Stephen Baxter - Time

She checked her watch. It was early evening in Vegas. Right now, she thought, I am supposed to be wrapping up the day’s work, making my way out through the protesters to my apartment.

Instead, this. Already Earth, her life, seemed a lot farther away than twelve hours, a mere quarter-million miles.

The craft sailed over brightening ground.

“You know,” Malenfant said, “when we pass the orbit of the Moon we’ll already have traveled farther than anybody has ever gone before.” He cupped her chin and turned her head to him. He ran his thumb over her cheek. It came away wet. She was surprised.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t know it would be like this.”

He smiled. “I know it’s wrong. I know I’m selfish. But I’m glad you’re here.”

She let him hold her, and they stared out at the fleeing Moon.

But suddenly Michael was here, pushing between them, warm limbs flashing, tinny translated voice jarring. Watch the Moon, Malenfant. Watch the Moon!

“Jesus,” Malenfant snapped. He was terrified, Emma realized

Maura Della:

Maura had to decide whether to endorse a military response to

Bootstrap’s activities.

It was a big decision. Maybe the biggest of her life.

It may be, proponents of the military option concluded, that there was something on the asteroid that was indeed essential to the future of humankind. If that was so, then surely it couldn’t be left in the hands of Reid Malenfant: a rogue, a maverick, out of control. And who best to take control but the U.S. government?

Well, perhaps.

She tried to call Bootstrap’s various offices. All she got was voice jail, endless automated phone systems. Occasionally a cop or FBI officer picked up, as a break from impounding Bootstrap files and property. Eschatology, similarly, was being raided and shut down.

Meanwhile she read through the reports her staff assembled for her, and watched TV, and scoured the Net, and tried to get a sense of where the world was heading now that the Carter prediction doom-soon gloom had been so confounded and confused by the far-future light show from the sky.

The e-psychologists likened it to the trauma, at an individual level, of learning the date of one’s death.

There were some positive aspects, of course. Thanks to the far-future visions the science of cosmology seemed to be heading for an overnight revolution — at least, in the minds of those who were prepared to entertain the notion that the Cruithne images might be genuine. Similarly — in ways she failed to understand, relating to constraints on particle-decay lifetimes and so forth — various other branches of physics were being turned over. On the other hand, some philosophers argued it was bad for the mental health of the species to be given answers to so many questions without the effort of discovery.

The churches had pretty uniformly condemned the downstream visions for their godless logic. Science fiction sales in all media had taken a hammering — not that that was necessarily a bad thing, in Maura’s opinion — though she had heard that there were already several digital dramas being cooked up in Hollywood’s banks of story-spinning supercomputers, stories set against the death of the Galaxy, or orbiting a black hole mine.

And on a personal level, there were many people who seemed simply unable to cope with it all.

There were some estimates the downstream hysteria had claimed more than a thousand lives nationally already. People were killing themselves, and each other, because they believed the shadowy future visions weren’t real, that Carter must be right after all; others were killing themselves because they thought the Cruithne future was real.

A lot of the fear and violence seemed to have focused on the Blue children — and, just as distressing, those who were suspected of being Blue. Perhaps it was inevitable, she thought; after all, the children live among us, here and now. How convenient it is to have somebody to hate.

Meanwhile the FBI had reported on a new ritual-murder sect. The adherents believed they were “fast-forwarding” their victims to a point where they would be revived by the black hole miners or some other group of downstreamers and live in peace and harmony, forever in the future.

And so on. More and more she got the sense that she was stuck in the middle of an immature species’ crisis of adolescence.

Which shaped her view on the decision that faced her.

Personally Maura had severe doubts there would be anything to find on Cruithne, except for ancient dusty rock and Dan Ys-tebo’s peculiar squid. What was more important was the symbolism of the military action.

The government would act to show it was still in control of events: that it was not paralyzed by the Carter prediction, that even Reid Malenfant was not beyond its jurisdiction. It seemed to Maura that this was what Americans always strove to do: to take a lead, to take control, to do something.

And that was the subtext, the real purpose behind the military response. The think tank report argued that the resonance of action was essential now to restore the social cohesion of a wired-up planet.

And Maura, reluctantly, found she agreed.

Sorry, Malenfant, she thought.

She registered her recommendation, and turned, with relief, to other matters.

Reid Malenfant:

Removed from the swirling currents of humanity, the crew of the

Gerard K O ‘Neill sailed into darkness.

After just a couple of days, though Earth’s clouds and blue-green oceans were still visible, its disc had shrunk to the apparent size of the Moon from the ground. And the next day, it was smaller still. It would take ninety days of such phenomenal traveling to reach Cruithne, tracing out its own peculiar orbit all of forty million miles from home.

The celestial mechanics of the ship’s trajectory were complex.

Both Earth and Cruithne rounded the sun in about a year. Cruithne, tracing its ellipse, moved a tad faster. It meant that the O’Neill had to leap between two moving rocks, like a kid hopping from one roundabout to another. After the impulse given it by its booster throw, the ship was coasting through its own orbit independently of the Earth, a rounded ellipse that cut inside Earth’s path.

By the time they reached Cruithne the ship would be around twelve degrees in advance of Earth: twelve out of three-sixty, a thirtieth of the circumference of the planet’s orbit.

Malenfant liked to think he would be a couple of weeks ahead in time of the folks back home.

He treated the first bouts of motion sickness with Scop-Dex; he was glad when he could wean his crew off that because of the drowsiness it caused. They all suffered from low-G problems like the facial puffiness and nasal irritation caused by body-fluid redistribution. They were peeing too much as a result of their bodies’ confusion over this, and their hearts, with less work to do, were relaxing. And so on. Despite the artificial G and the exercise regime he imposed, their muscles were wasting, their hearts were shrinking, and their bones were leaching away.

It was all anticipated and well understood, of course. But that didn’t help make it easier to accept. Most of their decondi-tioning, in fact, had happened in the first nine hours in space, when they were still inside the orbit of the Moon. And after the nominal mission, after two hundred days in space, they would all be walking with a stick for months.

So it goes.

He kept Cornelius and Emma busy by cross-training them on the medical equipment. There was simple stuff like cardio-pulmonary resuscitation procedures, how to administer elec-troshock paddles, the use of chemicals like sodium bicarb. He gave them familiarization training on the drugs the ship carried, along with blood products. There were more grisly exercises, such as emergency tracheotomy and how to secure an intravenous catheter (the fat saphenous veins of the inner thigh were the best bet).