Michael was crying.
Howell stepped forward. “Face it, Colonel Malenfant. You’re beaten.”
Malenfant seemed to come to a decision. “Sure I am. George, get her out of here. We have a spaceship to fly.”
George Hench grinned. “About time.” He wrapped his big arms around Howell and lifted her bodily off the floor. She screamed in frustration and kicked at his legs and swung her head back. She succeeded in knocking his headset off, but he just thrust her out of the room and slammed the door.
Emma was glaring at Malenfant. “Malenfant, have you any idea—”
George said, “Enough. You can debate it in space. Get out of here. I’ll take care of the rest.”
Malenfant clasped George’s beefy shoulder. “Thank you, my friend.”
George pushed him away. “Send me a postcard from Alcatraz.” He snatched another headset and started to yell at the technicians at their improvised consoles.
Malenfant faced Emma. He reached out and took her hand and gave it the gentlest of tugs.
As if in a dream, she followed him, as she always had, as she knew she always would.
As they walked out of the blockhouse into the gray of the Mo-jave dawn, she heard screaming, a remote crackle.
Gunfire.
Art Morris:
The Rusty performed beautifully. It was built to reach seventy on regular roads and maybe forty on anything, from sand dunes to peat bogs. Meanwhile he was sitting inside a shell of carbon-fiber composite and ceramic plating that was tough enough to stop a rifle bullet. Art didn’t have to do much more than point and hope.
He drove hell for leather at the fence. In his IR viewer he saw company guards running along inside the fence, pointing to where he was coming from, then getting the hell out of the way.
He laughed.
He hit the fence. He barely noticed it as it smashed open around him.
Guards scattered before him. He heard the hollow slam of bullets hitting the armor. He hit the ignition and powered up the diesel; there was no point in running silent now. The engine roared and he surged forward, exhilarated.
“Look what you did, Malenfant!”
He saw the pad ahead of him, the booster lit up like a Disney-land tower. He gunned the engine and headed straight for it.
Emma Stoney:
It was as if time fell apart for Emma, disintegrated into a blizzard of disconnected incidents, acausal. She just endured it, let Malenfant and his people lead her this way and that, shouting and running and pulling, through a blizzard of unfamiliar places,
smells, and equipment.
Here she was in a suiting room. It was like a hospital lab, gleaming fluorescents and equipment racks and medical equipment and a stink of antiseptic. She was taken behind a screen by unsmiling female techs, who had her strip to her underwear. Then she was loaded into her pressure suit, tight rubber neck and sleeves, into which she had to squeeze, as if into a shrunken sweater. The techs tugged and checked the suit’s seals and flaps, their mouths hard.
Gloves, boots.
Here was a helmet of white plastic and glass they slipped over her head and locked to a ring around her neck. Inside the helmet she felt hot, enclosed, the sounds muffled; her sense of unreality
deepened.
She heard Michael, elsewhere in the suiting room, babbling in his own language, phrases she’d picked up. Give me back my clothes! Oh, give me back my clothes! Her heart tore. But there was no time, nothing she could do for him.
In some other world, she thought, I am walking away from here. Talking calmly to Representative Howell, fending off the NRC people, figuring out ways to manage this latest disaster. Doing my job.
Instead, here I am being prepped for space, for God’s sake, for all the world like John Glenn.
She was hurried out of her booth. The others were waiting for her, similarly suited up. Malenfant peered out of his helmet at her, the familiar face framed by metal and plastic, expressionless, as if he couldn’t believe he was seeing her here, with him.
And now, after a ride in an open cart, she was hurrying across the compound, toward the glare of light that surrounded the booster. Pad technicians ran alongside her, applauding.
Then they had. to climb, with a single burly pad rat, into the basket of a cherry-picker crane, enduring a surging swoop as it lifted them into the air. They rose through banks of thin, translucent vapor that smelled of wood smoke. She saw smooth-curving metal, sleek as muscle and coated in condensation and frost, just feet away from her, close enough to touch.
Michael seemed to be whimpering inside his helmet; Cornelius was still gripping the kid’s fist, hard. The pad rat watched this, his expression stony.
The cherry picker nudged forward until it banged against the rocket’s hull. The tech stepped forward and began to fix a ramp over the three-hundred foot drop that separated them from the booster.
Malenfant went first.
Then it was Emma’s turn. Hanging on to the pad tech’s arm, she stepped forward onto the ramp. She was looking through a gaping hole cut into the fairing that covered the spacecraft itself. The hull was covered by some kind of insulating blanket, a quilt of powder-white cloth. There was a hatchway cut into the cloth, rimmed with metal. Inside the hatch was a gray, conical cave, dimly lit, the walls crusted with hundreds of switches and dials. There were reclining bucket seats, just metal frames covered with canvas, side by side. They looked vaguely like dentist’s chairs, she thought.
There was the smell of a new machine: the rich flavor of oil, a sharp tang of welded steel and worked brass, the sweet scent of canvas and wall coverings not yet pumped full of stale body odor. The cabin looked safe and warm and snug.
Again, the crackle of gunfire, drifting up from the ground.
George Hench:
For George Hench, in these final minutes, time seemed to slow,
flow like taffy.
He tried to step back from the flood of detail. Now that the politicos and bureaucrats had been slung out of here, there was a welcome sense of engineering calm, of control. He heard his technicians work through the prelaunch events, calling “Go” and “Affirm” to each other. Both the hydrogen and oxygen main tanks were filled and were being kept topped up. Inertial measurement units had been calibrated, which meant the BOB now had a sense of its position in three-dimensional space as it was swept around the Earth by the planet’s rotation. The propulsion-system helium tanks were being filled, antenna alignment was completed.
His ship was becoming more and more independent of the ground.
Now the external supply was disconnected. The valves to the big oxygen and hydrogen tanks were closed, and the tanks brought up to pressure. With a minute to go, he handed over control to the BDB’s internal processors.
It was then he got the word in his ear.
He pulled himself away from the consoles and studied the images in the security camera feeds. The picture was blurred, at the limit of resolution.
He saw a smashed section of fence. Guards down, lying on the ground. Some kind of vehicle, a boxy military kind of thing, slewed around in the dirt. Somebody was standing up in the vehicle, lifting something to his shoulder. Like a length of pipe. Pointed at the booster stack.
“Oh, Jesus.”
George. Do I have your authorization?
The bad of the bad. “Do it, Hal.”
He could see the guards in the picture struggling to pull on their funny-faces, their M-17 gas masks. Meanwhile the guy in the truck was readying his weapon, clumsily.
It might have been comical, a race between clowns.
The guards won. A single shell was lobbed toward the truck.
George could barely see the gas that emerged. It was like a very light fog, colorless. When it reached the truck, the guy there started coughing. He dropped his bazooka, or whatever it was. Then he started vomiting and convulsing.
A masked guard ran forward and jammed something into the hatchway in the top of the truck. Geo
rge knew what that was. It was a willy pete: a white phosphorus grenade.
The truck filled with light and shuddered. The guards moved closer.
There had been no sound. It was eerie to watch.
Three minutes.
George turned back to the booster stack, which stood waiting for his attention.
Emma Stoney:
The curving flank of the booster, just a couple of feet away from her, swept to the ground, diminishing with perspective like a piece of some metal cathedral. On the concrete pad at the booster’s base she could see technicians running, vehicles scattering away like insects. Farther out she could see the buildings of the compound, the fence, and the people swarming beyond: a great sea of them, cars and tents and faces, under the lightening dawn sky.
In one place the fence was dark, as if broken. She saw guards running. The distant crackle of gunfire drifted through the air. She saw a truck, a man dangling out of it, some kind of mist drifting, guards closing in.
She turned to the hatch. There was Malenfant, his thin face framed by his helmet, staring out at her.
“GB,” he said. “It was GB. That’s what the military call it”
“Sarin. Nerve gas. My God. You used nerve gas.”
“It was brought here to be incinerated in the waste plant. Emma, I have always been prepared to do whatever I have to do to make this mission work.”
I know, she thought. I know more than I want to know.
I shouldn’t be here. This is unreal, wrong.
He held out his hand to her. Through the thick gloves, she could barely feel the pressure of his flesh.
Without looking back, she entered the humming, glowing, womblike interior of the spacecraft.
George Hench:
Pale fire burst from the base of the stack. Smoke gushed down the flame trenches and burst into the air like great white wings, hundreds of feet wide. And now the solid boosters lit, and the light was extraordinarily bright, yellow and dazzling as the sun.
The stack started to rise. But the noise hadn’t reached him yet, and so the booster would climb in light and utter silence, as if swimming into the sky.
George had worked on rockets all his life. And yet he never got over this moment, this instant when the great blocky machine, for the first and only time, burst into life and lifted off the ground.
And now the sound came: crackling and popping, like wet wood on a fire, like oil overheated in a pan, like a million thunderclaps bursting over his head. The rocket rose out of the great cauldron of burning air, trailing fire, rising smooth and graceful. At the moment it lifted off the booster was burning as much oxygen as half a billion people taking a breath.
George, exhilarated, terrified, roared into the noise.
PART THREE
Cruithne
Darest thou now O soul,
Walk out with me toward the unknown region
Where neither ground is nor any path to follow?
— WALT WHITMAN
Emma Stoney:
Rockets, it turned out, were unsubtle.
The launch was a roaring vibration. She’d been expecting acceleration. But when each booster stage cut out, the engine thrust just died — suddenly, with no tail-off — so that the reluctant astronauts were thrown forward against their restraints and given a couple of seconds of tense breathing and anticipation; then the next stage cut in and they were jammed back once more. After a couple of minutes of this Emma felt bruises on her back, neck, and thighs.
But the thrust of the last booster stage was gentle, just a push at her chest and legs. Then, finally, the thrust died for good.
And she was drifting up, slowly, out of her seat, as far as her restraints would let her. She felt sweat that had pooled in the small of her back, spreading out over her skin.
The rocket noise was gone. There was silence in the cabin, save for the whirr of fans and pumps, the soft ticking of instruments, Malenfant’s quiet voice as he worked through his shutdown checklist.
And she heard a gentle whimpering, oddly high-pitched, like a cat. It must be Michael. But he was too far away for her to reach.
Now there was a series of clattering bangs, hard and metallic, right under her back, as if someone were slamming on the hull with great steel fists.
“There goes the last stage,” Malenfant called. “Now we coast all the way to Cruithne.” He grinned through his open faceplate. “Welcome to the Gerard K O ‘Neill. Don’t move yet; we aren’t quite done.”
This cabin was called the Earth-return capsule. The four of them sat side by side, their orange pressure suits crumpled in their metal-frame couches. Emma was at the left-hand end of the row, jammed between Malenfant and the wall, which was just a bulkhead, metallic and unfinished. She was looking up into a tight cone, like a metal tepee. She was facing an instrument panel, a dashboard that spanned the capsule, crusted with switches, dials, and softscreen readouts. On the other side of the panel she could see clusters of wires and optical fibers and cables, crudely taped together and looped through brackets. This was not the space shuttle, rebuilt and quality-certified after every flight; there was a home-workshop, improvised feel to the whole shebang.
Obscurely, however, she found that comforting.
The light, greenish gray, came from a series of small fluorescent floods set around the walls of the capsule; the shadows were long and sharp, making this little box of a spaceship seem much bigger than it was. But there were no windows. She felt deprived, disoriented; she no longer knew which way up she was, how fast she was traveling.
Malenfant reached up and took off his helmet. He shook his head, and little spherical balls of sweat drifted away from his forehead, swimming in straight lines through the air. “All my life I dreamed of this.” The helmet, released, floated above his belly, drifting in some random air current. He knocked it with a finger, and it started to spin.
Emma found her gaze following the languid rotation of the helmet. Suddenly it felt as if the helmet was stationary and it was the rest of the ship that was rotating, and her head was a balloon full of water through which waves were passing. She closed her eyes and pressed her head back against the headrest of her couch until the spinning sensation stopped.
There was a sound like a cough, a sharp stink of bile.
Emma opened her eyes and tried to lift her head, but her vision swam again. “Michael?”
“No,” Cornelius said, his voice tight. And now she saw a big ball of vomit, green laced with orange, shimmering up into the air above them. Complex waves crossed its surface, and it seemed to have ten or a dozen smaller companions traveling with it.
“Oh, Christ, Cornelius,” Malenfant said. He reached under his couch and pulled out a plastic bag that he swept around the vomit ball. When the vomit touched the surface of the bag, it started to behave “normally”; it spread out all over the interior of the bag in a sticky, lumpy mess.
It was like nothing Emma had seen before; she lay there and watched the little drama unfold, mindless of the stink.
There was a new series of low bangs, like guns firing, from beyond the wall beside Emma. With each bang she felt a wrench as her couch dragged her sideways.
“Take it easy,” Malenfant said to them all. “That’s just the hy-drazine attitude thrusters firing, spinning us up. We’re feeling transients. They’ll dampen out.”
There were metallic groans from the hull, pops and snaps from the latches that docked the Earth-entry module to the rest of the spacecraft cluster. It was like being in a huge, clumsy fairground ride.
But at length, as the spin built up, she felt a return of weight, a gentle push that made her sink back into her seat once more.
The attitude thrusters cut out.
“Right on the button,” Malenfant said. “We is pinwheeling to the stars, people. Let’s go open up the shop.”
He released his restraints. He stood up in his couch, his feet bouncing above the fabric, and he pulled at levers and straps until a central section of t
he instrument panel above him folded back. It was like rearranging the interior of a station wagon. Beyond the panel was a short tunnel leading to a hatch like a submarine’s — a heavy iron disc with a wheel at the center.
Malenfant said, “One, two, three.” He took a jump into the air. He drifted upward easily, floated sideways and gently impacted the wall of the tunnel. He grabbed on to a rung, his boots dangling. “Coriolis force,” he said. “Piece of cake.” He pulled himself farther into the tunnel, then reached up and hauled at the wheel.
But the wheel was jammed, presumably by the vibration of launch. What an anticlimax, Emma thought. Malenfant had to have Emma pass up a big wrench, and he used this to hit the wheel until it came loose. At last Malenfant had the wheel turning, and he pushed the hatch upward and out of the way. He floated easily through the hatch, his booted feet trailing after him. Emma, looking up beyond him, saw a disc of gray fluorescent light.
She glanced at Cornelius. “Me next?”
Cornelius’ face, still inside his helmet, was actually green. “I’ll pass Michael up.”
She took offher own helmet and stowed it carefully on Malen-fant’s vacated couch. Then, breathing hard, she undipped her restraints and laid them aside. She pushed down at her chair, cautiously. She drifted into the air a little way, fell back slowly. It was like wading through a waist-deep swimming pool.
She was aware of Michael watching her, his eyes round and bright inside his helmet.
She tried to think of something to say to him. But of all of them he seemed the most centered, she sensed, the most at home in this starkly new environment. How strange that was.
Without giving herself time to think about it, she bent her knees and pushed up.
She had leapt like an Olympic athlete, but she drifted away from her course and slammed, harder than Malenfant, against the wall of the tunnel. But she managed to grab on to a rung. Then she hauled at the rungs to pull herself through the tunnel. She seemed as light as a feather.
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