Saturn Run

20.

^{JULY 27, 2067}

Fang-Castro checked her implanted clock: 7:45 A.M. Universal time, which was about to become Ship’s time. She went back to looking at her brief speech, which would be broadcast throughout the ship and linked with an Oval Office broadcast by President Santeros.

She would broadcast from the control deck. Sandy was there with his cameras, which were already linked with broadcast control on the ground. At 7:50, the news anchor for PBS appeared on the screen; he spoke for a little less than a minute, setting up the President’s talk.

At 7:51, Santeros appeared on-screen. She looked almost… sweet, Fang-Castro thought. The power of digital makeup. Fang-Castro herself had only the old-fashioned kind, painstakingly applied by Fiorella. They were walking a narrow path: Fang-Castro wanted to look good, but by no means better than the President.

Santeros was saying… “a possible great step into the future for all of mankind. We have no idea exactly what our visitors have left behind out there, but we fully expect to benefit from the technology that we’ve already been witness to, as their ship arrived and then departed…”

Blah, blah, blah…

Fang-Castro checked the clock again, and saw Sandy holding up a fist. That meant that she was less than a minute away. Sandy flashed five fingers, twice: ten seconds…

Five fingers, four, and Santeros said, “From the command deck of the Richard M. Nixon, Naomi Fang-Castro, captain of the Nixon. Captain Fang-Castro.”

She was on.

“This is Fang-Castro of the USSS Richard M. Nixon. In just under two minutes, we will start the engines and begin the voyage that will see us arriving at Saturn at Christmas. Initially we will be firing a twenty-five percent thrust while we run our in-flight checks. Assuming everything is nominal, and we expect it to be, after one orbit we’ll bring the engines up to fifty percent power. At the end of the second orbit, we’ll take them to full power. The status display on the wall here in the ship, and on our blog down on Earth, will keep everybody current on our progress.”

This, she said, had already been a long journey. Hundreds of workers had visited the Nixon, to get the ship ready for the longest manned voyage in human history.

Blah blah blah…

At the carefully timed end, she said, “Thank you for your support, Madam President. We could not have done this without you. Now it’s time for me to say… three… two… one… and…

“Launch!”

In the ship, half the people in the Commons unconsciously braced themselves… for nothing.

The Chinese launch had been high drama. This was the exact opposite, a non-event. There was nothing. No vibration; no new sound, no feeling of acceleration or indication of motion. The status display showed no change in speed or altitude.

Somebody asked, “Is there a problem?”

Somebody else pointed at the broadcast feed on the main monitor. They were on the nightside, and the steady bright glow from the engines proved that they were firing.

Fiorella smiled into the camera: “Yes, the Nixon’s doing just what it was supposed to do, which is to begin its spiral out of low Earth orbit. At twenty-five percent power, though, and fully laden, its acceleration in open space is undetectable to human senses—a thousandth of a gee. In the zero-gee environment of the axle modules, free-floating objects will have started drifting, but none of the crew has felt anything different at all. In the zero-point-one gee artificial gravity of the Commons, there isn’t even a perceptible tilt to the floor.”

The reality of the departure was even more peculiar than that. The engines that were trying to push the ship forward were actually causing it to slow down. Before the Nixon could go to Saturn, it had to claw its way out of Earth’s gravitational well, and that took prodigious amounts of energy. The energy that was pouring out of the VASIMR engines as thrust all went into raising the ship’s altitude ever so gradually. With the passage of each minute the Nixon climbed by about one kilometer under the push of four plasma exhaust streams.

Bit by bit, the ex–space station’s orbit was expanding, and that’s what made things seem weird—a normal state of affairs in orbital mechanics. Larger orbits were slower orbits. In its original thousand-kilometer orbit, the space station zipped along at over seven kilometers per second. A geostationary communications satellite, orbiting at thirty-six thousand kilometers, only traveled at about three kilometers per second, while the moon, three hundred and eighty thousand kilometers away, traversed its path at a stately one kilometer per second. The Nixon obeyed the same laws of orbital physics. As the Nixon climbed kilometer by kilometer, it slowed down, and it would continue to do so until it was finally on an escape trajectory.

By lunchtime the earth that slid past the window was shrunken, the curvature of the horizon more pronounced. The Nixon was on its third expanding spiral orbit about the earth and the status monitor showed that it had lost about a third of a kilometer per second of velocity, but picked up more than five hundred kilometers of altitude. By dinnertime, the view of Earth, now three thousand, six hundred kilometers below, was dramatically different.

Sandy and Fiorella were doing two-minute squirts of commentary, every half hour. In their cameras, which ran continuously, the earth looked much smaller than it had at the start.

“Man, a freaking year with no surf. I think I want off,” Sandy said.

“I don’t know, Earth might not be a safe place for us,” Fiorella said.

“What?”

“We might have made Fang-Castro look a little too good.”

“Ah, bullshit,” Sandy said.

“Hell hath no fury like a president upstaged.”

Sandy grinned. “You know, FC did look pretty good. And when I left the command deck, I thought she looked a little smug.”

“It’s funny now, but…”

By breakfast the next morning, the Nixon had completed seven ever-expanding circuits of the earth. The planet, nineteen thousand kilometers away, was fully visible as a ball. The Nixon had lost almost half its speed, but no one could doubt that it was leaving the earth behind. The day before, the crew had been jubilant, hyper. By the next morning, everyone was simply subdued. For the next year, for better or for worse, the Nixon would be their entire world.

They were stuck with each other. No chance for second thoughts, no opportunity to back out.

John Clover finished his usual breakfast of pancakes, tofu sausage, and orange juice, looked at Becca and asked, “What?”

“Nothing. I’ve been up here for weeks, never a thought about it—the separation. Now I’m thinking about it.” She pushed an egg around her plate, nibbled at a piece of toast.

“Well, stop thinking about it.”

“Not always that easy.” She looked past him, at the shrinking Earth out the window, and at the altitude display, which was steadily clicking off kilometers like a second hand, each clock-tick marking their increasing separation from home.

“No, but you’ll get used to it,” Clover said.

“How do you know that? Maybe I’ll fabricate a hatchet and run screaming through the ship…”

“First, don’t let Crow hear you say that. Second, tens of thousands of people are sent to prison in the United States every year. Conditions are not good, but the vast majority manage to survive long periods inside when they are effectively as contained as we are. Many times, brutally contained, without access to any society at all. We, on the other hand, are all quite comfortable, well-tended, and engaged in one of the most prestigious adventures in the history of the world. We’ll all be famous in our various professions. You already are.”

“I couldn’t handle prison, either,” Becca said.

“Sure you could. In fact, if you were telling the truth about your last job, you were in a kind of prison—at least, a little green man from Mars couldn’t have told the difference. You woke up in one building, went to another building, spent the entire day there, until late at night, then went back to the first building, where you went to sleep. Here, you wake up in one building, take an elevator to the engineering department, work all day, and come back here to sleep. Same exact thing that you had been doing.”

“But back home, I could go out when I wanted to.”

“But you didn’t. Not often.”

“But if I poked a hole in the wall of my apartment, or a hole in the wall of a prison, the world would be outside. Apple trees and birds. Poke a hole in one of our walls, and there’s nothing out there but a giant void. Nothing but a black, airless hole and meaningless death.”

Clover smiled and said, “Take a pill. No, wait—don’t take a pill. Pull your shorts up and go back to work. You’re in an office building. Don’t worry about it.”

After a little more chat, Becca checked the time and said, “I like talking to you, John. I’m in an office building. I’m going to work. Nothing to worry about. And now, I gotta go to work.”

As she walked away, Clover leaned back in his chair and closed his eyes: poke a hole in one of our walls, and there’s nothing out there but a giant void. Nothing but a black, airless hole and meaningless death.

Oh, Jesus Christ, he thought. What have I done?

By lunchtime, the Nixon’s altitude had almost doubled, by dinnertime, nearly tripled. The earth was more than fifty thousand kilometers away. Still the most impressive object in the sky, thirty times the size of the full moon, the big blue marble was diminishing with each hour.

The Nixon was more than halfway through its eighth outward-bound loop around the earth, but it would never complete the orbit. Shortly before eight o’clock, Sandy walked through the Commons room and found Clover staring at the earth as it swept past with the rotation of the spacecraft. He was not alone. Everyone who wasn’t on duty seemed mesmerized by the shrinking Earth, sliding past the window, hypnotic as a stage magician’s swinging watch.

The PA system pinged. “This is Captain Fang-Castro. Our altitude is sixty-eight thousand kilometers and our velocity is three-point-three kilometers per second. We are now on an escape trajectory. Our next stop is Saturn. This will be the last status report of the day. Everyone have a good night.”

Clover sighed and smiled at Sandy. “On our way. Thank God. Life gets easier when there aren’t any choices, you know what I mean?”

“Yeah, exactly.”

“Less than a day and we’ll be out past the moon,” Clover said. “Hope we don’t hit it.”

Sandy laughed and said, “That’d embarrass the shit out of the orbit guys, huh?” He watched for another minute, then said, “I’m heading for the gym. Stink the place up a little, so it’s more like home.”

Clover said, “Good idea. I’ll catch you there.”

Sandy left and Clover turned back to the view screen. Even if the engines cut off this very second, they’d never return to Earth. They’d just coast through the solar system forever. Gravity no longer bound them to home and they were heading into deep space.

In an office building, Clover thought. In an office building with his faithful cat.