The Starchild Compact, page 12
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Ari had split his attention between Ginger and Saeed for the entire three hours in the Core. Ginger, who towered over him by a full twelve centimeters, was a wonder to behold as she captured the crew with her engaging displays and explanations. That is a female, he thought, who could change a man's mind about bachelorhood. As distracting as Ginger was, however, Ari saw his primary job in the Core as keeping a close eye on Saeed. The entire crew was in one tight location. If Saeed were going to break his word, this would be the obvious time. Ari set up the holocams to keep track of Saeed's position, with at least one focused on his face at all times. Ari kept his attention on the multiple holodisplay at the RVC, with its multiple view of Saeed.
At one point shortly after Ginger had brought up the polar display of their track around Jupiter, Saeed seemed to bow his head, and Ari paid close attention to his face. Saeed's lips moved, but Ari couldn't make out what he was saying. As quickly as he could without drawing attention to his actions, Ari called up a facial recognition program, and coupled it to a language program. He set the parameters to lip reading and Arabic, and a few moments later the words appeared in his display in flowing Arabic script: وأنا في انتظار الأوامر الخاص, which he translated as I await your command.
Chapter 12
Jupiter was fast shrinking behind them since they passed perigee a day and a half ago. From his personal quarters Jon could almost watch it diminish through his port. The crew was in high spirits as they prepared for the correction burn followed by the tether extension. Jon knew he was looking forward to feeling weight again, and he was pretty certain that the rest of the crew agreed with him.
"Enter," Jon responded to a knock on his door. Demitri entered and made himself comfortable.
"I have the burn calculations here, Captain," Demitri said, activating his Link.
Jon activated his Link and compared the numbers to what he had received from Houston in the morning message from Rod. "Looks like your numbers differ from Houston's by about five percent," Jon said. "Would you mind running a new set from fresh observations?"
"Would have done it anyway, Jon." Demitri grinned at him. "Be back in about an hour." The well-muscled Russian left in good humor, his pate catching a gleam of light as he passed through the door. "Looking forward to getting my feet back on the deck," he said in parting.
They could have gone with either set of numbers, but Jon wanted to give himself the greatest possible margin for maneuvering once they arrived in the vicinity of Iapetus. The interplay of gravitation fields would be so much more complicated there. He called up his latest Hyperchess game with Ari. It was his move, and Ari had really pulled a good one during their last session, caging his remaining Rook while threatening his Queen. Jon suspected he was in trouble. He tried to concentrate on his next move, but his mind insisted on reviewing for the hundredth time the complications Saeed had brought into his life. Jon trusted Ari's judgment, but he couldn't shake the feeling that Saeed was a fused powder keg.
Sooner than Jon expected, Demitri returned with new calculations based on fresh observations. The numbers had changed a bit, but not enough to concern Jon. "Let's go with your numbers," he told Demitri, "but run another set just before the burn."
"You got it, Captain."
Jon checked the time. "In an hour and twenty minutes, right?"
"I'll assemble the maneuvering team in the Core," Demitri said. "Might as well do a dry run before the real thing."
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The burn was anti-climactic, although it lasted for several hours. One-tenth-g actually feels pretty good, Demitri decided, sipping his black, very sweet coffee out of a real cup for a change. He lounged comfortably in the Astrogator's chair.
"How can you drink that stuff?" Ginger asked him from the next seat. Her coffee was blond and unsweetened.
"I prefer black and sweet – like my women."
"That's a worn out phrase, and besides, you take it any way you can get it!"
"Aussies one – Ruskies zero," Ari said from the RVC, sipping from his own cup of black and very sweet coffee, as close as he could get to his favorite Turkish brew.
Demitri knew better than to take on both of them, especially the Israeli, whose sharp humor came clad in the idiom of half a dozen languages. Demitri had no self-esteem problems. He knew he was the best Mother Russia had to offer for this historic voyage. But he had no illusions either. The accomplishments of the young woman beside him were astonishing, especially considering her tender age. And the tough little Jew – granted he had a year on Demitri, but he had crammed several lifetimes into his forty-one years. He raised his coffee cup in a toast. "Вот для наших безнадежное дело!" (Vot dlya nashih beznadezhnoe delo! – Here's for our hopeless cause!)
To which Ari responded, "для всех красивых женщин!" (Dlya vseh krasivyh zhenshchin! – For all the beautiful women!)
To which Ginger muttered half aloud, "Guys…"
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In preparation for extending the tether, Ari and Noel rigged several extra holocams around the tether reel in the Box lower end cap. There was no realistic way to observe the letting out of the tether in person, since there really was no practical way to return to the Pullman with the tether extended its full two kilometer length. Before setting to the task, Ari had turned Saeed over to Carmen so he and Noel could concentrate on the job. The idea was to observe closely while the tether extended, and then to keep close tabs on the reel during the remainder of the trip, since it was the anchor point for the extended cable, carrying the mass of the Caboose two kilometers away.
It took the better part of two hours before the extra holocams were installed and tested. Finally, Ari informed the Captain that they were ready, and the maneuvering team assembled in the Core. To simplify matters when they got closer to Saturn, Jon had decided to set their rotational plane perpendicular to their direction of travel, so that the same side of Cassini II would present itself continuously to their destination. Ari explained to Saeed what was needed, and then allowed him to manipulate the gyros. Saeed actually seemed to take pride in accomplishing the maneuver. When he was done, the ship was perpendicular to the ecliptic with the port in the crew lounge area above them facing their direction of travel. Saeed accomplished this with one smooth motion, so that when he was done, the ship was in position with no need for jockeying.
"Excellent job," Ari told him.
"I agree," Jon added, and commenced their third Pullman flip maneuver. The process was a practiced routine by now. The Pullman uncoupled from the Box, the ram pushed it away to the limit of the anchor cables, and then the anchor cables uncoupled, leaving the Pullman completely disconnected from the rest of the ship. Under Ari's close supervision, Jon allowed Saeed to flip the Pullman on the gyros. Saeed performed the maneuver with the skill of an old hand. With the Pullman's nose lined up to the Box, Jon released the tether cone, and moments later the Pullman was securely anchored to a two-meter length of tether.
"Okay," Jon said. "Lock her to the Box, and commence the spin-up."
While Ari latched the Pullman securely to the Box, Jon announced on All-Call, "This is the Captain…Stand by for commencement of rotation." He glanced at Ari, who nodded assent. "On my mark…five…four…three…two…one…mark…commence spin-up."
With a high-pitched whine audible throughout the ship, the gyros in all three modules commenced a coordinated spin-up.
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Slowly, over the next hour or so, the sixty-three meter long, twelve meter wide cylinder commenced revolving around the center of the Box like a propeller in flight, gradually building up to an equivalent gravitation at both ends of one-g – as before, rotating five and a third times each minute. By an hour and fifteen minutes into the event, the off-duty crew members sat or stood firmly planted, watching the stars sweep past the Canteen port. As gravity took over, the special place that each crew member had unconsciously acquired disappeared as their senses reoriented themselves to a room with a designated top and bottom. An occasional clatter here and there throughout the vessel gave witness to items still not in their proper place.
"Ou," Michele wailed, "it still makes me dizzy…even more so."
"Better not to look, then," Carmen told her, feeling a distinct sense of déjà vous. "Just sit quietly like you did the last time and wait for the tether to extend."
"It seems like just another routine operation this time," Noel noted.
"Not routine for me," Michele moaned. Elke stroked her hair.
"If you're not feeling better by the end of tether extension," Carmen said to her, "come to sick bay for something to settle your inner ear."
"Thanks, Doc."
Carmen checked on Chen in her holodisplay. He appeared comfortable, and his vitals were still normal. If anything, the weight would contribute to his recovery. She watched the bright disk that was Saturn rotate past the port, once every eleven seconds. Iapetus was not yet visible. She mused about their destination and the ultimate role she might play. Language skills… She smiled inwardly. It's a good thing I have my medical skills to offer. The idea that Iapetus could be an artifact seemed preposterous to her. An alien civilization didn't exactly conflict with her faith, but it did not really jibe with it either. She came up against the problem once again that she had dealt with so many times in her career. Carmen had carefully partitioned her mind – this side faith, that science. She had no need to balance one against the other. She simply slipped into whichever mode was appropriate to the situation, and moved forward.
Carmen was fascinated by the early twentieth century interest in Martian canals, pushed by Percival Lowell. By mid century, of course, the issue had largely been settled, and in 1965 Mariner 4 put the final nail in the canal coffin. She smiled as she thought of Jon Stock on the deck beneath her, hero of the first Mars expedition. He brought a special dimension to the Iapetus expedition. What would they find, she wondered. The best close-up observations remained inconclusive – sufficiently convincing to cause the nations of Earth to launch this expedition, but would they end up being the Mariner 4 of the twenty-first century?
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A deck below them in the Core, as Ari's revolution indicator reached five and a third, Jon said, "You ready to do this?"
"Piece of cake," Ari answered in perfect idiom.
Over the All-Call Jon announced, "Commencing tether extension," and nodded to Ari. "Ten meters a minute for the first hour."
At both ends of the Box clamps released. Pullman and Caboose slowly moved away from the box, driven by the centripetal force of their rotation. The Pullman and Caboose continued their measured pace for the rest of the hour, until they were 1,200 meters apart.
"Ease it up to ten meters a second, Ari, and hold it there for two minutes. Then bring it down to zero over the next thirty seconds."
Ari entered the parameters into the system, but kept his fingers near the controls in case something went wrong.
"Do you really believe you can make any difference if the computer doesn't do its job?" Demitri asked. "If that robot doesn't perform, we have much larger problems, and your doing a manual override will make no difference at all."
"My instincts have gotten me out of more than one jam," Ari retorted.
"No offense, my friend. I was thinking about the last jet fighter I piloted. Impossible to fly without the fly-by-wire computer. I told her where to go, and set the flight parameters, but she flew the plane."
"Nevertheless," Ari muttered, and kept his fingers poised.
Two and a half minutes later both the Pullman and Caboose settled into their two-kilometer extensions from the Box, and Jon shifted the maneuvering watch to standby. The crew went into normal cruising routine that they expected to maintain for the next 48 days.
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Fifteen days into the Saturn leg, Ginger cornered Demitri in the Canteen and asked him to join her in the Core.
"I've been doing some planetary observations," she told him. "I set up my deep-space camera to compensate for our rotation, and it had worked with total precision…until an hour ago. Now I am experiencing a slight precession, a precession that is unpredictably variable." She brought up a holodisplay, and flicked from one view to the other, views that she said should have been identical. Each successive image jumped ever so slightly. "Since it has to be the platform – us," she grinned at Demitri, "I took some exact measurements of our relative positions between Pullman, Box, and Caboose. The Box and Pullman are totally stable. But look at this." She pulled up successive images of the Caboose. Although it was barely noticeable, the centerline formed by the Caboose and tether was ever so slightly angled to the centerline formed by the Pullman and its tether. "What do you think?"
Demitri did a quick check on her calculations – they were correct. "We'd better inform Jon right away," he said.
Shortly thereafter, Jon arrived in the Core, and Ginger walked him through the same explanation she had just given Demitri.
"How long has this been going on?" Jon asked.
"A bit over an hour," Ginger answered, "but it's accelerating."
Jon stood in quiet thought for a few moments. "The only thing I can think of," he said finally, "is that the tether anchor is somehow lifting off the deck. Apparently we missed a weakened seam during our inspection following the asteroid hit." He examined the holo images from Ari's extra holocams. "Nothing jumps out at me," he remarked. "We need to fix whatever it is."
Although Demitri deferred to Jon's expertise, he felt compelled to add his own comments. "The devil is in the details," he said, adding, "It's an old Russian proverb."
Jon wasted no time. On the All-Call he summoned the crew to the Canteen. Ten minutes later he told the assembled crew, "We have a tether anchoring problem in the Box. It may be mission critical, so we have to address it." He explained what Ginger had discovered, and his take that the reel anchor for the Caboose tether was lifting, even though they couldn't see anything on the holocams. He turned to Ari. "Retract the tethers, Ari. Get us to a neutral stance as quickly as you can. And do it gently. We don't want any sudden strain on the reel anchor."
Ari set a fifteen-minute rate that reeled in the tether at about two meters a second. Sixteen minutes later both the Pullman and Caboose were firmly clamped to the Box.
"Saeed, bring the rotation to zero," Jon ordered.
Under Ari's watchful eyes, Saeed accomplished the task over the next fifteen minutes. Once Cassini II was stable in its orbit, Jon said, "Okay, Demitri, Ari, Noel…you come with me. Saeed, you stay with Ginger. Ginger, you have the conn 'till I get back." With that, he led the way through the Pullman into the Box, and through the Box to the lower end cap.
Ari brought along an aerosol can containing a florescent fine powder. He sprayed small amounts along the seam between the reel base and the deck, and around the bolts that reinforced the reel's deck connection. Then Noel rubbed the area with a silicon-saturated cloth that removed all the surface powder. A fine bright line remained running half way around the reel base, indicating a thin crack. Two of the anchor bolts indicated slight loosening.
"This is remarkable" Noel said. "I've never seen one of these seams tear."
"It's very much like a cracked weld," Jon said. "It takes a pretty good shock to bring it about."
"Like an asteroid hit," Demitri added.
"How do we repair it, Ari?" Jon asked.
Ari floated silently, apparently in thought. Demitri had been in a lot of tough situations in his life, but nothing like this. He was glad to have Ari's expertise and experience in handling these new synthetics. Give him two pieces of steel and a welding torch, and he was at home. But he really knew very little about the special adhesives and curing required for these polyaramid derivatives. Stronger and lighter than steel or even titanium, and the welds were equally strong – but what they had here said differently. Demitri stretched himself out to get a close-up look at the crack. "How far under the base do you think the crack goes?"
"I'm working on that," Ari said, and Demitri looked up to see him working his Link. "Based on the maximum angle Ginger saw, the extent of the crack – I'd say about a third of the way under the base."
"If the entire mass of the Caboose lifted it only that far," Demitri said, "there is no way we can duplicate that without extending the tether again, and I don't think we should do that until we have repaired this."
"There's another way," Ari said. He pulled up a holodisplay of a schematic of the Box. We drill through the deck to the anchor plate here," his pointer indicated a spot under the deck, "and here and here. Then we evacuate the Box, fill the holes with adhesive, and then repressurize the Box. This will force the adhesive throughout the loosened underside of the plate. Then we drill holes all the way through the deck and the plate here, here and here, and insert additional anchoring bolts that we reinforce with more adhesive. Finally, we evacuate the Box a second time to let the adhesive vacuum cure for two days."
"We can do this," Jon said. "I'm going to check with Houston, but we can do this."
"It would help if we could get ultraviolet under the plate – it cures better with UV, but lacking that, at least we can flood the outside with UV.
"Дьявол кроется в деталях (Dʹyavol kroet·sya v detalyah)," Demitri said half to himself.
"What's that?" Jon asked.
"An old Russian proverb," Demitri said, "like I said before. The devil is in the details."
Chapter 13
Jon sent Rod Zakes an encrypted message detailing the problem with the reel anchor, and sent it on its fifty-minute trip to Earth. He assumed that Houston would give the matter due consideration – at least several hours, and then get back to him. And that is what happened. Ten hours after his original message left Cassini II, Rod's response formed in Jon's local decryption machine. Reduced to its essence, Rod's message confirmed Jon's judgment: do the repair as Ari had outlined.
