The Next Continent

by Issui Ogawa

  “No approval required, Apple 3. The test protocol allows us to take AMPU out to five thousand meters. Sit tight, we’ll be with you shortly.” Frontier’s commander sounded like he was planning a walk in the park. Ryuichi stared out the observation port in a daze.

  In less than half an hour the shuttle loomed outside, nearly blocking the view of space. Frontier was now revolving in synchrony with Apple 3. A small oblong object separated from the shuttle. In what seemed a few seconds, it grew larger and resolved itself into an astronaut astride a slender tube, almost like a witch riding a broom. At the forward end of the tube were five gimbaled thrusters. The main motor and fuel tank were at the tube’s other end.

  The astronaut glided to within ten meters and gave his handlebar a slight twist. The vehicle’s front and rear thrusters pulsed propellant in several directions at once. It turned side-on, like a motorcycle skidding to a stop, yet maintained its rotation relative to Apple 3. The simple, intuitive way the astronaut controlled his vehicle belied the complexity of the maneuver. Any movement during orbit would change the orbit itself. NASA’s space scooter clearly had a sophisticated attitude control system.

  The astronaut’s EVA suit was also cutting-edge, a total departure from the bulky suits of the past. It had a sleek, streamlined look, accentuating the length of the astronaut’s arms and legs. The pride of NASA, this hard suit required no user predecompression.

  The astronaut was just outside Apple 3. He waved. “Sorry to keep you waiting. Flight Engineer Hardin, at your service. How about them apples?”

  “That was a very impressive approach. Give us a minute and we’ll roll over and show you the damage,” said Ryuichi.

  “Not necessary, Apple 3. I’d prefer to keep clear of your thrusters. Please maintain your current attitude. I’ll just do a walk around.” With that, Hardin nimbly flipped upside down and disappeared from view. The pilot put the external camera feed on the monitor.

  The American darted around the capsule like a hummingbird, then dove beneath the habitat module, which was connected by a narrow waist to the propulsion unit. He whistled.

  “Hello…looks like your problem is at the base of the array. The hinge is rotated and snagged. Engineers work hard to make these things snag-proof. This looks like something outside the design envelope.”

  “Can you do anything?” asked Ryuichi.

  “You’re not bringing this back with you, right? You just need power for orbit. Okay, let’s see if we can free this. One, two…three!”

  Ryuichi heard a thump from beneath his feet. At the same time, the panel blocking the external camera slid smoothly out of view.

  The pilot shook his head. “That was quick.”

  Hardin chuckled. “Force-feedback thruster control. AMPU is rock steady. That’s why Apple didn’t kick me back.”

  The American reappeared outside the observation port and nonchalantly radioed the shuttle. “Frontier, Hardin. Picking went smoothly. The Apple looks delicious.”

  “Thank you, Captain,” said Henderson. “You’re thirty-two seconds ahead of schedule. Synchronize and proceed to next position.”

  “Roger, Frontier.” Hardin waved.

  Suddenly the significance of this exchange hit Ryuichi. “So you guys didn’t report this to Johnson?”

  “EVAs are part of normal operation,” replied Henderson. “When we conduct them is up to me. Captain Hardin was, ah, previously scheduled to spend two minutes in your vicinity. And that’s all he did, Mr. Yaenami.”

  “You mean this was an unofficial rescue operation?”

  “We use that term when crew safety is at stake. Then everyone on the ground and in orbit works as a team to solve the problem. Shall I advise Johnson that we have an emergency?”

  “Of course not,” said Ryuichi with a reflexive shake of his head, though there was no video link. “We’re grateful for your help.”

  “No problem at all, Apple 3. You’re welcome to forget all about it,” Henderson said casually and signed off. Hardin waved one last time and moved away.

  Ryuichi and the pilot were drained. They floated about the capsule. “They completely had us. I didn’t know what to say,” said the pilot.

  “They knew what they were doing. This is child’s play for those people. We work like our lives depend on it just to get into space. We get up here and there they are, strolling around. Whistling.” Ryuichi watched Hardin’s receding form, eyes narrowed. “Those guys are the real deal.”

  THE 150-INCH MONITOR is flat white, without detail. Gradually the brightness falls to reveal a rocket lifting off amid towering plumes of white exhaust. A caption at the bottom reads: EVE I LEO MISSION LIFTOFF.

  Cut to the interior of Apple 3. A lion-haired figure in a flight couch, casually dressed in sweat-shirt and jeans. Four other flight couches are occupied by test dummies: women and children. The man smiles and flashes the victory sign. The camera jiggles.

  Footage from a chase plane. Eve gains altitude at a shallow angle, like an aircraft, and disappears into the distance. An insert shows a CG image of “the Mushroom” leaving the atmosphere. When Eve reaches Mach 1, the solid boosters jettison, and TROPHY kicks in for the long, smooth, air-breathing leg of the flight, taking Eve to an altitude of sixty kilometers. As the rocket climbs along the curvature of the earth, it leaves the blue of the atmosphere and enters the black of space. The first stage falls away. The second stage accelerates Apple into orbit.

  Capsule interior. At a signal from the pilot, the passenger releases his restraint harness and floats upward. He seems startled, then breaks into a broad smile. He pantomimes a cheek-to-cheek dance with an invisible partner. The reaction seems a bit over the top.

  A different interior, spacious and cylindrical and twice as wide as the passenger’s outstretched arms. The caption reads habitat module. The man takes a foil food packet from a drawer and punctures it with a straw. He “accidentally” lets some soup spill. The droplets float, suspended. He inserts his straw into one blob of soup after another and sucks them down.

  The toilet, at the far end of the compartment. The seat is formfitted for a complete seal. The man solemnly points to the two intakes—one small, one large—then to the antiseptic tissues for sterilizing the seat.

  Undressing. The man changes into pajamas. He looks relaxed, as if he were back home at the end of a long day.

  Sleeping accommodations. The man lowers a panel built into the wall of the compartment. A large, cloth-covered truss-frame structure unfolds like an accordion and extends to the other side of the compartment. The man walks to one end of the structure; from end-on, five hexagonal capsules containing beds are visible. The cross section looks like a honeycomb. Since everyone will sleep at the same time, the structure occupies most of the habitat module. The man floats into one of the compartments feetfirst, waves, and closes the opening with a curtain. The pilot, holding the camera, attaches an air line to each compartment. A subtitle explains that the lack of onboard convection requires the use of forced air.

  After a moment the man emerges from his sleeping compartment. He stretches comically as if he’s just had a good night’s rest. Naturally this is not possible. The flight is only three hours.

  After brushing his teeth, shaving, and tending to his mane of hair, the man changes back into sweat-shirt and jeans. The compartment has two round observation ports. The man goes to each port and looks out, quietly absorbed in the view.

  Cut to external camera view. A whirlpool of white clouds—a large low-pressure cell—sprawls across a dark blue ocean. The clouds hug the edge of the pressure cell like a floating Great Wall of China. The camera pans slowly toward the arc of the solar terminator. Suddenly the view is tinted purple, a gentle neon glow. The subtitle reads noctiluminescent clouds. The spacecraft is moving through glowing clouds of ice crystals high above the earth’s surface. The camera lingers for a long moment on the clouds and dissolves into a superimposed shot of the man’s profile. His cheeks are wet with tears.

&nb
sp; A computer graphic representation of the reentry process. The spacecraft’s path is a sine wave over a Mercator projection of the earth. After a descent burn over southern China, and after jettisoning the habitat modules, the capsule descends on a northeast trajectory toward Japan.

  Capsule interior. Lots of camera shake from the shock of reentry. The passenger grits his teeth but still manages a wave for the camera.

  The view from a ground-based camera. A speck against the twilight sky grows larger: a red and white trapezoid with a capsule slung beneath. The pilot skillfully trims the parafoil slider, banks gracefully, and softly touches down on the landing cushion laid along three hundred meters of runway. The underside of the capsule is charred black. The landing crew rushes up and hoses it down. They open the hatch.

  After a tense pause, the man’s head appears. He climbs unassisted down onto the runway, pumps his fists in the air, lit by a storm of camera flashes, and roars in triumph. Reporters with microphones rush toward him. Face still flush with excitement, he gleefully answers their questions. The camera pans upward. A full moon is rising into the glow of twilight.

  The video ends.

  “That was the five-minute version of the promotion video,” said Reika, standing next to the monitor. “We have a thirty-second version for prime time that went to terrestrial broadcasters worldwide. We’re streaming this digest and an uncut three-hour version on the net—unedited, except for the assistance from NASA.”

  “The Americans haven’t said anything about that, fortunately,” said Takumichi Gotoba. “They’re probably confident they’re ahead of us. Still, we’re not obliged to mention it. I don’t see a problem leaving it out.”

  The rest of the people in the conference room at Gotoba Engineering’s Tokyo headquarters nodded. The party to celebrate Ryuichi’s safe return had taken place two weeks ago. Today’s meeting had been called to discuss next steps. Gotoba’s brain trust was assembled in the same conference room where the project first saw the light of day.

  “After the prime-time spot aired, we received more than thirty-five hundred applications from individuals wanting to go into space. There were over fifteen hundred inquiries from national and local governments, universities, research institutions, travel agencies, broadcasters, web dailies, and news agencies. Everyone knows the fare per person is two hundred million yen.”

  Gotoba nodded with satisfaction. “It must be frustrating that you can’t service all that demand. You’d be halfway to covering your costs already.”

  “Yes,” said Reika. “But we’re in no position to take applications yet.”

  “That’s true. Gotoba Engineering staff will be the only passengers for a few years. But I have to say, Yaenami has guts. I could never have done that.” Gotoba shrugged. This was the difference between him and Ryuichi; otherwise they seemed to resemble each other. Besides the fact that Gotoba was sixty-one and Ryuichi forty-one, the older man could leave the work to his people and derive satisfaction from their success.

  “NASA hasn’t come out with a plan for space tourism yet. We’re still ahead, and the ball’s in our court.” He looked around the table. “Can we push harder? Move the timeline up?”

  Takasumi Iwaki, head of Gotoba’s Mobile Engineering Division, spoke. “This is not the time to panic. The project’s on track, but we still face a huge number of challenges. Without people on the surface, we can’t put the solar furnace into service and start producing cement. And we can’t put people on the surface till TGT successfully sends Apple to the moon and back.”

  “Hmm.” Gotoba looked at Tetsuo Sando. “What do you think NASA’s planning?”

  “They haven’t released much in the way of specifics. Lunar Generator 1 is near Eden Crater. That will give them electric power, but all they did was attach a landing module to a unit developed for the Mars program. We have next to no information about other engineering equipment they might be developing. But we do know that six years from now—which parallels our timeline—they plan to have a lunar base with a hundred people. They’re probably working round the clock on development.”

  “If they’re cobbling something together, they won’t be much of a threat.” Gotoba chuckled, but Sando just gazed back at him like an aging philosopher with an ominous presentiment. He shook his head. “The Americans thought through every element of Sixth Continent more than thirty years ago.”

  The room buzzed with exclamations of disbelief. Sando continued drily, “Since we began this project, I’ve been reviewing the history of space exploration. Take lunar concrete. The Universities of Arizona and Illinois were working on this problem in the eighties. In 1988, the American Society of Civil Engineers held a major conference on construction in space. NASA has support from hundreds of external organizations in the U.S. They’ve been in existence since 1958, and their base of technology and experience is very, very broad. If necessary, they can use their accumulated expertise and call on many outside organizations to create heavy machinery and production facilities in a very short period of time.” Sando paused, then said, “To be frank, I would not want to make an enemy of NASA.”

  “You’re too pessimistic, Sando.” Gotoba grinned. “We have a trump card: TROPHY.”

  “A trump card? No.” Sando shook his head. “NASA has thirty Titan X heavy launch vehicles on order from Lockheed Martin for the Mars missions. With that capacity alone they could put 250 tons of payload into lunar orbit.”

  “Interesting,” said Gotoba. “But we have Apple, which is better than anything NASA can offer. Their shuttle has a history of failure. They’ve lost three of them.”

  “Yes, three of the original shuttles. The supershuttle has a spotless record, and NASA has eight of them. If they wanted to, they could use that space fleet to put seventy people in low earth orbit in little more than two weeks. And their experience with the Apollo program means that putting people into lunar orbit would pose no challenge. Establishing a temporary presence on the surface would also be easy. Mars Ambassador 1 is on its way back to Earth as we speak. It could just as well be rerouted to the moon.” Sando removed his glasses and began polishing them. “This reminds me of my grandfather’s stories of the Great Pacific War.”

  “You mean it gets worse?” growled Iwaki.

  “NASA has a sponsor with unlimited financial resources: the U.S. government.”

  “Enough of this pessimism!” Gotoba pounded the table. He looked at Reika. “We have a powerful sponsor of our own. Right?”

  “Yes,” answered Reika. “We are prepared to fully fund the project.” Reika began tapping out figures on her wearcom. “So far, investment includes three billion yen for the evaluation of Kunlun Base. Forty-three billion yen for fifty-two Eve launch vehicles. Thirty-three billion for twenty Adam launch vehicles. Eighteen billion in development costs for both vehicles. Fifteen billion to develop Apple. Roughly twenty billion for the engineering equipment and other project elements. Adding promotion and personnel expenses, the total comes to 130 billion.”

  “And the budget is 150,” said Gotoba.

  “Correct. So far we’ve recouped around three billion from broadcasting and publishing rights and reservation deposits. But this figure will grow substantially. And we are negotiating for additional bank financing.”

  “You see?” Gotoba turned to the room. “We’re going to be fine. From here on out we’ll be in our element. The Americans may be multiarmed and hydra-headed, but they’ve never built a base in the Himalayas or at the bottom of the ocean. Let’s give them a run for their money!”

  Iwaki and Sando nodded. Gotoba didn’t need to prove anything by going into space. He could lead by force of personality alone.

  OVER THE NEXT six months, while the construction of Sixth Continent continued on schedule, NASA showed the world what it could do. The Americans launched fifteen heavy-lift rockets in rapid succession, inserting large payloads into lunar orbit. They established a power-generation capability and landed twenty-five rovers and five scrapers on
the surface. The rovers acted purely as transport vehicles, and the scrapers simply removed regolith and permafrost from the surface. NASA’s engineering equipment lacked the sophisticated capabilities of Gotoba’s multidozers. But their conservative design was robust. Lack of time to develop anything better was doubtless a factor, but NASA had apparently decided that for construction on the scale they were planning, using many machines with basic functionality was the optimum approach. America’s boundless industrial strength had enabled it to surpass Japan and Korea, Germany and France, its mother country England, and the mighty Soviet Union. At this rate, it seemed NASA would quickly catch up to and surpass the progress on Sixth Continent.

  Eden Entertainment’s response to these developments was muted, especially compared to their earlier splashy promotion campaign. They did not issue any particular comment. The media looked to Tae Toenji, whose guiding role in the project had been an open secret for some time, but she had withdrawn to her home in Nagoya and not been seen since. Some of the tabloids speculated that, having overreached herself, this mere teenager had taken flight at the decision by NASA, the world’s preeminent space agency, to compete with ELE. But there was another and just as widely held opinion: Tae had another trump card up her sleeve and was waiting for the right time to reveal it.

  In point of fact, there was some truth to this speculation—but only some. In the summer of 2030, more of that truth would come to light.

  THE NEWLY RISEN full moon cast a yellowish glow over the dark bulk of the Makino-ga-ike Forest. The Toenji mansion was surrounded by trees that reduced the noise of traffic from the nearby highway to a distant murmur. On the south-facing thirdfloor terrace, a figure in robe and slippers was hunched over a tube of about equal height, watching the night sky.

  “Grandfather?”

  Sennosuke Toenji turned to see his granddaughter open the sliding glass door and step out onto the terrace, clad in pajamas.

  “Did you finish your phone call?” he asked.