A Time Odyssey Omnibus

by Arthur C Clarke - Stephen Baxter

  Miriam said, a bit nervously, “It is?”

  “Oh, yes. Of three hundred tonnes all-up weight, only twenty tonnes is payload. And we’ll use up almost all of that fuel getting away from the Earth.” He eyed her cautiously. “Madam, I’m sure you were sent a briefing pack. You do understand that we will glide home from space, without powered engines? Returning to Earth is a question of shedding energy, not spending it…”

  She’d had no time to touch the glossy briefing pack, of course, but she did know that much.

  “So we’re just a flying bomb,” Nicolaus said.

  Even allowing for his nervousness Miriam was surprised he would say such a thing.

  Purcell’s eyes narrowed a bit. “I like to think we’re a bit smarter than that, sir. Now if I may I will take you through our emergency procedures…”

  These turned out to be rather alarming too. One option, in the event of decompression, involved being zipped up into a pressurized bag, as helpless as a hamster in a plastic globe. The idea was that astronauts in spacesuits would manhandle you inside your sphere across to a rescue ship.

  Captain Purcell smiled, competent, reassuring. “Madam Prime Minister, we no longer treat our passengers as children. Everything has been done to ensure your safety, of course. I could talk you through the flight profile, and describe to you how our engineers have labored to close what they unromantically call ‘windows of nonsurvivability.’ But this spaceplane is still a young technology. One has to simply ‘buy the risk,’ as we used to say in my day—and sit back and enjoy the ride.”

  The ground preparations appeared to be complete. Large, high-resolution softscreens unrolled over the walls and ceiling like blinds, and lit up with daylight. Suddenly it was as if Miriam were sitting in an open framework, looking out at the runway’s long perspective.

  Purcell began to strap himself into a seat. “Please enjoy the view—or, if you prefer, we can blank out the screens.”

  Miriam said, “Shouldn’t you be up in the cockpit?”

  Purcell looked regretful. “What cockpit? Times have changed, I’m afraid, madam. I’m the Captain on this flight. But Boudicca flies herself.”

  It was all a question of economy and reliability; automated control systems were much simpler to install and maintain than a human pilot. It just defied human instinct, Miriam thought, to give up so much control to a machine.

  And then, quite suddenly, it was time to leave. The plane shuddered as the big wing-mounted engines lit up—an invisible hand pushed Miriam back into her seat—and Boudicca was hurled like a spear down the long runway.

  “Don’t worry,” Purcell called over the engine noise. “The acceleration will be no worse than a roller coaster. That’s why they keep me on, I think. If an old duffer like me can live through this, you’ll be fine!—”

  Without ceremony Boudicca tipped up and threw herself into the sky.

  London’s sprawl opened up beneath Miriam.

  Orienting herself by the shining chrome band of the river, she picked out Westminster at its sharp bend in the river’s flow, said to be the place where Julius Caesar had first crossed the Thames. As her viewpoint rose higher the urban carpet of Greater London spread out below her, kilometer upon kilometer of houses and factories, a floor of concrete and tarmac and brick. In the spring morning light the suburban avenues were like flower beds, Miriam thought, stocked with brick-red blooms that gleamed in the sun. You could see the streets gather into little knots, relics of villages and farms planted as far back as the Saxons, now submerged by the urban sprawl. Miriam had grown up in the French countryside, and despite her career path was averse to city life. But London from the air really was remarkably beautiful, she thought—accidentally, for nobody had planned it this way, and yet it was so.

  As she climbed farther she saw that over the heart of the metropolis the great Dome was rising, skeletal and tremendous, designed to protect all those layers of history. She was glad it was there, for she felt a surging affection for the scattered, helpless city that lay spread-eagled below her, and a sense of duty to protect it from what was to come.

  Soon London was lost in cloud and haze. When she looked ahead, the sky was fading from deep blue, to purple, and at last to black.

  24: BDO

  Shining in the light that flooded space, Aurora 2 was undeniably a magnificent sight. But it was a complicated, ungainly magnificence, Miriam thought. Unlike Boudicca this ship had never been intended to fly in the atmosphere of any world, not even Mars, and so had none of the spaceplane’s slender aerodynamic grace.

  Aurora looked something like a drum majorette’s baton. The spine of the ship was a slim triangular spar some two hundred meters long. Under thrust, the greatest load the Aurora had to bear was along the length of its spine—and that was the direction in which this fragile ship was strongest, reinforced with struts of nano-engineered artificial diamond. At one end of the spine clustered power generators, including a small nuclear fusion reactor, and an ion-drive rocket engine whose gentle but relentless acceleration had pushed Aurora all the way to Mars and back. Spherical fuel tanks, antennae, and solar-cell arrays were strung along the spine. At the spine’s other end was a bloated dome that contained the crew quarters: habitable compartments, a bridge, life support systems. Somewhere in there, surrounded by water tanks for extra shielding, was the small, cramped, thick-walled solar-storm shelter where the crew, caught in interplanetary space, had retreated during the blistering hours of June 9, 2037.

  And the shield that would save the world was already growing around the Aurora, its glistening surface spiraling out like a spiderweb.

  Aurora served as a construction shack for the crews who, ferried up from Earth and Moon, labored to complete this mighty project. It was a noble destiny for any ship, Miriam thought. But Aurora had been destined to orbit another world, and there was something poignant about seeing it meshed up in a tangle of scaffolding. Miriam wondered if the ship’s own artificial intelligences, thwarted of their true purpose, knew some ghost of regret.

  Boudicca docked with the Aurora’s habitable compartment, nestling belly-first against its curving hull like a moth settling on an orange.

  Miriam and Nicolaus were met by an astronaut: Colonel Burton Tooke. Bud wore coveralls, practical enough but freshly laundered and pressed, and adorned with astronaut wings, mission logos, and military decorations. Bud extended a hand and helped pull Miriam through the docking tunnel. “You seem to be coping fine with the lack of gravity,” he offered.

  “Oh, I took some spins around the Boudicca’s cabin. It was great fun—after the first twelve hours or so.”

  “I can imagine. Space sickness hits most of us. And most people get through it.”

  Nicolaus hadn’t, however, a fact that had given Miriam some rather unkind satisfaction. Just for once, in that bubble of metal drifting between worlds, it had been she who had had to look out for him.

  Miriam had spent most of the flight working; she was reasonably up to date, and even felt quite rested. So she left Captain Purcell to sort out her few bits of luggage, and accepted Bud’s invitation for a quick tour. Nicolaus followed, cameras sitting on his scalp and shoulder like glistening birds, determined not to miss a moment of this photo opportunity.

  They drifted through the cramped corridors of the Aurora. This was a ship designed for space; there were pipes, ducts, and removable panels on walls, ceiling, and floor, rails and rungs to help you pull your way along in zero G, and a color-coding in pastel shades to help you remember which way was up. It was difficult to grasp that this unremarkable working space had sailed across the solar system, all the way to Mars and back.

  Despite the efficiency of the recycling systems there was a powerful, almost leonine stink of people. But they met nobody; the crew were either avoiding the visiting brass, or, much more likely, were out working somewhere. It was all very different from her usual Prime Ministerial visits, and oddly intimate—and she certainly didn’t miss the usual scrum o
f journalists and assorted hangers-on.

  They reached the hatchway to Aurora’s observation deck. Bud pushed open the door, and sunlight flooded over Miriam’s face. The deck’s “picture window” turned out to be a pane of toughened Perspex a lot smaller than any of the windows in her office in the Euro-needle. But once, briefly, this window had looked down over the red canyons of Mars—and now it looked out into space.

  There was work going on out there. A framework of open struts jutted out from just below the window, and extending far into the distance. Astronauts in color-coded spacesuits were crawling all over, pulling themselves along with handholds or cables or pushed by small thruster packs on their backs. There must have been a hundred people in that first glance, and as many autonomous, multilimbed machines, moving through a sunlit three-dimensional maze of scaffolding. It was hugely impressive, but complex, baffling.

  “Tell me what they’re doing.”

  “Okay.” Bud pointed. “In the distance, you can see heavy-duty equipment moving those struts into place.”

  “Those look like glass. The shield’s framework?”

  “Yeah. Moon glass. We’re extending the structure in a spiral fashion around the Aurora, so that at any given moment we keep the center of gravity of the whole BDO right here at L1.”

  She asked, “‘BDO’?”

  Bud looked abashed. “The shield. We astronauts will have our acronyms.”

  “And it stands for—”

  “Big Dumb Object. Kind of an in-joke.”

  Nicolaus rolled his eyes.

  Bud said, “The struts are prefabricated on the Moon. But up here we’re manufacturing the skin itself—not the smart stuff coming from Earth; just the simple prismatic film that we’ll lay over most of the BDO’s area.”

  He pointed to an astronaut wrestling with an ungainly piece of equipment. It looked as if she were extracting a huge balloon animal from a packing case. It was an almost comical sight, but Miriam took care to keep her face straight.

  Bud said, “We use inflatable Mylar formers as molds. Designing the inflatable itself is an art. You have to figure the deployment dynamics. When you blow it up you don’t want it stretching out of shape; the Mylar is only as thick as freezer film. So we simulate backward, letting it deflate its way into the box, trying to make sure it will deploy smoothly without tangling itself up or stretching…”

  She let him talk on. Bud was obviously proud of the work being performed here, meeting the challenges of an environment where the simplest task, such as blowing up a balloon, was full of unknowns. And anyhow, some space-buff piece of her was enjoying his talk of “deployment dynamics” and the rest.

  “And when the mold is ready,” he was saying, pointing to another area of work, “we spray on the film.”

  An astronaut supervised a clumsy-looking robot that rolled along a boom stretched out before a big inflatable disk. The robot was using a roller to smear a glassy surface on the Mylar face of the disk. The robot, working calmly, looked as if it were doing nothing more exotic than painting a wall.

  “The Mylar comes up from the ground in solid blocks,” Bud said. “To make a film, you heat the stuff and force it out through hot nozzles, so you get jets of filament. You give this stuff a positive charge, and make the target surface a negative electrode, so the polymer filament is drawn out like taffy, becoming hundreds of times thinner in the process. You couldn’t do this on Earth; gravity would mess with everything. But here you just squirt it on, deflate the mold, and peel it off.”

  “I want one of those robots to paint my flat.”

  He laughed, but it was a bit forced, and she was painfully aware that everybody who came here must make a similar joke.

  He said, “The robots and machines and processes are all very well. But the heart of this place is the people.” He glanced at her. “I come from a farming area in Iowa. As a kid I always liked to read stories of blue-collar guys just like my father and his buddies working in space, or on the Moon. Well, it can’t be that way, not for a long time. This is still space, a lethal environment, and the work we’re doing is highly skilled engineering. None of those grease monkeys out there is less qualified than a Ph.D. Blue collar they ain’t, I guess. But they have the heart—you know what I’m saying? They’re working twenty-four seven to get this job done, and some of them have been up here for years already. And without that heart none of this would get done, for all our gadgets.”

  “I understand,” she said softly. “Colonel, I’m impressed. And reassured.”

  So she was. Siobhan had briefed her well on Bud, but Miriam knew that Siobhan had developed a relationship with him, and one reason for coming here was to make her own assessment. She liked everything she saw about this blunt, can-do American aviator who had become so pivotal to the future of humankind; she was relieved that the project was in such evidently safe hands.

  Not that her Eurasian pride would ever have allowed her to admit as much to President Alvarez.

  She said, “I hope to meet some of your people later.”

  “They will appreciate that.”

  “So will I. I’m not going to pretend this isn’t a photo op for me; of course it is. But for better or worse this monstrous edifice will be my legacy. I was determined to come see it, and the people who are building it, before they kick me out.”

  Bud nodded gravely. “We follow the polls too. I can’t believe how bad they are for you.” He smacked his fist against his palm. “They should send their damn questionnaires up here.”

  She was touched. “It’s the way it goes, Colonel. The polls show people are broadly behind the shield project. But they are also suffering endless disruption because of all the wealth that is flowing off the planet and up here to this great orbiting sink of money. They want the shield, but they don’t like having to pay for it—and perhaps, beneath it all, they resent being faced with the threat of the sunstorm in the first place.”

  Nicolaus grunted. “It is classic barroom psychology. When faced with bad news, after the denial comes the anger.”

  Bud said, “So they need somebody to blame?”

  “Something like that,” Miriam said. “Or perhaps they’re right. The shield will go on, whatever happens to me; we’ve gone too far to change direction now. But as for me—you know, Churchill lost an election right after winning the Second World War. The people judged he had done his job. Maybe my successor will do a better job of easing the day-to-day pain than I can.” And maybe, she wondered, the people sensed just how exhausted she was, how much this job had taken out of her—and how little she had left to give.

  Nicolaus grunted. “You’re too philosophical, Miriam.”

  “Yeah,” Bud growled. “What a dumb time to call an election! Maybe it should be postponed for a couple of years—”

  “No,” she said firmly. “Oh, I suspect martial law will come to the cities before this is done. But democracy is our most important possession. If we throw it away when the going gets tough, we might never get it back—and then we’ll end up like the Chinese.”

  Bud glanced sideways at Nicolaus, the furtive look of a man who had grown used to working under conditions of security. “Speaking of which—as you know we’re monitoring the Chinese from up here.”

  “There have been more launches?”

  “On a good day you can see them with the naked eye. You can’t hide the firing of a Long March booster. But no matter how we try, we can’t trace them after launch, by optical means, radar—we even tried bouncing laser beams off them.”

  “Stealth technology?”

  “We think so.”

  It had been going on for a year: a massive and continuing program of space launches from China’s echoing interior, one huge mass after another hurled into the silence of space, their destination unknown. Miriam herself had been involved in efforts to figure out what was going on; the Chinese premier had deflected her probing without so much as raising a dyed eyebrow.

  She said, “Anyhow it makes
no difference to us.”

  “Maybe,” Bud said. “But it pains me to think we’re laboring up here to save their skinny ungrateful butts too. Pardon my language.”

  “You mustn’t think that way. Just remember, the mass of the people in China have little or no idea what their leaders are up to, and even less control. It’s them you are working for, not those gerontocrats in Beijing.”

  He grinned. “I guess you’re right. You see, this is why you’d get my vote.”

  “Sure I would…”

  He pointed. “If you look up, you can see what it’s all about.”

  She had to bend down to see.

  There was the Earth. It was a blue lantern hanging directly opposite the position of the sun. Miriam was a million and a half kilometers from home, and from here the planet looked about the size of the Moon from Earth. And it was full, of course; Earth always was, as seen from here at L1, suspended between Earth and sun.

  Earth hung low over the shield itself, and its pale blue light glistened from a glassy floor that stretched to a horizon that was already vanishingly distant. The emerging shield had yet to be positioned so that its face was correctly turned toward the sun; that would come in the final days before the sunstorm was due.

  It was an astounding, beautiful sight, and it was almost impossible to believe that mere humans had made this thing, here in the depths of space.

  On a warm impulse she turned to her press secretary. “Nicolaus, forget the damn cameras. You must see this view…”

  He was cowering against the rear bulkhead of the chamber, his face twisted with an anguish she had never seen in him before. He rapidly composed himself. But it was an expression she would think of again, three days later, as Boudicca made its last descent to Earth.

  On the way out of the observation deck, Miriam noticed a plaque, hastily carved from a bit of lunar glass:

  ARMAGEDDON POSTPONED

  COURTESY OF

  U.S. ASTRONAUTICAL ENGINEERING CORPS