The Year’s Best Military SF & Space Opera (22 page)

ICARUS AT NOON

by Eric Leif Davin

Once abuzz with human activity, the solar system is now all but devoid of life. Robots do the work faster, better, and safer than their biological counterparts, and the people of Earth have returned to the planet that bore them, content to experience life through a screen. But for one man, the last untouched piece of real estate in the solar system beckons.

HELL FILLED THE SKY.
The seething cauldron of the Sun, only 17 million miles away and thirty times larger than it appeared from Earth, began to pour fire across the horizon. Soon its thousand-degree heat would begin cooking Santiago de la Cruz. Facing Sol as it grew larger, de la Cruz sat cross-legged in the Lotus position, bobbing gently, as if underwater, above the burned and blackened surface of Icarus. Almost eighty million miles from home, de la Cruz prepared to die.

It wasn’t supposed to have been this way. It was an accident. It was because he shut down the damn computers on the final approach. No machine was going to have anything to do with touching down on this last “untouched” world. It was going to be one small step—for a man!

Santiago de la Cruz came in slow in the small cone of darkness trailing out from Icarus like a windsock. He wanted to park the ship in a close parallel orbit, then glide down in a suit. He miscalculated. Alarms blared, retros fired, and he plowed into the side of the asteroid in slow motion.

The ship’s oxygen gushed out into the void of space as the scarred side of the asteroid ripped into the ship. It was a long horizontal slash—not enough to demolish the spacecraft. But enough to disable it. It would never make it back to Earth. It now drifted as a companion body to the tiny world and would join it in its long 409-day journey around the Sun. Somewhere amid the wreckage floated a spacesuit. In the suit was Santiago de la Cruz.

Santiago de la Cruz was an old hand. He had thrilled at the stark beauty of the Martian hinterlands and walked the bubbling surface of Io. He’d commanded every type of craft. He’d supervised bases on Mars and Io, built the Deep Space Observer on Pluto when almost everyone else said it couldn’t be done. And because he was an old hand, he understood the logic of withdrawal. It made dollars and sense.

Besides, anyplace he’d been he could return to via VR tours. Anything seen by a robot or a human with a camera was easily accessible to anyone else thereafter. All you had to do was buy the appropriate virtual disk, slip it in, and you were there once more—or for the first time! You could hunker down to outlast a Martian sand storm, plummet through the stygian depths of the Jovian atmosphere, stand on the edge of an erupting volcano on Io. When virtual reality was as real as reality—who needed dangerous reality? But it still ate at him. “It’s just not the same,” he insisted to himself.

All around him Serenity Moon Base was a hive of activity, but as de la Cruz surveyed the installation he saw no humans. Worker ’bots scurried everywhere, intent on their work. Some of that work was ongoing astronomical observations. Other work entailed the industrial production of oxygen, hydrogen, and other raw materials for lunar and space-based industries. Mass-production industry no longer took place on Earth. It was cheaper and safer off-planet, where raw materials were plentiful and transportation was easy. Finished products were then dropped down the gravity well to Earth. The home planet consumed what the Solar System provided.

What the robots of the Solar System provided, de la Cruz thought bitterly to himself. Just as worker ’bots swarmed over Serenity Moon Base, so they swarmed over the entire System, from Mercury to Pluto and Charon. Indeed, they pushed out even farther than the System, as robot probes explored the edges of the Sun’s gravitational field and headed toward the nearest stars.

It’s been like this from the beginning, de la Cruz thought bitterly. Machines got here first, now they’re everywhere. The Russians weren’t the first in space. Back in 1957 it was Sputnik, a piece of Russian metal, which got into space first, announcing to everyone down below as it beeped away in the night sky that a machine got up here first. The first spacecraft from Earth to reach another world was another hunk of machinery, the Russian Lunik, which crashed on the Moon back in 1959. It was another Russian robot craft which reached Mars back in 1971. And so it went, planet after planet, probe after probe: Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn and their moons, Halley’s Comet, the asteroid belt. After Sputnik and Lunik it was Mariner, Pioneer, Viking, Pathfinder, Galileo, Magellan, Voyager. The machines always got there first.

And now they’ll be here last, de la Cruz thought to himself. The human presence in space was but a brief intrusion. It just didn’t make sense to have all those fragile and expensive pieces of protoplasm in harm’s way. They weren’t needed. Robot stations on Mercury and Venus, on Vesta and Mars, on Io and Pluto, could carry out all the observations and experiments any human could, and for a fraction of the cost. All the expensive life support systems needed to maintain human life could be jettisoned, making for a smaller, streamlined, high-performance facility operating on a shoestring. And it was safer, at least from the human viewpoint. When a catastrophic failure occurred at some far-distant outpost, all that was lost was some machinery.

And so the United Nations Space Agency had declared space gradually “off-limits” to humans. The human presence slowly pulled back from the fringes of the Solar System as human-staffed facilities were closed down one by one and put on automatic pilot. Serenity Moon Base, half-buried under the Moon’s Sea of Serenity, was the last to be staffed by humans. And, as the personnel went home at the end of their turns, it finally came down to Santiago de la Cruz. He was “The Last Man on the Moon.” It was his job to turn out the lights.

Santiago de la Cruz continued on his tour of inspection. It was for the most part redundant. The automatic systems ran everything, checked everything. But, it was his job, at least for the time being, and so he did it. He entered the hermetically sealed hangar where the Prometheus Project was nearing completion. Robot technicians scurried here and there running diagnostics on the craft. Soon it would be launched to the last unexplored piece of real estate in the Solar System, a small world previously overlooked. The all-conquering robots weren’t quite everywhere just yet and, almost as an afterthought, the final blank spot on the map of the Solar System was going to be filled in. How ironic, de la Cruz thought, that the craft was named Prometheus, after a man who stole fire from the gods.

De la Cruz paused to admire the ship. It was a beautiful piece of machinery—manufactured right here at Serenity Moon Base. Like everything else on the Moon—or on Earth—it was untouched by human hands, entirely produced by robot techies in an automated facility. “That’s just the problem,” thought de la Cruz. “Who needs people? We’re all redundant.”

Indeed, humans weren’t needed for any productive work. They were almost literally useless. Computers and robots produced everything—and they produced megatons of it, whatever it was. Thorstein Veblen had predicted it long ago. The “inordinate productivity of the machine,” he said, would soon produce wealth far beyond the fevered dreams of Midas. And it did. About the only job left for humans was to consume the wealth.

For those who could. Most could not. Earth had become a hellhole for the common person. There were no jobs. And there were no handouts. The “freeloading parasites” who comprised most of humanity had become an idle underclass locked out beyond the gates of Eden, where the equally idle rich frolicked. And when the underclass became too restive, there were lots of prisons just waiting for them. Santiago de la Cruz was not a member of the “owning” class, so no comfortable and well-guarded high-rise condo waited for him. And when a robot could do his job just as well and cheaper, no job awaited him. Instead, the underclass beckoned him. As soon as he finished supervising the closing of Serenity Moon Base to humans, he would join it. “Just what the hell am I going to do down on Earth?” he thought. “May as well be dead.”

The purpose of the Prometheus mission was to secure the Helios Station on the surface of Icarus, the hottest hunk of rock in the Solar System. Orbiting Sol inside the orbit of Mercury, Icarus was a two-mile-diameter nickel-iron asteroid. Even smaller than Deimos, the smallest Martian moon at seven-by-nine miles, there was nevertheless enough of it for a ship to approach in the shadow and touch down on it. The ship, however, would be as light as a feather. With gravity 1/10,000th that of Earth, a man, even in a bulky spacesuit, would not be able to walk across the surface of Icarus. He’d have to traverse the 15 square miles of jagged and sun-blackened surface by his hands, like a buoyant scuba diver pulling himself along the bottom of a Caribbean lagoon.

Once planted, the Helios Station would be a permanent, cheap, and fully automated solar observatory. It would monitor the various layers of the Sun’s roiling solar gases, the photosphere, chromosphere, and corona, with their varying temperatures, directions, and visual characteristics. Based on Icarus, its orbit would never decay, as had so many other robotic solar observer spacecraft, plunging them into the Sun.

In addition, the four-hour rotation of Icarus meant there would also be a period of night during which useful observations could be made of the chromosphere and corona, the layers of hot gases just above the Sun’s photosphere, or visual surface. While those layers actually shine by themselves, they are overwhelmed by the intensity of the direct surface glare. Blotting out that glare would bring the upper two layers into prominent view. Nighttime conditions would also make it possible for the Helios Station to observe the oval, gray, hazy glow of the inner Zodiacal light caused by sunlight reflection off dust particles along the plane of the Solar System, also erased in the full glare of the Sun.

And, with a wildly elliptical orbit, Icarus at perihelion—its closest approach to the Sun—dwarfed any hell Mercury could offer. On Mercury, the Sun was only twice the size as seen from Earth. On Icarus it filled the sky. With a brightside surface temperature of 797 degrees Fahrenheit, Mercury was hot enough—but at high noon on Icarus a week from perihelion, the temperature hit 1,000 degrees F. And Prometheus was going to rendezvous with Icarus at perihelion.

As Prometheus became more fully operational, de la Cruz spent more time in the facility, becoming more and more familiar with the last spacecraft he’d ever get to see up close and personal. Finally, he made a decision. Santiago de la Cruz had almost singlehandedly built the Deep Space Observer on Pluto at the very edge of the Solar System. He’d be damned if a robot spacecraft was going to set up Earth’s outpost at the other end of the System. He began programing instructions to alter the design and construction of Prometheus. He didn’t want too much changed. Just enough to support a single human occupant.

And who was to stop him? He was the only man on the Moon. And since he supervised all reports to Ground Control, it was easy enough to conceal what he was doing. By the time his superiors down on Earth found out what he was up to, it was too late. He was already in space.

“De la Cruz!” they radioed. “Abort immediately and return to Serenity!”

“No chance,” he replied. “I’m on my way to the Sun. I’ve got a rendezvous with Icarus at high noon.”

“De la Cruz, are you insane? This is suicidal!”

“Yeah, pretty irrational, alright. What’ya gonna do? Terminate my career?”

“Why are you doing this?”

“Like Sir Edmund said, ‘Because it’s there!’”

“De la Cruz, you are jeopardizing the success of a multi-trillion-dollar scientific expedition!”

“So arrest me,” de la Cruz radioed back, and then broke communication with Earth. He knew they’d be after him, but not before he got to Icarus first.

When Santiago de la Cruz regained consciousness, he seemed to be floating just above the steeply curving surface of a small hill. In all directions the dark and broken land fell away from him. A momentary wave of vertigo engulfed him and his head swam. Then he realized where he was and his vision steadied. The small hill below him was the entire near side of Icarus. Above him in the darkness of the asteroid’s night side floated the wreckage of Prometheus. Then, off to his side, the disorientingly near horizon flickered with fire as the Sun began to rise.

The Sun galvanized de la Cruz into action. The sudden impact of its hellish temperature would quickly overheat his suit’s cooling capacity. Soon, he’d be boiling like a lobster in its shell. He doubled over, reached down, and touched the surface of Icarus. “That’s one small handhold for a man,” he said, “one giant reach for all Mankind.”

Then he reached out and grabbed another handhold on the surface. He pulled himself forward and reached with his other hand for yet another outcropping. Then another. And another. Weighing less than an ounce in his suit, he made rapid progress as he pulled himself across the face of Icarus. As the asteroid’s rotation speed was only one mile per hour, de la Cruz soon saw the giant thermonuclear furnace of superheated gases which was the Sun sink back below the horizon behind him. He plunged deeper into the blessed -60 degree F. temperature of the Icaran night. In a short time he was in the middle of the asteroid’s nocturnal zone. All he had to do, he thought, was just keep moving. That way, he could always outrun the dawn. And, with the slight exertion such movement required, he could keep it up forever. Or until his suit ran out of oxygen.