Stephen Baxter - Time

The refrigerators and bowls of food were taken away. Now there was only food at mealtimes, twice a day.

The children were no longer issued fresh clothes. They were given shirts and shorts and shoes that were marked with small blue circles, just one set per child. The clothes soon became dirty and threadbare.

The last lessons were stopped, and the softscreens were taken away.

Many of the children wept and fought at that, but not Michael.

He had expected this to happen someday. The School had been like a strange dream anyway.

He would be able to work in his head. As long as he was left alone, as he had been in the village.

Emma Stoney:

Each morning now, Emma had to run the gauntlet of the noisy mobs outside Bootstrap’s Vegas office. This morning, as her car approached, a few of them burst through the police line. The car sensed warm human bodies ahead and slowed to a halt. Emma made sure her windows were sealed up, overrode the Smart-Drive, and inched the car forward.

Slowly the people parted, but not before they got close enough to scream in through the windscreen at her. There were eco types in body paint, a lot of religious groups she couldn’t identify, and also counter-protesters, people actually in favor of Bootstrap and its projects, mostly young white males with U.S. flags and other national emblems, chanting about pioneers and the new frontier. Some of them wore animated T-shirts with an image of Malenfant making a speech somewhere: a few words and a smile, cycled over and over on the crumpled cloth. She grimaced; she wondered how much money some remote corner of Bootstrap was making out of that. A line of cops, supplemented by company security people (racking up one hell of an expense, as Emma knew too well) kept the factions apart.

Here was a beefy guy with shaved hair, dressed in a green T-shirt and pants as if he were some kind of veteran. He was limping, one of his legs betraying him. He was carrying a blown-up picture of a sickly looking kid blowing candles on a birthday cake. He was shouting. “Yellow babies! Look what you did, Malenfant! Look what you did!”

Emma recoiled from his anger.

But once she was inside, and the gate had sealed itself shut behind her, she couldn’t even hear the protesters’ chants any more: only a soft white noise, barely audible, like rushing water.

Almost soothing.

She arrived at the conference room late. She took a seat quietly at the back of the darkened, half-empty room and tried to follow what was going on.

George Hench was chairing an engineering seminar on the design of a hab module for the proposed human-manned follow-up missions to Cruithne.

At the front of the room a technical type was standing at a lectern; a softscreen the size of a curtain was hanging on the wall behind him. Other techs sat around the first few rows, their arms draped over the backs of their chairs, their feet up before them.

These technicians were mostly men, mostly badly dressed, generally bearded. They were laden with doctorates and other qualifications. Many of them came from NASA itself, from corners of that sprawling bureaucratic empire called things like the Mission Definition Office or the Mars Exploration Studies Office. Behind each of these guys lay a whole fleet of beautiful spacecraft that had existed only in blueprints and mass estimates and a few items of demonstration technology, and that had landed on the Moon or Mars only in clean, software-generated NASA imagery, and in the dreams of their creators.

After Malenfant’s electrifying first launch, and his announcement that he was proposing manned missions to Cruithne and beyond — and despite the outstanding legal difficulties the company faced — Bootstrap had had no difficulty recruiting guys like these.

The speaker was describing the high-level design of the Cruithne mission’s hab module. He spoke in a mumble, directly to his softscreen, and the screen behind him showed a blizzard of bewildering images.

The hab was little more than a can, fifteen yards long. It had a small Earth-return capsule — a cone shaped like an Apollo capsule — glued to its lower end. The capsule would also serve as a solar storm shelter. Big winglike solar cell panels were fixed to struts extending from the can’s sides. Various antennae, thruster assemblies, and ports were visible through layers of powder-white insulation blankets. It reminded Emma a little of prehistoric images ofSkylab. But in the animated image the hab was spinning, end over end, to provide the crew with artificial gravity, at least at the can’s extremities. The speaker made great play of the mass limitations the craft was going to work under; it seemed that the whole design was right at the limit of what Malenfant’s BOB could throw into space.

Life-support systems engineering was far from Emma’s area of expertise. But attending meetings like this was all part of her general ongoing strategy to contain Reid MalenfanL She’d been around Malenfant long enough to know that it was worth her while to cast her net as wide as possible, to follow as much as possible, to anticipate as much as she could. Because, even here at the heart of Reid Malenfant’s secretive empire, she could never be sure under which rock the next rattlesnake lay coiled.

It was characteristic of Malenfant to be pressing ahead with the design, assembly, and even fabrication of his asteroid-pioneer spacecraft while the slow wheels of official approval still ground on. Not only that, he had become even more unobtainable than usual because he had launched himself into every aspect of the training of Bootstrap’s cadre of prospective astronauts, even to the extent of racking up flying hours and time in the centrifuge.

Meanwhile, Bootstrap’s destiny remained unresolved.

The fact that this next flight would — if it flew at all — be carrying human passengers just made the bureaucratic tangle that much worse. It had shocked Emma to learn that even comparatively unambitious human spaceflights incurred a lot of danger, much of it unacceptable to bodies like OSHA, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration.

Beyond the shelter of Earth’s magnetic field, for example, the astronauts would be bombarded by radiation, sporadically violent flares from the sun, and a steady drizzle of fast-moving cosmic rays: relics from remote parts of the universe, a single particle of which, George Hench had once told her, could pack as much punch as a baseball. Then there were the familiar hazards of zero gravity: bone decalcification, immune and cardiovascular system degradation, muscular atrophy.

Emma formed a bleak image of the crew limping across space in a cramped, stinking, spinning module, earnestly pounding away at their treadmills just to keep alive, cowering every time the sun belched. There was something un-American about it, she thought, something dogged and Soviet.

What might save Bootstrap was once again the weakness and ambiguity of the current regulatory regime. For example, OSHA actually had no radiation exposure standards for human exploration missions. NASA had adopted supplementary standards drawn up by bodies like the National Academy of Sciences and the National Council on Radiation Protection and Measurements as the agency’s standard for crew dose limits. But even then NASA had left loopholes, saying the standards should be applied to all but “exceptional exploration missions.”

Where NASA led, Reid Malenfant was happy to follow.

The presenter was nearing the end of his talk, and he had started to wax philosophical. Before Copernicus, humans believed humanity was walled off from the heavens by a set of crystal spheres. Well, those spheres are still there, but they aren ‘t made of glass, but of fear. Let’s do this. Let’s smash those spheres.