She emerged into a small chamber, a cylinder maybe ten feet across. The light was a flat, fluorescent gray-white. There was an odd smell, metal and plastic, a mix of staleness and antiseptic, air that had never been breathed. The walls were thick with equipment boxes, cables, pipes, softscreens, and displays. Above her there was a partition ceiling, an open-mesh diamond grill, beyond which she glimpsed more cylindrical chambers. Ducts and pipes coated with silver insulation snaked up through gaps cut in the ceiling. There were no windows here either, and her sense of enclosure increased.
Malenfant was standing here. He bent and grabbed under her shoulders, and hauled her up as if she were a child. “How do you feel?”
“For now, fine,” she said.
He pushed himself up into the air by flexing his toes. He seemed exhilarated, boyish. As he descended, slow as a feather, he was drifting sideways; and when he landed he staggered a little. “Coriolis. Just a little reminder that we aren’t under true gravity here, but rotating.”
“Like a bucket on a rope.” .
“Yeah. This compartment is what you might call ops. Controls for the cluster, computer hardware, most of the life-support boxes. We’ll use the Earth-return module as a solar storm shelter. Come on.”
He led her to a ladder at the center of the chamber. It ran straight up through a hole in the ceiling, like a fireman’s pole.
Emma walked forward cautiously. With every step she bounced into the air and came down swimmingly slowly, and the Coriolis forces gave her a small but noticeable sideways kick as she moved. It was disorienting, every sensation subtly unfamiliar, like walking through a dream.
Malenfant grabbed the ladder and began to pull himself upward. He moved effortlessly, like a seal.
Emma took the ladder but moved much more cautiously, taking the rungs one at a time, making sure her feet were firmly anchored. With every rung she climbed the weight dropped off her shoulders. But as if in compensation the sideways Coriolis push seemed that much more fierce, a tangible sideways shove prizing her loose of the ladder.
Malenfant had grabbed on to a strut. He reached down, took her hand, and helped her float up the last few feet. She seemed to drift over the open-mesh floor like a soap bubble. Malenfant babbled about cleated shoes he had brought along, but she found it hard to concentrate.
“This is the zero G deck,” he said, “the center of gravity of the cluster, the place we’re pinwheeling around. There are two more compartments above us. In here we have everything that needs a stable platform: astronomy, navigation, radar, antennae. We even have coelostats, little devices that will spin the opposite way to the ship, if we need them.”
“Malenfant, with this act — by launching again, by absconding from Earth — you’ve wrecked Bootstrap. You know that, don’t you? They’ll take apart everything you built up.”
“But it doesn’t matter, Emma. Because we’re here, now. On our way to Cruithne, and the downstreamer artifact, and everything. Nothing else matters.” He grinned and pulled at her hand. “Come see.”
She let herself be led toward small curving windows set in the wall. Each window was a disc of darkness. She pressed her face to cool glass and cupped her hands around her eyes.
The module’s hull was a fat, curving wall. Fastened to the outside she could see thick blankets: insulation and meteorite shielding. Solar-cell wings, seen edge-on, were filmy sheets of bluish glass, and slow ripples passed along them in response to some complex vibration mode. She was almost facing the sun here; the hull and the solar wings were brilliantly lit, and she could see no stars.
But now, swimming into her view, came the Earth.
It was a crescent, blue and white and brown. She could see a fringe of atmosphere, brilliantly bright, and the arc shape cupped a pool of darkness that was broken by strings of orange stars — cities, she realized, spread along the edge and river valleys of some continent on the night side of Earth. The ship’s rotation made the Earth turn, smooth as an oiled machine, over and over.
And as she watched, the Earth was growing smaller, visibly receding, as if she were riding into the sky in some glass-bottomed elevator.
She clutched Malenfant’s arm.
“I know,” he said, his voice tight. “Not even the Apollo astronauts saw it like this. They did a couple of orbits of Earth, time enough to get used to the situation before they lit out for the Moon. Not us; we’ve been thrown straight into the out.”
She checked her watch implant. She had a meeting with some East Coast investors booked right now.
On some level, deep in her mind, she sensed that this was wrong: not just the illegality and unexpectedness of it, but the very nature of the situation. She felt that she shouldn’t be here, that this was unreal; she felt as if she were outside the scene, somehow, looking in through a glass barrier.
She shouldn’t be here. And yet she was.
Perhaps she was in some form of shock.
The crescent Earth shrank, becoming more round, more three-dimensional, more vividly blue against the empty blackness of space, a planet rather than a world. And, she wondered, could it be really true that all the mind and love and hope in the universe was confined to that thin blue film of dirt and water and air?
Infomerdal
You know me.
Nowadays you probably know me better from my Shit Cola ads than for the one big successful glorious thing I did in my life. Which was to walk on the Moon.
Once. In 1971.
After that the whole damn thing was shut down.
Back in 1971 I thought that by now we would be well on the way to colonizing space. Why not? Airlines operate at just three times fuel costs. Why shouldn’t space operations be just as economical? Spacecraft are no more complex than airplanes — in fact, less so.
But since 1970 or thereabouts going to space has not been part of our national agenda.
NASA has kept complete control over space. But since 1970 NASA has produced paper, not spaceships. This was the agency, remember, that destroyed the Saturn V rather than allow it to launch cheap-and-cheerful Skylabs that would have threatened its bloated space station program.
In 1980 I joined the study group that convinced President Ronald Reagan that the statesman who led humankind to space would be remembered for millennia after Isabella the Great was forgotten. For a while, it looked as if something revolutionary might be done.
But then came the assassination attempt, and Cold War problems, and various other issues. The president left space to other people, wno couldn’t get it done.
NASA won its turf wars. We lost access to space.
But the dream — the reasons we need spaceflight, now more than ever — none of that has gone away.
Which is why I for one am fully behind Malenfant’s launch from the Mojave.
What else was he supposed to do? You just know those federal paper pushers were going to find every way they could to block him.
I want to emphasize that my personal problems are not the issue here, nor is my own career trajectory and related difficulties. To put it bluntly, I haven’t drunk a drop in four years, and my new marriage is working out just fine. What I am concerned about is that future generations should not be denied the opportunities denied to my own children and grandchildren.
That’s why I agreed to appear in this infomercial. Support Reid Malenfant. If you can’t bring yourself to do that, get off his back. The man is out there risking his hide for you and your
children.
Give him a break.
Emma Stoney:
Malenfant started up the life-support systems. Pumps and fans clattered into life, and Emma felt a breeze, flat and warm, in her hair. Then Malenfant clambered back up to the zero G deck to check the ship’s comms systems and navigation alignment.
The others gathered on the ops deck and stripped off their fat orange pressure suits. They changed into lightweight NASA-type jumpsuits that lacked a lot in style but were warm and practical and covered in pockets
and Velcro strips. They shoved the pressure suits down the hole into the Earth-return capsule and dogged closed the hatch.
Michael had to be manhandled through all this. He was passive, unresponsive, like a week-old infant; it was possible to move him around, even strip and clean and dress him like a doll, but he seemed to have no will of his own. Emma let Michael stay on the ops deck, and made sure at least one of them was there with him the whole time.
She realized that she had a sneaking, selfish gratitude that Michael was aboard. Having someone else to think about would take her mind off her own utter disorientation.
She climbed the fireman’s-pole ladder to go up — or down — to the module’s other two compartments. The disorientation of the changing vertical wasn’t so bad if she spent a few seconds in the zero G bay giving herself time to adapt. Then she could put out of her mind the fact that the ops deck had just been down; now it was up, and the ladder down now led her to the other decks that used to be above her head.
It worked fine provided she didn’t look up through the mesh and see people dangling from the ceiling like chandeliers.
The bio sciences deck was a mix of lab and field hospital. There was some medical equipment: a collection of pills and lotions and bandages and inflatable splints, and more heavy-duty equipment, scary-looking stuff like a defibrillator. The small lab area was pretty much automated, with little requirement from the crew but to pump in regular samples of blood and urine. Everything was color coded and labeled and built into smart little plastic units you could just pop out of the wall to repair and replace.
The lowest deck — called, with nerdish humor, the meatware deck — was up against the outer bulkhead of the craft, and so was the farthest from the cluster’s center of gravity. They would eat and sleep here, under the strongest gravity available — about equivalent to the Moon, a sixth of Earth normal. It wasn’t exactly possible to walk normally here, but at least she could move around without getting a kick sideways the whole time.
There was exercise gear: foldaway treadmills and an exercise cycle. Bunks were neatly stacked against one wall. They had private curtains, zip-up sleeping bags, night-lights, and little personal stowage pockets. She looked inside one of the pockets and found a small softbook and music player with headset, a sleeping mask, and earplugs, all marked with Bootstrap logos. It was cute, like an airline giveaway pack.
The John — strictly speaking the Waste Management System — looked like it would be less fun. It was the old space shuttle design, a lavatorial veteran of decades of spaceflight. There was a commode with an operating handle and, God help her, a control panel. Liquid waste would be captured and pumped away for recycling. Solid waste wasn’t recycled; a valve would open to the vacuum of space to dry out the feces, and it would then be dumped overboard. When she turned the handle a vent opened and air started sucking its way down into the commode, big vanes turning in a very intimidating way.
The toilet could only be used four times an hour, she noted with apprehension. She suspected that in the early days at least they would need more capacity than that.
Each crew member had a personal hygiene kit, more airline-complimentary stuff: a toothbrush, toothpaste, dental floss, nail clippers, soap, a comb, a brush, antichap lipstick, skin lotion, stick deodorant, a tube of shaving cream and a shaver that, bizarrely, worked by clockwork. There was a little hand-washing station, a hole in the wall through which you thrust your hands, and jets of hot and cold water played over your skin. It was also, thankfully, possible to take a shower, with a hose and a nozzle that you passed over your body inside a concertina-type wraparound curtain. But the curtain was imprinted with stern instructions about the importance of washing down the shower properly after use, to
avoid algal growths.
The galley was a neat little unit the size of a domestic freezer. It had hot and cold water dispensers, serving trays, a range of plastic plates and cutlery, and a teeny-tiny microwave oven. On the door of the galley was a complete food list, everything from apple sauce to turkey tetrazzini. The food, stowed under the galley, came in dehydrated packages, sliced meats with sauce or gravy in foil packages, plastic cans with tear-off lids. There were also a few treat items like candy bars in, the labels said, “their natural form.” There was even a tap that would dispense Shit Cola, the relic of some long-forgotten sponsorship deal. Experimentally she found a cup, a globe with an inlet valve and nipple, and tried a little of the Shit. The carbonation didn’t seem to be working right — no doubt some low-gravity problem — and it tasted lousy.
There was enough food for the four of them for two hundred days in space: ninety days out, ninety back, twenty at the asteroid. No doubt that could be stretched by rationing if it came to it, but it did give a finality to the mission duration.
She was unstowing all of this from its launch configuration when Malenfant called her from the zero G deck. She glanced at her watch and was startled to find that already twelve hours had elapsed since the launch.
She pulled herself up the ladder to join Malenfant by a window. He grinned and took her arm. “You’ll want to see this. We’re here for a gravity assist. In fact, we’ll be doing this twice.”
Quietly, he talked about the difficulty of reaching Cruithne, with its highly elliptical and tilted-up orbit. To that end the impulse from the rocket stack would be boosted with gravity slingshots around the Moon. The ship would whip right around the Moon, to be hurled inward past the Earth, and then out past the Moon a second time. The theft of momentum by the O ‘Neill would mean that the Moon would forever circle the Earth a fraction slower.
She let his words wash over her. For, beyond the small, curving window, she saw black, gray, brown-white, a mesh of curves and inky darkness, sliding across her view like oil. It was a crescent bathed in sunlight, pocked with craters, wrinkled by hills. On the plains she could see boulders, pinpoints of brightness sending long, needle-fine shadows across the dusty ground. And the cres cent was growing. The ship was flying into the shadow of the
Moon toward the terminator, the line between night and day.
The sunlit crescent narrowed, even as it spread across space. It was soon too large to be captured by a single window, and she leaned forward to see the sweep of the Moon, from horn to skinny horn. At last the crescent narrowed to invisibility, and she was flying over the shadowed Moon, a hole in the stars.
She found she was holding her breath. The noises of the ship’s systems, little gadgets humming and ticking, seemed sacrilegious in this huge dark quiet.
There was an explosion of light. She craned to see.
Far ahead of the craft, the sun was rising over the Moon. A line of fire had straddled the horizon, poking through the mountains and crater rims there. The light fled across the bare surface, casting shadows hundreds of miles long from mountains and broken crater walls. The smaller, younger craters were wells of darkness in the flat light.
She checked her watch. It was early evening in Vegas. Right now, she thought, I am supposed to be wrapping up the day’s work, making my way out through the protesters to my apartment.
Instead, this. Already Earth, her life, seemed a lot farther away than twelve hours, a mere quarter-million miles.
The craft sailed over brightening ground.
“You know,” Malenfant said, “when we pass the orbit of the Moon we’ll already have traveled farther than anybody has ever gone before.” He cupped her chin and turned her head to him. He ran his thumb over her cheek. It came away wet. She was surprised.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t know it would be like this.”
He smiled. “I know it’s wrong. I know I’m selfish. But I’m glad you’re here.”
She let him hold her, and they stared out at the fleeing Moon.
But suddenly Michael was here, pushing between them, warm limbs flashing, tinny translated voice jarring. Watch the Moon, Malenfant. Watch the Moon!
“Jesus,” Malenfant snapped. He was terrified, Emma r
ealized
Maura Della:
Maura had to decide whether to endorse a military response to
Bootstrap’s activities.
It was a big decision. Maybe the biggest of her life.
It may be, proponents of the military option concluded, that there was something on the asteroid that was indeed essential to the future of humankind. If that was so, then surely it couldn’t be left in the hands of Reid Malenfant: a rogue, a maverick, out of control. And who best to take control but the U.S. government?
Well, perhaps.
She tried to call Bootstrap’s various offices. All she got was voice jail, endless automated phone systems. Occasionally a cop or FBI officer picked up, as a break from impounding Bootstrap files and property. Eschatology, similarly, was being raided and shut down.
Meanwhile she read through the reports her staff assembled for her, and watched TV, and scoured the Net, and tried to get a sense of where the world was heading now that the Carter prediction doom-soon gloom had been so confounded and confused by the far-future light show from the sky.
The e-psychologists likened it to the trauma, at an individual level, of learning the date of one’s death.
There were some positive aspects, of course. Thanks to the far-future visions the science of cosmology seemed to be heading for an overnight revolution — at least, in the minds of those who were prepared to entertain the notion that the Cruithne images might be genuine. Similarly — in ways she failed to understand, relating to constraints on particle-decay lifetimes and so forth — various other branches of physics were being turned over. On the other hand, some philosophers argued it was bad for the mental health of the species to be given answers to so many questions without the effort of discovery.
The churches had pretty uniformly condemned the downstream visions for their godless logic. Science fiction sales in all media had taken a hammering — not that that was necessarily a bad thing, in Maura’s opinion — though she had heard that there were already several digital dramas being cooked up in Hollywood’s banks of story-spinning supercomputers, stories set against the death of the Galaxy, or orbiting a black hole mine.
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