As we allowed our breathing to return to normal, she fondled my balls and said, “you should let scientists look at these. They’re a medical miracle.” My semen was already dribbling from her opening, and this only increased after I withdrew. “I’ve never had a boyfriend who produced so much… and so often”, she quipped, kissing me and dashing to the bathroom.
I cleaned up the counter, grinning to myself. What a girl. What a weekend. But now she was going back to her flat, and I wouldn’t see her until Thursday. My heart sank at the thought. As she returned from the bathroom, I approached her with an idea. I wasn’t totally sure about this, but it seemed like the right thing to do.
“Gemma, I want to talk to you about something.” She was brushing her hair.
“Let’s talk in the car. I’m going to miss the train.” I grabbed her bag from the hall and we set off to the station. I noticed that she was holding her stomach, pressing it for some reason.
“Are you OK?”
She looked across at me. “Fine. It’s just sometimes when you put your whole length inside me, my cervix reacts a bit, and it feels odd. It doesn’t hurt. Just feels like you’re still there… which isn’t a bad feeling, I suppose. I miss your cock already.” I flashed her a grin. “What did you want to talk about?”
I took a breath. “I want to live with you.” There was silence. “I’d like us to find a way to live together. Either here in Wales or in London or somewhere else. What do you think?”
She smiled. “I think it’s a good idea”, she began, and then stopped.
“But?”
“Baby, I’m sorry. I lived with a guy before and he totally screwed me up. I lost all my personal space, I couldn’t follow my usual routines, and I like my routines. They work for me.”
“I wouldn’t change any of that”, I protested. This was not what I had expected.
“I know you wouldn’t try to, but I’m just not ready for that again. Not yet. We’ve only been together a few weeks – three, isn’t it? – and I know we’re been to Jupiter together and that should count for a lot, but I need more time on this. I need to think before I commit myself.”
Commit herself? Jesus. I tried to keep my voice calm, but I was livid under the surface. “OK, so spell it out for me, so I know where you’re coming from. Where do we stand?”
She fidgeted with her bag for a moment, looked out of the window. Then, “we’re very close friends, with very special privileges. I care about you a lot. I love having sex with you. I love spending time with you. But I need my own space, my own time. Can you understand that?”
I nodded slowly. ‘No’, I thought to myself, ‘I fucking well can NOT understand that’. My hands tightened invisibly on the steering wheel.
“Of course”, I managed.
“I don’t want to upset you. This weekend was… out of this world, literally… but can we slow down? Please?”
All my months on Takanli and a girl had never said no to me. I’m back on Earth for a few weeks and I get this. Don’t get me wrong – she was right to slow things down. We had rushed so quickly to this point, missing out all kinds of other things, preparatory things, getting-to-know-you things, meeting each others’ friends. It just hurt. Really quite badly. And I hadn’t experienced that for 85 years.
We pulled into the station and she gave me a quick kiss, promised to call. I accelerated out of the car park feeling like I’d been ditched. I wondered if she would call, I really did. Jesus. Had I been an idiot, with the Jupiter trip? Was I just guilty of showing off? Had I scared her away? Should I, in the context of my relationship with Falik, be dating her anyway?
The journey home passed in a blur of self-questioning. I resolved to put it aside for the rest of the day, to try to relax and get some work done with Hal. It was a little early for a drink, but they hardly effected me these days and I felt like I needed one.
“Scotch, neat over ice”, I asked the Replicator, who obliged within his usual ten seconds. “Hal, what have you got for me?”
Turning back to the Project, with its manifest complexities, after the carefree weekend with Gemma, was a mental challenge, and a welcome one. Hal had been in touch with various bodies related to our airfield in Norfolk. The Ministry of Defence had confirmed the details of the deal, including a formalised, legal-ese version of my wager with the Minister. Three months to an engine test. Six months to the first atmospheric flight test. Guaranteed British government support for everything I did, provided those tests happened on schedule.
Hal had also heard back from the local council, who were co-ordinating responses from the public. They were largely favourable. Part of this was due to our ‘spin’, Hal’s way with words. The new agreement was billed in Star Trek terminology, exciting, blood-pumping stuff. This move would herald a new era, not only in the local history of Norfolk, but in the history of our solar system. Norfolk would be at the nerve-centre of space exploration, the forefront of technological advancement, the very heart of... insert your emotive noun here… Local people were on board before they even knew it; the doubters I had met in the pub turned out to be in a minority. And certainly they were responding well to our noise-reduction ideas. This would not be like living under the flight path at Heathrow, they agreed. This would be quiet, sexily high-tech and a major cash-cow for the area.
The one truth I hadn’t the heart to tell them was that not one local person would gain employment because of me, my spaceplanes or Hal’s construction efforts. The entire thing would be managed with robots. I asked Hal to remind me why this was. He sighed heavily.
“Security, for one thing. We’re using materials which are entirely unknown on Earth. We’re using a propulsion system for the asteroid which, even at an accelerated rate of development, is twenty years in the future. We’re latching onto a rock from space and mining it, for God’s sake. This isn’t the production line for Mattel toys, or IBM Computers. This is alien technology”, he reminded me. “Besides, humans are too damned slow. There’s no way we’d be in a position to fire up an engine test in three months, and absolutely for certain no way we could do the flight test three months after that, if we were limited to the speed and accuracy of the human hand and mind.”
I bristled slightly. “Humans can be smart, too, Hal”.
He uttered a colourful oath, the first really rude thing I’d heard him say. He’s learning, I noted with a big grin. “Have you noticed”, he went on, “that the furthest out into space your ‘smart’ humans have ever gone is to spend a few fleeting hours on your moon? Didn’t your experience on, and off, Takanli teach you anything?” I nodded, deferring to his sage wisdom once more. I was going to have to get used to being trounced in these debates.
I attempted a rally. “Sure, Hal, but technologically, Apollo and the Shuttle are the best mankind has done… we’re in our infancy…”
He cut me off rather rudely. “Laziness. Corruption. Incompetence. Lousy prioritisation. Crappy financial and economic systems. Political connivances. Intellectual dereliction. Need I go on?”
He was always at his harshest, his most acidic, when elucidating upon the failings of humanity. He did not see how we could be so stupid, so wasteful, so… amateurish. I accepted all of these things as natural human traits – we plan poorly, we make bad decisions, we take steps for the wrong reasons. Apollo was a case in point. All those billions of dollars were not funnelled into the furtherment of man’s presence in the solar system. They bought a technological - and therefore a geo-political - lead over the Soviet Union. What a crap reason to do something.
But our project was different. The haste, and the need for an exclusively robot workforce, was driven not by political expediency or the trawling for votes, but by the need to put in place mechanisms by which mankind could avoid totally fucking up its only home. These different forms of damage we had so savagely and short-sightedly imposed on our planet were cumulative, I knew. Modest stupidity led to serious consequences. Serious stupidity led to calamity. Being sensible,
right now, was the only option.
So, the people of Norfolk would not benefit. Hal would have to come up with some press release or other about how our workers were being brought in from elsewhere. The need for security would be stressed – state of the art technology, dangerous chemicals, intellectual property issues, you name it – to justify the perimeter fence and the lack of public access to the airfield. It would only be for a few months, until the asteroid mission was successfully away. Then we could be more open about things.
And no press. Hal was adamant about that, despite my reservations. He could handle interview requests, which would take the form of written questions with written answers. If I wanted to contribute, I could, but there would be no face-to-face meetings with journalists. I was to keep out of the public eye if at all possible. This company, this endeavour, would be denied a human face. I didn’t like the idea. People were bound to find it sinister, particularly when combined with the security fence and zero access to the base. But he convinced me, after several hours of argument, that the dangers of the press were great enough to warrant a blackout. We didn’t need their approval, he reminded me, or even that of the public, now that we had MOD and government approval. They would benefit in the long run, but for now they had to be silently complicit.
We worked, I ate, we worked some more, and the hours passed. I tried not to think about Gemma, despite the jolt in my nuts whenever I remembered how gorgeous she had looked, sitting on my couch with her legs spread and her lovely, soft pussy beginning to get juicy. It was enough to drive me up the fucking wall. When we have achieved the equivalent of a committee’s weekly work in a few hours, I decided to give Hal a break. He didn’t find that joke particularly funny – I was still radically under-using his capacious processing power – so I shrugged once more at his stoical personality as I grabbed my jacket and headed out to the pub.
The evening air helped clear my head. Too much going on at the moment, I reasoned, and too much of it theoretical. All planning, no action. The Cruiser trip to Jupiter, now that was action. Slipping stealthily off the planet, and then that hair-raising parachute jump back from sub-orbit…. Wow. Fucking incredible. And not one other human being knew about it, except Gemma, who was probably just enjoying her time and space in London. Unless she was with someone else.
I banged open the door of the pub, entirely unwittingly, at the thought, and a slightly startled Sally bid me a good evening with concern on her face.
“Girl trouble?”
I sighed, took a long pull from the freshly poured pint. “You’re as perceptive as ever, my dear. Remember the girl in the raincoat who was in here… I don’t know, a few weeks back? I was chatting her up a bit.” Sally nodded. I explained what had happened, omitting the inter-planetary travel, record-breaking parachute jump, Relocation to a submerged alien vessel, zero-G sex and interactions with my supercomputer. The story lacked much as a result.
“Well, you know what they say, love”, she offered, pouring me a second pint. “There’s no better way of getting over the last one than by getting on top of the next one!” She lapsed into hysterics at the raw wit of her sage advice. I did my best to offer a chuckle, far more interested in getting to work on the pint. I left Sally to serve others, and perhaps brighten their evenings with nuggets of wisdom, and turned to the evening news on the little TV halfway up the wall.
There was a report from somewhere snowy, perhaps Norway or Greenland, with the journalist flying over a bay filled with icebergs. I leaned closer, trying to hear. It didn’t sound good. Something serious had happened underneath the Greenland icecap, it sounded like, and the meltwater had begun to lubricate the main body of ice, allowing it to shift further southward at a great rate. The grim-faced reporter was talking about a significant risk of sudden sea-level rises, flooding and a change in the salinity of the North Atlantic.
“Fuck”, I breathed silently. Tomorrow’s work became all the more important. These things couldn’t be reversed, but they could be slowed, brought under control. Nobody was doing anything concrete. There would be meetings in the UN, maybe a special document by the G8, perhaps even an international accord like Kyoto. But, in principle, at the end of the day, when all was said and done, fuck all would actually transpire.
Not if I have anything to do about it.
*****
The drone had been out for seven hours, its longest flight yet, dropping Relocation beacons throughout the farmland of Wales, central and eastern England, and East Anglia. In three missions, all at high altitude and carried out with admirable precision, more than fifty of the devices had been dropped into fields or areas of wasteland. Hal was certain that sufficient redundancy now existed so that the system would work well, even if several of them failed, or were discovered, whereupon they would automatically disintegrate and resemble a bunch of pinball machine parts. The problems of commuting to work were over.
The lease technically did not begin until midday, and there would be a small ceremony which would mark the official handover of the facility. I had come back from the pub with an even stronger sense of purpose; I grilled Hal for hours on every last aspect of the plan, and then slept. It was now 7am and we were ready to drive to Norfolk. It would be quite a shock to the Ministry delegation if I simply Relocated to the airfield, and appeared out of nowhere. One more long slog across the country, then our new Relocation network would take care of the rest.
Hal had done a sterling job putting together examples of the revolutionary materials we would be using, and I had these in a small briefcase, along with the usual PowerPoint presentation about the Orbiter and Carrier plane. The drive was smooth, although we hit rush hour at 8.30 and I sat twiddling my thumbs while thousands of other motorists allowed their cars to pollute freely in order to cover zero distance at zero speed. I could just imagine Falik, Carpash or the Boffin laughing themselves silly at the sight. ‘And you wonder how it is that your atmosphere is getting warmer! Hello? Hello? Anyone home?!’
I was waved onto the base by the security guard and parked up by the control tower once more. The Minister, Tom Fenlon, was there, as well as Knowles and a few other people. We exchanged pleasantries and I made a big deal of showing them the materials, insisting that we had some privacy. Knowles drove us out to one of the hangars in the Ministerial car, and the whole thing took on a rather enjoyable cloak-and-dagger feel, like I had smuggled these samples back from some factory in the Urals and it was 1985 all over again.
“Our main problem”, I explained to a rapt Minister, “is the sheer temperatures of the combustion process within the engine. You see”, I explained, using my hands to mimic the fuel flow, “the combustion is sympathetic in nature. The more fuel we provide, the more will burn, following a parabolic curve”. I described the curve in mid-air. “Force-feeding the process using these spherical combustion chambers, supported by high-quality materials like these, produces a tremendous increase in thrust over conventional models.”
I banged on about combustion, re-entry temperatures, thermodynamic properties and centripetal forces until the Minister started to glaze over slightly, and then showed him the new PowerPoint, which showed a large fleet of Orbiters operating out of Sculthorpe, ferrying dozens of tonnes a day into orbit.
“Son, I have no idea how the hell you’ve come up with this stuff… I mean, I’d love to meet your materials people and bend their ears for half an hour…”
I smiled thinly. “You’ll recall, Minister”, I began, “that our research is carried out amid conditions of secrecy which would be recognisable to the scientists who took part in the Manhattan Project.” He was nodding, waved me down.
“Yes, yes. We’ve agreed all of that. But remember, futuristic metals or none, I want to see an engine test in three months”, he said, raising a finger at me. “Don’t let me down, now!”
We shook hands, grinning at the ridiculousness of our wager. The Minister genuinely believed he had set me an impossible task. Hal openly wished that I’d said t
hree weeks, not three months. That might have given him a challenge. As it was, we would take the tape at a mere stroll.
Official photographs taken, handshakes done, and the various Ministry cars waved off, the security guard left his post and drove home. He seemed vaguely sad to leave, although I was sure the RAF would find him something else to do. And then, suddenly, I was alone on my very own airfield.
No, not an airfield, I corrected myself, glancing around at the massive runways with a grin. A Spaceport.
*****
I spent an hour setting up my command post in the abandoned control tower, from which I could see pretty much the whole site. With the Relocation system in place, I could easily hop over to the production or testing hangars once they were built. I installed my laptop by the windows and organised electrical power, desk space and coffee. We’d need to get a replicator in here, I thought, adding one to Hal’s monstrous build queue. He wanted to get started straight away.
I Relocated over to one of the old hangars and took a look around. There were three of the worn-out buildings, recently cleared by the RAF. I made some notes on my lectern, returned to the tower and brought Wright, Forager and Brunel with me to the hangar. This would do nicely as an initial work space for the construction phase. Hal got them moving immediately. The hangar was piped into the water supply, and the first thing the robots did was to manufacture a fuel pipe for Forager. Then they began work on the robot fleet.
Two hours later, three construction robots and two foragers were working in the tower to transform the place into a modern, well-connected, high-technology office. There were new desks, the ancient windows were replaced with double-glazing, the floor was re-laid and I had a full suite of printing and copying machines at my disposal. They even installed air conditioning, removing the musty wartime smell. Once the walls were painted, the place looked fantastic. I loved working there from the first moment, and I love it still as I write these lines in the very same office.
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