“I like it where I am.”
Henry’s image shrugged. He said, “I’ll be in touch.”
That was the entire negotiation. Later in the day, using my old computer, I went to my bank’s website. My checking account showed a deposit of five hundred thousand dollars.
My balance was now $500,967.57.
3
SOON AFTER THIS—so soon as to take me by surprise—Henry called at the stroke of noon.
He said, “I want you to come to a meeting. A car will pick you up at two o’clock. You’ll be gone for about a week.”
“Same place?”
“No,” Henry said. “Colder climate.”
There were three other passengers aboard the airplane with me, tall men about Henry’s age who were very clubby with one another. Not with me. They took me for exactly what I was, someone they didn’t know, and ignored me. They dressed like Henry, in jeans and T-shirts and sneakers—but then, so did I. The steward, the same young Asian I had met on the flight to the Grenadines, brought drinks and dinner. Afterward the men went to the back of the plane and played video games. I read for a while before turning out the light.
When I woke, not remembering when I had fallen asleep, it was daylight. The men were sound asleep, stocking feet protruding from the blankets. The pheromones were quite strong. Only one of them snored. My watch said five after one. I had no idea where we were or what our destination might be. We had been in the air for about nine hours. The safety video had told us that the cruising speed of this aircraft, a Gulfstream, was six hundred miles per hour, with a range of seventy-five hundred miles. Ergo, we wouldn’t run out of fuel for another two thousand miles.
The steward, this time wearing a name tag that identified him as Daeng, touched the back of my hand.
I said, “Where are we?”
“Almost there,” he whispered, with a brilliant smile. “Better hurry before they all wake up.”
When I emerged from the lavatory, the men were drinking coffee, eyes dull with sleep, hair standing on end, dark-chinned, not one bit friendlier than before. We broke through the clouds. A khaki desert, seemingly endless, came into view. In the middle distance, a dozen missiles, looking like great big rifle bullets arranged in a circle, materialized. They must be pointed at the United States—where else?
Beyond them lay a runway. The Gulfstream landed without so much as a squeak of tires and we disembarked—me first as the men, suddenly chivalrous, stood back and let me pass as if we had landed deep in the twentieth century. Outside, it looked and felt more like the tenth century. The wind moaned and stirred up dust.
There were no formalities—not a soul to be seen, no soldiers or police asking for passports. At the other end of the runway I saw a squat concrete building but could not make out the flag that flew above it. A large van was parked on the tarmac. Daeng loaded our luggage into it and we all piled in—the boys in the backseat, me in the front. Daeng got behind the wheel and drove smoothly along an absolutely straight macadam road that seemed to go nowhere.
We drove eastward—whizzed would be the better word, because Daeng had set the cruise control at one hundred miles per hour. No doubt parched desert creatures crawled and slithered in the sand beside the road, but the van seemed to be the only moving object in this drab and empty landscape. The radio, tuned to a satellite station, played twangy Chinese music loud enough to make conversation impossible—not that any was likely.
After an hour or so we arrived at a large round structure that was meant to resemble a yurt. Several smaller yurts surrounded it to make a compound. The yurts were made of some shiny space-age material I could not identify. A bank of solar panels and a row of wind turbines, propellers spinning, completed the tableau. Several fearsome-looking chow chow dogs roamed the grounds unleashed. Daeng handed each of us a chain necklace from which a blank plastic card dangled.
“Please wear these at all times for your own safety,” Daeng said.
We got out of the van. Three of the chows left the pack, each choosing one of the men. A fourth, a lion-colored animal, attached itself to me. The rest—there were maybe a dozen dogs in all—kept their distance.
Daeng and the dog escorted me to my yurt. After he had shown me the amenities—the yurt was a little America—Daeng pointed at the plastic tag hanging from my neck.
“It’s for the dogs,” he said.
“They check people’s ID?”
“They smell it,” Daeng said. “Each tag has a different scent, to differentiate individual humans. The chows attack if they don’t smell it, so don’t forget to wear it. Don’t be alarmed when they walk along with you. They’re trained to do that. Don’t try to be friendly with them. They don’t like it.”
I said, “Where are we?”
He flashed his perfect smile.
“Hsi-tau—Little Gobi Desert, the Chinese part,” he said. “Henry will be expecting you in the big yurt in half an hour.”
I left early, accompanied by my guardian chow, hoping to be the first to arrive, but the men were already seated around a table, engaged in a lively conversation with Henry. One of them was an American. The other two, though perfectly fluent in English, were not native speakers. This surprised me a little. Aboard the airplane they had certainly acted like Americans and dressed and sounded like them, too. But then, who in the world didn’t, nowadays?
Henry explained to me that that these men were engineers who specialized in spacecraft design, then came straight to the point without explaining my presence to them.
“We are here to answer a question,” Henry said. “What is the largest spacecraft that’s possible to build and launch into orbit with present technology?”
“That depends on where you want to build it,” said the genuine American in the group.
“Then where is the best place?”
“Low Earth orbit. You don’t have to contend with gravity.”
“Ha!” said another, who sounded like a Russian. “You will contend with a lot of gravity when you start lifting the parts of your spaceship two hundred miles straight up from the surface of the earth.”
“One moment, please,” said the third, plainly a German. “We’re starting from the wrong direction. First decide what is the optimum size for the job, then design to that size.”
In short, nobody answered the question, simple though it might be. Henry said, “Think in terms of a ship that could keep a crew alive and sane for a thousand years or more and deliver them at their destination in a condition to walk, speak, think, and remember what their mission was. And carry it out.”
“You’re kidding,” the American said.
“On the contrary,” Henry said.
“Forty generations in space?” said the German. “This is science fiction. With such a small gene pool, living in isolation from culture in an environment without gravity, they’ll be grotesque monsters in far less time than a thousand years.”
Henry said, “The genetic destiny of the crew is a separate question. The problem we are here to discuss is the design and construction of a space vehicle that can remain in space for a very long time and sustain a crew of several hundred human beings in such a way that they will remain human to the end of the voyage.”
The engineers exchanged glances.
The Russian said, “Tell us, Henry. Is this an intellectual exercise, or do you actually plan to build this spacecraft?”
“It’s not an intellectual exercise,” Henry replied.
“What’s the timeline? When does construction begin?”
“As soon as we have a blueprint.”
“That would take decades and hundreds of engineers. It’s a huge undertaking.”
“We don’t have decades,” Henry said.
The American—these fellows were scrupulous about taking turns—said, “The crew would be self-sustaining—produce their own food and everything else?”
“Yes.”
“Replace themselves in the usual way?”
�
��Yes.”
“What if they multiply at the same rate as earthlings? World population in the year one thousand was maybe three hundred million. Now it’s seven billion. Your ship would have to be the size of a planet to accommodate that.”
“True,” Henry said, “but irrelevant.”
“Do we design this vehicle in such a way as to take population growth into account, or not?”
“You design rationally,” Henry said. “What we want to know at the end of this meeting is, how big can the ship be? It’s just physics, fellows.”
The German said, “The International Space Station is the largest manmade object ever assembled in space. It took more than twenty flights by U.S. and Russian spacecraft to lift the components into orbit over a ten-year period. The space station has less than four hundred cubic meters of living space. That’s about the volume of a small suburban house.”
Henry said, “I’m not interested in being told what can’t be done.”
He pointed a finger at me. “What are your thoughts?”
All eyes turned to me and all asked the same silent questions. What could I know? Who was I, anyway? Henry hadn’t bothered to introduce me. Why would anyone care what I thought?
“The space station,” I said, “was made from modules that were launched into orbit, then fitted together. Why not do the same in this case, using larger components? Assuming that you have the means to launch an unlimited number of modules into orbit, the ship could be as large as you wanted to make it. It could even be disassembled when it reaches its destination and be maneuvered module by module onto the surface of another planet, or moon, and serve as living quarters for a colony.”
The American said, “Why would you want to do that?”
Henry said, “Why not? Start there.”
Without uttering another word, he left the yurt. In his wake, eyes were averted, silence reigned. Then the engineers went to work. I sat alone on my side of the table. The engineers huddled on their side, entering data in computers and scribbling notes—mostly crazy quilt equations—on legal pads. By noon, the tabletop was littered crumpled pages.
Meanwhile, I doodled. I drew modules and the rockets that would hurl them into orbit and string them together two hundred miles or more above the planet. I can draw and write. As I was not part of the discussion and had nothing else to do, I sketched colonies on our own moon and Jupiter’s icy moon, Europa. By the end of the day I had put together a kind of graphic novel of the expedition. It was of no use to anyone who had a scientific mind.
Henry returned around five o’clock.
By that time I was ready to be a team player, to say generous things about my colleagues’ ideas if they were better than mine, as my colleagues plainly were certain they would be.
The German acted as spokesman. He cleared his throat and to my great surprise, said, “Our new colleague has come up with an excellent concept.” He smiled at me, bowed ever so slightly, and said, “Congratulations!” You could practically hear the exclamation point.
“The merit of this idea lies in its obviousness, its simplicity,” the German continued. “Also its practicality. As the lady pointed out, we have already had some experience with assembling structures in space. We are impressed with the flexibility this approach provides in terms of design and materials. We believe the concept has other advantages, including the possibility that the crew could manufacture additional modules while the mission is in flight. We began with the attitude that the idea was unworkable. After only a few hours of consideration we cannot say for certain that it is, in fact, feasible, but the fundamentals are such that we are able to recommend further study.”
Diagrams of the module as the engineers imagined it were projected onto a screen. Actually they had visualized several different modules—spherical, square, rectangular, tubular. In a computer image of the assembled ship, all these forms fitted together very nicely—beautifully, in fact, as they swam through space like a cartoon history of solid geometry.
“All this is provisional, intended merely to demonstrate possibilities,” the German said. “However, Henry, our initial impression is that these possibilities are many. We are nevertheless somewhat daunted by the probable cost. We have made a rough estimate.”
At this point the Russian took over. He based his estimates on the capacities of the space shuttle and its launch system. With some modifications, there should be no insuperable engineering difficulty in modifying the system to carry the modules into orbit. However, lifting the modules and their contents and the crew into orbit would involve an estimated fifteen hundred launches. The cost of a single space shuttle launch at current prices was about one and a half billion dollars. Total cost would be at least one trillion dollars.
Henry did not blink an eye. No doubt he had already calculated the costs. He asked the engineers to keep working.
“We’ll be using a reusable launch system,” he said. “Concentrate on the modules.”
Eyebrows rose.
Henry said, “Think about new materials for the modules. Make all the modules the same size and shape. Otherwise we’ll have to design and build several different launchers.”
“Which shape?” asked the American.
“Spheres.”
“What kind of materials?”
“Indestructible ones, not metals,” Henry replied.
After five days, I went back to New York, back to my book. It would be inaccurate to say that the act of writing made me forget all about what Henry had told me. But the act of writing banished Henry and the end of civilization to brain compartments of their own. Or so I thought. Yet my characters got sadder and sadder as the story went on, as though they suspected something awful was afoot and I was keeping it from them. Maybe the watertight door between Henry’s compartment and theirs was not so watertight as I thought.
4
AN OLD BOYFRIEND RANG ME up. He had tickets to an Off-Off Broadway play that evening. Did I want to see it with him and have supper afterward? I said yes. The caller was a presentable fellow. He never talked politics. He could be funny. I had always liked him.
The evening began happily enough, but during the play, the usual bitter poor-me meditation about the impossibility of love, I found myself floating above the characters on stage, looking down on them as if I were undergoing an out-of-body experience on their behalf. They were all going to perish, the audience was going to perish, I was going to perish, the species was going to perish. Nobody in the tiny theater but me had the slightest idea that life as we knew it was almost over. I made an unseemly sound. Heads turned.
My friend said, “Are you OK?”
I did not respond, but got hold of myself.
Afterward, at supper, large tears dribbled from my eyes without warning. My date put down his fork, reached across the table, and took my hand.
“Are you sure you’re OK?” he asked.
“I’m fine,” I said. “I guess the play made me sad.”
“Why?” he said. “It was just the usual existentialist crap.”
He took me home in a taxi. On my doorstep he asked if he should come upstairs. My memories of him were fond, and a sensible woman in my state of mind would have said yes. But for some reason I thought of Henry and felt like a wife attracted to another man but faithful to her vows, so I said no, not tonight.
In due course, after weeks had passed, Henry got back in touch. I examined his computer image in search of a deeper tan or a convalescent pallor or anything else that might explain his long absence. However, he looked just the same—the silent-movie eyes, the Zenlike calm, the suggestion of a fleeting smile that never quite showed up.
He invited me to lunch. His driver picked me up and took me to a house just around the corner from the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Like the glass house in the Grenadines, this place, an art nouveau mansion, was full of art. I knew most of the pictures, but only as photographs because the paintings had always been the property of the hideously rich. If Henry decided to
sell just the pictures and sculptures on the ground floor in this house, he could probably have made enough after taxes to pay for a hundred shuttle launches with full payloads.
After lunch, Henry got down to business. He wanted to talk about secrecy.
“I thought you thought there was no need to go into that,” I said.
“This is not about you keeping secrets. I mean secrecy itself.”
Fascinating topic.
I said, “Henry, I understand that it would be a serious mistake to tell the world what you plan to do, if that’s what we’re talking about.”
Henry said, “Quite soon we’re going to start doing things that can’t be hidden from the world—the launches, the assembly of the spacecraft in orbit, the recruitment and training of the crew, the collection of specimens. . . .”
I twitched. Specimens?
Henry noticed my reaction but did not elaborate. “And a lot more,” he said. “How do we explain this?”
“Why not just tell the truth?” I asked. “Henry Peel is launching a spaceship. Nobody will be surprised.”
“They’ll want to know why I’m doing it.”
I said, “You don’t have to tell them. Everyone knows how secretive you can be. Maybe you just think it’s time for private enterprise to break the government monopoly on space travel once and for all. Maybe you’ve had one of your amazing ideas, which you are not at liberty to describe.”
“We can’t mislead,” Henry said.
“Who’s misleading? Everything will be out in the open except the purpose of the enterprise.”
“Exactly. So?”
“So who advertises purposes?”
A few days later, an earthquake registering 6.1 on the Richter scale occurred in rural Missouri. In the days that followed, tremors of similar magnitude occurred all over the world, including a number of places where earthquakes were unusual. A volcano in Ecuador and another in Alaska erupted. It snowed in summer on the South Island of New Zealand. Overnight, figuratively speaking, the North Pole moved a full degree of longitude in the direction of Siberia.
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