The stars were important. She had been trained to recognize many of them. When she had memorized their positions around the ship she would return to the machinery cluster and work the simple controls Dan had given her. By this means she could determine her position in space far more accurately than even Dan could have, from far-off Earth.

Then the rockets would flare, sending hails of exhaust particles shooting into space. They would push at the hide of the ship like a squid shoving at the belly of a whale. Waves, flaring with light, pulsed back and forth across the meniscus, illuminating the drifting clouds of algae, and Sheena could detect the subtle wash of gravity around her as the great mass of water was nudged back to its proper trajectory.

But to Sheena the stars were more than navigation beacons. Sheena’s eyes had a hundred times the number of receptors of human eyes, and she could see a hundred times as many stars.

To Sheena the universe was crowded with stars, vibrant and alive. The Galaxy was a reef of stars beckoning her to come jet along its length.

But there was only Sheena here to see it.

She found it hard to rest.

Sheena was utterly alone. Though she knew that there were no predators here, that she was as safe as any squid had ever been, she could not rest: not without the complex protection of the shoal around her, its warnings and sentinels. And, of course, without the shoal she was cut off from the society of the squid, the mating and learning and endless dances of daylight.

Dan had provided a kind of dream shoal for her: squidlike shapes that swam and jetted around her, glimmering. But the polarization of the light from their false hides was subtly wrong, and the fake shoal was no comfort. She was surprised Dan had not understood.

As the mission progressed, as she grew progressively more weary, her loyalty to Dan crumbled, grain by grain.

e-CNN:

And we return to our main story, the developing crisis around the illegal space launch by the Bootstrap corporation from their Mojave facility. It has become clear that the authorities, far from granting the approvals Bootstrap is seeking, were in fact moving to close down the operation completely. Joe…

Thanks, Madeleine. We do know that Cruithne was not the original target of Reid Malenfant’s interplanetary ambitions. Originally he was planning to head for Reinmuth, another asteroid that is much richer in metals than Cruithne. So, why Cruithne?

It’s now emerged, from sources inside Bootstrap itself, that in recent months Malenfant has become convinced that the world itself may be coming to an end — and that this global doom is somehow linked to asteroid Cruithne. What are we to make of this remarkable twist in this spectacular story?

We’ve been trying to determine if there is more to Malenfant’s fears about the future than mere paranoia. It is said there are respectable scientists who claim that it is a statistical fact that the world will end, taking all of us with it, in just a few centuries. Apparently this has been known in government circles since the 1980s. Again the administration declined to comment. Madeleine…

Joe, Reid Malenfant, fifty-one, is highly charismatic and popular. Since the announcement of his interplanetary venture he has become something of a cult figure. In fact last year’s best-selling Christmas toys were models of Bootstrap’s so-called Big Dumb Booster, along with action figures and animated holograms of the intelligent squid crew, and even of Reid Malenfant himself.

But, while undoubtedly an attractive figure, Malenfant has long been regarded by commentators as an unstable personality.

However Bootstrap spokespersons are saying this is all scurrilous rumor put out by enemies of Reid Malenfant, perhaps within his own corporation.

John Tinker:

Yes, they threw me out of the Flying Mountain Society.

Screw them.

And screw Reid Malenfant. Malenfant is a wimp.

Yes, he got his bird off the ground. But to continue to launch with 1940s-style chemical rockets is at best a diversion, at worst a catastrophic error.

People, you can’t lift diddly into space by burning chemicals.

There has been a solution on the drawing boards since the 1960s: Project Orion.

You take a big plate, attach it by shock absorbers to a large capsule, and throw an atomic bomb underneath.

Your ship will move, believe me.

Then you throw another bomb, and another.

For an expenditure of a small part of the world’s nuclear stockpile you could place several million pounds in orbit.

I believe in the dream. I believe we should aim to lift a billion people into space by the end of the century. This is the only way to establish a population significant enough to build a genuine space-going industry infrastructure — and, incidentally, the only way to lift off enough people to make a dent in the planet’s population problem.

Yes, this will cause some fallout. But not much, compared to what we already added to the background radiation. What’s the big deal?

Malenfant is right; we are facing a crisis over the survival of the species. Hard times make for hard choices. Omelettes and eggs, people.

Anyhow, those bombs aren’t going to go away. If America doesn’t use them, somebody else will.

Art Morris:

My name is Art Morris and I am forty years old. I am a Marine,

or used to be until I got disabled out.

My most prized possession is a snapshot of my daughter, Leanne.

In the snap she’s at her last birthday party, just five years old, in a splash of Florida sunshine. The snap’s one of those fancy modern ones that can show you movement, and it cycles through a few seconds of Leanne blowing at her cake. And it has a soundtrack. If you listen under the clapping and whoops of the family and the other kids, you can just hear her wheeze as she took her big breath. What you can’t see off the edge of the picture is me, just behind Leanne’s shoulder, taking a blow myself to make sure those damn candles did what she wanted them to do, making sure that something in her world worked, just once.

It wasn’t long after that that we had to put her into the ground. I didn’t understand half of what the doctors told me was wrong with her, but I got the headline.

She was a yellow baby, a space baby, a rocket baby.

Maybe by now she would have been one of these smart kids the news is full of. But she never got the chance.

I rejoiced when they shut down the space program. But now those assholes in the desert have started firing off their damn rockets again, regardless.

I keep Leanne’s picture taped to the dash of my car, or in my pocket.

Look what you did, Reid Malenfant.

Reid Malenfant:

Madame Chairman, this is not some wacko stunt. It is a sound

business venture.

Here’s the plan from here on in.

Cruithne is a ball of loosely aggregated dirt: probably eighty percent silicates, sixteen percent water, two percent carbon, two percent metals. This is an extraordinarily rich resource.

Our strategy is to aim for the simplest technologies, fast return, fast payback.

The first thing we’re going to make up on Cruithne is rocket fuel. The fuel will be a methane-oxygen bipropellant.

Then we’ll start bagging up permafrost water from the asteroid, along with a little unprocessed asteroid material. We’ll use the propellant to start firing water back to Earth orbit — specifically, a type of orbit called HEEO, a highly eccentric Earth orbit, which in terms of accessibility is a good compromise place to store extraterrestrial materials.

Thus we will build a pipeline from Cruithne to Earth orbit.