“I’m happy that’s over,” he said. “My parents wanted to come down to the spaceport with me. I had to talk them out of it. They came down here, though. Sorry I’m late.”
“That’s okay, you made it.”
We fastened our seat belts and watched the small screens on the backs of the seats in front of us. The shuttle began to move. Towers, hangars, the hotels and swirling walkways of Kennedy-Air rushed by as endless routine.
We went up, climbing until the sky turned deep blue. A hundred and ten kilometers up, the craft turned off its engines and glided south. I’d been on air shuttles before, but the moment of engine shut-off always took my breath away.
Stars burned in the purple-black over Africa as we whispered toward the equator, and the curving horizon made me feel the smallness of the planet. I was used to thinking of New York State as a suburb of New York City, but at this altitude a shuttle could reach Cairo, or any city on the globe, within an hour; you had to leave the planet to go anywhere far. Soon now, I realized, I would get a taste ofreal distance for the first time—from here to the Moon’s orbit; and yet that was a local run compared to interplanetary distances—to Mars or Mercury, for example.
I touched a control on my armrest and called up a view of deep space. People lived out in that black sky—on the Moon, Mercury, Mars, in the Asteroid Belt, and on the moons of Jupiter and Saturn; two million in the Bernal Clusters alone, more in the O’Neill Cylinders of Sun Orbit, not to mention the ten thousand dock workers of the asteroid hollow in High Earth Orbit, where the giant artificial caves served as berths for the massive interplanetary ships.
I dreamed of faraway worlds with strange skies. Domed cities on Mars and Venus, underground bases on Titan and Pluto, people looking outward to the nearer stars—to the triple system of Alpha Centauri, only four light years away. I raced across the wispy clouds below, out running the shuttle to Earth’s edge, where I gazed out into the starry blaze of the galaxy and forgot all my doubts.
Deep space. Sunspace was just a backyard compared with what lay out there. Yet I could blot out a million suns with my hand. The thought of going out there, of becoming even a small part of humanity’s Sunspace Settlements, sent a happy chill up my back, and I was no longer afraid.
What appealed to me most was that the rest of the solar system had not beengiven to humankind; people like me had gone out there to build and transform worlds for themselves. It seemed right to be able to do that, so much more human and creative than to be handed a world at birth by nature.
“What is it?” Morey asked.
“Just thinking. Neat, isn’t it?”
“It’s very beautiful,” he said softly.
Clouds floated up and covered our screens; then the shuttle fell through into sunlight, and the sight of the world below filled me with wonder.
Blue-green jungle covered Earth. We were in the final approach glide to Clarke Equatorial Spaceport.
“Take it easy,” Morey said. “We haven’t even left the planet yet.” But I could tell that he was also excited.
The big screen at the front of the aisle flashed:
JUNE 29, 2056, 2:02 P.M.
ETA: 2: 10 P.M.
Morey and I tightened our seat belts. The screens showed the spaceport ahead—square after square of cleared land covered with buildings, hangars, roads and walkways, and spacecraft crouching on launch pads. Earth’s spin being fastest here on the equator—sixteen hundred kilometers per hour—it was most economical to use that extra push to throw vehicles into orbit.
Almost every kind of launch system had been tried here, from complex stage rockets belching chemical propellant to track catapults to laser-fed and atomic rockets; various versions of these systems were still operational. There had even been a plan to run a cable elevator from an island out in the South Atlantic to an asteroid satellite in High Earth Orbit. That would have been awesome—a bridge disappearing into the sky—but the scheme had been abandoned for various technical, political, and safety reasons, even though it might have been successful if enough people had persisted.
The new gravitic catapult had come along in time to make most other systems obsolete. I was eager to see it in action. Maybe our flight was going to use it, I thought excitedly.
We were very low now. I tensed as the craft touched the runway and the feeling of free fall faded from my stomach. The shuttle slowed, but slow was still very fast; the ship covered several miles before coming to a halt.
“We’re here,” Morey said. He seemed a bit shaky as he unclipped his belt and stood up.
“What is it?” I asked.
“Upset stomach. It’s going away.”
I got up, and again I realized that we had come to a place that sent people through the sky into the blackness beyond Earth. The thought struck me in the most stupidly obvious way, and I teetered on the edge between excitement and fear as I followed Morey to the exit and out into a long tunnel.
At the end of the passage we put our cards into the passport check and pressed our palms down on the scan. Our cards popped back; we took them and went out into the waiting area, and it seemed to me suddenly that my whole previous life lay a hundred years or more behind me. I was free forever of the things I had worried about yesterday.
The sun and countryside were visible through the massive dome of the waiting area. Temperatures outside were probably over forty centigrade. The rain forest pressed in around the spaceport, and I thought of it as a sleeping thing that dreamed its animals, insects, flowers, and greenery; but it could not have dreamed the spaceport; we had done that ourselves, and I wondered if the forest were jealous.
Hundreds of people filled the great floor of the terminal, waiting to depart for all parts of Sunspace. Some stood by their luggage. Many were well dressed; others looked poorer. I noticed a group dressed in gray uniforms with red arm bands.
“Convicts,” Morey said. “Probably shipping out for the mining towns of the Belt.”
I stared at their glum faces. One young woman gave me a loutish look. Earth had turned against them. It was a sure way of making certain that a criminal would not repeat his crime anywhere near where he was sentenced.
“They’ll probably never come back,” Morey said softly.
“It’s sad.”
“Happens all the time,” Morey replied.
A muffled roar startled me. I looked up and saw a ship cross the Sun’s face, rising on vertical turbojets. Its nuclear pulse engine would ignite in the upper atmosphere and push the vessel away from Earth with a steady acceleration. The reality of it rushed through me like a jolt of electricity. Such ships and their larger cousins crossed the trillion-kilometer whirlpool of sun and planets in a few weeks. And the new gravity launchers would hurl them off the planet even more economically.
A 3-D sign flashed in my eyes:
ORBITAL TOURS!
SIGN NOW!
I blinked nervously and saw a holo of Earth from Low Orbit; then one from High Orbit. Elephants and human shapes tumbled through the void. Power satellites beamed energy down through the atmosphere, serviced by stubby robots and toy figures in spacesuits.
BECOME A SUNSPACER!
HIGH PAY AND A SCENIC PLACE TO LIVE!
PLUMBERS, ELECTRICIANS, VEHICLE AND
STRUCTURAL MAINTENANCE SKILLS NEEDED!
TEACHERS WELCOME!
APPRENTICE APPLICATIONS AVAILABLE
FOR ALL JOBS!
To many people Clarke Station was probably just another travel terminal, even though people were going home to Marsport, to the Moon, or to places that had only coordinates in space for an address; but for me it was all new suddenly, as if it had begun yesterday morning. Maybe I was taking my mind off the big change in my life, but I didn’t care; our solar civilization was big and growing bigger, and I was going out to see its true size. I wanted to cheer. There were millions of people out there, and they thought of themselves as being from space in the same way I thought of New York City as home. And somewhere in
the terminal there was probably a Sunspacer who was coming to Earth to study, and feeling just as excited as I was to be leaving.
“Come on,” Morey said.
I followed him, imagining a whole civilization in space, thousands of space habitats, millions of people eating and drinking, going to school, raising children, playing, thinking, and feeling, dreaming about the stars. One day the free habitats would scatter out into the spiral arms of the galaxy in search of resources and knowledge.
I was going out there, and maybe I would help make it happen. I tried to picture the reality of off-planet life; it was something I had always taken for granted, but now I was going to see it for myself.
“It’s neat,” I said, walking next to Morey.
“What is?”
“All this, here, and where we’re going.”
“It’s not so neat,” he said. “It could be much better.”
I didn’t know quite what he meant, but he didn’t seem to care whether I understood or not. “It doesn’t seem possible that human beings could have done it all,” I said.
“Well it wasn’t just given to us one Christmas.”
“I know we built it,” I said stupidly. “Human beings, I mean.”
He stopped and looked at me. We put down our bags. “You really want to know? All this happened because of a small group of people with pencils and paper—the theoretical physicists and chemists of the last five centuries. The engineers and builders applied their work, but it was all really finished a long time ago. We’re still catching up with the theoreticians.”
“Well, sure, I know. But the builders still had to make it all real.”
He shrugged and picked up his bag. “They’d have nothing to do without all the hard work being done for them. We’d still be riding horses.”
I couldn’t get upset at what he was saying, not just then; he wanted to become a theoretical physicist, after all. I imagined a team of white horses pulling a giant wagon through space. The driver was cracking a whip and shouting at the stars. It didn’t bother me that he wasn’t wearing a spacesuit; neither were the horses.
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4
Through The Sky
The inscription on the giant block of stainless steel in the center of the terminal floor read:
EQUATORIAL SPACEPORT 1
OPENED FOR THE PEOPLE OF EARTH
2002
THE STEEL IN THIS MEMORIAL WAS MANUFACTURED
OUT OF ORES MINED FROM THE FIRST ASTEROID
BROUGHT INTO EARTH ORBIT
2018
“Ten minutes to boarding,” Morey said, sending another chill of expectation up my back. We were really going; it wasn’t just something we were talking about.
I heard a muffled, crackling roar, and looked up in time to see a stubby orbiter rising on a red laser column. The beam tracked the ship, pumping energy into its engines. As the orbiter grew small and disappeared, I imagined its rising arc over the South Atlantic. The laser winked off as the craft attained enough speed to make orbit.
“We can look around some,” Morey said in the sudden quiet.
Human beings were aliens on the equator, I thought as we began to explore the interconnecting domes; the heat and humidity outside could kill.
The first dome we entered was filled with recruiting booths. Flashing holo signs hurried us to join in the building of new worlds:
FIND YOURSELF!
IN EXCITING WORK!
Spacescapes revealed distant parts of the solar system. The 3-D images produced vivid afterimages in my visual field, I was beginning to dislike being seized by the throat to get my attention.
“Now boarding!” a male voice boomed. “Shuttle 334 for Bernal One!”
“Didn’t your folks want to come and see you off?” Morey asked as we waited on line.
I shook my head and felt sorry for myself. “They didn’t even come to graduation.”
“What? I thought they were there.”
“I didn’t want to bring it up. It doesn’t matter.”
“What happened?”
“Nothing much. They had a fight and were out of town.”
There were a few people our age on the line, and I wondered if they were also going away to school.
“Parents think they’ll have you around forever,” Morey said as the line began to move forward. “Then they crack up when the time runs out and they realize they can’t make up for anything.”
I took a deep breath. “It was more than that, Morey. They’re breaking up. Dad wanted the usual renewal and Mom just wouldn’t give him one. It’s their problem now.”
“Well, it happens.” He glanced at me. “I’m sorry, Joe.”
“Bernal One!” the same male voice announced. “Last call!”
This was it. I was going out there, into the darkness of space, protected only by the shuttle.
“Didn’t you have a bag?” Morey asked as the line moved through the tunnel.
I looked around, not really caring. “Must have left it somewhere. They’ll send it home to my parents. I can do without that stuff.”
“Got your wallet?” Morey asked, grinning.
“Sure, right here.”
“Credit codes?”
“I never forget.”
We came out of the tunnel and boarded the tube car that would take us to the pad, two miles away. I grabbed a window seat and stared outside. It was the first time for both of us, and I wondered why Morey wasn’t as excited as I was; maybe Aristotle was right—knowledge killed the sense of wonder in the knower.
The car slid forward and shot into the darkness. I turned away from the window and looked around the brightly lit inside, wondering if I would get to know any of the faces at school. Most of the girls were alone, as were the boys. Only one girl was with an older woman, but she could have been a sister. One boy seemed to be with both parents, and he was looking uneasy.
The car glided out into a brightly lit area and slowed to a stop. Somewhere above us was the gravitic shuttle, waiting to carry us through the sky.
“How’s the stomach?” I asked Morey.
“All better,” he said as we stood up.
Emerging out onto a platform, we took our places on the line in front of the elevator.
“Attention please!”
A young man appeared at our right, hands on hips. He seemed to me to be looking at us critically.
“I’m your guide. My name is Kik ten Eyck,” he announced loudly. “I’ll be with you until we reach the college.” I thought he sounded as if he were herding a bunch of sheep. “I’ll be around to answer your questions and help you with any problems.” It was just a job to him, it seemed. Deliver the Earthies, dump them in the dorm, and get paid. His casual manner was probably fine for very nervous types. The flight was no big thing for him, and that would calm some people, but he seemed arrogant to me.
When our turn came, Morey and I stepped into the lift with half a dozen other kids and were whisked up the ship’s center to our seats.
Seats 22 and 23 were a third of the way to the nose. I grabbed the window seat again, but it didn’t matter; as in the air shuttle, there was no port, only a small screen on the overhead partition. It made for a safer ship, allowing for extra shielding from radiation and meteors.
“It’s bigger than I thought,” Morey said, peering up the shaft.
The empty lift went down past us. “Please fasten your seat belts.” In the confined space the voice sounded as if it were talking in my ear. I sat back and looked up at the screen.
It lit up, showing a crisscross of black roads, with weeds in between. “The launch plate,” the woman’s voice continued, “is a finely tuned installation that must be protected from heat and dust.” The weeds moved as the cover was pulled back, and the launcher emerged from below ground, a metal tube with a silvery ship standing halfway out of it, ready to pierce the sky.
I heard a high whining sound. My arms began to feel heavier. It seemed strang
e to be watching the ship I was in.
“Gravity inside the ship,” the woman’s voice went on, “will increase to six times normal before the shuttle is released by the reversing field.”
The high-pitched sound grew louder. Vast amounts of power were flowing in to create the repelling g-force. Our seats adjusted to face the overhead screen. I felt myself being pressed back into the heavy cushioning.
“I feel like an elephant,” Morey said.
The blue sky on the screen shimmered from the singing sound. A strange, hurrying happiness filled me.
I was the ship as it went up. A burst of yellow-orange sunlight struck my eyes; weightless, I fell toward a blue ocean of sky.…
It was strange to see a spacecraft lifting without a laser or jets, rising but also dropping away from Earth, since a reversed gravitational field was involved. An invisible cone of negative gravity was pushing the vessel up to the speed needed to reach the Moon’s orbit.
The ship climbed through the sky, fleeing the piercing cry of the launcher, becoming a small needle on the screen, held in a gravitational vise between heaven and earth.
I fell back into myself as the picture blinked and we saw a 3-D view of Brazil next to a sparkling ocean; The holo blinked again, showing stars and the glowing, deep-violet curve of the planetary horizon. We were coming out of an ocean of air into the splendor of Sunspace, pushed outward from the cradle of life by the mirror image of Earth’s own attraction. The ship had its own maneuvering engines, of course, but the short passage to Lunar Orbit did not require a fully powered trajectory. We would be in the weightlessness of free fall all the way to the Bernal Cluster.
“We’ll be reaching a speed of eighty thousand kilometers per hour,” the whispery voice said, “but allowing for slowing and maneuvering, the journey will take about twelve hours. Enjoy your trip and use caution in moving around. Zero-g pills will be dispensed by the steward to those passengers who may need them.” The voice seemed to chuckle for an instant.
“May I help you?” a steward asked from the passageway.
Morey grabbed the pills and swallowed them with water from a squeezeball. I hadn’t noticed how sick he had become.
The Sunspacers Trilogy Page 3