But now, swimming into her view, came the Earth.

It was a crescent, blue and white and brown. She could see a fringe of atmosphere, brilliantly bright, and the arc shape cupped a pool of darkness that was broken by strings of orange stars — cities, she realized, spread along the edge and river valleys of some continent on the night side of Earth. The ship’s rotation made the Earth turn, smooth as an oiled machine, over and over.

And as she watched, the Earth was growing smaller, visibly receding, as if she were riding into the sky in some glass-bottomed elevator.

She clutched Malenfant’s arm.

“I know,” he said, his voice tight. “Not even the Apollo astronauts saw it like this. They did a couple of orbits of Earth, time enough to get used to the situation before they lit out for the Moon. Not us; we’ve been thrown straight into the out.”

She checked her watch implant. She had a meeting with some East Coast investors booked right now.

On some level, deep in her mind, she sensed that this was wrong: not just the illegality and unexpectedness of it, but the very nature of the situation. She felt that she shouldn’t be here, that this was unreal; she felt as if she were outside the scene, somehow, looking in through a glass barrier.

She shouldn’t be here. And yet she was.

Perhaps she was in some form of shock.

The crescent Earth shrank, becoming more round, more three-dimensional, more vividly blue against the empty blackness of space, a planet rather than a world. And, she wondered, could it be really true that all the mind and love and hope in the universe was confined to that thin blue film of dirt and water and air?

Infomerdal

You know me.

Nowadays you probably know me better from my Shit Cola ads than for the one big successful glorious thing I did in my life. Which was to walk on the Moon.

Once. In 1971.

After that the whole damn thing was shut down.

Back in 1971 I thought that by now we would be well on the way to colonizing space. Why not? Airlines operate at just three times fuel costs. Why shouldn’t space operations be just as economical? Spacecraft are no more complex than airplanes — in fact, less so.

But since 1970 or thereabouts going to space has not been part of our national agenda.

NASA has kept complete control over space. But since 1970 NASA has produced paper, not spaceships. This was the agency, remember, that destroyed the Saturn V rather than allow it to launch cheap-and-cheerful Skylabs that would have threatened its bloated space station program.

In 1980 I joined the study group that convinced President Ronald Reagan that the statesman who led humankind to space would be remembered for millennia after Isabella the Great was forgotten. For a while, it looked as if something revolutionary might be done.

But then came the assassination attempt, and Cold War problems, and various other issues. The president left space to other people, wno couldn’t get it done.

NASA won its turf wars. We lost access to space.

But the dream — the reasons we need spaceflight, now more than ever — none of that has gone away.

Which is why I for one am fully behind Malenfant’s launch from the Mojave.

What else was he supposed to do? You just know those federal paper pushers were going to find every way they could to block him.

I want to emphasize that my personal problems are not the issue here, nor is my own career trajectory and related difficulties. To put it bluntly, I haven’t drunk a drop in four years, and my new marriage is working out just fine. What I am concerned about is that future generations should not be denied the opportunities denied to my own children and grandchildren.

That’s why I agreed to appear in this infomercial. Support Reid Malenfant. If you can’t bring yourself to do that, get off his back. The man is out there risking his hide for you and your

children.

Give him a break.

Emma Stoney:

Malenfant started up the life-support systems. Pumps and fans clattered into life, and Emma felt a breeze, flat and warm, in her hair. Then Malenfant clambered back up to the zero G deck to check the ship’s comms systems and navigation alignment.

The others gathered on the ops deck and stripped off their fat orange pressure suits. They changed into lightweight NASA-type jumpsuits that lacked a lot in style but were warm and practical and covered in pockets and Velcro strips. They shoved the pressure suits down the hole into the Earth-return capsule and dogged closed the hatch.

Michael had to be manhandled through all this. He was passive, unresponsive, like a week-old infant; it was possible to move him around, even strip and clean and dress him like a doll, but he seemed to have no will of his own. Emma let Michael stay on the ops deck, and made sure at least one of them was there with him the whole time.

She realized that she had a sneaking, selfish gratitude that Michael was aboard. Having someone else to think about would take her mind off her own utter disorientation.

She climbed the fireman’s-pole ladder to go up — or down — to the module’s other two compartments. The disorientation of the changing vertical wasn’t so bad if she spent a few seconds in the zero G bay giving herself time to adapt. Then she could put out of her mind the fact that the ops deck had just been down; now it was up, and the ladder down now led her to the other decks that used to be above her head.

It worked fine provided she didn’t look up through the mesh and see people dangling from the ceiling like chandeliers.

The bio sciences deck was a mix of lab and field hospital. There was some medical equipment: a collection of pills and lotions and bandages and inflatable splints, and more heavy-duty equipment, scary-looking stuff like a defibrillator. The small lab area was pretty much automated, with little requirement from the crew but to pump in regular samples of blood and urine. Everything was color coded and labeled and built into smart little plastic units you could just pop out of the wall to repair and replace.

The lowest deck — called, with nerdish humor, the meatware deck — was up against the outer bulkhead of the craft, and so was the farthest from the cluster’s center of gravity. They would eat and sleep here, under the strongest gravity available — about equivalent to the Moon, a sixth of Earth normal. It wasn’t exactly possible to walk normally here, but at least she could move around without getting a kick sideways the whole time.

There was exercise gear: foldaway treadmills and an exercise cycle. Bunks were neatly stacked against one wall. They had private curtains, zip-up sleeping bags, night-lights, and little personal stowage pockets. She looked inside one of the pockets and found a small softbook and music player with headset, a sleeping mask, and earplugs, all marked with Bootstrap logos. It was cute, like an airline giveaway pack.

The John — strictly speaking the Waste Management System — looked like it would be less fun. It was the old space shuttle design, a lavatorial veteran of decades of spaceflight. There was a commode with an operating handle and, God help her, a control panel. Liquid waste would be captured and pumped away for recycling. Solid waste wasn’t recycled; a valve would open to the vacuum of space to dry out the feces, and it would then be dumped overboard. When she turned the handle a vent opened and air started sucking its way down into the commode, big vanes turning in a very intimidating way.

The toilet could only be used four times an hour, she noted with apprehension. She suspected that in the early days at least they would need more capacity than that.