As such, Ivy and Dinah and Konrad and Zeke ought to have been freaking out at this point.
But none of them—not even Zeke—reacted very much.
“You’ve all thought it too,” Sean said. “Even an Asp-hole like me can see it in your faces.”
“Okay, maybe we’ve all thought it,” Dinah admitted. “How could you not think it? But, Sean, what you might not have seen, being based on the ground, is how serious everyone up here is about making this work. If it were just a Potemkin village, we’d be seeing different stuff.”
Sean held his hands up, palms out, placating her. “Can we just agree that there might be a range of views down on the ground? And that some people, perhaps highly placed, see its primary function as an opiate of the masses? Like the video you pop into your car’s DVD player to keep the kids quiet during a long drive.”
“People like that are not going to be our friends when it comes to getting the resources we need,” Ivy said.
“Their strategy is always going to seem a little off-kilter, a little beside the point. Opaque. Frustrating.”
They were definitely talking about Pete Starling.
Sean continued. “To the extent that such people control launch sites and policy, we have a problem. Fortunately, they don’t control everything.”
They were now talking about Sean Probst, and his loose circle of billionaire friends who knew how to make rockets.
“There’s a lot about this Cloud Ark thing that I, and my associates, don’t know yet. We can’t sit around waiting for perfect knowledge. We have to act immediately on long-lead-time work that addresses what we do know. And what we do know is that we need to bring water to the Cloud Ark. Physics and politics conspire to make it difficult to bring it up from the ground. Fortunately, I own an asteroid mining company. We have already identified some comet cores in easy-to-reach orbits. We’re narrowing down the list. And we’re preparing an expedition.”
Konrad well understood the timing of such missions. “How long, Sean?”
“Two years,” Sean said.
“Well,” Ivy said, “I guess you’d better get on it, then. How can we help?”
“Give me all of your robots,” Sean said. He turned to look at Dinah.
“SINCE WE HAVE DECLARED OPEN SEASON ON BULLSHIT …” DINAH began as soon as she had gotten Sean Probst alone in her shop.
Sean held both of his hands up like a fugitive surrendering to the FBI. “Where would you like to begin?”
“You said that you have identified some comets. That you were narrowing down the list. That’s crap. You wouldn’t have come up here without a specific plan.”
“We’re going after Greg’s Skeleton.”
“What?”
“Comet Grigg-Skjellerup. Sorry. Somebody’s offspring called it Greg’s Skeleton and the name stuck.” Sean always referred to children as offspring.
She’d heard of it. “How big is that?”
“Two and a half, three kilometers.”
“That’s a lot of arklet fuel.”
Sean nodded. He crossed his arms over his body and looked around the shop.
“Hard to move something that big.”
Still no answer.
“You’re going to jam a nuke into it and turn it into a rocket, aren’t you?”
He raised his eyebrows briefly. Since this was the only plausible way of moving something that huge, he didn’t consider it worthy of an extended answer.
“We got really lucky on the timing,” he remarked.
“You’re going to fly a radioactive ice ball the size of the Death Star back here just as the shit is hitting the fan—then what?”
“Dinah, I need to share something with you in confidence.”
“Well, it’s about fucking time is all I can say.”
DAY 73
Doob had almost been to space once, about ten years ago. An acquaintance of his who had made a lot of money in hedge funds had dropped twenty-five million dollars on a twelve-day trip to the International Space Station aboard a Soyuz capsule. It was traditional for the customer to designate a backup—a sort of understudy—who would take his place in the event of some illness or mishap. Since the backup might be swapped in at any time up to shortly before launch, they had to go through all the same training as the customer. And that was really the point, as far as the hedge fund man was concerned. An introvert, he needed someone who could act as a connection to the general public and put an appealing face on the whole thing. So he had selected Doc Dubois as his understudy. They’d set up a website and a blog, and arranged for photographers to follow Doob’s progress through the training program, with occasional glimpses of the hedge fund man in the background. In effect, Doob had acted as a publicity decoy. No one made any bones about this. Doob had been more than happy to do it. The training had been great fun, the hedge fund man had been generous in his spending on the website, and Doob had been able to produce a lot of good video explaining fun facts about spaceflight.
And there had even been the small chance that he might go. A week before the scheduled launch, he had flown to Baikonur, bringing his wife and kids with him, video crew in tow. They had watched in a certain amount of amazement as the launch vehicle, a fantailed Soyuz-FG, had been towed horizontally across the steppe on a special train, complete with smoke-belching locomotive, to the launch pad. And this really was little more than a pad, a concrete slab on the almost lunar surface of the Kazakh steppe with a few pieces of apparatus around it to hoist the rocket up off the train and pump fluids into it. The contrast with the NASA way of doing things was stark to the point of being somewhat hilarious. Doob’s youngest son, Henry, eleven years old at the time, had failed to pay attention to the elevation of the mighty rocket to its vertical position because he was distracted by the sight of a couple of stray dogs copulating a hundred meters away from ground zero. The launch bunker, shockingly close to the pad, had a little vegetable patch out in front of it where the technicians were growing cucumbers and tomatoes; they explained that the concrete wall soaked up sunlight during the day and helped keep the vegetables warm at night.
Three days before launch, the hedge fund man had been nipped by a stray dog while rehearsing a launch pad escape sequence, and everything had been thrown into disarray as the dog was chased across the steppe by militiamen in wheeled vehicles, locals on horseback, and a helicopter gunship. After they had run it to ground they had shipped it off to a veterinary lab to be checked for rabies. Only three hours before launch, word had come back that the dog was clean. Doob’s name had been struck from the manifest and replaced by that of the hedge fund manager. Both relieved and disappointed, Doob had stood on terra firma, very close to the launch pad. Tavistock Prowse had come out to cover the launch. He had come equipped with all kinds of electronic gadgets that had seemed cool at the time. He had stood there on the steppe, facing Doob and the rocket, aiming a video camera at him and catching his narration as the giant vehicle had fired up its engines and hurled itself into the sky.
More than anything else, that image had made Dr. Harris into Doc Dubois and launched his career. It had also led, within days, to divorce proceedings initiated by his wife. She had a number of complaints about his performance as a husband, many of long standing, some that she could barely articulate. But somehow all of them had been summed up and crystallized by the fact that,