Stephen Baxter - Time

But now Rutter from Illinois was leaning forward. “Will thlady yield on that? If you’ll yield for a moment I have something to ask.”

Howell glared at him, realizing her attack was being dissipated.

Rutter was a corpulent, sweating man with an anachronistic bow tie. To Emma he looked as if he hadn’t been out of Washington in twenty years. “I was interested in what you had to say, Colonel Malenfant,” he said. “Most of us don’t see any ethical problems in your links with organizations like Eschatology. Somebody has to think about the future constructively, after all. I think it’s refreshing to have a proposal like yours in which there is a subtext, as you might call it, beyond the practical. If you can go to the stars, bring home a profit and something … well, something spiritual, I think that’s to be applauded.”

“Thank you, Representative,”

“Tell me this, Colonel. Do you think your mission to Cruithne, if successful, will help us find God?”

Malenfant took a deep breath. “Mr. Rutter, if we find everything we hope to find on Cruithne, then yes, I believe we will come closer to God.”

Emma turned to Maura Della, and rolled her eyes. Good grief,

Malenfant.

There were follow-up questions from Howell, among others. But that, as far as Emma could tell, was that.

Maura was grinning. “He had them eating out of his hand.”

“All but Representative Howell.”

“The question he planted with Rutter put a stop to her.”

Emma goggled. “Replanted it?”

“Oh, of course he did. Come on, Emma; it was too obvious, if anything.”

Emma shook her head. “You know, I shouldn’t be shocked any more by anything Malenfant does. But I have to tell you he is not a Christian, and he does not believe in God.”

Maura pursed her lips. “Lies told to Congress, shock. Look, Emma, this is America. Every so often you have to push the God button.”

“So he won.”

“I think so. For now, anyhow.”

Representative Howell, the engineer from Pennsylvania who had argued for rationalism, pushed between them with a muttered apology. Howell looked distressed, frustrated, confused.

Malenfant, when he emerged, was disgustingly smug. “To

Cruithne,” he said.

Maura Della:

“Ladies and gentlemen,” Dan began, “welcome to JPL. Today, June eighteenth, 2011, a U.S. spacecraft piloted by a genetically enhanced cephalopod is due to rendezvous and dock with near-Earth object designated 3753, or 1986TO, called Cruithne, a three-mile-diameter C-type asteroid. We should be getting images from a remote firefly camera shortly, and a feed from the Nautilus herself…” He stood in a forest of microphones, a glare of TV lights. Behind him a huge softscreen was draped across the wall like a tapestry. It showed a mass of incomprehensible graphic and digital updates.

As Dan lectured his slightly restive audience, Maura allowed her attention to drift.

JPL, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, had turned out to look like a small hospital, squashed into a cramped and smoggy Pasadena-suburb site dominated by the green shoulders of the San Gabriel Mountains. A central mall adorned with a fountain stretched from the gate into the main working area of the laboratory. And on the south side she had found the von Karman auditorium, the scene of triumphant news conferences and other public events going back to NASA’s glory days, when JPL had sent probes to almost every planet in the Solar System.

Absently she listened to the talk around her, a lot of chatter about long-gone times when spirits were high, everybody seemed to be young, and there was a well-defined enemy to beat.

Heady days. All gone now.

Well, today the big old auditorium was crowded again, almost like the old days, mission managers and scientists and politicians and a few aging sci fi writers, all crammed in among the softscreen terminals.

Just as NASA had declared that Malenfant’s BOB design was a criminal joke that could never fly until it had flown, so its experts had declared that Bootstrap’s cephalopod-based asteroid expedition was irresponsible and absurd — until it had survived out in deep space, and, more important, had started to gather

some approving public attention.

And so, as Sheena 5 neared Cruithne, here everybody was,

basking in reflected cephalopod glory.

As they waited for the rendezvous, Dan launched stiffly into a

formal presentation on the technical aspects of the spacecraft.

“The membrane that is the core of the ship’s design is based on technology Bootstrap developed for undersea methane-extraction operations. As far as the biosphere itself is concerned, efficiency is the key. Phytoplankton, one of the most efficient life-forms known, can convert seventy-eight percent of available nitrogen into protein. The simplicity of the algae — no stems, leaves, roots, or flowers — makes them almost ideal crop plants, one hundred percent foodstuff. Of course the system is not perfect — it’s not completely closed, and imperfectly buffered. But it’s still more robust, in terms of operational reliability, than any long-duration mechanical equivalent we can send up. And a hell of a lot cheaper. I have the figures that—” What about the problems, Dan ?

He looked uncomfortable. “Sheena has had to spend more time acting as the keystone predator than we expected.”

Say what?

“Culling pathological species that get out of hand. And you have to understand that the system is inherently unstable. We have to manage it, consciously. Or rather Sheena does. We have to replace leaked gases, regulate the temperature, control the hydrological cycle and trace contaminants … ”

And so on. What Ystebo didn’t say, what Maura knew from private briefings, was that this could be a very near thing. It’s so fragile, Maura thought. She imagined the tiny droplet of water containing Sheena drifting in the immensity of interplanetary space, like a bit of sea foam tossed into the air by a wave, never to rejoin the ocean.

What about Sheena herself?

At that question, Dan seemed to falter.

Maura knew that Sheena had been refusing to participate in her “medical briefings,” or to interface with the remote diagnostics that Dan used to monitor her health. Not that Dan, or anybody else, knew why she was refusing to cooperate. Maura tried to read the emotions in Dan’s bearded, fat-creased face.

“You understand I can only speak to her once a day, when the spacecraft is above the horizon at Goldstone. She is in LOS — loss of signal — for fifteen hours a day.”

How do you feel about the fact that she’s not coming home?

Again Dan blustered. “Actually the simplification of the mission goals has worked benefits throughout the profile. The cost of the return — the mass penalty of return leg propellant and comestibles and the aerobrake heat shield — multiplied through the whole mission mass statement.”

Yeah, but it’s become a one-way trip for your squid. The Cala-mari Express.

Uncomfortable laughter.

Dan was squirming. “Bootstrap has plans to deal with the ethical contingencies.”

Technocrat bullshit, Maura thought; whoever coached this poor sap did a bad job. But she pitied Dan, nonetheless. He was probably the only person on the planet who truly cared about Sheena 5 — as opposed to the sentimental onlookers on TV and on the Net — and here he was, having to defend her being sentenced to death, alone in space.

And now, at last, an image came through on the big wall-mounted softscreen. Pictures from space. A hush spread over the hall.

It took Maura some seconds to figure out what she was seeing.