Time m-1

by Stephen Baxter

  And, suddenly, it was shipping-over time.

  In the week before she was to be flown to California, she paid a last visit to Tom’s center in Nevada. Bill was here to meet her, of course. He’d been working as an unpaid assistant at the center since Tom had been brought here, leaving Billie with Bill’s sister back home.

  They spent an unhappy, sleepless night in a motel, and then Bill drove her in to the center.

  The security operation was ferocious. But it was obviously necessary. Bill pointed out a place where the desert sand was blackened and scarred, the wire fencing obviously repaired.

  June, crisp in her Air Space Force uniform, wished she were wearing a weapon.

  “I hate to think of you and Tommy in here, with this shit going on.”

  Bill said tiredly, “Junie, don’t you follow the news? The whole damn world is going crazy. In here is about the safest place in the country we could be right now.”

  Maybe so, June thought, as she returned the glare of the scowling grunt on the gate. As long as those goons don’t turn around and start firing inward.

  They found Tom in a lab room filled with science equipment. Bill said the children worked on physics here.

  “Physics? How can Tom be working on physics? He’s five years old.”

  “June, things here are… different. Until you work with them, you wouldn’t believe it.”

  And now here came little Tom himself, straight and serious in his gold uniform with that ugly blue band on his breast. He was still carrying the electronic Heart she had given him. At first he walked solemnly, almost cautiously, holding on to the hand of a girl, an older kid, tall and blond and staring.

  But then Tom broke away and ran to his mother, and he was just Tommy, for a few moments more. She knelt down and grabbed his squirming warm body and buried her face in his hair, determined not to show him any tears.

  She played with him for a while, and he showed her his work. Some of it was frankly beyond her, strings of symbols crossing bright plastic softscreens. But some of it was just kids’ stuff, paintings of stick people and fluffy yellow clouds, clumsy models of rockets and animals made of paper and clay.

  The mix of the weird wonder-kid stuff and normal, everyday childishness was unnerving. She stole glances at Bill, and saw that he understood how she was feeling.

  And the whole time the older girl, Anna, stayed near Tom, always watching, always silent.

  When her time was up, June knelt down again and faced her son. “Tommy, you know I have to go away.”

  “Into space. Dad told me.”

  “I don’t know how long I’ll be gone.”

  “Will you come back?”

  A quick answer came to her lips, a mother’s white lie, but she bit back on it. She glanced up into Bill’s weary bafflement — into the gray, clear eyes of the girl, Anna — into the deep, unfathomable eyes of her own son.

  “I don’t know,” she told him. It was the truth, of course.

  He nodded gravely.

  When she let him go, he went to Anna, who took him by the hand and led him to a group of the others, and soon he was immersed in physics, or quantum mechanics, or whatever the hell they were doing over there. And he was animated, engaged.

  More than with her, his mother.

  Bill wiped tears from her cheek. “Some space ranger you’re going to make.”

  “We’re losing him,” she said. “That isn’t Tom any more.”

  “It is Tom. It’s just that he’s found something more… interesting than anything we can offer him.”

  “I’m going to be away for months,” she said.

  “I’ll be here when you come back,” Bill said. “We’ll have each other. Even if that’s all.”

  And he held her a long time.

  And then, before she knew it, she found herself assembled with fifty others parade-ground style on a slab of concrete at Vanden-berg Air Space Force Base, California.

  They were on a rise here, a foothill of the Casmalia Hills in fact, and she got a fine view of the ASFB facilities — blocky vehicle assembly buildings, gantries, gleaming fuel storage tanks — and the Pacific itself beyond, huge and blue and sleek like some giant animal, glimmering in the sun.

  C-in-C Space Command, a four-star Air Space Force general, took the stand before them. He glared at them with hands on hips and addressed them through a booming PA: The USASF’s proudest moment since we took command of the high frontier on the occasion of our sixtieth anniversary in 2007… The finest candidates from all the services… a rigorous selection process… the first U.S. spaceborne troops…

  The fifty of them were dressed in their space suits: bright silver with service epaulettes and name patches, white helmets under their arms, gloves neatly folded. Why the hell the suits should be silver she didn’t know — she looked like a cross between John Glenn and Buck Rogers — but she had to concede they looked magnificent, shining in the California sun, and maybe that was the point. TV cameras hovered around them, beaming their smiling faces across the planet. Symbols, she thought. But that made her feel good, to be a symbol of strength and reassurance in these difficult times. She stood a little taller.

  And now there was action at the launch facility itself. One of the assembly structures started to roll back.

  … From the major conflicts of history we learn conclusive lessons: the Trojan Horse. Hannibal’s crossing of the Alps. The retreat of Napoleon s infantry from Moscow. All of these underscore the strategic necessity for effective transportation of troops and their support equipment. Each new era of human progress has brought with it an urgency for an expanded military transport capability, most recently to global ranges, and now to the truly interplanetary scale…

  A spacecraft was revealed.

  It was a blunt cylinder. It was capped by a truncated, rounded nose cone, and fat auxiliary cylinders — expendable fuel tanks? — were strapped to the hull. She looked at the base, searching for rocket nozzles, but she saw only a broad dish shape, like a pie dish. The hull was coated with what looked like space shuttle thermal blankets and tiles, black and white, and there were big USASF decals and lettering. TV camera drones buzzed around the walls like flies.

  This new vessel is over two hundred feet tall, taller than the space shuttle, with a base diameter of eighty feet and a gross weight of fourteen million pounds. We have thirty-six combustion chambers and eighteen turbo pumps; the fuel system is liquid hydrogen and oxygen. The rocket engines are the most advanced available, developed by Lockheed Martin for the Ven-tureStar. They are based on the “aerospike “ principle, which I am assured will ensure optimal operation at all altitudes, from ground to interplanetary space. . .

  The bird looked like a toy, gleaming in the sun. She couldn’t see how it could be big enough to lift all of them to orbit, let alone all the way to an asteroid.

  It was only when she saw a technician walking past — an orange-hatted insect — that she got a sense of the ship’s true scale.

  It was immense.

  … We call her Bucephalus. She is the outcome of a whole series of covert projects mounted since we were effectively grounded by the Challenger debacle. She is built on studies developed over decades, but she has been designed, tested, constructed in a couple of months. This is U.S. can-do at its best, rising to this new challenge. Bucephalus will develop a takeoff thrust of eighteen million pounds, which is two and a half times as much as the Saturn rocket that took us to the Moon, and it will be so damn loud our major problem will be preventing it shaking Vandenberg to pieces…

  Laughter at that. Nervous, but laughter.

  Ladies and gentlemen, she is named after Alexander the Great’s charger. Now she is your steed. Ride her now into the great out there, ride her to victory beyond the sky itself!

  They cheered, of course. They even threw their white space helmets into the air. You had to make the four-star feel good about his project.

  But June knew she wasn’t the only one who gazed down on the gi
ant fat ship — scrambled together in just months and now destined to hurl them all off the planet — with deep, stomach-churning dismay.

  Reid Malenfant:

  The night before they reached the asteroid, Malenfant had

  trouble sleeping.

  Every time he turned over he would float up out of his bunk, or find his face in the breeze of the air-conditioning vent. When he took off his eye shield and earplugs the noise of the air system’s mechanical rattling broke over him, and the dimmed lights of the meatware deck leaked around the curtain into his compartment.

  He dozed a little, woke up alone, one more time. He decided to pop a pill. He climbed out of his bunk and made for the galley.

  There was movement far overhead. It was Emma, visible through the mesh ceiling.

  For a heartbeat he was shocked to find her there, as if he’d forgotten she was here on the ship. He had to think back, to remember how he’d coerced her onto the ship at the Mojave.

  She was up on the zero G deck. She seemed to be spinning in the air, as if she were performing somersaults.

  He pulled himself up the ladder and joined her. When he arrived she stopped, looking sheepish. She was wearing a loose cotton coverall.

  He whispered, “What’s up?”

  “Just trying to see Earth.”

  He looked out the window. There were Earth and Moon, neatly framed, a blue pebble and its wizened rocky companion, still the brightest objects in the sky save for the sun itself. They were spinning, of course, wheeling like the stars behind them, four times a minute.

  “You know,” she said, “it’s funny. Every time I wake up I’m surprised to find myself here. In this ship, in space. In my dreams I’m at home, I think.”

  “Let me try.” He braced himself on the struts behind her. He took her waist. He took his guide from Earth, the Moon turning around it like a clock hand, and soon he had her turning in synch. She stretched out her arms and legs, trying to keep herself stable. Her hair, which she was growing out, billowed behind her head like a flag, brushing his face when it passed him. When she slowed, he was able to restore her motion with a brushing stroke of her bare arm or leg. She laughed as he spun her, like a kid.

  Her skin was soft, warm, smooth, full of water and life in this dusty emptiness.

  He wasn’t sure how it happened, who initiated what. It did take a certain amount of ingenuity, however. The key, Malenfant discovered, was to brace himself against a strut for leverage.

  Afterward she clung to him, breathing hard, her face moist with sweat against his chest, their nightclothes drifting in a tangled cloud around them.

  “Welcome to the Three Dolphins Club,” he whispered.

  “Huh?”

  “How to have sex in free fall. If you can’t brace against anything, you do it like the dolphins do. You need a third person to push.”

  She snorted laughter. “How do you knovil… Never mind. This was stupid.”

  “We’re a long way from home, Emma. All we have out here—”

  “Is each other. I know.” She stroked his chest. “Your skin is hard, Malenfant. That time in the desert toned you up. I think I can still smell it on you. Dry heat, like a sauna. You smell like the desert, Malenfant… I still don’t understand why you wanted me on this flight. I have a feeling you planned this whole damn thing from the beginning.”

  Warm in his arms, she was waiting for an answer.

  He said, “You have things I don’t, Emma. Things I need.”

  “Like what?”

  “A moral center.” *

  “Oh, bullshit.”

  “Really.” He waved a hand. “Remember the note left by that crazy, Art Morris, the guy who tried to shoot down the BOB. Look what you did, Malenfant.”

  “He was crazy. You didn’t hurt his kid.”

  “I know. But I have hurt a lot of people, to get us here. For example they probably threw poor George in jail. Look what I did. I think it’s worth it, all of this. I think it’s justified. But I don’t know” He studied her. “I need you to tell me, Emma. To guide me.”

  “You screwed somebody else. You wanted a divorce. I disagree with everything you do. I don’t even understand how you feel about me.”

  “Yeah. But you’re here. And as long as that’s true I know I haven’t yet lost my soul.”

  She pulled away from him; her face was a pool of shadow, her eyes invisible.

  Emma Stoney:

  In the last hours Cruithne swam out of the darkness like some deep-ocean fish. Malenfant despun the O’Neill, and all of them — even Michael — crowded around the windows and the big light-enhanced softscreen displays to see.

  Emma saw a shape like a potato, a rough ellipsoid three miles long and a mile wide, tumbling lethargically, end over end. Cruithne was not a world, neat and spherical, like the Earth; it was too small for its gravity to have pulled it into a ball. And it was dark: so dark she sometimes lost it against the velvet blackness of space, no more than a hole cut out of the stars.

  The O ‘Neill crept closer.

  Emma began to make out surface features, limned by sunlight: craters, scarps, ridges, valleys, striations where it looked as if the asteroid’s surface had been crumpled or stretched. Some of the craters were evidently new, relatively anyhow, with neat bowl shapes and sharp rims. Others were much older, little more than circular scars overlaid by younger basins and worn down, perhaps by a billion years of micrometeorite rain.

  And there were colors in Cruithne’s folded-over landscape, spectral shades that emerged from the dominant grayish black. The sharper-edged craters and ridges seemed to be slightly bluish, while the older, low-lying areas were more subtly red. Perhaps this was some deep-space weathering effect, she thought; eons of sunlight had wrought these gentle hues.

  Cruithne’s form was a dark record of its long and violent gestation. Cruithne had been born with the Solar System itself, shaped by the mindless violence of impacts in the dark and cold, and hurled around the system by the intense gravity field of the planets. And now here it was, drifting through the crowded inner system, locked into its complex dance with Earth.

  Emma’s own brief life of a few decades, over in a flash, seemed trivial compared to the silent, chthonic existence of this piece of debris. But right now, in this moment of light and life, she was here. And she was exhilarated.

  Malenfant pointed at the asteroid’s pole. “The methane plant is there. So that’s where we’re heading. We’re closing at forty feet per second, three feet per second cross-range, and we’re still go for the landing. Time to check out the hydrazine thrusters.” Though immersed in the detail of the landing procedure, he took time to glance around at his motley crew. “Everything’s under control. Remember your training.”

  After endless rehearsals in the weeks out of Earth, they all knew the routine for the next few days. They would land close to the methane plant, make the O ‘Neill secure, then seek supplies to replenish their life support — principally water, nitrogen, and oxygen. Then they would refill O ‘Neill’s fat fuel tanks with asteroid methane to ensure they had an escape route, a fast way off this dirty rock. Once that was done, they would be free to pursue the main objectives of the mission, and—

  And a golden droplet erupted from the surface of Cruithne.

  They stood and watched, as if stunned, in the ticking calm and fluorescent light of the zero G deck. Emma could see how the droplet’s shape deformed as it rose from Cruithne’s shallow gravity well, oscillating like a jellyfish, and complex waves crisscrossed its surface, gleaming in sunlight. Emma glimpsed movement inside the translucent golden surface: small, strong shapes, darting in shoals, blurred and gray.

  It was quite beautiful, a soundless ballet of water and light, utterly unexpected.

  And it was growing, blossoming like a flower, heading toward O’Neill.

  There was a jolt, a groan of torn metal. Red emergency lamps started to flash, and a harsh buzzing klaxon roared rhythmically.

  “Maste
r alarm,” Malenfant shouted. He was clutching Michael against his chest. “Everybody grab something.”

  Emma looked around. The deck was spinning around her. She reached for a strut, but it was too far away.

  “Emma!”

  The open-mesh floor swept up to meet her.

  “… Earth. Tell those fucking squid we’re from Earth. God damn it, Cornelius.”

  “I told them. I just don’t think they believe us.”

  Emma found herself lying on a mesh partition, loosely restrained by a couple of strips of bandage around her waist and legs. Michael’s face was hovering over her like a moon, small and round, split by white teeth, bright eyes. He seemed to be mopping the side of her face—

  “Owl”

  — -where something stung. She could smell the sharp stink of antiseptic ointment.

  Am I in my office? What happened?

  Here came Malenfant. Michael backed away.

  She remembered it all: I’m in the spacecraft, in deepest space, not where I should be. Reality seemed to swim around her.

  Malenfant braced on a strut and peered down at her. “You okay?”

  She touched the side of her face. She felt open flesh, warm blood, a couple of elasticated bandages taped in place, slippery ointment. She lifted her head, and pain banged through her temples. “Shit.”

  She tried looking around. The lights were dim, maybe half-strength. The master alarm lamp was still flashing — its pulsing hurt her eyes — but at least the siren was switched off.

  There were starbursts in her eyes, explosions of pain in her head. The colors were washed out; she felt numb, her hearing dulled. She was like a ghost, she thought, only partially here.

  Malenfant reached down and removed the loose ties around her waist. She felt herself drifting up from the partition. “You’ve been out for fifteen minutes. You were a hazard to shipping so we tied you up. Michael has been nursing you.” He glanced at the boy. “Good kid, when his head is in one piece.”