TRILLION-DOLLAR
AED BUDGET PASSES
STOCKHOLM, 23 July (IP). The World Order Council today passed by a narrow margin appropriations totaling $877,000,000,000 for the operation of the Agency for Extraterrestrial Development in fiscal 2053-4.
Opposition to the bill, which passed by a vote of 563 to 489, was headed by Minority Leader Jakob Tshombe (L., Xerox), who has threatened to resign his post in protest to the record-breaking budget.
Almost three times the size of last year’s budget, most of the money is earmarked for the AED’s Sirius crash program. The most expensive part of this program is the construction of a Levant-Meyer Translation facility on a planet circling Tau Ceti.
Critics of the program point out that the Sirius system is almost certainly planetless, and that the LMT requires a target planet. The AED, however, claims that at the range of Sirius from Tau Ceti (less than thirteen light-years), the target body need be no larger than a small asteroid.
42 – CHAPTER TWELVE
TAU CETI MISSION, 14 FEBRUARY 2054
PERSONNEL:
1. TAMER 7 TANIA JEEVES. FEMALE, 33. 11TH MISSION. SUPERVISOR.
2. TAMER 5 GUSTAV HASENFEL. MALE, 28. 8TH MISSION.
3. TAMER 4 (PROB) JACQUE LEFAVRE. MALE, 28. 7TH MISSION.
4. TAMER 3 CAROL WACHAL. FEMALE, 26. 4TH MISSION.
5. TAMER 2 VIVIAN HERRICK. FEMALE, 26. 3RD MISSION.
EQUIPMENT:
5 GPEM MODULES
1 PERSONNEL RECORDER
1 HOMING FLOATER (SECOND SHOT)
(ADDITIONAL EQUIPMENT WILL BE SUPPLIED ON TAU CETI FOR SECONDARY TRANSLATION TO SIRIUS SYSTEM (SEE ATTACHED SPECIFICATIONS))
POWER REQUIREMENT:
2 SHOTS 9.84699368131 SU, TUNING
@ LOCAL TIME
07:45:28.28867BDK200561
07:48:11.38557BDK200560
MISSION PRIORITY 1.
FUNDING #999999 SIRIUS 90%
#000105 GEOFY 10%
Jacque and Carol went to Hell the week of its first rainfall.
Hell was the logical name for the only planet in Tau Ceti’s biosphere. No bodies of standing water, constant dust storms, Sahara-like temperatures even at the polar regions.
They landed near the equator, where Tau was an amorphous white glare overhead, where abrasive clouds sped along the ground on hurricane winds almost hot enough to boil water. Dunes melted and formed with surreal swiftness around them and there was no horizon, only white sand at your feet and white sky overhead and a white storm all around.
The wind loved only flatness; it had long since ground every mountain and hill down for dust to fill the valleys, and it screamed displeasure at their height and tried to blow them down.
Jacque could tune out the shriek of the wind outside, but the suit’s stabilizer moaned a wavering complaint as it fought to keep him upright. The sound all but deafened him, and made his teeth buzz.
Prudent animal instinct was telling him he’d be better off anyplace else. He resisted the urge to run blindly away, but did keep walking in nervous circles, looking for the floater. So did everyone else.
After a few minutes the floater appeared, tacking in against the wind. It bobbed like a bucking horse as they struggled on to it, then spiraled crazily up through the storm.
At about two thousand meters they hit a steady strong tailwind and started homing north, toward the polar settlement. Below them the top of the storm was an unbroken white surface, more like a snowscape than a maelstrom.
The storm began to break up as they moved north. Mottled ground was visible through twisting cyclone swirls of cloud. Eventually it turned hilly; nearing the pole they had to reach for altitude to clear the frost-dusted tops of mountains, Himalaya-sized but weathered into gentle lines.
And in a low bowl, protected by mountains on all sides, a sudden alien splash of green. Gardenspot. They dipped over it but didn’t land. The floater was homing toward where the LMT was being built, in another valley beyond.
It had taken six months to manufacture a crystal large enough to be practical and also free of internal flaws; a crystal with one microscopic bubble inside will explode with disconcerting force when you turn on the juice.
The crystal was in place and calibrated now, but the installation bore little resemblance to the streamlined efficiency of Colorado Springs. The first sign of it Tania’s team saw was a glittering metallic spiderweb covering acres of mountainside-the antenna that collected power from an orbiting microwave laser. A few kilometers away the actual station sat, an aluminum dome dwarfed by four concentric rings of huge squat metal cylinders, which were the fuel cells fed by the antenna. Cables linked everything in a confusing but graceful skein of catenaries.