Seveneves - Страница 36

But it was way up high. Hard to reach.

And yet they had to reach it.

And it was closer, easier to reach, than the Arjuna asteroids that Sean Probst was so excited about.

Feeling an idea take shape in his head, like an iron core congealing deep in a moon, he put it on hold and forced himself to turn his attention to more immediate questions. A few days ago in the Oval Office he had formed a resolve to get his ass into space and begin making things happen up there. Which was fine. But he had three months left on terra firma. He couldn’t neglect his responsibilities here. Some of which — the most important — were to his kids, to Amelia, and to their frozen embryo. But on top of that he had been given other jobs, and if he screwed them up badly enough, e.g., because he was standing on hotel balconies in the middle of the night thinking about how much iron was in PP1, then they might not send him up to the Cloud Ark at all. He hadn’t wanted to go, but once he had assented to the idea, he had begun wanting it more than anything, and he now feared that they would take it away from him. And if they sensed that fear, they could use it to control him. Better to overperform, to exceed expectations, to act like it was nothing at all.

SEVENTY-TWO HOURS LATER HE WAS LOOKING OUT THE WINDOW OF a U.S. Navy helicopter banking through a misty Himalayan valley as it lined up its final approach to a runway in Bhutan. Or perhaps the runway in Bhutan was the more correct phrasing.

There were about 750,000 people in this country, which meant that they were entitled to supply two candidates for the Cloud Ark. The arithmetic was a little fuzzy; if the same ratio were applied consistently all over the world, something like twenty thousand candidates would be gathered in. If an arklet could accommodate five people, then four thousand arklets would be needed in the swarm. Each arklet required a heavy-lift rocket to get it into orbit, and some assembly and prep work once it had reached Izzy.

Could it be done? If the entire industrial capacity of the world were thrown into the production of rockets, arklets, space suits, and the other goods needed? Perhaps. But probably not. Doob was privy to some recent estimates that put the numbers at closer to one-quarter of that figure.

And anyway, could the arklets really support five humans each? Without a doubt they were large enough for five people to bang around in, but it was not at all clear that each could be self-sufficient in food production. Building a sustainable ecosystem in a tube the size of a railway tank car was no small task. Biosphere 2, a well-known experiment in the Arizona desert, had attempted to support eight people on an ecosystem the size of a couple of football fields, and been unable to make it work long term. But its mission had been clouded by political strife and odd quasi-spiritual factors. A more down-to-earth project run by the Soviets had determined that eight square meters of algae — an expanse of pond scum about the size of two ping-pong tables — was needed to keep a single human supplied with oxygen. In the space between the hard inner hull and the inflated outer hull of a single arklet there was more than enough room. But much more real estate would be needed if the arklet were also to produce food. And those calculations didn’t even begin to address the real complications of keeping thousands of people alive in space for many years. It wasn’t enough just not to asphyxiate and not to starve. People would need medicine, micronutrients, recreation, stimulation. Ecosystems would get out of whack and need to be repaired with pesticides, antibiotics, and other hard-to-make chemicals. The thrusters that kept the arklets out of trouble would need to be refueled, and not only that but they would need maintenance and repair. The idea of a completely decentralized Cloud Ark was a chimera; it was not sustainable without a mother ship, a central supply dump and repair depot. The only plausible candidate for that was Izzy. But Izzy wasn’t designed for anything like that purpose. They’d been trying to make it over by cramming it with vitamins, but that only delayed the moment when they’d run out of all the goods they didn’t know how to produce in space, and people would begin dying in quantity.

From the fact that he had gotten nowhere raising awkward questions about this, Doob inferred that the Arkitects knew about it, and were on it, and just didn’t want to talk about it because public doubt and controversy were not going to help. Doob’s job, clearly, was to act like everything was okay. Today, that meant scooping up two young people from the Himalayan kingdom of Bhutan.

Did the little performance he was about to put on really mean that twenty thousand people from all over the world were going to end up living happily in the Cloud Ark? He just had to shut down the little Rain Man in his head—“Doob, as in dubious”—and not even think about it.

They had taken off two hours ago from the George H. W. Bush, a supercarrier keeping station in the Bay of Bengal. Doob had viewed the ship through the eyes of a man who, in a few months, would be making a permanent move to its orbiting equivalent. She was a completely artificial island, thousands of people densely packed into a wad of pure technology. The professionalism of the crew and the efficiency with which she ran were amazing. Could something like that be duplicated in space, with people chosen by lot from all over the world, and trained in camps over the course of a single year?

He reckoned he would know more in about half an hour.

The navy chopper plunged into a fog-stuffed slot between mountains and knifed through steam and mist for a few minutes. The airport’s sole runway came into view, startlingly close to them. The chopper flared to a perfect landing a stone’s throw from the terminal building. Doob became aware that his jaw was clenched, and tried to relax it. He had made the mistake of googling this place and learned that it was bracketed by eighteen-thousand-foot mountain peaks, that only eight pilots in the world were certified to land here, and that even they didn’t attempt it unless the sun was shining on the runway. Obviously the kinds of guys who flew choppers for the navy operated according to different rules, but it had still been a white-knuckle approach as far as Doob was concerned, and it made him wonder how he was going to react to being hurled into space on top of a hastily constructed tube full of explosive chemicals.

He shifted in his seat and felt a thick manila envelope slide out of his lap and to the deck with a solid thunk that almost woke up Tavistock Prowse. Tav had been sitting across from him for the entire duration of the flight, and had been sleeping for the last half hour — prostrate from jet lag. He was a bulky man, not especially tall, but constructed like a wrestler. The bald spot on the back of his head, which had been faintly visible even when he’d been in college, had expanded mercilessly, leaving just a monklike fringe of close-cropped hair around the back of his bullet-shaped head. Perhaps to draw attention away from it, he wore glasses with massive black frames. At one point a serious weight lifter, he had softened and spread in the last decade, and even more so since Zero. It was strange in a way to see him unconscious, for he never seemed to stop moving.

Doob had a pretty good idea why. Tav was hoping he’d get picked. If he worked hard enough, popped up on enough news feeds, garnered enough followers on Twitter, maybe some important person would decide that the Cloud Ark needed a professional communicator — the first, or the last, journalist. To Doob it seemed like long odds. A lot of people with Ph.D.s and even Nobel Prizes were ahead of Tav in line. But you never knew. And he couldn’t fault the guy for trying.

He bent forward and retrieved the envelope from the deck. It was a centimeter thick. It was labeled PARO, BHUTAN in neat block letters. The flap had never been opened. He was supposed to have spent the last couple of hours reading its contents, familiarizing himself with the task to be performed. Instead of which he had been looking out the window at the steamy green plains and lazily braided rivers of Bangladesh.

Hoping to make the most of the two or three minutes it would take to get the chopper’s door open, he plucked it up off the floor, tore it open, and pulled out a sheaf of pages. This was enough to wake Tav up, but not enough to make him move. He gazed at Doob and watched him read.

“If it’s wearing red, yellow, or both, it’s a lama,” he said. “Bow to it.”

“Isn’t that a camel from South America?”

“With one L. A holy man. Put the palms of your hands together and make a little bow.”

“I don’t believe in—”

“It’s not gonna kill you, is it? If he’s got a big yellow scarf over his left shoulder, he’s the king. Bow lower in that case.”

“Thanks. Anything else?”

Sitting next to Doob was Mario, their photographer: a man in his thirties with a short, dark mustache, a New York accent, and no expectation whatsoever of being picked for the Cloud Ark. On the flight over he had divided his time between reading his own copy of the same dossier and playing a video game on his phone. He had been on many more of these than Doob or Tav. Getting into the spirit of things, he pocketed his phone and piped up: “People are going to hand you things. Some of them might be really crusty and old and funny smelling. Those things are probably really important. Really important.”

“Then why are they—”

“Because they believe you are going to take it all up into space and preserve it.”