Asimov's SF, April-May 2007

by Dell Magazine Authors

  Of course, the Chinese claimed they were going to put a little manned lab in Lunar orbit early next year, and would land as soon as may be after that. Does that make it a race?

  I imagine the governments know what the Transform Space Consortium, tSpace, is up to in the Australian desert, not far from the K-1 launch site, where US regulators chased them. I just don't imagine they think it'll work.

  I'd visited tSpace once during the workup for Excelsior and been intrigued by their planetary lander design, but had been just as skeptical of the notion you could do it without a big cargo launcher. Just the idea of staging tankers along the whole route, refueling on the way to the Moon, again in Lunar orbit before landing, then again afterward ... not to mention flying back from the Moon in a spaceship with no aerobraking capability.

  You know that old story too: either you incinerate in the Earth's atmosphere, or you fly on by and die some time later, out in the cold and dark.

  The tSpace guy giving us the tour had looked me in the eye, and said, “If you don't break the Outer Space Treaty, we will.” Made me think about the little Standard ARM flag we'd had made up. That'll be fun.

  There was a little beep-beep from the console, and Sarah said, “Coming up on phasing burn. Five minutes."

  We were using the Moon mainly to twist our orbital inclination relative to the Sun, so one little burn and, UB(2009)/21 here we come ... Damn, I thought. I must be getting used to this....

  * * * *

  By the time another twenty-four hours had passed, Earth was a tiny blue marble in the sky, yellow-gray Moon a similar size off to one side. When I'd mentioned to Willy how the Moon seemed to be getting smaller faster, he'd given me a little smirk: It's closer, dummy. Think!

  Oh, right.

  So the sun was bright and the sky was black, and there wasn't much more to see. The brighter stars were managing to poke through the sun's glare, but most were lost in nothingness, here and there the steady, bright fireflies of the big planets and close planets. Venus over there, Jupiter there, wan Saturn that way ... I looked for Mars but couldn't find it. Maybe...

  Sarah was at the comm console, tracking the high-gain antenna this way and that, trying to find the CNN satellite again, muttering something about the published ephemerides, so I sat down at the astrogation station, pulled up the scope image, and started slewing along the ecliptic. There. Venus looked like a brilliant crescent moon, blinding against an intensely black backdrop.

  Funny you can't see ... well, no, I guess not. No Earthlight to make the nightside visible on the edge of vision. No moon. No nothing.

  Sarah said, “Hey. We're on!” When I looked, Willy and Minnie were floating behind her chair, each holding on with one hand.

  On the TV, there was another dark sky, indistinct, T-shaped thingy centered on the screen, while a woman's vibrant voice said, “This is a view of Excelsior emerging from behind the Moon, taken from telescopes at Mauna Kea, Hawaii. The spaceship and its four-person crew are now on their way to near-earth asteroid UB(2009)/21, the first human beings to leave Earth's orbit for a destination beyond the Moon. This is Chelsea Clanton, reporting live from Houston!"

  Willy said, “Houston?"

  Sarah said, “I think she's at SpaceHab."

  “But that's just our Apex 400 engineering telemetry!"

  A shrug. “We didn't exactly set up a Mission Control."

  The TV switched to CNN anchor Barney Frank in Atlanta, who said, “Meanwhile, in other news...” His sweaty jowls were replaced by the hazy ruins of Damascus.

  I slewed on from Venus, sticking to the ecliptic, unable to remember what planet was next. Suddenly, Saturn was a pale pastel disk, rings steeply tilted down, like the brim of a rakishly worn hat. Imagine going there. Maybe, if I live long e...

  Christ. I never thought I'd live long enough, or get lucky enough, to be here! Count your damned blessings and be glad, Burke the Jerk...

  Still. As always. Hoping against hope.

  A little more than a year after we secured that Gates Grant, Willy and I were still trying to get our designs resolved, figure out what the best way to do It would be, disagreeing every step of the way. One day, we took a Wild Blue flight to the new AndrewsSpace facility in the Nevada desert. I remember it was hot as hell that day, desert wind reeking like gunpowder, but it was nice and cool, cool and dim in the unexpectedly big hangar the pretty Chinese woman was showing us.

  Willy thought I was nuts of course, wasting our time like this. I mean, Andrews had been one of the COTS losers, though they'd fielded the biggest of the CEV proposals back in 2006, a ten-man Apollo-style capsule. Still, they had a lot of government contracts and were the primary subcontractor on the K-1. They had something. Something to show us.

  When Willy saw what it was, he tripped over his own feet, staggering, almost falling down.

  I managed a little more savoir faire, stopping dead in my tracks, gasping, saying, “Well ... Fuck!"

  The Chinese girl burst out in a full-throated laugh, startling in such a skinny little thing.

  The object lying on its side in the big, cool hangar was another matter entirely. I'd call it every goofy SF dork's wet dream of a magic starship. Big as an airliner, maybe fifty meters, nose to tail, eight huge triangular metal vanes starting amidships and tapering toward the tail, ring of windows just behind the conical nose.

  I said, “Where are you going with this? Tau Ceti?"

  That got another big laugh.

  “This is the Mini-Mag Orion, isn't it?"

  She said, “That's right. We don't call it that anymore, though. Not since NASA took the name Orion for the CEV."

  The original Orion had been a pulsed-fusion spaceship, sort of an interplanetary battleship, designed in the late 1950s. It would've worked, though the idea of riding full-sized H-bombs into the sky seemed ... lunatic, at best. This one, I knew, proposed to use a z-axis magnetic pinch engine design. But ... really building it?

  “So what do you call it now?"

  “The Project 8K11 Full-Scale Mockup."

  “Mockup."

  “It'll be about five years before we build the battleship prototype."

  A battleship prototype is a working version of a design, built with no regard to weight requirements. Too heavy to fly, but you could run all the systems and see them work.

  Willy said, “How much?"

  Another big laugh. “You boys must have some real money!"

  I said, “Our annual budget is..."

  Willy snapped, “Alan!"

  Oh, right. To some people, a hundred million a year is big bucks. Not to this girl, though.

  She smiled. “We think we're ten, maybe twelve years from space trials. When we sell them...? At least three billion USD twenty-ten. Adjusted for inflation, of course."

  “Of course. Can we see inside?"

  The control room in the nose was pretty good. Spacious and bright, with three seats in front of instrument panels, the other seven flat racks on the rear bulkhead, for passengers. I said, “It looks like your old CEV design."

  “It is. Still has the heat shield, too."

  Willy said, “This thing can't land on a planet. Why..."

  She said, “Just in case. It has minimal RCS, fuel cells and life support sufficient for one month. Call it an escape capsule."

  I said, “Or a lifeboat."

  “That too."

  The cylindrical compartment behind the command module looked pretty much like the bottom deck of Skylab, with a head and galley, storage compartments, and a bunch of “zero-gee staterooms,” really not much more than closets. Two hatches led one level further aft, one to an airlock, the other to what she called “accessible life support."

  “You going to launch manned?"

  She nodded. “It's sized to take the place of an Ares V earth-departure stage. We plan to launch in a high arc from Canaveral, and use the fusion drive to make orbit.” You could see the faraway gleam in her eyes then, a fanatic pursuing a fantastic dream. “With
a full fuel load, she can make a round trip anywhere in the inner solar system except Mercury. We can get to Mars, Venus. The low-inclination asteroids. Even Callisto, though not the other Galileans."

  Willy whispered, “Callisto...” looking right at me.

  “Too much radiation anyway,” she said.

  Later, outside in the roasting gunpowder night, she said, “So where do you boys think you're headed?"

  Maybe she meant just tonight, and Willy said, “Vegas..."

  But I pointed at a yellow diamond high in the night sky. “You see Jupiter?"

  Willy hissed, “Alan ..."

  I ignored him, and slid my finger forward to a point sixty degrees along the ecliptic. “Right about there, I think."

  Her dropped jaw had a satisfyingly comical look. After a minute, face quite serious, she said, “If you can come up with enough dough, we might be able to cut you a deal on an early flight model."

  I said, “By 2020, maybe?"

  “Probably a couple of years after that, I'm afraid."

  “Okay. We'll be in touch."

  Sitting in the cool comfort of our Hybrid Grand Cherokee, Willy said, “Why'd you tell her?"

  I shrugged. “No one's going to race us to the Fore-Trojans. You know that. And we've got easier fish to catch first."

  He nodded. “We'll sure as hell have to catch those fish, if we want to scrape up that kind of cash!"

  “Yeah. Meanwhile, we've got a flight to catch.” I tapped the dashboard clock. “Our meeting with Musk and his team is in ten hours."

  In the here and now, as Earth and Moon shrank slowly away, I finally managed to find Mars, a mottled red ball in the scope. You couldn't see much real terrain, just the ice caps and the four dark blotches of Olympus Mons and Tharsis ridge, but it did look like it had canals.

  So many illusions. So little time.

  Maybe I will stand there one time before I die.

  Who knows?

  * * * *

  A month later, I sat watching my instruments, as Willy burped Excelsior's methane/LOX engine, matching orbits with UB(2009)/21. Though you could hear the pop of the RCS thrusters, the main engine was too smooth and too far away, the only sign of anything unusual happening the little surges of acceleration on my butt.

  From the astrogation console, Sarah called out. “That's it! Ten klicks."

  When I looked up, having finished my checklist, Willy was yawing us around toward the asteroid. The sky was full of stars, of course, and for a moment I was disoriented. Okay. There's the perpetual noonday sun over there, same size as seen from Earth and the Moon, not blinding only because of the photoreactive glass forming the base of the dome's UV-opaque quartz outer layer. “Mmmmmphhhh..."

  Sarah, familiar with all my little grunts, said, “Look just over Smaug's high-gain antenna."

  Earth was tiny and blue from eight million miles out, but still a visible disk, Moon a gray-brown speck off to one side. Suddenly, the sky was familiar, Orion's belt jumping out at me, then the Pleiades, Aldebaran, and the Hyades ... There. That fat, pale-orange spark is Jupiter, and...

  I glanced at my own instruments, then tipped my head back so I could look straight up through the dome. “Hmh. I expected to see it."

  Willy said, “I did too. I guess, from almost five miles out, a rock smaller than a football stadium..."

  Minnie released her harness and floated up toward the inner surface of the dome. “It's big enough to see, big as your thumbnail, anyway. I guess the albedo is too low."

  Sarah said, “Hiding in the dark between the stars."

  I felt a sudden, hard pulse of atavistic thrill at her words. Look! Look where you are!

  I'd felt it a few times before, always unexpected, though you'd think by now I'd know the moments when it would come. Once when I sat in those sunny offices in Santa Barbara, California, sitting across the table from the famous PayPal guy, signing my name below Willy's on a contract said we agreed to buy three Falcon 9S9 rockets, complete with launch services, from Space Exploration Technologies, along with two complete manned-version Dragon space capsules, customized to our specs.

  Again four years later, as the four of us lay on our backs along with one other “honeymooning couple,” as I felt the hard, complex jolt as those nine Merlin engines lit, and the ground outside the porthole started to drop, taking us on our “practice flight” to the Bigelow Exodus.

  A third time on the day we took delivery of Excelsior from SpaceHab, standing in a hangar just before they boxed it up for shipment to Kwajalein. I'd stood there, looking in through the dome at those four seats and instrument panels, and suddenly realized what I was going to do, where I was going to go.

  In the spotter scope image, UB(2009)/21 was just off the center crosshatch, wanly lit up by the sun, not quite a potato-shaped lump. No, here was a fat charcoal-gray belly, with a smaller lobe on one end, making something that looked like a dirty snowman wearing a funeral shawl. A crippled snowman, perhaps?

  I said, “Snow-hunchback,” not quite realizing I'd spoken.

  Minnie giggled and said, “That's a pretty image! Too bad there's already an asteroid named Victor Hugo..."

  I said, “Is there one named Quasimodo?"

  She kicked off from the dome and came to float behind me, holding onto the back of my seat. Then, in a dreaming sort of voice, she said, “All sorts of clues to the formation of this thing. Five, maybe six distinct terrains. Craters all over the smaller binary, but near the contact point, you see they fade away..."

  This was her pulse of joy, different from mine perhaps, but still the moment of a lifetime. I suddenly realized Minnie Gillooly was about to become only the second geologist to stand on the surface of another world, after Harrison Schmitt on the Moon, forty-four long years ago. What the hell took so long?

  Damn fools in high places, of course.

  Willy said, “I guess it's time to prepare for landing. Guys?"

  Sarah said, “We can still decide to bring Excelsior in close."

  I shook my head. “Probably a good idea to stick with our plan, and leave Excelsior out here where nothing can happen to it.” It'd be a cramped ride home in Smaug and Fafnir, if we lost our mother ship.

  Willy said, “Okay. Let's get to it."

  Another little thrill went up my spine.

  * * * *

  No more than an hour later, and I sat strapped in Fafnir's pilot seat, looking out through the left forward docking window at Excelsior's dimly lit cupola dome. Sarah had the MacDonald-Detweiler MiniCanadarm unshipped from its mount on the little SpaceHab airlock/adaptor, and had reached forward to grapple its standard end effector to the fixture on Excelsior.

  It's become the usual way spacecraft link up now. No more gentle forward movement, “parking in the garage,” and gentle shudder of soft dock. Just fly within range of an RMS, or use your own, and swing on in to a Standard Berthing Mechanism.

  Beyond Excelsior, I could see the windows of Smaug lit up yellow, could see the vague shapes and shadows of Willy and Minnie, doing their tasks, same as us. In my earphones, Willy's voice, slightly crackly with interplanetary static, said, “Ready, gang?"

  My mouth went dry, and I could feel my heart start to stutter. “All set."

  “Let's do it."

  I took a deep breath and looked at Sarah, a few feet away in the flight engineer's seat.

  She smiled, and said, “Okay, Alan. Just like in the simulator."

  “I prefer to think of it as just like in a story, sweetling."

  More smile, then she looked down at her instruments, one hand in the RMS glove. “Say when."

  I remember the day I sat down to write that story. I'd never been much of a writer, but I'd kept it up over a long, long time, thirty-some-odd years producing a couple of dozen stories, a handful of novels, most of them published, in magazines, by New York publishers. Just a hobby, something fun to do when I wasn't making money, first as a marine machinery mechanic, then, when I got too old to be comfortable workin
g outdoors on the coast of Maine, in the winter, at night, sitting in an office writing computer software.

  I remember I sat down in my old green secretarial chair, in front of the aging HP 4550Z I set aside for writing, opened up a new file in WordStar 7.0a for DOS, the antiquated word processor I used only for stories. Wiggled my fingers above the keyboard to make the juices flow, then tappy-tap-tap, the words began forming on the screen.

  The people in the story weren't afraid, didn't feel their hearts speed up like crazy, lived in the future, had seen it all, were used to it all, ho-hum.

  Then I thought, What if it was me? Really me? What if I had the money to buy a space capsule from one of the New Space Entrepreneurs I was reading about, and go on my own real space adventure? How would I feel then?

  So I wrote the story that way.

  I was a hell of a lot more nervous now than the me in the story had been. But I said, “When."

  Sarah punched commands into her console, fingers chattering rapidly across the keyboard, and I felt a series of light jolts as the berthing latches let go, then a quiver as we came loose from Excelsior. “Berthing mechanism released,” she said.

  Then she put her arm in the glove, pushed the arm with one long smooth motion, then quickly opened her fingers. Out the window, I could see Excelsior suddenly swing away, then recede as the RMS end effector let go of the grapple fixture. And Sarah said, “Grapple released."

  I watched Excelsior drift away as she swung the arm back in and clipped it to its rack on the adaptor. Beyond the mothership, I could see Smaug receding in the opposite direction, growing smaller, then smaller still. Little lights twinkled around the hull, and she stopped, hanging in space.

  Okay, Burke the Jerk. Get busy. I nudged the hand controller, RCS jets popping and muttering through the hull, and Excelsior stopped going away too.

  In my earphones, Willy's voice crackled, “Okay. I guess if it wanders off while we're gone, we've got plenty of fuel to go looking."

  I took my eyes off the window, and looked down at the three flat panels of my IFR display, looking at radar, visual camera, and FLIR, columns of data down the left-hand edge of each screen, just the way I liked. Radar was all soft static, but for the bright beads of Excelsior and Smaug in the foreground. Visual showed nothing. But in FLIR, UB(2009)/21 was a bright sparkle, waiting against the dark sky.