Encounter With Tiber Read online

  He heard Jason’s voice. “Dad, I’m at NASA. They came and got me out of school when things started to go wrong. I’m really proud of you. I love you. Make it back if you can. I love you.”

  There was a long pause, and Chris said firmly, “Jason, I love you, too. Don’t know how this will work out, but if I can’t live I’ll die trying. And listen, I want you to have space for yourself; I gave you a gift that Sig will explain to you when—”

  The rocket fired under him; Chris glanced out the window to see the razor-sharp edges of the mountains, the dark hollows of the craters. They looked close, the number on the altimeter looked low, the speed indicator terribly high.

  The engines thundered against the fall, and the craft fell more and more slowly, ever downward toward the wild jumble of peaks and craters. Chris sat and waited; radar showed speed relative to the ground falling, falling, falling, till they were moving at less than 50 kilometers per hour—already he was below the peaks of the tallest mountains he could see, less than half a kilometer off the lunar surface. About a minute more, and his craft would touch down somewhere; he could only hope it wouldn’t land on a cliff edge or giant boulder.

  Then the Pigeon Rack shook violently as the engine began to chug out the last gasps of fuel. The floor pounded against Chris’s feet for a scant few seconds as the final bits of fuel burned erratically in the combustion chamber; then there was only the eerie silence and weightlessness of free fall.

  Chris spoke quickly. “Ah, hell, Jason, all I wanted to say is I love you and have a great life.”

  Then Chris turned up the volume on his headphones so that he could hear anything that might come up from Earth, and stood and listened for those words that might come after the three-second delay, watching the altitude and speed indicators. The engine had burned out at 470 meters, and his speed relative to the ground had been 50 km/hour or about 14 meters per second. His speed tripled, as the altitude indicator whirled down toward zero. He waited quietly for the zeros, listening for the long seconds as his family and friends called out to him across the quarter-million-mile gulf, knowing that he wouldn’t have time to see the zeros. In fact the “152.8” of the digital speed indicator was the last number he ever saw, as the rocky cliffs abruptly whizzed into view past his window, the frame of the Pigeon Rack broke against the ancient rockfall, and the stone face of the Moon tore into the Pigeon Rack as it smashed its way down the slope. Chris had a moment to see the world turn upside down, to see rocks pouring in through the breach in the hull, and just one last glimpse of the brilliant, steady, eternal stars before, with crunching finality, the ship slammed against a cliff face and fell sideways down into the crater, breaking apart as it went. He was almost certainly already dead when the Encyclopedia broke from its mooring and fell out onto the slope, crashing separately down to its resting place.

  I think I still believed Dad might make it until he said “I love you” for the second time; something about his tone told me this was it, and no mistake. They lost radio contact a second or two after, so I don’t think he heard me blurt out “I’ll miss you so much!” or Aunt Lori saying “Go with God, Chris,” and of course even if he did he had no way of knowing that I hung onto Aunt Lori for half an hour afterwards, sobbing. When Sig and Mom finally came around to the NASA building to collect me, they had a counselor already sitting at the house, waiting to take care of me. It didn’t make much difference at all; a counselor can only work if you talk, and for a couple of days I wouldn’t.

  It was almost two months later, after I’d begun to eat and was back in school again, that Sig and Aunt Lori sat down and told me about Dad’s life insurance policy. I would be going to space—if I wanted to, when I was ready.

  That night I spent a long time sitting at my bedroom window. It was a clear night, for D.C., and the Moon shone very bright and clear. The newspapers had made a big deal of pointing out exactly how to find the crash site, though even the best telescopes on Earth couldn’t actually see the wreckage; it was a little dark spot almost at the bottom of the Moon that marked the place, not a spot made by the wreck of course, but just a place that had been there for all of eternity. I looked at that, and at all the bright stars, and now and then at Dad’s picture. Every so often the tears would get too thick and I couldn’t see any of them. I guess I was up about half the night and I didn’t sleep well in the little time I spent in bed.

  That next morning I told Sig I was ready. He asked if I was sure and I said I was. That afternoon when I got home from school he was home early and on the phone putting some kind of deal together. I didn’t pay much attention at the time.

  But a few months later, there I was in the world’s first “extra-small” spacesuit—I still hadn’t gotten my growth, and it looked like I’d be cut from the team for eighth-grade football, too. Aunt Lori, beside me, rested her hand on my shoulder and said, “Stop playing with your visor, it annoys the telemetry people.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “And if you don’t stop being so polite you’ll annoy me.”

  I smiled at that, a little, and said, “Well, you know, there’s this thing about making a good impression. I don’t want to be the first brat in space.”

  I couldn’t feel her hug through the heavy layers of the pressure suit, but I knew it was there. “Well, I don’t think you have to worry about that. Really. And besides, all you have to do is be a passenger. This is my first time flying one of these things.”

  The new ship was called a Peregrine, and it was sort of descended from Orbital Science’s air-launch rocket, derived from the X-34 program, a mid-1990s plan for putting small satellites into orbit. The Starbird, plus the rush to get the Encyclopedia, had created such a huge market for manned launches that Lockheed-Martin had designed this beautiful ship, getting Burt Rutan out of retirement to create the giant Condor subsonic first stage, and the world now had its first real take-off-anywhere spacecraft—or almost anywhere. You still needed runways long enough for a tanker or a heavy bomber.

  The other thing the world had now, thanks to this private venture, was its first really beautiful spacecraft. The Peregrine was sleek and trim, its delta wing and fuselage forming a shape like a long, gracefully curved needle. As it sat there gleaming in the sun, I thought I had never seen anything so beautiful. “Are you looking forward to flying it?” I asked Lori.

  “Are you kidding? Look at it, it’s gorgeous,” she said. “I can see why your stepdad is planning to buy a fleet of them; heck, I’d pay for a ticket just to ride in something like that. The thought of taking one to orbit—well, six people have so far, and every one of them has come back swearing it’s the only ship worth taking to space. I don’t know if they’ll ever get the Yankee Clipper project started, what with all the politics, but I’ll tell you this, the Yankee Clipper will have to be a hell of an act to compete with this thing. But the most amazing thing to me is this: it’s so reliable that you can really schedule the flights. I mean, a ticket to space that means something more than ‘we’re going to try to do it sometime after this day.’ Now that’s a plain miracle, Jason.”

  We got the signal and walked forward through the gauntlet of video cameras; there were eight of us on this flight, each with our separate purposes. I was on the flight so that they could schedule an early return for me—there’s not much use for a kid in a space station, and even a quiet kid like me was apt to make administrators nervous. And since Peter Denisov would be bringing this Peregrine back down just a few hours after we arrived, they would return me to Earth as soon as they could while still making good on my father and Sig’s promises.

  Aunt Lori had a very different job. When Denisov and Jiang in Tiber Two had lifted off from the lunar south pole, the lander they had been flying had been the one that had brought them; having carried in a heavier mass, it had used up more of its fuel, and so there was no prospect of being able to hop over to the crash site, most especially because the crash site was a mountainside. Still, they’d been able to go first
to lunar orbit, and passing over the site five times, radar, video cameras, and binoculars had revealed only that whatever was left there, it was in a lot of pieces and they were scattered all over the scree-covered mountain slope. Nothing quite had the distinct shape of the Encyclopedia, but there was so much torn rubble it was impossible to say.

  Now Lori was leading the expedition that would land at a site about twenty kilometers away, three Pigeon Racks going together as a group: one to carry crew, one to carry a pressurized rover, and one for the return—it was hoped—of the bodies and the Encyclopedia. A lot was hanging on this; if the Encyclopedia had survived the crash (and lots of things could survive 150 km/hour crashes, the argument ran, why, that wasn’t even 100 mph and think of all the things on Earth that survived that speed in a car crash), then once it was finally retrieved, there would be decades of work in interpreting it. Many people said that would be the time to take a pause in space exploration, to work on making it safer and more profitable, especially now that the Moon was really open for our exploitation and held such a promising archeological site (not to mention abundant water in the polar craters that would allow large bases to be built there eventually). But if the Encyclopedia were gone, our next best hope was Mars—either its moon Phobos or Crater Korolev in its arctic, whichever the message had intended us to take as the search site. And Mars was always at least 140 times as far away as the Moon; it would be a long journey, and no one would go there, rationally, just to visit for a day and turn around. Chances were that crews would stay there for months or years, with all the attendant expenditure and difficulty.

  The stingy and the short-horizoned prayed that the Encyclopedia would be all right, that we could find it, get an immense return, and stop. Those with more adventure in their souls couldn’t help hoping that we’d have to go to Korolev first. And though there was no way of making a decision until it was recovered, that didn’t stop Congress, or the Russian Parliament, the Japanese Diet, the French Chamber of Deputies, or anyone else from arguing loudly about exactly what we should do.

  Me, I just missed my Dad and hoped that wherever he was he was happy. I was kind of hoping a burial service might put a close to this terrible time in my life. If they found the Encyclopedia, or they went to Mars, either way, that was fine with me, but I didn’t feel much part in it.

  We strapped into our seats in the Peregrine—Lori said it had a lot of room compared with Pigeons, Starbirds, or shuttles, but it was still a lot more crowded than any airliner. Lori ran a quick checkout, and then one of the coolest things of all happened. I was looking out the window as a great shadow reached over our craft: the Condor was pulling up over Peregrine to connect to it.

  The Condor had a vast wingspan and two separate fuselages; it squatted over our Peregrine and firmly gripped the connector on top of us with the special clamp in the middle of its huge wing. The Peregrine retracted its landing gear, and now we hung balanced under the bigger ship.

  As late as the space shuttle, countdowns had taken several days; the Starbird managed to count down in just a bit over one day. But Peregrine/Condor was a true quick-turn-around system, the first, and as soon as they had connection, the Condor pilot talked to Lori on the radio, and then to the tower, and the moment they were authorized we were rumbling down the runway, taking off into the clear desert air.

  At first it wasn’t much different from a regular airplane ride—except that after a while another airplane showed up, a great big lumbering tanker. I watched, fascinated, as the tanker came in above us; I couldn’t see exactly how it made the fuel connection, but I had seen pictures before so I had a general idea.

  At last, after almost an hour of loading the Peregrine with fuel and oxidizer the tanker flew away, and the Condor carrying us started to climb and accelerate again, laboring against the heavy load. The sky got deeper, clearer, and bluer.

  Finally, the Condor could do no more. The Condor, despite its slender appearance, was so huge that it carried nearly as much fuel as a big tanker, but it burned almost all of it on the way up, returning to base in a gentle glide. As we reached peak altitude and velocity, Lori exchanged a few phrases with the Condor pilot, then ignited our Peregrine engine. We dropped away from the Condor, which turned away to begin its return; the Peregrine’s jet engines fired hard enough to hold me down into my seat. We accelerated to supersonic, then hypersonic speeds as we continued up through the tropopause into the darkening sky of the stratosphere. The sun had an actinic glare off the Peregrine’s wings, now, and when I looked below I could see all of Florida spread out, and still we climbed farther. Then, as the air grew too thin for the jet engines, Lori ignited the rocket engines and we roared on up toward space, the curvature of the Earth and the blackness of the sky seeming to increase with every heartbeat.

  10

  I’M NOT SURE HOW much there really is to say about that strange day just a few weeks before my thirteenth birthday. Even as we accelerated up into orbit it was already beginning to write itself into my mind as a highlight, as something that I would have to remember forever no matter what. Somehow I felt that the important thing about it was going to be remembering it afterwards, and so there was very little time when I just saw, when I was just there. Most of the time I seemed to be looking at things hard, forcing my attention into them.

  And yet, for all that, it was still an astonishing experience, and for decades afterwards I would have dreams about it. The Peregrine roared on as the sky became velvet black and the Earth sank below into a huge round face; when the engine cut out, we were abruptly weightless, and though I couldn’t unstrap yet—there was still some maneuvering required—I could feel it.

  The sight of the Star Cluster was another amazing thing. The family of space stations that had grown up, in the years since the alien message had come, were so numerous that now each major spacefaring nation except China had one or two Big Cans on some sort of a truss with solar panels slowly drifting in their co-orbit with the old ISS in the space of a few miles; often there were many Starbird DTs attached as well. The total population of the nine stations—the old ISS, the French De Gaulle and Verne, Russia’s two SuperMirs, the Chinese Spirit of Mao, Japan’s Blossom of the Sky, and the new American John Glenn Station and Star Port (where we were going)—was clear up to thirty-five, as opposed to six when Dad had first gone there.

  Metal doesn’t oxidize in space, and the paints they were using didn’t peel or fade much, so you couldn’t tell the new from the old parts of Star Cluster at a glance, but still anyone looking at it got a strong sensation that this had been thrown together very quickly, completely ad hoc.

  People called it “the flying junkyard” and “that trailer park in space,” but whatever it might lack in aesthetics, it was still an amazing thing to see, and more amazing from the window of the Peregrine; there were three suited figures working outside who took a moment to wave. The huge array of metal and glass shining in the brilliant sunlight above the atmosphere has stayed alive in my memory ever since, even though I have been there myself many times, now, and was there the day they celebrated getting their hundredth permanent resident.

  The Peregrine drifted gently sideways, Lori jockeying it with its attitude jets, until it bumped against the docking port and locked in. There followed a series of bumps and mechanical noises that probably meant things to the astronauts but not to me. Then Lori turned around and said, “Okay, people, unstrap and let’s go in.”

  My first impression of Star Port, the new international mission staging orbital base, was that it was like the airport when you’re little (and when I was little I went through a lot of airports)—that is, there were several extremely solicitous people hovering around trying to make sure I was in the right place and not too unhappy. I didn’t even get everyone’s name, but luckily it didn’t matter, because suddenly I heard a voice. “Jason?”

  I turned and saw a tall, dark-haired man floating toward me. “François Raymond, the station commander for this month,” he said,
with a very slight accent. “I flew with your father once.” He extended his hand and I shook it, but he was already looking at everyone else in the room. “Slight change of plans, people. I’ve gotten two people to volunteer to take over for Peter Denisov and prep the Peregrine for return. So consequently Peter has the time free, and I’m authorizing him to serve as Jason’s guide.”

  A moment later Peter came around the corner, moving like the big kid he always seemed to be. We grabbed each other in a tight hug, and he murmured in my ear, “I’m so sorry about your father, Jason, but this is something he wanted you to have. Come with me and let me show you some things.”

  I had not seen Peter since Dad’s death, and I had only seen Lori briefly. All the spacefaring nations had accelerated their efforts at Tiber Base, trying to get as much information from the archeology as possible. But to get scientists to the south pole of the Moon, you needed pilots to fly them there and engineers to keep the equipment running. Hence Lori, Peter, and every other operational astronaut, astro-F, and cosmonaut had been getting into space more often in the past few months than most of them had in several years before.

  Peter was finishing up an assignment at Star Port, where he was engineer in charge of readying spacecraft for their return flights to Earth. He would have just a few days on the ground with his family, and then be headed back to the Moon, where he would be part of the surveying expedition to lay out the new Russian base at Crater Tsiolkovsky, on the far side.

  When the time had come for my flight up to space, purchased with Dad’s life insurance, Sig had scouted through the manifests until he found the one time this year when Lori and Peter would be at Star Port at the same time—my father’s two best friends, to show me space, to help me see why my father had devoted—and lost—his life.