For the first time since he’d known her, Gloria Hazeltine looked surprised. “But I thought your fuel cell was dead.”
“We’ve resurrected it,” O’Connor said happily. “We’ve got enough hydrogen to run the heaters most of the night.”
“Where’d you get the hydrogen?” Glory Hallelujah was wide-eyed with curiosity.
“Bug farts,” shouted Faiyum, from over O’Connor’s shoulder.
They made it through the night almost comfortably and spent the next day filling balloons with methane, then breaking down the gas into its components and filling the fuel cell’s tank with hydrogen.
By the time the relief ship from Tithonium landed beside their hopper, O’Connor was almost ready to wave them off and return to the base on their own power.
Instead, though, he spent the day helping his teammates and the two-man crew of the relief ship attach the storage racks with their previous ice core onto the bigger vehicle.
As they took off for Tithonium, five men jammed into the ship’s command deck, O’Connor felt almost sad to be leaving their little hopper alone on the frigid plain. Almost. We’ll be back, he told himself. And we’ll salvage the Viking 2 lander when we return.
Faiyum showed no remorse about leaving at all. “A Jew, a Catholic, and a Muslim walk into a bar.”
“Not another one,” Bernstein groused.
Undeterred, Faiyum plowed ahead. “The bartender takes one look at them and says, ‘What is this, a joke?’”
Even Bernstein laughed.
A PALE BLUE DOT
Galileo wrote, “Astronomers . . . seek to investigate the true constitution of the universe—the most important and most admirable problem that there is.”
Looking across the frontier of space, astronomers have found in recent years thousands of planets orbiting other stars. But so far, none of these exoplanets resembles Earth very closely. No one has yet found a “pale blue dot” like our own planet out among the stars.
Not yet.
But the search goes on, year by patient year, using constantly better instruments and ideas. Sky-scanning telescopes dot mountaintops all across our world. Telescopes have been placed in space, to look farther and better.
And as the frontiers of knowledge and discovery move on, the search for a pale blue dot continues.
The most important and most admirable problem that there is.
Tom Daniels tiptoed down the shadowy concrete corridor toward the door marked STAFF ONLY.
This is cool, he said to himself. Like a spy or a detective or something.
He was celebrating his fifteenth birthday in his own way. All summer long he’d been stuck here at the observatory. His father had said it would be fun, but Tom wished he’d stayed back home with Mom and all his friends. There weren’t any other kids at the observatory, nobody his own age anywhere nearby. And there wasn’t much for a bright, curious fifteen-year-old to do, either.
He remembered last summer, when he’d stayed home with Mom. At least at home I could go out in the backyard at night and look at the sky. He remembered the meteor shower that had filled the night with blazing streaks of falling stars.
No meteor showers here, he thought. Not this summer. Not ever.
Sure, Dad tried to find busywork for him. Check the auxiliary battery packs for the computers. Handle the e-mail going back to the university. If that was fun, Tom thought, then having pneumonia must be hysterical.
There was one time, though, when Dad let him come into the telescope control center and look at the images the big ’scopes were getting. That was way cool. Stars and more stars, big groady clouds of glowing gas hanging out there in deep space. Better than cool. Radical.
That was what Tom wanted. To be in on the excitement. To discover something that nobody had ever seen before.
But Dad was too busy to let Tom back into the control center again. He was in charge of building the new telescope, the one that everybody said would be powerful enough to see Earth-sized planets orbiting around other stars. Other worlds like Earth.
All the observatory’s telescopes were searching for planets circling around other stars. They had found plenty of them, too: giant worlds, all of them much bigger than Earth. None of them had an ocean of blue water. None had fleecy white clouds and an atmosphere rich with oxygen. No “pale blue dot” like Earth.
Dad said this new ’scope just might be able to find a pale blue dot out there among the stars: a pale blue dot like Earth.
So Tom tiptoed to the locked steel door, all alone in the middle of the night, determined to celebrate his birthday in his own way.
He had memorized the lock’s electronic code long ago. Now he tapped the keypad set into the concrete wall and heard its faint beeps. For a moment nothing happened, then the door clicked open.
What if somebody’s in the control center? Tom asked himself. What if Dad’s in there? I’m supposed to be asleep in my bunk.
He shook his head. None of the astronomers worked this late at night unless something special was going on. The big telescopes outside were all automated; the computers collected the images they saw and recorded all the data. Only if something unusual happened would anybody get out of bed and come down here.
