Chapter 9:
Challenges and
Speculation
“That is awesome,” Chris Thompson breathed, staring at the screen.
Stephanie agreed, though a part of her also thought that terrifying might be a better term. “Is the President serious?”
“I believe,” Dr. Dobyns said, “she’s serious enough to want our input on the idea.”
“Why in the world does this brief assume that the ship would launch from the ground?” Faye shook her head. “Build it in orbit! None of the literal or political fallout.”
Stephanie nodded. “I can’t imagine a reason we’d want to try something this . . . extreme.”
“Look at the size,” Dr. Dobyns said.
Stephanie looked, started, looked again. “On the order of a hundred thousand tons?”
“Unfortunately, yes,” Roger Stone said; he had brought the brief over personally. “You have to understand, we are not talking about sending a small capsule, such as we used for the Moon landings. This is a first-contact vehicle which, in the worst-case scenario, may also be forced to fight a very lopsided battle against an unknown enemy.”
“We can’t seriously think about fighting something like Fenrir, Mr. Stone,” Stephanie said after a moment.
Surprisingly, Stone smiled. “Dr. Bronson, we all devoutly hope that we will never have to attempt it. But as commander-in-chief of the United States, and as part of FORT, the President must consider, and be prepared for, even that eventuality. And you, yourself, pointed out early on that as the central portion of Fenrir is no larger than a large Earth city, nuclear weapons could quite easily be a threat to it.”
Stephanie had to pause at that. “They would have to have amazingly good meteor defenses; those would likely easily swat down any missiles we might send at us.”
“Let’s not argue the specifics of a military scenario,” Dr. Dobyns cut in. “Take it as a given that we have to prepare for it. That does make this concept . . . sensible.”
“And impossible to build in orbit,” Stephanie said reluctantly. “Even if we could get Daire Young’s entire launch capacity, it would take hundreds of Rocketship Heavies to bring the materials into orbit, and there’s just nowhere near enough people trained in orbital assembly to put something like that together.”
Roger nodded. “Especially since there would be no margin for error in assembly. We know how to build very large machines here on Earth; we’re just learning how to do it in space, and this will be”—his smile held a touch of disbelief as he looked at the diagrams—“well, a unique challenge even here on Earth.”
“On the positive side,” York added, “there won’t be any need to waste time trying to trim every ounce of weight, which is usually the major concern in aerospace engineering. The main challenge may be convincing the engineers to let go of those assumptions and instead focus on making the ship as tough as humanly possible.”
Roger grimaced. “If that were the main challenge, both the President and I would be ecstatic. Unfortunately, the main challenges are, as always, political. The FORT side we think can be handled, though there we will have a very hot potato in the sense of determining exactly where this monster launches from. But the fact is that while—at the moment—all the major world leaders appear relatively sensible on the subject, the same is not true of their overall governments—ours, unfortunately, among them.”
Stephanie wanted to argue, but she knew it was true. There were nutjobs all over, and unfortunately they voted. There would be people who saw the alien approach as the vangard for invasion (and, honestly, they had no way to prove it wasn’t); others who didn’t care what was going on in space but damn sure weren’t going to let anyone set off nukes anywhere on the planet; and still others who believed the entire thing was a gigantic conspiracy to let the government . . . do something undefined but bad. Never mind that such a conspiracy could never survive a moment’s scrutiny.
But her outrage couldn’t be entirely contained. “But we have to do something! We can’t just ignore this, and”—she took a breath—“and Roger, you and the President are right. We probably wouldn’t stand the chance of a bicycle against a charging rhino, but we can’t not prepare in case Fenrir is hostile. People have to see that! It’s right there!”
“Stephanie,” Faye said, shaking her head, “you can’t see it, any more than a virus or an atom or an extrasolar planet. The scientists can show pictures of something—something that even now is just a couple blurry pixels—and talk about what those pixels mean, but that’s no more real to a lot of people than, well, other people’s history a thousand years ago. Maybe it’s real, maybe it’s not, but really, how can that fuzzy ball of light hurt us? If you’re already cynical about scientific statements”—she gave a pained snort of laughter—“it’s the ‘aliens are coming’ that’s going to get more attention and make more sense than someone talking about infrared astronomy and acceleration vectors and such.”
Stephanie stared around at them all. “So, are you saying we’re not going to be able to actually do anything because there’s too many groups of people who want to ignore it?”
“Not entirely,” Roger said. “We’re saying that it’s going to be harder not so much because people want to ignore it, but because too many people will want to approach it in different ways, and that we have to figure out how to spin it in a way that can get at least some of all those different voter bases on our side. I was hoping someone here might have a few ideas.”
After a moment of silence, York Dobyns grinned. “You know . . . maybe. A lot of the anti-government types have all sorts of squabbles with the environmental types because of nuclear power—one side thinks it’d be a panacea to cure all our energy related problems, the other thinks it’s practically the creation of Satan.
“Why not pitch this nuclear drive solution to the pro-nuke group as a demonstration of nuclear safety?”
Roger stared at him. “That,” he said, “is one of the craziest, bass-ackward twists I’ve ever heard.” His face lit up with a fierce smile. “And it’s possibly brilliant. We’ll have to look into a way to insert that into dialogue without looking like it’s from us.”
“Detonating nuclear bombs in atmosphere to launch a giant nuclear spaceship will be a demonstration of safety?” Steph repeated. “Isn’t it more the demonstration of desperation?”
“It’s all in how you slant it,” Roger said. “Worldwide, there were hundreds of atmospheric nuclear detonations during testing, and they didn’t result in the world becoming a nuclear wasteland, so there is an opportunity there, perhaps.”
Chris Thompson sat up. “Pull the patriotism lever—if the USA doesn’t do this, we’re going to let the Russians and China be the ones to make a nuclear-powered spacecraft and meet the aliens? Play that one hard, and even the hard-liners are going to have an uphill fight to deny the funds.”
Stone’s grimace and nod showed he had about the same reaction to that as Stephanie. “After all the fighting against that particular jingoism we’ve done, it feels pretty hypocritical to start playing on it now . . . but yes, Dr. Thompson. That’s probably the best course we can take.”
Stephanie gritted her teeth, then made herself relax. I’ll have plenty of chances to get really pissed off later. Other things to talk about now. “Okay, let’s just step past this subject. Roger”—it was still weird to call the right hand of the President by his first name, but she was starting to get used to it—“we’re going to have to just assume that we can get this project underway. I am going to work on it if I have to go to Russia to do it. So, how practical is that design up there? Can we really lift that much into orbit?”
“We reviewed the old Project Orion work, and it was generally sound; in fact, their designs indicated you could go an order or two of magnitude higher, with one design around eight million tons. If FORT goes for it, we will be assembling the biggest multinational engineering task force the world has ever seen to make it happen.”
“Crew will have to be international, too,” York said, nodding. “Everyone will want in on this, and deserve to—this is humanity stepping out to meet our visitors.”
“Yes, and the crew should be large enough to make it feasible to have representation from most countries on board. A hundred-thousand-ton main payload is about the size of an aircraft carrier, and while a lot of that will be taken up by elements of the drive system and various other equipment, there should still be room for a lot of people on board.”
“You will not want to design it with aircraft carriers or submarines in mind, however,” Faye said after a moment.
Roger raised an eyebrow. “Why not? Aside from the obvious physical reinforcement to take acceleration, that is, we thought that long-term submarines would probably provide the best blueprint.”
Faye looked to York, York tilted his head, then shrugged. “Go on, Faye; I think I have an idea what you mean, but tell us what you see.”
“This isn’t a military expedition,” Faye said bluntly. “Oh, it has to have a military component and be prepared for military action, but it’s going to have a very large crew which will be primarily interested in first contact—linguists, scientists of all types, and so on—and that excludes the luxury of being able to select its crew entirely along military discipline and compatibility requirements. I’ve seen the interior of a submarine; for a military vessel it makes perfect sense, but that level of cramped interiors, spartan accommodations, and so on simply will not work for the much more general, and primarily civilian, crew you are likely to get.”
“I think she’s right,” said Stephanie. “The populations and expectations are very different. And you can’t expect to put the top-level scientists from around the world through the exact same military training.”
“They will have to go through some kind of training,” Roger said, “as it will be a unique situation for everyone. But . . . yes. I suppose you are right. And I might have to think of the possible publicity angles as well; a ship whose interior looks like just drab corridors will be a harder dramatic sell.” He straightened. “Well, I’ve brought you up to date and you’ve given us some valuable feedback; I’ll get back to the President and you people can get back to your own work. I’ll be in touch.”
After he had left, Stephanie looked around the room. “All right, everyone,” she said. “Let’s take this brief apart and then start thinking of what they’re missing. We want all the right ideas at the start.” She hesitated, then forced herself to go on. “And that means any military applications. Mr. Stone’s right: we may not want to fight, but if it comes to that, we’ll want to give our people the best chance they have.”
“Exactly right,” Dr. Dobyns agreed.
“So in that vein,” Stephanie said, feeling simultaneously grim and, unwillingly, fascinated by the idea, “while we wait for more useful basic information on Fenrir to get to us, let’s start thinking about its likely defenses . . . and how we could bypass them.”
With varying degrees of reluctance, her little team began examining the ways in which the human race could destroy the emissary they had waited all their lives to meet.