Stephen Baxter: Time

And there, as if trapped at the heart of the clumsy industrial metalwork, she saw the slim, snub-nosed form of a space shuttle external tank: a shape familiar from images of more than a hundred successful Cape Canaveral launches, and one memory-searing failure. White vapor was venting from somewhere in the stack, and it wreathed around the girders and tubing, softening the sun’s glare.

Oddly, she felt cooler; perhaps the heat capacity of this giant mass of liquid fuel was sufficient to chill the desert air, her own body.

Malenfant pulled up the Jeep, and they stepped out. Malenfant waved at hard-hatted engineers, who waved or shouted back, and he guided his party around the facility.

“What we have in there is a kind of mock-up of a space shuttle. We have the external fuel tank, of course, and a complete aft section, with three main engines in place. Where the rest of the orbiter would go we have a boilerplate truss section. The shuttle engines we use are obsolete: They’ve all flown in space several times, and have been decommissioned. We got the test hardware from NASA’s old shuttle main engine test facility in Mississippi, the Stennis Space Center.” He pointed to a fleet of tankers parked alongside the facility. They were giant eighteen-wheelers, but against the rig they looked like beetles at the foot of an elephant. “At Stennis they bring in the fuel, lox, and liquid hydrogen, by barge. We don’t have that luxury.”

They reached a flame pit, a mighty concrete conduit dug into the desert alongside the test rig. Malenfant said, “We’ve already achieved 520-second burns here, equivalent to a full shuttle flight demonstration test, at one hundred percent thrust.” He smiled at Maura Della. “This is the only place in the world anybody is firing shuttle main engines right now, still the most advanced rocket engines in the world. We have a nineteen-story-high fuel tank in there, eight hundred tons of liquid fuel chilled through three hundred degrees or below. When the engines fire up, the turbo pumps work at forty thousand revs per minute, a thousand gallons of fuel are consumed every second—”

“All very impressive, Malenfant,” Della said, “but I’m hardly likely to be overwhelmed by engineering gosh-wow numbers. This isn’t the 1960s. You really think you need to assemble all this space hardware just to lose a little waste?”

“Surely. What we plan is to use rocket combustion chambers as high-temperature, high-volume incinerators.” He led them to a show board, a giant flow diagram showing mass streams, little rockets with animated yellow flames glowing in their hearts. “We reach two to three thousand centigrade in there, twice as high as in most commercial incinerators, which are based on rotary kiln or electric plasma technology. We feed the waste material through at high speed, first to break it down and then to oxidize it. Any toxic products are removed by a multistage cleansing process that includes scrubbers to get acidic gases out of the exhaust.

“We think we can process most poisonous industrial byproducts, and also nerve gas and biological weapons, at a much greater speed and a fraction of the cost of conventional incinerators. We think we’ll be able to process tons of waste every second. We could probably tackle massive ecological problems, like cleaning out poisoned lakes.”

“Getting rich by cleaning the planet,” Della said.

Malenfant grinned, and Emma knew he had worked his way onto home ground. “Representative, that’s the philosophy of my corporation. We live in a closed economy. We’ve girdled the Earth, and we have to be aware that we’re going to have to live with whatever we produce, useful goods or waste. But, if you can spot the flows of goods and materials and economic value, it’s still possible to get rich.”

Cornelius Taine had walked away from the others. Now he was clapping, slowly and softly. Gradually he caught the atten-

tion of Malenfant and Della.

“Captain Future. I forgot you were here,” Malenfant said

sourly.

“Oh, I’m still here. And I have to admire the way you’re handling this. The plausibility. I believe you’re even sincere, on the level of this cover-up.”

Maura Della said, “Cover-up? What are you talking about?”

“Key Largo,” Cornelius said. “That’s what this is really all about. Isn’t it, Malenfant?”

Malenfant glowered at him, calculating.

Here we go, Emma thought bleakly. Not for the first time in her life with Malenfant she had absolutely no idea what was going to come next, as if she were poised over a roller-coaster

drop.

“I watched your Delaware speech the other night,” Cornelius

said.

Malenfant looked even more uncomfortable. “Expanding across the Galaxy, all of that? I’ve given that talk a dozen times.”

“I know,” Cornelius said. “And it’s admirable. As far as it goes.”

“What do you mean?”

“That you haven’t thought it through. You say you’re planning a way for humankind to live forever. Getting off the Earth is the first step, et cetera. Fine. But what then? What is forever! Do you want eternity? If not, what will you settle for? A billion years, a trillion?” He waved a hand at the sun-drenched sky. “The universe won’t always be as hospitable as this warm bath of energy and light. Far downstream—”

“Downstream?”

“I mean, in the far future — the stars will die. It is going to be cold and dark, a universe of shadows. Do you hope that humans, or human descendants, will survive even then? You haven’t thought about this, have you? And yet it’s the logical consequence of everything you’re striving for.

“And there is more,” Cornelius said. “Perhaps you are right that we are alone in this universe, the first minds of all. Since the universe is believed to have evolved from others, we may be the first minds to have emerged in a whole string of cosmoses. That is an astounding thought. And if it is true, what is our purpose? That, you see, is perhaps the most fundamental question facing humankind, and ought to shape everything you do, Malenfant. Yet I see no sign in any of your public statements that you have given any consideration to all this.”

The meaning of life? Was this guy for real? But Emma shivered, as if in this hot desert light the wind of a billion years was sweeping over her.

“We understand, you see,” Cornelius said.

“Understand what?”

“That you are trying to initiate a clandestine return to space here.”

“Bull hockey,” Malenfant barked.

Emma and Maura Della spoke together.

“Malenfant, he alleged this earlier—”

“If this is true—”

“Oh, it’s true,” Cornelius said. “Come clean, Malenfant. The truth is he wants to do more than fire offrockets to burn waste. He wants to build a rocket ship — in fact a fleet of rocket ships — and launch them from here, the heart of the desert, and send them all the way to the asteroids.”

Malenfant said nothing.

Della was visibly angry. “This is not what I came here for.”

Cornelius said, “Malenfant, we back you. A mission to an NEO, a near-Earth object, makes obvious economic and technical sense: the first step in any expansion off-planet, in the short to medium term. And in the long term, it could make the difference.”

“What difference?” Della said.

“The difference,” Cornelius said easily, “between the survival of the human species, and its extinction.”

“So is that what you came to tell me, you swivel-eyed freak?” Malenfant snapped. “That I get to save the world?”

“Actually we think it’s possible,” Cornelius said evenly.

Della frowned, eyebrows arched skeptically. “Really. So tell us how the world will end.”