Phase Space (26 page)

It was June, 1997.

Slade reached the Control Centre, which was just a ten-yard trailer set up three miles from
Sun God
’s launch pad. He entered and sat in front of a computer screen. Two McDonnell engineers were here waiting for him, with their own consoles and controls. But during the flight phase,
Sun God
would be Slade’s ship, and that suited him just fine.

The countdown proceeded, calm and controlled. And –

Light burst from the base of the craft, the pure, clear glow of burning hydrogen. All of three miles away, the exhilaration of ignition made Slade’s soul rise. A billow of white smoke blasted sideways, out across the desert surface, stirring the cryogenic clouds, which were soon stained yellow by kicked-up sand.

The conical craft slid smoothly into the air, soon rising above its support structure. When it had risen out of the hydrogen cloud, that clear flame, lengthening, was all but invisible.

Then the rocket ship slowed to a halt, thirty yards above the ground. It was astonishing. Rockets weren’t supposed to
do
that.

Now the DC-X responded smoothly to its programming, tipping and scooting a few yards back and forth across the desert, moving simply by tilting its four rocket nozzles, directing the thrust. The engineers rattled through their tests.

It looked so easy, Slade thought. But it wasn’t.

The problem with spaceflight was, humans were trapped here, on the surface of the Earth, by the laws of physics. If you were going to use chemical engines to get to orbit from Earth, you needed a ninety per cent mass fraction: ninety per cent of your take-off mass had to be fuel. Back in the sixties, when they first built the Atlas, they could get no better than seventy or eighty per cent.

This little craft, the DC-X, looked good, but its mass fraction was only sixty per cent. It was supposed to pioneer technologies to push up that mass fraction. For this flight it had been given all kinds of fancy modifications, like a new graphite epoxy hydrogen tank, a lox tank made from aluminium-lithium alloy, and an oxygen-hydrogen reaction control system that used excess fuel from the main tanks.

DC-X was a one-third prototype. The full-scale version – a hundred and twenty feet tall, just a little taller than John Glenn’s Mercury-Atlas – would weigh in at five hundred tons, and be capable of carrying two crew to orbit.

But it wouldn’t be piloted. The crew would be passengers, helpless as babies, stuck in the metal belly of the craft.

Well, it probably wouldn’t ever get built. Even if it did, it was so far in the future Slade wouldn’t see it.

But here he was anyhow, flying
Sun God
back and forth, in little arcs over the desert.

Slade, aged sixty-seven, had been in aviation – specifically, rocket craft – all his life. He was an old lifting-body man. After Patuxent, he flew the old X-15 a couple times. When his buddies were applying to NASA in the sixties, for Mercury, he just wasn’t interested. He wanted to stick with spaceplanes. He figured those dumb ballistic capsules just weren’t the future.

Well, he’d been proven correct. There had been that scare when the Russians had first thrown up their heavy satellites and their cosmonauts, but it was soon obvious that the Soviets’ technical lead was only in heavy-lift boosters. Just one American had flown in orbit – John Glenn, in 1961, in his tin-can Mercury capsule atop an Atlas booster – and then the nation had backed off. And when John Kennedy had called for a decade-long programme to reach the Moon – the
Moon,
with throwaway boosters and ballistic capsules, for God’s sake – he had been roundly howled down.

America had gone back to Eisenhower’s slow and steady approach. And so, after forty years, the Atlas, steadily upgraded, remained America’s only orbital booster system, with a capacity to orbit of a few tons.

But anyhow Atlas was enough for practical purposes like weather satellites and comsats. You didn’t
need
anything more powerful, unless you wanted to do something seriously dumb like fly to the Moon! The research had gone on into new technologies, slowly and incrementally.

There was no rush.

And Slade, to his own surprise, had grown old watching it all go by, waiting for a chance to fly.

Of course
this
wasn’t piloting. The DC-X was completely controlled by the computer. Slade had what the engineers called trajectory command over the bird. He was sending in pre-scripted plays like a gridiron coach, then leaving it to the software to execute the plays.

But that was okay. You didn’t need much imagination to believe you were up there, in the tip of that cone, flying.

Sun God
stayed in the air by standing on a rocket flame – just like a lunar lander would have worked – in fact, he thought now, he’d have been more than happy to sit on the nose of that thing and ride it down to the surface of the old Moon itself, with Bado.

– And as he framed that idea, he saw Bado again. In his unwelcome memory that treacherous old X-15 came barrelling out of the sky once more, slamming Bado, his good buddy, into the high Mojave – that soft crump, the almost gentle puff of dust.

Damn, damn. It had always seemed so
wrong.
Maybe in some other life, he and Bado could really have flown some kind of Mercury capsule down to the surface of the Moon. Maybe that was where his recurring dream came from –

– in which Bado came loping out of a shallow crater, towards Slade, bouncing happily over the sandy surface of the Moon –

– but then there was the other half of his dream, where he was just a kid, toiling in the guts of some huge space rocket factory, forced to speak a guttural European tongue –

Moons and mountains. Recurring dreams. An old geezer thing, evidently.

But the Moon probably would have killed them anyhow. There were scientists who said the mountains there would crumble like meringues if you set foot on them, or the dust itself would explode and swallow you up.

Anyhow, Slade was going to die without ever
knowing.

Time to bring her in.

Sun God
swept through a smooth arc towards the splash of concrete that was its landing pad. The bird slid down through the last few feet, as smooth as if it was riding a rail down to the ground, and he let the automatics finish the touchdown.
Sun God
just stuck out its four landing legs and landed on its pad, as gently as a dragonfly settling on a lily.

Slade got out of his chair. His back and shoulders were stiff; he worked his fingers and arms to loosen up the muscles.

A tech was slapping him on the back. ‘How about that,’ he said. ‘Just as fat as a goose. Outstanding.’

‘Yeah. Outstanding.’

Slade stepped out of the trailer. It was still bright morning; the flight had lasted just minutes. And in the sky, that big old Moon hadn’t yet set; it just hung there – oh, hell, something must be wrong with his eyes, he spent too much time peering at those damn computer screens – the Moon was bright red …

…
red in the light of the sun, which has swollen to a crimson giant in its old age, its hot breath suffocating the First World – and yet, paradoxically, scattering life over our own more remote globe.

How would First World life function
?

It is possible water could play the role in a life system that ammonia does for us: a water-based biosphere!

First World life forms would drink water as we do ammonia, and breathe oxygen as we do nitrogen. When we respire, we burn methane in nitrogen, producing ammonia and cyanogen. Similarly, the First World life would burn sugars in oxygen and give off water and carbon dioxide. To close the loop there would be some form of photosynthesis, hydrous plants using solar energy to turn the products of that respiration – water and carbon dioxide – back to sugars and oxygen, as our plants turn ammonia and cyanogen back to methane and nitrogen …

Strange, but not impossible!

What would the First World have been like, in those remote days
?

It would be a world of water oceans, perhaps with caps of polar ice, and a clear air, of free oxygen buffered by nitrogen. And there would be clouds, of water vapour …

On such a large world, spinning sixteen times as fast as Home, the climate would be more complex than our own. Powerful Coriolis forces would act on the air, generating swirling storms
…
We can only imagine the cultures and ecosystems which evolved in such complex and violent climatic conditions.

There is more. Chemical reactions are dependent on temperature. Reaction rates are increased as the temperature rises. On a world so warm that even water is a liquid the reaction rates rocket, by perhaps a hundred to a thousand times.

Thus, the metabolism of hydrous creatures would proceed at a much faster rate than ours. That would be offset by the increased gravity, but still, life must have proceeded at a frenetic pace.

We can even deduce the colour of the sky, on that strange, lost world.

There was no methane in the air, because it would have reacted with the free oxygen. And because light from the blue end of the spectrum has a wavelength similar in size to the molecules of the air – nitrogen and oxygen – the sky of the First World must have been
blue,
not green …

At last, the First World was betrayed by the star that gave it life. The end came when the surface grew so hot that the very stuff of water-based life – complex molecules and carbon-based molecular chains – was broken down.

Finally those unlikely water oceans boiled, and huge clouds of vapour were suspended in the atmosphere, driving temperatures higher still, ever faster. But even the clouds did not last forever. At last the water vapour in the air was broken up by energetic sunlight and the hydrogen driven off into space, leaving a planet baked dry, its surface cracked and flattened under a dense, sluggish atmosphere, utterly lifeless –

In any event it seems clear that my putative water-laden Moon voyagers did not have the means to escape their planet, or to avert their ultimate doom.

Trips to the Moon: logic was not enough! My simulation had taught me that, at least. ‘Logic’ to these creatures meant starving their projects of resources! And besides, nobody logical would attempt to travel between this world and its Moon with such primitive technology. Nobody sensible.

But these people were neither logical nor sensible. I knew I must remember that.

I sought a logical political structure in their reconstructed history, a structure that could have commanded significant resources. I reset the parameters of the simulation –

But I was speaking of my search for evidence of spaceflight by
this antique intelligence, of its travel to the desiccated satellite:

The inner system, at the bottom of the sun’s gravity well, is crowded. Conditions are quite unlike Home, which is, of course, the largest satellite of the Fourth World. (Although, it is not well known, once the Fourth World sported a gigantic ring system, made up of chunks of ice and other debris, residue from the formation of the sun. The rings must have been beautiful. But they have long since evaporated, as the sun’s heat roared in the faces of its children –)

I digress.

The First World, then, swims through a cloud of debris, of thousands of planetesimals left over from the untidy formation of the system, aeons ago. Despite geological smoothing, its surface shows the evidence of repeated bombardment, which has diminished but not ceased with the passing of time. Its airless satellite is scarred still more impressively.

I studied the orbital characteristics of one such planetesimal in particular. Many of these objects had orbits close to or crossing the First World’s. But in this case, the parameters were so close to those of the First World that I grew suspicious.

Then excited.

Could this be the artefact I had sought? Not on the surface of either world – but some form of abandoned spacecraft, or space colony, circling the sun with its mother planet
?

I scraped together funding for a mission to the anomalous planetesimal: a small ship to sail through the light of the Moon …

…
the light of the Moon which shone like a torch beam into the dormitory as Slade woke, reluctantly. Already the older men were moving around him, shuffling, conserving what energy they had.