Each crew member had a personal hygiene kit, more airline-complimentary stuff: a toothbrush, toothpaste, dental floss, nail clippers, soap, a comb, a brush, antichap lipstick, skin lotion, stick deodorant, a tube of shaving cream and a shaver that, bizarrely, worked by clockwork. There was a little hand-washing station, a hole in the wall through which you thrust your hands, and jets of hot and cold water played over your skin. It was also, thankfully, possible to take a shower, with a hose and a nozzle that you passed over your body inside a concertina-type wraparound curtain. But the curtain was imprinted with stern instructions about the importance of washing down the shower properly after use, to

avoid algal growths.

The galley was a neat little unit the size of a domestic freezer. It had hot and cold water dispensers, serving trays, a range of plastic plates and cutlery, and a teeny-tiny microwave oven. On the door of the galley was a complete food list, everything from apple sauce to turkey tetrazzini. The food, stowed under the galley, came in dehydrated packages, sliced meats with sauce or gravy in foil packages, plastic cans with tear-off lids. There were also a few treat items like candy bars in, the labels said, “their natural form.” There was even a tap that would dispense Shit Cola, the relic of some long-forgotten sponsorship deal. Experimentally she found a cup, a globe with an inlet valve and nipple, and tried a little of the Shit. The carbonation didn’t seem to be working right — no doubt some low-gravity problem — and it tasted lousy.

There was enough food for the four of them for two hundred days in space: ninety days out, ninety back, twenty at the asteroid. No doubt that could be stretched by rationing if it came to it, but it did give a finality to the mission duration.

She was unstowing all of this from its launch configuration when Malenfant called her from the zero G deck. She glanced at her watch and was startled to find that already twelve hours had elapsed since the launch.

She pulled herself up the ladder to join Malenfant by a window. He grinned and took her arm. “You’ll want to see this. We’re here for a gravity assist. In fact, we’ll be doing this twice.”

Quietly, he talked about the difficulty of reaching Cruithne, with its highly elliptical and tilted-up orbit. To that end the impulse from the rocket stack would be boosted with gravity slingshots around the Moon. The ship would whip right around the Moon, to be hurled inward past the Earth, and then out past the Moon a second time. The theft of momentum by the O ‘Neill would mean that the Moon would forever circle the Earth a fraction slower.

She let his words wash over her. For, beyond the small, curving window, she saw black, gray, brown-white, a mesh of curves and inky darkness, sliding across her view like oil. It was a crescent bathed in sunlight, pocked with craters, wrinkled by hills. On the plains she could see boulders, pinpoints of brightness sending long, needle-fine shadows across the dusty ground. And the cres cent was growing. The ship was flying into the shadow of the

Moon toward the terminator, the line between night and day.

The sunlit crescent narrowed, even as it spread across space. It was soon too large to be captured by a single window, and she leaned forward to see the sweep of the Moon, from horn to skinny horn. At last the crescent narrowed to invisibility, and she was flying over the shadowed Moon, a hole in the stars.

She found she was holding her breath. The noises of the ship’s systems, little gadgets humming and ticking, seemed sacrilegious in this huge dark quiet.

There was an explosion of light. She craned to see.

Far ahead of the craft, the sun was rising over the Moon. A line of fire had straddled the horizon, poking through the mountains and crater rims there. The light fled across the bare surface, casting shadows hundreds of miles long from mountains and broken crater walls. The smaller, younger craters were wells of darkness in the flat light.

She checked her watch. It was early evening in Vegas. Right now, she thought, I am supposed to be wrapping up the day’s work, making my way out through the protesters to my apartment.

Instead, this. Already Earth, her life, seemed a lot farther away than twelve hours, a mere quarter-million miles.

The craft sailed over brightening ground.

“You know,” Malenfant said, “when we pass the orbit of the Moon we’ll already have traveled farther than anybody has ever gone before.” He cupped her chin and turned her head to him. He ran his thumb over her cheek. It came away wet. She was surprised.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t know it would be like this.”

He smiled. “I know it’s wrong. I know I’m selfish. But I’m glad you’re here.”

She let him hold her, and they stared out at the fleeing Moon.

But suddenly Michael was here, pushing between them, warm limbs flashing, tinny translated voice jarring. Watch the Moon, Malenfant. Watch the Moon!

“Jesus,” Malenfant snapped. He was terrified, Emma realized

Maura Della:

Maura had to decide whether to endorse a military response to

Bootstrap’s activities.

It was a big decision. Maybe the biggest of her life.

It may be, proponents of the military option concluded, that there was something on the asteroid that was indeed essential to the future of humankind. If that was so, then surely it couldn’t be left in the hands of Reid Malenfant: a rogue, a maverick, out of control. And who best to take control but the U.S. government?

Well, perhaps.

She tried to call Bootstrap’s various offices. All she got was voice jail, endless automated phone systems. Occasionally a cop or FBI officer picked up, as a break from impounding Bootstrap files and property. Eschatology, similarly, was being raided and shut down.

Meanwhile she read through the reports her staff assembled for her, and watched TV, and scoured the Net, and tried to get a sense of where the world was heading now that the Carter prediction doom-soon gloom had been so confounded and confused by the far-future light show from the sky.

The e-psychologists likened it to the trauma, at an individual level, of learning the date of one’s death.

There were some positive aspects, of course. Thanks to the far-future visions the science of cosmology seemed to be heading for an overnight revolution — at least, in the minds of those who were prepared to entertain the notion that the Cruithne images might be genuine. Similarly — in ways she failed to understand, relating to constraints on particle-decay lifetimes and so forth — various other branches of physics were being turned over. On the other hand, some philosophers argued it was bad for the mental health of the species to be given answers to so many questions without the effort of discovery.

The churches had pretty uniformly condemned the downstream visions for their godless logic. Science fiction sales in all media had taken a hammering — not that that was necessarily a bad thing, in Maura’s opinion — though she had heard that there were already several digital dramas being cooked up in Hollywood’s banks of story-spinning supercomputers, stories set against the death of the Galaxy, or orbiting a black hole mine.

And on a personal level, there were many people who seemed simply unable to cope with it all.

There were some estimates the downstream hysteria had claimed more than a thousand lives nationally already. People were killing themselves, and each other, because they believed the shadowy future visions weren’t real, that Carter must be right after all; others were killing themselves because they thought the Cruithne future was real.

A lot of the fear and violence seemed to have focused on the Blue children — and, just as distressing, those who were suspected of being Blue. Perhaps it was inevitable, she thought; after all, the children live among us, here and now. How convenient it is to have somebody to hate.