“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,
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.
The stack started to rise. But the noise hadn’t reached him yet, and so the booster would climb in light and utter silence, as if swimming into the sky.
George had worked on rockets all his life. And yet he never got over this moment, this instant when the great blocky machine, for the first and only time, burst into life and lifted off the ground.
And now the sound came: crackling and popping, like wet wood on a fire, like oil overheated in a pan, like a million thunderclaps bursting over his head. The rocket rose out of the great cauldron of burning air, trailing fire, rising smooth and graceful. At the moment it lifted off the booster was burning as much oxygen as half a billion people taking a breath.
George, exhilarated, terrified, roared into the noise.
PART THREE
Cruithne
Emma Stoney:
Rockets, it turned out, were unsubtle.
The launch was a roaring vibration. She’d been expecting acceleration. But when each booster stage cut out, the engine thrust just died — suddenly, with no tail-off — so that the reluctant astronauts were thrown forward against their restraints and given a couple of seconds of tense breathing and anticipation; then the next stage cut in and they were jammed back once more. After a couple of minutes of this Emma felt bruises on her back, neck, and thighs.
But the thrust of the last booster stage was gentle, just a push at her chest and legs. Then, finally, the thrust died for good.
And she was drifting up, slowly, out of her seat, as far as her restraints would let her. She felt sweat that had pooled in the small of her back, spreading out over her skin.
The rocket noise was gone. There was silence in the cabin, save for the whirr of fans and pumps, the soft ticking of instruments, Malenfant’s quiet voice as he worked through his shutdown checklist.
And she heard a gentle whimpering, oddly high-pitched, like a cat. It must be Michael. But he was too far away for her to reach.
Now there was a series of clattering bangs, hard and metallic, right under her back, as if someone were slamming on the hull with great steel fists.
“There goes the last stage,” Malenfant called. “Now we coast all the way to Cruithne.” He grinned through his open faceplate. “Welcome to the
This cabin was called the Earth-return capsule. The four of them sat side by side, their orange pressure suits crumpled in their metal-frame couches. Emma was at the left-hand end of the row, jammed between Malenfant and the wall, which was just a bulkhead, metallic and unfinished. She was looking up into a tight cone, like a metal tepee. She was facing an instrument panel, a dashboard that spanned the capsule, crusted with switches, dials, and softscreen readouts. On the other side of the panel she could see clusters of wires and optical fibers and cables, crudely taped together and looped through brackets. This was
Obscurely, however, she found that comforting.
The light, greenish gray, came from a series of small fluorescent floods set around the walls of the capsule; the shadows were long and sharp, making this little box of a spaceship seem much bigger than it was. But there were no windows. She felt deprived, disoriented; she no longer knew which way up she was, how fast she was traveling.
Malenfant reached up and took off his helmet. He shook his head, and little spherical balls of sweat drifted away from his forehead, swimming in straight lines through the air. “All my life I dreamed of this.” The helmet, released, floated above his belly, drifting in some random air current. He knocked it with a finger, and it started to spin.
Emma found her gaze following the languid rotation of the helmet. Suddenly it felt as if the helmet was stationary and it was the rest of the ship that was rotating, and her head was a balloon full of water through which waves were passing. She closed her eyes and pressed her head back against the headrest of her couch until the spinning sensation stopped.
There was a sound like a cough, a sharp stink of bile.
Emma opened her eyes and tried to lift her head, but her vision swam again. “Michael?”
“No,” Cornelius said, his voice tight. And now she saw a big ball of vomit, green laced with orange, shimmering up into the air above them. Complex waves crossed its surface, and it seemed to have ten or a dozen smaller companions traveling with it.
“Oh, Christ, Cornelius,” Malenfant said. He reached under his couch and pulled out a plastic bag that he swept around the vomit ball. When the vomit touched the surface of the bag, it started to behave “normally”; it spread out all over the interior of the bag in a sticky, lumpy mess.
It was like nothing Emma had seen before; she lay there and watched the little drama unfold, mindless of the stink.
There was a new series of low bangs, like guns firing, from beyond the wall beside Emma. With each bang she felt a wrench as her couch dragged her sideways.
“Take it easy,” Malenfant said to them all. “That’s just the hy-drazine attitude thrusters firing, spinning us up. We’re feeling transients. They’ll dampen out.”
There were metallic groans from the hull, pops and snaps from the latches that docked the Earth-entry module to the rest of the spacecraft cluster. It was like being in a huge, clumsy fairground ride.
But at length, as the spin built up, she felt a return of weight, a gentle push that made her sink back into her seat once more.
The attitude thrusters cut out.
“Right on the button,” Malenfant said. “We is pinwheeling to the stars, people. Let’s go open up the shop.”
He released his restraints. He stood up in his couch, his feet bouncing above the fabric, and he pulled at levers and straps until a central section of the instrument panel above him folded back. It was like rearranging the interior of a station wagon. Beyond the panel was a short tunnel leading to a hatch like a submarine’s — a heavy iron disc with a wheel at the center.
Malenfant said, “One, two, three.” He took a jump into the air. He drifted upward easily, floated sideways and gently impacted the wall of the tunnel. He grabbed on to a rung, his boots dangling. “Coriolis force,” he said. “Piece of cake.” He pulled himself farther into the tunnel, then reached up and hauled at the wheel.
But the wheel was jammed, presumably by the vibration of launch. What an anticlimax, Emma thought. Malenfant had to have Emma pass up a big wrench, and he used this to hit the wheel until it came loose. At last Malenfant had the wheel turning, and he pushed the hatch upward and out of the way. He floated easily through the hatch, his booted feet trailing after him. Emma, looking up beyond him, saw a disc of gray fluorescent light.
She glanced at Cornelius. “Me next?”
Cornelius’ face, still inside his helmet, was actually green. “I’ll pass Michael up.”
She took offher own helmet and stowed it carefully on Malen-fant’s vacated couch. Then, breathing hard, she undipped her restraints and laid them aside. She pushed down at her chair, cautiously. She drifted into the air a little way, fell back slowly. It was like wading through a waist-deep swimming pool.
She was aware of Michael watching her, his eyes round and bright inside his helmet.
She tried to think of something to say to him. But of all of them he seemed the most centered, she sensed, the most at home in this starkly new environment. How strange that was.
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
