Stephen Baxter - Time

It was as if time fell apart for Emma, disintegrated into a blizzard of disconnected incidents, acausal. She just endured it, let Malenfant and his people lead her this way and that, shouting and running and pulling, through a blizzard of unfamiliar places,

smells, and equipment.

Here she was in a suiting room. It was like a hospital lab, gleaming fluorescents and equipment racks and medical equipment and a stink of antiseptic. She was taken behind a screen by unsmiling female techs, who had her strip to her underwear. Then she was loaded into her pressure suit, tight rubber neck and sleeves, into which she had to squeeze, as if into a shrunken sweater. The techs tugged and checked the suit’s seals and flaps, their mouths hard.

Gloves, boots.

Here was a helmet of white plastic and glass they slipped over her head and locked to a ring around her neck. Inside the helmet she felt hot, enclosed, the sounds muffled; her sense of unreality

deepened.

She heard Michael, elsewhere in the suiting room, babbling in his own language, phrases she’d picked up. Give me back my clothes! Oh, give me back my clothes! Her heart tore. But there was no time, nothing she could do for him.

In some other world, she thought, I am walking away from here. Talking calmly to Representative Howell, fending off the NRC people, figuring out ways to manage this latest disaster. Doing my job.

Instead, here I am being prepped for space, for God’s sake, for all the world like John Glenn.

She was hurried out of her booth. The others were waiting for her, similarly suited up. Malenfant peered out of his helmet at her, the familiar face framed by metal and plastic, expressionless, as if he couldn’t believe he was seeing her here, with him.

And now, after a ride in an open cart, she was hurrying across the compound, toward the glare of light that surrounded the booster. Pad technicians ran alongside her, applauding.

Then they had. to climb, with a single burly pad rat, into the basket of a cherry-picker crane, enduring a surging swoop as it lifted them into the air. They rose through banks of thin, translucent vapor that smelled of wood smoke. She saw smooth-curving metal, sleek as muscle and coated in condensation and frost, just feet away from her, close enough to touch.

Michael seemed to be whimpering inside his helmet; Cornelius was still gripping the kid’s fist, hard. The pad rat watched this, his expression stony.

The cherry picker nudged forward until it banged against the rocket’s hull. The tech stepped forward and began to fix a ramp over the three-hundred foot drop that separated them from the booster.

Malenfant went first.

Then it was Emma’s turn. Hanging on to the pad tech’s arm, she stepped forward onto the ramp. She was looking through a gaping hole cut into the fairing that covered the spacecraft itself. The hull was covered by some kind of insulating blanket, a quilt of powder-white cloth. There was a hatchway cut into the cloth, rimmed with metal. Inside the hatch was a gray, conical cave, dimly lit, the walls crusted with hundreds of switches and dials. There were reclining bucket seats, just metal frames covered with canvas, side by side. They looked vaguely like dentist’s chairs, she thought.

There was the smell of a new machine: the rich flavor of oil, a sharp tang of welded steel and worked brass, the sweet scent of canvas and wall coverings not yet pumped full of stale body odor. The cabin looked safe and warm and snug.

Again, the crackle of gunfire, drifting up from the ground.

George Hench:

For George Hench, in these final minutes, time seemed to slow,

flow like taffy.

He tried to step back from the flood of detail. Now that the politicos and bureaucrats had been slung out of here, there was a welcome sense of engineering calm, of control. He heard his technicians work through the prelaunch events, calling “Go” and “Affirm” to each other. Both the hydrogen and oxygen main tanks were filled and were being kept topped up. Inertial measurement units had been calibrated, which meant the BOB now had a sense of its position in three-dimensional space as it was swept around the Earth by the planet’s rotation. The propulsion-system helium tanks were being filled, antenna alignment was completed.

His ship was becoming more and more independent of the ground.

Now the external supply was disconnected. The valves to the big oxygen and hydrogen tanks were closed, and the tanks brought up to pressure. With a minute to go, he handed over control to the BDB’s internal processors.

It was then he got the word in his ear.

He pulled himself away from the consoles and studied the images in the security camera feeds. The picture was blurred, at the limit of resolution.

He saw a smashed section of fence. Guards down, lying on the ground. Some kind of vehicle, a boxy military kind of thing, slewed around in the dirt. Somebody was standing up in the vehicle, lifting something to his shoulder. Like a length of pipe. Pointed at the booster stack.

“Oh, Jesus.”

George. Do I have your authorization?

The bad of the bad. “Do it, Hal.”

He could see the guards in the picture struggling to pull on their funny-faces, their M-17 gas masks. Meanwhile the guy in the truck was readying his weapon, clumsily.

It might have been comical, a race between clowns.

The guards won. A single shell was lobbed toward the truck.

George could barely see the gas that emerged. It was like a very light fog, colorless. When it reached the truck, the guy there started coughing. He dropped his bazooka, or whatever it was. Then he started vomiting and convulsing.

A masked guard ran forward and jammed something into the hatchway in the top of the truck. George knew what that was. It was a willy pete: a white phosphorus grenade.

The truck filled with light and shuddered. The guards moved closer.

There had been no sound. It was eerie to watch.

Three minutes.

George turned back to the booster stack, which stood waiting for his attention.

Emma Stoney:

The curving flank of the booster, just a couple of feet away from her, swept to the ground, diminishing with perspective like a piece of some metal cathedral. On the concrete pad at the booster’s base she could see technicians running, vehicles scattering away like insects. Farther out she could see the buildings of the compound, the fence, and the people swarming beyond: a great sea of them, cars and tents and faces, under the lightening dawn sky.

In one place the fence was dark, as if broken. She saw guards running. The distant crackle of gunfire drifted through the air. She saw a truck, a man dangling out of it, some kind of mist drifting, guards closing in.

She turned to the hatch. There was Malenfant, his thin face framed by his helmet, staring out at her.

“GB,” he said. “It was GB. That’s what the military call it”

“Sarin. Nerve gas. My God. You used nerve gas.”

“It was brought here to be incinerated in the waste plant. Emma, I have always been prepared to do whatever I have to do to make this mission work.”

I know, she thought. I know more than I want to know.

I shouldn’t be here. This is unreal, wrong.

He held out his hand to her. Through the thick gloves, she could barely feel the pressure of his flesh.

Without looking back, she entered the humming, glowing, womblike interior of the spacecraft.

George Hench:

Pale fire burst from the base of the stack. Smoke gushed down the flame trenches and burst into the air like great white wings, hundreds of feet wide. And now the solid boosters lit, and the light was extraordinarily bright, yellow and dazzling as the sun.