Ark (36 page)

Henry pressed a speed-dial key. His phone was still on speaker,
so I could hear everything. The number he was calling rang three times, then General Yao picked up.

In a tone of delight, he said, “Henry.”

Henry said, “Am I interrupting anything?”

“I’m in a meeting, but I’m sure that the others will understand when I tell them who’s calling.”

He did so without bothering to cover the mouthpiece with his hand.

“Please turn on your television receiver,” Henry said. “Channel two two eight seven.”

We heard the set come on in Beijing.

Yao said, “It’s nothing but snow.”

Henry supplied an access code.

On the screen of our own television set, a hatch opened on the Spaceplane. Three space maidens floated from it in their vermilion suits and swam, as it seemed, to the satellite. It was a beautiful picture, but apparently Yao’s companions didn’t like what they saw on their own screen. Someone with a squeaky voice cursed in Cantonese. Somebody else shouted, and then began to cough violently.

Yao said, “Henry, what is the meaning of this?”

Henry said, “We’re having a drill. The object you see on-screen is the primary communications satellite for China’s space program.”

On-screen, the cargo bay of the Spaceplane opened. A crane unfolded like origami from the cargo bay.

Henry said, “There are five other Chinese national defense satellites in orbit. Our ships can reach any or all of them easily and quickly. If necessary we can retrieve an entire satellite and return it to Earth or some other destination, or make repairs in orbits. This team, one of several, is specially trained to deal with just such problems. Should you ever need assistance, we’d be only too happy to do what we can to help out. We could even work on all six satellites at once.”

In orbit, the space maidens waited, a few meters from the satellite. Each held a tool in her gloved hand, an effective prop, since all the world knew how good these women were with tools. We heard others in Yao’s meeting talking to one another. It was a babble, everyone shouting at the same time. I caught a word here and there, but couldn’t put their meaning together because they were using words I didn’t know.

General Yao came back on the line. By now he had recovered his sangfroid, and he sounded almost like the original Yao, bland and false to the core.

“Very interesting, Henry,” he said, and clicked off.

The Chinese troops departed the factory thirty minutes later. They were General Yao’s men, Ng Fred reported over the telephone—from the same unit as the soldiers who always came with him. They were armed to the teeth, but they made no threatening gestures. Their conduct was exemplary. Their faces were expressionless. Their eyes looked straight ahead. They touched no one, asked no questions, made no demands, just spread out through the two factories, took up their posts, and waited.

“Did the officers explain why they were there?” Henry asked.

“They were mute,” Ng Fred replied. “So were the men. Didn’t speak a word the whole time.”

“Why not?” I asked.

“Probably because they’d be the last to know why they were,” Ng Fred said

~ * ~

6

THE TIME HAD COME TO move the crew of the mother ship into orbit,
and Henry flew to their compound to bid them good-bye. From the air, their compound with its glittering windows and multitude of rooftops and trees and lawns and twinkling royal-blue swimming pools and green soccer fields and tennis courts and baseball diamonds might have been any suburban community outside any city in the developed world, except that in this case there was no city.

The commander of the mission met us on the tarmac. He was a Gary Cooper type—weather-burnt, slow-spoken, tall, gaunt, and handsome.

He and Henry clasped hands and spoke each other’s names.

“Angus, meet my wife,” Henry said. “My dear, Admiral Angus Henderson.”

Henderson took my hand and squeezed it, relaxing his grip just before the bones snapped.

“An honor, ma’am.”

The crew had assembled in the vast interior of a hangar. There were hundreds of them. They were a good-looking lot, all of them in tip-top physical condition—lean, quick moving, clear-eyed. They belonged to many nationalities. They radiated competence and chosenness. Whatever their gender or race, they were alike in manner and affect, as if they had all gone to the same school, which had fitted each of them out with the same manner, the same convictions. Give them a test and they would intuit the answers and ace it. Clearly they had lived up to their SAT scores or their countries’ equivalents. They had lived in isolation and trained together in this compound for a year or more. Previously they had been astronauts, cosmonauts,
pilots,
military officers, physicists, chemists, scientists of many other disciplines, computer whizzes, engineers, academics, physicians, surgeons—name it. The genders were present in something like proportionate numbers. So were the races. Taken together, the crew looked like a scientifically selected sample of the best and brightest and most genetically favored of the earth’s peoples. No doubt that was exactly what they were.

They were as orderly as a congregation of Episcopalians awaiting the first note of the organ. Smiles—white, bright, perfect smiles— flashed throughout the crowd. At the front of the hangar a Space-plane stood on its tail like a religious symbol, its polymer skin gleaming in the artificial light. Despite the verdant look of the compound from an altitude of ten thousand feet, the parched scent of the desert filled the nostrils.

When Admiral Henderson mounted the rostrum, the entire group sprang to its feet. The explosive noise made by this unified movement of people was a single, simultaneous, profoundly military sound.

From the lectern, Angus Henderson gave a curt nod. The crew sat down.

“It is sometimes said in introducing an especially distinguished visitor that he needs no introduction,” Henderson said. “That is seldom really true. Today, it is. Our visitor’s name and his work are known to nearly everyone in the world. He is the man we work for. Ladies and gentlemen, Mr. Henry Peel
.”

Henry entered from stage left. His appearance was greeted by total silence. The hush was almost visible, as if a cartoon balloon had popped into existence above the audience in which a single incredulous thought, printed in bold caps, had popped simultaneously into several hundred minds:
“THIS
IS HENRY PEEL?”

This collective incredulity lasted, maybe, for a count of ten. Then the audience leapt to its feet and slapped hands together as if an applause sign had lighted up. Henry did not say
thank-you-thank-you
or make any other gesture. He just stood at the rostrum, smiling his fugitive smile and moving no other muscle as he waited for the outburst to run its course.

When it did, he adjusted the height of the microphone and said, “Hi, I’m Henry
.”

More applause, also appreciative laughter. The guy had a sense of humor! When quiet was restored, Henry began to speak in his usual unhurried way. He was perfectly at ease. Neither he nor anyone else had ever addressed a hangar full of people he was about to send into space for the rest of their lives, but he was so relaxed that you might have thought he was a member of Toastmasters International who did this sort of thing every day. He did not flatter the audience. They didn’t need flattery. Being selected for this mission might be the ultimate meritocratic achievement, but they were accustomed to being selected and I suppose they took it for granted that they had been chosen to rescue the human race. Henry nevertheless managed to send them the message they wanted to hear: They deserved to be here. He was glad to meet them at last. He thanked them for the many invaluable contributions they had already made to the mission. The pilots among them had been flying the Spaceplanes and the mother ship itself, insofar as it needed to be controlled, by remote control for many months. About a hundred of them had visited the mother ship and the rest of the flotilla in orbit.

“As those of you who have gone aboard the mother ship know,” Henry said, “the problem of weightlessness has remained the chief obstacle to the ultimate success of the mission. In fact, there was little point in launching the mission unless the crew could be capable, at the end of it, of walking off the ship onto the surface of the planet and doing the job they had returned to Earth to do. The physical and psychological consequences of the crew’s adaptation to weightlessness over a journey that might last for several generations are obvious. Many doubted that such an adaptation was even possible. It was essential to find a solution before the mission was launched, even if it was only a partial answer to the problem that could be improved upon by the crew in the course of the flight. In regard to that problem, I have good news.”

The audience’s attention tightened like a collective muscle.

He said, “I can tell you that a system of artificial gravity is in the process of being installed in orbit within the mother ship and the Spaceplanes. It has undergone exhaustive testing in the laboratory and in space. It works
.”

This audience was far too cool to gasp or to applaud this astonishing news, but the feeling in the room changed. The lights dimmed. Monitors lit up. An image of the mother ship and its attendant Spaceplanes and other escorts appeared. The camera zoomed in until the flotilla filled the screen. An interior shot showing space maidens, dressed in coveralls, going about their tasks. One of them, an extremely pretty girl on a tall ladder, dropped a tool and it fell slowly to the floor twenty feet below, bounced some five feet straight up, fell, and bounced again, finally settling on the floor. In another shot about a dozen girls did gymnastics, leaping off the balance beam and floating back down to it while performing slow-motion somersaults in air. Another group of young women ran a race around the perimeter of the sphere in which the gym was located. They took tremendously long strides, covering meters with every step, and floating from one footfall to another. Mostly they wore their hair in tight pigtails, but one girl ran with her blue-black hair unbound. It floated around her head like a shadow in a painting.

The pictures stopped. The lights went on.

Henry said, “As you can see, the artificial gravity we have so far achieved is weaker than Earth gravity. To be precise, it is about twenty-four percent of Earth gravity, or roughly halfway between the gravity of the moon and the gravity of Mars. It is, however, adequate to maintain the health of human muscles and equilibrium, and we believe that its strength can be substantially increased during flight as the phenomenon is more fully understood.”

“Increased by how much
?”
asked a man with a bass voice that would have made an umpire wince.

“Theoretically, to something close to Earth gravity,” Henry answered politely, “I’m sure there are other questions. Go ahead
.”

He pointed to a woman in the second row.

“My question is simple,” she said. “How did you do it?”

“Our friend Ng Fred, who can make reality out of any idea, and his workers fabricated the equipment in the underground plant you have all visited,” Henry said. “The modules that power the system were lifted into orbit by booster rockets, then placed in proper position using remote control from Earth
.”

“Not that,” said the blonde. “How does it work?”

^“
Diamagnetism,” Henry said. “We created a magnetic field that resembles Earth’s magnetic field.”

“What about the metals in the ship?”

“The mother ship and the Spaceplanes, as you know, are made entirely of polymers. Where it was impossible to avoid the use of metal, aluminum and other nonmagnetic metals were employed.”

He pointed at the man with the powerful voice.