Saturn Run Read Online Free PDF Page A

Fletcher said. “The Saturn ring system is lousy with these little moonlets. There are hundreds of them, maybe thousands. Most of them we’ve never looked at in detail. This is a pretty typical one, dim and not perturbing the ring system too much, so it’s pretty small and low mass, not something particularly interesting that we’d be paying attention to.”
    “Either that, or it’s something big, hollow, and painted black,” Emery mused.
    “And that’s what you got?” A wrinkle appeared in Santeros’s forehead, which was not usually a good thing for people speaking with her.
    Lossness spoke up. “Madam President, we’re looking across more than a billion kilometers of space and we just can’t see details that small. This thing is huge by human engineering standards, but on the astronomical scale of things it’s almost insignificant. If we hadn’t accidentally caught it in a calibration run, we’d never have even noticed it.”
    Santeros nodded: “Which means that nobody else knows about it?”
    “Very likely not,” said Lossness. “We know how big and how good the best telescopes in the world are, and what they can see. We still put more money into astronomical research than anybody else, we have the best instruments, and we got very, very lucky. There’s always a chance somebody else got lucky, but the odds are a thousand to one against.”
    Santeros turned to Crow and asked, “What’s our security status?”
    Crow said, “We’re off to a decent start. Dr. Fletcher told his working group that if any of them spoke a word of this to anyone, including husbands, wives, significant others, or any one-night stands they were trying to impress, he’d run them out of the astrophysics community,” Crow said. “He apparently succeeded in shutting them down until I got there. I rounded up the same bunch, told them we’d given this the highest military and civilian classifications, and if they talked about it, they would be charged with treason and executed. I was not funny about it.”
    “Were they impressed by the threat?” Santeros asked Fletcher. “Shutting up academics is like trying to herd cats.”
    “They were . . . quite impressed,” said Fletcher. “Mr. Crow scared the shit out of them.”
    “Good. That’s one of the reasons he works here,” the President said.
    Crow said, “I have to tell you, ma’am—it’s gonna leak. It’s too big. There are lots of Chinese working at Caltech and they are patriots. Chinese patriots. They are far beyond smart. Sooner or later, one of them’ll get a whiff of this and it’ll wind up in Beijing. We’ve got some time, but not an unlimited amount.”
    “Give me an estimate,” Santeros said.
    Crow looked down at his hands for a moment, calculating, then said, “Anything between tomorrow and a year from now. Unless something unusual happens, I don’t believe it’ll be close to either end of that line. If we put our smartest security people on it—guys who won’t go out there waving their guns around trying to shut everybody down and drawing a lot of attention because of that—I’d give you either side of a bet on seven months. Assuming that the aliens don’t call us up.”
    “Huh. That . . . uh . . .” The President turned to Emery, the vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs. He was a mild-looking man wearing old-fashioned glasses, with short, sandy hair. He looked more like a college professor than a man who’d directed the early glory days of the Argentine Incursion. “Richard, what’s the military’s assessment?”
    “Gene and I ran this past a couple guys at the think tanks, and, amazingly, people have already considered scenarios like this and looked into their implications.”
    “Which are?”
    “They’re pretty scary, ma’am.”
    —
    “Ray guns?”
    “No. Bad movies notwithstanding, they wouldn’t need them. The geniuses aren’t scared by ray guns, they’re scared by the ship itself.”
    Fletcher started, and