The probe’s mode of travel had changed now, she noticed; the pitons were applying small sideways or braking tweaks to an accelerating motion toward the system’s center of gravity, that contact zone. The gravitational tug of the rock below must be decreasing, balanced by the equal mass of rock above, so that the net force was becoming more and more horizontal, and the probe was simply pulled across the surface.
Now the second lobe was so close, in this virtual diorama, it was over her head. Its crumpled inverted landscape formed a rocky roof. It was dark here, with the Sun occluded, and the slices of starlight in the gap between the worlds were growing narrower.
Lamps lit up on the probe, and they played on the land beneath, the folded roof above. She longed to reach up and touch those inverted craters, as if a toy Moon had been hung over her head, a souvenir from some Aristotelian pocket universe.
“I think we have something,” Xenia said quietly.
Maura looked down. Her field of view blurred as the interpolation routines struggled to keep up.
There was something on the ground before her. It looked like a blanket of foil, aluminum or silver, ragged-edged, laid over the dark regolith. Aside from a fringe a meter or two wide, it appeared to be buried in the loose dirt. Its crumpled edges glinted in the low sunlight.
It was obviously artificial.
Brind had next met Malenfant a few months later, at Kennedy Space Center.
Malenfant found KSC depressing; most of the launch gantries had been demolished or turned into rusting museum pieces. But the visitors’ center was still open. The shuttle exhibit — artifacts, photographs, and virtuals — was contained within a small geodesic dome, yellowing with age.
And there, next to the dome, was Columbia, a genuine orbiter, the first to be flown in space. A handful of people were sheltering from the Florida Sun in the shade of her wing; others were desultorily queuing on a ramp to get on board. Columbia ’s main engines had been replaced by plastic mock-ups, and her landing gear was fixed in concrete. Columbia was forever trapped on Earth, he thought.
He found Brind standing before the astronaut memorial. This was a big slab of polished granite, with names of dead astronauts etched into it. It rotated to follow the Sun, so that the names glowed bright against a backdrop of sky.
“At least it’s sunny,” he said. “Damn thing doesn’t work when it’s cloudy.”
“No.” The granite surface, towering over them, was mostly empty. The space program had shut down, leaving plenty of room for more names.
Sally Brind was short, thin, intense, with spiky, prematurely gray hair; she was no older than forty. She affected small round black glasses that looked like turn-of-the-century antiques. She seemed bright, alert, engaged. Interested, he thought, encouraged.
He smiled at her. “You got any answers for me?”
She handed him a folder; he leafed through it.
“Actually it was a lot of fun, Malenfant.”
“I’ll bet. Gave you something real to do.”
“For the first time in too long. First we looked at a continuous nuclear-fusion drive. Specific impulse in the millions of seconds. But we can’t sustain a fusion reaction for long enough. Not even the Japanese have managed that yet.”
“All right. What else?”
“Maybe photon propulsion. The speed of light — the ultimate exhaust velocity, right? But the power plant weight and energy you’d need to get a practical thrust are staggering. Next we thought about a Bussard ramjet. But it’s beyond us. You’re looking at an electromagnetic scoop that would have to be a hundred kilometers across—”
“Cut to the chase, Sally,” he said gently.
She paused for effect, like a kid doing a magic trick. Then she said, “Nuclear pulse propulsion. We think that’s the answer, Malenfant. A series of microexplosions — fusion of deuterium and helium-3 probably — set off behind a pusher plate.”
He nodded. “I’ve heard of this. Project Orion, back in the 1960s. Like putting a firecracker under a tin can.”
She shaded her eyes from the Sun’s glare. “Well, they proved the concept, back then. The Air Force actually ran a couple of test flights, in 1959 and 1960, with conventional explosives. And it’s got the great advantage that we could put it together quickly.”
“Let’s do it.”
“Of course we’d need access to helium-3.”
“NASDA will supply that. I have some contacts… Maybe we should look at assembly in lunar orbit. How are you going to keep me alive?”
She smiled. “The ISS is still up there. I figure we can cannibalize a module for you. Have you decided what you want to call your ship?”
“The Commodore Perry,” he said without hesitation.
“Uh-huh. Who — ?”
“Perry was the guy who, in 1853, took the U.S. Navy to Japan and demanded they open up to international trade. Appropriate given the nature of my mission, don’t you think?”
“It’s your ship.” She glanced about. “Anyhow, what are you doing out here?”
He nodded at the shuttle exhibit. “They’ve got my old EMU in there, on display. I’m negotiating to get it back.”
“EMU?”
“My EVA mobility unit. My old pressure suit.” He patted his gut, which was trim. “I figure I can still get inside it. I can’t live with those modern Jap designs full of pond scum. And I want a maneuvering unit…”
She was looking at him oddly, as if still unable to believe he was serious.
“Not ours,” Xenia whispered. “Nothing to do with Bruno.”
Suddenly Maura found it difficult to breathe. This is it, she thought. This unprepossessing blanket: the first indubitably alien artifact, here in our Solar System. Who put the blanket there? What was its purpose? Why was it so crudely buried?
A robot arm reached forward from the probe, laden with sensors and a sample-grabbing claw. She wished that was her hand, that she could reach out too, and stroke that shining, unfamiliar material.
But the claw was driven by science, not curiosity; it passed over the blanket itself and dug a shallow groove into the regolith that lay over it, sampling the material.
Within a few minutes the results of the probe’s analysis were coming in, and she could hear the speculation begin in Bootstrap’s back rooms.
“These are fines, and they are ilmenite-rich. About forty percent, compared to twenty percent in the raw regolith.” “And the agglutinate has been crushed.” “It’s as if it has been beneficiated. It’s just what we’d do.” “Not like this. So energy-intensive…”
She understood some of this. Ilmenite was a mineral — a compound of iron, titanium, and oxygen — that was common in long-exposed regolith on airless bodies like the Moon and the asteroids. Its importance was that it was a key source of volatiles: light and exotic compounds implanted there over billions of years by the solar wind, the thin, endless stream of particles that fled from the Sun. But ilmenite was difficult to concentrate, extract, and process; the best mining techniques the lunar Japanese had thought up were energy-intensive and relied on a lot of heavy-duty, unreliable equipment.
“I knew it!” somebody cried. “There’s no helium-3 in the processed stuff! None at all!” “None to the limits of the sensors, you mean.” “Sure, but—” “You mean they’re processing the asteroids for helium-3? Is that all?”
Maura felt oddly disappointed. If the Gaijin were after helium-3, did that mean they used fusion processes similar to — perhaps no more advanced than — those already known to humans? And if so, they can’t be so smart — can they?