Fiction River: How to Save the World Read online

  “Right.” They watched the launch a moment longer. “Now, you do know they might be able to track the crowbar by radar, right? A crowbar has a damned small radar cross-section, and they’d have to be looking at it when it launched. But it’s not invisible.”

  Faulkner smiled. “Appearance, Stross, is everything. What people will see will be a cargo tanker filled with helium-3 exploding as it touches down. Sunrisearth can try to blame us…but what people will remember is the tanker going up in a huge ball of flame. Just like the Hindenburg.”

  “The Hindenburg was filled with hydrogen, sir. This is helium. It won’t burn.”

  “No, but the tanker will explode when the crowbar hits it, right?”

  “Oh, with that much kinetic energy smacking into it, it’ll explode, all right. The equivalent of twelve tons of high explosive.”

  “And that’s what people will see. What they’ll remember. Fuel for fusion reactors being recklessly brought from the Moon to Earth by Sunrisearth… and it explodes all over every news feed and Net channel on the planet. They’ll hear the word ‘reactor’ and assume nuclear radiation.”

  The rocket on the TV monitor was almost out of sight, a tiny, brilliant star atop a twisted column of white smoke.

  “Hell, they won’t even notice when Sunrisearth blames us,” Faulkner added.

  ***

  Kajura’s course corrections were made remotely from Mission Control. Resnewski didn’t have to do a thing. The hardest part was the boredom; he slept a lot, as Earth gradually swelled ahead, blue and swathed in white. His suit handled his sanitary needs, while he ate and drank liquids through a lock in his helmet.

  The trip took three days.

  Still under control by Fremantle, Kajura flipped end for end and fired her Earth-return stage motors. By then, Kajura was plunging Earthward at better than eleven kilometers per second, doomed to burn up like a flaming meteor if her speed was not arrested.

  Again, monstrous pressures crushed Resnewski into his seat, dragging on…and on…and on…the solid-fuel rockets steadily slowing him at five gravities, slowing him from eleven kilometers per second to less than four.

  And by that time he was in the atmosphere, the leading edges of the tank, coated in lunar ceramics, glowing red as his cockpit shook and rattled so hard he wondered if it could possibly stay attached.

  The craft spun once more, and the empty ER stage dropped away. A pure glider, now, Kajura streaked down across night over Africa…then punched into the dawn somewhere south of India.

  Slower now, at one kilometer per second, Resnewski continued his descent.…

  ***

  Several thousand kilometers above and to the north, the ExEm kinetic kill orbital launcher detected the hot infrared trace of the Kajura as it blazed down out of the dawn sky above the Indian Ocean. Rotating in space, it aligned its launch rail with a point off the west Australian coast…and at a precisely calculated point, it fired.

  The projectile, variously known as a “crowbar,” a “telephone pole,” or a “rod from God,” was solid tungsten, 6.1 meters long, 30 centimeters wide, massing eight tons. A needle-sharp prow of ceramics shielded its leading surfaces from the heat of re-entry.

  Strap-on solid-fuel rocket motors accelerated it to fifty kilometers per second. There was no warhead; its deadliness resided within its kinetic energy alone.

  Still accelerating, it punched into Earth’s atmosphere.

  ***

  The Kajura was down to a hair above Mach 1, now, gliding level across the Indian Ocean at an altitude of five hundred meters. Resnewski had taken the controls; while major evolutions like firing the braking rockets could be handled from the ground, the final approach through the atmosphere was tricky. Resnewski had a single joystick in his right hand with a radio link to the Kajura’s control surfaces.

  The landing area was a thousand-kilometer stretch of ocean extending northwest from Perth and Fremantle; putting down anywhere within that expanse would be fine, but Resnewski wanted to bring the tanker down as close to shore as he could manage. Before going to work for Dynospace, he’d been a Lightning driver for the U.S. Navy—the qualification that had won him his chance to go to the Moon with Thom Pollard. Steering a 41-ton storage tank from a strap-on saddle-cockpit was simplicity itself compared with jockeying an F-35C Lightning II down to a rolling carrier deck on vectored lift fans.

  Kajura dropped lower, shuddering, her shock wave through the atmosphere raising a towering rooster tail of spray astern. Resnewski used the drag to slow the craft further, gently swinging the joystick left and right to cut a series of sweeping curves across the ocean.

  “Kajura, Fremantle,” sounded over his radio. “We have you at fifty kilometers out.”

  “Copy fifty klicks,” he replied. “I’m going to park this thing right on your doorstep.”

  “Kajura, this is Sundance!” Pollard’s voice broke in, frantic. “High speed launch from orbit, bearing on your position!”

  Sundance, Resnewski knew, was still in space, following him down six hours behind him. Pollard would have a good view of his spacecraft from orbit over the Indian Ocean right now.

  “This is Mission Control! We confirm the target! Inbound…intercept course!”

  “What’s range?” Resnewski snapped. “Give me a countdown in seconds!”

  “Twenty seconds to impact!” Mission Control told him.

  “It’s a crowbar!” Pollard added. “She’s booking at forty…no fifty thousand K!”

  Shit. Someone was trying to knock the Kajura out of the sky before she could reach Fremantle.

  “Cutting left!” Resnewski called, hauling the joystick over. The glider dropped a dozen meters, and he pulled back on the stick, sailing higher and slowing as he turned.

  “Kajura, target is tracking you,” Mission Control said. “Ten seconds! Nine…”

  He pulled right, then leveled out. Come on, you son of a bitch, he thought, battling the drag from his shockwave. He was dropping below Mach 1 now.

  “Five…four…three…two…”

  At literally the last second, Resnewski slammed the joystick hard to the right. Kajura responded…sluggish…

  And then, with a terrific whoomp, the crowbar struck… but astern! Astern! Coming in at fifty thousand meters per second, the missile’s flight controls had simply not been able to keep up with the far slower Kajura’s maneuvers.

  Or the human mind at the controls.

  Resnewski twisted in his seat, looking through an aft port, and saw a solid green and white wall of water towering behind the glider. Not good… Shit! Shit! Shit…

  The wall struck, and Kajura surged forward. He struggled with the controls, trying to keep the craft balanced…but he was riding on the wave racing out from the impact now.

  Ahead, buildings rose along City Beach and inland, at Perth. Rottnest Island passed to the right…and then a long expanse of white sand beach appeared just ahead.

  The wave dwindled, energy spent, and Kajura slowed in her headlong rush toward the shore. Almost lovingly, she kissed sandy bottom…coming to rest in the surf off North Fremantle.

  “Mission Control, this is Kajura,” he said, his voice shaking. “I’m…down.”

  “We copy you down, Kajura. Welcome home.”

  ***

  A week later, Corbell called a press conference at Fremantle Mission Control. Pollard and Resnewski both were there, as was Wittgenstein and a number of other Dynospace officials. But the star of the show was Sunrisearth, and its promise of a new age of cheap and plentiful energy.

  “Ladies and gentlemen,” Corbell said with a dramatic flourish, “let there be light!”

  He threw the switch, rigged just for this demonstration, and all of Western Australia went onto helium-3 power.

  “Sun and Moon,” Corbell told the hundreds of reporters packed into the auditorium. “Power from the Sun, by way of Earth’s Moon. This first shipment, the first of many, I might add, of helium-3—worth roughly two trillion dollars
on the open market, changes everything. The era of the supermajors, of Big Oil, is now over.”

  It would not be, Wittgenstein thought, quite as simple as that. The richest, most powerful business empires ever to rule Earth would not roll over and die without a fight. Still, the world now knew that ExEm had tried to destroy the helium shipment—tried and failed. ExEm’s CEO had been indicted, and there were rumors that the energy conglomerate would be broken up. The world’s financial markets were in turmoil with the news…but overall the market trend was up. Both Dynospace and Sunrisearth’s stocks had quintupled in value in just four days on the Australian market.

  For the first time in decades, it seemed, people were optimistic.

  “In its place,” Corbell continued, “cheap, inexhaustible energy, costing, we estimate, seven dollars per BOE. No radiation, no meltdowns, no China Syndrome. Within twenty years, we believe, spacecraft with helium-3 drives will be opening up the Solar System. One of the first long-term goals will be helium mining facilities in orbit around the outer planets, sending Humankind’s new lifeblood back to Earth in a steady stream.

  “It means, at the very least, an end to this endless, wasteful, bloody fighting over Earth’s oil fields. At last, we have a far cheaper and safer alternative.

  “All of us remember, I’m sure, what was written on the plaque left at Tranquility Base sixty-five years ago, right? We came in peace for all mankind. Resnewski and Pollard, I think, did the NASA astronauts one better.”

  The wall-size screen behind him lit up, showing the Kajura as she’d appeared after coming to rest on the beach, and before she’d been hauled off to the reactor farm for unloading. Her hull was scoured and scorched, but the lettering stenciled onto her flanks at the Apollo Basin was still visible, still legible.

  In their own way, the words were a closing volley in the recombinant memetic war with Big Oil. One of the important lessons of RM in recent years had been the realization that positive messages were far, far more powerful than negative. Long ago, studies had shown that drug and alcohol use among American school students increased when the dangers were stressed…but dramatically decreased when the message suggested instead that few of their friends overdid it at parties—a positive message. Humans tended to ignore messages contrived to tear them down, to frighten them, or to order them about.

  The words on Kajura’s hull were of this last kind, and that, more than anything else, declared the now inevitable downfall of the nay-sayers.

  We come with peace for all mankind.…

  Introduction to “The Legend of Parker Clark and Lois Jane”

  Multi-talented author Ron Collins lives in Columbus, Indiana, with his wife, Lisa, and his cat, Keiko. He’s contributed more than 50 stories to publications such as Analog Science Fiction & Fact, Asimov’s Science Fiction, and Nature. His work has received a Writers of the Future prize and a Compuserve HOMer. You can find more information about him at www.typosphere.com.

  About this story, he writes, “Given the anthology’s theme, I wanted to write something focused on a current issue. But I thought that perhaps not even Superman could save the world today, that it would take an entire pantheon of Justice Leagues. I didn’t want to write a superhero story, though, so I started doodling about a doctorate student, and discovered he was a scientist working on carbon reduction techniques, and then he told me a little about his hopes and dreams, and then...out came “The Legend of Parker Clark and Lois Jane.” Credit goes to my wife, Lisa, for helping me form the title, which (and who), of course, I love.”

  I’ve worked with Ron on several other projects, and was so happy when I read his story, as it was the epitome of what I was looking for. A problem defined, explored, and solved, with a little rebellion against the man—or in this case, woman—not to mention the entire petroleum industry, to boot.

  The Legend of Parker Clark and Lois Jane

  Ron Collins

  It was nearly lunchtime, and I was splicing a six base-pair sequence when Dr. Monro’s assistant said she wanted to see me in her office.

  Last week was one of my best ever as a student and as a researcher, but I always assume the worst, so as I walked to her office, I categorized everything I might have done to get her tights in a wad. I came up with an entire periodic table of possible sins, ranging from breaking something in the Bute lab—where GEN101 students learned basic techniques for manipulating bacteria—to brainstorming with Penzie Larimer on her stem cell project. By the time I got to Monro’s office, I was ready to be skewered because of any one of a hundred things.

  Except, of course, for the one she had in mind.

  I knocked on the door and stuck my head in.

  “Mark,” she said, waving me to a seat and putting down a bowl of the yogurt and strawberry concoction she always ate for lunch. “Come on in.”

  Like everyone else, I had read her press clippings before I came to the department—I knew how hard she’d had to work to climb out of the still-present residue of the Indian caste system while doing her post-doc work in Bangalore, how her insights resulted in using genes from the intestinal bacteria of people with diabetes to create the genetic vaccine that essentially wiped out the AIDS epidemic, how she offended her parents and family by marrying a European she met in Copenhagen. She was a freaking heroine, a cultural icon, a woman who was the buzz of a thousand science blogs. Northwestern had essentially re-jiggered their entire curriculum to get her to agree to come to the great Midwest, and everyone who heard I was coming to the school’s BioEng program said I should be excited to study under her.

  And I had been. For a while.

  Then I got to know who she was.

  Dr. Pendita Monro, PhD, was a tall, angular woman who carried an intimidating quiet about her that was only enhanced by the way her white lab coat contrasted so crisply with her dark skin. Her lips would purse ever so slightly—as if she were judging everyone in the room—and her brown eyes held a combination of fire and patience that told you she didn’t think much of your intellect, but could wait all day for you to speak and therefore disprove what little doubt she might be holding in abeyance.

  I took a seat. “Digger said you wanted to see me?”

  She methodically cleaned her spoon and set it next to the yogurt.

  “I need you to stop work on the carbon dioxide splitter.”

  “Excuse me?”

  She cocked her head ever so slightly.

  My vision crossed and my tongue seemed glued to my teeth.

  “That’s my entire thesis,” I finally said.

  “We’ll find another area for you to study.”

  “I don’t understand. We just got it working, and last week you told me to focus on short sequences—”

  “You can perfect short-string splicing on another project. Perhaps fuel production.”

  “Just what the world needs,” I said without attempting to conceal my sarcasm. “Another pioneer in fuel production.”

  The process of configuring bacteria to create isobutanol—fuel—out of carbon-based waste material had been perfected over the past decade to the point that the mechanics were a 100-level class. All the base work was done, leaving nothing to pursue but finding ways to push it to volume—which would be relatively easy—and developing distribution channels—which was a political swampland I had less interest in than sitting through another social studies elective. All us doctoral students had chewed this fat a thousand times over. No matter what they said publicly, the political wing of the country was stacked against bacterial fuel because it got in the way of the big money behind coal, solar, and wind.

  And, while I agreed with Monro that pushing our ability to do short-string sequencing was good science, it wasn’t going to save the world. Not like my project—which started with that same R. eutropa bacteria they were using to create fuel, but which I had finally configured to leach CO2 from the air, digest the carbon portion, and leave pure oxygen free to enter the atmosphere.

  In theory, a properly dos
ed muffler or other device introduced to the exhaust stream of an automobile, or any other polluting device for that matter, would result in that vehicle emitting no CO2. None. It would be like planting a tree in your exhaust pipe, which is why I named this new bacteria R. eutreepa.

  Absolutely cool.

  This was going to be my gift to the world.

  Last week, for the first time ever, a batch of my little artificially engineered bacteria had managed to break CO2 into its component parts. The fact that it died off at temperatures over 150F didn’t do a thing to change my opinion—which was that I was the freaking king of science. The bomb. R. eutreepa actually did the job. It had grabbed CO2 and cut it up properly. That Saturday night, for the first time in my life, I went out and got very, very drunk.

  It was worth losing Sunday for.

  Now, I just needed to extend R. eutreepa’s ability to survive at extreme temperature. I was so close to total success. A month? Two? I didn’t know exactly how long it would take, but I was on the cusp of creating an organism that could bring the exhaust of CO2 into our atmosphere to a complete halt.

  Life was getting ready to be very good.

  “I’m sorry you feel that way about our fuel production program, Mark,” Dr. Monro said. “But as of today, your project has been reprioritized.”

  “You’re serious?”

  “I am if you want your degree.”

  And that was that.

  I went back to the lab, feeling like a pup that had been thoroughly whipped, though for the life of me, I had no idea what had just happened.

  ***

  When I was a kid, I dreamed about being Super Spider-Man.

  Seeing no reason I couldn’t be both Superman and Spider-Man at the same time, I made a pair of webslingers out of cardboard and yarn that I wore around my wrists and used to spin my sticky webs. To complete the cliché combo, I would tie my blanket over my shoulders and stand in the hallway, showing off my bony chest.