A Sword Into Darkness

1: “TURNAROUND”

April 3, 2023; NASA Headquarters; Washington DC

There was nothing quite like the District in springtime. Gentle sunlight bathed the cityscape with warmth, banishing the last vestiges of winter's gloom and filling the idealistic and the unscrupulous alike with hope for the coming year. Fragrant, flowering ramparts of lilacs, forsythia, and cherry blossoms bordered sidewalks, providing tourists, politicos, and drivers an almost idyllic setting for navigating the nation’s capitol. Not even thoughts of the inevitable scandals, gang violence, and traffic congestion—which were certain to come with summer—could spoil Washington’s upbeat mood.

That mood was not shared by all, however.

A side door to the National Aeronautic and Space Administration’s DC headquarters burst open and released a furious, embarrassed Gordon Elliot Lee upon the city. He stormed out of the building, muttering to himself and glaring at the knots of ill-attired tourists walking along E street. Gordon strode forward with purpose, his own dark mood unrelieved by the joyful colors and pleasantly fragrant air everyone else seemed to bask in. He brushed past stupefied Washingtonians and stalked toward the nearest garbage can he could find, right at the intersection of E and 3rd. Reaching the can, he ripped open his slim briefcase.

As Gordon began to stuff page after page from his briefcase into the brown steel mouth of the can, the door to NASA’s concrete and glass offices burst open again. Lydia Russ scanned up and down E street and blanched when she saw what he was doing. She hurried as fast as her stylish pumps would allow her, and reached Gordon just as he ran out of paper and began to sort through the golden rainbow of data disks he had brought with him. She drew to a halt and tried to catch her breath, crying out, “Gordon! Stop this right now!”

He looked back at her and frowned. Apparently deciding the garbage can was no longer worthy of his offerings, he instead flung the disks outward into the four lanes of traffic heading up and down E street. The BlueROMs made excellent Frisbees and they shone and flashed beautifully as they bounced off cars and up from the blacktop. The drivers were somewhat less appreciative of his thoughtful gift, however. Everyone heard the familiar dissonance of screeching brakes, squealing tires, blaring horns, and one final movement of crunching metal.

Gordon grimaced and looked back to Lydia. His fine-boned, vaguely Amer-Asian features appeared unreadable, lost in a tumult of emotion. “Looks like my reputation’s not the only thing I’ve wrecked today.”

She approached and snatched the briefcase from him. Looking inside, she saw the only things left were some pens, flash drives, and Gordon’s ultra-expensive, ultra-thin business tablet. She wondered if his tantrum would have extended to throwing that into the street.

Raised voices and slamming car doors rose above the din of traffic resuming. Lydia saw the two drivers whose Lexus-on-Mercedes ballet had ended so abruptly. Each gentleman gestured wildly to the other, intent on fixing blame upon their obviously guilty counterpart. Then one picked up a battered BlueROM and they both began scanning up and down the street. Lydia took Gordon’s arm and pulled him away, hurrying down 3rd street, away from the accident.

He followed her lead only grudgingly, still in a huff over whatever had precipitated his fit. She glared at him. “Gordon, what the hell were you thinking?”

He looked at Lydia, remembering when they had been much more than industry associates. Her shoulder length, light brown hair whipped around her face in the building spawned wind, and he felt an unexpected pang of regret cutting through his pique. They had parted ways so long ago, but he thought their reunion had gone well until this. He had burned many bridges in the intervening years in order to make his mark in the world, yet he had to admit to himself that it hurt to think he had burned his final one to her. “I figured if I couldn’t even get you to listen, then all my work belonged in the garbage. The disk thing may have been a bit much, but it’s not like I didn’t have provocation.”

“That’s not what I’m talking about. What were you thinking, going to the NASA with … that?”

He pulled his arm free of her grasp and stopped on the sidewalk, his anger resurging anew. “I’ve earned the right to tell NASA anything I damn well please! I’m Gordon-god-damn-Lee, not some wacko in a tinfoil hat. Who did you come to when you lost your little satellite constellation? And when Samuels threatened to drag you in front of the Senate for that thruster explosion, who did you get to explain it all away? Me! Every time me, so I think that entitles me to a little benefit of the friggin’ doubt.”

Lydia looked back to the street. One of the drivers stood on the sidewalk now, looking at the knots of tourists and business people for his quarry’s face. She turned back to Gordon and motioned for them to continue walking. He followed alongside and she hissed in a stage whisper, “You’re right. You’ve earned at least a fair hearing, but all benefit of the doubt is forfeit when you start talking about alien invasions. We get too many crackpot ideas pitched at us to not be a little sick of that sort of thing.”

His face grew hot as his fury was joined by a twinge of embarrassment. “I never said anything about invasions! That was that little toad with the narrow glasses—Evenrude, or Evensly, or—”

“Evanston,” she sighed. “The Associate Deputy Administrator for Policy and Planning. You also had the deputy directors from Ames, Marshall, and Goddard in there, but Evanston’s the one guy you really needed to convince if you wanted to get any real support from us.”

“Yeah,” he said, the heat in his voice sheepishly dampened. “Evanston. Damn it, Lydia, how can they look at everything I showed them and just refuse to see it for what it is? It’s damn near irrefutable!”

“No, it’s not. It’s preliminary: neither refuted nor vetted. You only have five months of data from a single, non-NASA observatory. That’s barely enough to get decent parallax, so that throws your distance calculations into question. Your velocity estimates are extremely tentative, and calling your acceleration figures a fair guess would be pure charity on my part. Your spectral analysis is questionable, and your conclusions, well, I believe I’ve already mentioned the word ‘crackpot’, right?”

Gordon grimaced and spun about, searching the bright lip of the horizon. Finding his bearings, he jabbed an accusing finger due south. “Someone or something is coming, Lydia, and griping about the quality of my data isn’t going to change that! I only have five months of data because the light only showed up five months ago, which is more or less what has me so damned concerned in the first place. It’s a turnaround!”

Her face showed her confusion, and that only made him more exasperated. “A turnaround flip! Kinematics! Newton’s damned laws! Weren't you listening?"

"Do not yell at me, Gordon! I'm your friend, not your employee."

He visibly tried to restrain his emotions. "Okay, I'm sorry, but listen to me now. Delta Pavonis is 19.9 light-years away. Call it even twenty, and now that little yellow sun—a sun just like our own—has started turning blue. But stars don’t just turn blue. No, there’s something else there, some bright blue light in front of the star, covering it up a bit, a bright blue light which is ten rather than twenty light-years away and on a direct line to us. Essentially, the light’s shown up at the exact halfway point between Delta Pavonis and our solar system, and if my blue-shift guesstimate is to be believed, it’s moving at 46% the speed of light. That means only one thing to me.”

She shook her head. “It leads me to any number of possibilities, of which ‘turnaround’ is the least likely.”

“You keep denying what’s so obvious, and you’re going to cut yourself on Occam’s Razor. We're dumb monkeys, barely out of the trees. When we go to space, we do these high thrust, low efficiency, short burn Hohmann transfers. It's all we have the technology for, but it’s slow—deadly slow. We could never reach another solar system that way.

"If you’re an advanced, space-going culture, on the other hand, then the fastest way to get from one star to another—without cheating with a wormhole—is to apply thrust the whole way. You point your exhaust towards home for half the journey, accelerating to some ungodly speed, and then flip around and accelerate in the opposite direction until you match speed with your target system. It’s called a brachistocrone trajectory and it’s only possible with something that can thrust for a long, long time. And using this super-rocket, you wouldn’t see any engine flare until it was at the half-way point, exactly what we are seeing.”

She smiled softly. “Listen to yourself, Gordon. You’re talking about an alien rocketship. Even if I accepted your data, there’re still too many holes. What are the odds of our closest, truly compatible star having a decent solar system? And if it could support life, what are the odds they would be technologically advanced enough to notice us and come for a visit, a visit that would take nearly a century of continuous thrust if I’m doing the numbers right? How could they possibly carry enough reaction mass to make the engine work from there to here? And why wouldn’t they just send a message? That would only take 40 years round-trip.”

“Precisely! There’s no good reason for them to come here physically. If they were benign, they would call. If they wanted to just kill us, they wouldn’t ever have bothered to turn around. They could have cracked the planet in half with velocity alone and we’d never see them in time. So why are they coming here? That’s the big question. That’s NASA’s mission.”

She ran a hand through her hair, brushing its billowing strands from her face in her own matching frustration. “No, it’s not. It’s not because there is no alien ship coming here. You wonder why you got put in the crackpot category? Because the crackpots are the ones who’d rather believe in the unbelievable than consider things with a skeptical eye.”

“Damn it, Lydia! Where’s the imagination and wonder you used to dazzle me with? You and NASA have the exact same problem these days. You’re all so worried about conservative budgets and little missions, about appearing respectable and professional to the world at large, that you reject anything that has the air of the fantastic or unusual. God forbid the agency that makes science fiction fact take a cue from science fiction. Find me a scientist in there who’s read the “Mote in God’s Eye” and I’ll show you the person who should be backing me up.”

Lydia crossed her arms and regarded him quietly. She gave a glance to the sidewalk along E street and saw that the angry driver was gone. Shaking her head, she began to walk back toward the headquarters entrance, speaking loudly enough for him to hear as she left him behind. “I’ve read Niven and Pournelle, and a host of others. The thing you don’t seem to understand is that comparing your speculative observations to some whiz-bang space opera doesn’t make your case more believable. It makes you look like a fanatic who’s lost his touch with reality.”

Gordon looked at her in dismay, but hurried forward to join her. He locked eyes with Lydia for a brief moment, finally catching sight of the pity she now viewed him with. He wanted to yell at her, to tell her how and why she was wrong, but it was pointless. She was closed to him, his last bridge burned. “Is it as bad as all that?”

“Well,” she smiled. “You’re an idle-rich tech wizard with an over-funded amateur astronomy bug, so some eccentricity has to be expected, I guess. The tantrums are a bit much, though. Listen, Gordon, it’s just too crazy, too ambiguous, and too soon. No one’s going to worry about something ten light-years away and forty years down the calendar right now. But, if it happens, you may reserve the right to say ‘I told you so,’ and I’ll owe you a beer or something.” She held out his briefcase to him.

He took it and closed the top. This was goodbye. “Actually, I figure you’ll be proven wrong in about 33 years, what with 43 years to slow down and ten years for the light from the half-way point to get here.”

They reached the sidewalk along E street. Lydia came close and gave him a gentle squeeze on his arm. “Thirty three years then. Plenty of time.”

Gordon smiled tightly. He looked over at the two cars that had kissed fenders when he had thrown out the BlueROMs. The drivers stood by the side of the road, exchanging information and casting baleful glances in his direction. “No, not nearly enough time, Lydia. I don’t know why they’re coming, but if it’s to do us harm, we haven’t got a chance in hell of stopping them, not without the government’s support anyway. To face what’s coming on any sort of equal footing, we need to play catch-up in a big way. A single generation is way too short to do that, not without a little faith and a whole lotta luck.”

“I’m sorry, Gordon.”

He smiled back, the anger and frustration supplanted by melancholy in his eyes. “It’s all right. If the Air Force won’t have me, and NASA won’t have me, and you won’t have me, I can go it alone. It won’t be the first time. Take care of yourself, all right?”

Lydia Russ nodded and watched him as he walked away. He did not get far before his car drove up to meet him. The driver opened his door, and Gordon gave one last long look to her and the building behind her, then he entered and the sleek black car drove away. She turned slowly about, taking in the city, the flowers, the trees, and steadily increasing throngs of tourists and travelers.

Gordon’s car turned the corner and she smiled, her frustration and wistful regret fading away. It was hard to stay worried about so distant a threat as Gordon Lee and his alien rocket. After all, it was springtime in Washington DC.