Read Mission: Tomorrow - eARC Online
Authors: Bryan Thomas Schmidt
Mission: Tomorrow - eARC (31 page)
“Obviously,” Adrian said, seating himself on a stool at the table, “the time variables have us tied up.”
“Obviously,” Adrian said, leaning back against one of the microwaves, not wanting to put himself in a mirror-image position. “But what isn’t obvious is what we’re going to do about the fact that we only remember what happens later.”
“That’s true,” Adrian said. “So the secret is to prepare later for what we need to know earlier.”
Adrian nodded. “I’ve thought of that. At least I think I’ve thought of that. The difficult part is remembering that we have to store information for earlier use.”
“We have to come to that realization independently, every time. We have to learn to think differently, just as we have to learn to think differently about Jessica and Frances.”
“What do you mean?” Adrian asked.
“It’s clear to me, and it should be clear to you, that both Jessica and Frances are fond of us.”
“And I’m fond of them,” Adrian said.
“One, or maybe both, are going to want that relationship to get even closer.”
Adrian nodded. “That’s an uncomfortable thought, but if it happens I will have to handle it.”
“When we ‘handle it,’ as you say, we will have to think in unaccustomed ways.”
“I know,” Adrian said.
“I don’t mean just the business of allowing emotional involvement, even intimacy, but the possibility of sharing, or being shared.”
Adrian took a deep breath. “I understand you. What am I saying? I am you.”
“In the same way,” Adrian said, “we are going to have to think about our physical predicament in unconventional ways. Logic doesn’t work.”
“We’ll have to try illogic,” Adrian said. “As a matter of fact, I’ve already tried it. I caught up with you by going the other way.”
“I was the one who caught up with you,” Adrian said and then waved his hand. “No matter. We’ll have to think impossible things.”
“As Frances would say, ‘I can’t believe impossible things.’”
“‘I daresay you haven’t had much practice,’” Adrian continued. “‘When I was your age, I always did it for half an hour a day. Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.’”
Adrian moved from in front of the microwaves. “I’m glad we had this meeting, even though it was a bit of a shock.” He didn’t offer to shake hands with the other Adrian. That would have been too much. “But I hope it doesn’t happen again.”
He went through the doorway into the corridor. This time he didn’t look back.
They all knew it was time to act. Jessica looked at Adrian, Adrian looked at Frances, Frances looked at Jessica. They had been in the wormhole too long. None of them knew how long it had been: days, weeks, maybe even years. But they knew that if they didn’t do something soon they would never get out.
Jessica looked at the gyrating readouts on the control panel. “We have to know what is going on outside,” she said.
“None of our instruments work,” Adrian said. “Or if they work, they aren’t recording.”
“We could turn on the viewscreens,” Frances said.
“We’ve tried that. All we see is glare,” Jessica said.
“That’s the cosmic microwave background boosted into visible light,” Adrian said.
“I think the viewscreens are as unreliable as the readouts,” Jessica said. “We try to cut back on the light, and the screens go black. Somebody has to go outside and report.”
Adrian nodded. “I agree. And I’m the only one who is capable of making sense of what is happening. I’ll get ready.”
“You can’t be spared,” Frances said. Her face had that “there’s no use arguing with me” look.
“Frances is right,” Jessica said. “I’m the most experienced in working on the outside, the youngest, the most athletic, the steadiest—”
“You can’t be spared either,” Frances said. “You’re young, all right, and you have a life ahead of you if we ever get to a place where you can live it. That leaves me.”
“There’s radiation out there,” Adrian said. “God knows what. Even if it isn’t fatal, whoever goes out there is going to take a lot of damage.”
“Besides,” Jessica said, “you get sick just turning your head quickly.”
“I can do this,” Frances said. “I can do whatever I have to do. And you’ve got a young body and young ova—all that needs to be preserved if we’re going to have a future.” She stood in front of them both, in the control room, square and ready.
“I’m not going to talk you out of this, am I?” Jessica asked.
Frances shook her head. “In a movie you’d hit me on the head and take my place, but this isn’t a movie and it isn’t going to happen.”
“I’m glad you know the difference,” Adrian said. “No heroism.”
“Just common sense,” Frances said. “Now I need some help in getting into a suit.” She smiled at her admission of inadequacy.
Spacesuits had not been built for someone as short and wide as Frances, but a man’s suit had been adapted by removing sections of the leg and welding the remaining pieces together. That didn’t help Frances’s agility, but then she hadn’t used the suit much. Now she struggled into it, and Jessica checked all the closures twice.
“Don’t stay out there more than a minute or two,” Jessica said, “and don’t try to do more than a simple survey. Be sure to snap yourself to the interior hook and make certain your magnet is firmly attached to the outer hull before you—”
“Hush,” Frances said. “You’re only making me nervous.”
She turned and hit the large button beside the inner hatch. It cycled open as Frances turned, patted Jessica’s shoulder with her glove, and touched Adrian’s hand. She adjusted her helmet and stepped over the sill into the airlock.
Jessica spoke into her head-held microphone. “Can you hear me? Be sure you keep your mike open all the time. I’m going to suit up so that I can come out and get you if you’re in trouble.”
Frances shook her head inside the helmet as she pushed the inner button and the door began to close. “We don’t want to lose two of us,” she said. “Don’t worry. If I don’t get back, it’s been a great run.” But her face looked pale before the door completely closed. “I’m opening the outer hatch. God, it’s bright out here!”
Jessica looked at Adrian, and Adrian looked back, but their thoughts were outside. “What’s going on?” Adrian asked.
“I’m darkening my face plate. There, that’s better.”
“What can you see?” Jessica asked.
“Wait a minute. I feel a little sick. There’s nothing to look at.”
“Frances!” Jessica said. “Look at the airlock. Look down at your feet. Then look at the ship. Orient yourself to the ship!”
“Got it!” Frances said. “The ship seems to be moving. I can see some kind of disturbance in the glare that might be exhaust, so the engine is still operating, but we knew that, since we’ve had gravity.”
“Which way are we going?” Adrian asked.
“Hard to say,” Frances said. “There seems to be a dark place in the glare.”
“Which direction?” Adrian asked.
“Toward the rear of the ship,” Frances said triumphantly. “Where the anti-matter stuff comes out.”
“That must be the mouth of the wormhole where we entered,” Adrian said.
“That’s enough,” Jessica said. “Come in.”
“Not yet,” Frances said. “I’m looking around while I’m here.”
“Don’t look around!” Jessica said.
“Funny stuff out here,” Frances said. “A weird-looking contraption just went by. All twisted pipes and girders. Speak of ships that pass in the night!”
“You’re not doing us any good out there,” Adrian said.
“There’s another ship, or vehicle, or something,” Frances said. “Only it’s like a stack of waffles with a flagpole through the middle.”
“Frances!” Jessica said. “You’re making us nervous.”
“Goodness knows, you’ve made me nervous often enough,” Frances said. “There’s an alien, I think. A creature of some sort with tentacles. And one shaped like a cone with eyes. And another, and another!”
“You’re losing touch!” Adrian said. “Come back! Now!”
“There’s the Mad Hatter!” Frances shouted. “And Humpty Dumpty. And the caterpillar smoking the water pipe. And the Queen!”
“Come back!” Jessica said softly. “Come back, Frances!”
“Off with their heads!” Frances said.
Adrian looked at Jessica. She turned and began climbing into her spacesuit.
“Remember,” Frances said, “you have to run twice as fast as that!”
Something clanged from outside the ship, like a magnet being freed and metal-shod feet pushing against the hull.
Jessica stopped halfway into her suit. “I knew I should have gone,” she said.
Adrian shook his head. “There’s no way we can go faster,” he said. “But maybe we can make Frances’s sacrifice meaningful.” He didn’t know how that was going to happen, but, as unshed tears burned his eyes, he knew he would make it happen.
Jessica slapped the viewscreens back on and let the glare fill the control room. “We’ve got to do something. Frances has—is going to—oh, I don’t know what the right tense is. But she has given us all the information we’re likely to get, and she’s dead—surely she’s dead.”
“There’s not much doubt about that,” Adrian said. “We’re remembering things that have yet to happen, including things that might happen, and we’ve got all the memories of what has yet to happen that we’re likely ever to get.”
“Even though we’ve just entered the wormhole,” Jessica said.
Adrian nodded. “That’s the funny way time works in here. Now we know but later on we’ll forget. So we’ve got to do it now.”
“Frances said we had to run twice as fast,” Jessica said.
“And I said there was no way to do that,” Adrian said, “or any reason to think going twice as fast would get us anywhere.” He looked around at the control room. In spite of the glare, for the first time he was seeing things clearly: Frances, Jessica, the aliens and their plans. “We’ve been trying to reconcile the unreconcilables, the time anomalies, or own inability to adjust to inversions and potentials.”
Jessica looked at him hopefully, the way an apprentice looked at her master, anticipating wisdom.
“We’ve got to turn the ship around,” Adrian said. He turned to the controls. “Go back the way we came. If we were in real space, we’d have to decelerate for as long as we’ve accelerated, but this is hyperspace and we haven’t moved far from where we entered.”
“Let me do it,” Jessica said. She began punching instructions into the computer. “But isn’t that just giving up?”
“Maybe,” Adrian said. He tried to isolate a cold feeling in the pit of his stomach. Maybe it was giving up. “Logically we should come out the way we came in, and then everything will have been for nothing—all our psychological torment, the felt years of experience, Frances’s sacrifice—”
“But maybe not?” Jessica said.
Adrian could feel the ship swinging even though there was nothing to see, no way to get information from gauges, nothing but glare. . . .
Something surged.
Conflicting gravities tugged at their bodies, as if all their loose parts wanted to go in different directions, as if their internal organs were changing places. . . . Then the glare and the gravity fluctuations stopped suddenly. Adrian and Jessica looked at each other, remembering everything that had happened or might have happened inside the wormhole. They turned to look at the viewscreens. The glare was gone. Outside was the blackness of space with here and there the pinpoint hole of a star. It could have been anywhere in the galaxy including back near the spot from which they had been drawn into the wormhole.
Jessica adjusted the controls and new arenas of space swam into view. The stars were few and distant. A single star loomed closest, but it was old and faint.
“That isn’t our Solar System,” Jessica said. “That isn’t our sun.”
Adrian shook his head. “Wherever we were going, we’ve arrived.”
“How did you figure it out?” Jessica asked.
“If time was inverted,” Adrian said, “maybe space was, too. In order to get out, we had to reverse our course. But then, I had some help.” He thought about the other Adrian, who now would never exist, except maybe in the never-never world of the wormhole, and how he had caught up with him only when he went the other way. But maybe that never-never existence, like that of the children and maybe even of Cavendish, was as real as any other. “Maybe I’ll tell you some time.
“Meanwhile,” he continued, “I think we have managed our rite of passage and have a rendezvous with destiny.”
“Whatever that means,” Jessica said.
Adrian smiled at her. There would be great moments ahead, he thought, and moments of tenderness and fulfillment and maybe distress and regret and pain. But it would be living.
He heard a noise behind him and turned toward the entrance.
“Frances?” he said. “Frances?”
* * *
James Gunn
has had a career divided between writing and teaching, typified by his service as president of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America and as president of the Science Fiction Research Association, as well as having been presented the Grand Master Award of SFWA and the Pilgrim Award of SFRA. He now is Emeritus Professor of English at the University of Kansas and continues to write.
He has published more than 100 short stories and has written or edited 42 books, including
The Immortals, The Listeners, The Dreamers, Alternate Worlds: The Illustrated History of Science Ficton, The Road to Science Fiction,
and, most recently,
Transcendental
and its sequel,
Transgalactic
. “The Rabbit Hole” was originally published in
Analog
and is the central portion of the novel
Gift from the Stars.
Next, a Chinese taikonaut encounters a strange vessel and finds herself dealing with Ben Bova’s irascible scoundrel, Sam Gunn in . . .
RARE (OFF) EARTH ELEMENTS
(A SAM GUNN TALE)
by Ben Bova
You must understand that it all happened many years ago, when I was very young and inexperienced in the ways of the world.
Oh, I was not completely naïve. After all, to be trained as a taikonaut was a demanding discipline, especially for a young woman. To be first in my class was a fine accomplishment that I am still proud of. And to be chosen to claim the asteroid was not only a great honor, it was a heavy responsibility.
The People’s Republic of China was expanding into space in those days. While the Americans and Europeans restricted their efforts to space stations in low orbits, China built its base on the Moon. When the Russians sent an automated probe to scout the near-Earth asteroids, the great ones in Beijing decided to send taikonauts to claim some of them for China.
One of the taikonauts they sent was me: Song-li Chunxi.
My mission was to reach asteroid 94-12, an undistinguished chunk of rock that was hardly more than three kilometers long, at its greatest axis.
Romantics dreamed of finding gold and silver among the asteroids, platinum and high-quality nickel-iron. I was sent to asteroid 94-12 because spectroscopic studies of the rock showed it contained many tons of rare-earth elements.
You seem puzzled. Rare-earth elements such as neodymium, lanthanum, cerium and the others were very important in the manufacture of computer memories, rechargeable batteries, cell phones, magnets and the whole panoply of modern electronics devices. What copper was to Morse’s telegraph and Bell’s telephone, rare-earth elements are to today’s digital world.
The American capitalists had formed several private companies to mine the asteroids. So China led the movement in the United Nations to require that a human being personally claim an asteroid for his (or her) nation’s utilization. Otherwise the greedy capitalists could have sent out fleets of robotic vehicles and claimed the rights to everything in sight!
International law was quite specific. No nation may claim sovereignty over any natural object in space. No nation may claim the Moon, for example, or any asteroid, as part of its national territory. But a nation—or even a private corporation—may claim
use
of the natural resources of a body in space, so long as the claim is made by a human being actually present on that body.
So China sent me to asteroid 94-12. It was one of the near-Earth asteroids: hundreds of them orbited within a few million miles of Earth. The so-called Asteroid Belt was much farther away, of course; millions of asteroids were in that region, out beyond the orbit of Mars, too far for economically profitable mining operations.
My mission was a simple one: fly from our launch center in Sinkiang to asteroid 94-12, claim it for the PRC, and then fly home. I would be alone for the three months it would take to reach the asteroid, claim it, and then fly home again.
That was before Sam Gunn entered the picture.
Even as a little girl, long before I entered taikonaut training, I had heard of Sam Gunn, of course. He was a legend: a scheming, devilishly clever entrepreneur who had made several fortunes on various space endeavors, and then managed to lose everything and had to start all over again.
He was known as a conniver, a fast-talking pitchman who would bend or even break any rules that stood in his way. And also an oversexed libertine who pursued women—any and all women—relentlessly. Although no one would admit it officially, I had heard several times that the great ones in Beijing would not mind at all if Sam Gunn got himself killed while pursuing one of his wild schemes.
For more than six weeks I coasted through space toward a rendezvous with 94-12. To the scientists I was living in microgravity, but it was effectively zero-gee. It might have been enjoyable, if only I’d had enough room in my tiny cabin to actually float free. But I didn’t. My spacecraft was officially described as “compact.” After the first week of my mission I thought of it as cramped, confined.
And it was lonely, with no one even to talk with except the disembodied voices from mission control, back in Sinkiang. After two weeks I began to take EVA jaunts outside merely to relieve the feelings of claustrophobia that were pressing in on me.
After all, I was expected to work, eat, sleep, attend to my hygiene, all in a compartment little larger than a coffin. My world was no bigger than two meters across: everything from the panel displaying my spacecraft’s systems’ status to the zero-gravity toilet I had to strap myself onto was within arm’s reach.
Even with the regular messages from the mission controllers in Sinkiang, I felt alone, abandoned, so very far from home, far from warmth and the touch of another person.
So I would suit up and go outside. The huge, vast universe was all around me out there: the distant blue sphere of Earth and myriads of bright unbinking stars, the endless infinity of eternity. It soothed me, it kept me sane. I would float at the end of my safety tether and stare at the star-flecked darkness for hours. Somehow the loneliness I felt inside my cabin was dispelled by the grandeur of the universe. I even composed poetry in my head out there in the emptiness.
At last I approached the asteroid and made ready for the rendezvous maneuver. The spacecraft’s automated guidance and propulsion systems were programmed for the landing, of course, but I sat in my contour chair with both hands hovering above the control yokes, ready to take command of the ship if the automated systems faltered.
The mission controllers in Sinkiang were of no help: I was nearly three light-minutes away from Earth; it would take them six minutes or more to respond to my requests. I was on my own.
The automated systems worked flawlessly, almost. The asteroid grew bigger and bigger in my observation port, until it blotted out everything else and all I could see was its lumpy, pitted surface rushing up to meet me.
And a spacecraft sitting in the middle of an irregular, lopsided crater!
A spacecraft? How could that be? There was no record of another spacecraft mission to 94-12, no communications from such a spacecraft.
Glancing at my panel readouts, I saw that I would be touching down on the asteroid in less than four minutes. No time to ask Sinkiang for orders. I had to make my own decision.
Feeling excited, happy even, I grasped the control yokes firmly and jinked my spacecraft with a spurt from the attitude control jets to land softly in the same crater beside the unexpected craft already there.
I touched down feather light, but still kicked up a cloud of dust. As I waited for it to dissipate, I realized that the other craft was much bigger than my own. Very much bigger. It was huge, actually: a trio of bulbous spherical shapes studded with antennas, thruster jets, solar panels and what looked like airlock hatches, with a quartet of rocket nozzles at its far end. My spacecraft looked like a pitiful child’s model beside it.
As I shut down my propulsion systems, I felt a sudden wave of anxiety. The stranger had obviously landed on 94-12 before I had. He had probably already sent his claim to the asteroid back to whoever had sent him here. My mission was ruined and I was a failure.
But when I tried to send a message back to Sinkiang, I found that all the communications wavelengths were being jammed.
Jammed? By whom? Why?
For several long minutes I sat in my contour chair wondering what I should do. The other spacecraft loomed in my observation port, silent, seemingly inert. Perhaps it was uncrewed, I thought. No, that couldn’t be. A robotic vehicle would not need to be so big.
Could it be an alien spacecraft? A visitor from another star?
I fought down the thrill of excitement that surged through me. Occam’s razor, I told myself. The simplest explanation is usually the correct one. Don’t go inventing extraterrestrial visitors; that’s the wildest possible explanation.
And yet . . .
My spacecraft had a pair of telescopes mounted outside on its skin, for visual observation of the asteroid during my approach phase. I could feel my heart throbbing excitedly beneath my ribs as I worked the control panel and turned the smaller of the telescopes onto one of the hatches along the other craft’s hull. Focusing it, I saw that there were operating instructions printed next to the hatch—in English.
No extraterrestrials.
I tried the radio again, this time attempting to contact that spacecraft. No go. The signals were still being jammed, up and down the frequency range.
Well, I thought, if I can’t get a signal through to it, it can’t get a signal through to me. Whoever it is might not even know I’ve landed alongside him.
Then a new thought struck me. Perhaps whoever is in that craft is dead. Obviously the ship is too big for just one person. Maybe the entire crew has died.
Of what? The craft did not appear to be damaged. Some malfunction of their life support system? Some virus or a leaking gas line that poisoned them all?
There was only one way to find out, I finally decided. So I suited up and prepared to leave my spacecraft. The space suit should protect me from any virus or poisonous agent inside the other ship, I reasoned. The suit is a self-contained little ecology. If I can get inside their ship, I can see what’s happened to them. If it’s some sort of disease I can skip out quickly and get back to my own ship. Any disease organisms that might attach themselves to the outside of my suit will be quickly killed by exposure to vacuum and the high-intensity radiation out in the open between our two ships.
Wishing I could contact Sinkiang for approval of my decision or even advice, I wriggled into my space suit and touched the control stud that pumped the air out of my compartment. When the panel light showed the compartment was in vacuum, I opened the hatch then floated halfway out. The asteroid’s gravity was so minuscule that I was just about weightless.
The other ship was too far away for my EVA tether to reach, so I strapped the maneuvering jet pack to my shoulders before pushing myself completely out of my cabin.
Slowly, carefully, I picked my way between the rocks strewing the dusty ground. With each cautious step I floated almost a meter above the ground. It wouldn’t have taken much effort to jump completely free of the asteroid and go into orbit around it.
Once I got to the airlock hatch I read the instructions printed alongside it, then pressed the stud beneath the printing. The hatch popped open a few centimeters. I pulled it all the way open and hauled myself inside.
The airlock chamber was lit by a single red light on its control panel. Using my helmet lamp I peered at the instructions and worked the keypads in the proper sequence. The outer hatch closed and locked, the airlock filled with air, and the panel light turned from red to green. I stepped to the inner hatch and opened it.
On the other side of the hatch a passageway stretched in either direction, fully lighted. Which way should I go?
Then I heard a voice shouting in the distance. At least someone was alive in the ship!
I cracked open the visor of my helmet and took a quick, testing sniff of air. Perfectly good. Sliding the visor all the way up, I heard the voice much better. A man’s voice. Swearing with profound, profane, infuriated vehemence. In English. American English.
Tingling with a mixture of apprehension and excitement, I made my way slowly along the passageway.
“. . .no good, mother-humping, brain-dead, backstabbing pustule of a control circuit . . .” the male voice was raging in a sharp, slightly nasal tenor.
The passageway ended at an open hatch. On the other side of it was a small compartment bearing dials and viewscreens and gauges on its walls, with a command chair in their midst, its arms studded with switches and pushbuttons. The man doing all the yelling was in that chair, his back to me.
“Hello,” I said. In English, since that was the language he was using so fluently.
No response. He simply kept on yowling and banging his fists on the armrest controls, like an infuriated little child.
“Hello,” I repeated, louder.
He whirled his chair around. “Yipes!” His eyes went round and he bounded out of the chair. In the low gravity he soared across the compartment and banged into me. We staggered backwards, arms and legs entangled, and toppled to the deck.
“Who the hell are you?” he demanded, his face bare centimeters above my own.
A little breathless from the fall, I replied, “Song-li Chunxi.”
“You’re Chinese,” he said, scrambling off me and to his feet.
“Yes.” I started to get up from the deck. He grabbed my arms and hauled me erect.
And he stared at me. “Lord, you’re beautiful!”
I knew that I was very plain and ordinary. But he was gaping at me as if I were a goddess.
I asked, “And you are?”
He made a little bow. “Sam Gunn, at your service.”
That’s how I met Sam Gunn.
He was not much taller than I: not more than a hundred sixty centimeters, I judged. Wiry as an elf, with a thatch of rust red hair and freckles sprinkling his stub of a nose. His eyes were greenish blue, or perhaps bluish green. His round face was far from handsome, but somehow when he broke into his lopsided gap-toothed smile he seemed almost attractive.
“What are you doing here?” Sam demanded. “How’d you get here? Where’d you come from?”
“The People’s Republic of China has sent me to claim this asteroid,” I replied. “But apparently you have already done so.”
“I would’ve if I could’ve.”
I felt my brows knit in puzzlement. “You mean you haven’t registered a claim?”
“Not yet. All my comm systems are down.”
“You’re being jammed, too?”
Sam shook his head. “It’s not jamming. It’s the lousy, overpriced, underperforming fusion propulsion system on this ship.”
“Fusion?” I gasped. “Your ship is propelled by a nuclear fusion system?”
“When it works,” he said, his words dripping with disgust.
Before I could ask another question, Sam explained that he had bought a prototype fusion rocket from the university professors who had invented it, with the intent of prospecting for valuable asteroids among the near-Earth objects.