The Sparrow

There was silence and then A

"Yes," he said simply, with a kind of hilarious gravity that kept the rest of them off balance. "Sofia, George, Jimmy. I was only speculating before—but this is a serious possibility, yes? Fitting out an asteroid for such a trip?"

"Yes," Sofia confirmed. "As Mr. Edwards said, the idea has been around for some time."

"It would cost hell's own money," George pointed out.

"No, I don't think so," Sofia said. "I know of bankrupted wildcatters who'd be pleased to sell off hulks that didn't pan out, with the engines in place. It wouldn't be cheap but neither would it be prohibitive, for some kind of corporation…" Her voice trailed off and she looked at Sandoz, as everyone else was. For some reason, he found what she had just said very fu

None of them could have known what he was thinking, how much this reminded him of that evening in Sudan when he read the Provincial's order sending him to John Carroll. Where he met Sofia. And A

"I wasn't listening closely enough before," he said, back in control. "Tell me again how this could be done."

In the next hour, George and Jimmy and Sofia outlined the ideas for him: how wildcatters selected and obtained suitable asteroids and outfitted them with life support, how the engines broke down silicates to use as fuel to move the asteroids to Earth-orbit refineries, how twenty-ton loads of refined metals were aimed, like the old Gemini capsules, at recovery sites in the ocean off Japan's coast. How you could scale the system up for long-range travel. Trained as a linguist and a priest, Emilio had a hard time understanding the Einsteinian physics that predicted that the transit time elapsed on Earth would be around seventeen years, while the effect of traveling near light speed would make it seem closer to six months for the crew onboard the asteroid.

"Nobody understands this the first time they hear about it," George assured him. "And most people who think about it at all just accept that the math works out this way. But let's say you go to Alpha Centauri and come straight back. When you get home, the people you left would be thirty-four years older but you'd only have aged about a year, because time slows down when you're near light speed."

Jimmy explained how they could plot the course, and Emilio found that even less intelligible. And then there was the problem of making landfall. There were a lot of loose ends, George and Jimmy and Sofia acknowledged. Even so, it could be done, they thought.

A

"I know," he laughed. "So am I."

She looked around the room for allies and found none. "Am I the only one who sees how nuts this is?"

"'God does not require us to succeed. He only requires us to try, " Emilio quoted quietly. He was sitting very still, in the farthest corner of the cubicle, elbows on his knees, hands clasped loosely, looking up at her with merry eyes.

"Oh, sure. Wave Mother Teresa in my face," A

"No," George insisted. "It can be done, at least in theory."

"A

"Not this morning, but I could start working on it now and by the time everything's ready to go, I could be ready. There are very good astronomical programs that we can use. You don't just aim at where Alpha Centauri is now. You have to aim at where the system will be in however many years it'll take your craft to get there. But that's just celestial mechanics. You just have to decide to work the problem out. And you'd have to find the planet once you got to the star system. That might be harder, really."

Emilio turned to Sofia. "If you had freedom of choice, would you find it objectionable to work again for the Society of Jesus? Perhaps as a general contractor, to acquire and organize the material elements needed to put such a mission together? You have contacts in the mining industry, yes?"

"Yes. The project would be different from the kind of AI analysis I ordinarily do, but no more demanding. I could certainly pull together the materials, if I were authorized to do so."

"Even if the mission were, at its heart, religious in nature?"

"My broker would have no objections. Jaubert's done business with the Jesuits before, obviously."

"I ca

"My choice." She had not had a choice in so many years. "There is no objection. That is, I have none."

"Good. George, how different is the life-support system used for mining asteroids from the underwater system you are familiar with?"

George didn't answer right away. All the technology he'd mastered, he was thinking. All the miles he'd run. Everything—his whole life was an apprenticeship for this. He looked at Sandoz and said, steady-voiced, "Same things. Only instead of extracting oxygen from water, they use rock. The oxygen is a by-product of the mining and fuel production for the engines. And, like Jimmy said, by the time we're ready to go, I could be up to speed."

"Oh, now, stop right there," A

"I am seriously proposing that everyone in this room be involved with this. Including you. You have anthropological expertise, which would be invaluable when we make contact—"

"Oh, come on!" A

"— and you are a physician as well, and you can cook," he said, laughing, ignoring the howl, "which is a perfect combination of skills because we can't afford to have a doctor along who would only wait around for someone to break a leg."

"Peter Pan. You guys are all set to go to Never-Never-Land and I get to be Wendy. Fabulous! There is a rude gesture that comes to mind," A

"Yes. I am afraid I think I do believe that," he said, wincing. "I'm sorry."

She looked at him, helpless with exasperation. "You are demented."

"Look, A