Space. Stephen Baxter

I’m really just a kind of curator, of the grey literature.’

      ‘Grey?’

      ‘Studies and proposals that generally never made it to the light of day. The stuff is badly archived; a lot of it isn’t yet digitized, or even on fiche … Even this building is seventy years old. I bet it would be closed for good if it wasn’t for the Moon rocks.’

      That was true; elsewhere in this building, fifty per cent of the old Apollo samples still lay sealed in their sample boxes, still awaiting analysis, after six decades. Now that there were Japanese living on the Moon, Brind suspected the boxes would stay sealed forever, if only so they could serve as samples of the Moon as it used to be in its pristine, prehuman condition. An ironic fate for those billion-dollar nuggets.

      ‘I know all that,’ he said. ‘But I used to work for NASA. Where else am I supposed to go? Look – I want you to figure out how it could be done. How can we send a human to the solar focus? It will all come together, once we have a viable scheme to fix on. I can get the hardware, the funding.’

      She arched an eyebrow. ‘Really?’

      ‘Sure. And the science will be good. After all, we still haven’t sent a human out beyond the orbit of the Moon. We can drop probes on Jupiter, Pluto en route. We’ll get sponsorship from the Europeans and Japanese for that. The US government ought to contribute, too.’

      You make it sound so easy, Colonel Malenfant … ‘Why should these organizations back you? We haven’t sent a human into orbit, other than as a passenger of NASDA or ESA, in twenty years.’

      ‘Otherwise,’ said Malenfant, ‘we’ll have to let the Japanese do this alone.’

      ‘True.’

      ‘Also there’ll be a lot of media interest. It will be a hell of a stunt.’

      ‘A stunt is right,’ she said. ‘It would be a spectacular one-shot. Just like Apollo. And look where that got us.’

      ‘To the Moon,’ he said severely, ‘forty years before the Japanese.’

      She chose her next words carefully. ‘Colonel Malenfant, you must be aware that it will be difficult for me to support you.’

      He eyed her. ‘I know I’m thought of as an obsessive. Twenty years after Shuttle was grounded, I’m still working out a kind of long, lingering disappointment about the shape of my career. I want to pursue this Gaijin hypothesis because I’m obsessed with them, because I want America to get back into space. I have an agenda. Right?’

      ‘I – yes. I guess so. I’m sorry.’

      ‘Hell, don’t be. It’s true. I was never too good at the politics here. Not even in the Astronaut Office. I never got into any of the cliques: the spacewalkers, the sports fans, the commanders, the bubbas who hung out at Molly’s Pub. I was never interested enough. Even the Russians mistrusted me because I wasn’t enough of a team player.’ He slapped his leathery hand on her desk. ‘But the Gaijin are here. Sally, I’ve waited ten years for our government, any government, to act on that lunar infrared evidence. Only Frank Paulis responded – a private individual, with that one damn probe. Now, I’ve decided to do something about it, before I drop dead.’

      ‘How far away is the solar focus?’

      ‘A thousand astronomical units.’ A thousand times as far as the distance between Earth and sun.

      She whistled. ‘You’re crazy.’

      ‘Sure.’ He grinned, showing even, rebuilt teeth. ‘Now tell me how to do it. Treat it as an exercise, if you like. A thought experiment.’

      She said dryly, ‘Do you have an astronaut in mind?’

      His grin widened. ‘Me.’

      

      Dark, crumpled ground, a horizon that was pin-sharp and looked close enough to touch, a sky full of stars dominated by a single bright spark …

      Maura felt herself lurch as the probe began to make its way across the folded-over asteroid earth. She saw pitons and tethers lance out ahead of her field of view, extruding and hauling back, tugging the robot this way and that. Her viewpoint swivelled up and down, and some augmentation routine in the virtual generators was tickling her hind brain, making her feel as if she was riding right along with the robot over this choppy, rocky sea. With a sub-vocalized command, she told the software to cut it out; some special effects she could live without.

      Xenia whispered to her audience of VIPs. ‘As we move we’re being extremely cautious. The surface gravity is even weaker than you might expect for a body this size. Remember this “dumbbell asteroid” is a contact binary, a compound body; imagine two pool balls snuggled up against each other, spinning around their point of contact. We’re a fly crawling over the far side of one of those pool balls. The dumbbell is spinning pretty rapidly, and here, at the pole, centrifugal force almost cancels out the gravity. But we modelled all these situations; Bruno knows what he’s doing. Just sit tight and enjoy the ride.’

      And now something was looming beyond that close horizon. It was like the rise of a moon – but this moon was small and dark and battered, a twin of the world over which she crawled. It was the other lobe of the dumbbell.

      Xenia said, ‘We’re studying the ground as we travel. As we don’t know what to look for, we’ve carried broad-spectrum surveying equipment. For instance, if the Gaijin came here to extract light metals such as aluminium, magnesium or titanium, they would most likely have used processes like magma electrolysis or pyrolysis. The same processes could be used for oxygen production. In the case of magma electrolysis the main slag component would be ferrosilicon. From a pyrolysis process we would expect to find traces of elemental iron and silicon, or perhaps slightly oxidized forms …’

      We are crawling across a slag heap, Maura thought, trying to figure out what was made here. But are we being too anthropomorphic? Would a Neandertal conclude that we must be unintelligent because, searching our nuclear reactors, she could find no chippings from flint cores?

      But what else can we do? How can we test for the unknowable?

      The asteroid’s second lobe had all but ‘risen’ above the horizon now. It was a ball of rock, black and battered, that hung suspended over the land, as if in some Magritte painting. She could even see a broad band of crushed, flattened rock ahead, where one flying mountain rested against the other.

      The second lobe was so close it seemed Maura could see every fold in its surface, every crater, even the grains of dust there. How remarkable, she thought.

      The probe’s mode of travel had changed now, she noticed; the pitons were applying small sideways or braking tweaks to an accelerating motion towards the system’s centre of gravity, that contact zone. Gravity must be decreasing in strength the tug of the rock below her balanced by the equal mass of rock above, so that the net force was becoming more and more horizontal, and the probe was simply pulled across the surface.

      Now the second lobe was so close, in this virtual diorama, it was over her head. Its crumpled inverted landscape formed a rocky roof. It was dark here, with the sun occluded, and the slices of starlight in the gap between the worlds were growing narrower.

      Lamps lit up on the probe, and they played on the land beneath, the folded roof above. She longed to reach up and touch those inverted craters, as if a toy Moon had been hung over her head, a souvenir from some Aristotelian pocket universe.

      ‘… I think we have something,’ Xenia said quietly.

      Maura looked down. Her field of view blurred as the interpolation routines struggled to keep up.

      There was something on the ground before her. It looked like a blanket of foil, aluminium or silver, ragged-edged, laid over the dark regolith. Aside from a fringe a metre or two wide, it appeared to be buried in the loose dirt. Its crumpled edges glinted in the low sunlight.

      It was obviously artificial.