Time. Stephen Baxter

me,’ Malenfant said heavily, ‘why Cruithne is so much more difficult.’

      George ticked the problems off on his fingers. ‘Cruithne is twenty degrees out of the plane of the ecliptic. Plane changes are very energy-expensive. That’s why the Apollo guys landed close to the Moon’s equator. Two. Cruithne’s orbit is highly eccentric. So we can’t use the low-energy Hohmann trajectories we employ to transfer from one circular orbit to another, for instance in travelling from Earth to Mars. Changes to elliptic orbits are also energy-expensive. Three –’

      Malenfant listened a while longer.

      ‘So you’ve stated the problem,’ said Malenfant patiently. ‘Now tell me how we do it.’

      There was more bluster and bullshit and claims of impossibility, which Malenfant weathered.

      And then it began.

      George produced mass statements for the BDB and its payload, began to figure the velocity changes he would need to reach Cruithne, how much less manoeuvring capability he would have, how much less payload he could carry there compared to Reinmuth. Then he began calling in an array of technicians, all of whom started just as sceptical as himself, most of whom, in the end, were able to figure a reply. They called up Dan Ystebo at Key Largo to ask him how little living room his pet squid really, truly could survive in. Dan was furious, but he came back with answers.

      It took most of the day. Slowly, painfully, a new mission design converged. Malenfant only had to sit there and let it happen, as he knew it would.

      But there was a problem.

      The present spacecraft design packed enough life support to take Sheena 5 to Reinmuth, support her work there, and bring her home again: she was supposed to come sailing into Earth’s atmosphere, behind a giant aeroshell of asteroid slag.

      But there was no way a comparable mission to Cruithne could be achieved.

      There was a way to meet the mission’s main objectives, however. In fact it would be possible to get Sheena to Cruithne much more rapidly.

      By cutting her life support, and burning everything up on the way out.

      For Sheena, a Cruithne voyage would be one way.

      Emma Stoney:

      From Emma’s perspective, sitting in her office in Vegas, everything was starting to fall apart.

      The legalistic vultures were hovering over Malenfant and his toy spaceships, and meanwhile the investors, made distrustful by rumours of Malenfant’s growing involvement with bizarre futurian types, were starting to desert.

      If Malenfant had made himself more available, more visible to shore up confidence, it might have made a difference. But he didn’t. Right through Christmas and into the New Year Malenfant remained locked away with Cornelius Taine, or holed up at his rocket test site.

      It seemed to Emma events were approaching a climax. But still Malenfant wouldn’t listen to her.

      So Emma went to the Mojave.

      Emma stayed the night in a motel in the town of Mojave itself. She was profoundly uncomfortable, and slept little.

      Her transport arrived before dawn. It was an Army bus. When she climbed aboard, George Hench was waiting for her. He had a flask of coffee and a bagel. ‘Breakfast,’ he said. She accepted gratefully; the coffee was industrial strength, but welcome.

      The other passengers were young engineers, trying to sleep with their heads jammed in corners by the windows.

      The drive out to the BDB test site was dull but easy. The sun had risen, the heat climbing, by the time they hit the thirty-mile road to Malenfant’s BDB launch complex – or launch simplex, as he liked to call it.

      Hench jammed open the bus window. ‘Natural air conditioning,’ he said, cackling.

      She glanced back. One or two of the youngsters behind them stirred.

      Hench shrugged. ‘They’ll sleep.’

      At the site the bus passed through the security fence and pulled over, and Emma climbed down cautiously. The light glared from the sand that covered everything, and the heat was a palpable presence that struck at her, sucking the moisture from her flesh.

      The test site had grown. There were a lot more structures, a lot more activity even at this hour of the morning. But it was nothing like Cape Canaveral.

      There were hardly any fixed structures at all. The place had the air of a construction site. There were trailers scattered over the desert, some sprouting antennae and telecommunications feeds. There weren’t even any fuel tanks that she could see, just fleets of trailers, frost gleaming on their tanks. People – engineers, most of them young – moved to and fro, their voices small in the desert’s expanse, their hard hats gleaming like insect carapaces.

      And there was the pad itself, the centre of attention, maybe a mile from where she stood, bearing the Nautilus: Bootstrap’s first interplanetary ship, Reid Malenfant’s pride and joy. She saw the lines of a rust-brown Shuttle external tank and the slim pillars of solid rocket boosters. The stack was topped by a tubular cover that gleamed white in the sun. Somewhere inside that fairing, she knew, a Caribbean reef squid, disoriented as all hell, would some day ride into space.

      Hench said gruffly, ‘I’ll tell you, Ms Stoney –’

      ‘Emma.’

      ‘Working with those kids has been the best part of this whole damn project, for me. You know, these kids today come out of graduate school, and they are real whizzes with Computer Aided This and That, and they do courses in science theory and math and software design … but they don’t get to bend tin. Not only that, they’ve never seen anything fail before. In engineering, experience gained is directly proportional to the amount of equipment ruined. No wonder this country has fallen behind in every sphere that counts. Well, here they’ve had to build stuff, to budget and schedule. Some of the kids were scared off. But those that remained flourished …’

      And here came Malenfant. He was wearing beat-up overalls – he even had a spanner in a loop at his waist – and his face and hands and scalp were covered in white dust patches. He bent to kiss her, and she could feel gritty sand on her cheek.

      ‘So what do you think of Nautilus? Isn’t she beautiful?’

      ‘Kind of rough and ready.’

      Malenfant laughed. ‘So she’s supposed to be.’

      An amplified voice drifted across the desert from the launch pad.

      ‘What was that?’

      Hench shrugged. ‘Just a checklist item.’

      ‘You’re going through a checklist? A launch checklist?’

      Malenfant said, ‘Demonstration test only. We’re planning two tests today. We’ve done it a dozen times, already. Later today we’ll even have that damn squid of Dan Ystebo’s up in the payload pod, on top of a fully fuelled ship. We’re ready. And Cruithne is up there waiting for us. And who knows what lies beyond that. As soon as you can clear away the legal bullshit –’

      ‘We’re working on it, Malenfant.’

      Malenfant took her for a walk around the booster pad, eager to show off his toy. Malenfant and Hench, obviously high on stress and adrenaline, launched into war stories about how they’d built their rocket ship. ‘… The whole thing is a backyard rocket. It has Space Shuttle engines, and an F-15 laser gyro set and accelerometer, and the autopilot and avionics from a MD-11 airliner. In fact the BDB thinks it’s an MD-11 on a peculiar flight path. We sent the grad school kids scouring through the West Coast aerospace junkyards, and they came back with titanium pressure spheres and hydraulic actuators and other good stuff. And so on. Assembled and flight-ready in six months …’

      He