Now some of you may wonder why I devote my weekly column to such a strange idea. It’s because of all these rumors we’re hearing on the net. It seems there’s a new crisis looming… something nebulous and frightening which strains the edges of reality.
Want the truth? I’d been expecting something like this. Really.
You see, for all our problems, it was starting to look as if people had finally begun to grow up… as if we’d learned some lessons and were starting to work well together at last. Perhaps we had things too well in hand. So, by conservation of crises, here comes something new to frighten us half to death.
It’s just an idea, and admittedly a half-baked, unlikely one. Still, picking apart ideas is what the net is all about.
• EXOSPHERE
inside a locked spaceship, she wasn’t expecting anybody. And yet, there came a knock at the door. Teresa had been wriggling through a cramped space, using a torque wrench to tighten a new aluminum pipe. She stopped and listened. It came again — a rapping at the shuttle’s crew access hatch. “Just a minute!” Her voice was muffled by the padded tubing around her. Teresa writhed backward out of the recess where she’d been replacing Atlantis’s archaic fuel-cell system with a smaller, more efficient one stripped out of a used car. Wiping her hands on a rag, she stepped across rattling metal planks to peer through the middeck’s solitary, circular window.
“Oh, it’s you, Alex! Hold on a sec.”
She wasn’t certain he could hear her through the hatch, but it took only a few moments to crank the release and swing the heavy door aside. Repairing and cleaning the hatch had been her first self-appointed task, soon after arriving on this tiny island of exile.
Alex waited atop the stairs rising from the pediment of the Atlantis monument. Or the shuttle’s gibbet, as Teresa sometimes thought of it. For the crippled machine seemed to hang where it was, trapped, like a bird caught forever in the act of taking off.
“Hi,” Alex said, and smiled.
“Hi yourself.”
The slight tension elicited by June Morgan’s visit was quite over by now. Of course she shouldn’t have felt awkward that her friend’s lover happened to pass through from time to time. Alex carried heavy burdens, and it was good to know he could relax that way on occasion. Still, Teresa felt momentary twinges of jealousy and suspicion not rooted in anything as straightforward as reason.
“Thought it time I dropped by to see how you’re doing.” Alex raised a sack with the outlines of a bottle. “Brought a housewarming present. I’m not disturbing, I hope?”
“No, of course not, silly. Watch your step though. I’ve torn up the deck plating to get at some cooling lines. Have to replace a lot of them, I’m afraid.”
“Urn,” Alex commented as he stepped over one of the yawning openings, staring at the jumble of pipes and tubing. “So the catalysts June brought you helped?”
“Sure did. And those little robots you lent me. They were able to thread cabling behind bulkheads so I didn’t even have to remove any big panels. Thanks.”
Alex put the sack down near the chaos of new and old jerry-rigging. “You won’t mind if I ask you a rather obvious question?”
“Like why? Why am I doing this?” Teresa laughed. “I honestly don’t know, really. Something to pass the time, I guess. Certainly I don’t fool myself she’ll ever fly again. Her spine couldn’t take the stress of even the gentlest launch.
“Maybe I’m just a born picture straightener. Can’t leave an honest machine just lying around rusting.”
Peering into the jumble of wires and pipes, Alex whistled. “Looks complicated.”
“You said it. Columbia-class shuttles were the most complex machines ever built. Later models streamlined techniques these babies explored.
“That’s the sad part, really. These were developmental spacecraft. It was dumb, even criminal, to pretend they were ‘routine orbital delivery vehicles,’ or whatever the damn fools called them at the time… Anyway, come on. Let me give you a tour.”
She showed him where NASA scavengers had stripped the ship, back when the decision had been made to abandon Atlantis where she lay. “They took anything that could be cannibalized for the two remaining shuttles. Still, there’s an amazing amount of junk they left behind. The flight computers, for instance. Totally obsolete, even at the time. Half the homes in America had faster, smarter ones by then. Your wristwatch could cheat all five at poker and then talk them all into voting Republican.”
Alex marveled. “Amazing.”
Teresa led him up the ladder to the main deck, where South Pacific sunshine streamed in through front windows smudged and stained by perching seagulls. The cockpit was missing half its instruments, ripped out indelicately long ago, leaving wires strewn across dim, dust-filmed displays. She rested her arms on the command seat and sighed. “So much love and attention went into these machines. And so much bureaucratic ineptitude. Sometimes I wonder how we ever got as far as we did.”
“Say, Teresa. Is there a way to get into the cargo bay?”
She turned around and saw Alex peering through the narrow windows at the back of the control cabin. It was pitch black in the bay, of course, since it had no ports to the outside. She herself had been back there only once, to discover in dismay that midges and tiny spiders had found homes there, lacing the vast cavity with gauzy webs. Probably they used cracks Atlantis had suffered when she fell onto her 747 carry-plane, ruining both ships forever. The Boeing had been scrapped. But Atlantis remained where she lay, her cargo hold now home only to insects.
“Sure. Through the airlock on middeck. But—”
He turned. “Rip… There’s a favor I have to ask.”
She blinked. “Just name it.”
“Come outside then. I brought something in the truck.”
The crate had to be winched up the pediment steps. From there it was a tight squeeze through the crew-egress hatch.
“We can’t leave it here,” Teresa said, panting and wiping her brow. “It blocks my work space.”
“That’s why I asked about the bay. Do you think we can get it through?”
Just left of the toilet cubicle stood the shuttle’s airlock, now the only way into the cargo bay. Teresa looked, and shook her head dubiously. “Maybe if we uncrate your whatever-it-is.”
“All right. But let’s be careful.”
She saw why he was so nervous when they peeled away the inner packing. There, resting inside a gimbaled housing, lay the most perfect sphere Teresa had ever seen. It glistened almost liquidly, causing the eye to skip along its flanks. Somehow, vision flowed on past, missing the thing itself.
“We’ll have to carry it by the housing,” Alex told her. Teresa bent to get a good grip on the rim as he took the other side. It was very heavy. Like a gyroscope, the silvery ball seemed to stay oriented in exactly the same direction, no matter how they shifted and jostled it. But then, that might have been an illusion. For all Teresa knew, it was spinning madly right in front of her. No ripple in the convex reflection gave any clue.
“What… is this thing?” she asked as they paused for breath inside the airlock. There was barely room for the globe and its cradle, forcing them to squeeze side by side to reach the opposite hatch. The close press of Alex’s shoulder, as they sidled together, felt at once familiar and warm, recalling times not so long ago of shared danger and adventure.
“It’s a gravity resonator,” he told her, caressing the sphere with his gaze. “A completely new design.”