backed off a little, and stood up straight. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said.
‘Don’t tell me. At your time of life, you don’t have time to waste.’
‘No, I’m just a rude asshole. Always was. Mind if I sit down?’
She said, ‘Tell me about the solar focus.’
He moved a pile of glossies from a chair; they were digitized artist’s impressions of a proposed, never-to-be-funded, unmanned mission to Io, Jupiter’s moon. ‘What I’m talking about, specifically, is a mission to the solar focus of Alpha Centauri – the nearest star system.’
‘I know about Alpha Centauri.’
‘Yes … The sun’s gravitational field acts as a spherical lens, which magnifies the intensity of the light of a distant star. At the point of focus, out on the rim of the system, the gain can be hundreds of millions; at the right point, it would be possible to communicate across stellar distances with equipment no more powerful than you’d need to talk between planets. The Gaijin may be using the Centauri solar focus as a communication node. The theorists are calling it a Saddle Point. Actually there is a separate Saddle Point for each star. All roughly at the same radius, because of –’
‘All right. And why do we need to go to Alpha Centauri’s focus?’
‘Because Alpha was the first source of extrasolar signals. And because the Gaijin are there. We have evidence that the Gaijin entered the system at the Alpha solar focus. From there, they sent a fleet of some kind of construction or mining craft into the asteroid belt. Sally, we now have infrared signatures, showing the activity in the asteroid belt, going back ten years.’
‘There is an unmanned probe en route to the asteroid belt. Maybe we should wait for its results.’
Malenfant flared. ‘A private initiative. Not relevant, anyhow. The solar focus – that is where the action is.’
‘You don’t actually have any direct evidence of anything out at the solar focus, do you?’
‘No. Only what we’ve inferred from the asteroid belt data.’
‘But there’s no signature of any huge interstellar mother ship out there, at the rim. As there would have to be, if you’re right.’
‘I don’t have all the answers. That’s why we have to get out there and see. And to tell the damn Gaijin we’re here.’
‘I don’t see how I can help you.’
‘This is NASA’s Solar System Exploration Division. Right? So, now we need to go do some exploring.’
‘NASA doesn’t exist any more,’ she said. ‘Not as you knew it, when you were flying Shuttle. The JSC is run by the Department of Agriculture –’
‘Don’t patronize me, kid.’
She sighed. ‘I apologize. But I think you have to be realistic about this, sir. This isn’t the 1960s. I’m really just a kind of curator, of the grey literature.’
‘Grey?’
‘Studies and proposals that generally never made it to the light of day. The stuff is badly archived; a lot of it isn’t yet digitized, or even on fiche … Even this building is seventy years old. I bet it would be closed for good if it wasn’t for the Moon rocks.’
That was true; elsewhere in this building, fifty per cent of the old Apollo samples still lay sealed in their sample boxes, still awaiting analysis, after six decades. Now that there were Japanese living on the Moon, Brind suspected the boxes would stay sealed forever, if only so they could serve as samples of the Moon as it used to be in its pristine, prehuman condition. An ironic fate for those billion-dollar nuggets.
‘I know all that,’ he said. ‘But I used to work for NASA. Where else am I supposed to go? Look – I want you to figure out how it could be done. How can we send a human to the solar focus? It will all come together, once we have a viable scheme to fix on. I can get the hardware, the funding.’
She arched an eyebrow. ‘Really?’
‘Sure. And the science will be good. After all, we still haven’t sent a human out beyond the orbit of the Moon. We can drop probes on Jupiter, Pluto en route. We’ll get sponsorship from the Europeans and Japanese for that. The US government ought to contribute, too.’
You make it sound so easy, Colonel Malenfant … ‘Why should these organizations back you? We haven’t sent a human into orbit, other than as a passenger of NASDA or ESA, in twenty years.’
‘Otherwise,’ said Malenfant, ‘we’ll have to let the Japanese do this alone.’
‘True.’
‘Also there’ll be a lot of media interest. It will be a hell of a stunt.’
‘A stunt is right,’ she said. ‘It would be a spectacular one-shot. Just like Apollo. And look where that got us.’
‘To the Moon,’ he said severely, ‘forty years before the Japanese.’
She chose her next words carefully. ‘Colonel Malenfant, you must be aware that it will be difficult for me to support you.’
He eyed her. ‘I know I’m thought of as an obsessive. Twenty years after Shuttle was grounded, I’m still working out a kind of long, lingering disappointment about the shape of my career. I want to pursue this Gaijin hypothesis because I’m obsessed with them, because I want America to get back into space. I have an agenda. Right?’
‘I – yes. I guess so. I’m sorry.’
‘Hell, don’t be. It’s true. I was never too good at the politics here. Not even in the Astronaut Office. I never got into any of the cliques: the spacewalkers, the sports fans, the commanders, the bubbas who hung out at Molly’s Pub. I was never interested enough. Even the Russians mistrusted me because I wasn’t enough of a team player.’ He slapped his leathery hand on her desk. ‘But the Gaijin are here. Sally, I’ve waited ten years for our government, any government, to act on that lunar infrared evidence. Only Frank Paulis responded – a private individual, with that one damn probe. Now, I’ve decided to do something about it, before I drop dead.’
‘How far away is the solar focus?’
‘A thousand astronomical units.’ A thousand times as far as the distance between Earth and sun.
She whistled. ‘You’re crazy.’
‘Sure.’ He grinned, showing even, rebuilt teeth. ‘Now tell me how to do it. Treat it as an exercise, if you like. A thought experiment.’
She said dryly, ‘Do you have an astronaut in mind?’
His grin widened. ‘Me.’
Dark, crumpled ground, a horizon that was pin-sharp and looked close enough to touch, a sky full of stars dominated by a single bright spark …
Maura felt herself lurch as the probe began to make its way across the folded-over
