Jimmy. I was only speculating before—but this is a serious possibility, yes? Fitting out an asteroid for such a trip?'
'Yes,' Sofia confirmed. 'As Mr. Edwards said, the idea has been around for some time.'
'It would cost hell's own money,' George pointed out.
'No, I don't think so,' Sofia said. 'I know of bankrupted wildcatters who'd be pleased to sell off hulks that didn't pan out, with the engines in place. It wouldn't be cheap but neither would it be prohibitive, for some kind of corporation…' Her voice trailed off and she looked at Sandoz, as everyone else was. For some reason, he found what she had just said very funny.
None of them could have known what he was thinking, how much this reminded him of that evening in Sudan when he read the Provincial's order sending him to John Carroll. Where he met Sofia. And Anne and George, who found Jimmy. Who brought them all here, now. He ran his hands through the dark, straight hair that had fallen into his eyes and saw them all staring at him. They think I've lost my mind, he thought.
'I wasn't listening closely enough before,' he said, back in control. 'Tell me again how this could be done.'
In the next hour, George and Jimmy and Sofia outlined the ideas for him: how wildcatters selected and obtained suitable asteroids and outfitted them with life support, how the engines broke down silicates to use as fuel to move the asteroids to Earth-orbit refineries, how twenty-ton loads of refined metals were aimed, like the old Gemini capsules, at recovery sites in the ocean off Japan's coast. How you could scale the system up for long-range travel. Trained as a linguist and a priest, Emilio had a hard time understanding the Einsteinian physics that predicted that the transit time elapsed on Earth would be around seventeen years, while the effect of traveling near light speed would make it seem closer to six months for the crew onboard the asteroid.
'Nobody understands this the first time they hear about it,' George assured him. 'And most people who think about it at all just accept that the math works out this way. But let's say you go to Alpha Centauri and come straight back. When you get home, the people you left would be thirty-four years older but you'd only have aged about a year, because time slows down when you're near light speed.'
Jimmy explained how they could plot the course, and Emilio found that even less intelligible. And then there was the problem of making landfall. There were a lot of loose ends, George and Jimmy and Sofia acknowledged. Even so, it could be done, they thought.
Anne listened as closely as Emilio, but she was skeptical to the point of dismissing the whole business as silly. 'Okay, granted,' she said at last, 'I personally have a hard time understanding how maglev trains stay up. But look, there are half a million things that will go wrong. You'll use up the whole asteroid before you get there—the fuel will run out. The asteroid will crack apart if you mine it out wrong. You'll hit some random piece of interstellar shit and get smashed to atoms. You'll fall into one of the suns. You'll crash trying to land on the planet. You won't be able to breathe once you get there. There'll be nothing you can eat. The singers will eat you! Emilio, quit it. I'm serious.'
'I know,' he laughed. 'So am I.'
She looked around the room for allies and found none. 'Am I the only one who sees how nuts this is?'
''God does not require us to succeed. He only requires us to try, ' Emilio quoted quietly. He was sitting very still, in the farthest corner of the cubicle, elbows on his knees, hands clasped loosely, looking up at her with merry eyes.
'Oh, sure. Wave Mother Teresa in my face,' Anne said, getting angry. 'This is stupid. You guys are crazy.'
'No,' George insisted. 'It can be done, at least in theory.'
'Anne, we have, in this room, much of the expertise needed to make a go of this, or at least to attempt it,' Emilio said. 'Jimmy, could you navigate such an asteroid, using the same skills you use to locate astronomical targets?'
'Not this morning, but I could start working on it now and by the time everything's ready to go, I could be ready. There are very good astronomical programs that we can use. You don't just aim at where Alpha Centauri is now. You have to aim at where the system will be in however many years it'll take your craft to get there. But that's just celestial mechanics. You just have to decide to work the problem out. And you'd have to find the planet once you got to the star system. That might be harder, really.'
Emilio turned to Sofia. 'If you had freedom of choice, would you find it objectionable to work again for the Society of Jesus? Perhaps as a general contractor, to acquire and organize the material elements needed to put such a mission together? You have contacts in the mining industry, yes?'
'Yes. The project would be different from the kind of AI analysis I ordinarily do, but no more demanding. I could certainly pull together the materials, if I were authorized to do so.'
'Even if the mission were, at its heart, religious in nature?'
'My broker would have no objections. Jaubert's done business with the Jesuits before, obviously.'
'I cannot speak for my superiors,' Emilio told her, dark eyes opaque now, 'but I will propose that they buy out your contract, terminate it and work with you directly as a free agent. Your choice, not the broker's.'
'My choice.' She had not had a choice in so many years. 'There is no objection. That is, I have none.'
'Good. George, how different is the life-support system used for mining asteroids from the underwater system you are familiar with?'
George didn't answer right away. All the technology he'd mastered, he was thinking. All the miles he'd run. Everything—his whole life was an apprenticeship for this. He looked at Sandoz and said, steady-voiced, 'Same things. Only instead of extracting oxygen from water, they use rock. The oxygen is a by-product of the mining and fuel production for the engines. And, like Jimmy said, by the time we're ready to go, I could be up to speed.'
'Oh, now, stop right there,' Anne said flatly and looked straight at Emilio. 'This has gone far enough. Are you seriously proposing that George get involved in this?'
'I am seriously proposing that everyone in this room be involved with this. Including you. You have anthropological expertise, which would be invaluable when we make contact—'
'Oh, come on!' Anne yelled.
'— and you are a physician as well, and you can cook,' he said, laughing, ignoring the howl, 'which is a perfect combination of skills because we can't afford to have a doctor along who would only wait around for someone to break a leg.'
'Peter Pan. You guys are all set to go to Never-Never-Land and I get to be Wendy. Fabulous! There is a rude gesture that comes to mind,' Anne snapped. 'Emilio, you are the most sensible, rational priest I've ever met. And now you are telling me that you think God wants us to go to this planet. Us personally. The people in this room. Am I getting this straight?'
'Yes. I am afraid I think I do believe that,' he said, wincing. 'I'm sorry.'
She looked at him, helpless with exasperation. 'You are demented.'
'Look, Anne. Perhaps you're right. The whole idea is mad.' He moved from his corner to her perch on a table behind Jimmy's terminal, took her hands and went down on one knee, not in an attitude of prayer but with an odd playfulness. 'But, Anne! This is an extraordinary moment, is it not? Entertain, for this extraordinary moment, the notion that we are all here in this room, at this moment, for some reason. No, let me finish! George is wrong. Life on Earth is unlikely,' he insisted. 'Our own existence, as a species and as individuals, is improbable. The fact that we know one another appears to be a result of chance. And yet, here we are. And now we have evidence that another sentient species exists nearby and that they sing. They sing, Anne.' She felt his hands squeeze hers. 'We have to find out about them. There is simply no alternative. We have to know them. You said it yourself, Anne! Think of the theology.'
She had no reply. She could only look at him, and then at the others, one by one. Sofia, who was knowledgeable and brilliant and who seemed to think there was no insurmountable economic or technical difficulty in launching a mission. Jimmy, who was already working out the astronomical problems. George, whom she loved and trusted and believed in, and who thought they should be part of this. Emilio. Who spoke of God.
'Anne, at least, shall we not try?' Emilio pleaded. He looked about seventeen years old to her, a teenager trying to convince his mom that he'd be fine driving across the country on a motorcycle. But he was not seventeen, and she was not his mother. He was a priest, pushing middle age, and he was alive with something she could hardly imagine.
'Let me propose the idea to my superiors,' he said, his voice reasonable. He stood but kept her hands in his.
