Jim Nuffield

Prometheus Blue — An Excerpt 

Dr. Marissa Blake had been waiting outside the Oval Office with a few other people. They had introduced themselves graciously, but then had returned to their private conversation, leaving Marissa to look around a bit. She had never been in the White House before and she had to admit, it was a little intimidating. She wasn’t sure what to expect in this meeting with the president, but she had heard a lot about Lexington’s aggressive style and approach. She reminded herself to be strong and to try her best to speak truth to power.

And then the inner door opened from within and a man who didn’t look any older than twenty gestured. “They’re ready for you.”

“Go time,” Marissa said to herself. Walking into the power chamber, Marissa first noticed Lexington standing by her desk. The President gestured the Speaker of the House and the Senate Majority Leader to come in. “Dean, Vickie have a seat. You too Dr. Blake.”

Marissa knew that Lexington had run an extremely successful campaign. She had won the House and the Senate with comfortable majorities in each. Her political capital was huge and she liked having the image as a decisive leader who got things done.

“OK, who’s up?” Lexington asked.

Chief of Staff Bracewell spoke. “Madame President, Dr. Blake here is the discoverer of this fragment. I’ve asked her here to give us a briefing on its course, and to summarize the academic world’s perspective on our options for dealing with it. Dr. Blake?”

“Just a moment, George,” broke in Lexington. “Dr. Blake, I understand that you are responsible for discovering this, this star named in your honor, is that right?”

Marissa, always the scientist responded. “Yes and no, Madame President. The fragment was first observed –”

“Don’t pussy foot around, Dr. Blake. Did you discover this or not?” Lexington was working from her playbook to keep those around her off balance. Her modus operands was well known: ‘don’t let your counterpart run with their agenda. Impose your own’. The strategy had served her well and enabled her to savage her opponents in debate.

“Madame President,” Marissa began, “the fragment was first observed in the fifteen hundreds, with a number of recorded observations in the centuries since then. I was the first visual observer of the fragment.”

“OK, I appreciate you being very clear for the record Dr. Blake. But tell me: why were you so wrong about this?”

“What do you mean, Madame President?”

Randall Matton, SecDef jumped in. Marissa wondered if he was acting as her designated attack dog. “Dr. Blake,” he asked, “your President wants to know that as the face of this amazing star show we were supposed to see, why were you so spectacularly wrong in your prediction?”

“I wasn’t wrong, Mr. Matton. In fact, I was quite accurate. I publicly stated weeks ago that the probability of impact was about 68%. It seems that those odds didn’t pay off.”

“And what probability did you assign to this thing swinging around to come right for us?” Matton was challenging her.

“Admittedly it was a very low percentage, Mr. Matton,” Marissa responded. “In fact –”

Lexington interrupted again and stared hard at Marissa. “All right, all right that’s enough. We get that there’s plenty of CYA going around.” Despite the insult, Marissa held her gaze unblinkingly. “So what are you proposing we do about this then?”

 “We don’t have enough data yet to make a firm recommendation on the right course of action, Madame President. We –”

“Why not?” Lexington cut her off. “Don’t you people know these things?”

Unfazed, Marissa went on. “The Event just occurred a few days ago. I convened a meeting of our top scientists and engineers and we’ve been discussing our options. Do you want me to summarize?”

“Go ahead,” Lexington said. She briskly gestured at Franky, who immediately bought her a padded chair. She sat down without acknowledgement, facing the group turned towards her.

Marissa continued. “We’ve evaluated many different scenarios and tested them with computer model simulations run at both the MIT and Georgia Tech universities. We have reasonable agreement on our general conclusions. At the highest level, there are four potential courses of action:

“One, blow it up. Send enough explosive power out there to do the job that Barnard’s Star didn’t.

“Two. Divert it. Get a space ship or space ships out there and detonate an explosion beside the Fragment and as far from Earth as possible. If we could divert it just a tiny little bit early enough, we could make it miss our solar system.”

“Just a moment,” Jones said, Director, National Intelligence. “This is a huge thing. Almost as big as the Sun, I hear. A ‘tiny nudge’ as you describe it could hardly be expected to save the solar system.”

“Well, think of it this way,” Marissa answered. “Say you are on a ship setting out from Lisbon, Portugal and travelling to New York. You get to set the course one time during the voyage, and after that your direction of path is fixed until you reach land. If your direction setting is perfect, you’ll reach New York as planned. Let’s say you decide during the voyage that you’d rather go to Boston instead. If you wait until you get close to New York, you’ll have to turn the ship quite a lot to the north and with quite a lot of force to make it happen. But if you do it just after you set sail from Lisbon, only a tiny course correction is needed. So the earlier you do it, the less power and more impact you will have.”

“OK, OK that all makes sense,” Lexington said. “So we send a rocket up there with a bunch of bombs and give it a nudge. Got it. What else?”

“Well,” continued Marissa, “Option #3 is to get off the planet. Build ships to move to another planet or star system.”

That brought a derisive laugh from the president. “That’s rich. How are you gonna move six billion people off this planet? And where the hell are they going to go? Are you kidding me?”

“I’m just presenting the alternatives, Madame President. To round out the full picture. We may end up rejecting any of them outright and early,” replied Marissa.

“OK, and fourth?”

“Well, our fourth option is really ‘do nothing’. I’m speaking strictly scientifically here. But impact is nearly seven hundred years away and we could literally decide to ignore it and leave the problem to future generations.”

“Kick the can down the road?” Lexington asked incredulously. “That’s crazy. This is an action-based administration, Dr. Blake. My administration will always be seen as decisive. No way. The American people, the world, would never respect us for that. We’re taking care of this thing now. Just get that option out of our scenario planning, got that?”

“Yes, Madame President. I certainly was not advocating this course, just presenting for completeness,” Marissa added.

“All right, fine,” Lexington said. Looking up at the assembled group, she said “OK folks, do you have any questions for Dr. Blake?”

Randall Matton, Secretary of Defense: “Dr. Blake. Assuming we wanted to blow it up, how much explosive power would we need?”

“Well, we don’t know exactly yet. Obviously, it would be an enormous amount. I would say –”

“We’ve got an enormous amount right now,” Lexington cut her off.

“Yes, Madame President, we do,” Marissa responded carefully. She was realizing how high strung Lexington was. She judged it was important not to appear to belittle her small amount of knowledge on the subject, but rather to guide her gently to a reasonable course of action.

“The best way I think that I can describe it,” Marissa continued, “is to put this in relative terms. As we know, the United States and Russia have by far the largest arsenals of nuclear weapons in the world. These total roughly 4,500 active warheads and possibly another 5,500 that could be activated reasonably quickly with renewed fuel.

“Of course over the past few decades, both countries have reduced their nuclear stockpiles considerably, to perhaps 20% of what they once were. In addition, the average yield of each nuclear weapon has reduced dramatically too. Overall, the world’s destructive capability is about 4% of what it was during the peak of the cold war.”

“Or put another way, we have lots of room to expand,” Lexington added to nods all around.

“So how much do we have now, in terms of raw power?” the Senate Majority Leader asked.

Matton broke in with the answer. “We estimate that there are about 6,500 megatons of explosive power among the world’s arsenals.” Marissa nodded.

“Jesus,” breathed SecState Whitley. “That’s six and a half billion tons of explosive power? Surely that’s enough!”

“No, I’m afraid not. Not even close,” Marissa said. “Using our simulations, we estimate that if we combined every weapon on earth into one massive flotilla, we probably not even be able to blow up the moon. Maybe we could if we buried it deep under the crust, but even then not likely.”

Seeing that the assembled group was getting agitated, Marissa went on: “Of course that’s just a hypothetical.”

“So what would it take to blow up the fragment?” Lexington asked.

“Well, according to our current measurements, the fragment is about 29 million times the mass of the moon. We would need a hundred million times what we have, I would guestimate, to be sure.”

“That’s preposterous,” retorted Lexington. “I think you guys are playing it too safe. Randy, what do you think?”

Everyone turned to look at the secretary of defense. Like all of cabinet-level officials present for the meeting, he had been in his job for just a few months. Marissa had followed the news–Lexington had chosen her cabinet secretaries primarily for their toughness and their no-nonsense handling of political opponents. Cable news was full of speculation about Matton getting a plumb appointment in return for being the first to endorse Lexington. When the defense position came up, military experience did not appear to be a required qualification. Cable news hosts across the spectrum had openly questioned the level of independent thought exercised within Lexington’s cabinet. One thing seemed certain, the president liked action, not words. Marissa had no idea how this game was played: how does one pretend to be a person of wisdom and action, agree with Lexington at every opportunity and not appear to openly suck up to her, all at the same time?

“Well, I would say Madame President, that you’re right. Our best nuclear engineers have told me that stars are made of the stuff of nuclear bombs. I’ve heard a lot of people say that if we could just encourage a massive detonation inside the star, then a chain reaction might just finish the job. To my way of thinking, we should be able to accelerate our weapons production to a scale never before seen,” he concluded.

“I agree,” Lexington said. “Well said.”

Marissa spoke up. “Madame President, Secretary Matton is correct, global forces can absolutely build up destructive power massively in just a few short years. But experts are badly divided on the effects of nuclear explosions inside a star. There’s no experimental data to support Mr. Matton’s view on that. And the infrastructure needed to build and maintain that size of destructive force is almost unimaginable. Not to mention getting it to the –”

“You’re thinking small, Dr. Blake,” Lexington interrupted. “Not that I expected differently from the scientific community.” She looked around at her appointees. “We don’t think small in this room, do we folks?”

Everyone, even the elected congressman and senator quickly shook their heads and muttered things like “no way” or “not on our watch” and other forms of sycophantic agreement. Marissa just stared at the president stone-faced. Seemingly satisfied with the assent among her staff, Lexington turned back to Marissa.

“What else have you got?”

“Well, Madame President, I don’t know if we thoroughly evaluated the other option,” Marissa said.

“Which one?”

“Getting off this planet. It’s an enormous undertaking, but we have time, and –” Marissa was interrupted.

“I won’t hear of it.” Lexington broke in. “No. I can see it now. Tomorrow’s headline in the New York Times: ‘Lexington Decides Only the Elite Deserve Survival’, or some other crap like that. Like I said, Dr. Blake, not only are you thinking small, you’re thinking stupid now.”

Marissa looked around for some semblance of support. There was none. She wasn’t offended by the president’s words. Marissa was quite confident in herself. She viewed the president’s words as a reflection on the president, not on herself. Notwithstanding, she responded. “Madame President, we haven’t had time to really study our options. We need to convene the world’s experts, work this through, figure out the pros, cons, challenges and costs with each course of action. Why there may even be an option we haven’t considered yet.”

“Sure,” Lexington responded icily. “Let’s just get every goddam scientist in the world in one place so they can all argue and make names for themselves. Strut around like peacocks. Take forever just to tell people of action that they can’t do anything. Or give us stupid advice that the people wouldn’t accept.” Marissa started to speak. The President raised her index finger to silence her. “No. I will not sit around for the entire length of my first term while academics”–this last word came out bitterly–“control the discourse and dominate the airwaves with their pronouncements, their opinions and their fake wisdom.”

“Madame President,” Marissa said. She was the only person in the room who had no real reason to fear the president, as far as she knew. “It would be a mistake not to consider all the alternatives before committing to an action that might drive global policy for generations. The scientific and engineering communities –”

“Have failed us miserably,” Lexington interrupted, her voice rising to a near shout. “We’ve had enough grandstanding from star scientists who can’t get their predictions right. That’s enough!”

Lexington paused and glared at the group. With the exception of Marissa, everyone nodded affirmation. Marissa glared back, her arms folded. She realized that her voice was not being heard today, not in this office.

“No,” Lexington said. “I’ve decided.”

“You’ve decided?” Marissa asked incredulously. “Already? We don’t know enough to decide anything yet. We –”

“We know plenty, Dr. Blake. It’s pretty simple, really.” The irony of that phrase was not lost on the people in the room. To them the message was clear: this was no time for rogue opinions or views. Lexington paused again, this time for effect. This was a momentous event and she wanted to savor the moment.

“We’re going to blow the fucker up,” Lexington said.

And there it was. No-one in the room could know that these words would quickly be picked up by the press and repeated throughout history. Eventually, they would stand among the famous words of Winston Churchill’s ‘We shall fight them on the beaches’, Kennedy’s ‘ask not’, Reagan’s ‘tear down this wall’, King’s ‘I have a dream’ and other memorable phrases of history. Future scholars would judge if Lexington’s words will sit on the right side of history.

Marissa looked around the Oval Office. Everyone in the room sat back and relaxed. Decision made. Tension released. Actions to take. The group of politicians began to talk all at once, giving supporting nods. One fist pump came from the SecDef. The Chief of Staff said “Well said, Madame President, well said. The American people will see this as decisive. Everyone will see that something’s got to be done. And you are doing it. Bravo.”

It started with Bracewell. Within moments, the entire group was applauding the president. All except Marissa. She was fuming. But she was wise enough to realize that anything that she had to say at this point would fall on deaf ears. Worse, it might lead to her exclusion from participation in future high-level discussions on the matter. At 76, Marissa had shed her blind ideals. She knew that fighting for right and losing an overmatched battle may be honorable, but if it meant that you were excluded from the party, you couldn’t affect change from within. So she swallowed her resentment and her wisdom and vowed to step back and try to steer the ship from Lisbon, not from New York.

Lexington, stood in front of her supplicants, basking in the adoration. Now relaxed with the pressure of the decision behind her, she said “All right, good. Dean, Vickie, I want the House and Senate behind this. 100%. I need the full support of Congress. Got it?”

“Got it, Madame President, you’ll have it,” the Speaker said. Walter nodded on behalf of the Senate.

“OK. That’s all folks, that is all,” Lexington said, rising from her chair. The group all rose from their seats and was ushered out of the Oval Office. As she passed through the door, Marissa heard Lexington calling out “George, stick around a minute.” In her wake, the Secret Service agent closed the door, leaving Marissa on the outside.