Space

by Stephen Baxter

  She said grimly, ‘You see, Malenfant? Any number of probes to the belt won’t answer the fundamental questions.’

  ‘No.’ Malenfant shook his head, mind racing. ‘We’ve got to send somebody out there. Through a thousand AU; out to the solar focus … But that’s impossible.’

  ‘Nevertheless that is the challenge, Malenfant. There – at the solar focus – is where the answers will be found. That is where we must go.’

  Chapter 4

  ELLIS ISLAND

  Maura was flying around an asteroid.

  The asteroid – whimsically christened Ellis Island by the Bootstrap flight controllers at JPL – was three kilometres wide, twelve long. The compound body looked like two lumpy barbecue potatoes stuck end-to-end, dark and dusty. Maura could see extensions of the Bruno’s equipment ahead of her: elaborate claws and grapples, lines that coiled out across space to where rocket-driven pitons had already dug themselves into the asteroid’s soft, friable surface.

  With an effort she turned her head. Her viewpoint swivelled. The asteroid shifted out to the left; the image, heavily enhanced and extrapolated from the feed returned by Bruno, blurred slightly as the processors struggled to keep up with her wilfulness.

  She was suspended in a darkness that was broken only by pinpoints of light. There were stars all around her: above, below, behind. Here she was in the middle of the asteroid belt, but there was not a single body, save for Ellis itself, large enough to show a disc. Even the sun had shrunk to a yellow dot, casting long shadows, and she knew that it shed on this lonely rock only a few per cent of the heat and light it vouchsafed Earth.

  The asteroid belt had turned out to be surprisingly empty, a cold, excessively roomy place. And yet it was here the Gaijin had chosen to come.

  Xenia Makarova, Bootstrap’s VIP host for the day, whispered in her ear. ‘Ms Della, are you enjoying the show?’

  She suppressed a sigh. ‘Yes, dear. Of course I am. Very impressive.’

  And so it was. In her time as part of the President’s science advisory team, she’d put in a lot of hours on spaceflight stunts like this, manned and unmanned. She had to admit that being able to share the experience vicariously – to be able to sit in her own apartment wearing her VR headband, and yet to ride down to the asteroid with the probe itself – was a vast improvement on what had been on offer before: those cramped visitors’ booths behind Mission Control at the Johnson Space Center, that noisy auditorium at JPL.

  And yet she felt restless, here in the dark and cold. She longed to cut her VR link to the Bruno feed, to drink in the sunlight that washed over the Baltimore harbour area, visible from her apartment window just a metre away.

  She said to Xenia, ‘It’s just that space operations are always so darn slow.’

  ‘But we have to take it slow,’ Xenia said. ‘Encountering an asteroid is more like docking with another spacecraft than landing; the gravity here is so feeble the main challenge is not to bounce off and fly away.

  ‘We’re coming down at the asteroid’s north pole. The main Gaijin site appears to be at the other rotation pole, the south pole. What we intend is to land out of sight of the Gaijin – assuming we haven’t been spotted already – and work our way around the surface to the alien. That way we may be able to keep a measure of control over events …’

  ‘This is a terribly dark and dusty place, isn’t it?’

  ‘That’s because this is a C-type asteroid, Ms Della. Ice, volatiles and organic compounds: just the kind of rock we might have chosen to mine for ourselves, for life support, propellant.’

  Yes, Maura thought with a flicker of dark anger. This is our belt, our asteroid. Our treasure, a legacy of the solar system’s violent origins for our future. And yet there are Gaijin here – strangers, taking our birthright.

  Her anger surprised her; she hadn’t suspected she was so territorial. It’s not as if they landed in Antarctica, she told herself. The asteroids aren’t yet ours; we have no claim here, and therefore shouldn’t feel threatened by the Gaijin’s appropriation.

  And yet I do.

  The Alpha Centauri signal – though the first, picked up a year ago – was no longer unique. Whispers in the radio wavebands had been detected across the sky: from Barnard’s Star, Wolf 359, Sirius, Luyten 726–8 – the nearby stars, the sun’s close neighbours, the first destinations planned in a hundred interstellar-colonization studies, homes of civilizations dreamed of in a thousand science fiction novels.

  One by one, the stars were coming out.

  There were patterns to the distribution. No star further than around nine light years away had yet lit up with radio signals. But the signals weren’t uniform. They weren’t of the same type, or even on the same frequencies; such differences were just as confusing as the very existence of the signals. And meanwhile the Gaijin, the solar system’s new residents, remained quiet: they seemed to be producing no electromagnetic output but the infrared of their waste heat.

  It was as if a wave of colonization had abruptly reached this part of the Galaxy, this remote corner of a ragged spiral arm, and diverse creatures – or machines – were busily digging in, building, perhaps breeding, perhaps dying. Nobody knew how the colonists had gotten here. Nobody could even guess why they had come now.

  But it seemed to Maura that already one fact was clear about the presumed Galactic community: it was messy and diverse, just as much as the human communities of Earth, if not more. In a way, she supposed, that was even healthy. If communities separated by light years had turned out to be identical, it would be an oppressive sky indeed. But it was sure going to make figuring out the meaning of it all a lot more difficult.

  And, for Maura, that was a matter to regret.

  She was never short of work, of invitations like this. She knew that as part of the amorphous community of pols and workers who never really got the stink of the Beltway out of their nostrils, she was prized by corporations like Bootstrap as an opinion-former, perhaps a conduit to power. But she was, officially, retired. Perhaps she should sit back and stop thinking so hard, and just let the pretty light shows from the sky wash over her.

  But that wasn’t in her nature. And, after all, Reid Malenfant was older than she was, and she knew he continued to agitate for a deeper engagement with the mystery of these Gaijin, for more probes, other missions. If he was still active, then perhaps she should be.

  But, in this complicated universe, she was too damn old. The more complicated it was, the more likely it was that she would never live to see this puzzle – perhaps the greatest mystery ever to confront humanity – unravelled.

  Now a technical feed faded up in Maura’s other ear. ‘Closing with the target at two metres per second, range just under a klick, one metre per second cross-range. Hydrazine thruster tests in progress: +X, -X, +Y, -Y, +Z, -Z, all check out. Counting down to the thruster burn to null our approach and cross-range velocities a klick above the ground. Then we’re on gyro-lock to touchdown …’

  With an effort of will, Maura tuned out the irrelevant voices.

  The asteroid became a wall that approached her in slow, dusty silence; the tether lines twisted before her, retaining their coils in the absence of gravity. She made out surface features, limned by sunlight: craters, scarps, ridges, valleys, striations where it looked as if the asteroid’s surface had been crumpled or stretched. Some of the craters were evidently new, relatively anyhow, with neat bowl shapes and sharp rims. Others were much older, little more than circular scars overlaid by younger basins and worn down, presumably by a billion years of micrometeorite rain.

  And there were colours on Ellis’s folded-over landscape, spectral shades that emerged from the dominant grey-blackness. The sharper-edged craters and ridges seemed to be slightly bluish, while the older, low-lying areas were more subtly red. Perhaps this was some deep space weathering effect, she thought; perhaps aeons of sunlight had wrought these gentle hues.

  She sighed. It really was lovely, in a quite unexpected way – l
ike so much of the universe she found herself in. By God, I love it all, she thought. How can I retire? If I did, I would miss this.

  And now, with a kiss of dust, the Bruno reached its destination.

  The techs began cheering tinnily.

  A year before the Bruno’s arrival – after the AAAS meeting – Malenfant had returned to the Johnson Space Center, for the first time in two decades.

  The campus looked pretty much unchanged: the same blocky black and white buildings, with those big nursery-style numbers on their sides, scattered over square kilometres of grassy plain here at the south-east suburban edge of Houston, all contained by a mesh fence from NASA Road One. (But it wasn’t called the NASA Road any more.) In the surrounding streets there were still run-down strip malls and fast food places and Seven-Elevens.

  But inside the campus itself, there was no sign of the tourists who used to ride between the buildings in their long tram trains. And though there were plenty of historic-marker plaques, nobody was making history here any more.

  The cherry trees were still here, though, and the green grass still seemed to glow.

  He wasn’t here to sight-see. He had come to meet Sally Brind, who ran a NASA department called the Solar System Exploration Division. He made his way to Building 31.

  Inside, the air conditioning was ferocious, a hell of a contrast to the flat moist Houston heat outside. Malenfant welcomed the plummeting temperature; it was like old times.

  Reid Malenfant had loomed over Sally Brind. He was leaning on her desk, resting his weight on big, bony knuckles. He was around twice Brind’s age and he was a legend out of the past. And, to her, he was as intimidating as hell.

  ‘We got to get out to the solar focus,’ he began.

  ‘Hello, good morning, nice to meet you, thanks for giving up your time,’ she said dryly.

  He backed off a little, and stood up straight. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said.

  ‘Don’t tell me. At your time of life, you don’t have time to waste.’

  ‘No, I’m just a rude asshole. Always was. Mind if I sit down?’

  She said, ‘Tell me about the solar focus.’

  He moved a pile of glossies from a chair; they were digitized artist’s impressions of a proposed, never-to-be-funded, unmanned mission to Io, Jupiter’s moon. ‘What I’m talking about, specifically, is a mission to the solar focus of Alpha Centauri – the nearest star system.’

  ‘I know about Alpha Centauri.’

  ‘Yes … The sun’s gravitational field acts as a spherical lens, which magnifies the intensity of the light of a distant star. At the point of focus, out on the rim of the system, the gain can be hundreds of millions; at the right point, it would be possible to communicate across stellar distances with equipment no more powerful than you’d need to talk between planets. The Gaijin may be using the Centauri solar focus as a communication node. The theorists are calling it a Saddle Point. Actually there is a separate Saddle Point for each star. All roughly at the same radius, because of –’

  ‘All right. And why do we need to go to Alpha Centauri’s focus?’

  ‘Because Alpha was the first source of extrasolar signals. And because the Gaijin are there. We have evidence that the Gaijin entered the system at the Alpha solar focus. From there, they sent a fleet of some kind of construction or mining craft into the asteroid belt. Sally, we now have infrared signatures, showing the activity in the asteroid belt, going back ten years.’

  ‘There is an unmanned probe en route to the asteroid belt. Maybe we should wait for its results.’

  Malenfant flared. ‘A private initiative. Not relevant, anyhow. The solar focus – that is where the action is.’

  ‘You don’t actually have any direct evidence of anything out at the solar focus, do you?’

  ‘No. Only what we’ve inferred from the asteroid belt data.’

  ‘But there’s no signature of any huge interstellar mother ship out there, at the rim. As there would have to be, if you’re right.’

  ‘I don’t have all the answers. That’s why we have to get out there and see. And to tell the damn Gaijin we’re here.’

  ‘I don’t see how I can help you.’

  ‘This is NASA’s Solar System Exploration Division. Right? So, now we need to go do some exploring.’

  ‘NASA doesn’t exist any more,’ she said. ‘Not as you knew it, when you were flying Shuttle. The JSC is run by the Department of Agriculture –’

  ‘Don’t patronize me, kid.’

  She sighed. ‘I apologize. But I think you have to be realistic about this, sir. This isn’t the 1960s. I’m really just a kind of curator, of the grey literature.’

  ‘Grey?’

  ‘Studies and proposals that generally never made it to the light of day. The stuff is badly archived; a lot of it isn’t yet digitized, or even on fiche … Even this building is seventy years old. I bet it would be closed for good if it wasn’t for the Moon rocks.’

  That was true; elsewhere in this building, fifty per cent of the old Apollo samples still lay sealed in their sample boxes, still awaiting analysis, after six decades. Now that there were Japanese living on the Moon, Brind suspected the boxes would stay sealed forever, if only so they could serve as samples of the Moon as it used to be in its pristine, prehuman condition. An ironic fate for those billion-dollar nuggets.

  ‘I know all that,’ he said. ‘But I used to work for NASA. Where else am I supposed to go? Look – I want you to figure out how it could be done. How can we send a human to the solar focus? It will all come together, once we have a viable scheme to fix on. I can get the hardware, the funding.’

  She arched an eyebrow. ‘Really?’

  ‘Sure. And the science will be good. After all, we still haven’t sent a human out beyond the orbit of the Moon. We can drop probes on Jupiter, Pluto en route. We’ll get sponsorship from the Europeans and Japanese for that. The US government ought to contribute, too.’

  You make it sound so easy, Colonel Malenfant … ‘Why should these organizations back you? We haven’t sent a human into orbit, other than as a passenger of NASDA or ESA, in twenty years.’

  ‘Otherwise,’ said Malenfant, ‘we’ll have to let the Japanese do this alone.’

  ‘True.’

  ‘Also there’ll be a lot of media interest. It will be a hell of a stunt.’

  ‘A stunt is right,’ she said. ‘It would be a spectacular one-shot. Just like Apollo. And look where that got us.’

  ‘To the Moon,’ he said severely, ‘forty years before the Japanese.’

  She chose her next words carefully. ‘Colonel Malenfant, you must be aware that it will be difficult for me to support you.’

  He eyed her. ‘I know I’m thought of as an obsessive. Twenty years after Shuttle was grounded, I’m still working out a kind of long, lingering disappointment about the shape of my career. I want to pursue this Gaijin hypothesis because I’m obsessed with them, because I want America to get back into space. I have an agenda. Right?’

  ‘I – yes. I guess so. I’m sorry.’

  ‘Hell, don’t be. It’s true. I was never too good at the politics here. Not even in the Astronaut Office. I never got into any of the cliques: the spacewalkers, the sports fans, the commanders, the bubbas who hung out at Molly’s Pub. I was never interested enough. Even the Russians mistrusted me because I wasn’t enough of a team player.’ He slapped his leathery hand on her desk. ‘But the Gaijin are here. Sally, I’ve waited ten years for our government, any government, to act on that lunar infrared evidence. Only Frank Paulis responded – a private individual, with that one damn probe. Now, I’ve decided to do something about it, before I drop dead.’

  ‘How far away is the solar focus?’

  ‘A thousand astronomical units.’ A thousand times as far as the distance between Earth and sun.

  She whistled. ‘You’re crazy.’

  ‘Sure.’ He grinned, showing even, rebuilt teeth. ‘Now tell me how to do it. Treat it as an exercise, if you like
. A thought experiment.’

  She said dryly, ‘Do you have an astronaut in mind?’

  His grin widened. ‘Me.’

  Dark, crumpled ground, a horizon that was pin-sharp and looked close enough to touch, a sky full of stars dominated by a single bright spark …

  Maura felt herself lurch as the probe began to make its way across the folded-over asteroid earth. She saw pitons and tethers lance out ahead of her field of view, extruding and hauling back, tugging the robot this way and that. Her viewpoint swivelled up and down, and some augmentation routine in the virtual generators was tickling her hind brain, making her feel as if she was riding right along with the robot over this choppy, rocky sea. With a sub-vocalized command, she told the software to cut it out; some special effects she could live without.

  Xenia whispered to her audience of VIPs. ‘As we move we’re being extremely cautious. The surface gravity is even weaker than you might expect for a body this size. Remember this “dumbbell asteroid” is a contact binary, a compound body; imagine two pool balls snuggled up against each other, spinning around their point of contact. We’re a fly crawling over the far side of one of those pool balls. The dumbbell is spinning pretty rapidly, and here, at the pole, centrifugal force almost cancels out the gravity. But we modelled all these situations; Bruno knows what he’s doing. Just sit tight and enjoy the ride.’

  And now something was looming beyond that close horizon. It was like the rise of a moon – but this moon was small and dark and battered, a twin of the world over which she crawled. It was the other lobe of the dumbbell.

  Xenia said, ‘We’re studying the ground as we travel. As we don’t know what to look for, we’ve carried broad-spectrum surveying equipment. For instance, if the Gaijin came here to extract light metals such as aluminium, magnesium or titanium, they would most likely have used processes like magma electrolysis or pyrolysis. The same processes could be used for oxygen production. In the case of magma electrolysis the main slag component would be ferrosilicon. From a pyrolysis process we would expect to find traces of elemental iron and silicon, or perhaps slightly oxidized forms …’