Moonstruck. Part 30

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 subst.i.tutions 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 subst.i.tutions. Perhaps by then he'd have an online tutorial explaining everything.

Life was never that cooperative, though, was it?

CHAPTER 35.

"Hi, Stinky. Yo, Smelly." Boggy vegetation squished beneath their slowly shuffling, broad webbed feet. Good. Swelk had fretted about the unnatural metal decking her friends suffered aboard ship. The animals chewed contentedly on synthesized sludge, ma.s.sive jaws sliding and grinding in a totally alien motion. Despite widespread suspicions that Krulchukor bioconverters employed nanotech, no one-certainly not Kyle-would endanger the Girillians by opening one for inspection. "Do they brush you guys enough?"

"Perhaps you could give the other guests a chance, sir." A zoo guard politely indicated the serpentine queue behind Kyle. Plenty of tourists were glued to the railing, but, Kyle guessed, none spoke so familiarly to the main attractions. "This exhibit is quite popular."

He moved along rather than argue. Seeing Smelly and Stinky was how he communed with his dead friend. He loved the cats, but a.s.sociated them more with Dar. He drifted through the rest of Girillia House, murmuring as he went. None of these critters had bonded like the swampbeasts with Swelk; none affected him as deeply.

He found an empty bench. Swelk, he thought, at least one puzzle that had us stymied is solved. That reflection yielded a bit of the solace he'd sought unsuccessfully in Girillia House.

The computer Matt had repaired with masersat parts might-in twenty years? More?-lead to amazing breakthroughs. It wasn't a cookbook for fusion or interstellar travel, but it offered clues: operating procedures and detailed parts inventories. The recovered files, in Kyle's belief, held more promise than the charred starship surrendered to UN custody.

The how of the mother ship holo-projection had gnawed at him long after the fact of the hologram became obvious. Why would the aliens have such equipment with them? Discovering the masersats to be cobbled-together devices had only deepened the mystery.

But now, extrapolating from newly recovered Krulchukor files, he had an answer.

The alien star drive, its physical principles still maddeningly obscure, was inoperative deep within a star's gravity well. Starships used solar sails to exit solar systems-sailing conserved He3 for interstellar travel. In settled solar systems, big laser cannons rapidly propelled starships to where their drives could engage. In low-tech solar systems (which, in practice, meant any system not colonized by Krulirim), shipboard emergency gear included kits to build laser boosters. Seed a convenient, sunlight-drenched,

silicon-rich asteroid with nanomachines. Wait a bit for semiconductor lasers, and the solar cells to power them, to grow. Voila!The moon's surface was one-fifth silicon by ma.s.s. Without an atmosphere, solar energy was abundant on the dayside.

If Swelk's translator had correctly converted units of measure, an emergency booster kit would expand into an about-kilometer-squared patch. An individual laser was a silicon structure only millimeters in

size, but a full-grown booster contained billions. Inventory records showed several kits had been taken from ship's stores.The evidence was entirely circ.u.mstantial, but Kyle was sure he finally understood the mother-ship trick.

Just as Grelben's engineers had kludged masersats from onboard equipment, they, or perhaps Rualf's special-effects team, must have hacked into the booster-kit software. Change the aiming logic to track a

moon-orbiting radar buoy instead of a receding starship. Add an animation model of the movie-prop vessel to be projected. (Model, as well, the occasional holographic auxiliary ship going to or from the mother ship-an effective bit of misdirection.) Schedule the hand-off of projection duties from laser patch to laser patch, to compensate for the moon's rotation and to mimic the mother ship's purported orbital path. For a species with centuries of computer experience, he guessed the reprogramming was a snap.

Memories of Swelk occupied his walk to the Metro station and the subway ride itself, reminiscences intermingled with hopes for a new beginning. In a West Wing waiting room, he tried to focus on the latter.

"Sorry, I'm running late. Crisis du jour." Britt had appeared in the doorway. "Much simpler than crises we've handled. Come in. Can I get you something?"

"Water, thanks."

"Carl, two Perriers." Once the earnest intern nodded acknowledgment, Britt led the way to his office.

"How's my favorite diplomat?"

"Fine." He took a chilled bottle. "Busy." A workaholic, not that I'm ent.i.tled to criticize.

Britt draped his suit coat over a chair. "It's ominous when you get terse and tongue-tied on me. What now?"

"Good news, actually." Kyle took a photo from his shirt pocket. "Matt's team repaired a recovered

Krulchukor computer. Unlike Swelk's, it wasn't filled with movies and a translation program." They'd have been out of luck, though, without Swelk's computer to translate for it.Britt raised an eyebrow. "After all these years, they fixed it. Interesting."Admit nothing. "Good things come to he who waits."

"We'll let that lie. What's on your always active mind?"Had there been an emphasis on "lie"? "It was a crewman's computer. The maintenance files should be very helpful in recreating Krulchukor technology. Case in point." Kyle explained the mother-ship illusion. "It's nice to know why the mother ship was off in lunar orbit."

An intercom buzzed. "Your next appointment is here, sir."

Britt picked up the photo. "For someone bearing good news, you don't seem happy."

Nothing would be gained by citing the maddeningly vague reference in a recovered file to Clean Slate.

Nor would rea.s.serting his unshaken conviction of dangers lurking on the moon accomplish anything.

Every suggestion over the years of a lunar program had been rebuffed. Krulirim were patient. They had to be-interstellar voyages lasted years.

Why was he the only one who believed Grelben's plans could be years in preparation?

None of this prevented Kyle from doing his d.a.m.nedest to be prepared. "Dar predicts the President will

give the computer, too, to the UN. Our favorite diplomat implies I'm bitter."

Britt clasped his hands, fingers interlaced. "If, as I think likely, she's right, then what? Can I lure you into the District more often?"

"No, but with a good excuse." They had arrived, at last, at the reason for his visit. "I'd like to accept the President's offer of a job referral."

CHAPTER 36.

Darlene's right leg dangled from the freestanding hammock, her bare foot inches above the patio brick.

The hammock was nevertheless swaying, Kyle's longer leg rocking them gently. Her head rested on his shoulder. Blackie was curled up and purring on her lap. A mild breeze was blowing, moonlight was streaming. "Explain again why we hardly ever do this?"

He kissed the top of her head. "Because, Madam Undersecretary, you're usually off gallivanting around

the world."

That was a half truth not worth debating. She swigged some no-longer-cold beer rather than respond.

The past few months, he was in Houston as much as she was gone on her own, more varied travel. The President, true to his word, had gotten Kyle a shot at a payload-specialist berth on an upcoming NASA shuttle mission. The payload for whose calibration, operation, and, if need be, repair, Kyle would become responsible did upper-atmosphere measurements, the details of which eluded her. Kyle's understanding, of course, was infinitely deeper than hers and growing daily. (They'd been together long enough that she knew nothing was larger than infinite, but she didn't care. She just wouldn't express the thought.)

The astronauts she'd met were pilots and engineers, not scientific experts. That surely meant the payload could be operated without a full theoretical understanding of the measurement techniques, or the climate models in which the measured values would be used, or the abstruse controversies that swirled around competing climate models . . . but there was no way Kyle would be satisfied flying without that expertise. So when he wasn't training at Johnson s.p.a.ce Center, he was immersed in self-study of atmospheric physics. They were once again coming at a globally vital problem from two entirely different sides.

This time, thank G.o.d, the problem wasn't eating him up. She patted his arm.

"Beautiful, isn't it?"

That could have been a reference to togetherness, the weather, the patio and its wooded setting, or the

cloudless night sky aglitter with stars. Had her companion meant any of those things, he wouldn't have

been Kyle. "The full moon? Yes, it's gorgeous."They were silently admiring its round perfection when, as if by the throwing of a switch, the moon went dark.

"Yes, I'm serious!" insisted Kyle. "How's the weather? Look out your window."

"Sunny and warm. Basically like every day." His old college buddy, who lived in LA, sounded puzzled and not a little peeved. "Why did you really call?"

"The sun's normal?" Kyle persisted into his cell phone. He'd outwaited a call-waiting signal. Dar ran inside to answer the house phone.

"Big bright yellow ball, intends to set in the west. Yes, it's normal. So this is about . . . ?""Gotta go-I'll explain later." He hung up over annoyed protests. Overhead, stars sparkled like diamonds, as brightly as ever. How, in a cloudless night sky, could the moon be ghostly dim when in California, where it was just after six, the sun was behaving?

There was no denying the apparition overhead.

He was swinging his telescope toward the spectral moon when his cell phone rang. Dar yelled from inside, "That's Britt. I transferred the call." "Hi, boss." As best Kyle could tell, the moon, apart from having gone ashen, was unchanged. He'd studied it enough nights to trust his impression. "Yes, I know. Yes, the moon's gone dark and no, I can't say why." He unbent from his crouch over the telescope eyepiece. "But I'm on it."

* * * Too many people jammed in a consequently overheated room. Too many speculations and too few facts. It was disquietingly like the arrival day of the Galactics.

Kyle fanned himself with a folder as he digested the latest findings. An obvious change from that earlier crisis was the medium of note taking: electronic whiteboards, read/writeable across the Internet, had replaced walls covered in Post-it notes. The Franklin Ridgers could as easily have coordinated from their offices, like the hundreds of scientists worldwide whose data they were collating. Crowding this room showed psychology trumping technology.

"That's one possible explanation shot to h.e.l.l." Ellen Nakamura, a twenty-something new hire with spiky blue hair, hung up her cell phone. "Thank G.o.d." She threaded a path through the crowd to a terminal. On the big wall display marked "solar status" new text appeared: SOHO readings nominal. The Solar and Heliospheric Observatory probe was permanently stationed a million miles sunward from Earth, at an Earth-sun gravitational balance point. If SOHO, with its plethora of instrumentation and uninterruptible view of the sun, saw no variation in the sun's behavior, that was definitive. The sun was normal.

There weren't many ways to dim the moon. Moonlight was only reflected sunlight, so a solar problem could have been the root cause. Nakamura was right: thank G.o.d. If the sun were the source of the problem, they could all speedily freeze to death. A second wall was dedicated to an investigation of any unknown phenomenon impeding the light path from sun to moon, or moon to Earth. Regularly updated windows mirrored the findings of observatories worldwide. Some big light blocker in s.p.a.ce, never mind where such a thing could have come from, would likely also darken some stars. No such dimmed stars were in evidence. That did not eliminate a filtering disk precisely sized and placed to obscure only and exactly the moon as viewed from anywhere on Earth. But how could such an object be held stationary, against the solar-wind pressure on such a huge expanse? "Matt. Any word on radar sweeps for a blocker?"

"He's stepped out," answered a voice Kyle didn't recognize. "But yes, there's news. Rear wall, lower left

corner. Radar sees nothing between here and the moon."

"Thanks." So if there were a light-blocking object in s.p.a.ce, it's not only precisely positioned and placed, it's radar-transparent. Stealthed. If such an object existed, and popped up out of nowhere, surely it would be an alien artifact. Spoiling the moonlight . . . Clean Slate couldn't be anything simultaneously so huge and so petty, could it?