Time m-1

by Stephen Baxter

  “Water?” Emma asked.

  He nodded. “Oh, yes. As permafrost and hydrated minerals. Twenty percent by mass, by God. Every prediction fulfilled, exceeded in fact.”

  Malenfant smacked his hands together. “It’s a warehouse up there.”

  Dan plastered a big softscreen over the posters and photos and memos and other crap on the wall, and tapped its surface. Up came an image of the asteroid’s surface — gritty and crumpled, Emma thought, like roadside slush — and there was one of the microrobots they were calling “fireflies.”

  As she watched, a tiny puff of vapor vented from the base of the firefly. It jetted sharply up away from the asteroid ground, swiveled neatly, then shot out a little dart that trailed a fine cable, like fishing line. The dart buried itself in the loose rock. The line went taut and began to haul itself in, neatly dragging the firefly back to the surface.

  “The fireflies are working great,” Dan said. “We should be able to find a hundred applications for these babies: in LEO, other asteroids, even on the Moon. The propulsion system is neat. It’s a digital propulsion chip: a little bank of solid rocket motors, and you can address the motors individually, pop pop pop, to get a high degree of maneuverability and control.”

  Emma asked, “And Sheena is running these things?”

  “Oh, yes.” Dan grinned proudly. “She has a big waldo glove in the habitat she can fit her whole body right inside. Of course that took some designing. Because she lacks bones, Sheena doesn’t have a good sense of where her arms are in space. So the wal-does feed back information about pressure and texture. She does a fine job. She can run eight of these babies at once. In many ways she’s smarter than we are.”

  “And yet we sent her out there, to die,” Emma said.

  There was an uncomfortable silence, as if she’d been impolite to mention such a thing.

  Dan pulled his VR mask over his face and started to scroll through more results from the asteroid, and Emma went in search of a coffee machine.

  Sheena 5:

  And on Cruithne, Sheena laid her eggs.

  They were cased in jelly sacs, hundreds of them in each tube. There was no spawning ground here, of course. So she draped the egg sacs over the knot of machinery at the heart of her miniature ocean, which had now anchored itself to the surface of Cruithne. The gardens of egg cases dangled there, soft and organic against the hard machinery.

  Small schools of fish came to nose at the eggs. She watched until she was sure that the fish were repelled by the jelly that coated the eggs, which was its purpose.

  She had no instinct to return to the eggs, to cradle them. But she knew this was an unusual circumstance; this small ball of water, collapsed to a fat lens against the asteroid, was no enriching ocean. So she developed a habit of visiting the eggs every few hours, of squirting gentle water jets over them to keep them aerated.

  All this was out of sight of Dan’s cameras. She did not tell him what she had done.

  Michael:

  More children arrived, but now they seemed bewildered and frightened. They always had blue circles crudely stitched onto their shirts or jackets. The children would complain and cry until they learned the first of the rules Michael had learned, which was never to complain or cry.

  Some children were taken away, too.

  Many were taken by concerned-looking people who would put their arms around a frightened child. Michael didn’t know what this meant. Perhaps it was a trick.

  The children taken away all had white skin. The children who were brought in mostly had black or brown skin. Soon, most of the children who were left behind, including Michael, had brown or black skin. He didn’t know what this meant either.

  One day he saw a Brother wearing a gold ring.

  Michael was fascinated by the gold, the deep luster of the time-stretched electrons in its structure. He came forward and stared at it. The Brother smiled at him and held out his hand so he could see.

  Then, without warning, the Brother swung back his arm and slammed his fist into the side of Michael’s head. Michael could feel the ring dig into his flesh, warm blood spurting. The Brother smiled and walked away.

  To his shame, Michael was crying.

  He ran back to his dormitory. He ran across the floor toward his pallet. But there was a Sister here, and she grabbed his arm and shouted at him. He didn’t understand, but then she pointed at the floor. He had left a trail of blood. He had to get a mop and bucket and scrape his drying blood off the floor. But still the blood flowed, and he had to work harder to keep it off the floor, and it seemed as if it would never stop.

  That snapshot, the incident with the ring, divided Michael’s life in two, as light from dark.

  The visitors grew fewer, until they stopped coming altogether.

  And the lessons were more infrequent. Sometimes they were replaced by work sessions, in which the children had to paint the huts or clean floors or mop out the toilet blocks. Sometimes they were just canceled altogether.

  The refrigerators and bowls of food were taken away. Now there was only food at mealtimes, twice a day.

  The children were no longer issued fresh clothes. They were given shirts and shorts and shoes that were marked with small blue circles, just one set per child. The clothes soon became dirty and threadbare.

  The last lessons were stopped, and the softscreens were taken away.

  Many of the children wept and fought at that, but not Michael.

  He had expected this to happen someday. The School had been like a strange dream anyway.

  He would be able to work in his head. As long as he was left alone, as he had been in the village.

  Emma Stoney:

  Each morning now, Emma had to run the gauntlet of the noisy mobs outside Bootstrap’s Vegas office. This morning, as her car approached, a few of them burst through the police line. The car sensed warm human bodies ahead and slowed to a halt. Emma made sure her windows were sealed up, overrode the Smart-Drive, and inched the car forward.

  Slowly the people parted, but not before they got close enough to scream in through the windscreen at her. There were eco types in body paint, a lot of religious groups she couldn’t identify, and also counter-protesters, people actually in favor of Bootstrap and its projects, mostly young white males with U.S. flags and other national emblems, chanting about pioneers and the new frontier. Some of them wore animated T-shirts with an image of Malenfant making a speech somewhere: a few words and a smile, cycled over and over on the crumpled cloth. She grimaced; she wondered how much money some remote corner of Bootstrap was making out of that. A line of cops, supplemented by company security people (racking up one hell of an expense, as Emma knew too well) kept the factions apart.

  Here was a beefy guy with shaved hair, dressed in a green T-shirt and pants as if he were some kind of veteran. He was limping, one of his legs betraying him. He was carrying a blown-up picture of a sickly looking kid blowing candles on a birthday cake. He was shouting. “Yellow babies! Look what you did, Malenfant! Look what you did!”

  Emma recoiled from his anger.

  But once she was inside, and the gate had sealed itself shut behind her, she couldn’t even hear the protesters’ chants any more: only a soft white noise, barely audible, like rushing water.

  Almost soothing.

  She arrived at the conference room late. She took a seat quietly at the back of the darkened, half-empty room and tried to follow what was going on.

  George Hench was chairing an engineering seminar on the design of a hab module for the proposed human-manned follow-up missions to Cruithne.

  At the front of the room a technical type was standing at a lectern; a softscreen the size of a curtain was hanging on the wall behind him. Other techs sat around the first few rows, their arms draped over the backs of their chairs, their feet up before them.

  These technicians were mostly men, mostly badly dressed, generally bearded. They were laden with doctorates and other qualifications. Many of them came fr
om NASA itself, from corners of that sprawling bureaucratic empire called things like the Mission Definition Office or the Mars Exploration Studies Office. Behind each of these guys lay a whole fleet of beautiful spacecraft that had existed only in blueprints and mass estimates and a few items of demonstration technology, and that had landed on the Moon or Mars only in clean, software-generated NASA imagery, and in the dreams of their creators.

  After Malenfant’s electrifying first launch, and his announcement that he was proposing manned missions to Cruithne and beyond — and despite the outstanding legal difficulties the company faced — Bootstrap had had no difficulty recruiting guys like these.

  The speaker was describing the high-level design of the Cruithne mission’s hab module. He spoke in a mumble, directly to his softscreen, and the screen behind him showed a blizzard of bewildering images.

  The hab was little more than a can, fifteen yards long. It had a small Earth-return capsule — a cone shaped like an Apollo capsule — glued to its lower end. The capsule would also serve as a solar storm shelter. Big winglike solar cell panels were fixed to struts extending from the can’s sides. Various antennae, thruster assemblies, and ports were visible through layers of powder-white insulation blankets. It reminded Emma a little of prehistoric images ofSkylab. But in the animated image the hab was spinning, end over end, to provide the crew with artificial gravity, at least at the can’s extremities. The speaker made great play of the mass limitations the craft was going to work under; it seemed that the whole design was right at the limit of what Malenfant’s BOB could throw into space.

  Life-support systems engineering was far from Emma’s area of expertise. But attending meetings like this was all part of her general ongoing strategy to contain Reid MalenfanL She’d been around Malenfant long enough to know that it was worth her while to cast her net as wide as possible, to follow as much as possible, to anticipate as much as she could. Because, even here at the heart of Reid Malenfant’s secretive empire, she could never be sure under which rock the next rattlesnake lay coiled.

  It was characteristic of Malenfant to be pressing ahead with the design, assembly, and even fabrication of his asteroid-pioneer spacecraft while the slow wheels of official approval still ground on. Not only that, he had become even more unobtainable than usual because he had launched himself into every aspect of the training of Bootstrap’s cadre of prospective astronauts, even to the extent of racking up flying hours and time in the centrifuge.

  Meanwhile, Bootstrap’s destiny remained unresolved.

  The fact that this next flight would — if it flew at all — be carrying human passengers just made the bureaucratic tangle that much worse. It had shocked Emma to learn that even comparatively unambitious human spaceflights incurred a lot of danger, much of it unacceptable to bodies like OSHA, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration.

  Beyond the shelter of Earth’s magnetic field, for example, the astronauts would be bombarded by radiation, sporadically violent flares from the sun, and a steady drizzle of fast-moving cosmic rays: relics from remote parts of the universe, a single particle of which, George Hench had once told her, could pack as much punch as a baseball. Then there were the familiar hazards of zero gravity: bone decalcification, immune and cardiovascular system degradation, muscular atrophy.

  Emma formed a bleak image of the crew limping across space in a cramped, stinking, spinning module, earnestly pounding away at their treadmills just to keep alive, cowering every time the sun belched. There was something un-American about it, she thought, something dogged and Soviet.

  What might save Bootstrap was once again the weakness and ambiguity of the current regulatory regime. For example, OSHA actually had no radiation exposure standards for human exploration missions. NASA had adopted supplementary standards drawn up by bodies like the National Academy of Sciences and the National Council on Radiation Protection and Measurements as the agency’s standard for crew dose limits. But even then NASA had left loopholes, saying the standards should be applied to all but “exceptional exploration missions.”

  Where NASA led, Reid Malenfant was happy to follow.

  The presenter was nearing the end of his talk, and he had started to wax philosophical. Before Copernicus, humans believed humanity was walled off from the heavens by a set of crystal spheres. Well, those spheres are still there, but they aren ‘t made of glass, but of fear. Let’s do this. Let’s smash those spheres.

  Whoops, raised fists, a scattering of applause.

  These technicians had tunnel vision, she thought. To them the mission was everything, the various obstacles a frustration that stopped them from doing things. And when they were forced to confront those obstacles they resorted to hopeful button pushing: Ptolemaic spheres, the frontier, the American dream, can-do attitude, the spirit of Wright and Lindbergh and Armstrong, the organizational will that enabled us to cover a continent, win the Second World War, blah blah.

  But, she thought, maybe they had to be that way to get anything done at all. Dreams had to be uncomplicated to be achievable.

  Now another technician got up to show a new type of chart. It represented a flow of raw materials to a schematic of the hab’s manufacture: electrical components from factories around the United States; structural parts from the big aerospace companies; raw materials from a variety of producers; a web of sources, flows, and sinks.

  There was one box at the lower left corner that Emma had trouble reading. She sat forward and squinted.

  The source box was marked “Dounreay.” And the product flowing out of it was “enriched U-235.”

  And Emma had spotted her rattlesnake.

  She got out of her seat and slipped out of the room.

  When she got back to her office she booted up her softscreen and started to find out about Dounreay.

  And, immediately after that, she booked a flight to Scotland.

  She arrived at a place called Sandside: a tiny village, just holiday homes and a pub. She got out of the car — no SmartDrive — and climbed a low hill at the edge of the village.

  She was on the north coast of Scotland, just a few miles from John O’Groats, the miniature tourist trap that was the northernmost point of mainland Britain. There was a sweeping beach before her, and then the sea itself, wild and gray under a flat lid of sky. On the horizon she glimpsed more landmasses, the Old Man of Hoy and the Orkneys. It was a rugged place suffused by wind noise, poised between sea and sky, and the wind seemed to suck the warmth from the core of her body.

  And there, sprawled across the eastern horizon, was Dounreay: a mile-long sprawl of buildings, a giant golf ball shape, huge gray and brown sheds and chimneys. Somehow, oddly, even though she knew what this place represented, it did not offend the eye.

  Here came Malenfant, his gaunt frame swathed in a giant quilted coat. He climbed up the little hillock beside her.

  “You look ill,” she said.

  He shrugged. “I don’t think the climate suits me. Even though I’ve got some Scottish blood. Maybe all that Vegas sunshine has diluted it.”

  “What have you been up to this time, Malenfant?”

  He sighed. “Doing what needs to be done.”

  She faced him. “Listen to me for once, you asshole. If you’re planning to launch nuclear materials into space, if you’re even intending to move nuke stuff around the planet, you’re committing a whole series of offenses. And if you’re going to involve Bootstrap in that — if you’re going to involve me — then tell me about it.”

  “I will, I will,” he soothed. “But we don’t have a choice.”

  “Oh, Malenfant. You never do.”

  He took her arm, and they walked along the hillock.

  He picked out some of the sights of Dounreay for her. This was the second-largest nuclear installation in Britain, after Sella-field. Once it had generated power, made medical isotopes, run three reprocessing lines and a nuclear waste-packaging plant. The golf ball shape was a fast reactor, built in 1959. It had
caught fire and overheated several times. Now it was shut down and preserved, bizarrely, by a heritage ministry. The big gray sheds were for reprocessing nuclear waste, extracting usable fuel from spent material. Behind the golf ball there was a waste shaft two hundred feet deep that contained fifteen thousand tons of waste mixed with uranium and plutonium. It was very unstable; it had already suffered two hydrogen explosions, spraying radioactive waste everywhere.

  “Jesus,” she said. “What a folly. Another generation’s dreams of cheap power. And we have to live with the shit forevermore.”

  “Well, it didn’t go entirely to plan,” he conceded. “Originally this was going to be a nuclear park. Six reactors. But the technology was ahead of its time.”

  “Ahead of its time? “

  “Everything was within the guidelines of the time. Even the secrecy, if you want to know. You have to remember it was the Cold War. They didn’t have the same obsession with safety we have now. An obsession that has stunted us since, conservatively, 1970. And guess what? The local people now love the plant. If it never produces another watt, Dounreay is going to be around for a hundred years. Four generations of high-quality, highly skilled local employment. Because it will take that long to decommission it.”

  “So tell me something else. If the U.K. government shut this place down in the 1990s, how come you managed to acquire enriched uranium here?”

  He said gently, “There’s nothing illegal.”

  “My God, Malenfant.”

  “Look.” He dug a small, crumpled softscreen out of his pocket, unfolded it with stiff fingers. It showed an image of something like a rocket engine, a sky-blue nozzle mounted by complex machinery, tall and skinny. The diagram was labeled with spidery text much too small to read. Malenfant said, “This is what we’re building. It’s a nuclear reactor designed for space missions. Here’s the reactor at the top.” He pointed with a thumbnail and worked his way down. “Then you have pumps, shielding, and a radiator. The whole thing stands about twelve feet tall, weighs about a ton. The reactor has a thermal output of a hundred and thirty-five kilowatts, an electrical supply of forty kilowatts…