SUMMIT PRODUCES AGREEMENT IN PRINCIPLE,
BUT NO DETAILED ACCORD
The Strasbourg summit meeting has adjourned with agreement on the general principles of an overall settlement, but no detailed language for a treaty, which will be written by working committees established at the meeting, who will probably take at least six months to complete their draft.
Soviet President Constantin Gorchenko has agreed to introduce a resolution into the Common European Parliament calling for the simultaneous admission of the United States, the Ukraine, and any other Soviet Socialist Republic that decides to seek direct admission via national plebiscite. American President Nathan Wolfowitz has agreed to place Battlestar America under control of the Parliament as part of the eventual treaty of admission, and the leaders of the other present member states, after much heated discussion, have agreed to consider all old American debts to their governments, central banks, and private financial institutions formally canceled.
It was further agreed that all representation in the new Common Parliament shall be by direct election from districts of roughly equal population under a single statute to be enacted by the Common Parliament, that district lines shall be drawn and adjusted every five years by the Common Parliament, and that any legally qualified citizen of the whole may stand for any district without regard to the old national boundaries.
Member states will retain national military forces on an operational level, but these will be placed under a unified mixed command appointed by the Common Parliament, which will also directly control all nuclear forces as well as the Battlestar America defense system, whose personnel will be chosen according to a national quota system yet to be determined.
No name for the new transatlantic order has yet been agreed upon. “Union of Terrestrial Nations,” “Union of Terrestrial Peoples,” “Atlantic Confederation,” “Northern Confederation,” and “United States of Earth” have all been suggested, but none of these has met with general approval.
It would seem that the new order we are now embarking upon is as yet too fluid in its emerging nature, too much of a break with the past, too unforeseen in its eventual consequences, at present, even to have found its proper name.
—Robert Reed, StarNet
XXX
It seemed to take forever to get the Tass and StarNet crews settled in their seats, but at long last they had finally secured their equipment, Franja had her takeoff clearance, and the Aeroflot Concordski was at the top of the runway.
It wasn’t stretching a point all that far to say that the negotiations for the coverage of this flight had been more difficult and tortuous than what had gone on at the Strasbourg summit.
Tass had wanted this flight to depart from Moscow; this was, after all, an Aeroflot Concordski, and they had been the ones who’d put the whole thing together, hadn’t they? Mother, and the doctors, had put their feet down on that. The medical risk had to be minimized, and that meant no prior flight from Paris to Moscow, and certainly not a grueling train ride. So it was agreed that the flight would leave from De Gaulle.
Tass then demanded exclusive coverage of the flight to orbit, and StarNet hit the ceiling. This was as much their doing as Tass’s, they had a right to equal coverage. Tass then countered by offering shared coverage of the flight to orbit in return for an exclusive on the Grand Tour Navette. Agence France-Presse and Reuters screamed at that one—the GTN was a European ship, wasn’t it?
Finally, StarNet agreed to pay Tass a handsome sum for the right to cover the flight to orbit for the American market, with Tass getting its exclusive in the rest of the world. The GTN trip would be covered by a press pool of all the major news agencies, one correspondent each, and a common cameraman, and each of them would have the right to sell their version on the open market.
Once the contracts had been signed, though, Tass took over and cut through red tape like a knife through butter. Jerry Reed’s daughter was an Aeroflot pilot with a Concordski rating? Perfect! We’ll have her fly her own father into orbit! Why not have her accompany him around the Moon? Good way to get our own spin on it for the folks back home!
At the last moment, they had even decided that Father should sit beside Franja in the co-pilot’s seat. Aeroflot officials had protested that that violated any number of safety regulations, but the Tass people had made a quick call to Moscow, and now here Father was, sitting beside her as she ran up the turbofans, the hibernautika console lashed to the co-pilot’s seat behind him, and an automatic camera taped over the instrument panel to catch the shot.
“I’ll try to make this as easy on you as I can, Father,” Franja told him.
“Don’t worry about me, Franja,” Father said, grinning from ear to ear like the smallest of boys. “I’m not about to die on you now!”
“Of course you’re not, Father,” Franja said uneasily, and she gunned the engines, released the brakes, and the Concordski roared down the runway.
A MODEST PROPOSAL
The Americans, the Europeans, and the Soviets are presently in a quandary over the choice of a name for their new grouping, but from our perspective, the perspective of the majority of the world’s struggling population on the outside looking in, the choice is obvious.
Why not call it the Caucasian Union and be done with it? For is it not a union of and for the developed white nations of the Northern Hemisphere, a consolidation of the economic and military power of the First and Second Worlds without regard for the welfare of Third World peoples?
If the rumored Japanese application for admission is ever accepted and that name becomes too racially offensive, “The Union of the Haves” would be an even better name, for that is just what it is.
—Times of India
Sonya stood alone with Robert on the tarmac, far away from the press and the official mob, and her heart skipped a beat as the Concordski lifted off the runway, tucked its landing gear into its belly, and seemed to leap into the sky.
“Bon voyage, Jerry,” she muttered softly, and then she began to cry.
Bobby put his arm around her. “Come on, Mom,” he said, “that’s our crazy space cadet up there, and he’s going where he’s always belonged.”
“He’s killing himself, Robert,” Sonya said. “You know that as well as I.”
Bobby didn’t say anything for a long while, as the Concordski dwindled away to a silvery glimmer still climbing up into the bright blue sky.
“Robert?”
“Let it be, Mom, let it be.”
“I’m trying, Bobby, really I am!”
“I know, Mom, you’ve been very brave.”
“Not as brave as he is!” Sonya wailed.
“Not many people are.”
“Oh, Bobby, Bobby, I don’t want to lose him now that I’ve really found him! Is that so selfish? Is that so wrong?”
“Of course it isn’t,” her son told her. “But don’t think about losing him now. Think of him up there at last, where he’s always wanted to be. Don’t think of what we’re losing. Think of what he’s finally found.”
Sonya tried, she really did. She stood there with Bobby’s arm around her shoulders until she had entirely lost sight of the Concordski rising toward the stars, and she tried with all her heart to feel what Jerry must be feeling now, going home at last to his dream in the sky.
And she almost made it, her heart was almost glad, as she saw a tiny point of fire way up there as the main engine ignited, as Jerry rode it up and out to a place where she couldn’t follow. She tried to be happy for him, even as a sad lorn part of her knew she was saying good-bye.
AN END TO AN ECONOMY OF LIMITS
Third World nations may have a moral and political right to their protests against the emerging new Northern Hemispheric order, for in the short run, and perhaps in the medium run as well, what has indeed emerged is a world in which a union of the rich northern developed nations will even more fully dominate the impoverished and fragmented peoples of the Third World.
But in the long run, the vast amounts of capital released by the consolidation of the military programs of most of the world’s major powers, and the technological synergy among the American, Soviet, and European space programs, will result in the transformation of our present global economy of scarcity into a solar system–wide economy of abundance, with open-ended resources of raw materials, energy, and perhaps even land.
In such an environment, exploitation of Third World nations for cheap raw materials and labor will no longer make pragmatic economic sense, and while it would be too much to expect the developed nations to donate the lion’s share of the benefits to lifting the rest of the world out of poverty, the era of economic imperialism will at least be over, and capital resources released for mutually advantageous development.
The slices may not be more equitably divided, but the pie will get bigger and bigger every year. In the long run, this rising tide will indeed lift all boats.
—Financial Times
Jerry’s breath was quite literally taken away when the main engine fired and the g’s pressed him back into his seat. It was like a sock in the stomach that went on and on and on, a mountain crushing his chest, as the hibernautika tried to stabilize his straining heart. His field of vision was filled with sparkles, and it kept threatening to go black. He seemed to feel capillaries bursting, his head rang like a hollow gong, and he could feel the rush of blood behind his eardrums.
“Are you all right, Father?” Franja’s voice said thickly beside him.
“Yeah, yeah,” he managed to wheeze, “I’m doing okay.”
But of course he wasn’t, and he knew it. He was blacking in and out, he was struggling to keep his head above water in an inky sea, and every so often, a wave broke over it, and he was no longer there, he was drifting down, down, down, into the darkness, where it would be so easy to just let himself float forever . . .
. . . floating upward like a cloud riding a thermal, upward like a dolphin rising for air, and bursting suddenly into the bright blue sunshine . . .
The boost was over. Brilliant white sunlight flooded the cabin through the windshield, and he was awake, and aware, and alive.
He could still feel his heart beating febrilely in his chest, and he still didn’t seem to be getting quite enough oxygen, but his breathing had stabilized, and his vision had cleared, and his body was as light as air.
“Father? Father? You were unconscious there for a while, are you all right?”
Jerry loosened his harness, pushed with his feet, lifted his butt off the seat cushion, and floated there three inches above it, just as he had always imagined, laughing in delight.
“I feel wonderful, Franja!” he declared. “I’ve never felt better in my life!”
He was dizzy, he was weak, he could feel his heart beating abnormally, and he had a raging headache, but it was nothing but the perfect truth.
“The best is yet to come, Father,” Franja said in a much-relieved tone of voice. “The best is yet to come.”
She fired a series of attitude-control thrusters, and the Concordski rolled gently out of the sunshine like a basking whale.
And, oh God, there it was! Immense and glorious, glowing like a living jewel against the black velvet of the void.
He had seen this sight reproduced on film and video at least ten thousand times. He had dreamed of it, he had imagined it, all of his life. There had never been a moment when it was far from his mind’s eye. But nothing had really prepared him for the authentic experience.
The seas glowed with a blue intensity that seemed to go all the way down into the core of the planet. The continents paraded by like great shaggy beasts. The cloud decks painted slowly moving shadows across the surface, swirling and whirling with the visible breath of the atmosphere. The whole Earth was restlessly, palpably, majestically alive.
And he was floating weightlessly above it like a dolphin at the apogee of its leap. He was looking back at where he had struggled up from like the first lungfish to climb gasping up the beach to gaze back in wonder at the mirrored surface of the sea.
The Concordski’s orbit carried it past the terminator, or rather the Earth below seemed to turn beneath him to proudly display the lights of its cities, spangled sparsely across the great continents, gathered along the coastlines into nebulae, into stellar clusters, and it seemed as if the galaxy itself were mirrored down there, the promise of the true golden age of space to come, when the cities of man would spread themselves out among the stars.
And if he would never live to see that age, if he had been born far too soon to walk the streets of unknown cities on planets circling far-distant suns, well, he had lived long enough to have this moment. To sit here with his daughter and see this planet entire, to look back on the Earth, on the cradle of that far-distant galactic future, at the moment of its birth.
The Concordski continued along its ballistic orbit, and the sun rose again, baleful and beautiful, a fast, hard, orbital sunrise, sharp and sudden as a halogen lamp turned on in a darkened room.
“There it is, Father, there it is!” Franja cried, pointing at a mote of light shimmering in the actinic glare.
Yes, there it was, defining itself as they approached it, the silvery oval of the fuel balloon, the long needle of the central spine, the spidery framework, the passenger module slung beneath it.
The Grand Tour Navette shining there in the darkness, brilliantly lit by the orbital sunrise.
Franja began firing thrusters, and soon enough had matched orbits, and there he was, floating weightlessly, looking out at the true wonder of what he had wrought.
Sunlight gleamed on the silvery surface of the great fuel balloon, so like an outsized blimp from this perspective, like a whale of the stellar seas. Below it, the windows of the passenger module glowed with internal life, like the cabin lights of a great ocean liner seen from a dinghy at night.
It was indeed a true spaceship, the first of its kind. Not a “module” or a “vehicle” or a “space capsule,” but a true ship of space, right off the cover of one of his father’s old science-fiction magazines.
Flash Gordon would feel right at home. Buck Rogers would not be disappointed. Captain Kirk would be proud to take command.
He had done it. He had built himself a real spaceship, and he was going to ride it before he died.
And as Franja warped the Concordski closer to the Grand Tour Navette, as a spaceway reached out from the passenger cabin to mate with the plane’s air lock, as thrillingly ordinary as a jetway rolling up beside an airliner outside the terminal, Jerry thought of Rob.
Rob Post’s words echoed in his heart. “You’re going to live in the golden age of space travel, it’s up to you, kiddo, you can be one of the people who makes it happen.”
And it was true. He was.
And it tasted just like a huge bowl of Häagen-Dazs chocolate ice cream swimming in deep, dark Hershey’s chocolate syrup.
And you were another, Uncle Rob. Thank you for the ice cream.
Franja was too busy with final maneuvers to see him cry.
But the camera above the instrument panel caught it all and broke the world’s heart.
CONGRESS OF PEOPLES TO REASSESS POSITION
The Congress of Peoples opened its meeting in Vienna today amid considerable division and confusion.
Did the arrangements worked out at the Strasbourg summit by the existing nation-states move far enough in the direction of a “Europe of Peoples” for the Congress to support it? Or should the nationless peoples unite in Parliament to either oppose it or modify it? And if the latter, modify it to what? Should the Congress of Peoples re-form itself as a transnational political party? Or should it consider its work done and disband in triumph?
“This promises to be a long and complex session,” Ian MacTavish said. “The Congress of Peoples has long been oriented toward a long hard struggle. Now we find ourself unexpectedly coping with a sudden partial victory.”
Perhaps Slovak delegate Gustav Svoboda put it best: “The real question is whether there will be enough government left on a nation-state level to be worth fighting. Or whether we should just sit back, hold our peace, and let this obsolescent layer of largely ceremonial function just wither away.”
—Die Welt
Father had suffered more damage during the boost to orbit than he had ever allowed to show. Franja should have realized that when he blacked out during the burn, but he had been so happy, and she had been busy maneuvering the Concordski, and she didn’t see how bad it had really been until they were in the spaceway.
Three crew members came brachiating up the rings to greet them, just like space monkeys, and Franja had reflexively grabbed a ring herself. But Father just floated there at the end of the spaceway, waving his arms weakly in a futile attempt to stabilize his position, staring down the tube uncertainly, his face pale, his chest heaving, his eyes narrowed against the pain.
“I . . . I don’t think I can manage that,” he admitted grudgingly, as the crewpeople whipped up the spaceway toward them, then hung one-handed from the rings.
And they had had to ease him and the hibernautika down the spaceway into the Grand Tour Navette, just like a team of space monkeys unloading fragile cargo.
The cabins in the passenger module might seem like stark spare broom closets to anyone who had never been a space monkey on Cosmograd Sagdeev, but to Franja, they were the lap of space-going luxury. They were as big as a four-monkey bunkroom, but there was only one set of nets, and it had a blow-up headrest so that you could read comfortably in bed. There was a desk and a chair you could strap into. The clothes locker had drawers. The toilet was completely enclosed. And there was actually a small round porthole through which to see the stars.
They put Father in a cabin beside hers. He had wanted to tour the ship immediately, and the press pool was all too eager for it, but Franja had insisted that he rest, and once they had him in the nets, he lost consciousness almost at once.
Jerry awoke to the sight of Franja’s face peering down at him with worried eyes. There was a young man floating beside her, above his sleep net, studying him with a more professional concern, glancing at some hand-held instrument.
Looking across his chest, Jerry saw that his shirt had been unbuttoned, that there were electrodes pasted above his heart, circuited through a tiny transmitter taped in the center of the cluster.
“Just a checkup, Father,” Franja said all too reassuringly. “Dr. Gonzalez has been running some routine tests.”
“How am I doing, Doctor?” Jerry demanded. “How long have I been out?”
Franja and the doctor exchanged quick uncertain glances.
“The truth, Doctor!” Jerry insisted.
Franja sighed. “Tell him,” she said.
“Well, Mr. Reed, you did suffer some anoxia during the acceleration, and there has been some deterioration of heart function, and you may notice some minor problems with motor control . . . ,” Gonzalez said slowly.
Then, much more rapidly: “But you have slept for nearly ten hours, and the zero gravity seems to have improved your condition, or at least stabilized it.”
“Can he move about, Dr. Gonzalez?” Franja asked.
Gonzalez seemed to ponder that for a long moment. “I suppose so,” he finally said. Then he forced a ghastly phony smile. “That is what you’ve risked your life for, isn’t it, Mr. Reed?”
“They’re about to break orbit, Father,” Franja told him. “They want you on the bridge for the big moment. Think you can make it?”
“Or die trying,” Jerry declared, and he managed to laugh, feeling a pain in his chest as he did that quickly subsided. No one else thought it was very funny.
The doctor removed the electrodes, and Jerry managed to button up his own shirt, though his fingers felt a bit numb and wooden. They got him out of the nets, the doctor velcroed his oscilloscope to the bulkhead and took hold of the hibernautika’s handle. Franja took Jerry’s hand, and, brachiating along the rings easily with the other, towed him like a great frail balloon out of the cabin and up the central corridor to the bridge.
The standard bridge crew was four—a pilot, a co-pilot, a flight engineer, and the captain—though they had followed Jerry’s original design and provided three extra couches for observers at the rear, well away from the instrument panels and controls.
One of these was occupied by the press-pool cameraman, who lay there in his nets swiveling his camera endlessly as Jerry was introduced to the French captain, the German pilot, the Russian co-pilot, and the British flight engineer.
But Jerry had little attention left for the formalities, he scarcely heard what anyone was saying, including himself, for his being was transfixed by a vision, and the vision that transfixed him was that of the vast curve of the Earth through the big observation bubble that formed the prow of the passenger module.
There had been endless argument about that bubble. It compromised structural integrity. It added to the cost. It was entirely superfluous, a wall screen and cameras would have afforded a much more complete selection of views.
But in the end, the romantics had won out, and there it was, the naked reality itself, palpable and massive in the crystalline vacuum, awesomely present as no video image could have been.
After the preliminary footage had been shot, they fastened Jerry into the couch beside the cameraman, Franja crawled into the nets of the one on the other side and took his hand, a shot that had the cameraman straining awkwardly in his restraints to get the close-up.
The bridge crew returned to their couches and the short countdown began.
“Sixty seconds . . .”
“All systems green.”
“Thirty seconds . . .”
“Firing sequence initiated . . .”
“Ten seconds . . .”
“We have a commit.”
“Zero . . .”
“Ignition confirmed,” the co-pilot said, but it was entirely superfluous, as Jerry felt a subtle but unmistakable pressure squeezing him gently back against the padding of the couch. It was barely noticeable as the main engine overcame the GTN’s massive inertia, but as it built up delta v, the pressure began to build up too, his lungs started to strain. His heart was racing in his chest by the time the curve of the Earth began to fall away.
Jerry knew that what he was experiencing was no more than a half-g acceleration, but after the long hours of zero gravity, his body seemed to weigh twice, not one half, of what it had on Earth. It was like being plunged back into a suddenly unfamiliar and hostile element, like vaulting out of a long float in a heated swimming pool up into the sudden chill of the naked air.
It seemed as if he were trying to breathe some viscous fluid. Spiderweb tingles radiated from his chest down his arms. His head felt as if it were stuffed with broken glass. Tiny sparkles teased at his field of vision.
Oh please, please, don’t let me black out now!
The Earth slid out of the observation bubble’s field of vision as the Grand Tour Navette executed a roll, and now the transient sparkles were quite overwhelmed by thousands of hard bright stars glaring unwaveringly in the perfect darkness.
I won’t! I won’t!
He squeezed Franja’s hand with what was left of his strength and felt her strong young grip squeezing back. His field of vision seemed to narrow so that all he saw was the glorious star field drifting majestically across it from left to right. His body was pressed hard against the couch padding, as if a great hand on his chest were seeking to thrust him away from the vision before him, down, down, down, into the inky black waters. . . .
And then a brilliant silvery ball pushed back the circling darkness with a hard white actinic light as it swam majestically across the observation bubble.
The Grand Tour Navette juddered from the rapid firing of clusters of small thrusters and then it was centered in the bubble, in his fading field of vision, pulling him toward it, not down, down, down, but up, up, up, into the bright white circle of light mottled with faint gray dapplings, up a long narrow dark tunnel toward the glorious promise at the other end, toward the Moon.
He smiled, he sighed, and he let it take him up, up, and away.
After Father had lost consciousness on the bridge, Dr. Gonzalez had insisted that he rest in his cabin as much as possible and had given him a sedative to keep him asleep.
“I’m afraid the prognosis is not good,” he told Franja. “Medically speaking, this has been a very foolish venture. He’s worse than he was when he boarded. He showed some improvement after hours in zero g, but even this mild acceleration now . . .”
“The prognosis was always terminal, Doctor,” Franja said grimly. “We all knew that, and so did he. But will he make it? Will he make it to the Moon?”
Gonzalez had shrugged. “That, I think, is not an entirely medical matter. His heart has been damaged, his respiration is becoming labored, and he’s probably sustained scattered cerebral damage already. He could suffer a major stroke or heart attack at any time, or survive like this for weeks.”
But then he had stepped out of his medical persona. “As a doctor, all I can say is that the flesh is deteriorating rapidly,” he said. “But as a man . . . Well, the spirit is impressively strong. And he deserves to make it. And barring a major incident, that should count for something. All we can do is give him all the rest we can and pray to God for justice.”
“I wish I could do that sincerely, Dr. Gonzalez, but I’m afraid I have a great deal of difficulty believing in God, just or otherwise. I’m afraid I’m not quite up to praying for cosmic justice.”
And Gonzalez had smiled a strange little smile. “But I do, Señorita Reed,” he told her, “so, con su permiso, I will.”
And so Father slept most of the time, and Gonzalez prayed, and Franja found herself alone for most of the forty-four-hour voyage, eating in the commissary, sleeping in the nets, fending off the unwanted attention of the press-pool reporters, who refused to let her alone in the absence of their star performer, and spending most of her waking hours in the small observation bubble in the nose of the salon module, watching the imperceptible approach of the Moon.
It looked so cold and pale at first, a hard white disc of reflected sunlight, baleful and indifferent in the cruel black darkness, nothing like a planet, nothing like the living Earth she had spent so many hours regarding with wonder and longing as a space monkey on Cosmograd Sagdeev.
It seemed like a painted backdrop, a special-effects shot from some sleazy film; distant and flat, a foolish thing indeed for which to throw one’s life away. What was it after all but a cold colorless rock whose only hint of life, the semblance of a human face that the eye constructed from the patterns of the mares and the craters, was a mere optical illusion, a perceptual denial of the lifeless reality?
Only as it grew larger and larger, only as the GTN could be perceived as actually speeding toward it, did it wax into a true sphere in her mind’s eye, and loom into psychic focus as another planet, with a true geography cast into shadowed relief, with its own dusty version of mountains and valleys, desiccated and stillborn, but still truly another world.
Only then did the vision become real, become personal. Only then did it even occur to her that she too was about to experience the fulfillment of a teenage dream. Only then did she feel the impact.
She was going to the Moon.
How strange that she had never thought of it that way before! She had never thought of it as anything but Father’s trip to the Moon. She had quite forgotten, somehow, that this was something that she too had dreamed of—as a girl listening to Father’s stories, as a student in the lycée working so hard for admission to Yuri Gagarin University, at Gagarin itself, working night and day to bring a moment like this about, aboard Sagdeev, and in pilots’ school too.
Only in these last years hopping from city to city, immersed in the newfound wonders of a living planet, had the dream of space lost its clear hard-edged purity and faded into some vague future possibility, become the memory of a dream dreamt long ago by someone else.
Only fortune, and indeed what had seemed like bad fortune at the time, had confined her to one planet and taught her to love the wonders of the Earth. She had never sought to be the woman she had become.
And only Father’s misfortune had gifted that woman with the fulfillment of the lost girlhood dream she had inherited from him. Only now, when she had quite forgotten that goal in her total concern for him, was she about to receive what she had once so single-mindedly sought.
There was some kind of justice in that.
For only now was Father’s last gift truly deserved.
And by God, Father deserved it too.
Franja did not believe in God, still less in cosmic justice.
But as she looked out on the dead white surface of the Moon, she thought she could see a tiny sparkle, the Lunagrad half-burrowed into the surface of this world that had never before known life, and she imagined cities spangled over the once-dead surface in some far-distant age, cities as teeming with life and complexity as any on Earth. And that too would be the fulfillment of the great human dream in the face of a cold and uncaring void.
Even a dead world could become what life chose to make it.
And she found herself remembering something Nathan Wolfowitz had said in the midst of a crisis that had threatened to scourge that life from the Earth in a paroxysm of human stupidity.
There ain’t no justice in this world, the American President had said, except the justice we make.
Or in any other, she thought.
No, she couldn’t bring herself to pray to a God she didn’t believe in for cosmic justice. But just now she found herself envying those who could and did.
AN OPTIMIST’S VIEW OF THE GREAT SILENCE
Before the discovery of the Barnards, the pessimists took our failure to detect signals from extraterrestrial civilizations as proof that no one was out there. Now that we know that there is, now that we even have hints of unthinkably advanced civilizations toward the galactic core, the pessimists take our continued failure to detect interstellar broadcasts as proof that these civilizations are hostile or indifferent. Or even engaged in a Darwinian battle of tooth and claw we should seek to hide from.
But from an optimist’s viewpoint, this failure to communicate may be seen as potential good news. For if it is possible for civilizations at a sufficient stage of advancement to engage in easy interstellar chatter, to travel easily to other stars, why would they bother? Why cope with a communications delay measured in decades and centuries when you can meet face-to-face? Who knows, civilizations much in advance of our own might even acquire the ability to travel faster than light, by wormhole tunnels created by artificial black holes, for example, or more likely by something we cannot even imagine.
The pessimists look out at the stars, and they fearfully see the very chauvinisms we now, finally, seem to be in the process of overcoming writ large and eternal in a galactic behavioral sink.
But we optimists look out at the stars and hopefully see a galactic main and the ships of many peoples sailing its immensity, and we say perhaps they have avoided contacting us for the best of reasons. Perhaps they’ve just been waiting for us to grow up, put the strife and dangers of planetary adolescence behind us, hoist our own sails, and set forth to join them, not as the buccaneers we once were, but as a mature and worthy civilization.
—Science
Occasionally, Jerry found himself rising up to the surface of a sea of warm liquid blackness into a world of pressure and pain and sparky occluded vision. Sometimes Franja was there, sometimes the doctor, but most of these moments of conscious lucidity were endured alone, lying in the darkened cabin, feeling the breath being squeezed out of him, the edge of vertigo and nausea, the pains radiating out from his chest down his limbs, the headache that fragmented thought, the fetid metallic taste of his own death in his mouth.
A part of him would recoil and try to drift back into the comforting nothingness, but the stronger part of him fought to retain consciousness even of this, fought to remain awake and alive, fought not to die like a whimpering creature in the dark, used the pain, the struggle itself, as a goad to awareness.
Not yet! Not now!
Always the darkness was stronger, always his last thought was of being dragged back down beneath the surface, but always he came rising up again, and now he felt himself surfacing once more, into the pain, into the ceaseless pressure, into . . .
He blinked his eyes in wonder. There were still floaters in his field of vision, but he was seeing much more clearly now. And thinking more clearly too, he found himself realizing. He was fully awake. There were still tingly pains in his chest and limbs, but the pressure was gone. And so was the crushing weight of gravity.
His head still ached and he was still quite dizzy, but the black tide had receded from his mind, and his consciousness was clear and sharp. Gasping to breathe the attenuated air, he felt like a dying fish that had been tossed back into the water, reprieved and reinvigorated by a sudden return to his natural element.
As zero gravity was now.
And then he realized what had happened. The main engine had been shut down for the insertion into lunar orbit. He had made it! They were there! They had reached the Moon!
But then he remembered that there was one ordeal yet to come.
They would use gravitational braking to let the Moon close the parabola of their flyby into an elliptical orbit, but they had to lose velocity first to do it, and that meant one more burn, a short, hard hot one at a quarter g, with the main engine thrusting against the forward vector.
First they would turn the ship. . . .
And the GTN began to jerk and judder as scores of little control thrusters brought it about. Then there was a long terrifying stillness as the computers verified the burn parameters.
And the ship shook and a great fist slammed him back into the padding, knocking the breath out of him, sending lightning bolts of pain across his chest and down his limbs, pounding him back into the inky waters, pushing him under, dragging him away, down, down, down . . .
Not yet, goddamn you! Not now!
Jerry ground his fingernails into the flesh of his palms. He bit down gingerly on his tongue. He would not let the darkness carry him away this time, he would not trust that he would rise to the surface again, he would damn well wait this out, he would not lose consciousness now!
Not yet, motherfucker! Not now!
It seemed to go on forever, and then, all at once, it was over. The main engine shut down, the fist on his chest disappeared, and he came bobbing weightless like a cork up out of the depths of the suffocating sea.
After the acceleration, the return of zero gravity was like a burst of exhilarating energy, a return to natural life. His breathing was labored, the pains in his chest and arms were worse than before, there was an unsettling numbness in his fingers and toes, but his vision had cleared, the darkness had receded, and he was very much awake and aware.
Indeed, everything seemed to have a special sharpness, a newness, a wonderful clarity. Slowly and awkwardly, he managed to disengage himself from the nets, and let himself float upward like a cloud toward the arbitrary ceiling. He just let himself drift like that for a while, exulting in the weightless freedom, until a ring came within his feeble grasp.
He was hanging there from it in a standing position when they came to get him, floating on his feet like a man, like a new man, like a man of the future who was going to the Moon.
Franja’s eyes widened in amazement. The doctor frowned. The cameraman caught it for posterity.
“Well, well, Mr. Reed,” the man from Tass said in English, with a smile of relief, “good to see you up and about.”
Jerry insisted on making his own way to the bridge, hand over hand out of the cabin and down the central corridor, with Franja lugging the hibernautika behind him, and the cameraman brachiating awkwardly backward in front of him to get the shot. It seemed to require no strength at all, once you got into the rhythm of it and just let it happen in liquid slow motion, it was like some kind of effortless aerial dance.
You’re a real space cadet, Bob had told him often enough. You ought to be a citizen of outer space.
He grinned as he brachiated down the corridor, weak as a kitten, still in pain, intimate now with his own approaching death, but flying weightlessly like a bird through its natural element just the same.
Now I am, Bob, now I am!
Franja said good-bye at the entrance to the bridge. There were only three free positions inside, and this was a moment that the press pool, robbed of so much human-interest coverage by Jerry’s weakened condition, refused to cede to familial togetherness.
She handed the hibernautika over to the Tass reporter, whom the luck of the pool schedule had given this slot, and the bridge door opened. The cameraman backed awkwardly inside, and then the correspondent, beckoning for Jerry to follow.
Jerry grabbed the last ring in the corridor and vaulted feet first inside. The Russian co-pilot was there to catch him, hugging him about the waist, like a man tenderly catching a small child in his arms.
Through the observation bubble, the Moon was enormous, and the Grand Tour Navette was falling toward it as it approached the line of the terminator, descending toward the pearlescent gray surface just as the Eagle had in those televised images an entire lifetime ago.
But there it was, no longer an image on television, no longer a childhood dream, no longer a flat white circle but a great gleaming curve of a planet rising up to greet him.
The co-pilot released him, took him by the hand, and towed him gently to his own empty couch at the front of the bridge.
“We thought you might like to log a little flight time on the controls,” the young Russian said tenderly. He grinned at Jerry. “Our way of saying thanks for the joystick,” he said as he fastened the harness. “Thanks for giving us the fun of flying her by the seat of our pants!”
“Hold the joystick please, Mr. Reed,” the Tass reporter said. “What a wonderful shot!”
The Grand Tour Navette sped across the sunlit surface toward the line of the terminator, toward the dark side of the Moon, with the joystick control in Jerry’s right hand, and his ship approaching lunar perigee.
The GTN crossed the terminator and swung around the darkened hemisphere into brilliant starry darkness, up and around toward the apogee of its elliptical orbit, and there it was, rising from behind the limb of its satellite, the globe of the Earth, huge and luminous and alive, and there Jerry was, at long impossible last, rounding the Moon, and looking back on all of cis-lunar space from the apogee of the spaceship’s orbit, hanging weightless at the apogee of his own life.
Did he see those sparkling motes moving out there between the Moon and its planet, or were they more floaters in his field of vision, projections in his mind’s eye? It didn’t really matter, for he did see them, and they were there, the satellites and the Cosmograds, the battle stations and Spaceville, the lights of the present and future celestial city of man.
“There will be a short retroburn now to circularize our orbit,” the captain said behind him. The ship juddered as the maneuvering thrusters fired, and it turned end for end, turned the observation bubble away from the Earth, away from the Moon, away from the birthplace, toward the face of the infinite vastness of the future, toward the unthinkably distant stars.
Surely these moving points of light had to be artifacts, visual distortions, projections of the heart’s desire, but he did see them, as clearly as if he had been granted a vision of the far future that he would never live to see—Grand Tour Navettes moving out toward Mars and Jupiter and beyond, starships headed for planets circling far-distant suns.
The retroburn crushed him back into the padding, his breathing became labored, his heart seemed to flutter wildly, and pain shot down his legs and arms.
But it didn’t last long, and he scarcely noticed it, for he was walking on water, soaring out among the stars, out into the future, out where he had always belonged.
They turned the ship again, and once more the Moon lay beneath him, but now the GTN was in a low circular orbit, sweeping majestically across the landscape of another world, great sharply shadowed craters and jagged uneroded mountains, pockmarked wastelands, and desert dusts, pearlescent in the hard sunlight, oh so real in the unnaturally sharp focus of the airless void.
They crossed the terminator again, swept over the nightside, then back over the sunlit surface.
And as they completed the full orbit, Jerry could see it down there on the surface below, and this was no illusion, this was unmistakable, the flash of the great solar mirror, the tiny sharp shapes outlined against the pearly brilliance, the round dot of the red circle they had painted on the surface to proclaim “Here we are!”
Lunagrad. The permanent human settlement that man had planted on another world.
It didn’t matter that that ensign was red, that those were Russians down there. They were humans, and they were living their lives on another planet, and from this vantage, that was all that mattered, they were humans, they were walking on water, and so was he.
“Take the conn, please, Mr. Reed,” the captain said.
“Fly her?” Jerry muttered, unable to take his eyes away from the vision before him.
“Just follow the captain’s marks,” the pilot said. “The computer will do the rest.”
The joystick felt strangely cool and glassy in Jerry’s grasp.
“On my mark,” the captain said as they sped toward the sharp nightside divide.
“Mark!”
They crossed into darkness, and the stars came out, and Jerry pulled straight back on the joystick, and felt the main engine fire. But this time the pressure and the pain seemed to be happening to someone else, for he was riding a mighty rocket, he was in command of its vast forces, he was flying his own spaceship around another world.
“Ten seconds . . .”
The joystick was like a huge cold bowl of chocolate ice cream in a child’s hands.
You’re too young to understand what you’re going to see tonight, but you’re not too young to understand a whole pint of Häagen-Dazs. . . .
“Twenty seconds . . .”
The strange pearlescent television-gray lunar landscape coming up under the lander camera . . . The hollow descending hiss of the retrorockets through the bulkhead . . .
The Eagle has landed . . .
“Twenty five . . .”
The bulky figure descending the ladder in slow motion . . .
“Shutdown.”
The foot coming down on the gray pumice and changing the destiny of the species forever.
Jerry recentered the joystick and floated upward into a sparkly starry dark, but as the Grand Tour Navette rounded the limb of the Moon, a brilliant blue globe appeared at the end of the narrowing black tunnel, the Earth seen from beyond the gravity well, from beyond the onrushing darkness, looking back at him from where it had all started, looking back at him from the future he would never live to see.
But he had lived to see this.
That’s . . . uh . . . one small step for mankind, one giant leap for a man.
“Mr. Reed? Mr. Reed?”
Jerry’s vision was growing blurry now, the inky waters were rolling over him, all that he could see was a brilliant blue circle opening up before him, all he could feel was the wonderful chocolate taste in his mouth.
“Mr. Reed? Mr. Reed? Can you tell the world what it feels like to have finally made it? To fly to the Moon?”
“Like the biggest bowl of chocolate ice cream in the world,” Jerry said into the microphone quite clearly before he sighed and let it carry him up and away.
“What a sight this is! Who would have believed such a thing was possible a few short dark weeks ago? But here it comes, a Russian plane, an Aeroflot Concordski, touching down on the runway at San Francisco Airport to bring a dying American hero home!
“The plane is turning toward the terminal now, the engine of the ambulance helicopter is already running. It is reported that Jerry Reed’s condition has deteriorated further in the last few hours, the planned press conference has been canceled, and he will be taken directly to the hospital and placed in intensive care. . . .
“I have a feeling the world will long remember these pictures, ladies and gentlemen. I have a feeling this is like the first shot of a mushroom-pillar cloud, or the very first footage of the Earth as a planet rising over the surface of the Moon. That shot of the first Aeroflot flight to touch down on American soil in a generation is an image that will forever mark the border between an old world and the new.”
—NBC
The strain of reentry had been far too much, they had almost lost him, and after an hour of circling and messages back and forth between Washington and Moscow, the Soviet Concordski had finally been allowed to land at the San Francisco airport.
That had been a glorious, and terrible, and infuriating moment for Bobby, the cheers, and the lights, and the cameras, Dad’s ashen face as they lowered the gurney from the plane, the mad dash wheeling him through the press of reporters to the helicopter, the microphones shoved in his face . . .
Too much had gone on too fast for Bobby to really have time to feel anything, and now, locked in an awful deathwatch in a hospital room in Palo Alto, he found himself almost wishing the press, with its noise and lights, would find this place and burst into the room waving microphones and cameras.
Anything to break this deathly stillness.
Franja stood beside him, numb and stony-eyed. Mom, who had long since cried herself dry, sat by the bedside. Dr. Burton stood at the other side of the bed, watching the life-signs monitors expectantly, a sunny blond vulture in medical greens. Sara hung back at the rear of the room, looking rather lost.
Dad lay in the bed, breathing shallowly, and Bobby tried to convince himself that his father was feeling no pain, that he was just finally slipping away into a dreamless sleep.
He had been conscious only three times on the trip back from the Moon, and, according to Franja, he had not really been coherent, babbling things she could not understand.
“But his face, Bobby,” Franja told him, “you should have seen it. I never saw him look so happy.”
Dad had been at the edge of death by the time they had helicoptered him to Immortality, Inc., but he rallied tantalizingly under intensive medical care, hanging on for three days now, neither quite dead, nor truly alive.
“If only we could blue-max him,” Burton had fretted. “But no, we have to wait for clinical brain death, it’s the damn law!”
And so the awful deathwatch had begun, and continued, and dragged, on, and on, and on, until now Bobby could only stand there, wishing for it to be over, wishing for his father to finally die.
“Sonya . . .”
Dad’s eyes were still shut, but they were moving fitfully beneath his eyelids like those of a man in a dream, and his lips were moving weakly, and out of them came a dry whispery sound.
“I’m here, Jerry!” Mom said, squeezing his hand.
Dad’s eyes slowly opened, swept weakly around the room, closed again. “I did it,” he whispered, “I walked on water.”
Bobby shot a glance at Burton, who nodded and departed. Then Bobby took Franja’s hand, and they knelt down by the bedside.
“Yeah, Dad,” he said softly, “you really are a bona fide citizen of outer space now.”
Dad’s eyes opened again and looked right at him for what Bobby knew would be the last time. And there was something in them, something brave, and crazy, and somehow satisfied, that almost let him make his peace with that.
“It’s okay, Bob,” Dad told him, as if reading his heart. “I’ve been there, I’ve seen it, it’s not the end, just the end of the beginning . . .”
“Father—”
“What a life you’re going to have, Franja!” Dad said. “You’re going to live in the golden age of space travel. You’re going to be one of the people who makes it all happen. Someday you’re going to sail one of our little canoes into the harbor of a great galactic city. I know it. I’ve seen it. It’s out there waiting for us, you and me, Franja, you and me. . . .”
Franja burst into tears. Bobby hugged her to him.
Father smiled. “You two go now, please,” he said. “I think your mother and I would like to be alone. Take care of each other. Let me remember you like this at the end.”
“Oh, Father!”
“Let it be, big sister, let it be,” Bobby said, and he led her away.
“Sonya . . . I want you to do something for me,” Jerry whispered, his voice growing dimmer with every syllable, his eyes closing heavily at the very end.
“Anything, love . . . ,” Sonya said, leaning closer. “Jerry? Jerry?”
Slowly Jerry’s head rolled over on the pillow toward her, slowly, even more slowly, he fought to open his eyes one last time. And then they were looking right at her, and were it not for what she saw there, she would have quite fallen apart.
But Jerry’s eyes were bright and strong, and his dry cracked lips were creased in a faint smile. “Don’t cry, Sonya,” he whispered. “I’ve been there . . . I’ve seen it . . . starships sailing through the darkness like great ocean liners toward cities circling far distant suns . . . that’s where we’re all going, Sonya, won’t it be grand . . . ?”
Sonya didn’t know whether to rage or to laugh or to cry.
Even now! Even at death’s door! Still her urban spaceman to the very end! Never had she loved him more.
She had always thought she had loved him in spite of this.
Now she finally understood that this was the heart of everything she had loved him for.
“Sonya . . . Sonya . . .”
“Yes, Jerry, I’m here.”
“I want you to do something for me.”
“Anything, love.”
Jerry’s eyes looked down at the hibernautika sitting by his bedside, back into her eyes. “Turn me off,” he said.
“Jerry!”
“Turn me off, Sonya!” he said much more strongly. “Let me go!”
“Don’t ask me to do that!” Sonya cried. “You know I can’t!”
“Sure you can, Sonya,” Jerry told her. “It’ll be just like going to sleep. Like Rip van Winkle. And I’ll wake up in a brand-new world.”
“Oh, Jerry,” she cried, despite herself, “how can you talk like that even now?”
“Because I believe it, Sonya.”
“You really believe it?” Sonya sobbed.
“Of course I do. I’ve seen it. I know it. This is the beginning of the golden age of miracles. Impossible dreams are happening every day. You’re the one who’s always telling me to read the papers, Sonya.”
“Oh, Jerry, I just can’t stand the thought of losing you!” Sonya moaned. “Is that so wrong?”
Jerry’s lips creased in a weak little smile that his eyes made absolutely radiant. “Then let’s not lose each other, Sonya,” he said. “Live a good long happy life,” he told her. “Think of it as a nice long separate vacation. But when it’s over—”
“Jerry—”
“—when it’s over, you come home to me.”
“Oh, Jerry!”
“Let them put you in the time machine too, Sonya. Promise me you’ll do that.”
“Oh, Jerry, Jerry . . .”
“Promise me, Sonya!”
“I promise, love,” Sonya said, willing to say anything to avoid saying the final good-bye.
Jerry sighed. He squeezed her hand one last time before his strength failed him. His head rolled away from her with a heartbreaking smile, and he stared at something he saw on the ceiling, smiling still.
“I’ve got a wonderful idea, Sonya,” he whispered. “Have them put it in our contracts. Let’s not let them wake us up for five hundred years. Let’s not wake up until we can take the grand tour together again, let’s begin our new lives with a long second honeymoon out among the stars. Wouldn’t you like to do that, Sonya?”
“More than anything else in the world . . . ,” Sonya said quite truthfully.
“Don’t you believe that we will?”
“Yes, Jerry, I do,” she lied.
“Then I’m ready to go there now,” Jerry said. “Time to pull my plug.” And he closed his eyes and spoke no more.
Sonya sat there by the bedside for a long, long time, listening to his agonized breathing falter away, watching his smiling tranquil face freezing into its final mask, crying and crying and crying, and waiting for some outside force to end this endless moment.
But nothing did.
Nothing would.
And somehow, she knew, nothing should.
Finally, she thought of the foolish promise she had made him, to join him five hundred years after this moment was ended, a promise that had been made without belief, but now, she suddenly knew, not without a commitment of the heart.
And that had been his parting gift to her, a gift that she now saw had been hers for the taking all along if only she had made the leap of faith to seize it.
You can walk on water, Sonya, but first you have to find something worth walking on water for.
He had always had a dream like that and she never had. She had envied him that, and loved him for it.
But now he had finally succeeded in giving it to her. She could accept his most precious gift at last. She could believe it. She could feel it.
She could see them sitting there with a foaming bottle of champagne, toasting each other in a sidewalk café in another City of Light on a planet circling a far-distant sun, and looking back on this moment with a warm nostalgic glow as their true betrothal of the spirit.
“Let it be right,” she whispered. “Let it be so.”
And she reached out a loving hand and tenderly pulled the plug.