“It was different when they had a whole World to themselves,” Anderson said slowly. “They could feed themselves or starve.”
Ogelby came to their defense. “But they will be feeding themselves. They have a thousand people out there building extra farms, all volunteers.”
“It won’t work,” O’Hara said. “I’ve seen the projections. You know how long it takes to make soil from scratch. More time than it takes to make babies.”
“I thought they were mining Devon’s World.”
“What’s left of it. We’ll be lucky if they reclaim ten percent of the topsoil, and that’s been sitting exposed to space for two years. Sterilized and desiccated. We have to supply water, worms, microorganisms.”
“And nitrogen,” Anderson cut in, “and carbon—that’s it, ultimately. The same old story.” It was a problem as old as the Worlds themselves. Metals they had in plenty, and oxygen, from the lunar surface and the interior of New New, which was a hollowed-out mountain of steel. But you can’t grow food without carbon, nitrogen, and water, and although every molecule of these precious substances was meticulously recycled, no such process is perfect. Because of inevitable steady losses, closed-cycle agriculture can’t even sustain a stable population, let alone a growing one. Before the war there had been active commerce between the Earth and the Worlds, Earth trading hydrogen (which the Worlds burned to make water), carbon, and nitrogen for energy and exotic manufacturing materials and pharmaceuticals that could only be produced in zero gravity. So the Worlds’ population could steadily grow.
“No more,” Ogelby said to the duck, who was pacing nervously in front of him. “I guess we lose perspective in the lab. As if Deucalion were coming in tomorrow.” Deucalion was the name of a CC (“carbonaceous chondritic”) asteroid that was being slowly moved toward New New. They would be able to mine it for nitrogen, carbon, hydrogen, and other useful things, but it was still five years away. Ogelby was involved in designing and setting up the factories that would eventually take the asteroid apart. Right now, though, they just had a pilot plant, working on small amounts of CC material sent up from the Moon. It didn’t manufacture enough to offset any population growth.
“If they could only wait a few years,” Anderson said. “We’ll be rebuilding Devon’s World. Right now Deucalion has to take precedence.” Originally, the towing job had been a very long-term project, twenty-eight years from Deucalion’s original orbit to New New. After the war they knew they had to speed it up. This was why so much amateur talent had been pressed into repairing the farms: most of the regular construction crews were frantically building mass-driver engines and solar-powered tugs to haul them out to intercept Deucalion. If things went according to schedule, they would cut down the remaining transit time for the asteroid from nineteen years to five.
“It’s just happening too fast,” O’Hara said. “If two thousand women have two-point-eight babies a year for five years, that’s twenty-eight thousand new mouths to feed. With six or seven hundred deaths per year, overall, that’s a population increase of about ten percent.
“And if they all grow up to be Devonites, we have a regular yeast culture on our hands. In a couple of generations, every other person is going to be bald and holy and fucking anything that moves.” O’Hara skimmed a flat pebble out over the lake; it skipped twice, curving to the right. “I wouldn’t like to be Coordinator.”
“Change of heart?” Ogelby said. That was her ambition.
“I don’t know anymore. I may just sit and watch.”
2
When O’Hara returned to work there was a message at her console telling her to go to Level 6, Room 6000, and talk to Saul Kramer. The woman she was working for didn’t know anything about it, but a quick directory check showed that Kramer was in charge of personnel at the Department of Emergency Planning. That was pretty exciting, as was the unusual request for a face-to-face meeting—you expect a Ranking Bureaucrat to talk to you through memos, or at most on the cube.
Her excitement took an anxious twist as she approached Room 6000. A man about her age, vaguely familiar, came out the door and walked swiftly by without greeting her, his face pale and grim.
A white-haired woman in the stark anteroom glanced at a console and asked whether she was Marianne O’Hara, and said that Mr. Kramer would see her. As O’Hara pushed open his door she remembered where she had seen the young man. Module 9B, the quarantine—a surge of adrenaline shocked her and she stopped halfway through the door, took a breath, and realized it couldn’t be. She didn’t have the plague; if that were it she wouldn’t be walking around free.
Kramer’s desk was littered with paper, a rare sight. He even had a recycler in the corner, with a stack of new paper beside it. A dramatic-looking man, completely bald, large and muscular, with pale gray eyes. He looked up at her with concern. “O’Hara? Are you all right?”
She laughed nervously. “I just frightened myself with a thought—that man who just left…”
“Lewis Franconia.” He gestured. “Have a seat.”
“We were together in the quarantine.”
He nodded vigorously. “No coincidence.”
She sat down and clasped her hands together, to stop the shaking. “Something showed up?”
“What-no, nothing like that, nothing medical. It’s just no coincidence that you were both on Earth recently. That’s true of almost everybody who’s come in here today.”
When O’Hara didn’t say anything, he continued. “We have a favor to ask of you. A very big favor.”
“For Emergency Planning?”
“We’re implementing it. But the request comes straight from the Coordinators.”
“I’ll do what I can.”
“We need a group of people to go back to Earth.”
“Earth?” She leaned forward. “Now? What about the plague?”
“You’ll be isolated in spacesuits. Sterilized by vacuum before you get out of them.” He shuffled some papers. “This is absolutely secret. Whether you say yes or no, you can’t tell anybody about it. Not even your husbands.”
“All right.”
“You know why New New survived the war.”
“Sure. You can’t hurt a mountain with a shotgun.”
He nodded. “The missiles that got the Worlds were designed, built, and put to bed more than eighty years ago. They were set afloat by the Americans to use against Socialist military satellites, but they weren’t deactivated after the Treaty of 2021. Just retargeted, in case the Worlds did something the States didn’t like. Fortunately for us, they were designed for use against relatively small, fragile targets. To destroy New New would take a direct hit from a large hydrogen bomb.”
“I understand.”
“Well, that’s just what we’re faced with. They have a hydrogen bomb and they plan to use it on us.” He waved at the cube on the wall, which was showing a map of Africa. “From Zaire.”
She stared at him. “Who has a hydrogen bomb? How could they get it here?”
He sorted through papers and handed her two sheets. “Read this. It’s utterly fantastic.”
It was no secret that many of the survivors on Earth thought the Worlds were responsible for the war. An energy boycott against the United States had precipitated the revolution that within hours escalated into nuclear war.
So here was a group that had decided to do something about it: revenge. Die Schwerter Gott, the Swords of God, a group of young Germans who had managed to remove the warhead from a missile that hadn’t fired. They were moving it to the spaceport in Zaire, one of two launch facilities that had survived the war. There was a shuttle on the pad; they planned to load the bomb into the cargo hold and launch a suicide mission.
“But that’s not possible, is it? There aren’t any engineers left, no pilots.”
“It is barely possible. That shuttle is one of the luxury designs from Mercedes. Very fast, very wasteful of fuel, but it can take twenty or so people from Earth to high orbit in one go, two da
ys’ flight. It’s automated to a fare-thee-well; anyone who can read the manual and punch a computer could get it here. They couldn’t dock safely, not without a skilled pilot, but that’s immaterial to them.”
She handed back the papers. “You want us to go to Earth and stop them?”
“Actually, what we hope is that you’ll get to Zaire before they do. They’re having trouble transporting the bomb; there’s no air transport left in Europe. They’re moving it overland to Spain, where they’ll get a boat to Magreb. That’s how we found out about them, intercepting radio messages while they were arranging for the boat.”
“What if we get there too late?”
“You’re stuck. Our shuttle will get you there, but you have to take theirs to get back.”
“Is there anybody there, at the spaceport?”
“The telescope shows a few people wandering around. No organized activity; no communications we’ve been able to monitor.”
“But they aren’t likely to let us just walk in and hijack their shuttle.”
“Who can say? You might scare them all off when you land.”
“I suppose.” She shook her head. “I have to make a decision right away, can’t talk to anybody?”
“Just to me. You have to decide before you leave this room.”
“When would we be taking off?”
He looked at his watch. “About seven hours from now. You go from here straight to the hub.”
O’Hara stood up and crossed the room. She stared at the cube for a minute. “I just don’t understand. Why me? Just because I’ve been to the Zaire spaceport?”
“Partly because you’ve been there. Partly because…there may be violence. Not many people in New New have any experience with that.”
“You seem to know an awful lot about me,” she said evenly. “Who gave you that bit of information? One of my husbands?”
“Says here… it’s from a transcript, um, of the therapy sessions you had last year.”
“How the hell could you get your hands on that?”
“I couldn’t. But if the Coordinators want something, they can generally get it.”
“You want me to believe that one of the Coordinators sat down and went through confidential medical records, just in case something useful might show up?”
“Of course not; it was done by someone in my office. But under the Coordinators’ authority. It was a simple computer search, semantic association—and we didn’t single you out. Everybody’s records were searched.”
“That’s nice to know. Nobody has civil rights.”
“It’s temporary. You have to admit that the situation—”
“I guess we don’t have time to argue about it. But if you want me because I can supposedly handle violence, you didn’t read that record very thoroughly. That’s why I was in therapy.”
“All I personally know is what’s on this piece of paper. That you’ve carried guns and fired them—”
“No plural. Once. I carried a gun once, in my lap, trying to get to the Cape when the war started. I also fired it only once.”
“That’s one more time than the rest of us.”
She looked back at the cube. “You mainly want people who’ve been on Earth.”
“That’s right; the more recently, the better. There won’t be any time to get accustomed to it.” He paused and leaned forward.
“You fit other criteria: we need people who are young and physically strong, who have experience working in spacesuits. And people without children.”
“That’s encouraging.” She returned to the chair and slumped into it. “I suppose you also want people who are relatively useless, who won’t be missed.”
He shook his head. “That’s not a factor at all. In fact, the expedition’s leader is the Engineering Coordinator.”
“That’s not very smart.”
“It was her decision.” He crumpled up the piece of paper with O’Hara’s data on it and tossed it into the recycler. “What’s yours?”
“Oh…I suppose I have to do it.”
“No one’s forcing you.”
“That’s not exactly what I mean.”
3
She wasn’t even allowed to say good-bye. They taped a message for her to leave for Daniel and John, that she and several others were going back into isolation, but not to worry, it wasn’t the plague.
The lift to the hub was empty. O’Hara put on her sticky slippers and pushed the middle button, marked “0.”
The sensation of weight decreased as the lift rose, or fell, toward the hub. When it stopped she was weightless, which of course was no novelty. The doors slid open and a man walked in upside-down and stood on the ceiling, also with Velcro slippers. They nodded and O’Hara walked down the short corridor, making a little ripping sound each time she lifted a foot. A sign said it would be more natural to use handholds and float through the corridor, but you were liable to collide with somebody coming around a corner or through a door.
She went into the locker room and checked out the spacesuit she’d been assigned last year, and a bundle of those damned diapers, and floated into the Operations Room.
There were four men there, her age or younger, and one woman, Coordinator Sandra Berrigan. Their space-suits were hanging in midair by the opposite wall; O’Hara pushed hers gently in that direction.
O’Hara swam over and introduced herself. She already knew one of them, Ahmed Ten, but hadn’t recognized him at first. A short black man, back on Earth he’d worn his gray hair long, in a huge frizzy cloud; now he was shaven bald. It made him look younger.
“Two more to come,” Berrigan told her. “We’ll hold off the actual briefing until we’re aboard the shuttle. Good-man, you want to show O’Hara how the guns work?” She’d wondered about that; by statute, there were no weapons in New New.
Goodman was a beefy youngster with a quick grin. He beckoned for O’Hara to follow him through the airlock door.
The shuttle floated huge in the pressurized bay. There was a strange smell in the air, burnt metal, like the smell around a welder.
“What they done,” Goodman said, “was take an oxy gun and put a fuel feed on her, then put a sparker at the nozzle. Fuel’s a mixture of vegetable oil and powdered aluminum.” He brought her an oxy gun with an extra tank and a ceramic extension on the nozzle. “Point her down there and give the trigger a quick one.”
She aimed down the long dimension of the bay and pinched the trigger. A squirt of bright flame roared out twenty or thirty meters, orange shot through with blinding blue-white. The noise of it echoed around the chamber. Recoil from the blast pushed O’Hara gently back against the airlock door.
“We all have these?”
“You and me and two others. They wasn’t time to make more.”
“Let’s hope we don’t have to use them. That’s terrible.”
“Yeah, awful,” Goodman said, without too much conviction. “Remember, it won’t go in a straight line on Earth. You got to aim high, for the gravity.”
“Right.” O’Hara wondered what virtue the computer had divined in Goodman.
The airlock opened and Berrigan peered in. “Everybody’s here. O’Hara, come give us a hand. Goodman, you have two more customers.”
All that was left to be loaded were the spacesuits and some paper crates of food. They put them in nets and hooked the nets one at a time to a centrifuge device, to weigh them. Berrigan entered their masses into a console inside the shuttle.
There was nothing dramatic about taking off. Pumps hammered, fading away as they drew air from the chamber. Then the outer lock irised open, there was a tiny push of acceleration, and they drifted, slower than a walk, out into space.
“Change orbit in an hour and twenty minutes,” Berrigan said. “Let’s go over our plan, such as it is.”
She switched on a cube and tapped in some instructions. A flat map of the Zaire spaceport came up. “All we really have to do is leave this ship here,” she said, pointing to the e
nd of the runway, “disabling it so that it can’t be refueled and used against us. Then we just walk down this track to where the shuttle’s waiting.
“That’s where it gets a little complicated. If it looks like there’ll be any trouble, we get aboard in a hurry and leave. Assuming the ship does work.
“If we have free run of the place, though, there are some interesting things we might do. First, Goodman and O’Hara run up to the operations center, here, and burn anything that looks important. We don’t want to leave them with any launch capability at all.”
“What about us?” Ahmed Ten asked. “Can this Mercedes take off without any launch support?”
She laughed. “With a trained monkey at the controls. Everybody’ll get a chance to study the manual for it, but basically all you have to do is ask the computer for a catalog, punch in your destination and launch time, and strap yourself in.
“While you two are having fun, the rest will be down in this building here. That’s a cryogenic storage area, and it appears to be intact. Cryogenics means nitrogen; we’ll take as much as we can. Goodman and O’Hara will keep their eyes open for a vehicle. But even if we have to hand-carry it, we should be able to move a few tonnes, to bring back to the farms.
“I’ll go straight to the shuttle and do a systems check on it. It should only take a few minutes to find out whether it’s still working.”
“If it isn’t, we’re all dead?” O’Hara said.
“There’s a chance not. This isn’t a suicide mission.
“We have enough air, tank switching, to stay in our suits for forty hours. And we can probably find compatible air tanks at the spaceport, though that’s not certain. Standard German ones won’t fit.
“Still, we could probably make time, perhaps indefinitely. Find or make a hyperbaric chamber, keep the inside of it sterile. If the shuttle is down but repairable, Michaels and Washington and I might be able to fix it.