Starfire Read online

  Hot stuff. Not all that efficient in the long run—only a small fraction of the injected fuel would fuse, even under ideal circumstances, and a great deal of waste heat would still have to be disposed of by radiators—but Linwood was satisfied that at least he had salvaged some neutrons.

  It was dark outside when Linwood happily finished his sketching. Not that he made an improvement on the Q Branch beam projector; he knew that what he’d drawn had little or nothing to do with death rays. That was fine with him. He turned out the light and went upstairs, made himself a wiener sandwich, and lay down in bed, after popping a chip into the viddie—that classic British thriller from the 1950s, X the Unknown, starring Dean Jagger; it had a great monster, a puddle of smart, ravenous, radioactive mud.

  The next day, when Linwood displayed a suitably gussied-up draft of his idea to his coworkers in Q Branch, the youngest of them, a kid on summer loan from MIT, had an attack of giggles. What Linwood had drawn had nothing to do with ray guns, said the pimpled kid—who spoke as an authority on ray guns, having read in his short life a great deal of space opera and very little else—and it wasn’t even all that original. What ol’ Linwood had here was an afterburner for a fusion rocketship.

  Linwood Sketch 3

  Linwood grinned, forwarded his idea to the lab’s spacecraft propulsion branch, and turned to other matters while he waited to hear more. He never did, until years later.

  A couple of days after he’d had his bright idea his vacation came up, and he took a plane to join the rest of the Deveraux clan at the family reunion in Louisiana. On the quick plane ride to New Orleans and the much longer drive north through the fields in a rented Ford jet, his mind kept circling the same set of concepts. His “fusion afterburner” wasn’t one of them, except as a catalyst, which had gotten him to thinking about rocketships in general. But before he could pin down the squirming idea he was pawing and worrying, he arrived and was immediately plunged into the sticky intricacies of family affairs. For the next few hours he grinned more than he was accustomed, noted spreading waistlines and thinning hair, became reacquainted with many small children he’d forgotten, and was introduced to shiny new spouses and plump pink babies he’d never seen before.

  Most of Linwood’s relatives had stayed close to the land or had gotten jobs in local industry; Linwood was an aberration, made more mysterious to them because he couldn’t talk about his work. But they graciously tolerated his peculiarities and didn’t seem to mind when his attention drifted.

  On the first hot and very humid night he sat on a folding chair on his cousin Pierre’s brick patio, munching deep-fried catfish balls—rolled up bits of the creature itself, not its reproductive organs—which were about as succulent as old golf balls. The light of the misty moon and stars, so smeared they could hardly compete with the phosphorescent glow of fireflies, illuminated a slope of dirt, rust red in daytime, which led down to a cattle tank. After a while Linwood’s attention drifted—

  —away from the men’s talk of church politics and cotton to memories of the year he was fifteen years old, the year Challenger had exploded while he and the other kids in his high school class were watching it on TV.

  That was the same year the debate over a new antimissile system, strategic-defense-something—he couldn’t recall the acronym, everybody had called it Star Wars—had reached a crescendo of sorts, sad in retrospect. The president of the United States had promised an impenetrable shield against nuclear weapons to cover every American city, a sort of bombproof Astrodome, but his supporters kept trying to explain that he hadn’t really meant to put it quite that way. Perhaps, at unspecifiable cost, it would be possible to defend some of our missile sites—not our cities.

  At age fifteen, while Linwood easily absorbed the technical arguments for and against Star Wars, he modeled his opinions on those expressed at the dinner table by his father, a computer programmer at a local pump manufacturing plant that had recently acquired an army contract. A devout deacon in an offshoot fundamentalist congregation, the senior Deveraux stressed the innate moral superiority of any kind of defensive weapon over any kind of offensive weapon. This seemed a strong and reasonable stance to young Linwood; it did not occur to him at the time to ask whether “defense” that was dedicated solely to the defense of offense shared this ethical superiority.

  He never had asked that question, during all the years of college and the Marine Corps—he had made a particularly thin, tough, quiet marine—or during the years of graduate-school grind that followed, or during the many steady hours at Livermore Lab, working first on miniature bombs, graduating at last to these damned innately morally superior ray guns that still would not function the way they were supposed to.

  Occasionally Linwood would catch a newsbite about how NASA was putting itself back together, securing its technical base, making fitful strides in scientific exploration, laying the foundation for human colonization of space. And about how the Europeans and Japanese and Russians were doing it better, maybe. He would experience a fleeting moment of regret that NASA’s confusion following Challenger had deflected his teenage enthusiasm from what had been his goal until that moment: to be an astronaut.

  But not until after he had almost subconsciously designed a hot-rod rocket engine, not until he was sitting on a dark sweltering patio in his home town listening to the judicious Christian murmur of his farmer relatives harmonizing with the drone of the cicadas, their slow sentences punctuated by the blue flash of fireflies, had it occurred to him that he was only thirty-five years old, that he was in excellent physical condition, and that it was not too late.

  He applied to NASA. A year later, somewhat bemused, Linwood found himself bent over in an Air Force doctor’s office with a plastic rod stuck up his behind, the white-coated M.D. behind him shoving the thing this way and that, whistling while he worked. There was nothing abnormal about Linwood’s plumbing; this was simply the final indignity in that long rite de passage endured by all astronaut candidates.

  He went home to Livermore, and within a couple of days he got a call saying he’d made the cut. He was happy and sad at the same time. Sad because he’d wasted a lot of his life doing stuff he wished he hadn’t. But he hoped in his quiet way to start compensating for that.

  An astronaut, for his conscience’s sake…

  “The count is at T minus two hours and fifteen minutes and counting,” said launch control.

  Commander Braide scrutinized her console. Some of the little screens showed computer-generated diagrams; others displayed live TV pictures of the ship’s systems—its fuel pellet “factory,” where spheres of deuterium and tritium were continually cast in free fall; the bulky glass lasers, with their mirrors and frequency-amplifying crystals; the capacitors and transformers of the power storage subassemblies; the field magnet coils and their cryogenics; the magnetohydrodynamic generators; the tanks and pumps and motors of the maneuvering system; the thermonuclear propulsion core.

  “We have a hold at T minus two hours and twelve minutes,” said launch control.

  “What do you show, Linwood?” the commander asked.

  His voice returned over the comm system: “Capacitors fully charged, pellet injector primed and ready, nozzle field strength optimum—a green board in propulsion.”

  “Not your problem, Starfire,” said launch control. “We have a sticky tracking antenna.”

  Braide switched the main pixel array over to the view from the station, seeing the ship as launch control saw her: long and sleek, gleaming in the sunlight, a stack of stainless steel cylinders hanging in starry space, attached by umbilicals to Archimedes Station: Starfire.

  Starfire. The name had seen use at least a couple of times before: once for one of Lockheed Aircraft’s slow and ugly jet fighter planes of the 1950s, once for an inelegant lump of a tokamak, an early design-study fusion reactor of the 1970s not worth building. This time it fit.

  The simple shape was embellished at its base with more intricate constructions. Her
e a cage of glass bars embraced a steel spheroid; the glass bars split a master laser’s beam and directed it through mirrors and crystals to the heart of the fusion reaction chamber. Rooted to the reactor were three great black fins, as big as wings. This deceptively streamlined craft would never feel atmosphere, however; its wings were radiators of carbon-carbon and molybdenum tubing through which liquid lithium flowed to carry off the reactor’s excess heat.

  The ship’s narrow fuel tanks were packed tight and tall to provide maximum shielding between engine and crew. Its main engine exhaust nozzle was not the solid bell of a chemical rocket but an openwork of lacy pipes and coils in steel and bronze, generating invisible magnetic forces.

  For two years the ship had been growing like a bud from the side of Archimedes. Its vital components had been pre-assembled and pretested on Earth for five years before that, then disassembled and carried into orbit, there to be reassembled and tested again. But as a whole system Starfire had never been tested. Until today.

  Starfire was an X-ship, an experimental model, but its descendants would open the solar system as the railroads had opened the American West, as jet airplanes had contracted the globe. The commander believed that Starfire’s fusion-powered grandchildren and great-grandchildren would penetrate the Galaxy. Simply to be members of its crew would earn them all footnotes in history.

  As the hold on the count stretched, the commander fingered a platinum cross that hung close to her neck on a strong chain, centered it on her throat, let herself slip into daydreams…

  “What do you know about other worlds?” said Ransom. “…Your roof is so dense that your people cannot see through into Deep Heaven and look at the other worlds.”

  When she was of an age to be read stories, her mother and father had taken turns reading her all of C. S. Lewis’s Narnia fantasy series, and a little later, Out of the Silent Planet and its sequels. Only much later did she realize what her parents, agnostics both, had been trying too subtly to convey. It was a passage from Perelandra that came back to her now:

  “Oh, I see it,” she said. “I am older now. Your world has no roof. You look right out into the high place and see the great dance with your own eyes. You live always in that terror and in that delight, and what we must only believe, you can behold…”

  Robin Braide had turned seventeen a few weeks before the accident that took her mother’s life. The Saturday had started as one of those startlingly clear, hot, blue Seattle summer days that people greet with mixed emotions: some northwesterners consider them a well-earned reward for enduring months of dark drizzle, but many also feel an upwelling of guilt, as if dark drizzle were all they deserved.

  Guilt was not congenital to Robin. Stubbornness was. Her father, a physics professor at the University of Washington, and her mother, a landscape architect, had held firm (if oxymoronic) notions about discipline: they believed people were responsible only to themselves for their behavior, so long as they did not impinge on the rights of others. But long before their firstborn daughter could speak, she had found a means to subvert their tolerance.

  When disgruntled, she held food in her mouth. Splurting would have been okay—messy, but a healthy expression of independence and easy to deal with: the kid doesn’t want to eat, let her go hungry, clean up the mess. Simple. But a baby can’t be forced to swallow, nor can she be allowed to fall asleep with a wad of mashed prunes poised on the threshold of her windpipe. The first time it happened Robin’s parents tried to wait her out; Robin sat in her battle-stained high chair for two hours, cheeks bloated and eyes crossed, until she began to nod off. Then Mom and Dad went in with fingers to dig out the food. She woke up; she fought and bit. And thus it continued…for months.

  Robin’s father had a horror of biological explanations and proposed that some early experience, however trivial, must have been the source of the quirk. After their second daughter was born and quickly developed into a placid and laughing baby, her parents decided that Robin wasn’t so much stubborn as determined, a trait more worthy of praise. Meanwhile the example of a younger and very much beloved sibling, possessed of much less determination, led shrewd Robin to temper her own displays.

  Her childhood was in fact unusually happy. She excelled in school. She excelled in sports. As a teenager she excelled in car repair, and by the age of fifteen she owned a souped-up secondhand Mustang jet. But by sixteen she was spending all of her spare time sailing, and boys, while interesting, were not worth much of her time unless they virtually lived, as she did that year, on the water.

  The day her mother died Robin was captaining one of Portage Bay Yacht Club’s twenty-two-foot Carlsen Comets against the Bellevue YC. Her mother, who lacked Robin’s passion for things nautical but knew her way around a boat, was serving as her crew.

  The first leg of the race, east across Lake Washington, was all tedious tacking, with barely enough wind to keep headway and no significant advantage gained by any in the field; ski boat drivers roared past, sneering at the frustrated sailors. But rounding the buoy the wind freshened; a glance at the sky showed hazy clouds gathering rapidly, already obscuring distant Mount Rainier—sudden contrary weather, and the promise of a squall.

  Still, the north leg was slow and unexciting; only by sailing wing and wing, with constant nervous trimming of a lolling spinnaker, did Robin gain even a few feet over the second boat.

  At the second buoy Robin held a precarious lead. Her mother got the spinnaker stowed smartly just as Robin came about and headed southwest for the finish line. A wayward dollop of spray pasted her cotton jersey to her chest as she hauled in the mainsheet; Robin smelled the tang of hemlock and spruce. The windward rail rose clear of the chop; she hitched her butt highside as her mother scrambled to set the jib.

  The sudden brisk wind, the spray, the thrill of the boat heeling over exulted them. Her mother turned to grin at her. As Robin was grinning back, the prow rammed driftwood; Robin yanked in the tiller to let the floating log roll by, but the still-taut sails threatened to knock the boat down. She came into the wind again and her mother overbalanced, lost her grip, and pitched over the side, shrieking with embarrassed laughter.

  For a few seconds the disappointed Robin thought she might still win the race—the sails were well trimmed, and if the wind held steady on course she might get across the line without another tack…but of course she’d forfeit anyway. So the unworthy thought passed, and she loosed the sheets.

  Her mother was grinning apologetically from the waves, her blond head framed in her orange life vest, as Robin’s boat hissed by a few feet to leeward, barely clearing the path of the oncoming pack. The skippers of the next boats in line called out dutifully, offering assistance, but Robin and her mother called back that they were fine, they didn’t need help. The sun-warmed water was warm enough, and even without a vest her mother was a strong swimmer. They had all the time in the world.

  Robin planned to come about again, drive crosswind slowly with the jib luffing like loose laundry, ease up beside her mother, pull her over the side, then haul in—and still pass the last of the pack. As she was plotting her moves she felt cold air moving overhead and saw the sparkling water in front of her turn dull green. Clouds had covered the sun. She came about into a solid gray wall of rain. Her mother was nowhere to be seen.

  Within seconds Robin was blinded by sheets of water pouring out of the sky, thundering against the mainsail, pouring over the rail in freak waves. In the cockpit her white canvas shoes glimmered under a foot of water.

  The boat wouldn’t sink, no matter how much water it took—the trick was to keep it from capsizing. The wind came in driving gusts from all quarters, randomly. The waves seemed impossibly high and close together. Robin recognized the effects of wave interference but it was of no help to her; it took all her strength and quickness to dodge the swinging boom, to haul on wet lines until her fingers were white and stinging, to whipsaw the tiller until the sluggish hull responded. The minutes stretched interminably; the squall wa
s squatting on top of her boat.

  Then it moved on again, as rapidly as it had arrived. Excited gulls wheeled and screamed as the sun filtered through filaments of cloud. The lake was littered with bright flotsam and capsized hulls; of the squadron of Comets, Robin’s was one of only three still upright. She began crossing the water back and forth, searching, and because there were no flares aboard the day sailer, she took a few seconds to raise her pennant, upside down, to the top of the mast. Somebody onshore spotted the distress signal with binoculars and sent a launch out. Shortly before it drew alongside, Robin came upon an orange life vest with frayed and broken straps.

  Her mother’s body was never found. Eventually it was assumed that some trick of inversion had carried it to the bottom of the deep lake and trapped it there, likely forever. Robin did not cry as long as they were searching, for she had persuaded herself that her mother was not dead; it surprised her that she could not cry even when the search was abandoned.

  She did not cry at the memorial service, and when she overheard a murmur she was meant to hear—about time healing all wounds—her lips tightened in determination. Not this wound. No amount of time. Something of her mother lived as long as Robin refused to forget. She did not cry when her father took her into his arms and clung tightly to her, pleading with her to let go, as tears rolled down his own cheeks and dripped into her hair; sadly she realized that she did not feel closer to him for that, but more distant.

  On her seventeenth birthday Robin’s mother had given her a pendant cross of platinum set with a single irregular pearl. Robin’s thanks had been sincere but unenthusiastic; she wore it for a few days, then put it in her jewelry box. The day of the service she hung the cross around her neck again.

  It had stayed there ever since, removed only temporarily, only when necessary. Now she wore it on a fine choker of titanium steel.