Free Voyage to Alpha Centauri: A Novel by Michael D. O'Brien

Strachan McKie waxed personal today when we ate together in the cafeteria. It began when he banged down his tray on the table, sat himself across from me, and commenced: “They’re bona fide idiots up there on the secret deck.”
    “Why do you say that, Stron?” I asked, intrigued.
    “They’re protocol zombies, that’s why. I just had a talk with the chief flight astronomer, and asked him why the hell the on-planet astronomers aren’t invited upstairs. He said something to the effect that personally, personally , he’d be ever so pleased to have me take part in the cabal, but it’s against the rules. Against the rules, he said, the sniveller.”
    Then followed a stream of colorful Scottish invective. The mood tab behind his ear began flashing an ugly red. I heard a faint tinny voice coming from somewhere near it.
    “Shut up!” he bellowed, and tore the thing from his skin. Fuming, he tossed it onto the floor. Then he opened his shirt front and ripped a humvee from his chest, throwing it onto the floor as well.
    “Ouch”, he snarled, since his unpremeditated violence had made him lose a few white chest hairs.
    “Why would such a sensible idea be against the rules?” I pressed.
    “What?” he barked.
    “Why is it against the rules to have both sets of astronomers getting together?”
    “They don’t want any cross-pollination.”
    “Intellectual cross-pollination, you mean?”
    “Right. He says they want two sets of eyes observing from different perspectives. Triangulation. Depth perception.”
    “Sounds like nonsense to me, Stron. It’s good policy in some fields, but I can’t for the life of me see why it would be useful to astronomers in our situation. You’re all in the same spot, aren’t you? And you still will be when we land on the planet.”
    “Exactly”, he growled. “So what’s going on here?”
    “Maybe nothing more than knee-jerk territorialism.”
    “Maybe. At best, it’s knee-jerk compartmentalization, minus the knee.”
    I laughed. “Well, I wouldn’t let it get under your skin. Surely, they don’t see any more than we see on the public screens.”
    “Aye, but they do get to look at a whole lot more instruments than we do. I want to see the spectrographs. I want magnetic readings, gravity aberrations, full-spectrum wave records—the lot.”
    I now recalled that among his many achievements, Stron is the discoverer of the spectrum factor that is widely known in the astronomy community as the “McKie edge”. This is a light anomaly that he posits as a bio-signature of chlorophyll-bearing photosynthetic plants in atmospheres where ozone, oxygen, and methane are present.
    “You want to see the edge”, I said.
    “Damn right, I want to see the edge! But the boys upstairs want to keep it all to themselves so they can write the definitive papers on the big discovery. One small step for a man, one giant leap for the onboard astronomers.”
    His face was now flaming, his hands clenched.
    “You may be right”, I said. “Still, it’s not worth a heart attack.”
    That brought him up short. He glared at me with one eye closed.
    “What’s your favorite sport?” I asked.
    “My favorite sport?”
    “Yeah. Mine’s basketball. What’s yours.”
    “Don’t be ridiculous, Hoyos. And don’t distract me. This is serious.”
    “I know it’s serious. Answer my question.”
    He snorted. “Curling.”
    “Stones on ice?”
    “No, not just stones on ice. Not tin box rinks and artificial ice with synthetic stones smacking while the vidcams blink-blink-blink.”
    “Then what . . . really . . . is curling?”
    “You’re a tricky man, Hoyos.”
    “I know. So, what’s real curling?” Stron sat back and closed his eyes.
    “Curling is every sense you can imagine uniting in concentrated ecstasy. It’s art. It’s war. It’s history. It’s sheer poetry.” He opened his eyes. “ Hard poetry, you understand.”
    “That’s an interesting insight. In what way is it hard