I’m sixty-one years old. I’m not in the habit of thinking about death. I suppose I always had a vague plan to fight it: to use all my resources, every technique and trick I could find and pay for, to live as long as possible.
But is it worth it? To cling to life until I’m drained of strength t and mind and hope? But isn’t that exactly what we saw in the far future, a senile species eking out the last of its energies, straggling against the dark?
It seems to me that age, growing old, is a war between wisdom and bitterness. I’m not sure how I’ll come out of that war myself, assuming I get so far.
Maybe some things are more important than life itself.
But what?
Emma Stoney:
Even as his representatives wrestled with the bureaucratic demons that threatened to overwhelm him — even as the world alternately wondered at or mocked his light-and-shadow images of the far future — Reid Malenfant sprung another surprise.
He went on TV and the Nets and announced a launch date for BDB-2, tentatively called O’Neill.
And as Malenfant’s nominal, fictional, technically-plausible-only launch date approached, events seemed to be coming to a head. On the one hand a groundswell of popular support built up for Malenfant, with his enterprise and defiance and sense of mystery. But on the other hand the forces opposing him strengthened and focused their attacks.
Look at it this way. If all this legal bullshit evaporates, and I’m ready to launch, I launch. If I ain ‘t ready to launch, I don’t launch. Simple as that. What am I wasting?
Come watch me fly.
He was wasting a few million bucks, actually, Emma thought, with every aborted launch attempt. But Malenfant knew that, and it wouldn’t stop him anyhow, so she kept it to herself.
And she had to admit it worked: raising the stakes again, whipping up public interest to a fever pitch. Nothing like a countdown to focus the mind.
Then, a couple of days before the “launch date” itself, Malenfant asked Emma to come out from Vegas. Things are hotting up, babe. I need you here…
She refused Malenfant’s offer of a flight out to the compound. She decided to drive; she needed time to rest and think. She turned on the SmartDrive, opaqued the windows, and tried to sleep.
It was only when the car woke her, some time before dawn on Malenfant’s “launch day,” that she began to be aware of the people.
At first there was just a handful of cars and vans parked off the road, little oases of light in the huge desert night. But soon there were more: truck-camper vans, and cars with tent-trailers, and converted buses, and Jeeps with houses built on the back, and Land Rovers, and Broncos with bunks. There were tents lit from inside, people moving slowly in the predawn grayness. There were people sleeping in the cars, or even in the open, on inflatable mattresses and blankets.
As she neared the Bootstrap site itself the density of people continued to increase, the little groups crowded more closely together. She saw a place where a blanket spread out under the tailgate of an ancient convertible was almost overlapping the groundsheet of a much more elaborate tent. In another, right next to an upscale mobile home, she saw an ancient Ford, its hood held in place by what looked like duct tape, with a child sleeping in the open trunk and dirty bare feet protruding from all the windows. And as dawn approached people were rising, stirring and scratching themselves, making breakfast, some climbing on top of their cars to see what was going on at the Bootstrap compound.
She spotted what looked like a military vehicle: a squat, fierce-looking Jeep of some kind, with black, rectangular, tinted windows. A man was standing up, poking his head out of a sunroof. He was beefy, fortyish, shaven-haired. He shifted, as if he was having trouble standing. He was watching the compound with big, professional-looking binoculars. She thought he looked familiar, but she couldn’t think where from.
When she looked again the Jeep had gone. It could only have driven off, away from the crowded road, into the desert.
Farther in she spied uniforms and banners. There were religious groups here, both pro and anti Malenfant. Some of them were holding services or prayer sessions. There were animal rights campaigners holding animated posters of Caribbean reef squid, other protesters holding up images of sickly yellow babies. And then there was the spooky fringe, such as a group of women dressed in black shifts painted with bright blue circles, holding up sky-blue hoops to the sky. Take me! Take me!
But these agenda-driven types were the minority, Emma realized, flecks of foam on the great ocean of ordinary people who had gathered here, on the day of Malenfant’s “launch.” There were whites, blacks, Asians, Latinos, Native Americans. There were young people, some infants in arms, and a lot of oldsters who probably remembered Apollo 11. There was no reason to suppose they weren’t just as thickly crowded as this on every approach to the Bootstrap compound.
So how many? A million?
But why were they here? What had drawn so many of them from so far?
It was faith, she realized. Faith in Malenfant, faith that he could once more defy the various forces ranged against him: Reid Malenfant, an old-fashioned American can-do hero who had already brought back postcards from the future and was now about to launch a rocket ship and save the species single-handedly.
I have to admit, Malenfant, you hit a nerve.
And as she thought it through, as that realization crystallized in her, she understood, at last, what was happening today.
My God, she thought. He s actually going to do it. He’s going to launch, come what may. That’s what this is all about.
And she felt shock, even shame, that these strangers, so many of them, had understood Malenfant’s subliminal message better than she had. Come watch me fly, he’d told them; and here they were.
She pressed forward with increasing urgency.
At last she was through the crowds and the security barriers and inside the compound. And there — still a couple of miles away — was Malenfant’s ship, BDB-2, called O ‘Neill.
She could see the slim profile of the booster stack: the angular space shuttle boat-tail at the base, the central tank with its slim solid boosters like white pencils to either side, the fat tube of the payload module on top. There were splashes of red and blue that must be the Stars and Stripes Malenfant had insisted must adorn all his ships, and the hull’s smooth curve glistened sharply where liquid air had frozen out frost from the desert night. The tower alongside the BOB looked minimaclass="underline" slim and calm. There were clouds of vapor alongside the booster, little white knots that drifted from the tanks.
Bathed in a white xenon glow, the booster looked small, remote, even fragile, like an object in a shrine. This was the flame to which all these people had been drawn.
She got out of her car and ran to George Bench’s control
bunker.
The blockhouse was small, cramped, with an air of improvisation. One wall was a giant window, tinted, giving a view of the pad itself, the splash of light around the waiting booster. Facing the window were consoles — just desks piled with manuals and softscreens and coffee cups — each manned by a young T-shirted technician. At the back of the room were more people, arguing, running back and forth with manuals and piles of printout. Cables lay everywhere, in bundles across the floor and along the ceiling.
In one doorway, being shepherded by one of Malenfant’s flunkies, there was a gaggle of what looked like federal-government types, gray suits and ties and little briefcases. One of them, protesting loudly, was Representative Mary Howell, Emma realized with a start, the former chemical engineer who had given Malenfant such a tough ride in the Congressional hearings.