Creative Commons – The Plainsrunner – Chapter Thirty-Eight

Continuing the serial release of The Plainsrunner under a Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike license – (CC-BY-SA).

Blunt’s sneery smirk is back.

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rjb

Chapter Thirty-Eight – Sunward

The loss of five members meant that the team had to reach into the pool of backups, which is why Blunt ended up on Tallgrass’s crew. The first he knew about it was when Blunt stuck his head in the door and said, “Hey Runny!”

Tallgrass looked up from his book, and his face must have fallen because Blunt’s lit up with a sneery grin. Tallgrass said, “What are you doing here, Blunt?”

“I live here,” said Blunt, looking for signs in Tallgrass’s face. “I work here.” He moved into the room. “We’re teammates now, Runny. You’re going to be seeing a lot of me.”

“Well, come on in, teammate,” said Tallgrass. “Pull up a pad. Take a load off.” He reached for his bookmark, because he was sure he wouldn’t be getting any reading done for a while.

Blunt snatched the book out of his hand, losing his place. “Whaddaya reading?” he said, looking at the cover. “Orbital harmonics?” He sneered and tossed the book down. It bounced off the desk and hit the floor, bending some pages. As Tallgrass picked it up and straightened the pages, Blunt said, “Why bother reading that crap? The computers take care of all that.”

“I like to know,” said Tallgrass. “I like to know everything about the subject.”

“Why? You don’t need to know all that extra stuff. Or maybe you’re sucking up. Is that it, Runny? Are you still sucking up? You don’t have to, you know. You’re already in.”

“Is that what you did?” asked Tallgrass. “Did you suck up to get in?”

Blunt’s insinuating smirk was replaced by a frown. “No!” he said. “I didn’t have to suck up. My father knows people.”

“So, you’re here because your father knows people.”

“That’s not the only reason,” shouted Blunt. “He got me in, but I know my stuff. I just don’t bother with the useless extras.”

“I guess that’s where we differ, Blunt. To me, knowledge isn’t useless.” He put the book on his desk, bookmark firmly in place. “Besides, I’m helping Seagrass, too.”

“Yeah. That was too bad. It’s too bad your cripple friend can’t be here, Runny. But on the bright side, you got me.” Blunt got up and walked to the door. “I’ll be seeing you around,” he said as he left.

Tallgrass sat and thought for a long time, then he sighed, shook his head, and picked up his book.

Sunward asked Grasswind to use focused beam radio when communicating, as they had done with their first message. They said they didn’t want to risk the “destroying angels” picking up their signals and coming back to punish them again.

That was interesting. Grasswind asked Sunward if they had a record of the first attack. Did they have solid evidence of what happened?

Sunward replied that they had accounts of the events as written down by their prophets and seers in the sacred language of the Great Mystery.

Okay, said Grasswind. So no actual data, then.

The heavenly inspired word is better than your base data, was the reply.

There wasn’t much to say to that, so Grasswind allowed that they had legends of their own, which bore some loose similarities to the picture they were putting together out of the facts. Sunward told them bluntly that their legends were wrong and that they would be straightened out in time.

Over the months, talk eventually came around to Grasswind’s L1 Lagrange point, and its odd behavior. Sunward said that they had noticed it too, and they were going to fly out there and investigate it.

Grasswind was surprised and pleased to discover that their sister planet also had a space program. They marveled at the coincidental timing after all these millennia. Sunward told them that it was no coincidence. They’d had a stable civilization with moderate technology for centuries, and they only began the space program when Grasswind’s promiscuous use of radio alerted them to the danger. What danger? Why, that the venal people from the wrong planet might get there first.

When asked tactfully why they had radio technology in the first place, they replied that it was to monitor for just such a situation as this.

“We can’t let them get there first,” said Tallgrass, his voice rising. He was in Trueway’s office, with the early morning sun beating off the sea and streaming in the window.

Trueway, surprised by the early visit and still waiting for his cup of tea to cool down enough for the first sip, said, “Why not?”

Tallgrass hesitated. “I don’t know,” he said. “I just know we can’t.”

Trueway smiled and raised his cup. His top lip quivered tentatively over the hot liquid before withdrawing. He lowered the cup to his desk. “I know what you mean,” he said. “I don’t want them to get there first either. But we need more than our feelings if we want people to change the schedule and speed up the program.” He eyed the tea again.

Tallgrass’s cup was steaming on his side of the desk, ignored. “We don’t have to speed it up much,” he said. “We’re almost ready to go now.”

“No we’re not. We’ve barely finished the first vessel, and we’ve hardly begun on the second one.”

“We don’t need to take both of them. We can have the first one checked out, stocked and ready to go in a couple of weeks.”

“A couple of weeks?” Trueway picked up his cup again and took a drink, flinching when it burned him. “That seems hasty. I don’t want to send people out there unprepared.”

“Okay, three weeks then. That’s plenty of time to finalize the planning, program the computers with the flight parameters, prepare the vessel and complete our training.”

“But your training isn’t nearly complete. There’s still another year of it scheduled.”

“That’s just repetition. We know everything we need to know. I’m telling you, we’re ready to go.” He picked up his cup as Trueway turned to gaze out the window. They both sipped and thought for a few minutes, then Trueway turned back.

“I agree with you,” he said, making Tallgrass grin. “But we need to convince everybody else. The Director. The governments. It won’t be easy.”

It turned out it wasn’t that difficult after all. The Director had been preparing to call him that morning, and was pleasantly surprised by his call. Representatives of all the governments had already called her, urging her to bring the launch forward as much as possible. “So Deputy Director,” she said, “what can you do to satisfy their wishes?”

“Well Director,” he said, “as Mission Generalist Tallgrass says, we can be ready to launch in three weeks. Two if we decide to push it.”

“I see,” said Director Allbright. “Tallgrass is there, is he?”

“Yes. He came first thing to try to get the program accelerated.”

“Good man,” she said. “Does he happen to have an estimate for how long it will take the Sunwardians to get there?”

Trueway switched the phone to speaker and repeated the question to Tallgrass, who said, “Yes, Director. It depends on many factors, of course, but our best guess is six weeks, if they left right when we got the message.”

“Six weeks,” she said. “And if we launch in three weeks, we can be there four weeks from now. Are you sure about these numbers?”

“Yes,” he said, “depending on when they launched, of course. I made some estimates, but Seagrass confirmed them with solid calculations.”

“Seagrass,” she said. “Your friend. Of course. Very sad.” They shared a short silence, then she said, “I visited him in the hospital shortly after the incident, and was very impressed. When I tried to congratulate him for his unselfish act – saving you – he wouldn’t have any of it. He only wanted to tell me how important you are to the program. You have quite the friend there, Mission Generalist Tallgrass.”

“I know, Director, but he’s the one who’s important to the program. He knows more about it than anybody.”

“Okay,” she said. “We obviously have a case of mutual admiration here. But from where I stand, you’re both important. That’s why you will be on the flight crew, and Seagrass will be in Mission Control. Be ready to launch in three weeks.”

“Yeah!” said Tallgrass, taking a large swig of his tea. He couldn’t wait to tell Seagrass.