Radio Nowhere

2026 October 14 21:00 UT
Test Year 0, Day 47 11:15 CST

Will spent most of his time in Moore. This might have been true before the Examiners had come. But now, instead of piecing together an improved cell phone network, he ran what had become known as the Screamer Lab: communications hub, place to re-wire electronics, and, for thirty minutes a day, media center for the expanded student news agency. Will worked in this place, and most days he slept there. He’d given his apartment to a houseless couple and the swords of Masamune hung over a cot against one wall in a side room. A version of this place existed at MIT, although Will had only heard it and seen still pictures.

From a bench here, Will had received the first email from sent from MIT to Caltech over the short-wave radio. With a relatively quiet magnetosphere and no other transmitters interfering, there were now ten channels of data flowing back and forth between the campuses. Five hundred kilobits a second wasn’t enough for the gaming parties that raged at each school to become intercontinental, but it handled email, some long-distance telephone calls, and updates to TauWiki – fifty-three hundred articles describing the results of all the survey teams, where vandalism was not tolerated.

Today, there was light rain in the early morning, but inside the lab Will worked from dawn to a Tau hour before noon. Not withstanding the need for the campus wireless to be completely reactivated and more phones to be hacked, Will had drawn KP this week and as long as power was from the solar arrays that meant cooking in midday, when there was enough wattage to run the stoves. So Will turned off his soldering iron, placed a test call and a text message with the 2011 iPhone he’d just finished with, and headed downstairs, leaving the lab to the other three EEs in residence and the stereo playing Bruce Springsteen.

He didn’t go straight to the Avery House kitchen, where he’d have to butcher one of the zards killed this morning, but to Venkat Sakhar’s lab on the second floor.

Venkat had been in his fifth year of a PhD specializing in genetic engineering, building designer proteins by tricking E. coli to accept amino acids that it didn’t normally use. That project was on hold since there was not much need for producers of obscure cancer drugs right now. Now the Indian’s culture vials held bacteria keyed to produce more urgent needs: vitamin B-12, which was not present in the Tau animals that had been tested and wouldn’t be available in quantity until there were many more goats and chickens; vitamin D, which some Techers were still not getting in sufficient quantity despite their new lifestyle; and insulin, the last most urgent for Will’s purposes.

Every few days, the biologist drew off the bulk of the insulin-producing cultures, baked them, centrifuged out the cells, refined out the insulins and combined them into the right mixture of short- and long-acting. And at least once a day, Will and the other diabetics on campus came to Sakhar and he pressed one of the transdermal injectors he’d gotten from the Examiners against their skin.

“Shall we?” Sakhar dropped the injector, followed by his gloves, into a chemical sanitizer. “I get grilling duty.”

There was now a captive herd of zards in a pen north of campus. The big six-legged scaled herbivores were at the best semi-domesticated. Will had had to set John Han’s fractured collarbone during his brief stint on that part of the food duty. But every morning, a few of the most recalcitrant animals were herded out by the dogs and cowboys and slaughtered, then the carcasses loaded into the sole refrigerated truck and sent to the various municipal kitchens, where they were dissected and cooked. It was bloody work, and the meat had an unpleasant orange tint, but it would taste good enough once roasted or microwaved or grilled or fried.

Will sliced the meat into pieces with deft strokes of a butcher’s knife in what had been the Avery parking lot. One zard was about fifty kilos of useable meat (the muscle tissue was cleared for humans to eat, but not the internal organs), so with five consumed per day, everyone at Caltech had about two thousand kilojoules from local animal sources. The herd was still only four hundred head, so it wasn’t sustainable yet and the zard rustlers kept running down more animals.

As he worked, Will talked with Sakhar, who was the only chef constantly outside. He was working with the zard’s twelve hexagonal thigh muscles, which were a passable imitation of steak flavored with lemon and chilis, using the improvised electric grill. Grease dibbled down, sizzled on the hot plates, and drained into a catch basin.

The conversation wandered. As the bones and enveloping muscle of the zard’s two spines, which also served as ribs, were separated out for the evening’s stew and to feed to the dogs, they reminisced about meals: calamari and sushi; the Argentine bistro in Pasadena; the last Thai takeout, the last bagels, the last burrito, all eaten within a week of arrival. As Will sliced the feet and other small muscles into pieces for stir fry, they moved to discussing the future.

“Why bother about domesticating the zard, anyway?” Venkat lifted up one side of a steak, turned it back down. “We’re not going to treat them like the US treated the buffalo. There’s plenty to last us twenty-four years.”
Will’s knife chopped steadily across the board. “Why won’t we need to eat zard after that? The Test may be done, but we’re still going to be here. … They said they’d give us the planet, not send us home. So we’ll need to plan out for more than just living from now until one magical day.”

“But we’ll have broader contact …”

“They haven’t given us anything the easy way. I’ll bet that if we pass, there will simply be another test beyond that one. Maybe they’ll give us phenomenal cosmic power and we’ll be able to make food out of nothing.” Slide the strips of meat into a caldron; grab the next lower leg. “But I don’t want to count on that. So we need to domesticate the zard, seed Dam Lake with pisces and install the hydroelectric turbine, and piece together a fission reactor to use all that uranium we have piled by the Isotope Lab.”

“And Mina finds all the oil and we burn it and over-run this world like we did Earth? That doesn’t sound like passing.” Flip the steaks.

“Sustainable development, then. We have to live, we just don’t expand too far. Hydro and solar and breeder fission are clean, especially since we didn’t mine the uranium or make the solar cells here. The Examiners have to have assumed some expansion. I’ll trust them that far. … Although I’m worried about an Earth species other than us running wild. Tau shouldn’t become like Australia.” Now he started on the entrails, to be made into dog feed or chopped and buried in the compost.

“Don’t worry about that, at least for the macroscopic species.” Sakhar pointed his tongs at the pile of spiky orangestem plants that were waiting to be stripped and roasted. They were still the most readily eaten local vegetation. “I’m worried that Tau microbes make poisons too – some of them could live on pure cyanide and strychnine. Fortunately they’ve been very susceptible to damage by acetic acid, but just keeping them out of our biome is hard enough, let alone the other way around.”

“Maybe you’re right, but keep an eye on it.” Will tossed all the waste from the cooking into the dumpster, cleaned the board and knives and his arms up to the elbow, tossed the apron into the high-temperature laundry bin, and hosed down the parking lot. Finally it was time for lunch.

Lunch was a piece of zard thigh-steak; bread with a small pat of orange marmalade; a salad with the first lettuce, tomatoes and cucumbers, olive oil from the trees scattered across campus and a minute amount of goat cheese; and water to drink. The bread was running short. Very little flour was left and it would be months before the wheat harvest. At least there were some fresh vegetables now. Vegetarians ate roasted orangestems with varying enthusiasm.

And then Will was back to work. Two hours ago, the Tau Ceti – the sun, to keep things simple – had set at MIT and Caltech’s transmitter had taken over the job that gave the Screamer Lab its name: transmitting to Earth. Two hours before dawn at MIT, they would start again and drain their batteries until sunrise, while Caltech powered down.

Every day, Will and Laura Sturm at MIT updated the message, which transmitted now on endless loop as the satellite dish tracked Earth’s position in the sky. There was a condensed summation of about ten thousand words that took twenty minutes out of every three hours, and then the two hours and forty minutes of the daily message: several thousand words of personal messages, supplemented by Patrick Townsend’s and the MIT med students’ medical reports, Adam Delbert and Mina’s survey results, and a few images. Once a week, a more detailed summary took up three hours.

But before the updates could be added, and synched between the two Screamers, every single word had to be examined by one of the Four Physicists. Today it was Kevin Zhang, serious and always clean-shaven and well dressed, despite the lack of a dry cleaner’s. Will had been to his lectures, and knew the secrets of negative matter as well as any of the Four, but they insisted on reading the material that was transmitted. So far, nothing had been excised, but Zhang tensed whenever he saw words like “particle”, “accelerate”, “speed of light”, and even “one percent”.

Eventually, Kevin gave approval, and then went off to work on the nuclear reactor with Nick Larson. He’s still nursing his guilt, Will noted, sensitive to the physicist’s breath pattern, the tightness in his facial muscles, the way he kept habits so rigidly. Will had no way to dispel this, and quenched the urge to help. He had his own schedule to keep to. No psychoanalysis right now.

He dialed a long-distance call on the voice-over channel. “Laura, ready for the update.”

“Sending it over. Talk to you tomorrow.” On the other side of the world, Laura was working by the light of her computer screen, since power at night was precious. The rest of her lab was dark. Her staff had gone for the night, and Laura herself had places to be.

Data packets started to flow. “Here it comes. Enjoy your date.” Hearing this, Laura signed off, leaving only the automatic Internet link and the emergency alarm connecting the two Institutes.

Then it was time to update the survey maps. The areas within ten kilometers or so of both campuses were known in detail, and the iron mine’s surroundings were covered. At MIT, the Recon Platoon had done a rough survey of regions up to five hundred kilometers away. The GPS Division of Caltech had not gone so far afield: the seismologists were either on other projects or charting iron deposits and looking for oil, the geologists were prospecting and the meteorologists were trying madly to produce a sensible local weather forecast. Only one field team was out right now. Mina was oil prospecting on the other side of the Gell-Mann Mountains, a hundred kilometers to the south. It had taken her team five days to get there: they’d gone far inland to get around the range and to ford Throop River since the improvised ferry across Dam Lake couldn’t carry a van.

In the absence of the mapping software running on the computers in North Mudd, Will adjusted the maps that went out in the summary report by hand. It was slow work: add in the heights of the peaks in the Gell-Manns – 1247 m above sea level here, this ridge following a line at an almost constant 1220; now update the bathymetry of the coastal ocean. He included the distribution of different types of ground cover: cyanogenic barbweed, Page’s Folly, burrozard warrens; where there were trees, where there were deposits of granites and basalts and barely congealed sandstones. Not that much data came in every day, but the total had to be kept consistent and clear.

Then the alarm went, a patterned beeping on the voice-over channel reserved for the survey team. With one hand, Will switched over to his crisis management screen, with the other he pressed the button to call Mina. “This is Will. Mina, what’s wrong?”

Mina was normally reserved, but he could tell she was on edge. Her voice carried the tremors of adrenalin surge. “Will, there’s been an accident. The front van – it’s rolled. Will, are you there?”

“I’m here. The rest of you are safe? The medics?” He grabbed one of the hacked phones, switched it to the emergency channel, and checked that there was reception.
“We’ve stopped. It looks like some sort of pede was hidden in the grass and they hit it. Oh God …”

“Breathe. The medics are heading in?” Got to call Dorman, get the kit together. They may need Townsend or me. How to get there?

“Lisa and Ryan. Ai was in the van, along with Jesse, Kris, and Eli.”

“Keep talking. I’m going to call in a couple of others.”

Townsend and Dorman were fortunate enough to have their phones with them. They got to the Screamer Lab within five minutes. By then there was a clinical picture from the medics. They had been almost miraculously lucky: two of the passengers in the rolled van were fine – nothing but bruises from their restraints. Then the luck started to run out. Elijah couldn’t move the fingers in his left hand or feel below the elbow. But the big problem immediately was Lan Yu Ai.

The former senior had been driving. His seatbelt and the airbags had stopped him from breaking all his bones against the steering column or snapping his spine as the van spun, but couldn’t stop the shard of the dashboard that had ripped through the femoral artery on his right leg.

Over the radio, Will and Townsend, Sakhar and Dorman, heard the medic’s report as it came: patient is a 22-year-old male with a lacerated right leg and assorted contusions. Extricated while maintaining pressure on the laceration. Shard was found on ceiling of van, no indications that any remains embedded. Patient’s vitals are starting to become shocky. Right leg raised, pressure dressing applied, but bleeding continues. Using pressure point and QuikClot … bleeding has been stopped. Patient sedated at own request, moved to clean zone established between vans. Blood loss estimated crudely as a liter. Patient is in shock. Oxygen being administered at 6 liters/min, supply sufficient for six hours. Patient cannot be moved or clot will tear free, cannot suture until patient is stabilized. Circulation to lower right leg is present, but limited. Patient is in urgent need of blood or at least plasma transfusion. Blood type listed on record as AB+. Compatible donors present, but are also patients, and we do not have transfusion equipment.

Caltech had no blood bank, at least not yet. So far, the minor medical procedures that Patrick Townsend had had to perform hadn’t even needed donors. Sakhar’s equipment could be modified easily, but it was here, not a hundred kilometers south. The medics started modifying what they did have in their kits, but one-shot disposable injectors couldn’t be changed to pump a half-liter of blood out or in.

In the end, the solution was inevitable. There were six people on campus who could pilot the paraglider ultralights. One of them was David Dorman, lead BOC Ninja. He also had a suitable blood type, had been screened as a potential donor, and was thin enough that the bag of equipment Sakhar and Townsend put together wouldn’t exceed the craft’s load. At 15:25 CST, one hour and twelve minutes after the accident, accompanied by a second pilot (not a donor) carrying another set of equipment, Dorman, wearing a fluorescent green vest over his usual black, took off from the Beckman Lawn, cleared the trees, turned south ward, and leveled off at 1300 m, with a map tied to his right leg and an inertial tracker to his left.

The orange-and-white parasails had a peak speed of 65 kilometers/hour, and so at 17:05 CST, one hour before sunset, they slowly spun down to the surface next to the two intact vans and the tents the non-injured surveyors had set up. Dorman had no sooner touched the ground than two of the team grabbed him, pushed the releases on the harness, unsnapped the bag, and shoved him and it in the direction of the largest tent. Leaving the disposition of his chute behind, he entered.

What followed was not a textbook operation, but was good enough none-the-less. Dorman was a patient donor. His blood was transferred directly, but slowly, into Ai, who hovered at the fringes of consciousness, muttering now and again in Mandarin. The sedatives and analgesics in the medic’s kits weren’t the best, so what would happen next would hurt him. They restrained his leg by binding it to a board.

Mina sat against one side of the tent, minding the space heater and the radio. Both she and Dorman had been given masks and also gloves, but kept their hands to themselves. The medics, with occasional prompts from Townsend, monitored Ai’s vitals. After an hour, the patient had stabilized. They disconnected the transfusion rig and started the operation.

Dorman’s pack had contained some of the precious store of dissolving sutures. They cut off the blood flow to the leg, slightly enlarged the wound, carefully but quickly broke off the blood-soaked zeolite-platelet mass of QuikClot, and cut out the torn three-centimeter piece of the artery.

Prompts came constantly from Townsend, with Will adding an occasional adjustment: Stitch the ends back together, quickly now. Let back the bloodflow a little. There’s a spurt. Pressure and stitch over. Three more stitches. Let it go. No leaks? A little more. Good. How’s perfusion in the toes? Mina, if you could just squeeze the big toenail and tell us how long it takes to turn pink again – good. Blood’s getting down there. Now, stitch up the surrounding muscle.

For the skin, they used normal sutures because the fine ones were gone. There was no plastic surgery here. Ai would have one nasty scar, but at least the leg would heal.
Eli’s arm was broken in a compound fracture. They’d set it as best they could before Dorman had gotten there, but there was definitely nervous damage. Some of the numbness was shock and had started to fade, but there was also something long-term. He needed to get back to campus and the MRI, but they couldn’t travel at night.

Will didn’t sleep until late that night. Mina kept passing information back. The convoy could fit in the remaining vans, but both the rolled van and the pede that it had run over would probably need to be examined in detail. “Send out two more vans, to meet us half-way and to also bring back the evidence. Eli and Dorman go back tomorrow with the first van. I’ll stay here. We’ll move once the medics clear Ai to travel – give that two or three days.” He offered to come out himself, but she dismissed that plan.

Even after things settled down at the accident site and Mina had managed to get to sleep, there was work for Will. MIT had just woken up, and needed to be briefed. They expressed sympathy, and offered clinical advice if needed, which was everything they could do.

And after that, Will couldn’t calm himself. He started to feel the same helpless anxiety and grief he’d felt when he’d heard about the base of Millikan after arrival, and when Wonjin was mauled. There was some anger too, at the Examiners – but that was always there, mixed with respect and even admiration.

Mina was all right, as was most of her team. Ai would eventually heal. Elijah was what bothered him – that he might lose his left arm. That and the sheer fact of the accident. Will knew his probability, knew that accidents were bound to happen, but that didn’t make them any easier to accept.

And so ended the 47th day of the Exam for Caltech’s Screamer to Earth: he could not calm himself mentally, so he turned to physical exhaustion. He took the swords from their rack. On an open area of the roof of Moore, he drew them in the moonless meteor-streaked night of Tau. For an hour, non-stop, they silently traced out the exact forms of single-person kendo kata, interspersed with the fluid drawing and sheathing of iaido, the bare-hand techniques of karate and aikido, and Chen Tai Chi. He knew all the techniques, but his muscles and tendons were not yet tuned to this level of exercise, and started to ache and beg for rest. Only then was Will able to let go of the concerns of day-to-day life on Tau and of the Test, and sleep.