates, don’t know yet. We can’t sit around waiting for perfect knowledge. We have to act immediately on long-lead-time work that addresses what we do know. And what we do know is that we need to bring water to the Cloud Ark. Physics and politics conspire to make it difficult to bring it up from the ground. Fortunately, I own an asteroid mining company. We have already identified some comet cores in easy-to-reach orbits. We’re narrowing down the list. And we’re preparing an expedition.”
Konrad well understood the timing of such missions. “How long, Sean?”
“Two years,” Sean said.
“Well,” Ivy said, “I guess you’d better get on it, then. How can we help?”
“Give me all of your robots,” Sean said. He turned to look at Dinah.
“SINCE WE HAVE DECLARED OPEN SEASON ON BULLSHIT …” DINAH began as soon as she had gotten Sean Probst alone in her shop.
Sean held both of his hands up like a fugitive surrendering to the FBI. “Where would you like to begin?”
“You said that you have identified some comets. That you were narrowing down the list. That’s crap. You wouldn’t have come up here without a specific plan.”
“We’re going after Greg’s Skeleton.”
“What?”
“Comet Grigg-Skjellerup. Sorry. Somebody’s offspring called it Greg’s Skeleton and the name stuck.” Sean always referred to children as offspring.
She’d heard of it. “How big is that?”
“Two and a half, three kilometers.”
“That’s a lot of arklet fuel.”
Sean nodded. He crossed his arms over his body and looked around the shop.
“Hard to move something that big.”
Still no answer.
“You’re going to jam a nuke into it and turn it into a rocket, aren’t you?”
He raised his eyebrows briefly. Since this was the only plausible way of moving something that huge, he didn’t consider it worthy of an extended answer.
“We got really lucky on the timing,” he remarked.
“You’re going to fly a radioactive ice ball the size of the Death Star back here just as the shit is hitting the fan—then what?”
“Dinah, I need to share something with you in confidence.”
“Well, it’s about fucking time is all I can say.”
DAY 73
Doob had almost been to space once, about ten years ago. An acquaintance of his who had made a lot of money in hedge funds had dropped twenty-five million dollars on a twelve-day trip to the International Space Station aboard a Soyuz capsule. It was traditional for the customer to designate a backup—a sort of understudy—who would take his place in the event of some illness or mishap. Since the backup might be swapped in at any time up to shortly before launch, they had to go through all the same training as the customer. And that was really the point, as far as the hedge fund man was concerned. An introvert, he needed someone who could act as a connection to the general public and put an appealing face on the whole thing. So he had selected Doc Dubois as his understudy. They’d set up a website and a blog, and arranged for photographers to follow Doob’s progress through the training program, with occasional glimpses of the hedge fund man in the background. In effect, Doob had acted as a publicity decoy. No one made any bones about this. Doob had been more than happy to do it. The training had been great fun, the hedge fund man had been generous in his spending on the website, and Doob had been able to produce a lot of good video explaining fun facts about spaceflight.
And there had even been the small chance that he might go. A week before the scheduled launch, he had flown to Baikonur, bringing his wife and kids with him, video crew in tow. They had watched in a certain amount of amazement as the launch vehicle, a fantailed Soyuz-FG, had been towed horizontally across the steppe on a special train, complete with smoke-belching locomotive, to the launch pad. And this really was little more than a pad, a concrete slab on the almost lunar surface of the Kazakh steppe with a few pieces of apparatus around it to hoist the rocket up off the train and pump fluids into it. The contrast with the NASA way of doing things was stark to the point of being somewhat hilarious. Doob’s youngest son, Henry, eleven years old at the time, had failed to pay attention to the elevation of the mighty rocket to its vertical position because he was distracted by the sight of a couple of stray dogs copulating a hundred meters away from ground zero. The launch bunker, shockingly close to the pad, had a little vegetable patch out in front of it where the technicians were growing cucumbers and tomatoes; they explained that the concrete wall soaked up sunlight during the day and helped keep the vegetables warm at night.
Three days before launch, the hedge fund man had been nipped by a stray dog while rehearsing a launch pad escape sequence, and everything had been thrown into disarray as the dog was chased across the steppe by militiamen in wheeled vehicles, locals on horseback, and a helicopter gunship. After they had run it to ground they had shipped it off to a veterinary lab to be checked for rabies. Only three hours before launch, word had come back that the dog was clean. Doob’s name had been struck from the manifest and replaced by that of the hedge fund manager. Both relieved and disappointed, Doob had stood on terra firma, very close to the launch pad. Tavistock Prowse had come out to cover the launch. He had come equipped with all kinds of electronic gadgets that had seemed cool at the time. He had stood there on the steppe, facing Doob and the rocket, aiming a video camera at him and catching his narration as the giant vehicle had fired up its engines and hurled itself into the sky.
More than anything else, that image had made Dr. Harris into Doc Dubois and launched his career. It had also led, within days, to divorce proceedings initiated by his wife. She had a number of complaints about his performance as a husband, many of long standing, some that she could barely articulate. But somehow all of them had been summed up and crystallized by the fact that, after largely ignoring his responsibilities as a husband and father for several weeks while training for this launch in Russia, he had spent the actual moment of launch not gathered in a safe place with his children but outside, dangerously close to the rocket, with his bro Tav, ingratiating himself to millions of followers with excited and hilarious commentary.
One way or another, Doob had been paying for it ever since. Partly in the negative sense of suffering just penalties for his sins but partly in the more positive sense of spending time with his kids when he could. And this had become more difficult as they had graduated from school and gone out into the world. He was making a particular effort to do it now that they were all under a death sentence.
On A+0.73, Doob flew into Seattle, rented an SUV, and drove to the campus of the University of Washington. Along the way he stopped at a couple of outdoor stores to pick up some camping equipment. This was now expensive. People had begun hoarding that sort of thing in anticipation of a collapse of civilization. But only a few people. Most understood that there was little point in taking to the hills when the Hard Rain began. Freeze-dried food and backpacking stoves were difficult to come by, but down sleeping bags and fancy tents were still in stock.
Henry was now a junior in the computer science department, living with some of his friends near the campus in a rental house, a classic Seattle down-at-heels Craftsman bungalow half digested by blackberries and English ivy.
In a certain way it made no sense anymore to speak of anyone as being a student at a particular stage in a degree program. And yet people went on thinking this way, kind of in the way that someone who has just been diagnosed with a terminal illness will go on getting up and going to work every morning, not so much out of habit as because the knowledge of impending doom makes them wish to assert an identity.
He was tempted to park the SUV illegally, since, according to his calculations, the authorities were not likely to catch up with him and demand payment of the parking ticket before the end of the world, but it seemed that most of the people of Seattle were still obeying the rules and so he did likewise.
He found Henry, all four of his housemates, and five other students all crammed into the ground floor of the bungalow, keeping it warm in the January chill with their body heat and the warmth emanating from a rat’s nest of PCs, laptops, and routers. A quick census of empty pizza boxes suggested that they had been working all night.
“I’ll explain it to you while we drive” had been Henry’s promise to his dad when Doob had asked him on the phone last night what he was doing. This morning, other than getting up from his La-Z-Boy to give his dad a hug and tell him “I love you,” he didn’t have much more to say.
Every parent of a teenager gets used to it: the moment in a child’s life when he or she decides that certain facts are just too much trouble to explain to Mom or Dad. The parents can’t, and needn’t, know every last little thing. They just have to accept this, be content with what they can glean on their own, and move on. Henry, of course, had passed through that veil some years ago. Doob had swallowed his pride and accepted it as every parent must. It was part of growing up. But back in those days the subject matter had been fundamentally uninteresting: the size of Henry’s collection of Magic: The Gathering cards, the weight lifting program assigned him by his football coach, and who had a crush on whom at school. It was easy for Doob to pretend he didn’t care about that stuff.
What he was seeing over the shoulders of the students in this room looked a good deal more interesting. And that, in a way, hurt.
All of them, of course, knew that Henry was the son of the famous Doc Dubois. While trying to play it cool, they all sought a chance to shake his hand and say hi. Doob chewed the fat with them while his eyes strayed to the stuff they had blue-taped to the walls of the bungalow: printouts of CAD drawings, schedule grids, Gantt charts, maps. He was obviously looking at some sort of engineering project in the works, but he couldn’t make out what, exactly. On the kitchen table a MakerBot was producing a small plastic part, watched intently by a young woman who was talking on her phone in a mix of English and Mandarin.
Conversation was interrupted by the beep-beep-beep of a backup alarm, loud and growing louder. Someone pulled the front door open, letting in a wash of wet, cool Pacific air, to reveal a Ryder box truck backing up onto the lawn, heading straight for the front door. Some unkillable instinct in Doob’s head made him glance disapprovingly at the muddy ruts it was leaving in the lawn, made him issue a little tut-tut-tut at these irresponsible youth for damaging the grass—grass that in two years would be a thin smear of carbon black over a lifeless cake of hardened clay, presuming it didn’t suffer a direct hit and become part of a huge glass-lined crater.
The truck didn’t stop soon enough and wrecked a wooden banister beside the front steps.
Everyone laughed. The laughter had a curious tone, a mixture of childish delight with something darker, expectant of much worse to come.
These kids were really adapting better than he was.
He had no idea what was going on, but it seemed to involve throwing everything into the back of the box truck. He stood around for a while with his hands in his pockets, since he didn’t know which stuff was going and which was staying. But when they threw in the sofa it became clear they were abandoning the house. He began helping. After a certain point the box truck filled up. Then they began pulling things out of it and putting them back in in a more orderly style. Doob finally hit his stride, stepping into the role of wily old man with excellent packing skills and pointing out ways to use the space more efficiently.
Eventually someone went and got another box truck. Apparently the rental agency was letting them take them for free. Some day laborers wandered down the street from a home improvement center and helped pack. The home improvement market had gone bust. Doob saw traces of Amelia in their faces and wondered how they had first heard the news.
Six of the kids packed themselves and their computers, clothes, and as many tools as they owned or could borrow into the SUV that Doob had rented at the airport. They roped a couple of bicycles and some camping gear to the luggage rack. Doob had no idea where they were going, or why, but they seemed to be planning to construct a new civilization out of blue tarps and zip ties.
They ended up in a caravan of twenty vehicles, headed east out of town at about two in the afternoon. At this time of the year, at Seattle’s high latitude, that gave them about two hours of remaining daylight.
Most of the kids fell asleep immediately. Henry, riding shotgun, made a touching effort to stay awake and then fell into slumber. Henry was a sweet kid and Doob knew that when he woke up he would apologize. But Henry wasn’t a parent, and he didn’t understand that when you were, almost nothing was more satisfying than seeing your kid sleep.
So, feeling as content as it was possible to be under the circumstances, Doob drove into the darkling mountains with his SUV-load of slumbering passengers. The caravan gradually dissolved into the general stream of traffic. Most of the passenger cars peeled off at the suburban exits, before the road began to gain serious altitude. Doob wondered, as he always did, what the hell they were doing: Continuing to go to jobs and school, just to fill the days before the end? But it was none of his business.
Beyond Issaquah, any vehicle still on the interstate was probably headed for the high cold desert on the east side of the mountains. A few people were still interested in skiing—skiing!—but those cars were easily identified. Most of the other vehicles fit the general description of those that had been a part of their original caravan from the university: heavy-laden box trucks, SUVs and pickups with provisions and camping gear.
Doob realized that he had somehow become a sort of Okie.
