I almost snapped at him, told him hewastrying to look out for me and I didn’t need it—but actually, his offer was kind of nice.I didn’t feel like being prickly all the time. And I didn’t want to die in a riptide. And I kind of liked spending time with Ethan Barbanel.
“Okay, I suppose.” When he smiled at me and offered his hand, I took it and let him draw me to my feet. Together we went back into the warm glow of Golden Doors, and downstairs to eat ice cream sundaes.
Seven
I showed up at Dr. Bradley’s office at 9:00 a.m. the next day.
“Jesus, you’re prompt,” she said, squinting at me. “Isn’t this your summer vacation? Shouldn’t you be staying up until midnight and sleeping until eleven to restore your sleep bank?”
I stared at her blankly.Adults, man.“I’m used to waking up at six for school.” This morning, I’d woken at six and knocked on Ethan’s door, and we’d gone down for a dip in the ocean. I’d been surprised by how comfortable it’d felt.
“Cruel and unusual punishment,” she muttered. “Thank god I’ll never have to do that again.” She waved a hand at the room’s second seat, a wobbly-looking wooden chair. “You can sit…there.”
I sat and took in the office. A disaster, like Dad’s at home, which I found reassuring. My chair had an uneven leg; I’d need to stuff a wad of papers under it at my first possible chance.
I waited for instructions. I was ready to do whatever grunt work Cora wanted—data entry, scrub the windows, get a breakfast sandwich. But Cora simply stared right back at me, clutching an exceedingly large coffee mug.
Finally, she spoke. “Okay, so, you should probably start with some background reading…”
“I’m reading your dissertation.” I’d started at two in the morning, when I’d woken and been unable to fall back asleep.
She blinked. “You are? How did you even find it?”
“It’s online.”
“It should be under lock and key.” She shook her head. “Okay, well. Why don’t I give you an overview and set you up.”
She did, and I got started on background reading. Which was, frankly, a little terrifying. Apparently space was a junkyard no one had jurisdiction over. Old satellites, rocket parts, fuel tanks, and other debris floated endlessly. Every time anything collided in space, it created more debris, which increased the chance of the International Space Station or satellites or tsunami warning systems or anything else up there getting harmed.
“Dr. Bradley?” I asked when she took a break to make more coffee.
“You can call me Cora.”
Interesting proposition; I’d probably avoid calling her anything. “Okay. I have a question. People know about this, right? You know about it, I assume the government and the EPA know—why isn’t more being done?”
She tilted her head, as though waiting for me to expound.
“If we know it’s bad, why are billionaires allowed to send up stuff that gets turned into trash during space storms?” I hadn’t even known solar storms existed until today; now I knew the sun, usually consistent, occasionally ejected solar material capable of messing with Earth’s magnetic field and knocking a satellite outof orbit. “Why aren’t we talking about space debris and cleaning it up or telling people they can’t launch whatever they want into space?”
“Mm.” She stirred some cream into her coffee. “Well, it’s hard for people to look further than the immediate future, at how this could impact our ability to explore space. And there’s no regulation for what people can do—no one owns space. It’s like the Wild West.”
“The final frontier,” I murmured.
She grinned. “Exactly. And some of us are talking about how to clean it up. Giant nets, magnets, spacecraft capable of pushing deactivated satellites into the atmosphere so they burn up. Harpoons, even. But they’re wildly expensive to build. Also, you need people to agree to them. Imagine if the US said it was going to send up a harpoon to take down a decommissioned satellite—other countries might be wary, because what’s to stop us from taking down one of their working satellites?” She took a sip of coffee. “It becomes a huge international problem.”
“So do we need a…space committee? Who’s in charge of space?”
“There’s regional programs. We have NASA, and there’s the European Space Agency. Russia, China, Japan, India all have their own programs. Getting them to work together…” She shrugged.
“Okay, so…” I rubbed my forehead. “We have to figure out where all the debris is, find a way to pick it all up, fund it, and get governments all over the world to sign off.”
“Great.” Cora smothered a smile. “I look forward to chairing your thesis committee in ten years.”
“What?”
“Bad joke,” she said, still laughing to herself.
I eyed her. Sounded like the kind of joke Dad made.
