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He glanced down at his game controller. Landscape shifted as his head moved. Infrared laser beams shining into his eyes and sensors tracking eye motions from the reflections. He looked up and the landscape shifted again. “The hills to my extreme left and right look alike.”

  “Identical, in fact. The bot’s full-circle view is compressed into ninety degrees, because you, unlike the bot, can’t see three-sixty. To your far left and far right, about ten degrees of landscape overlap for continuity. You get used to it.”

  Marcus had never seen the attraction of the Phoebe tourist bots. Moon bots: maybe. Over the years robotic lunar landers had deployed those to far-flung and quite varied terrain. The catch was cost: lunar bots were expensive. Once an armchair explorer sent a lunar rent-a-bot over a cliff or into a crevasse—that was that. And because of the comm delay to and from the moon, accidents did happen. And so, time on lunar bots did not come cheap.

  Lose a bot on tiny, nearby Phoebe—much less likely, anyway, given the shorter comm delays—and often someone could retrieve it. Recoverability made armchair exploration of Phoebe affordable.

  But Marcus “saw” PS-1 and Phoebe almost daily, with clearance to operate the surface-camera systems. (Not bots though. For security purposes, work bots could only be accessed with much higher clearance than he had, and then only from local terminals.) He had come to think of the rent-a-bots creeping about parts of Phoebe’s surface—when, from time to time, they strayed outside the tourist zone—as so much optical clutter.

  Still …

  He swept a hand across his controller. Gesture-sensing logic read the motion—more clever processing of infrared reflections. With an all but imperceptible delay the landscape slid to his right as the bot turned. Motion somehow emphasized the duplicated scenery at the extremes of the holo.

  If he recalled correctly, and the fast response suggested he did, Phoebe was all but overhead at the moment. He swept his hand back—and nothing happened.

  “Hold your fingers together,” Valerie said, “so you don’t clutter the IR reflections. Fingers don’t control individual tentacles.”

  Walking by gesture would be a great user interface. If his hand had eight opposable fingers. If the round-trip delay, ping-ponged through comsats, though far more manageable than in the lunar case, did not sometimes approach a full second. “Walking” involved a joystick and then only indicated a general direction. The bot’s onboard nav software figured how to locomote across the landscape.

  He swept his hand again, keeping his fingers straight, still, and together. This time, the landscape shifted as he expected. “I don’t get it. Exploring Phoebe seems like the last thing that would interest you.”

  “Patrick, a guy I work with, was into these bots right after Phoebe rentals came online.” She seemed about to say more, and to reconsider. “I tried to interest Simon in remote-controlled exploration. Any kid his age is going to spend time in VR, and this seemed much more civilized than the usual shoot-’em-ups.”

  “How’d that go over?”

  “A mom’s suggestion? About as well as you’d expect.”

  Marcus kept gesturing, the landscape swaying in response. “Am I ready for a stroll?”

  “Uh-huh. Let’s find a pair of bots somewhere interesting.” She did something with her controller and a translucent pop-up materialized over the landscape. “Okay, here’s an idle pair of bots near the Grand Chasm. You take bot three-twenty-seven.” With a gesture, she changed the scene.

  He had seen the Grand Chasm often enough, but never like this. Never so vast. What had changed?

  The horizon was way too close.

  “These bots can’t be more than a foot tall,” he said. “I’m used to watching from the safety cameras, atop eight-foot posts.”

  “Size isn’t everything,” she said. And blushed.

  Marcus pretended not to notice, guessing the words had just slipped out. If Valerie was one for flirting or double entendres he had yet to see it.

  He waggled a tentacle at her bot. “So, come here often?”

  Laughing, she managed to make her bot shrug. “Only twice, both times long ago.”

  “Hmm. Maybe this can be our place.” The line felt hokey, and yet like the first uncontrived remark he had come up with all evening.

  They each arched a tentacle over the railing to peer into the abyss, where scree piles dotted the dark, undulating depths. He saw bots stranded partway down and the tentacle tips of others peeking out from beneath piles of rubble. Trapped before the barrier went up, or did tourists climb their bots over the railing?

  The chasm sides looked unstable, but exactly how treacherous were they? Marcus needed several tries to grasp and drop a stray pebble over the railing. Under Phoebe’s scant gravity, the rock more floated than fell. Finally, picking up speed, it struck a canyon wall and triggered a slow-motion rockslide.

  Few people had ever entered the Grand Chasm, and—as much as geologists ached to explore Phoebe’s most prominent feature—none had gone down very far. Too dangerous, the risk assessments always concluded. Even flying in, a hopper’s exhaust could start an avalanche. Someday, perhaps, when mining was less of a priority, the staff could tunnel into the bottom of the rift.

  Someday remained distant.

  Marcus had long suspected an excess of caution after the early—and unrelated—incident during the establishment of Phoebe base. One geologist had already died on Phoebe, and NASA was determined not to lose another.

  Now, in eerie silence, as the slo-mo rockslide went on and on, Marcus reconsidered.

  Only how was he seeing this? Not sunlight—ever. Not earthlight, given the minimal comm delay. Phoebe had to be more or less overhead at the moment, deep inside Earth’s shadow. Moonlight? The moon was just past first quarter. The light it cast would strike obliquely, the shadows pointing in one direction—only the shadows around the bots pointed every which way. That suggested artificial lighting, yet he saw neither lamps nor spotlights.

  He gave up trying to work it out. “I’m confused. Where is our light coming from?”

  “Not light. Not as you mean it, anyway. The bots use lidar.”

  Like radar, only based on laser beams. “So this is all computer-synth imagery?”

  “Uh-huh.” She stood and stretched. “I feel like coffee. How about you?”

  “Sure.” He followed her into the kitchen, where a pair of binoculars sat on the counter near the back door. “Wildlife?” he guessed, pointing.

  “Stargazing.” She finished putting up the pot of coffee and grabbed the binocs. “Come outside.”

  The night was cool and cloudless. After the moon, waxing gibbous as he had remembered, The Space Place, playground of petrocrats, kleptocrats, and the other superrich, was the brightest object in the sky. Only this was a sky unlike any he had seen in a long time. Far from big-city lights, the stars blazed. Thousands of them.

  “Try these.” She handed him the binoculars—

  Through which countless more stars shone. And there, aglow in infrared from the residual heat of their last passes through sunlight, tiny shapes: an oval, a rectangle, and, the brightest of the three, a not-quite-round pearl. Phoebe’s sunshield and PS-1, seen at a bit of an angle, and The Space Place. Phoebe itself was too dark and cold to spot even with thermal imaging.

  Her hand was on his back, turning him. “Now look. No, up a little. A little higher.”

  “At what?”

  “You’ll know it when you’re there.”

  The Milky Way looked like spilt milk—with a scattering of diamond chips.

  “Wow,” he said. “Thanks.” He slowly turned, taking in the grandeur of the night sky. He eventually thought to offer Valerie her binocs. To the naked eye the night now seemed blacker than ever. “It’s very dark out here.”

  “Oh, crap!”

  Huh? “What’s wrong?”

  “You didn’t plan to drive back tonight, did you? If you think it’s dark here…”

  Think how dark it will be in the fore
st, crossing the mountains, he completed. “Not a problem. I have a room for the night in the observatory residence hall. You don’t need to chase me off just yet.”

  “That’s good.” A sudden, unexpected peck on the cheek suggested she meant it. “And if you’d like, how about you come by in the morning for breakfast?”

  Turning, slipping his arms around her waist, Marcus said, “I’d like that a lot.”

  Monday, May 8

  From the secluded anonymity of a black stretch limo, shared only with a longtime assistant, Yakov Nikolayevich Brodsky watched urban streets slip past.

  He always enjoyed visiting Chicago. With its extensive expatriate community, he dined well here, on everything from blini to borscht to stroganoff. The finest elaborate banquet cost less than a passable snack in Moscow—

  Because few here could have afforded Moscow prices.

  And so, in a very different way he relished the signs of America’s decline. The weed-choked medians. The empty stores and shuttered factories. The would-be day laborers milling about in a 7-Eleven parking lot. Most of all he enjoyed the waiting lines and per-gallon prices as they passed neighborhood gas stations.

  What a difference a decade could make.

  The limo sped downtown amid an escort of blue-and-white Chicago police cruisers. Lights flashing, they crossed under the rickety elevated train tracks that demarcated the Loop.

  “We’re almost there, sir,” the driver announced soon after. “Five minutes.”

  A driver! How quaintly decadent. But doubtless the driver with whom he had been provided also spied on him. “Very well.”

  Yakov savored, too, Chicago’s distinctive architecture. Perhaps his favorite example was the masterpiece that came into view as the motorcade turned onto Jackson Boulevard.

  For decades the Chicago Board of Trade Building had towered over everything else in this city. From the speeding car, alas, Yakov could not fully appreciate the edifice’s art-deco distinctiveness. He could scarcely even see the three-story statue of Ceres, goddess of agriculture, which crowned the building’s peak.

  This building projected a confidence and a presence, embodiment of a bygone era, of an American century. Not so the many modern glass-and-steel skyscrapers: their drab and boxy exteriors served only as metaphors for the hollowed-out American economy.

  Police had cleared the street and sidewalk in front of the Chicago Board of Trade Building and were keeping scores of picketing protesters behind sawhorse barricades. AMERICAN GRAIN FOR AMERICANS many placards read. STOP BURNING FOOD another popular sign demanded.

  Inwardly, he smiled.

  As the limo pulled up to the curb, eight serious men and women in somber garb strode from the main entrance. Yakov waited for the driver to open his door.

  “Welcome, Yakov Nikolayevich!” one of his greeters declared, a hand outstretched. “You honor us by your visit.”

  “Hello, Roland,” Yakov acknowledged. Roland Johnston was chief executive officer of the CBOT. Yakov would deal with no one lesser.

  “I trust your flight was satisfactory?”

  “Very comfortable. Thank you.” Washington, to which Yakov was posted as deputy trade representative, was only a short hop away. Shorter, in fact, than he would have wished. He so seldom found the opportunity to fly his Learjet. “My assistant, Irina Ivanovna Chesnokova.”

  “Ms. Chesnokova.” Roland introduced his aides and hangers-on, and then, with a quick gesture toward the protest, suggested proceeding inside. “I apologize for the ruckus.”

  “Democracy,” Yakov said. They could decide whether he intended sympathetic understanding or ironic dismissal. “Very good. I would like to see the trading floor.” The pits of the original trading floor, alas, had been filled with concrete, the new area turned into mundane offices. A travesty, Yakov thought. “And the electronic trading facilities, of course.”

  “Naturally,” an aide agreed. The corner of a folded datasheet peeked from a pocket of her jacket.

  The Americans would give him the grand tour, fawn over his every word, then wine and dine him. When he completed his business, their limo would whisk him back to the airport. And between?

  Between—to the certain dismay of the demonstrators outside, and countless others of similar opinion—his hosts would do everything in their power to expedite his purchase of corn and wheat. Two million metric tons of each, with intimations of yet larger purchases to follow.

  They would bow and scrape and cut corners on his behalf, because he did not need their help. He could, he would suggest obliquely, shift much of his purchasing to the Canadians and Australians. His minions could quietly accumulate much of his stated need in smaller lots, through Internet trading and via pliant third parties, before anyone would see the pattern.

  Only he wouldn’t. Visibility, not secrecy, suited his purpose. That so rarely happened.

  Ethanol substituted for gasoline. Higher grain prices made ethanol more expensive and less competitive. The mere specter of higher grain prices would spook oil markets around the globe. Whatever few extra dollars he might spend on grain—which, with great magnanimity, Russia would distribute to her friends in the Third World—would be more than repaid in higher energy prices.

  Roland Johnston was by then extolling the virtues of some recent upgrade to his organization’s electronic trading mechanism.

  Yakov just nodded. If anything important came up, Irinushka could summarize later for him. She had already asked several probing questions about the measures taken to assure the integrity of data in their computer systems.

  The men among Johnston’s staff crowded around her, drawn to her classical beauty, vying to impress. Some must suppose she frowned in concentration at their wit or wisdom, or struggled with English jargon, for their speech had gotten louder and slower. And she, never giving any sign, would despise them for their vanity and condescension.

  She had been born deaf. She had neither heard nor spoken until she was five, after receiving the cochlear implants masked by her long, flowing, red hair. When too many people spoke at once, or in chaotic environments like the trading floor, the din sometimes confused the implants’ noise filters and speech-discrimination circuits.

  Despite everything, she understood more than the fawning, self-important young men could imagine.

  “Are you seeing what you wanted?” Johnston asked.

  Yakov nodded. “This is a very worthwhile visit.”

  How strange it was to accomplish grand strategy by means as prosaic as buying corn. Because deputy trade representative was only his cover for his true position: a senior agent of the Federal Security Service.

  Russia’s interests often required methods more subtle—or far more dramatic.

  Saturday, May 13

  “What do you think, professor?” Eric the bartender asked.

  Patrick looked away from the 3-V in the corner. “I think the Yankees will win in a blowout.”

  Eric laughed. “That’s a given. No, I wondered if you were ready for another.”

  It was Patrick’s turn to laugh. “No, that’s a given.”

  “I like the way you think, professor. Be right back.”

  Three people sat along the bar and a few couples at scattered tables: Saturday night in Outer Nowhere. No families with children, thankfully. He still found families hard to take.

  Eric reappeared with a fresh, foaming pint. “Your beer, professor.”

  “Thanks.” Taking a long slow sip, Patrick returned his attention to the ballgame.

  He took no offense at professor. Eric called anyone from NRAO that. In the winter, when this ski resort bar would be hopping, Eric’s patrons were sport. Except any ski bunnies who Eric was hitting on. Them, he promoted to sportette.

  Snowshoe was far enough from Green Bank to keep Patrick’s coworkers to a minimum. Alas, because the resorts offered most of the area’s finer dining, that minimum was not zero. As, captured in the behind-the-bar mirror, the approaching man and woman reminded him.
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br />   “Hi, Patrick,” a familiar voice called cheerily.

  Swiveling on his stool, Patrick thought Valerie Clayburn and her NASA friend made a cute couple. Both wore casual slacks and knit shirts: dressed up for her and down for him. “Hi, Valerie.”

  “Marcus Judson. Patrick Burkhalter.” To Patrick, Valerie added, “You remember Marcus visiting us for a staff lunch?”

  The name? That, Patrick had forgotten. But Marcus himself, after the reception she had arranged for him? No way. The wonder was that Marcus had gotten past it. Hopefully he had seen through to the good person underneath. Though maybe he just had eyes in his head.

  Too much information. “Of course. Hello,” Patrick said.

  “Pleased to meet you. You’re the guy who put Valerie onto Phoebe bots, right?”

  Patrick shrugged. “You make it sound like I encouraged her.”

  Eric sauntered over, a napkin over his arm. “What can I get you, professors?”

  “Two glasses of the house Merlot, Eric,” Marcus answered.

  “You’ve been promoted to a regular,” Patrick said. And quickly: Valerie’s ambush had been only four weeks ago. “Feel honored.”

  “Patrick is an astronomer, too,” Valerie said.

  “Astrophysicist,” Patrick corrected.

  Marcus rubbed his chin, brow furrowed. “There’s a difference?”

  “A big one.” Valerie grinned. “Say I’m on a plane. If I feel sociable, I’m an astronomer. Everyone loves astronomy. When I want to read in peace, I’m an astrophysicist.

  “Marcus, I’ll get us a table. Patrick, will you join us for dinner?”

  Which part of astrophysicist was unclear? “I don’t plan to stay late tonight,” Patrick lied.

  Besides, Valerie did not need a chaperone. Patrick wondered if Judson would become a regular with her, too. Everyone would know when Judson stopped getting a room in the res hall for his weekend visits. Green Bank was a small town, and the observatory staff was even tinier.

  “If you change your mind,” Valerie persisted, then strode off for the dining room.

  Eric ambled back, setting down two wineglasses. “I started you a tab, professor.”