1 Chapter 1

1

I burst into the room that had been set up for me. Late. I was so late.

“Sorry I kept you waiting, General.” I rushed over to greet the man I’d kept waiting. I’d met with a colleague at Roswell a few weeks before regarding some of the artifacts discovered there, and when Dr. Perkins had called to discuss his latest find—2060 was proving to be an excellent year not only for him but for the future of Terra—I’d been so fascinated I’d lost track of time.

“Not at all, Dr. Van Allyn.” General Banks thrust out a hand, grabbed mine, and vigorously shook it. “We just got here ourselves. Thanks so much for meeting with us.”

“I’d say it was my pleasure, but there’s nothing pleasant about this.” I glanced at the major who stood at his elbow.

“Major Reiner is the liaison between the Air Force and the press. Major, this is Elwyn Van Allyn, the premier authority on—”

I cleared my throat.

“—nanoparticles.” He gave a bland smile.

“Dr. Van Allyn.”

“Major.” I nodded at him. In the normal course of events there would be some civilians involved in a meeting of this nature as well, but this wasn’t normal in any sense of the word, not with Air Force Air Police cordoning off the building to discourage anyone who was curious about what was going on inside. Mankind had been reaching for the stars since Vostok 1 almost a century ago, and there were still conspiracy theorists who believed we’d never been to the moon. They’d have liked nothing better than to throw a monkey wrench into the works, even if that meant the ultimate destruction of the human race.

“I’ve read a good deal about your work. On nanoparticles.” The major laughed deprecatingly. “Of course, I could only follow two words out of five.”

“That many?” General Banks patted his shoulder.

Major Reiner smiled, then became serious and tapped the com-link in his ear. After listening for a moment, he murmured something into it, tapped it again, and turned to the general.

“If you’ll excuse me for a moment, sir? There seems to be a minor glitch…”

“Yes, of course, Major.” Banks waited until we were alone before saying, “All right, now, we’d better get on with this. Just let me make some room on this table.” He pushed aside the platter of sandwiches the commissary had provided.

“Thanks.” I opened my briefcase, took out the tablet containing the specs regarding this meeting, and opened the program.

“We’re finally, reallydoing this. I can hardly believe…” He looked over them, his expression becoming more and more dazzled. “This hyperdrive you’ve developed is absolutely amazing, Doctor—sheer genius.”

“Mmm.” It wasamazing, but I could hardly agree that I was a genius. What I was supposed to have discovered had been with an assist from Roswell.

Roswell had been—was still—so highly classified that most people had forgotten about it completely. Everyone thought we scientists had discovered all this new technology on our own.

Except for those same conspiracy theorists who expounded that nothing indicated our science was advanced enough to come up with any of this.

It was fortunate no one took them seriously.

I tapped an icon, and an image sprang up. “This is what enabled us to launch the MRVtwo days ago. Venus was closer to Terra at that point, only about twenty-six million miles, and we needed to get the MRValoft.”

“Hmm. But you’re taking off for Mars this afternoon, aren’t you?” Banks worried a cuticle, an odd reaction for a man of his stature.

“Yes. After a few last minute tweaks, we got the final approval to launch earlier today, which is fortunate—Mars will be about forty-two million miles away. The next time it’s closer than this will be in 2287.”

“That’s more than two hundred years from now.” The general’s complexion had taken on a sickly pallor.

“Yes. And we just can’t wait that long.” I paused to observe him more closely. Unbeknownst to many, the population of Terra would reach critical mass a good deal before then. “Unless mankind gets its head out of its collective asses and pays attention to what the ecologists have been telling us for decades, we’ll need to find a planet suitable for colonization. And if neither of these happens before 2100, then Malthus’s theory will unfortunately come to pass.”

The general shuddered. He was a smart man and knew what that meant. But it wasn’t just cannibalization that Homo sapiens had to worry about. We’d poisoned the seas and the air, and the population had grown to a point where soon we wouldn’t be able to sustain the billions on Terra.