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"That's exactly right I figure maybe twenty Phoenix hulls full of slurried hydrogen, plus a Phoenix-type ship for the rescue, plus a couple more hulls to hold the drive and the rigging to string it all together. You'd have to assemble it after launch and accelerate it to a seventh of lightspeed, using a couple hundred standard tanks. Then take it apart, stow the rigging, and send everything through a Lazarus II drop ship one hull at a time."
"We could do it. Does Robin know about this?"
"Who's had time to call him? I only just thought of this an hour ago. I've been working out the math."
'We could do it," Jerryberry said, his eyes afire. "We could' bring 'em back. All it would take would be time and money."
She smiled indulgently down at him; at least she always seemed to, though her eyes were level with his own. "Don't get too involved. Who's going to pay for all this? You might talk your bemused public into it if you were extending man's dominion across the stars. But to rescue six failures?"
"You don't really think of them that way."
"Nope. But somebody's going to say it."
"I don't know. Maybe we should go for it. Those self-trammitting hulls could be turned into ships afterward."
"No. You'd drop them on the way back."
Jerryberry ran a hand through his hair. "I guess you're right. Thanks, Gem. You've done a lot of work for something that isn't ever going to get built."
"Good practice. Keeps my brain in shape," said Gem.
He was at home, doggedly working out a time-and-costs schedule for the rescue of Lazarus, when Karin Sagan called. She said, "I've been wondering if you need me for the broadcast."
"Good idea," said Jerryberry, "if you're willing. We could tape an interview any time you're ready. I'll ask you to describe the circumstances under which you found Lazarus, and use that to introduce the topic."
"Good."
Jerryberry was tired and depressed. It took him a moment to see that Karin was too. "What's wrong?"
"Oh...a lot of things. We aren't just going to forget about those six astronauts, are we?"
His laugh was brittle. "I think it unlikely. They aren't decently dead. They're in limbo, falling across our sky forever."
"That's what I mean. We could wake them any time in the next thousand years, if we could get to them."
"That's my problem. We can."
"What?"
"But it'd cost the Moon, so to speak. Come on over, Doctor. I'll show you."
Lazarus cost N$ 2,000,000,000
Lazarus II cost N$ 500,000,000
Phoenix cost N$ 110,000,000
Colony (six ships adequately equipped) cost N$ 660,000,000
Support systems in solar system N$ 250,000,000
TOTAL COLONY PACKAGE, IN CLUDING COLONY AND
PHOENIX AND SUPPORT SYSTEMS IN SOLAR SYSTEM: N$ 1,520,000,000
Twenty-two self-transmitting hulls cost N$ 1,540,000,000
(One self-transmitting hull costs N$70,000,000)
Interstellar drop ship costs N$ 900,000,000
Phoenix-type rescue ship costs N$ 110,000,000
R & D costs nothing
Support systems in solar system N$ 250,000,000
TOTAL COST OF RESCUE N$ 2,000,000,000
"...which is just comfortably more than it cost to build Lazarus in the first place, and a lot more than it cost us to not colonize Alpha Centaurus. It wouldn't be impossible to go get them. Just inconvenient and expensive."
"In spades," said Karin. "You'd tie up the Corliss accelerator for a week solid. The whole trip would take about thirty four years starting from the launching of the drop ship."
"And if it could be done now it could always be done; we couldn't ever forget it until we'd done it. And it would get more difficult every year because Lazarus would be getting further away."
"It'll nag us the rest of our lives." Karin leaned back in Jerryberry's guest chair. His apartment was not big: three rooms, with doors knocked between them, in a complex that had been a motel on the Pacific Coast Highway thirty years ago. "There's another thing. What are we really doing if we do it Whyte's way? We're talking the public into not backing a space project. Suppose they got the habit? I don't know about you-"
"I just plain like rocket ships," said Jerryberry.
"Okay. Can you really talk the public into this?"
"No. Lazarus didn't even cost this much, and Lazarus almost didn't get built, they tell me. And Lazarus failed, and so did the colony project. So: no. But I'm not sure I can bring myself to talk them out of it."
"Jansen, just how bad is public support for the Space Authority?"
"Oh... it isn't even that, exactly. The public is getting unhappy about JumpShift itself."
"What? 'What for?"
"CBA runs a continuous string of public opinion polls. The displacement booths did genuinely bring some unique problems with them-"
"They solved some too. Maybe you don't remember."
Jerryberry smiled. "I'm not old enough. Neither are you. Slums, traffic jams, plane crashes-nobody's that old except Robin Whyte, and if you try to tell him the booths brought problems of their own, he thinks you're an ungrateful bastard.
But they did. You know they did."
"Like flash crowds?"
"Sure. Any time anything interesting happens anywhere, some newstaper is going to report it. Then people flick in to see it from all over the United States. If it gets big enough you get people flicking in just to see the crowd, plus pickpockets, looters, cops, more newstapers, anyone looking for publicity.
"Then there's the drug problem. There's no way to stop smuggling. You can pick a point in the South Pacific with the same longitude and opposite latitude as any given point in the USA and most of Canada, and teleport from there without worrying about the Earth's rotational velocity. All it takes is two booths. You can't stop the drugs from coming in. I remember one narcotics cop telling me to think of it as evolution in action."
"God."
"Oh, and the ecologists don't like the booths. They make wilderness areas too available. And the cops have their problems. A man used to be off the hook if he could prove he was somewhere else when a crime happened. These days you have to suspect anyone, anywhere. The real killer gets lost in the crowd.
"But the real beef is something else. There are people you have to get along with, right?"
"Not me," said Karin.
'Well, you're unusual. Everyone in the world lives next door to his boss, his mother-in-law, the girl he's trying to drop, the guy he's fighting for a promotion. You can't move away from anyone. It bugs people."
"What can they do? Give up the booths?"
"No. There aren't any more cars or planes or railroads. But they can give up space."