6

Bert Goldberg sank into his creaky office chair. He wiggled the grimy mouse to wake his wheezing Dell and gobbled a bite of his bologna sandwich. Berta, his wife—“the other ‘Bert’” as she liked to introduce herself with a meaty laugh—was out grocery shopping. He had to make some kind of progress on the job search if he wanted her to come home from the next shopping trip with more than bologna and macaroni.

He was already scrolling through job listings, but there weren’t a lot of openings for fifty-two-year-old electrical engineers with a background in aeronautics. Satellites, specifically.

He sighed and opened another tab in his browser to compose an entry for his blog, “To the Moon, Alice!”

Goldberg wasn’t much for gadgets, although he certainly understood them. Given a screwdriver and a few minutes by himself, he could disassemble and repair most everything, as his fingers just seemed to work on their own, gently prodding and turning. Most of the modern toys held little appeal for their own sake. He was more interested in how they worked than how he could use them. “If it ain’t broke, what’s the point?” he’d once explained to Berta. He did enjoy blogging, though. He’d developed a dependable audience of a few thousand readers who followed his musings on everything from space travel to medieval warfare.

Goldberg tapped at his keyboard. The old keys were getting squishy, and the letter “Q” often got stuck. Good thing he didn’t need that one often. Currently, he was trying to coax something readable from a previous draft post about the maintenance needs for “solar sails,” a theoretical propulsion system for interplanetary probes. No matter how many edits he made, though, he couldn’t seem to fix it. A few years ago, he’d dreamed of retiring and devoting himself to his hobbies. As it turned out, a hobby was much more fun as a diversion than a devotion. Particularly when you had credit card bills piling up in your kitchen.

He tabbed back over to the job listings.

He popped the last bite of sandwich in his mouth and banged out a few keywords, expecting the usual “no listings.” Instead, more than 100 openings spilled down the screen.

Whoa.

In the last 30 minutes, dozens and dozens of positions had opened up, all looking for experienced electrical engineers willing to relocate and begin work immediately. In addition to the old standbys—Thales Alenia Space, Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Loral, Astrium, JSC—dozens of manufacturers that had gotten out of the satellite game years ago were now advertising, too.

Bert and Berta had already agreed that if they had to relocate from Denver for his job hunt, they’d do it. Lockheed Martin Space Systems had a big presence in the area, but the satellite division had been cutting staff due to the watery economy. Commercial and government clients had all been cutting their orders in the last year or so.

But you wouldn’t have known it from this job board. There were now openings from Colorado to California to France, Russia, Canada, the UK, Japan, and more. Goldberg backed out of his refined search and did a broader search across all job categories at satellite manufacturers. Thousands of listings filled the browser, page after page after page.

“What the hell . . .” He dipped into a bag of Fritos with his free hand. He smeared the chips into his mouth, dusted his hands, and fired off his résumé to every opening for which he was remotely qualified, more than thirty in all, then clicked back to his blog.

Goldberg deleted the limp entry he’d been composing and tapped out a new post about the surge in job postings. What was going on? He scanned the news headlines. Then a deeper search for any space- or communications-related news that would justify this overnight multi-billion-dollar surge. He’d already looked twice earlier in the day, and he came up empty again. He refreshed the job listings page, just to make sure it hadn’t been some kind of glitch. Nope. This was beyond bizarre. It made no sense. This industry could crash fast, but recoveries were always slow, as clients were reluctant to make such expensive investments until demand was unmistakable.

He finished composing his blog post, hit “publish,” and opened his email to look through last night’s correspondence. All thirty-four of his job applications had already been answered. They’d all come through in the last twenty minutes, while he’d been writing the post. All were requesting phone interviews. Today. He slumped back. Could this be some kind of scam? Seemed unlikely. All the job openings had been cross-posted to the websites of the individual manufacturers. If it was a scam, then it involved some kind of global computer hack against a bunch of companies who employed some of the best security nerds in the biz.

Not a scam, but something was definitely . . . wrong.

A childhood memory burbled up, of his uncle describing how the US geared up for World War II after the Japanese attack. Literally overnight, the country mobilized. Factories trickling out small batches of cars and refrigerators for a sleepy economy were jolted to life in a war fever. Tanks and airplanes and millions and millions of bullets, artillery shells, and bombs poured out. By the time they’d pulled the bodies from the water, America was a different country.

Goldberg rocked back in his chair.

Mobilization.

He rolled the word around in his mind, turning it over like a broken radio, looking for the loose wire or busted transistor. Mobilize? But why? For what? Why would you crank up the global satellite industry? War seemed unlikely. Beyond the usual political squabbles, there wasn’t any kind of global confrontation brewing that would lead to World War III.

All those listings going live at the same time meant something. Couldn’t deny that. Whatever was happening was bigger than just one company winning a contract and opening its wallet. All these guys seemed to be responding to the same signal. Like they’d all just gotten huge checks and tight deadlines. But for what?

It must be some kind of natural disaster, then? Something to do with global warming? Hard to imagine all these new birds were just for one storm, as they took months or years to build and launch. And there were already a handful of weather-tracking satellites overhead, some of them a far sight more sophisticated than most people knew. The military funded a lot of the satellite industry, after all. Any US government satellite, even if officially built for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration or some other civilian agency, eventually did double duty for the soldiers and the spies. It didn’t bother him. Every other country did the same. Just a fact of life, and he had no problem keeping an eye on the assholes of the world. The bottom line was that the US and the rest of the world had more than enough super-fancy birds watching the clouds, the oceans, and the surface of the planet for any near-term needs.

So if they weren’t looking down, these new birds must be looking . . . the other direction? Out into space?

Goldberg munched a few more chips. Steve, their aging lab, snored and whimpered at his master’s feet as his paws twitched. Goldberg dropped a handful of chips absently and the dog slurped them up with barely a glance, crunching them quickly and then drifting back to sleep.

An asteroid? A collision of some kind? What else could it be? He could imagine the gaggle of astrophysicists rushing into a White House briefing room, armed with maps and photos and laptops and coffee.

He sat up, crumbs and larger chunks of food tumbling to the floor. Steve vacuumed those up, too.

If it really was an asteroid collision, Goldberg realized he probably knew some of the guys who would be in those meetings, NASA PhDs and other big brains. For those guys, unemployment was just something economists studied. Windbags, most of them. But a few of the scientists didn’t mind talking to the grunts who actually machined and assembled their telescopes and rovers and antennas.

He rummaged through a drawer and removed a thick stack of business cards held together with a double-wrapped rubber band.

A few months ago, his wife had bought him a scanner he could use to copy the names and addresses to his computer, but the scanner was still in a box in a closet, gathering cobwebs.

“Dammit, Bert, get organized!” she had said, then laughed, when she was cleaning the closet last week.

He snapped the rubber band off and flung it aside. He thumbed through the stack, looking for the card he wanted, flipping the others back into the drawer.

“Where is it? Ah, Mark, there you are, you bastard.”

Mark Norris. Goldberg laughed, looking at the officious font on the card. Norris was an old friend from high school who loved pranks almost as much as Goldberg. Goldberg had wound up at community college, while Norris had gone to MIT.

Still, they’d shared a fascination with rocketry and space travel and had built a dry ice launcher out of metal pipe one Saturday afternoon and launched glow sticks into the principal’s swimming pool from a hundred yards away on a November night. Their friendship had survived distance and time. Norris now worked at Phoenix Aerospace, a startup company made up mostly of former NASA hardware engineers and software developers. A Silicon Valley billionaire was funding the startup, the latest trend among the nouveau riche. It had been months since Goldberg had talked to his old friend, and he wasn’t sure what to expect.

He thumbed the keypad on his cordless phone—the cell phone hadn’t been charged in days, and was currently serving as a drink coaster for a can of soda.

After nearly a dozen rings, he was about to hang up when a frazzled voice came on the line.

“Yeah? I mean, hello?”

“Mark, you son of a bitch, I nearly gave up. It’s Bert. You fall asleep at your desk again?” he asked with a snort. It was a joke, as Norris was the most tireless man he had ever met. Most meth addicts probably got more shut-eye.

He expected a good-natured rejoinder, but Norris’s voice came back with a strained intensity.

“Bert, hey, how’s it going, man?” he said, more statement than question. “Listen, uh, I’ve got a lot on my plate right now, and . . .” He trailed off. Goldberg leaped into the opening.

“Yeah, that’s kind of why I’m calling. Don’t know if you heard, but Lockheed laid me off a few months ago, and so I’ve been job hunting and came across something weird today.”

“Wait, what?” Norris’s voice had gained an electric intensity. “Holy shit, Bert, look, uh, how’d you like to come by the office tomorrow and chat? Hell, look, forget the meeting, how’d you like a job? The pay is $110k, and we need you to start yesterday.”

Goldberg leaned back in his chair, staring at the ceiling. A column of ants was marching along the plaster from the window frame. The exterminator had quoted them 200 bucks for the job. Not a chance. So now the Goldbergs had a few thousand roommates.

“Mark, what’s going on? I just searched through all the job boards, and yesterday there wasn’t squat and now there’s openings from here to Beijing. I’ll be honest, buddy, I was a little freaked out before I called you, and now I’m a little more freaked out.”

Norris let out a deep breath.

“Bert, I can’t really tell you anything right now. I barely know anything. But there’s something big going down, and we’ve been told to bring everyone onboard immediately. I’m sure you’ll have your pick of jobs by the end of the day, but I can offer you pretty much whatever you want right now. I’m serious, we’ll fly you out here to Arizona tonight, first class, and put you to work first thing tomorrow. We’re in a god-awful hurry.”

“Is it an asteroid, Mark?” He swiveled to look out the window as he heard Berta’s van huff and creak into the driveway.

“Honestly, I don’t know. Maybe. Nothing makes sense right now. I think . . . look, let me hold the chatter. If you take the job, I can fill you in on what I do know when you get here. You’ll need security clearance. Yours still current? Say the word and you’ll have a boarding pass emailed to you within the next five minutes for your flight. You in?”

Berta was singing the climax of “Nessun Dorma” from Turandot as she came in the door, swinging grocery bags from her ponderous arms. She marched into the office bellowing the final “Vincerò!” but stopped when she saw her husband’s tense face.

“Yeah, I’m in,” he said.

“Excellent. I’ll pick you up at the airport. No, scratch that, I’ll send someone to get you. I don’t think I’m going home tonight. Give Berta my love.”

Norris hung up.

Goldberg gently deposited the phone back in its cradle.

“Well, don’t keep me in suspense. These ice cream sandwiches are about to drip down my toes.”

“Looks like I’ve got a job,” he said.

“Congratulations and holy shit. Doing what?”

He was stunned, then laughed.

“I forgot to ask.”