Time m-1

by Stephen Baxter

  “Emma, you have to understand. If we have humans aboard a new Nautilus, we have a mission an order of magnitude more power-hungry than Sheena’s. And then there are the power requirements for surface operations. To generate the juice we need from a solar array you’d need an area half the size of a football field, and weighing maybe ten times as much. Even the BDB couldn’t lift it.”

  “And this is what you’re planning to build?… Oh. You’re already building these things. Right?”

  He looked pleased with himself. Look what I did. “We hired Russian engineers. Dug some of them out of retirement, in fact. The U.S. never developed nuclear power sources beyond radioisotope heat generators we flew on unmanned missions. In fact the Clinton administration shut down our space nuclear power research program. What can you do but condemn that? When we gave up nuclear power, we gave up the future.

  “But the Russians flew nuclear power sources on reconnais-

  sance missions back in the 1960s, and they even test-flew a de-

  sign called Topaz, which is what we based this baby on. Of

  course we were able to tune the design a hell of a lot.”

  “Malenfant—”

  He tapped the little screen. “All we need is fifty pounds of en-

  riched U-235, in the form of uranium dioxide pellets. The mod-

  erator is zirconium hydride, and you control the reaction by

  rotating these cylinders on the outside of the core, which—”

  “How are you smuggling this shit into the Mojave?”

  “Smuggling is a harsh word.”

  “Come on, Malenfant. Those desert skies are pretty clear. Surveillance satellites—”

  “You really want to know? All the satellites’ orbital elements are on the Net. You can work out where they will be at any minute. You just shut down until they’ve passed overhead. Even better, make sure you hit the night shift at the National Imagery and Mapping Agency down at Fairfax. There’s always something more interesting to look at than pictures of an old buzzard like me jerking off in the desert.”

  “Act now; justify later. Like the BDB launch. Like most of the actions in your life.”

  “Emma, you have to trust me on this one. If I can run a Topaz or two, prove it’s safe, I can get the authorizations I need. But I have to get the nuke stuff to run the tests in the first place.”

  “And the citizens of Las Vegas have to trust you, too, until enriched uranium comes raining down out of the sky? You know, you’re a dreamer, Malenfant. You actually believe that one day we will all come to our senses and agree with you and hail you as a hero.”

  “I’m already a hero.” He winked. “There are T-shirts that say it. Look, Emma. I won’t pretend I’m happy with everything I’m having to do. No more than you are. But we have to go on. It’s not just Bootstrap, the profits: not even about the big picture, our future in space—”

  “Cornelius. The Carter catastrophe. Messages from the future.”

  He eyed her. “I know how you’re dealing with this. You’ve put it all in a box in your mind that you only open when you have to. But it s real, Emma. We both saw those neutron pulses.”

  “Neutrinos, Malenfant,” she said gently.

  “We’re in this too deep, Emma. We have to go on.”

  She closed her eyes. “Malenfant, patience has always been your strength. You don’t need lousy Russian reactors and dubious uranium shipments. Take your time and find another way to build your spaceship.”

  His voice was strained. “I can’t.”

  And, of course, she knew that.

  He bent down and kissed the top of her head.

  She sighed. “You know I won’t betray you. I’ve been sucked in too deep with you for a long time, for half my life. But do you ever consider the ethics of implicating me, and others, in this kind of shit? You have to be open with me, Malenfant.”

  “I will,” he said. “I promise.”

  She knew, of course, that he was lying.

  In fact she was more useful to him if she didn ‘t know. It made her denials that much more effective. It probably even protected her a little, too.

  But that wouldn’t be uppermost in his mind; it was just an incidental. What drove Malenfant was maximizing her utility in the drive toward his ultimate goals — -just like any of the tools he deployed.

  She understood all that. What she really didn’t know, in her heart of hearts, was why she continued to put up with it.

  She linked her arm through his, and they huddled together against the wind, looking over Dounreay. Mist swept in off the sea, covering the plant in grayness.

  Reid Malenfant:

  How can we turn asteroid rock into rocket fuel? Sounds like

  magic, doesn’t it?

  First we’ll crack asteroid water into hydrogen and oxygen with electrolysis. Remember high school science classes, the Pyrex beakers and the wires and the batteries? All you have to do

  is pass an electric current through water to break it down. That’s

  what we do. But the units we use are a little more advanced.

  Slide, please.

  This is a solid polymer electrolyte, or SPE, electrolyzer. What you have is sandwiched layers of electrolyte-impregnated plastic separated by metal meshes. The whole assembly is compressed by metal rods running the length of the stack.

  SPEs have been used extensively on nuclear submarines and on the space station. They run for thousands of hours without maintenance.

  As for the methane, we will extract some directly from the asteroid material, and more by processing carbon dioxide. We use something called a Sabatier reactor. Slide. We liquefy the hydrogen from the electrolyzer banks, and feed it into the reactor with carbon dioxide. Out the other side comes water and methane — which is just a compound of carbon and hydrogen. The reaction is very efficient, ninety-nine percent in fact, and is exothermic, which means it requires no input of heat to make it work, just the presence of a ruthenium catalyst.

  Sabatier units have been used in space before, for life-support applications. They have been tested by NASA and the Air and Space Force and have also been used on the space station.

  There is further information in your packs on how we intend to optimize the ratios of the methane-oxygen bi-propellant, and various subsidiary processes we need. We can show you a demonstration breadboard prototype. Oxygen-hydrogen is of course the most powerful chemical-rocket propeOant of all. But hydrogen is difficult to liquefy and store: low temperature, large bulk. Methane is like oxygen, a soft cryogenic, and that guided our choice.

  AH this sounds exotic. But what we have here is very robust engineering, gaslight-era stuff, technologies centuries old, in fact. It’s just a novel application.

  Ladies and gentlemen, mining an asteroid is easy.

  Slide, please.

  Sheena 5:

  The babies were already being hatched: popping out of their dissolving eggs one by one, wriggling away, alert, active, questioning. With gentle jets of water, she coaxed them toward the sea grass where they would browse until they were mature.

  She tried not to think about what would happen then.

  Meanwhile, she had work to do.

  When Sheena powered up the rock eater, she was more nervous than at any time since the landing itself. She lay as still as she could inside her waldo glove and tried to sense the eater’s systems — the gripping tracks that dug into the asteroid’s loose surface, the big gaping scoop of a mouth at the front, the furnace in its belly like a warm heart — as if she herself had become the fat clanking machine that would soon scuttle crablike across the asteroid floor.

  She understood why she felt so tense.

  The rock eater was a complex machine. It would need monitoring as it chewed its way around the asteroid, to make sure it didn’t burrow too deeply into the surface, or spin its tracks on some loose patch of rock and throw itself into the emptiness of space, beyond retrieval.

  But it was no more difficult to contro
l, in principle, than the little firefly robots, and she was used to them by now; in fact she had come to enjoy deploying six, seven, eight of them at once, a shoal of robots, relishing the chance to show offher skill to Dan.

  It wasn’t even the importance of this operation for her mission that made her anxious. She knew the fireflies had done no more than measure, weigh, analyze, monitor. Now, for the first time, she was going to do something that would change the asteroid, to make something out of its loose, ancient substance. To fail would mean that she could not succeed with her great task of bringing this asteroid’s incomprehensible riches back to Earth.

  But that wasn’t why she was so anxious.

  To fail would mean that her young would die here, as she would, cut off from the shoal, for no reason. That was what mattered to her. To die was one thing; to die for no purpose was quite another. It was a fear that never left her, a knowledge that seemed to circle around her, like a predator, waiting for her to weaken.

  Therefore — exhausted, aging as she was — she would not weaken, would not fail.

  It was time. She pushed at the glove.

  And she felt the eater dig its scooplike jaw into the loose soil at the surface of Cruithne.

  Her first motions were clumsy. From the microcameras embedded in the eater’s upper surface she saw chunks of regolith sail up before her, dust and larger fragments. The fragments disappeared from her view, following loose, looping paths. Some of them escaped the asteroid’s tiny gravity field altogether and sailed off on new orbits of their own, new baby asteroids circling the sun.

  Patiently she slowed, tried again, adjusted the angle of the scoop and the speed at which it plowed into the surface. Soon she had it right, and a steady stream of asteroid rock worked its way in through the scoop to the eater’s hopper.

  Now little belts and shovels forced the captured regolith into the processing chambers. First the ore was ground up and sieved by rocking mechanical jaws and rollers and vibrating filter screens. Next, magnetic fields sucked out nickel-iron metal granules. Then the crushed ore was passed to a furnace that was powered by the sun’s focused heat.

  Liquid, baked from the rock, began to gather in the condenser tanks, big low-gravity globules drifting around the thin walls.

  This one roving rock eater, patiently working its way over the asteroid’s surface, would deliver pounds of precious water every day from the unpromising rock of the asteroid. The water would be processed further and used in many of the other, more complex machines. And so this asteroid would be transformed from a lump of ancient slag into something wonderful, something alive.

  When she was happy with the eater’s operation, she pulled herself out of the glove. She swam down to where the pipe trailing back from the eater met the habitat membrane. And she found a trickle of fresh asteroid water.

  She swam through the asteroid stream, let it wash under her carapace and through her gills. It was warm, perhaps from the heater at the heart of the rock-eating robot, and there was only a trickle of it, seeping into the great mass of the habitat. But Sheena swam back and forth through it, her hide pulsing excitedly.

  She was the first creature from Earth to swim in water not of her native planet, water that had formed before the sun itself — water that had lain dormant, bound into this dark lump of rock, until she had liberated it.

  She knew this was Dan’s mission, not hers; she knew she was Dan’s creature, not her own. But she was proud, because she was the first; no other creature who had ever lived or ever would live could claim this honor from her.

  She swooped and pulsed her j oy.

  Sheena sent the fireflies to converge at one pole of Cruithne. There, patiently, piece by piece, she had them assemble a small chemical factory, pipes and tanks and pumps, and a single flaring nozzle that pointed to the sky. Borers began to dig into the surface of Cruithne, drawing up surface regolith and the rock and ice that lay deeper within. Precious solar panels, spread over the dusty surface of the asteroid, provided power via cables strung out over the regolith.

  The factory began its work, turning ancient asteroid rock into something new.

  The whole process — to take ancient rock and ice, and to transform it into something new — seemed remarkable to Sheena.

  At last, under Sheena’s control, simple valves clicked open. Through firefly cameras, the images were relayed to the laser projectors cupped over her eyes. Sheena could see a flame erupt from the nozzle, flaring up into the sky. And now combustion products emerged, ice crystals that caught the sunlight, receding in perfectly straight lines. It was a fire fountain, quite beautiful.

  Humans could control operations from Earth from now on. Asteroid water and raw, unprocessed rock would be swallowed into giant bags and, pushed by rockets like this test rig, steered through the empty ocean of space toward Earth, as if by a squid’s mantle jet.

  Dan would tell her there was much celebration within Bootstrap. He did not say so, but Sheena understood that this was mainly because she had finished her task before dying.

  She turned away from the waldo glove and the imagers, the human machines, and sought out her young.

  * * *

  They were growing explosively quickly, converting half of all the food they ate to body mass.

  At first they had been asocial, foraging alone in the beds of sea grass. But already — though still tiny — they had developed shoals. She watched the males fighting — aggressive signaling, fin beating, chasing, and fleeing — miniature battles that prefigured the greater conflicts to come at breeding time.

  Some of the young were already hunting the smaller fish, adopting behavior patterns her kind were hatched with, even talking to each other in the simple, rich sign language that Dan said was hardwired into their brains by millions of generations of ancestors: / am large and fierce. Look at my weapons. I am sea grass; I am no squid. I am strong. Look at me!

  She knew that Dan must be aware of the existence of the young by now. The growing imbalance in the small ecosphere could surely not be ignored. But he said nothing; and she volunteered nothing.

  Most of the young were dumb. Four were smart.

  She took the smart ones to one side. She swam at the heart of their small shoal. She was growing old now, and she tired easily. Nevertheless she taught the smart ones how to hunt, sophisticated techniques beyond their dumber siblings.

  She taught them how to lure foolish fish. They would hold up their arms with blanched tips, waving them, distracting the attention of the fish from the far more dangerous tentacles, waiting to strike.

  She taught them how to stalk, gradually approaching a fish from behind, where its vision was poorest.

  She taught them how to chase, pursuing fleeing prey with careful watchfulness until close enough to make the final, decisive lunge.

  She taught them to hunt, disguised. They would mimic sar-gassum weed, hanging in the water with arms dangling, ready to dart out at incautious fish. Or they would swim backward with false eye spots and arms held together and waved like the tail of a fish.

  They practiced on the smaller fish, and some of them eyed the other squid, their siblings.

  She taught them about the reef, the many creatures that lived and died there, how they worked together, even as they competed and fought and hunted. She tried to teach them about predators.

  She role-played, swooping down on them like a moray eel, trying to catch tiiem with her arms and beak. But they were young and agile and easily evaded her, and she sensed they did not believe her stories of monsters that could nip off a squid’s arms, or even swallow a squid whole, enhanced brain or not.

  And she taught them language, the abstract signs Dan had given her. As soon as they had the language their mantles rippled with questions. Who? Why? Where? What? How?

  She did not always have answers. But she showed them the machinery that kept them alive, and taught them about the stars and the sun, and the nature of the world and universe, and about humans.

&nbs
p; The young ones seemed to understand, very quickly, that Sheena and all her young would soon exhaust the resources of this one habitat. The habitat had been designed to support one squid, herself, for a fixed period of time, a time that was almost expired. Already there had been a number of problems with the tightly closed environment loops — unpredictable crashes and blooms in the phytoplankton population, depletions or excessive concentrations of trace elements — and corresponding impacts on the krill and the fish.

  The young were very smart. Soon they were able to think in ways that were beyond Sheena herself.

  For instance, they said, perhaps they should not simply repair this fabric shell, but extend it. Perhaps, said the young, they should even make new domes and fill them with water.

  Sheena, trained only to complete her primary mission, found this a very strange thought.

  There weren’t enough fish, never enough krill. The waters were stale and crowded.

  This was clearly unacceptable.

  So the smart young hunted down their dumb siblings, one by one, and consumed their passive bodies, until only these four, and Sheena, were left.

  Michael:

  His memories were jumbled.

  When tourists had come to the village they would take snapshots with their cameras, and sometimes they would send them to the village. Michael would see himself in the pictures, a person who no longer existed, smiling up at somebody who was no longer there, like two ghosts. Sometimes the pictures would arrive out of order, so he would see himself in a T-shirt with a hole in it, and in the next picture there he would be, a little shorter maybe, with the T-shirt magically fixed.

  When he had been taken out of the village he had understood almost none of what happened to him, and his memories had become jumbled, like the snapshots.