Martin Greenberg - Space Stations

Eriksen had to caution him not to use Valkyrie to go back to Mars except in the event of utter emergency, aware that he had no way of enforcing his injunctions once he was gone. Still, Jeanne would probably be a moderating influence on the audacious Cajun.

Well, he didn’t tell me not to go to Deimos. That’s another place where I could look for information about the origin of the Martian moons. Boutillier smiled to himself as he thought of all the explorations that Jeanne and he could be doing together.

Upon his return to Earth, Captain Eriksen was going to recommend that Space Station Phobos (Fear) be renamed Orbital Base Hope in view of the bright future he foresaw now.

History records that the first person to walk on Mars was from Trailblazer, and the first people to land on Mars alive were from Ares. And, the first two residents of Phobos were from both ships.

This story is dedicated to the memory of Professor Juergen Rahe, who capably directed the Planetary Exploration Program at the NASA Headquarters until his tragic death in 1997. He was a good friend and colleague for more than three decades. A Martian Crater was recently named after him.

MY father used to joke that he was four hundred years older than my mother. He was Esteban Fenway, copilot of Ian Arkwood’s Space Magellan when they discovered NBH Draconis, the quiescent black hole just two hundred light-years north of Earth. Arkwood died there. Off the ship, exploring its tiny iron asteroid, he was caught by a radiation burst from something falling in. My father got home with the news.

The drama of his escape from its invisible gravity well is among my first recollections, as I heard it at the bedtimes when he used to trot me on his knee. He never tried to make himself the hero, but I loved the story for his genial voice and the strange magic of its relativity paradoxes. I always shivered at the terrible mysteries of NBH and loved the thrills of his escape alive.

“It’s a fearful monster, Sandy. A demon nobody can see. It has a terrible strength and a terrible hunger. It eats people and planets and stars and even the light that could show where it is. It hides in a great dark cave it has dug for itself.”

“If you couldn’t see it, how did you find it?”

“Its own dreadful power gives it away. Like your pocket lens, it bends light to magnify anything beyond it. All we could see was that little patch of brighter stars.”

“Will it swallow us?”

“We’re safe,” he promised. “So long as we stay away.”

“But you could go back?” I was always frightened. “And get there in no time at all?”

“In none of my time.” He liked to dazzle me with the wonder of the skipships. “And skip back again in another instant. That’s what we did. Our whole cruise, to survey half a dozen stellar systems and find NBH, took us just a few months on the Magellan, but four hundred years passed here on Earth while we were away.”

When I wondered how that could be, he said something I didn’t understand about Einstein and the relativity of space and time.

“No need to vex your little head about it.” He laughed at my fears. “Or about any danger from NBH itself. It’s too far off to touch us, and I got away without a scar. It was coming home that nearly killed me. The Arkwood expedition had been forgotten. Nobody wanted to believe a black hole could be so near. People called me crazy, and I did feel driven half out of my mind. Your mother saved me.”

I heard more about that from her. A journalist assigned to do the story, she found him in a bar, overwhelmed by an Earth that seemed stranger than NBH and drinking to escape more questions than he had answers for. With her at his side, he made the best of his moment.

She helped him set up the Arkwood Foundation and find funds to build Black Hole Station. Every other year through my childhood and youth, a new Magellan took off to carry supplies for it and relieve half the six-man staff.

Of course nobody returned to report anything. Nobody could, not for another four hundred years. I remember sitting at the dinners my mother used to give for the foundation staff and my father’s scientific friends. Listening to their talk, I felt baffled by the riddles of NBH and haunted with dread of its invisible power.

Schwarchild bubbles? Event horizons? Anti-horizons? Singularies? Quantum geometries? Negative matter? Negative time? Black holes, white holes, wormholes?

What did the words mean? What dark magic let the black hole pull men off the Earth, not to return till all they had known was gone?

“Wormholes?” I asked my father once. “Are they really tunnels through space and time to other worlds?”

“Flying carpets?” He laughed at the question. “Not for spacecraft. Not even if they do exist. Tidal forces would tear your unlucky astronaut into superhot plasma, and matter that falls into the Schwarzchild bubble stays there. Nothing gets out except the Hawking hot-body radiation. And not much of that.”

“So what good is the station?”

“No way to know.” He shrugged, his bright blue eyes looking off beyond me. “No way for us, here and now. But I want to know what’s waiting for us, there inside the bubble.

NBH is a natural lab with a trillion times more power than anything we can build here on Earth.”

My mother may have known how impatient he was for that knowledge, but I was stunned on the morning at breakfast, the year I was twelve, when he pushed his plate aside and looked across the table at my mother. He told her he was taking the next relief ship out to the station.

Her face gone pale, she sank back in her chair.

“If you have to go.” Her lips were quivering when she finally gathered herself to speak.

“If you have to.”

Bravely, she helped him pack what he wanted to take and invited his friends to a farewell dinner. She had to wipe at her tears before she could kiss him farewell. My throat was aching when he gripped my hand and turned to leave, and my own eyes blurred at the eager spring in his step as he walked up the ramp to board Magellan Five.

“He loves us,” she whispered to me. “But NBH has caught him. It will never let him go.”

She took his place at the head of the foundation and kept the relief ships flying out. Over the years I met most of the volunteers when they came for training. All of them were men. She insisted very firmly that black holes were not for women.

Those men were a bright and lively lot. I admired them for many things: their abilities, their courage, their dedication to science. Yet I felt a sort of pity for them. Every one, in his own way, had suffered some painful loss. Disappointment in love, disaster in business, defeat of some driving ambition, failure of a dream.

“We’re all of us unhappy,” one of them confessed when I had bought him a farewell drink. “If we’d been content with Earth here and now, we wouldn’t be gambling our lives for the uncertain secrets of NBH. Or the chance we’ll get back to some fabulous Utopia four hundred years from now.” He made a bitter face. “The fact is, we’re diving into our own black holes.”

Wishing them well, I’d never wanted to follow. Yet I had never outgrown my longing to see my father again, or escaped my childhood fascination with the ominous riddles of NBH. Out of college, I came home with a degree in cosmogony, planning to join my mother at the foundation. She told me she was shutting it down.

“We can’t.” I felt dismayed. “Think of my father.”

“I do. Every day.” Her lips quivered. “But he’s had ten years at the station, if he stayed there. We’ll never know what he’s done or failed to do, but Magellan Ten has drained the last of our funding. This last mission will evacuate and abandon the station.”