5 Most of It
Washington, D.C. · Thursday, 21 September 2028.
Glen had the draft open on his tablet before the plane left the gate.
“I moved the thermal section to an appendix,” he said. “Kessler’s numbers, cited, one paragraph. Keeps the referees on the orbit.” He scrolled. “First Earth Trojan at L5. Nobody’s ever had one. The biggest L4 one’s about a kilometer. This is two.”
“About two.”
“About two.” He was grinning at the screen. “The Jupiter Trojans got Lucy. Somebody’s going to want to come here. If it holds up, it’s a target. Not this decade, maybe not ours. But somebody writes the mission concept, and the people who found it are on it.” He looked over at her. “That’s the branch for ten years, Dana. That’s a line in the budget with our names next to it.”
She told him it was a good draft. It was.
He was asleep over Kansas with the tablet on his chest. She didn’t sleep. The September memo was in her bag, printed, because she hadn’t wanted it on a screen on a plane, and she didn’t take it out. She knew what was on it. Nobody put an asteroid’s ephemeris under NOFORN. Glen had read the same nine names, and he had moved the heat to an appendix.
The building was a tan federal block a street south of Independence Avenue, with a flag over the door and a loading dock beside it. The guard had their badges printed before they reached the desk. Upstairs, phones went into a wooden cubby outside the door, each in its own numbered slot.
“Facts only,” Glen said in the corridor. “No heat sources.”
“The heat’s a fact.”
“The heat’s Kessler’s fact. What makes it isn’t anybody’s.” He held the door for her. “Twenty minutes. They’ll want to know if it’s going to hit anything, and it isn’t.”
The room had no windows and ten people in it, counting the two of them. Nobody gave a name. The woman at the head of the table had been a voice on planetary defense telecons for a year, and in person she introduced herself as PDCO, as if they had never spoken. The rest went round by office. OSTP. Energy, a man younger than Dana expected. A Space Force lieutenant colonel, his cap on the table. Someone from NASA headquarters. The National Security Council staff, a man in a gray suit with a legal pad. The two at the far end nodded when it reached them, and PDCO moved on without waiting. The man from Energy and the woman from OSTP had left an empty chair between them. Everyone spoke to the head of the table and not to each other.
She gave them twenty minutes, all of it, in order. Her half, then Kessler’s: what his office had circulated and what he had sent her since.
She said what each slide said and stopped.
The colonel went first. “Can it hit anything?”
“No. It’s at L5. Earth’s orbit, sixty degrees behind us. It’s 150 million kilometers from here, and it’ll stay there.”
“For how long?”
“If nothing moves it, longer than we’ve been keeping records.”
He wrote that down.
“What is it?” the woman from OSTP said.
“A dark body, about two kilometers across. Warmer than it should be.”
“That’s what it looks like. What is it?”
“I don’t know.”
The NSC man had his pen capped. He waited until she looked at him.
“Could it be a spacecraft?”
She had “consistent with” ready. She had used it all morning, and it would have done again. But the slide behind her was the one with the crossing on it, and she had spent six months trying to make that line mean something else.
“Nothing I know of in nature does this,” she said. “The only model that fits is a powered one: braking along the track, to a stop at L5.”
“So it’s a spacecraft.”
“It could be. I’d want more data than I have.”
“You’ve tried the natural ones.”
“The ones I know of.”
“And?”
“They don’t fit.” She heard how that sounded and tried to take some of it back. “That’s a statement about my models. There are things in the solar system nobody has modeled. Something new is still more likely than—” She stopped there.
“But you can’t rule it out.”
“No.”
He uncapped the pen, wrote one line, and capped it again.
She looked at Glen. He wasn’t looking at her. He was looking at the slide, at the solutions coming down to the line and stopping on it, and she watched him arrive where she had arrived. He didn’t argue it. When he turned to her he gave her a small nod, the one he gave when a result held up under review, and there was nothing in it against her. Then he looked down the table at the two people who hadn’t given an office, and she saw the rest of it reach him: what a room like this did with a result like that.
“Who else knows?” the woman from OSTP said.
“Darmstadt.”
“ESA.”
“Yes.”
“All of it?” the NSC man said.
She thought of a plot with no text on it, sent from her kitchen on Labor Day Monday.
“Most of it.”
At the far end of the table, one of the two took out a pen and wrote a word on an index card.
The rest took fifty minutes, and nobody raised their voice.
“Is anything in preparation for publication?” PDCO said.
Glen answered, because it was his. “A draft. We were going to submit after the crossing.”
“We’ll ask you to hold it.”
“For how long?”
“Until there’s guidance.”
“Okay,” Glen said. He didn’t look at Dana. He moved his tablet an inch toward the middle of the table, as if someone might want to take it.
The man from NASA headquarters asked what she would do with Hubble. She told him: a spectrum, to see what the surface was made of; photometry, to see whether the brightness held. She had asked for six orbits three cycles running and never gotten one. She asked for twelve.
“Write it for forty,” he said. “The Director will see it this week. It won’t go to the committee.”
Forty orbits was a career. She wrote 40 on her pad, and the pen felt odd in her hand.
“Do you have the expertise you need?” That was the man from Energy, his first question of the morning. “On the thermal side, the materials side. We can find people.”
She heard what it meant: other people, cleared ones, with her table in front of them. “I have what I need.”
“Think about it,” he said, pleasantly.
At the end PDCO read from a single sheet in the voice people use for fire exits. The September analysis and anything derived from it was not to be discussed with anyone outside the distribution. That included foreign nationals, and it included partner agencies. No talks, no preprints, no informal correspondence. Figures counted as derived. Questions about handling went to the designation block.
Nobody looked at Dana while she read it. Dana looked at the sheet.
The hotel was a block from L’Enfant Plaza, and the air conditioner knocked on and off every few minutes. She ate half a sandwich over the laptop and opened the September solutions. They came up under the banner.
A few minutes after ten the mail chimed.
| From | Matthias Kessler <matthias.kessler@esa.int> |
| To | Dana Okafor <dana.okafor@jpl.nasa.gov> |
| Date | Fri, 22 Sep 2028 04:06:51 +0200 |
| Subject | September |
Dana,
Rita had a call from headquarters yesterday evening, at half past six. Paris. She did not tell me what was said. She has asked me to hold the thermal note and send nothing outside the office until she has spoken to them again.
Could you send me your September solutions? I would like to check the crossing against my own astrometry. Mine are crude.
Matthias
Half past six in Paris was half past twelve here. At half past twelve she had been in that room, watching PDCO read from her sheet.
It was four in the morning in Darmstadt. Since May he had sent her everything she asked for, the minute she asked. He had never once asked for anything back until tonight.
The solutions were open in the other window. Twenty-six rows, the crossing a few rows from the end.
She clicked reply.
I can’t send them because — she deleted it.
I’ve been asked not to — asked by whom, he would think, and he would be right to.
It isn’t my decision — which told him whose it was.
I’m sorry. I can’t explain yet. That one was closer, and yet was the only part she meant.
She cut it down until it was nothing he could forward and nothing she would have to take back, and sent it before she could find what was wrong with it.
| To | Matthias Kessler <matthias.kessler@esa.int> |
| Subject | Re: September |
Not yet.
D.