Time m-1

by Stephen Baxter

  › The objective here isn’t to disprove Carter — that may be impossible. You can hole the argument but you can’t sink it, and anyhow the one true invalidation will be our continued survival in 201 years — but we must stop this ludicrous panic over Carter before it eats us all up like a brush fire.

  Maura Della

  Doom soon was all rather difficult to believe, a month after Cornelius had gone public, as Maura endured the usual Potomac hell: breakfasts with reporters, morning staff meetings, simultaneous committee meetings to juggle, back-to-back sessions with lobbyists and constituents, calls, briefings, speeches, receptions, constant implant-pager tingles to make quorum calls and votes on the run. And then there were the constituency issues she couldn’t neglect: “casework” — distributing small favors, funded by the federal pork barrel and otherwise — and targeted mail and fund-raising shots and chat-room surgeries and online referenda and appearances, in person, e-person, or simulated. It was all part of the constant campaign, a treadmill she knew she couldn’t fall off of if she expected to get elected again.

  But this was just the general grind of federal government. It was as if illegal rocket launches in the desert, the dire warnings of doom, had never happened.

  The federal government think tanks who had tried to flesh out the Carter catastrophe hypothesis had provided her with some gloomy reading.

  On the one hand, nobody could definitively undermine the argument itself on philosophical or mathematical grounds. No tame expert would stand up and say he or she could demonstrate the damn thing was bullshit in simple enough terms for the president to deliver to the nation, the panicking world.

  On the other hand the think tanks could come up with a lot of ways the world might end.

  War, of course: nuclear, biological, chemical, A disaster from genetic engineering, malevolent or otherwise. The report recalled one near-miss in the early ‘OOs in Switzerland, concerning a birth-control vaccine. A genetically altered salmonella bacterium had been supposed to cause a temporary infection in the female gut that triggered antibodies against sperm. It had, of course, mutated and gotten out of control. A hundred thousand women had been rendered permanently infertile before the bug was stopped.

  Environmental catastrophes: the continuing collapse of the atmosphere’s structure, the greenhouse effect.

  Ecoterrorism: people waging war both for and against the environment. Witness the ground-to-air missile that had recently brought down the Znamya, the giant inflatable mirror that should have been launched into orbit to light up the night sky over Kiev. Witness similar attacks on the reef balls on the Atlantic ocean shelf, the giant concrete hemispheres intended to attract fast-growing algae and so soak up excess atmospheric carbon dioxide. Maura was grimly amused to see that Bootstrap had been maj or investors in both these proj ects.

  But much worse was possible. The environment was essentially unstable, or at least only quasi-stable. If somebody found a way to tip that stability, it might only need a small nudge.

  That was the man-made stuff. Then there were natural disasters. That hoary old favorite, the asteroid strike, was still a

  candidate.

  And the Earth, she read, was overdue for a giant volcanic event, one of a scale unseen in all of recorded history. The result would be a “volcano winter” comparable to nuclear-war aftermath.

  Or the radiation from a nearby supernova could wipe the Earth clean of life; she learned that the Earth, in fact, was swimming through a bubble in space, a bubble blown clear in the interstellar medium by just such a stellar explosion.

  And here was something new to her: perhaps a new ice age would be triggered by the Earth’s passage through an interstellar cloud.

  The report concluded with more outlandish speculations. What about annihilation by extraterrestrials? What if some alien species was busily transforming the Solar System right now, not even aware that we existed? .

  Or how about “vacuum decay”? It seemed that space itself was unstable, like a statue standing on a narrow base. It could withstand small disturbances—”small,” in this case, including such things as galactic-core explosions — but a powerful enough nudge, properly applied, could cause the whole thing to tip over into… well, a new form. The take-home message seemed to be that such a calamity would be not just the end of the world, but the end of the universe.

  Et cetera. The list of apocalypses continued, spectacular and otherwise, at great length, even to a number of appendices.

  The report authors had tried to put numbers to all these risks. The overall chance of species survival beyond the next few centuries it put as 61 percent — the precision amused Maura — a result they described as “optimistic.”

  That wasn’t to say the world would be spared all the disasters; that wasn’t to say the human race would not endure death and suffering on giant scales. It wasn’t even a promise that human civilization in its present form would persist much longer. It was just that it was unlikely that the world would encounter a disaster severe enough to cause outright human extinction. Relatively unlikely, anyhow.

  Whether or not the world was ending, the prediction itself was having a real effect. The economy had been hit: crime, suicides, a loss of business confidence. There had been a flight into gold, as if that would help. This was, the think tankers believed, ironically a by-product of a recent growth in responsibility. After generations of gloomy warnings about Earth’s predicament, people had by and large begun to take responsibility for a future that extended beyond the next generation or two. Perhaps in the

  1950s, the world two centuries hence would have seemed im-

  possibly remote. Now it seemed around the corner, awfully

  close, within the bounds of current plans and thinking.

  It was ironic that people had begun to imagine the deeper future just as it was snatched from them.

  Above all we must beware Schopenhauerian pessimism, she read. Schopenhauer, obsessed with the existence of evil, wrote that it would have been better if our planet had remained lifeless, like the Moon. From there it is only a short step to thinking that we ought to make it lifeless. It may be that this motivates some of the destructiveness seen recently in our urban communities, although the disruption caused by the so-called “Blue children “phenomenon at a fundamental level — that is, nuclear family level — is no doubt contributing.

  It was a complex of responses, an unstable species sent into a spin by the bad news from the future. Perhaps what would bring down humankind in the end was not nature or science, but a creeping philosophical disaster.

  In the midst of all this, Malenfant was summoned to appear before the House Committee on Space, Science, and Technology in Washington, D.C., an appearance that might be — as Maura realized immediately — his last chance to save his sorry ass.

  Emma Stoney:

  On the morning Malenfant was due to give his testimony,

  Emma — nervous, unsleeping — was up early.

  She took a walk around Washington, D.C. It was a hot, flat morning. The traffic noise was a steady rumble carried through the sultry air.

  She followed the Mall, the grassy strip of parkland that ran a mile from the Capitol to the Lincoln Memorial. The grass was yellow, the ground baked hard and flat, though it was only April. The heat rose in waves, as if she were walking across a hot plate. From here she could see several of the nation’s great buildings: seats of government, museums. A lot of neoclassical marble, grandly spaced: This was an imperial capital if ever there was one, a statement of power, if not of good taste.

  She considered going to see the asteroid-exploration VR gallery Malenfant had donated to the Air and Space Museum. Typical Malenfant: influencing public opinion with what was ostensibly a gesture of generosity. Maybe another day, she thought.

  She reached the. Washington Monument: simple and clean, seamlessly restored since its ‘08 near-demolition by Christian libertarians. But the flags that ringed it were all at half-mast in recognition o
f the American lives lost in the latest anti-American terrorist outrage in… she’d forgotten already. France, was it?

  And then she turned, and there was the White House, right in front of her: still — arguably — the most important decision-making center on the planet. There was what looked like a permanent shantytown on the other side of the road, opposite the White House, panhandlers and protesters and religious crazies doing their stuff in full view of the chief executive’s bedroom window. Police drones buzzed languidly overhead.

  D.C. was dense, real, crusted with history and power. Compared to this, Malenfant’s endeavors in the desert and off in space seemed foolish, baroque dreams.

  Nevertheless, here Malenfant was, ready to fight his corner.

  Maura eyed Emma. “So, about Malenfant. What is it with you two?”

  “Umm?”

  “I can’t understand how come you’re still together.”

  “We’re divorced.”

  “Exactly.”

  Emma sighed. “It’s a long story.”

  Maura grunted. “Believe me, at my age, everybody has a long story.”

  To loosen them both up, Maura Della had taken Emma as a special guest to the House gym, in the basement of the Rayburn House Office Building. It was smaller than Emma had expected, with a pool, steam and massage rooms, a squash court, and exercise equipment. Maura and Emma had opted for a swim, steam, and massage, and now Emma felt herself relax as her mechanical masseur pounded her back with plastic fingers.

  They had married young — he in his thirties, she in her twenties.

  Emma had had her own career. But she had been excited at the prospect of coming with him, of following his charming, childlike, outlandish dreams of a human expansion into space. She had known her public role would be as an air force wife, perhaps as a NASA wife, and those institutions were old and hidebound enough that she knew she would be forced to let her career shadow his. Raising air force brats, in fact. But the truth was they were partners, and would be for life.

  But Malenfant had washed out of NASA at the first hurdle.

  She had been stunned.

  He had come back silent, sullen. He had never told her what

  went wrong; she had learned not to press him on it.

  And after that, nothing had been the same.

  He was floored by his setback for a whole year before he resigned from the air force and started finding other directions to channel his energy. That had been the start of Bootstrap Incorporated, of Malenfant’s journey to riches and power. Emma had worked with him, even in those early days. But he had started to push her away.

  “I still don’t understand why,” she told Maura. “We’d planned children, family years, a home somewhere. Somehow, all that had disappeared over the horizon. And then—”

  “You don’t have to tell me.”

  Emma smiled, feeling tired. “It’s in the gossip columns. He had an affair. I found them together. Well, the marriage was finished. I’ll tell you the strangest thing. I’ve never seen him so unhappy as at that moment.”

  In fact it had seemed to her that Malenfant was working to finish it, digging at its foundations: that he had taken a lover only to drive away Emma.

  Her e-therapists had said he was reacting to the thwarting of his true ambition. Now that he knew he would never achieve his dreams, Malenfant was playing with the toys of youth one more time before the coffin lid started to creak down over him.

  Or maybe, some of the e-therapists argued, it was just some hideous andropause thing.

  “The only advantage of e-therapists,” Maura murmured, “is that their horseshit is cheaper than humans’.”

  “Well, whatever, it hurt.”

  “And it still does. Right?”

  Emma shrugged. “Someday I’ll understand.”

  “And then you’ll walk out the door?”

  “That’s my plan. So. You think we’re going to get through

  today?”

  “I think so,” Maura said briskly, turning to business. “The danger man is Harris Rutter, from Illinois. One of the Gingrich generation. You know, once they arrive here people never leave, in office or not. You have strata of power, going back decades. Rutter has a lot of power. He’s on a number of appropriations subcommittees, sluiceways for federal money. But Rutter’s power is all negative. He likes to filibuster, raise delaying amendments, stall appointments — all means to frustrate the will of the majority, until he gets his own way, whatever that is. But I think I managed to blindside him this time.” “How?”

  “Federal pork. Or at least, the promise of a slice, if Malenfant gets his way.”

  “That’s looking a long way ahead, isn’t it?”

  “You have to stay ahead of the power curve in this town, Emma,” Maura murmured, and she closed her eyes with a sigh, as her massager went back to work. “Did you know they didn’t let women in this gym until 1985?”

  The hearing, here in the Rayburn building, took place in a cramped, old-fashioned conference room cooled by a single inadequate air conditioner. There were two rows of conference tables down the middle of the room, with nameplates for the representatives on one side, and for the testifiers on the other. It was a place of judgment, of confrontation.

  Malenfant was here. He looked crisp, calm, confident, composed, his bald pate gleaming like a piece of a weapons system.

  Emma looked into his eyes. He looked as innocent and sincere as if he’d just been minted.

  Malenfant took the stand, and Emma and Maura took seats side-by-side at the back of the room. Two representatives took the lead: Harris Rutter, the former lawyer, and Mary Howell of Pennsylvania, once a chemical engineer. Both of them were Republicans.

  The purpose of the hearing was for Malenfant to justify, once more, why he shouldn’t be shut down. Rutter questioned Malenfant hard about the dubious legality of his operations, particularly his first launch.

  Malenfant’s answers were smooth. He allowed himself to sound irritated at the maze of conflicting legislation Bootstrap had had to tiptoe through, and he launched into a rehearsed speech about his manned space program to come: how he had four astronaut candidates already in training, chosen to be representative of the U.S. demographic mix. “It wasn’t hard to find volunteers, sir, even though we emphasized the dangers to them — not of the space mission, but of being grounded without making the flight.” A little sympathetic laughter.

  “In this country we have a huge reservoir of expertise in launching space missions, reserves of people laid off by the space and defense industries, people champing at the bit to be let to work again. In my view it’s a crime to waste such a skilled resource.” Then he went on to how the mission was being assembled mainly from components supplied, not by the usual aerospace cartels, but by smaller — sometimes struggling — companies right across the United States. Malenfant was able to outline a glowing future in which the benefits of the new, expansive space program would flow back from the Mojave in terms of profits and jobs to districts right across the country, not least to Illinois and Pennsylvania, home states of his inquisitors.

  Emma whispered to Maura, “Laying it on thick, isn’t he?”

  Maura leaned closer. “You have to see the big picture, Emma.

  Most big pork-barrel projects gain broad support in their early stages, when there are a lot of representatives who can still hope for a slice of the ultimate pie. If Malenfant can promise to bring wealth to as many districts as possible, all for a modest or even zero government outlay, then he’s convincing people at least to give him the benefit of the doubt.”

  Malenfant seemed to have survived Rutter’s grilling. But now — to Emma’s surprise — into the attack came Howell, the engineer from Pennsylvania. She was a tough, stockily built woman of about fifty, her defiantly gray hair tied back in a bun. She looked sharp, vigorous, and spoiling for a fight.

  “Colonel Malenfant. Bootstrap is about more than engineering, isn’t it?”

  “I don’t kno
w what you mean.”

  Howell held up a copy of the Washington Post, with a splash headline about the Feynman radio at Fermilab, an animated picture beneath of Cornelius Taine repeating some Carter-catastrophe sound bite. She quoted, “ ‘Exclusive statements from an Eschatology spokesperson… Fermilab managers furious at the misuse of their facilities.’ “

  “That news release was nothing to do with me.”

  “Come, Colonel Malenfant. I’ve absolutely no doubt that news management like this goes on only with your tacit approval. So the question is why you feel this kind of message from-the-future mumbo jumbo helps your cause. Now, you have a background in engineering, don’t you, Colonel? As I do.” She eyed him. “I daresay we’re about the same age. So we’ve both witnessed the same changes in our society.”

  “Changes?”

  “The distrust of technology. The loss of faith in scientists, engineers — in fact, a kind of rejection of the scientific method itself, and of the scientific explanation of the world. Do you agree that we’ve seen a flight to the irrational?”

  “Yes. Yes, I agree with that. But I don’t necessarily agree with

  your implication, that the irrational is all bad.”

  “Oh, you don’t.”

  “There are many mysteries science has not dealt with, perhaps never will. What is consciousness? Why does anything exist, rather than nothing? Why am I alive here and now, and not a century ago, or a thousand years from now? We all have to confront such questions in the quiet of our souls, every minute of our lives. And if the irrational is the only place to look for answers, well, that’s where we look.”

  Representative Howell rubbed her temples. “But, Colonel Malenfant, you must agree that it is our brains, our science, that have made the world around us. It is science that has given the planet the capacity to carry many billions of people. ‘It is only the intelligent management of the future that can get us through the next decades, assure us of a long-term future.’ I know you agree with that, because it’s a direct quote, from your own company report last year. Now. Let’s not hear any more bullshit philosophizing.”