John Scalzi - Tales From the Clarke

“What kind of problem?” Coloma asked.

“The sort where I think you might want to come down and have me explain it to you in person,” Basquez said.

“I tried updating the engineering software on the consoles, but that didn’t work because the consoles are fifty years old and the hardware can’t keep up with the new software,” Basquez said, handing his PDA to Coloma. “So I went in the opposite direction. I took the software from the consoles, ported it into my PDA and created a virtual environment to run it. Then I updated it inside that environment to boost its sensitivity. And that’s where I saw this.” He pointed to a section of the PDA, which was displaying a picture of what looked like a glowing tube.

Coloma squinted. “Saw what?” asked. “What am I looking at?”

“You’re looking at the energy flow through a section of the conduit we just installed,” Basquez said. “And this”-he pointed again at a section of the PDA, tapping it for emphasis-“is a kink in the flow.”

“What does that mean?” Coloma said.

“Right now it doesn’t mean anything,” Basquez said. “We’re only passing ten percent of capacity through the conduit to prep and test the skip drive. It’s a disruption of maybe one ten-thousandth of the total flow. Small enough that if I hadn’t updated the software, I would have missed it. The thing is, there’s a reason we keep power flows as smooth as possible-disruptions introduce chaos, and chaos can mean ruptures. If we push more capacity through the conduit, there’s no guarantee that the disruption won’t scale at a geometric or logarithmic rate, and then-”

“And then we would have a rupture and then we’d be screwed,” Coloma said.

“It’s a very small risk, but you’re the one the Colonial Union is telling to make this thing go off without a hitch,” Basquez said. “So this is a hitch. A potential hitch.”

“What do you want to do about it?” Coloma said.

“I want to take down that chunk of tube and run some scanners through it,” Basquez said. “Find out what’s causing the problem. If it’s an imperfection in the physical conduit or the sheathing inside, that’s something we can fix here. If it’s something else…well, I have no clue what else it could be except a physical imperfection, but if it’s something else, we should figure out what it is and what we can do about it.”

“Does this set us back on our itinerary?” Coloma asked.

“It might, but it shouldn’t,” Basquez said. “I’m about 99.99 percent sure it’s something we can deal with here. My people will need about ninety minutes to take down that section, another sixty to scan it the way it should be scanned, about ten minutes to buff out any imperfections we find, and another ninety minutes to reinstall the section and run some tests. If everything checks out, we can push more power through on schedule. You won’t miss your skip.”

“Then stop talking to me about it and do it,” Coloma said.

“Yes, ma’am,” Basquez said. “I’ll let you know when everything’s cleaned up.”

“Good,” Coloma said. She turned away from Basquez and saw Wilson walking up to her. “You’ve lost your flock,” she said to him.

“I didn’t lose them, I parked them in the officers lounge to watch a video,” he said. “Then I went to the bridge to find you, and Balla said you were here.”

“What is it?” Coloma said.

“It’s our Earthlings,” Wilson said. “I’m pretty sure they’re not actually from Earth. Not recently, anyway.”

“You’re basing your suspicions on a baseball team?” Neva Balla asked, disbelievingly. Coloma had her report to the conference room she and Wilson were in and had Wilson repeat what he had said to her.

“It’s not just any baseball team, it’s the Cubs, ” Wilson said, and then held out his hands in a helpless sort of gesture. “Listen, you have to understand something. In all of the history of professional sports, the Cubs are the ultimate symbol of complete failure. The championship of baseball is something called the World Series, and it’s been so long since the Cubs have won it that no one who is alive could remember the last time they won it. It’s so long that no one alive knew anyone who was alive when they won it. We’re talking centuries of abject failure here.”

“So what?” Balla said.

“So the Cubs won the World Series two years ago,” Wilson said. He nodded to Coloma. “I made a joke to Captain Coloma here that I’ve been using that security clearance I have to check baseball box scores. Well, it’s not a lie, I do. I like having that connection back home. Yesterday when Tiege mentioned being a Cubs fan, I sent in a request for the Cubs’ season stats going back to when I left Earth. As a Cards fan, I wanted to rub his face in his team’s continued failure. But then I found out the Cubs had broken their streak.”

Balla looked at Wilson blankly.

“Two years ago the Cubs won a hundred and one games,” Wilson continued. “That’s the most games they’ve won in over a century. They only lost a single game in their entire playoff run, and swept the Cards-my team-in their divisional series. In game four of the World Series, some kid named Jorge Alamazar pitched the first perfect game in a World Series since the twentieth century.”

Balla looked over to her captain. “This isn’t my sport,” she said. “I don’t know what any of this means.”

“It means,” Wilson said, “that there’s no possible way a Cubs fan who has been on Earth anytime in the last two years would fail to tell any baseball fan that the Cubs won the series. And when I identified myself as a Cards fan, Tiege’s first reaction should have been to rub the Cubbies’ victory in my face. It’s simply impossible.”

“Maybe he’s not that big of a fan,” Balla said.

“If he’s from Chicago, it’s not something he would miss,” Wilson said. “And we talked enough about baseball last night that I’m pretty confident he’s not just a casual viewer of the sport. But I grant you could be right, and he’s either not enough of a fan or too polite to mention the Cubs ending a centuries-long drought. So I checked.”

“How did you do that?” Balla asked.

“I talked about the Cubs being the ultimate symbol of professional sports futility,” Wilson said. “I needled Tiege about it for about ten full minutes. He took it and admitted it was true. He doesn’t know the Cubs won the Series. He doesn’t know because the Colonial Union is still enforcing a news blackout from the Earth. He doesn’t know because either he’s a colonist bred and born or is former Colonial Defense Forces who retired and colonized.”

“What about the other people on his team?” Balla asked.

“I talked to them all and casually dropped questions about life on Earth,” Wilson said. “They’re all very nice people, just like Tiege is, but if any of them know anything about Earth anytime since about a decade ago, it got past me. None of them seemed to be able to name things that anyone from the United States or Canada should know, like names of sitting presidents or prime ministers, popular music or entertainment figures, or anything about big stories of the last year. A hurricane hit South Carolina last year and flattened most of Charleston. One of the women, Kelle Laflin, says she’s from Charleston but seems completely oblivious that the hurricane happened.”

“Then what’s going on?” Balla said.

“We’re asking the same question,” Coloma said. “We have a team from Earth here to buy this ship from the Colonial Union. But if they’re not from Earth, where are they from? And what do they intend with the ship?”

Balla turned to Wilson. “You shouldn’t have left them alone,” she said.