Time m-1

by Stephen Baxter

  Malenfant is right; we are facing a crisis over the survival of the species. Hard times make for hard choices. Omelettes and eggs, people.

  Anyhow, those bombs aren’t going to go away. If America doesn’t use them, somebody else will.

  Art Morris:

  My name is Art Morris and I am forty years old. I am a Marine,

  or used to be until I got disabled out.

  My most prized possession is a snapshot of my daughter, Leanne.

  In the snap she’s at her last birthday party, just five years old, in a splash of Florida sunshine. The snap’s one of those fancy modern ones that can show you movement, and it cycles through a few seconds of Leanne blowing at her cake. And it has a soundtrack. If you listen under the clapping and whoops of the family and the other kids, you can just hear her wheeze as she took her big breath. What you can’t see off the edge of the picture is me, just behind Leanne’s shoulder, taking a blow myself to make sure those damn candles did what she wanted them to do, making sure that something in her world worked, just once.

  It wasn’t long after that that we had to put her into the ground. I didn’t understand half of what the doctors told me was wrong with her, but I got the headline.

  She was a yellow baby, a space baby, a rocket baby.

  Maybe by now she would have been one of these smart kids the news is full of. But she never got the chance.

  I rejoiced when they shut down the space program. But now those assholes in the desert have started firing off their damn rockets again, regardless.

  I keep Leanne’s picture taped to the dash of my car, or in my pocket.

  Look what you did, Reid Malenfant.

  Reid Malenfant:

  Madame Chairman, this is not some wacko stunt. It is a sound

  business venture.

  Here’s the plan from here on in.

  Cruithne is a ball of loosely aggregated dirt: probably eighty percent silicates, sixteen percent water, two percent carbon, two percent metals. This is an extraordinarily rich resource.

  Our strategy is to aim for the simplest technologies, fast return, fast payback.

  The first thing we’re going to make up on Cruithne is rocket fuel. The fuel will be a methane-oxygen bipropellant.

  Then we’ll start bagging up permafrost water from the asteroid, along with a little unprocessed asteroid material. We’ll use the propellant to start firing water back to Earth orbit — specifically, a type of orbit called HEEO, a highly eccentric Earth orbit, which in terms of accessibility is a good compromise place to store extraterrestrial materials.

  Thus we will build a pipeline from Cruithne to Earth orbit.

  This will not be a complex operation. The methane rockets are based on tried and trusted Pratt and Whitney designs. The cargo carriers will be little more than plastic bags wrapped around big dirty ice cubes.

  But in HEEO this water will become unimaginably precious. We can use it for life support and to make rocket fuel. We think Nautilus should be able to return enough water to fuel a further twenty to fifty NEO exploration missions, at minimal incremental cost. This is one measure of the payback we’re intending to achieve. Also we can sell surplus fuel to NASA.

  But we are also intending to trial more complex extraction technologies on this first flight. With suitable engineering, we can extract not just water but also carbon dioxide, nitrogen, sulfur, ammonia, phosphates — all the requirements of a life-support system. We will also be able to use the asteroid dirt to make glass, fiberglass, ceramics, concrete, dirt to grow things in.

  We are already preparing a crewed follow-up mission to Cruithne that will leverage this technology to establish a colony, the first colony off the planet. This will be self-sufficient, almost from day one.

  And the colonists will pay their way by further processing the Cruithne dirt to extract its metals. The result will be around ninety percent iron, seven percent nickel, one percent cobalt, and traces. The trace, however, includes platinum, which may be the first resource returned to the surface of the Earth; nickel and cobalt will probably follow.

  Incidentally, I’m often asked why I’m going to the asteroids first, rather than to the Moon. The Moon seems easier to get to, and is much bigger than any asteroid besides. Well, the slag that is left over after we extract the water and volatiles and metals from asteroid ore — the stuff we’d throw away — that slag is about equivalent to the richest Moon rocks. That’s why I ain’t going to

  the Moon.

  Later we’ll start the construction of a solar power plant in Earth orbit. The high-technology components of the plant — such as guidance, control, communications, power conversion, and microwave transmission systems — will be assembled on Earth. The massive low-tech components — wires, cables, girders, bolts, fixtures, station-keeping propellants, and solar cells — will all be manufactured in space from asteroid materials. This plan reduces the mass that will have to be lifted into Earth orbit severalfold. This plant will produce energy — safe, clean, pollution free — that we can sell back to Earth.

  And that’s the plan. In the next few years Cruithne volatiles will support the space station, more Earth-orbital habitats, and missions to the Moon and Mars, as well as the first self-sufficient off-Earth colony.

  That little lot ought to see me through to retirement.

  But what about beyond that?

  Beyond that, the Galaxy awaits, and all the universe. Virgin territory. All we need is a toehold. And that’s what Bootstrap will give us. America has discovered a new frontier, and we will become great again.

  Frankly, Madame Chairman, I think I’ve spent enough time in front of Congressional committees like this and other boards of inquiry. All I need is for you to let me carry on and do my job. And I don’t see I have a damn thing to apologize for.

  Thank you.

  Sheena 5:

  Swimming through space, despite her consuming weariness,

  Sheena 5 had work to do.

  She explored the complex knot of equipment that was the center of her world. It was like swimming around a sunken boat.

  The machinery was covered with switches and levers, labeled with black-and-white stripes and circles so she could recognize them. And there were dials designed for her eyes — dials coated with stripes like the hide of a squid, dials that could send out pulses of twisting polarized light. The dials told her what was happening inside the equipment, and if anything was wrong she was trained to turn the levers and switches to make it right.

  Sometimes she had to chase away curious fish as she did so.

  If anything more serious was wrong she could ask Dan for help, and he always knew the answer, or could find it out. She would fit the plastic cup to her eye, and speckled laser light would paint images on her retina, distorted diagrams and simple signs that showed her what to do.

  The machinery contained whirring motors that drove pumps and filters: devices that, coupled with the flow of heat from the sun, drove steady currents. The currents ensured that the waters mixed, that no part became too hot or cold, too rich with life or too stagnant. Otherwise the diatoms and algae would cluster under the bubble’s skin, where the sunlight was strongest, and would grow explosively until they had exhausted all the nutrients available and formed a dank cloud so thick the water would die.

  And the filters removed waste from the water, irreducible scraps that no creature in this small world could digest. But something had to be done with those wastes, or gradually they would lock up all the nutrients in the water. So the machine contained a place that could burn the wastes, breaking them down into their component parts. The products, gas and steam and salts, could then be fed back to the plants and algae.

  Thus, in Sheena’s spacecraft, matter and energy flowed in great loops, sustained by sunlight, regulated by its central machinery as if by a beating heart.

  Dan told her that she was already a success: in her management of the equipment, she had shown herself to be much smarter and more adaptable
than any human-made machine they could have sent in her place.

  She knew that in their hearts the humans would prefer to send machines, mindless rattling things, rather than herself. That was because they knew they could control machines, down to the last clank and whirr. But they could never control her, as was proven by the remnants of the spermatophore she still guiltily hoarded in her mantle cavity, cemented to the inner wall.

  Perhaps they were jealous.

  How strange, she thought, that her kind should be so well adapted to this greater, infinite ocean, so much better than humans. As if this was somehow meant to be. It seemed to Sheena that it must be terribly confining to be a human, to be confined to the skinny layer of air that clung to the Earth.

  At first she had found it strangely easy to accept that she would die without seeing Earth’s oceans again, without rejoining the shoals. She suspected this was no accident, that Dan had somehow designed her mind to accept such instructions without fear.

  Which was, of course, not true.

  But as her restlessness and tiredness gathered, as her isolation increased, the importance of Dan and his mission receded, and her sense of loss grew inexorably.

  And, of course, there was a final complicating factor nestling in her mantle cavity.

  She would have to release her eggs eventually. But not yet. Not here. There were many problems that day would bring, and she wasn’t ready for them.

  So, swimming in starlight, Sheena cradled her unhatched young, impatiently jetting clouds of ink in the rough shape of the male she had known: the male with the bright, mindless eyes.

  Michael:

  It was some weeks after the woman had come to the village that

  Stef called him.

  “I have to go away,” Stef said. “So do you.”

  Michael didn’t understand. Stef, with his machines and his food and his girls, was the most powerful person in the village, far more powerful than the headman or the herbalist. Who could make him do things?

  And besides, Michael had never been more than a few hundred yards outside the village, never slept anywhere but in a village hut. He wasn’t sure what “going away” might actually mean, what he would be made to do.

  It seemed unreal. Perhaps it was all some game of Stef’s.

  “I don’t want to go,” Michael said. But Stef ignored him.

  He slept, trying not to think about it.

  But the very next day they came for him.

  * * *

  A car pulled up outside the village. Big smiling women got out. Cars came to the village every day, stayed a few hours, left again. But this day, for the first time in his life, Michael would have to get into the car, and leave with it.

  He took his clothes, and the flashlight Stef had given him. Stef had given him new batteries too, long-life batteries that would not run down so quickly. Michael didn’t want to go, but the big women, their smiles hard, made it clear there was no choice.

  “I’m sorry,” Stef said to Michael. “We never finished our lessons. But you’ll be okay. You’ll keep learning.”

  Michael knew that was true. He knew he couldn’t stop learning. Even when he was alone, even in the dark, he would just keep working, learning, figuring out.

  Even so he was frightened.

  “Take me with you,” he said.

  But Stef said no. “They won’t even let me take Mindi,” he said. Mindi had been his favorite girl. Now, pregnant, she had gone back to her mother, because no man would have her. “They’ll look after you,” Stef said to Michael. “You’re a Blue”

  That was the first time Michael had heard that word, the English word, used like that. He didn’t know what it meant.

  He wondered if he would ever see Stef again.

  He was taken through a series of bright buildings, a barrage of voices and signs, nothing of which he could understand. Even the smells were strange.

  At one point he was in an airplane, looking down over parched land and blue sea.

  Afterward he thought he must have slept a great deal, for his memories of the journey were jumbled and fragmented, and he could put them in no logical order.

  So he came to the School.

  Emma Stoney:

  Thanks to the unauthorized launch, the spectacular sight of the golden spacecraft leaving Earth orbit, Malenfant had become a popular hero. This was his Elvis year for sure, the media advisers were telling them, and they were working hard on making

  him even more mediagenic.

  But he had made an awful lot of very powerful enemies. Opposition to Malenfant had erupted, as if orchestrated, right across the financial and political spectrum. Right now, it seemed to Emma, they were farther away than ever from being certificated to fly again, and farther still from being licensed to keep any money they made out of Cruithne, assuming Nautilus actually got there.

  Emma called a council of war in the Bootstrap offices in Las Vegas: herself, Malenfant, Maura Della. She didn’t invite him, but Cornelius Taine came anyhow.

  Malenfant stalked around the office. “I can’t believe this shit.” He glared at Emma. “I thought we figured out our prebuttals.”

  “If you’re blaming me I’m out of here,” she said. “Remember, you never even warned me you were going to fire off your damn rocket.”

  Maura said evenly, “I know what you tried to do, Malenfant. You thought that by simply launching, by proving that your system worked safely, you could cut through the bureaucratic mess, as well as prove your technical point.”

  “Damn right. Just as I will prove my economic point when we start bringing the goodies home.”

  Maura shook her head. “You’re so naive. You showed your hand. All you did was give your opponents something to shoot at.”

  “But we launched. We’re going to Cruithne. That is a physical fact. All the staffers on the Hill, all the placeholders in the NASA centers, can’t do a damn thing about that.”

  Cornelius Taine steepled his elegant fingers. “But they can stop you from launching again, Malenfant.”

  “And they can throw you in jail,” Emma said softly. “We mustn’t argue among ourselves. Let’s go over it point by point.” She tapped the tabletop; it turned transparent, and an embedded softscreen brought up a bullet chart. “First, the NASA angle.”

  Malenfant laughed bitterly. “Fucking NASA. I couldn’t believe the immediate one-eighty they pulled about the feasibility of my BDB design, after it flew.”

  “Why are you surprised?” Cornelius Taine asked. “They hoped you would fail technically. Now that that is not possible, they intend to ensure you fail politically.”

  “Yeah, that or take me over.”

  It seemed to be true. With indecent haste — leading Emma to suspect they had been working on precisely this move in advance, and waiting for the moment to strike — NASA had come up with counterproposals for BDB designs, issuing formal Requests for Proposals to prospective industry partners. NASA claimed they could start flying BDBs of their own in five or ten years’ time — after ensuring that all the relevant technologies were “understood and in hand.”

  Not only that, they were absorbing Malenfant’s long-term goals as well, with proposals for an international program to reach and exploit the asteroids.

  “I’m not sure how we can win this one,” Maura said. “After all, NASA is supposed to be the agency that develops spacecraft.”

  “But,” Cornelius said heavily, “this process of assimilation is precisely how NASA has killed off every new space technology initiative since the shuttle.”

  “Yeah,” Malenfant growled. “By turning it into another aerospace industry cartel feeding frenzy.”

  Maura held her hands up. “My point is NASA may well win. If they do, we need a way to live with that.”

  We, Emma thought. Even in the depths of this tense meeting, she found time to wonder at the way Malenfant had, once again, turned a potential enemy into a friend.

  “Next,” Emma said warily. “Congressi
onal funding.”

  “We’re not reliant on federal funds,” Malenfant snapped.

  “That’s true,” Maura said dryly. “But you’ve been happy to accept whatever general-purpose funding you could lay your hands on. And that’s turning into a weakness. We’re being caught between authorization and appropriation. You need to understand this, Malenfant. These are two phases. Authorization is a wish list. Appropriation is the allocation of funds to the wish list. Not every authorized item gets funded.” She paused. “Let me put it simply. It isn’t wise to spend authorized money as if it were appropriated already. That’s what you did. It was a trap.”

  “It was peanuts,” Malenfant growled. “And anyhow I don’t know why the hell you Congress critters can’t just make a simple decision.”

  Maura sighed. “Federal government is a complex thing. If you don’t use the processes right—”

  “And,” Emma said, “next year looks even worse. The bad guys all sources of federal funding we budgeted for and have put in place recision and reprogramming processes to—”

  “Then we rebudget,” Malenfant said. “We cut, trim, rescope, find new funds.”

  “But the investors are being frightened off,” Emma said. “That’s the next point. It started even before the launch, Malenfant. You knew that. Now they’re hemorrhaging. The problems we’ve had with the regulatory agencies have scared away even more of them.”

  “But,” Cornelius Taine said evenly, “we must continue.”

  Oh, Christ, Emma thought.

  Cornelius looked from one to the other, his face blank. “Don’t any of you understand this? Who do you want to appropriate the Solar System? The Russians? The Chinese? Because if we fail now, that’s what will happen.”

  Emma said sharply, “I’ll tell you the truth, Cornelius. From where I’m sitting you’re part of the problem, not the solution. No wonder the investors took flight. If any of your kook stuff has leaked out—”

  Cornelius said, “The Carter catastrophe is coming no matter what you think of me.”