She hesitated for a moment. Then she asked, “What’s it like?”
He looked at her in puzzlement. “What’s what like?”
“Being in space. Tell me what it’s like. Please. I’ve always wanted to know.”
He sat up straight, peering at her. She was in dead earnest. She wasn’t being flirtatious or even friendly; she was staring at him as though he had some kind of secret that her life depended on, waiting for him to speak.
But he didn’t know what to say. “Oh,” he said, waving a vague hand, “you know.”
“I don’t know,” she said harshly. “I want to know.”
He looked at her in surprise. “Sorry,” he said. “Only there isn’t much to tell about what it’s like. When you’re in the big ship it doesn’t feel like you’re in space. It doesn’t feel like you’re anywhere in particular, just there. The engines are going at the regular G-thrust all the time, and you don’t feel anything except when there’s a course change, like when we went around the Sun—”
“Around the Sun?” she whispered, her eyes wide with fascination. So he had to tell her every bit about it—what they saw in the screens, what they felt as the ship heated up, what it was like when the main engines at last were turned off in Earth orbit, and most of all how it felt as they came down in the lander. “And you flew that thing?” she asked, her eyes bright.
“Oh, no,” he admitted. “They wouldn’t let me do the actual piloting. That was Polly’s job. I know how, though.” And then he had to tell her about the hours in the flight simulator.
Before he finished she had whispered to the waiter, and two new drinks were in front of them—not wine for him this time, but a carbonated soft drink that made him sneeze. “Gesundheit,” she said dreamily. “You know, I trained in one of those things, too.”
He blinked at her. “A Hakh’hli flight simulator? But you weren’t on the ship!”
“No, of course I wasn’t on your ship. How could I be? But we had flight simulators of our own. There are still volunteers to go into space, you know.”
“But they can’t, can they? That ring of debris—”
“Right,” she said bitterly. “We can’t get through the garbage ring. Unmanned satellites, yes. Sometimes. We send them up every once in a while, and about one out of five of them survives for a year without damage. Well, without being totally destroyed, anyway. That’s not bad, for unmanned satellites. We can always make more of them. But it isn’t good enough odds to send up people. People are a lot more fragile. So when I signed up for astronaut training Dave and I had a big fight. He called me a kamikaze—well, actually it was, ‘You kamikaze bitch!’ ”
“Kami—? Oh! You mean, like the Japanese suicide pilots from your World War Two?”
“That’s right. It meant he thought volunteering to go into space was like committing suicide. The way it turned out, he was pretty near right. The first two ships they launched did, in fact, kill their crews. Four astronauts. Two in each ship. People I’d trained with. So they called off the program, and then the rest of us never got up there at all.”
“But you’d still like to?”
She blazed at him. “You’re goddamn well told we’d like to. Not just me! There are millions of kids out there who’d give their right eyes to do what you’ve done—and hundreds of millions of grownups who’d kill you in a hot minute to take your place.”
“Really?” he asked, alarmed. “But that wouldn’t work, Marguery. The Hakh’hli wouldn’t be fooled. They’d know right away—”
He stopped, because she was laughing at him. “I’m sorry, Sandy,” she said. “I didn’t mean that literally. But I didn’t exactly not mean it, either, only I don’t mean you should worry about somebody actually trying it. No one will.”
“I didn’t really think anyone would,” he assured her, almost truthfully.
“But don’t think the human race isn’t interested in space! In fact, there’s going to be an astronomical convention in York next week. They’re probably going to ask all three of you to come to it, so they can see the pictures and listen to you talk—and, I guess, most of all just to be in the same room with somebody who’s been there.”
Sandy took a thoughtful sip of his drink. The fizziness in his nose stopped just short of being actually painful; he decided he liked it. “Marguery?” he asked. “How did you get into such a mess?”
“Mess?”
“The mess in the world. The debris in space. And letting things warm up so the ocean levels went up, depleting the ozone layer, acid rain. All those things. How did you human beings let it all get so bad?”
“Us human beings? And what are you?” she demanded harshly. “Chopped chicken liver?” And then, as he opened his mouth for a puzzled question, she shook her head. “Never mind. I know what you mean.” She reflected for a minute. “Well, I guess the only answer is that the old people didn’t know they were doing wrong. Or anyway the ones that did know it was wrong didn’t count, and the ones that counted didn’t care.”
“They didn’t know war was wrong?”
“Oh, well,” she said doubtfully. “I guess they knew that, all right, only they got themselves into a place where it just happened. There was a place called the Near East—”
“Near to what?”
“That’s just what it was called, Sandy, the ‘Near East.’ Anyway, they had a little war, only they got to using what they called ‘tactical nukes.’ And then people outside that part of the world got involved, and then the big countries began using the big nuclear missiles. On each other. Well, the orbital defenses took care of most of them, but it was really a mess, you know.”
“I wish I did know,” Sandy said wistfully. “We stopped getting your broadcasts along about then, you know.”
“Really? Well, all right, I guess I can fill you in. It’s a long time ago, but I think I know most of it, anyway. About five percent of the nukes got through. A submarine-launched one took out Washington, D.C.—that was where the government was then—and a bunch landed in New Mexico and Arizona and so on, but, really, it wasn’t a big nuclear war. I think altogether only fifteen warheads hit their targets. Only that was really all it took, you see. And after that—”
She paused, staring into her drink. Then she said, “Well, things got pretty bad. There were a lot of people sick from radiation, and then it was hard to get food to the cities, and nothing could come at all from the Near East, where it all started, and a lot of fuel came from there . . . and then there was the AIDS. That was bad stuff, Sandy. It was bad around the old United States, but in lots of places it was just, well, there wasn’t anybody left after a while. Before they got the vaccines they’d just send people with it to Africa to die, because everybody there was going to be dying, anyway. Not just from AIDS; from malaria, and typhus, and just plain starvation.” She looked sad. “They had ten times as many people back then. Now Africa’s empty. There’s only about half a billion alive in the whole world. A single country like China or India had a lot more than that all by themselves before the war.”
“Are you telling me that five billion people died?” Sandy gasped.
“Sandy,” she said reasonably, “they’d probably all be dead by now, anyway. And—” She hesitated, then burst out, “And they deserved it, damn them! All of them! The thing I can’t forgive them for is that they shot us out of space, forever!”
Chapter 11
The thing that keeps the human race trapped on the surface of the Earth is its own previous activities in space. Just as has happened often before in human history, the human race has been defeated by its own success. As soon as the first rockets reached Low Earth Orbit they began shedding pieces of themselves. By the 1980s more than seven thousand objects were routinely tracked—pieces the size of a baseball and up, from a wrench dropped by a space-walking astronaut to abandoned fuel tanks the size of a box car. In those days it required a full day’s computing before any Shuttle flight to plot an orbit that would not result in a catastrophic collision with some spinning piece of space junk. But at least the big pieces could be located. The ones too tiny to be tracked were the real killers. At least half a dozen working satellites were by then known to have been damaged or destroyed. Any scrap of metal—any crumb, even a chip of paint—at the velocities of Low Earth Orbit could puncture and even destroy another satellite. But that was only the beginning. Then along came Star Wars. Some people thought the Strategic Defense Initiative wouldn’t work. Unfortunately, it almost did. After the war, all those thousands and thousands of pop-up lasers and killed satellites and “smart rocks” and exploded missile parts filled the Low Earth Orbit volume with an impenetrable spinning mine field of junk. So space travel came to a shuddering stop, just when it had become almost easy. There were places where the minefield was thinner than other places—the least dangerous were above the planet’s poles—but even in the thinnest places only armored satellites could hope to get through, at great cost in launch mass because of their great weight and the fact that they had to be launched without help from the Earth’s spin. Even those stayed operational only as long as it took for some colliding scraps of metal, plastic, or paint to pit their mirrors and fry their instrumentation. Of manned flights after that, there were none at all. Not successful ones, anyway. Not for more than half a century, and none likely until the junk orbits decay, a matter of hundreds of years.