Asimov's SF, April-May 2007

by Dell Magazine Authors

  Copyright © 2007 Robert Silverberg

  [Back to Table of Contents]

  * * *

  SOULAR

  Peter Payack

  A new radar detector

  that has recently been invented

  can not only detect rainbows

  -

  as was its original intention

  -

  but also has the unexpected

  yet astonishing power

  of seeing people's souls.

  -

  While meteorologists

  and weather enthusiasts

  are all aglow about this new

  innovation,

  -

  blithely code-named “Soular,"

  -

  civic and church

  authorities are looking

  leerily about this new invention.

  -

  Church Officials,

  are distressed about meteorologists

  meddling in matters

  previously the domain

  of people of the cloth,

  -

  not to mention it being

  somewhat unethical to have

  lay-people voyeuristically

  gawking into a person's soul.

  -

  The Surgeon General

  has now also become involved

  and recommended against

  government approval.

  Her rationale:

  The soul has never before

  been considered

  a bodily part

  and is therefore beyond

  their scope of investigation.

  -

  In addition,

  The Civil Liberties Union

  has intervened

  and has asked for a court injunction

  to put a stop

  to the test trials of this new mechanism.

  -

  Under the Fourth Amendment

  of the Constitution

  this is considered

  an invasion of personal privacy.

  The Constitution holds it

  illegal to search

  a person's house,

  and the body being a “temple"

  makes it illegal

  to peer into a person's

  most vital essence.

  —Peter Payack

  Copyright © Peter Payack

  [Back to Table of Contents]

  * * *

  THE ROCKET INTO PLANETARY SPACE

  by William Barton

  "Magazines are the soul of science fiction, and the place where it first began. Hundreds of novels are published every year, but only a few magazines exist at any one time, and only a few of those last for any length of time. Asimov's is one of those that have lasted, becoming the literary heart of science fiction in the eighties, nineties, and beyond. Happy birthday, Asimov's! I'm grateful to have been a part of it all."—William Barton

  Over the past thirty-five years, William Barton has written numerous science fiction stories, including the award-winning novel Acts of Conscience (Warner Aspect, 1997) and several stories for Asimov's SF, most recently, “Down to the Earth Below” October/ November 2006). Regarding “The Rocket into Planetary Space,” he says, “I am, as the clever comedian once said, The Luckiest Boy in the World! I was seven years old when Sputnik 1 orbited the Earth, and only ten when Yuri Gagarin flew. I was fourteen when Mariner IV sent back those first magical photos of Mars, eighteen when Apollo 8 orbited the Moon and still eighteen when Eagle set down on the Sea of Tranquility. I was twenty-five when Viking 1 landed on Mars and twenty-seven when the two Voyagers left for the stars. When I was thirty, I stood just three miles from the launch pad and watched STS-1 Columbia climb heavenward on a column of fiery smoke. What followed was Challenger exploding when I was thirty-five, then the Endless Space Station of my forties, then my own Columbia falling to pieces over Texas when I was fifty-two, and I began to feel cheated. Cheated out of the universe Asimov, Heinlein, and all the others promised me when I was that little boy, breathless in front of the TV news. This story is about why I changed my mind, and why I feel so very lucky to have lived here and now, after all."

  This is the way things turned out for Burke the Jerk. If things can turn out this way for someone like me, there's hope for us all. And I always did believe an elephant can fly...

  On September 7, 2016, just three weeks before my sixty-sixth birthday, when I should've been retired and tucked safely away in a Geezer Storage Facility somewhere down on the Grand Strand of South Carolina, or living under a bridge somewhere if things had gone that badly, maybe even safely dead, I was strapped into a canvas bucket seat in front of the systems engineer's console in the forward cupola of the node we'd mounted to the front of Excelsior, our shiny new SpaceHab Apex 400 cargo module, watching the fat, flat Pacific roll by, five hundred klicks straight down.

  Excelsior. I remember how everyone razzed me about that when I proposed it. My wife Sarah'd said, Isn't that wood shavings or something? True. But in Latin, it means Higher.

  The world's a fairly featureless place from low equatorial orbit, which passes over Brazil and Congo and not much else. Most everything cool looking is in the northern hemisphere, or down around the south pole. Sure, the Andes are spectacular enough, and you can see Kilimanjaro sticks up part way, but what the hell. I thought they should've put the Bigelow Exodus orbital hotel in polar orbit, give folks something to look at, once they got tired of the novelty of a zero-gee honeymoon, but equatorial's the best place to toss inflatables from the Rocketplane Kistler K-1 site at Woomera, easy to reach by Dragon from SpaceX's Falcon-9 pads on Kwajalein. Maybe when they get the second one built, and the launch site outside Vegas in a few years?

  My pal Willy Gillooly was at the pilot's console, neatly bundled up in one of the used launch and entry suits we'd picked up cheap from Roskosmos, one hand on the rotational controller, watching his console clock count backward toward zero. He had the helmet open and thrown back onto the nape of his neck, and I always thought Willy looked like some old Dick Tracy character, um ... Flattop? That's one. Skinniest guy I ever met, face as bony as Michael Rennie playing Klaatu. Nice as hell, though. And smart. Way smarter than me.

  From the bulkhead speaker, Minnie, voice squeakier than usual, said, “CNN is starting its satellite feed. Turn on your TV.” Willy claims his wife got that name because her parents thought she looked like Minnie Pearl when she was a baby, but what newborn ever looks like anything but a space alien? You know damn well it was something to do with the Voice of the Mouse.

  Minnie was going to ride out the burn in Smaug's reentry module, sort of as a safety measure, and I suppose Sarah should've done the same with Fafnir, but she wanted to sit at her astrogator's console with us, and here she was. Our two SpaceX Dragons were hard-docked to the two y-axis ports on the node, and, theoretically at least, anything that might tear them loose would most likely kill us all. Still, you never know.

  I hit the power button on the TV, and the CNN anchor's sharp voice proclaimed, “This is Chelsea Clanton, bringing you a Live Scoop, direct from the Bigelow Exodus, high above the Pacific Ocean!"

  On the screen, what you could see was the broad curve of the Earth, mainly blue, with a complex swirl of white clouds, Hawaii visible as a hazy bit of crud up by the northern limb. In the foreground was a little tiny thing looked like some kind of toy.

  Willy said, “Jeez, we're only ten klicks away! Don't these guys know about telephoto lenses?"

  All you could really see was the United Launch Alliance Delta V second stage, which we'd had launched out of Kourou without a payload, meaning most of the fuel for the six RL-10B engines had made it to orbit too. We'd sent up the Apex 400, both Dragons, and the three Xcor Prometheus methane/LOX propulsion modules on three separate Falcon 9S9 launches.

  Turned out to be a lot harder than we expected, getting it all bolted together.

  On TV, Ms. Clanton was yammering, “You're looking at Excel
sior, the world's first manned interplanetary expedition, developed and assembled in secret by a privately funded consortium of space scientists,” I heard Willy, conservative as Goldwater's Ghost, snort as she went on, “Bound today for a secret destination, somewhere beyond the Moon!"

  Behind me, I heard Sarah sing, “Some-where, beyond the Moooon...!"

  It'd been hard to come up with the six hundred thirty million dollars for this, and when we first thought of it ten years ago, it seemed like a ridiculous idea. Still, the Gates Foundation gives away that much and more every month, year in, year out, and one month in ‘09 we convinced them to give us a bit of a boost.

  Minnie said, “The CNN producer says you need to start the audio feed, Alan."

  I hit that button too.

  Sarah giggled and Willy snorted, then they both sobered up.

  Willy said, “Go for interplanetary injection. Thirty seconds."

  I started paying attention to my console. Willy's main job is to hold the stick and make sure the Delta V guidance package is doing what Sarah says it needs to do. Me? Well. I wrote Excelsior's flight software, and I left myself in the loop.

  Willy said, “Ten seconds,” and damn if his voice didn't sound tight.

  “Ten, Willy. Astro?"

  Sarah said, “Go."

  “Rescue?"

  Minnie said, “Go."

  Willy said, “Five."

  I was tempted to call “Guide-o,” and then answer myself, in an attack of the nervous sillies, but I said, “Valves open at tank-head idle."

  “Zero."

  I thumbed the switch. “Ignition."

  There was a slight tremor, igniters firing slightly out of synch. Willy said, “I show 2 percent thrust."

  I stole a look at the TV, ignoring Clanton's color commentary. There was white light guttering around the RL-10B expansion bells. “Looks like a good burn.” Not the way you usually start up rocket engines, but we figured better safe than sorry.

  Willy said, “Energize pumps. And watch the strain gauges.” If we lost the Dragons and lived, we'd probably still get home someday, but I suppose he didn't want to lose Minnie.

  There was a steady vibration now, and I felt my butt press down lightly on the canvas. “Pump idle, all six. Ten percent thrust."

  I heard Willy blow out a long breath. “Okay. Go with throttle-up."

  I'd gotten myself an old airliner throttle, though the computer and my software could handle all this, but, you know, I wanted to feel it. Feel it under my own hand. When I slid the bouquet of levers forward along the slot, I suddenly got heavier, then heavier still.

  And when I looked out the cupola dome, the Earth's curved horizon was, ever so slowly, starting to drop, with a beautiful yellow crescent Moon rising out of the haze over Peru.

  * * * *

  By the end of the work day, a few hours later, the Earth, shrunk to the apparent size of a basketball, had become a slim crescent due to our exit trajectory, and I floated in front of Fafnir's hatch window, picking out city lights with my binoculars. You would not believe how much light comes from Japan, not to mention the enormous coastal cities of China. All those people crammed into that little bit of space, then the black expanse of Siberia and Central Asia beyond.

  It reminded me a little bit of making a night flight back from California to the east coast when I was a kid. You'd fly out of the solid light-flood of L.A., then it would be black, black, black all the way to the Mississippi, small towns along the river, then more black until you crossed the Appalachians, where the woods were lit up by dots of light, like a mirror held up to the midnight sky.

  Behind me, Sarah said, “Can you still see the Delta stage?” I could hear the soft whisper of her getting undressed, getting ready for her first sponge-bath of the expedition.

  I turned the binoculars toward where I thought it should be, then scanned along its trajectory, back and forth. It was just a little yellow thing, a bright rectangle far out in the black. “Barely."

  She said, “Twenty klicks maybe? Tumbling?"

  “I don't think so."

  ULA had agreed to monitor the stage and direct it to an impact on the Lunar farside to keep it from becoming a future navigation hazard out in deep space. There's a Saturn S-IVB stage out there already that gets reported as a new asteroid every few years.

  I took the binoculars down and looked out across the dark Excelsior assemblage, glad Willy and Minnie had turned out the cupola lights, but not gone into Smaug yet. If you looked close, you could see their shadows inside the little dome, close together, over by the pilot station.

  We'd started rotisserie mode to keep skin heating more or less even, and just now, the sun was somewhere behind the Apex 400 body, leaving us in shadow. Just enough shadow to see a starry night sky, enough shadow to see the Milky Way go all the way round and, crossing it, a faint silver haze of gegenschein.

  I whispered, “Damn...” All the millions of words I've churned out in my life and now, seeing this, I couldn't come up with a damn thing.

  Sarah drifted up behind me, putting a hand on my shoulder to steady herself, then docking her head next to mine. “Wow!” she said. “Zodiacal light?"

  I nodded, still speechless.

  Softly, she said, “Alan, if you'd told me, when you sat down ten years ago to write that idiotic story ... well. I'd've sent for the nice young men in their clean white coats."

  I'd gotten the idea after looking at the websites of the six NASA Commercial Orbital Transportation System COTS contenders, had a good time writing it, and forgotten all about it while the usual year went by between sale and publication. A year, a couple of weeks, and then the phone rang.

  I'd known Willy Gillooly for maybe twelve years by then, both of us busy with our lives and careers, acquaintances, maybe friends, because we both found time to write the occasional technostory, because both of us were good enough to get published. After telling me how much he liked the tale, he'd said, “I ran the numbers. Looks like you did the arithmetic right for a change."

  I'd managed a dry, “Thanks.” That was our usual litany. My shaky math, his shaky people.

  Then he'd said, “How much you think it'd cost to really do it?"

  “I dunno. A billion?"

  Willy ran a research lab many orders of magnitude bigger than my little software design bureau, but nowhere near that big. “Too bad,” he'd said. And that was that until, some months later, I found myself looking at the rules for submitting a proposal to the Gates Foundation. I'd called him back, then called the PayPal guy and let him know what I was thinking. Turned out he'd liked the story too.

  The sun came around the Apex hull, lighting up the foreground, and Sarah said, “Hey, look! Willy and Minnie are necking!"

  They were, floating under the cupola dome, faces pressed together, arms and legs wrapped around, holding them tightly together. “Still got their clothes on, anyway."

  Sarah snickered, “If it was us ... well, Willy's too shy for that."

  “Who's he think's watching? God?"

  “Us, dummy."

  True. We'd had a damn good time on our orbital Second Honeymoon, and I suppose Willy and Minnie did too. Having a good time now, by the looks of it.

  Sarah said, “Did you know Minnie's got a brother named Max?"

  I turned away from the view and gave her a look. “Have they killed their parents yet?"

  She laughed.

  * * * *

  Two days later, we flew behind the Moon. I remember, when I was a kid, fresh out of high school, just shy of fifty years ago, listening to one of the Apollo 8 astronauts describe what it was like arriving in Lunar orbit. Because of when and where they were going, the limitations inherent in launching to the Moon from Florida, they'd arrived over the farside in darkness, the only sign of where they were a big black Something blotting out half the sky.

  Our trajectory took us over a daylit farside, the four of us sitting in Excelsior's dome, looking out at a torn, hilly landscape, gray and brow
n dirt brilliantly floodlit yellow by the sun, gaping like hayseeds, bug-eyed in the big city. Though I'd been studying Lunar maps for years, anticipating this moment, I couldn't spot a God-damned thing.

  I said, “Man. It's a good thing we don't need to find a landing site down there."

  Willy said, “Yep. It'd be up to Sarah."

  Who, sitting at her astrogation console, said, “Hey! I see the Soyuz!"

  She put it on our screens, but it wasn't much to see, a tiny green freckle arcing over the moonscape, higher than we were, in a free-return trajectory. If you looked close, you could spot the solar panels, like wings on a blackfly.

  Minnie said, “Can you get any closer?"

  “That's the best I can do in the spotting scope."

  Willy said, “Can you imagine being dumb enough to shell out all those bucks for that little ride?"

  I shrugged. “Well, they've found four guys wanted to do it in the last three years.” It was the ultimate space joyride to date. The Russians would send two tourists along with a pilot up to ISS for a weeklong stay, then dock the Soyuz to a propulsion module and fling them around the Moon. For a hundred million dollars a seat.

  Willy said, “Maybe now we've proved the Interplanetary Dragon works, SpaceX will give it a try. You could do it with a 9S9 for half the money, with twice the seats."

  Minnie said, “I think they'll wait to see how things turn out with the Moon Race."

  I said, “And tSpace."

  Sarah said, “And us."

  “Yeah."

  I guess there's a Moon Race, though not much of one in public. The Russians have only got their little tourist enterprise, claiming they were putting most of their effort and money into a long-range joint Mars program with ESA. Meanwhile, NASA's Orion capsule hadn't flown ‘til 2014 after all, its ISS duties captured by SpaceX and RpK. All to the good, I guess, since now they were saying they'd be in Lunar orbit by late 2017, and would land the following year, two years ahead of dawdling Bush's original schedule.