Stephen Baxter - Time

Surely such a nature is essential for any intellectual success.

Emma Stoney claims that Michael’s withdrawn and suspicious nature has nothing to do with any autism, but is a direct result of how he has been handled by us, the adult world. Well, perhaps.

There are six classic symptoms of Asperger’s. I would claim Michael exhibits five of these.

I should know. I recognize four in myself.

June Tybee

For June Tybee, the pace of the training was ferocious. As a tech specialist who seemed likely to go into battle, her own workload was mostly physical stuff and combat.

She was put through parachute drops. She endured the rigors of” a centrifuge in a big navy lab in Pennsylvania. She floated for hours underwater in weighted-down pressure suits fighting mock battles against experienced NASA astronauts who would come swarming at her from any which way (think three-D! think three-D!). The training was clearly intended to desensitize her against the experiences of the upcoming spaceflight. There would be time enough during the mission, the long flight to Cruithne, to brief them all on operations at the asteroid itself.

And, suddenly, it was shipping-over time.

In the week before she was to be flown to California, she paid a last visit to Tom’s center in Nevada. Bill was here to meet her, of course. He’d been working as an unpaid assistant at the center since Tom had been brought here, leaving Billie with Bill’s sister back home.

They spent an unhappy, sleepless night in a motel, and then Bill drove her in to the center.

The security operation was ferocious. But it was obviously necessary. Bill pointed out a place where the desert sand was blackened and scarred, the wire fencing obviously repaired.

June, crisp in her Air Space Force uniform, wished she were wearing a weapon.

“I hate to think of you and Tommy in here, with this shit going on.”

Bill said tiredly, “Junie, don’t you follow the news? The whole damn world is going crazy. In here is about the safest place in the country we could be right now.”

Maybe so, June thought, as she returned the glare of the scowling grunt on the gate. As long as those goons don’t turn around and start firing inward.

They found Tom in a lab room filled with science equipment. Bill said the children worked on physics here.

“Physics? How can Tom be working on physics? He’s five years old.”

“June, things here are… different. Until you work with them, you wouldn’t believe it.”

And now here came little Tom himself, straight and serious in his gold uniform with that ugly blue band on his breast. He was still carrying the electronic Heart she had given him. At first he walked solemnly, almost cautiously, holding on to the hand of a girl, an older kid, tall and blond and staring.

But then Tom broke away and ran to his mother, and he was just Tommy, for a few moments more. She knelt down and grabbed his squirming warm body and buried her face in his hair, determined not to show him any tears.

She played with him for a while, and he showed her his work. Some of it was frankly beyond her, strings of symbols crossing bright plastic softscreens. But some of it was just kids’ stuff, paintings of stick people and fluffy yellow clouds, clumsy models of rockets and animals made of paper and clay.

The mix of the weird wonder-kid stuff and normal, everyday childishness was unnerving. She stole glances at Bill, and saw that he understood how she was feeling.

And the whole time the older girl, Anna, stayed near Tom, always watching, always silent.

When her time was up, June knelt down again and faced her son. “Tommy, you know I have to go away.”

“Into space. Dad told me.”

“I don’t know how long I’ll be gone.”

“Will you come back?”

A quick answer came to her lips, a mother’s white lie, but she bit back on it. She glanced up into Bill’s weary bafflement — into the gray, clear eyes of the girl, Anna — into the deep, unfathomable eyes of her own son.

“I don’t know,” she told him. It was the truth, of course.

He nodded gravely.

When she let him go, he went to Anna, who took him by the hand and led him to a group of the others, and soon he was immersed in physics, or quantum mechanics, or whatever the hell they were doing over there. And he was animated, engaged.

More than with her, his mother.

Bill wiped tears from her cheek. “Some space ranger you’re going to make.”

“We’re losing him,” she said. “That isn’t Tom any more.”

“It is Tom. It’s just that he’s found something more … interesting than anything we can offer him.”

“I’m going to be away for months,” she said.

“I’ll be here when you come back,” Bill said. “We’ll have each other. Even if that’s all.”

And he held her a long time.

And then, before she knew it, she found herself assembled with fifty others parade-ground style on a slab of concrete at Vanden-berg Air Space Force Base, California.

They were on a rise here, a foothill of the Casmalia Hills in fact, and she got a fine view of the ASFB facilities — blocky vehicle assembly buildings, gantries, gleaming fuel storage tanks — and the Pacific itself beyond, huge and blue and sleek like some giant animal, glimmering in the sun.

C-in-C Space Command, a four-star Air Space Force general, took the stand before them. He glared at them with hands on hips and addressed them through a booming PA: The USASF’s proudest moment since we took command of the high frontier on the occasion of our sixtieth anniversary in 2007… The finest candidates from all the services… a rigorous selection process… the first U.S. spaceborne troops…

The fifty of them were dressed in their space suits: bright silver with service epaulettes and name patches, white helmets under their arms, gloves neatly folded. Why the hell the suits should be silver she didn’t know — she looked like a cross between John Glenn and Buck Rogers — but she had to concede they looked magnificent, shining in the California sun, and maybe that was the point. TV cameras hovered around them, beaming their smiling faces across the planet. Symbols, she thought. But that made her feel good, to be a symbol of strength and reassurance in these difficult times. She stood a little taller.

And now there was action at the launch facility itself. One of the assembly structures started to roll back.

… From the major conflicts of history we learn conclusive lessons: the Trojan Horse. Hannibal’s crossing of the Alps. The retreat of Napoleon s infantry from Moscow. All of these underscore the strategic necessity for effective transportation of troops and their support equipment. Each new era of human progress has brought with it an urgency for an expanded military transport capability, most recently to global ranges, and now to the truly interplanetary scale…

A spacecraft was revealed.

It was a blunt cylinder. It was capped by a truncated, rounded nose cone, and fat auxiliary cylinders — expendable fuel tanks? — were strapped to the hull. She looked at the base, searching for rocket nozzles, but she saw only a broad dish shape, like a pie dish. The hull was coated with what looked like space shuttle thermal blankets and tiles, black and white, and there were big USASF decals and lettering. TV camera drones buzzed around the walls like flies.

This new vessel is over two hundred feet tall, taller than the space shuttle, with a base diameter of eighty feet and a gross weight of fourteen million pounds. We have thirty-six combustion chambers and eighteen turbo pumps; the fuel system is liquid hydrogen and oxygen. The rocket engines are the most advanced available, developed by Lockheed Martin for the Ven-tureStar. They are based on the “aerospike “ principle, which I am assured will ensure optimal operation at all altitudes, from ground to interplanetary space. . .