The Sparrow - Mary Doria Russell [49]
"Nah—navigation would be mostly automated, at least until you got near the system," George told her. "You’d just launch yourself in the right direction—"
"And pray," said Emilio, laughing a little crazily.
They fell quiet, talked out for the moment. "What do we do now?" Jimmy asked. It was almost eight o’clock, and he was beginning to think about what kind of trouble he could be in for not calling Masao Yanoguchi first.
It was Emilio Sandoz, face solemn and eyes alight, who answered him. "Start planning the mission," he said.
There was silence and then Anne laughed uncertainly. "Emilio, sometimes I can’t tell when you’re joking. Do you mean a mission or do you mean a mission? Are we talking science or religion?"
"Yes," he said simply, with a kind of hilarious gravity that kept the rest of them off balance. "Sofia, George, 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