Free Analog SFF, June 2011 by Dell Magazine Authors Page A

with only bad memories to show for the day. Whereas he . . .
    He still bore the scars. Patrick was more than qualified to coordinate routine maintenance and teach visiting astronomers to operate the gear, so it hadn't been entirely a pity appointment. More like an I'll owe you one arrangement between execs at the apex of Big Science.
    After the Jules Verne probe went missing, JPL wanted Patrick gone . NASA did, too, but even more, they wanted to put a halt to the embarrassing publicity. No matter what anyone suspected, they could only prove that he had cut procedural corners to upload an emergency maneuver. That the distant probe went silent days later could have been pure coincidence.
    And so Patrick had made clear what would keep him from giving interviews and suing for wrongful termination. He required ongoing access to a big dish—somewhere.
    Without too much torture of the English language, Green Bank was somewhere.
    And so he went in one not-so-easy step from the principal investigator of a major interplanetary probe to lowly observatory staffer. Training and maintenance offered plenty of opportunity to use radio telescopes without grant applications sure to be rejected.
    He used the big dishes every chance he could get.
    After the divorce—no way would Anna move here from Pasadena—what else did he have to do?
    He had sworn to Anna that things would turn out all right. That maybe this had happened for a good reason. He would not have trusted him, either, especially given how little he had been able to explain, but it still hurt that she hadn't. More than anything, he missed the kids. He wondered if Rob and Clarissa would ever understand, or forgive him for the divorce.
    When Patrick tuned back to the present, Judson remained in the hot seat. Only the objections varied: from powersats, miles across, getting in the way of observations, to the heat they would reradiate as infrared, to minutiae of RF interference. Some people argued for the joy of arguing. Par for the course here, but Judson could not know that.
    Along the way, an admin slipped into the lounge and handed Valerie a folded sheet of paper. Another joy of life in the quiet zone: runners instead of cell phones. Valerie grimaced at whatever she found written, dashed off her own note, and handed it to Judson, then rushed off.
    By the time the hyperbole reached, “Powersats will mean the end of astronomy until"—yeah, right!—"someone builds an observatory on the far side of the moon,” Patrick had had enough.
    "There's more to life than astronomy,” he snorted. Too bad Valerie had left. If anyone needed the reminder, she did. But for Simon, she might never go home. “And life takes power, people. Lots and lots of power."
    Turning, Tamara gave Patrick an Et tu, Brute stare, but from across the room a couple of engineers nodded.
    "We learned to live with DirecTV,” Ernesto Perez conceded.
    To which someone snapped, “Yeah, by giving up listening on those frequencies."
    Rekindling the debate, from which it took the tech director noisily sliding back her chair to bring a halt.
    * * * *
    At least, Marcus thought, tucking his notes from the lunch into his shirt pocket, one secret of the Universe had been revealed. Town meetings were not the worst way to spend a day.
    If he had correctly parsed Valerie's scrawl, she was retrieving a sick kid from school and going home for the rest of the afternoon. One scribble might have said “single mom,” to explain her disappearance. It was too bad about her son, but Marcus was happy to make a quick getaway.
    Only driving home, as much as he tried to enjoy the Appalachian scenery, he couldn't. Ellen's recent rebuke kept nagging at him: Have you considered the possibility someone else might know something?
    If he could get past Valerie bushwhacking him, she had given him a lot to ponder.
    * * * *
    Wednesday, April 19
    Marcus poked at a telecom console, setting parameters for the upcoming conference call, and thinking: