Mission: Tomorrow - eARC (3 page)

Of course, space travel isn’t all about adventure or science. Like everything else, it’s also heavily laden with politics. Here Jack McDevitt has a reporter investigating a curious past dialogue when he uncovers a secret no one wants discovered, the secret of . . .

EXCALIBUR

Jack McDevitt

The Snowden revelations had been out for several years, dumping one major story after another into the news cycle. But the bombshell didn’t show up until Gordon Kerr, who was working on his seventh book, a history of the space agency, noticed that one relatively insignificant report showed a conversation in which someone at NASA commented that “Bancroft says it’s a go. Get it moving.” Bancroft at the time was one of NASA’s senior operational directors. The intercept was dated August 28, 1989. Gordon had been surprised to discover that the NSA was scooping up communications of government agencies. But he would have thought no more of this one except that the date rang a bell. He needed a minute to put it together:
Voyager 2
was passing Neptune and leaving the solar system.

Bancroft, unfortunately, had died two years earlier.

“Did it have anything to do with
Voyager
?” he asked Tom Morrison, his long-time friend and the director at the Jet Propulsion Lab.

“How would I know?” asked Morrison. “What difference does it make? It’s almost twenty years ago.” Morrison was a tall, take-charge guy who was usually easygoing. Gordon had known him since his days as a cub reporter for the
Pasadena Star-News.
At that
time, Morrison had been a NASA radio operator . They’d met at a party, where Gordon had arranged an interview, and written a story for the
Star-News
. It had been his first by-line.

Morrison seemed annoyed by the question. But he immediately relaxed, smiled, and sank back into his desk chair.

“So there’s nothing?” Gordon asked.

“No.” Morrison was laughing now.

Gordon trusted him, but he was after all a government guy. Sometimes stuff got classified. He’d learned from the Snowden releases that sometimes they weren’t even allowed to admit that material had been classified. “Did the Russians get there first?” he asked, intending it as a joke.

Morrison’s dark brown eyes clouded. “You’re kidding, Gordy, right? Disney would get there before the Russians.”

“Well, Tom, to tell the truth, we’ve been pretty much going backward ourselves. I haven’t checked recently, but aren’t they still taking us to the space station?”

Tom’s office was decorated with pictures of Morrison’s wife Janet and his three kids, and framed photos of him with senators, the governor, the vice president, and one depicting a very young Morrison talking with Richard Feynman. He took a deep breath. “I know. Not much you can do when the money’s not there. We’re probably lucky we can keep the lights on.”

The conversation dissolved into one they’d had numerous times before, how funding was being poured into armaments and the Middle East while the space agency stumbled along. It was only after he’d ridden down in the elevator and was headed across the parking lot that Gordon realized his old buddy had neatly steered the conversation away from the NSA intercepts.

Gordon wasn’t sure why he’d agreed to work on the project. NASA needed all the publicity it could get during those despondent days, and he owed Morrison a lot of favors. The director had pointed him to solid stories over the years. And his career had soared as a result. He’d won the Bancroft Prize and the Ralph Waldo Emerson Award for his observations on the state of the culture. Without his help, Gordon might not have had a career at all. Maybe he’d still be the sole reporter for
The Holton Tablet
, the small-town weekly he’d started with.
   

But he was looking at a story that did not have a happy ending. He didn’t even like his working title—
NASA: Eye on the Stars.
The agency had been stopped dead in its tracks. The voters had long since given up on it. When NASA had reached a point that we couldn’t even get to the space station without help, it had simply been too much.

Gordon knew a lot of people at JPL. He liked them, and they were of course rooting for him to pull something off with the book. Something that would direct popular attention to the importance of the space agency. But that wasn’t going to happen. He knew it, and they knew it.

There’d been an odd tone in Morrison’s response. Moreover, he hadn’t asked anything about the context of the intercept. He hadn’t even asked who’d been speaking. It had been Bancroft’s operational assistant.

Molly, Gordon’s wife, thought he was frustrated about the lack of progress he was making on the book. “Just back away from it,” she said, as he came in the door and dropped onto the sofa. “Nobody over there is going to hold it against you. They know you’ve done your best with it, and that it’s dead. We can’t repair roads and bridges, and there’s no money for public schools. How could they possibly justify billions for space travel? Anyhow, Gordie, if you want the truth, even if they provided some funding, where would we go?”

Certainly, he thought, nowhere if we don’t try.

Gordon specialized on the human side of space travel. He didn’t get involved much with the rockets. Rather, he portrayed the radio operator waiting for a vehicle to renew contact when it came out from behind the Moon. Or the astronaut sitting atop a launch vehicle in the scariest moments of a mission, those immediately preceding liftoff. His readers would know how it felt to be a manager when there was a hitch in the countdown, caused perhaps by a warning from one of the calibrators. He wondered what it had been like when the
Challenger
exploded, or when Gus Grissom, Edward White, and Roger Chaffee had died during a launch sequence rehearsal.

There were powerful stories to tell. But he needed a conclusion, not a dead end. He wondered how Jack Kennedy would have reacted had he known what was coming.

That evening, Gordon settled back in to work on the book. His deadline was only three months away, and he was running behind. But it was hard to get his mind away from the NSA intercept, Bancroft, and
Voyager
’s Neptune passage.

It was ridiculous. There could be no connection. The truth was he was
hoping
for something that would open a door. Not a way to do serious journalism. Still, it stayed with him, and he found himself hunting through the vast collection of archival material that NASA had provided as background for
Eye on the Stars.

And something else
did
turn up. In 1993, NASA had launched
Arkon
1
on a twelve-year voyage to explore the Kuiper Belt. It was curious because even short-range missions were complicated and inevitably involved decades-long planning. But the archives showed no indication of anyone even mentioning such a mission before September 1989, a few weeks after
Voyager
2
’s approach to Neptune. Moreover, on its way to the Kuiper Belt,
Arkon
would receive boosts from the sun, Earth, and Neptune
.

The planning routinely involved scientists outside NASA who had requested help with specific projects. In this case, three physicists had been part of the consultations. But the records indicated little in the way of preparatory discussions.

Of the three, only Maria Delmar, at Cal Tech, was still alive. She’d retired, but remained in the Pasadena area. Her website indicated she was working on a book about the Kuiper Belt. She was precisely the person Gordon wanted to talk with.

He set up an appointment, and connected with her on Skype. Maria was in her sixties, but she looked considerably younger than he’d expected. Brown hair speckled with gray, cut short. Animated green eyes. And an expression that suggested she’d welcome talking about the
Arkon
mission.

“
It was perfect timing,” she said, allowing a touch of frustration to creep into her eyes. “We were just in the process of discovering the Kuiper Belt when they called.”

“
They
being NASA?”

“Yes. They’d included me in some of their earlier missions. Anyway, they explained they wanted to go out past Neptune and do some exploring. Try to get a feel for what the Kuiper Belt was about. And did I want to become part of the operation.”

“And you did?”

“Sure.”

“So what happened?”

“They asked me to make recommendations, and to set up some specifics as to what we should be looking for. They really didn’t seem to have much of a handle on things. But considering we hadn’t even known for certain there
was
a Kuiper Belt a year earlier, it wasn’t exactly a shock.”

“And what did you ask for?” said Gordon.

She laughed. “I can send you a copy if you like. Basically, we were trying to establish that it really existed. The reason for the apparent emptiness of the outer solar system had never been clear. Once you get beyond Jupiter, there didn’t seem to be much in the way of asteroids or comets. We weren’t sure why. Maybe the gas giants simply swept the area clean. Or maybe it was a factor of sheer distance that we just couldn’t make out small objects that far away. Then, as the technology got better, we began to get indications that there
were
objects out there. A lot of them, and mostly beyond Neptune. What we wanted from
Arkon
was simply discovery. Go tell us what’s there.”

“Were you satisfied with the results?”

“Oh, yes.” She lit up. “
Arkon 1
was a complete success. We had to wait eleven years for it to reach the area, but it was worth it. We found out there were tens of thousands of large objects in orbit beyond Neptune. The ones we had a chance to see were, for the most part, not the rocky asteroids of the inner solar system, but were instead composed primarily of ice.”

“How big is
large
?”

“Diameters of sixty miles or more.”

“Maria, was there anything unusual about the operation? Anything different?”

“Not that I’m aware of.” She looked thoughtful. “Other than the windup.”

“How do you mean?”

“Well, usually, when they ran a mission like that, we were invited to JPL at the end. There’d be presentations, conferences, and generally a chance for all of us to get together and compare notes. They did a presentation with
Arkon 1
, took us to lunch, and that was about it. It almost seemed as if, as far as NASA was concerned, the mission hadn’t really been consequential. But I can understand that. To them, the Kuiper Belt was just a ring of ice.”

Gordon put it aside as a waste of time and went back to writing his history. His intention was to demonstrate what the nation had lost when the government had diverted funding as the national debt soared during the early years of the twenty-first century. And he probably would never have gone back to the Bancroft issue had he not come across another coincidence.

NERVA, which was to have designed a nuclear reactor that would power space travel, was abandoned in 1972 because of a combination of funding issues and concern about nuclear reactors in orbit. NASA tried to resurrect the idea in 2003 with the Prometheus Project. Gordon checked the
Arkon
1
schedule: That would have been about the same time that the vehicle was getting its final boost from Neptune.

They put everything they had into it for two years, before the project was defunded in 2005.

“Something was going on,” he told Molly.

“Why? Because Neptune was always involved? It’s a coincidence.”

Gordon had spent time with a substantial number of astronauts over the years. He’d had some over for dinner. Had played bridge with others. And even vacationed with Cal Bennett and his wife. He’d specialized in writing human interest stories about the NASA experience, and the smartest thing he could do was get close to the people who rode the rockets.

One of them —he didn’t recall which—had commented that NASA was looking for volunteers to train for a long-range flight. That had been at about the same time that Prometheus was going forward. But he’d gotten nothing more on it. And when he’d asked, everybody just shrugged. Never heard of it.

Cal had been at the Cape when the Prometheus Project was launched, the all-out effort to create a nuclear reactor to power a space vehicle. He was a Navy commander, recently retired, now living in Glendale.

Gordon called him. “Be passing through your area tomorrow,” he said, making it clear he would be traveling without Molly. “I was wondering if I could treat for lunch?”

They met at the Cheesecake Factory, exchanged greetings, ordered their meals, and talked about politics for a while. Cal was tall and lean. He still looked as if he was on the happy side of forty. “How the hell do you do it?” Gordon asked.

The commander grinned. “You have to get enough chocolate,” he said.

“Yeah,” Gordon said. “I know the formula.” For him, weight was a constant battle. “What are you hearing from NASA these days?”

“Not a lot. I don’t think there’s much going on.” He looked frustrated. “We were supposed to be on Mars by now.”

“When I was a kid,” Gordon said, “we thought we’d have been on our way to Alpha Centauri by the end of the century.”

“You watch too many movies.”

“I guess.” The food came, a turkey sandwich for Gordon, pizza for Cal, iced tea for both. “You know,” Gordon continued, “I got my hopes up when they restarted the reactor research.”

“That was a long time ago, pal.” Cal shrugged. “I hate to say this, but I don’t think we’re going anywhere. Not now, or
ever.”

“I hope you’re wrong.” Gordon bit into his sandwich.

“You know, I let myself get optimistic when they started Prometheus. But in the end it was the same problem: The government talked, gave us assurances, and then decided they had no money.”

Gordon nodded. “I even heard they started a program to train astronauts for long-range flights.”

Cal laughed. Or maybe it was more of a sneer. “Excalibur,” he said.

“Is that what they called it? Excalibur?”

Cal needed a minute. Maybe to finish chewing. Maybe to decide what he wanted to say. “Yeah. They were running it at the same time as Prometheus. It was classified at the time. But I can’t believe it matters now. Not after all these years. They were talking about a manned flight to Mars.”