He had brought along a bottle of expensive and authentically French champagne to celebrate the launches. "We could have had VIP seats," I told Diane. "Bleachers outside the Vehicle Assembly Building. Brushing elbows with President Garland."
"The view from here is as good," Jason said. "Better. Here, we're not props in a photo opportunity."
"I've never met a president," Diane said.
The sky, of course, was dark, but the TV in the hotel room (we had turned it up to hear the countdown) was talking about the Spin barrier, and Diane looked into the sky as if it might have become miraculously visible, the lid that enclosed the world. Jason saw the tilt of her head. "They shouldn't call it a barrier," he said. "None of the journals call it that anymore."
"Oh? What do they call it?"
He cleared his throat. "A 'strange membrane.'"
"Oh no." Diane laughed. "No, that's awful. That's not acceptable. It sounds like a gynecological disorder."
"Yeah, but 'barrier' is incorrect. It's more like a boundary layer. It's not a line you cross. It acquires objects selectively and accelerates them into the external universe. The process is more like osmosis than, say, crashing a fence. Ergo, membrane."
"I'd forgotten what it's like talking to you, Jase. It can be a little surreal."
"Hush," I told them both. "Listen."
Now the TV had cut to the NASA feed, a bland Mission Control voice talking the numbers down. Thirty seconds. There were twelve rockets fueled and nominal on their pads. Twelve simultaneous launches, an act that a less ambitious space agency would once have deemed impractical and radically unsafe. But we lived in more daring or desperate times.
"Why do they all have to go up at once?" Diane asked.
"Because," Jason began; then he said, "No. Wait. Watch."
Twenty seconds. Ten. Jase stood up and leaned into the balcony railing. The hotel balconies were mobbed. The beach was mobbed. A thousand heads and lenses swiveled in the same direction. Estimates later put the crowd in and around the Cape at nearly two million. According to police reports, more than a hundred wallets were lifted that night. There were two fatal stabbings, fifteen attempted assaults, and one premature labor. (The child, a four-pound girl, was delivered on a trestle table at the International House of Pancakes in Cocoa Beach.)
Five seconds. The TV in the hotel room went quiet. For a moment there was no sound but the buzz and whine of photographic gear.
Then the ocean was ablaze with firelight as far as the horizon.
No single one of these rockets would have impressed a local crowd even in darkness, but this wasn't one column of flame, it was five, seven, ten, twelve. The seaborne gantries were briefly silhouetted like skeletal skyscrapers, lost soon after in billows of vaporized ocean water. Twelve pillars of white fire, separated by miles but compressed by perspective, clawed into a sky turned indigo blue by their combined light. The beach crowd began to cheer, and the sound merged with the sound of the solid-fuel boosters hammering for altitude, a throb that compressed the heart like ecstasy or terror. But it wasn't only the brute spectacle we were cheering. Almost certainly every one of these two million people had seen a rocket launch before, at least on television, and although this multiple ascendancy was grand and loud it was remarkable mainly for its intent, its motivating idea. We weren't just planting the flag of terrestrial life on Mars, we were defying the Spin itself.
The rockets rose. (And on the rectangular screen of the TV, when I glanced at it through the balcony door, similar rockets bent into cloudy daylight in Jiuquan, Svobodnyy, Baikonur, Xichang.) The fierce horizontal light became oblique and began to dim as night rushed back from the sea. The sound spent itself in sand and concrete and superheated salt water. I imagined I could smell the reek of fireworks coming ashore with the tide, the pleasantly awful stench of Roman candles.
A thousand cameras clattered like dying crickets and went still.
The cheering lasted, in one form or another, until dawn.
* * * * *
We went inside and drew the drapes against the anticlimactic darkness and opened the champagne. We watched the news from overseas. Apart from the French rain delay, every launch had been successful. A bacterial armada was en route to Mars.
"So why do they all have to go up at once?" Diane asked again.
Jason gave her a long thoughtful look. "Because we want them to arrive at their destination at roughly the same time. Which is not as easy as it sounds. They have to enter the Spin membrane more or less simultaneously, or they'll exit separated by years or centuries. Not so critical with these anaerobic cargos, but we're practicing for when it really matters."
"Years or centuries'? How is that possible?"
"Nature of the Spin, Diane."
"Right, but centuries?"
He turned his chair to face her, frowning. "I'm trying to grasp the extent of your ignorance here…"
"Just a question, Jase."
"Count a second for me."
"What?"
"Look at your watch and count me one second. No, I'll do it. One—" He paused. "Second. Got that?"
"Jason—"
"Bear with me. You understand the Spin ratio?"
"Roughly."
"Roughly isn't good enough. One terrestrial second equals 3.17 years Spin time. Keep that in mind. If one of our rockets enters the Spin membrane a single second behind the rest, it reaches orbit more than three years late."
"Just because I can't quote numbers—"
"They're important numbers, Diane. Suppose our flotilla just emerged from the membrane, just now, now—" He ticked the air with his finger. "One second, here and gone. For the flotilla, that was three and a fraction years. One second ago they were in Earth orbit. Now they've delivered their cargo to the surface of Mars. I mean now, Diane, literally now. It's already happened, it's done. So let a minute pass on your watch. That's approximately a hundred and ninety years by an outside clock."
"That's a lot, of course, but you can't make over a planet in two hundred years, can you?"
"So now it's two hundred Spin years into the experiment. Right now, as we speak, any bacterial colonies that survived the trip will have been reproducing on Mars for two centuries. In an hour, they will have been there eleven thousand four hundred years. This time tomorrow they'll have been multiplying for almost two hundred seventy-four thousand years."
"Okay, Jase. I get the idea."
"This time next week, 1.9 million years."
"Okay."
"A month. 8.3 million years."
"Jason—"
"This time next year, one hundred million years."
"Yes, but—"
"On Earth, one hundred million years is roughly the span of time between the emergence of life from the sea and your last birthday. One hundred million years is time enough for those microorganisms to pump carbon dioxide out of carbonate deposits in the crust, leach nitrogen from nitrates, purge oxides from the regolith and enrich it by dying in large numbers. All that liberated C02 is a greenhouse gas. The atmosphere gets thicker and warmer. A year from now we send another armada of respirating organisms, and they begin to cycle C02 into free oxygen. Another year—or as soon as the spectroscopic signature from the planet looks right—we introduce grasses, plants, other complex organisms. And when all that stabilizes into some kind of crudely homeostatic planetary ecology, we send human beings. You know what that means?"
"Tell me," Diane said sullenly.
"It means that within five years there'll be a flourishing human civilization on Mars. Farms, factories, roads, cities…"