CHAPTER 23

The station had actually sent a car over to her hotel. The all news channel was rolling out the red carpet in every way but one. When Dee had been ordered to do the interview, by her uncle, she had figured they’d be sending a crew to film it in Stockton. Nobody had said anything about having to fly all the way to Washington DC, where the studios were, just so she could sit with a talk show host and listen to him crack jokes about basketball teams she had never heard of.

It was really no surprise to Dee that this television appearance was coming. The Japanese had announced the official launch of their mission. The crew had linked up with their rapidly accelerating starship and it had now left the gravitational pull of Earth. The Unified Corporate Office of Japan was proudly trumpeting the achievement of launching the first interstellar mission in history. This had ruffled a few feathers here in Washington, down at NASA, and even at OK headquarters in Tucson.

A barrage of media appearances was the American answer to the Japanese launch. It was obvious that the government was really hoping to make everyone forget about the Japanese by concentrating on their own mission. It made Dee wonder if the idiots in charge, including her uncle, understood that there would be no mission if she didn’t finish her job. Did they understand that they needed to leave her alone?

Apparently not.

This interview had cost her all kinds of time that she had not counted on. If having to fly to DC was not bad enough there had also been hours of prep time leading up to the flight. Uncle Isaac had sent up his media relations experts to give Dee a crash course in the dynamics of her interviewer, how he worked, and how to field his questions. The military and NASA types also felt a need to brief her on the matter. Much of it was repetitive and after they all finished telling Dee what she could not say, Dee had to wonder if this interview was not going to be much more than a smile and wink.

The only interesting part of the process had been when Dee got to see the interview that Jack had done. Dee had only been vaguely aware of it. She remembered it being mentioned back around the time they all went to Florida. She had never actually seen it though. Dee could count the times she had watched television on the fingers of one hand.

Jack really did come off pretty good on television and Dee was not sure why that surprised her. She knew he was educated, and fairly bright, but he had never struck her as the articulating type. His gruff voice, his semi Texan accent, gave him an almost ‘aw shucks’ kind of demeanor. Dee had never really thought of Jack as the ideal point man but the television interview had changed her mind a little. He came off as not only a competent engineer, pilot, and explorer, but had an almost philosophical side that Dee had never seen before.

Of course there were other things about his interview that seemed pure Jack Kelly. It was why her attitude towards him was only slightly altered. One particular question that he had answered stuck with Dee. Jack had been asked what he thought the biggest influence the expedition would be on pop culture . He laughed the question off, mostly, but did manage a reply.

“Well after Neil Armstrong walked on the moon,” Jack had told the interviewer, “people started asking that famous question. We can put a man on the moon but why can’t we do this or that? Makes you wonder what they’re going to be saying after this trip.”

Dee hoped she didn’t get stuck with saying anything that stupid. As the car turned into the studio parking lot, she had become quite apprehensive that she would do just that. She tried to fight those feelings off by thinking about work. She did so for the entire time she waited to go on camera.

Her mind was awash in a sea of engineering specs. None of them were new to her and, for that matter, they were the same basic dead ends that she had reached before. At least thinking about that aspect of her job kept her from mulling over the dead ends she reached via the constant bickering with Yurgani Vitosk.

He was always very quick to point out that she did not understand what he was trying to tell her. Dee always responded by pointing out that he was not aware of the engineering involved in the things he suggested. He normally, and quite bluntly, responded to that by stating the obvious. He was not the engineer. At that point Dee usually told him to shut up till he was one. How often did they reenact this same scene?

The bad part about all of that was that Dee was certain she understood what he was talking about. The physics he pioneered made up the bulk of required science and engineering courses at MIT. Vitosk thought otherwise, naturally. Apparently he knew some of Dee’s old professors and quite often referred to them by one of his favorite words, “moron.”

It would seem that the Russian was not all that happy with a lot of the follow up work that had been done with his theories. He rejected some of the notions that were now standard and, as far as Dee was concerned, well founded.

A good example of that was the habit that Vitosk had of always complaining about the charts drawn up to display the range of tachyons. While he didn’t dispute the basic data he did seem to have problems with how the information was displayed. Dee could not understand the difference. They had to put the data into some form that would make it presentable, didn’t they?

“Doctor Brewer,” Vitosk would say. He was always proper and polite, even when loosing his temper, “tachyons are being treated here as if they are particles or matter. They are not. Until you erase this entire concept from you mind, you will never figure out how to make your propulsion system work.”

She understood that they were not matter! Why couldn’t Vitosk just accept that everyone was not as stupid as he thought they were! Who did he think he was talking too? Dee was not some college freshman! The arrogance of that man! She had to wonder if sometimes he was reaching just to get the upper hand in their debates.

“I am not violating relativity,” he would insist. “Did relativity violate thermodynamics? No, Einstein did not contradict Newton, he expanded on it with new observations about the universe that were not possible in the time of Newton. That is all we have here.”

That always led into his lecturing, “the tachyon is not even a wave length. It is a side effect Doctor Brewer. It is the detectable energy from universal mechanisms that at this point we can only guess about. If I had to venture an opinion I would say that it is what happens when solid matter breaks down upon accelerating to greater than light velocities. That is precisely why photons fall into a gray area. Up until recently they were the only observation we had of this process. Even that was incomplete.”

Dee figured his explanation of this was an attempt at filling in the holes. Vitosk had stumbled onto all kinds of things that defied explanation. His insistence that the speed of light in a vacuum was not the metaphorical end of a scale, but rather the middle point, in the grand hierarchy of the universe, was not in his paper on Tachyons. He couldn’t prove it so, at best, that part of his theory was a flight of fancy.

None of this had really helped and Dee was certain that all of the resources they had spent in getting that man had been a waste. On that note she prepared to waste a little more of her most precious resource, time. The television people were ready for her and Dee was actually a little relieved. It meant the end of this ordeal was now at hand. It helped since it meant that her smile for the television audience was somewhat genuine. Wasn’t that called method acting?

Before the light came on over the camera, a television guy reminded her of the sound byte thing. She just nodded as she collected herself. The host talked with her a little during the television break, to ease her tension, and prepare her for what was coming. It was minimal. The OK public relations people had said he liked to do things off the cuff. They were very right.

As the interview shaped up, the thing that annoyed Dee the most was how he constantly kept directing the conversation to things she knew little about. Dee was mostly ignorant of pop culture and that seemed to be his favorite subject. She jumped at the chance to talk science, a subject that her host was the least interested in.

He rambled to Dee for a moment about the Japanese spaceship, “what our government keeps saying is that the Japanese are actually using nuclear bombs as gasoline, or as an engine, whatever you call it. Now there are those who are claiming this is dangerous. Doctor I guess you’re the person to ask. Wouldn’t something like this pollute outer space with all kinds of dangerous radiation?”

Dee felt like she had just been asked a question by a third grader, “there’s already so much dangerous radiation out there that any residue left by that would hardly be noticeable. I don’t think most people understand that we live in a radioactive universe.”

The host came back with, “well certainly it wouldn’t be as safe as here on Earth. Aren’t we protected from radiation by our atmosphere?”

“Um,” Dee was about to use one of Vitosk’s favorite words but managed to catch herself. “Our very planet is radioactive. It’s everywhere.”

The host looked befuddled but he was very good at making that work for him, “well why doesn’t everything die then?”

“Because for us it’s normal,” Dee had to keep thinking back to her briefings by her own media consultants. She suddenly realized he was leading her down a sidetrack. He wasn’t as stupid as he was pretending to be. They had said he would do that. She tried to nip it quickly before he switched to the dangers of space travel in general.

It had been appalling to Dee when she received her media briefing. As she had gathered, the news industry selected it’s stories about the same way that OK did it’s product lines. That struck Dee as fundamentally wrong. The media wasn’t trying to convince people to use some product in their bathroom! These people were supposed to be reporting the news! Yet they only went with stories that sold.

Right now, unfortunately, the big story about Hermes revolved around nonsense. There was a big push to say that starships were not environmentally safe. The doom and gloom types always managed to get press because their words tended to be more sensational. Dee had to wonder if it had occurred to anyone that these starships would never be in an environment that they could pollute!

“Radiation is a natural occurrence. When solid matter breaks down that is what you get. We’re all exposed to it from the day we are born till the day we die. The Hermes is more than adequately shielded. It’s not anything we’re really concerned with.”

The host would not let it go, “I thought you needed something like plutonium to get radiation? Isn’t that what they use in nuclear bombs?”

Dee bowed her head before continuing, “nuclear bombs are looking to get a maximum release of energy, in a very short time span, so they use the most unstable substance possible. The reality is that if you hit any solid matter with enough energy you’ll split or fuse the atoms and… well, boom.”

His next question sounded completely unintelligible to Dee. This time it was not because the question was just plain silly. This time, it was because Dee was no longer paying attention. Suddenly her mind began drifting back to something Vitosk had said in their endless debates. What Dee had just told her talk show host made her think of it. It couldn’t be that simple, could it?

“Doctor Brewer?” The host asked.

“I’m sorry,” Dee shook her head and then smiled, “what was that again?”

As the interview wound down Dee’s mind kept drifting right back to Vitosk. The ridiculous nature of the conversation she was having with her host made her almost miss the Russian. Yet Dee kept thinking one thing over and over again. It kind of made her angry. Vitosk had been right all along. For that reason alone the same words kept playing in her mind till long after she was flying back to California, “that son of a bitch!”