Read Online Space by Stephen Baxter - Free Book Online Page B

get out to the solar focus," he began.
    "Hello, good morning, nice to meet you, thanks for giving up your time," she said dryly.
    He backed off a little, and stood up straight. "I'm sorry," he said.
    "Don't tell me. At your time of life, you don't have time to waste."
    "No, I'm just a rude asshole. Always was. Mind if I sit down?"
    "Tell me about the solar focus," she said.
    He moved a pile of glossies from a chair; they were digitized artist's impressions of a proposed, never-to-be-funded, unmanned mission to Io, Jupiter's moon. "What I'm talking about, specifically, is a mission to the solar focus of Alpha Centauri -- the nearest star system."
    "I know about Alpha Centauri."
    "Yes... The Sun's gravitational field acts as a spherical lens, which magnifies the intensity of the light of a distant star. At the point of focus, out on the rim of the system, the gain can be hundreds of millions; at the right point, it would be possible to communicate across stellar distances with equipment no more powerful than you'd need to talk between planets. The Gaijin may be using the Centauri solar focus as a communication node. The theorists are calling it a Saddle Point. Actually there is a separate Saddle Point for each star. All roughly at the same radius, because of--"
    "All right. And why do we need to go to Alpha Centauri's focus?"
    "Because Alpha was the first source of extrasolar signals. And because the Gaijin are there. We have evidence that the Gaijin entered the system at the Alpha solar focus. From there, they sent a fleet of some kind of construction or mining craft into the asteroid belt. Sally, we now have infrared signatures, showing the activity in the asteroid belt, going back ten years."
    "There is an unmanned probe en route to the asteroid belt. Maybe we should wait for its results."
    Malenfant flared. "A private initiative. Not relevant, anyhow. The solar focus -- that is where the action is."
    "You don't actually have any direct evidence of anything out at the solar focus, do you?"
    "No. Only what we've inferred from the asteroid belt data."
    "But there's no signature of any huge interstellar mother ship out there, at the rim. As there would have to be, if you're right."
    "I don't have all the answers. That's why we have to get out there and see. And to tell the damn Gaijin we're here."
    "I don't see how I can help you."
    "This is NASA's Solar System Exploration Division. Right? So, now we need to go do some exploring."
    "NASA doesn't exist anymore," she said. "Not as you knew it, when you were flying shuttle. The JSC is run by the Department of Agriculture--"
    "Don't patronize me, kid."
    She sighed. "I apologize. But I think you have to be realistic about this, sir. This isn't the 1960s. I'm really just a kind of curator, of the gray literature."
    "Gray?"
    "Studies and proposals that generally never made it to the light of day. The stuff is badly archived; a lot of it isn't yet digitized, or even on fiche... Even this building is seventy years old. I bet it would be closed for good if it wasn't for the Moon rocks."
    That was true; elsewhere in this building, 50 percent of the old Apollo samples still lay sealed in their sample boxes, still awaiting analysis, after six decades. Now that there were Japanese living on the Moon, Brind suspected the boxes would stay sealed forever, if only so they could serve as samples of the Moon as it used to be in its pristine, prehuman condition. An ironic fate for those billion-dollar nuggets.
    "I know all that," he said. "But I used to work for NASA. Where else am I supposed to go? Look -- I want you to figure out how it could be done. How can we send a human to the solar focus? It will all come together, once we have a viable scheme to fix on. I can get the hardware, the funding."
    She arched an eyebrow. "Really?"
    "Sure. And the science will be good. After all, we still haven't sent a human out beyond the orbit of the Moon. We can drop probes on Jupiter, Pluto en route. We'll get