Alexis Gilliland - The Third Wave

On Lunar Three the starship was going forward more smoothly than could have been hoped, and the boatload of water en route from Diomedes was taken as proof of Divine satisfaction. In the highest circle of government, however, news of the water from Diomedes waited on the pleasure of the next highest circle. And in the next highest circle of government, that boatload of water was the last straw.

The bedside phone rang, and the secretary of the Navy rolled over and picked it up. “De la Haye here,” he grunted.

“This is Juan Dominguez,” said the voice on the other end. “I was just talking with the Lunar desk over at the DIA.” A pause. “Were you asleep, Delay?”

Fitzgerald de la Haye glanced at the clock; 2:43 a.m. “Naah, I was having me a little insomnia,” he lied. “Whut the hay-ull have you got this time Juan?”

“Personal intelligence from Luna Base, old buddy. Our source up there passed on some information he felt was what we like to call ‘speculative.’ The guy on Lunar desk went and used technical sources to get essential confirmation.”

Oh? The old brain started clicking away. Anything hot from the Moon didn’t look to be real good at this point. “Ah thought we had those fellas tied down, Juan.”

“Es verdad, Delay. The starship can’t be launched without fuelling from Earth, otherwise, 300,000 hydrogen bombs. ’Sa whole point of the exercise.”

“Oh, that’s raht.” But if they were ready to launch except for the bombs, we’d have a hard time refusing to send them on up. So we kept them short of… of water. “Ah’m in the picture, ah guess. What sort of information did your source come up with?”

“What got passed on was that the crew of the prototype starship is using their ship’s boat to send 1,200 tons of water for the starship being built on Lunar Three.”

Oh, shit. The starship people had been after us to send up 50 tons of liquid hydrogen so they could burn it to 450 tons of water with lunar oxygen. And we, of course, have been putting them off because we don’t want to give up our nukes. “And y’all confirmed this?”

“Some of it, Delay.Technical sources confirm that the ship’s boat has been launched, and that Diomedes Station is powering it as the thing heads for the inner Solar System.”

How long before that damn cargo of water gets to the Moon? Taking the crew back, the ship’s boat would have been in transit maybe four or five months, something like that. Find out. Find out soonest? Soonest figures to be morning, after the people get to work. “You did the raht thing,Juan, old buddy. Thanks for the call, and fax your report to my office, will you?” de la Haye slid his feet into carpet slippers, and put on his blue bathrobe. Now what?

He shuffled down to the kitchen and nuked a cup of water in the microwave, stirring instant coffee and sweetener into the boiling water. “Hay-ull,” he muttered. The NRDA had tried to get the construction to stop while they ran the design through their big old CAD machines. What happened? Volunteer machines came out of the woodwork. Goddamn Japs. So the design work on the starship, including all the stuff learned off of the damn prototype, that had been done. Try to argue “we can do it better” and they asked “how?” Try to argue the damn details, the dirty bastards made you look like idiots.

So they were doing the construction work, already, without so much as a by your leave. De la Haye studied the cup of coffee steaming in front of him. The starship, what did they call it, The Dyson s Sphere II? The sucker had a whole lot of popular support. Which meant the president wasn’t real happy when they got out in front to slow down the wheels of progress. Which meant the cockamamie thing was tee-totally out of control.

Except for the bombs, there was nothing more that Earth needed to send up. Except for a few odds and ends of equipment, and, of course, the 50 tons of hydrogen to make water for the biosphere. Except for the bombs? Once the word got out that the starship was ready to go, the Navy would have to give them up.

He took a sip of hot coffee. “Hay-ull,” he said again. Probably the starship would be ready to go about the time the water arrived from Diomedes Station. Then there would be all this drumroll of publicity about the biosphere being ready, and selecting the crew and all that. When was the last time they could be stopped?

De la Haye took another sip of coffee. Probably the last time the starship could be stopped would be before word of that 1,200 tons of water leaked out. Which could be any old time. All the Luna Base people had to do was hold a press conference. Which meant that the Navy had to move fast, real, real fast. He picked up the phone and called up the list of emergency numbers, watching them scroll by the little screen in the handle. His immediate boss, the secretary of the defense, was useless, but down the line his deputy assistant was Daniel Boyce Kelly, and it was Kelly’s number that he punched.

“Danny Boy? Good.This is de la Haye.” A pause. “Yes I know what time it is. And yes, it is that important. I wouldn’t have called you if it wasn’t that important.” There was another pause. “Well, if you want to keep the Armed Forces nuclear it’s important, anyway.” De la Haye sighed and covered a yawn. “Well, no, not exactly. First I need to tell you what the problem is, Danny Boy. Just you listen up to what 1 have to lay on you, and maybe we can find a way out of this jackpot.”

The rotund and red-cheeked MacArthur looked concemed. “Tonight’s lead story on the ‘MacArthur-Levine News Hour’ is the confrontation that has blown up over the American attempt to rotate our personnel at Lunar Three. Our guests tonight are Admiral Henry Fontaine of the Washington Institute of Space Habitation and the secretary of the Navy, Fitzgerald de la Haye. We’ll go with you, first, Mister Secretary. What happened, sir?”

What a mess, what a mess, thought de la Haye. What had Kelly told him: “Tell the truth and shame the devil?”

Easy for him to say, his ass wasn’t on the line. “We decided to make some changes in the staffing of the starship, is all. Nothing major, just benching some people back to Earth and sending in the second team.”

“You sent up the entire American section of the High Skies Fleet just to change a few people? Sir, for some time now we have been told that those ships were inoperable; that they couldn’t fly to carry needed supplies into orbit.”

This is not going well, not going well at all. “Well, Mac, our ground crews finally got them working, and we figured, well, we figured we wanted some team players working on the starship.” A sigh. That football analogy was just plain stupid, de la Haye decided, no way in hell would anyone buy Turi John as a quarterback not taking orders from the bench. “The fact is,” he said at last, “Doctor Ramos up there on Lunar Three was completely out of control. We gave orders; he ignored them. We asked to review plans; he sent us new plans, supposedly incorporating our objections.”

MacArthur nodded and looked directly into the camera. “Why then did your people up there go along with him?”

Under stress, Haye s accent began to thicken. “Foah one thang, that man is charismatic as hay-ull, sort of like a cult leader. Foah anothuh ouah people up there really, really want to see that starship launched, they-all want to see it launched so bad that they have become a cult, soht of. If’n that man Ramos tells them the orders we send up is trying to delay the stahship, they bee -lieve the tacky sonofabitch an’ do what he tells ’em to do an’ not what we tell ’em needs to be done.”