The Darkest Side of Saturn: Odyssey of a Reluctant Prophet of Doom

By Tony Taylor

Eric Hoffer Book Awards First Place for Commercial Fiction

Visionary and satiric. Two astronomers discover an asteroid: Death is possible -- will it hit? Strong doses of romance, science, religion and sex . . . with some ballet thrown in for good measure.

A courageous and visionary work an instant classic
--BlueInk Reviews

From IndieReader Reviews:

Two astronomers discover an asteroid on a potential collision course with Earth.

Harris Mitchel and Diana Muse are old friends and scientific rivals, but when they jointly discover a new asteroid, which they name Baby, their lives are upended for good. Harriss wife Jennifer is growing increasingly frustrated with his dedication to work over marriage. A fundamentalist minister with money troubles hopes to boost his ministry by taking public exception to Mitchels advocacy of science as a new frontier and a new inspiration -- and a conservative radio personality is stoking the fight for his audiences amusement. A New Age community views Mitchel as a new prophet. But the stakes are higher than any of them realize, since Baby appears to be on a collision course with Earth. Can Harris and Diana manage to save the world as well as their own personal lives?

The Darkest Side of Saturn manages to play with the religion-science divide in a truly thought- provoking and entertaining fashion. Mitchels inspired and dramatic view of science and discovery as the meaning and purpose of human existence is shown not only from his perspective, but refracted through the viewpoints of others, whether Dianas intelligent pragmatism, the cynical whats-in-it-for-me attitude of politicians and administrators, the angry fundamentalist reaction of the Rev. Farnsworth, or the mystical, but somewhat scatterbrained, devotion of his New Age true believers. The writing is both poetically lyrical and driven, full of energy and force, especially when the topic is either science or sex. Rapier-sharp verbal fencing and a snarky, witty sense of humor brighten the book. The romance is feisty, vigorous, and sensual, with electricity vividly present from the beginning of the novel. The ending offers a fascinating perspective on the whole, combining both scientific awe and mystical philosophy in a new and intriguing way.

The Darkest Side of Saturn is a mischievous, playful, and intelligent look at human consciousness, science, religion, inspiration and truth.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Jul 7, 2014
• ISBN: 9781491734223

Tony Taylor

Pilot, spacecraft navigator, author: Tony Taylor flew fighters in the Air Force and later navigated NASA spacecraft to all eight planets of the solar system, adding minor planet Pluto in 2015 to maintain bragging rights for “all the planets” in case it’s promoted to full planethood again. His latest novel, The Darkest Side of Saturn, reflects many of his NASA experiences and won several honors, including First Place for Commercial Fiction in the 2016 Eric Hoffer Book Awards and Book of the Year in the 2015 Arizona Literary Contest. His first novel, Counters, drew on air combat experiences in Vietnam and won an Honorable Mention in the Hoffer Awards. Both books made the Short List for Grand Prize in that contest. Tony lives with his wife Jan in Sedona, Arizona. He may not be the only interplanetary navigator in Sedona, land of vortices and UFO enthusiasts, but he’s probably the only one who actually worked for NASA.

Book preview

THE DARKEST SIDE OF SATURN

The novel is extraordinary, a fusion of fanaticism and hard science, the visionary and the profane, the obstinately secular and prophetic religion, a union of two streams of metaphysics and literature which flow into a sea of overwhelming consequence. It has the visionary sprawl of Baxter, Macauley, Stross, in an unromanticized view of religious process which refracts Sinclair Lewis’ ELMER GANTRY. An impressive work which coming to terms with the menacing grace of religious exploration can stand with James Blish’s A CASE OF CONSCIENCE or Walter Miller’s CANTICLE FOR LEIBOWITZ as serious uncompromising statement. Most impressive. And to its benefit and mine, utterly accessible. Humanity prime.

—Barry N. Malzberg

"Extraordinarily well-crafted and deeply thought-provoking… nothing short of a science fiction tour de force; a courageous and visionary work… comparable in thematic power to Walter M. Miller, Jr.’s Hugo Award-winning novel A Canticle for Leibowitz. . . . To classify this novel as simply science fiction would be a grand disservice: It’s an apocalyptic thriller, a powerful romance, a cautionary tale about religious fanaticism, and, above all else, a disturbingly insightful self-examination of humankind and our apparent decline into a society powered by apathy, ignorance, and intolerance… . Readers who think they know where the novel is going are in for a jaw-dropping, unforgettable literary experience! . . . This is an instant classic."

—BlueInk Reviews

A scientific prophecy propels this ominous Armageddon thriller; religious fanaticism rooted in the biblical era meets contemporary mayhem generated in an astronomy lab… This incredible story captures attention and sustains the constant doubt required to motivate the characters… . The novel presents an eccentric cast in innovative passages and messianic scripture. Hymns and pseudoreligious passages provide lengthy breaks in the narrative, allowing one to see the extent of a freakish fixation. The psychological basis of this mind-spinning tale is a classic messiah complex… The trip to the final page is filled with bizarre descriptions and poetic madness… .Taylor presents a world teetering on the brink of the blackness of nothing and the lightness of life.

—Foreword Clarion Reviews

A satire; a romance; a disaster epic; a treatise on science, religion, bureaucracy and hysteria; a coming-of-age tale; a meditation on messianic savior versus unbalanced fanatic; and the story of man’s obsession with space, alternate realities and doomsday prophecies… . Expansive brilliance… A wild ride… mind-boggling at the end.

—Kirkus Reviews

Also by Tony Taylor:

Counters: A Novel 2008

For Louisa and Chelsea

57423.png

THE DARKEST SIDE OF SATURN

ODYSSEY OF A RELUCTANT PROPHET OF DOOM

Copyright © 2014 Tony Taylor.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, names, incidents, organizations, and dialogue in this novel are either the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

iUniverse

1663 Liberty Drive

Bloomington, IN 47403

www.iuniverse.com

1-800-Authors (1-800-288-4677)

Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Thinkstock.

ISBN: 978-1-4917-3421-6 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4917-3422-3 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2014908929

iUniverse rev. date: 06/30/2014

CONTENTS

Prologue

1 Discovery

2 The Lab

3 Radio Sermon

4 Tabletop Mountain

5 The Chase

6 Religious Experience

7 Cooling It

8 Prophecies I

9 Religious Experience

10 Neptune

11 Asteroid 1997 Oi13

12 Dance For One

13 The Righteous Path

14 Ye Of Little Faith

15 First Words

16 The Choir

17 Bridge To Nowhere

18 Dear Ed

19 Dreamers And Schemers

20 Hymn 438

21 The Abstract

22 Entrée

23 Visitor Control

24 One More Data Point

25 Multiplication

26 Tour And Tennis

27 Hokule´A

28 Canoes And Spaceships

29 Missile

30 Dinner

31 Adagio

32 Two Phone Calls

33 Error

34 Improbabilities

35 Locked Out

36 Writing

37 Dancing With The Devil

38 Doubts

39 Paranoia

40 Romance Of The Dance

41 The Representative

42 Pas De Deux

43 The Conference

44 Escape

45 Dance Of Duality

46 The News

47 Hymn 96

48 The Ernestness of Being Important

49 Inquisition

50 Mister President

51 Saint Lydia

52 Down To Earth

53 On A Roll

54 Believers

55 Dancing And Groceries

56 Cornbread Theology

57 Visions

59 In The Beginning

60 Violence Of The Lambs

61 Hymn 297

62 Dinner

63 Late Night

64 Religious Experience

65 Last Words

66 Letter

67 In The Ending

68 Begin Again

69 Earthstrike

70 Saint James

Epilogue

THANKS

Chelsea Taylor: so many conversations at the Nano Cafe, so many ideas. You haven’t a humble bone in your body—nor have you need for one.

Jan Taylor: my severest critic, and most ardent and valued supporter.

NASA, JPL, and KinetX Aerospace, Inc., which provided my opportunities to navigate spacecraft to every planet in the solar system.

Carla Riedel: My friend whose editing advice got me through the final rigors of the manuscript.

Bill Owen, for sharing his knowledge of astronomical observing at Table Mountain.

The Los Angeles Times: excerpts from my op-ed of 1989, A Piece of Us Goes on a Voyage of Wonder.

José Luis Galache of the Minor Planet Center, for a helpful discussion on asteroid discoveries.

My writers groups and friends—including Pat, Mary, Bob, Gloria, Laura, Janet, Pam, and Paige—for reading and critiquing.

Wikipedia and the Internet, for knowledge at the fingertips.

The Bible, The Book of Mormon, Handel’s Messiah, and various radio broadcasts in the Bible Belt and elsewhere.

APOLOGIES

To the people, books, poems, hymns, quotes, songs, titles, phrases, styles, and concepts from which I have disgracefully borrowed to mangle and butcher, and to those whose praise I have inadvertently neglected:

Amazing Grace, For Whom the Bell Tolls, Silence of the Lambs, Tyger Tyger, burning bright, Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking, The Importance of Being Earnest, Vision works; plans don’t (James Flanigan), cabbages and kings, visions of sugarplums danced in their heads, and more.

The Bible, The Book of Mormon, Handel’s Messiah, and various radio broadcasts in the Bible Belt and elsewhere.

PROLOGUE

Begin

I n the beginning, in our cradle of creation, the world was without form. Nothing existed except the potential to exist. There was no matter. There was no space for matter to occupy. This state existed for an immeasurable time because there was not even a place for time in the nursery of future unive rses.

Suddenly there was a quantum vacuum fluctuation—never mind that a vacuum implies there’s nothing to fluctuate. In the first infinitesimal interval was born time, space, and matter. We embarked on the first task of our new baby universe, which was to begin a long cruise of expansion to push back the frontier of nothingness.

Commensurate with the Many-worlds interpretation of the quantum mechanical theory that was to become fashionable many eons hence, our baby universe immediately began dividing into infinitely many sister universes, invisible to each other but nevertheless real and weaving almost parallel but slightly diverging courses through meta-time. One of these—minutely altered from ours—was to become the home of the Author. In that universe, as in ours, there was vast light, whiter than white. Matter followed space followed matter, inextricably linked. A chaotic soup of naked particles and the coordinate manifold in which it boiled expanded pell-mell into the future.

Never mind the Author’s universe! In ours—nearly four hundred thousand years later—the fireball of expansion cooled and faded as electrons, protons, and neutrons ended long courtship rituals and settled into blissful married life as nuclear families of simple atoms of hydrogen, helium, and a tiny smattering of heavier elements. The fireball ended, the universe became lucid, and the leftover background radiation—radio, infrared, visible, ultraviolet, x- and gamma-ray—began a long unimpeded stretch into the wavelengths we would eventually hear as interstellar fuzz in our microwave receivers. A hundred million years later the first stars condensed from collapsing clouds of hydrogen, and after that, galaxies were born, seeded with black holes and condensing themselves into swirls of stars.

In one of these galaxies—nine billion years after the beginning—an unremarkable cloud of gas and dust enriched with heavier elements recycled from the supernova ghosts of ancestor stars began the slow contraction that ended in the formation of a new yellow star. The leftover dust and gas formed a great disk about this star, then condensed into numerous large and small bodies. Collisions ensued, large against large, small against small, and all gradations between, and in the interval of only a few tens of millions of years most of the matter in this stellar system had consolidated itself into a few large behemoths called planets.

Most of the remaining dust and gas of the system vanished, disbursed into interstellar space, blown away by the radiative push of the new star. Most of the smallest bodies in the interstices of the system also vanished, eaten by their planetary cousins.

But remnants of these small bodies—these leftover crumbs of creation and collision—continued to wander throughout the system. One of these, B, of modest size and carbonaceous composition, circulated initially in a simple orbit in the outer part of a great grinding field of small bodies between the fourth and fifth planets. After a few hundred million years, bobbing like a cork in gravitational tides and surfs, dinged and dented by encounters with its neighbors, B passed close to the fifth planet, and its orbit altered to include approaches to the fourth. In the course of the next few billion years it suffered more tiny gravitational encounters with both the fifth and fourth planets until eventually a somewhat larger nudge brought B into the range of the third, our cradle endlessly orbiting.

Meanwhile, our organization had begun on this planet. Meanwhile, we had become conscious, which is to say we had discovered ourselves and the universe about us. But we had not yet seen this modest particle.

Curiously this mote, B, did not exist in our Author’s universe—which in many other aspects remained identical to ours. In our universe, however, B was real. In our universe, finally, at this third planet—after one thousand nine hundred and ninety-seven revolutions about the central star since the arbitrarily defined birth of a significant religious figure—B arrived within the perceptive purview of the planet’s inhabitants.

•••••

1 DISCOVERY

1997

July 24th, 00:37 Pacific Daylight Savings Time

Thursday

B minus sixteen years

T he constellations had wheeled through the sky past midnight. Harris had worked all evening. He was weary. Diana would soon come to take the telescope away.

He sighed and leaned back in the rolling chair in front of a computer monitor filled with stars and the small streak of a satellite. Harris Mitchel closed his eyes, dug his knuckles into the sockets, and rubbed. Stars flashed beneath his lids—blue twinkling sparkles. If he stopped just a moment and allowed himself to relax, to doze just a few seconds . . .

No! She’d come in and find him sleeping. He kicked up from the warm, overstuffed chair, paced in a circle around it twice, lifted his mug from the console, and took a sip of hours old coffee. He slapped his face twice and pinched his thigh.

He’d fought the system all evening. Everything that could go wrong had gone wrong. He’d finally gotten past the network hang-ups and the broken liquid nitrogen tube and the intermittent power failures that made him redo the pointing calibrations each time. Now that he was just about to get productive data, Diana would waltz in at any minute to kibitz and ultimately demand her time on the telescope. Thus it was written in The Schedule.

Harris was more than tired; he hurt. He’d been up since four o’clock the previous morning and his body didn’t like it at all. His bladder complained. His back was sore and catchy; there was a kink in it from moving across the observatory floor all night long. His lower spine just behind the kidneys felt as if it might buckle—fold and snap like a dry stick—if he was careless and bent the wrong way. It would be so easy to relax in the chair.

He pushed through the door from the warm observing room into the noticeably cooler telescope dome, stepped down to the hydraulic platform and crossed the dark interior, guided by a tiny red light, an unblinking animal eye over the frame of the exit.

He stepped onto the top of the outside stairway. Stars hit him in the face. He wanted to stand there and suck them down into his center, wallow in them, worship them. But first things first. He descended the steps to the ground, shuffled cautiously a few feet down the side of the hill, unzipped and sent a warm stream of liquid whizzing into blackness.

The wind had died completely and the air was cool and still. The smell of pines and aromatic tobacco from Emil Cartwright’s pipe blended pleasantly in his nostrils. It was comforting to know that Emil was out there somewhere in the darkness, puttering efficiently to keep the observatory humming.

The Big Dipper lay nearly on its back just above the piney ridge in front of him, upright to catch the liquid—a celestial blend of tea or coffee, thank you—pouring from its companion, the Little Dipper, above it. He followed the handle out past the end star, Alkaid, and extended the curving line across the sky in his imagination, arcing around to… There! Sinking low over the western horizon was a bright topaz gem. Arc around to Arcturus. Star of Gladness.

To his right, the majestic glowing smoke of the Milky Way climbed straight up out of the northeast horizon. He tilted his head back, following it to the brilliant blue Deneb and blue-white Vega nearly at the zenith. He sighed, zipped up, and turned to follow the glow down the southern sky through the Teapot pouring out steam and stars, through the galactic center to the setting tail of Scorpius whose baleful red eye, Antares, glared at him. The Milky Way plunged into the mountains on the southern horizon.

He turned left to see the waning gibbous moon sitting like a cocked-over rugby ball above the eastern horizon. He’d prefer a darker sky, but it wouldn’t bother him as much as it would Diana later on when the moon was higher and brighter.

Harris stepped carefully back up the hill and up the steps to the dome. He stood on the platform at the top of the steps and looked around one more time before going in.

Somewhere out there is my asteroid, he mused, looking eastward. He punched a button on his watch; the display lit up. Forty-five minutes after midnight.

Somewhere out there is my wife. Still at the party? Or in bed? Whose bed?

Night smells teased his nostrils. Emil’s pipe smoke had drifted away, leaving behind evergreen and the faintest odor of skunk.

And bacon. Diana. Having a midnight breakfast.

•••

Why thank you, Harris. A sarcastic female voice roused him from his nap. He started awake. Damn! How long? Five minutes? Ten? While he’d snoozed in his chair in front of the console, Diana Muse-Jones had come in to claim her telescope. She’d caught him napping. The scope had finished its appointed exposure while Harris drifted away, nodding, dreaming, finally snoring. She’d tiptoed to the console and tip-tapped quietly on the keyboard to bring his just-finished image onto the screen.

Bingo. She tapped a neatly trimmed red fingernail against the glass of the monitor. Earth crosser.

What? What the hell are you… Crosser? A fading dream—something involving a woman, a boat, and a beach—filigreed his mind. He rubbed his face to brush the remnants away.

It’s so nice of you to help me with my job. Diana leaned over Harris, both hands on the armrests of his chair and looked him straight in the eye from two feet away, grinning asymmetrically. Black hair framed her pretty Asian face. Black eyes taunted him. She tilted her head. "I guess I’ll have to share it with you, though. Technically it is your image." She laughed and smiled righteously. A princess. But I saw it first.

What? Where? Harris jumped up from the chair, rubbed his eyes and leaned closer to a monitor full of stars and electronic fuzz.

Diana cocked her head to slide hair away from her eye. There. Her fingernail traced a white streak almost six inches long diagonally across the face of the monitor. Right there. For anybody who can see.

Yes. For anybody who could see. It almost knocked him down. Serendipity had struck. Snuck up behind him while he snoozed and bonked him on the head.

What was your exposure? Abruptly she was all business.

Two minutes. It could be cataloged, you know.

Nope. There was nothing for tonight that would be this close. I’d know.

Could be a satellite.

No way. No! A satellite would be across the whole screen and brighter. This is way too slow for a satellite, but way faster than most asteroids. Her brow furrowed. "Wait, wait, did you say two minutes? Only two? Wow! Fast! About three arc-minutes per minute. What’s the pointing? Never mind. Diana had already displayed the set-up data and scanned it before Harris could recall the right ascension and declination he’d fed the pointing program. It’s low inclination, probably less than five degrees."

Harris marveled that she could integrate the information in her head so quickly.

"Damn, it’s close, Harris. Are you sure it was only two minutes? Look at that streak!"

Harris watched her excitement mount. He enjoyed seeing her lose a struggle with her composure. "It doesn’t have to be a crosser, y’know. It could be just plain old vanilla near-earth, y’know." He sank back into the chair. His eyelids drooped. He was pushing twenty-four hours without sleep.

Just my logical and highly educated guess, Diana responded smugly. Wanna bet?

Harris nodded wearily. Sure. Same as before? He smiled at the line he’d handed her and waited to see if she’d take the bait.

She didn’t even notice. She tapped furiously at the keyboard. Let’s have a closer look. The image grew twice as large. She boxed the streak with the mouse, tapped, and the image jumped again. Bigger, bigger.

The streak went across the entire monitor now. She boxed a small segment near the middle and tapped again.

Oh my god.

Harris’s eyes opened wide. What?

Her nose was inches from the monitor. Harris, look!

He reluctantly hauled himself from the chair and put his face beside Diana’s.

Resolved! She squealed with glee like a teenaged girl.

What?

Look, look, you dummy! It’s three pixels wide! And it varies, it’s only two over here, see, and the stars are sharp. So it’s not bad focusing. We can see the diameter! She danced from foot to foot in excitement. It’s big. Or really close. Or both.

Harris could almost feel heat radiating from her.

We have to catch it, Harris! It’ll get away if we don’t get some more images right now.

Diana, I’m so tired. He shook his head and put his hand on her arm.

She stiffened and pulled her arm away. Then softened. Harris. Help me.

He wanted to help, he would help, even though his back hurt and he desperately needed to crawl into a warm bed and oblivion.

Well, I . . .

At that moment the image on the monitor distorted and filled with stripes, the lights flickered once, twice, and then the room went black.

Harris? Her voice turned panicky. What happened?

Goddamn power has been going out all night.

Harris. Help! We’ve got to catch it.

•••••

2 THE LAB

A t 5:05 the previous morning, Harris had driven into an empty parking lot at the Advanced Technology Laboratory. He’d fixed a pot of coffee in the common area down the hall from his cubicle, filled up his Nomad cup, stirred in a spoonful of sugar, and returned to his desk, squeezing between knee-high stacks of computer printouts littering the floor of his office. He moved aside mounds of paper and textbooks on the desk to make room to the right of his keyboard and put a fresh yellow legal pad in the middle of the space. He rummaged through his filing cabinet to fish out four folders, which he set down carefully onto teetering piles of paper and other folders at strategic locations around the desk. A half-eaten doughnut hardened into staleness sufficient for driving nails hid on a cafeteria napkin behind stacks of overdue library journals beneath an overflowing bookshelf at the back of his desk.

Harris plopped down in his chair, clicked through a few layers of folders on his computer desktop, and brought a short document onto the screen.

NAVIGATING TO ASTEROID KUNJII-SMYTHE

by

Harris T. Mitchel, Jr.

Member of Technical Staff

Lord of the Solar System

& etc., etc.

It was a very short document—that was all he’d written for an upcoming conference. This was July; the conference was in September. He had six weeks to write and polish a paper and get it through a tortuous approval cycle. Then he had to generate and rehearse a presentation.

Over the next few hours he made several trips between coffee pot, filing cabinet, and desk, adding the men’s room to the itinerary towards the end. It was hard-slogging work. He made two figures and a table. He formed phrases and sentences, paragraphs and sub-sections, sections and divisions, marching words like soldiers down the page toward the grand fallacy that this paper would result in anything that would be read, understood, and appreciated by anyone other than himself and a handful of other people in the world, many of them right here at the Lab.

He hated technical writing. It was one of the hardest things he’d ever done, yet he was better than most—more readable than ninety-nine percent of all the other engineers and scientists that mutilated the language with excessive modifiers, passionless prose, dense logic, convoluted sentences, weak watered-down verbs, passive construction, arcane points of analysis, and over-utilization of the verb utilize. Only a handful of people would ever care about the contents of this paper. Why did he?

He didn’t know, except… maybe it was the travel, the opportunity to mix with others of his kind… or the technical work: the analysis itself—the math, the computing, the observing and hypothesizing and iterative process of learning . . .

No! He was going to a new world. He was on a mission and was going to an asteroid. He was the navigator, and he would ride a spacecraft—figuratively at least—past the islands of the inner solar system to a tiny blip that nobody had ever seen up close before in the great ocean of space. That was why he did it. The tedious work on the computer screen in front of him was just one of the undesirable side effects. Someone had to write the paper. Tag, you’re it!

He’d built up a full head of steam, generating three full pages of deathless technical prose—four, if you count the figures and the table—when the sleeping Lab began to awaken and the normal morning hubbub started chipping away at his attention.

Sybil-the-Secretary called: Don’t forget, I need your timecard today. Early. While Harris tallied up his time and began to fill out the card, Roy White stopped by to chat in his interminable fashion, slouched just outside the opening of his office, thumb parked over the lip of a coffee cup. Harris felt momentum draining away like blood out of his head.

It was a blessing when the telephone rang (Scuse me a sec), because it drove Roy away, but it was a curse because Kevin, the mission engineer for the Hokule´a project, wanted more orbit analysis. While Harris listened, his computer beeped with new email. He idly brought up the message while Kevin droned in his ear and found that it contained a mandatory Lab-wide survey. Fill in the squares and write comments. Due today.

The rest of what had begun as a promising early morning agenda expired little by little until dead, gummed to death by the entropy of a bureaucracy-infested major national laboratory. All momentum on the paper was lost, nibbled to death by ducks. Harris glanced at his watch. It was a few minutes after 10 o’clock. Damn!

He grabbed the file folder containing transparencies that he’d generated the night before and raced off to the large conference room down the hall. The meeting had already started and the room was filled almost to overflowing.

This one was for Saturn Explorer, the other project Harris worked on. Hokule´a was a cheap little project going to a tiny little body, an asteroid. Saturn Explorer was a great big project going to a great big body—Saturn—and it cost a lot of money. This would be the Lab’s money cow for a very long time, because it takes a long time to get to Saturn, and once you’re there, for all the expense and effort, you want to stay awhile. The project was too big for Harris’s taste, but he’d been sweet-talked into doing some of the orbit analysis. As if he’d had a choice. As with everything else in the world, money rules.

After almost a decade at the Lab, he still marveled that a roomful of apparently sober men and women could discuss a planet and its moons as if they were talking about a business venture—as if designing a marketing strategy for women’s apparel. Saturn! Really! And the satellites: Mimas, Enceladus, Tethys, Dione, Rhea, Titan, Hyperion, Iapetus, Phoebe, and clouds of assorted orbiting rocks, not to mention the rings. Here were people talking about outer space right down here on earth.

Not that they couldn’t make it boring. Harris listened with half an ear, daydreaming about rockets and weightlessness while the first presenter buzzed on about the joys of telemetry data modes. He dozed, head bobbing up and down in random jerks, while the second presenter talked in exquisitely sonorous detail about spacecraft sequencing, using a long wooden pointer to tap here and there on slides filled with boxes and labels and arrows and bullets and graphs.

Then it was his turn to talk about the orbit analysis he’d done on the moons. All those children, a brood of siblings circling the planet! Where were they? Exactly?

That was part of his job: track them down with a telescope, pin them against the stars, fold in data from other observatories and missions, and project them years into the future, years forward in their orbits, so that by the time Saturn Explorer got there it would know exactly where to find them.

His phone rang as he walked back into his office.

Hello, Harris Mitchel speaking.

A pseudo-sultry female voice answered. Hello, Harris Mitchel. You’re fucked.

Ahh… right. Hi Di. Whaddaya mean?

Diana slipped back into her normal voice. Are you observing tonight?

Yeah, of course. You knew that.

Then you better get started. It’s a long drive up, and there’s a lot of prep time.

Uhh… I don’t get it. I’m telecommuting in. Aren’t you? I already built my observations schedule file and I just need to upload it and Emil can . . .

Not any more. Clive got down from Tabletop about an hour ago. You remember those thunderstorms that were hanging around the mountains yesterday? Well they struck. He says all the landlines at Tabletop are down. A big tree fell. No power, no phone, no data. They’re on generator. So if you want to . . .

Oh crap, Di. I hadn’t counted on… I mean I have a social event tonight.

Tsk, tsk, there’s always something. Well, you know, I’m letting you know because I’m a good girl, and now I can be an ever better girl and do you a favor by taking your time slot off your hands and . . .

No way, Diana! I’m coming up. Later this afternoon after two more meetings.

Ok, but make damn sure you’re off no later than one o’clock in the morning.

He thought for a moment. No, no, the schedule is one-thirty, Diana. I’m positive on that. It’s got to be one-thirty because my main target isn’t high enough until one.

There was a pause. Finally in an aggravated voice she answered, Ok, one-thirty, but you better leave me with a well-calibrated scope.

Sure. Where are you? Want a ride?

On my cell, already on the way.

That was fast.

"I am fast. I have to build my observations when I get there, and then I’m going to get some sleep. And the reception is going to die after this bend, so bye-bye."

And she was gone.

Harris carried his tray from the cafeteria to an outside table and sat down with his lunch group. Pines and palms swayed in a breezy Southern California sky above eight engineers and scientists—three women and five men including himself—who rubbed elbows and brains at a round table built for six.

It was a boisterously eclectic bunch. They pounced on new topics like hockey players slapping at a free puck, or rival scavengers ripping the guts out of fresh carrion. They dissected fluctuations in the microwave background radiation and the Dow-Jones average; critiqued the long-term stability of the solar system and two-party politics; and chortled over the illogical logic of quantum mechanics and the judicial system. They cuffed around lawyers and politicians; sniggered at films, fashions, and UFO fanatics; and snorted at the effluvia of the media in general and talk show hosts in particular. They laughed over Unix, militias, conspiracy theories, religion, the Civil War, evolution, and OJ.

"I saw your op-ed piece in the Times, Tryon remarked to Harris. Well written. Congratulations."

Thanks.

Did they pay you?

A little.

Our country has lost its soul. The essence—the I—has sputtered away over the last few decades . . .

It is clear that there is no longer a shared dream to replace the vanished frontier of our old West . . .

It’s time to ask the navigator’s question: Where are we and where are we going? At the moment, our country is sailing straight for the shoals. We need a new purpose, a unifying discipline, the equivalent of a new religion in order to change direction for clearer, deeper waters. We need a new frontier to replace our old West . . .

The New West had been a passionate article about the manned exploration of space. In the lunch bunch the vultures circled.

Of course the premise is all wet, Cathy said.

How’s that?

Why do we need manned exploration? We learn everything we need to know by sending probes.

Exactly, Tricia added. "Men are too expensive anyhow. We need a womaned space program." They all laughed.

Why? Really? I thought it was self-evident. We need an external goal, a frontier, a challenge. That’s people, not machines. It’s the difference between . . .

Wait a minute, preacher, Milt broke in, smiling obnoxiously. The space program doesn’t drive the great American public, Joe Sixpack, or Mister Taxpayer. What drives people is greed. Or survival. Or sex. Your basic instincts, y’know, not highfalutin concepts like a new frontier.

Now that the puck was down they all took turns whacking at it. After a while Harris smiled and spread his arms wide, palms out. Nail me to the cross, guys.

That’ll larn you to preach to the choir, Cathy teased. She reached around and patted his back.

Harris laughed. Choir? How about shooting squad?

She shrugged and smiled sweetly. Sometimes the choir bites back. Dream on, Harris. No, really, I mean that in a positive way. You’re one of our resident space prophets to the vast unwashed public. It’s a nasty job but somebody has to do it.

The lunch bunch seethed and writhed with discordant opinions, all seemingly valid, each with a nugget of truth. The net effect of this turmoil was of an out-of-tune but oddly harmonized chorus.

People don’t give a rat’s ass about space. All they want is scandals, circuses, and sex. Brian, the resident cynic, persisted for a parting shot as Harris gathered up his tray. "Write about that and they’ll pay you a lot more. Call it Sex, Lies, and ATL."

Amen, Lauren and Joe affirmed.

On the way back to the office Harris stopped by his mail slot and found two letters. One looked like a conference announcement. The other was addressed in a hand-written, crabbed scrawl. No return address. Ah! A letter about the op-ed. He flicked both letters across his chair onto the foothills of the paper mountains rising off his desk, risking that they’d be buried beneath an avalanche or lost forever in an unmapped ravine. He grabbed another manila folder containing the transparencies he’d finished at eight o’clock the evening before and paced off toward his next meeting.

He was about to answer the same question as in the first meeting: Where is everything? Only the spacecraft and the destination were different. Four engineers sat around a small table in a small conference room and asked, Where, exactly, is Nesbit in four years when Hokule´a flies by it?

Nesbit. An asteroid of opportunity. A piece of solar system flotsam left over from the original debris, maybe blasted off some larger body, orbiting endlessly along a pathway that, although invisible, was as real as an animal trail through the forest. Wait long enough and you’ll see the animal come by. The problem was the trail was broad and fuzzy… or rather their knowledge was fuzzy—the trail itself, obeying the laws of physics with perfect fidelity, was narrow and defined to anyone who was omniscient.

Spacecraft Hokule´a would be launched in less than two years. On the way to her final destination, asteroid Kunjii-Smythe, she would pass through the main part of the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. What a shame to miss a photo op. Nesbit was a name that popped up a week earlier in a computer search for targets of opportunity along the way to Kunjii-Smythe. For the price of about a half-kilogram of the spacecraft’s precious maneuvering fuel, her path could be diverted slightly—enough for a close flyby. The question was, how close did they dare come?

In this meeting, part of that question had to be answered by Harris, but at the moment he couldn’t answer it. He put up a slide that showed Earth in its circular orbit around the Sun, Nesbit in its nearly circular orbit between Mars and Jupiter, and the smooth dotted trajectory of Hokule´a connecting the two after looping around the Sun twice, apparently flying right through the middle of the asteroid. He replaced the transparency with another that showed a blow-up of the encounter. The asteroid, still just a small dot at the center of the slide, was surrounded by a red error ellipse. Hokule´a’s trajectory was a straight line cutting diagonally through the right side of the ellipse.

Harris stepped into the glare of the projector, throwing his shadow across Hokule´a. He tapped the red oval with his pen. That’s about three hundred kilometers radius. Not very good, but it’s all we can do with observations ten years old. They wanted to fly by Nesbit close enough for pictures showing details down to one meter. That equated to two hundred kilometers. With an error of three hundred kilometers, they could be on the wrong side of the asteroid, looking the wrong direction, clicking off hundreds of images of empty space. Great resolution but lousy framing. Not acceptable.

Can you get more observations? Kevin asked.

We’d better do it right now, since we’re at the end of the current best observing season and there are no more good opportunities until well after launch. If we get just one night of observations, the error shrinks to less than a hundred kilometers, one sigma.

Can you do that?

Harris smiled. It was nice to have a ready answer. Already scheduled. Tonight.

He went straight to his second afternoon meeting. It was a long one and boring, so he spent most of the time outlining his conference paper in his notebook and doodling in the margins.

After the meeting Harris returned to his office, tossed the slides onto a pile on a shelf, went for a cup of coffee, and came back to stretch out for a minute in his rolling chair. He retrieved the two letters he’d tossed onto his desk.

As suspected, the first one was a flyer advertising a conference, but not one he would have anticipated. It was from The Committee to Welcome the Hokule´a. Not spacecraft Hokule´a, but the vessel it was named for, canoe Hokule´a—a double-hulled working replica of an ancient Polynesian craft that sailed between islands of the Pacific as spacecraft Hokule´a would sail between islands of space.

The letter began:

We take pleasure in offering you the opportunity to speak at a public celebration of the arrival of the Hokule´a in Long Beach, California next month. You were recommended to us by Theodore Talbot, a former speaker from your organization who . . .

Harris shook his head. I don’t have time for another conference. Why did he do this to me? He made a mental note to complain the next time he saw Talbot.

He opened the other letter. The scrawled handwriting on the envelope was repeated on a single folded sheet of paper inside. Harris read it laboriously, stumbling over the difficult handwriting. Amazed, he read it again.

Dear Dr. Harris Mitchel,

What hath God wrought? Are the heavens no longer his domain? Your article in the Times seems to indicate so. You say that our country needs a new soul and a new religion. There is no apparent humility in your voice or faith in your heart. You speak of a new religion of outer space to turn the thoughts and souls of man outward. But what of the old religion of inner space, the faith of our fathers in the Creator and His Son and all His holy works? Your new religion is of and for man, worshipping the secular idols of science and false progress. It is a faith of man in himself and thus rooted in evil. Be cautious in your words and thoughts. Open your heart to the word of our Lord, and be careful that you serve not Satan but Him.

His Will Be Done

EF

What is this! What was in the article that had set off the writer? True, Harris had used the words soul and religion, but it wasn’t really about those things as such; it was about finding a motivation for the country, finding a New West to replace the manifest destiny of the old one. At least somebody had read the article, but this wasn’t a reaction he’d expected.

He frowned and searched the envelope for a return address. None. He laughed. He’d been addressed as a Doctor of Philosophy when, in truth, he was only a Master of Science. Both irritating and flattering.

He’d ponder it later. He tossed both letters into his briefcase, pulled the overnight duffel bag containing a toilet kit and extra clothes that he kept for these occasions out from the corner, left a voice mail for Sybil-the-Secretary and walked to the west parking lot, lugging the bag and his briefcase with him. He plopped the briefcase into the passenger seat of his Jeep, hefted the bag into the back, and drove off.

Passing through the gate he noticed a small demonstration in progress just outside the Lab. Maybe two dozen people armed with placards and banners fluttering in the wind lined the east side of Oak Grove Drive:

Stop the Cover-up!

Tell the TRUTH about the Face on Mars

NASA can’t be trusted

ATL: Anything but the Truth Laboratory

The Face is Real but All We Get is Lies!

Tell us about the aliens!

He smiled. All that misdirected fervor! Now there’s a religion. And some seriously underemployed people.

He drove south on Oak Grove, turned right on Berkshire, and came to the Foothill Freeway. Now he had a choice: go left on the conservative route by freeway most of the way; first east, then north on I-15, then west into the San Gabriel Mountains via Highway 138 and the Angeles Crest Highway—easy but boring—or go right to pick up the other end of the Angeles Crest Highway at La Cañada Flintridge, north and east on a winding scenic route through the thick of the mountains—hard but interesting. Either way took about the same time.

Scenic. He went right.

Twenty minutes later, as his Jeep pulled up the long straight stretch toward the foothills, after he’d delayed it as long as he could, he punched a number into his cell phone. It rang twice.

Jennifer?

Oh, hi, Hon. Coming home? Can you stop by the store and get . . .

I’m not coming home, Jen, I’m… ah… I’m driving up to Tabletop Mountain.

There was a long silence.

I have to do this, Jen. Something unexpected happened, I have to . . .

The silence became very loud.

Jen? Jennifer? He looked at the phone to see if it was still working.

"God damn it Harris! So what do we do about the party at the Williamses tonight? Do I call and tell them you’re just too damn busy to come to their unimportant little ol’ party?"

Well, I… I’m sorry, but the land lines went down at… I didn’t expect . . .

Everything you fucking do is unexpected, Harris! Goddamn it, I won’t call them. I’ll go by myself and tell them in person what an asshole you are.

. . . it was going to run automated tonight, but then… and I have to go up . . .

"And then I’ll have