Time m-1

by Stephen Baxter

  Malenfant couldn’t keep from laughing. “Cornelius, at last I’ve seen you out of control.”

  Cornelius was panting. “I have it. The numbers. The Feynman numbers. I figured it out, Malenfant. And it changes everything.”

  Despite the heat of the day, Malenfant felt goose bumps rise on his bare arms.

  He made Cornelius sit down, take his jacket off, drink some water.

  Cornelius brusquely cleared clutter from the tabletop — battered softscreens, quality forms, a progress chart labeled with bars and arrows, old-fashioned paper blueprints, sandwich wrappers, and beer cans — and he spread his own softscreen over the desk.

  “It was staring us in the face the whole time,” Cornelius said. “I knew it had to be connected to you, Malenfant, to your interests. Your obsessions, even. And it had to be something you could act on now. And what—” He waved a hand. “ — could be a grander obsession than this, your asteroid mission?”

  George Hench paced around the room, visibly unhappy.

  Cornelius glanced up at George. “Look, I’m sorry to disrupt your work.”

  George glared. “Malenfant, do we have to put up with this bull?”

  “Whatever it is, it ain’t bull, George. I’ve seen the setup—”

  “Malenfant, I spent my career fending off hand-waving artistes like this guy. Color coordinators. Feng Shui artists. Even astrologers, for Christ’s sake. Sometimes I think the U.S. is going tack to the Middle Ages.”

  Malenfant said gently, “George, there was no U.S. in the Middle Ages.”

  “Malenfant, we have a job to do here. A big job. We’re going to a fucking asteroid. All I’m saying is, you need to focus on what’s important here.”

  “I accept that, George. But I have to tell you I’ve come to believe there’s nothing so important as the downstreamers’ message. If it’s real.”

  “Oh, it’s real,” Cornelius said fervently. “And what it means is that you’re going to have to redirect your mission.” Cornelius eyed George. “Away from Reinmuth.”

  George visibly bristled. “Now, you listen to me—”

  Malenfant held up a hand. “Let’s hear him out, George.”

  Cornelius tapped at his softscreen. “When I began to wonder if the numbers referred to an asteroid, I thought 1986 might be a discovery date. So I logged on to the Minor Planet Center in Massachusetts.” A table of numbers and letters scrolled down the screen; the first column, of four digits and two letters, all began with 1986. “This is a list of all the asteroids first reported in 1986. This first code is a provisional designation—”

  “What do the letters mean?”

  “The first shows the half month when the asteroid was discovered. The second is the order of discovery in that half month. So 1986AA is the first asteroid to be discovered in the first half of January, 1986.”

  Malenfant eyed the numbers with dismay. “Shit. There must be dozens, just for 1986.”

  “More in later years; asteroid watches have gotten better.”

  “So which one is ours?”

  Cornelius smiled and pointed to the second column. “As soon as enough observations have been accumulated to determine the asteroid’s orbit, it is given an official designation, a permanent number, and sometimes a name.”

  The official numbers, Malenfant saw with growing excitement, were in the range 3700-3800. Cornelius scrolled down until he came to a highlighted line.

  1986TO 3753 0.484 1.512 0.089…

  The key numbers jumped out at Malenfant: 1986 3753.

  “Holy shit,” he said. “It’s there. It’s real”

  “Not only that,” Cornelius said. “This little baby, 1986TO, is like no other asteroid in the solar system.”

  “How so?”

  Cornelius smiled. “It’s Earth’s second moon. And nobody knows how it got there.”

  George Hench stomped out to “go bend some tin,” glaring at Cornelius as he did so.

  Cornelius, unperturbed, called up more softscreen data and told Malenfant what little was known about asteroid number 3753.

  “It is not in the main belt. In fact, it’s a near-Earth object, like Reinmuth. What the astronomers call an Aten.”

  Malenfant nodded. “So its orbit mostly lies inside Earth’s.”

  “It was discovered in Australia. Part of a routine sky watch run out of the Siding Springs observatory. Nobody’s done any careful spectral studies or radar studies. But we think it’s a C-type: a carbonaceous chondrite, not nickel-iron, like Rein-muth. Water ice, carbon compounds. It probably wandered in from the outer belt — far enough from the sun that it was able to keep its volatile ices and organics — or else it’s a comet core. Either way, we’re looking at debris left over since the formation of the Solar System. Unimaginably ancient”

  “How big is it?”

  “Nobody knows for sure. Three miles wide is the best guess.”

  “Does this thing have a name?”

  Cornelius smiled. “Cruithne.” He pronounced it Crooth-knee. “An ancient Irish name. The ancestor of the Picts.”

  Malenfant was baffled. “What does that have to do with Australia?”

  “It could have been worse. There are asteroids named after spouses, pets, rock stars. The orbit of Cruithne is what made it worth naming.” Cornelius pointed to numbers. “These figures show the asteroid’s perihelion, aphelion, eccentricity.”

  Asteroid 3753 orbited the sun in a little less than an Earth year. But it did not follow a simple circular path, like Earth; instead it swooped in beyond the orbit of Venus, out farther than Mars. “And,” Cornelius said, “it has an inclined orbit.” Cornelius’ diagrams showed 3753’s orbit as a jaunty ellipse, tipped up from the ecliptic, the main Solar System plane, like Frank Sinatra’s hat.

  Malenfant considered this looping, out-of-plane trajectory. “So what makes it a moon of the Earth?”

  “Not a moon exactly. Call it a companion. The point is, its orbit is locked to Earth’s. A team of Canadian astronomers figured this out in 1997. Watch.”

  Cornelius produced a display showing the orbits of Earth and Cruithne from a point of view above the Solar System. Earth, a blue dot, sailed evenly around the sun on its almost-circular orbit. By comparison, Cruithne swooped back and forth like a bird.

  “Suppose we follow the Earth. Then you can see how Cruithne moves in relation.”

  The blue dot slowed and stayed in place. Malenfant imagined the whole image circling, one revolution for every Earth year.

  Relative to the Earth, Cruithne swooped toward Venus — inside Earth’s orbit — and rushed ahead of Earth. But then it would sail out past Earth’s orbit, reaching almost to Mars, and slow, allowing Earth to catch up. Compared to Earth it traced out a kind of kidney-bean path, a fat, distorted ellipse sandwiched between the orbits of Mars and Venus.

  In the next “year” Cruithne retraced the kidney bean — but not quite; the second bean was placed slightly ahead of the first.

  “Overall,” Cornelius said, “3753 is going faster than the Earth around the sun. So it spirals ahead of us, year on year.” He let the images run for a while. Cruithne’s orbit was a compound of the two motions. Every year the asteroid traced out its kidney bean. And over the years the bean worked its way along Earth’s orbit tracing out a spiral around the sun, counterclockwise.

  “Now, what’s interesting is what happens when the kidney bean approaches Earth again.”

  The traced-out bean worked its way slowly toward the blue dot. The bean seemed to touch the Earth. Malenfant expected it to continue its spiraling around the sun.

  It didn’t. The kidney bean started to spiral in the opposite direction: clockwise, back the way it had come.

  Cornelius was grinning. “Isn’t it beautiful? You see, there are resonances between Cruithne’s orbit and Earth’s. When it comes closest, Earth’s gravity tweaks Cruithne’s path. That makes Cruithne’s year slightly longer than Earth’s, instead of shorter, as it is now. So Earth starts to outstrip
the kidney bean.” He ran the animation forward. “And when it has spiraled all the way back again to where it started—” Another reversal. “ — Earth tweaks again, and makes Cruithne’s year shorter again — and the bean starts to spiral back.”

  He accelerated the time scale further, until the kidney-bean ellipses arced back and forth around the sun.

  “It’s quite stable,” Cornelius said. “For a few thousand years at least. Remember a single kidney bean takes around a year to be traced out. So it’s a long time between reversals. The last were in 1515 and 1900; the next will be in 2285 and 2680—”

  “It’s like a dance,” said Malenfant. “A choreography.”

  “That’s exactly what it is.”

  Although Cruithne crossed Earth’s orbit, its inclination and the tweaking effect kept it from coming closer than forty times the distance from Earth to Moon. Right now, Malenfant learned, the asteroid was a hundred times the Earth-Moon distance away.

  After a time Malenfant’s attention began to wander. He felt obscurely disappointed. “So we have an orbital curiosity. I don’t see why it’s so important you’d send a message back in time.”

  Cornelius rolled up his softscreen. “Malenfant, NEOs — near-Earth objects — don’t last forever. The planets pull them this way and that, perturbing their orbits. Maybe they hit a planet, Earth or Venus or even Mars. Even if not, a given asteroid will be slingshot out of the Solar System in a few million years.”

  “And so—”

  “And so we have plausible mechanisms for how Cruithne could have been formed, how it could have got into an orbit close to Earth’s. But this orbit, so finely tuned to Earth’s, is unlikely. We don’t know how Cruithne could have gotten there, Malenfant. It’s a real needle-threader.”

  Malenfant grinned. “And so maybe somebody put it there.”

  Cornelius smiled. “We should have known. We shouldn’t have needed a signal from the downstreamers, Malenfant. That Earth-locked orbit is a red flag. Something is waiting for us, out there on Cruithne.”

  “What?”

  “I have absolutely no idea.”

  “So now what?”

  “Now, we send a probe there.”

  Malenfant called back George Hench. The engineer prowled around the office like a caged animal.

  “We can’t fly to this piece of shit, Cruithne. Even if we could reach it, which we can’t, Cruithne is a ball of frozen mud.”

  “Umm,” Cornelius said. “More to it than that. We’re looking at a billion tons of water, silicates, metals, and complex organics — aminos, nitrogen bases. Even Mars isn’t as rich as this, pound for pound. It’s the primordial matter, the stuff they made the Solar System out of. Maybe you should have planned to fire the probe at a C-type in the first place.”

  “George, it’s true,” Malenfant said evenly. “We can easily make an economic case for Cruithne—”

  “Malenfant, Reinmuth is made of steel. My God, it gleams. And you want to risk all that for a wild-goose chase with your la-la buddy?”

  Malenfant let George run on, patiently. Then he said, “Tell me why we can’t get to Cruithne. It’s just another NEO. I thought the NEOs were easier to reach than the Moon, and we got there forty years ago.”

  George sighed, but Malenfant could see his brain switching to a different mode. “Yeah. That’s why the space junkies have been campaigning for the NEOs for years. But most of them don’t figure the correct energy economics. Yes, if you look at it solely in terms of delta-vee, if you just add up the energy you need to spend to get out of Earth’s gravity well, there are a lot of places easier to get to than the Moon. But you need to go a chart deeper than that. Your NEO’s orbit has to be very close to Earth’s: in the same plane, nearly circular, and with almost the same radius. Now, Reinmuth’s orbit is close to Earth’s. Of course it means that Reinmuth doesn’t line up for low-energy missions very often; the orbits are like two clocks running slightly adrift of each other…”

  “So tell me,” Malenfant said heavily, “why Cruithne is so much more difficult.”

  George ticked the problems off on his fingers. “Cruithne is twenty degrees out of the plane of the ecliptic. Plane changes are very energy-expensive. That’s why the Apollo guys landed close to the Moon’s equator. Two: Cruithne’s orbit is highly eccentric, so we can’t use the low-energy Hohmann trajectories we employ to transfer from one circular orbit to another, for instance in traveling from Earth to Mars. Changes to elliptic orbits are also energy-expensive. Three…”

  Malenfant listened a while longer.

  “So you’ve stated the problem,” Malenfant said patiently. “Now tell me how we do it.”

  There was more bluster and bullshit and claims of impossibility, which Malenfant weathered.

  And then it began.

  George produced mass statements for the BOB and its payload, began to figure the velocity changes he would need to reach Cruithne, how much less maneuvering capability he would have, how much less payload he could carry there compared to Reinmuth. Then he began calling in an array of technicians, all of whom started just as skeptical as himself, and most of whom, in the end, were able to figure a reply. They called up Dan Ystebo at Key Largo to ask him how little living room his pet squid really, truly could survive in. Dan was furious, but he came back with answers.

  It took most of the day. Slowly, painfully, a new mission design converged. Malenfant only had to sit there and let it happen, as he knew it would.

  But there was a problem.

  The present spacecraft design packed enough life support to take Sheena 5 to Reinmuth, support her work there, and bring her home again: she was supposed to come sailing into Earth’s atmosphere behind a giant aeroshell of asteroid slag.

  But there was no way a comparable mission to Cruithne could be achieved.

  There was a way to meet the mission’s main objectives, however. In fact it would be possible to get Sheena to Cruithne much more rapidly.

  By cutting her life support, and burning everything up on the way out.

  For Sheena, a Cruithne voyage would be one way.

  Emma Stoney:

  From Emma’s perspective, sitting in her office in Vegas, every-

  thing was starting to fall apart.

  The legalistic vultures were hovering over Malenfant and his toy spaceships, and meanwhile the investors, made distrustful by rumors of Malenfant’s growing involvement with bizarre fu-turian types, were starting to desert.

  If Malenfant had made himself more available, more visible to shore up confidence, it might have made a difference. But he didn’t. Right through Christmas and into the New Year Malenfant remained locked away with Cornelius Taine, or holed up at his rocket test site.

  It seemed to Emma events were approaching a climax. But still Malenfant wouldn’t listen to her.

  So Emma went to the Mojave.

  Emma stayed the night in a motel in the town of Mojave itself.

  She was profoundly uncomfortable, and slept little.

  Her transport arrived before dawn. It was an army bus. When she climbed aboard, George Bench was waiting for her. He had a flask of coffee and a bagel. “Breakfast,” he said. She accepted gratefully; the coffee was industrial strength, bat welcome.

  The other passengers were young engineers trying to sleep with their heads jammed in corners by the windows.

  The drive out to the BOB test site was dull but easy. The sun had risen, the heat climbing, by the time they hit the thirty-mile road to Malenfant’s BOB launch complex — or launch simplex, as he liked to call it.

  Hench jammed open the bus window. “Natural air-conditioning,” he said, cackling.

  She glanced back. One or two of the youngsters behind them stirred.

  Hench shrugged. “They’ll sleep.”

  At the site the bus passed through the security fence and pulled over, and Emma climbed down cautiously. The light glared from the sand that covered everything, and the heat was a palpable presence that struck at
her, sucking the moisture from her flesh.

  The test site had grown. There were a lot more structures, a lot more activity even at this hour of the morning. But it was nothing like Cape Canaveral.

  There were hardly any fixed structures at all. The place had the air of a construction site. There were trailers scattered over the desert, some sprouting antennae and telecommunications feeds. There weren’t even any fuel tanks that she could see, just fleets of trailers, frost gleaming on their tanks. People — engineers, most of them young — moved to and fro, their voices small in the desert’s expanse, their hard hats gleaming like insect carapaces.

  And there was the pad itself, the center of attention, maybe a mile from where she stood, bearing the Nautilus: Bootstrap’s first interplanetary ship, Reid Malenfant’s pride and joy. She saw the lines of a rust-brown shuttle external tank and the slim pillars of solid rocket boosters. The stack was topped by a tubular cover that gleamed white in the sun. Somewhere inside that fairing, she knew, a Caribbean reef squid, disoriented as all hell, would someday ride into space.

  Hench said gruffly, “I’ll tell you, Ms. Stoney—”

  “Emma.”

  “Working with those kids has been the best part of this whole damn project, for me. You know, these kids today come out of graduate school, and they are real whizzes with Computer Aided This and That, and they do courses in science theory and math and software design — but they don’t get to bend tin. Not only that, they’ve never seen anything^M before. In engineering, experience gained is directly proportional to the amount of equipment ruined. No wonder this country has fallen behind in every sphere that counts. Well, here they’ve had to build stuff, to budget and schedule. Some of the kids were scared off. But those that remained flourished.”

  And here came Malenfant. He was wearing beat-up overalls — he even had a wrench in a loop at his waist — and his face and hands and scalp were covered in white dust patches. He bent to kiss her, and she could feel gritty sand on her cheek.

  “So what do you think ofNautilusl Isn’t she beautiful?”