“The swim first. That’s important to her.”
We talked it over with the Space Force press people and came up with a workable plan. There was a beach to the north of the base, closed to the public, which would afford a good view of the launch. Snowbird could get her swim, and they would get publicity shots of us watching the launch. (With Paul “regrettably” declining the VR pilot’s seat; too tired and out of practice.) Then we could fade out of sight, to the relief of all concerned.
Namir and Elza and Dustin wanted to go back to New York City. That didn’t sound smart to me. Elza thought with hair dye and a dab of makeup, they’d regain their former anonymity, lost in the crowd. I thought Namir was too handsome for that, and Dustin too weird-looking, his hair in spikes, but I kept it to myself.
We had a last family dinner in the mess hall, Namir ecstatic at having actual steaks to grill. Real potatoes and fresh asparagus. Bottles of good California wine.
I didn’t sleep well, and neither did Paul. Crazy days.
Just at dawn, we all piled into Space Force vans and went down a bumpy gravel road to the beach. There was a hard beauty in the dusty, persistent plants.
The ocean a churning, eternal miracle. Snowbird was awestruck, speechless.
Paul and I rolled up our pant legs and waded into the frigid surf with her, hand in hand. “So warm,” she said. “Feel the sand.”
We gave her a line to hold, just a clothesline that was in the back of the van, and she floated out past the breakers for a few minutes, Space Force divers watching her anxiously. They didn’t want to preside over the first Martian to die of drowning. She might have enjoyed the irony.
The time for the launch approached. The camera crew had written our names in the sand (Dustin remarked on the metaphor) where we were supposed to stand. We took our positions and watched the countdown on the off-camera monitor.
I had visions of the old twentieth-century launches, a roaring fury of fire and smoke. But they didn’t have free power. In our case it was kind of a hiss and a screech, a nuclear-powered steam engine. A blue-white star sizzling in its tail.
It rose slowly. At first it looked like ad Astra, but of course it was one of the replicas they’d used for practice. The nose had some white stuff painted thickly on, which Paul called an “ablative layer.” I had to think of the thick white sunscreen he’d been wearing the day we met, in the Galápagos, the day before I left Earth.
It was pretty high when the light in its tail went out. The monitor went out, too, then flickered back on as the sound of the rocket stopped abruptly.
Spy again, on the monitor. Shaking its head.
“You don’t listen, do you?”
The rocket started falling in a tailspin, then rolled to point down.
“I suppose we have to be less subtle.”
The rocket nosed into the ocean, about a mile away, raising a high white spume.
“All this energy that you call ‘free’ comes to you at the expense of a donor world in a nearby universe. You are donors now.” The monitor went dead.
A tracking airplane pancaked into the sea and sank. Another plummeted to crash on the beach to the south.
The camera crew were shouting into their phones.
A jet plane that had been high screamed to its death in the sea.
I went to my purse. The phone was blank. Namir slid into the driver’s seat of a van and punched the START button over and over.
Snowbird stopped toweling herself and looked in some direction. “So this is the end,” she said, as if you had asked her for the time.
“Idiots,” Paul said.
“Surprise,” Dustin said.
Even Elza was almost speechless. “So what do we do now?”
For some reason they looked at me. I was standing at the gate. I tried it and it swung open, its electronic lock dead.
“I think we better start walking.”
Ace Books by Joe Haldeman
WORLDS APART
DEALING IN FUTURES
FOREVER PEACE
FOREVER FREE
THE COMING
GUARDIAN
CAMOUFLAGE
OLD TWENTIETH
A SEPARATE WAR AND OTHER STORIES
THE ACCIDENTAL TIME MACHINE
MARSBOUND
STARBOUND
BODY ARMOR: 2000
NEBULA AWARDS STORIES SEVENTEEN
SPACE FIGHTERS
THERE IS NO DARKNESS
Copyright
THE BERKLEY PUBLISHING GROUP
Published by the Penguin Group
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This is an original publication of The Berkley Publishing Group.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.
Copyright © 2010 by Joe Haldeman.
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eISBN : 978-1-101-17143-1
1. Married people—Fiction. 2. Human-alien encounters—Fiction. 3. Interplanetary voyages—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3558.A353S73 2010
813’.54—dc22
2009040932