Orson Card: Earth unavare

Lem lowered the glasses and looked out the window to his right. The cargo bay doors were open, and the gravity laser was in position, pointing out into space at the pebble in the sky. Lem couldn’t see the engineers from his position, but he knew they were down in the lab adjacent to the cargo bay, prepping the laser for the test.

According to the Juke research team that developed it, the gravity laser-or glaser as they had come to call it-was supposed to be the future of the space-mining industry, a revolutionary way to break surface rock and dig deep through the toughest asteroids. It was designed to shape gravity in much the same way a laser shaped light, though since gravity was not reflective, it worked on very different principles; understanding them was way below Lem’s pay grade. The company had spent billions of credits to build this prototype, and quite a bit more to keep it a secret. Lem’s job was simply to oversee the field tests. A cakewalk of a mission.

That is, if the gravity laser would ever turn on. It was the first deep-space trial, so Lem expected the delays born of extreme caution. But it was beginning to seem as if something was actually seriously wrong with the device and everyone was afraid to tell him.

“I’m waiting, Dr. Dublin,” Lem said, keeping his voice pleasant.

A man’s voice sounded in Lem’s earpiece. “Just a few moments, Mr. Jukes. We’re nearly ready to begin.”

“You were nearly ready to begin ten minutes ago,” said Lem. “Didn’t anyone print the word ‘on’ beside the right button?”

“Yes, Mr. Jukes. Sorry for the delay. It shouldn’t be long now.”

Lem rubbed his forehead just above his eyes, fighting back the beginnings of a migraine. The ship had been in the Kuiper Belt for six weeks now, where failure would have no witnesses and there would be no massive object to be torn apart if the reaction got out of hand. But the engineers, who were supposedly ready before this flight even launched, had produced nothing but delays. Their explanations might have been completely legitimate, or they might have been sesquipedalian bushwa. Because of the huge time lag in sending and receiving messages to the Board of Directors back on Luna, Lem had no idea what the Board-or his father-were thinking, though he was fairly certain it wasn’t unbridled joy. If Lem wanted to preserve his reputation and return to Luna with any sense of dignity, he needed to shake things up and produce results fast. The longer the wait, the greater the suspense, and the bigger the disappointment if the glaser failed.

Lem sighed. Dublin was the problem. He was a brilliant engineer but a terrible chief engineer. He couldn’t stand the idea of being blamed for any mistake, so he aborted tests at the slightest sign of malfunction. Dublin was so worried about damaging an expensive prototype or pushing it beyond its capacity-and therefore costing the company its investment-that the man was paralyzed with fear.

No, Dublin had to go. He was too cautious, too slow to take risks. At some point you had to make the leap, and Dublin didn’t know how to detect that moment. Lem needed to send positive results to the Board now. Today, if possible. It didn’t have to be much. Just some data that suggested the gravity laser did something like what it was designed to do. That’s all the Board wanted to hear. If it needed further development before it could be used commercially, fine. At least that gave the impression that Lem and the crew were doing something. That isn’t asking too much, Dr. Dublin. Just give me one semisuccessful test. The gravity laser worked in the lab back on Luna, for crying out loud. We didn’t come all the way out here without testing it first. The damn thing worked before we left!

Lem tapped a command into his wrist pad and ordered the drink dispenser to mix him something. He needed a boost, a fruit concoction laced with something to drive off the headache and get his energy up.

He sipped the drink and considered Dublin. Lem couldn’t fire the man. They were in space. You can’t send a man packing when he has nowhere to go-though the idea of jettisoning Dublin into space did put a smile on Lem’s face. No, Lem needed to take less drastic measures. Get a little creative.

Lem tapped his wrist pad again, and the wall to his right lit up. Icons and folders appeared on the wall-screen, and Lem blinked his way through a series of folders, diving deeper into the ship’s files until he found the documents he was looking for. A photo of a Nigerian woman in her late fifties appeared, along with a lengthy dossier. Dr. Noloa Benyawe was one of the engineers on board and had been with Juke Limited for thirty years, or as long as Lem had been alive, which meant she had endured Lem’s father Ukko Jukes, president and CEO, for as long as Lem had. It was like meeting someone who had survived the same grueling military campaign, a sister in suffering.

No, that was too harsh perhaps. Lem didn’t despise his father. Father had done great things, achieved great wealth and power by relentlessly pushing those around him to innovate, excel, and squash any obstacle in their way. Unfortunately, Father had run his family in much the same way.

Is this another of your tests, Father? Did you give me an engineering team led by a butterfly-hearted ditherer to see if I could handle the situation and get a more deserving and reliable person in place? It was just the kind of thing Father would do, laying snares along Lem’s path, creating obstacles for him to overcome. Father had always worked that way, even when Lem was a boy. Not to be cruel, Father would say. “But to teach you, Lem. To toughen, you. To remind you that as a child of privilege, no one is your friend. They will claim to be your friend, they will laugh at your jokes and invite you to their parties, but they do not like you. They like your power, they like what you will become someday.” That was child rearing to Father. Parents shouldn’t coddle their children when bullies pester them at school, for example. Real parents like Father pay a bully to torment their child. That teaches a child the harsh truth of life. That teaches a child how to use subterfuge, how to build allies, how to strike back at those stronger than themselves, not with violence necessarily, but with all the other weapons at a child’s disposal: public humiliation, fear, the scorn of one’s peers, social isolation, everything that cracks a bully and pushes him to tears.

Lem wiped the thought away. Father wasn’t testing him. There was too much at stake for that. No, Lem wasn’t so conceited as to believe that Father would risk the development of the gravity laser simply to teach Lem one of his “life lessons.” This was purely Lem’s problem. And he would deal with it.

“Dr. Dublin,” Lem said into his microphone, “when you said that the test would begin in a few moments, I assumed that you defined a few moments the same way I do, mere minutes at most. But by my clock, nearly fifteen additional minutes have passed. I recognize that the glaser is of utmost importance to this ship, but there are other matters on this vessel that require a captain’s attention. As much as I enjoy staring out into space and pondering the meaning of the universe, frankly I don’t have the time. Are we conducting a test or aren’t we?”

Dr. Dublin’s voice was small and hesitant. “Well, sir, it appears that we may have run into a snag.”

Lem closed his eyes. “And when were you going to inform me of this snag?”

“We were hoping that we could fix it quickly, sir. But that doesn’t seem likely now. We were about to call you.”

I’m sure you were, thought Lem. He pushed his cup into the receptacle. “I’m coming down.”

Lem made his way to the push tube, one of the many narrow shafts that ran through the ship. He pulled himself inside and folded his arms across his chest. The walls, like the floor and sidewalls of the ship, produced an undulating magnetic field. The magnets either attracted or repelled the vambraces Lem wore on his forearms and the greaves he wore on his shins. Lem said, “Fourteen.” At once he was sucked downward. When he arrived, the lab was in such a state that no one noticed him float into the room. Most of the engineers were hovering weightless around the wall-screen that stretched the length of the room. It held countless windows of data, diagrams, blueprints, messages, scribbles, and equations. It hurt Lem’s eyes just to look at it. The engineers were politely arguing over some technical matter Lem didn’t understand. Dr. Dublin and a few assistants were standing on the wall to Lem’s left, looking down on a hologram of the gravity laser that was about one-fifth the size of the real thing. It annoyed Lem when people in a room didn’t maintain the same vertical orientation. Being perpendicular to everyone else was indecorous.