Myra said. Into interplanetary space.
If you pick the right altitude to leave the elevator, you can use its momentum to hurl you wherever you want to go. The Moon, for instance.
Is that where were going?
Alexei smiled. Oh, a bit further than that.
Then where, damn it? Theres no point in secrecy nowas soon as we leave the elevator the authorities will know where were going.
Mars, Mum. Mars. Bisesa was bewildered. Mars? Wherewell, where something is waiting for you. But this little pod wont keep us alive all the way to Mars. Of course not, Alexei said. Well be picked up. Well rendezvous with a lightship. A solar-sail ship.
Its already on the way.
Bisesa frowned. We have no rockets, do we? Once were free of the ribbon well have no motive power at all.
We dont need it. The ship will rendezvous with us.
My God, Bisesa said. And if something goes wrong
Alexei smiled, unconcerned.
Talking to Alexei through these long days, Bisesa thought she had begun to see something of his psychologythe psychology of a Spacer, subtly different from the Earthbound.
Alexei had something approaching a morbid fear of failure in the machinery around him, for he was entirely dependent on that for his very life. But on the other hand he had absolutely no doubt in the implacable working-out of orbits and trajectories and interceptions; he lived in a realm where celestial mechanics visibly ruled everything, a mighty, silent clockwork that never developed a flaw. So once his gadgets had cut them loose of the ribbon he believed he would be safe and secure; it was inconceivable to him that their lightship rendezvous could be missed. Whereas Bisesa and Myra were terrified of just that possibility.
Somewhere in there was the key to understanding Alexei, Bisesa thought, and the new Spacer generation. And she thought she would understand him even better if she could make out the peculiar prayers he seemed to chant softly while distracted: psalms to the Unconquered Sun.
On the twelfth day they sat on their fold-down chairs, with all their loose gear tied down in advance of the jolt of weightlessness that would come when Alexeis explosive bolts severed the cabin from its pulley.
Alexei eyed his crewmates. Anybody want a countdown?
Shut up, Myra said.
Bisesa looked down at the ribbon that had been her anchor to reality for twelve days, and up at an Earth reduced to a pebble. She wondered if she would ever see it loom large againand what lay ahead of her before that could happen.
Alexei whispered, Here we go
There was a flash below, on the cabins roof that had become a floor. The ribbon fell away, startlingly fast, and gravity evaporated like a dream. Tumbling, loose bits of gear rolling around them, Alexei laughed and laughed.
PART 2 JOURNEYS 15: LIBERATOR
April 2069
John Metternes, ships engineer, called up to Edna from Achilles. There was another holdup. The techs down there on the asteroid still werent satisfied with the magnetic containment of the antimatter pellets.
Any more delays and the Liberator was going to miss another window for her first trial cruise.
Edna Fingal looked out of the thick wraparound windows, away from the convoluted surface of the Trojan asteroid beneath her, to find the sun, so far away here on the J-line it barely showed a disk. Surrounded by the flight decks calm hum and new-carpet smell, she chafed, restless. She wasnt good at waiting.
Intellectually, in her head, she knew she had to wait until the engineers were absolutely sure about what they were doing. The Liberator depended on a new and untried technology, and as far as Edna could tell these magnetic antimatter bottles were never exactly stable; the best you could hope for was a kind of controlled instability that lasted long enough to get you home. It was thought that a failure of containment had been the cause of the loss of the Liberators unnamed prototype predecessor, and of Mary Lanchester and Theo Woese, the A-23Cs two-person crew.
But in OutSys, out there in the dark, something was approaching, something silent and alien and hostile. Already it was inside the J-line, closer to the sun than Edna was. Edna was captain of the worlds only spacegoing warship even close to operational status, the only healthy vessel in the first Space Group Attack Squadron. She itched to confront the alien.
As she often did, she tried to relieve the stress by thinking of family.
She glanced at a chronometer. It was set to Houston time, like all master clocks throughout human space, and she mentally