Space (10 page)

Much of the key equipment was of Russian design -- the recycling systems, for instance. He had big generators called Elektrons that could produce oxygen from water distilled from his urine. Drinking water was recovered from humidity in the air. There was a system of scrubbers called Vozdukh that removed carbon dioxide from the air. He had a backup oxygen generator system based on the use of "candles" -- big cylinders containing a chemical called lithium perchlorate that, when heated, gave off oxygen. He had emergency oxygen masks that worked on the same principle. And so on.

It was all crude and clunky, but -- unlike the fancier systems American engineers had developed for the space station -- it had been proven, over decades, actually to work in space, and to be capable of being repaired when it broke down. Still, Malenfant had brought along two of most things, and an extensive tool kit.

Malenfant's first task, every day, was to swab down the walls of his hab module with disinfected wipes. In zero gravity microorganisms tended to flourish, surviving on free-floating water droplets in the air. It took long, dull hours.

When he was done with his swabbing, it was exercise time. Malenfant pounded at a treadmill bolted to a bracket in the middle of the habitation module. After an hour Malenfant would find pools of sweat clinging to his chest. Malenfant had to put in at least two hours of hard physical exercise every day.

On it went.
Boring a hole in the sky,
the old astronauts had called it, the dogged cosmonauts on
Salyut
and
Mir. Looking at stars, pissing in jars.
To hell with that. At least he was going someplace, unlike those guys.

He communicated with his controllers on Earth and Moon using a ten-watt optical laser, which gave him a data rate of twenty kilobits a second. He followed the newscasts that were sent up to him, which he picked up with his big, semitransparent main antenna.

As the months wore on, interest in his mission faded. Something else he'd expected. Nobody followed his progress but a few Gaijin obsessives -- including Nemoto, he hoped, who had, deploying her shadowy, vast resources, helped assemble the funding for this one-shot mission -- not that she ever made her interest known.

Sometimes, even during his routine comms passes, there was nobody to man the other end of the link.

He didn't care. After all they couldn't call him back, however bored they were.

While he worked his treadmill, his only distraction was a small round observation port set in the pressure hull near him, and so he stared into that. To Malenfant's naked eye, the
Perry
was alone in space. Earth and Moon were reduced to starlike points of light. Only the diminishing Sun still showed a disc.

The sense of isolation was extraordinary. Exhilarating.

He had a sleeping nook called a
kayutka,
a Russian word. It contained a sleeping bag strapped to the wall. When he slept he kept the
kayutka
curtained off, for an illusory sense of privacy and safety. He kept his most personal gear here, particularly a small animated image of Emma, a few seconds of her laughing on a private NASA beach close to the Cape.

He woke up to a smell of sweat, or sometimes antifreeze if the coolant pipes were leaking, or sometimes just mustiness -- like a library, or a wine cellar.

Brind had tried another tack. "You're seventy-two years old, Malenfant."

"Yeah, but seventy-two isn't so exceptional nowadays. And I'm a damn fit seventy-two."

"It's pretty old to be enduring a many-year space flight."

"Maybe. But I've been following lifespan-extending practices for decades. I eat a low-fat, low-calorie diet. I'm being treated with a protein called coenzyme Q10, which inhibits aging at the cellular level. I'm taking other enzymes to maintain the functionality of my nervous system. I've already had many of my bones and joints rebuilt with biocomposite enhancements. Before the mission I'm going to have extensive heart bypass surgery. I'm taking drugs targeted at preventing the buildup of deposits of amyloid fibrils, proteins that could cause Alzheimer's--"

"Jesus, Malenfant. You're a kind of gray cyborg, aren't you? You're really determined."

"Look, microgravity is actually a pretty forgiving environment for an old man."

"Until you want to return to a full Earth gravity."

"Well, maybe I don't."

After two hundred and sixty days, halfway into the mission, the fusion pulse engine shut down. The tiny acceleration faded, and Malenfant's residual sense of up and down disappeared. Oddly, he felt queasy; a new bout of space adaptation syndrome floored him for four hours.

Meanwhile, the
Perry
fired its nitrogen tet and hydrazine reaction control thrusters, and turned head over heels. It was time to begin the long deceleration to the solar focus.

The
Perry,
at peak velocity now, was travelling at around seven million meters per second. That amounted to 2 percent of the speed of light. At such speeds, the big superconducting hoops came into their own. They set up a plasma shield forward of the craft, which sheltered it from the thin interstellar hydrogen it ran into. This turnaround maneuver was actually the most dangerous part of the trajectory, when the plasma field needed some smart handling to keep it facing ahead at all times.

The
Perry
was by far the fastest man-made object ever launched, and so -- Malenfant figured, logically -- he had become the fastest human. Not that anyone back home gave a damn.

That suited him. It clarified the mind.

Beyond the windows now there was only blackness falling between Malenfant and the stars. At five hundred astronomical units from the Sun, he was far beyond the last of the planets; even Pluto reached only some forty astronomical units. His only companions out here were the enigmatic ice moons of the Kuiper Belt, fragments of rock and ice left undisturbed since the birth of the Sun, each of them surrounded by an emptiness wider than all the inner Solar System. Farther beyond lay the Oort cloud, the shadowy shell of deep-space comets; but the Oort's inner border, at some thirty thousand astronomical units, was beyond even the reach of this attenuated mission.

When the turnaround maneuver was done, he turned his big telescopes and instrument platforms forward, looking ahead to the solar focus.

"You must want to come home. You must have family."

"No."

"And now--"

"Look, Sally, all we've done since finding the Gaijin is talk, for twelve years. Somebody ought to
do
something. Who better than me? And so I'm going to the edge of the system, where I expect to encounter Gaijin." He grinned. "I figure I'll cross all subsequent bridges when I come to them."

"Godspeed, Malenfant," she said, chilled. She sensed she would never see him again.

The
Perry
slowed to a relative halt. From a thousand AU, the Sun was an overbright star in the constellation Cetus, and the inner system -- planets, humans, Gaijin, and all -- was just a puddle of light.

Malenfant, cooped up in his hab module, spent a week scanning his environment. He knew he was in the right area, roughly; the precision was uncertain. Of course, if some huge interstellar mother craft was out here, it should be hard to miss.

There wasn't a damn thing.

He went in search of Alpha Centauri's solar focus. He nudged the
Perry
forward, using his reaction thrusters and occasional fusion-pulse blips.

The focusing of gravitational lensing was surprisingly tight. Alpha Centauri's focal-point spot was only a few kilometers across, in comparison with the hundred
billion
kilometers Malenfant had crossed to get here.

He took his time, shepherding his fuel.

At last he had it. In his big optical telescope there was an image of Alpha Centauri A, the largest component of the multiple Alpha system. The star's image was distorted into an annulus, a faintly orange ring of light.

He recorded as much data as he could and fired it down his laser link to Earth. The processors there would be able to deconvolve the image and turn it into an image of the multiple-star Alpha Centauri system, perhaps even of any planets hugging the two main stars.

This data alone, he thought, ought to justify the mission to its sponsors.

But he still didn't turn up any evidence of Gaijin activity.

A new fear started to gnaw at him. For the first time he considered seriously the possibility that he might be wrong about this. What if there was nothing here, after all? If so, his life, his reputation, would be wasted.

And then his big supercooled infrared sensors picked up a powerful new signature.

The object passed within a million kilometers of him.

His telescopes returned images, tantalizingly blurred. The thing was tumbling, sending back glimmering reflections from the remote Sun; the reflections helped the processors figure out its shape.

The craft was maybe fifty meters across. It was shaped something like a spider. A dodecahedral central unit sprouted arms, eight or ten of them, that articulated as it moved. It seemed to be assembling itself as it traveled.

It wasn't possible to identify its purpose, or composition, or propulsion method, before it passed out of sight. But he was prepared to bet it was heading for the asteroid belt.

It was possible to work out where the drone had come from. It was a point along the Sun's focal line, farther out, a point no more distant from the
Perry
than the Moon from Earth.

Malenfant turned his telescopes that way, but he couldn't see a thing.

Still, he felt affirmed. Contact, by damn. I was right. I can't figure out how or what, but there sure is something out here.

He powered up his fusion-pulse engine, one more time. It would take him twenty hours to get there.

It was just a hoop, some kind of metal perhaps, facing the Sun. It was around thirty meters across, and it was sky blue, the color dazzling out here in the void. It was silent, not transmitting on any frequency, barely visible at all in the light of the point-source Sun.

There was no huge mother ship emitting asteroid-factory drones. Just this enigmatic artifact.

He described all this to Sally Brind, back in Houston. He would have to wait for a reply; he was six light-days from home.

After a time, he decided he didn't want to wait that long.

The
Perry
drifted beside the Gaijin hoop, with only occasional station-keeping bursts of its thrusters.

Malenfant shut himself up inside the
Perry
's cramped air lock. He'd have to spend two hours in here, purging the nitrogen from his body. His antique shuttle-class EVA mobility unit would contain oxygen only, at just a quarter of sea-level pressure, to keep it flexible.

Malenfant pulled on his thermal underwear, and then his cooling and ventilation garment -- a corrugated layering of water-coolant pipes. He fitted his urine-collection device, a huge, unlikely condom.

He lifted up his lower torso assembly -- this was the bottom half of his EMU, trousers with boots built on -- and he squirmed into it. He fitted a tube over his condom attachment; there was a bag sewn into his lower torso assembly garment big enough to store a couple of pints of urine. The LTA unit was heavy, the layered material awkward and stiff. Maybe I'm not in quite the same shape as I used to be, forty years ago.

Now it was time for the HUT, the hard upper torso piece. His HUT was fixed to the wall of the air lock, like the top half of a suit of armor. He crouched underneath, reached up his arms, and wriggled upward. Inside the HUT there was a smell of plastic and metal. He guided the metal rings at his waist to mate and click together. He fixed on his Snoopy flight helmet, and over the top of that he lifted his hard helmet with its visor, and twisted it into place against the seal at his neck.

The ritual of suit assembly was familiar, comforting. As if he was in control of the situation.

He studied himself in the mirror. The EMU was gleaming white, with the Stars and Stripes still proudly emblazoned on his sleeve. He still had his final mission patch stitched to the fabric, for STS-194. Looking pretty good for an old bastard, Malenfant.

Just before he depressurized, he tucked his snap of Emma into an inside pocket.

He opened the air lock's outer hatch.

For twenty months he'd been confined within a chamber a few meters across; now his world opened out to infinity.

He didn't want to look up, down, or around, and certainly not at the Gaijin artifact. Not yet.

Resolutely he turned to face the
Perry.
The paintwork and finishing over the hull's powder-gray meteorite blanket had pretty much worn away and yellowed, but the dim sunlight made it look as if the whole craft had been dipped in gold.

His MMU, the manned maneuvering unit, was stowed in a service station against the
Perry
's outer hull, under a layer of meteorite fabric. He uncovered the MMU and backed into it; it was like fitting himself into the back and arms of a chair. Latches clasped his pressure suit. He powered up the control systems and checked the nitrogen-filled fuel tanks in the backpack. He pulled his two hand controllers around to their flight positions, then released the service station's captive latches.

He tried out the maneuvering unit. The left hand controller pushed him forward, gently; the right hand enabled him to rotate, dip, and roll. Every time a thruster fired, a gentle tone sounded in his headset.

He moved in short straight lines around the
Perry.
After years in a glass case at KSC, not all of the pack's reaction-control thrusters were working. But there seemed to be enough left for him to control his flight. And the automatic gyro stabilization was locked in.