“That we will,” said Annetine. Sniffling, Anna turned to Ev. “Here are we two being so emotional, and not you, eh?”
“It won’t hit me until we pass the orbit of Saturn,” said Ev.
“So.” Anna sat down. She fished a tissue out of her handbag and blew her nose. Mark and Ev sat on either armrest of the chair beside her. “Mark Willson, you I suspected maybe to meet on this trip. For months you have been asking for specimens for this and that flimsy reason. And looking every day gloomier than the day before. I have been thinking to myself, maybe Mark is going to the stars. But Dr. Evrett Reynolds, you surprise me!” She regarded Ev with blue eyes that were red-rimmed, yet piercing.
Mark said, “He surprised me, too. Not to mention Pennington Genetech.”
“I would imagine, if today he quit from that high-paying job.”
“I did more than just quit at Pennington.” Ev indicated the mouse carrier. He grinned brilliantly. “Madam, I robbed the Pennington gene bank.”
Annetine laughed, her characteristic, ringing laughter that could splinter the quiet in a small room. It sounded wonderful to Mark. “So how long have we until the docking?”
Ev gestured upward. “The ship is accelerating too. We’re playing catchup.”
“We’re already on our way?” Mark discovered that his battered stomach had one more flipflop left in it.
“Yes. Ship, televators and all, we’re ascending, on the grounds that the authorities will throw everything they have at us if they realize how much genetic material we’ve stolen and how many good scientists are going with us.”
Anna nodded.
Images appeared on the twelve walls of the middle of the deck. One flat video screen showed the Genesis Foundation’s director, Kristeller, in an interview; on another screen appeared the President of the United States, in a news conference. There was sound, the words of the two men, but muted and from here audible only as a murmur. While the cold night of stars wheeled by the windows, Mark watched the other videos—pictures and diagrams of the ship. There was a depiction of the vaults of stasis, ready to receive and freeze thousands of colonists. Mark’s eyes shied away to another screen, showing the greenhouse that would grow for centuries while people stayed in stasis. The greenhouse was crammed with young plants and seedling trees. Mark imagined the trees patiently growing for a century and more, a tangled green heart within the traveling starship.
The televator wheeled around. Below the wide window, Earth receded with the speed of ascent. Sunset, faded to maroon, rimmed the western edge of the planet. Closer and darker was the bulk of North America, detailed by the lights of the power grid. “We’ve got friends in low places,” Ev announced. He pointed down. “Look at the western seaboard.”
The power distribution grid was fading, like a sudden, visible cooling of the continent’s fever. Umbra within penumbra, the center of the brownout was black. The blackout radiated from Star Field.
“The lights are going out down there. And so are the machines,” said Ev. Elsewhere in the observation deck, puzzled voices were raised as others noticed the same thing.
Mark jumped up. “Are they shutting the Fountain down?”
“Just the opposite,” Ev said firmly. “It was risky—interfering with the computer that controls the continental power grid. But a top executive in the power consortium was in on the plan. Look. You can see it happening. Power is being diverted to the Space Fountain, on an unprecedented scale. From which we get one hell of a boost.”
“The executive,” asked Anna, “has he gotten away with us? Do you know?”
“Yes, I do. No, he isn’t coming. He’s over the upper age limit. He stayed, and he’ll probably be in prison for the rest of his life.”
“Prison, for the crime of giving us a head start.” Anna shook her head in dismay.
“And for destroying the Space Fountain.” Anna gaped at Ev, who smiled thinly. “The energy surge will burn out the power plant and disperse the particle streams. So nobody can use the Fountain to come after us. And the North American launchers and spaceports that the authorities might have used against us are dropping out of service. The west coast Space Force bases are blacking out.” Triumph edged Ev’s voice. “Nothing on Earth can stop us now.”
Mark sat down again on his arm of the chair. He felt dizzy.
On one video screen, the President of the United States appeared in a new mood. He was furious. He had been informed of the blackout. And he was telling the nation and world that the blackout had caused a high speed train accident in Nevada, and in California, a midair collision of two planes because the Air Net had been out of operation before emergency power came on. Five people had died. “How sad,” Anna murmured, shaking her head. Ev just stared at the floor. The president’s words were audible to the shocked, soundless audience on the observation deck. Anyone responsible for the blackout could be charged with terrorism. They would face the death penalty.
“That’s bad.” Ev still stared at the floor. “He wants sacrificial lambs ”
The televator turned back toward the stars. This time, Mark recognized the thickest congregation of stars as the Milky Way. He had seen it from lands and seas on Earth, the glowing path across the sky; here it was vertical with respect to the view from the observation deck window.
Apart from the video screens, there were no lights on the observation deck. The Earth below had fallen under the pall of a night without the yellow glow of electricity, and Mark’s eyes had adjusted to the darkened world. The Milky Way seemed like a solid mass of brilliance, a glittering column of bright stars and dust standing over the dark limb of Earth.
Ev said, “Mark, you’re wrong.”
“About something, or about everything?” Mark asked. He felt utterly drained.
“You said the stars are lifeless. They aren’t. Cosmic genesis, remember? Big blue stars forge atoms—iron and oxygen and carbon. And when they turn into supernovas, they throw all the atoms of new stars and* worlds and life out into space. So the Seven Sisters are our sisters. And organic molecules first formed in interstellar dust clouds. In the beginning, they rained on Earth, remember?”
“It was a hell of a long way from organic molecules to life on Earth,” said Mark.
“At the start, Earth was a hard, hostile place. Life changed the water and the land, the air and the weather, slowly and surely, to make a place conducive to life. But, see, what we’re doing is taking life back to the stars, where it came from. This time life will remake a hard world much more quickly.” Ev smiled radiantly, not at Mark or Anna, but at the stars. “Life was exiled on Earth for four billion years. But it belongs to the stars.”
Never had Mark known Ev to be much of a visionary. But what he had said sounded right. Mark nodded with a lump in his throat.
Anna laughed, though not as ringingly loudly as usual for her. Wonder softened her laughter. “That is good, Ev. Don’t forget what you have told us here. When the going gets hard in the future, we will need to think that way about what we are doing ”
Ev stood up and put his hand on the glass, leaning toward Earth. “I won’t forget. Neither will somebody down there. When we get farther out, I’ll be able to talk to Titan and Titan can send a confidential message back here, and I’ll tell her.”
Mark knew who Ev meant. “You can say I love her, too. And that I’ll always remember her no matter what happens.”
Anna reached up to squeeze Mark’s shoulder. “My dear boy, don’t worry. He’s right. It’s meant to be, that we will reach a good new world.”