Only Kyle's feet were outside the shadow of the beach umbrella, and that exposure was by choice. He was planted in a beach chair, toes digging into damp sand whose moisture was sporadically replenished by swirls of mild Caribbean waters. An unopened novel rested on his lap.
Reading was the last thing he felt like.
Darlene's chair and his shared the umbrella. Beneath the wide-brimmed straw hat that covered her face she murmured in her sleep. She was the reason he was here. She badly needed a vacation, and the only way to get her on one was to go himself. Globe-trotting hadn't worn her out, it was her itinerary: disaster after catastrophe after cataclysm. He tried to share her worries, her sadness, but talking wasn't enough.
What was the world coming to when lolling on the beach with a beautiful woman was a duty instead of a delight? Sipping a piña colada, he tried to get interested in his book. What part of his frustration, he wondered, came from knowing he may as well be here as at the lab? Specialists needed the first crack at the recovered masersat. He'd only have been in their way.
Maybe he did belong on the beach: Project Clear Skies was over. (But not Project Swelk, his inner conniver rebutted. Kyle had yet to dare articulating the unsuspected step three.)
Aside from Dar's murmuring, all that could be heard were seagulls and lapping waves. They had a long stretch of St. Croix shoreline to themselves. Not many Americans could afford vacations these days, while former friends took their tourist euros, yen, and rubles elsewhere.
The utterances muffled by Dar's hat became whimpers. Her limbs twitched. Damn it! Kyle was neither mind reader nor gambler, but he'd have bet big bucks she was reliving that moment off Costa Rica. The one tragedy that, unfolding before her eyes, personified the many deaths for which she'd tried to extend America's often-rejected concern. That poor girl! How long had she been trapped at the dock's end, only to drown with rescue within sight?
And poor Dar, watching helplessly as it happened.
With a flash of déjà vu, the azure sky once more blossomed with remembered flames. Of the many deaths for which the Krulirim were responsible, none obsessed him like the five men and women on the Atlantis. He could no more have saved them than the doomed submariners or silo crews. The difference was he'd experienced the shuttle tragedy at first hand, and that it was of a scale he could viscerally understand. He understood Dar's grief, all right. The next time she cried out, he had an urge to join. He threw his book in frustration.
"Drink, mister?"
Kyle turned. The crockery on the boy's tray glistened with condensation. Cherry stems, cocktail umbrellas, and plastic straws peered over the rims. "A colada. Bill it to room 412."
"Two, please." Dar sat up and removed her hat. "I woke myself up." She shouted herself awake many nights.
"No, I disturbed you, hailing this young fellow." The lad kept from his face any reaction to the white lie as Kyle accepted two brimming drinks.
She waited for the boy to continue his rounds. "Not unless your voice rose an octave and you were whimpering."
"You've got to lighten up on yourself." He handed her a beverage. "No, really."
"Physicist, heal thyself."
Touché. He drew a long sip through his straw. "We are a sorry pair, aren't we?"
"Speaking of being sorry . . . I apologize in advance if this offends you." Holding her mock-coconut vessel at arm's length, she exchanged grimaces with its ceramic face. "We finally have the"—she glanced around furtively, although no one on the beach was in earshot—"item. It will be studied. Maybe it's time to apply that same focused attention to climate issues. Global warming. El Niño. Improved weather forecasting."
"The same focused attention" meant, Change what you're doing. Kyle, tackle a problem that's certain. She knew he knew. He leaned over and kissed her. "I really love you."
That didn't mean yes.
"UN SecGen demands custody of stolen Galactic guardiansat." Kyle ripped the clipping with its screaming headline from a corkboard. He hurled it, wadded and torn, into a trash can. What would the UN do with the artifact if they had it? He pictured it behind glass in a museum.
Before letting that happen, he'd swipe it again.
"Like a patient etherized upon a table." If Hammond Matthews had noticed his colleague's fit of pique, he gave no sign. It was Friday, and Matt wore scientist casual: jeans, T-shirt, white socks and sandals.
The outbuilding devoted to the study of the captured masersat was uncharacteristically empty. It's amazing, thought Kyle, what fifty bucks of pizza can accomplish. He would join the mini-thanks after his private viewing.
The "patient" spanned a line of lab benches. It was twenty-some feet long, and the canvas tarp draped over it revealed only gentle curves and the hint of a waist. "Try not to disturb it."
"We're doing our best."
The metaphor Kyle truly favored was too discouraging to express, a comparison that had first come to him as the charred, twisted wreck of the starship was trucked to Franklin Ridge.
The aliens had fusion power, an interstellar drive, and artificial gravity. How far ahead of human technology were they? Swelk said they'd had space travel for many Earth centuries. Still, a species as tradition-bound as the Krulirim surely discouraged the heresies that begat scientific revolutions. For the sake of argument, imagine they were merely one century ahead of humans.
A hundred years ago, Earth's cutting-edge technology was vacuum tubes and biplanes. No jet engines or rockets. No quantum mechanics, which meant no transistors or integrated circuits. No computers or fiber optics. What would the best scientific minds of 1907 make of, say, a half-melted space shuttle or Boeing 777? What beside wings and a tail would make sense?
Negativism was a vice Kyle refused to indulge. He flipped back the tarp to uncover the familiar insectile shape. To his surprise, the satellite gave no evidence of having been opened. Except for strips of masking tape, it looked untouched. He felt the surprise on his own face. "But the wings came right off."
"Watch." Matt grabbed a portable electric heater with a pistol grip—an industrial-strength hair dryer. It started with a roar, heat shimmers rising from its nozzle. He directed hot air toward the stump from which had once sprouted a solar-wing spar. After a few seconds, a gap formed. The stump divided very near the hull, suggesting the hinge that had eluded the spacewalkers. Gripped in an insulated glove, the hinged joint swung freely. "No, wait." He waved off Kyle. After the area cooled, he straightened the spar and reheated it. The seam disappeared. Wiggling the stump showed the junction had returned to its former rigidity. "Works every time, at exactly the same distance from the hull."
Shape-retaining alloys were found in expensive eyeglass frames and golf clubs, but Kyle had never heard of a material that remembered and reformed seams. "How'd you find this?"
"We wanted to get inside. There were no bolts to undo, no seams to unweld. Rather than cut at random, and damage who knows what, we did an ultrasound scan. It showed seams. The hull material feels," he rapped, "more like plastic than metal, so someone mentioned thermoplastic. We tried heating the lines from the ultrasound image."
Aha. "The tape on the hull marks heat-activated seams."
"This is why you're paid the big bucks." Ignoring Kyle's humph, Matt began heating the waistlike indentation between the main hull sections, rocking the satellite to reach completely around. "Everyone comments these sections don't look like they belong together." A space opened as he spoke. "Things are often as they seem."
Kyle pried gingerly at the newly opened gap with asbestos-coated gloves. The hull sections parted, only a few wires linking the halves. Every satellite he'd ever seen was jam-packed, its parts tightly interlinked. "Okay, one side has the phased-array antennas for active radar cancellation—stealthing. The other side has wave guides for the maser. Any guesses?"
"In a minute." Matt unrolled a paper scroll, weighting the corners with empty coffee mugs. The printout appeared to be an ultrasound image. "The other grafts are less obvious, but four pieces make up this baby. Look here," he tapped, "and here. You can see two smaller modules also spliced in. Like the radar section, there aren't many connections to the main body."
"Any idea what this means?"
"Yeah. Swelk told you the starship was a commercial freighter. She traveled with a film company. So why did the Krulirim have doomsday weapons?"
"We've all wondered." The question drove Ryan Bauer nuts.
"Here's our best guess," said Matt. "Imagine you're on the interstellar equivalent of a tramp steamer. You have no weaponry, but signaling equipment must be very powerful to reach between stars. Say, comm masers." He rummaged in a cabinet drawer and found some candy. "At this rate, there won't be any pizza left. Now there's no reason to hide comm masers, but the aliens wanted these hidden. Their plan wouldn't work if we'd seen them frying the Atlantis or the early-warning birds. So what could they have carried that would hide comm satellites?"
"Radar buoys?" guessed Kyle. "Handy for returning to places one's already checked out. Only you reprogram the buoys to beam the opposite signal of whatever they sense."
"So we think." Matt popped a handful of candy into his mouth. "Say they've improvised a stealthed weapon. How is it aimed? The star sensors used with a comm maser wouldn't track a shuttle in flight." He tapped a small circle on the printout. "See this little guy spliced into the maser section? We hope to prove it's an IR sensor, interfaced to the onboard computer."
"What's this graft?" Kyle pointed on the scan to another hull alteration. This section had its own antenna; a few wires connected it to the main electronics section. His question elicited only a shrug. "Well, I have a thought. It looks like an independent, much lower power, microwave subsystem. Maybe it was used to read out the damned orbs. Swelk said the recording equipment was from the troupe's supplies."
"Makes sense."
His on-the-beach feelings of redundancy were largely confirmed. Matt's team was making tremendous progress. "Now the big question. Why did it stop working?"
By way of reply, Matt aimed a penlight. "What do you see?"
Kyle pondered. Fat wires leading from the two small grafts and the radar section ended in an ill-shapen metallic glob. Near that clump was something blocky whose only familiar features were a connection to the solar-panel stump and what looked like a "heat pipe" for transporting thermal energy to an external radiator. On a human satellite, the greatest source of heat was the main power supply. The blocky thing had a small scorch on an otherwise featureless and unused metal connector. He burst out laughing. "You just can't get good help these days."
"Yup," agreed Matt. "Bad power connections. It would seem a sloppy soldering job has given us our best chance yet to understand these guys."
I would've thought it impossible, thought Darlene, to be lonelier than the sole noncelebrant at a party. Now I know better. Being that lone noncelebrant's spouse was much worse. The intimate setting, an antique-filled sitting room in the White House Residence, only emphasized Kyle's withdrawal. She nursed a piña colada—she'd become enamored with them in the Virgin Islands—while chatting with the rest of the team. In a gathering of five, there was no disguising Kyle's silent sulking.
Britt said the President would be by to extend his appreciation, "for a job well done." For a job two-thirds done, Kyle had muttered, not that his principled dissent or his odd choice of fractions now mattered. Nor did it improve his mood that even she, however reluctantly and diplomatically, disagreed with him. As one of the team, she couldn't paper over this difference of opinion. Sighing, she again sampled her drink. The White House bartender was second to none.
The ringing of fine crystal got everyone's attention. Britt was wielding the silver spoon. "Everyone? A moment of your time, please."
"That ship sailed five years ago," said Erin Fitzhugh, drawing a laugh.
"Fair enough." Britt set down his champagne flute. "And since I, too, want to thank you all for your heroic efforts, that reminder is entirely apt. Darlene, Erin, Kyle, Ryan—the order of that list being alphabetical, mind you—your country owes you a debt of deep gratitude."
Darlene at best half listened to Britt's valedictory speech, brooding still on the fallout in her personal life of the group's unresolved rift. Despite every appearance of victory, Kyle wanted America to stay its course in a dogged quest for scientific certainties.
She didn't know how the mother ship had been projected. She didn't care. The key thing was, it was gone. That, and that the masersats were neutralized—for which Kyle deserved full credit. They had in hand, finally, one of the orbiting weapons—again thanks to him. With his own lab showing just how kludged it was, continued anxiety about alien threats was no longer tenable. Sorry, hon, we have more pressing problems. Like mending fences with the ingrate rest of the world. Like ten-plus percent unemployment. Like climate disasters. Could I, she wondered yet again, interest him in global-change research? How rotten a wife would I be to try?
"The President will be here in a few minutes, to add a few words."
She set down her glass, shaking her head no, when an attentive steward started her way. She'd be driving home. All she could do for Kyle tonight was let him drink freely.
The President entered. "Everyone, thank you for coming." Robeson circulated, shaking the men's hands and embracing the women. "What you accomplished, for country and planet, is exceptional. That so much had to be done in secrecy—and was done despite the approbation of the uninformed and unappreciative—makes those deeds all the more noteworthy. You have my complete respect and admiration.
"The dissatisfying part of our circumstances, I don't need to tell you, is the world's lack of understanding. That, my friends, makes the next point so difficult. It's surely far harder for you."
The President's gaze, which had been sweeping from face to face, locked now on Kyle. This will really hurt, thought Darlene.
"The campaign you orchestrated assured our victory. But in any war, especially one of subterfuge and deceit, an early casualty is truth. Suppression of the truth, our focus on the alien artifacts, and our custody of those artifacts, continue to estrange America from other nations.
"In a televised address Monday evening, I will announce completion of our program of alien study. The alien satellite and wrecked starship will be released to international investigation, under UN stewardship. I will also cancel the remaining satellite-recovery missions."
"Mr. President," Kyle blurted. "What about Clean Slate?"
"I'm sorry, Kyle. I know your concerns are sincere. That said, it's been a long time. Maybe the aliens tried something, and it did not work. You convinced us, rightly, that we had to understand the threat hanging over our head. Despite economic pain and world condemnation, we followed the course you laid. And maybe the alien captain was simply messing with our heads. The fact is, there is no credible evidence of an alien threat. So now—"
"But Grelben didn't know Swelk had bugged his bridge." Kyle couldn't contain his frustration. Darlene cringed—you don't interrupt the President. You certainly don't use that lecturing tone with him. "Grelben couldn't have been speaking for our benefit."
"So now," repeated Robeson, "it's time to move on, to enjoy such modest rewards as are in my power to bestow. I have many friends in the private sector, for those looking to make a change. And you'll have a sympathetic ear for new challenges you may aspire to in the executive branch." Robeson winked. "I won't mind if you avoid positions requiring Senate confirmation."
"Respectfully, sir." Kyle was nothing if not persistent, thought Darlene. Sometimes maddeningly so. "We haven't checked the moon yet, although the aliens spent time there. We need a lunar program."
That remark earned Britt a presidential glower: He's your protégé. Britt read the dirty look the same way she did. He took Kyle's arm and steered him into a corner. Their whispered conversation was unintelligible but intense.
Darlene joined Kyle as soon as Britt left, standing so that to face her, Kyle remained facing the corner. Behind him, by the hors d'ouevres table, Ryan and Erin compared notes animatedly—about Kyle's near meltdown, surely. Britt and the President were in another corner having their own one-on-one. "Honey, a boss once advised me, 'The third time I tell you something, I really mean it.' Wasn't there a third 'no' about a lunar program long ago?"
"I've lost count." He had the decency to look embarrassed, perhaps realizing he had pushed too far. "I'm getting another drink. You want a refill?"
"No, thanks. What about the President's gracious offer?" Diplomat 101: when an issue is irresolvable, change the subject.
"Outplacement assistance?" He mimed deep thought for about two seconds. "Astronaut doesn't require confirmation." His answer was too loud to have been only her benefit.
Britt, thankfully out of Kyle's line of sight, extracted a twenty-dollar bill from a coat pocket and handed the money to the President.
Darlene would have given Britt long odds on that bet.
"Hi, Chuck," Kyle called to the bored-looking guard. Hammond Matthews, ambling at his side, waved a greeting. They tried to exude nonchalance: the visiting VIP and the lab director on a casual walk-by inspection.
"Greetings, Docs. Too bad you're working. It's a beautiful weekend." He pointed at the note taped to the glass door clicking shut behind them. "I haven't seen the computer geeks. Can I call the help desk for you?"
"No, thanks. It won't take long once they arrive." Matt's smile stayed internal until they rounded a corner. "No time at all." The advertised network upgrade was entirely fictitious.
"Your secret plan for assuring our privacy is a sign on the door?
Matt mashed his thumb onto the fingerprint scanner beside the lab door. "The note's a memory jogger for anyone coming by despite the well-publicized scheduled maintenance. Their ID card won't get them inside today."
The lab had been stripped in preparation for the masersat's arrival; weeks later, the room still looked barren. Odds and ends, however—soda cans and coffee cups, small tools, digital meters, misplaced cell phones, open tech journals left facedown, wire scraps—had proliferated everywhere. Five computers remained on despite the purported network upgrade, their monitors flashing screen savers. Amid chaos striving to reassert itself, the masersat awaited.
Beneath its tarp, the satellite gaped open. "You have the parts?" asked Kyle. Getting a nod, he unsoldered four electronic components. Whatever those devices did, components with like surface markings—parts codes, they hoped—were in every Krulchukor pocket computer.
Matt jotted a discrete number with a fine-point marker on each liberated item. It wouldn't do to get confused which parts came from where.
Eleven not-entirely-destroyed computers had been recovered from the Consensus. Not one functioned. All had, presumably, been damaged by the fire. Swelk's computer worked—but its memory was filled with alien movies. While Swelk's was their only operational alien computer, it was too precious to tinker with. This could be their last chance to repair the other computers. Who knew what information those contained?
Of course, few of the computer components and none of the masersat parts appeared broken. Kyle imagined a 1907 engineer faced with an inoperative modern computer. If the only electronics I'd ever seen used vacuum tubes, what sense could I make of integrated circuits? Would ruined chips even look damaged? Heat can destroy electronics without melting the parts.
Which reduced them to crossing fingers and swapping components.
He tried not to consider the many permutations of parts substitutions ahead, as he soldered scavenged, same-labeled parts into the satellite. Whatever the international monstrosity that eventually arose to examine the masersat . . . if and when they got their act together, and actual research resumed . . . he'd eventually suggest that they try chip substitutions. Perhaps by then he'd have an online tutorial explaining everything.
Life was never that cooperative, though, was it?