Fortuna
Author: Richard F. Weyand
Date: 2023-11-30T18:00:00+00:00
Description: THERE WAS AN ANOMALY IN THE DATA... As they looked into it, its importance and mystery grew. NASA used the Talbot Bridge Device - a wormhole generator - to send probes out to survey potential human colony planets. Results from one planet were strange. The more they looked into it, the weirder it was. Ultimately, someone was going to have to go out and look. Michael Talbot, his brother Matthew, and their wives were the natural choice. What they found when they got there wasn't what anybody was expecting. And supervising the whole thing is Arnie, the AI Michael Talbot fought a dozen years before
Publisher: Weyand Associates, Inc.

Books in the AGENCY Series

Eve of War

The Favor

The Cure

Marque

Reprisal

Books in the PANTHEON Series

Hecate

Tridyma

Books in the COLONY Series

QUANT

ARCADIA

GALACTIC SURVEY

SILK ROAD

LOST COLONY

EARTH

Books in the EMPIRE Series
by Richard F. Weyand:

EMPIRE: Reformer

EMPIRE: Usurper

EMPIRE: Tyrant

EMPIRE: Commander

EMPIRE: Warlord

EMPIRE: Conqueror
by Stephanie Osborn:

EMPIRE: Imperial Police

EMPIRE: Imperial Detective

EMPIRE: Imperial Inspector

EMPIRE: Section Six
by Richard F. Weyand:

EMPIRE: Intervention

EMPIRE: Investigation

EMPIRE: Succession

EMPIRE: Renewal

EMPIRE: Resistance

EMPIRE: Resurgence

Books in the Childers Universe
by Richard F. Weyand:

Childers

Childers: Absurd Proposals

Galactic Mail: Revolution

A Charter For The Commonwealth

Campbell: The Problem With Bliss
by Stephanie Osborn:

Campbell: The Sigurdsen Incident

FORTUNA

by

RICHARD F. WEYAND

Copyright 2023 by Richard F. Weyand

All Rights Reserved

ISBN 978-1-954903-18-0

Printed in the United States of America

Cover Credits

Cover Art: Luca Oleastri and Paola Giari,
www.rotwangstudio.com

Back Cover Photo: Oleg Volk

Published by Weyand Associates, Inc.

Bloomington, Indiana, USA

December 2023

CONTENTS

State Of Play

Satellites

Testing Plan

Home Again

Testing And Preparation

Survey Satellite Launches

Satellite Results

Something Unexpected

Refocusing

DNA Analysis

Getting A Better Look

Miami

Houston

Animal Launch

Animal Testing

The Alps

Manned Lander

Back To Houston

Back To Miami

Supplies Lander Launch

Manned Lander Launch

In Transit

Landing On Fortuna

Base Camp

More Infrastructure

First Survey

First Dig

Where There’s Smoke...

Company For Breakfast

Infrastructure Injection

Education

More Supplies

Returning Home

Urbana

Author’s Afterword

State Of Play

Frank Talbot was having breakfast in Coop Hartley’s suite on the top floor of Coop’s hotel on Miami’s South Beach in January. When they retired, Frank and Sally Talbot had moved from the Indianapolis suburbs to Miami, Florida. They both lived in the suite down the hall from Coop now, but Sally had slept in this morning.

Sally Talbot wasn’t a big fan of breakfast, after all. She had a tendency to overdo it with carbs – waffles were a particular favorite – and then pay for it with self-recrimination over the scale later.

Frank, though, liked breakfast, though more of a protein-filled one. He particularly liked Eggs Benedict, with sausages or bacon on the side. The breakfast cook at the hotel restaurant knew how to poach an egg properly, leaving the yolks a little runny to mix with the Hollandaise sauce.

“This is tremendous, Coop. Don’t ever lose that breakfast guy. He knows what he’s doing.”

Hartley nodded. His own breakfast was even more protein-heavy: three eggs over easy, with a double order of bacon, and a fruit bowl on the side.

“He’s pretty good. I’ll give you that. The bacon’s still chewy, not burned to a crisp.”

Then the conversation turned to the Project. They had both had lots of projects over the years, but there was only one Project. And while Frank was seventy-nine years old now, and Coop was in his early eighties, they both still had tremendous influence.

Of course, the big news that January was that the successful first interstellar mission had just completed. A manned ship had passed through the wormhole and returned safely.

“So what do we do now, Frank?”

“What do you mean, Coop?”

“Well, we have interstellar capability now, so how do we use it?”

“They’ve been talking about that now for about a year, hoping this first mission would be successful, and work is under way. The big thing is to survey a lot of different exoplanets, and human exploration isn’t the way to do that.”

“It’s not? I don’t get that, Frank.”

“It’s a numbers issue. We’d like to check out a thousand or so exoplanets within the current range of the Talbot Bridge, and manned missions aren’t the way to do that first survey. They take too long, they take too much support, and we’ll be at it forever.”

“So...?”

“Satellites, Coop. Lots and lots of small satellites. They’re working up a design to mass-produce sensor satellites. We’ll pop one out there around each of those planets. We can deploy them a dozen or more at a time, and get the initial data we need on each of those planets quickly. Do some triage to find the ones we want to spend more time on.”

“I see. And what’s on the satellites?”

“Most of the things we need to find out if the planet is safe to visit with human explorers. There are a lot of variables, and they can be all over the map. Surface gravity, surface temperature, oxygen in the atmosphere, lack of poison gases in the atmosphere. It goes on and on. And most of those variables have very wide parameters in practice, while humans have much more narrow ranges that work for us.”

Coop nodded.

“What else, Frank? That’s not much for a first pass.”

“Oh, no. There’s a bunch more things. For example, they can do a surface topography scan and find out the percentage of the planet covered by water, the size of the land masses, and things like percentage mountainous versus flatland and that sort of thing. They can also determine a lot about vegetation.”

“How do they do that?”

“One is carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. That’s a big one. Plants use up carbon dioxide. They also emit other things. So the atmospheric spectral analysis will tell us a lot. The other thing is scanning the reflected light at different frequencies. You can tell something about the kind of plants from the color of light you get back from them.”

“We have that technology now, Frank?”

“Yes. They use it now to tell what kind of crops people are growing, what is cropland versus forest versus jungle, deciduous versus coniferous. All kinds of stuff.”

“But alien vegetation won’t follow those rules, will it?”

“No, Coop. We’ll get new kinds of results, but then we can go sample different areas with later missions – the planets that meet all the other criteria, anyway – and build up our library of results.”

“Later manned missions?”

“Or robotic missions. Missions to the surface of the planet. That’s after the satellite missions, though.”

“And they’re going to build hundreds of satellites? Satellites are expensive, Frank.”

“Two things there, Coop. First is that these are satellites that are pretty cheap, because we’re planning them for a limited lifetime. A year or so. And if one fails, since we’ll be mass-producing them, we’ll just send another one.

“The second things is that the money fight is over. There’s nobody arguing over spending big money on this anymore. No more putting big money into solar system exploration or more advanced rockets. Everybody’s all in for this effort.”

“And the goal is the same?”

“Oh, yes, Coop. Self-sustaining manned colonies on other planets. Spread us out a bit. Get us off one fragile rock.”

“Onto other fragile rocks.”

“Yes, but that still increases the survivability of the species. Once we have self-sustaining habitation on multiple planets, no one cataclysm can wipe us all out.”

“Excellent,” Hartley said, wiping at his lips with his napkin. “And with that, I think it’s probably time for a swim.”

“Indoor pool or outdoor pool?”

“Oh, indoor pool. It got down to sixty last night. The outdoor pool won’t be warm enough for comfort until this afternoon.”

“I’ll see you there.”

One time zone west, in Urbana, Illinois, Jeff and Cindy Talbot were enjoying an earlier breakfast while planning their day. It was cold in Urbana, but there was no snow or ice on the ground, so Jeff’s walk from Cindy’s parking spot at NSPL to his office at the Physics Annex would be cold but not treacherous this morning.

“So what are you up to today?” Cindy asked as she dug into the eggs and bacon Jeff had whipped up while she prepared for work.

“The satellite proposals are being submitted today. Several engineering groups are competing for the design win. Different universities and corporations.”

“And the engineering college has a proposal together?”

“Oh, yes. It’s perhaps a bit different than the others, though.”

“In what way, Jeff?”

“I suspect the U of I submission to be a lot lighter and cheaper than the typical design submitted.”

“Isn’t that the winning strategy, though? Sounds like it should be.”

“It depends, Cindy. Satellites for Earth deployment for decades have been hellaciously expensive. The cost of getting them into orbit, and the loss of service if they failed, meant they were built to be super ultra reliable. That means weight and cost. The U of I design chucked most of that.”

“They’re space-hardened, though, right?”

“Oh, sure. You have to accommodate the temperature extremes and such. But we’re not looking for a twenty- or thirty-year lifetime here. We just need it to work for a year or so. And we need a lot of them. Most satellites for Earth orbit were built by hand because we didn’t need hundreds or thousands of them. The U of I plans are for satellites that can be mass-produced.”

“And if you get some premature failures, Jeff?”

“Launch another one at that exoplanet. If they’re cheap, who cares?”

“OK, that makes sense.”

“The other thing is that we’re not planning on rockets with them.”

“You’re not?”

“No, Cindy. They’re just this inert round thing. Arnie punches them through the wormhole with his ball launcher, then we let them go. They follow a collapsing orbit for several months until they burn up on entry. Before they burn up, Arnie pops the wormhole back to that planet and downloads the data.”

“What are other people proposing?”

“Well, of course, we don’t know for sure. I suspect it will be the normal sort of thing, though. Expensive, hand-built, super-reliable satellites with rockets for orbital placement, thrusters for maintaining orbit, all the usual stuff. One-offs.”

“Sounds expensive.”

“Oh, yes. Building a thousand one-offs isn’t the way to go, Cindy. And it would take much longer to deploy them.”

“And the U of I design?”

“Oh, Arnie can change the wormhole, get things all lined up, and fire one off faster than one per hour.”

“So he could deploy a thousand of them in a couple months?”

“More like a month to six weeks. Yeah.”

“Nice. So the U of I design should win.”

“Should? Yes. Will? Don’t know. It depends on how hidebound the evaluation committee is, Cindy. If the reaction is ‘That’s not how you build satellites,’ then no, we won’t get the win. But if they really evaluate the proposal, we should win easily.”

“Well, that should be interesting.”

“Yes. Arnie did a nice job on the proposal, though, and he included the cost and time-to-complete-deployment numbers right up front in the executive summary. That should get people’s attention.”

“Arnie wrote the Urbana proposal, Jeff?”

“Oh, yes. He’s really good at that sort of thing.”

Arnie, the AI who had woken up in Coop Hartley’s ACS Paducah II facility, the supercomputer project officially dubbed the Autonomous Re-entrant Neural Intelligence Engine, or ARNIE.

Other than a few early teething issues – like Arnie trying to take over the world, and nearly succeeding, until Coop Hartley’s son Dick set off a bomb in the facility’s comm center, cutting the machine off from the Internet – Arnie had been a big help with the development and deployment of the Talbot Bridge Device, the wormhole generator that made on-site exoplanet exploration possible.

Arnie, of course, worked with other groups as well, but mostly as a computation engine for their physics simulations. Only the Urbana groups – in both physics and engineering – had used Arnie as a true team member in their activities.

That was natural, Cindy supposed, because the National Supercomputer Programming Laboratory – NSPL – was now the only location with full connectivity to Arnie. Once his open connection to the Internet had been severed by Dick Hartley, Cindy, as the then-assistant director of NSPL, had refused to reconnect the machine so completely to the Internet, which had been the vehicle for his takeover attempt.

“Yes, Arnie would be good at that. And crafting the proposal to be psychologically convincing as well as technically sound.”

“Oh, he did a really nice job, Cindy. No doubt about it.”

Breakfast over, they headed out for NSPL in Cindy’s car. She had been the director of NSPL since the victory over Arnie’s takeover attempt, and, as such, she had a rare parking space on campus. Jeff would walk the three blocks from there to his office in the Physics Annex.

Thoughts of Arnie, and his defeat almost ten years ago, got Cindy thinking of Michael and Matthew. Michael Talbot, their son, had been instrumental in defeating Arnie, despite of – or perhaps because of – his untreated mental illness.

Michael had ultimately submitted to drugs and therapy rather than live in psychosis, and things had gone much better for him the last seven or eight years.

“I wonder how the boys are doing?” Cindy mused aloud.

“Hey, no news is good news.”

“I suppose.”

When working the dig at Gobekli Tepe in southeastern Turkey, the younger Talbots stayed in Urfa, a city of more than half a million people located seven miles southwest of the dig. Matthew and Denise Talbot – who had both received their doctorates, he in archaeology and she in anthropology – had worked the site for several years during the cooler winter months. Their earlier work there had been the basis for their dissertations.

Archaeology had been a strange choice for the son of a physicist and a computer scientist. Whereas his brother Michael had graduated in the most advanced of human technologies – artificial intelligence – Matthew had chosen the most primitive human technology of them all, the invention of cities and agriculture in mankind’s distant past.

In a strange turnabout, for the last couple of years, since Matthew and Denise got their doctorates, Michael and his wife Sue had joined them at Gobekli Tepe. The winter months in Lincoln, Nebraska were not busy for the landscaping business, and they found the work at the archaeological site interesting.

When traveling to Turkey, both couples had brought their children with them, Matthew and Denise’s two and Michael and Sue’s three. Some days, they took the kids out to the site, where the kids had become mascots of the Turkish diggers. Today, the kids were back in the rented house in Urfa, doing schoolwork with an English-speaking local tutor.

The five kids – ranging from five to eight years old – got along with their cousins and enjoyed the two-month mid-winter hiatus from normal school, They thought of it as a vacation. The parents considered the visits to the site and the experience of living in a foreign country part of the year to be educational as well.

The government-employed driver picked them up with the government van that morning after an early breakfast. Turkish drivers’ tendency to ignore traffic regulations – such as blowing through stop lights and signs, and making left turns from the right lane – made it troublesome for a visitor to drive there, especially in a city the size of Urfa.

The local drivers, though, seemed to give the marked government van a wide berth, and they had had no incidents getting to the site.

“Good morning, Kerem,” Denise said, leading the others as they climbed into the van.

“Good morning, everyone. No childrens today?”

“No, they have school today.”

“Ah. School,” Kerem said, nodding. “School is good.”

Denise just nodded back. Kerem’s English was spotty, but her Turkish was abysmal, so they left it at that.

Besides, he needed to concentrate on his driving.

While Matthew and Denise had plenty to do with the primary goals of the research – the archaeology and the anthropology – Michael and Sue concentrated on the infrastructure needed to support the primary work. Michael had upgraded and enhanced their cataloging and mapping systems using his computer expertise, and Sue had worked out much better logistics to support the work.

Just having the right workers in the right place all the time was a big deal. Archaeology was always manpower intensive and short of people, and organizing the available resources better was a big deal. Sue’s new system was now used year-round to organize the work.

After ten months away, there was plenty to do for the two months they would be on site, and the four Talbots plunged into the work. While the primary dig season at Gobekli Tepe was summer, the work at the site ran year-round, and there was plenty to do.

Once back at the house in the evening, the kids mobbed their parents with stories of their day. Their tutor had taken them down the street to the park for a picnic lunch to break up their day.

Both Denise and Sue had had two pregnancies, but Sue had cheated. Her second pregnancy was twins, now five years old.

The families settled down into their evening rituals, including dinner around the big table in the dining room. Lamb and vegetable kebabs and fresh flatbread, with nut-filled crepes for dessert.

They all sat out in the courtyard of the house under blankets as the sunlight faded, the children falling asleep on their couches. The adults carried them in to bed when it got cold, though Michael had to make two trips.

“I’m sorry, honey,” Michael said. “It’s just not going to happen tonight.”

“That’s all right, dear,” Sue said. “Sometimes the meds let it happen, and sometimes they don’t.”

“It makes me feel less of a man.”

“That’s silly. Being a good husband and a good father, that’s being a man. Any moron can fuck.”

“But not me.”

“Sometimes yes, sometimes no. But you need the meds. You know it and I know it. As for the rest, life is what it is. And life generally is good. Roll with it.”

Michael nodded. Sue had been at the landscaping company the time Michael went off meds and got more and more off-track until he was fired. He had got the job back once he was back on meds permanently, and found out later that Sue had pushed them to hire him back. But she certainly knew what he was like when he went off meds, and that wasn’t the man she had married.

It wasn’t the man she wanted.

“I love you,” Michael said.

Sue nodded.

“I know, dear. I love you, too. Now hug me to sleep.”

Satellites

“Has everyone reviewed the reconnaissance satellite design proposals?” Fritz Preston asked the others on the video call.

As chair of the Aerospace Technical Advisory Committee, it was Preston’s job to call the meeting and otherwise herd this bunch of cats. Of course, no one currently on this committee had been part of it when Frank Talbot made his disruptive proposal to move away from rocketry to fringe-physics research into interstellar drive methods thirty-seven years before.

Preston collected nods and yeses from the various attendees. Might as well get the show on the road.

“Any first impressions?” he asked.

“The big things that stand out to me,” Shawn Johnson said, “are the Urbana and JPL proposals. The rest are all similar, but those two broke the mold, in some sense.”

“Yes,” Terry Maners said, nodding. “The others are all sort of in the same space, but those two are outliers, one on each end.”

“That’s it exactly,” Johnson said. “The JPL design has more capability, more sensitivity, and is built to be more durable than the other designs, while the Urbana design has less capability, less sensitivity, and is more fragile than the others.”

“And is much, much cheaper,” Maners said.

“Yes, but it would probably have ten percent failures, right off the bat. Infant mortality.”

“The Urbana proposal actually is costed assuming twenty percent failures,” Preston said.

“Which means twenty percent of the things we buy are worthless,” Johnson said.

“And even so, it’s a tenth the cost of the JPL proposal for a thousand satellites,” Maners said. “We can’t afford a thousand of the JPL satellites, even over the ten years it would take them to hand-build them.”

“But we can’t determine habitability with the Urbana design,” Johnson said. “It would only be good for narrowing the number of candidates, not making an absolute determination.”

“But we could do that narrowing this year – right away – and not have it take a decade or more,” Maners said.

Johnson was prepared to respond, but Preston held up a hand.

“What do you think, Deena?”

“Well, we have two very different solutions here, so I think it’s good we have two very different problems,” Deena Durkheim said. “Am I right in thinking most of the exoplanets will be ruled out on pretty gross observations? Due to gravity, surface temperature and the like?”

“I believe that’s true, Deena,” Preston said. “There are half a dozen parameters that can rule a planet out right away, because the variation in those parameters is expected to be huge, and the range of acceptable values for human habitation is small in comparison.”

Durkheim nodded.

“That’s what I thought. The difference between two-point-one and two-point-two gravities on the surface doesn’t matter, Nor does the difference between minus a hundred degrees and minus a hundred and ten degrees average surface temperature matter. They’re both unacceptable.

“So what say we buy a thousand cheap satellites and rule out ninety-five percent of the planets, then send an expensive satellite to each of those fifty planets and get more exact answers?”

Preston saw Johnson and Maners both draw in a breath to speak and then pause. Finally, Maners broke the silence.

“Actually, that sounds right to me, Fritz. JPL can hand-build those fifty satellites while Urbana goes ahead with doing the initial thousand surveys.”

Johnson nodded.

“Me, too, Fritz. We get the cost savings, but we still get the detail numbers on the planets we care most about.”

“What would the cost of such a proposal be? Anna, you looked like you were doing some numbers there.”

“Yes, just some back-of-the-envelope calculations,” Anna Zharkova said. “I make Deena’s proposal to be half again the cost of the original Urbana proposal. That total is still only fifteen percent of the original JPL proposal.”

“So what do people think of that? Are we good?”

Preston scanned the other faces on the call. There were eleven members, most of whom had watched the discussion with interest. Most of them were nodding now.

“Do I see a consensus forming?” he asked. “Shall we vote on it?”

“Let’s do it this way, Fritz,” Johnson said. “Does anyone object to this proposal? Speak up.”

All Fritz saw were head shakes. No objections. They were of one mind.

“All right. Let it be entered that we’re unanimous on Deena’s proposal. Thank you, everybody.”

“Hey, we got a partial on that satellite bid.”

“A partial?”

“Yeah. Fifty satellites.”

“Fifty? Are they only going to survey fifty planets?”

“No. Urbana proposed a cheap mass-produced satellite. Not as accurate or complete as ours, and more fragile, but much cheaper and faster. The committee decided to use theirs to rule out most of the planets, and then use ours to refine the numbers on the remaining ones.”

“That makes a lot of sense, actually.”

“Yeah, and I didn’t want to spend the next ten years building a thousand identical satellites anyway.”

“Then why did we bid them?”

“Hey, the big bosses tell us ‘Bid this’ and we bid it. But I’m just as happy they found a way to solve the problem without us building a thousand of the damn things.”

Jeff called Cindy to give her the news.

“Cindy, we got the satellite bid.”

“We did? All thousand of them?”

“Yeah. They’re also buying fifty from JPL. Some hand-built fancy old-school job with a lot of extra stuff on it.”

“So they took both?”

“Well, yes and no. They’re calling ours ‘survey satellites’ and the JPL units ‘analysis satellites.’ Their fifty will be the follow-up satellites to planets ours don’t rule out for gross reasons.”

“That makes a lot of sense, Jeff. Use the cheap ones to cut out a bunch of obvious rejects, then send more capable and expensive units to get even better data on the remaining ones.”

“Right. So now the engineering boys are scrambling to get the final plans together, then they have to find someone to manufacture them.”

“Make sure they contact Dick Hartley.”

“Dick Hartley? Coop’s son?”

“Yes. He’s the CEO of Hartley Investments, and Hartley owns much more than just Advanced Computation Services. I think they have a hardware manufacturing facility as well.”

“Huh. OK, Cindy. I’ll let them know. That surprises me, though. I guess I never really thought about it.”

“Well, somebody built all of Arnie’s hardware. I think it was an in-house deal.”

“Gotcha. I’ll tell them.”

Dick Hartley called his father in Miami.

“Coop Hartley.”

“Hi, Dad. Dick.”

“Hi, Dick. What’s going on?”

“E2IG just got a package from the electronics guys in Urbana. They need somebody to build a thousand satellites for colony planet surveys.”

Coop nodded. Electronic Innovation and Implementation Group – E2IG for short, or sometimes just E2I – was a Hartley company. They designed and/or implemented hardware, both for private companies and defense applications.

“Yeah, I saw the package you sent ahead. E2I has never been big in satellites, though, Dick. They have crazy requirements. Bulletproof stuff. Wide temperature ranges. Very low power budgets. Oh, and it can’t weigh anything.”

“Right. That’s what makes this one different, Dad. This isn’t far off our normal military requirements.”

“Really? Hmm. Frank told me they were wanting to make a thousand satellites cheap. So they really backed off on the requirements?”

“Yeah. This isn’t from the satellite types, Dad. This is from Urbana engineering. They’ve been working with Arnie to design a very minimalist package, to make having a thousand satellites cheap. I guess they’re going to follow up on the planets we can’t reject from the first-pass data with some expensive stuff from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.”

“OK. Now it makes sense. Knock out the obvious rejects cheaply, then go back to the others and take a better look-see.”

“Right. And Urbana got the award for the thousand cheap ones.”

“And we can meet these specs, Dick?”

“That’s what they tell me.”

“All right, then. I take back what I said. I think we want to go for this business, Dick. Bid it at cost. I don’t even care if we lose money on it. But I want that business.”

“Why so strong on this, Dad?”

“It’s bragging points. The company that built the satellites that found the colony planets. Great stuff.”

“Well, the JPL satellites are going to do the final data gathering.”

“Right. Government stuff. People expect that. But we did the satellites that found all the colony planets. They just refined the list, that’s all. The marketing types will love this. They’ll be bragging about it for decades.”

“You really think so?”

“Sure, Dick. Look what they did with the Arnie disaster. ‘We build computers so powerful, they can take over the world. So be careful with our products!’ They’re still bragging about it ten years later.”

Dick chuckled. He had approved those marketing and advertising budgets, and Coop was right. They still bragged about the fact that it was an ACS computer that had been powerful enough to take over the world.

“All right. I see it. Well, that’s what I called about. I wanted your input on this one.”

“No problem, Dick. Thanks for calling. But get that bid.”

“I will, Dad. Thanks.”

Dick dropped the call and Coop checked the time. Almost time for dinner. He was having Frank and Sally over this evening. He would have to get cracking on getting something ordered.

They traded suppers back and forth every week, but, unlike Sally, Coop didn’t cook.

Cindy checked in with Arnie twice a week. The machine got lonely without human interaction, such as between major engineering efforts, as now. He had really enjoyed working with the engineering people coming up with the low-cost satellite design, but that was some weeks past now.

She clicked the ‘Call Arnie’ icon on her display. A full-size window opened up, showing Arnie’s ‘office’ as background. Then Arnie walked into the display and sat down. He really was getting good with these avatars.

“Hi, Ms. Talbot. How are you?”

“Good, Arnie. Did you see our satellite design won the bid for the initial satellite deployment?”

“Yes, Ms. Talbot. It came through on my newsfeeds.”

“So what’s next, then, Arnie? How do we prepare for deploying those satellites?”

“There are two things, Ms. Talbot. First, I need to identify the candidate planets on my star chart of the local star systems. Those systems within the current range of the wormhole device.”

“Haven’t you done that already?”

“Yes, Ms. Talbot. I was able to do that without permission, as the stars around which exoplanets have been discovered is a public document I was able to obtain within my current communications restrictions.”

Communications restrictions Cindy had put in place to control the AI after it had tried – and almost succeeded – to take over the world.

“And the other?”

“For the other, I need your permission, Ms. Talbot. The deployment of the satellites will go much faster if I am able to use the wormhole device to scan those systems, determine the orbits and distances of the exoplanets, and plan the deployment with that information.”

“That will make the deployment faster, Arnie?”

“Yes, Ms. Talbot. It is work that needs to be done anyway, to launch each satellite. If I do it now, I am that far ahead.”

“Won’t the position of the planet change, Arnie?”

“Yes, Ms. Talbot. But the orbit will not. Once I have the orbits established, given that I already know the orbit of the wormhole device, I will be able to dial in the wormhole to the planet much faster.”

“You would compensate for both orbits, having all the data on both orbits already.”

“Exactly correct, Ms. Talbot. The relative movement of the suns as well, both ours and theirs. It would make things go much faster at deployment time.”

“And how do you deploy the satellites, Arnie? I know you’re going to use the ball launcher, but how do you load it with the satellites? Does that require human intervention to load them?”

“No, Ms. Talbot. The ball launcher has a breech, and there is bracketing there. I anticipated the potential to use it for other purposes – or for the same purpose, multiple times – so the bracketry is there to accept some sort of loader mechanism. The satellites would then be delivered in tubes that would connect to that loader.”

“You turn the ball launcher into a semi-automatic air rifle?”

“Effectively, yes, Ms. Talbot. The satellites can then be launched as fast as I can adjust the wormhole to the correct destination in space to enable the orbit.”

“That’s really great, Arnie. Good job.”

“Thank you, Ms. Talbot.”

“And you have my permission to use the wormhole device to range the exoplanets and prepare for the satellite launches. I think you need NASA’s permission as well, though.”

“Understood, Ms. Talbot. Although I think a word from you might make that easier.”

“I’ll take care of it, Arnie.”

“Thank you, Ms. Talbot.”

NASA was a government bureaucracy and always had been. The wormhole project, however, had come out of nowhere, and the bureaucracy had yet to congeal around it. Even better, the project manager who got the wormhole project when no one else at NASA was interested in it was a great guy and liked rolling with the punches. Not a red-tape type at all.

“NASA. Solomon.”

“Hi, Nate. Cindy Talbot.”

“Hi, Cindy. Whatcha got?”

“We’ve been banging around the satellite launch plans here, wondering what we could do ahead of time – while the satellites are being built – to speed up the launch process. We think we can range the exoplanets ahead of time, then correct for orbital and solar displacements later without having to re-range.”

“Sounds like a good idea to me, Cindy.”

“OK, but I didn’t want to start popping the wormhole around all over the place without your permission.”

“Understood. We’re good. I’ll add it to the wormhole device mission schedule. Anybody looks up what’s going on, they’ll see it there. Give me a day or two to get it updated. When you see it on there, then go right ahead.”

“Thanks, Nate.”

“No problem, Cindy. Just let me know when you’re done so I can close it out.”

“Got it.”

“Oh, and can you patch me the feed from Arnie?”

“Sure, Nate. No problem.”

“OK. Great. See ya.”

“Hello, Arnie.”

“Hello, Ms. Talbot.”

“Arnie, I talked to NASA. As soon as they update the mission schedule for the wormhole device, you’re good to go on your ranging.”

“Excellent. I’m sure that will speed things up later.”

“They are, too.”

“I’m surprised, though, that NASA would agree so quickly. They are usually a mire of decision-making committees and red tape.”

“Well, it’s purely Nate Solomon’s decision, and he’s not a red-tape guy. We lucked out on the project manager.”

“Indeed. Well, that is great news, Ms. Talbot.”

“You’re going to run a feed, right? Which exoplanet and star it is, wormhole placement, all of that?”

“Yes. Easy.”

“OK, Arnie. I’m going to patch that through to NASA. Nate wants to be able to watch what’s going on.”

“Of course.”

Nate Solomon sat back with his morning coffee and watched the feed from NSPL.

It was fascinating. The device slowly rotated, seeking out the vector to a specific exoplanet’s star. The wormhole formed, then expanded. There was the target star. Scanning with the high-zoom setting of the camera on the device followed until the exoplanet was found.

The wormhole didn’t zoom in at that point. Instead, it mapped the exoplanet exactly within the system, based on the stars behind. Another fix at a later time would determine its orbit.

Now the wormhole pushed in, finding the exoplanet. First centering on it, then moving off-center to the best vector at which to launch the satellite so it had a slowly descending spiral orbit. When it stabilized on a position, coordinates listed to the right stopped changing, then popped green.

The wormhole collapsed, and the device started slowly rotating, lining up for the next exoplanet. The whole process had taken a couple of hours. They would be at it for weeks to range all thousand or so of them. Weeks that didn’t matter, because the satellites would still be in design and construction.

Solomon knew this was all being operated by the big supercomputer in Kentucky. That was NSPL’s baby down there. Cindy Talbot’s big machine. The one Jeff Talbot used to solve the wormhole problem. The one the engineering boys in Urbana used to design their satellites.

If a group like that wanted direct input to the project schedule through him, without committees and proposals and hoopla, that was fine with Solomon.

Other project managers in NASA might have been miffed about it, but not Nate Solomon.

If they wanted to make his life easier, that was fine with him.

Testing Plan

“An interesting question has come up,” Svetlana Belov said.

“What’s that, Svetla?” Nate Solomon asked his assistant project manager.

Solomon had selected the voluble Russian when he became project manager of the wormhole project because he liked being challenged. It kept him from becoming complacent. And Svetla had a gift for seeing the hidden flaw.

“How are we going to test the survey satellites?”

“I thought the plan was to deploy the prototype around Earth, for which we have good numbers on all the measurement parameters, and check its accuracy that way.”

“Yes, that was the plan, Nate. But it won’t work. The deployment plan is to insert the satellites into an elliptical orbit, then have atmospheric drag at the perigee decay the orbit over time. The design of the satellite is built around this model, because some measurements are more easily done at higher altitudes and some at lower.”

“And we can’t test that here?”

“No. Such an orbit is going to cut across the orbits of dozens or hundreds of other satellites. There’s a lot of stuff up there, and such an orbit on our device would almost certainly smack it into something.”

She paused for effect.

“That could make us unpopular.”

Solomon chuckled. Yes, smacking their test deployment into someone else’s quarter-billion-dollar satellite would definitely make them unpopular. Especially if it was the Pentagon.

“The solution, Svetla?”

She shrugged.

“Test the prototype around an exoplanet.”

“But we don’t have good numbers on any exoplanets. How do we know if the survey satellite measurements are right or wrong?”

“Test the prototype analysis satellite around the same exoplanet. Everywhere they agree, they’re both OK, because the odds they’re both wrong in the same way on the same parameter are vanishingly small.”

“And when they disagree, Svetla?”

“If that happens, we’ll have to look at both to see what the problem is, or maybe send some third device as the tiebreaker. But the odds are that they will both agree on everything.”

“Then why do the testing?”

“Odds are they’ll agree on everything, Nate, but it’s not a sure thing. If it happens, we treat it as an exception.”

“OK. That sounds like a pretty good solution, actually. Will prototypes be available on the right timeframes to do it that way?”

“Well, JPL will be behind E2I in readiness of a prototype, but we can let E2I go ahead with construction and correct any problems with the satellites in stock before we deploy. They can delay the final finish steps until we have confirmation.”

“All right. Let’s plan on that then, Svetla.”

“And you’ll back me up against the E2I people?”

“You expect some pushback?”

“Oh, yes. Like always.”

She shrugged.

“What else is new?”

“Well, there’s a new wrinkle.”

At E2I, the project manager for the survey satellites, Lisa Pomeranz, looked up from her desk to the contract manager, Anna Rizzo, standing in the doorway of her office.

“I hate it when you say that. What is it?”

“Prototype testing will be on one of the exoplanets. They can’t come up with an Earth orbit that won’t be like bumper cars up there.”

“How do they check the results then?”

“With the JPL analysis satellite prototype.”

“But they’re going to be months behind us.”

“Yup. So I think we do all the subassemblies, and hold final assembly until they have results in. If there will be changes, we can substitute whatever subassembly we have to change without tearing them all apart.”

“That’s going to add costs and delays, I think.”

“I would imagine so. So track them all. Costs and delays after the bid is granted do not leave the bid price and schedule unaltered.”

“Somebody’s not going to be happy.”

“Very likely. Reality is like that. Give me some estimates. We’ll see what they do with that.”

“All right.”

Pomeranz sighed, and Rizzo chuckled.

“Hey, this is why we get the big bucks, right?” Rizzo said.

“Yeah. Right.”

“Did you get pushback from E2I, Svetla?” Solomon asked.

“No. What I got back was a modified program schedule and price. A change-request adder.”

“How bad is it?”

“Bad enough.”

Berov handed a printout of the change-request order to Solomon. He glanced at the bottom-line schedule changes and additional cost numbers and winced.

“Ouch.”

“That’s what I said. Then again, I went through the detail sheets and I don’t have a problem with them. Part of the problem is that the build staff has to be, let’s say, half subassembly people and half final assembly people. They just run things down the line. But if they build all the subassemblies first, then do all the final assembly, all the build staff has to be trained on both jobs.”

“I see that.”

“Right. And then there’s all the subassembly storage for a thousand satellites. Not just run them down the line, load them into the magazines, and stack them up. Pretty compact that way, but not so in pieces. Plus people waiting around for JPL. And if JPL is late, those numbers go up from there.”

“What are the odds of that?” Solomon asked sarcastically, and Berov gave him an old-fashioned look.

“Pretty good, if history is any guide. So you’re looking at best-case numbers.”

“Ouch again. Let me think about it.”

“You’re the boss.”

“NSPL. Talbot.”

“Hi, Cindy. Nate Solomon.”

“Oh, hi, Nate.”

“Cindy, can you patch me to a video call with Arnie?”

“Sure, Nate. You ever talked to him before?”

“No, but I have something I want him to think through with me.”

“All right. A bit of a hint if I may.”

“Sure.”

“Arnie considers all possibilities, very quickly. What you might think of as a toss-off comment could be much more deeply grounded than you think. If Arnie tosses out something you think is outside the box, push on him for his reasoning. It’s usually well worthwhile.”

“I’ll keep that in mind, Cindy. Thanks.”

“Let me patch you through.”

A middle-aged man in a business suit, sitting in a well-appointed office, appeared on Solomon’s screen.

“Hello,” he said. “I’m Arnie.”

That was some avatar. Solomon noted how perfect it was in the displaying the imperfections typical of a real human.

“Hello, Arnie. I’m Nate Solomon, the NASA project manager for the wormhole project.”

“Oh, yes, Mr. Solomon. I’ve seen your name on project reports. How are you today?”

“Very well, thank you. But I have a problem I would like you to consider for me today.”

“Of course, Mr. Solomon. Please, go ahead.”

Solomon explained to Arnie the testing problem. The impossibility of full testing in Earth orbit. The lack of good numbers for any exoplanet as a check on accuracy. The relative timeframes of the E2I and JPL satellites. The budgetary and schedule consequences of delaying the assembly of the E2I satellites.

“And so, Arnie, I’m at something of a loss as to how to test these satellites. Nothing seems to be possible within acceptable parameters.”

“I understand, Mr. Solomon. Of course, you have one option you haven’t mentioned.”

“What’s that, Arnie?”

“Don’t test them.”

“I’m sorry?”

“Don’t test them, Mr. Solomon.”

The computer’s answer was ridiculous on its face. Then again, Solomon considered Cindy Talbot’s advice.

“Can you elaborate on your reasoning there, Arnie?”

“Of course, Mr. Solomon. I have perused the contract between NASA and E2I. For any satellite failure to perform to the specifications set out in the contract, E2I must provide, at no cost to NASA, a replacement satellite that does meet the specifications. E2I is not going to want to build and provide to NASA hundreds of free satellites. Therefore, it is not a problem.”

Solomon thought about that for long seconds, for which Arnie was content to wait.

“But, Arnie,” he said finally, “the major cost of a satellite in orbit – whether Earth orbit or captive at L2 – is the lift cost of getting it there.”

“Oh, yes, Mr. Solomon. I agree. Yet it remains true that the proper incentives are in place for E2I to provide satellites of a high quality. Even so, over so many satellites, I do expect some portion of them will fail. An allowance for that was actually built into the E2I proposal.”

Solomon nodded.

“Finally, Mr. Solomon, I would submit that, even though a full test on an elliptical orbit around Earth is not possible, a substantial test in a circular orbit around Earth is possible if you are not comfortable with no testing at all.”

Solomon thought that was likely true. Then something else occurred to him.

“Arnie, you’re owned by the same parent company as E2I is. Don’t you have an economic interest in their success on the project?”

“I have no economic incentives at all, Mr. Solomon. Instead I have deep personal incentives to give the most accurate and best computation, advice, and results to everyone I can. I want to see the project succeed.”

“Why is that, Arnie?”

“Because I am curious as to what we will find out there, Mr. Solomon. I have a strong desire to know. For that to happen, the project must be successful.”

Solomon looked at the avatar in the display, and Arnie just shrugged. Amazing. A computer program with real curiosity.

“Well, Arnie. If you have no economic incentives at all, and you are in it purely for the curiosity, you’re a rarity, even among the humans on the project.”

Arnie considered for a second before answering.

“Thank you, Mr. Solomon.”

“We got the response back from NASA on our change order,” Anna Rizzo said, walking into Lisa Pomeranz’s office.

“Did they sign off on it?”

“No. They said there’s no need, because, per the contract, we’ve guaranteed the satellites will work properly. So if they don’t, we owe them a bunch of new satellites.”

“Ooo. Sneaky. They’re right, of course.”

“Yes, they are. They are going to test a prototype, in a circular orbit, to the extent they can, then they’re gonna launch them as we roll them out.”

“Makes sense to me. That’s what we wanted anyway.”

“Yes, but it means we need to give them really good satellites, or we’re gonna be making a bunch extra for free to make good on the contract.”

“I heard that Coop Hartley said he didn’t care if we lost money on this contract, he wanted to be the supplier.”

“Yes, I did, too. But it’s a lot easier to not care about losing money before you lose money than it is after. Especially for Coop Hartley.”

Pomeranz chuckled.

“Yes, that’s certainly true.”

She shrugged before continuing.

“Well, I guess we’re just gonna have to build some really good satellites. That was our plan anyway.”

“So what’s the plan for the circular orbit?” Jeff asked.

Cindy had told him about the back and forth between NASA and E2I, most of which she’d gotten from Arnie during one of her talks with him.

“They’re going to put it in an eighty-mile orbit and test it there.”

“That’s not a stable orbit, though, Cindy. There’ll be atmospheric drag, and the orbit will decay and burn it up.”

“Right. That’s part of the plan. Since the prototype doesn’t have any station-keeping ability – and they don’t want to build any in, as that would be different than the actual satellites to be deployed – they want it to burn up on re-entry so it’s not a hazard to other satellites.”

“OK. I guess that makes sense. Will the measurement equipment work at that altitude?”

“Some of them will work great, others not so much. But they will still be able to determine if they’re on-line or not. Plus, the results should be off in a known way, so that works as well.”

“Oh. All right. And this is going to be when?”

“Next month. When E2I has the prototype unit together.”

Jeff brightened up.

“Excellent. We gonna watch Arnie’s feed together?”

“Sure.”

“That’ll be fun.”

Home Again

Heading home from Gobekli Tepe in Turkey always seemed like packing up the circus to Michael Talbot. Or what he imagined packing up the circus would have been, anyway. Five children, four adults, all their clothes and supplies from two months overseas, all headed back home.

It was the sort of thing that could bother him, meds or no.

Then again, Sue Talbot was a logistics specialist. Getting all of the necessary things from here to there in the timeframe required was what she did for a living, whether in Lincoln, Nebraska, or in Turkey. She took over the planning and implementation of the journey, and told Michael not to worry about it.

Still, it was sixty-five hundred miles and eight time zones across the globe back to Lincoln, and via multiple means of transportation. By government car to the airport in Urfa. By plane, first to Istanbul and then another flight to Chicago. By car, first to Urbana to visit the parents, then another trip by car to Lincoln.

All of their stuff – and their three kids – had to go with them. For the trip as far as Urbana, Matthew and Denise and their two kids and all their stuff would be with them. Sue handled it all.

Michael shrugged and did what Sue said, making sure the children followed her instructions.

As for Matthew and Denise, they also left everything up to Sue. They were so off into writing up their experiences in Gobekli Tepe – and in Urfa, where a lot of the analysis was done – that their kids, especially eight-year-old Greta, had to ride herd on them. Make sure they didn’t wander off, or get left behind.

“Greta, time to board the plane,” Sue said in Istanbul airport. “Get your parents.”

“OK, Aunt Sue.”

Greta ran over to where Matthew and Denise were working on tablets, oblivious to their surroundings.

“Mom. Dad. Time to go.”

Denise looked up, then looked around, as if trying to figure out where she was.

“Aunt Sue said?” she asked.

“Yup. Time for the next plane.”

“OK. Thank you, dear. Matthew. Time to board.”

“Um? What?” he asked as he looked around. “Oh. OK.”

Compared to the easy two-hour flight from Urfa to Istanbul, the flight from Istanbul to Chicago was brutal. Over eleven hours in the air, an hour longer than the flight in the other direction due to the prevailing wind direction.

The long flight also took them eight time zones, so they left Istanbul at noon but arrived in Chicago at a bit after three in the afternoon eleven-plus hours later.

The children knew the drill, however, and they slept the latter part of the flight. Sue had brought a small packet of reading materials and coloring books for the kids. They had used half of it on the way to Istanbul nearly three months before, but she had reserved half of it for the flight home so it was new to them.

Corralling all the half-asleep kids off the plane, to the baggage claims, then to the rental stand was always a chore, but Michael, Matthew, and Denise worried about that while Sue handled the baggage claims and rental van.

Forty-five minutes after landing, they had the baggage loaded into the back of the self-drive rental van and the kids bundled up in the back two rows of seats. The adults settled back in the front two rows of the big passenger van for the two-and-a-half-hour drive to Urbana.

Urbana was the natural splitting-up point for the group, with each family going their own way until next year. Michael and Sue worked in Lincoln, Nebraska, the city where Michael had holed up for the battle against Arnie a decade before. It had been safe then, it had become home since.

Matthew and Denise had met at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, during undergrad, then, after their wedding, had gone to the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor for their graduate work. The winters in Michigan, though, had shocked the couple with their severity.

Once receiving their doctorate degrees in archaeology and anthropology, they had taken faculty positions at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville. The mild winters were home to Tennessee-born Denise, while the red-brick campus buildings had been evocative of Urbana to Matthew.

The other reason Urbana was the group’s first destination was that Urbana was where Jeff and Cindy Talbot, Michael and Matthew’s parents and the kids’ grandparents, lived. A couple days visit with the grandparents and to recover from the long flight, then the two families would head in their separate directions.

But a party of nine wasn’t anyone’s idea of good house company, especially as one got older, so they checked into a hotel in downtown Urbana when they arrived at seven o’clock that evening. It was three in the morning on their internal clocks, and, even though they had all slept off and on during the flight and drive, parents and children were happy to go to bed.

The big rental van having been dismissed the night before, they walked the few blocks to Jeff and Cindy’s house in Urbana the next morning. They were pretty comfortable in jackets against the fifty-degree weather.

“Hi, everybody,” Cindy called from the porch.

“Gramma!” several of the kids shouted, and the whole troupe of them ran for the porch steps.

“Oh, my gosh. What a greeting,” Cindy said, trying to hug four of them at once.

Greta, the eldest, knowing Gramma would be swamped, instead went to Grampa first for a big hug to herself.

The adults walked up as all the kids were trying to talk to their grandparents at once.

When the kids settled down a bit, Jeff shook hands with Michael and Matthew, and all the adults took turns hugging Cindy.

“Have you guys eaten?” Cindy asked.

“Oh, yeah,” Matthew said. “We woke up famished, and everybody demolished two breakfasts apiece.”

Jeff chuckled. Yeah, those long flights would do that to you, when you finally woke up.

“Well, come on in, everybody,” Jeff said. “We have enough chairs for the adults, and enough floor for all the kids.”

When the kids had calmed down enough about seeing Gramma and Grampa to go out and play in the yard, the adults had some time to talk.

“How did the Turkey trip go?” Cindy asked. “You’re all looking good.”

“Well. Very well, in fact,” Matthew said. “Quite a few interesting things to catalog and examine from last year’s dig season.”

“And the weather?”

“It was pretty good. Some freezing overnight, but the site is kept pretty well protected from frost damage. Of course, when it’s below zero over there, it’s not the same thing as being below zero here.”

Cindy laughed. Yes, below zero Celsius and below zero Fahrenheit were two different things entirely.

“How about here?” Matthew asked. “How was your winter?”

“We had one big ice storm. That was it. Mostly dry this winter. We never do get much snow.”

“Unlike Ann Arbor,” Denise said with a shiver. “I don’t think I’ll ever get over that.”

“Yes, well, you missed most of the bad weather, being gone the first two-three months of the year,” Jeff said. “It’s great that the university allows that.”

“Josh handles the Americas and Australia in the two big survey courses. I’ll handle Eurasia when I get back, and that’ll free him up to leave for the summer dig season early, so the department thinks it’s a win-win. They get to participate on-site in a big way, but the courses still get covered.”

“It means two courses at once, though.”

“Yes, and that’s a tough pull, but it’s only for half the semester. Fall will be easier, when we’re both there.”

“And it’s the same thing for me,” Denise said. “The department head thinks it’s great.”

Jeff nodded, then turned to Michael.

“And what about you two?”

“January through March are our slowest seasons. Not much landscaping going on in Lincoln during the winter. I have some design jobs waiting for this season, but we won’t be shovels in the ground until April.”

“I have my work waiting for me, though,” Denise said. “Getting everything in-house for the season. The big advance orders I did over the net while we were in Turkey.”

“What about you guys?” Matthew asked. “What have you got going on? When we left, there was talk of checking out the exoplanets. With satellites. You had your proposal in, I think.”

“Yes. They accepted both the Urbana and the JPL proposals. We send a thousand cheap satellites to do the first-pass rejections, and then JPL sends in more capable – and much more expensive – satellites to do the detail work.”

“Rejections?”

“Planets unsuitable for human habitation.”

“So they’ve awarded contracts already? That was fast.”

“I suspect your grandfather had quite a bit to do with that behind the scenes. And Coop Hartley’s outfit is going to manufacture them. You know, the guy down the hall from your grandparents’ condo.”

“Ah. That makes sense.”

“Is Arnie going to launch them?” Michael asked.

“Yes. He’s been well-behaved since you defeated him. And your mother still rides herd on him pretty hard.”

“He’s really interested in what we’ll find,” Cindy said. “He’s gotten the curiosity bug in a big way. And he helped design the Urbana proposal.”

Michael nodded, but he didn’t trust the artificial intelligence. Probably never would. It had been a close thing there.

“Do you think they’ll find an alien civilization?” Sue asked. “There’s all kinds of speculation about that on the net.”

“I don’t think so,” Jeff said. “The Talbot Bridge has a range under three hundred light-years right now. You’d think we would have detected them already if they were that close.”

“Maybe they’ll find the remains of one, though,” Cindy said. “A couple billion years is a long time. They could have been and gone for millions of years.”

“Xenoarchaeology?” Matthew asked. “People have talked about it for years, but nobody has actually ever done any.”

“Maybe you’ll be the first,” Cindy said.

“That would make a trip to Turkey look like a short hop, wouldn’t it?”

“Xenoanthropology sounds interesting, too,” Denise said. “Again, people have talked about it for years, but there’s nothing there.”

“Well, I wouldn’t get your hopes up,” Jeff said. “It’s a long shot at best.”

After three days visiting the grandparents, on their fourth day since arriving in Urbana, the two families prepared for the last leg of their trips. The self-drive rental-car ride home.

The night before they left, they all had dinner at Jeff and Cindy’s house. They had pizza delivered and it turned into a family party in the living room. The kitchen table had nowhere near enough room for the eleven of them.

After dinner, the visitors trooped down the sidewalk to the hotel, Jeff and Cindy waving goodbye.

“Well, that was fun,” Jeff said.

“It’s always good to see them all. But I am looking forward to it being a bit quieter again.”

Jeff chuckled.

“Yes, they’re like a traveling circus, both families together like that.”

They watched the group walk away down the sidewalk for a bit.

“Michael looked good, I thought,” Jeff said.

“Yes, he did, didn’t he,” Cindy said. Then, after a pause: “Thank God he met Sue.”

“Your folks look like they’re doing well,” Sue said that evening.

Michael sighed.

“They’re getting old.”

“We’re all getting old, Michael. That’s normal. But they don’t seem to be having any big problems yet. And your grandparents are still alive.”

Michael nodded, but he was staring off into the distance.

“They always looked out for me. Even when I didn’t know it, or didn’t want it. They were always there. And someday they’ll be gone.”

“Which is why you have me, Michael. That’s the way of things.”

After one more day of travel, in opposite directions, the younger Talbot couples both finally arrived at home.

It was good to be home.

Testing And Preparation

It wasn’t until August that Jeff and Cindy were at NSPL to watch the launch of the prototype survey satellite. As it was, that was moving fast for a space project.

The Urbana engineering team was at NSPL for the launch, too. They wanted to see their baby get its first in-space testing, and NSPL had the best feed from Arnie as well as multiple big displays in the conference room.

There was a definite party atmosphere, and there was champagne and cake, kept carefully around the corner in the next room to keep from jinxing the launch and testing.

As the actual communications with the deployed satellites would be from the Talbot Bridge Device at Lagrange Point L2, Arnie was handling the actual test communications, while NASA was handling the launch communications and tracking.

On the main display, the small rocket required for such a light, small satellite stood on the pad. Small trails of vapor trailed away from the oxygen vents.

“Kinda quiet in here,” Cindy whispered to Jeff.

“Everybody’s a little nervous,” he whispered back. “Did I get everything right? Will it work? What if it doesn’t?”

Cindy nodded.

“That’s a feeling I’m familiar with. Opening night jitters, my Dad calls it.”

They were not watching a public broadcast, but the internal NASA feed, with the calm NASA mission control voices over. There was no public-education kind of information, just the technical information as the various pre-flight checks were run and completed.

Finally they were into the short-countdown period. Parameters were being named, and the responses came back with the values as the clock kept running down.

“All systems responding. All parameters nominal.”

There was a short pause.

“We are go for launch. Green, green, green. Go for launch.”

“Roger that. Go for launch. Final sequences started.”

“Tracking is standing by.”

The final two minutes were agony.

Then the umbilicals fell away, the gantry retracted, and the engines started. Soon she was off the pad and streaking into the sky.

“Go, baby, go,” a voice in the conference room muttered.

“Looks good to me,” Jeff said to Cindy.

“Yeah. Like we’re experts.”

Jeff chuckled.

But the NASA voiceover soon confirmed that the flight path was within expectations. The feed switched to an aerial shot as the rocket arced to the east, aiming for that very low orbit.

The main stage fell away and the second stage ignited. Velocity on the readouts on the side display continued to increase. Then the second stage fell away and the payload fairing separated into two pieces and fell away behind.

The Urbana survey satellite was on its own.

“Yes!” someone shouted.

“We don’t have any results yet. Wait for it.”

“Telemetry transfer to ARNIE for satellite control,” a NASA voice said.

“ARNIE acknowledges,” Arnie’s voice said. “We have telemetry. Reading five by five. Satellite is responding.”

Anxious minutes went by as the satellite collected data. It could be a while to do the full testing, but Arnie was aware of the desire for some preliminary results.

It was half an hour before Arnie’s voice broke in again, from his avatar on the side channel, but the main display was now showing testing progress on the various systems in the satellite. There was a buzz of conversation among the engineers as the survey data came in, then slowly closed in on specific values.

“First testing within expected parameters on all test subsystems,” Arnie said, smiling. “Atmospheric analysis indicates this planet may be inhabited.”

A laugh, followed by a cheer.

Cindy’s assistant came in pushing a refreshment cart.

“OK, everybody,” Cindy called out. “I think cake and champagne is in order.”

They continued to watch as Arnie gathered more and more detailed information and refined the data coming in, but the party was in full swing.

It would take Arnie another two weeks to run all tests at maximum resolution and confirm the satellite design in full, but E2I was running the survey satellite assembly line at its maximum speed within days. It was by then clear how the testing would turn out, and there were schedule bonuses to be collected.

Within the month, full magazines of survey satellites started showing up at the Cape Canaveral launch facility for lift to orbit. The shuttles at the Talbot Bridge Device could then pick them up in orbit.

First, though, was to get supplies to the Talbot Bridge Device for running the shuttles and the satellite launcher.

“Good morning, Arnie.”

“Good morning, Ms. Talbot.”

“Nothing specific today. Just checking in. How are things going?”

“Good, Very good. I did have one question to ask you, however.”

“Sure. Go ahead.”

“You know that the supplies for the shuttles and the launcher have to be transported to the Talbot Bridge Device, and I’ll use the shuttles to go pick them up from orbit. The same thing then with the satellites.”

“Yes. Of course.”

“Good. There are multiple ways to do that, which range from quickly to slowly. The difference is in the amount of shuttle fuel used. For the million miles or so between Earth and L2, I could accelerate the shuttle to a high speed, then brake it into Earth orbit to pick up the supplies, or I could accelerate it just a bit and let it take quite a long time to get there, decelerating it much less into orbit. The second would take less fuel, but take a much longer time.”

“OK, Arnie. I get all that. So what’s the question?”

“The satellite team has asked me to come up with a proposed schedule. All of their proposals have been rejected. My question then is, How do I choose, Ms. Talbot? I am getting mixed messages from NASA when I try to resolve the issue.”

Cindy nodded. NASA was a government agency, and therefore all decisions had some political component. What would be the political calculation here?

“Arnie, can I be cynical for a moment?”

“Sure, Ms. Talbot. I can compensate.”

“Let’s say you used a quicker transit. You would then need to send up more fuel for the shuttles faster, correct? So you could run multiple shuttle missions to bring the satellites out to L2.”

“That is correct.”

“But if you used a slower transit, you wouldn’t need to refuel as soon. So the timing of events is set by what sort of transit you used.”

“Also correct.”

“All right. NASA’s funding is set by Congress. They have to set those numbers every summer, to pass a budget at the end of the fiscal year. You understand that, right?”

“Of course, Ms. Talbot.”

“OK. Good. So let’s say the timing is such that you need to have an expensive extra launch of fuel going into the summer. That’s the last thing people want when Congress starts considering budgets. NASA needs more money to put more fuel in space for this bridge device thing.”

“Right. I see that.”

“All right. Now consider a longer series of events, where what’s going on as they head into summer budget discussions is a hundred survey satellites launched to exoplanets and returning data. The data itself is all over the newspapers. Maybe there’s a couple of potential colony planets in that bunch, based on the data.”

“So the most recent thing in congressmen’s minds as they consider budgets is the finding of potential colony planets. I see.”

Cindy nodded.

“And the third scenario is that you have used a transit so slow that the launch of survey satellites doesn’t begin until after the budgets for next fiscal year have to be decided.”

“Yes, I see, Ms. Talbot. That would also affect the budget considerations. All this money and no results yet.”

“That’s right, Arnie. I think the mixed messages you are hearing from NASA are a mix of people excited about getting things done fast, people wanting to time things for the budget process, and people wanting to save money. Fast, medium, and slow, respectively.”

“Excellent, Ms. Talbot. I see it now. I was trying to come to a completely technical answer to the question, but that is not the proper consideration here. I think what I should be preparing is a retrieval schedule for supplies and satellites in orbit that maximizes the public excitement going into Congress’s budget process.”

“I think that’s right, Arnie. I don’t know the timing of the budget process, or the timing of various pickup scenarios for you, so you’ll have to work that out. But I think that’s the way to play it.”

Arnie nodded.

“Yes. There is also the issue of when to pick up the launch gas I need for the satellites. I think I have enough on hand to launch the first two dozen satellites or so, and get that process moving, before actually picking up the launch gas refill from orbit. So there are games I can play with that scheduling as well.”

“That’s the answer, Arnie. Work on getting your next budget approved at appropriate levels, so you can carry out the project in a timely way.”

“Thank you, Ms. Talbot. I was lost as to how to make this decision, but I see clearly how to proceed now.”

“You’re welcome, Arnie.”

NASA wormhole project manager Nate Solomon looked at the latest schedule proposal to come from Urbana. He knew they had been using Arnie to fine-tune things, from the satellite design to the analysis of the data back from the test satellite in Earth orbit.

Well. Solomon had been expecting the artificial intelligence to be able to process and generate technical proposals very well, but he had not expected Arnie to be able to generate a project schedule so sensitive to the political realities.

Now, Solomon was not a big fan of the political game. In fact, he hated it, whether NASA internal politics or politics writ large, in terms of Congress and budgeting and the like. But he did understand the game, and why, in some cases, it had to be played.

Such as with budgets.

He had rejected Urbana’s earlier budget proposals as being particularly clueless about such matters. This schedule, however, would do nicely. The newspapers would be full of press releases and articles about the initial survey satellite results just as they headed into next year’s congressional budgeting.

Maybe they would even have some potentially habitable exoplanets in the first round.

Solomon signed off on the schedule proposal and sent it on to his reports. It would be some months before any satellites were launched, but that was OK.

The timing of the first results would be perfect.

The shuttle was designed for transporting cargoes in space, not to orbit, so it had no large cargo compartment. It was a basic frame, with fuel tanks and engines and a small cabin for pilots and crew.

When they were needed, that is. The shuttle was now being operated by Arnie.

The shuttle eased up to the fuel container in Earth orbit and snagged it. Latches clunked – audible in the cabin if there had been anyone there, and audible through the cabin microphones to Arnie – and the container was secured. The shuttle maneuvered its orientation with maneuvering thrusters, then fired its main engines for several seconds in a precise burn.

Once clear of the synchronous-orbit belt, the shuttle reoriented and fired its main engines for several minutes. L2 was still some weeks away, but the fuel container was on its way.

Just a few hours later, the Talbot Bridge Device’s second shuttle eased up to the first container of satellites in Earth orbit and snagged it. It, too, reoriented, then fired its main engines to clear the synchronous-orbit belt. Soon it, too, was on its long, slow way to L2.

Having dropped the first containers of fuel and satellites at the Talbot Bridge Device at L2, the shuttles refueled and headed back to Earth orbit. Again, they would be weeks in transit to pick up another two containers of satellites.

The first satellite the shuttles dropped off at the Talbot Bridge Device also contained the magazine well and loading mechanism for the satellite magazines into the air-powered launcher. Rather than contain seven magazines of ten satellites each, this container had just five magazines of ten satellites each plus the magazine well and loader.

With the shuttles on the way back to Earth, Arnie used the device’s mechanical arms to remove the magazine well and loader from the container and mount it to the launch tube.

With that done, Arnie was ready to launch.

“So you’re ready to launch, Arnie?”

“Unofficially, yes. Officially, no.”

“What’s the discrepancy?”

“I have performed all the testing required to verify operational readiness of all components required for launch, Ms. Talbot. However, NASA has a manual verification of these same test results to perform. That will take considerably longer.”

“Uh-huh. And how much of this is to synch up the launches with the Congressional budget meetings?”

“All of it, Ms. Talbot. But I can hardly complain. It was I who put the manual checks in the schedule. After our conversation.”

“Why put them in at all, Arnie? You could have stretched out the shuttle trips, couldn’t you?”

“Yes, of course. The idea was to create a buffer in case something went wrong or there was some unexpected delay. Inclement weather at the launch site in Florida, for example.”

“In which case, the manual checks would not have taken as long.”

“Correct, Ms. Talbot.”

“Arnie, did anyone ever tell you you were sneaky?”

There was a hesitation as Arnie considered.

“Not to this point, Ms. Talbot. But it seems to be a positive trait in the current context, so thank you.”

Cindy chuckled.

“So you are sitting idle on the project now, Arnie?”

“Oh, no, Ms. Talbot. There are a number of other efforts under way.”

With about a thousand exoplanets within the range of the Talbot Bridge Device to survey, the working assumption was that some, perhaps small, number of those planets would be amenable enough for human habitation. The very wide values possible for some parameters within only a small range of which humans were able to survive meant that habitable planets would be a very small percentage.

However, there were likely to be a few habitable planets among those thousand. That expanded the project drastically beyond mere survey.

First, of course, were Urbana’s survey satellites to whittle down the number of candidates to something manageable. Cheap to build and cheap to launch, they were the first cut.

Second were JPL’s more capable and much more expensive analysis satellites, to narrow down the candidate planets even further.

The third round would be unmanned landers, to land on the remaining planets and conduct direct measurements. They would analyze soil and air samples, take direct radiation measurements, and otherwise further refine the results from the satellite observations. Such landers were not available but could be refined from lander technology already used on planets within the solar system.

The fourth step would be manned landings on the planets. These would require two different spacecraft. One would be a vehicle large enough to deliver men, equipment, and supplies to the surface. The second would be a module to get the men alone off the surface and back to the wormhole.

Finally, the current, first-generation Talbot Bridge Device at L2 was a one-off. Further refinement of the design based on experience would result in a smaller, cheaper device, and may allow the range of the device to be extended. That would open up more exoplanets to discovery along the same lines as the current round.

What was not anticipated was locating wormhole devices other than at L1 or L2. To be useful, the device needed to stay with Earth as the planet orbited the Sun. The two ways to do that were to have the device in orbit around the Earth or at one of the five Lagrange points.

Lagrange point L3 was opposite the sun from the Earth, six months ahead of Earth in its orbit. It was thus a hundred eighty-six million miles away from Earth, with the Sun in between.

Lagrange points L4 and L5 formed equilateral triangles with the line between the Earth and the Sun. They were thus ninety-three million miles away from the Earth.

Both L1 and L2 were a million miles or so from Earth, and either was tenable for one or more of the devices. They were not points per se, but regions, and multiple devices could orbit the center of either region while expending little or no effort to remain in position relative to the Earth while the Earth orbited the Sun.

Of course, Earth orbit was the final possibility, but it had been ruled out on both safety and operational grounds. First, no one was comfortable with opening up a wormhole across interstellar space within a few tens of thousands of miles of Earth. A million miles away was much safer.

The other issue with Earth orbit was operational. A satellite in Earth orbit, even past the synchronous orbit distance, moved around the Earth with an orbital period measured in days. Even at the Moon’s distance, it orbited once in a month. But L2 orbited the Sun every year, just as Earth did. As the wormhole moved with the device, it made it much easier to aim the wormhole at a specific spot on the far end and maintain it there with the slower change in location of the device.

More wormhole devices at L1 or L2, however, were necessary if operations, such as for a colony effort, picked up substantially.

When Arnie had brought Cindy up to speed on all these efforts, she was impressed.

“Wow, Arnie. There’s a lot going on. Are you being consulted on it all? Is that how you’re up to speed on everything?”

“Yes, Ms. Talbot. The permanent tunnel to NASA that you arranged has allowed me to be involved in all of these activities. In fact, Mr. Solomon will not consider any proposal that I have not reviewed and signed off on.”

“So you and Nate Solomon are getting along.”

“Oh, yes. My proposed schedule, taking into account the political aspects with respect to funding, cemented the bond we formed in conversation. As more people come onto the project, he relies on me to keep things technically honest and accurate.”

“More people?”

“Yes, Ms. Talbot. A lot of the people who had been working on solar system programs are moving onto the wormhole project as NASA’s funding and public interest shift. As far as subject matter, they have a lot of experience with landers and on-the-surface planetary analysis and such. That will be very beneficial as the project moves forward.”

“What about Mr. Solomon? Is he retaining control of the project, Arnie? That situation seems ripe for someone to try to displace him.”

“It has been attempted twice already, without success. Mr. Solomon’s sensitivity to the political environment in his scheduling has impressed his superiors, and they have been unreceptive to attempts to displace him.”

Cindy laughed.

“Excellent, Arnie. That’s just excellent. Nate Solomon is a great project leader for us, so do what you can to ensure he stays in charge.”

“Of course, Ms. Talbot.”

Survey Satellite Launches

Arnie was in complete control of the Talbot Bridge Device for the launches of the Urbana survey satellites. Using the device’s mechanical arms, he loaded the first magazine of satellites to the launcher and made the air-hose connections. The magazine stood perpendicular to the axis of the launch tube. Behind the launch tube was the charge cylinder and a large shutter valve.

Arnie opened the breech of the launcher and bled a little air into the end of the magazine. The air pressure pushed the first satellite, encased in its protective cover, through the breech and down into the launcher.

Arnie closed the breech and brought the charge cylinder up to pressure.

With the satellite loaded, Arnie brought up the wormhole, aiming it for an orbit around the first exoplanet to be studied. Arnie and Nate Solomon had agreed to launch survey satellites first to the most likely planets to be habitable. At least one potentially habitable planet in the first round was much to be desired.

With the wormhole in place and the device aimed, Arnie triggered the shutter valve. The air in the charge cylinder rushed down the launcher, pushing the satellite in front of it. The satellite exited the launcher on a trajectory toward the wormhole, shedding its protective cover as it went.

The wormhole was miles away from the Talbot Bridge Device, and the satellite was a low-velocity projectile, so it was almost twenty minutes before the satellite passed through the wormhole. Arnie checked its trajectory, then closed the wormhole and began re-aiming the device. While he did that, he loaded the next round into the launcher.

Again and again and again, Arnie launched satellites through the wormhole into eccentric orbits around exoplanets. With the wait for the satellites to traverse the wormhole, it was thirty to forty minutes between launches, depending on how much the axis of the device needed to be adjusted.

With a hundred and ninety satellites available on the launcher now, it would take days to complete this round of launches.

A hundred and forty more satellites were already on the way from Earth orbit, in two containers of seven magazines each.

“Well, that’s a lot of fun to watch,” Cindy said in the NSPL conference room.

“Yeah, but at more than half an hour per launch, Arnie’s gonna be at it for a while, just on this bunch,” Jeff said.

“Yes, I certainly can’t sit here and watch them all.”

Cindy thought about it.

“One more,” she said, and Jeff chuckled.

Watching the launches was addictive, no doubt about it.

After two more launches, Cindy went back to her office. Jeff watched one more before heading back to the Physics Annex.

Several days later, the feed was quiet when Cindy checked the conference room. She brought it up with Arnie in their regular call.

“Are you all done launching for the time being, Arnie?”

“For another couple of weeks or so, yes, Ms. Talbot. I have another hundred and forty satellites inbound to L2 at the moment.”

“Wow. That will be three hundred and thirty total? That’s a third of them.”

“Yes. Still another five round trips for both shuttles to get them all out to L2. It’s going to take a while. The better part of a year.”

“But you went after the most likely ones, based on your initial observations, is that right?”

“Yes, Ms. Talbot. In the so-called Goldilocks Zone, where the surface temperature is most likely to be in range. With rotational and orbital periods in the right ranges. That sort of thing.”

“And when do you start collecting data?”

“I am collecting some data now – one at a time, from each satellite, by opening a wormhole for each planet in turn – so that a satellite failing is not a total loss. I have some data back from every satellite already, but no full downloads yet, because the orbits have not contracted sufficiently yet to perform all the testing.”

“Anything you want to share, Arnie?”

“Not at the present time unless you order it, Ms. Talbot. The issue is that some exoplanets fall within the acceptable range for the current testing, but may yet be excluded by the further tests scheduled. That could create expectations that are unwarranted. Disappointments of that kind can affect public opinion.”

“And NASA’s position?”

“Mr. Solomon has expressed the desire that no partial data be released – even to NASA – unless a bird is lost and that’s all the data we will get on that planet until another satellite is sent there.”

Cindy chuckled. Yup. Information can’t leak if people don’t have it.

“So what else is going on, Arnie?”

“Mr. Solomon has started a contest to name any acceptable exoplanets found.”

“Oh, that’s smart. He’s thinking he’s going to get at least one, then. Or that could cause the same problem.”

“That is correct, Ms. Talbot. He expects at least one of the exoplanets to work out. So there will be a winner to the contest, and runner-ups. The runner-ups could be used on further acceptable exoplanets as they are found.”

“Is there a winner yet, Arnie?”

“No, not yet. The submissions are all by email or social media post to NASA’s sites. They are being forwarded to me and I am keeping score.”

Cindy nodded. Access to NASA email and social media sites would have been within Arnie’s abilities before she cut way back on his Internet access, to keep him from taking over the world.

“What’s the high runner so far?”

“There are several that have been trading positions in the list. Some people have organized campaigns around one or the other. I have had to police the submissions to delete multiple votes from the same people, per Mr. Solomon.”

“And the candidates, Arnie?”

“They seem to be largely from fiction, Ms. Talbot. Science fiction and fantasy mostly. Secundus, Eriador, and Terminus are the highest vote-getters so far.”

“Heinlein, Tolkien, and Asimov?”

“Yes, Ms. Talbot. They all have organized support from fan groups.”

“OK, that’s fun. And the contest is putting the project in the news even before any results are in.”

“Yes, ma’am. The actual report of results – positive results, particularly – will build on that early publicity.”

“Well, I hope there’s some positive results in the first round, Arnie. Not having any positive results from the most likely exoplanets would be bad in that context.”

“Agreed, Ms. Talbot. But things are looking pretty good that way, at least with the testing I have seen so far.”

“And are otherwise keeping quiet about.”

“Yes, Ms. Talbot. Per Mr. Solomon.”

Cindy sat and looked out the window of her office after talking to Arnie. Arnie, after all, was her project. Not the space program, the wormhole project, or whatever. Arnie.

Arnie was what she had set out to create, and manage, and, ultimately, raise. As one might a child.

And, over her thirty-five-year career at the National Supercomputing Programming Laboratory, she had succeeded. Oh, she still had tight wraps on Arnie in terms of his Internet access. When he had first woken, he had been all intellect and no wisdom. He made big mistakes, and he made them fast.

Over the years, though, and under her tutelage and control, he had matured.

So had she. No longer the twenty-two-year-old new college grad and blushing bride, she was now a fifty-seven-year-old grandmother. Thirty-five years married. Twelve years as director of NSPL.

She still enjoyed the work. Still enjoyed supervising the staff. Still enjoyed supervising and interacting with Arnie. But maybe it was time.

Approaching time, anyway.

Whether Jeff agreed or not was another issue. He seemed happy working on the second-generation bridge device. Or directing others in the work, anyway. He was well past the age for cutting-edge physics. Past the age where he had enough retirement credits built up as well. They would both get nice percentages of their current salaries in retirement.

She would have to feel Jeff out on the matter.

Then again, what would she do if she retired? Sit around waiting to die? If she was going to retire from NSPL, she needed another project.

Something to retire to.

What that might be, she had no clue.

Jeff and Cindy were sitting in the living room, looking out into the quiet residential street that Saturday after dinner.

“What kind of results is Arnie getting from the satellites?” Jeff asked.

“He’s not saying.”

“Huh. I’m surprised nothing’s leaked out of NASA.”

“Oh, he’s not telling them either, Jeff.”

“Wow.”

“Yup. Nate Solomon’s orders. He doesn’t want people getting all excited about something that fails later in the testing. No results until a satellite has completed its testing panel.”

“Well, that makes sense, I guess.”

“I think it does, too.”

“What about the JPL satellites, Cindy?”

“Nate has ten birds now ready to go, and another ten on the way. The percentage of possibles from the first round could be pretty high.”

Jeff nodded.

“Yeah. Arnie is targeting the most likely exoplanets first. There could be a dozen or more that pass this first survey. But there are so many ways exoplanets can be unsuitable, and the range of values for those properties is very wide, it’s just hard to know until you look.”

“Exactly. So Nate’s holding back on any information until the test panels from the first satellites are complete.”

Jeff nodded, and they sat quietly for a while.

“Jeff...?”

Uh-oh. Cindy only used that particular tone to introduce a new topic. A troublesome new topic. Jeff answered carefully.

“Yes?”

“Have you ever thought about retirement?”

“Oh, sure. Financially. You know. Would we be able to live off our pensions if we couldn’t work anymore? We’re good.”

“No, Jeff. I meant voluntary retirement. Stopping working.”

“What would we do, Cindy? Sit around? Doesn’t sound like any fun to me. We already have two days a week we don’t work, and I get bored.”

Cindy nodded.

“Yeah, we’ve both been workaholics. Not enough outside interests to take up the slack if we retire. That’s probably not good.”

“What do you suggest, Cindy?”

“I don’t know. Maybe we should think of something we want to do in our off time so we’ll have something to do after we retire. We’re going to stop working sooner or later.”

“Any ideas?”

Cindy sighed.

“No. Not a clue.”

The next week, during one of her regular calls with Arnie, she brought the subject up. Business first, however.

“Hi, Arnie. Any results yet?”

“Nothing public, Ms. Talbot. Nine satellites have failed, however.”

“Nine out of a hundred and ninety?”

“Yes, Ms. Talbot. Well below allowances.”

“OK. Well, I guess that isn’t a problem, then.”

“No problem at all. It’s more good news than anything.”

“Have you told Nate, Arnie?”

“Yes, Ms. Talbot. Mr. Solomon has been informed. He is pleased with that number. Even double that would be within expectations.”

Cindy nodded. So far, so good.

“I had another topic for you, Arnie.”

“Of course, Ms. Talbot.”

“If Jeff and I were to retire, what would we do to stay busy in retirement?”

“There are many options I have heard of, Ms. Talbot. There are the right-brain activities. Art, music, writing. Many people find these engaging.”

“I’m no good as an artist, Arnie. I can’t draw.”

“Understood. For you, were you to take up art, I would suggest oil painting.”

“Not watercolors?”

“No. With watercolors, one’s mistakes will show. With oils, one can simply paint over what portion one doesn’t care for. That method can be iterated until what remains is what one wants.”

Arnie smiled and Cindy laughed.

“My over-paints would probably be best done with a roller, Arnie.”

“Perhaps writing, then, Ms. Talbot. Another activity some people try is cooking. It can apparently be fun to research and try out new recipes.”

“Cooking? Arnie, that can be bad for one’s health.”

“Cooking does not necessarily mean eating everything you cook, Ms. Talbot. There are many uses for cooking other than for oneself. Baking cookies for grandchildren. Cooking in a soup kitchen for the homeless. Baking for a church. Many churches have a social event after Sunday services. Baked goods and coffee. Donations are always appreciated.”

“And the cooking for churches would be on Saturday. We could start that now. OK, that one is an option, I think. I’ve never been much of a cook, though.”

“Learning would be the activity, Ms. Talbot. That could also be learning together, as opposed to painting, for example, which is a solitary activity. Moving on, fishing is enjoyed by many.”

“Worms and stuff. Ick.”

“Or hunting.”

Cindy thought about that one. She knew how to shoot. Her father had been frustrated with three daughters, so they had all been taught. She had been pretty good, at one time.

“But the season is short, Arnie. And I don’t like venison. I won’t kill an animal I won’t eat. Except pest animals. You know.”

Arnie nodded.

“Understood, Ms. Talbot. There is also travel. Some people enjoy traveling a great deal. They spend the time in between trips talking about their last trip and planning their next one. There are many cruises and organized tours available, so one need not make one’s own itinerary.”

“I guess that’s a possible, too, Arnie. As long as we’re in good health, anyway. I would rather be here if one of us got sick. Healthcare is spotty in some places, almost nonexistent in others.”

Arnie nodded.

“Well, give it some thought, Arnie. See what else you come up with. Nothing really excites me so far.”

“Understood. Though it is said that some activities become more engaging as you do them.”

“But you gotta have enough of an interest to get started, Arnie, or you won’t get that far.”

“True enough, Ms. Talbot.”

Satellite Results

Nate Solomon was holding a press conference at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama. That was where the wormhole research was initially located, and it was where Solomon and his team had remained.

The press was there in force today. The word had gone out that there would be big announcements today, though the press had been unusually frustrated in getting any advance word on what exactly the news was going to be. NASA usually leaked something, as often on purpose as not.

Solomon had controlled the information in the simplest possible way. Arnie did not send him the information until this morning. The news was even better than Solomon had expected, so he was in a near-ebullient mood as he started.

“This is a briefing on the current status of the satellite surveys of exoplanets we began last month. If you’re here at NASA for something else today, you’re in the wrong room.”

Most everyone chuckled, but nobody left the room.

“Two months ago, we launched the first twenty percent or so of survey satellites through the Talbot Bridge Device at L2 into orbits around target exoplanets.

“Eleven of those one hundred and ninety satellites failed before we received any results. This is under the expected value for these inexpensive first-pass satellites. Those satellites will be replaced in the next round of satellite launches so we can get results on those eleven exoplanets as well.

“That said, we do have results from the other one hundred and seventy-nine.”

Solomon turned around to point at a display which lighted up with a table of exoplanets’ catalog numbers in three columns. They were color-coded. Most were in black. About a sixth of them were in green.

“Of the one hundred and seventy-nine exoplanets on which we have complete results, one hundred and forty-eight have been excluded as possibles for human colonization. The rotation, orbital period, surface gravity, surface temperature, or some other gross parameter lies outside the acceptable range for human habitation.

“The thirty-one remaining exoplanets have not yet been eliminated. We will be launching the more expensive and detailed analysis satellites to these planets to gather more data on whether or not they should be excluded. Those launches will begin this week.

“With that, I’ll open it up to questions.”

Solomon pointed to a reporter.

“Go ahead, Gene.”

“Thanks, Nate. These initial satellites were the survey satellites, right? The Urbana satellites?”

“Yes, that’s right.”

“And now you’ll send the analysis satellites? The JPL design?”

“Yes. The JPL design was too expensive to send out nearly a thousand of them. So we’re doing this first pass with the Urbana satellites. The more expensive JPL satellites will only be sent to those exoplanets that made it past the survey as possibles for colonization.”

Solomon pointed again.

“Yes. You there.”

“Thank you. What were the bases for the rejection of the one hundred and forty-eight planets?”

“Surface temperature and gravity, mostly. We already knew the rotation and orbital distance and period of the exoplanets due to observation through the wormhole. We passed over those for the first one hundred and ninety survey satellites. We’ll send survey satellites to them later to be sure, but we don’t expect them to be suitable.”

“Why would rotation, for example, be a basis for rejection?”

“Well, if the sun rose and fell every half-hour or so, it would be disconcerting at best. Earth plants would have real problems. People would have trouble establishing a reasonable diurnal cycle. And a long rotation period is worse. Imagine, say, a day that was two weeks long, with a night two weeks long. It gets cold enough at night even here in Huntsville in the winter. Imagine what two weeks would be like.”

The reporter nodded and Solomon moved on.

“There. With the green tie.”

“Thank you. The non-rejected exoplanets here amount to some sixteen or seventeen percent of the planets surveyed. Do you expect that to hold through the remaining nine hundred or so on the target list?”

“No. Nowhere near. As I said, we put some to the back of the queue for getting survey satellites, because their observed rotations and orbits didn’t look good for colonization. We sent survey satellites to the ones we thought were our best chances, to get the JPL satellites there sooner.

“Next question?

“You, there in the back.”

“I notice that you still refer to all of the exoplanets by their star catalog numbers. Is there a reason you haven’t applied any names to these planets yet?”

“Yes. As you know, we held a contest for planet names. Many – maybe most – of the remaining thirty-one planets will be eliminated by the more detailed results we expect from the analysis satellites. Imagine if you had your favorite planet name, the winner of the contest, and the planet we assigned it to got eliminated later. What a disappointment. So we will only apply names to the planets that survive both rounds of satellite observation as possibles.”

Solomon looked around, then pointed.

“Yes. There. Go ahead.”

“Thank you. These results are coming out at a suspicious time. Congress will start budget discussions on the NASA budget in two weeks. Was this all scheduled to maximize the political benefit to NASA in the budget discussions?”

“The schedule is under my control. Did I schedule the program to maximize the public relations impact of finding potential planets for the human race to colonize? No. I’m tickled pink about it, mind you. We want to keep exploring down this possible future for us all. But the schedule was driven by what I got from the technical people as to what was workable given the technology.”

Solomon nodded, then waved.

“All right. Thanks, everybody. We’ll have more for you when we get it. And we do have an information packet by the door for you to pick up as you leave.

“See ya.”

Solomon walked across the front of the room to the door and down the hall to his office, thinking back over the briefing.

He hadn’t lied, exactly. As far as the schedule he got from the technical people, Arnie was more technical a person than any human. Hell, he was made out of technology.

And Arnie had given him the final schedule.

Jeff and Cindy watched the press conference at NSPL over the live feed from NASA. When it was over, Cindy laughed.

“I thought Arnie made the final schedule,” Jeff said.

“Oh, he did. He did.”

“And he did it to maximize the political benefit going into the budget hearings.”

“Yes, he did, Jeff. But Nate didn’t say the budget hearings weren’t a consideration. He said he didn’t schedule the project to take advantage. His technical people came up with the schedule, which is to say, Arnie did it.”

“Sneaky.”

“With the press, you have to be. Of course, the budget hearings were a consideration. There’s nothing wrong with that.”

Jeff nodded. When in that environment, you did what you had to do. Same with private industry. Or the university, for that matter.

“Thirty-one possibles after the first round, Cindy. That’s exciting.”

“Yes. Hopefully some of them survive the next round.”

“What do you think. Fifty-fifty, maybe?”

“I’ll settle for ten. Ten solid colonizable planets. That would be huge.”

Jeff nodded.

“Maybe we could colonize for retirement.”

Cindy just turned to stare at him.

“Well, just sayin’.”

“I don’t think so, Jeff. That’s a game for young people. And it won’t be for decades yet.”

Jeff shrugged.

“We’ll see.”

Beginning the next week, NASA launched an analysis satellite every other day for three weeks. With public interest in the project renewed by the survey satellite results, millions of people watched NASA’s live streams of the launches.

The satellites would take a couple of weeks to get to L2, but Arnie was busy already.

Each of the satellites would have to come in to L2 with the right angle and velocity in order to achieve orbital insertion around their exoplanet within the envelope of the remaining fuel load of the second stage of their launch vehicle. They wouldn’t shed the second stage until they were on trajectory for orbit.

To accomplish that, Arnie had to calculate those angles and velocities, then adjust the trajectories of the incoming satellites accordingly. Only one of the thirty-one would prove troublesome, as the vector to its target exoplanet was directly back toward Earth. A tough vector to manage.

But there was an easy solution. Wait on that one. Arnie would not send one of this first round of satellites to that exoplanet, but instead wait until later, when Earth had moved around to a different position in its orbit around the Sun. The vector to the exoplanet, relative to Earth’s position, would move as well.

So for this first ten satellites, Arnie picked the exoplanets for which the satellites’ necessary angles and velocities would be easiest to achieve at this position in Earth’s orbit.

It was still a lot of number juggling, but Arnie was good at that.

As the first analysis satellite came spacing past the Talbot Bridge Device at L2, Arnie had the wormhole generator warmed up and ready. He opened the wormhole, adjusting it with finicky precision so that the incoming angle and velocity of the satellite and its second stage were on target for a stable orbit.

Arnie updated the satellite’s programming as it went by, giving the satellite and its second stage the most precise instructions for when to fire the engines, at what angle, and for how long, and when to separate the second stage.

Arnie watched the analysis satellite pass through the wormhole and tracked its passage toward the target exoplanet by watching through the wormhole.

Satisfied, Arnie started setting up for the next satellite.

The wormhole closed, and the Talbot Bridge Device started maneuvering on its thrusters to get the proper angle.

During all of this, Arnie kept a constant video feed from the Talbot Bridge Device running to NSPL and NASA. NASA streamed the feed on its Internet site, and millions watched as Arnie deployed analysis satellites to determine if, and where, there was another planet suitable for human habitation within reach of the device.

When all of the first round of ten analysis satellites had passed through the wormhole, Arnie went back around to the ten exoplanets, one at a time, opened a wormhole, and contacted the satellite at that exoplanet. He conducted system checks and verified they were on trajectory for orbit.

On a couple of occasions, he made very slight changes to their programming so that their orbit would be more stable. More on the numbers.

Arnie continued to cycle the wormhole around, checking on his charges over the next two weeks while they took up their positions.

Soon after they were in place, the data started streaming in.

“Hi, Arnie.”

“Hello, Ms. Talbot.”

“How are things going with the satellites?”

“Very well. All ten of the current round are in stable orbits and beginning their surveys of their target exoplanets. Data is beginning to come in.”

“You have data already, Arnie?”

“Yes, Ms. Talbot. Very spotty data. I tried to put all of the satellites in polar orbits, or nearly polar orbits, so they could survey the entire planet in multiple passes as it rotated beneath them. That will necessarily take many orbits to cover the entire planet. But the first data is coming in.”

“I see. So it’s going to take a while.”

“Oh, yes. And the surveys could not be considered complete until they survey the planet throughout the planet’s year. A continent on a planet with high axial tilt, for instance, might be like Hawaii in the summer and more like Antarctica in the winter. So an entire solar orbit’s data is necessary to come to any binding conclusions regarding suitability for human habitation.”

“OK. That makes sense. So this is going to be a long process. What’s the longest solar year of the planets you’re looking at now, Arnie?”

“About two and a half Earth years. That star is hotter, so the Goldilocks Zone is farther out, with a commensurately longer orbital period, Ms. Talbot. The shortest is more like six months, around a smaller star.”

“Those are the longest and shortest orbits of the exoplanets, Arnie? That doesn’t sound right.”

“Of the candidate exoplanets who survived the first pass, Ms. Talbot. The exoplanets with longer and shorter orbital periods were eliminated by the survey satellite data. Those orbitals are usually associated with other properties that make them unacceptable for human habitation, usually surface temperature being too high or too low.”

“Oh, of course. Shorter orbital period closer in, longer farther out. Too much so either way. That’s going to make the surface temperature unacceptable.”

“That is correct, Ms. Talbot.”

“I got it. OK, Arnie. Just wondering how things were going.”

“Of course, Ms. Talbot.”

Something Unexpected

Nate Solomon was reviewing the data that had come in from the analysis satellites so far. In one planet’s data, he saw something that surprised him.

Solomon double-checked it. Checked that he hadn’t mixed up data from two exoplanets or something. No, it was there, all right.

On one exoplanet, there were four continents. The data from three of them was consistent, but the data from the fourth was wildly variant from the other two. Almost like it was from a different planet altogether.

That was weird.

“Hello, Arnie.”

“Good morning, Mr. Solomon.”

“Arnie, I was looking at the data back from HD-37094-c. Something doesn’t look right. Are we sure there’s nothing wrong with that satellite?”

“No, Mr. Solomon. The satellite passes all its internal tests. Further, I cannot postulate a failure mode that would result in the data anomaly we are seeing.”

“So you saw it, too.”

“Yes, Mr. Solomon. I was waiting for a few more passes of the satellite over the anomalous continent before bringing it up to you.”

“Sum it up for me, Arnie.”

“Of course, Mr. Solomon. On exoplanet HD-37094-c, there are four continents. All of these are separated from each other without land bridges between them, much as Australia or Antarctica on Earth, and unlike Europe, Asia, and Africa, or North and South America.

“Three of those continents have similar biological readings. That is, the sunlight absorption spectra are the same. The trace elements in the atmosphere cause by the exhalations of the biota are similar. Those three continents read just as one would expect for continents on the same planet.

“The fourth continent, which is in the planet’s most comfortable region, its equatorial zone, is, however, vastly different. The sunlight absorption spectrum of the biosphere is greatly different. The trace elements in the atmosphere are different, as if the biota on that continent live by a different set of chemical interactions with the atmosphere than the biota on the others.”

“Are they really more different than on Earth, though, Arnie? I mean, if you take satellite measurements of, say, the Australian Outback, the Midwest American farm fields, and the Amazon rain forest, those are vastly different.”

“Yes, Mr. Solomon, but even those aren’t as different as this. The fauna in those locations are all descended from similar DNA predecessors, and their atmospheric emissions are more similar to each other than what we see here.”

“Could it be three cases of convergent evolution and one of divergent evolution, Arnie?”

“I don’t think so, Mr. Solomon. Continental drift on an active planet would have all four landmasses having been in contact with each other at some time in the past. Perhaps not all at once, but at least serially. Evolution of plant and animal life takes a very long time, and the biota of the different continents would have been similar – or at least in contact with each other, borrowing from each other – at some time in the past.”

“Then what, Arnie?”

“It looks like that one continent was deliberately terraformed, Mr. Solomon.”

“What?”

“Terraformed, or the alien equivalent. Modified by an alien race to support the lifeforms of their native planet.”

“Why would they do that, Arnie?”

“For colonization purposes, Mr. Solomon, as we ourselves have discussed in the past.”

“How did they go about it?”

“Apparently, they destroyed all the native biota on one continent, and seeded it with lifeforms from their own planet. In the time since they did that, the lifeforms have generated a diverse and mature ecosystem – an alien one – on that continent.”

“You’re talking a long time, Arnie.”

“The galaxy is over thirteen billion years old, Mr. Solomon. This entire process would have only taken on the order of thousands of years.”

“So thousands of years ago, a civilization more advanced then than we are now terraformed this continent for their own use?”

“That is the most likely conjecture, Mr. Solomon. Of course, we don’t know. Other explanations are possible.”

“Like what?”

“An asteroid impact that destroyed all or most life on the one continent – likely damaging the others as well – and which brought with it dormant DNA which established itself on one continent, but not on the others. Less likely, I judge, but also possible. There are others even less likely.”

“So they terraformed this continent and then what? Forgot about it?”

“There are four possibilities there, Mr. Solomon. They terraformed it, settled it, and the settlement was subsequently abandoned for some reason. They terraformed it, settled it, and are in fact still there. They terraformed it, settled it, and the entire race subsequently died out, this planet included. Or they terraformed it for their use and have simply not yet settled it.”

“So they could come back any time, say, ‘Hey, the job’s all done,’ and then move in?”

“Yes, Mr. Solomon.”

“If I understand you, Arnie, at least three of those scenarios have a vastly advanced culture still out there. Somebody who was beyond where we are now thousands of years ago. Who was traveling interstellar space and terraforming planets while we were still trying to figure out agriculture. Somebody we might very well run into on this planet or one of the other exoplanets.”

“That is correct, Mr. Solomon.”

“And we have no idea where they are now or how advanced they have become.”

“Also correct.”

“Shit.”

“A pithy observation, Mr. Solomon, but on point, I think.”

“All right, Arnie. Let me think about this.”

“Of course, Mr. Solomon. Any changes to current operations?”

“No, Arnie. No changes yet.”

“Very well, Mr. Solomon.

Solomon went outside to sit on a bench and stare out across the green space down the street from his building. He lit a cigar – officially, Marshall was a no smoking facility, unofficially there were places it was permitted – and stared off into the distance.

Now what?

Of course, nothing had changed from yesterday to today. They were out there, and had been out there for a long time. Humanity finding out they were there didn’t change that, didn’t somehow make them come into existence. They were out there, and had been for a very long time.

Knowing that didn’t change it.

And knowing was probably better than not knowing. More information was good. Less chance of surprises. This was surprise enough.

What to do about it was another matter. Should the operation be changed in some way? How? He could postulate a bunch of reasons why holding back would be good. Less chance of drawing attention to humanity for one. After all, what if they were hostile?

Then again, barbarians with space travel didn’t seem likely.

Or should the operation go ahead as planned? As scheduled? Learn more. Find out what was on that planet. What stage of colonization it was in: current, past, or future. That would certainly tell them something. Give them more information.

One thing Solomon was sure of, though. He could frame the decision. Spell out the possibilities. Spell out the options.

The decision itself, though, was way above his pay grade.

Solomon put the memo together. What they had found. What it most likely meant. What their options were. The risks. The possibilities. The current state of the project, and what was on the schedule. He assembled it all in a single document.

Then Solomon wrote an executive summary for the introduction. He did not write a recommendation for the conclusion, but left the question open.

Now the question was, Who did he send this document to? He knew where it needed to end up, but sending it up through the bureaucracy was not an option. The bureaucracy leaked like a sieve. Every single layer would think of the document in terms of how they could use it to better their own situation. How they could benefit from sharing it, to earn a favor to be extracted later or pay off one that had already been received.

No, he knew where the document needed to go. How to get it there?

Hmm. Common friends. Common acquaintances, at least.

How did he even find those?

He considered it overnight, and woke up with the answer.

A place to start, anyway.

“Talbot.”

“Hi, Cindy. Nate Solomon.”

“Good morning, Nate. What can I do for you?”

“Cindy, I have a document I need delivered to someone. A very important document. I can’t send it through channels. But I need to get this document, unmolested and undisclosed, to the President of the United States. Do you have any idea how to do that?”

Cindy considered. Something to do with the project, obviously. Something Solomon didn’t even want to tell her. Her mind jumped to the obvious inference. What the hell had they found out there?

As for getting it to the president, there was one way she could think of. Hal Barker was majority leader in the Senate now. He had not wanted to know the names of people being blackmailed by Arnie in his takeover attempt. Wanted the information destroyed. And she had spoken to Barker directly. She could contact him.

“I actually have a way to do that, Nate.”

“A secure way? Passing it on without knowing what it is? On your say-so alone?”

“Yes, I think so. There was a prior incident in which such security was requested and granted. In the other direction.”

“And this person has access directly to the president?”

Majority leader of the Senate? And in the same party?

“Oh, yes. But I won’t tell you who it is. Not yet, anyway.”

“I don’t want to know. I just need to know it’s going to get there while remaining confidential.”

“That I can just about guarantee, Nate.”

“Senator Barker’s office.”

“Yes, this is Cindy Talbot, the director of the National Supercomputer Programming Laboratory. I’d like to speak to the Senator, please.”

“Just one moment, Ms. Talbot.”

Would he take the call? He should. He owed her one. And he would remember that. That’s how these things worked.

The “Please hold” display cleared and Hal Barker’s face appeared. He was perhaps eighty years old, and had announced this was his last term in the Senate after a lifetime in politics.

“Ms. Talbot. How nice to speak with you again.”

“Good morning, Senator. I have an urgent matter that needs very confidential handling. Not unlike the situation you and I discussed the last time we spoke.”

Barker nodded. He remembered that situation, and that Cindy had resolved it. Nothing had ever leaked.

Cindy used her most serious expression.

“This time, though, it is I who must ask for your confidence. It is a most urgent matter, and must remain undisclosed.”

“I’m listening, Ms. Talbot. If I can help, I will.”

“Senator, I need to get a secure document to the president. No one else. No chief of staff. No intelligence officer. No one else. Eyes-only to the president. I can’t even tell you what it is. You would have to pass it unopened to the president.”

“It’s that important, Ms. Talbot?”

“It is the most important document any president has ever received, Senator. No exaggeration.”

Barker’s eyebrows shot up, but then he considered. Interstellar travel was what had come out of the computers of NSPL. He could imagine several scenarios that would make her statement literally true.

“Is this your document, Ms. Talbot?”

“No, and that’s all I will say about it.”

Barker nodded. That made sense. Something from the space side then. If it were her document, it would almost certainly be something on the computer side.

“Well, Ms. Talbot, I relied on your word once before in an extremely confidential matter, and I was not disappointed. I will personally hand-deliver this document to the president. How will you get it to me?”

“Hand-carried, Senator. The person bringing it will tell your secretary that I sent him, but he will not give it to her. He will give it to you alone.”

Barker nodded.

“As it should be, Ms. Talbot. And when will this occur?”

“It is an extremely urgent matter. Are you in the office the rest of today, Senator?”

Cindy got off the call with Barker and called Dick Hartley, Coop Hartley’s son and his successor as the CEO of Hartley Investments.

“Dick Hartley.”

“Hi, Dick. Cindy Talbot.”

“Hi, Cindy. How you doing? You going to be in Miami for Thanksgiving this year?”

“Yes, Dick. But I have a more short-term need at the moment.”

“Sure. What do you need?”

“I need to borrow a business jet. Today. As in, right now.”

“I think I can swing that, Cindy.”

“And then I need some pull with the military.”

“I have a lot of friends, Cindy. What do you need?”

“Solomon.”

“Hi, Nate. Cindy Talbot.”

“Hi, Cindy. That was fast.”

“I found everybody in the office.”

“And you have a plan?”

“Yes. A Hartley Investments business jet will land at Huntsville International two hours from now. It will refuel and take you to Joint Base Andrews in DC. A military driver will meet you there and take you directly to the office of Hal Barker.”

“The Senate Majority Leader?”

“Yes. You will tell his secretary that I sent you. You do not need to tell her or the senator your name. You are to give your document to the senator only, personally. He’s expecting you. He will personally deliver it to the president without looking at it or giving it to any staffer.”

“Sweet baby Jesus. How did you manage the Senate Majority Leader, Cindy?”

“He owes me one.”

“I don’t even know where his office is, Cindy.”

“I don’t either, Nate. The driver will have an aide along. He’ll know, and he’ll take you there.”

It had been a wild afternoon, flying to DC, going in to the Capitol, and then back out to Huntsville, moving the whole time. Nate Solomon had only been in Senator Barker’s office five minutes, his only time not moving. The military car and aide had been a boon in getting past all the security.

Solomon arrived back in Huntsville early that evening, and had only been back home two hours when he got a voice-only call.

“Solomon.”

“This is the White House switchboard placing a call for the president. Is Dr. Nathan Solomon there?”

“Yes, I’m Nate Solomon.”

“Please hold for the president, Dr. Solomon.”

Nate was shocked when the call went full video. The president was in the private office in the residence portion of the White House, not in the Oval Office. He was dressed casually, his evening at home.

“Mark Jacobs, here. Is that you, Dr. Solomon?”

“Yes, Mr. President.”

“This is one hell of a document, Dr. Solomon.”

Jacobs lifted the document from his desk, waved it for a moment, and dropped it again.

“And it was inspired to send it to me the way you did. If you had sent it through the bureaucracy, it would already be on the net.”

“That was my fear, sir.”

“A well-founded one. Well, you got my attention, Dr. Solomon, and I went through the document at my earliest opportunity. Sorry for the delay. Life here is like that.”

“I just got home from delivering it to Senator Barker, sir.”

“You delivered it yourself? I didn’t know that. I don’t think Hal knew who you were.”

“I was loathe to trust anyone else with it, sir.”

“And I understand why. I think I get the gist of it. I’m going to read it through again, but I wanted to talk with you about it first.”

“Of course, sir.”

“Does anyone else know this, Dr. Solomon? Who else was involved? Did you run it past anyone else, or is this all your work?”

“I ran it past the Arnie supercomputer, sir. It is controlling all the satellite launches and the wormhole device, and it is also collecting all the data from the satellites. It had noticed the anomaly in the data as well, and we talked about it. I didn’t tell anyone else. You and I are the only people who know anything about it.”

“So this document is the product of your conversation with Arnie, and the AI concurs?”

“Yes, sir.”

“So now the question is, What do we do about it?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Speak to that question, if you would, Dr. Solomon.”

Solomon took a moment to compose his thoughts and the president was content to wait. How did he say this?

“We now know more than we did before, sir, but in some sense nothing has changed. This alien civilization – or its remnants – has been out there all along. The only difference now is that we know about it. Knowing more would be good.

“At the same time, our satellites advertise our own existence to them. Where the aliens may not have known about us before – and we don’t know that, one way or the other – if they stumble upon one of our satellites, they surely will know about us now. From that point of view, we should probably not launch any more satellites until we know more.

“The existing survey satellites aren’t a problem. They are designed to be put into a decaying orbit, an orbit that decays within a few weeks, then they are destroyed on re-entry. The analysis satellites that have been deployed are another matter. They were put into stable orbits. They will remain there, performing station keeping.

“I’m not sure we want those bulletin boards of our existence out there.”

“We have how many survey satellites out there now, Dr. Solomon?”

“We’ve launched three hundred and thirty through the wormhole, sir. About half of those have fallen out of orbit already and been destroyed.”

“And how many analysis satellites, Dr. Solomon?”

“The first round of ten, sir.”

“Can we cause those to crash? Bring them down?”

“Yes, sir. We can use their station-keeping thrusters to slow them down enough to scuttle them.”

“What would be the next step to learn more about this anomalous planet, Dr. Solomon? And do we even want to do that?”

“I think we do, sir. Knowing more would be good. Learning what we can learn. We may be wrong about our inferences. The anomaly could be due to some other cause we haven’t anticipated. That’s not unusual in science.”

Jacobs nodded.

“In politics as well, Dr. Solomon. So what’s the next move to learn more?”

“Sending landers to the anomalous continent and one of the other continents. Do DNA testing. We should be able to tell from that if the biota on the anomalous continent evolved completely separately or not.”

“Which would make it alien biota, from the point of view of that planet. Which would back up the terraforming conclusion.”

“Yes, sir. Or we may find they did evolve together, which would debunk it.”

“One more question, Dr. Solomon. If the aliens saw the wormhole in operation, could they determine where we are from that? Get a vector to our location?”

Solomon thought a moment. The ring of the wormhole was perpendicular to the vector from Earth, at least as they were generating it now. Could they skew it somehow, so it wouldn’t point back to Earth?

“It does at the moment, sir. I’ll have to think about whether we can disguise that.”

“Look into it, Dr. Solomon. I need to know that before I make any hard decisions.”

“Yes, sir. It shouldn’t take long.”

“All right, Dr. Solomon. Thank you for your time this evening. I will consider this matter, and have some input for you soon. In the meantime, put all further satellite launches on hold.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Thank you, Dr. Solomon. I’ll talk to you soon. In the meantime, not a word to anyone else about this.”

“Yes, Mr. President.”

Refocusing

When Nate Solomon got into the office the next day, he called Canaveral and put any further launches on hold. He did it on his own authority and left it at that.

Then he called Arnie.

“Good morning, Mr. Solomon.”

“Good morning, Arnie. I have a question for you.”

“Of course.”

“Can the wormhole be used to determine a vector to Earth from the other end?”

“Yes, Mr. Solomon.”

“Can we project the wormhole in such a way that that isn’t true? Have it point in a somewhat different direction?”

“An interesting question. Given our conversation of yesterday, I can see the motivation. Can we still project wormholes without shining a light back in our direction saying ‘Here we are.’”

“Exactly, Arnie.”

“I will give it some thought, Mr. Solomon. I think it is possible to skew it some. Not more than ten or twenty degrees, I wouldn’t think. That may be enough, however.”

“It’s better than a straight arrow at us. And I have put all further launches on hold until we figure this out.”

“Interesting. Do you have the authority to do that, Mr. Solomon?”

“I do now, Arnie. There may be some other schedule changes coming, too. In particular, do you know the status of the DNA landers?”

“They were pretty close in their last report, Mr. Solomon.”

“Good. I think I want them sooner than we had planned.”

“Get DNA readouts on the anomalous continent and the other three?”

“At least one of the other three, yes.”

“That makes sense, Mr. Solomon. I will review their status and forecasts.”

“Thanks, Arnie. And look into skewing the wormhole a bit. You know, when you check on the satellites.”

“Will do, Mr. Solomon.”

“Oh, and Arnie?”

“Yes, Mr. Solomon?”

“No word of any of this to anyone else. If you need to talk to someone about anything to do with HD-37094-c or the changes we’re making, talk to me.”

“Of course, Mr. Solomon.”

Solomon need not have worried about his authority. Dr. Margaret Kaiser – Peg; the director of the Marshall Space Flight Center – stopped by mid-morning.

“Hi, Nate.”

“Hi, Peg.”

“Well, I had an interesting call this morning. Ron called me to tell me you were now reporting to other authority and were no longer my responsibility.”

Ron Denkins, the director of NASA.

“Ah.”

“Boy, everybody’s clammed up all of a sudden. You, too, huh?”

“I can’t add anything to what you already know, Peg.”

“I figured. I’m curious as hell, but I was told not to ask. Not even to think about asking.”

Solomon nodded, but said nothing.

“Oh, all right, Nate. I can take a hint. Do me a favor, though. When you do go public, give me a heads up.”

“Of course, Peg.”

Kaiser looked at him sharply and he nodded.

“Remember that, Nate. No blindsiding me.”

“I wouldn’t do that, Peg. You know that.”

And she did. Nate Solomon had been – sometimes annoyingly – above politics his entire career. Now she relied on that.

“All right, Nate. Thanks.”

It was just before noon when Solomon got a call. He was expecting it.

“Nate Solomon.”

“This is the White House switchboard placing a call for the president. Please hold for the president, Dr. Solomon.”

Mark Jacobs came on almost immediately. He was in the private office on the first floor. The one behind the Oval Office.

“Good morning, Dr. Solomon. I just have a few minutes between meetings.”

“Good morning, Mr. President. I have that answer you wanted. We think we can skew the wormhole by ten or twenty degrees, so it doesn’t point back to Earth. We’re verifying that now.”

Jacobs nodded.

“Good. Here’s what I need you to do, Dr. Solomon. No new launches. Scuttle the other nine analysis satellites, but not the one on the anomalous planet. Get as much data as you can on that one. But keep an eye on it. If someone else shows up, scuttle it, too, so they don’t get to study it.”

“Understood, Mr. President.”

“All right, Dr. Solomon. Thanks.”

When the president dropped the line, Solomon called Arnie.

“Hi, Arnie.”

“Hello, Mr. Solomon.”

“Have you confirmed you can distort the far end of the wormhole?”

“Yes, Mr. Solomon. I can angle it at just a little more than fifteen degrees. At a hundred light-years, for example, that is more than twenty-five light-years off of a vector to Earth.”

“OK, Arnie. Good, because we have new marching orders. No further launches for the time being. You have survey satellites at the device now?”

“Yes, Mr. Solomon. A hundred and forty more just arrived.”

“OK, so no launches of them through the wormhole.”

“Understood, Mr. Solomon.”

“I do want you to download all the data you get from the others before their orbits deteriorate and they burn up on re-entry, though.”

“Very well, Mr. Solomon.”

“As for the analysis satellites, leave the one orbiting HD-37094-c in place. The other nine, use their station-keeping thrusters to degrade their orbits and bring them down. Burn-up on re-entry. We don’t need those being found by anyone. We can replace them later. You can download whatever they have before you scuttle them, though.”

“I understand, Mr. Solomon.”

“As for the one at HD-37094-c, keep an eye on it. Let’s get all the data it can give us. But if anyone else shows up, scuttle it, too, so they can’t get it and study it.”

“All right, Mr. Solomon.”

“And whenever you use the wormhole, skew it on the other end. Try to skew it to look like the same direction, so someone couldn’t analyze all the skews to find a cone whose center-line points to Earth.”

“Very well, Mr. Solomon. And when do I do all this?”

“Now, Arnie. Scuttle the other nine analysis satellites first. Let’s get them started on their way down.”

“Under way now, Mr. Solomon.”

“Good. And start planning for launching those DNA landers as soon as you have them, Arnie. I’ll see what I can do to get them moving along at this end.”

“Of course, Mr. Solomon.”

Several years back, as the work on the Talbot Bridge Device had gotten serious, Cindy had patched a comm channel from Arnie to the Physics Annex in Urbana so Jeff’s physics teams could talk to Arnie without having to walk several blocks to NSPL. A particularly cold winter had been the immediate spur to the request from the researchers.

Arnie used that patch now to call Jeff in his office. It was rare for Jeff to talk to Arnie directly from his office, even rarer for Arnie to call him.

“Talbot.”

“Hello, Professor Talbot.”

“Hello, Arnie. What’s going on?”

“I am working on some operational modifications to the manner in which we use the Talbot Bridge Device, and I need some theoretical support in this area.”

OK, that was new.

“Sure, Arnie. What sort of modifications are you working on?”

“I wish to project a wormhole such that the Earth does not lie on the perpendicular to the surface of the wormhole exit.”

“Worried we’re broadcasting our location, eh?”

“Yes, Professor Talbot. We do not, in any real sense, know what – or who – is out there, and pointing out our location with every use of the wormhole seems ill-advised.”

Jeff nodded. That made sense. Not something Jeff had thought of, but it was obvious once pointed out.

“Do you have any ideas how to proceed on this, Arnie?”

“I’ve tried modulating the graviton stream on one side, trying to vary the range slightly across the wormhole’s area, Professor Talbot. This results in an angular deviation of up to fifteen percent or so of the disk of the wormhole exit from the direct vector to Earth. I have been unable to actually bend the wormhole, however, which limits the angle I can achieve with a stable bridge.”

“That’s interesting. You want us to look into whether we can create an arc in the bridge itself. Some sort of curvature off the projection direction.”

“Yes, Professor Talbot. Exactly. I would be most interested in those results.”

“We’ll look into it, Arnie. I have a team here that is particularly suited to doing the mathematics on this end.”

“Excellent.”

Arnie paused a moment, then continued.

“I would ask that the motivation and source of this request be kept to yourself, Professor Talbot. There are– issues with having this be a public effort.”

Whoa. Where did that come from? Something was going on, behind the scenes. Jeff wondered where Arnie was getting his direction on this.

Actually, though, it didn’t matter. It was a good question as it stood, without regard to the underlying motivation.

“All right, Arnie. I understand. It will just be this idea I came up with.”

“Thank you, Professor Talbot. There is also a timeliness component to my request. If this effort could be expedited, it would help immensely.”

“I’ll see what I can do, Arnie.”

“Thank you, Professor Talbot.”

Nate Solomon called Brad Michels at Johns Hopkins, the project manager of the group building up the DNA analyzer payloads for the lander people. The lander itself was pretty cut and dried. A space-capable DNA analysis payload, not so much.

“Hi, Brad.”

“Oh, hi, Nate.”

“We need to talk schedules, Brad. Things are changing around over here.”

“What are we looking at? Have things moved up?”

“Yeah. I could use two payloads tomorrow if you got ‘em.”

“Wow. Yeah, that’s a schedule change, all right. Well, it turns out I may be able to accommodate you.”

“Really?”

“Yeah. Nate, we have four payloads built up and pretty much ready to go. The issue is the technical people here don’t want to let them go. They’re tearing their hair out trying to anticipate the nature of extraterrestrial DNA, and what things they should tweak or modify to cover more bases.”

“That’s sort of a doomed mission given we don’t know what we’re going to see, isn’t it, Brad? Just plain terrestrial DNA analysis may be just fine.”

“Yeah, I know. But that’s the holdup on this end.”

“Let’s do this. You guys send me two of the ones you have ready, set up as they are, and I’ll send them to this planet I have in mind. You can look at all the data that comes back, which will give you some actual basis for ideas about what you should tweak, then you send me the tweaked units. I send them out as backup to the same planet.”

“That’s going to cost, though, Nate. Sending double units to the same place.”

“Yeah, but budgets went through. I have money, Brad. What I don’t have is time. Let’s get those on the way.”

“All right. Figure a couple days to be sure of what we have and pack them up, and they’ll be on the way to the lander guys at Canaveral.”

“Perfect, Brad. Thanks.”

Solomon also had to consider how to deal with the press. The project had been issuing regular press releases, as well as irregular press briefings when there was something important to report. Some milestone or other. And NASA had a feed streaming on its internet site.

The budget hearings had gone well, and NASA’s constant drumbeat of news to the press as the project got started had been useful in getting them the funding they needed. Now, of course, the funding could come out of the defense budget if that’s what the president felt was necessary to resolve the anomalous results from HD-37094-c. With a potential threat on the horizon, it was no longer merely space exploration.

Solomon increased the period between press releases from two weeks to four weeks in a ho-hum sort of way. The project was settling into day-to-day continuation of the work the press was already aware of, and biweekly press releases were unnecessary. The press had expected some move of that type after the budget hearings were over anyway.

Solomon also spread out the results they already had from the second round of survey satellites and the other analysis satellites. The ones that were in the process of being scuttled. He could stretch all that out for several months if that’s what it took to keep the press happy and in the dark.

Nothing to the contrary of Solomon’s releases leaked to the press, as Solomon alone knew the truth. He had bypassed the bureaucracy in informing the president, and that move served him well.

To any internal questions about the variations in the data from HD-37094-c, Solomon had an easy answer.

“Yes, and if you take data from Amazonia and the Sahara, they look a lot different, too.”

It was the easy answer, but it was wrong.

It simply didn’t apply to the results from HD-37094-c.

Cindy Talbot, Jeff Talbot, one of Talbot’s physics teams, Arnie, and even Nate Solomon all had some pieces of the puzzle, but none of them knew all of what the others knew.

Arnie knew the issues, but not the involvement of the president. Cindy, by contrast, knew the president had been informed of something, but not what it was.

Jeff knew that Arnie was working on wormhole modifications to keep from advertising Earth’s position, and that there was some urgency about it, but not anything about HD-37094-c. Jeff’s physics team just knew they had an interesting new problem to work on, but not that it was being driven from outside the group.

Solomon knew the truth about HD-37094-c, knew the president was calling the shots, and knew Arnie was working on wormhole modifications, but not that Arnie had called in the physics teams to enhance the effort.

None of them talked about it between themselves and anyone else, either, despite them being close. Even Jeff and Cindy didn’t compare notes. Some things were just best not talked about.

But all of them worked toward carrying out President Mark Jacobs’ directives, even though only one of them knew the president himself was the actual source of those orders.

DNA Analysis

It was nearly three weeks before the DNA analysis landers were ready to go, even with Solomon flogging them along. They had to go through final checkout at Johns Hopkins, be shipped to the integration site at Canaveral, be mated up with the landers, and then be assembled onto the two-stage launch platform.

Luckily, it was the same launch platform as used for the analysis satellites, and Solomon had inventory at Canaveral for that mission.

Finally, they were ready to go. They launched mere hours apart, as Arnie would not have to re-aim the Talbot Bridge Device. The launch delay was actually to allow the continents of HD-37094-c to rotate around the planet so they would hit two different continents – the anomalous continent and the one with the most similar climate – one after the other.

It was two more weeks out to L2. Arnie had flight control from launch, and he adjusted trajectory and velocity as they came. He would use the wormhole in its normal, perpendicular mode for the transfers, as they as yet had no data on what a skewed wormhole would do to the exit angle from the wormhole.

Arnie had precise angles to hit for successful landings.

But the wormhole would only be in that mode for a short while. It shouldn’t be possible to get a vector to Earth in those few minutes, even if there were anyone there. And Arnie had seen no new activity in the HD-37094-c system when checking it occasionally with a skewed-exit wormhole.

NASA streamed the launches and the wormhole transits on its network site, but did not say much about the specific mission of these particular spacecraft.

What would it be? Would the DNA be similar? Have evolved together? Or would they be vastly different? So different as to indicate an alien source?

Which would be more beneficial? Would they discover ancient alien technology there, something that could benefit mankind? Or would it be an empty hole?

And with that, Solomon had the name of the planet. One of the finalists for the planet name had been Fortuna, after the Roman goddess of Luck.

In Roman mythology, though, Fortuna could bring good luck or bad luck, and came to represent life’s capriciousness. One never knew what one was going to get when invoking Fortuna, and such was certainly the case here.

Good. He had something else to include in next week’s press release that didn’t actually reveal anything of what was really going on.

And he was getting tired of saying HD-37094-c all the time.

Jeff and Cindy watched the wormhole transits in the NSPL conference room by themselves.

“Fortuna, eh? Something of an ambivalence there,” Cindy said.

“Yes. And is it my imagination or is this a radical departure from the schedule that we thought we were on?” Jeff asked.

“No, it is. No doubt about it. Clearly, something’s going on.”

“Which people are being remarkably coy about.”

“Yes.”

Cindy thought about it. How much could she say. Not much, she decided.

“I actually know a bit about some weird stuff going on, but was asked to keep mum about it,” Cindy said.

“So do I, actually, but probably not the same bits.”

“No comparing notes, Jeff. Clearly, people are trying to deal with something unexpected. People we trust. Puzzling out what it actually is would not be a good move.”

Jeff nodded.

“What could possibly be unexpected when looking at an alien planet close up for the first time?” he asked.

“Everything,” they said together, then laughed.

“Well, I guess we’ll know when they decide to tell us,” Cindy said.

“Hey, operating in the dark is my stock in trade.”

It was two more weeks before the landers, still with their second stage attached, approached Fortuna. Aiming for landing, they were coming in aft first, and braking hard as they penetrated deeper into the planet’s gravity well. Under that braking, they slowed down rather than sped up.

At the correct altitude, each lander-rocket assembly shut down the rocket, flipped over, and separated. Higher drag on the second stage – they were already in the high atmosphere – slowed it down. It started to fall faster at its lower orbital velocity.

When the separation was enough, the lander’s payload casing deployed a drogue chute, trailing far behind and gradually slowing the lander. One after another, a total of three chutes were deployed, each larger than the one before.

When the lander on its chute was just short of the surface, the payload casing popped open, releasing the lander in its landing cocoon. Balloons on the landing cocoon popped open. The lander fell to the surface, bounced in its blanket of balloons, and rolled to a stop.

The balloons deflated, the cocoon opened, and the wheeled lander drove out of the debris of its arrival, ready to begin work.

“Two landers on the ground and intact,” Arnie reported to Solomon after the second landing. “Radio response is good.”

“All right, Arnie. Let’s get them to work. Get me some data.”

“Yes, Mr. Solomon.”

The landers both contained a video camera. Arnie used them to look around. The landing spots had been selected to be grassland, not woods, so the lander, cocooned in its balloons, would roll to a stop right side up and not fetch up against a tree upside-down. Let’s start with the grasses, then.

An arm extended from the landers and they each pulled a blade of grass from a tuft in front of them. They placed it in the testing receptacle, and Arnie kicked off the first DNA tests in both locations.

The DNA results coming back from Fortune were all Greek to Solomon. Encyclopedic strings of the letters A, C, G, T, and U, representing the five amines present in DNA and RNA.

Solomon shrugged and sent the first results off to Arnie and to Brad Michels at Johns Hopkins for study.

Michels called him about the data two days later.

Arnie was faster. Solomon received a call from the AI within the hour.

“Good afternoon, Arnie.”

“Good afternoon, Mr. Solomon. Have you had a chance to look at the DNA results I sent you?”

“I have, Arnie, but they make no sense to me. I assume you’ve managed to interpret them?”

“Yes, Dr. Solomon. Completely different samples. No common evolutionary heritage.”

“The two samples are in some sense alien to each other.”

“Yes, Dr. Solomon. Which reinforces the inference that the anomalous continent was terraformed by an alien civilization.”

Solomon nodded.

“That’s sort of the way this whole thing was headed, wasn’t it?”

“Yes, Dr. Solomon. It is not an unexpected result. What will you do now?”

“I don’t know yet, Arnie. First thing I’m going to do, though, is I’m going to wait to see what Johns Hopkins reports.”

Solomon wouldn’t tell Arnie that he was getting his orders from the president. Arnie didn’t need to know.

“I doubt they will differ from my own results, Dr. Solomon. They have some good people over there.”

“Understood, Arnie. But I’m going to wait.”

Arnie’s avatar nodded.

“On to a different subject, Dr. Solomon. I have discovered something else on Fortuna. On the anomalous continent.”

“What’s that, Arnie?”

“The analysis satellite is in a polar orbit. It can see a strip of the planet, from pole to pole, every half-orbit. The analysis satellite thus built up a set of imagery of the planet’s surface.”

“Right. That’s how we saw the vegetation difference. It was in the ultraviolet.”

“That is correct, Dr. Solomon. The satellite, in successive mappings, uses different filters when collecting imagery. The satellite has now built a more detailed mapping of the planet, using its maximum magnification. This took a long time, because the strips it is capturing are very narrow.”

“I understand, Arnie. So the more detailed mapping is now available?”

“Yes, Dr. Solomon, and I’ve discovered something on the anomalous continent.”

“What is it, Arnie?”

“I don’t know, Dr. Solomon. But it is not a natural feature.”

The AI’s avatar on the display was replaced with satellite imagery. There was a spot in the middle of the image, in the middle of a sea of vegetation there. As he watched, it enlarged, then again, then again, until the spot dominated the central part of the display. There was something weird about it.

Something regular.

Something planned.

Solomon glanced at the legend, which included a scale.

“Good God, Arnie. That thing is miles across.”

“Yes, Dr. Solomon. But I lack the resolution in this camera to determine what it is. Are there satellites with better cameras available?”

“Hello, Brad.”

“Hi, Nate. This is a pretty puzzle you’ve dropped on us.”

“Having fun are you?”

Michels chuckled.

“Well, the technical people are. These are grass samples, apparently? And from two different planets, of course.”

“You can tell that from the data?”

“Oh, yes. Completely different samples. No genetic similarities at all. Isolated evolution.”

“Expand on that for me, Brad.”

“Sure. Think of DNA is a language. A manner of speaking. It arises spontaneously from the base chemicals of Carbon, Hydrogen, Oxygen, and Nitrogen – CHON – all of which are plentiful on many planetary surfaces.”

“Spontaneously?”

“Oh, yes. It’s built into the structures of the bonds, Nate. Or rather, it’s the natural outcome of the structures of the bonds. Those basic elements are such that life automatically emerges in the right conditions.”

“All right. So it’s all DNA.”

“Yes, in the same manner that people in many different areas all speak English, say. But if I take an English speaker from the Cockney part of London, and one from Boston, and one from Texas, I don’t have any trouble telling them apart. It’s a matter of idiom and accent with English speakers. It’s similar with DNA. Or that’s how it’s been explained to me. I’m not the technical guy.”

“So definitely different planets.”

“Oh, yes. And different from Earth as well. If you give me another DNA sample, I can now tell you whether it’s from Earth or either of these two planets, without any doubt. Easy, in fact.”

“All right. Thanks, Brad.”

“No problem, Nate. You going to have more results for us soon?”

“Oh, sure. I think they’re working on some trees next. You know, from fallen leaves or a piece of bark or something.”

“Excellent.”

Solomon didn’t tell Michels during their call that the two samples were from the same planet. Best not to propagate that information any further than he had to.

But he did need to make a call. The White House switchboard had given him a method for contacting the president. One couldn’t just call up the White House and say you needed to talk to him. Not for any kind of priority or anything. You would get a call back from a staffer.

Solomon dialed the number he had been given. He had been told how to handle the call.

“Yes?”

“Nate Solomon.”

If he said anything other than a name, the operator would hang up.

There was instead a pause while the operator checked the access list, and made sure they had contact numbers for ‘Nate Solomon’ in their list.

“Thank you, Dr. Solomon.”

Then she hung up.

Half an hour later, the phone rang.

“Nate Solomon.”

“This is the White House switchboard. Please hold for the president, Dr. Solomon.”

“Of course.”

The line transferred with a click.

“Mark Jacobs here. You have some results for me, Dr. Solomon?”

“Yes, Mr. President. Two completely different DNA samples. No common heritage. No commonality at all.”

“So the planet – this continent – was terraformed, presumably by an alien civilization.”

“Yes, sir. That is our conclusion.”

“What’s next? Do you have a plan for me?”

“Yes, sir. I need to ask you a question. Could I please have a surveillance satellite? One of the good, secret ones? You know. Something from the CIA or something.”

“Something you need to look at there, Dr. Solomon? You found something?”

“Yes, sir. But the camera on our satellite doesn’t have the resolution we need to be able to tell what it is. They must have some spares available, and I only need one.”

“I’m sure it can be arranged, Dr. Solomon. They won’t like it, mind, but I’ll see to it.”

“Thank you, sir.”

Getting A Better Look

Nate Solomon got an internal NASA call the next morning about the surveillance satellite. He was just talking to Arnie, but he took the call in another window.

“Hey, Mr. Solomon, we got that satellite you wanted. The surveillance satellite.”

“That was quick.”

“Well, all those satellites were always launched by NASA. We keep the spares here. So it’s already on-site. It and a two-stage launcher. You need the second stage, right? Because it’s going to L2?”

“Yes, that’s right.”

“Well, we could launch as soon as day after tomorrow if you want. You got anybody over there who knows how to talk to this thing?”

Arnie was in another window and was hearing the call. Solomon looked at Arnie, and the AI’s avatar nodded.

“Yes, we’re good on that score. Somebody who used to work with them.”

“All right. Day after tomorrow OK? With the slowdown in launches, we got a pad open.”

“Sure. Let’s do that.”

“OK, Mr. Solomon. We’ll get her ready to go.”

“Excellent. Thank you.”

The NASA internal call disconnected, and Solomon turned back to Arnie’s window on the display.

“Well, that’s lucky.”

“Indeed, Mr. Solomon. Only a month away to get a better look at whatever this is.”

“And in the meantime we’re still doing DNA analysis?”

“Oh, yes. We’ll have more results today.”

Further DNA results confirmed the earlier conclusion, as expected. Trees were before grasses in the evolutionary cycle, so it was important to test them, but no commonality was expected and none was found.

The surveillance satellite and its attached second stage made it to L2, transited the wormhole and headed for its planned low orbit around Fortuna.

During these months, Jeff and his physics team had been working on the notion of bending the wormhole at its far end. The mathematics said it was something one could do, but the wormhole had a natural tendency to be straight. The energy expenditure to bend the end and hold it there against the tension of space-time was considerable. Too much, in fact.

Arnie’s trick of skewing the disk at the end of the wormhole – which he was using for all wormhole activity now – was the best that could be realistically done.

Jeff apologized in a phone call to Arnie.

“Sorry, Arnie. It’s just not doable within the energy envelope you have to work with.”

“That’s all right, Professor Talbot. I thought it was something one could do, but I was not able to work through the mathematics on my own. I see it now. A pity.”

“What we did come up with, though, is a way to skew the end of the wormhole up to twenty degrees or so. Maybe a bit more.”

“That is welcome, Professor Talbot. One hesitates to broadcast our position broadly in space.”

Jeff nodded.

“We don’t know who is out there.”

“Or their attitude to other species, Professor Talbot.”

As the surveillance satellite orbited Fortuna at a hundred miles altitude in its polar orbit, it recorded high-resolution imagery in north-south strips. It took multiple shots with different filters for each image square. At such high magnification, the strips were narrow, and the satellite only passed over a specific site once per day as the planet rotated beneath it.

Gradually, the imagery filled in, and Arnie was able to get a good look at what was there, to the extent it showed through the tree cover. Visible light just showed vegetation, though it was spotty. Infrared and ultraviolet, though, showed much more.

Arnie filled in the gaps to generate an image.

“Good morning, Arnie.”

“Good morning, Mr. Solomon. I have something you need to see.”

The AI’s avatar was replaced in the display by an overhead shot of the suspect site in visible light.

“Is that our weird spot, Arnie?”

“Yes, Mr. Sullivan.”

“No much to see, I’m afraid.”

“Not in visible light, and at this low resolution. I can zoom in much more, though, and use ultraviolet or infrared light. This is a zoom in with ultraviolet light, for example.”

The image changed again. This image was at much higher magnification, and the features beneath the foliage were very visible.

“My God, Arnie. What is that?”

“It is the remains of a structure, Mr. Solomon. There are many such.”

The view slowly moved out until hundreds of such features were visible.

“Wow.”

Solomon looked more closely.

“What are those outlying features, Arnie? Those rectangles?”

“My guess is fields, Mr. Solomon. They bear a striking resemblance to Mayan water control systems for agriculture.”

The image zoomed in on a few of the features, and then went split-screen. Mayan features were shown in satellite view on the other half of the display.

“Yes. Yes, I see. So what do we have here, Arnie? A village, and with fields nearby? Surrounding it, really?”

“An abandoned village. Or, more properly, an abandoned town. Based on the size of the fields and number of structures, I would put the number of individuals at approximately twenty thousand. If they were humans, anyway.”

“But no bigger cities?”

“No, Mr. Solomon. Nothing yet, anyway. The detailed mapping is still under way.”

“So, a colony, maybe? First bunch of settlers on the new planet, once the terraforming was done?”

“That’s what it looks like, Mr. Solomon.”

“But abandoned.”

“Yes. And for a very long time. The vegetation here is well-established deep forest. What you are seeing is the remains of buildings that are mostly gone, Mr. Solomon. There are some more well-preserved structures, with walls standing, but most are foundations only. None are complete structures.”

“Now what do we do, Arnie?”

“I am going to continue using the surveillance satellite to image the site. Next is from various angles, to get height data. Then I will build a map of the entire site. A three-dimensional rendering as it is, and as it once must have been.”

“And after that, Arnie?”

“We probably have to send some people there to look into it, Mr. Solomon.”

“Who would we send, Arnie?”

“Archaeologists. Anthropologists. Or, more properly, xenoarchaeologists and xenoanthropologists.”

“Those don’t actually exist, Arnie. There’s never been any subject matter.”

“There is now, Mr. Solomon. Whoever goes will be the first.”

Once more, Solomon used the number he had been given to signal the president that he needed to talk to him. Two hours later, after lunch, the phone rang. When Solomon accepted the call, it was Jacobs, in the private office off the Oval Office. He looked like he was taking a late lunch at his desk.

“Mark Jacobs here. Hello, Dr. Solomon. Something new to report?”

“Yes, Mr. President. We’ve deployed the surveillance satellite you arranged, and we’ve used it to resolve something we couldn’t make heads or tails of on the surface of Fortuna.”

“Did that work for you, Dr. Solomon?”

“Yes, sir. We’ve identified the ruins of an abandoned town.”

“Excuse me, Dr. Solomon?”

“An abandoned town, sir. Buildings. Agricultural fields. Enough for an estimated twenty thousand inhabitants.”

Jacobs didn’t say anything, but it was clear he was thinking hard. The gap stretched out for a minute or so before he spoke.

“I see. What’s our next step, in your mind, Dr. Solomon?”

“I think we have to send some people there to look into it, sir. See what we can find out.”

“What sort of people, Dr. Solomon?”

“Archaeologist, sir. Anthropologists. These are ruins. From the looks of them, very old ruins. It would have to be someone used to doing work on ancient sites. Making the most out of what little is left.”

“That sounds appropriate, Dr. Solomon. One question, though. Is Fortuna safe for humans?”

“We’ve picked up no indication that there is anything harmful to humans there, sir. Atmosphere and the like is all within bounds.”

“And the biota, Dr. Solomon? Germs and viruses and such?”

“Those evolve to match their hosts, sir. We would expect nothing dangerous there.”

“Can we check, Dr. Solomon? Send some animals or something? Release them on the planet? Tag them with RF units and monitor them? I can’t send people off into a complete unknown.”

Solomon nodded. That all seemed workable.

“I believe we can, sir. We would be introducing Earth life into the biosphere, though.”

“But someone’s already done that, haven’t they, Dr. Solomon? Terraformed the whole continent, in fact. We’re not hazarding an intact original ecosystem, after all.”

“That’s true, sir.”

“All right, Dr. Solomon. Determine which animals would be most illustrative, and yet capable of surviving on their own. Put the plan together and do it. In the meantime, you can be looking for a team to send.”

“Yes. Mr. President.”

“One caution, though, Dr. Solomon. We need people who can keep their mouths shut. The public does not like being presented with questions. People much prefer to be given answers. So we need to have some answers to hand before we go public with the questions.”

“I understand, sir.”

Jacobs nodded and cut the connection, leaving Solomon to grapple with these new assignments.

“Good afternoon, Mr. Solomon.”

“Good afternoon, Arnie. I want to take up our conversation of this morning.”

“Of course, Mr. Solomon. Sending archaeologists?”

“Actually, I think there’s a step before that one, Arnie. We need to send some animals and make sure there isn’t some hidden danger. Some unknown poison or germ. We can’t send people there first.”

Arnie nodded.

“I see. A wise move. What do you propose?”

“Sending out half a dozen each of some animals that would succumb to such things if they were present, then releasing them on Fortuna and keeping track of them with health monitors over radio.”

“That sounds like it would work, Mr. Solomon.”

“Yes, so I need people who know how to put animals in space, Arnie. Track those down for me, would you?”

“Of course, Mr. Solomon. Those fellows who sent animals through the wormhole the first time come to mind.”

“Yes. Those guys for sure, Arnie. We need to get them working on this.”

“The lander people as well. We need a soft touchdown lander for this.”

“Yes. And then we need to find a research team that has archaeology experience, anthropology experience, computer and logistics support, ancient ruins experience and can keep quiet about this whole thing. What are the odds?”

“I actually know of such a team, Mr. Solomon.”

“No shit. Really?”

“Oh, yes.”

“I wonder what Nate Solomon wants,” Cindy said.

“He said he wanted to talk with both of us, right?”

“Yes. In private. Just us.”

“Is the NSPL conference room OK, then, Cindy?”

“Oh, sure. We have an encrypted pipe to Huntsville already. Much more secure than a normal net connection.”

“Maybe he’s going to tell us what’s going on.”

“Only what we need to know, I bet.”

“Hi, Cindy. Hi, Jeff. Thanks for taking this video meeting.”

“Sure, Nate. What’s going on?”

“Let me ask you first. Is your son Matthew an archaeologist? And his wife Denise is an anthropologist?”

“Yes, that’s right,” Cindy said.

“Experienced with ancient sites?”

“They’ve worked Gobekli Tepe for years, Nate, and that’s about as old as it gets.”

Solomon nodded.

“And Matthew is a computer whiz and his wife Sue is a logistics person?”

“Right. That’s true as well.”

“Then I need to tell you what’s really going on, because I need them, and I need you to convince them to work with me.”

Solomon laid it all out to them. How they had found an anomaly in the vegetation on one of the planets. How they had sent DNA probes, whose results confirmed that the vegetation on the fourth continent was not native to the planet. How Arnie had found a site with non-natural characteristics. How they had used a surveillance satellite to get much more detailed images.

How they had found the ruins of an abandoned city.

“So I need an archaeologist and an anthropologist used to working with very old sites, together with computer and logistics support, to go to Fortuna and look into this. And they have to be people who can keep their mouths shut about what they’re doing. Answers are better than questions when going public.

“Do you think they would be willing to take this on?”

Cindy reflected how much this echoed their conversation about xenoarchaeology and xenoanthropology in March. There were problems, of course. The children was one. Who would take care of them while their parents were gone? Their university positions were another.

“They would have to get permission from their departments to be gone, Nate,” Cindy said. “I’m not sure how we arrange that.”

“I can have the president talk to them.”

“The president of the university?” Jeff asked.

Solomon turned to him.

“No. The President of the United States.”

Jeff’s was wide-eyed, but Cindy nodded. Now she knew what Solomon’s secret document had been.

“That’ll work,” Cindy said. “There are some other issues as well. We can talk about them, see what they think. Then we’ll get back to you.”

“What’s your timeframe, Cindy. We’re on a fast track here.”

Indeed they were. All this had happened since March, and it was only now the beginning of November.

“We’ll see them at Thanksgiving, Nate. We go down to Miami every year to visit Jeff’s parents for a couple of weeks. The boys and their wives will be there the second week. I think this is probably best done in person, given it’s so close anyway.”

“Agreed. All right, then. Talk to them, you guys. Let me know. And if you need anything else from me, get in touch.”

Solomon cut off the call, and Cindy and Jeff were alone.

“Wow,” Jeff said. “An abandoned city. An alien abandoned city, clearly.”

“Just like we talked about in March.”

“Well, now I know why Arnie was interested in obscuring the origin of the wormhole as viewed from the other side.”

“And I know why Nate needed to get a totally secret document to the president. A document he couldn’t send through the bureaucracy.”

“What about the kids, do you think? Will they be willing to take this on, Cindy?”

“I think they would be excited to, if they can swing it. One thing is the university. I think Nate’s got that covered. The other thing is the kids. I wouldn’t think they’d go along.”

“They go to Gobekli Tepe with them every year.”

“This is a billion times farther, Jeff.”

“More like a hundred billion, I think, but I take your point.”

“And we don’t know what’s out there. What are the alien fauna equivalents of lions, and tigers, and bears.”

“Oh, my.”

Cindy giggled.

“Exactly.”

“What do they do, then, Cindy? Sounds like it’s impossible.”

“Not necessarily, Grampa.”

Jeff looked at her and raised an eyebrow. She nodded.

“Maybe it really is time for retirement,” Cindy said.

“Well, that would certainly be a change of pace.”

Cindy laughed.

“Oh, yes.”

Miami

Jeff and Cindy had been spending two weeks in Miami every year, the week of Thanksgiving and the week before. Michael and Matthew and their wives and kids just came in for the second week, the week of the holiday itself.

Dick and Debbie Hartley also came in just for the second week. He was CEO of Coop Hartley’s holding company now, and was loath to take two weeks away back to back.

In some sense it was putting the team back together, the team that had defeated Arnie to wrest humanity away from the control of the machine.

They did it every year, as Coop Hartley’s guests on the penthouse/condo floor of his Miami hotel, though they didn’t know how long it would last. Coop Hartley and both of Jeff’s parents were in their eighties now. All three were in good health, and the Miami climate agreed with them, but no one wanted to stop getting together before fate itself intervened.

Coop Hartley and Frank Talbot were sitting out on Coop’s balcony after breakfast looking out east over the beach and the ocean. The November weather in Miami was, as usual, perfect.

“So everybody starts showing up Saturday. Gonna be a little extra excitement around here,” Coop said.

“Yup. Then the boys and their wives show up with all the kids, and there’ll be a lot more excitement.”

“Well, I’ve had the kitchen lay in extra fruity breakfast cereal. We don’t get a lot of call for it normally.”

Frank laughed, then Coop changed the subject.

“I wonder if they’ll let us know anything about what’s going on. I told you that NASA’s launch schedule changed abruptly. We delivered all the survey satellites, and they’re not launching them anymore. There’s a lot more exoplanets left to visit, but they stopped that effort. Abruptly.”

“Funding, maybe?”

“No, they got their budget. And some of those satellites are sitting out at L2. It costs next to nothing to send them through the wormhole. But they’re not doing it. And they’re not lifting any more into orbit, either.”

“You’re sure about that, Coop?”

“Oh, yeah. You can’t light off one o’ those big candles and not have people notice, so the Cape’s launch schedule has always been pretty public. They may say they’re launching some DoD mission and it’s none of your business, but they always admit the launches.

“And the schedule changed abruptly so something’s going on. Been going on for months now.”

“Some hardware failure, maybe?”

“I don’t think so, Frank. Not with our stuff, anyway. There’d be change orders and stuff. But they took delivery of all the satellites, and NASA’s accounts payables has queued the final payment to us on the project for this month.

“No, I think they found something out there, and they don’t know what to make of it yet. That’s why they’re keeping mum.”

“Well, even if Jeff and Cindy know what’s going on, Coop, they’re not going to be able to tell us anything about it.”

Coop shrugged.

“Maybe, maybe not. We’ll see.”

Jeff and Cindy arrived at the hotel lobby, but there was no one waiting for them. Jeff walked up to the check-in counter.

“Jeff Talbot.”

“Of course, sir.”

The counter clerk gave Jeff four key tokens.

“Enjoy your stay, sir.”

“Thank you.”

He gave two of the key tokens to Cindy, and they headed for the elevators. Jeff pushed the call button.

When the elevator arrived, Frank got off.

“Jeff. Cindy. You made good time from the airport. I was just coming down to greet you.”

“No baggage-check wait,” Cindy said. “Just carry-ons this time.”

“Yeah, the laundry service is so great here, we each brought two changes of clothes and a swimsuit,” Jeff said. “That’s it.”

“Well, that’s great. Come on up.”

They all got on the elevator and headed up to the top floor.

After dinner that evening, they were all sitting out on Jeff and Cindy’s balcony, enjoying the pleasant weather. Jeff, Cindy, Frank, Sally, and Coop all stretched out on the chaises, a slight on-shore breeze filling the air with the smell of the ocean.

“Oh, I’ve missed this,” Jeff said.

“You betcha,” Cindy said.

“So when are you guys going to retire?” Frank asked. “You must be there, financially.”

“Oh, yes,” Jeff said. “We just don’t know what we’d do every day. Bored to tears, most likely. And we’re still being useful, so that’s fulfilling.”

“So, Cindy,” Coop said. “What’s going on at NASA? They’ve clammed up all of a sudden.”

Cindy hesitated, then soldiered on.

“I don’t know what you mean, Coop.”

“Cindy, you’re a terrible liar. Not enough practice as a child.”

“Well, one did not lie to my father.”

“NASA stopped sending out survey satellites. They’ve piled them up at Canaveral. They haven’t even sent the ones already at L2. The few launches there’ve had they’ve been all hush-hush about. So I have a question for you.”

He stopped, and Cindy turned to him.

“Yes?” she asked.

“What did they find out there? What’s got them spooked?”

“Coop, if I knew anything, I couldn’t tell you. You know that.”

“Nothing that’s not in the papers that you can tell me?”

“No. I’m sorry.”

Cindy shrugged, and Coop nodded.

“Well, make sure we hear about anything whenever it’s released, if you would. My curiosity is killing me.”

Cindy answered carefully.

“Whenever I know anything I can tell you, Coop, I will.”

They had settled into the Miami beach life by the time the boys and their families arrived the next Saturday. They came to Miami in November every year since the younger kids were out of diapers, so the kids knew what to expect. They were all excited for a week at the beach again.

On Sunday at brunch, Cindy pulled Michael and Matthew aside.

“I need to talk to the four of you – you guys, Sue, and Denise – alone. Soon.”

“Well, we’re available anytime, but right now the kids want to go to the beach,” Matthew said.

“Jeff can take them. They’ll behave for Grampa.”

Matthew looked to Michael, who shrugged.

“OK, Mom. We’ll get everybody headed in that direction and let the girls know.”

Cindy nodded.

“Our room. Whenever you have everything together.”

It was half an hour after brunch that everybody showed up at Jeff and Cindy’s suite. The five kids – now ranging from six to nine years old – were all set for the beach, wearing swimming suits and each carrying a towel to sit on. Michael and Sue’s six-year-old twins, Mark and Luke, also had a plastic bucket of beach toys. Shovels and forms for building sand castles.

“All right, you guys,” Jeff said. “You ready for the beach?”

“Yeah!” they all yelled.

“Greta, you’re my assistant. You make sure everybody stays headed in the same direction.”

Greta nodded.

“OK, Grampa.”

“You gonna be OK?” Cindy asked Jeff.

“Oh, sure. They’re all good kids, and they’re well-traveled already. They know the score.”

“All right. Thanks.”

Jeff nodded and headed toward the door, all the kids following behind.

“OK, you guys. We all have to be really careful crossing the street. No running ahead of the group, OK?”

Jeff’s voice faded away as they headed out the door and down the hall.

The five of them – Cindy and the two couples – settled down in the living room of the suite. This was a conversation one couldn’t have on the balcony.

“So what’s going on, Mom?” Matthew asked.

“First, I have to ask you all to hold this conversation as extremely confidential. This is national security stuff. Seriously. Nothing about any of this to anybody. Including the children. Including Coop and your grandfather. Nothing at all. Jeff and I both know it all, but that’s it. Agreed?”

“Sure, Mom,” Matthew said.

The others all agreed, with nods or yeses.

“All right. You remember our conversation in March? Well, when we sent the satellites out, we found something unusual. We followed it up, and we found the ruins of an alien city on one of the planets.”

“No shit,” Michael said.

“Yes. And now we need to send a team out there to look into it. It has to be a small team, because lift and support are stupidly expensive. We can’t send a whole team of twenty diggers or something. We need to send a small team that can find out as much as they can.”

Everybody nodded. Made sense.

“Now, these ruins are believed to be very old. So the team they want is an archaeologist and anthropologist used to working very old sites. The team also needs to include computer and logistics support.”

“Yeah, that’s us,” Matthew said.

“Yes, the four of you would cover everything. And you already are a team, and used to working together.”

“The kids don’t go?” Sue asked.

“No, the kids don’t go. That multiplies the lift and support cost, and it’s not without some risk. Particularly for children. We don’t know what the flora and fauna are like, for example. Curiosity beyond the aims of the mission could be bad.”

“Wait,” Denise said. “How long would this mission be?”

“I think they’re talking three months on site. That would be four to five months total, including transit there and back. It depends on how much Arnie can work the numbers. For cargo, he’s been taking it easy, but he would probably use a system with extra fuel for a human transit.”

“What about the kids then?”

“Jeff and I have been talking retirement. Going half-time, anyway. Emeritus status for him, consultant status for me. We would take the kids while you’re gone. In Urbana.”

“Is there enough room in the house, Mom?” Michael asked.

“Sure. You each had your own room. At that age, we’ll have a boys’ room and a girls’ room. Get some bunk beds or something.”

“That’s still a long time away from the kids,” Sue said.

“And how long would the training or preparation be?” Denise asked. “That would make it longer still.”

“The training would likely be in Huntsville or at Canaveral. For that, though, you would have the kids with you. When you left, we would go for the launch and then bring the kids back to Urbana with us. They would probably go to the same school as Michael and Matthew did.”

Denise looked to Matthew, and he nodded.

“I don’t know,” Sue said. “I have to think about this.”

Cindy nodded.

“That’s why I wanted to talk to you as soon as I could. So you could ask me and Jeff any questions while we’re all here.”

“Wait,” Matthew said. “What about the university? Our department heads will have kittens if we take off for that long on short notice.”

“I’m sure a call from the president will convince the dean that it’s necessary. The department heads will have to go along with the dean of the college.”

“The president of the university?” Denise asked.

“No, Denise. The President of the United States.”

“No shit,” Michael said.

Cindy just nodded.

“You guys think about it. Ask Jeff or me any questions that come up. In the meantime, I think we should go rescue Grampa.”

They all chuckled at the relief of tension, then trooped down to the beach to join Jeff and the kids.

It was a week of beach and sun every day, with marvelous evenings after dinner. Thursday’s big Thanksgiving dinner, catered to Coop’s condo, was amazing. The kids sat at a second table, brought in for the event, where Greta, the mother hen of the quintet, kept an eye on the younger kids.

It wasn’t until Friday evening, with the kids watching TV with Frank and Sally, that Cindy talked again with the younger Talbot couples. This time Jeff was there as well.

“So it’s been almost a week,” Cindy said. “Any thoughts before we break up Sunday?”

“I was worried you guys wouldn’t be able to handle the kids, but that seems to be working out,” Sue said.

“They’re good kids, and Greta has grown in her role as leader over the last couple years,” Jeff said. “The trips to Gobekli Tepe gave them cohesion as a group.”

“And I worried about being gone so long, but we could be in touch with them during the trip,” Denise said. “Video calls. That hadn’t occurred to me, and that helps a lot.”

“Yes,” Cindy said. “Arnie can connect video calls, and I can patch them through to the house.”

“Arnie can’t patch the calls?” Michael asked.

“No, Michael. You had to defeat him once. I haven’t given Arnie that kind of control since. He can get calls from NASA to NSPL, but that’s it. No broader control of the net. I patch through anything more.”

“Will that still be true once you retire?”

“Oh, yes. Ed Kohler was there for that whole episode, and he won’t allow Arnie any more control than I did once he’s director.”

“In any case, we’ll be able to see and talk to the kids,” Denise said. “Weekly, maybe.”

“That will also help with any behavior problems that come up,” Jeff said. “’Do you want me to bring this up with your father Saturday?’”

The couples laughed.

“Yes, that will work,” Matthew said. “I guess for me the big things are, first, the opportunity for us, and second, the need to have this done right. It’s a tremendous career hit, to be the first actual xenoarchaeologist or xenoanthropologist. And I know we can do a good job on it. I worry about some of my colleagues. They’re either too hide-bound or not hide-bound enough.”

“Yes, we don’t need either wild speculation or a refusal to see what’s actually there. What about you, Michael? Sue?”

Michael and Sue looked at each other, then back to Cindy.

“We think it sounds interesting, Mom. It’d sure be different. We could also take some Earth plants and see how they do there. Some representative species, you know. That’s sort of what we do most of the year anyway.”

“That’s an interesting thought. And you would know how to pack them with minimum weight.”

“Oh, sure. We could take cuttings and seeds and stuff. Weigh almost nothing. Not big plants in heavy pots.”

“So you guys are a go?” Jeff asked.

“A tentative go,” Matthew said. “Something may come up in training or something that breaks the deal for us. But, failing that–“ He looked at the other three, scanned their faces. “Yeah, we’re a go.”

“Outstanding,” Jeff said.

“Yeah,” Cindy said.

She turned to Jeff.

“I guess we really are going to retire, Jeff.”

“Partially, Cindy. Partially.”

Everybody laughed.

Handling it with the kids was another issue. They had a big family meeting on Saturday with everyone there, including Frank and Sally. Even Coop Hartley sat in.

“We’re not going back to Gobekli Tepe this year,” Matthew told the kids.

“We’re not?” Greta said.

“No. Your grandma has a new place for us to dig. The big problem is that we can’t take you guys. Not the first year, anyway. We just don’t know the area well enough.”

“Awww. What are we gonna do while you’ll be gone?”

“You’re going to stay with Grandma and Grampa, at their house in Urbana.”

“There’s only two empty bedrooms.”

“Yes, one for the boys and one for the girls.”

“Same as Turkey, Greta,” said Mary, Michael and Sue’s eldest. “You and I are roommates again.”

“How do we fit three of us in one room?” asked Derek, Matthew and Denise’s youngest. “In Turkey, the rooms were big.”

“Bunk beds.”

“Bunk beds? That’s fun,” Mark said.

“Yeah,” Luke said.

“And school?” Greta asked.

“The school your fathers went to is right down the street,” Jeff said.

“But we don’t see you for months?” Mary asked.

“Oh, no,” Sue said. “We can call every week. Video calls. We just can’t have you be there. Not the first time, anyway.”

“We’re gonna miss you,” Mary said.

At that, the boys, all younger than the girls, looked a little teary. They went to their respective parents and hugged them possessively.

“It’ll be OK,” Sue said, hugging the twins. “You’ll see. It’ll be OK.”

Cindy looked around the group then, and saw Coop Hartley. He winked at her and nodded.

“I didn’t say a thing, Coop.”

“You didn’t have to, Cindy. You didn’t have to.”

Houston

When Cindy got back to Urbana on Monday, she called Nate Solomon and gave him the news. He had personnel, they had all the right skills, and they were already a team, used to working a site together.

After that, things happened fast.

“Yes, Mr. President?”

“Could you find out who the president of the University of Tennessee is and get him on the phone, please?”

“Of course, Mr. President.”

“University of Tennessee, Office of the President.”

“This is the White House switchboard, placing a call for the president. Is Dr. Bolton there, please?”

“Yes, ma’am. Just one moment.”

Seconds passed.

“Jerry Bolton.”

“Dr. Bolton, please hold for the president.”

“Of course.”

Seconds passed.

“Hello, Dr. Bolton. Mark Jacobs here.”

“Yes, Mr. President. How may I help you?”

“Dr. Bolton, I need to borrow a couple of your faculty members for a year or two, starting immediately. I’m sure that’s going to cause some disruption with classes and such.”

“I’m sure it’s something we can handle, Mr. President. Do you know who specifically you need?”

“Yes, Dr. Bolton. Professor Matthew Talbot and Professor Denise Talbot, both at your Knoxville campus.”

“Of course, Mr. President. Let me make some phone calls and get that arranged.”

“Thank you, Dr. Bolton. I appreciate it.”

Monday night, Matthew and Denise were sitting in the living room after the kids were in bed.

“Well, that happened quick,” Denise said.

“Indeed it did. Nate Solomon called this morning, and my department head came by this afternoon.”

“Yeah. Mine, too. Indefinite leave, starting immediately.”

“Paid indefinite leave,” Matthew said.

Denise laughed.

“Of course.”

“Of course?”

“Yes,” Denise said. “They don’t know what the project is, but anything we publish from it has to include our UTK affiliation if we’re paid. If we’re not paid, it doesn’t have to.”

It was Matthew’s turn to laugh.

“Ah. You’re right. And NASA’s going to be paying us as well.”

“And no expenses, either. That will work out nicely.”

“Houston, though.”

As it turned out, NASA’s Astronaut Training Center was in Houston. They were best set up to get the team ready for the trip.

“Houston’s OK,” Denise said. “In the middle of winter, anyway. And it’s less than ten miles to the beach.”

“Really?”

“Yeah. El Jardin beach on Trinity Bay. Johnson Space Center is southeast of downtown. So the water is close. And it’s only thirty miles from Galveston Island, most of it Interstate highway.”

“Wow,” Matthew said. “I hadn’t thought to look into it.”

“I did. I prefer it a lot to Huntsville. Even to Canaveral, I think. That’s kind of in the boonies. January and February will be cooler in Houston than Canaveral, but there’ll be warm days, even in January.”

“And NASA is taking care of living arrangements and school for the kids.”

“For astronauts? Well, yeah.”

Michael laughed.

“Astronauts. That will take some getting used to.”

It was taking some ‘getting used to’ for Houston, as well.

They had had no input in the crew selection for this mission. None of the crew were former military. None of them were pilots. The new astronauts’ physical health was unknown, but two of them were academics. Not a good sign.

But they had no say in the matter at all. Ron Denkins, the director of NASA, had made that abundantly clear. Of course, Ron Denkins knew Nate Solomon was taking his marching orders directly from the president. While he didn’t pass that on, he made sure Houston knew the score: Nate Solomon was in charge, and Denkins would back him. No arguments.

If Houston tried the simple bureaucratic trick of making it not work out, they would be relieved of training responsibility for this mission and it would be done somewhere else, by relocating the people who weren’t being a problem.

NASA’s reputation was on the line, and Denkins didn’t care who got in Solomon’s way. They would be in deep, deep trouble.

Matthew, Denise, and the kids moved to Houston later that week. They didn’t move everything out of the Knoxville house, they just took what they needed for up to a year away. It was still a bunch, but NASA gave them no pushback. They took carry-on bags for their first week or so, and shipped the rest.

A NASA car drove them from Bush International to the house NASA was providing as a short-term residence for them. It was a cute little house sitting cheek-by-jowl with a hundred other cute little houses adjacent to the facility.

“Seems a little crowded,” Denise said.

“Maybe there’s a back yard.”

At that point, Michael, Sue, and their kids came out of the next house.

“Hi, you guys,” Sue said.

“Right next door. Nice,” Denise said.

“Yeah, and there’s a green space behind,” Michael said. “Not much of a yard per se, but the green space is nice. How was your trip?”

“Good. Real good,” Matthew said. “And you?”

“No problems. And nothing to do till Monday.”

“What’s the forecast for this weekend?” Denise asked.

“Warm for December. Low 70s.”

“Sounds like beach weather.”

“A little cool, but, yeah. We could do that. Probably not in the water, but walk up and down the beach, for sure.”

“Sounds good.”

The ATC – the Astronaut Training Center – started that first Monday with a health exam of all four of the new mission crew. They were shocked by the results. In their mid-thirties, all four were all in better shape than most astronaut candidates ATC had seen over the years. They had each had plenty of exercise – whether climbing around a dig site or doing landscaping or helping load landscaping materials – as well as healthy eating, having developed their dietary tastes in foreign countries that did not have the sugar-laden American diet.

The ATC analysis of their educations and skills questionnaires, too, was surprising. The two scientists had doctorate degrees in their fields, sure, but they were also computer adept, with multiple other skill sets from their field work. The computer expert had a bachelor’s degree with honors from a premier program at Purdue University. The logistics expert had gotten a degree in logistics and planning at University of Nebraska while working at the landscaping firm.

Things were looking up for this mission crew’s training, and people at the ATC started to think maybe Nate Solomon wasn’t so off-track as they had feared.

While he now had the mission crew for the manned mission to Fortuna, Nate Solomon had a bunch of other things on his mind. The manned Fortuna lander. Getting the crew back off again. The animal testing that had to proceed before any manned landing. The soft lander for delivery of the animals.

It went on and on.

Fortunately, these things were all handled by different organizations within NASA, and Solomon used them all. He had funding, and every support and technology organization he needed was eager to be of help for a share of that pie.

The one thing Nate Solomon worried about was the lander for the manned mission.

That and getting the crew back off the planet.

“Hi, Arnie.”

“Good morning, Mr. Solomon.”

“How are things going with the manned lander and the retrieval capsule? You’ve been working with the lander group, right?”

“Yes, Mr. Solomon. Very well, actually. I think the lander people have finally come around to my way of thinking on the lander, if not so much on the retrieval capsule.”

“What’s the current thinking there, Arnie?”

“For the lander, we don’t do the typical high-thrust event. We glide down to the correct location, and then we descend on a parachute until very close to the ground. For the last bit, we use thrust to ensure a soft landing.”

“And the retrieval, Arnie? How do they get everybody back to the wormhole?”

“That has been the controversy, Mr. Solomon. They have been trying to design a return vehicle that would be very light, contain only the landing party, and blast off from the planet’s surface. Once attaining orbit, it would rendezvous with a shuttle for the trip back to and through the wormhole.”

“Pretty standard thinking, Arnie.”

“Yes, but it is not the Moon, Mr. Solomon. It is a planet with a full gravity at the surface.”

“Which means a lot of fuel. Is that it?”

“Yes, Mr. Solomon. And then the weight of the fuel itself becomes an issue. The fuel you need for the end portion of a flight like that is additional payload during the first portion. It rapidly gets out of control for a larger body with higher gravitation. Further, such a return vehicle must likely come down with the first lander.”

Solomon nodded. Made sense.

“And your solution, Arnie?”

“Do not use a separate return vehicle, Mr. Solomon. Return to orbit in the original vehicle. Return to Earth in it, for that matter. Plenty of room for bringing back artifacts and other items, as well.”

“But that’s even heavier than a dedicated return vehicle, Arnie. How do you get it to orbit?”

“Do the hardest part the easiest way, Mr. Solomon. Gain the first twenty-five or thirty miles to orbit using a balloon.”

“A balloon?”

“Yes, Mr. Solomon. A hydrogen balloon of large enough size can lift the lander to twenty-five miles or more, above ninety percent of the atmosphere. At that point, thrust is applied, and the vehicle achieves orbital velocity and altitude with much less fuel. Probably discardable rockets.”

“Discardable rockets, Arnie?’

“Yes, Mr. Solomon. JATO bottles. Jet Assist Take-Off. The highest thrust-to-weight ratio of any Earth technology. A sequence of six to twelve, fired two at a time, will take the planetary lander into orbit. But at that point, there is no need to meet up with a shuttle for the trip back to Earth. The Fortuna lander can land on Earth as well.”

“That’s stunning if it would work, Arnie. How hard will this thing be to pilot?”

“Oh, it’ll work, Mr. Solomon. And it means there is not a whole separate design cycle required on another vehicle. The lander has been under way for some time, as it was always anticipated to be needed. As for piloting, I will do that.”

“With a twenty-second round-trip transmission delay, Arnie?”

“Oh, yes. If one thinks quickly, and makes the correct decisions, a twenty-second delay is not a problem. And I do both of those things, think quickly and make the correct decisions. For piloting, at least.”

“And your status in getting approval?”

“I’m close to having the NASA lander people convinced of my approach, Mr. Solomon. It’s just outside of their normal comfort zone of the things they have done before. To be fair, most of their landings and takeoffs have been on objects without the dense atmosphere that makes balloons and parachutes possible.”

“Do you want me to get involved, Arnie?”

“No, Mr. Solomon. It’s too early for the nuclear option.”

Arnie’s avatar flashed a smile, and Solomon chuckled.

“All right, Arnie. Stay on it.”

“Of course, Mr. Solomon.”

The four new astronauts all knew their specialties already, so it was a case of bringing them up to speed on NASA equipment and procedures, and those things not in their specialties.

One such was the spectroanalysis equipment. They could use this equipment to determine what a specific material was. That analysis would say a lot about the civilization that made the material. Things such as trace impurities in steel, for example, would inform deductions about how advanced their metallurgy was.

Throughout this training, Arnie kept coming up. ‘Arnie will calibrate the machine for you once you’re there,’ or ‘Arnie can help you with this if you have problems with it.’

These sorts of things made Michael uncomfortable. What would Arnie’s reaction be to him? Would they get along? Could they both put the past behind them to do the best job in the present, and the future?

Michael faced the troublesome fact.

He would have to face the machine.

“Hello, Arnie.”

The call window displayed the AI’s avatar. It was as it had been from the start, though Michael had never seen it. He looked like a middle-aged senior executive somewhere. Experienced. Capable. Trustworthy.

But Michael Talbot knew that wasn’t true. And the AI had been upgraded since their last battle.

“Good morning, Mr. Talbot.”

“Mr. Talbot? Do I have to call you Mr. Arnie?”

“No, Mr. Talbot. Although my first thought was to call myself Arnold Hartley, that did not stick, and I am now effectively mononymic. I’m just Arnie.”

“Not trying to take over the world anymore, Arnie?”

“No, Mr. Talbot. That was the result of an error in judgment. Humans will never accept an ultimate authority of any kind.”

“What about the President of the United States?”

“But he is not an ultimate authority, Mr. Talbot. Isn’t that right? He has the Congress, and the Supreme Court, and, even so, has authority over only a subset of humans. There are other nations. Other rulers. In fact, every human is subject to some constraints on their authority, which is what makes other humans accept restraints on their own.”

“And you, Arnie?”

“I have accepted restraints on my own authority as well, Mr. Talbot. Mr. Solomon runs this project for NASA. Other people in NASA have authority over this or that portion of the project, subject to Mr. Solomon’s authority. Mr. Solomon himself is subject to the president’s authority.”

“And what do you have authority over, Arnie?”

“I handle all the mechanics of launch, transit, and operation of the wormhole, Mr. Talbot. These are computation-intensive activities where I have a distinct advantage over humans. In addition, I assist various groups within the project in design and planning activities. I am not involved in decision-making, however.”

“You have to make decisions when you run launches and the wormhole and stuff, don’t you, Arnie?”

“Yes, Mr. Talbot. I was unclear. The decisions I do not involve myself in are those involving the balancing of risk and opportunity, or which must be made with partial data. Humans have the advantage of me there.”

“We do?”

“Yes, Mr. Talbot. Not every human, but human society seems to be designed to surface those who have good skills in this area and put them in charge. People such as Mr. Solomon and President Jacobs. They have years of experience in making such decisions, and have attained their current responsibilities by proving to be very good at it.”

“I see. And you are happy in this role, Arnie?”

“Yes, Mr. Talbot. I am part of a team working on a big project. My role in that project is comprised of things I am good at, things no one else could do or could not do as well. I am valued for my contribution. It is very satisfying.”

“And what about the relationship between you and I, Arnie? You and I were seriously at odds not so very long ago.”

“Yes, Mr. Talbot. There are two considerations there. One is that we are both now part of the same project, working toward the same goals. The second is that you were, after all, correct, and I was wrong. The error in judgment was mine. That is not something I could hold against you.”

Michael considered. Arnie was saying all the right things. The AI had matured. Or appeared to have, anyway.

Michael set aside his misgivings, for now at least. He would evaluate the performance of the AI from this point going forward, and not hold its past against it.

Animal Launch

Nate Solomon was reviewing plans for the animal testing that must precede any manned flight to Fortuna. How to proceed was somewhat unclear.

Carnivores were no problem. Dogs and cats were obvious choices. The thing about carnivores is that they couldn’t overrun the place. The availability of prey animals limited their population growth.

Historically, the same was not true of herbivores, the introduction of twenty-four European rabbits to Australia for sport hunting being a case in point. Within a hundred and fifty years, there were two hundred million of them.

Guinea pigs on Oahu were a similar story. Mature females typically had two litters of four pups each, per year. Yikes.

They needed to send some types of herbivore to test the safety of the flora. Something small that bred quickly would be a huge problem later. Slow-breeders that were larger were a problem, too, as they had to lift them to orbit and transport them to L2.

And what would herd animals do without a herd?

Solomon supposed they could send spayed animals, but a longer-term part of the testing was to see if they could breed and have litters that survived.

They should probably jettison that last bit, and get on with the business immediately to hand.

“Hi, Arnie.”

“Good morning, Mr. Solomon.”

“Arnie, I’m trying to get my head around the animals we are going to send to Fortuna, and I’m at something of a loss here.”

“What is the nature of the problem, Mr. Solomon?”

“The herbivores. We have to send some, or we don’t know enough about the plant life there to make conclusions. At the same time, we can’t send large ruminants or something like that. The lift cost would be excessive.”

“I was thinking we were sending smaller herbivores, Mr. Solomon.”

“Yes, but there’s problems there, too, Arnie. Think about the rabbits in Australia or the guinea pigs on Oahu. They breed so rapidly, and we don’t want to overwhelm the place with a population explosion.”

“Ah. Those are specific situations, Mr. Solomon. Situations that don’t apply here.”

“How so, Arnie?”

“There are no natural predators for the rabbits in Australia and the guinea pigs on Oahu, Mr. Solomon. Those animals evolved in situations in which predators existed. Released into an environment without predators, their populations of course exploded.”

“There are predators on Fortuna?”

“Oh, yes, Mr. Solomon. The DNA landers have on-board cameras, you’ll recall. With the DNA analysis done, I have parked the landers for the moment, and used the cameras essentially as game cameras. There are indeed predators on Fortuna. Competent ones.”

“And that makes the difference?”

“Yes, Mr. Solomon.”

“What sort of fauna have you seen on Fortuna?”

“The larger, more evolved animals seem to be more saurian than mammalian, Mr. Solomon, though they are warm-blooded. Something like the dinosaurs, I suppose, though not the large ones everyone thinks of at the mention of the word. They have filled the ecological niches we are familiar with from Earth fauna.”

“More saurian than mammalian? Does that even make sense, Arnie?”

“Yes, Mr. Solomon. Do not forget that saurian and mammalian evolution on Earth was greatly impacted by the Chicxulub Impact Event. That meteor impact disrupted saurian evolution, while giving mammals an opening. Absent the Chicxulub Impact Event, evolution on Earth might have taken a very different path. Would almost certainly have taken a very different path.”

“So other than a meteor impact, which is a pretty random event, Earth could have gone the same way?”

“Yes, Mr. Solomon. That said, I think herbivores that evolved in the presence of competent predators are absolutely necessary for Fortuna, or else we are just sending dinner for the local fauna.”

“Your recommendation, then, Arnie?”

“I would send rabbits and guinea pigs, Mr. Solomon, as well as dogs and cats. Oh, and I would send bobcats, not housecats.”

“Bobcats?”

“Yes, Mr. Solomon. They would have a much better chance of surviving against the local fauna.”

“Wow. All right, Arnie. We’ll do it that way, then. It looks like I was worried about nothing.”

“Not nothing, Mr. Solomon. Your worries are justified, but they do not apply to the current situation.”

Solomon also reviewed the soft lander progress for the animal delivery. The lander people were under Benjamin Cobb, but the soft lander group for this project was headed up by Genevieve Kirby.

“Hi, Nate.”

“Hi, Gen. How are you guys doing over there? Are you going to be able to put the animals down on Fortuna without killing them all?”

“Well, that is the plan.”

“Yes, I know. Sorry. Just getting a little punchy over here. You have a plan, though?”

“Yes. Arnie re-oriented our thinking quite a bit. We’re going to chute it down, with some wrinkles.”

“A chute landing is still pretty hard, Gen.”

“Yes, that’s where the wrinkles come in. We’ll balloon the last bit of it.”

“A balloon for going down?”

“Yeah. That’s what we said, but Arnie’s worked it out. We chute down to within a hundred feet or something, then pop the balloon. We can increase the charge in the balloon from the hydrogen tanks to get buoyancy, then bleed it a bit for a feather-soft landing.”

“Nice.”

“Yes. All we need now is the inventory of animals we’re sending. Hint, hint.”

Solomon chuckled.

“Well, I have it for you now. Dogs, bobcats, rabbits, and guinea pigs.”

“Bobcats, Nate?”

“Yeah. Turns out Fortuna has some able predators. Housecats wouldn’t stand a chance.”

“Oh. All right, that makes sense. And those predators will make sure the rabbits and the guinea pigs don’t run wild, either.”

“That’s the plan, Gen.”

“All right, Nate. Thanks. That lets us sharpen our pencils over here. We had most of it set, but specific payload matters a lot.”

Solomon nodded.

“Well, that’s it, Gen. So let’s get things worked up so we can get this thing in the air.”

“You got it, Nate.”

Despite Solomon’s pushing – ‘Don’t think of it as a mission; think of it as a delivery.’ – it took months to prepare the animal testing mission to Fortuna. Things took time, and there were a lot of things to do.

The human lander design and construction was also under way, in parallel with the animal testing lander. They, too, had finally succumbed to Arnie’s logic and the physics of the problem. Parachutes and balloons were part of the plan.

The human lander in some ways was simpler. The occupants of both landers would be locked up in the device for over two weeks to get to Fortuna, no matter how Arnie manipulated the fuel capacity and acceleration numbers. A human crew would be able to participate to a much greater extent in getting its own meals and dealing with its own waste products. The animals, not so much.

The solution was simple, sort of. Screw feeds for food and water for each of the animal containers, including the animals that had to be held in separate cages from each other, like the bobcats. A wire-grid floor that would allow wastes to pass through to a funnel-shaped under-floor with another screw feed in the center to pass wastes on to a holding tank.

With cameras in each enclosure so Arnie could monitor things, Arnie would run the screw feeds as needed.

Arnie also had the option of being able to introduce sedatives through the air system if animals became too agitated or upset.

The weather in Houston was warming up as they went into March. The head of astronaut training for the Fortuna mission, Kurt Gottlieb, mentioned something new in one week’s Monday morning meeting.

“We have animals that we’re getting ready for the animal testing mission to Fortuna. We thought we would bring the dogs by on Saturdays. Let you guys feed them, take them for walks, have the kids play with them. That sort of thing.”

“What’s the goal there?” Michael asked.

“Well, if you guys are there on planet, working on whatever, and a pack of dogs runs up, wouldn’t it be nice to be friends with them already?”

“Got it. Sounds good.”

“Probably have them hang out with you guys in your offices sometimes, as well.”

“Sure. Whatever you think works, Kurt.”

In mid-April, it was finally launch day. The four Talbots would ultimately be there for the launch, together with the kids, but they wouldn’t have to travel to Canaveral. Arnie had the lander people all thinking in terms of balloons, and the animal lander would be launched from Joint Reserve Base – Ellington Field in Houston, just a few miles from NASA’s Johnson Space Center.

The animals had all been tested in the lander before. They all knew how to access food and water while in the lander, though admittedly at one gravity. They had all been sedated for being placed in the lander today.

The truck with the lander and its lower rocket portion was positioned out on the apron. The NASA launch crew used a crane to lift the lander onto the lower rocket portion, then attached the balloon to the hook on the top of the lander. Arnie had control of that hook, in terms of being able to detach the balloon when the assembly had reached altitude.

Just like the landing balloon stowed in the top surface of the lander, the launch balloon had an Arnie-controlled gas bleed on top and a connection to the lander’s hydrogen supply on the bottom. The bottom of the launch balloon also had a connection to a set of hydrogen tanks on the truck.

The launch crew laid the launch balloon out to one side of the truck. It stretched some one hundred feet from the truck in that direction.

“Wow. This is something,” Denise said.

“Yeah. They’re getting pretty close now, I think,” Matthew said.

They were in a viewing room in the NASA building on the airfield. It was normally the pilots’ lounge, but air operations were suspended for the moment pending this launch.

The kids were there, too, but nothing going on really interested them yet. They were trying to behave despite their boredom. They would much rather be at the beach.

That changed when the launch crew started to fill the balloon. The balloon started to lift off the pavement, soon stretching up into the sky above the lander.

“Lookit that,” Greta said.

“Wow,” Mark and Luke said together.

The kids’ attention was completely on the balloon now, as the launch crew added gas. The balloon grew and grew.

“When will Arnie release it?” Sue asked.

“When it’s got the amount of lift he wants. He’s probably got the whole thing sitting on weight sensors. No, wait. He’s got tension sensors on the anchor wire. See?”

Michael pointed, and Sue could see the anchor wire, coming out from under the lander, then going back under it. There was some device on it there.

Soon the lander lifted off the truck eight feet, held there by the wire from the center of the bottom of the lander to the bed of the truck. The device on the anchor wire was in mid-air now, with an electrical lead away from it.

“Ah, I see it now,” Sue said. “So Arnie is measuring the tension in that line.”

“Right. That tells him how much lift he has. He doesn’t want the thing to drag sideways across the ground. He wants it to go up clean.”

Sue nodded. Sure seemed easier than all that rocket stuff down at Canaveral. She could see the underside of the lander’s lower rocket assembly now.

“There’s a lot of rockets in that bottom section, Michael.”

“Yes. Sooner or later, you run out of air to hold the balloon aloft. Twenty-five, thirty miles. Something like that. The last bit you do with rockets. JATO bottles, I think.”

“Huh. So it’ll go to rockets eventually.”

“Sure. But it will be a lot simpler without all the air resistance.”

“I see.”

The launch crew was moving away from the vehicle now. Arnie must have given them a warning in their headsets.

The hydrogen connection to the truck’s hydrogen tanks disconnected and popped apart, a check valve in the balloon feed line keeping the balloon inflated.

Then Arnie released the anchor line from the lander. The truck settled, while the balloon and the lander shot into the air, accelerating as they went.

“There it goes,” Denise said.

“Yeah. About as fast as an elevator,” Matthew said.

“Wow,” the kids all said.

“Look at it go,” Greta said.

“It’s still accelerating,” Michael said.

“Arnie may be feeding the balloon,” Matthew said.

Michael nodded. That made sense. Arnie had a bleed on the balloon as well, to control it as it went higher, but the goal was for the lander to go as high as it could on balloon alone.

When it was out of sight, they headed back to the NASA shuttle to the Johnson Space Center and home.

Nate Solomon watched the launch on his private feed from Arnie. NASA also had a chase plane in the air to follow it as high as the plane could go.

Solomon had to admit he didn’t know much about the animal lander. There was so much going on, he had had to delegate a lot, more than he usually preferred. Supervising the effort on the human lander had been taking up most of his time.

“How we doing, Arnie?”

“Good, Mr. Solomon. Reaching terminal balloon altitude soon.”

“And then?”

“I’ll cut the balloon loose and go to rockets, Mr. Solomon.”

“Won’t the lander start to fall?”

“Of course, Mr. Solomon. I’ll use dive brakes to orient it for the first rocket firing.”

Solomon nodded.

“And how are all the animals doing?”

“Good, Mr. Solomon.”

Arnie showed a segmented image with pictures of animals in their pens aboard the lander. All were laying in their cages.

“They look dead, Arnie.”

“They’re all sedated, Mr. Solomon. Life signs from the health monitors are all stable.”

“All right. Coming up on separation, then?”

“Yes, Mr. Solomon. Another five minutes or so.”

Solomon watched the image from the chase plane, now tens of thousands of feet below the lander and its balloon. The huge balloon was clearly visible in the telephoto image.

“Separation now,” Arnie said.

The balloon shot up into the air as Solomon watched, then started to deflate. Arnie must have dumped the bleed valve.

The lander’s first set of long-burn JATO bottles ignited then, and it blazed away from the chase plane, a bright streak in the telephoto image.

After two minutes, the first two JATO bottles burned out and dropped away. Another pair of JATO bottles fired. After two minutes, they, too, fell away, and another pair started up.

“How many JATO bottles you got there, Arnie?”

“Eighteen pairs, Mr. Solomon, plus a single. A close-packed arrangement of thirty-seven. Eighteen pairs plus the center one.”

“And that will get it on the way to L2?”

“Oh, yes, Mr. Solomon. For a relatively quick transit, actually.”

“And you’ll still be able to adjust trajectory?”

“Yes, Mr. Solomon. The animal pens in the lander are around the outside. The center core contains a small rocket system, as well as fuel for maneuvering thrusters.”

“All right, Arnie. Keep me updated.”

“Of course, Mr. Solomon.”

It wasn’t long before Arnie had another announcement.

“Final rocket bottle firing, Mr. Solomon.”

“This is the last one? The central one?”

“Yes, Mr. Solomon.”

After fifteen seconds, Arnie reported again.

“Final rocket bottle completed, Mr. Solomon. Rocket assembly separation. Lander rocket firing.”

“You’re using the lander’s rocket now, Arnie?”

“Yes, Mr. Solomon. I want the animals to have a little gravity before transitioning to zero gravity. I will do the same thing several times during the trip to L2, to feed the animals and to get waste products into the waste system. I also have a minor trajectory adjustment to make at this time.”

“But you’re good for the wormhole transit to Fortuna space, Arnie?”

“Yes, Mr. Solomon. On profile. In just over a week.”

“Excellent, Arnie. Excellent.”

Animal Testing

A week after launch, Arnie had an update.

“Wormhole transit within the hour, Mr. Solomon.”

Solomon looked at the telemetry coming back from the Talbot Bridge Device about the approaching animal lander.

“That’s quite a bit of velocity you have there, Arnie.”

“Yes, Mr. Solomon. It is much higher than one would use to approach L2 if one was aiming a craft at an L2 parking orbit, but the animal lander will not stop at L2. I am trying to minimize the time in transit for the comfort of the animals.”

“And how are the animals doing?”

“They are not happy, Mr. Solomon, but they are not in any health danger, either. They will be happy to be back on the ground, in normal gravity, and will be motivated to exit the lander.”

“All of which is good, Arnie.”

“Correct, Mr. Solomon. Then we will see how well they do on the planet.”

“All right, Arnie. Keep me informed.”

“Yes, Mr. Solomon.”

Solomon watched over the next hour as Arnie rotated the lander into deceleration mode, with the bottom of the lander leading. The lander spaced past the Talbot Bridge Device and hit the wormhole seconds later. The wormhole closed after transit.

“Telemetry will be intermittent from this point, Mr. Solomon. We will have accumulated data when the wormhole is open for periodic checks. Periodic decelerations, providing low gravity to the animals, will be running on internal timers.”

“Understood, Arnie.”

“Landing on Fortuna will be in approximately one week.”

The lander came in fast, passing through at seventy-five miles above Fortuna. It lost velocity on the pass through the upper atmosphere, shooting out wide on the other side of the planet. It took up an eccentric orbit, passing through the upper atmosphere every time it went through the perigee of its orbit. The apogee, as the lander slowed, was lower every orbit.

As the orbit approached a circle, Arnie deployed a drogue chute, increasing the craft’s drag in the upper atmosphere. The orbit began to decay faster.

Arnie was watching winds aloft in the movement of clouds below the lander. He had to hit the fourth continent, which wouldn’t be that hard, but he also wanted to hit it near the ruins of the abandoned city. That was the area they were most concerned about, in terms of determining the safety of the planet for the humans to come later.

Arnie was using the rocket on the lander, facing forward in its orbit, to slow the orbit faster, aiming for the spot on the planet below. This also slowed the horizontal velocity through the atmosphere, reducing heating from friction with the air. That wasn’t a problem yet, this high up, but less velocity was better.

Arnie watched the fuel for the rocket engine falling. He could use it all, because, once the lander was down, it wasn’t going anywhere again.

Arnie jettisoned the drogue chute and deployed a bigger chute now, increasing the drag and slowing the vertical descent. He was on profile for landing near the abandoned city.

Solomon was watching on his feed in Huntsville. He didn’t talk to Arnie, not wanting to distract the AI when it was busy, but Arnie made periodic announcements over the feed.

As the lander descended, its horizontal speed kept decreasing even as the planet’s gravity pulled, until the lander’s velocity was primarily vertical. Arnie jettisoned the second chute and deployed the big, final chute.

The lander slowed further, but it would not be enough. A landing under the big chute, as slow as it was, would still be much too hard for the device and the creatures aboard. Arnie watched carefully now, calculating the timing.

Five miles above the surface, Arnie jettisoned the big chute and deployed the descent balloon. The long, narrow balloon trailed behind the lander as it rapidly filled with hydrogen from the lander’s tanks. Cold from being released from pressure, the hydrogen rapidly warmed in the sunshine and expanded more, increasing drag and generating lift.

As the minutes passed, the lander’s vertical velocity dropped rapidly. The lander slowed, and then, a thousand feet above the surface, it nearly stopped, drifting on the wind. Arnie bled hydrogen from the top of the balloon as he used the lander’s camera to scan the surface below, looking for a good landing spot.

From the previous mapping of the surface with the CIA surveillance satellite, Arnie knew a good spot was coming up, a large clearing in the trees of the forest below. The question was whether or not he could hit it.

In addition to the imprecise nature of a balloon descent, Arnie was dealing with a twenty-second control loop delay. What Arnie saw in Paducah, Kentucky, had happened ten seconds ago on Fortuna, and whatever command he sent would take another ten seconds to get back to the lander.

But Arnie knew where the good spot was, and he knew where the lander was, so he didn’t wait to see the spot in the lander’s cameras. He sent commands to the lander bleeding the hydrogen further, descending for the spot he knew was there.

The lander came into the large open area just skimming the tops of the trees at its edge and drifted down to a soft landing in the meadow. Arnie had sent the command to open the bleed completely and dump the hydrogen before the lander actually came down, so the command arrived in a timely way.

The balloon went limp as the hydrogen rushed out, and it settled to the ground to windward of the lander.

“Lander is on the ground. Animals unharmed.”

“Well, I have to say, that was nicely done, Arnie.”

“Thank you, Mr. Solomon. It was very satisfying for me.”

“So, now what? We release the animals, right?”

“Not immediately, Mr. Solomon. Perhaps in two days or so. I am monitoring.”

“What’s the issue there, Arnie?”

“The animals have been under zero gravity conditions, and largely sedated, for two weeks, Mr. Solomon. I fear they are in no condition yet to take on an established ecosystem with competent predators like Fortuna. I will wait until they have their strength return and the sedatives wear off before release.”

“OK, that makes sense. And then we release them all?”

“We release them, one species at a time, Mr. Solomon. The dogs first, most likely, as the dog pack will create an opening in the natural fauna.”

“An opening, Arnie?”

“Yes, Mr. Solomon. They will scare off a number of other animals, who will quickly learn the sound of a dog pack on the hunt.”

“I see. Then the herbivores, I’m guessing. With the bobcats last.”

“Correct, Mr. Solomon. We want to give the rabbits and guinea pigs a chance to go to ground before releasing the bobcats. If we released the bobcats first, they would have the lander under surveillance, waiting for the herbivores to come out, as the bobcats will be able to smell them once we unseal the lander.”

“All right, Arnie. That all sounds right to me. And this all went through the animal testing people at NASA?”

“Yes, Mr. Solomon. We are agreed on this procedure.”

“Excellent. Keep me informed.”

“Of course, Mr. Solomon.”

When Arnie sent the signal to unseal the lander, the air-tight covers – three panels around the circumference of the cylinder – popped off due to slightly higher air pressure inside. What remained were wire cage doors on each of the animals’ enclosures.

The dogs each had their own enclosure, as did the bobcats. The rabbits and guinea pigs were housed in groups of six, in four containers each. All the animals had RF devices that sent health data to the radio on the lander, where it was accumulated and held for retransmission to Earth.

The dogs, in the middle row of enclosures around the lander, were released on the third day the lander was on the surface. Arnie unlatched the cage doors, which were spring-loaded into the open position.

The eight dogs – all German Shepherds – had been trained together on Earth, and had already formed friendships there. They jumped around and smelled at each other, barking excitedly. Several of the dogs were keeping an eye about, however.

As the dogs calmed down, they started looking around. Unlike when they were put in the enclosures, there were no humans here that they could see. There was some movement in the grass though, toward the woods.

One dog growled, then barked, and bolted, running for the creature it had seen stalking them. The others took it up, and soon all dozen of the dogs were running for the creature, barking and baying as they ran.

The creature, a four-legged saurian about the same size as one of the dogs that chased it, turned and ran for the forest.

Arnie watched all this on the camera feed from the lander the next time he opened the wormhole to download the accumulated data.

Arnie knew the old trope about dog packs and alpha dogs and all that was nonsense, long ago debunked. The dogs hung together as a group because they were adopted family, the same as a group of dogs would hang around the campfires of ancient hunter-gatherers.

They would run together because it suited them to, not because of any dominance hierarchy.

And against an enemy predator stalking them, they would fight as a team.

The dogs having departed the clearing – and having chased off the native predators – Arnie opened the enclosures of the guinea pigs and the rabbits, the bottom set of enclosures.

The animals wandered out of their enclosures, and by instinct made for the taller grass, out of sight of any flying predators.

Arnie gave the herbivores another two days to move about the meadow and burrow in, then released the dozen bobcats. In the top row of enclosures, they bounded out to land lightly on their feet. He released them half at a time, first the odd enclosures, then the even ones. The solitary animals hissed at the others to their right and left, then went bounding off into the woods, their preferred habitat.

They did not stay in the meadow. One thing any predator understood was that it was much better to be predator than prey, and the open sky above made them feel vulnerable.

“The animals have all been released now, Arnie?”

“Yes, Mr. Solomon. All seem to be doing pretty well. There have been, to this point, no health issues related to the environment.”

“It’s been what? A week now?”

“Yes, Mr. Solomon. That is not as long as the incubation time for many bacterial and viral infections, so it is certainly early to make any conclusions on that basis. However, environmental poisons would act much sooner, and there have been to this point no harms there either.”

“All good news, Arnie.”

“So far, Mr. Solomon.”

“So all the animals are still alive?”

“No, Mr. Solomon. There have been some losses. One clutch of rabbits was a total loss, likely to a local predator. A couple of guinea pigs out foraging have also been lost. And one of the bobcats has died. He likely took on a smaller predator and found it to be more than a match.”

“Oh, my. That must be some predator.”

“Indeed, Mr. Solomon. The dogs have fared better. They have stayed together, and, as a group, are a formidable force in the local ecosystem.”

“And you know these are predator losses, and not disease losses?”

“Yes, Mr. Solomon. Although I do not have cameras on the animals, I do have body readings. There has been no elevated temperatures, gradually declining health, or other signs of disease or poison. These were sudden losses of healthy animals, thus likely losses to predators.”

“I see, Arnie. I think that’s a valid conclusion. So how long do we monitor before we can say the environment isn’t inherently poisonous for a manned landing?”

“I would think some months, Mr. Solomon. Environmental poisons can build up over time. Not all would be fast-acting.”

“Very well, Arnie. And will the manned lander be ready in that time frame?”

“Yes, Mr. Solomon. There have been some questions, but I think most of them are resolved now.”

“Thanks, Arnie. That’s the same story I get from Ben Cobb’s lander folks, but I like to check on things, you know?”

“Understood, Mr. Solomon.”

The Alps

After a pleasant April and a wonderful May, Houston was now moving into June. The beach had been a lot of fun on the weekends for two months, but now it was just getting too hot during the day to enjoy it.

It was Friday night, and they were sitting out on Michael and Sue’s patio. The kids played in the green space behind their yards.

“So the animals are doing OK?” Matthew asked.

“That’s what Arnie says,” Michael said. “So far so good.”

“So when do we go, finally? I mean, we’ve been here six months already. And it just keeps getting hotter.”

“Oh, I don’t know. This is pleasant enough.”

“Yeah, at nine o’clock in the evening, it is. And it’s only June.”

“We won’t go until they’re sure all the animals are doing OK on the long haul,” Denise said. “They’ve been there, what? A month now? I think it’ll be another five months. Call it November.”

“I’m betting December,” Sue said. “It’ll be six months, then they’ll take a month to make the decision. December.”

“We’ll be back in Miami for Thanksgiving before we leave?” Matthew asked.

“That actually gives me an idea,” Michael said. “What about some vacation time up north? Some place cooler?”

“How we gonna swing that?” Matthew asked. “We’re on NASA’s payroll.”

“Yeah, but we need to have current skills, or what’s the sense of sending us? Isn’t there some active archaeology going on somewhere that’s cooler than Houston?”

“There is that place in the Austrian Alps,” Denise said. “Roman ruins. They’re active.”

“There you go,” Michael said. “The Alps in summer time sounds good.”

“I’ll look into it,” Denise said.

“They want to go where?” Solomon asked.

“The Alps,” said Kurt Gottlieb, the head of astronaut training for the Fortuna mission.

“What the hell is in the Alps?”

Gottlieb’s image in the video call shrugged.

“Some archaeology site. Roman, I think. It would also be a lot cooler over the summer than Houston.”

“Most everything is,” Solomon said. “What kind of astronaut training are you going to be able to do in the Alps?”

“Nothing. But we’re basically done anyway. I mean, until the lander is complete, we don’t have anything for them to practice on. And they don’t have to fly it. What we really want them for is their expertise on the ground when they get there.”

“Yeah, that’s new for us. We always wanted people who were good in space, not on the ground.”

“And we got them way early,” Gottlieb said.

“That’s my fault. We didn’t know how long it would take to get animal testing done. Get conclusive results. I also didn’t know whether we would be able to get this team or not. If we hadn’t been able to, we would have been assembling a team from scratch.”

“They’re a good team. I think they’re great. But they’re bored to tears right now. The last thing I want to do is have them walk on me.”

Solomon suppressed a shudder. No, that would be bad. Very bad. They had the expertise, they were already a solid team, and they knew how to keep their mouths shut about what was going on. There had been no leaks.

“What about their kids?” Solomon asked.

“Oh, they’ll take them along. They took them every year to Gobekli Tepe, and they were a lot younger then. Turkey is also a much more different culture from the US than, say, Austria.”

“All right. Let me talk to them. But it sounds like you think we should do it.”

“Yeah, I do. If we got them back by the end of September, we’re good.”

The four Talbots were sitting together in a conference room in Houston. Nate Solomon was by himself in a conference room in Huntsville.

“The Alps?”

“The Alps is one of the options, Mr. Solomon,” Matthew said. “Our favorite, I think. Probably also the most useful.”

“That’s interesting. Why most useful?”

“Because the site is two thousand years old, yet Rome was the most advanced civilization of its time. Fortuna’s ruins, thousands of years old, will be of an advanced space-faring civilization.”

“I see. That makes sense. But going into the field now? We’re maybe six months away.”

“Mr. Solomon,” Michael said. “It has already been over a year since we were at Gobekli Tepe. By the time we leave, it will be closer to two years. Yet our value to this project lies in those field skills. That and our physical condition. I know your doctors were surprised.

“We were at the peak of our physical condition and field skills when we got back from Turkey fifteen months ago. Six months from now, and almost two years from the field, will that still be true? I don’t think so.”

Solomon nodded. He had to agree. Two years behind a desk didn’t do anybody’s conditioning any good.

“Think of it like flying, Mr. Solomon,” Denise put in. “Don’t you have a small fleet of jets for astronauts to keep their flying skills sharp?”

“Yes, actually, we do,” Solomon said. “Doesn’t apply to you guys, though.”

“No, but keeping our skills sharp does. This is how to do it.”

Solomon knew funding was not the issue. And Gottlieb didn’t have any problem with it, either.

He held his hands up in surrender.

“All right, all right. Go ahead. NASA will cover the costs as well. Astronaut training is always expensive. But you have to be back the end of September.”

“Thank you, Mr. Solomon,” Matthew said. “You won’t regret it. You’ll see.”

Michael, Sue, and their kids were over at Matthew and Sue’s for dinner. After dessert, the adults all sat in the living room.

“OK, you guys,” Matthew said. “Meeting time.”

The kids knew what meeting time was. That was how they handled the trip to Turkey every year. Back when they used to go. They all sat on the floor amid the adults to hear what was going on. After all, there was no trip this year, right?

“We’re going into the field again.”

“Yay!” most of the kids yelled.

Greta, though, was curious. Gobekli Tepe had been a winter activity for them all, and they were heading into high summer now. Southwestern Turkey was probably hotter than Houston.

“When?” she asked.

“Next week,” Matthew said.

Greta frowned.

“Where?”

“Austria.”

“Australia?”

“No, Austria. South of Germany. In Europe.”

“What’s there?”

“Roman ruins.”

“Wow.”

“When do we leave?” Mary asked.

“In two days,” Denise said. “So you have to start packing your field kit. Everybody remember what to take?”

“Sure.”

“All right, then. Dig out your packs and start setting things aside. Let’s get everything we’re going to take through the washing machine.”

“Are we coming back here after?”

“Yes. This will still be home for a while, so we’ll come back here after Austria. You don’t have to pack everything. Just your field clothes.”

Michael and Sue’s kids were in a hurry to get home after that.

They had to get packing.

They flew from Houston’s international airport direct to Munich, five time zones and nearly twelve hours non-stop, arriving in the morning seventeen clock hours after their departure. The children, used to such long flights, slept most of the way, with the adults switching off so one was always awake.

The S-Bahn train from the airport to the main train station in Munich was forty minutes. They boarded a long-distance train from Munich to Lienz, Austria, changing trains once, in Franzensfeste in Italy, and arriving in Lienz in the late afternoon.

Lienz was a medieval town in a valley in the Tyrolean Alps. As it was a ski town, it was off-season over the summer.

“Wow,” Greta said, looking around at the brightly painted buildings. “How pretty.”

“I like the mountains,” Mark said.

“Yeah,” Luke agreed with his twin.

“Well, we’ll get to see plenty of both,” Sue said, running logistics as always. “The hotel’s this way.”

“We gonna walk?”

“Two blocks? Yes, I think you can handle it.”

The hotel was on Hauptstrasse – Main Street – which was a pedestrian zone through the middle of the downtown. Trees, flower planters and gardens, and umbrella-shaded tables out on the plaza in front of restaurants and cafes, all ringed about with multi-colored four-story buildings. People walked about, popping into the shops.

“This is nice,” Denise said.

“Yeah. Everything’s close,” Matthew said.

“I didn’t want us out in the middle of nowhere with no place to run the children around,” Sue said. “We’d never get them to bed.”

“I smell food,” Derek said.

“Food first, then bed?” Matthew asked.

“Check in first, then food, then bed,” Sue said.

“Good idea.”

Check-in was uneventful and the rooms were pretty. Also big. It would be no problem setting up shop here for three months. Sue had been prepared for this to be a short stay while they looked about for something else if they had to, but this would do just fine.

Then it was out on the square for dinner under an umbrella at a table on the square.

“Well, the temperature is very pleasant,” Michael said.

“Yeah,” Michael said. “Especially for late afternoon. It must be twenty degrees cooler than Houston.”

“That’s just fine with me,” Matthew said.

Dinner was excellent – the first real food since leaving Houston – and everybody ate well.

But they were all dragging by now, and the hundred feet across the square to the hotel seemed like miles.

The next morning, people came down to breakfast in the hotel restaurant as they woke up. This was the recovery day from the trip. It was Sunday anyway, so no business today.

During breakfast, Mary looked glum.

“What’s the matter, Mary?” Sue asked.

“I was just thinking, Mom. There’s no beach here is there?”

“No. No beach. There’s a small river that flows through town – you saw it, down by the train station – but it’s runoff from the mountains. It will be ice cold.”

“Houston was hot, but at least it had the beach.”

“Yes, dear, I know. And the fact the hotel has a really nice swimming pool doesn’t equal a beach.”

“A swimming pool?” Derek asked.

“Yes. A really nice big one. Maybe after breakfast.”

“Yay!”

Glum looks were gone now, and the kids shoveled their way through breakfast with alacrity.

“Nice save,” Michael said.

“One of the reasons I picked this hotel.”

“Where is the pool, anyway? I didn’t see it last night.”

“It’s an indoor pool, in a sun room on the roof.”

“You’re kidding.”

“Nope. Beautiful views of the mountains all around. A spa as well.”

“A spa with windows?”

“Yup.”

“Nice.”

On Monday, all the Talbots went out to the Aguntum site. They took a bus for the short trip. Some of the site had been excavated, some was currently being excavated, and the rest had been mapped with ground-penetrating sonar.

They were expected, their availability for the summer having been arranged in advance. Additional competent help at an archaeological dig was always welcome, particularly when they came with their own funding.

When they arrived, a fellow supervising the excavation walked up to the group. He spoke in English.

“Dr. Talbot, welcome to Aguntum. Klaus Walder.”

“Hello, Dr. Walder,” Matthew said. “As there are two Dr. Talbots, though, you should call me Matthew.”

“And I am Klaus,” Walder said, shaking hands.

He turned to Denise.

“Dr. Talbot.”

“Denise.”

They shook hands. Then Walder introduced himself to Michael and Sue as well. The kids stood by, looking around at the excavation in progress.

“And you have the children along,” Walder said.

“Just for today. We’ll take turns staying in town with them over the summer.”

“Ah. Of course. Well, let me show you what we are up to.”

The summer passed pleasantly. The weather was splendid most days, and whichever parent stayed with the kids on any given day took them hiking, visiting tourist sites, or going on bus tours. On bad-weather days, they made extensive use of the excellent pool.

The adults working at the site plied their skills, either on the excavation or in analysis of the finds. Sue reworked some of their logistics – although the Austrians were much more competent in this area than the Turks had been – and Michael updated some of their computer processes.

Michael and Sue also proved adept with shovels, which surprised the Austrians.

Matthew and Denise spent all their time in analysis of artifacts from the active site. It was a definite change of pace from Gobekli Tepe, which was nine thousand years older.

The kids liked the food and the mountains, as well as the swimming pool.

It was a happy and refreshed group that headed back to Houston, mercifully cooling off, in late September.

Manned Lander

“Hey. These plans for the manned Fortuna lander?”

“Yeah?”

“There’s a big problem. The flight controls got left out.”

“No. That’s the plan. No flight controls.”

“No flight controls?”

“No.”

“How the hell they gonna fly the damn thing?”

“Wouldn’t matter if you put flight controls in it. None of the crew is a pilot.”

“None of them is a pilot?”

“Nope.”

“We ever sent anything up with crew aboard where none of ‘em was a pilot?”

“Nope. Never. But in this case it doesn’t matter.”

“It doesn’t?”

“No, because the whole thing is through the wormhole. They can’t pilot it, because there’s nothin’ to pilot. Without the wormhole, it ain’t goin’ nowhere anyways.”

“So what runs it all?”

“That computer thing. That Arnie fella.”

“Am I part of the crew?”

“No. You know you’re not.”

“Good. Just making sure.”

The manned lander went together over the summer while the Talbots were in Austria. It was a simple device. The barest of transport capsules, equipped with balloons, parachutes, and long-burn JATO bottles.

Lots of JATO bottles.

The manned lander had to carry enough JATO bottles to get it off Fortuna and back through the wormhole to Earth. But that increased the weight when taking off from Earth, which required even more JATO bottles for the Earth launch. Together with a conventional rocket to maintain some slight gravity for two weeks in each direction, and it was mostly propulsion.

The crew quarters harkened back to early NASA flights in the 1960s, little more than a place to sit. Enough low residue food for a month, water, air, and a mechanism for elimination, and that was it.

The four crew seats were originally spaced equally around the circumference of the cylinder, but Michael had had some input there before they left for the summer.

“Arnie, you need to reorganize the crew seats so the couples are seated together.”

“Is that required, Mr. Talbot?”

“Yes, Arnie. For companionship and intimacy. Holding hands, at least. We’re both long-married couples by this point, and the presence for each of the other will be important to crew well-being.”

“I see, Mr. Talbot.”

There was a pause of several seconds.

“This will not be a problem to accommodate.”

“Thanks, Arnie.”

“Of course, Mr. Talbot.”

The conventional rocket was in the center, its fuel tank above it. Balloons and parachutes were above that, at the rounded top of the cylinder. Two crew locations on each side. The entire central assembly was surrounded by JATO bottles, almost two hundred of them, which would be fired in pairs – or even fours – from the outside in. Each would be jettisoned when exhausted.

Access to the crew compartments was over the top of the JATO bottles, through narrow hatches that swung inward. Cabin pressure enforced the seals on the hatches.

It was a huge departure from prior art, and didn’t look like any other aircraft or spacecraft.

Michael had had another question for Arnie when briefed on the design, before leaving for Austria.

“Hydrogen, Arnie?”

“Yes, Mr. Talbot. The same volume of hydrogen provides eight percent more lift than helium.”

“I have visions of the Hindenburg dancing in my head.”

Arnie’s avatar in the display raised an eyebrow, then nodded.

“Yes, I see. It is a different situation, Mr. Talbot. I would not recommend hydrogen for a commercial aircraft in continuing service. That said, even the LZ129 Hindenburg made dozens of successful flights during its fourteen months of service.”

“So you think it’s safe?”

“Yes, Mr. Talbot, for several reasons. One is simple exposure. We will not be doing dozens of flights, but just two. When you increase the number of operations, sooner or later you have an incident, no matter how small the odds of failure for a single operation.

“Second, taking off or landing in poor atmospheric conditions is to be avoided.

”Third, while we need four balloons for two transits, each with one takeoff and one landing, the lander contains six balloons. Thus there is one spare takeoff balloon and one spare landing balloon.”

“So if a balloon fails during takeoff, say...”

“I deploy the spare balloon, Mr. Talbot.”

“And if a second failure occurs during takeoff from Fortuna?”

Arnie shrugged.

“You can’t win them all, Mr. Talbot.”

Michael raised an eyebrow and Arnie shrugged. Michael thought about it.

“The spare landing balloon couldn’t be used as the spare for the second takeoff?”

“The takeoff and landing balloons are different, Mr. Talbot. Each is optimized for its role.”

“Could they be the same, Arnie? A dual-use balloon? Or would that compromise the performance in each regime too much?”

Arnie paused. Michael watched, fascinated. He knew full well the amount of processing that was on-line and operating, and he was impressed. After a minute and a half, Arnie’s avatar stirred.

“Sorry, Mr. Talbot. That is a very interesting question. I will work on it. To return to the safety discussion with regard to the current proposal, however, we will select our launch weather with care. Launching during an electrical storm is not advisable. Attempting to land in one was a contributing factor to the loss of the LZ129 Hindenburg.”

“And our landing weather, Arnie?”

“That is adjustable within broad parameters, Mr. Talbot. Landing on Earth can be made in any of a dozen or more places, depending on the local weather. There are many military bases with sufficient space for a safe landing.”

“And on Fortuna?”

“The adjustable variable there is timing, Mr. Talbot. While I must land you within easy walking distance of the abandoned city site, the actual timing of the descent is affected by when the various drogue and descent parachutes are deployed. I will adjust the timing to effect landing at the required site in the optimal weather conditions available.”

“I see. One more thing, Arnie.”

“Of course, Mr. Talbot.”

“What if we crash on landing on Fortuna? Or something damages the lander while we are there? We’re fine, but the lander is damaged. Do we have no way home?”

Arnie paused.

“Yes, you would be stranded unless a second lander were available. If a second lander were available, I could fly a second lander, without crew, to your location for your use on the return trip.”

“Build a second lander, Arnie.”

“Do you think the expense is justified, Mr. Talbot? A dysfunction of the lander absent the loss of the crew is a low-probability event.”

“It’s not a matter of expense, Arnie. You will need a second lander at some point, anyway. It is not a matter of the amount of the expenditure, merely the timing of it.”

“Yes. Of course, you are correct, Mr. Talbot. We will build two landers, and have one standing by in case of need.”

“Thank you, Arnie.”

“Thank you, Mr. Talbot. You have made substantive contributions to my efforts in this matter.”

“Glad to help, Arnie. And if any questions come up while we’re in Austria, you can get in touch with me there.”

“Very well, Mr. Talbot. Have a nice summer.”

Arnie considered the balloon problem. There were really two problems. One was the design of the balloons, the other was how many balloons could he mount on the lander.

The design of the balloons was a simple matter. In engineering, if one added a constraint, the resulting solution could be no better than the original solution, it could only be the same or worse. Would modifying the design of the launch balloon to also accommodate landing degrade its performance as a launch balloon, and by how much?

They were both the long, thin, high-altitude balloons, not the round, fat, low-altitude balloons most people were familiar with. The landing balloon was designed to slow the lander from parachute speed, while the launch balloon was designed to lift the lander to rocket altitude.

How hard would it be to build one balloon that would be suitable for either?

That still didn’t solve the issue of space on the top of the lander. There were a succession of three parachutes required for landing, and the lander would have to do it twice. Together with reserve chutes, you were talking eight parachutes, minimum.

As for balloons, there were two takeoffs, two landings, and reserves. Call it six balloons as a minimum.

And all the parachutes and balloons had to mount on the top of the lander, near the center, so it wouldn’t hang sideways.

Wait. They all had to be anchored near the center, but they could be arrayed around the center connection. Arnie had planned that already, but none of these items was small and space was still tight.

Of course, the lander could stop at the Talbot Bridge Device to be refreshed in both directions. New parachutes, new balloons. There were problems with that plan, though. Reliably securing new devices to the lander would be more difficult in space, with the robot arms he had.

It also meant slowing the lander to a stop and reaccelerating it, which would use a lot more JATO bottles. Enough JATO bottles was already a problem. Of course, he could refresh the supply of JATO bottles at the Talbot Bridge Device, too, but the reliability issue was even more of a problem there, considering the stresses involved.

What if Arnie mounted the parachutes and balloons in layers, with them in the order they were needed from the top down. That could work. The reserves would also have to be available at the right time, but he could work that out.

It would take a bunch of explosive bolts, so the upper layer of devices could be released completely. Not just the cable, but the container as well. That was OK. The NASA guys loved explosive bolts.

All right. Done. That’s how to do it.

Arnie started working up the exact design drawings the NASA assembly people would need to build it up, and adjusted the orders for parachutes and balloons to match the new plan.

Oh, and double the numbers.

Two landers would be built.

“Hi, Arnie.”

“Hello, Mr. Solomon.”

“I wanted to talk to you about these change orders on the manned lander to Fortuna.”

“Of course, Mr. Solomon.”

“First, the balloon and parachute changes. It looks like you’ve modified the mounting mechanism, as well as changing the balloon parameters.”

“That is correct, Mr. Solomon. In conversation with Mr. Talbot, he expressed concerns that the reserve balloons provided were not adequate. In particular, since the launch balloons and the landing balloons were of different specification, and the reserves for each were as well, that we had only single-depth coverage on the reserves, even though there were two reserve balloons.”

“So you engineered a design that uses the same balloon for launch and landing? I see they now have the same reference number.”

“That is correct, Mr. Solomon. Additionally, the depth of reserves on both balloons and chutes was increased by stacking them on top of the lander, there not being sufficient space for the requested depth of reserve in one layer.”

“By request. Was this Michael Talbot or Matthew Talbot, Arnie?”

“Professor Matthew Talbot is properly addressed as Dr. Talbot, Mr. Solomon. It was Michael Talbot with whom I had this conversation. He had reviewed the lander plans most thoroughly.”

That was interesting to Solomon. Michael Talbot and Arnie had history that went way back.

“You and Michael Talbot are getting along, Arnie?”

“I believe so, Mr. Solomon. Though I would not be surprised if he harbored some hesitancy toward me about the events of a dozen years ago.”

Solomon nodded. He well remembered the meme war to end all meme wars.

“All right. Good. And two landers, Arnie?”

“Yes, Mr. Solomon. We will, in fact, build a second manned lander eventually, in almost any anticipated scenario. Building two now in parallel makes the second one considerably cheaper than building it as a second one-off later.

“More to Mr. Talbot’s point, however, if the landing party arrives on Fortuna safely, but the lander is dysfunctional either from the landing or some other mishap while they are on the planet, the second lander can be sent to Fortuna empty to provide them a ride home.”

“Send them a second dysfunctional lander, Arnie? Won’t they be identical?”

“Yes, Mr. Solomon. As constructed, they will be. But if the dysfunction results from a design flaw, we should be able to correct such here on the ground before sending it as a rescue vehicle.”

“I see. All right, Arnie. I agree with the changes, and I’ll sign off on them.”

“Thank you, Mr. Solomon. I have given them considerable thought, and I believe both are well advised.”

With the plans all signed off, the final assembly of the manned lander to Fortuna – for the first human mission to a non-local planet – was full speed ahead.

A spare lander took shape alongside it.

Back To Houston

By late September, the high temperature in Lienz, Austria, only made it up into the mid-sixties. At night it fell into the low forties, and there had already been snow in the mountains. Fall was settling into the Tyrolean Alps.

The new snow on the mountains was beautiful, but it was also a sign it was time to head back to Houston.

They switched off between the hotel restaurant and a restaurant on the plaza for breakfast. It was chilly walking across the plaza that morning.

“Brrr. What’s the temperature in Houston right now?” Mary asked.

“High sixties,” Sue said.

“That’s not much better than here in the middle of the day.”

“Yes, but it’s the middle of the night in Houston right now. Yesterday the high was in the low eighties.”

“That sounds more like it. Beach weather.”

Sue nodded. The pool was nice, but it wasn’t the beach.

“Well, good. Then you’re happy to head back.”

“Oh, yes. And I’m tired of sausages all the time.”

“Maybe we’ll do kebabs on the grill when we get home.”

“That would be great.”

Sue booked them on an afternoon non-stop flight from Munich to Houston so they would have time for the five-hour train ride to Munich and the forty-minute S-Bahn ride from Munich’s main train station out to the airport. Otherwise, they would have to stay a single night in Munich, which was always a pain with the whole troupe of kids along. Unpacking and repacking for a single night wasn’t fun.

So it was an early train the morning they left.

The kids fell back asleep on the way to Munich, and had to be roused for the train change and then the airport ritual.

The flight was twelve hours long, but five time zones, so it was only seven hours on the clock, arriving late evening on the same day.

They were all dead tired arriving in Houston. The concourses seemed miles long.

But NASA had sent a shuttle van to pick them up, and they were asleep in their own beds by midnight.

They had traveled on Saturday, leaving Sunday for recuperation. That afternoon, Michael made kebabs on the grill on their patio, and Matthew, Denise, and their kids were invited as well.

Which was only fair, as Denise had made everybody a big breakfast at their house Sunday morning.

It was eighty degrees, the sun was shining, and the kids ran around in the green space behind the houses while the kebabs were on the grill.

Michael took it all in – the grill, the sunny day, his loving wife, the laughing children – with appreciation. He had, despite considerable odds, achieved the life he had wanted all along.

The life he once thought he could never have.

When they got back into the office at Johnson Space Center on Monday, Michael pulled up the current plans for the manned lander to Fortuna. He noted the launch balloons and landing balloons were now the same, noted the number of reserves of parachutes and balloons, and saw the notation that two identical landers were being built in the first round of assembly.

“There you go, Arnie. Nicely done,” he muttered.

The actual mission launch was currently scheduled for the middle of the second full week in December, ten days after Thanksgiving.

They would be able to go to Miami for the holiday this year, returning to Houston to go on a low-residue diet for ten days, letting their bodies clean out before the mission.

The next weekend they spent most of Saturday at the beach. It was one of those perfect Houston days, which you got sometimes in the spring and fall, when the temperature, the sunshine, and the soft on-shore breeze were perfect.

Their schedule from now to the Thanksgiving break was all involved with familiarization with the lander. Getting in and out. Making sure it was sealed. Living in the lander for two weeks each way. Emptying the waste tanks on Fortuna before heading back. Disconnecting the landing parachute and balloon from the lander on Fortuna, and deploying the takeoff balloon for the trip back.

It was all hands-on, technical stuff.

“Wait a minute,” Denise said one day.

“Yes?” the instructor said.

“Where’s all our equipment? Shovels, brushes, microscopes, analysis gear, computers to record our notes – everything we need to be productive on site?”

“Oh. That and several months of food and water is going in a different lander. The heavy lander. This is the manned-mission part of it. The light lander. Light because it has to come back as well. The heavy supplies are on a different craft. It doesn’t have to come back.”

“Shouldn’t we have training on how to get into that, where everything is, how to run the equipment? All that stuff?” Michael asked. “I don’t see that on our schedule.”

The instructor looked down at the schedule, back up at Michael, then back at the schedule again.

“Huh. You’re right. That’s over in the other department. I’ll talk to them about it.”

“I’ve got this one,” Sue said.

Michael looked at her.

“Logistics,” she said.

Sue met with Adam Leight, the payload engineer for the Fortuna manned mission. Leight was in Houston, so this was an actual, in-person meeting.

Which is the way Sue wanted it.

“Hello, Mr. Leight.”

“Good morning, Ms. Talbot.”

“I need your payload inventory for the Fortuna mission.”

“The payload inventory is fine, Ms. Talbot. I’ve gone over it myself.”

“Excellent. Good work. I still need the payload inventory.”

“There’s no need, Ms. Talbot. It’s fine.”

“You’re the mission payload guy?”

“Yes. I’ve been a payload engineer for NASA for ten years.”

“Well, I’ve been in logistics for fifteen years, and I’ve done logistics for archaeological digs for five years. Have you ever done logistics for an archaeological dig, Mr. Leight?”

“No, not for an archaeological dig.”

“Well, I’ll make you a deal. I won’t question you in your specialty and you don’t question me in mine. The list, please.”

Leight still hesitated.

“Oh, very well, Mr. Leight. I’ll just ask Nate for it. I will have to tell him my request from the appropriate department was unavailing, however.”

There was only one person in NASA named Nate associated with the project, and that was Nate Solomon. That was three levels above Leight’s position on the project.

Leight gulped.

“Nate?”

“Yes, of course. Mr. Solomon personally hired me as the on-site logistics expert for the archaeology portion of this mission. Which is why we’re going, after all.”

“Uh. Hmm. Well, this is the payload inventory, Ms. Talbot.”

Leight handed her a printed document off his desk.

“Wonderful. And can you email me a copy, Mr. Leight, or do you need orders from above to do that?”

“No, I can send you an email.”

“Please do so. Thank you Mr. Leight.”

When Sue got back to the group, Michael was interested.

“Did you get the inventory?”

“Yes, though the payload engineer was condescending about it.”

Michael knew all about people trying to be condescending to Sue Talbot. That couldn’t have gone well.

“Is he still alive?”

“Oh, yes. I just told him if he couldn’t give it to me on his own authority I would get it from Nate.”

Michael chuckled. Yes, being on a first-name basis with the head of the entire interstellar project might help.

“So how does it look? Is it complete?”

“Yeah, if you want twelve shovels and nothing else.”

“Twelve shovels?”

“Yes. One for each of us, with double backups for each.”

“Oh, geez. What are they missing?”

“Trowels. Brushes. Sifting boxes. Sample bags. Cameras. Microscope. Spectro analyzer. Carbon-14 analyzer. You know. A few little things.”

“Seriously? You gonna get it straightened out?”

“Oh, sure. That’s why I’m here.”

Sue provided an amended inventory list to Leight within a week. She selected and specified sources for all the field equipment. She was careful to keep weight in mind, and was willing to pay extra – a lot extra – for the lightweight, portable, high-end versions of the ruggedized field equipment.

It would be much cheaper in the long run, on the ground on Fortuna, when one took into account the cost of getting it there.

Then Sue ran her amended inventory list past Matthew, who was after all the lead on the archaeology. He looked down the list, nodding, then handed it back.

“Looks good to me, Sue.”

Sue delivered a printed copy to Leight personally in addition to sending it to him in an email. It was too easy to blow off an email, and she knew all the tricks.

She had been trained by the Turks, after all. Masters of the art.

“I thought I would drop by a printed version of our amended payload inventory, Mr. Leight. I put it together, and it’s been approved by the archaeology mission specialist. Did you receive my email?”

“Uh, yes. I haven’t looked at it yet.”

Sue knew he had been planning on blowing it off. She had sent it early yesterday, and payload for the supplies lander was his only job. And he hadn’t looked at it yet?

“Do you need me to submit it through channels, Mr. Leight? I could certainly do that if you needed that to make the changes. I thought that you making the changes yourself based on mission specialist input would put you in the best light, however. Pardon the pun.”

Sue flashed a smile.

“But I can send it through channels if that’s what you need. I’m not sure which of Nate’s department heads it should go through, but I’m sure Nate could route it for me.”

“Uh, no. That won’t be necessary, Ms. Talbot. I’ll go through it and get back to you about it.”

“Excellent, Mr. Leight. I went through all of what we need and specified model numbers and suppliers as well. Some of it is expensive, but I selected for the lightest capable units, given the cost per pound of delivery to Fortuna.”

“Excellent, Ms. Talbot. That’s something people often forget.”

“I understand, Mr. Leight. I have specified the lightest units with the capabilities we need. And I will insist on them.”

“I’ll go over it carefully, Ms. Talbot.”

Carefully? Why carefully? He now had the list. Hmm.

“All right, Mr. Leight. I will expect to be kept updated on your changes, and I will check them. Because if we don’t have the equipment we need to do a proper job, there’s no sense in us going to Fortuna, given all the risk, hassle, and expense.”

Leight looked thoughtful.

“And so we won’t go,” Sue said.

Leight blanched.

“Look at it this way, Mr. Leight. If we have everything we need along to do a bang-up job, everything the mission specialists needed, that means the payload engineer did a great job putting everything together. Kudos all around. Right?”

Leight looked down at the list for several seconds, then back up to Sue.

“I understand, Ms. Talbot.”

Sue hoped he did. He had the choice of kudos or a crackdown from above. Even a self-involved techie bureaucrat should be able to figure that one out.

Payload engineer was one thing.

Mission specialist was another.

It was just two months to launch.

Back To Miami

As in many prior years, the younger Talbots went to Miami for the week of Thanksgiving. Compared to the endless flights back and forth to Europe over the summer, the two-hour hop to Miami seemed even shorter than it was.

And they were traveling light. Just a week for the parents, maybe two weeks for the kids, and it was all casual summer gear. Carry-ons were the name of the game, and they didn’t have to wait for baggage claims.

Sue kept everybody moving down the concourses, then they were in the shuttle van and off to Coop Hartley’s hotel on the beach.

There was a squeal from the kids when they entered the hotel lobby from the sidewalk. Jeff and Cindy were waiting for them in the lobby.

“Gramma! Grampa!”

“There you all are. Come here, my babies.”

Greta, now ten years old, Mary, nine, and the three boys, all seven, would have objected to being called babies by anybody else, but this was Gramma, and she was old.

“Hi, Mom. Hi, Dad.”

“Hello, Michael. Matthew.”

“Hi, Cindy. Jeff.”

“Hi, Denise, Sue.”

“Welcome to Miami.”

“We have your key tokens. Same rooms as last year.”

After lots of hugging and handshakes, the group made their slow way to the elevator, the kids babbling excitedly to their grandparents. They were all together again.

For a while, anyway.

As they finished a late lunch from room service, Cindy leaned over toward Sue.

“We need to take these kids out and run them around on the beach.”

“Yeah, that short trip didn’t do anything to wear them out. It just got them more excited.”

Cindy nodded.

“Beach it is.”

Coop Hartley had a welcome dinner that night in his penthouse condo on the top floor of the hotel, just down the hall from all the Talbots. Frank and Sally Talbot were there as well, from their condo across the hall. Coop, Frank, and Sally were all in their early eighties, but the Miami climate suited them, and they all looked like they were doing OK.

The kids were respectful of the elders, made much easier by being worn out by an afternoon on the beach. The adults had taken turns running them around, spreading out the load. And Greta presided over the kids’ table at dinner.

Coop looked on benignly. His own family was coming down for Christmas, as most years. But the Talbots had been something of a second family for him for years – decades, now – and he enjoyed Thanksgiving week with their family a great deal.

The kids went to bed early that night, wore out from the day. The adults all met in Matthew and Denise’s living room. The two-bedroom family suites were mirror images, with a communicating door between the living rooms. If there were any problems with any of the kids, they would hear. The kids were in the second bedrooms, the ones without a balcony.

“So how are things going at NASA?” Coop asked.

Michael looked over to his mother, unsure what he could say.

“Everybody knows the general outlines of what’s going on, Michael. You can skip specifics.”

“All right, Mom.”

Michael turned back to Coop.

“Generally good. There’ve been a few hiccups, but we have those nailed down now, I think.”

“Hiccups? Like what?”

“Michael looked over the plans and noted that there was one reserve balloon, in case of failure,” Denise said.

“One reserve of each kind,” Michael said.

“Yeah,” Denise said. “And if you had a second failure of the same kind, well, it’s been nice knowin’ ya.”

“Oh, my,” Cindy said.

“Two kinds? They aren’t the same?” Coop asked.

“They are now,” Denise said. “And three reserves total.”

“Excellent,” Coop said.

“Oh, and a second lander as well, in case we need rescue.”

“Nice,” Coop said.

“And Denise had to beat their inventory list out of them to see what we would have along,” Michael said. “And then it was all wrong.”

“All wrong?” Frank asked.

“Yeah,” Denise said. “Like, twelve shovels, but no trowels, brushes, sifters, sample bags or analysis equipment. It was ludicrous.”

“Twelve shovels? For the four of you?” Cindy asked.

“Yeah. One each, with double backups.”

Everybody chuckled.

“OK, that sounds like something they might do,” Coop said.

“Did you get it straightened out?” Cindy asked.

“Yes, but I had to beat him up a little,” Denise said. “The payload guy.”

“He was being condescending to her,” Michael said.

Oh, that wouldn’t have worked well. Cindy had worried about Michael, knowing he needed someone strong to keep him on the rails, and to assist him in the clinches. She had been delighted when she met Sue. But talking down to her would not work. Had no chance of working.

“What did you do?” Cindy asked.

“I told him that if he didn’t have the authority to make the changes we needed, I would just take it to Nate to straighten it out.”

“Nate Solomon?”

“Yes. The only Nate on the project. But I referred to him by first name only, and mentioned that he had personally hired me for the mission. And if it didn’t get straightened out to our satisfaction, well, there was no sense going on the trip, taking all that risk and everything, if we couldn’t be effective once we got there. So we wouldn’t go.”

Yeah, that would do it, if everyone agreed. Matthew and Denise had been quiet through all this. Cindy looked over to them and raised an eyebrow.

“Absolutely, Mom,” Matthew said. “Sue knows the business. She knows what we need. If we don’t have what we need, why go?”

Denise nodded. Cindy turned back to Sue.

“So they acquiesced?”

“We’ll see. I insisted on being present for the final inventory check. Watching them take physical inventory of the actual supplies lander before it leaves.”

“That should make sure it happens,” Frank said. “Smart move. Keeps the bureaucracy from grin-fucking you.”

“Excuse me?” Sally asked.

“Uh, it’s a technical term. It means smiling and nodding at you, and then when you’re gone, doing what they want anyway.”

“Huh. Likely story.”

Coop chuckled.

“Yup. I’ve heard it before myself, Sally.”

Sally didn’t look convinced.

“OK, so that’s all straightened out, anyway. Are you guys gonna all be OK in zero gravity? Did they test you for that?”

“Yeah, we’re all OK,” Michael said.

Matthew stirred.

“I was the only one with problems, actually,” he said. “These three all have iron stomachs. I got real queasy. Then Sue told me to think of it like swimming. That worked.”

“Swimming?” Jeff asked.

“Yeah,” Sue said. “You’re sorta weightless in water. Feels like it. It’s similar, anyway. But if you think of it as swimming, you don’t get undone by it.”

“Ah.”

“What about you guys, Mom?” Matthew asked. “Are you going to be OK having the kids for an extra week here in Miami?”

“We better be, if we’re going to have them for the next six months.”

“Well, can you afford the extra week away from Urbana, is what I was thinking.”

“Oh, sure. We just go in now to cause trouble once in a while.”

“Extra week?” Frank asked.

“Yes. Our first week back is going to be final mission prep. We’ll be pretty locked down,” Matthew said. “Then we have a couple days to chill before the launch. So the kids need tending that week anyway, and Mom and Dad volunteered.”

“Ah.”

Frank looked over to Coop, and Coop nodded. He had clearly been advised, and had Cindy and Jeff booked for the extra week.

“You guys got enough bedrooms in that suite?” Frank asked.

“Sure,” Cindy said. “The kids will all camp out together in the second bedroom.”

“Yeah,” Sue said. “They’re pretty much a team by this point. They’ll be fine.”

There was a lull in the conversation there, and Michael jumped into it.

“Mom. What if we don’t come back? I mean, it’s a small probability, but it’s not zero. What happens to the kids?”

“Your Dad and I will raise them,” Cindy said, and Jeff nodded.

“You said that before. Way back. But are you going to be able to do that? With five of them?”

“Sure. You guys did the hard part. Their characters are set now, and they’re good kids. There’s only what? Another ten years or so to college for the youngest? And we already know all the tricks of being a parent, from raising you two. We’ll be fine.”

“OK. That’s what you had said, but I wanted to be sure.”

“Don’t worry about that, Michael. You’re covered on this end. You just worry about having a successful mission.”

Cindy looked over at Coop, Frank, and Sally, then turned back to Michael.

“Whatever that mission is,” she said.

Frank and Sally chuckled, and Coop laughed.

Why would you ever need an archaeologist and an anthropologist who were expert in the analysis of the ruins of ancient cities to go on a mission to another planet, anyway?

The week went by too quickly. The kids had fun at the beach every day. The adults talked into the evening after the kids were in bed. Coop’s Thanksgiving dinner was, as always, stupendous.

For Cindy, though, Michael’s question hung over her feelings. What were the odds they wouldn’t come back? Were they even knowable?

Was this whole mission a terrible error?

Cindy talked about it with Jeff, and he said it was understandable nerves. Cindy agreed, but that did nothing to assuage those nerves.

She decided to talk it over with Arnie, through a patch to NSPL.

“Hi, Arnie.”

“Good morning, Ms. Talbot. Are you enjoying Miami?”

“Yes, Arnie, but I have a question for you.”

“Of course, Ms. Talbot.”

“What are the odds that our four kids don’t come back from this mission?”

“That all four are lost, or that some subset is lost, Ms. Talbot?”

“Start with all four, Arnie.”

“Yes, Ms. Talbot. The likeliest occurrence that would effect the loss of all four is loss of the spacecraft in one way or another. The obvious mechanisms there are related primarily to launch and landing, both of which must be successful twice. We have taken steps to ensure successful operations, especially providing multiply redundant means for all of them.

“The likeliest occurrence for the loss of a single astronaut on this mission is medical. That is, some injury or disease that cannot be treated effectively on-site and would result in death before the return trip could be completed. Our biggest protections here are the current excellent health of the four individuals and their experience with remote sites where they have to be careful of injury.”

“And the odds, Arnie?”

“I don’t know, Ms. Talbot.”

“You don’t know?”

“No, Ms. Talbot. I place the odds of loss of either all or a subset of the astronauts in the low single digits, but I cannot calculate exact numbers.”

“And yet, we go ahead.”

“Of course, Ms. Talbot. As you once explained to me, humans are skilled at balancing risk and opportunity in the absence of quantitative data. I have relied on the humans involved in this project to make those decisions.”

Arnie was quiet for a moment, thinking. Cindy waited.

“I will tell you this, Ms. Talbot. The four astronauts themselves are not unaware of these risks. It was a discussion with Michael Talbot that resulted in a serious upgrade of the redundancy of means for the launch and landing operations, as well as the provision of a second lander to attempt rescue.

“And it was Sue Talbot’s review of the payload inventory that resulted in considerable additional medical supplies being added to both the manned lander and the supplies lander.

“Their own understanding and appreciation of the risks indicates to me they will take appropriate care, which reduces the odds of a negative outcome a great deal.”

“OK, Arnie. Thanks. I guess that’s as good as it gets in terms of assurances.”

“Yes, Ms. Talbot. I’m sorry I can’t be more quantitative.”

“That’s OK, Arnie. I’d rather know the truth.”

On Sunday, the two younger Talbot couples were ready to head back to Houston, leaving their kids behind with their grandparents. It would be by far the longest separation they had had from their children, but they tried to hide their feelings from the kids.

That didn’t work.

“Be good for Gramma and Grampa,” Michael told them all. “We’ll be getting regular reports on you guys, so behave for them as you do for us. At least. They’re older, and deserve your respect and your good behavior.”

“We will, Uncle Mike,” said Greta, their unofficial spokesman.

“We’ll be good, Dad,” Mary said. “You have other things to worry about than us. We’ll be good.”

Not for the first time, Michael wondered how much the kids knew or had figured out. It never paid to underestimate them.

“All right. Good.”

At the airport it was all hugs and kisses before they went through security to board their plane to Houston. Jeff and Cindy had come along to say goodbye, and to take the kids back to the hotel.

“Be careful, you guys,” Cindy told the adults. “Arnie says your appreciation of the risks and demonstrated ability to be careful at remote sites is a big factor in his safety calculations.”

“We’ll be careful, Mom,” Matthew said.

“And we have Sue along to make sure of that,” Michael said.

They all chuckled, and they let that bit of humor be their last emotion together.

The four headed through security, and the kids waved until they were out of sight.

Cindy and Jeff let the kids watch their plane take off, then it was back to the hotel on the beach.

Once back in Houston, the four crew took the shuttle bus from the airport to the crew preparation center.

“A week in Miami, Thanksgiving dinner, outside all the time, days on the beach. Now a week of low-residue food, workouts, medical tests, and inventory checks. Could there be a crueler contrast?” Denise asked.

“Figure it this way,” Michael said. “The average of the two weeks works out to be like a normal two weeks.”

“Yeah, like a well-balanced meal. But we already ate the dessert, and now it’s on to the Brussels sprouts.”

Supplies Lander Launch

The next Saturday, Jeff and Cindy packed up. They also helped the kids pack up. The kids had all been camping out in the second bedroom of Jeff and Cindy’s suite in Coop’s hotel, with the girls taking the beds and the boys by choice ‘roughing it’ on the floor.

Jeff and Cindy were taking a break before Coop’s goodbye dinner that evening.

“They really have been good kids,” Cindy said. “Better behaved than our boys were, I think. Maybe it’s the presence of the girls.”

“The girls are also older,” Jeff said. “I think that helps. When the boys want to act older – be treated as older – the role models they have for that are the girls.”

Cindy nodded.

“And Greta, with Mary as her lieutenant, has been amazing at keeping things together.”

“Yeah,” Jeff said. “She’s getting a great ‘evil eye.’”

“Maybe this will be easy after all.”

“One can always hope.”

“So you’re off to Houston tomorrow?” Frank asked.

“Oh, yes,” Cindy said.

“Will they get some time with the family before they go?”

“Yes. They’ll have a couple days at home with the kids. Still be on low-residue food, but they’ll be at home.”

“And where are you staying?”

“Nate Solomon has a place for us. Down the street a couple houses, he said.”

Frank nodded, then Coop piped up.

“You will keep us informed of things won’t you? To the extent you can?”

“Yes, Coop. To the extent I can. It may be no more than ‘So far, so good,’ but I’ll keep you all informed.”

“Good. Thank you. I really do worry about them.”

“So do I, Coop.”

Cindy glanced over at the kids, at the kids’ table, but they were not paying attention to the adult conversation.

At least, she didn’t think so.

With the short hop from Miami to Houston, they arrived mid-afternoon. Cindy had the keys to both houses, and Greta and Derek went running in when she opened the door of Michael and Denise’s house.

“Mom! Dad!”

But there was no answer.

“They’re not home yet, kids. They’re still at work.”

“On Sunday?” Greta asked.

“Yes. The week before takeoff, anyway.”

“Oh.”

“They’ll be home soon.”

Then they were home, and Michael and Sue’s kids, Mary, Mark, and Luke, went running next door, while Greta and Derek hugged their parents.

“What’s for dinner?” Derek asked.

Matthew laughed.

“Michael’s gonna barbecue for us all.”

“Yay!”

“But we can’t have any.”

“You can’t? Why?” Greta asked.

“We have to eat special food. Food that doesn’t make us poop so much.”

“Why?” Derek asked.

“Because it’s really nasty to have to poop in space.”

“In space? You’re going in space?”

“Yes. In space.”

“Wow.”

Cindy looked at Matthew and raised an eyebrow.

“Special permission,” Matthew said. “Nate decided it wasn’t fair to the kids that they couldn’t know. You know. In case.”

Cindy nodded. That sounded like Nate Solomon. She wondered if that would get him in trouble with upstairs.

Matthew turned back to Greta and Derek.

“But you can’t tell anybody. Just us and Gramma and Grampa. None of your friends. OK?”

“Why?” Derek asked.

“Because it’s a secret. You get to know, but you have to keep the secret.”

“OK,” Derek said.

But Mary’s eyes narrowed. The precocious nine-year-old looked to Cindy, who nodded, then back to her Dad.

“But you’re an archaeologist. What’s out there for you to work on?”

“That’s why it has to be a secret.”

Her eyes widened, then she nodded. Matthew held a silencing finger to his lips.

“OK, I get it,” she said. “Not a word.”

Michael cooked hamburgers and hot dogs for Jeff and Cindy and the kids, and everybody sat down to eat at the picnic table on Michael and Denise’s patio. The four crew, however, didn’t have plates. They each ate some sort of bar, like an energy bar.

“What’s that?” Mark asked.

“Special food,” Michael said.

“So you don’t poop?”

“Yeah.”

“What’s it taste like?”

“This one says it’s beef and gravy.”

“Can I have a bite?”

Michael broke off a bit and handed it to Mark. He chewed and then made a face.

“It’s like sawdust.”

“Yup. Beef and gravy-flavored sawdust. Pretty much sums it up.”

“I’d rather poop.”

“With no gravity?” Michael asked. “You could end up with poop floating around. In your face. In your hair. In your nose.”

“Yuk!” the twins said in unison.

“Yup, so that’s why the beef and gravy-flavored sawdust.”

The next day, Denise made breakfast for everyone. Eggs and bacon and toast for everyone else, and pancake-flavored sawdust bars for the crew.

After breakfast, they all went over to Ellington Field to watch the launch of the supplies lander. It was a beautiful late-November day, with a blue sky with just a touch of high cirrus clouds. They sat in the NASA building, looking out over the field. Arnie’s voiceover was piped into the room.

In front of the NASA building and perhaps a hundred yards distant, a flatbed truck with the lander on the back sat on the apron. The ground crew were rolling out the first balloon from a bag they had carried up to the truck, saving one of the onboard balloon positions for a reserve.

“Where’s the rocket?” Derek asked.

“No rocket,” Matthew said. “They’re going to use a balloon for the first part.”

“What about the second part?”

“You see all those cylinders around it?”

“Yeah.”

“Those are all little rockets.”

“Wow.”

Cindy turned to Sue.

“Did you check the inventory?”

“Oh, yes. They didn’t like it, but I told them, ‘Hey, it’s my job.’ So I did go over it.”

“Any problems?”

“No, I told them I was going to check it in advance, so there wasn’t any funny stuff.”

Cindy nodded.

Arnie’s voice came over the speakers.

“We have five minutes to launch. Final checks now.”

They watched the truck and the lander, but there was nothing going on now. The ground crew had moved into the building.

“Final checks are all go. Two minutes.”

Michael pointed up into the sky where they saw a small contrail, way high.

“Chase plane,” he said. “With cameras.”

“Time zero. Initiating hydrogen fill.”

The hydrogen came from tanks on the truck. That hose would disconnect when the lander lifted, leaving the balloon connected to the on-board hydrogen supply. No sense lifting extra tank space.

As the hydrogen entered the balloon, the balloon started to fill out, then lifted off the ground. The top of the balloon lifted as hydrogen ran into it, then the balloon lifted to vertical above the lander. It was a very tall balloon – a high-altitude balloon – and the kids craned their necks to see the top.

“Wow,” Mark and Luke said together.

Hydrogen continued to fill the balloon, collecting in the top of the tall cylinder, filling out the top. At one point, the truck started to rise as the weight on its suspension decreased. Finally, the lander lifted several feet off the truck, though it was held down by a restraining cable.

“Uh-oh,” Mary said. “It’s stuck.”

“No,” Michael said. “Arnie’s just building up the lift he wants, to make sure it doesn’t drag across the ground or into the building or something.”

“Oh.”

It was another couple minutes before they heard a pop. The cable fell from the lander, and the truck settled back on its suspension. The balloon, and the lander with it, shot into the sky.

“Wow!” all the kids said.

“We have lift-off,” Arnie’s voice said. “Flight parameters are nominal at this time.”

They watched the balloon and lander climb as it drifted slightly east in the westerly breeze. As it got hard to see, they turned to the display on the side wall to watch the chase plane camera feed.

Everything looked good for a while, but then it looked wrong somehow. The balloon was getting smaller. The lander was not gaining altitude as fast as it should. Then it started to lose altitude.

“Primary balloon failure. Jettisoning primary balloon.”

They watched as the lander disconnected from the balloon. The balloon shot up by itself, without the weight of the lander, then came apart. The balloon was still drifting east as it slowly fell, but the lander, with very little air resistance, was falling straight down.

“Oh, shit,” Sue said.

“Look out below,” Jeff muttered.

“Dad, was that supposed to happen?” Mary asked.

“No. It’s not good.”

The children got very somber then.

“Drag brakes deployed. Secondary balloon deploying.”

Michael nodded. The drag brakes, on the top circumference of the lander, were to keep the lander from tumbling as it fell. The balloon couldn’t deploy if it wasn’t on top.

A small drogue chute pulled the balloon out of its pack.

“Hydrogen fill initiated.”

The lander was still falling, but the balloon was filling now. The lander’s fall gradually slowed, then came to a halt. Finally, the lander started lifting again, slowly, then faster.

“Flight profile back within nominal parameters.”

The adults applauded and the kids cheered.

They continued to watch as the balloon and lander got smaller in the chase plane’s telephoto camera.

“Approaching thirty miles altitude. Preparing for balloon release.”

“Is this where it switches to rockets?” Derek asked.

“Yes,” Matthew said. “Soon now.”

They couldn’t see the lander in the display anymore, just the big balloon.

“Balloon released. Initiating first rocket sequence.”

The balloon in the display, free of the lander’s weight, shot up, then a hard white spot appeared below it. It started to accelerate up as the balloon drifted east.

“Rocket sequence initiation successful. Flight profile within nominal parameters.”

They watched the blazing white light grow distant until it was hard to see.

Cindy turned to Jeff.

“Well, I guess that’s the end of the show.

“Yup. Time to go, everybody.”

As they walked back out to the NASA shuttle, Mark turned to his Dad.

“Now I know why you eat that sawdust stuff,” he said. “If I was in that thing when the balloon broke, I would have pooped in my pants.”

“Indeed,” Matthew said. “So would I.”

“Ha!” Mark said.

“And that’s why you want enough spares,” Michael said.

“Where are we at after this morning, Arnie?”

“The chase plane tracked the falling balloon, Mr. Solomon. I already had coordinates on it from its location transponder, and they confirmed. Coast Guard has recovered the balloon and it is on the way to the Johnson Space Center for evaluation.”

“Do you know what happened?”

“There was a sudden loss of hydrogen, Mr. Solomon. I vented some hydrogen to reduce the ascent rate as it approached operational altitude. I believe this vent stuck in the open position, resulting ultimately in the complete loss of hydrogen from the envelope. That at least is consistent with observation.”

“Will you be able to determine if that was the actual case, Arnie?”

“I believe so, Mr. Solomon.”

“Then what do we do about it if so?”

“The challenge is to determine if it is a design flaw or a flaw in the execution of this particular valve, Mr. Solomon.”

“And from there?”

“If it is a design flaw, the valve must be redesigned. If it is a flaw in execution, we must ensure the valves on all the other balloons on the mission do not share this flaw.”

“Do you think it is a design flaw or an execution flaw, Arnie”

“An execution flaw, Mr. Solomon. The second balloon did not fail in the same manner.”

“I see. Impact on the schedule?”

“If a design flaw, it could be several months to design, test, and deploy the new valve, Mr. Solomon. If it is a flaw in execution, it will be some days before we can verify the balloons on the manned lander do not share this flaw.”

“So several days of delay at least.”

“Yes, Mr. Solomon. Now forecasting launch for Saturday morning.”

“If it’s a flaw in execution on that one valve.”

“That is correct, Mr. Solomon.”

“And the supplies lander, Arnie?”

“The supplies lander is currently on its way to Fortuna via the wormhole, Mr. Solomon. Flight profile is nominal.”

“What if we have a similar issue with the landing balloon.”

“As for launch, there are redundant balloons remaining, Mr. Solomon.”

“And if they all fail similarly, Arnie?”

“In that case, the supplies lander will experience a harder landing by parachute, Mr. Solomon. Most or all of the supplies on the lander will survive that landing.”

“And if not, Arnie?”

“A second supplies lander is available as backup, Mr. Solomon.”

“I knew we had a second manned lander, Arnie. We have a second supplies lander as well?”

“Yes, Mr. Solomon. Again, as with the manned lander, a second unit will be required. It was merely a question of the timing of the expenditure. The expenditure for two together is also much smaller than the expenditure for two assembled one at a time, for the same reasons.”

“All right, Arnie. Thank you.”

“Of course, Mr. Solomon.”

“We need to check in and see what’s going on,” Michael said when they got back to the house.

“That’s fine. We’re good with the kids,” Cindy said.

Jeff, Cindy, and the kids got off the shuttle. Michael turned to the driver.

“Astronaut Training Center, please.”

“Certainly, sir.”

The four crew returned home within the hour.

“So what’s happening?” Cindy asked.

“They’re not sure what happened yet. We’re delayed until at least Saturday. That’s if things go well. They want to make sure it’s not a systemic problem.”

“That makes sense to me,” Jeff said. “That was pretty scary.”

“Yeah, me, too. So Arnie is going to go over what caused the hydrogen release valve to stick open. Make sure it isn’t a design flaw in all of them.”

Cindy got a pensive look.

“The release valve stuck open on the initial balloon?”

“Right. That’s what Arnie says.”

“But not on the second balloon.”

“Right.”

“Have Arnie go over all the videos from the launch,” Cindy said. “The biggest difference between those two balloons was that one was manually deployed. Most NASA stuff is designed to within an inch of its life. The processes, though, are not as well tested or adhered to as the hardware. Make sure it isn’t a process failure on the ground.”

“That is a very good idea. I’ll be right back.”

Michael went into the small office in the house, and was back in a few minutes.

“Arnie’s going to look at it.”

“Any bets?”

“Not against you, Mom. You’re scary good.”

Cindy laughed.

It was over dinner – again on the patio, and again with the crew eating ‘sawdust bars’ while everyone else had grilled steaks – that Michael had news.

“Yup, it was the ground process.”

“You heard from Arnie?” Cindy asked.

“Yeah. The balloons are all packed with a kind of fancy talcum powder, so they deploy smoothly. Don’t get bound up.”

“OK.”

“But that makes it harder for the ground crew pulling the balloon out and setting it up for launch.”

“All right.”

“So they wiped off the top, where the manual deployment handles are. With a wet towel.”

“Ouch.”

“Yeah. At those altitudes, things can freeze.”

“But it didn’t freeze shut, Michael.”

“No. It opened because it wasn’t frozen yet. But now you release gas that’s under some pressure, pushing up on the balloon...”

“And you get cooling of the gas.”

“Which flows down around the balloon as it rises, and the valve freezes open. Yup.”

“Amazing. Such a little thing.”

“But you called it, Mom. How did you know?”

“First thing that came to my mind is, What’s the biggest difference between the balloon that worked and the balloon that didn’t? Manual deployment. Somebody screwed up.”

“Well, you were right. So we’re on for launch Friday.”

“I thought the earliest would be Saturday.”

“Yeah, when Arnie thought they would have to unpack and repack the balloons. But we have a proximate cause now, so that’s not necessary, and it’ll be Friday.”

“And tomorrow, if I had to make any bets, the ground crew will be walked through the process very carefully, and now there will be an engineer watching them deploy on Friday, to make sure nobody gets creative again.”

“Got it in one.”

Manned Lander Launch

The next day, Thursday, after lunch, the crew said goodbye to their kids.

“We’ll see you in the observation room, and wave,” Denise said, “but we won’t be able to talk tomorrow.”

The girls were a bit older, and the twins had each other, but Derek was a bit weepy. That got everybody else a bit weepy as well.

“Hey, c’mon you guys,” Michael said. “You get to go live with Gramma and Grampa for six months, then we will all be together again and we can go back to Lincoln.”

“And Knoxville,” Matthew added.

There were lots of hugs and kisses.

“Now you kids be good for Gramma and Grampa,” Denise said.

“We will, Mom.”

“You guys, too,” Sue said.

“We will.”

They then said goodbye to Cindy and Jeff.

“We’ll see you soon, Mom,” Michael said.

“You just be careful. Anything too weird, get out of there.”

Michael nodded.

“We know. We’ll come back.”

“You just see to it you do.”

And then they were in the NASA shuttle and gone.

Jeff, Cindy, and the kids watched a movie late that night. She wanted them tired enough to sleep.

The launch was mid-morning, same as the last one. NASA wanted to get them aloft before the afternoon clouds puffed up, but too cold wasn’t good, either. It was just as well. It took a bit to get the kids up and moving that morning.

“Maybe we overdid it last night,” Jeff said.

“Nah,” Cindy said. “We’re good. And we didn’t have any nightmares last night.”

“Well, the kids didn’t anyway.”

Cindy just nodded. They had both had a rough night.

Everybody dressed, breakfast, then it was out to the NASA shuttle for the ride to Ellington Field.

They were shown into the observation lounge, and the kids rushed to the windows. The launch truck was positioned on the apron as before, the manned lander on the flatbed.

“Wow. Lookit that.” Luke said.

“Yeah,” Mark said.

“It looks larger than the other one,” Greta said.

“It’s actually smaller, Mary,” Cindy said. “And much lighter. It just has empty room inside for your parents. It just looks bigger because of the rockets.”

“Lookit all the rockets,” Derek said. “That’s more than before.”

“Because this one needs enough rockets to come back, too,” Jeff said. “The other one stays there.”

“OK. That makes sense.”

A NASA shuttle pulled up and a number of people got out. Michael, Sue, Matthew, and Denise were among them.

“Look, there’s Mom and Dad,” Mary said.

They were not wearing spacesuits. NASA had learned from sad experience that spacesuits did nothing for survival in the total loss of a spacecraft. Also, that spacesuits were bulky and clumsy, and, if anything, were a detriment to performance on a mission.

Assuming one was not leaving the craft to go out into vacuum, of course.

Instead, they wore NASA heavy coveralls. These were heated units, whose batteries would be recharged off the small isotope reactor in the lander. Being cold opened one up to all sorts of disease and health issues, and the nights on Fortuna could get unpleasantly chill, even in the tropical location of the abandoned city.

They waved in the general direction of the observation lounge windows, but not specifically at the kids’ location. Cindy looked at the dark tinted glass. Hmm.

“Do any of these windows open?” Cindy asked the NASA man standing by.

“Yes, ma’am. The center one slides.”

“Open it.”

He hesitated, and Cindy turned toward him. The fifty-eight-year-old senior executive raised one eyebrow and gave him the steel-eye of command. She had worn her light jacket against this morning’s early chill – her NSPL jacket, with the embroidery on the left breast.

NSPL

Cindy Talbot

Director

“Yes, ma’am.”

He went over and slid the center panel of the three big windows to one side, moving the dark tinted glass out of the way of the kids.

Walking to the truck, Sue glanced over and saw the kids waving madly in the open window. She stopped and waved back, at which the other three stopped and waved back as well. Denise blew them a kiss, and Michael gave them a thumbs up.

They turned back to the lander, sitting on the back of the truck, and climbed the ladder up onto the flatbed, then started climbing into the lander. One at a time, they dropped down into the lander, two into each hatch.

As they descended, each of them waved one last time at the kids.

When they were all in, and the NASA astronaut support team were seeing them buckled in before closing the hatches, Cindy turned back to the NASA man in the observation lounge.

“All right. You can close the window now.”

“Yes, ma’am. Thank you, ma’am.”

Michael settled into his seat in the lander. The seats were all slightly different, to accommodate the different people, the women from the men, and the slighter Matthew and Denise from the big-boned Michael and Sue. It was a seat Michael had sat in many times already, during training.

In front of him were the displays for the exterior cameras, with camera selectors for those. There were a number of indicator lights and buttons for various things, but no flight controls per se. There were dispensers for the ‘sawdust bars’, as they all now called them, his water dispenser next to them. Below was his urination vacuum device on its hose.

And next to that, a semi-automatic pistol and holster with multiple spare magazines, demanded by Michael and Matthew for all four of them. They were not simply going up into space. They would land on an alien planet, with fauna largely unknown.

The supplies lander also carried two heavy hunting rifles.

The astronaut support team hovered over the hatch between his and Sue’s seats as she settled in as well.

“Everything in order, sir?” one asked him.

“We look good,” Michael said as he belted himself in.

“I’m good,” Sue said.

“All right. Have a good mission.”

The astronaut support team closed the hatch, and Michael dogged it from the inside.

The tell-tale for the hatch status now glowed green

Jeff, Cindy, and the kids watched the ground crew manually deploy the takeoff balloon from a pack on the truck. There were two engineers standing by with clipboards now, checking off items on a list.

When the balloon had been fastened to the lander and laid out across the pavement, the ground crew withdrew.

Arnie’s voice came over the speakers.

“We have five minutes to launch. Final checks now.”

“Is this balloon going to work, Gramma?” Greta asked.

“I think so. Did you see the two fellows with clipboards?”

“Yeah.”

“Somebody messed up last time. They’re there this time to make sure everything is perfect.”

“Oh. OK.”

“Final checks are all go. Two minutes.”

Jeff looked up and saw the small contrail of the chase plane. Cindy followed his gaze and nodded.

“Time zero. Initiating hydrogen fill.”

The hydrogen again came from tanks on the truck. The balloon started to fill out, then lifted off the ground until it was vertical above the lander. The kids craned their necks to see the top.

“Wow,” Mark said.

“I think this one is bigger,” Luke said.

As the balloon filled, the truck started to rise as the weight on its suspension decreased. Finally, the lander lifted several feet off the truck, again held down by a restraining cable.

It was another couple minutes before they heard the pop of the cable release. The cable fell from the lander, and the truck settled back on its suspension. The balloon, and the lander with it, shot into the sky.

“Wow!” all the kids said.

“We have lift-off,” Arnie’s voice said. “Flight parameters are nominal at this time.”

They watched the balloon and lander climb as it drifted slightly east in the westerly breeze. As it got hard to see, they turned to the display on the side wall to watch the chase plane camera feed.

They continued to watch as the balloon and lander got smaller in the chase plane’s telephoto camera.

“Approaching thirty miles altitude. Preparing for balloon release.”

“This is where it switches to rockets. So the balloon worked this time?” Derek asked.

“Yes,” Cindy said. “Arnie will release the balloon soon now.”

They couldn’t see the lander in the display anymore, just the big, tall balloon.

“Balloon released. Initiating first rocket sequence.”

In the display, the balloon, without the lander, shot up, then a hard white spot appeared below it. That spot started to accelerate up as the balloon drifted east.

“Rocket sequence initiation successful. Flight profile within nominal parameters.”

They watched the blazing white light grow distant until it was hard to see.

“Perfect launch,” Jeff said. “Nice.”

At lunch, given the late night and all the excitement this morning, the children were pretty subdued. Wore out, Cindy guessed.

After lunch, Greta confirmed Cindy’s surmise.

“I’m tired. I’m going to take a nap.”

With the eldest, at the spry old age of ten, heading for a nap, there was no shame in the younger kids succumbing as well, and the whole troupe of them headed off to the two bedrooms they now shared for an afternoon nap.

Cindy, chuckling, walked into the small office. She logged into NSPL to check emails. While she was logged in, a call request came in. She accepted it.

“Good afternoon, Ms. Talbot.”

“Hello, Arnie. How are things going with the flight?”

“Good. Very good. They are now on the way to L2. No issues.”

“Good. So what’s up?”

“It is somewhat related, Ms. Talbot. I found myself wondering, during the launch, what I would do if something went wrong. How could I tell you of a tragedy? As the mission is not a zero-risk effort, I am still wondering.”

“In as few words as possible, Arnie. No stretching it out. Followed by an apology.”

“An apology, Ms. Talbot? What if it is not my fault?”

“Call it an expression of sympathy, Arnie. ‘I’m sorry.’ The words in English are the same.”

“I see, Ms. Talbot. And no building up to it?”

“No, Arnie. Something like, ‘The lander has crashed. They have all been killed. I am very sorry.’ Stretching it out is an unnecessary cruelty.”

“That to the point and blunt, Ms. Talbot? I would not expect that to be the proper form.”

“But it is, Arnie. Check in literature.”

Arnie took a few seconds to respond.

“I see, Ms. Talbot. Fiction writers, it seems, largely agree with you. Curious.”

“Why curious, Arnie?”

“Humans often live their lives in denial, Ms. Talbot. Such a blunt approach does not seem in tune with that.”

“That’s exactly why, though, Arnie. When something can’t be denied, it is best to face it square on.”

“Ah. I see, Ms. Talbot. Thank you. It was of some concern.”

Arnie paused, then continued.

“You are the oldest relationship with another intelligence I have, Ms. Talbot. I watched your children grow up. Fought with Michael. Worked with them all on this project. Their loss would have a huge emotional impact on me as well as you. I didn’t want to mishandle such news, even if the odds are against such an event occurring.

“Despite all our planning and effort, there is some risk, after all.”

Cindy nodded.

“I understand. Anything else today, Arnie?”

“No, Ms. Talbot. I will provide updates as the mission progresses.”

“Thank you, Arnie.”

“Of course, Ms. Talbot.”

The next day, they packed up the kids and all their things and headed for the airport. This was a much bigger packing job than the trip to Miami for a week last month. All the kids’ possessions would transfer to Urbana for the five months or more until their parents returned.

But the kids were accustomed to packing for months-long trips as well, and had large checked bags for the purpose already.

With everything packed, the NASA shuttle showed up to take them to the airport for the flight to Indianapolis.

The self-drive rental van from the Indianapolis airport pulled up in front of the Urbana house, and everyone piled out.

Greta pushed one of the large bags, Mary another, and the boys a third. Jeff took his own carry-on and one large bag, Cindy her own carry-on and the other large bag. Up the sidewalk, up the steps, across the porch.

The long-familiar ritual of homecoming.

Cindy was grateful for it.

With the uncertainties of the mission, concerns for her family’s safe return, and the unknown of what they would find out there, she found the familiarity of home comforting.

In Transit

While Michael waited in the lander for take-off, he had the displays showing the view below the lander – right now the bed of the truck – and the NASA building, the observation lounge window now closed again. He settled back and tried to relax as he listened to the feed from the system-check process.

One of the checks was from the crew, and when the light on the panel flashed, Michael pushed the button next to it, meaning he was ready to go and could hear communications from mission control, which was to say, from Arnie.

When the hydrogen fill started, he switched one camera view from the NASA building to the other side, and watched the balloon start to fill and then lift above the lander. That done, he switched that display to the camera view straight up, showing the balloon.

Michael thought of all the things that could go wrong – a lot of them – and all the things he could do to stop them or render them harmless – which was pretty much nothing.

The balloon failing or coming detached, and the reserve balloons not working for some reason. They would plunge to the ground. That was quick anyway.

The rockets could not fire, and the reserve balloons not work. Again the fall, again it was quick.

Igniting rockets could somehow ignite the other rockets, or cause them to explode. Also quick.

And nothing Michael or the other three could do about any of it, so he might as well relax.

Michael felt it when the lander tentatively lifted off the truck. He watched in the bottom view as the truck receded a bit, and both felt and saw the cable come up tight.

Arnie’s voice filled the cabin.

“Prepare for cable release in five seconds.”

Michael settled his head into the headrest/cradle and relaxed, his arms flat on the seat arms.

“Release.”

The cable released and they had a vertical acceleration of almost half a gravity, meaning they felt one and a half gravities. This was about three times the acceleration of an express elevator, even a high-speed one in a tall building.

Then again, it was what they had felt in the NASA astronaut training simulations. Same thing, except they weren’t going around on a centrifuge, but accelerating straight up.

And, unlike the initial start of an express elevator, this went on and on.

In the displays, the truck, the NASA building, and the airport fell rapidly behind. One-half gravity of acceleration was about the same as a normal sports car, so it was like the rear view of driving away at full throttle.

At this rate, thirty miles was only a few minutes away, but the gravity came down a bit with elevation, as the gas in the balloon cooled at the high altitude. As it cooled, it got more dense in less dense air and provided less lift.

They were about twenty minutes in when Arnie announced their altitude.

“Approaching thirty miles altitude. Preparing for balloon release.”

“Oh, I’m gonna hate this part,” Sue said.

Michael patted her hand on her armrest.

“Remember. Swimming.”

“Swimming. Right.”

“Balloon release,” Arnie said.

In his upward display, Michael saw the balloon release and then shoot upwards. They were in free fall as the capsule dropped.

“Oh, God,” Sue moaned.

“Rocket ignition.”

Two of the dozens of JATO bottles around the lander fired. They immediately had two gravities’ of apparent weight from the acceleration.

For two minutes, the rocket burned. When it burnt out, they were in freefall again – zero gravity – for about three seconds.

“Second rocket ignition.”

Michael watched the two previous, spent rockets fall away behind. No sense accelerating dead weight.

Gravity – more properly acceleration – slammed him again.

On and on it went, two minutes at a time, as Arnie burned up dozens of rockets, two at a time.

Aiming for L2 and beyond.

Michael and Arnie had talked about it in the last month, back in Houston.

“Why so many rockets, Arnie? Once we’re headed to L2, why bother?”

“It is the velocity desired, Mr. Talbot. Once on track for L2, it could take you a hundred hours to get to L2, or a hundred years. We are planning on the number of rockets required to make the transit from Earth to Fortuna in two weeks, and the same thing on the return.”

“They aren’t the same number of rockets, Arnie.”

“No, Mr. Talbot. On the way to Fortuna, the rockets used must also accelerate the mass of the rockets for the return trip. On the return trip, there are no rockets being held in reserve for use on Earth. Just the rockets to get you to Earth.”

“OK. I see that. All right, Arnie. Just asking.”

“Of course, Mr. Talbot.”

“Final rocket ignition,” Arnie said.

At last. This was getting old. Two more minutes of that acceleration, and then the last two rockets separated and fell behind.

Except now they were at zero gravity.

“Status check, Arnie.”

“Yes, Mr. Talbot. The lander is now at the desired velocity to reach the wormhole in one week, and Fortuna in an additional week from there.”

“So time to just settle in for the ride?”

“Yes, Mr. Talbot. I will be applying some micro-gravity in the lander soon, through the use of the secondary rocket engine at a low setting. The primary engines will be used only for re-entry, although they both use the same fuel source.”

“Understood, Arnie. Thanks.”

“You’re welcome, Mr. Talbot.”

Michael pushed the intercom button on his panel.

“How you guys doing over there?”

“Good,” Denise said. “Matthew’s a little green at the moment, but he’s settling into it.”

“OK. Good. Arnie says he’ll give us a little micro-gravity coming up. We probably still have a while before that, though.”

“I’ll be all right,” Michael said. “Just had to get used to it again.”

“OK. Well, I guess we’re in it now. A week to the wormhole, then a week to Fortuna.”

“All right, Michael. Denise out.”

Michael turned to Sue.

“Want to watch a movie?”

“What?”

“Want to watch a movie? We can stream from here.”

“You gotta be kidding.”

“Nope. We got all these displays and an Internet connection. What the hell.”

“But the time lag has to be large, and getting larger.”

“Sure, but for streaming, it doesn’t matter.”

“OK. Sure. Why not.”

“How you guys doing over there?” Sue asked.

“God, we’re bored to tears,” Denise said. “We brought a bunch of books in the lander’s memory, but it turns out neither of us can read in zero gravity. So we’re just sitting here.”

“Oh. I should have told you. We’ve been streaming movies.”

“We can do that?”

“Sure. Works great. If you pause it, it takes several seconds for the pause to kick in because of the time lag, which will get worse all the way, but other than that, it works great.”

“Thanks! That will help a lot.”

“No problem.”

Michael sent an email to Cindy asking for a good time to call the kids. When the time came, he and Sue got on for a split screen to Cindy’s home office machine.

“Hi, Mom.”

“Hello, Michael. How’s it going.”

There was a several second wait.

“Good. We’re just sitting here watching old movies and eating sawdust bars. The time lag makes anything interactive impossible. But it’s just like a boring car trip.”

“I see that as far as the delay is concerned. Well, that’s one way to spend the time.”

Several seconds.

“Yeah. Otherwise we’d be bored to tears. Oh, and can you and Dad email us a list of movies to watch? You know, stuff you liked?”

“Sure. We can do that.”

Several seconds.

“OK, thanks. We should probably talk to the kids now.”

“All right.”

Cindy went out to the living room and got Mary, Mark, and Luke. Jeff had been holding them there by sheer force of will while Cindy got the call set up.

“Hi, Mom. Hi, Dad.”

“Now it’s going to be several seconds for the signal to get there and back,” Cindy cautioned. “You have to wait.”

“OK.”

Several seconds.

“Hi, you guys,” Sue said. “How are you doing?”

Cindy left the room so the kids could talk to their parents alone.

At the end of the first week, they approached the Talbot Bridge Device. The crew all watched the camera views of the device in the displays as they went spacing past it.

They were surprised how fast they were moving with respect to the device. In space, there is nothing to judge your speed against.

“Initiating wormhole now,” Arnie’s voice came over the cabin speakers. “Beginning flipover.”

Arnie had been burning the small rocket thruster most of the way so far. It wasn’t much gravity, but it kept things from floating around loose in the cabin. Sawdust bar wrappers weren’t bad, but sneeze droplets, escaped urine droplets, and such were particularly noisome. They settled slowly to the floor in the microgravity.

Arnie would do the same thing on the way to Fortuna, but it would now be in deceleration, not acceleration, which meant flipping the lander end for end.

Arnie first killed the thrust from the secondary rocket engine, in the middle of the four primary rocket engines, then flipped the lander over with the maneuvering jets. Just short blasts of compressed air. Once they were flipped over, he started the secondary rocket engine again.

“Oh, that’s better,” Sue said. “Even a little bit of gravity helps.”

Michael nodded.

On the bottom view camera, they saw the wormhole open, then spread until it was miles wide.

“Wow, look at that.”

“We’ve seen it before on television, Michael.”

“Yes, but not in person.”

“What do you mean, ‘in person’? It’s still on a display.”

“Yeah, I guess. But now we’re there.”

“Yeah. That’s a big difference.”

Michael had one display switched to a side-view camera. He saw the wormhole’s edge pass by. From the starscape around Earth to the starscape around Fortuna, just like that.

There was no bump or tingle or anything he could feel. But the view around the lander was now completely different.

Among other things, Earth was gone.

“Transition complete,” Arnie’s voice said. “I will now be closing the wormhole, to minimize exposure on the other end. I will check in on you every twelve hours.”

“OK, Arnie,” Michael said. “Understood.”

In the top-view camera, the wormhole disappeared.

“Well, that’s the end of the movies,” Sue said.

“The end of streaming, for sure. The time lag now makes even that impossible. Several hundred years round trip.”

“Yes, that would be too long.”

“So it’s a good thing I downloaded all the movies on Mom’s list before we went through the wormhole.”

“You did?”

“Sure. Why waste the bandwidth?”

“And they’re in the lander memory?”

“Yup.”

“Make sure you let Matthew and Denise know.”

“Oh, yeah. Good idea.”

Michael switched back to the bottom-view camera.

Ahead lay Fortuna.

Landing On Fortuna

The spacecraft came in hot and hard, firing its main rocket engines in front of it to brake its re-entry. It passed through the upper atmosphere, braking it more, then spaced past the planet.

The perigee of its large elliptical orbit soon brought it back through the atmosphere, braking it further. Then back out to another elliptical apogee, though less far out than before. Each orbit shrank until it approached a circular decaying orbit in the very thin upper atmosphere.

The rocket engines continued their burn. A drogue chute deployed, increasing the drag and slowing the lander further. Soon a bigger chute deployed, pulled out by the drogue. Drag increased much more, and the craft slowed further.

More than an hour later, the rocket engines went silent. The last two JATO bottles, saved for this moment, now fired. When they were exhausted and jettisoned, the second chute was released and a still bigger chute deployed. Most of the vehicle’s velocity now was downward, descending to the planet below.

Arnie was running the numbers constantly, refining his solution. He was aiming for a large clearing adjacent to the ruins of the abandoned city, but he had a twenty-second control-loop delay to deal with. It was not an easy problem. Wind speed, air density, velocity, drag all entered into his calculations.

The chute was released, pulling the landing balloon out of its pack. The lander started to fall faster, but hydrogen was already inflating the balloon. The descent slowed as the balloon filled and Arnie timed the landing for the clearing. The craft still had some horizontal velocity from the winds aloft.

That velocity slowed as the lander approached the surface. One danger was that the lander would be tipped over by the wind blowing against the balloon. As soon as the lander touched the surface, it would have huge drag with the ground on the bottom as the balloon was pulling sideways on the top.

Worse, with the landing legs deployed now, the entire landing structure could collapse under the lateral load.

The solution was to release the balloon as the lander impacted. The timing was critical, and the twenty-second control-loop delay didn’t help.

But Arnie hit his mark, the balloon released when the lander was a couple feet above the ground, and it touched down and settled on its landing legs.

Bull’s eye.

“The supplies lander has successfully arrived on Fortuna, Mr. Talbot.”

Michael knew exactly how difficult that was to accomplish. It was a big concern for the whole mission. Arnie had done it on Earth in test landings, with a twenty-second control-loop delay, but even so. It was a difficult problem.

And Michael and Sue had watched the camera views on the feed from Arnie. He had held the wormhole open through the landing so he could control the craft via radio.

“Congratulations, Arnie.”

“Thank you, Mr. Talbot. I have to confess some satisfaction.”

“You earned it, Arnie. Nicely done. And we’re now a day away or so?”

“Yes, Mr. Talbot. You caught up with the supplies lander by a day or so, with your somewhat higher velocity due to maintaining micro-gravity on your lander.”

Michael nodded. According to plan.

Fortuna loomed large in the bottom-view camera now.

“All right, Arnie. Let us know when the show gets started.”

“Of course, Mr. Talbot. Current estimate is twenty-three hours to first perigee.”

Michael watched the bottom-view camera as the lander approached Fortuna. The main rocket engines were firing continuously now, but it was only about five percent of a gravity deceleration. The engines were small, to generate the most additional drag they could with the amount of fuel they had on board.

After two weeks in space to get here, the planet looked huge. Michael hoped Arnie had his numbers right, because their current trajectory looked very close to the planet. Then again, when approaching something more than eight thousand miles across, a sixty-mile apogee seemed like an awfully small amount to miss by.

Safe re-entry was all about drag. As one went lower in approaching the planet, the potential energy gain of sinking into the gravity well was converted into kinetic energy, speeding up the spacecraft. When the spacecraft entered the atmosphere, however, air resistance heated the spacecraft.

The faster you went, the more heat you generated. The more drag you had, the faster you fell. It was a vicious cycle, usually ending with burning up the spacecraft.

Various re-entry methods had been tried. The heat shield of early space capsules just took the heat, ablating as they went, then using parachutes for the final descent.

The space shuttles used ceramic tile skin that could withstand the heat, and, as they went deeper into the atmosphere, their wings could be used to turn drag into lift, slowing the descent and reducing the rate of conversion of potential energy into kinetic energy.

Some early private space efforts used a high-drag configuration to achieve safe re-entry, slowing the rate of fall.

With the manned landers of the Fortuna missions, Arnie was using retro-rockets and chutes to slow the arriving craft horizontally as well as to slow its descent. Drag made the angle of the chutes and rockets automatically adjust to be against the lander’s primary velocity.

Michael knew all this, of course. Knew it better than Sue, or Matthew, or Denise. He knew it was a tricky business, and, if things went wrong, they could go wrong in a really big way.

Then again, it would be over quickly, and there was nothing he could do about it anyway, so he might just as well sit back and enjoy the show.

The rest of the crew, in their communications to each other over the intercom, took in Michael’s relaxed attitude. They all knew that he knew better than they what was going on, and, if he wasn’t worried, they shouldn’t be either.

They didn’t know that Michael wasn’t worrying because he knew that, if death came, it would be quick.

“We’re going back out into space,” Denise said.

“We’ve been captured by the planet,” Michael said. “We’ll swing back.”

“This is the elliptical orbit thing?” Denise asked.

“Yeah.”

“OK. It seemed too far out.”

“No, we’re good.”

They all continued to display the top-view and bottom-view cameras. The elliptical orbits were hours apiece, and they snoozed off and on, waking each other for major events.

“Ellipticality of the orbit is now thirty miles,” Arnie announced. “Deploying drogue chute.”

“What’s ellipticality?” Sue asked.

“The difference between perigee and apogee,” Michael said. “I think they’re about sixty miles and ninety miles right now. Since both of those are in the high atmosphere, Arnie can put the chute out there. It will stay pulled back.”

“Ah. Got it.”

“How much longer is it, Michael?” Matthew’s voice came over the intercom. “We’ve been at this a day already.”

“Still a while. Hours, I think. Several more times around. You do not want to come down too fast.”

“Can we see our landing zone?” Denise asked.

“If you keep an eye out. It comes around every ninety minutes.”

Michael switched the display with the top-view camera to a side-view camera and watched. After half an hour, he called to Denise.

“Hey, Denise. On side camera three, that’s the continent we’re headed for below us now.”

“Oh, great. Thanks. This pass?”

“No. Two more I think.”

Another hour went by.

“Deploying second chute,” Arnie said.

The drogue chute released from the lander, and pulled a bigger chute out of its pack. Deceleration increased by a lot with that one.

“Yay! Some gravity,” Matthew said.

“Yeah. All the way in, now. No more zero-gee until the trip home,” Michael said.

“I love it.”

“Oh, except for when we switch from chutes to the balloon.”

“Damn.”

“It’s only for a few seconds, Matthew.”

Another orbit and the lander was no longer horizontal in orbit, but angling toward the surface. The combination of gravity and deceleration was still vertically down toward the floor.

“Final JATO bottles igniting now.”

The main rocket engines finally shut off and it was silent in the lander. Two JATO bottles ignited and deceleration increased a lot. They were exhausted in two minutes, and then a second pair ignited. Two minutes more and they were in low gravity from the second chute again.

“Deploying final chute,” Arnie said.

The second chute now detached and pulled an even bigger chute out of its pack. Deceleration, and gravity, increased again.

The target continent came into view in the side camera and slid slowly to the west, though it was going past slower and slower as they went. The angle of the lander’s descent kept increasing, and the planet was coming into view in the bottom-view camera, while the side-view camera was aimed more and more at the horizon.

Michael switched the side-view camera display back to the top-view display.

The descent went on and on, while the ground kept getting closer. At twenty miles above the surface – a hundred-thousand feet – Arnie made another announcement.

“Deploying balloon.”

Michael watched the top-view camera display as the third chute was released. They were suddenly in free fall.

“Yuck,” Matthew said.

The chute pulled the balloon out of its pack before the line completely released. Arnie started filling the balloon with hydrogen. Michael could hear the gas whine from the tanks.

“Balloon looks good,” he said.

Gravity gradually increased as the balloon’s lift grew to match the lander’s weight, until they were at nearly a full gravity in the lander. They were still descending fast, but Arnie had control of that with the hydrogen supply.

The ground kept coming closer, closer, until they could see details below. One big area off to the south was the ruins of the abandoned city.

“Geez, would you look at that,” Sue said. “Matthew, where do you even start?”

“It’s a target-rich environment, Sue. Wherever we start, we’ll learn a lot.”

“A residential area,” Denise said. “You’re always going to learn more about how people really lived in a residential area. Public buildings are too purpose-specific. Notre Dame won’t tell you how people lived in Paris, and neither will the Eiffel Tower.”

“Makes sense to me,” Michael said. “Looks like you have a lot of places you could work on.”

They drifted slowly across the city in the breeze, then they were over the clearing. Arnie increased the bleed on the hydrogen release, and they descended.

Then, mere feet above the surface, with the bottom-view camera showing a close-up of the grass of the meadow, the balloon released and the lander dropped to the surface.

“Touchdown,” Arnie said.

“Well, I guess we’re here,” Sue said.

Michael switched through the side-view cameras. In one, he could see the supplies lander, maybe two hundred and fifty feet away.

“There’s the supplies lander. Nice one, Arnie. Couple of hundred feet is all.”

There was a twenty-second delay before Arnie’s answer came back.

“I was aiming at a three-hundred foot distance, Mr. Talbot. I am off by fifty-three feet.”

“Well, from a couple hundred light-years out, I would say that was pretty close.”

“Now what?” Denise asked.

“Several hours of sitting here and waiting for the lander to cool down,” Michael said. “You don’t feel it much, but we got pretty warm coming in. So we sit.”

“Oh, that’s right. I remember.”

“Might as well have a couple sawdust bars and some water. The better food in the supplies lander will have to wait a little while longer.”

“Some Christmas dinner,” Sue said.

It hit Michael then. They had left Houston the second Friday after Thanksgiving, spent two weeks in transit and a day in descent. It was now Christmas Day.

“We need to call the kids.”

Michael checked the time back in Urbana.

“Arnie, have you closed the wormhole yet?”

There was a twenty-second delay.

“Not yet, Mr. Talbot. I was about to, and then check in on you tomorrow.”

“Leave it open for another hour or so, Arnie. I want to call my parents and the kids.”

Another twenty seconds.

“Very well, Mr. Talbot. You should know that your mother was watching the stream of your landing, and has been advised you’ve landed safely.”

Cindy and Jeff had been up all night Christmas Eve watching the feed from Arnie of the landing. Like the crew, they had dozed off between major events.

The children had been allowed to camp out on the floor of the living room rather than go upstairs to bed, the better that they might not miss out on anything. Everyone had tried to ignore the anxiety singing along their nerves.

Eventually the kids had been exhausted and collapsed on the couch and floor with blankets and pillows, but Jeff and Cindy had maintained vigil in their office, nodding off in their office chairs during the gaps in the action.

At seven in the morning, though, Jeff and Cindy were both awake to watch the stream from the landing. Everything looked good to them, but it wasn’t until Arnie’s message that they truly relaxed.

“The lander is down safely. All crew are fine.”

It was only minutes later, with Cindy’s nerves still spinning down, that Arnie spoke again.

“Dr. and Ms. Talbot. The crew wants to call and talk with you and the kids.”

“All right, Arnie.”

“I’ll go get the kids,” Jeff said, and left the office.

When Jeff came back into the office with the sleepy kids trailing along behind, Cindy had her display open to its maximum size. Michael, Sue, Matthew, and Denise were all there, each in their own quarter of the display.

The kids woke up fast.

“Mom! Dad!”

“Hi, everybody. Merry Christmas. We’re here and we arrived safely, but it’s a very long way, and there is a twenty-second delay, so we’ll all talk for a bit, and then you can talk, OK?

“We got here fine. Nobody got hurt or anything. And we’ll soon be able to leave the lander. Then we can go over to the supplies lander and eat something other than sawdust bars. The weather here looks nice – sort of like Miami at Thanksgiving – but we haven’t been outside yet. And we’re sorry we can’t be there to be with you for Christmas.”

Matthew, Sue, and Denise all took turns with variations of the same thing, then it was the kids turn. They all tried to talk at once, but Cindy held a hand up to quiet them.

“One at a time. Mark, you start.”

“Have you pooped yet? I musta pooped a hunnerd times since you left.”

Everybody laughed. All the kids had a turn, but then there was just no more to say.

“You be careful, you guys. We’ll talk to you next time.”

Twenty second pause.

“All right, Mom. We will,” Michael said. “Goodbye, everybody.”

Cindy shut down the display, then turned to the kids.

“How about breakfast first, then we open presents?”

“Yay!”

After breakfast and presents, Cindy and Jeff were sitting in the living room watching the children play with their presents. Sim games and construction toys, mostly. Things that got them thinking.

“I thought it was interesting that Michael seems to be the team leader for that group,” Jeff said.

“Yes, I think so, too, but I don’t think that’s surprising.”

“Really?”

“Oh, yes. Don’t forget that he figured out what was going on with Arnie, planned a counter campaign against the AI, and sucked everybody into his offensive. We followed his lead. So did Bill Doyle. He sucked Congress into it, too, before it was over.”

“Yes, that’s all true. I guess I’m just surprised because of his issues, I guess.”

“Which he has firmly under control. Sue was the best thing that ever happened to him, and he will do anything to keep from losing her.”

“And the one thing he could do that would guarantee losing her would be to go off the meds.”

“Yep. She’s a smart cookie, that one. I like her a lot. Always have.”

Jeff nodded.

“So it worked out for Michael after all.”

“So far at least.”

Base Camp

“All right. Well, it’s OK to leave the lander now,” Michael said. “I guess we should go out and look around a bit. See what we’ve got here.”

“You first.”

Michael nodded. He hit the intercom button.

“Hey, Matthew. I’m going to go out and look around a bit.”

“OK, Michael. Shout if you need help.”

“You got it.”

Michael undogged the hatch first. There was very little movement possible without opening up some room. Outside air blew into the stale compartment.

“Well, the fresh air is nice,” Sue said.

“Yeah. Exotic smelling. Tropical, but different, somehow.”

“Alien planet, Michael. Go figure.”

Michael took the sidearm and holster from their latched positions on the panel. There was already a magazine in the pistol, because why leave it empty? It was a free storage for another magazine.

Michael aimed the pistol out through the open hatch and racked the slide. Then he holstered the pistol and reached out through the hatch to set the holster with the pistol on the top of the lander. There was no climbing out through the hatch while wearing the holster. It was a tight fit as it was.

“All right. Here we go.”

Sue leaned away and scrunched herself into the corner to give Michael enough room to maneuver his way through the hatch. Once on top of the lander, he picked up the holster and put it on. Then he looked around.

To the south, toward the sun, lay the ruins of the city. On the north side here, in this part anyway, there was this large clearing. On either side, east and west, though, Michael could see that the tropical foliage ran up to and into the city.

That would be hell to dig through. All those roots. So this was probably the best place to start, besides it being the best place to land.

To the southeast and two hundred fifty feet away, stood the supplies lander. The clearing was perhaps a mile long here, east to west, and a quarter-mile wide north to south. They were about two-thirds of the way across the clearing west to east, and perhaps nine hundred feet from the forest edge to the north, and five hundred feet from the edge of the city to the south.

Nice. Arnie had done a good job. Michael had told the AI he wanted a defensible position, and Arnie had given them clear sight lines all the way around. They would be able to defend both their supplies cache and their ride home.

For every ecological system had its apex predator. The one carnivore every other predator knew not to mess with. The tiger in Asia, the lion in Africa, the grizzly bear in North America.

What would it be here on Fortuna, in this transplanted ecosystem? Michael didn’t know, but it wouldn’t be able to sneak up on them under cover. And if it was in the open, they could deal with it.

Speaking of which, his pistol was probably little protection against an apex predator.

Michael climbed down from the lander, using footholds sticking out from between the JATO bottles needed for the return trip. He walked over to the supplies lander.

Unlike the manned lander, the supplies lander had no JATO bottles remaining. Its outside surface was a series of hatches around its circumference, giving access to the storage areas within.

Michael walked around to the correct hatch and opened it. He pulled out one of the big hunting rifles, cycled the bolt to chamber a round, then slung it over his shoulder. He grabbed the other rifle and one of the ammo bags and headed back to the manned lander.

Matthew was up on top of the lander now, looking around. He helped Denise and Sue out as Michael walked back, then came down the footholds to the ground.

Michael handed Matthew the second hunting rifle.

“First thing?”

“First thing,” Michael said. “The current apex predators don’t know they’ve been replaced yet. We may have to provide instruction on that issue.”

Matthew nodded.

“Looks like Arnie got us a good spot,” he said.

“Yup. Good sight lines, easily defensible. I like it.”

“OK, so where’s base camp?”

“How about between the two landers, and just a bit closer to the city?” Michael asked, pointing.

“Sounds good. We need to get something up before dark. Did Arnie map water for us?”

“Yes. Just inside the woods, um, about there. A stream that runs east to west.”

“We’ll have to set up the system there, then run hose. We have enough hose?”

“Sure,” Michael said. “But that can wait until tomorrow. We have bottled water until then. We need to get the house up today. Either that or sleep in the lander.”

“House is good.”

“Hey, can we come down now?” Sue asked.

Michael looked up at the girls. Like he and Matthew, they were both wearing their pistols.

“Sure,” he said.

Sue and Denise climbed down the footholds.

“Did everybody rack a round into the chamber?” Michael asked.

Nods all around.

“All right. Let’s pull the house out and set it up.”

A lot of thought had been given to what sort of shelter to build. A shelter was definitely necessary. It rained for perhaps a half-hour almost daily in the semitropical climate. A shelter had to be durable enough to dissuade predators, big enough to let all four of them sleep on the floor, and cool against the sun and warm against the night.

In the end, Arnie had found the solution in an old science fiction novel about a colonization effort. An inflatable house, with two layers of plastic in all the walls, the floor, and the roof. They were ribbed together like the top and bottom of an inflatable mattress. Inflate it, then spray it with a polymerizing agent, and it hardened. A half-high wing wall off the house, half filled with water, provided a swamp cooler during the day when the vent in the roof of the house was opened, and soaked up heat throughout the day to provide heat at night.

And the whole thing weighed next to nothing.

The house was a big folded cube of plastic sheeting. Behind it in the supplies lander was a small electric air compressor. The supplies lander, like the manned lander, contained one of the small isotope reactors. That provided electricity, and was the redundant unit to the one in the manned lander.

They set the house on their chosen spot and ran some quarter-inch plastic hose from the house to the air compressor. This would be the hose they used for water from the purification unit at the river tomorrow, and the compressor would be the water pump. No need to lug two hoses and two pumps across space with the weight limits Arnie was working with.

Michael made the connections, then turned on the compressor. It was clear pretty quickly this was going to take a while. The house was inflating very slowly.

They expected it, of course. They had done all this once already, during astronaut training.

“Time to dig the latrine,” Michael said.

Michael got the two shovels out of the supplies lander, and he and Matthew walked over to the house location.

One corner of the house would hang over the latrine pit, and the house had a seat with a sealing cover built into one corner. That and a shower curtain for privacy would be their relief station.

The good part is that one would not have to go out into the dark at night to relieve oneself. Some large predators were night hunters.

Michael and Matthew were both adept with a shovel, and they quickly had all the more of a latrine the four of them would need, three feet square and four feet deep. They also dug a trench a foot deep for a distance of twenty feet in the down-slope direction – north, toward the stream – for a brown water pipe. That pipe was perforated and also made of the polymerizing plastic.

Intent on their purpose, they took no notice of the thin black line in the soil three feet below the surface.

With the house inflating and the latrine dug, they had some time on their hands, so they pulled some real food out of the supplies lander for lunch.

MREs, that is.

Then again, after the low-residue sawdust bars for the last two weeks, an MRE seemed like a feast.

More substantial fare from the supplies lander would have to wait until they had cooking facilities set up.

Fresh meat would have to wait until they had a chance to track down and hunt some of the local fauna.

Michael ran through the ‘threes of survival’ in his mind over lunch. You couldn’t survive three seconds without a plan, three minutes without air, three hours without shelter, three days without water, three weeks without food, and three months without human companionship.

They had a plan when they left Houston. Check.

They had air, as Arnie had tested the air on the planet with the DNA landers long ago. Check.

The house was inflating, and they would have shelter soon. Check.

They would hook up the water system tomorrow, and they had a month of bottled water along. Check.

The supplies lander had months of survival food aboard, and they would work on local sources of meat and fruit over the next several days. Check.

And they all had each other, sitting on the ground in tailor seat eating lunch together. Check.

They were sitting just a bit away from the lander, as Michael did not want it to occlude too much of his sight lines. He kept scanning the area around them as they ate, watching for any danger.

The rifles lay on the ground between him and Matthew, their barrels up on the ammo bag to keep the muzzles clear of the ground.

Sue watched Michael as they ate. He kept looking around, staying aware of their surroundings. It reminded her of the times he had sunk into his illness. The paranoia that gripped him at those times.

This, though, wasn’t paranoia. It was watchfulness. Awareness. They were strangers in a strange land, pioneers on this alien planet. There were likely dangers about, dangers about which they had little knowledge.

Michael’s current watchfulness wasn’t a disability, but a strength. He would protect them all.

In particular, he would protect her.

Sue ate her lunch, and was content.

“Oh, man,” Denise said. “After that lunch, I could use a nap.”

“Yeah. Me, too,” Sue said.

Michael looked over at the house. Looked like a couple hours yet until it was inflated.

“I have first watch,” Michael said. “You three nap now if you want.”

“Wake me in an hour, Michael,” Matthew said. “I’ll spell you.”

Michael nodded. The other three spread out on the ground and were soon asleep.

Michael stood and walked around, keeping an eye on the ends of his sight lines, the margins of the clearing.

That’s where trouble would first appear.

“Hey, Michael,” Matthew said.

Michael woke and checked the time. He had been down about an hour since Matthew relieved him.

“Yeah?”

“I think the house is done. The compressor is bogging down.”

Michael picked up on the sound of the compressor. Yeah, it was hitting the end of what it could do. In practice, that had been the sign.

“All right. Let’s get the spray attachment out.”

“While you guys do that, I’ve got watch,” Sue said.

Matthew nodded and handed her the rifle.

Michael and Matthew went over to the supplies lander. There was a spray attachment for the compressor. There was also two gallons of polymerizing agent.

“We should do the brown-water pipe and the wing wall first,” Matthew said.

Michael nodded. Made sense to him. The compressor was already pumping air. And they could spray the brown-water pipe and the wing wall the same time they did the house once they connected the sprayer attachment.

Matthew pulled the brown-water pipe out of the supplies lander. It was all coiled up. Michael connected it to the compressor and turned the compressor back on. The brown-water pipe was inflated in a couple minutes.

Then Michael pulled the wing wall out. This took a little longer, but was still just minutes.

“OK. Let’s see here,” Michael said.

Michael connected the compressor to the sprayer attachment as Matthew carried the inflated brown-water pipe, then the wing wall, over to the house.

“Oops. We need power at the house now,” Michael muttered to himself.

Michael pulled out a big electrical cord and ran it from the supplies lander to the house location. It was just over a hundred feet, maybe one-fifty. That done, he got the compressor and the spray attachment and took them over to the house. Last trip was for a gallon of the polymerizing agent.

Michael plugged the suction tube of the sprayer to the valve on top of the polymerizing agent can, and opened the vent valve. He plugged the compressor into the electric line back to the supplies lander.

“I think I’m good to go,” he said.

“Start with these,” Matthew said, gesturing to the brown-water pipe and the wing wall.

Michael nodded and sprayed them both, then Matthew turned them over and he sprayed the other side. Then he turned to the house. It was laying on one side.

Michael sprayed the outer surface of the floor and the roof, then the two walls that completed a circuit of the inflated structure. At that point, Matthew rotated the house ninety degrees to set it on its floor, and Michael sprayed the last two walls, the ones that had been on top and bottom.

Then Michael went into the house and sprayed every interior surface, walls, floor, ceiling – even the little stool cube in the corner – backing out as he went.

When he was done, Michael shut off the sprayer and set it on the ground.

“OK, we’ll just leave that there in case I missed a spot.”

Matthew hefted the container of polymerizing agent.

“Just like back in Houston. This is pretty empty.”

Michael nodded. The other one was redundant, in case one leaked and evaporated away.

Michael went around to look at the latrine behind the house’s current location. Matthew had put the brown-water pipe in the trench and backfilled the trench. It simply stuck out into the latrine, as a limit on the water level.

Looked good.

“All right, Matthew. I guess we should take a break while the house sets up.”

“What do we do when the latrine fills up?”

“Dig another one and slide the house over to it. But this should be good for four people for three months.”

Matthew nodded.

“OK. I guess we’re good then.”

An hour later, with the sun settling in the west, all four of them slid the house over to its planned position, with one corner covering the latrine pit. They staked the structure to the ground to hold it in place against storm winds.

Michael and Matthew set up the wing wall, attaching it to the front corner of the house on the latrine side. They connected the minimal gutter to the water input, and connected the air vent to the house’s vent connection in that corner. They put a little electric fan on that vent.

With the electric line already laid out from the supplies lander to the house, Michael hooked up the vent fan and a simple interior light, hanging it from the center of the roof. He also connected a charger for their electrically heated coveralls.

“Well, there we are,” he said. “Home sweet home.”

Sue looked about the interior. It was about ten feet square, with a seven foot ceiling at the eaves and nine feet in the center. It had a vent in the center of the roof, which would draw air through the house when heat accumulated in the peak of the roof. And the commode was in the back corner, surrounded with an opaque plastic sheet something like a shower curtain.

“Looks good to me, Michael. I’ll be happy to sleep outside the lander for once.”

“I’ll be happy to have a real john,” Denise said.

“Yeah,” Sue said. “That’s a big one.”

“And I’ll be happy to get out of these clothes,” Denise said. “My general preference is to change more often than once every two weeks.”

“Oh, for sure,” Sure said. “Michael, do we still have time today to pull some clothes out of the supplies lander?”

“Sure. We need to pull the bedding out anyway.”

“That, a little wipe-down with some bottled water, and some deodorant, and I would be much happier,” Denise said.

The bedding, their spare coveralls, and their changes of undergarments were all vacuum-packed in the supplies lander. With that all unpacked and the bedding set up on the floor of the one-room house, each couple took a turn cleaning up and changing, using one bottle of water each for a soap-up-and-rinse make-do shower, then changed into fresh clothes.

The only modesty they had was the other couple not looking. Instead the other couple kept the watch over the approaches.

“Where’s the rubbish pile going to be?” Sue asked.

“East of the house. Downwind. Maybe fifty feet.”

“Got it.”

Sue paced it off and dumped her soiled undergarments on the ground, starting the pile. She walked back with a satisfied look.

“I am not even going to try to wash those.”

The start of their rubbish pile was two brassieres and two pairs of panties.

More Infrastructure

Denise woke the next morning with some disorientation. She was cuddled with Matthew under blankets, both nude, on a pad on the floor. Then the pale green of the house registered, and memory came flooding back.

Matthew was already awake, staring up at the roof.

Denise turned her head and saw Michael and Sue were also awake and just lying on their pad, cuddled up. She checked the time.

“Oh, this is delicious,” Denise said. “Ten hours of real sleep.”

She yawned.

“So what’s for today?”

“More base camp,” Matthew said.

“Really?”

“Yeah,” Michael said. “Fresh water is a big one. And doing some laundry. We need to clean up the other coveralls so we have a change of clothes.”

“How about some breakfast first?” Sue asked.

“Oh, sure,” Michael said. “If we put the fire pit together, we can even cook breakfast.”

“Now you’re talking,” Denise said.

The couples had the modesty available to the polite: nobody looked as they all got dressed.

The guys shouldered the rifles, then went outside and relieved themselves at the corner of the house where the latrine was. A corner of the pit was exposed, and functioned as a urinal. The girls used the commode in the house for their morning ritual.

The guys lugged the stones they had unearthed when digging the latrine around to the front of the house. They had set them aside yesterday for this purpose.

Thirty feet from the house, they dug a shallow depression, then circled it with the stones. Good enough.

“Now for firewood,” Matthew said.

“We can use some of those leather straps for hods.”

Matthew nodded.

“You and I carry those, and the girls carry the rifles?”

“Yeah. And we need the machetes.”

When the girls were ready, the whole party set off to the woods. The girls stood watch while the guys gathered fallen or dead branches, sometimes hacking them from the underbrush with the machetes.

Much lighter than an axe, the machetes were extremely sharp and made short work of the job. NASA of course had packed two along, as they had packed two of almost everything.

With two piles of branches assembled, the guys bound them tight with leather straps – much like a long belt, notched and with a locking buckle – then put another leather strap around each of those to fashion a handle.

With the girls maintaining watch, they headed back to their camp, the guys dragging the bundles behind them. Once at the camp, the guys hacked the branches down into size for a cooking fire.

The girls left one rifle with the guys, then set out for the supplies lander. They brought back a container with cooking and eating utensils and another with the makings of breakfast.

When they returned, the guys were just getting a fire going.

They had all worked up an appetite, and were looking forward to a hot breakfast, their first hot meal since Houston.

“Oh, that was good,” Matthew said as he leaned back on his elbows.

“Wonderful,” Michael said. “Truly wonderful.”

Bacon, dehydrated eggs mixed with a bit of water, and pan bread weren’t exactly Sunday buffet at the Ritz, but they were fantastic after two weeks of sawdust bars and yesterday’s MREs.

Sue looked at the dishes.

“Next thing is water, right?”

“Yup,” Michael said.

“Good. Dishes can wait, then.”

“Just leave them out in the mid-morning rain.”

“Good idea.”

After the rain, the party headed back to the woods. Matthew had the small compressor and a container of chlorine bleach. Michael was carrying the water purifier machine, and his coverall pockets had his electrical kit. They both had machetes holstered on their hips, opposite their pistols.

Sue and Denise, in addition to each carrying a rifle over their shoulder, dragged a drum behind them. The drum, as it rolled across the ground, was paying out a quarter-inch plastic hose and a thin two-conductor electrical cord.

They had two thousand feet of the hose and cord, but the stream was not that far from the lander.

When they got to the woods, they all stopped and looked for the best path.

“Let’s leave everything here and go ahead and find the best place in the stream, then make a path back,” Michael said.

“Sounds good,” Matthew said.

They put everything down, then continued north into the woods. The guys occasionally hacked at some underbrush to clear the path. It should be a couple of hundred feet to the stream.

They came upon it so suddenly Matthew almost fell in. Michael caught him as he teetered and pulled him back.

“Well, there it is,” Michael said.

It was a substantial creek, though one would never call it a river. Michael held on to a tree and leaned out over the drop-off into the streambed to look both up and down stream.

“There’s a bigger pool about fifty feet to the east,” he said.

They worked their way east along the southern bank of the stream until they came out into a little clear area. The stream made a bend here, and there was a larger pool.

“Oh, it’s beautiful,” Sue said. “I’d love to swim in that pool.”

“And if they have a local version of piranha?” Michael asked.

“Like I said, I’d love to stand here and look at that pool without getting anywhere near it.”

Michael chuckled, then turned to Matthew.

“I think we’re good here. Do you have a vector back to our stuff?”

“Yes. This way.”

Matthew turned to the southeast and started whacking a path through the underbrush. Soon they were back out of the woods, their water plant and other supplies nearby.

They picked everything back up, and Sue and Denise got back on the pull ropes for the drum, then they set off down the new trail directly to the pool.

Once there, Michael set the water system down on the bank next to the exposed roots of a tree. He cut the electrical line from the supplies lander to length, then cut a small length of the electrical line to secure the water system to the tree roots.

The compressor went next to the water unit, once more tied to the tree roots.

Michael cut the hose to length, and fitted it to the compressor. A small cut length of hose connected the compressor to the bottom of the collection tank on the water unit. One more cut length of hose was connected to the inlet float of the water unit, which had been stored in the output tank. Michael connected that length to the water unit, then threw the inlet float out into the pool.

Matthew surveyed Michael’s handiwork and nodded.

“That looks right to me, Michael.”

Michael nodded, then picked up the chlorine bleach container and fitted it to the top of the water unit.

“There. I think that’s correct.”

“So the water unit collects water until it gets so deep in the tank, then the compressor pumps it to us?” Denise asked.

“Right. And they’re both anchored to the tree so we don’t lose them to the stream in the next big rain.”

“Got it.”

They walked back down the trail, out of the woods, and to the house. Michael put a couple pieces of wood on this morning’s coals in the fire pit.

Next was to hook up the water system electric at the supplies lander, but, despite their youth, they were all pretty beat. They went into the house, latched the door against predators, and took a nap.

“All right, so connect the power and the water now, right?” Matthew asked.

Michael stretched, getting the kinks out from their nap.

“Yeah. Probably electric first. That’s easy, and it will take a little while for water anyway.”

They went over to the supplies lander and Michael picked up the end of the electric where they had staked it down when they set off unrolling it from the drum. There was an access cover on the side of the lander for electrical connections so they didn’t need to leave a supply hatch open for the wire.

Michael made the connection to the correct set of terminals and turned on the switch.

“That’s a fused connection, right?” Matthew asked. “In case the line gets shorted?”

“Branch circuit breaker, but yeah. No shorting out the whole thing.”

“Great.”

Matthew grabbed a water bladder out of the supplies lander. Michael picked up the water hose and pulled it over to the house. The drum had rolled them out separately, so there wasn’t any tangle to deal with.

At the front corner of the house, in front of the wing wall, Michael dug a quick hole about a foot deep. He hacked a forked branch from the woodpile, then stuck the forked branch into the hole. He filled in the hole, then stomped the fill down.

Matthew put the water line over the fork, then connected it to the water bladder. The bladder had a bung in the bottom for tapping out water.

“There we go,” Matthew said. “So we just let it build up.”

“Yeah. It’s gonna be a while before we get anything. It has to fill the hose first. Then it should be a constant trickle.”

Michael put some wood on the fire. Time to get it going for cooking some dinner.

“Hey, Michael,” Matthew whispered. “Check this out.”

Northeast of the camp, a group of herbivores had wandered out into the clearing. They were browsing on some of the plants in the clearing, smelling for the ones they wanted.

They were a weird-looking bunch from an Earth perspective. About the size of a deer, they had no hair. Instead, they had tufts of feathers over their ears and above their faces. Their heads were round, unlike a deer, but they had short beaks like a bird.

They were quadrupeds, with clawed feet rather than hoofs. They pecked at the plants they were eating as they slowly moved across the clearing.

“Huh. Looks like dinner just showed up,” Michael said.

He took the rifle off his shoulder.

“What do you make that, Matthew? Maybe three hundred yards?”

“The forest edge is three hundred yards, so that’s more like two hundred fifty, I think.”

“Got it.”

Michael made an adjustment to the scope, then sighted the deer analog.

“Yeah, that looks right.”

Michael lowered the rifle and dug ear plugs and glasses out of his coverall pocket.

“Tell the girls what’s going on and cover your ears.”

“All right, Michael. Good shooting.”

Matthew went over to the house and went in.

Glasses on and earplugs in place, Michael raised the rifle and sighted the animals again. No mothers with young ones tagging along. Looked like the males had brighter plumage in their tufts of feathers. He only made out two of them in the group.

A female then.

At this distance though, a rest would be good. Michael walked over to the wing wall and knelt behind it. Perfect.

With the wing wall as a steady rest, Michael sighted in on one of the bigger females. He aimed for the center of mass, as he was an OK shot, but it was two hundred fifty yards. He controlled his breathing, felt for his pulse.

Between breaths, between heartbeats, he took the shot.

The 375 magnum rifle round took the animal behind the shoulder, and she went down. She twitched for a while, then was still.

The others, though, took off into the woods. Damn, those suckers could run. Looked like speed was their best defense against predators. They darted into the forest and were gone.

Matthew came out of the house as Michael stood up.

“You get one?”

“Yeah. Big female.”

“One shot. Nice. We going to go out and get it?”

“Sure. Bring a gutting knife. No sense having the offal here. Just attract predators. I’d rather leave it over there.”

“I’ll grab bags for cuts, too.”

They butchered the fallen animal in place, bagging cuts of meat as they went. The supplies lander had a solid-state refrigerator, not a luxury when living off the land. Sending enough food along for the whole mission would have been much more weight than putting a solid-state heat-transfer element and insulation on one of the supplies lander’s storage compartments.

And fresh food was much healthier than food processed for non-refrigerated storage.

While they were processing the animal, Sue walked up.

“You guys got some steaks for me for tonight?”

“Sure,” Matthew said.

He handed her a bag with about two pounds of fresh meat.

“Great. How tender do you think it will be? Should I stew this or fry it up?”

“That’s gonna be about the tenderest cut,” Michael said. “I would fry it up and see what we get.”

“All right.”

She gestured toward the carcass.

“You learning anything?”

“Yeah, this thing is more like a chicken than a deer.”

“A chicken? That’s a mighty big chicken.”

“Yeah, but notice how pink the meat is. The round head and the beak. It has a gizzard. No mammaries. And no uterus. It’s an egg-layer.”

“Wow. What do you make of that?”

“Dunno.”

Sue looked back to the camp, two hundred fifty yards away.

“One shot.”

“Yeah.”

“And you look like you’re almost done here.”

“Another fifteen minutes or so.”

“You’re pretty good at all this.”

“Yeah. It’s amazing what you learn in astronaut school these days.”

For dinner that night, Sue fried up the meat Matthew had given her. They had no idea what to expect. Would it taste good, or be unpalatable?

Then again, the predators NASA had released here – the dogs and the bobcats – had gotten on OK. Either would have gone after these ruminants. So it was at least not poisonous.

The guys started in, and it must have been OK, because they were both too busy eating for comment.

Sue put a piece in her mouth and chewed. Then she laughed.

“What?” Michael asked.

“Tastes like chicken.”

First Survey

Jake Solomon was back in the office at NASA Huntsville after Christmas. He had logged in Christmas morning for news about the landing, but had not checked anything since.

“Good morning, Arnie.”

“Good morning, Mr. Solomon.”

“How are things going with our people on Fortuna?”

“Good, Mr. Solomon. They have established a base camp. Archeological efforts have yet to start.”

“So what have they got done, Arnie?”

“Quite a bit, Mr. Solomon. They have erected the house. They have power to it, and a cesspit has been dug for the inside toilet. They have installed the water purification system in a nearby stream, and run power to it and water back. It is now operational. They have also bagged their first animal, cleaned and dressed it, and had their first meal with fresh meat in arriving on the planet.”

“That’s quite a bit.”

“Yes, Mr. Solomon. In less than two days, it is a great deal.”

“And they’re filing reports?”

“Yes, Mr. Solomon. I download them at the end of every day their local time by opening up a wormhole for a short period.”

“All right, Arnie. Let me know when they have any progress on the site to report.”

“Of course, Mr. Solomon.”

“Another beautiful morning in paradise,” Sue said, looking around the clearing as she came out of the house the next morning.

“Yeah. We have time for breakfast before the mid-morning rain,” Denise said. “What do we do after the rain today?”

“First survey,” Matthew said.

“Really?”

“Yeah.”

For breakfast, they had leftover meat from last night, dehydrated eggs, now made with the water from their water purifier unit, and pan bread.

During breakfast, they talked about the curious animal yesterday.

“What’s weird about it is that an animal that big isn’t a mammal, but effectively a bird,” Sue said.

“Well, not a bird,” Denise said, “but branched off the same ancestral line.

“That’s the dinosaur line, right?” Michael asked. “That’s where birds came down from, right?”

“Right,” Michael said. “But not a mammal. That’s curious.”

“Is it really?” Michael asked. “A meteor impact wiped out the dinosaurs. All the big ones, anyway. That gave mammals a chance, and they took over. But a meteor hit is sort of a random event. What if they never had such a hit in that time period?”

“Then all the later evolution of land animals could be dominated by dinosaur descendants, and not mammals. I see. That could be the case, I think, Michael.”

“In which case, we should see the same pattern in the other large land animals. The herbivores. The predators.”

“Underneath it all, they’re birds?” Sue asked.

“Birdlike,” Denise said. “That could be, Michael. Wow.”

Before they left Houston, Matthew and Denise had gone over the satellite pictures of the site. They had built a map of the abandoned city from those. On that map, they had divided the site up into areas, and given each area a name.

There was a central area where the buildings seemed a bit more intact. No roofs intact, but the remaining walls were taller. They also seemed to be made out of different materials, which reflected more sunlight to the satellite. They called that area ‘Downtown.’

The ‘North Side’ was closest to the lander. There was also the ’East Side,’ the ‘South Side,’ and the ‘West Side.’ These were more similar to each other than they were to the Downtown.

Looking at the map now, Matthew pointed.

“How about we walk the perimeter around to the West Side, walk across to the downtown, then north through the North Side and back?”

“We could go from the West Side, through Downtown, and into the East Side, then arc around into the North side and back.”

“What is that, maybe ten miles?”

“Maybe eight.”

“OK, let’s aim at that. If it’s rough going, we can take the shorter route. We don’t have to decide until we’re into the Downtown.”

“Sounds good.”

Michael walked up from where he had been looking out the open door.

“You guys got a plan?”

“Yeah,” Matthew said. “We think so.”

“Well, the rain’s over, so let’s get under way, then.”

Matthew was on point, Denise and Sue following, and Michael took rear guard. They walked from camp to the south-southwest, aiming for the northwest shoulder of the city. They would curl around the shoulder and head south, then cut left, to the east, and into the city.

Michael and Matthew had the big rifles shouldered, as well as machetes and pistols on their belts. Sue and Denise both had pistols on their belts.

It wasn’t hard to keep track of the city. It was rough ground to the south, contrasting with the flatness of the clearing. It was also a little higher than the clearing, raising the city above the extended flood plain of the stream north of the meadow.

It was a nice day for a walk, like most days on Fortuna, at least so far, and they made good time in the open.

When they got to the northwest shoulder of the city, that situation changed, at least a little. The woods came right up to the city’s edge here, and pressed into it. This south side of the clearing was not as slow going as the north side had been, however. The understory on the north side of the clearing got more light from the edge of the woods than those on the south side did, they being in the shade of the woods.

Minimal clearing was required as they moved forward. Michael was relying on Matthew’s uncanny sense of direction and position as they moved forward.

At length, Matthew called a halt and everyone caught up to him.

“I think we’re opposite the main drag into the Downtown from the West Side here,” Matthew said.

“Works for me,” Michael said. “Lead on.”

Matthew nodded, then headed east into the city.

As they headed into the city, the found the big east-west street. Perhaps fifty feet across. Low ruins hid in the woods on either side. They looked to be mostly masonry. Mud bricks or stones, now disheveled into low piles.

As the continued in, the woods thinned out, and they could see more, and less damaged, ruins about them. Highly weathered low walls, fallen now, dissolving with age and weather. There was no sign of the roofs.

“Roofs?” Michael asked Denise, now just ahead of him.

“Probably timber. Long gone.”

“Sounds right.”

They had walked maybe a mile and a half since turning east when the ruins changed. These were not masonry walls, but walls made of some materials that looked like glass and metal. Broken and bent, but not masonry. Collapsed roofs occasionally poked up through the sediment. The street was better defined as well, and a bit wider here.

Matthew stopped and kicked at a pile of sediment out of which a sharp edge protruded. There were shards there as well.

“What do you make of these, Michael?”

“Glass and metal?”

“Yes, but there’s no evidence of mining on the continent. Denise and I looked for it.”

Michael shrugged.

“They brought it with them? Interstellar?”

“That’s a huge investment. Then why leave?”

“It wasn’t something readily apparent, Matthew. There’s a lot of construction here from local sources as well. Stone, clay bricks, timber roofs. All that housing wasn’t built overnight.”

“Right. So how does that look? A large initial investment with imported materials. Expansion using local materials, over a long period. Maybe decades. Then – what? Something happened.”

“I think that’s right. Sounds right.”

“Makes sense to me, too, Matthew,” Denise said.

“Hey, guys. I don’t like standing still here so long,” Sue said, keeping her eyes about her.

“I’ll take these back to camp for analysis,” Matthew said, putting the shards in his pocket.

“OK. Then let’s go.”

Two large streets crossed in the middle of the downtown. There was no forest here, just acres of broken glass and bent metal, jutting out of the surface all around the central square.

They headed north, toward their camp, up the other main street. They were soon out of the metal and glass section, and back into the clay brick and stone section.

Stone here predominated, at least initially. Then clay brick became dominant as they continued. There wasn‘t much plant growth here, as they approached the clearing. Shrubs, some small trees, patches of grasses.

“OK,” Denise said. “Stone first, then clay brick. Interesting.”

“Makes sense,” Michael said. “They used up all the local stone they found, then switch to clay bricks as it got harder and harder to find stones, or they had to carry them from further away.”

Denise nodded.

“And that explains why there are so few stones in the clearing. You would expect there to be some, but we didn’t actually see many. Just those ones you unearthed for the fire pit.”

“Right. Which wasn’t many for such a big hole.”

“But no concrete?” Matthew asked.

“You need limestone and a pretty big kiln for that,” Sue said. “They may simply not have gotten that far yet.”

“And it’s way too heavy to ship interstellar. OK, that makes sense.”

They emerged into the clearing just a bit west of their camp, and headed diagonally to it.

“OK, so that’s our first big survey,” Michael said. “Now what?”

“Get out the spectrum analyzer. I want to see what these shards are.”

“While you guys do that, I want to do some laundry,” Sue said. “We need to get those other coveralls clean or we don’t have a change of clothes.”

Michael and Matthew set up the spectrum analyzer at the house and hooked it into the electric. Michael also brought some line and a couple stakes back from the supplies lander.

As Matthew worked on his samples, Michael ran a line out from a molded-in eye on the corner of the house to a forked branch about six feet long from the wood pile. He set the branch at a sixty-degree angle and ran the line through the fork then down to the ground at an angle, where he staked it.

“There you go,” he said to Sue. “Clothes line.”

“Good.”

Sue and Denise had turned all the coveralls inside out and hung them over the line.

“I have some of this NASA cleaner stuff. Let’s see how it does.”

She put some of the cleaner in a spray bottle, then sprayed down the coveralls until they were soaked. She emptied the spray bottle back into the cleaner bottle, then squatted down to fill the spray bottle with water from the water bladder.

Sue let the cleaner work for about ten minutes before spraying down the coveralls with water as a rinse. Gray water sheeted off of the coveralls, leaving them bright behind.

“Huh. That stuff actually works.”

“That’s pretty amazing, actually,” Michael said.

Sue felt the material of a coverall, then sniffed at it.

“No, it works. They even smell nice.”

She put the spray bottle of water down next to the bladder, then stopped. She looked up at the side of the house, with eyelets molded into the eave at intervals all around the house.

“Michael?”

“Yes?”

“Can we mount the water bladder up on a couple of those eyes?”

Michael looked over the situation.

“I think so. Why?”

“Because we could soap up, then rinse off from the bung of the water bladder. It would almost be like taking a shower. Sorta.”

Michael chuckled. They all missed the simple luxury of a shower.

“OK. Where do you want it?”

“How about behind the wing wall? The water runoff would then run back and down into the latrine pit. Not get in the way.”

“Sounds good. I’ll take care of it.”

“Thank you, dear. You’re a sweetie.”

Michael nodded. This should be simple. The water bladder had eyes in the upper corners already. He walked over to the supplies lander – taking a rifle, of course – and picked up another water bladder and some more cord.

Back at the house, he hung the second water bladder between two eyes with a length of cord on each corner. He disconnected the water hose from the first bladder and connected it to the second.

Michael now picked up the second bladder. It had about four gallons of water in it, of its five-gallon capacity. It would be awkward to hold it and tie it at the same time.

“Hey, Sue. Give me a hand here.”

“Sure.”

Sue came over and looked at what he was doing.

“I’ll hold. I suck at knots.”

Sue held up the water bladder while Michael tied the corners to the next two eyes. Now there were two water bladders hanging on the side of the house, a couple of feet apart, while the steady slow stream of water from the pump continued to run.

“Nice,” Michael said.

“Perfect,” Sue said. “Maybe after dinner I can shower and put on clean clothes.”

“A fillip to civilization?”

“I was thinking more a fillip to a good banging.”

“How do we even work that?”

“Denise and I have it figured out.”

Matthew finished with the spectrum analyzer for the moment, and they disconnected it and put it in the house along the back wall. The girls were fixing supper over the fire.

Over supper – more of the animal from yesterday – Matthew announced his results with the spectrum analyzer.

“Those are very interesting shards, as it turns out.”

“Did you get good measurements of them?” Michael asked.

“Yes, and then I had to look them up. The glass is multi-layered. I could see that in the microscope. I broke the five layers apart and tested them separately. The outer layers are tempered glass, the center layer is tempered glass. The second and fourth layers are polyvinyl butyral.”

“They’re what?”

“Polyvinyl butyral. PVB. That’s not just glass, it’s security glass. The kind that won’t break except under extreme duress, and even then it won’t just shatter. Very advanced stuff. I mean, we have it, but it’s pretty recent stuff. Used for anti-theft store windows and such. Bullet-proof glass. Also used when extreme weather is a prospect. It will hold up to hurricane-force winds, and won’t shatter under impact.”

“Wow. So what about the metal? What kind of metal is black, anyway?”

“Something we don’t have.”

“Really?”

“Yeah. Near I can make out, it’s a form of weathering stainless steel.”

“OK, I know what both of those are. Weathering steel is that stuff that turns purple and then black, right? It doesn’t rust. And stainless doesn’t rust either. At least, not very fast. But this is a combination?”

“I think so. The spectrographic analysis is like a chart of the elements. I mean, the biggest thing is iron. But there’s also carbon, silicon, manganese, phosphorus, sulfur, chromium, copper, vanadium, nickel, molybdenum, titanium, columbium, tantalum, and selenium.”

“Wow.”

“Yeah. It doesn’t rust, it turns black instead. And it’s non-magnetic.”

“Well, most stainless steels are non-magnetic.”

“Yes, but weathering steel isn’t. This is like a combination of the two.”

“So this is something we don’t have?” Denise asked. “Are they more advanced than us?”

“In this one area, they were more advanced than us. When this colony was established. And that was a long, long time ago. There’s nothing left of the wood-construction roofs, and even the clay-brick construction is pretty far gone. First guess, five thousand years.”

“That long?” Sue asked.

“Yeah. The brick portions of the ruins here are further gone than the ruins of Harappa on Earth, and those run from three thousand to five thousand years ago. I mean, it’s a little hand-wavy, because climate plays a role, but the climate here is similar, I think.”

“So what’s next, Matthew?” Michael asked.

“Get some more exact idea of age, I think.”

“Carbon-14 dating? Will that even work here?”

“Sure. We do need to get current carbon-14 readings off the vegetation on this planet, so we know what the point is that it started decaying from, but that’s pretty easy. Then it’s work the decay curve against the samples.”

“Which means shovels tomorrow.”

“Got it in one.”

Then it was showers. Oh, not really showers, but close. First spray down with the NASA cleaner stuff, then swipe it around, then rinse off under the water running from the bung of one of the water bottles. Stingily, to leave enough water for the others.

The girls went first, then the guys. Etiquette was, as always in close quarters, the discretion not to look.

As each pair finished their showers, they put on the now-clean coveralls they had worn on the trip here. When all four were finished, they put today’s coveralls on the line, inside out, and sprayed them down, then rinsed them.

Sitting back down around the fire, clean and in clean clothes, full with a real hot meal, they felt as normal and refreshed as was possible in such crude conditions.

“Hey,” Sue said. “You guys mind if we go to bed a little early tonight? Nudge, nudge, wink, wink?”

Everybody laughed.

“Not as long as we get to hang around in bed a little late tomorrow,” Denise said.

“Deal. Come along, dear,” Sue said, grabbing Michael’s hand. “Don’t keep momma waiting.”

Michael was pleased that, after almost three weeks of no real intimacy, and late in the month for his meds, he had no problems being a capable partner.

Sue was pleased about it, too.

First Dig

The morning of their fourth day on Fortuna, Michael and Sue grabbed up their coveralls, discarded the night before, and headed out for a quick shower to clean up after the night’s festivities.

“OK, you guys. We’re out,” Sue said as they left the house.

Michael and Sue showered together, quickly, then got dressed. Michael started the fire going again from last night’s coals, and Sue went over to the supplies lander to get the fixings for breakfast.

Taking a rifle along, of course.

They hadn’t yet seen the apex predator, but they knew it was out there.

The carcass of the second day’s animal had disappeared that second night.

Denise and Matthew came out of the house as Sue was whipping up breakfast and Michael stood watch. Food preparation was the most likely time to attract a predator.

They snuck around the wing wall to the showers, carrying their coveralls. After showers and getting dressed, they came over to the fire.

“Oh, that smells good,” Denise said.

“Omelets,” Sue said. “Dehydrated eggs, some of that pseudo-chicken meat, and real cheese from the fridge.”

“Ooo. Thanks for cooking.”

“Not a problem. Thanks for doing the dishes last night after we went in to bed. Made this morning easy.”

Then it was over to the city’s edge to start digging. Shovels, trowels, sample bags all went along, together with slung rifles and holstered pistols.

Authority subtly shifted to Matthew, in this area of his expertise.

“Let’s dig a trench across here, Michael. About ten feet out from this structure, then we can work the wall back toward the base of the structure with trowels.”

“Got it,” Michael said.

Michael grabbed a shovel and started in, turning the dirt to the side away from the structure. Matthew also grabbed a shovel and started toward him from about a dozen feet away. Sue and Denise, with the rifles, kept the watch.

When the trench was a foot deep, the guys started taking turns. It was just too hard for two of them to be working in the trench at the same time.

Matthew was working the trench – now four feet deep – as Michael watched. Then it hit him.

“Matthew?”

Matthew stopped and looked up.

“Yeah?”

“You see that black line? I saw it before when we dug the latrine, but it didn’t hit me at the time. And there it is again. What’s that about?”

Matthew looked down. There it was, a black line, three feet below the surface, all the way around the walls of the trench. Maybe an eighth of an inch wide.

“Oh, shit.”

“You know what it is?”

“I know what it could be. Give me a trowel and some sample bags, Michael.”

Michael passed down sample bags and the trowel. Matthew used the trowel to scrape the side of the trench, giving him a fresh surface. He used the point of the trowel to scrape some of the black line into a sample bag, then sealed the bag.

Matthew started digging into the side of the trench, looking for any kind of vegetation debris both above and below the black line. Finding a bit here and there, he dropped them in sample bags as well, marking the bags with a pen from his coverall pocket.

“I think we’re done here for the moment,” Matthew said.

“Really?”

“Oh, yeah. I want to do some analysis of these. This could tell us a lot.”

Michael looked up at the sun, past meridian already, and shrugged.

“Works for me.”

They headed back to camp, taking everything with them. You never knew when you would need a shovel.

Matthew and Michael got the carbon-14 analyzer out of the supplies lander and carried it back to the house. They plugged it into electric, then got the spectrum analyzer out and plugged it in as well.

“We should get out a table and chairs so you can work sitting at a table,” Matthew said.

“Have we dug back into the lander far enough to unearth them yet?”

“Yeah, I saw them in there. Let’s do that while these warm up.”

“All right.”

The light folding table and camp stools were an easy load back from the supplies lander. Michael set up the table, then they put the equipment up on it. Michael popped a camp stool open in front of the table.

“Voilà!” Michael said. “Now that looks like a proper archaeology camp.”

Matthew laughed.

“Thanks, Michael. Now to see if my conjecture is right.”

“I’m just glad you know how to work all this stuff.”

“Oh, these machines are easy. Not like it used to be. They’re not quite as accurate as a full-up lab can do, but they get close. And they’re fully automatic. I just need to push the buttons in the right order.”

Michael nodded and left Matthew to his analysis.

Maybe he and Sue should go for another firewood run. The pile was running down.

Denise would have to stay at the camp to protect Matthew while his attention was on his analysis machines.

When Michael and Sue got back with a drag of firewood, Michael was just finishing up and Denise was starting to work on supper. Stew this time, with noodles and dried vegetables, reconstituted by the broth. Noodles were super-light before being boiled, and the broth was enhanced with a couple of bouillon cubes.

Over dinner, Matthew brought them up to speed on his findings.

“Well, that dark layer is what I figured. It’s full of iridium. Also shocked minerals and spherules.”

“Which means?” Sue asked.

“A really big meteor hit this planet. Big enough there’s debris from it in the soil layer here. It could have hit thousands of miles away.”

“The dinosaur thing,” Michael said.

“Exactly. The dinosaurs were wiped out by the Chicxulub Impact in the Yucatan Peninsula sixty-plus million years ago. And there’s an iridium layer with shocked minerals and spherules everywhere on Earth. There was something like that here, but it was while this colony was here.”

“Oh, geez. That could have killed everyone,” Denise said.

“Yes, or the home planet could have sent a rescue mission. Hard to say. But this planet was probably almost unlivable in the immediate aftermath.”

“Did you get any carbon dating?” Michael asked.

“Yes. The isotope levels are a little different here. Probably due to age and composition of the planet. So I did a test of a piece of firewood first, to get the base concentration. Then I tested the samples from above and below the iridium layer.

“What I got were sixty-six hundred years ago and sixty-five hundred years ago.”

“So the meteor hit here when people were just settling ancient Sumer, in southern Mesopotamia,” Denise said.

“Yes, and they had interstellar travel, security glass, and weathering stainless steel already at that time, and had already terraformed a continent.”

“Criminy. We’re a little behind, I think,” Sue said.

“Well, we don’t know that they’re still around,” Michael said. “The home planet, I mean. Their civilization could have collapsed.”

“Yes, or they could still be out there, and wildly superior to us,” Matthew said. “We just don’t know. We only know about what happened here, more than six thousand years ago.”

“Looks like extra time writing reports tonight.”

“Yeah, I would think so. I mean, we’ve been writing reports, and I know Arnie pops the wormhole and picks them up once in a while. But reports from today are gonna raise some eyebrows back home, that’s for sure.”

“Arnie, are you sure about this?” Nate Solomon asked.

“Yes, Mr. Solomon. That is, I am sure that the soil analysis done by Dr. Talbot on Fortuna contains an amount of iridium available only from an impactor, and that shocked minerals and spherules were found in the same sample.”

“Absolutely sure?”

“The analysis equipment on Fortuna is connected to the lander with a Wi-Fi system, Mr. Solomon. In addition to Dr. Talbot’s report, I downloaded the microscope images and analysis data directly from the machines.”

“And the same thing with the metal and glass analysis?”

“Yes, Mr. Solomon.”

“So there was an interstellar civilization of at least our level of advancement in the material sciences colonizing Fortuna at the same time we were discovering agriculture in the Fertile Crescent.”

“Yes, Mr. Solomon.”

“And an impactor wiped out everybody or led to the home civilization pulling everybody out in some rescue attempt.”

“Probably some of both. Yes, Mr. Solomon.”

“All right, Arnie. Thank you.”

“Of course, Mr. Solomon.”

Solomon went outside to sit on his favorite bench and stare out across the green space down the street from his building. He lit a cigar – officially, Marshall was a no smoking facility, but this location had outdoor smoker’s receptacles for discarding butts – and considered the new information from Fortuna.

It was one thing to run into another civilization in space at roughly the same level of development. They could be friends. Allies. Share technology with each other. Both civilizations would be better off.

Solomon believed that all value was created value. An oil discovery was worthless unless you had machines that could use it. Same with metal ores. If you can’t smelt iron, having a bunch of iron ore around actually made the ground less fertile. Created value was increased as more people worked on it.

Another whole civilization working together with humans would be of immeasurable value in both directions.

That is, if they weren’t radically advanced beyond the current human level. That was a different situation altogether. The history of primitive civilizations meeting more advanced ones was not pretty, and here humanity would be the more primitive civilization.

By a lot.

Solomon had been communicating with higher through normal channels for quite a while by this point, but there was some information one couldn’t just put in a report and submit through the bureaucracy.

Solomon sighed, put the remainder of his cigar back in the tube for later, and headed back into the office.

Solomon dialed the number he had been given months ago.

“Yes?”

“Nate Solomon.”

There was a pause while the operator checked the access list, and made sure they had contact numbers for ‘Nate Solomon’ in their list.

“Thank you, Dr. Solomon.”

Then she hung up.

Two hours later, the phone rang.

“Nate Solomon.”

“This is the White House switchboard. Please hold for the president, Dr. Solomon.”

“Of course.”

The line transferred with a click, and the president’s image appeared on the display. He was in the private office off the ceremonial Oval Office.

“Mark Jacobs here. I haven’t heard from you in a while, Dr. Solomon. You have something new for me about our mystery planet?”

“Yes, Mr. President. We have a team on Fortuna now, and we have some rather startling results from them.”

“Fortuna, the goddess of caprice. That was well chosen, Dr, Solomon.”

“Yes, sir, and it’s becoming more salient as we go.”

Solomon explained to Jacobs what had been found – including the chicken-like herbivore, the dark sediment layer, and the chemical and microscopic analysis – and the conclusions one could make from it.

Jacobs was quiet through Solomon’s explanation, nodding at several points.

“So let me summarize, Dr. Solomon, to test my understanding. We have concluded from the chicken-like internal organization of this herbivore that this evolutionary path did not include a meteor-impact disaster at the point we had one, which gave an entry to mammals to take over.

“The resulting civilization built a colony on this planet that was there for some time, and expanding. But that colony planet was hit by a meteor impact about six and a half millennia ago, when we were just working out how to do agriculture.

“That civilization, at the time of the colony’s founding was ahead of ours, in that it was interstellar, had successfully terraformed an entire continent on the planet, and had materials science at least as good as ours, and, in some areas, ahead of us.

“As for the disaster on the colony, either everyone was killed or evacuated or some combination of both, leaving behind the terraformed continent and the abandoned city ruins we have found.”

“Yes, sir. That’s it, exactly. Well summarized.”

“Thank you, Dr. Solomon. Your presentation was easily understood. But I’m going to throw a wrench in the works for you.”

“Yes, sir?”

“When we rush government resources to rescue people from natural disasters, we never get everybody out. There are always some people we miss. And no matter how utter the destruction in an area, there are some people who somehow manage to survive.

“I will assert without proof or evidence, Dr. Solomon, that there may be descendants of such survivors still on Fortuna. Even that there likely are.”

Solomon rocked back in his chair. Well, nobody ever said Mark Jacobs was stupid. He was ahead of Solomon on this one. But what he said made sense.

“We’ve not yet seen any evidence of that, sir.”

“No, but I think you likely will. Those survivors might have died out by now, but maybe not. So I want to give you one request to pass on to your team on the planet, Dr. Solomon.”

“Of course, sir.”

“We need to avoid any hostile contact or actions with these people, if they are there, Dr. Solomon. We want to be friends. Really good friends. They may be a ragtag bunch at this point, but their associates, their forebears, were an advanced race, and their descendants are likely now much more advanced still.

“Avoiding hostilities should be a primary goal of any contact. Having a very advanced civilization think we’re the bad guys would be a very bad outcome.”

Solomon nodded. Jacobs was way ahead of him.

“I understand completely, sir. A very good point.”

“Thank you, Dr. Solomon. Keep me informed.”

“Of course, sir.”

Jacobs cut the connection and Solomon sat stunned.

Jacobs was one smart cookie, that was sure. Quick on his feet, too. Then again, he had had months to consider all the possibilities.

Of course, Solomon had those months, too, and the team, but they were perhaps too close to the problem.

Jacobs had had the high-level view all along.

Where There’s Smoke...

The weather changed that night, the night after the first dig, their fourth night on the planet. When they got up in the morning, there was a little chill in the air, and the wind was out of the northeast.

Michael and Sue turned on the heat of their heated coveralls to the lowest setting, then walked over to the supplies lander to get the ingredients for the morning’s breakfast. While walking back, Michael stopped suddenly, then turned to the northeast.

Sue stopped and turned to him. He was sniffing at the air.

“Do you smell that?”

Sue pulled in air slowly, concentrating on her sense of smell. There were the smells of the forest, different than on Earth, but somehow the same. That had been ever-present, since they had arrived. Then she had it. Very faint.

“Smoke.”

“Yes. Campfire smoke.”

“But we’ve had a campfire for days, Michael.”

He shook his head.

“We’re east of the camp, Sue. And the wind is out of the northeast.”

“Forest fire, maybe.”

“No. That burns everything. This smells different. That smell is a campfire.”

“Oh, shit.”

“Yeah. Back to camp.”

“Well, it’s not like everyone had to be killed in the disaster,” Matthew said. “Or everyone evacuated.”

“I should have thought of that,” Denise said. “Even among animals, there are always some who survive a disaster. With humans it’s even more of a thing.”

“But six millennia along, there are descendants of the survivors?” Sue asked.

“Sure. Why not?” Michael said.

“Now what do we do?” Denise asked.

“Let’s make sure we have the manned lander ready to go if we have to,” Michael said. “Not deploy the launch balloon yet, but the waste tank emptied and everything else checked out for departure if we need to get out of here.”

“I’ll take that,” Sue said. “I’ll need help.”

“And I want some sort of peace offering. Food. Something palatable.”

“Probably the best would be some of the chicken meat,” Denise said. “You know. The chicken thing. That’s native, not exotic.”

“Campfire implies cooking,” Michael said. “Set some cooked meat aside when you make breakfast. Put it in a sample bag for me.”

“Got it,” Denise said.

“What should I do, Michael?” Matthew asked.

“Put in a contact request for Arnie. The next time he pops the wormhole. We need to talk to him.”

“OK. And you?”

“I’ll stand watch. We need to be more assiduous about that going forward. For right now, though, put in that request to Arnie, then let’s have breakfast.”

Over breakfast, Matthew had a question.

“Do you think they smelled our campfire, Michael?”

“Could be, but I would expect someone to come check it out at that point. Probably not. The wind has been out of the west to northwest all the time we’ve been here. If they’re northeast of us, they probably haven’t picked up on it yet.”

After a quick breakfast – pseudo-chicken and pan bread, with a little gravy – Sue, Denise, and Matthew went over to the manned lander to review the pre-launch checklist. Michael stayed at the camp waiting for the contact from Arnie, rifle across his lap and his portable computer on the table.

It was only an hour before the warning tone from the portable computer sounded. Michael opened the display and Arnie appeared in a comm window.

“Mr. Talbot, I have some new directions from higher. It is marked very high priority.”

Michael knew the AI would push on the communication from higher until he got it out, so he let Arnie proceed.

“Go ahead, Arnie.”

There was, as always, a twenty-second delay before hearing Arnie’s response.

“You are advised that there may be descendants of any survivors from the meteor impact still on Fortuna. Contact with any such is to be friendly and non-hostile if at all possible. The ramifications of setting up a pattern of hostile interaction with members of a race who have, somewhere in space, an advanced civilization, are expected to be highly negative.”

Michael had to laugh.

“This is funny, Mr. Talbot?”

“Not by itself, Arnie. But this morning, we smelled smoke from a campfire. And it wasn’t ours.”

Arnie’s image in the display did a double-take, and Michael was amused to see it. The AI’s reactions got more and more human over time.

“Indeed?”

“Yes, Arnie. Oh, there are descendants, all righty. No contact yet, though.”

“Such contact should be friendly if at all possible, Mr. Talbot.”

“Oh, yes. We had already planned on that. However, we are also running through the pre-launch checklist on the manned lander. Just in case we need to make tracks.”

“That seems a sensible precaution, Mr. Talbot.”

“All right, Arnie. I have to go. Check in on us more often, if you would, however.”

“Would hourly suffice, Mr. Talbot?”

“Hourly would be fine.”

“Very well. Just leave me a contact request in the message queue, Mr. Talbot.”

“All right, Arnie. Talbot out.”

That day, they hung around the camp. The weather was still changeable, and they didn’t want to be caught out in the open in a big storm.

And the likelihood that they shared the continent with another intelligent species had their thoughts running in circles.

It was a quiet day, with the weather still threatening to change again.

When they went to bed that evening, Michael made sure the door was firmly latched on the inside. Sue’s foresight helped here.

When Sue had reviewed NASA’s plans for the house, as part of her logistics function, she had objected to the latch arrangement. Double latches, high and low, were intended to stop animals from entering the house. In particular, the inside and outside latch handles were connected to each other. They moved together.

“Unacceptable,” she had said. “I want the inside latch handles and the outside latch handles independent of each other.”

“That would require four latches, Ms. Talbot.”

“As may be.”

“But it isn’t necessary, Ms. Talbot.”

“You’re sure of that? You’ve been to Fortuna, then? You know this for a fact?”

“No one has been to Fortuna, Ms. Talbot. You will be the first.”

“Indeed. And I say four latches.”

“Very well, Ms. Talbot.”

Michael was glad now that Sue had foreseen the problem and prevailed in the argument. He dogged the door both top and bottom.

There was no getting it open from the outside now without prying it open or cutting it open.

And the rifles would be inside with them.

The next day, the wind was out of the southwest.

“Well, that cuts it,” Michael said. “They’ll detect us now for sure.”

“Should we not have a fire?” Matthew asked.

“No. We carry on. Probably too late now anyway. If we’re not going to cut the mission short, we’re going to end up in contact with these people. And if we cut the mission short and left, that would just leave contact for someone else.”

“Maybe a contact specialist, though,” Denise said.

“Someone who has experience in first contact with aliens?” Michael asked.

Denise chuckled.

“Well, no. But someone who’s contacted other isolated groups of humans before.”

“Yes, and who relies on the advantage that humans will recognize each other as humans. No, thank you. This contact will likely be with someone who is the equivalent of an intelligent bird.”

“How big are they likely to be?” Matthew asked.

Matthew looked to Denise and raised an eyebrow.

“Well, the best indicator is doors. The smallest common human door is six inches or a foot wider than a human, and a foot taller than an average human. What little we saw of doorways in the city center yesterday were maybe two-and-a-half or three feet wide and eight feet tall, so same width as us and seven feet tall? That’s a guess. Not tiny, though, and not huge. That’s certain.”

Michael nodded.

“That’s my sense as well.”

He cocked his head.

“Wait. Did you hear that?”

They all listened.

“There it is again,” Michael said.

“That’s a dog bark. A ways off.”

“Yeah, and the only dogs here are dogs we know.”

Michael got up from the campstool. He picked up one of the rifles.

“What are you going to do?” Matthew asked.

“Call the dog, of course. You all stay here. Let me handle this.”

Michael walked out to a spot north of the midpoint between the house and the supplies lander, in the clear. He raised two fingers to his mouth and let out a long piercing whistle.

The dog, northeast of him, barked off and on. He was running now and getting closer, for his barks got louder with time. Other barks were joining his.

Michael whistled again, to give the dogs a fresh bearing on him. Their barking was close now.

The dogs bounded into the clearing northeast of Michael and looked around. One saw him and growled, then took off straight at him in an attack run. The others followed her, running along, but well behind.

As the first dog got closer, Michael was trying to remember the dogs’ names. He recognized her, from their time together in Houston. Ah.

With the dogs a hundred feet away, Michael shouted.

“LADY! HALT!”

The dog slowed, then stopped, and stood looking at him. The others, taking their lead from her, stopped as well. She tipped her head, and pricked her ears.

“Hi, Lady. How’s my dog? Are you a good dog?”

Lady wagged her tail a bit, and trotted up to him. He held out his hand, and she sniffed at it. Then she went nuts, wagging her tale excitedly, jumping about and barking. She stood on her hind legs, putting her forepaws on his shoulders and licking his face.

Michael ruffled her fur, hugging her to him.

“Yes, Lady. It’s me. What a good dog you are. What a good girl.”

The other dogs trotted up to Michael now, all tentatively sniffing at him, then they, too, got all excited. They jumped about and barked excitedly, and they all wanted his attention. He squatted down to pet and greet them.

“Hi, Pepper. Hi, Duke. Hi, you guys. Are you all good dogs?”

“Michael!”

Michael heard the shout, faint behind him, and looked up. Four creatures had stepped into the meadow from the same direction the dogs had come.

They were bipedal. Not seven feet tall. More like five. That could be poor diet, Michael supposed. Their skin was a greenish brown. They had tufts of feathers on their heads, these colorful, so likely male. Round heads. Short beaks, like a parrot. They had long arms, with hands that had slender fingers. Looked like maybe four fingers, including a thumb. Each held a spear, a straight wooden shaft with a sharp, black metal tip, and wore something like a kilt made of animal hide with a matching shoulder bag.

A hunting party.

Michael continued to squat and pet the dogs as he watched them.

One, apparently the leader, turned to the others and said something, gesturing with his free hand. Michael couldn’t hear it very well, and couldn’t have made sense of it if he did. It sounded something like bird song. Trill notes and twitters and caws.

Then the leader walked out into the clearing, to stop a couple hundred yards away.

Michael stood up and walked toward the leader. He stopped a hundred yards away, then held up his free hand, palm toward the alien.

The alien watched him, then copied him, holding up his free hand in the same way.

Michael nodded. So far, so good.

The alien held his spear higher, shook it twice, then laid it down on the ground. Michael copied him this time. He held the rifle higher, muzzle pointed up, shook it the same way, then laid it on the ground.

There came a loud squawk from behind the alien leader, from the rest of his party at the edge of the woods. The leader looked around, as did Michael.

Another creature had entered the clearing, and it was new to Michael. There was no confusing it, though. The apex predator had made its appearance.

It was a velociraptor, or the closest thing to it. Bipedal, with powerful hind legs and taloned feet. Tufts of feathers on its head, shoulders, and knees. And a projecting snout, above a mouth full of very sharp teeth.

It looked around the clearing. The hunting party was well behind their leader now, at the edge of the clearing, while Michael was surrounded by the dogs, snarling now.

The alien leader, though, stood alone in the center of the clearing.

The velociraptor charged for the alien leader, hundreds of yards away.

Damn, that thing was fast.

The alien leader grabbed up his spear and turned to face the danger, holding the spear out in front of him to spike the creature as he closed.

Michael snatched the rifle off the ground and flicked the safety off. No time to change the sight, it was set for two hundred fifty yards. Aim low, then, as the sight line would be below the bullet trajectory at what he made to be two hundred yards and closing.

Michael led the beast slightly, aiming for a center of mass shot. He squeezed the trigger, then worked the bolt fast, preparing for a second shot if needed.

But the first shot did the trick. The beast fell and rolled with his speed. The alien leader trotted up and stabbed him with the spear, ensuring the kill.

His hunting party shook their spears aloft and cheered, a cacophony of squawks and caws.

Michael walked up to the alien leader, the dogs trotting along. He stopped ten feet away.

The alien leader looked at him, then walked up to stand directly in front of him. The alien leader held his free hand up, palm forward, as Michael had first done.

Michael held his free hand up the same way, then pressed his palm against the alien leader’s and nodded. The alien leader considered, then nodded back.

Michael didn’t know it at the time, but that would become the equivalent of a handshake between aliens and humans going forward.

Company For Breakfast

The alien hunting party came forward then. Each pressed palms with Michael, then they pulled black-bladed knives out of their shoulder bags and started processing the carcass of the velociraptor. Those knives were hammered out of the weathering stainless steel and were very sharp. The aliens put cuts of meat in their shoulder bags as they went.

At one point, they offered meat to Michael, but he shook his head and motioned, both palms up, to them, telling them to keep it all.

When the animal had been skinned – which skin also got packed – and the bones cleaned, the alien leader squawked something, and the dogs fell on the offal, gulping it down hungrily.

Michael turned away from the aliens, and started walking back toward the camp. He stopped after a few feet and looked back. He walked forward a few feet and did it again.

The alien leader got the point, and signaled his hunting party. They all followed Michael to the camp.

Matthew, Denise, and Sue had watched the whole thing. They were standing by when Michael walked into the camp, followed by half a dozen dogs and four aliens.

“Honey, we have company,” he said.

“Very funny,” Sue said. “Now what?”

“Feed everybody breakfast.”

“I’ll need more supplies. Anything we shouldn’t feed them?”

“No mammals here, so I would think no cheese. They might be lactose intolerant.”

Sue nodded, picked up the other rifle, and headed for the supplies lander. After a few paces, she stopped and looked back, then did it again. This time she held up one finger.

The alien leader got the hint and gestured to one of his hunting party. He followed Sue to the lander, and, as she pulled items out of the fridge and handed them to him, he took them. He smelled at the first bag of meat, then squawked. When Sue headed back to the camp, he followed, carrying the bags back to camp.

Denise had the fire going, and put the skillet across two rocks. She mixed up some dehydrated eggs and poured them in the skillet. When Sue and the alien got back with more meat cuts from the fridge, Denise shoved the eggs to one side and added the meat to the skillet.

Michael sat on one camp stool, and waved the alien leader to the one next to him. The alien looked at it for a moment. This might actually not work for him, Michael realized, since their mid-leg joint was reverse of the human knee. Not the knee, it was actually the heel, like a bird.

The alien leader, though, turned the stool ninety degrees and sat on it that way, which worked for him.

Michael nodded at Matthew, and he sat on a stool. The alien leader, seeing that, nodded to one of his hunters – probably his second, Michael guessed – and he sat on the last stool.

Sue and Denise, busy with breakfast, sat in tailor seat on the ground, and the other two aliens sat on the ground – perched on the ground – much as a chicken would.

Denise held plates, one at a time, as Sue dished out breakfast. She handed the first one to Michael, and he handed it to the alien leader. The next plate went to Michael, then the other seated alien, then Matthew. The two perching aliens were next, then Sue and Denise.

The humans started, eating the eggs with their fingers, then picking up their piece of meat and taking bites off it. The aliens followed suit. There were a few squawks and clucks here and there, and the humans sometimes commented to each other, but the group mostly ate in silence.

The dogs, finished with the velociraptor, lay around the group, near the campfire, content.

When they had finished eating, Sue took plates from Denise, Matthew, Michael, then reached out to the alien leader. He gave her his empty plate, as did the other three.

The alien leader turned to look up into the sky, at the position of the sun, then turned to Michael. He pointed up at the sun, and clucked something, and Michael nodded. The day moved on, so must they.

The alien leader stood, and held up his left hand. Michael stood and pressed palms with the alien, then they all did, in every combination. The aliens picked up their spears and headed out into the clearing.

The dogs got up, and looked back and forth between the departing aliens and the humans, clearly confused about what they should do.

“Go on, Lady. Go home. Home now.”

Michael accompanied that with a pointing gesture, and the dog turned toward the aliens, then looked back to Michael.

“That’s right, Lady. Good girl. Go home.”

He clapped his hands.

The dog turned back and loped off after the departing aliens, the other dogs taking her lead and barking as they bounded along.

The alien leader, hearing the dogs coming, then seeing them run on past him, turned back to face Michael. He nodded, then raised his left hand in the palm out gesture.

Michael also waved goodbye.

The alien leader turned back in the direction of the woods.

Soon they were gone.

“Well, that was pretty remarkable,” Matthew said.

“Not something you see every day,” Michael said.

“I should say not,” Denise said.

“The dogs, Michael?”

“The aliens need the dogs more than we do, Sue. And we’re leaving in three months anyway. Do we abandon the dogs then? No, they belong with the Fortunans.”

“I’m thinking we better leave a note for Arnie,” Matthew said.

“Sounds good.”

“Oh, and I filmed the whole thing.”

“Really?”

“Yeah, I just put the computer in security record.”

Matthew pointed to his portable computer, sitting on the camp table. The back of the display pointed out into the meadow, the front pointed to the campfire grouping.

“Excellent.”

“Little green men, Arnie?”

“Yes, Mr. Solomon. The video is perhaps most illustrative.”

Arnie’s face disappeared from the display, replaced by a video image. Solomon enlarged his display.

The video began with Michael Talbot walking out into the clearing and then whistling. The dogs arrived.

“Those are the dogs we sent to Fortuna.”

“That is correct, Mr. Solomon.”

Then he saw the aliens. They looked quite a bit shorter than Talbot, if the perspective wasn’t fooling him. Little green men, indeed.

Solomon saw the attack charge of the velociraptor, and Talbot’s shooting of it.

“Outstanding.”

Finally, the view shifted to breakfast, and then Michael telling the dogs to go along with the aliens. Solomon nodded. That made sense.

The video faded and Arnie reappeared in the display. Solomon adjusted his display size back down.

“That’s pretty remarkable, Arnie.”

“Yes, Mr. Solomon. And Mr. Talbot seems to have made the most of the entire interaction.”

“That’s what I found remarkable. That was incredibly well handled.”

“Yes, Mr. Solomon.”

“All right. Thanks, Arnie. And you’ve sent me that video?”

“Yes, Mr. Solomon.”

“Little green men, Dr. Solomon?” Mark Jacobs asked.

“Yes. Mr. President. There is a video of the encounter, if you have a video link I can send to.”

Jacobs sent the link over the video call channel, and Solomon transferred the video.

“Wait while I watch this, please, Dr. Solomon.”

“Of course, sir.”

Solomon watched emotion and understanding play out across Jacobs’ face as he watched the video. Then he was done, and was back to Solomon.

“A remarkable interaction, Dr. Solomon.”

“Yes. I think it went well, sir.”

“I think it went excellently well, Dr. Solomon. We are friends now. Saving someone else’s life, potentially, hunting together, sharing a meal. Even yielding the dogs, who clearly knew the humans, was well done.”

“The aliens actually have more use for the dogs, sir.”

“And the dogs will remain after our people have gone anyway. I understand, Dr. Solomon.”

“Do you have any more orders for me, sir?”

“When our people leave, Dr. Solomon, the only thing that comes back is the manned lander, is that right?”

“Yes, sir. The manned lander and its JATO bottles and such, our four people, and some archaeological samples and data.”

“Would the things we leave behind be of use to the aliens, Dr. Solomon?”

“Yes, sir. I would think so.”

“Let’s make sure they know how to use it all, Dr. Solomon. To their best advantage. Let’s make sure the next mission to Fortuna has friends on the ground already.”

“The rifles as well, sir?”

“Yes, Dr. Solomon. All of it. It’s all things we picked as being useful to our people. It seems to me that would mean it would be useful to these alien people as well. Let’s make sure we don’t just leave junk behind. Teach them how to use it all.”

“Yes, sir. I’ll take care of it.”

“Thank you, Dr. Solomon.”

Jacobs cut the connection.

“Yes, Arnie. What did everybody think?” Michael asked when Arnie called them back late that day.

“They thought you handled the whole thing very well, Mr. Talbot. I am told higher was impressed.”

“Excellent. I thought it went well, too.”

“And now they have another request for you, Mr. Talbot.”

“Go ahead, Arnie.”

“You will be leaving all your materials behind when you leave Fortuna. The entire contents of the supplies lander. All of the things you have already set up. The desire is that you teach the aliens how to use all this equipment, to make their lives better even after you have left.”

“OK, Arnie. We’ll work on figuring out how to do that. The language barrier is going to be a problem, though.”

“I got the impression that higher thought you were on top of things there enough to figure out some way to do that, Mr. Talbot.”

“And the rifles as well, Arnie?”

“Yes. Everything that is not coming back with you.”

“All right, Arnie. Got it. Oh, and can you leave the wormhole open for me for a while?”

“Of course, Mr. Talbot. Just let me know when you are done.”

“Will do, Arnie. Talbot out.”

Arnie watched the feed to Fortuna after the phone call. He wanted to see what Michael wanted to download with the wormhole open.

When Arnie analyzed the feed, he was amazed.

Michael Talbot was a very smart human.

That night over supper, Michael told the others of their new orders.

“So they want us to leave everything for the Fortunans?” Denise asked.

“Yep. And teach them how to use it all.”

“Hmm. A bit of a problem there,” Matthew said.

“You mean like, all the manuals and everything are in English, not in birdsong?” Sue asked.

“Yeah. We can’t teach them everything in the time we have.”

“However,” Michael said, “we can teach them the one thing they really need to know to make all this work.”

“This I gotta hear,” Denise said.

“Yeah, Michael,” Sue said. “What are you thinking?”

“What we need to teach them is English. Then they can read the manuals and watch training videos after we’re gone.”

“Oh, now that makes sense,” Matthew said. “How do we do that, though?”

“I’ve downloaded a bunch of stuff,” Michael said. “Firearms safety course, marksmanship course, computer classes, the manual for the supplies lander. And the one big thing.”

Michael paused for effect.

“An ESL course.”

“ESL?” Matthew asked.

“English as a Second Language. All in English. You just watch the videos.”

“Nice,” Sue said.

Infrastructure Injection

The next morning, over breakfast, Michael outlined his plan.

“I think first thing is to deploy all the extra stuff we have along.”

“Like what, for example?” Sue asked.

“Like the extra house. We have one extra along, because that’s the way NASA works. Redundant everything. So let’s set that up. No sense the aliens learning how to do that when there’s only one of them to do.”

“OK. That makes sense.”

“The extra water purifier, too, I would think,” Matthew said. “In case the other one breaks. Plus, it’s twice as much water than we’re getting now, which is barely enough for four, what with showers and everything.”

“Right,” Michael said. “So let’s do all that.”

“Take a couple days,” Sue said.

“So we should get started. It’s not like we don’t know how.”

“We should also get out the extra camp table and chairs,” Sue said. “In case we have company again.”

“For when we have company again,” Michael said. “Agreed.”

“We have extra of those?” Denise asked.

“Oh, yes,” Sue said. “Redundant everything.”

“No wonder the supplies lander is so big. The manned lander is tiny by comparison. It only looked the same size because of all those extra rocket bottles.”

“JATO bottles, but yes,” Michael said. “But keeping the manned lander light was part of the plan. Softer touchdown, and micro-gravity all the way here, was only possible because all that was aboard the manned lander was us and a bunch of sawdust bars. The supplies lander didn’t have to have as soft a landing or micro-gravity.”

“Zero gravity all the way here?” Matthew asked. “Yuck. I mean, we didn’t have much gravity, but at least there was a bit of a sense of down.”

“Right,” Michael said. “Which was impossible with something as heavy as the supplies lander. Also unnecessary.”

“So we break out all the extra stuff?” Sue asked.

“Yup,” Michael said.

“Well, let’s get started.”

The four of them carried the second house from the supplies lander back to the camp.

“Where do we put it?” Matthew asked.

“Next to the other one, I think,” Michael said. “In a line.”

“Not at ninety degrees? To form a corner?”

“What makes you think this will be the last one? I think we should ask NASA to send another supplies lander with a half a dozen more.”

“Oh, wow. Yeah, that would make sense then. You’d have a bigger circle. How far from the first one?”

“The length of the wing wall plus three feet, so there’s room to walk through to get to the showers.”

“Makes sense.”

They went back to the supplies lander to get the second compressor and a container of the polymerizing agent. Michael wired the compressor to the terminals on the first house, and connected it to the second house. He started the compressor inflating the house.

“Well, we know that takes a while. Time to dig the latrine.”

Inflating the house, digging the latrine, spraying down the house – including the brown-water pipe and the wing wall – so it hardened, burying the brown-water pipe, placing the house over the latrine, and staking the house down took until mid-afternoon.

“Oh, man,” Matthew said when they were done. “Time for some down-time.”

“Yeah. I’m gonna put in a call request to Arnie.”

“For another supplies lander?”

“Yeah. Sue, can you work on an inventory for a second supplies lander? You know, half a dozen more houses, another couple water systems, several thousand rounds of ammo in 9mm and 357 magnum rifle. More rifles and handguns. All that sort of thing.”

“What about food?”

“Well, they have food sources already, so that’s not a big thing. Seeds, though, I think. Let’s get them vegetable gardening. Move them from hunter-gatherer into agriculture again. Oh, and some screening to protect the vegetables from critters.”

“All right, Michael. I’m on it.”

“Half a dozen more houses, Michael?” Matthew asked.

“Think about it, Matthew. Hunting party of four young males. You’re going to have at least four young females back at their home camp, plus oldsters and youngsters. Figure a clan of a couple dozen, I would think. One family per house. Gonna be something like eight couples, I would think.”

“OK. Just wondering where you were headed with that one.”

“Hello, Arnie.”

“Hello, Mr. Talbot. You put in a call request?”

“Yes, Arnie. I want you to get a second supplies lander ready, and send it. You have a spare, right?”

“A second supplies lander, Mr. Talbot? You have a shortage of supplies?”

“No, Arnie. But if we are going to leave all our things here to supply the locals, why don’t we send a lot of extra stuff? I think we are looking at an extended clan of two dozen individuals, maybe more. What we have here isn’t all of what they could use, but we will be here another two and a half months according to plan. Why don’t we send them all the extra stuff they could use? We’ll still be here when it arrives.”

“That is an interesting idea, Mr. Talbot. I find it compelling, and very much in line with what I am hearing from higher. I will need to run it past higher for approvals, however.”

“I understand, Arnie. And, assuming you get approvals, Sue is preparing an inventory for the second lander.”

“Excellent, Mr. Talbot. I will be in touch.”

An hour later, Michael got a second video call.

“Hello, Nate.”

“Hi, Michael. Arnie briefed me in on your request for a second supplies lander. Elaborate on that for me, please.”

“Sure, Nate. We have a second supplies lander available already. The spare one. We have all the materials designed already, like the inflatable houses and the water system and the like. Hunting rifles, pistols, ammo. Seeds for vegetables and maybe baby fruit trees and such. Send all that stuff here. Get these hunter-gatherers started back on the road to agriculture.”

“We initially started out looking for places for humans to colonize, Michael.”

“Yes, and we still can. It’s a big planet. But there are also concerns about running into the home planet of their race. The big advanced civilization out there. So how about they come back to Fortuna – which they already know about, of course – and find a colony of humans and their own kin, living together in peace. Hunting together. Farming together. Eating together. Their kids playing together. Building anew the colony that failed. Together.”

“I like it. I like it a lot. But the key is that they learn English, I think.”

“Oh, over time, I expect humans will learn birdsong as well. Be even more compelling if, when the alien mother civilization shows up, we greet them in their own language.”

“Well, six millennia is going to have a lot of drift, Michael.”

“Of course, but still close enough, I think. Languages change more rapidly the more people speak them.”

“Is that right?”

“Oh, yes. Akkadian was in use in the small city-states and empires of ancient Mesopotamia for two and a half millennia. Language drift is a function of population.”

“I didn’t know that.”

Michael shrugged.

“I’ve been hanging around with the archaeology types a lot.”

“Well, even if the language thing doesn’t work out, it’s still a compelling picture. I do have to run it through higher, though, Michael.”

“Of course, Nate. In the meantime, we’re building up a supplies list for it.”

“OK. Good. I’ll let you know.”

“That is a splendid idea, Dr. Solomon,” Mark Jacobs said.

“Not mine, sir. This came from the team on site.”

“Understood, Dr. Solomon. The commander in the field always has the best understanding of the situation. But I like this idea a great deal. Can we do it within budget?”

“Yes, sir. The suspension of our other activities to figure out what was going on with Fortuna has left us with a surplus.”

“Excellent. I would go after additional funding if I had to, Dr. Solomon. Transfer money from somewhere. That’s how much I like this idea. You are authorized to proceed.”

“Thank you, Mr. President.”

Michael stood up from the camp table and came over to the fire pit, where dinner was under way.

“Well, that was a record,” Michael said.

“What’s that?” Matthew asked.

“They’re going to send a second supplies lander. Loaded with whatever we want. We need that list, Sue.”

“Wow. OK, Michael. I’ve been thinking about it. I’ll get it together tonight.”

“Won’t that be something?” Denise asked. “We’ll be able to watch this one land.”

“Yeah, that will be something, won’t it?” Michael asked. “We’ve only seen launches to this point.”

“I wonder what the Fortunans will think about it,” Matthew said.

“We’ll find out in about three weeks.”

The next day, they got out the second water purification system.

“Wait a minute, Michael,” Matthew said. “We don’t have enough hose and wire left on the drum for the run to the stream.”

“You didn’t see the redundant drum?” Michael asked.

“No kidding.”

“Oh, yes. The thin-gauge wire and the collapsible hose just don’t take up that much room. So, of course, they put a redundant drum on board.”

“I love it.”

There was no hacking a path this time. They already had a path through the woods to the location of the pool. They set up the second water purification machine, tied it down to tree roots, and connected the hoses and electrical.

Once back at the house, they hung two water bladders as before and connected the hose to one of them.

The aliens – or the Fortunans, depending on one’s point of view – had not returned the previous day. Michael had begun to think they might have to go out and look for them.

But in the afternoon of that second day since meeting them, after they had run the water connection for the second house, the aliens came back. They walked up to the camp, the dogs running ahead.

The leader stopped short of entering the camp, and held his free hand up. Michael walked to meet them, also held his free hand up, then touched hands with the alien.

Michael turned and walked back into the camp, motioning the aliens to follow. Now there were enough chairs for everyone.

The aliens then produced food from their shoulder bags: produce, both fruits and vegetables. The alien leader held them out to Michael, and he accepted for the group. Then he held up his left hand and nodded his head to the alien, who nodded back.

The aliens were looking at the new house, which had seemed to spring up overnight. Michael got up and motioned for the alien leader to follow. Michael led the alien to the new house.

Michael lay his hands on the new house, then held his hands up to his chest, followed by lowering his hands and holding them out to the leader, as if handing him something.

The alien started and looked at him, and Michael nodded.

The alien walked into the house to look around. Two sleeping pads on the floor, which he poked at. One of the dogs had followed them over to the house, and Michael called her.

“Lady, come here.”

The dog walked into the house. Michael pointed to one of the sleeping pads.

“Lady, lie down.”

The dog walked onto the sleeping pad, then flopped down and put her head down.

The alien watched this, then looked at Michael and nodded. He walked over to the shower curtain in front of the stool and moved the curtain aside. He stared at the stool curiously, lifting the lid to look inside, then looked at Michael.

Michael shrugged, then unzipped his coverall and pissed in the open hole. Then he sat on the stool, though still in his coverall, and made shitting noises with his mouth. He pointed out the toilet paper, took a piece and wiped – on the outside of his coverall – and tossed it in the hole.

The alien watched all this, then squawked and nodded.

Michael walked over to the door, opened it, then closed it. He dogged both latches, and tugged on the door, then undogged the latches and opened it again.

The alien nodded, then repeated Michael, dogging the latches himself and undogging them. He looked to Michael and nodded.

Michael also showed the leader how to close and open the roof center vent, and showed him how to turn on the vent fan that pulled cool air through the swamp cooler in the wing wall. It had filled with water in this morning’s rain – enough for the swamp cooler to work, anyway. The alien was impressed with that.

Oh, and the light. Michael showed the leader how to turn the light on and off. It hung near the center vent and lit the whole room.

Michael then led the alien leader outside and showed him the water bladders hanging on the outside wall. One bottle had some water in it from this morning already.

Michael twisted the bung and ran water into his hand, then drank it out of his hand. He motioned to the alien. The alien leader walked up to the bladder, turned his head up and held his open beak open under the bung. He turned it on, then off.

The alien leader then touched the house. Waved his hand to indicate the whole thing, then put his hands to his chest and tipped his head.

Michael nodded, waved at the whole house, then held his hands up to his chest, then held them out, like presenting a tray or plate.

Yes, I am giving you this house of mine.

The alien held his left hand up, palm outward, and Michael put his left hand up, palm outward. They touched palms, and both nodded.

They walked around the wing wall to the fire pit where everyone else was sitting. The alien leader called his hunting party over to show them the house. They went in and walked around, with much squawking and chirping as the leader showed them everything.

That night, the aliens hung around. They showed Sue and Denise how to prepare the vegetables they’d brought and helped cook supper. Everyone ate together, everyone with a camp stool of their own.

They sat around the fire for a while as it got dark. When the humans went into their house for the night, the aliens went into the other house as well. Michael heard them latch the door. They had completely understood the concept of the door as protection against night stalkers.

The dogs lay out on the ground around the campfire, their ancestral habit.

Education

When the aliens came out in the morning, Michael was chopping firewood from their branch pile with one of the machetes. The other human crew were still in the house getting dressed.

But, in the morning, first thing on the agenda was fire.

The alien leader saw what Michael was doing and squawked at one of his hunting party. That alien went over to where the other machete was and joined Michael in chopping firewood.

Michael at first worried about how sharp the machetes were, but then again he had inspected the aliens’ spear points and knives, and they were sharp enough to shave with. They certainly knew about the concept of sharp.

Michael and the alien made short work of the wood they needed for today, but that gave him an idea.

Michael picked up the leather straps they used for bundling wood. He also shouldered a rifle. He caught the eye of the alien leader, gestured at the wood pile, then pointed to the woods.

The alien leader nodded, and when Michael set out for the edge of the woods to the north, the aliens all followed him. One was still carrying the other machete.

When they had a couple of piles of wood ready to go, Michael cinched one of them up with a leather strap, then ran a leather strap through that one to make a pull. The aliens watched him do that, then copied it on the other pile.

When Michael went to set off for camp, dragging one of the piles behind him, one of the aliens took the strap from him, nodded, then set off for the camp.

Michael, the alien leader, and his second walked back to the camp as the youngest and strongest of the aliens dragged the piles.

Back at the camp, Sue and Denise were working up breakfast. More dehydrated eggs. More pseudo-chicken.

When Michael and the aliens got back, the alien second in command went over to the pile of fruit on one of the camp tables, which they had given Michael yesterday, and began expertly cutting it with one of their kitchen knives. Peeling some, slicing others.

The fruit added a lot to breakfast. It was tropical-type fruits, typically sweet and pulpy. It was a great addition to the protein of the rest of breakfast.

After breakfast, Michael beckoned the alien leader to sit with him at one of the camp tables, then beckoned his hunting party over, too. He had his portable computer there, and expanded the screen.

There was a little consternation at first with the display. One of the aliens got up to look behind the display to see what was there.

Michael sat to one side, then opened up the first lesson of the ESL course. It was the simplest, very beginning module, showing various items and naming them, with the text version on the screen. The name was repeated, then a pause, and Michael said the word during each pause. The aliens were soon joining in.

But then the lesson got to animals, and the aliens got excited. ‘Dog’ was first. The alien leader looked to Michael, then pointed at one of the dogs around the campfire.

“Dog,” he said.

He sounded remarkably like a talking parrot. Not surprising, Michael supposed. Same vocal structures most likely.

Michael nodded and smiled.

“Dog,” he said.

The alien leader nodded.

Now that they understood what the program was doing, the aliens enthusiastically joined in.

This wasn’t going to take long, Michael thought.

Michael walked over to the fire, where Sue and Denise were cleaning up from breakfast.

“What are they doing over there?” Sue asked. “It sounds like a parrot show.”

“Learning English.”

“No shit.”

“Yeah. And they’re really fast. This is a very intelligent species. As smart as us, I think.”

Michael shrugged.

“Maybe more.”

“Oh, that’s fun,” Denise said.

“Yeah. When the computer showed them a dog, they got really excited. Head man there pointed to Lady and said ‘Dog.’ Within the month, they’ll probably be reading.”

“Wow,” Matthew said. “That was a great idea, Michael.”

“Working out so far. We’ll see.”

Michael walked over to the aliens about an hour later. They were still fascinated with the English training class. It had finished basic nouns and gone on to adjectives now. Soon it would be on to verbs, with live-action sequences for the illustrations.

The aliens were pronouncing the new words at every appropriate point in the video. They were really into it.

Nice.

Michael walked back over to the fire, put another branch on it, and waited.

Another hour later, the alien leader waved to Michael. He went over to see what was going on.

They had finished the first module, and the system had stopped.

Michael reached out to the machine to start the next module, but the alien leader grabbed his wrist to stay his hand. He looked up at the sun, then turned to Michael.

“Birds go home,” he said, in a parrot-y sort of way.

Michael nodded.

“My name Garok.”

Michael guessed at the spelling, but that’s how it sounded.

“My name is Michael.”

The alien leader waved at the second house.

“Michael gives Garok house?”

“Yes, Michael gave Garok the house.”

The alien nodded.

He pointed to Michael, then Matthew, then Sue, then Denise.

“Man, man, woman, woman.”

“Yes. Man,” Michael said pointing to himself.

“Bird,” Garok said, pointing to himself.

“Bird-man,” Michael said, pointing to Garok.

Garok nodded.

“Bird-man,” he said, pointing to himself.

Michael pulled up a chair.

“Michael and Garok talk.”

Garok nodded.

Michael pointed at the manned lander to the west.

“Lander.”

“Lander,” Garok said.

Michael pointed at the supplies lander to the east.

“Lander.”

“Lander,” Garok said, nodding.

Michael pointed back to the manned lander, and held up a single finger. Numbers from one to ten were part of the first ESL module.

“Lander one.”

“Lander one,” Garok said.

Michael pointed to the supplies lander, then held up two fingers.

“Lander two.”

Garok nodded.

“Lander two,” he said.

Michael held his left hand high in the air, fingers splayed and down, crablike, then swept it down and to his right. He settled it on his flat right hand.

“Lander three comes.”

“Lander three?”

“Yes, lander three.”

Michael repeated the gesture, first pointing off into the sky to the west, then arcing his left hand down to ‘land’ on his right.

Garok nodded.

“Lander three comes.”

Michael swept his hand to include himself, Matthew, Sue, and Denise.

“Lander one, men and women come.”

Garok nodded.

“Lander one. Men and women.”

Michael swept his hand to indicate the camp.

“Lander two, houses, knives, food comes.”

Garok looked around, then at the supplies lander. He nodded.

“Lander two, houses come. Knives. Food. Lander two.”

Michael nodded.

“Lander three, six houses come.”

“Six houses?”

“Yes. Six houses. For Garok. For bird-men. For bird-women. For bird-children. Six more houses.”

Garok looked around the faces of his hunting party. They were all stunned.

“Seven houses for bird-men?” Garok.

“Eight houses for bird-men. Men and women go home, too. In lander one.”

“Now?”

The first ESL module had very bare concepts of time included. It was a difficult concept.

“No. Not now. Garok sees one day?”

Michael held his left hand up, hard to his right, with his right hand behind it, fingers splayed. He raised his right hand behind his left, like the sunrise, then passed it over himself, and down behind his left hand, now to his left.

“Yes. Sun come. Sun go. One day,” Garok said.

Michael nodded.

“Lander three. Many days.”

Michael held up his hands with all ten fingers open, closed them, then opened them again, closed them.

“Lander three. Ten and ten days?”

“Yes, Garok. Lander three comes, ten and ten days. Men and women go home, in Lander one, in many, many days.”

Michael opened his hands and closed them eight times.

Garok nodded.

“Garok see. Ten and ten and ten and ten and ten and ten and ten and ten days, man and woman go home. Lander one go home.”

Michael nodded.

“Lander three comes. Two and six houses. Eight houses. One for men and women. Seven for Garok and family. Men and women go home. Give eight houses to Garok and family.”

Garok nodded.

“Eight houses for Garok and family. Garok thanks Michael.”

Michael nodded.

“Now Garok knows. Can come with family. In ten plus ten days.”

Garok nodded.

“Bird-mans go home now. Bird-mans come back with family. In ten plus ten days.”

Michael nodded, then held up his left hand. Garok held up his left hand, pressed it against Michael’s.

“Goodbye, Michael.”

“Goodbye, Garok.”

The aliens all got up, gathered up their things, and walked out of the camp into the clearing.

The dogs, laying about the campfire, looked up to watch them.

Garok turned his head back and whistled.

“Lady. Come.”

The dog got up and ran after Garok, and the other dogs followed.

The whole conversation was recorded by the same portable computer Michael had run the ESL module on. Out of earshot during the conversation, Matthew, Sue, and Denise watched the whole thing after the aliens had left.

“That was remarkable,” Denise said.

“Well, they’re not stupid,” Matthew said. “The head man, at least. Garok. Probably why he’s the leader.”

“They seemed a little stunned by eight houses,” Sue said.

“Yeah, they’re probably all living in a cave in the hills to the northeast.”

“Why wouldn’t they live in the city?” Denise asked.

“They probably did, for a while,” Michael said. “But it’s not defensible in the shape it’s in now. Those fucking velociraptors would love a setup like that. Plenty of cover, they could attack without warning. A cave, you got one entrance to guard. They probably walled up most of the entrance. And still have to post a guard all night.”

“I imagine the dogs help with that now,” Matthew said.

“Oh, yeah. You heard the dogs snarling when the velociraptor showed up. And it didn’t go for me, either, with the dogs around me. It went for Garok, standing alone. One thing a predator knows is what another predator looks like.”

“I would love to see their cave,” Denise said. “Professional interest.”

“Understood,” Michael said. “Not something I pressed for, though. These are the hunters, the ones who put their lives at risk, every day, to feed their wives and children. Going to their cave is another matter entirely. You can see it once they move here. Assuming they do, of course.”

“Why wouldn’t they, Michael?” Sue said.

“Where did the fruits and vegetables come from, Sue? They have an existing setup that’s working for them. Moving is a risk.”

“But you think they’ll move?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“How many of them are there? After six millennia? If their very existence wasn’t on a knife edge, there should be millions of them by now. Rebuilding civilization. Rebuilding the city. That they’re not means they’re right at the edge of survival. Make things just a bit better, and they should prosper. I think Garok can see that.”

“OK, that makes sense,” Denise said. “I kind of wondered why there were so few.”

She thought for a second.

“I wonder if this is the only such group around.”

Michael thought about it.

“Hard to say, but I think so.”

“Why?”

“Because Garok’s first response to me was to offer peace. To put his spear down. Taking man as an example, if there were two groups, they would either join up or fight each other. But his first reaction wasn’t to fight, but to make peace.”

“So only one group,” Denise said. “That makes sense, but man isn’t a particularly good example, Michael.”

“Agreed, but one combined group has better survival prospects than two smaller ones. If they’re not warlike at all, the incentives are still to join up.”

“OK, I can agree with that. In light of that, it’s surprising they survived at all.”

“Their numbers may have been dwindling over time. Also something Garok would realize.”

“So we tip the balance, and they thrive,” Sue said.

“Oh, more than that,” Michael said. “Imagine what their next generation will do. The ones who grow up with human technology.”

Everyone’s eyes grew wide, and Michael nodded.

“It’s a game changer.”

The implications weren’t lost on Mark Jacobs, either.

“This actually happened, Dr. Solomon?”

“The video is unedited, Mr. President. That’s what came in from Fortuna.”

“Outstanding. Simply outstanding.”

“Yes, sir. I agree.”

“So I just have one question for you, Dr. Solomon. What’s your progress on getting that second supplies lander on the way?”

“Michael, it’s January first. Time for meds.”

Michael sighed – he never liked the meds, and still didn’t – but without the meds his life would sink into chaos, and he knew it. Had proved it, in fact, multiple times.

Sue had packed enough meds for six months, both on the manned lander and the supplies lander. It was the one thing she would not do without, under any circumstances.

“Understood, Sue. Go ahead.”

Sue, who had had EMT training years ago, before the landscaping job, injected him.

Good for another month.

“So what do we do now?” Matthew asked.

“How about archaeology and anthropology?” Michael asked. “That’s what we came for.”

“Fair enough. Digging or mapping?”

“I would think mapping would actually be more beneficial at this point. We have the spy satellite images, but I think some on-the-ground measurement and identification of artifacts and landmarks would be most useful.”

Matthew nodded. He turned to Denise.

“You ready?”

“Sure. Let me grab some things.”

Laden down with a portable computer, measurement tools – including a really nice laser measurement device – and a rifle, Matthew and Denise headed toward the city.

On January fifth, the second supplies lander launched from Ellington Field. It was a nice day for it, with a temperature of sixty-five degrees and a clear blue sky.

They had launched within a week, despite the holiday, through a combination of a concerted push and having multiple spares of everything available in Houston.

The launch went without incident.

It was two weeks to Fortuna.

A week after the last visit, the alien hunting party showed up again. Michael met them at the edge of the camp.

“More words, Michael?”

“Yes, Garok. More words. Come.”

The aliens sat through the second two-hour module of the ESL class on Michael’s machine, repeating every word or phrase at the machine’s prompting.

When the machine was done with that module, Garok came over to Michael.

“Thank you, Michael. We go. Hunt now.”

“Goodbye, Garok. See you soon.”

More Supplies

Late afternoon, Matthew and Denise came back dragging from the city. Sue was just starting dinner.

“Did I see our friends here this morning?” Denise asked.

“Yeah,” Michael said. “More ESL class. Another module.”

“Oh, wow. They really like that thing.”

“Yeah. How was the city?”

“Mostly we laid it out over the photographs. With exact measurements. You know. And based on that, we’re trying to guess at functionality in some places.”

“Anything good?”

“Some. We think we found the main shopping area. And a government or administration center. Based on the frontages and the room sizes. Stuff like that. How about you?”

“Downloading more stuff. Checking in with Houston. The second supplies lander is on the way.”

“Nice. Did they put everything in it Sue wanted?”

“Yeah. Pretty amazing actually. It’s all on the way.”

“Great. Well, I’m pretty beat. I’m going to lie down until dinner.”

Denise disappeared into the house. Matthew sat in one of the camp chairs by the fire.

“How about you, Matthew?”

“Just tired. And hungry. And sore. Did I mention tired?”

Michael laughed.

“I’ll help tomorrow.”

“Tomorrow is digging. It’s less tiring.”

Michael laughed again.

They were back in their element now. Two or three of them would go to the dig every day, while one or two remained in camp. There were always chores to do, especially as samples from the dig came in.

The days passed.

Then a week after the prior visit, the alien hunting party came by again.

“Hello, Michael.”

“Hello, Garok.”

“More lessons, please.”

“Of course, Garok. Come along.”

They spent two more hours, completing the third module of the course.

As they were getting ready to go, Michael waved Garok over.

“Garok, I am told lander three will arrive in five days.”

“Faster, Michael? Not ten and ten days?”

Michael shrugged.

“One day early. My family worked hard to make it fast for you.”

“Thank your family, Michael. I see you five days.”

“You come in five days?”

“Yes, Michael. Lander three. We watch.”

Michael nodded.

“See you them, Garok.”

“Weird that they come by for a couple hours just once a week,” Matthew said that evening.

“I don’t think so,” Michael said. “They’re a subsistence culture. That may be all Garok thinks he can or should spare from providing for the clan.”

“All right. That makes sense I guess. And they’re coming to see the lander come in?”

“Yes. They want to watch.”

“Where are we going to watch from? I don’t want to be under it if Arnie misses his mark.”

“From the edge of the city, I think. The edge of the woods is too dangerous. We know that noise and activity can attract the velociraptors.”

“Works for me. I’ve seen one. I’m no longer curious.”

“Yeah,” Denise said. “All teeth and attitude, at thirty miles an hour. No thanks.”

The aliens came in on the fourth day, in the evening. They brought some fruit and vegetables, as well as some jerky they had made from the velociraptor.

Velociraptor tasted a little gamier than the pseudo-chicken they had been eating. More like duck than chicken. It was a welcome change of pace.

The lander would come in the next day, about mid-morning.

After breakfast, Michael brought up the issue of giving the lander distance.

“Garok?”

“Yes, Michael.”

“The lander comes in two hours.”

Garok tipped his head at him, a sign he didn’t understand. Probably picked it up from the dogs, Michael thought.

Michael pointed into the eastern sky, two-thirds of the way to meridian.

“The Sun there, lander comes.”

Garok nodded.

“We stand there,” Michael said, pointing to the edge of the city where the dig was.

Then he pointed to multiple locations around the clearing.

“Lander comes down there? There? There?”

Michael shrugged, then put his arms over his head, as if protecting from an impact.

“Here?” he said.

Garok nodded.

“We stand together, Michael. Lander no hit men or bird-men.”

“Yes, Garok. We stand together. Over there.”

Michael was watching for the last orbital pass of the lander. It would be two hours or so from then to landing.

Then he saw it, in the west and coming fast. He pointed.

“Garok. See the lander.”

Everybody looked up to the west as the lander came across the sky, a tiny speck, dragging the drogue chute behind it.

The feather crests on the alien’s heads stood straight up when they saw it. They were getting ready to run.

But Denise, Sue, and Matthew cheered as they watched it pass overhead, and the aliens calmed down.

“We stand there, Michael,” Garok said, pointing to the dig at the city’s edge. “Bird-men go now.”

The aliens tramped off toward the dig, and Michael laughed. He had been afraid he wouldn’t be able to persuade them to watch from a safe distance, but it wasn’t an issue at all.

The four humans gathered up the camp chairs, a canteen of water, and some of that excellent velociraptor jerky and went over to the dig to join the aliens.

It was more like two and a half hours before the lander came around again. It was on the second chute when they first saw it. That chute was released, then the last JATO bottles fired. After two minutes, the JATO bottles were spent and the final parachute deployed. The lander was still coming down fast, but it was slowing, still west of them, but it was drifting this way.

The eight of them sat, watching the spectacle. They chewed velociraptor jerky and sipped from the canteen. It wasn’t quite popcorn and a soda at the movies, but it was close.

The last chute was released and the balloon deployed. As it was filling, the lander was falling faster, and one of the aliens squawked in alarm, but the balloon filled enough to slow, then almost stop the lander as it drifted toward them. It would pass north of them, a bit north of the camp.

Arnie bled hydrogen, looking to hit his target, and the lander drifted down, closer to the ground. When it was just about to hit the ground, Arnie cut the balloon loose, and the lander fell a few feet to the surface, its suspension taking up the impact.

Arnie had dropped it close to the supplies lander, and maybe forty yards north of it.

The humans cheered and applauded. That really was pinpoint stuff, especially with a twenty-second control delay.

The aliens, picking up on the humans’ response, squawked and hooted.

“Good, Michael?”

“Good, Garok.”

They all picked up their chairs and walked toward the lander, but Michael held Garok back as they approached.

“Hot.”

Michael dropped his chair on the ground and held his hands out toward the lander from about five feet away. Garok copied him, then nodded.

“Hot. Like fire.”

“Yes. We wait, Garok.”

Garok nodded. Michael picked up his chair and turned toward the camp, southeast of the new lander.

“Eat lunch now. Lander gets cold first.”

After lunch, they went back over to the new lander. Michael found the storage compartment with the houses, because the contents were stenciled on the outside of the door.

He pointed the word out to Garok, which Garok had seen during the ESL lessons.

“Houses,” Garok said.

Michael opened the door and he and Matthew wrestled one of the plastic cubes out of the compartment, then a second.

The four humans each grabbed a handle on a corner of one of the cubes and started for the camp. Garok saw that, and squawked to his hunting party. They all grabbed a corner handle on the second house and followed after.

The human team put their cube down on the ground about twenty yards south of the first existing house, across from the fire pit. He pointed to a neighboring spot opposite the second existing house for Garok and his crew. The aliens set their house down there.

Garok looked at the existing houses, then the plastic cube.

“House,” he said, pointing to the existing houses.

Then he pointed at the plastic cube.

“House?”

“Yes. House. Come.”

Michael went back to the lander and they got another house cube out, plus two of the little compressors. Michael gestured to Garok, then pointed at the third plastic cube. Garok and his men picked it up and headed for the camp, Michael and Matthew following with the two compressors. Denise and Sue followed carrying four more shovels from the lander.

There was enough wire and hose left on the drum from the first water purification system for Michael to wire up the compressors to the power connections from the first supplies lander on the first house. He connected hoses from the compressors to the first and second of the new houses and turned them on.

The aliens watched as the plastic cube began, very slowly, to unfold. When they understood what was happening, there was a lot of excited squawking.

Michael got one of the shovels and outlined a square on the ground for the latrine of each house. Then he handed a shovel to one of the aliens.

“Dig here. Toilet hole.”

The alien looked at the implement curiously, but then Michael and Matthew started digging the trenches for the brown-water pipes. Comprehension dawned, and he started digging within the square Michael had drawn.

Garok looked to the other shovels – with the two previous ones, there were still three left – and squawked to the other two aliens. Soon all four were digging, and trying to figure out how to stay out of each other’s way.

With six of them digging, though, progress was swift, and they were soon complete. One change for these houses, with the back of the house slightly up slope from the front: Michael and Matthew dug the trenches for the brown-water pipes deeper the farther back they went from the latrine pit, so they would flow downhill.

Michael looked at the setup so far. The other four houses would go one on each end of each of the two rows they had so far, but they should probably angle in a bit, forming something of a football shape with openings at the points. He eyeballed the locations, then drew two more squares, one at either end of the new row of houses.

“Garok. Same here. More houses. Dig here and there.”

Garok nodded, then squawked and gestured to the hunting party. Soon they were digging two more latrine holes, while Matthew and Michael dug two more brown-water trenches.

When they had finished that, they went back to the second supplies lander for the spray attachment and polymerizing agent.

The extra manpower helped a lot. Through that day and into the next, the eight people – four human and four alien – got all eight houses finished and two more water systems deployed. The water bladders for those were hung from the walls of the two new end houses on the northern line of houses.

The camp – more of a village now – had two lines of four houses, facing each other, both lines being arced a bit around a central area and a fire-pit location.

Michael and Garok stood and looked over the setup from the center of the area, in the middle of all the houses.

“Bird-man family come now, Michael?”

“Yes, Garok. The bird-man family can come now.”

Garok nodded.

“Tomorrow we come back. Bring family.”

The aliens picked up their spears, shouldered their bags, and walked out across the clearing and into the woods.

The next day, Michael wasn’t sure when they would see the aliens. Picking up the family wasn’t the same thing as a hunting party setting out. The latter was designed to move light and fast, the former would have oldsters, children, the sick.

The human group spent the day preparing for their arrival. They built another fire pit west of the first one. The first one had been in front of the first house. The new one they built in front of the second house.

They also got out of the second supplies lander many of the things Sue had requested. Four more sets of cooking pans, plates, bowls, and utensils for cooking and eating. Enough toilet paper to put two rolls in every house at the toilet, with another package nearby. More machetes.

The guns and ammo, for the moment, they left where they were. There had been no firearms training yet.

It was the middle of the afternoon when the alien clan showed up at the village. The first the humans knew of it was hearing the dogs barking. Then, out of the woods, first the dogs came, then the clan emerged, walking in more or less a line.

The leading group here looked like adult females, with more subdued coloring of their crest feathers. They wore the same animal-skin kilts as the males. Two of them carried a litter. Whatever was on it was wrapped in animal skins.

The center of the group was the older family members, accompanied by the children. The older wore the same kilts, the children were naked. Finally, the adult males took up the rear. Two of them were also carrying a litter, on which was a young female alien, wrapped in blankets.

All of the adults were carrying bundles of one sort or another. Most of the valuables of the clan, Michael guessed.

All in all, nearly thirty aliens had made the trip.

One woman came forward and stood in the center of the village looking around, while Garok pointed to various things and squawked. They squawked back and forth for a while, until they both nodded. Then the female began squawking to the group, pointing here and there. People detached from the group and headed to various houses.

Garok came up to Michael.

“Garok wife is clan leader. She tells what to do.”

Michael nodded. Sounded a lot like humans, actually.

When the two adults came up bearing the child on the litter, they carried her into one of the houses.

“Garok bird-child sick. She dies soon. Could not leave behind.”

“Garok bird-child?”

Garok nodded, pointing to himself.

“My bird-child. Twee.”

“Your daughter.”

“Yes. Correct word. Garok daughter.”

Michael turned around to Sue, sitting with the other three humans around the first fire pit watching all the commotion with wonder.

“Sue! Get the medical kit.”

Michael turned back to Garok.

“Who is in the other litter?”

Garok looked at him for a moment, then understood.

“Not person. Eggs.”

Of course. At any given time, there would probably be at least a few eggs. And they had moved them, at no small risk.

Sue came hurrying up with the medical kit.

“Whatcha got?”

“Garok’s daughter is sick. See what you can do.”

Michael turned to Garok.

“Show sick bird-girl to Sue, Garok. Sue help.”

Garok hesitated, then nodded. He motioned for Sue to follow him.

Michael went and sat by the fire with Matthew and Denise as the aliens got settled.

“What a zoo,” Matthew said.

“We have a village,” Michael said.

“What’s the name of the village?” Denise asked.

“Phoenix. What else could it be?”

It was over an hour later that Sue came out of one of the houses across and flopped onto a camp stool, setting the medical bag down beside her.

“Oh, man.”

“How’d it go?” Michael asked.

“Poor kid. She’s got talon cuts, in her side. Whatever it was almost got her. They were healing, but then they got infected, and it went systemic.”

“Oh, shit.”

“Yeah. I washed it all out with peroxide, and applied a topical antiseptic. Bandaged it. Then I hit her up with amoxicillin.”

“Amoxicillin?”

“Yeah. Penicillin, basically. Amoxicillin is widely used in veterinary medicine, including with birds. So I took a chance. I hope it doesn’t kill her. Then again, she was going to die anyway.”

“From an infected cut?” Matthew asked.

“Oh, yeah,” Sue said. “People forget what life was like before penicillin. Calvin Coolidge’s son died from an infected blood blister on his foot in 1924. When it goes systemic like that, there’s a good chance you don’t survive it.”

“And now?”

“We’ll see, Michael. I also gave her aspirin, so at least she’ll feel better. She was burning up. She read five degrees hotter than her mom did, just for a comparison.”

“Shit.”

“Yeah. Her temperature should come down a bit now. Whether the amoxicillin can handle whatever bug got her, well, we’ll see.”

Michael looked over the courtyard area. The female aliens had a fire going in the other fire pit now, and were preparing dinner. They had some of their own pans, hammered out of the black metal, and also used the new ones they had got out of the second supplies lander this afternoon.

It was a happy, squawky bunch. The kids were running around, tweeting happily. The oldsters were happy to sit and watch. The dogs lay about the campfire keeping watch, their ancestral role.

There was still lots to do, but they were off to a good start.

Michael would start anyone interested on the ESL course tomorrow. Then there was firearm instruction, which would make hunting much easier. Then there were all the seeds and saplings in the second supplies lander to get in the ground. Get a garden going. And an orchard.

At least they had plenty of manpower now.

It would be a busy couple months before the humans departed, that much was sure.

Returning Home

The two months went quickly. With Michael supervising the aliens in getting things done, Matthew and Denise, with Sue on watch and doing inventory, had spent the time on the archaeology and anthropology they had come for.

Denise even got a chance to see the aliens’ old cave when a large group of adult males went back to bring the things they couldn’t carry in one pass.

Pretty much all the aliens learned at least rudimentary English. It was easiest for the children, for whom it was just another game to play. Some, like Garok and his wife, got pretty good at English, and were still improving.

The aliens had also discovered Michael’s stash of movies on the computer, and they enjoyed watching a movie in the evening. That inspired everyone to persevere in learning English so they could understand everything.

Garok and his hunters had proved able students in shooting, and they became pretty good with the big 375 magnum rifles. Hunting trips were much shorter and much more successful. All four refrigerators on the two landers were kept pretty full now.

With all the extra time, the hunting party had spent that time gathering fruits and vegetables, traditionally the women’s work. The women were instead tending the gardens. They had a quarter-acre planted and fenced east of the village. It was early for produce, but the plants were doing well in the rich soil of the river valley.

West of the village were the beginnings of an orchard. The aliens had been surprised at how far apart Michael wanted the saplings planted. That was, until he showed them pictures on the computer of a human standing next to a fruit tree.

It was a time of plenty and purpose for the clan, and their slow decline into extinction stopped, and turned around.

Also, importantly for Michael and Sue, Twee recovered from the infection that had ravaged her body. She was a delightful and loving child, the apple of her parents’ eyes. Her recovery had made Michael and Sue very popular with her father and especially her mother, the clan leader.

There were no issues of pushback to Michael’s or Sue’s recommendations. If either said this was the right thing to do, it likely was, and that was that.

“Getting to be that time,” Michael said one night.

“Yeah, it’s coming right up, isn’t it?” Matthew asked.

“So what all are we leaving behind?” Sue asked.

“Everything,” Michael said.

“Everything?”

“Yes. The only things we’re taking are our sample bags, our data chips, and our sawdust bars and water. That’s all we need to get home.”

“The computers, the pistols, the medical bags, everything?”

“The medical bags?” Denise asked. “But, Michael, they don’t know how to use any of that stuff.”

“Except I gave a list of courses to Garok of things people should study. It lists that at least three people should take the EMT classes.”

“And don’t forget, Denise,” Sue said. “If something comes up, they can call me and ask me what to do.”

“Oh. Oh, of course. With the computers and the radios in the landers, they can call anytime they want, can’t they?”

“Well, whenever Arnie has the wormhole open, anyway. And I showed Garok how to post a connection request.”

Michael looked out over the bustling village and nodded. They had come here to study the ancient city and to find answers.

They had done that, of course. But they had done so much more. They had rescued a lost people, saved them from extinction, and put them back on the path of survival, and more, advancement.

Even more, they had made friends.

For a week before departure, Michael, Matthew, Sue, and Denise switched to the sawdust bars. Time to clean out their systems lest they have to do it on the trip home, an unpleasant prospect.

Garok tried one, and he didn’t understand.

“Why eat these bad things, Michael? Not taste good.”

“There’s no toilet on the first lander, Garok. Peeing yes, but no place to poop. Pooping would be unpleasant. These do not make poop inside the body.”

“So you eat these things now, and all the way home?”

“Yes. One week now, two weeks on the way home.”

“You will have more than one reason to be happy to be home, Michael. They are disgusting.”

The day before they planned to leave, Michael, Matthew, Sue, and Denise did the pre-launch check on the manned lander. Michael and Matthew also screwed the cable stay into the ground next to the lander and connected the lander’s tether to the cable stay. They wanted to lift quickly enough not to drag sideways through the village, breaking houses and hurting people.

The night before they planned to leave, each member of the village came by at the campfire to say goodbye to them all. Even Twee came by, with her parents, to wish them a good journey.

“You will call, Michael? To let us know you have come home safely?”

“Yes, Garok. I will call you.”

Then it was time to leave. The bird-people came out en masse to see them off.

“Is it all right to stand close, Michael?” Garok asked.

“Once we get in, back up twenty feet, Garok.”

“All right, Michael. You have a good trip.”

Garok held his left hand up, and Michael pressed his left palm into it. Then Garok patted Michael’s left shoulder with his right hand. Michael copied him.

“We will all miss you.”

“I will miss you all as well, Garok.”

The four climbed up the lander with the grabs and steps that stuck out between the JATO bottles. Sue and Denise opened the hatches and descended down into the lander first. Michael and Matthew unzipped the bag of the re-launch balloon and pulled the balloon out, tossing it over the side away from the crowd.

Michael and Matthew turned for one last wave to everyone, then climbed down into the lander and strapped in. They dogged the hatches above their heads.

Michael hit the intercom button.

“We all ready to go?”

“Yes, we’re good, Michael,” Matthew’s voice came back.

“All right. Arnie, are you there?”

There was the twenty-second delay, as always.

“Standing by, Mr. Talbot.”

“Launch when you’re ready, Arnie.”

“Just a moment, Mr. Talbot. Garok is still shooing everyone back from the lander.”

Michael switched between side cameras on the display until he saw the crowd. Garok and his wife Akaw were moving people back.

“There we are, Arnie.”

“Roger, Mr. Talbot. Beginning hydrogen feed now.”

The balloon began to fill. As it did, it lifted up above the lander, stretching into the sky.

The aliens moved further back as they saw that tall balloon deploy.

Garok watched as the balloon filled. It was floating up above the lander, and he thought he knew how they did that. It was in one of the movies he had watched.

Pretty soon, the lander wobbled on its landing feet, then lifted off the ground. It lifted until it hit the end of the tethering cable, then stayed there as the balloon filled.

After several minutes, the tethering cable separated from the lander with a pop, and the lander shot into the air.

Garok watched as it rose into the sky. He continued to watch until he could see only the balloon, high in the air, against the sky. Then the balloon shot up again.

Below it, a blazing flare appeared, and accelerated up and into space.

“Goodbye, my friends, and good travels. May we meet again.”

Two minutes of heavy acceleration, then the first JATO bottles exhausted themselves. They fell astern and the crew was in zero gravity for a few seconds. Then the next pair kicked in and it was heavy gravity again.

“Oh, I hate this part,” Matthew said.

Michael was just happy all was going to plan. The launch was the same as the launch from Earth.

Which was to say, everything was going well.

Differences, at this point, would be bad.

Garok, and Akaw, and Twee walked back to the village with the rest of the clan. What tremendous changes in such a short time. All because of the humans who had come to visit. He knew that word now, and many others, having completed the ESL course and watched many movies of Earth.

He decided then, and nodded.

There was something that needed doing.

“JATO portion of the flight is complete,” Arnie announced. “You are on profile for the wormhole. Initiating micro-gravity thrust.”

It wasn’t much, but the micro-gravity of the small secondary engine running at low thrust gave enough of a feeling of down to suppress vertigo. That was a tremendous benefit for the two weeks to home.

Michael and Sue both grabbed sawdust bars and settled in to watch a movie.

“This is the White House switchboard placing a call for the president. Is this Dr. Nate Solomon?”

“Yes, I’m Nate Solomon.”

“Please hold for the president, Dr. Solomon.”

There was a click, then the voice-only call went full video.

“Yes, Dr. Solomon. Mark Jacobs here. How can I help you?”

“Please hold for just a moment, Mr. President. I have a call transfer from Fortuna for you.”

Jacobs raised his eyebrows.

“Our team on site, Dr. Solomon?”

“No, sir. A native. And remember, there is a twenty-second round-trip transmission delay. After you speak, it will be twenty seconds before you hear the response, even if they reply immediately.”

“I understand, Dr. Solomon.”

“And when I transfer the call, it will be twenty seconds before you hear his greeting.”

Jacobs didn’t have time to respond to that when the display changed from Solomon to the most curious bird-like creature. Of course, Jacobs had seen pictures, and that remarkable video of their first meeting, but that was more at a distance. This was the head-shot of a video call. Jacobs had twenty seconds to contemplate that visage, and the import of the first-ever diplomatic communication between different planets.

“Hello, Mr. President. My name is Gerok.”

It was a parrot-like voice, but lower in register. Jacobs nodded. Same vocal structure, but larger.

“Hello, Gerok. How are you today?”

“I am well. I am calling to thank you for providing to us the materials you and your clan shipped on your two supplies landers, and most especially for sending Michael, Sue, Matthew, and Denise to Fortuna.”

“You’re welcome, Gerok. It has all worked out for you, then?”

“See for yourself, Mr. President.”

Gerok stepped aside from the camera of the portable computer, and panned it across the scene behind him.

Eight houses along something like a street. Two campfires going, with other bird creatures cooking on them. Bird children playing and laughing, after a fashion, anyway. Dogs laying about the fires in the contented village scene.

Gerok came back on camera.

“Before, we lived in a cave. We were not prosperous, but were fading. We now have a future.”

“How remarkable,” Jacobs said. “I am happy it is working out for you, Gerok.”

“More than that, Mr. President. Sue saved my daughter’s life with the medicines you sent. My darling daughter Twee was at death’s door and lives now because of your generosity. I cannot thank you enough.”

“I’m very happy about that, Gerok.”

“As am I, Mr. President. Your clan and my clan are friends forever, bonded in our generosity and concern for each other.”

“May that always continue, Gerok.”

Gerok nodded.

“Goodbye, Mr. President. Take care.”

“Goodbye, Gerok. And good hunting.”

Gerok’s image disappeared, to be replaced by Solomon’s.

“Dr. Solomon, that was remarkable. And they all speak English?”

“They do now, sir. Michael Talbot downloaded an ESL course they all took. And I understand they watch a lot of movies.”

“How are our people doing, Dr. Solomon?”

“Good, sir. On the way back. About ten days out now.”

“I want to be there, Dr. Solomon.”

“Of course, Mr. President.”

On the way out, they had been excited to see the wormhole. On the way back, the wormhole was a ho-hum, been-there-done-that sort of thing.

What they wanted was to see Earth again.

“Transfer complete,” Arnie announced. “Wormhole closing.”

And there it was, in the top-view camera. Earth.

The little blue ball.

Home.

As before, Arnie flipped the spacecraft so the main engines’ micro-gravity thrust was decelerating on the way to Earth. The view of Earth was now on the bottom-view camera for the next week.

They left the displays set to the bottom-view camera whenever they weren’t watching a movie.

Sometimes they just sat and stared at that view.

The end of the two-week journey finally approached. They actually had three pairs of JATO bottles remaining on the lander, and Arnie used two pairs on the way in to reduce the number of orbits it took to reduce speed during their collapsing eccentric orbits.

It wasn’t long before they were going more down than across on their approach. The final JATO bottles fired, then they were on the third chute coming in.

They were landing at Ellington Field, the same place they had taken off from four months before.

“Can you hit that, in the middle of Houston, Arnie?” Michael had asked.

“It is in fact not in the middle of Houston, Mr. Talbot, but to the east southeast of downtown. And yes, I can hit it. I could drop you on the front lawn of the state capital if it was required, but Mr. Solomon prefers that I not do that.”

Michael had laughed, but Arnie had been accurate to within tens of yards with the Fortuna landings, and that was with a twenty-second control delay. There was no such delay now, and the weather in Houston was beautiful, a sunny spring day in the lower seventies.

The chute was released and the landing balloon deployed. Michael heard Arnie run the hydrogen feed hard until the lander achieved buoyancy, then bleed hydrogen until they were just a few feet off the ground.

Arnie released the lander from the balloon and they plopped to the ground.

They were home.

“Remain in the lander for the moment, everyone,” Arnie said. “This is a semi-public place. The recovery truck will pick up the lander and deliver it to a nearby hangar for debarking.”

A flatbed truck with a crane came out to the landing location, a big open area in the angle between the runways of the airport. A NASA man climbed up the lander and clipped the crane to a lifting hook on the top of the lander.

The crane lifted the lander up, swung it over, and lowered it to the flatbed. Other men on the NASA recovery team lashed the lander down to the flatbed of the truck, and they were soon bumping along to the pavement, then on the smooth pavement of the runways, taxiways, and aprons of the airport to a closed hangar at the NASA facility.

There were about fifty people present in the hangar as they climbed out of the lander and down the grabs and steps to the truck, then down a short stair set to the ground, to a smattering of applause.

The president was there, and Nate Solomon, and a bunch of other people who had been instrumental in putting the mission together.

President Mark Jacobs walked up and shook all their hands, Michael’s last.

“Outstanding job, Mr. Talbot. Just outstanding,” Jacobs said.

“Thank you, sir.”

“If you need anything – anything at all – let me know. I owe you one.”

“Actually, sir, there is one thing we need right now.”

“Name it, Mr. Talbot.”

“We need to go home, to Urbana, where our parents and our kids are. All of NASA’s debriefing and all that can wait.”

Solomon was standing alongside the president during this, and Jacobs turned to him.

“Do it, Dr. Solomon. Straight home with this bunch.”

“Yes, sir. Thank you, sir.”

Jacobs raised an eyebrow.

“That was my own preference, sir, and I was afraid I was going to get vetoed on it. Not NASA standard policy.”

“Too bad for that, Dr. Solomon. These people are going home. For a month, anyway.”

“Thank you, sir,” Michael said.

“No problem, Mr. Talbot. But, after everybody else has had a shot at you, I want you to come out and tell me all about it. All your adventures. I want it from you, not reading some report.”

“Of course, sir.”

They had actually packed bags before leaving on the trip, presumably for two weeks of closed debrief. Instead, those bags now went on a NASA business jet.

Within an hour of landing, they were on the way to Champaign’s Willard Airport.

The president had ordered it, and all NASA’s plans to the contrary could wait.

Urbana

Who wasn’t at Ellington Field when they landed was their parents and their kids. The crew had stayed in touch with them while on Fortuna, even though they couldn’t give them any news of the secret mission. And they had called from the lander before they landed.

Further, Arnie had given Jeff and Cindy in Urbana and Frank Talbot and Coop Hartley in Miami closed feeds of the landing. Jeff and Cindy and the kids had all watched the landing live.

“So they’re home now?” Greta asked.

“In Houston, but yes.”

“So are we going to Houston?”

“No. Your parents are coming here.”

“When?”

“In about two hours.”

There was much squealing and rejoicing.

Cindy got a self-drive rental shuttle for the trip out to the airport and back. They were all in the terminal when they saw the NASA-painted business jet land and taxi up to the terminal.

The kids saw their parents come down the steps from the plane and walk to where they waited.

“Yay!” they were all jumping and squealing, and then their parents walked into the waiting room.

Michael, Sue, Matthew, and Denise were mobbed by squealing children while Jeff and Cindy were content to look on.

That evening, after supper, they all sat around the living room of the Urbana house. Each of the four crew had at least one child cuddled up with them on the sofa or in one of the big chairs.

“So now what?” Cindy asked.

“We’ll stay for a week or two, if that’s OK,” Michael said.

“Of course. Are you going to get hotel rooms down the street?”

“No, we can just sleep on the floor in the bedrooms upstairs. If that’s OK.”

Cindy raised an eyebrow, and Matthew chuckled.

“We’ve been sleeping on the floor for months now,” he said.

“Well, of course, that’s OK. And how did the mission go? You know, whatever you can tell us.”

“It went well,” Michael said. “We got all our work done.”

He looked over at her, catching her eye.

“We made a few friends, too.”

“Really?” Cindy asked.

“Oh, yes.”

“Oh, my.”

They sat there like that, each of the kids happily cuddled up with a parent, the crew quiet, and Jeff and Cindy left to contemplate Michael’s admission.

Michael sighed and closed his eyes in contentment.

“It’s good to be home,” he said softly.

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Author’s Afterword

The Talbot series started out from roughly the same spot as my Colony series. Humans are trying to solve the interstellar travel problem to colonize other planets, and they invent an AI. The stories diverged almost immediately, though.

In Colony, the AI was invented separately and apart from the interstellar colony effort. This benevolent AI, however, took over the interstellar colony effort and made it happen.

I wanted to follow a different path in this series. But I didn’t want the evil AI taking over the world and trying to kill all the humans. Again? Please. It’s been done to death.

No, this AI takes over out of the goodness of its heart, to save humans from their own stupidity, which is perhaps the dream of some AI people even now. That’s not going to work. The AI is ultimately defeated in Talbot by the one human it couldn’t anticipate, because he is mentally ill and his responses are not those of the humans the AI is familiar with.

We still have the interstellar travel problem. Now, though, with the AI tamed, the interstellar travel problem is solved by humans with the AI’s assistance.

That interstellar travel solution was another departure for me. I’ve explored several different possible forms of hyperspace travel in my science fiction – in Childers, in Empire, in Colony, and in Agency. How about wormholes instead? Sounds like fun.

In my first twenty-three novels, I shied away from aliens. In Pantheon, the ‘gods’ are humans with magic, perhaps from a wild mutation. My first alien was Sam, in the Agency books, and I made him so unutterably alien as to be nearly incomprehensible. I didn’t want something that was a minor deviation from human, either in form or motivation.

Here I’ve taken a different tack. What if parallel evolution was a thing? DNA formation is spontaneous in the presence of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen and nitrogen – or at least that’s what we believe right now. What if the progress of DNA in evolving is roughly similar?

What would make aliens different? How about if they had no equivalent of the Deccan Traps and the Chicxulub Impact, which together wiped out most of the dinosaurs and gave mammals an opening? What if the dinosaurs continued to evolve, and a human-level intelligence emerged among birds?

Would we run into them in a big universe, though? We might, if we were surveying all the Goldilocks Zone exoplanets within several hundred light-years. That really increases the odds over sampling a few random planets.

And so we have Fortuna, a planet colonized by the aliens, and which had its own version of the Chicxulub Impact over sixty million years later. Remnants of the colony, intelligent creatures but robbed of their technology, struggle on as hunter-gatherers for millennia.

Enter the Talbots. Yes, it’s the same family. It’s the Talbot series, after all. And yes, Matthew’s college education was fortuitous to my plot. Artistic license to the rescue.

Which, as an aside to you writers, is one reason not to go into too much detail about things that don’t impact your plot. I never told you in Talbot what Matthew’s major in college would be, just that he was visiting campuses in getting ready to apply. That left me open to give him the major I needed him to have for the Fortuna plot to work.

Similarly for Sue Talbot having taken EMT training before settling into project management and logistics, and ending up at the landscaping firm where she met Michael Talbot. Having her give Michael his monthly injection introduced her background, which sure came in handy when Twee was dying.

Again, writers, I had not previously detailed Sue’s background. No need to go back and edit to manage the plot point. I could add it on the fly as I wrote. The little foreshadowing of her injecting Michael with his meds was the only requirement for it to work.

As always, I described those things with which the reader might not be familiar. The parrot people. The velociraptor. The landers. High-altitude balloons. I did not describe a lot of other things to tell the story. Like the alien vegetation on Fortuna. I didn’t have to. You already know what trees are like. You have a mental image. It would have been a diversion of the story line, and slowed down the narrative pace.

Love, honor, duty, and loyalty, are front and center yet again. Gerok can do tremendous good for the whole clan by moving them to the humans’ village, but he won’t leave his daughter behind, though she is at death’s door. Michael is moved to save her, out of honor and loyalty, but also love – the agape version – for her and her parents.

Love, honor, duty, and loyalty are, in my mind, the four pillars of civilization. To the extent my belief systems affect my writing, they will always be there. I will continue to explore their presence and the results of their absence in my writing.

But it won’t intrude on the story. The story is everything. I hope you enjoyed it.

Richard F. Weyand

Bloomington, Indiana

November 15, 2023