Saturn Run Read Free Page B

Sanders wanted to stay on course, and yet maintain that kind of fine arithmetical symmetry, he’d have to screw four more women, since eight, nine, and ten were not prime. A woman who overheard the comment said the Star’s erratic sense of humor was part of the reason that Sandy had managed to sleep with seven out of seventeen, while the Star was striking out. She added, before picking up her lunch tray, “You fuckin’ dweeb.”)
    And the women who’d slept with young Sanders confessed to each other, over hushed lunches, that while it was possibly true that Sandy might not match their knowledge of advanced physics and astronomy, sex was one area in which young Darlington definitely knew how to change a tire. Even, on occasion, multiple tires.
    So virtually all his male colleagues, and a considerable (but shrinking) fraction of the female contingent, loathed him. Not that their loathing amounted to much: rudeness, mostly. They cut him out of grad student meetings.
    Which made what happened all that much worse.
    The interns’ room was a windowless hall, a nearly perfect cube of yellow limestone, divided into sixteen tiny cubicles; it had once been a storage room.
    There were four interns present when Sandy ambled through the door. Three of them were peering at computer screens, and the fourth had her head down on her desk. She snored.
    “Man, you smell like pachuca weed,” one of the interns, Ravi Chandrakar, said, as Sandy passed.
    “Yeah, well, you smell like chili-cheese wieners. Given a choice, I’d rather smell like dope,” Sandy said.
    “That’s the goddamn truth,” said another of the interns. “You keep eating those fuckin’ chili-cheese wieners, I’m gonna drag you to a window and throw you the fuck out.”
    “Yeah, right, like where are you gonna find a window?”
    The sleeping woman stirred, but didn’t awaken; the hostility had been simulated.
    Sandy took his desk, touched the ID pad with his index finger, and the screen popped up.
    He had been assigned to nursemaid Chuck’s Eye. The work was not hard. Or, maybe it was, but the computers did it. Sandy was the human eye that double-checked the results, to make sure the computers hadn’t missed anything unusual enough that it fell outside their analysis parameters. And the computers would tell him if that happened, so he could alert a Real Scientist.
    The current program didn’t even hold the possibility of uncovering an event of astronomical interest: it was a calibration run on a new camera module. The idea was to take a well-known, and therefore uninteresting, part of the sky and make simultaneous exposures with all the different-wavelength cameras. Superimpose them and make sure that all the little points of light aligned properly and that the spectra looked more or less normal.
    Repeat that three times, at half-hour intervals, and make sure that those later stacks of images matched the first, so you knew that the tracking was good. Nothing in deep space changed rapidly, unless you were so amazingly lucky as to catch a supernova or gamma-ray burst, and the computers would recognize those things. Absent such a rarity, the four sets of stacked images should match up pixel for pixel.
    It was a job made for a computer. But Chuck’s Eye was a seriously valuable resource, and the Real Scientists felt the same way about their time, so it fell upon Sandy to babysit it. It seemed the perfect place to park a guy who’d written a senior thesis on “Movement Art as Planetary Drive.”
    To do his job, Sandy was required to push three keys on a computerkeyboard to bring up a string of associated photos, then put his finger on the screen and drag them together, and then pinch them, and the computer would compare the images to see if anything untoward might be happening.
    All this, in revenge for being a rich, good-looking, unemployable arts major. And, of course, that whole serial womanizer thing . . . to say nothing of the way he ran his mouth.
    So he