The cabins in the passenger module might seem like stark spare broom closets to anyone who had never been a space monkey on Cosmograd Sagdeev, but to Franja, they were the lap of space-going luxury. They were as big as a four-monkey bunkroom, but there was only one set of nets, and it had a blow-up headrest so that you could read comfortably in bed. There was a desk and a chair you could strap into. The clothes locker had drawers. The toilet was completely enclosed. And there was actually a small round porthole through which to see the stars.
They put Father in a cabin beside hers. He had wanted to tour the ship immediately, and the press pool was all too eager for it, but Franja had insisted that he rest, and once they had him in the nets, he lost consciousness almost at once.
Jerry awoke to the sight of Franja’s face peering down at him with worried eyes. There was a young man floating beside her, above his sleep net, studying him with a more professional concern, glancing at some hand-held instrument.
Looking across his chest, Jerry saw that his shirt had been unbuttoned, that there were electrodes pasted above his heart, circuited through a tiny transmitter taped in the center of the cluster.
“Just a checkup, Father,” Franja said all too reassuringly. “Dr. Gonzalez has been running some routine tests.”
“How am I doing, Doctor?” Jerry demanded. “How long have I been out?”
Franja and the doctor exchanged quick uncertain glances.
“The truth, Doctor!” Jerry insisted.
Franja sighed. “Tell him,” she said.
“Well, Mr. Reed, you did suffer some anoxia during the acceleration, and there has been some deterioration of heart function, and you may notice some minor problems with motor control . . . ,” Gonzalez said slowly.
Then, much more rapidly: “But you have slept for nearly ten hours, and the zero gravity seems to have improved your condition, or at least stabilized it.”
“Can he move about, Dr. Gonzalez?” Franja asked.
Gonzalez seemed to ponder that for a long moment. “I suppose so,” he finally said. Then he forced a ghastly phony smile. “That is what you’ve risked your life for, isn’t it, Mr. Reed?”
“They’re about to break orbit, Father,” Franja told him. “They want you on the bridge for the big moment. Think you can make it?”
“Or die trying,” Jerry declared, and he managed to laugh, feeling a pain in his chest as he did that quickly subsided. No one else thought it was very funny.
The doctor removed the electrodes, and Jerry managed to button up his own shirt, though his fingers felt a bit numb and wooden. They got him out of the nets, the doctor velcroed his oscilloscope to the bulkhead and took hold of the hibernautika’s handle. Franja took Jerry’s hand, and, brachiating along the rings easily with the other, towed him like a great frail balloon out of the cabin and up the central corridor to the bridge.
The standard bridge crew was four—a pilot, a co-pilot, a flight engineer, and the captain—though they had followed Jerry’s original design and provided three extra couches for observers at the rear, well away from the instrument panels and controls.
One of these was occupied by the press-pool cameraman, who lay there in his nets swiveling his camera endlessly as Jerry was introduced to the French captain, the German pilot, the Russian co-pilot, and the British flight engineer.
But Jerry had little attention left for the formalities, he scarcely heard what anyone was saying, including himself, for his being was transfixed by a vision, and the vision that transfixed him was that of the vast curve of the Earth through the big observation bubble that formed the prow of the passenger module.
There had been endless argument about that bubble. It compromised structural integrity. It added to the cost. It was entirely superfluous, a wall screen and cameras would have afforded a much more complete selection of views.
But in the end, the romantics had won out, and there it was, the naked reality itself, palpable and massive in the crystalline vacuum, awesomely present as no video image could have been.
After the preliminary footage had been shot, they fastened Jerry into the couch beside the cameraman, Franja crawled into the nets of the one on the other side and took his hand, a shot that had the cameraman straining awkwardly in his restraints to get the close-up.
The bridge crew returned to their couches and the short countdown began.
“Sixty seconds . . .”
“All systems green.”
“Thirty seconds . . .”
“Firing sequence initiated . . .”
“Ten seconds . . .”
“We have a commit.”
“Zero . . .”
“Ignition confirmed,” the co-pilot said, but it was entirely superfluous, as Jerry felt a subtle but unmistakable pressure squeezing him gently back against the padding of the couch. It was barely noticeable as the main engine overcame the GTN’s massive inertia, but as it built up delta v, the pressure began to build up too, his lungs started to strain. His heart was racing in his chest by the time the curve of the Earth began to fall away.
Jerry knew that what he was experiencing was no more than a half-g acceleration, but after the long hours of zero gravity, his body seemed to weigh twice, not one half, of what it had on Earth. It was like being plunged back into a suddenly unfamiliar and hostile element, like vaulting out of a long float in a heated swimming pool up into the sudden chill of the naked air.
It seemed as if he were trying to breathe some viscous fluid. Spiderweb tingles radiated from his chest down his arms. His head felt as if it were stuffed with broken glass. Tiny sparkles teased at his field of vision.
Oh please, please, don’t let me black out now!
The Earth slid out of the observation bubble’s field of vision as the Grand Tour Navette executed a roll, and now the transient sparkles were quite overwhelmed by thousands of hard bright stars glaring unwaveringly in the perfect darkness.
I won’t! I won’t!
He squeezed Franja’s hand with what was left of his strength and felt her strong young grip squeezing back. His field of vision seemed to narrow so that all he saw was the glorious star field drifting majestically across it from left to right. His body was pressed hard against the couch padding, as if a great hand on his chest were seeking to thrust him away from the vision before him, down, down, down, into the inky black waters. . . .
And then a brilliant silvery ball pushed back the circling darkness with a hard white actinic light as it swam majestically across the observation bubble.
The Grand Tour Navette juddered from the rapid firing of clusters of small thrusters and then it was centered in the bubble, in his fading field of vision, pulling him toward it, not down, down, down, but up, up, up, into the bright white circle of light mottled with faint gray dapplings, up a long narrow dark tunnel toward the glorious promise at the other end, toward the Moon.
He smiled, he sighed, and he let it take him up, up, and away.
After Father had lost consciousness on the bridge, Dr. Gonzalez had insisted that he rest in his cabin as much as possible and had given him a sedative to keep him asleep.
“I’m afraid the prognosis is not good,” he told Franja. “Medically speaking, this has been a very foolish venture. He’s worse than he was when he boarded. He showed some improvement after hours in zero g, but even this mild acceleration now . . .”
“The prognosis was always terminal, Doctor,” Franja said grimly. “We all knew that, and so did he. But will he make it? Will he make it to the Moon?”
Gonzalez had shrugged. “That, I think, is not an entirely medical matter. His heart has been damaged, his respiration is becoming labored, and he’s probably sustained scattered cerebral damage already. He could suffer a major stroke or heart attack at any time, or survive like this for weeks.”
But then he had stepped out of his medical persona. “As a doctor, all I can say is that the flesh is deteriorating rapidly,” he said. “But as a man . . . Well, the spirit is impressi
vely strong. And he deserves to make it. And barring a major incident, that should count for something. All we can do is give him all the rest we can and pray to God for justice.”
“I wish I could do that sincerely, Dr. Gonzalez, but I’m afraid I have a great deal of difficulty believing in God, just or otherwise. I’m afraid I’m not quite up to praying for cosmic justice.”
And Gonzalez had smiled a strange little smile. “But I do, Señorita Reed,” he told her, “so, con su permiso, I will.”
And so Father slept most of the time, and Gonzalez prayed, and Franja found herself alone for most of the forty-four-hour voyage, eating in the commissary, sleeping in the nets, fending off the unwanted attention of the press-pool reporters, who refused to let her alone in the absence of their star performer, and spending most of her waking hours in the small observation bubble in the nose of the salon module, watching the imperceptible approach of the Moon.
It looked so cold and pale at first, a hard white disc of reflected sunlight, baleful and indifferent in the cruel black darkness, nothing like a planet, nothing like the living Earth she had spent so many hours regarding with wonder and longing as a space monkey on Cosmograd Sagdeev.
It seemed like a painted backdrop, a special-effects shot from some sleazy film; distant and flat, a foolish thing indeed for which to throw one’s life away. What was it after all but a cold colorless rock whose only hint of life, the semblance of a human face that the eye constructed from the patterns of the mares and the craters, was a mere optical illusion, a perceptual denial of the lifeless reality?
Only as it grew larger and larger, only as the GTN could be perceived as actually speeding toward it, did it wax into a true sphere in her mind’s eye, and loom into psychic focus as another planet, with a true geography cast into shadowed relief, with its own dusty version of mountains and valleys, desiccated and stillborn, but still truly another world.
Only then did the vision become real, become personal. Only then did it even occur to her that she too was about to experience the fulfillment of a teenage dream. Only then did she feel the impact.
She was going to the Moon.
How strange that she had never thought of it that way before! She had never thought of it as anything but Father’s trip to the Moon. She had quite forgotten, somehow, that this was something that she too had dreamed of—as a girl listening to Father’s stories, as a student in the lycée working so hard for admission to Yuri Gagarin University, at Gagarin itself, working night and day to bring a moment like this about, aboard Sagdeev, and in pilots’ school too.
Only in these last years hopping from city to city, immersed in the newfound wonders of a living planet, had the dream of space lost its clear hard-edged purity and faded into some vague future possibility, become the memory of a dream dreamt long ago by someone else.
Only fortune, and indeed what had seemed like bad fortune at the time, had confined her to one planet and taught her to love the wonders of the Earth. She had never sought to be the woman she had become.
And only Father’s misfortune had gifted that woman with the fulfillment of the lost girlhood dream she had inherited from him. Only now, when she had quite forgotten that goal in her total concern for him, was she about to receive what she had once so single-mindedly sought.
There was some kind of justice in that.
For only now was Father’s last gift truly deserved.
And by God, Father deserved it too.
Franja did not believe in God, still less in cosmic justice.
But as she looked out on the dead white surface of the Moon, she thought she could see a tiny sparkle, the Lunagrad half-burrowed into the surface of this world that had never before known life, and she imagined cities spangled over the once-dead surface in some far-distant age, cities as teeming with life and complexity as any on Earth. And that too would be the fulfillment of the great human dream in the face of a cold and uncaring void.
Even a dead world could become what life chose to make it.
And she found herself remembering something Nathan Wolfowitz had said in the midst of a crisis that had threatened to scourge that life from the Earth in a paroxysm of human stupidity.
There ain’t no justice in this world, the American President had said, except the justice we make.
Or in any other, she thought.
No, she couldn’t bring herself to pray to a God she didn’t believe in for cosmic justice. But just now she found herself envying those who could and did.
AN OPTIMIST’S VIEW OF THE GREAT SILENCE
Before the discovery of the Barnards, the pessimists took our failure to detect signals from extraterrestrial civilizations as proof that no one was out there. Now that we know that there is, now that we even have hints of unthinkably advanced civilizations toward the galactic core, the pessimists take our continued failure to detect interstellar broadcasts as proof that these civilizations are hostile or indifferent. Or even engaged in a Darwinian battle of tooth and claw we should seek to hide from.
But from an optimist’s viewpoint, this failure to communicate may be seen as potential good news. For if it is possible for civilizations at a sufficient stage of advancement to engage in easy interstellar chatter, to travel easily to other stars, why would they bother? Why cope with a communications delay measured in decades and centuries when you can meet face-to-face? Who knows, civilizations much in advance of our own might even acquire the ability to travel faster than light, by wormhole tunnels created by artificial black holes, for example, or more likely by something we cannot even imagine.
The pessimists look out at the stars, and they fearfully see the very chauvinisms we now, finally, seem to be in the process of overcoming writ large and eternal in a galactic behavioral sink.
But we optimists look out at the stars and hopefully see a galactic main and the ships of many peoples sailing its immensity, and we say perhaps they have avoided contacting us for the best of reasons. Perhaps they’ve just been waiting for us to grow up, put the strife and dangers of planetary adolescence behind us, hoist our own sails, and set forth to join them, not as the buccaneers we once were, but as a mature and worthy civilization.
—Science
Occasionally, Jerry found himself rising up to the surface of a sea of warm liquid blackness into a world of pressure and pain and sparky occluded vision. Sometimes Franja was there, sometimes the doctor, but most of these moments of conscious lucidity were endured alone, lying in the darkened cabin, feeling the breath being squeezed out of him, the edge of vertigo and nausea, the pains radiating out from his chest down his limbs, the headache that fragmented thought, the fetid metallic taste of his own death in his mouth.
A part of him would recoil and try to drift back into the comforting nothingness, but the stronger part of him fought to retain consciousness even of this, fought to remain awake and alive, fought not to die like a whimpering creature in the dark, used the pain, the struggle itself, as a goad to awareness.
Not yet! Not now!
Always the darkness was stronger, always his last thought was of being dragged back down beneath the surface, but always he came rising up again, and now he felt himself surfacing once more, into the pain, into the ceaseless pressure, into . . .
He blinked his eyes in wonder. There were still floaters in his field of vision, but he was seeing much more clearly now. And thinking more clearly too, he found himself realizing. He was fully awake. There were still tingly pains in his chest and limbs, but the pressure was gone. And so was the crushing weight of gravity.
His head still ached and he was still quite dizzy, but the black tide had receded from his mind, and his consciousness was clear and sharp. Gasping to breathe the attenuated air, he felt like a dying fish that had been tossed back into the water, reprieved and reinvigorated by a sudden return to his natural element.
As zero gravity was now.
And then he realized what had happened. The main engine had been shut down for the insertion
into lunar orbit. He had made it! They were there! They had reached the Moon!
But then he remembered that there was one ordeal yet to come.
They would use gravitational braking to let the Moon close the parabola of their flyby into an elliptical orbit, but they had to lose velocity first to do it, and that meant one more burn, a short, hard hot one at a quarter g, with the main engine thrusting against the forward vector.
First they would turn the ship. . . .
And the GTN began to jerk and judder as scores of little control thrusters brought it about. Then there was a long terrifying stillness as the computers verified the burn parameters.
And the ship shook and a great fist slammed him back into the padding, knocking the breath out of him, sending lightning bolts of pain across his chest and down his limbs, pounding him back into the inky waters, pushing him under, dragging him away, down, down, down . . .
Not yet, goddamn you! Not now!
Jerry ground his fingernails into the flesh of his palms. He bit down gingerly on his tongue. He would not let the darkness carry him away this time, he would not trust that he would rise to the surface again, he would damn well wait this out, he would not lose consciousness now!
Not yet, motherfucker! Not now!
It seemed to go on forever, and then, all at once, it was over. The main engine shut down, the fist on his chest disappeared, and he came bobbing weightless like a cork up out of the depths of the suffocating sea.
After the acceleration, the return of zero gravity was like a burst of exhilarating energy, a return to natural life. His breathing was labored, the pains in his chest and arms were worse than before, there was an unsettling numbness in his fingers and toes, but his vision had cleared, the darkness had receded, and he was very much awake and aware.
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