John Sandford - Saturn Run

Two exceptions had been made: one passenger had a rare but treatable form of cancer, and his extremely expensive medication simply hadn’t been ready because of a bureaucratic entanglement with Ameri-Med. The insurance system refused to provide a three-year supply of pills because of cost considerations, and had no way to change its mind without rewriting its software, which might cost a couple of billion dollars. Crow had called the pharmaceutical company that made the medication, and after carefully explaining the situation to the CEO, in which he pointed out the intense interest in his decision by both the President and the IRS, a batch of pills was put on a hopjet from Philadelphia and had arrived that morning.

The other exception was for a violin; the psychiatrist who owned it refused to allow an electronic scan. “If it gets ruined,” he told Crow, “I’m out nine million.”

“Couldn’t you take a cheaper violin?”

“No. It wouldn’t have the tone. I need the tone.”

Now one of Crow’s security officers, a woman named Carol, hurried up to him as he watched the crowd, and said, “We have a tiny problem. Roger Ang doesn’t want his violin x-rayed, either. He says x-raying it could damage the tone by changing the varnish at a molecular level. It’s like a rare”—she looked at a slip of paper in her hand—“Enrico Politi. He says we can x-ray the case, and has no problem with an internal fiber-optic check on the violin itself, if he can watch it to make sure we don’t harm the instrument.”

Crow nodded. “All the musical instruments will be loaded at the same time in the cargo hold. Do the fiber-optic check, tell him that I’ve decided that an X-ray isn’t necessary. When the instruments are put on the cargo mover, pull the violin, x-ray it, and if it’s clear, put it back on the cargo mover. Just a little sleight of hand, Carol.”

“What if the tone is affected?” she asked.

“It won’t be—but there’s no arguing with that brand of assholedom. If he knows it’s been x-rayed, he’ll hear a difference and sue somebody. If he doesn’t know, he won’t. Okay?”

“Okay.” She hurried off.

The crew of ninety-one would be taking along eighty-one musical instruments of all varieties. They were a brilliant, disciplined bunch, and people who were both brilliant and disciplined often played musical instruments.

“There’s a clear connection there—people who learn a musical instrument early in life are basically learning to discipline themselves, and that carries over to other intellectually demanding fields,” said one of the shrinks who’d been hired to consult on possible shipboard problems. He’d recommended sending along both personal musical instruments and a supply of loaner instruments, so that those who didn’t actually play an instrument could learn en route.

“If you can get a bunch of bands going, there’s no better way to build teamwork and tie people together,” he told Crow. “It’s also a great way to kill time, for people without a lot to do.”

The manifest now included four electronic pianos.

Crow checked his implants: July 21, 2067, a hundred and forty-three hours to departure.

JULY 27, 2067

Fang-Castro checked her implanted clock: 7:45 A.M. Universal time, which was about to become Ship’s time. She went back to looking at her brief speech, which would be broadcast throughout the ship and linked with an Oval Office broadcast by President Santeros.

She would broadcast from the control deck. Sandy was there with his cameras, which were already linked with broadcast control on the ground. At 7:50, the news anchor for PBS appeared on the screen; he spoke for a little less than a minute, setting up the President’s talk.

At 7:51, Santeros appeared on-screen. She looked almost… sweet, Fang-Castro thought. The power of digital makeup. Fang-Castro herself had only the old-fashioned kind, painstakingly applied by Fiorella. They were walking a narrow path: Fang-Castro wanted to look good, but by no means better than the President.

Santeros was saying… “a possible great step into the future for all of mankind. We have no idea exactly what our visitors have left behind out there, but we fully expect to benefit from the technology that we’ve already been witness to, as their ship arrived and then departed…”

Blah, blah, blah…

Fang-Castro checked the clock again, and saw Sandy holding up a fist. That meant that she was less than a minute away. Sandy flashed five fingers, twice: ten seconds…

Five fingers, four, and Santeros said, “From the command deck of the Richard M. Nixon , Naomi Fang-Castro, captain of the Nixon . Captain Fang-Castro.”

She was on.

“This is Fang-Castro of the USSS Richard M. Nixon . In just under two minutes, we will start the engines and begin the voyage that will see us arriving at Saturn at Christmas. Initially we will be firing a twenty-five percent thrust while we run our in-flight checks. Assuming everything is nominal, and we expect it to be, after one orbit we’ll bring the engines up to fifty percent power. At the end of the second orbit, we’ll take them to full power. The status display on the wall here in the ship, and on our blog down on Earth, will keep everybody current on our progress.”

This, she said, had already been a long journey. Hundreds of workers had visited the Nixon , to get the ship ready for the longest manned voyage in human history.

Blah blah blah…

At the carefully timed end, she said, “Thank you for your support, Madam President. We could not have done this without you. Now it’s time for me to say… three… two… one… and…

“Launch!”

In the ship, half the people in the Commons unconsciously braced themselves… for nothing.

The Chinese launch had been high drama. This was the exact opposite, a non-event. There was nothing. No vibration; no new sound, no feeling of acceleration or indication of motion. The status display showed no change in speed or altitude.

Somebody asked, “Is there a problem?”

Somebody else pointed at the broadcast feed on the main monitor. They were on the nightside, and the steady bright glow from the engines proved that they were firing.

Fiorella smiled into the camera: “Yes, the Nixon ’s doing just what it was supposed to do, which is to begin its spiral out of low Earth orbit. At twenty-five percent power, though, and fully laden, its acceleration in open space is undetectable to human senses—a thousandth of a gee. In the zero-gee environment of the axle modules, free-floating objects will have started drifting, but none of the crew has felt anything different at all. In the zero-point-one gee artificial gravity of the Commons, there isn’t even a perceptible tilt to the floor.”

The reality of the departure was even more peculiar than that. The engines that were trying to push the ship forward were actually causing it to slow down. Before the Nixon could go to Saturn, it had to claw its way out of Earth’s gravitational well, and that took prodigious amounts of energy. The energy that was pouring out of the VASIMR engines as thrust all went into raising the ship’s altitude ever so gradually. With the passage of each minute the Nixon climbed by about one kilometer under the push of four plasma exhaust streams.

Bit by bit, the ex–space station’s orbit was expanding, and that’s what made things seem weird—a normal state of affairs in orbital mechanics. Larger orbits were slower orbits. In its original thousand-kilometer orbit, the space station zipped along at over seven kilometers per second. A geostationary communications satellite, orbiting at thirty-six thousand kilometers, only traveled at about three kilometers per second, while the moon, three hundred and eighty thousand kilometers away, traversed its path at a stately one kilometer per second. The Nixon obeyed the same laws of orbital physics. As the Nixon climbed kilometer by kilometer, it slowed down, and it would continue to do so until it was finally on an escape trajectory.