The Precipice gt-8

by Ben Bova

  Pancho could feel it radiating from the backs of the crew standing by the consoles.

  “Do you think it’s going to rain?” Amanda whispered.

  Pancho looked up at the looming thunderheads. “Sooner or later.”

  At last Duncan said to Randolph, “We’re ready to launch.”

  “Okay,” said Randolph. “Do it before it starts pouring.”

  Duncan said crisply, “Launch!”

  Pancho turned her attention to the missile sitting out on the grass. For a moment nothing happened, but then its tail-end spurted flame and it lurched forward. Just as she heard the whining scream of the jet engine, another sound cut in: a deeper, more powerful roar. The missile leaped off the ground, angling sharply toward the cloud-filled sky, trailing a billow of smoke.

  Something fell away from the climbing missile. A rocket pack, Pancho realized.

  They used it to get the bird off the ground.

  The plane levelled off a scant hundred meters in the air and circled the field once.

  “Nominal flight,” one of the engineers called out.

  “Fusion drive ready?” Duncan asked.

  “Primed and ready.”

  “Light it.”

  The missile seemed to falter for a moment, as if it had stalled in midair. Pancho saw the slightly smoky exhaust wink out, heard the jet engine’s screech die away. The missile glided for several moments, losing altitude. Then it seemed to bite into the air, raising its nose and climbing steeply upward as it howled a thin, screeching ethereal wail.

  “Programmed flight trajectory,” Pancho heard someone call out. “On the money.” The bird flew out to sea until it was a barely visible speck, then turned back and rushed toward them, climbing almost to the base of the thunderheads, its ghostly wail barely audible, streaking past, heading inland. Then it turned again and headed seaward once more. Racetrack course, Pancho realized. Lightning was flickering in the clouds now.

  “Coming up on the two-minute mark,” said one of the engineers. “Mark! Two minutes.”

  “Bring her in,” Duncan commanded.

  “Automatic trajectory,” came the answer.

  Pancho watched as the missile turned back toward them once again, dropped its flaps, slowed, and gracefully descended for a landing out in the area where it had taken off. The grass was scorched out there from the takeoff rocket’s hot exhaust. Turning slightly, she saw that Randolph was standing just outside the door, eyes riveted to the approaching missile, mouth slightly open, fists clenched. The missile was still moving fast when it touched the ground, bounced into the air again, wobbled back to the ground, and then plowed nose-first into the dirt, throwing a spray of grass clods and pebbles as it flipped over onto its back and banged down so hard one of the wings tore off. It sounded like a junkyard falling out of the sky.

  But the engineers and technicians were all cheering, jumping up and down, pounding each other on the back, yelling and waving like a team that had just scored a gold medal in the Olympics. Randolph yanked off his cap and pegged it out toward the sea.

  “Och, what a divot!” Duncan shouted. He raced through the open door to Randolph and launched himself into the older man’s arms, wrapping his legs around Randolph’s middle. Randolph staggered backward and they fell to the ground together, laughing like maniacs.

  Pancho looked at Amanda. She seemed just as puzzled as Pancho felt. With a shrug, Pancho said, “I guess any landing you can walk away from is a good landing.”

  Amanda shook her head. “I shouldn’t think you’d walk away from that one if you’d been aboard it.”

  Randolph was disentangling himself from Duncan and getting to his feet. Brushing dirt from his windbreaker, grinning hugely, he walked over to Amanda and Pancho while Duncan scampered toward the shed. “It works!” Randolph said. “You’ve just witnessed history, ladies. The first actual flight of a fusion-powered vehicle.”

  “Fusion?” Pancho gaped at him. “You mean that little bird had a fusion engine on her?”

  Amanda said, “But I thought fusion generators were great immense things, like power stations.”

  Duncan raced back to them, waving a dark bottle in one hand. The rest of the crew gathered around. Pancho wondered why no one went to the poor little aircraft, smashed and crumpled on the grass.

  Someone produced paper cups and Duncan began to splash liquor into them. At first Pancho thought it was champagne, but the bottle wasn’t the right shape. Scotch, she realized. Scotland’s gift to the world.

  “Hey,” said Randolph, “I need some ice with this.”

  Duncan actually shuddered. “Ice? With good whisky? You Americans!”

  Pancho took a sip of hers, neat. “Wow!” she managed to gasp.

  “To the Duncan Drive,” Randolph toasted, lifting his paper cup. “To the stars!” Duncan countered. “We’ll ride this engine to Alpha Centauri one day!”

  Randolph laughed. “The Asteroid Belt will be far enough, for now.” A couple of the men quaffed their drinks down in one gulp, then trotted out toward the wrecked cruise missile. Others headed for the shed. “Check the cameras, too,” Duncan called after them.

  Pancho asked Randolph again, “That little ship has a fusion engine in it?”

  Nodding, Randolph replied, “In place of its warhead.”

  “The engine’s that small?”

  “It’s only a wee test engine,” said Duncan. “Just to prove that it can provide controllable thrust.”

  “Now we can build one big enough to carry a real payload to the Belt,” Randolph said.

  “Once you raise the money,” added Duncan.

  With a glance at Amanda, Pancho asked Randolph, “But why did you bring Mandy and me out here? Just to have a couple more witnesses?” His grin growing even wider, Randolph answered, “Hell no. I wanted you to see this because you two are gong to pilot the first fusion rocket to the Asteroid Belt.”

  NEW KYOTO

  The Yamagata family estate was set on a rugged hillside high above the office towers and apartment blocks of New Kyoto. Built like a medieval Japanese fortress, the solid yet graceful buildings always made Dan think of poetry frozen into shapes of wood and stone. It had suffered extensive damage in the earthquakes, Dan knew, but he could see no sign of it. The repairs had flawlessly matched the original structures.

  Much of the inner courtyard was given to an exquisitely maintained sand garden. There were green vistas at every turn, as well: gardens and woods and, off in the distance, a glimpse through tall old trees of Lake Biwa, glittering in the late afternoon sun.

  The tiltrotor plane settled down, turbines screeching, in the outer courtyard. Dan pulled off his sanitary mask and unbuckled his safety belt. He was through the hatch before the pilot was able to stop the rotors. Squinting through the dust kicked up by the downwash, Dan saw Nobuhiko Yamagata waiting at the gate to the inner courtyard, wearing a comfortable kimono of deep blue decorated with white herons, the Yamagata family’s emblem.

  For an instant Dan thought he was seeing Saito Yamagata, Nobuhiko’s father, the man who had been Dan’s boss in the old days when Randolph had been a construction engineer on the first Japanese solar power satellite. Nobo had been ascetically slim when he was younger, but now his face and body had filled out considerably. He was tall, though, some thirty centimeters taller than his father had been, even several centimeters taller than Dan himself. The two men bowed simultaneously, then grasped each other’s shoulders.

  “By damn, Nobo, it’s good to see you.”

  “And you,” Nobuhiko replied, smiling broadly. “It’s been much too long since you’ve visited here.” His voice was deep, strong, assured. “You’re looking well,” Dan said as Yamagata led him past the flowering shrubbery of the inner courtyard, toward the wing of the old stone and wood house where the family lived.

  “I’m too fat and I know it,” Nobo said, patting his belly. “Too many hours behind a desk, not enough exercise.”

  Dan made a sympathetic noise.r />
  “I’m thinking of taking a trip to Selene for a nanotherapy session.”

  “Aw, come on, Nobo,” Dan said, “it’s not that bad.”

  “My doctors nag me constantly.”

  “That’s what the double-damned doctors always do. They learn it in medical school. No matter how healthy you are, they always find something to worry you about.”

  They walked along a winding path of stones set across the middle of the carefullyraked sand garden. Dan noticed the miniature olive tree off in one corner of the garden that he had given Nobo’s father many years earlier. It looked green and healthy. Before the greenhouse cliff had struck, even in June the tree would have been covered by a heated transparent plastic dome to protect it from the occasional frost. Now the winters were mild enough to leave the tree in the open all year long.

  “What’s your father’s status?” Dan asked as they removed their shoes at the open door to the main house. Two servants stood silently just inside the door, both women, both in carnelian-red robes.

  Nobuhiko grimaced as they walked down the hallway lined with shoji screens. “The medical researchers have removed the tumor and cleaned father’s body of all traces of cancerous cells. They are ready to begin the revival sequence.”

  “That can be tricky,” Dan said.

  Ten years earlier, Saito Yamagata had had himself declared clinically dead and then frozen in liquid nitrogen, preserved cryonically to await the day when his cancer could be cured and he would be revived.

  “Others have been thawed successfully,” Nobo said as they entered a spacious bedroom. It was paneled in teak, with bare floors of bleached pine, and furnished sparely: a western-style bed, a desk in the opposite corner, two comfortablelooking recliner chairs. One wall consisted of sliding shoji screens; Dan figured they covered a closet, built-in drawers, and the lavatory. Dan saw that his one travel bag had already been placed on a folding stand at the foot of the bed. “Still,” he said, “thawing must be pretty dicey.”

  Yamagata turned to face him, and Dan saw Saito’s calm brown eyes, the certainty, the power that a long lineage of wealth and privilege can bring to a man. “We have followed the research work very thoroughly,” Nobo said. He smiled slightly. “We have sponsored much of the work ourselves, of course. It seems that Father could be revived.”

  “That’s great!” Dan blurted. “Sai will be back with us-” Nobuhiko raised a hand. “Two problems, Dan.”

  “What?”

  “First, there are very strong political forces opposing revival of any cryonicallypreserved person.”

  “Opposing… oh, for the love of Peter, Paul, and Peewee Reese. The New Morality strikes again.”

  “Here in Japan it’s an offshoot of the New Dao movement. They call themselves the Flowers of the Sun.”

  “Flowers of crackpots,” Dan grumbled.

  “They have a considerable amount of political power. Enough to get nanotechnology banned in Japan, just as your New Morality people got it banned in the States.”

  “And now they’re against reviving corpsicles?”

  A reluctant grin cracked Yamagata’s solemn expression. “Delicately put, Dan. My father is a corpsicle.”

  Waving a hand, Dan said, “You know I don’t mean any disrespect.”

  “I know,” Nobuhiko admitted. “But the unhappy fact is that these Flowers of the Sun are attempting to pass a law through the Diet that would forbid cryonics altogether and make it a crime to attempt to revive a frozen body.”

  “Why, for god’s sake? On what grounds?”

  Nobuhiko shrugged. “They say the resources should be spent in rebuilding our ravaged cities. They say that we don’t need rich old people to be brought back among us, what we need are healthy young people who can work hard to rebuild Japan.”

  “Bullcrap,” Dan muttered. Then he brightened. “Hey, I know how you can get around them! Fly your father up to Selene. They’ll revive him there. They can even use nanomachines if they have to.”

  Nobo sat on the bed, his shoulders sagging. “I’ve thought of that, Dan. I’m tempted to do it, especially before the government bars removal of frozen bodies from the country.”

  “They can’t do that!”

  “They will, before the next session of the Diet is over.”

  “Goddammit to hell and back!” Dan shouted, pounding his fist into his palm. “Has the whole stupid world gone crazy?”

  “There’s something else,” Nobo said, his voice barely above a whisper.

  “Something worse.”

  “What on earth could be worse?”

  “The people who have been revived. Their minds are gone.”

  “Gone? What do you mean?”

  With a helpless spread of his hands, Nobuhiko repeated, “Gone. The body can be revived, but apparently the freezing process wipes out the brain’s memory system. Those we’ve revived are mentally like newborns. They even have to be toilet trained all over again.”

  Dan sank into one of the plush recliners. “You mean Sai’s mind… his personality… gone?”

  “That’s what we fear. Apparently the neural connections in the brain break down when the body is frozen. The mind comes out a virtual tabula rasa.”

  “Shit,” Dan muttered.

  “We have our research scientists working on the problem, of course, but there’s no point to reviving my father until we know definitely, one way or the other, how his mind has been affected by the freezing.”

  Dan hunched forward, forearms on his thighs. “Okay. I understand now. But get Sai’s body to Selene. Now! Before these religious fanatics make it impossible to move him.”

  Nobuhiko nodded grimly. “I believe you’re right, Dan. I’ve felt that way myself for some weeks now, but I’m glad that you agree.”

  “I’m heading up to Selene next week,” Dan said. “If you like, I’ll take him with me.”

  “That’s very good of you, but this is a family matter. I’ll take care of it.”

  Dan nodded. “Okay. But if you need any help — anything at all, just let me know.” Nobuhiko smiled again, and for the first time there was real warmth in it. “I will, Dan. I certainly will.”

  “Good.”

  The younger man rubbed at his eyes, then looked up at Dan again. “Very well, I’ve told you my problem. Now tell me yours. What brings you here?” Dan grinned at him. “Oh, nothing much. I just need a couple of billion dollars.” Nobo’s face remained completely impassive for a long moment. Then he said, “Is that all?”

  “Yep. Two bill should do it.”

  “And what do I get in return for such an investment?”

  With a chuckle, Dan replied, “A bunch of rocks.”

  LA GUAIRA

  Pancho looked up, bleary-eyed, from her desktop screen. Across the room that she and Amanda were sharing, Mandy sat at her desk with virtual reality glasses and earphones covering half her face, peering intently at her own screen. “I’m goin’ for a walk,” she said, loudly enough to get through Mandy’s earphones. Amanda nodded without taking off the VR glasses. Pancho squinted at the screen, but it was nothing but a jumble of alphanumerics. Whatever Mandy was studying was displayed on her glasses, not the computer screen. Their dorm room opened directly onto the patio. Cripes, it’s almost sundown, Pancho saw as she stepped outside. The late afternoon was still tropically warm, humid, especially after the air-conditioned cool of their quarters. Pancho stretched her long arms up toward the cloud-flecked sky, trying to work out the knots in her back. Been settin’ at that stupid ol’ desk too damned long, she said to herself. Mandy can sit there and study till hell freezes over. She’s like a dogass computer, just absorbing data like a friggin’ machine.

  Dan Randolph had put them to studying the fusion drive and working with the engineering team that was converting a lunar transfer buggy into the ship that would carry them out to the Belt. They saw Randolph rarely. The man was jumping all across the world like a flea on a hot griddle, hardly ever in the same place more than
one night. When he was in La Guaira he drove the whole team hard, and himself hardest of all.

  Peculiar place for a corporate headquarters, Pancho thought as she walked from the housing complex out past the swaying, rustling palm trees, toward the seawall. La Guaira was more suited to being a tourist resort than a major space launching center. Randolph had settled his Astro Manufacturing headquarters here years ago, partly because its location near the equator gave rockets a little extra boost from the Earth’s spin, partly because he found the government of Venezuela easier to deal with than the suits in Washington.

  Strange, though. Randolph was rumored to have been in love with President Scanwell. There were whispers about their being lovers, off and on, a stormy romance that only ended when the ex-President lost her life in the big Tennessee Valley earthquake.

  It all seemed so far away. Pancho followed the winding path toward the seawall, her softboots crunching on the gravel. The Sun was just about touching the horizon, turning the Caribbean reddish gold. Massive clouds were piling up, turning purple and crimson in the underlighting. With the breeze coming off the sea, making the palms bow gracefully, this was as close to a tropical paradise as she could imagine.

  But the seawall reminded her of a harsher reality. It was shoulder high, an ugly reinforced concrete barrier against the encroaching waters. It had originally been painted a pastel pink, but the paint had faded in the sun, and the concrete was crumbling here and there where storm tides had pounded against it. The old beaches were all underwater now, except at the very lowest tides. The surf broke out there, long combers tumbling and frothing with a steady, ceaseless growling hiss. And still the sea was rising, a little bit more every year. “Looks pretty, doesn’t it?”

  Startled, she turned to see Randolph standing there, looking glumly out to sea. He was wearing a wrinkled white shirt and dark slacks that had gone baggy from long hours of travel.

  “Didn’t see you coming up the path, boss,” said Pancho. “Come to think of it, I didn’t even hear you on the gravel.”