“How do the power relays look?”Zafirah wanted to know.

“They’re all operational now,” Wu said. “You can power them back up. And you can tell the other habitats that we’re finally ready to fire up all six accelerators in tandem.”

“Good work, Liddie. I’ll give the others the go-ahead signal as soon as you’re back inside.”

“If it’s all the same to you, I’d like to stay out here and watch the fireworks,” Wu said. “I have the best seat in the house.”

“I’m not sure that’s such a good idea,”Zafirah said.

Wu scowled. She’d expected this. “Come on, Zaf. It’s not like I’m standing in the path of the beam. And just being outside the rock exposes me to a hundred times more stray radiation than the experiment is going to give off. Besides, you’re not gonna order me to miss witnessing history are you?”

After an elastic moment of silence, Wu heard her [74] colleague sigh resignedly. “All right, Liddie. You win. Just take some nice pictures for me, all right?”

“For all of us,” Wu said, patting her toolkit, where the camera remained stowed. And for all the generations who are going to follow us.

Wu cast her eyes toward the asteroid’s western horizon. The Earth and the Moon, respectively at their slender crescent and nearly full, phases as seen from the L-5 point, had just disappeared behind the colony’s sunlit side. In their absence it was far easier to see the outlines of the potato-shaped asteroid that housed the Roykirk colony, which loomed a mere 150 kilometers away. The remaining four asteroid colonies, though out of Wu’s immediate line of sight at the moment, were spaced at similar intervals along an ellipse centered on the Earth-Moon system’s gravitationally balanced L-5 point.

Wu shivered with exhilarated anticipation. The time for the test firing had finally arrived, a tangible justification for hope. Barring some last-minute equipment foul-up either here or on one of the other colonies, the six O’Neill habitats, working in concert, would soon offer the world a limitless supply of cheap energy. Shortly the O’Neill colonies would furnish heat, light, and transportation for ordinary people all over the Earth, instead of merely supplying exotic antiparticles to Earthbound researchers like Zefram Cochrane.

Within the next few moments, they would create the first completely functional subspace warp field.

The Earth and the Moon reappeared in the east, moving inexorably across the star-dappled night. Turning sideways, Wu looked at the cloud-fleeced magnificence of the Earth, its dark side lit sporadically by the lamps and hearths of a much-reduced human civilization. What little she could see along the planet’s narrow sunlit crescent now seemed pristine, its cerulean hue evoking a time before anyone had heard of nuclear winter.

[75] It was as though Gaia herself were holding her breath, eagerly anticipating whatever was to come next.

Wu touched the radio controls at her neck ring once again, tuning in the channel being shared by Zafirah and the other five particle-accelerator managers. She wanted to remember every word spoken on this historic occasion. Perhaps Zafirah had prepared a brief but profound comment, some immortal turn of phrase that would forever after be identified with Friday, 9 August 2058. One giant leap for mankind, indeed,Wu thought, ruefully aware that in many parts of the world stone axes and the bow once again represented the apex of technological progress.

One by one, the spokespeople for each O’Neill colony checked in over the open channel, forming a bouillabaisse of accents from every corner of the Earth.

“All systems show green on the Moss-Offenhouse colony.”

“The NicholCorp facility is green for go.”

“Starling habitat here. We’re looking good.”

“Brynner asteroid is all set.”

“Colony Roykirk here. We’re ready and standing by for a full-up warp-field test.”

Wu heard Zafirah’s voice next, utterly serious and businesslike. “Particle flow shows green on Vanguard. Magnetic bottles are stable. Antimatter containment is positive.”

A couple of heartbeats later another voice came over the channel. Its rough, world-weary quality, along with its noticeable lightspeed delay, told Wu that she was listening to Christopher Brynner himself. Too enfeebled by age and illness to leave Earth for the O’Neills, Brynner was the founder of Brynner Information Systems as well as the chairman emeritus of the Gerald Moss-Ralph Offenhouse Conglomerate. Despite reversals of fortune during the war, Brynner’s pockets remained deep enough to bankroll today’s experiment.

“This is Ground Station Bozeman ,”Brynner said. “I want[76] to thank and congratulate you all for the extraordinary forward stride you’re about to make on behalf of the entire human race. Now let me hand the microphone over to someone who speaks your language far better than I ever could.”

Another voice spoke up a beat later. “Uh, hello, everybody,”it said. Wu instantly recognized the bourbon-roughened voice of the man whose warp-field theories Dr. O’Neill’s spiritual children were about to test.

“I can’t offer you anything to top what Mr. Brynner just said,”Cochrane continued, sounding uncomfortable. “Except to tell you that if the sustained warp-field experiment ends up looking as good up there as it does on paper down here, then ProjectPhoenix could have a prototype warp-capable vessel ready for launch as early as next Spring.”

Wu hoped Zafirah and the key players on the other O’Neills weren’t prone to flop-sweats.

“So I’ll finish by wishing all of you good luck,”Cochrane said. “And godspeed.”

Except for the hiss of her respirator, the universe went utterly quiet around Wu for several moments after Dr. Cochrane signed off. Zafirah’s much nearer-sounding voice finally broke the silence.

“You heard the man, people. Initiate the activation sequence.”

Reconfiguring her suit tethers so that she faced “down”—straight out into space—she reached into her toolkit to free the miniature digital Hasselblad camera from its restraining strap. The nearly full Moon now stood directly above her like a glowing sentinel, its image preternaturally crisp in the vacuum.

She pointed the camera toward the eastern horizon, where Vanguard’s portion of the warp field would soon begin forming before it connected up with its counterparts on the Roykirk asteroid and the habitats beyond. Wu felt a slow pulsation beginning to radiate from beneath the asteroid’s skin. It quickly increased in amplitude, [77] jarring her. Surprised, she lost her grip on the camera, which launched itself into space as though shot from a rifle. Then the universe exploded around her, and she saw and heard nothing more.

Were it not for the fading effects of the nuclear winter, this August evening on the outskirts of Bozeman, Montana, might have been pleasantly warm. Against the gradually intensifying cold, Lily Sloane drew her coat tightly about herself, her arms crawling with gooseflesh. She stood on a hill just out of sight of the dilapidated Quonset hut Cochrane had grandly dubbed “Ground Station Bozeman.”

Lily heard Cochrane’s boots grinding against the gravel path as he approached from a nearby stand of trees. She didn’t bother looking up from the eyepiece of the tall prewar telescope that had occupied her attention for the past ten minutes.

“Hey, Zee,” she said, still squinting through the eyepiece, Cyclops-like. The telescope was pointed at about a forty-five-degree angle upward into the night sky. “I must have bumped this damned thing. You had it pointed straight at the O’Neills. I saw a flash a while back, but now I can’t make out anything.”

Lily was beginning to suspect that considerably more was wrong here than merely a maladjusted telescope. Straightening up from the eyepiece, she met Cochrane’s gaze.