Ever since that brief time of bold lunar missions-and the even-briefer Zheng He era-no astronaut had ventured beyond the radiation belt. Instead, they hunkered in safety, just above the atmosphere, while robots explored the solar system. This made Gerald the Far-Out Guy! With his bola for an arm, and the grabber for a hand, he reached beyond. Just a bit, into the maelstrom. No one else got as high.
Trawling for garbage.
“All right…,” he murmured. “Where are you…?”
Radar had the target pinpointed, about as well as machines could manage amid a crackling fog of charged particles. Position and trajectory kept jittering, evading a fix with slipperiness that seemed almost alive. Worse-though no one believed him-Gerald swore that orbits tended to shift in this creepy zone, by up to a few thousandths of a percent, translating into tens of meters. That could make a bola-snatch more artistic guesswork than physics. Computers still had lots to learn, before they took over this job from a couple of primates.
Hachi chirped excitedly.
“Yeah, I see it.” Gerald squinted, and optics at the tether-tip automatically magnified a glitter, just ahead. The target-probably some piece of space junk, left here by an earlier, wastrel generation. Part of an exploding Russian second stage, perhaps. Or a connector ring from an Apollo flight. Maybe one of those capsules filled with human ashes that used to get fired out here, willy-nilly, during the burial-in-space fad. Or else the remnants of some foolish weapon experiment. Space Command claimed to have all the garbage radar charted and imaged down to a dozen centimeters.
Gerald knew better.
Whatever this thing was, the time had come to bring it home before collision with other debris caused a cascade of secondary impacts-a runaway process that already forced weather and research satellites to be replaced or expensively armored.
Garbage collecting wasn’t exactly romantic. Then again, neither was Gerald. Far from the square-jawed, heroic image of a spaceman, he saw only a middle-aged disappointment, on the rare occasions that he looked in a mirror at all, a face lined from squinting in the sharp light of orbit, where sunrise came at you like a wall, every ninety minutes.
At least he was good at achieving a feat of imagination-that he really existed far above. That his true body spun out there, thousands of kilometers away.
The illusion felt perfect, at last. Gerald was the bola. Thirty kilometers of slender, conducting filament, whirling a slow turn every thirty minutes, or five times during each elongated orbit. At both ends of the pivoting tether were compact clusters of sensors (my eyes), cathode emitters (my muscles), and grabbers (my clutching hands), that felt more part of him, right now, than anything made of flesh. More real than the meaty parts he had been born with, now drifting in a cocoon far below, near the bulky, pitted space station. That distant human body seemed almost imaginary.
Like a hunter with his faithful dog, man and monkey grew silent during final approach, as if sound might spook the prey, glittering in their sights.
It’s got an odd shine, he thought, as telemetry showed the distance rapidly narrowing. Only a few kilometers now, till the complex dance of two orbits and the tether’s own, gyrating spin converged, like a fielder leaping to snatch a hurtling line drive. Like an acrobat, catching his partner in midair. After which…
… the bola’s natural spin would take over, clasping the seized piece of debris into its whirl, absorbing its old momentum and giving that property new values, new direction. Half a spin later, with this tether-tip at closest approach to Earth, the grabber would let go, hurling the debris backward, westward, and down to burn in the atmosphere.
The easy part. By then, Gerald would be sipping coffee in the station’s shielded crew lounge. Only now-
That’s no discarded second stage rocket, he pondered, studying the glimmer. It’s not a cargo faring, or shredded fuel tank, or urine-icicle, dumped by a manned mission. By now, Gerald knew how all kinds of normal junk reflected sunlight-from archaic launch vehicles and satellites to lost gloves and tools-each playing peekaboo tricks of shadow. But this thing…
Even the colors weren’t right. Too blue. Too many kinds of blue. And light levels remained so steady! As if the thing had no facets or flat surfaces. Hachi’s questioning hoot was low and worried. How can you make a firm grab, without knowing where the edges are?
As relative velocity ebbed toward zero, Gerald made adjustments by spewing electrons from cathode emitters at either cable end, creating torque against the planetary field, a trick for maneuvering without rockets or fuel. Ideal for a slow, patient job that had to be done on the cheap.
Now Hachi earned his keep. The little monkey stretched himself like a strand of spaghetti, smoothly taking over final corrections-his instincts honed by a million generations of swinging from jungle branches-while Gerald focused on the grab itself. There would be no second chance.
Slow and patient… except at the last, frenetic moment… when you wish you had something quicker to work with than magnetism. When you wish-
There it was, ahead. The Whatever.
Rushing toward rendezvous, the bola’s camera spied something glittery, vaguely oval in shape, gleaming with a pale blueness that pulsed like something eager.
Gerald’s hand was the grabber, turning a fielder’s mitt of splayed fingers, reaching as the object loomed suddenly.
Don’t flinch, he chided ancient intuitions while preparing to snatch whatever this hurtling thing might be.
Relax. It never hurts.
Only this time-in a strange and puzzling way-it did.
Does the universe hate us? How many pitfalls lie ahead, waiting to shred our conceited molecule-clusters back into unthinking dust? Shall we count them?
Men and women always felt besieged. By monsters prowling the darkness. By their oppressive rulers, or violent neighbors, or capricious gods. Yet, didn’t they most often blame themselves? Bad times were viewed as punishment, brought on by wrong behavior. By unwise belief.
Today, our means of self-destruction seem myriad. (Though Pandora’s Cornucopia will try to list them all!) We modern folk snort at the superstitions of our ancestors. We know they could never really wreck the world, but we can! Zeus or Moloch could not match the destructive power of a nuclear missile exchange, or a dusting of plague bacilli, or some ecological travesty, or ruinous mismanagement of the intricate aiconomy.
Oh, we’re mighty. But are we so different from our forebears?
Won’t our calamity (when it comes) also be blamed on some arrogant mistake? A flaw in judgment? Some obstinate belief? Culpa nostra. Won’t it be the same old plaint, echoing across the ruin of our hopes?
“We never deserved it all! Our shining towers and golden fields. Our overflowing libraries and full bellies. Our long lives and overindulged children. Our happiness. Whether by God’s will or our own hand, we always expected it would come to this.
“To dust.”
– Pandora’s Cornucopia
2.
Meanwhile, far below, cameras stared across forbidden desert, monitoring disputed territory in a conflict so bitter, antagonists couldn’t agree what to call it.