Heinlein's Children

“But for some damned reason, those NASA bureaucrats have decided to encrypt all the data from the Mars Observer!”

I laughed, “What’s the matter? They afraid of finding out the Face on Mars is really a face?” Dub flashed a meaningful look at me, as if he might have believed my off the wall comment.

He rolled out his swivel chair, plopped down into it, remained quiet for a full minute. Outside, the real national anthem of Washington, D.C.—the full-throated police siren—wailed past the Old Executive Office Building. The place had not been built to minimize noise—how much noise had there been from carriages and horses anyway? The muggy May afternoon reminded me that the magnificent building had been constructed long before air conditioning, too. Dub said, “Might be so, Arlan. Why else would they encode the stuff?”

I blurted out, “Boy, that would be something. We’d have a space program again, for sure.” Somewhere in those next few milliseconds both our sci-fi minds zeroed in on the obvious solution: “What if—” we said simultaneously, then stopped, laughing.

“You can find out the encryption codes, Dub?” He nodded; as we had both discovered long ago, in the government business there are sci-fi fans and fans of space infiltrated simply everywhere, and their allegiances belong to higher concepts than petty bureaucratic rules.

“And, Arlan, you know the folks at JPL who will handle the data?” I nodded. We rolled our swivel chairs over to the center of the room and slapped a “high five.” He swung around, opened a little-used lower drawer in his desk, pulled out a half-full bottle of some Scotch he’d brought back from an Air Force symposium in Scotland, years back. He poured an inch of the golden liquid in each of our empty coffee cups. We toasted ourselves, our future.

“To Space!” Dub said with a smile.

“Fuck the State!” I whispered.

Wasn’t really that hard to do what had to get done, back there in the early ’90s, even though our first attempt turned out rather poorly, at first. Folks didn’t carry around Know-It-Alls to record every damned thing they did, or every conversation they had. No, not even criminals had to carry them—we didn’t even have KIAs, you must recall they weren’t even invented yet. So, anyhow, it was fairly easy to get committed, yet anonymous, people to do what was necessary to help the human race get into Space.

There was John at JPL, and Chuck at Orbital Corporation, and Kijo at NASA and Mike at NSA and Alyta out in Tucson with her multitude of friends of all ages, all over the scattered remnants of the fast-disappearing Space Program. And Dub’s Air Force connections helped all along the line; those SSTO guys were anxious to have a mission before they were zeroed out of Congress’ budget. With Harry out near the VLA and Ralph and Fred and Creve at Sandia, and the hacker FreeNet gangs at Bell Labs and Intel and BDM, why pretty soon we had the whole thing fairly well scoped out, coordinated and encrypted via the Internet link. We’d intercept the real Mars Observer data in real-time, erase it, overlay it with our own digitally-produced stuff, blow some minds, freak out the world, and get us all back on track, out toward the stars where we belonged.

Afraid of leaks? Why no, we weren’t—we were all dedicated to The Dream, and any traitor would have been shunned forever, banned from The Dreamers, and that would have been punishment too severe to contemplate.

So that’s what we did, our little-but-growing band of techno-conspirators: we diddled around with the data so that it would show The Face and The Pyramids and The City on Mars. This caused a bit of trouble, at first—our initial attempt to test our data-bait-and-switch accidentally screwed up the Mars Observer, and NASA lost a billion-dollar probe. We were all pretty bummed out for a while, but then the new “faster-better-cheaper” philosophy swung into play, and with Single-Stage-To-Everywhere rockets, a lot of probe stuff was soon en route to Mars. So we gave it to them, to the whole world—a reason to go.

On to Mars!

There really never was a problem; for twenty years now, I’ve worried about it, but there really never was a problem. No technical snafus, no traitors to The Dream. Hell, I tell myself, we gave them Mars. So it cost over Nine Hundred Billion dollars; that’s about what it cost us to stabilize southern Africa, when they refused to pay up their share of the international Mars fleet. Mars is a lot prettier than the habitable parts of SwAfrikaa, and a lot more hospitable!

NASA helped too, of course. Not just the NASA Dreamers who went along with my deception, but the whole friggin’ thing wouldn’t have been possible without the government’s paranoia, without them encrypting the Mars Observer video data, for God’s sake! I mean, the Reds were out of business back then (at least in their first incarnations), so who were we trying to protect the data from?