Space

Three hundred microexplosions each second hurled energy against the pusher plate. Slowly, ponderously, the craft was driven forward.

From Earth, the new Moon was made brilliant by fusion fire.

The acceleration of the craft was low, just a few percent of gravity. But it was able to sustain that thrust for a long time — years, in fact — and once the Perry had escaped lunar orbit, its velocity mounted inexorably.

Within, Reid Malenfant settled down to the routines of long-duration spaceflight.

His hab module was a shoebox, big enough for him to stand up straight. He drenched it with light from metal halide lamps, hot white light like sunlight, to keep the blues away. The walls were racks that held recovery units, designed for easy replacement. There were wires and cables and ducts running along the corners of the hab module and across the walls. A robot spider called Charlotte ran along the wires, cleaning and sucking dust out of the air. Despite his best efforts, the whole place was soon messy and cluttered, like an overused utility room. Gear was scattered everywhere, stuck to the floor and walls and ceiling with straps and Velcro. If he brushed against a wall he could cause an eruption of gear, of pens and softscreens and clipboards and data discs and equipment components, and food cans and toothpaste and socks.

Much of the key equipment was of Russian design — the recycling systems, for instance. He had big generators called Elektrons that could produce oxygen from water distilled from his urine. Drinking water was recovered from humidity in the air. There was a system of scrubbers called Vozdukh that removed carbon dioxide from the air. He had a backup oxygen generator system based on the use of “candles” — big cylinders containing a chemical called lithium perchlorate that, when heated, gave off oxygen. He had emergency oxygen masks that worked on the same principle. And so on.

It was all crude and clunky, but — unlike the fancier systems American engineers had developed for the space station — it had been proven, over decades, actually to work in space, and to be capable of being repaired when it broke down. Still, Malenfant had brought along two of most things, and an extensive tool kit.

Malenfant’s first task, every day, was to swab down the walls of his hab module with disinfected wipes. In zero gravity microorganisms tended to flourish, surviving on free-floating water droplets in the air. It took long, dull hours.

When he was done with his swabbing, it was exercise time. Malenfant pounded at a treadmill bolted to a bracket in the middle of the habitation module. After an hour Malenfant would find pools of sweat clinging to his chest. Malenfant had to put in at least two hours of hard physical exercise every day.

On it went. Boring a hole in the sky, the old astronauts had called it, the dogged cosmonauts on Salyut and Mir. Looking at stars, pissing in jars. To hell with that. At least he was going someplace, unlike those guys.

He communicated with his controllers on Earth and Moon using a ten-watt optical laser, which gave him a data rate of twenty kilobits a second. He followed the newscasts that were sent up to him, which he picked up with his big, semitransparent main antenna.

As the months wore on, interest in his mission faded. Something else he’d expected. Nobody followed his progress but a few Gaijin obsessives — including Nemoto, he hoped, who had, deploying her shadowy, vast resources, helped assemble the funding for this one-shot mission — not that she ever made her interest known.

Sometimes, even during his routine comms passes, there was nobody to man the other end of the link.

He didn’t care. After all they couldn’t call him back, however bored they were.

While he worked his treadmill, his only distraction was a small round observation port set in the pressure hull near him, and so he stared into that. To Malenfant’s naked eye, the Perry was alone in space. Earth and Moon were reduced to starlike points of light. Only the diminishing Sun still showed a disc.

The sense of isolation was extraordinary. Exhilarating.

He had a sleeping nook called a kayutka, a Russian word. It contained a sleeping bag strapped to the wall. When he slept he kept the kayutka curtained off, for an illusory sense of privacy and safety. He kept his most personal gear here, particularly a small animated image of Emma, a few seconds of her laughing on a private NASA beach close to the Cape.

He woke up to a smell of sweat, or sometimes antifreeze if the coolant pipes were leaking, or sometimes just mustiness — like a library, or a wine cellar.

Brind had tried another tack. “You’re seventy-two years old, Malenfant.”

“Yeah, but seventy-two isn’t so exceptional nowadays. And I’m a damn fit seventy-two.”

“It’s pretty old to be enduring a many-year space flight.”

“Maybe. But I’ve been following lifespan-extending practices for decades. I eat a low-fat, low-calorie diet. I’m being treated with a protein called coenzyme Q10, which inhibits aging at the cellular level. I’m taking other enzymes to maintain the functionality of my nervous system. I’ve already had many of my bones and joints rebuilt with biocomposite enhancements. Before the mission I’m going to have extensive heart bypass surgery. I’m taking drugs targeted at preventing the buildup of deposits of amyloid fibrils, proteins that could cause Alzheimer’s—”

“Jesus, Malenfant. You’re a kind of gray cyborg, aren’t you? You’re really determined.”

“Look, microgravity is actually a pretty forgiving environment for an old man.”

“Until you want to return to a full Earth gravity.”

“Well, maybe I don’t.”

After two hundred and sixty days, halfway into the mission, the fusion pulse engine shut down. The tiny acceleration faded, and Malenfant’s residual sense of up and down disappeared. Oddly, he felt queasy; a new bout of space adaptation syndrome floored him for four hours.

Meanwhile, the Perry fired its nitrogen tet and hydrazine reaction control thrusters, and turned head over heels. It was time to begin the long deceleration to the solar focus.

The Perry, at peak velocity now, was travelling at around seven million meters per second. That amounted to 2 percent of the speed of light. At such speeds, the big superconducting hoops came into their own. They set up a plasma shield forward of the craft, which sheltered it from the thin interstellar hydrogen it ran into. This turnaround maneuver was actually the most dangerous part of the trajectory, when the plasma field needed some smart handling to keep it facing ahead at all times.

The Perry was by far the fastest man-made object ever launched, and so — Malenfant figured, logically — he had become the fastest human. Not that anyone back home gave a damn.

That suited him. It clarified the mind.

Beyond the windows now there was only blackness falling between Malenfant and the stars. At five hundred astronomical units from the Sun, he was far beyond the last of the planets; even Pluto reached only some forty astronomical units. His only companions out here were the enigmatic ice moons of the Kuiper Belt, fragments of rock and ice left undisturbed since the birth of the Sun, each of them surrounded by an emptiness wider than all the inner Solar System. Farther beyond lay the Oort cloud, the shadowy shell of deep-space comets; but the Oort’s inner border, at some thirty thousand astronomical units, was beyond even the reach of this attenuated mission.

When the turnaround maneuver was done, he turned his big telescopes and instrument platforms forward, looking ahead to the solar focus.

“You must want to come home. You must have family.”

“No.”

“And now—”

“Look, Sally, all we’ve done since finding the Gaijin is talk, for twelve years. Somebody ought to do something. Who better than me? And so I’m going to the edge of the system, where I expect to encounter Gaijin.” He grinned. “I figure I’ll cross all subsequent bridges when I come to them.”

“Godspeed, Malenfant,” she said, chilled. She sensed she would never see him again.

The Perry slowed to a relative halt. From a thousand AU, the Sun was an overbright star in the constellation Cetus, and the inner system — planets, humans, Gaijin, and all — was just a puddle of light.

Malenfant, cooped up in his hab module, spent a week scanning his environment. He knew he was in the right area, roughly; the precision was uncertain. Of course, if some huge interstellar mother craft was out here, it should be hard to miss.

There wasn’t a damn thing.

He went in search of Alpha Centauri’s solar focus. He nudged the Perry forward, using his reaction thrusters and occasional fusion-pulse blips.

The focusing of gravitational lensing was surprisingly tight. Alpha Centauri’s focal-point spot was only a few kilometers across, in comparison with the hundred billion kilometers Malenfant had crossed to get here.

He took his time, shepherding his fuel.

At last he had it. In his big optical telescope there was an image of Alpha Centauri A, the largest component of the multiple Alpha system. The star’s image was distorted into an annulus, a faintly orange ring of light.

He recorded as much data as he could and fired it down his laser link to Earth. The processors there would be able to deconvolve the image and turn it into an image of the multiple-star Alpha Centauri system, perhaps even of any planets hugging the two main stars.

This data alone, he thought, ought to justify the mission to its sponsors.

But he still didn’t turn up any evidence of Gaijin activity.

A new fear started to gnaw at him. For the first time he considered seriously the possibility that he might be wrong about this. What if there was nothing here, after all? If so, his life, his reputation, would be wasted.

And then his big supercooled infrared sensors picked up a powerful new signature.

The object passed within a million kilometers of him.

His telescopes returned images, tantalizingly blurred. The thing was tumbling, sending back glimmering reflections from the remote Sun; the reflections helped the processors figure out its shape.

The craft was maybe fifty meters across. It was shaped something like a spider. A dodecahedral central unit sprouted arms, eight or ten of them, that articulated as it moved. It seemed to be assembling itself as it traveled.

It wasn’t possible to identify its purpose, or composition, or propulsion method, before it passed out of sight. But he was prepared to bet it was heading for the asteroid belt.

It was possible to work out where the drone had come from. It was a point along the Sun’s focal line, farther out, a point no more distant from the Perry than the Moon from Earth.

Malenfant turned his telescopes that way, but he couldn’t see a thing.