A smattering of consciousness, and robots would have realised that their lives were mercifully free of anxiety.
But everyone else was anxious enough to be going on with. Vic Thorn had had a long shower, listened to ‘My Way’, put on a T-shirt, trainers and shorts, and had just decided to spend the day in the fitness studio when the call came from headquarters.
‘You could be useful to us in solving a problem,’ said Ed Haskin, under whose responsibility the spaceport and the systems attached to it fell.
‘Right now?’ Thorn hesitated. ‘I was planning to spend a bit of time on the treadmill.’
‘Right now would be better.’
‘What’s up?’
‘It looks as if there are problems with your spaceship.’
Thorn bit his lower lip. A thousand alarm bells went off in his head at the idea that his take-off might be delayed. Bad, very bad! The ship was supposed to leave the port at about midday, with him and another seven astronauts on board, to relieve the crew of the American moon base who, after six months of selenic exile, were succumbing to hallucinations of tarmac roads, carpeted flats, sausages, meadows and a sky full of colour, clouds and rain. On top of that, Thorn was scheduled to be one of the two pilots for the two-and-a-half-day flight and, to cap it all, to be leader of the crew, which explained why they were talking to him rather than anyone else. And there was another reason why any hesitation struck him as more than inopportune—
‘What’s up with the crate?’ he asked, with deliberate indifference. ‘Doesn’t it want to fly?’
‘Oh, it wants to fly all right, but it can’t. There was a glitch during loading. The manipulator broke down and blocked the hatches. We can’t shut the freight area.’
‘I see.’ Relief flooded through Thorn. A defective manipulator could be dealt with.
‘And you know why it broke down? Debris. A heavy fall.’
Thorn sighed. Space debris, whose unwelcome omnipresence was down to an unparallelled orbital congestion, begun in the 1950s by the Soviets with their Sputnik launches. Since then, the remnants of thousands of missions had circulated at every altitude: burnt-out propulsion stages, decommissioned and forgotten satellites, wreckage from countless explosions and collisions, from complete reactors to tiny fragments of shrapnel, drops of frozen coolant, screws and wires, bits of plastic and metal, scraps of gold foil and vestiges of flaked-off paint. The constant fracturing of the splinters with each fresh collision meant that they were breeding like rodents. By now the number of objects larger than one centimetre was estimated at 900,000. Barely three per cent of these were constantly monitored, and the ominous remainder, along with billions of smaller particles and micrometeorites, was on its way elsewhere – in case of doubt, with the inevitability with which insects ended up on windscreens, towards wherever you happened to be.
The problem was, a wasp hurtling at a luxury limousine with the momentum of an identically sized fragment of space debris would have developed the kinetic energy of a hand-grenade and written off the vehicle in an instant. The speeds of objects moving in opposite directions became extreme in space. Even particles only micrometres across had a destructive effect in the long term: they ground away at solar panels, they destroyed the surfaces of satellites and roughened the outer shells of spaceships. Near-Earth debris burned up sooner or later in the upper layers of the atmosphere, but only to be replaced by new debris. With increasing altitude its lifetime extended, and it could theoretically have survived for all eternity at the level at which the space station was orbiting. The fact that several of the dangerous objects were known and their flight-paths could be calculated weeks and months in advance provided a certain consolation, because it allowed the astronauts just to steer the whole station out of the way. The thing that had crashed into the manipulator plainly hadn’t been one of those.
‘And what can I do about it?’ asked Thorn.
‘I know, crew time.’ Haskin laughed irritably. ‘Tightness of resources. The robot can’t sort it out all by itself. Two of us will have to go out, but at the moment I’ve only got one staff member available. Would you jump in?’
Thorn didn’t think for long. It was very important for him to get out of there on time, and besides, he liked space-walks.
‘That’s fine,’ he said.
‘You’ll be going out with Karina Spektor.’
Even better. He’d met Spektor the previous evening in the crew canteen, an expert in robotics, of Russian origin, with high cheekbones and cat-green eyes, who had responded to his attempts at flirtation with seeming willingness to engage in further international understanding.
‘I’m on my way!’ he said.
—in a city that never sleeps—
Cities tended to generate noise. Streets in which the air seethed with acoustic activity. People drawing attention to themselves by beeping, calling, whistling, chatting, laughing, complaining, shouting. Noise as social putty, coded into cacophony. Guitarists, singers, sax players in house doorways and subway tunnels. Disgruntled crows, barking dogs. The reverberation of construction machinery, thundering jackhammers, metal on metal. Unexpected, familiar, wheedling, shrill, sharp, dark, mysterious, noises that rose and fell, that approached and fled, some that spread like a gas, others that caught you right in the pit of the stomach and the auditory canal. Background noises of traffic. The flashy bass baritone of heavy limousines vying with dainty mopeds, with the purr of electromobiles, the grandiloquence of sports cars, souped-up motorbikes, the thumping get-to-the-side of the buses. Music from boutiques, footstep concerts in pedestrian precincts, strolling, shuffling, strutting, rushing, the sky vibrating with the thunder of distant aeroplane turbines, the whole city one great bell.
Outside the space city:
None of that.
Familiar as the sounds might have been inside the living modules, laboratories, control rooms, connecting tunnels, leisure areas and restaurants distributed across an overall height of 280 metres, there was a ghostly feeling the first time you left the station for EVA, ‘Extravehicular Activity’, the external maintenance service. Suddenly, without transition, you were out there, really out there, more out there than anywhere else. Beyond the airlocks all sound stopped. Of course you didn’t go entirely deaf. You could hear yourself very clearly, and you could hear the rush of the air-conditioning unit built into the spacesuit, and of course the walkie-talkie, but it was all being played out inside your own portable spaceship.
All around you, in the vacuum, perfect silence reigned. You saw the mighty structure of the station, peered through illuminated windows, saw the icy radiance of the floodlight batteries high above, where enormous spaceships were being assembled, spaceships that would never land on a planet and only existed in weightless suspension, you were aware of industrial activity, the turning and stretching of the cranes on the outer ring and the shuttles from the inner zone, you observed robots in free fall, so like living creatures that you felt like asking them the way – and intuitively, overwhelmed by the beauty of the architecture, the far-away Earth and the coldly staring stars, their light undispersed by the atmosphere, you expected to hear mysterious or dramatic music. But space stayed mute, its sublimity orchestrated only by your own breath.
In the company of Karina Spektor, Thorn floated through the emptiness and silence towards the defective manipulator. Their suits, fitted with steering nozzles, enabled them to navigate precisely. They slipped across the docks of the vast spaceport embraced by the tower-like construction of the space station, wide as a freeway. Three moon shuttles were currently anchored on the ring – two of them fixed to airlocks, Thorn’s spaceship in the parking position – and also the eight plane-like evacuation pods. Basically the whole ring was one great switching yard, around which the spaceships constantly changed location to keep the symmetrically constructed station in balance.