Rehearsals For Retirement Part 1

Rehearsals for Retirement.

by Jeff Hecht.

The captain of the s.p.a.ces.h.i.+p Ronald McNair ran through the calculations again, but the results still were not encouraging. After eleven years in the Air Force and twenty-five in the Astronaut Corps, Marty Allen felt ent.i.tled to a decent pension, but the bureaucracy had other ideas. His last time back on Earth, the offensively officious young woman who ran the Benefits Department had only frowned and reminded him, "You should be grateful you people in the Astronaut Corps can retire at 57 with a pension. People here on the ground can get laid off with nothing."

He shut down the little portable computer, swearing under his breath at the politicians who had privatized the International s.p.a.ce Cooperative, and at the managerial bureaucrats who ran it from the ground. He looked away from the flatscreen display as it flipped between normal and reversed polarity, fading to its neutral gray off color. His machine was only five years old, but the McNair's main cabin showed its age. It had been built over 20 years earlier, in the Cooperative's last boomlet of activity, after an asteroid missed the earth by 40,000 miles in 2024. The Asteroid Hazards Commission's estimates of impact probabilities had stimulated vast infusions of cash from paranoid American, European, j.a.panese, and Russian groundlings. Marty had joined the Corps then, eager to escape the stagnation that disarmament had brought to the U.S. Air Force. He had had no idea that would be the last major investment in manned s.p.a.ce flight.

"Have you looked at this one yet, Marty?" asked his sole companion, mission scientist Fern Ky.

The question took Marty away from his rehearsals for retirement, and back to the job at hand, the obliteration of potential asteroid menace number 18 out of 20. Fern was four years older, but packed more energy into her 90 pounds and 4 feet 11 inches than Marty did in twice the ma.s.s. She was going to fight the retirement that awaited them when they returned to Earth; he had come to welcome the idea. Marty admitted he hadn't paid much attention to the two kilometer rock that appeared as a digitized blob on his viewscreen.

"It has unusual spectral signatures." She copied a display from her screen onto his. It showed a series of spectral peaks as a function of wavelength. "These are the standard lines from the solar spectrum," she explained, as faint white labels appeared on the screen. "If we subtract the solar lines, by comparison with a direct readout from the sun, we can isolate the asteroid's absorption." A spectrum appeared, with red labels giving absorption wavelengths. "It shows all the usual rock lines, but it also has some surprisingly strong metal lines." Bold yellow labels appeared and began flas.h.i.+ng beside several peaks.

"So we got a nickel-iron this time." They had been blowing up rocky asteroids, along with a couple of dead comets.

"Not exactly, Marty." She took remote sensing far more seriously than anyone else left in the s.p.a.ce Cooperative. A decade ago the groundling managers had tried to drop remote sensing as not cost effective, until the engineers had pointed out that the asteroid s.h.i.+ps already had the equipment and had to have two people on board. Now the managers were automating the whole fleet, to save money and get rid of the troublesome people who wanted to spend money on science and exploration. Data supposedly would be recorded automatically. If it was, Marty expected it would be consigned to the same bureaucratic oblivion that awaited Fern's data when they got back to earth. "Compare it to your standard nickel-iron spectrum," she said. Another plot appeared on the screen, this one blue with blue labels. "A difference spectrum shows what's really there."

A green plot appeared midway between the blue line and the spectrum with the red labels. Fern played with her keyboard and controls, and three labels on the green plot turned bold yellow and flashed slowly on the screen. Marty stared at the words: "ALUMINUM," "COPPER" and "t.i.tANIUM." "Metallic?" he asked, doubtfully.

"Yes," she said, "elemental. s.h.i.+ny enough that the sensors have recorded several glints. We've got something funny out there."

Marty didn't welcome the challenge of something new. After blowing three more asteroids to non-threatening bits, he could retire from the Cooperative's demolition derby. He had spent too many years pretending to protect humanity from the type of asteroid impact that got the dinosaurs. He was tired of worrying about managers, corporate bureaucrats and half-crazed dreamers with PhDs. "I doubt it's anything much, Fern. It must have accreted from somewhere...."

"That is unlikely. I need to run more readings, but the computers can't match it with anything in the memory banks. I've registered it as an anomaly."

He nodded grimly, knowing what that meant. The mission scientist had the option, or perhaps it was the duty, to notify headquarters if they discovered anything. The regulations were 40 years old and n.o.body back on earth gave a d.a.m.n, but that wouldn't stop Fern. She would use this excuse to try to stretch the mission so she could explore the asteroid. He knew the managers back on the ground would chuckle at "Crazy Ky," and deny the request. They would put the incident on the long list of human problems that would end with the automation of the McNair, the last of the old manned s.h.i.+ps. Never again would astronauts discover something managers didn't want to know.

Marty stared at his viewscreen as Fern copied enlarged images of the asteroid onto it. It was bright against the blackness of s.p.a.ce, but it would have been black against his own dark skin. "Mean albedo 0.070," announced the display in the lower right corner; it would have said so out loud if Marty hadn't turned off speech synthesis to keep from going mad. Something flashed on the screen momentarily. Fern ran her fingers across her keyboard, and the flash returned to their screens in freeze-frame. "Mean albedo 0.083," read the display.

"There was another glint. It must have been a good-sized area, too," she said, studying the screen. "It increased net reflection by nearly 20%. I'm going to signal the base."

Marty didn't bother telling Fern it wouldn't do any good. The radio message would take 15 minutes to travel to distant earth. If the bureaucrats deigned to reply, their message -- inevitably a lengthy variation on the word "no" -- would take another 15 minutes to return. That would take the Ron McNair half an hour closer to its target, and bring Marty half an hour closer to checking off asteroid number 18.

The reply took over an hour to arrive. Marty wondered if anyone in the control room was authorized to reply. Doubtless, the managers would prefer that no one could. The controllers would have to fill out forms in quadruplicate, to guard against responses outside of the organizational norm. It was necessary to follow the proper chain of command to a.s.sure proper coordination and a most cost-effective mission, as the policy book said.

When Marty had joined the Astronaut Corps, Earth Control still communicated with s.p.a.cecraft via video links and television cameras. The video had gone when some bureaucrat had decided the bandwidth cost too much to maintain. Pure audio lasted for a few years, then someone else decided they could save a few nickels by sending all messages as text. They claimed it fit better with the computer controls, and allowed better error-checking protocols. The managers didn't care that an astronaut 270 million miles from home would rather hear a human voice trying to break through the crackle of static; money could be saved.

The message read as if it had been written by a lawyer. Perhaps it had; law degrees were the right credentials for management positions, even for the Russians. The block letters appeared on both of their workscreens: "In response to your message of 1300 hours, 21 July 2053: You are to archive all sensor data regarding Asteroid 12876 in permanent form on a standard Lightfile data disk. Follow standard procedure A7 in Astronaut Handbook in collection of aforementioned data files. However, as stated in your mission charter, in order to successfully meet the objectives of your mission, as specified in performance review parameters, demolition of Asteroid 12876 must be completed on schedule by 1200 hours 22 July 2053. Anomalous sensor data does not cost-justify alteration of this objective. Scientific objectives of mission are secondary to securing safety of Planet Earth by destroying potentially hazardous Asteroid 12876."

"I don't believe them, Marty!" Fern exclaimed. "Can't they see this is something we have to handle differently? Dammit, my orbital model shows no chance of impact for 10 million years, and that's as far as it can go. I sent them all that data . . ."

Marty shrugged. No new managerial idiocy could shock him. "What did you expect? n.o.body back on Earth gives a d.a.m.n about what's up here. All they care about is having nice soft jobs, good pay, and lots of security. They fooled the public into thinking all these asteroids were bullets with 'EARTH' written all over them. Maybe they fooled themselves as well. They just want us to follow orders, no questions asked."

Fern didn't respond, so Marty went back to the game he was running on the viewscreen. He was tiring of seeking his way through the Levels of the Pyramid. Some new monster seemed to pop up at each turn, each more frightening than the last. Killing them used energy points, and he was running low on food. This time he had made it to the eighth level, but there were five more to go before he reached the peak of the pyramid. He didn't think he would make it this time, but someday he was sure he would beat the d.a.m.n game.

The word "INTERRUPT" flashed on the screen in red letters, and the game vanished, automatically saved. It was not a message from the main computer; Fern had pushed the override. The new display showed the asteroid in three colors. A key on the left showed that each color corresponded to an infrared waveband from the laser radar; red was 10 micrometers, yellow was 3 micrometers, and blue 1 micrometer. The display cycled through all three, then superimposed them. Labels appeared, most near bright spots on the surface, reading, "APPARENT METALLIC DEBRIS." Marty was annoyed. Normally Fern was the best of companions, spending her time working equation-puzzles, reading, or a.n.a.lyzing isotopic data she had collected from earlier asteroids. She never imposed herself on Marty and he had returned the favor. "Is this really necessary?" he asked.

"It sees metallic debris, Marty. Do you have any idea what that means?"

It was a rhetorical question; she left no time to answer. "The solar system didn't make s.h.i.+ny metals naturally. Something crashed there. We may have found what happened to one of the old solar system probes."

"Oh!" Marty nodded, mildly interested at last. He was a s.p.a.ce history buff. His parents had grown up in a Detroit slum thinking that men on the moon were history, but they had lived long enough to see their son go there to fix a sick radio telescope. He longed for the good old days when the s.p.a.ce program tried to make discoveries rather than a profit. His collection of s.p.a.ce data included records on all the old probes that had gone beyond Earth orbit, dating back to the Voyagers and Mariners. He went to his private quarters, returning in a few minutes with an old-fas.h.i.+oned CD-ROM disk. The reader spit it out the first time, but recognized the format the second.

Fern's mind never rested. While Marty had looked for the disk, she had calculated the asteroid's...o...b..t back to 1970, and was ready to compare it to last known trajectories for lost probes like Phobos 1. The CD-ROM data wasn't in the right format for that. Marty had to dump five-year chunks into memory and search for probes lost inside the outer limits of Fern's...o...b..t. Few could have gone beyond Mars, and none came close to matching Fern's...o...b..t.

She insisted on another search, and when that failed she borrowed the disk and ran her own. Nothing matched, even when she changed parameters to see if any outbound probes might have looped back, caught by the gravity of a planet. She went by hand through the whole list, stopping only when the controls began warning: "WITHIN 100-MINUTE ZONE."

It was time to fine-tune the rocket to stay near the asteroid. Marty hit a b.u.t.ton to quiet the alert. "So what is it?"

"I don't have any idea. You're sure this list is complete?"

"It's supposed to be. s.p.a.ceData covers everything but some early Soviet military launches, where n.o.body ever found any hard data after things opened up." He paused to think. "They might have missed a few launches from countries that never got heavily into s.p.a.ce. But none of those ever got beyond the Earth's gravity . . ."

Fern displayed the images on the screen again. They were larger but still unresolved and mysterious. She punched a few keys, saying, "I'll run some image enhancement routines to see if I can spot sharp edges."

At 5,000 kilometers, they couldn't expect much. Their telescope and array detector were small, designed to find asteroids, not to image them. They both stared at their screens as the software tried to ma.s.sage the incoming image data, but nothing useful came out.

Marty turned his attention to maneuvering the McNair. Slowing to a kilometer per second as they approached the asteroid had been easy. Its gravity was so weak that he had to cut the speed to under a meter per second to orbit it. The computers were up to the job, but the mechanics were getting touchy. The years had worn the valves in the fuel and oxygen lines; what should have been a smooth power adjustment tended to fade or surge. As they neared the rock, he had to watch the sensors and the computers. The opto-electronic processor automatically homed on a distant bright spot, but it became confused once the disk got larger than half a degree -- about 200 kilometers away from a two-kilometer asteroid. When the engineers renovated the McNair, they would add newer processors that could handle the close approach automatically, but until then the s.h.i.+p needed a human pilot.

The challenge of hitting the right orbit was one of the few things Marty would miss on the ground. He had joined the Air Force to fly planes, and he still loved fine-tuned machinery. Motorcycles had given his father the same thrill, but they had been banned as unsafe for decades. The changes that crash-proofed cars and highways had taken all the fun from driving. He almost forgot Fern and her mysterious metals as he slipped the McNair into a near-perfect five-kilometer orbit, circling the asteroid so slowly that it hardly seemed to move. He lingered over the controls, almost wis.h.i.+ng the job wasn't done. A few commands produced a display of orbital parameters: period 48,000 seconds, orbital speed 0.66 meter per second. It was no wonder the rock seemed to stand still beneath them. Its gravity was so feeble they circled it at walking speed.

A picture flashed on Marty's screen. "INTERRUPT, OVERRIDE," was printed on the top. It was a view Fern had taken through their small opto-electronic telescope, looking down on a pile of metal, rocks, and other dark objects. The metal was bright but irregular, like chunks of sheet-metal sc.r.a.p.

"That's your metal?" Marty asked.

"Some of it," she replied. "I found two other piles within a couple hundred meters. All three looked pretty much the same. Sun and shadow angles indicate each pile is twenty meters across and maybe ten meters high. That picture makes the pile look higher because the sunlight is coming in at a steep angle. Have you looked at the metal closely?"

Marty hadn't, but he couldn't see any special patterns on the screen. "I don't see anything . . ."

"Much of it is smooth; some of it seems to be plates . . ."

"But that's impossible. Nature doesn't make smooth chunks of metal. Any kind of s.h.i.+ny metal is rare enough out here . . ."

"You know what it looks like, Marty," Fern said. "We've both seen the Lunar Base sc.r.a.p dump. I think we've been a little more careful than this, but whoever left it probably didn't expect visitors here."

"n.o.body's been out here, Fern. We went through the whole d.a.m.n s.p.a.ceLog archive . . ."

"I wasn't talking about humans. People have wondered why n.o.body came to visit if the galaxy was full of inhabited planets. This says that somebody did come, but we never noticed on earth."

Marty stared at Fern, open-mouthed. She had always seemed sane. Like most people he had long ago abandoned hope of finding intelligent extraterrestrials. A few crackpots still listened to old antennas, but radio noise had stopped serious work on earth, just as scattered light hid the stars in city and suburban skies. The new generation had never seen the heavens, and could hardly be expected to care.

"There is absolutely no evidence," Marty began. He could show Fern records from his s.p.a.ce history files that debunked every claim of alien visitors as the work of crackpots.

She didn't dispute that. Instead, she pointed to the screens that showed the junk pile. In s.p.a.ce, she said, metal plates could remain s.h.i.+ny for millions of years. Long before protohumans climbed down from the trees, she suggested, visitors might have stopped on the asteroid to repair something, then left. Spectral a.n.a.lysis gave mixed readings; some rock, some complex organics, and many lines that didn't match the modest list of compounds in its memory. What should the spectrum of a trash dump look like?

Marty shrugged, accepting her argument for the lack of a better idea or the will to argue. "It figures, doesn't it, that the first evidence of aliens would be their garbage."

"It's not that strange. Most things that archaeologists and paleontologists find are dead bodies or somebody's trash. There may be footprints down there, too, but we can't see them from here. We've got to investigate. I've already sent a message to Earth Control."

Marty doubted the ground-bound bureaucrats would be happy. He wasn't sure he was. He remembered his father grumbling one time construction was stopped because a backhoe had uncovered an old outhouse pit. The state had sent out an archaeologist, who spent months sifting through the rotting remains. His father had never gone back to that job.