The celestial mechanics of the ship’s trajectory were complex.
Both Earth and Cruithne rounded the sun in about a year. Cruithne, tracing its ellipse, moved a tad faster. It meant that the O’Neill had to leap between two moving rocks, like a kid hopping from one roundabout to another. After the impulse given it by its booster throw, the ship was coasting through its own orbit independently of the Earth, a rounded ellipse that cut inside Earth’s path.
By the time they reached Cruithne the ship would be around twelve degrees in advance of Earth: twelve out of three-sixty, a thirtieth of the circumference of the planet’s orbit.
Malenfant liked to think he would be a couple of weeks ahead in time of the folks back home.
He treated the first bouts of motion sickness with Scop-Dex; he was glad when he could wean his crew off that because of the drowsiness it caused. They all suffered from low-G problems like the facial puffiness and nasal irritation caused by body-fluid redistribution. They were peeing too much as a result of their bodies’ confusion over this, and their hearts, with less work to do, were relaxing. And so on. Despite the artificial G and the exercise regime he imposed, their muscles were wasting, their hearts were shrinking, and their bones were leaching away.
It was all anticipated and well understood, of course. But that didn’t help make it easier to accept. Most of their decondi-tioning, in fact, had happened in the first nine hours in space, when they were still inside the orbit of the Moon. And after the nominal mission, after two hundred days in space, they would all be walking with a stick for months.
So it goes.
He kept Cornelius and Emma busy by cross-training them on the medical equipment. There was simple stuff like cardio-pulmonary resuscitation procedures, how to administer elec-troshock paddles, the use of chemicals like sodium bicarb. He gave them familiarization training on the drugs the ship carried, along with blood products. There were more grisly exercises, such as emergency tracheotomy and how to secure an intravenous catheter (the fat saphenous veins of the inner thigh were the best bet).
Of course he was no medic himself. He relied heavily on recordings and softscreen simulations to keep him on the right track.
But both Cornelius and Emma were intelligent; they both soon figured out the subtext of their training, which was that in the event of any real emergency there was little that could be done. A single serious injury would likely exhaust their medical supplies. And even if the patient, whichever unlucky sap it was, could be stabilized long enough to be kept alive and brought home, the others would have to nurse a nonfunctioning invalid all the way back to Earth.
Malenfant didn’t share with the others the training he’d gotten for himself on euthanasia, or on how to conduct a scientifically and legally valid autopsy.
During those first weeks they stayed healthy enough, luckily.
But once the adrenaline-rush excitement of the launch and the novelty of the mission wore off, all three of the adults — himself included — came crashing down into a feeling of intense isolation. He had expected this. He’d gotten some psychological training, based mainly on Russian experience, on long-duration spaceflight. Cornelius, for example, seemed locked in a bubble world of his own, his odd, smoothed-over personality cutting him off from the others like a second spacesuit. Malenfant left him alone as much as possible.
The general depression seemed to be hitting Emma hardest, however.
Oddly, when he looked into her eyes, it sometimes seemed as if she weren’t there at all, as if there were only a fragment of the Emma he knew, looking out at him, puzzled. How did I get here? It was understandable. He had, after all, shanghaied her, utterly without warning.
It would help if there were something to fill up her time, here on the O ‘Neill. But there was no real work for her to do beyond the chores and the training. He had softbooks, of course, but he’d only brought along technical manuals, a few books for the kid… Not a novel in the whole damn memory, and not even a yellowing hardcopy paperback. It would be easy enough to have stuff up-loaded from Earth, of course, but although the reports and telemetry he downloaded daily were surely being picked up by the NASA deep-space people, nobody down there seemed inclined to talk back to him.
He tried to handle his own deep sense of guilt.
He’d felt he needed to bring her along, on a whole series of levels. He still felt like that. But it would, after all, have been easy to push her away, there in the critical moments in the Mo-jave. To have kept from stealing her life from her.
If not for his Secret, maybe they’d be a little more open with each other. Of course, if not for the Secret, they wouldn’t be here at all.
But what was done was done.
Anyhow he’d refused to waste processor capacity on e-therapy programs, or any of that other modern crap that he regarded as mind-softening junk, despite recommendations from a slew of “experts” during the mission planning. The truth is, he knew, there were no experts, because nobody had gone out as far as this before. They would just have to cope, learn as they went along, support each other, as explorers always had.
He did worry about the kid, though. Even though Michael spooked him half to death. Wherever that came from, it surely wasn’t the kid’s fault…
Flight in deep space was, after all, utterly strange — even for Malenfant, who felt as if he’d spent his whole life preparing for this.
It was possible to forget, sometimes, that they were locked up here in this tiny metal bubble, with nothing out there save for a few lumps of floating rock that came to seem less and less significant the farther they receded from Earth.
But most times, everything felt strange.
If he walked too rapidly across the meatware deck, he could feel the Coriolis cutting in, a ghostly sideways push that made him stagger. Even when he washed or took a drink, the water would move around the bowl in huge languid waves, pulsing like some sticky, viscous oil. If he immersed his hands it felt like water always had, but it clung to his flesh in great globules and ribbons, so that he had to scrape it off and chase it back into the bowl.
And so on. Everything was strange. Sometimes he felt he couldn’t cope with it, as if he couldn’t figure out the mechanics or logic of the environment. Perhaps, he thought, this is how Michael feels all the time, living in this incomprehensible, fragmented world.
It was a relief to retreat to his bunk, eyes closed, strapped in, shut out from all stimuli, trying to feel normal.
But even here, in deepest space, with no sensory input at all, he could still feel something: the evolution of his own thoughts, the sense of time passing as he forged downstream into the future, the deepest, most inner sense of all.
There was no science to describe this. The laws of physics were time-reversible: they ran as happily backward as forward. But he knew in his deepest soul that time was not reversible for him, that he was bound on a one-way journey to the future, to the deepest downstream.
How strange, how oddly comforting that was.
He drifted into sleep.
Milton Foundation e-spokesperson
It distresses all of us that the general psychological reaction to the news of the future has focused on the Blue children. You have to understand that Foundation Schools have always worked for the children’s protection as much as their development.