Time

Inside the gate there was a Portakabin, once more displaying the corporate logo. Beyond that there was more desert. There was no metalled road surface, just tracks snaking to the dusty horizon.

Emma pulled the car over and climbed out. She blinked in the sudden light, felt perspiration start out of her flesh after a few seconds of the desert’s dry, sucking warmth. The shade of the cabin, even badly air-conditioned, was a relief.

She took in the cabin’s contents with a glance. Malenfant’s joky company mission statement was repeated several times: Bootstrap: Making Money in a Closed Economy – Until Something Better Comes Along … There were display stands showing the usual corporate PR, much of it approved by herself, about the methane extraction fields, and Bootstrap’s clean-up activities at Hanford and the Ukraine nuke plants and Alaska, and so forth.

Bootstrap had tied up a recent youth-oriented sponsorship with Shit Cola, and so there was a lot of bright pink Shit livery about the stands. Cornea gumbo, Emma thought: too cluttered and bright. But it defrayed the costs. And the Shit audience – sub-age-25, generally sub-literate consumers of the planet’s trendiest soft drink – were showing themselves amenable to subtle Bootstrap persuasion, mixed in with their diet of endless softsoaps and thongathons.

No evidence here of giant rocket plants in the desert, of course.

Cornelius was looking around in silence, an amused half-smile on his lips. She was finding his quiet know-all attitude intensely irritating, his silences disturbing.

She heard the whine of an electric engine, a car of some kind pulling up outside. With relief she stepped out the door.

The car was a late-model jeep, a bare frame mounted on big fat tyres, with a giant solar-cell carapace glistening like beetle chitin. It carried two people, talking animatedly. The passenger was a woman, unknown to Emma: sixty, perhaps, slim and smart, wearing some kind of trouser suit. Practical but a little hot, Emma thought.

And the driver was, of course, Reid Malenfant.

Malenfant got out of the car like a whip uncoiling. He bounded up to Emma, grabbed her arms, and kissed her cheek; his lips were rough, sun-cracked. He was ruinously tall, thin as a snake, bald as a coot. He was wearing a blue NASA-type jump-suit and heavy black boots. As usual, he looked somehow larger than those around him, as if too big for the landscape. She could smell desert dust on him, hot and dry as a sauna. He said, ‘What kept you?’

She hissed, ‘You’ve a hell of a nerve, Malenfant. What are you up to now?’

‘Later,’ he whispered. The woman with him was climbing out of the car with caution, but she seemed limber enough. Malenfant said to Emma, ‘Do you know Maura Della?’

‘Representative Della? By reputation.’

Maura Della stepped forward, a thin smile on her lips. ‘Ms Stoney. He’s told me all about you.’

‘I bet he has.’ Emma shook her hand; Delia’s grip was surprisingly strong, stronger than Cornelius Taine’s, in fact.

Malenfant said, ‘I’m trying to win the Representative’s support for the project here. But I suspect I’ve a little way to go yet.’

Della said, ‘Damn right. Frankly it seems incredible to me that you can attempt to build an eco-friendly project around rocket engines …’

Malenfant pulled a face at Emma. ‘You can tell we’re in the middle of an argument here.’

‘We sure are,’ said Della.

Malenfant fetched plastic water bottles from the car and handed them out while Maura Della kept on talking.

‘… Look, the Space Shuttle actually dumps more exhaust products into the atmosphere than any other current launcher. Water, hydrogen, hydrogen chloride and nitrogen oxides. The chloride can damage the ozone layer –’

‘If it got into the stratosphere,’ Malenfant said amiably, ‘which it doesn’t, because it rains out first.’

‘65% of it does. The rest escapes. Anyhow there are other effects. Ozone depletion because of the deposition of frozen water and aluminium oxide. Global warming contributions from carbon dioxide and particulates. Acid rain from the hydrogen chloride and the NOX products –’

‘Limited to a half-mile around the launch site.’

‘But there. Anyhow there are also the toxins associated with rocket launches, which only need to be present in small amounts. Nitrogen tet can cause acute pulmonary oedemas, hydrazine is carcinogenic – and there are old studies linking aluminium with Alzheimer’s.’

Malenfant barked laughter. ‘The aluminium in rocket motors is one hundredth of one per cent of the total US annual production. We’d have to be launching like Buck Rogers to do any real damage.’

‘Tell that to the mothers of the Florida yellow babies,’ Della said grimly.

It had been a massive scandal. Medical studies had revealed a series of birth abnormalities showing up in Daytona, Orlando and other communities close to Cape Canaveral, in Florida. Abnormal livers, faulty hearts, some external defects; a plague of jaundice, sometimes associated with serious neurological diseases. Yellow babies.

Naturally Malenfant was prepared for this. ‘First of all,’ he said evenly, ‘the medicos are split over whether the cluster exists at all. And even if it does, who the hell knows what the cause is?’

Della shook her head. ‘Heptyl has been detected in soil and plants. Along the east coast of Florida it reaches as much as point three milligrams per kilogram –’

Emma asked, ‘Heptyl?’

‘Dimethyl hydrazine. Unburned rocket fuel. Highly toxic; hydrazine compounds are notorious liver and central nervous system poisons. Furthermore we know it can linger for years in bodies of water, rivers and marshes …’ Della smiled thinly. ‘I’m sorry. I guess we got a little worked up, driving around out here. As you probably know, Malenfant has been kibitzing Congress for some time. Me specifically. I thought I should come see if this rocket shop of his is just another hobby-club tax write-off, or something serious.’

Emma nodded. Right now she didn’t see why she should make life easy for Malenfant. ‘He calls you Bill Proxmire in a skirt.’ Proxmire had been a notorious NASA-opposing Senator of the late twentieth century.

Maura Della smiled. ‘Well, I don’t wear skirts much. But I’ll take it as a compliment.’

‘Damn right,’ said Malenfant easily, utterly unfazed. ‘Proxmire was an unthinking opponent of progress –’

‘While I,’ said Della dryly to Emma, ‘am a thinking opponent of progress. And therefore, Malenfant is calculating, amenable to persuasion.’

‘I told you it was a compliment,’ Malenfant said.

As the two of them fenced, Cornelius Taine had been all but invisible, standing in the shadows of the Portakabin’s doorway. Now he stepped forward, as if materializing, and smiled at Malenfant. Cornelius didn’t blink in the harsh sunlight, Emma noticed. Maybe he was wearing image-processing cornea implants.

Malenfant frowned at him, startled. ‘And who the hell are you?’

Cornelius introduced himself and his company.

Malenfant growled. ‘Eschatology. I thought I told the guards to keep you kooks out of the compound.’

Emma tugged his sleeve. ‘I brought him in.’ She murmured about the shareholding Cornelius represented. ‘Take him seriously, Malenfant.’

Cornelius said, ‘I’m here to support you, Colonel Malenfant. Really. I don’t represent any threat to you.’

‘Malenfant. Just call me Malenfant.’ He turned to Della. ‘I apologize for this. I get these bullshit artists all the time.’

Della murmured, ‘I suspect you only have yourself to blame for that.’

Cornelius Taine was holding up manicured hands. ‘You have me wrong, Malenfant. We’re not psychics. We are scientists, engineers, economists, statisticians. Thinkers, not dreamers. I myself was formerly a mathematician, for instance.

‘Eschatology has built on the pioneering work of thinkers like Freeman Dyson who, in the 1970s, began to consider the future scientifically. Since then we, and others, have worked hard to compile, umm, a road map of the future. In fact, Colonel Malenfant, we already have proof that our studies of the future are generally successful.’

‘What proof?’

‘We’ve become rich out of them. Rich enough to invest in you.’ He smiled.

‘Why have you come here today?’

‘To emphasize we support you. That is, we support your true objectives. We know about Key Largo,’ said Cornelius.

Della looked confused. ‘Key Largo? In Florida?’

The name meant nothing to Emma. But she saw it had caught Malenfant off balance.

‘This is too complicated for me,’ Malenfant said at last. ‘Get in the jeep. Please. We’ve got some hardware to see. Now that I do understand.’

Meekly, harbouring their own thoughts, they obeyed.

It was a three-mile drive to the test stand, further than Emma had expected. Bootstrap owned a big piece of desert, it seemed.

Malenfant’s base here was like a miniaturized version of Edwards: miles of chain-link fence cutting out a hole in the desert, a hole within which exotic technology lurked, the scent of other worlds.

But there was a lot of plant here: fuel tanks and hangar-like buildings and skeletal test stands. Malenfant just drove past it all without comment or explanation. Was there a secret purpose here, more equipment than could be explained away by the waste-disposal cover story?

Malenfant and Maura Della continued to argue about space and rockets. Cornelius Taine was oddly detached. He sat apparently relaxed, hands neatly folded before him, gaze sweeping over the desert, as the babble of chemical names and statistics went on. There was something repellent about his surface of self-containment.

Emma was financial controller of Bootstrap – not to mention Malenfant’s ex-wife – but that meant little to Malenfant in terms of openness and sharing of information with her. She knew he did rely on her to keep the company within the fiscal regulations, though. And that meant that, in a bizarre way, he trusted her to break through his elaborate webs of deceit and concealment in time to comply with the reporting rules. It was a kind of dance between them, a game of mutual dependence played to unspoken conventions.

In a way, she admitted to herself, she enjoyed it.

But she did wonder – if Cornelius turned out to be right – if Malenfant had gone too far this time. Secret rocket ships in the desert? So 1950s, Malenfant …

Still, here in this desert, just a few score miles from Edwards itself, Reid Malenfant – supple, tanned, vigorous, cheerful – seemed at home. Much more than in a boardroom in Vegas or Manhattan or DC. He looked like what he was, she thought – or rather what he had always wanted to be – a Right Stuff pilot of the old school, maybe somebody who could have gotten all the way into space himself.

But, of course, it hadn’t worked out that way.

They reached the engine test facility. It was a big open box of scaffolding and girders, with zigzag walkways scribbled across the structure, and a giant crane peering over the top of everything. Lights sparkled over the rig, bright despite the intensity of the afternoon sun. It looked like a piece of a chemical factory, unaccountably shipped out here to the dull California desert. But on a boxy structure at the centre of the ugly conglomerate Emma could see, crudely painted over, a NASA roundel.

And there, as if trapped at the heart of the clumsy industrial metalwork, she saw the slim, snub-nosed form of a Space Shuttle external tank: a shape familiar from images of more than a hundred successful Cape Canaveral launches, and one memory-searing failure. White vapour was venting from somewhere in the stack and it wreathed around the girders and tubing, softening the sun’s glare.

Oddly, she felt cooler; perhaps the heat capacity of this giant mass of liquid fuel was sufficient to chill the desert air, her own body.

Malenfant pulled up the jeep, and they stepped out. Malenfant waved at hard-hatted engineers, who waved or shouted back, and he guided his party around the facility.

‘What we have in there is a kind of mock-up of a Space Shuttle. We have the external fuel tank, of course, and a complete aft section, with three main engines in place. Where the rest of the orbiter would go we have a boilerplate truss section. The Shuttle engines we use are obsolete: they’ve all flown in space several times, and have been decommissioned. We got the test hardware from NASA’s old Shuttle main engine test facility in Mississippi, the Stennis Space Center.’ He pointed to a fleet of tankers parked alongside the facility. They were giant eighteen-wheelers, but against the rig they looked like beetles at the foot of an elephant. ‘At Stennis they bring in the fuel, lox and liquid hydrogen, by barge. We don’t have that luxury …’

They reached a flame pit, a mighty concrete conduit dug into the desert alongside the test rig. Malenfant said, ‘We’ve already achieved 520-second burns here, equivalent to a full Shuttle flight demonstration test, at one hundred per cent thrust.’ He smiled at Maura Della. ‘This is the only place in the world anybody is firing Shuttle main engines right now, still the most advanced rocket engines in the world. We have a nineteen-storey-high fuel tank in there, eight hundred tons of liquid fuel chilled through three hundred degrees or below. When the engines fire up the turbo-pumps work at forty thousand revs per minute, a thousand gallons of fuel are consumed every second –’

‘All very impressive, Malenfant,’ said Della, ‘but I’m hardly likely to be overwhelmed by engineering gosh-wow numbers. This isn’t the 1960s. You really think you need to assemble all this space hardware just to lose a little waste?’

‘Surely. What we plan is to use rocket combustion chambers as high-temperature, high-volume incinerators.’ He led them to a show board, a giant flow diagram showing mass streams, little rockets with animated yellow flames glowing in their hearts. ‘We reach two to three thousand Centigrade in there, twice as high as in most commercial incinerators, which are based on rotary kiln or electric plasma technology. We feed the waste material through at high speed, first to break it down and then to oxidize it. Any toxic products are removed by a multistage cleansing process that includes scrubbers to get acidic gases out of the exhaust.

‘We think we can process most poisonous industrial by-products, and also nerve gas and biological weapons, at a much greater speed and a fraction the cost of conventional incinerators. We think we’ll be able to process tons of waste every second. We could probably tackle massive ecological problems, like cleaning out poisoned lakes.’

‘Getting rich by cleaning the planet,’ Della said.

Malenfant grinned, and Emma knew he had worked his way onto home ground. ‘Representative, that’s the philosophy of my corporation. We live in a closed economy. We’ve girdled the Earth, and we have to be aware that we’re going to have to live with whatever we produce, useful goods or waste … But, if you can spot the flows of goods and materials and economic value, it’s still possible to get rich.’

Cornelius Taine had walked away from the others. Now he was clapping, slowly and softly. Gradually he caught the attention of Malenfant and Della.

‘Captain Future. I forgot you were here,’ Malenfant said sourly.

‘Oh, I’m still here. And I have to admire the way you’re handling this. The plausibility. I believe you’re even sincere, on the level of this cover-up.’

Maura Della said, ‘Cover-up? What are you talking about?’

‘Key Largo,’ said Cornelius. ‘That’s what this is really all about. Isn’t it, Malenfant?’

Malenfant glowered at him, calculating.

Here we go, Emma thought bleakly. Not for the first time in her life with Malenfant she had absolutely no idea what was going to come next, as if she was poised over a roller-coaster drop.

Cornelius said, ‘I watched your Delaware speech the other night.’

Malenfant looked even more uncomfortable. ‘Expanding across the Galaxy, all of that? I’ve given that talk a dozen times.’

‘I know,’ said Cornelius. ‘And it’s admirable. As far as it goes.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘That you haven’t thought it through. You say you’re planning a way for mankind to live forever. Getting off the Earth is the first step, et cetera. Fine. But what then? What is forever? Do you want eternity? If not, what will you settle for? A billion years, a trillion?’ He waved a hand at the sun-drenched sky. ‘The universe won’t always be as hospitable as this warm bath of energy and light. Far downstream –’

‘Downstream?’

‘I mean, in the far future – the stars will die. It is going to be cold and dark, a universe of shadows. Do you hope that humans, or human descendants, will survive even then? … You haven’t thought about this, have you? And yet it’s the logical consequence of everything you’re striving for.

‘And there is more,’ Cornelius said. ‘Perhaps you are right that we are alone in this universe, the first minds of all. Since the universe is believed to have evolved from others, we may be the first minds to have emerged in a whole string of cosmoses. That is an astounding thought. And if it is true – what is our purpose? That, you see, is perhaps the most fundamental question facing mankind, and ought to shape everything you do, Malenfant. Yet I see no sign in any of your public statements that you have given any consideration to all this …’

The meaning of life? Was this guy for real? But Emma shivered, as if in this hot desert light the wind of a billion years was sweeping over her.

‘We understand, you see,’ said Cornelius.

‘Understand what?’

‘That you are trying to initiate a clandestine return to space here.’

Malenfant barked, ‘Bull hockey.’

Emma and Maura Della spoke together,

‘Malenfant, he alleged this earlier –’

‘If this is true –’

‘Oh, it’s true,’ Cornelius said. ‘Come clean, Malenfant. The truth is he wants to do more than fire off rockets to burn waste. He wants to build a rocket ship – in fact a fleet of rocket ships – and launch them from here, the heart of the desert, and send them all the way to the asteroids.’

Malenfant said nothing.

Della was visibly angry. ‘This is not what I came here for.’

Cornelius said, ‘Malenfant, we back you. A mission to a NEO, a near-Earth object, makes obvious economic and technical sense: the first step in any expansion off-planet, in the short to medium term. And in the long term, it could make the difference.’

Della said, ‘What difference?’

‘The difference,’ Cornelius said easily, ‘between the survival of the human species, and its extinction.’

‘So is that what you came to tell me, you swivel-eyed freak?’ snapped Malenfant. ‘That I get to save the world?’

‘Actually we think it’s possible,’ said Cornelius evenly.

Della frowned, eyebrows arched sceptically. ‘Really. So tell us how the world will end.’

‘We don’t know how. We think we know when, however. Two hundred years from now.’

The number – its blunt precision – startled them to silence.

Malenfant looked from one to the other – the suspicious ex-wife, the frowning Congressman, the mysterious prophet – and Emma saw he was, rarely for him, hemmed in.

Malenfant drove them back to the Portakabin. They travelled in silence, sunk in their respective moods, wary of each other. Only Cornelius, self-absorbed, seemed in any way content.

At the cabin Malenfant served them drinks, beer and soda and water, and they stood in the Californian desert.

Voices drifted over the baked ground, amplified and distorted, as a slow countdown proceeded.

Malenfant kept checking his watch. It was a fat, clunky Rolex. No implants or active tattoos for Reid Malenfant, no sir. For a man with his eye on the future, Emma thought, he often seemed wedded to the past.

The firing started.

Emma saw a spark of light, an almost invisible flame at the base of the stand, billowing white smoke. And then the noise came, a nonlinear crackle tearing at the air. The ground shook, as if she was witnessing some massive natural phenomenon, a waterfall or an earthquake, perhaps. But this was nothing natural.

Malenfant had once taken her to see a Shuttle launch. She’d had tears in her eyes then, from sheer exhilaration at the man-made power of the thing. And there were tears now, she found to her reluctant surprise, even at the sight of this pathetic, cut-down half-ship, trapped in its steel cage and bolted to the Earth.

She said, ‘Cornelius is right. Isn’t he, Malenfant? You’ve been lying to me for months. Years, maybe.’

Malenfant touched her arm. ‘It’s a long story.’

‘I know. I’ve lived it. Damn you,’ she whispered. ‘There’s a lot of unfinished business here, Malenfant.’

‘We’ll handle it,’ Malenfant said. ‘We can handle this guy Cornelius and his band of airheads. We can handle anybody. This is just the beginning.’

Cornelius Taine watched, eyes opaque.

Bill Tybee:

My name is Bill Tybee.

… Is this thing working? Oh, shit. Start again.

Hi. My name is Bill Tybee, and this is my diary.

Well, kind of. It’s really a letter for you, June. It’s a shame they won’t let us talk directly, but I hope this makes up for your not being home for your birthday, a little ways anyhow. You know Tom and little Billie are missing you. I’ll send you another at Christmas if you aren’t here, and I’ll keep a copy at home so we can all watch it together.

Come see the house.

Here’s the living room. Sorry, I folded up the cam. There. Can you see now? You notice I got the video wall replaced, finally. Although I hate to think what the down payments are going to do to our bank balance. Maybe we could have got by with the old one, just the hundred channels, what do you think? Oh, I got the solar-cell roof replaced too. That storm was a bitch.

Here’s Billie’s bedroom. I’m whispering because she’s asleep. She loves the hologram mobile you sent her. Everybody says how smart she is. Same as her brother. I mean it. Even the doctors agree about Billie; they’re both off the, what did they say, the percentile charts, way off. You managed to give birth to two geniuses here, June. I know they don’t get it from their father!

I’ll kiss her for you. There you go, sweet pea. One from me too.

Here we are in the bathroom. Now, June, I know it’s not much as part of the guided tour. But I just want to show you this stuff because you’re not to worry about it. Here’s my med-alert ribbon, this cute silver thing. See? I have to wear it every time I leave the house, and I ought to wear it indoors too. And here are the pills I have to take every day, in this bubble packet. The specialist says they’re not just drugs but also little miniature machines, tumour-busters that go prowling around my bloodstream looking for the defective cells before breaking themselves up and flushing them out of, well, I won’t show you out of where. Here I am taking my pill for today. See? Gone. Nothing to worry about.

The Big C just ain’t what it used to be. Something you have to live with, to manage, like diabetes, right?

Come on. Let’s go see if Tom will let us into his room. He loves those star pictures you sent him. He’s been pinning them up on his wall …

Emma Stoney:

Emma was still furious when she drove into work, the morning after her trip to the plant.

Even this early on an August morning, the Vegas streets were thronged. People in gaudy artificial fabrics strolled past the giant casinos: the venerable Caesar’s Palace and Luxor and Sands, the new TwenCen Park with its cartoon reconstructions of 30s gangster-land Chicago and 60s Space Age Florida and 80s yuppie-era Wall Street. The endless lights and laser displays made a storm of colour and motion that was dazzling even against the morning sunlight, like glimpses into another, brighter universe. But the landscape of casinos and malls didn’t stay static; there were a number of vacant or redeveloping lots, like missing teeth in a smiling jaw.