The Orion Protocol (10 page)

16

January 31/PBS Studios/Washington, D.C.

“We are alive in a new Golden Age of Astronomy.”
Angela could hear her own prerecorded voice-over as she stepped up to a yellow tape mark on the floor of the PBS soundstage.

“In the Orion Nebula, thanks to the Hubble Telescope, mankind can now watch stars being born for the first time in history.”

Behind her a large Sony monitor displayed an opening
Science Horizon
montage of spectacular space images gathered from a host of NASA instruments.

“And with this first look at a ‘cosmic nursery’ comes a new view of Creation as well. Not as something long finished and slowly dying, but as a glorious, evolving work-in-progress.”

A stylist knocked down the shine on Angela’s nose and forehead with a Victoria Vogue sponge. Behind the glass in the producer’s booth, Miriam made eye contact and hit the talk-back button.

“Three minutes, kiddo.”

Angela nodded. Standing in a tight pool of light, she closed her eyes and let go of everything she could do nothing more about today, particularly everything having to do with their would-be whistle-blower, Deep Cosmo.

During the day, calls to all the courier services used by both PBS and NASA had come up with zilch in tracking the package back to its source. Neither day-shift security nor the mail-room people had been
any help, either. But this was just the beginning and she and Miriam had an overall battle plan.

A plan that they were initiating tonight.

Up in the producer’s booth where Miriam called the shots for three cameras, the hard decisions in terms of the show had already been made, but the booth was where it all came together. It was also ground zero whenever things went to shit, as they were always threatening to do, though Miriam handled the pressure with an enviable smart-ass aplomb.

“When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro,” she whispered breathily into the talk-back mike, cracking up Angela, the crew around her, and everyone wearing headsets on the soundstage floor. Broadcast production was en eccentric enterprise about which Hunter Thompson’s smart remarks on the ‘60’s New Journalism were often apropos.

“Two minutes, everybody.”

Miriam buzzed the stage manager.

“Billy? Let’s have places, please. Where’s Eklund?”

“On his way. I called Goddard and they said he left an hour ago.”

“Okay, if he’s not here by break time we go to plan B.” Miriam was already marking up her copy of the script with potential revisions.

“Uh, what plan B?”

“I’m workin’ on it. Places.”

On the monitors, Angela’s recorded voice-over continued.

“In Upsilon Andromedae and scores of other places in our own galaxy we are also seeing the first thrilling proof of planets circling sunlike stars. Giordano Bruno, an Italian monk, was burned at the stake four hundred years ago for suggesting that the cosmos was home to thousands of Earths. Perhaps Father Bruno deserves an apology.”

Miriam looked up from her rewrites as Professor Stephen Weintraub and the famed Nobelist Dr. Paula Winnick were escorted from the backstage makeup room and settled into chairs on the raised platform of the set. As always, she thought the septuagenarian Dr. Winnick had a fascinating presence.

What an incredible woman, she thought
.

Wearing a Chanel suit and radiating an effortless, exuberant intelligence, Winnick was by far the most publicly recognized name in American space science after Einstein and Carl Sagan. Now that she had outlived them both, her star in the Academy of Sciences and the media firmament was fixed and unrivaled.

Getting the high sign from the sound guy on the set, Miriam checked the clock, cursed the tardy Richard Eklund in absentia, and warned Angela.

“One minute. I’ll count you in.”

“Okay.”

“Everybody. We are go in one. Ready?”

Holding up her hands like an orchestra conductor, she cued the camera, saw the red light come on, and spoke into her headset.

“Angie? Camera One. On ten . . .”

Using all ten fingers, Miriam orchestrated the visual cross-fade from STAR 51 PEG, forty light-years away, to Angela’s live, studio close-up.

“All these dramatic firsts pose a profoundly new question. Not what if there is life out there, but what if life . . . is all around us?”

Angela paused, holding an enigmatic smile for dramatic effect, then crossed over to the
Science Horizon
set and her distinguished guests.

“Anyone interested in joining the discussion on-line, you can find these images and more, plus a new viewer bulletin board, at www.sciencehorizon.org/tolas—spelled T-O-L-A-S.”

At the meeting in Miriam’s office at 10:00
A.M.
, the TOLAS bulletin board had been Angela’s idea.

“I think we can assume Deep Cosmo is watching.”

“So we use the show to send him a message, establish contact, let him know we got the package and we want to talk,” Miriam said, swiveling in her chair. “It could also scare him the hell off.”

“If he’s not talking to us, he’s as good as scared off already,” Angela pointed out. “I think we’re demonstrating good faith.”

But Miriam Kresky was not thinking about Deep Cosmo right now. She was too busy cuing visuals, calling cameras, and wondering how she could ever have thought that late-ass geek Eklund was attractive.

“What’s the penalty for killing an astronomer, anyway?” She shot a look at the twentysomething mixer working the console faders.

“Billions and billions of years,” he said in a perfect Carl Sagan cadence that almost made her fall off her chair.

A half block away in an early-adopted General Motors EV-1, Eklund had long since given up on his malfunctioning cell phone and turned off both the a/c and the radio in a desperate effort to conserve electricity.

“Come on, let’s go, let’s go, let’s go!”

Being jammed up in traffic and trapped in an electric car running out of charge was a uniquely agonizing purgatory for a techno-freak and avowed environmentalist. A warning light flashed on the dashboard: 5%
OF CHARGE REMAINING/RANGE
.5
MILES
.

“Oh, no.” He checked his watch and pounded the dash in frustration.

Honking the horn could drain the last trickle from his battery pack, so Eklund had been reduced to fiddling with his wilting hand-tied bow tie and yelling things out the car window.

“Yes! Yes! Just move over. Just move it a little bit . . . Yes!”

At last able to maneuver into the PBS parking structure, Eklund raced up the concrete ramp on his last remaining electrons. He felt abjectly stupid and embarrassed for being so late. But as he jumped out of the car and ran flat out into the building, he reminded himself that nobody was going to kill him for screwing up the show and if he was lucky they’d still have time for at least part of his planned presentation.

Later he’d wish that they had just killed him.

At Goddard, Eklund had given them a private glimpse of several archived NASA photos showing intriguing Martian anomalies, from
tubelike structures to triangular monoliths. Angela and Miriam had been extremely impressed. And after being assured that all of the images were available for broadcast use and in the public domain, Angela had pitched him their idea.

“Okay, here’s the deal. We want to provoke or inspire whoever sent that TOLAS disk I showed you into making contact with us and starting a dialogue. And to do that, we’re going to produce a show about NASA’s search for life in the solar system. And we’d like you to come on and make the case for the Intelligence Hypothesis on Mars.”

“We’ve invited Paula Winnick,” Miriam added, in the flat, matter-of-fact way she had acquired as a producer when invoking famous names. It was Eklund’s turn to be impressed.

“Really.”

“And we have confirmed Professor Stephen Weintraub.”

“
Mars Observer
imaging team. Wow.” Eklund sat up alertly, his mind shifting into a higher gear: this was pretty much raising the bar as high as it went.

“So, Richard, what do you think?”

While he took a moment to mull it over Miriam studied what Eklund was wearing.

Leather suspenders and a bow tie with little red rockets?
She decided that a major part of him was still a twelve-year-old boy who loved the idea of space exploration more than anything, and she found his grown-up sense of style in expressing this both eccentric and rather charming.