Stephen Baxter - Time

Without giving herself time to think about it, she bent her knees and pushed up.

She had leapt like an Olympic athlete, but she drifted away from her course and slammed, harder than Malenfant, against the wall of the tunnel. But she managed to grab on to a rung. Then she hauled at the rungs to pull herself through the tunnel. She seemed as light as a feather.

She emerged into a small chamber, a cylinder maybe ten feet across. The light was a flat, fluorescent gray-white. There was an odd smell, metal and plastic, a mix of staleness and antiseptic, air that had never been breathed. The walls were thick with equipment boxes, cables, pipes, softscreens, and displays. Above her there was a partition ceiling, an open-mesh diamond grill, beyond which she glimpsed more cylindrical chambers. Ducts and pipes coated with silver insulation snaked up through gaps cut in the ceiling. There were no windows here either, and her sense of enclosure increased.

Malenfant was standing here. He bent and grabbed under her shoulders, and hauled her up as if she were a child. “How do you feel?”

“For now, fine,” she said.

He pushed himself up into the air by flexing his toes. He seemed exhilarated, boyish. As he descended, slow as a feather, he was drifting sideways; and when he landed he staggered a little. “Coriolis. Just a little reminder that we aren’t under true gravity here, but rotating.”

“Like a bucket on a rope.” .

“Yeah. This compartment is what you might call ops. Controls for the cluster, computer hardware, most of the life-support boxes. We’ll use the Earth-return module as a solar storm shelter. Come on.”

He led her to a ladder at the center of the chamber. It ran straight up through a hole in the ceiling, like a fireman’s pole.

Emma walked forward cautiously. With every step she bounced into the air and came down swimmingly slowly, and the Coriolis forces gave her a small but noticeable sideways kick as she moved. It was disorienting, every sensation subtly unfamiliar, like walking through a dream.

Malenfant grabbed the ladder and began to pull himself upward. He moved effortlessly, like a seal.

Emma took the ladder but moved much more cautiously, taking the rungs one at a time, making sure her feet were firmly anchored. With every rung she climbed the weight dropped off her shoulders. But as if in compensation the sideways Coriolis push seemed that much more fierce, a tangible sideways shove prizing her loose of the ladder.

Malenfant had grabbed on to a strut. He reached down, took her hand, and helped her float up the last few feet. She seemed to drift over the open-mesh floor like a soap bubble. Malenfant babbled about cleated shoes he had brought along, but she found it hard to concentrate.

“This is the zero G deck,” he said, “the center of gravity of the cluster, the place we’re pinwheeling around. There are two more compartments above us. In here we have everything that needs a stable platform: astronomy, navigation, radar, antennae. We even have coelostats, little devices that will spin the opposite way to the ship, if we need them.”

“Malenfant, with this act — by launching again, by absconding from Earth — you’ve wrecked Bootstrap. You know that, don’t you? They’ll take apart everything you built up.”

“But it doesn’t matter, Emma. Because we’re here, now. On our way to Cruithne, and the downstreamer artifact, and everything. Nothing else matters.” He grinned and pulled at her hand. “Come see.”

She let herself be led toward small curving windows set in the wall. Each window was a disc of darkness. She pressed her face to cool glass and cupped her hands around her eyes.

The module’s hull was a fat, curving wall. Fastened to the outside she could see thick blankets: insulation and meteorite shielding. Solar-cell wings, seen edge-on, were filmy sheets of bluish glass, and slow ripples passed along them in response to some complex vibration mode. She was almost facing the sun here; the hull and the solar wings were brilliantly lit, and she could see no stars.

But now, swimming into her view, came the Earth.

It was a crescent, blue and white and brown. She could see a fringe of atmosphere, brilliantly bright, and the arc shape cupped a pool of darkness that was broken by strings of orange stars — cities, she realized, spread along the edge and river valleys of some continent on the night side of Earth. The ship’s rotation made the Earth turn, smooth as an oiled machine, over and over.

And as she watched, the Earth was growing smaller, visibly receding, as if she were riding into the sky in some glass-bottomed elevator.

She clutched Malenfant’s arm.

“I know,” he said, his voice tight. “Not even the Apollo astronauts saw it like this. They did a couple of orbits of Earth, time enough to get used to the situation before they lit out for the Moon. Not us; we’ve been thrown straight into the out.”

She checked her watch implant. She had a meeting with some East Coast investors booked right now.

On some level, deep in her mind, she sensed that this was wrong: not just the illegality and unexpectedness of it, but the very nature of the situation. She felt that she shouldn’t be here, that this was unreal; she felt as if she were outside the scene, somehow, looking in through a glass barrier.

She shouldn’t be here. And yet she was.

Perhaps she was in some form of shock.

The crescent Earth shrank, becoming more round, more three-dimensional, more vividly blue against the empty blackness of space, a planet rather than a world. And, she wondered, could it be really true that all the mind and love and hope in the universe was confined to that thin blue film of dirt and water and air?

Infomerdal

You know me.

Nowadays you probably know me better from my Shit Cola ads than for the one big successful glorious thing I did in my life. Which was to walk on the Moon.

Once. In 1971.

After that the whole damn thing was shut down.

Back in 1971 I thought that by now we would be well on the way to colonizing space. Why not? Airlines operate at just three times fuel costs. Why shouldn’t space operations be just as economical? Spacecraft are no more complex than airplanes — in fact, less so.

But since 1970 or thereabouts going to space has not been part of our national agenda.

NASA has kept complete control over space. But since 1970 NASA has produced paper, not spaceships. This was the agency, remember, that destroyed the Saturn V rather than allow it to launch cheap-and-cheerful Skylabs that would have threatened its bloated space station program.

In 1980 I joined the study group that convinced President Ronald Reagan that the statesman who led humankind to space would be remembered for millennia after Isabella the Great was forgotten. For a while, it looked as if something revolutionary might be done.

But then came the assassination attempt, and Cold War problems, and various other issues. The president left space to other people, wno couldn’t get it done.

NASA won its turf wars. We lost access to space.

But the dream — the reasons we need spaceflight, now more than ever — none of that has gone away.

Which is why I for one am fully behind Malenfant’s launch from the Mojave.

What else was he supposed to do? You just know those federal paper pushers were going to find every way they could to block him.

I want to emphasize that my personal problems are not the issue here, nor is my own career trajectory and related difficulties. To put it bluntly, I haven’t drunk a drop in four years, and my new marriage is working out just fine. What I am concerned about is that future generations should not be denied the opportunities denied to my own children and grandchildren.