Charles Sheffield - Out of Copyright

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Out of Copyright

by Charles Sheffield

Troubleshooting. A splendid idea, and one that I agree with totally in principle. Bang! One bullet, and

trouble bites the dust. But unfortunately, trouble doesn't know the rules. Trouble won't stay dead.

I looked around the table. My top troubleshooting team was here. I was here. Unfortunately, they were

supposed to be headed for Jupiter, and I ought to be down on Earth. In less than twenty-four hours, the

draft pick would begin. That wouldn't wait, and if I didn't leave in the next thirty minutes, I would never

make it in time. I needed to be in two places at once. I cursed the copyright laws and the single-copy

restriction, and went to work.

“You've read the new requirement,” I said. “You know the parameters. Ideas, anyone?”

A dead silence. They were facing the problem in their own unique ways. Wolfgang Pauli looked

half-asleep, Thomas Edison was drawing little doll-figures on the table's surface, Enrico Fermi seemed to

be counting on his fingers, and John von Neumann was staring impatiently at the other three. I was doing

none of those things. I knew very well that wherever the solution would come from, it would not be from

inside my head. My job was much more straightforward: I had to see that when we had a possible

answer, ithappened. And I had to see that we gotone answer, not four.

The silence in the room went on and on. My brain trust was saying nothing, while I watched the digits on

my watch flicker by. I had to stay and find a solution; and I had to get to the draft picks. But most of all

and hardest of all, I had to remain quiet, to let my team do some thinking.

It was small consolation to know that similar meetings were being held within the offices of the other three

combines. Everyone must be finding it equally hard going. I knew the players, and I could imagine the

scenes, even though all the troubleshooting teams were different. NETSCO had a group that was

intellectually the equal of ours at Romberg AG: Niels Bohr, Theodore von Karman, Norbert Weiner, and

Marie Curie. MMG, the great Euro-Mexican combine of Magrit-Marcus Gesellschaft, had focused on

engineering power rather than pure scientific understanding and creativity, and, in addition to the Soviet

rocket designer Sergey Korolev and the American Nikola Tesla, they had reached farther back (and

with more risk) to the great nineteenth-century English engineer Isambard Kingdom Brunel. He had been

one of the outstanding successes of the program; I wished he were working with me, but MMG had

always refused to look at a trade. MMG's one bow to theory was a strange one, the Indian

mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan, but the unlikely quartet made one hell of a team.

And finally there was BP Megation, whom I thought of as confused. At any rate, I didn't understand their

selection logic. They had used billions of dollars to acquire a strangely mixed team: Erwin Schrodinger,

David Hilbert, Leo Szilard, and Henry Ford. They were all great talents, and all famous names in their

fields, but I wondered how well they could work as a unit.

All the troubleshooting teams were now pondering the same emergency. Our problem was created when

the Pan-National Union suddenly announced a change to the Phase B demonstration program. They

wanted to modify impact conditions, as their contracts with us permitted them to do. They didn't have to

tell us how to do it, either, which was just as well for them since I was sure they didn't know. How do

you take a billion tons of mass, already launched to reach a specific target at a certain point of time, and

redirect it to a different end point with a different arrival time?

There was no point in asking them why they wanted to change rendezvous conditions. It was their option.

Some of our management saw the action on PNU's part as simple bloody-mindedness, but I couldn't

agree. The four multinational combines had each been given contracts to perform the biggest space

engineering exercise in human history: small asteroids (only a kilometer or so across-but massing a billion

tons each) had to be picked up from their natural orbits and redirected to the Jovian system, where they

were to make precise rendezvous with assigned locations of the moon Io. Each combine had to select the

asteroid and the method of moving it, but deliver within a tight transfer-energy budget and a tight time

schedule.

For that task the PNU would pay each group a total of $8 billion. That sounds like a fair amount of

money, but I knew our accounting figures. To date, with the project still not finished (rendezvous would

be in eight more days), Romberg AG had spent $14.5 billion. We were looking at a probable cost

overrun by a factor of two. I was willing to bet that the other three groups were eating very similar losses.

Why?

Because this was only Phase B of a four-phase project. Phase A had been a system design study, which

led to four Phase B awards for a demonstration project. The Phase B effort that the four combines were

working on now was a proof-of-capability run for the full Europan Metamorphosis. The real money

came in the future, in Phases C and D. Those would be awarded by the PNU to a single combine, and

the award would be based largely on Phase B performance. The next phases called for the delivery of

fifty asteroids to impact points on Europa (Phase C), followed by thermal mixing operations on the

moon's surface (Phase D). The contract value of C and D would be somewhere up around $800 billion.

That was the fish that all the combines were after, and it was the reason we would all overspend lavishly

on this phase.

By the end of the whole program, Europa would have a forty-kilometer-deep water ocean over all its

surface. And then the real fun would begin. Some contractor would begin the installation of the fusion

plants, and the seeding of the sea-farms with the first prokaryotic bacterial forms.

The stakes were high; and to keep everybody on their toes, PNU did the right thing. They kept throwing

in these little zingers, to mimic the thousand and one things that would go wrong in the final project

phases.

While I was sitting and fidgeting, my team had gradually come to life. Fermi was pacing up and down the

room-always a good sign; and Wolfgang Pauli was jabbing impatiently at the keys of a computer

console. John von Neumann hadn't moved, but since he did everything in his head anyway that didn't

mean much.

I looked again at my watch. I had to go. “Ideas?” I said again.

Von Neumann made a swift chopping gesture of his hand. “We have to make a choice, Al. It can be

done in four or five ways.”

The others were nodding. “The problem is only one of efficiency and speed,” added Fermi. “I can give

you an order-of-magnitude estimate of the effects on the overall program within half an hour.”

“Within fifteen minutes.” Pauli raised the bidding.

“No need to compete this one.” They were going to settle down to a real four-way fight on methods-they

always did-but I didn't have the time to sit here and referee. The important point was that they said it

could be done. “You don't have to rush it. Whatever you decide, it will have to wait until I get back.” I

stood up. “Tom?”

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Charles Sheffield - Out of Copyright

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