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‘About the vacuum,’ said Rogachev. ‘I gather our bodies will explode if we’re exposed to an airless space without protection?’

‘It’s not quite as dramatic as that. But you would die whatever happened, so it’s a good idea to keep your helmet on nicely at all times. Most of you are familiar with the old spacesuits in which you looked like a marshmallow. So inflated that the astronauts literally had to go hopping about because their trouser legs didn’t bend. For short missions and occasional space outings that was fine. But in continuously inhabited space cities, on the Moon or on Mars, monster suits like that wouldn’t make any sense at all.’

Nina pointed to the tight-fitting overall that she herself was wearing. It was made of a thick neoprene-like material and was covered with a network of dark lines. Her elbows and knees were protected by hard shells. Even though she looked as if she’d put on three diving suits one over the other, the ensemble seemed somehow sexy on her.

‘That’s why they’ve recently started using suits like these. Bio-suits, developed by a beautiful woman, Professor Dava Newman of MIT. They’re pretty, don’t you think?’ Nina turned slowly on her axis. ‘You’re going to ask me how the required pressure is created. Very simple. Instead of gas, a huge number of fixed metal braces create a mechanical counter-pressure. It’s only where the skin is highly mobile that the material is kept flexible; in all other areas it’s rigid, it’s practically an exoskeleton.’

Nina took a torso-shaped shell from the nearest shelf.

‘All armour and applications fit the basic unit, as this carbon-fibre torso protector reveals. A backpack full of life-support systems is connected to attachment points on the back, and air is pumped into the helmet and guided along pipes to the boots and gloves, the only areas in which there is gas pressure. The traditional, noisy cooling system has been replaced by a temperature-controlling nano-layer. There are additional protectors for the limbs, like the ones you’ll know from mediaeval suits of armour, except much lighter and harder. In space you’re exposed to cosmic radiation, there are micrometeorites flying about, and on the Moon you’ll be exposed to regolith, moon dust. While the movements of your feet in space don’t really matter much, on planetary surfaces they’re crucially important. To do justice to all that, bio-suits are conceived as construction sets. Dozens of elements can be combined at will, quickly and with only a few rapid manoeuvres. You breathe the same oxygen–nitrogen mixture as you do on Earth and here on board, and now you no longer have to wait for ages in the pressure chamber.’

She started pulling on her boots and gloves, attached the backpack with the life-support systems to the back plate of the suit and linked the connectors to one another.

‘Child’s play, Dava Newman would say, but be careful. Don’t try to do it on your own. Don’t make me have to come and pick you up, all dried up and twisted. Okay? Fine! Bio-suits are low-maintenance, and one more thing while we’re on the subject: if anyone feels a certain physical need – just let it flow. Your valuable pee is trapped in a thick layer of polyacrylate, so don’t worry that it’s going to splash down your legs. These’ – and Nina pointed to two consoles under the wrist – ‘are controls for a total of sixteen thrust nozzles in the shoulder and hip areas. Astronauts no longer dangle like newborn babies from umbilical cords; they navigate by recoil. The blasts are short, and they can be manually released or left up to
computer calculation. That option’s a new one. When the electronics decide that you’ve lost control, you’re automatically stabilised. Your computers are connected to mine, and remote-controlled as well, so strictly speaking you can’t get lost. Here’ – her hand slipped over another console along her forearm – ‘you’ll find thirty little buttons, each one with the option of speaking and receiving. With these you’ll decide who you want to communicate with. “Talk to all” means you’re talking to everybody, “Listen to all” means you’re receiving everybody. To get your declarations of love out of the way, choose the individual connection and switch the rest off.’ Nina grinned. ‘Anyone worried about me seeing you in your underwear? Nobody? Then off with your clothes! Let’s get ready to go out there.’

* * *

‘What about the chickens?’ asked Mukesh Nair.

‘A crackpot idea,’ Julian objected. ‘There are four left. Two are even still laying eggs, little spherical things with the nutritional value of golf balls. The pelvic muscles of the others have regressed so far that they can’t push anything out.’

‘So much for births in space,’ said Eva Borelius. ‘Push, push! But what with?’

‘And what about the chicken poo?’ Karla Kramp seemed weirdly fascinated by the subject.

‘Oh, they crap more than we’d like them to,’ said Julian. ‘We tried to siphon it off, but you have to be careful that you don’t suck the feathers off the poor creatures’ butts. The whole thing’s pretty tricky. Quite honestly, I don’t know how to raise chickens in zero gravity. They don’t like it. They’re always bumping into each other, you have to put them on leashes, they look baffled. Unlike fish, by the way! They don’t seem to care, they live in a kind of floating state anyway. We could look into fish-breeding next, if you like.’

‘We haven’t tried everything yet,’ announced Kay Woodthorpe, a squat woman with the face of a Chihuahua, who worked for the bioregenerative systems research group. ‘If the worst comes to the worst, we’ll try artificial gravity.’

‘How would you do that?’ asked Carl Hanna. ‘By making the OSS rotate?’

‘No,’ Julian shook his head. ‘Just the breeding module, uncoupled and stored a few kilometres away. A structure like OSS isn’t suited to spinning. You’d need a wheel for that.’

‘Like in science fiction movies?’

‘Exactly.’

‘But you’ve got one here,’ said Tautou. ‘Not a wheel, perhaps, but axial symmetric elements—’

‘You’re talking about a Bernal sphere, my friend. That’s something else. A wheel whose rotational element corresponds to the speed of the Earth’s rotation.’ Julian
frowned. ‘Imagine a car tyre or a cylindrical body. When it turns, centrifugal forces arise at the internal wall, opposite the axis. Then something like gravity comes into being. You can walk along a self-enclosed surface, excellent jogging route, by the way, while the gravity decreases towards the axis. Feasible in principle. The problem is the requisite size and stability of such a structure. A wheel with a diameter of – let’s say – a hundred metres would have to complete a rotation every fourteen seconds, and the gravity at your feet would probably be stronger than the gravity at your head, because your body accelerates to different degrees. And besides, if you set something like that in motion— You know that from driving: when one of your tyres isn’t properly balanced, it lurches like mad; and now imagine a rotating station starting to careen. You’ve got people walking about, how are you going to ensure that they’re evenly distributed at all times? You couldn’t begin to calculate the vibrations produced, everyone would be nauseous, the thing might explode—’

‘But you’ve left the era of lightweight construction behind,’ said Hanna. ‘With the lift you can put unlimited mass in orbit. Just build a bigger, more stable one.’

‘Would such a thing be possible?’ Tautou said in amazement. ‘Like the one in
2001
?’

‘Sure.’ Julian nodded. ‘I knew Kubrick. The old guy had thought very carefully about that, or let’s say he’d had other people think about it for him. I’ve always dreamed of copying his space station. That massive wheel turning to the sounds of waltz-music, which you can walk around. But it would have to be huge. Four kilometres in diameter. High orbit, highly armoured. So you could fit a whole city inside, with residential areas, parks, maybe a river—’

‘I think this is quite fascinating enough,’ Sushma Nair said to her husband and, glowing with enthusiasm, touched his arm. ‘Look at that, Mukesh. Spinach. Courgettes!’

They were floating along a glass wall several metres high. Behind it all kinds of greenery curled and sprouted, fruits dangled from trees.

‘Pioneering work, Julian,’ Mukesh agreed. ‘You’ve managed to impress a simple peasant.’

‘Just as you have impressed the world.’ Julian smiled.

False modesty, Nair, thought Hanna.

While a brave little group explored the vacuum outside, he, Eva Borelius, Karla Kramp, Bernard Tautou and the Nairs were, under the expert guidance of Julian and Kay Woodthorpe, viewing the two biospheres, the huge, spherical modules in which the bioregenerative life-support system department was experimenting with agriculture and animal-rearing. Over six floors, Biosphere A brought together courgettes and cabbage, spinach, tomatoes, paprika and broccoli, a real Little Italy
of vegetables, as well as kiwi-fruit and strawberries, the whole thing populated by a fauna of bustling robots, constantly planting, fertilising, hoeing, cutting and harvesting. Hanna wouldn’t have been surprised to see carbon-fibre-reinforced rabbits with radio-telescope ears gnawing at the lettuce and suddenly floating away at their approach. He threw back his head. One level up, apple-trees stretched knotty branches resplendent with cudgel-hard fruits.

At first, Woodthorpe told them, there had been massive problems. The predecessors of the greenhouses, called salad-machines, had been little more than standard racks in which tomatoes and lettuce flourished in competition. As plants took their bearings from gravity like almost all living creatures, and thus knew where to stretch and in which direction to send their roots, the loss of up and down had led to the formation of terrible thickets – unfortunately at the expense of the fruits, which led a wretched guerrilla lifestyle in the middle of the kraken-like root-monster. Thrown into confusion, even spinach had produced only woody stalks in a desperate bid to cling onto something, until it occurred to someone to subject the fields to artificial tremors, brief shakes as a result of which their fruit and vegetable plants finally sought support down below, where the vibrations came from.

‘Since then we’ve had the rank growth under control, and you can see the quality,’ Woodthorpe explained. ‘Certainly, it is and will always be greenhouse produce. The strawberries taste a bit watery, you wouldn’t necessarily win any prizes with the red peppers—’

‘But the courgettes are great,’ said Julian.

‘Yeah, and so’s the broccoli and amazingly the tomatoes too. We don’t really know yet why one works better than the other. At any rate the greenhouses give us cause to hope that we may in future be able to close life-support systems that are presently open. On the Moon we’ve nearly got there.’

‘What do you mean “close”?’ asked Karla.

‘Just like on Earth. Nothing gets lost there. The Earth is a self-enclosed system, everything is constantly being processed. Just look on the space station as a small copy of our planet with proportionately limited resources of water, air and fuel, except that in the past we couldn’t rework all those resources. We were constantly forced to maintain supplies. Carbon dioxide, for example, got completely out of hand. Today we can split it in reactors, use the liberated oxygen again to breathe, or combine it with hydrogen to form water, and the remaining carbon can be synthesised with methane to form fuel. Just a bit of sludge gets lost in the process, and it’s hardly worth mentioning. The problem is more one of bringing the size and consumption of the reactors into a convincing relationship with their effectiveness. So we try to do that with natural regeneration processes. Plants can also serve that
purpose. Our own little rainforest, if you like. On the Moon we have bigger greenhouses, and we’re on the brink of completely closing all the cycles.’

‘No market for a water-supplier, then,’ laughed Tautou.

‘No, the OSS is on the way to complete self-reliance.’

‘Hmm, self-reliance.’ Karla thought for a moment. ‘So you could soon be declaring independence, could you? Or the whole Moon. By the way, who does the Moon actually belong to?’

‘Nobody,’ said Julian. ‘According to the lunar treaty.’

‘Interesting.’ Karla’s Modigliani eyebrows raised, arches of amazement, her face an oval full of ovals. ‘Given that it doesn’t belong to anyone, it’s not short of people.’

‘That’s right. The treaty urgently needs to be rewritten.’

‘Perhaps to say that the Moon belongs to everybody?’

‘Correct.’

‘So the people who got there first. Or who are already up there. America and China.’

‘By no means. Anyone else can follow them.’

‘
Can
anyone follow them?’ she asked slyly.

‘That, my dear Karla,’ smiled Julian, ‘is exactly the point.’

* * *

Finn O’Keefe tried to find solace in physics.

The dressing process had gone on for ages, until at last the group hung, packed and helmeted, in the hermetic seclusion of the airlock, a clinically illuminated, empty room with rounded edges. Hand-grips ran along the walls; a display provided information about pressure, temperature and atmospheric composition. Nina explained that this chamber was considerably larger than the other hatches distributed around the OSS. Once Peter Black had joined them, the group now comprised eight people. A hiss, growing quieter and finally fading away, indicated that the air was being sucked out, then the outer bulkheads glided silently open.

O’Keefe gulped.

In thrall to early human fears of plunging into the abyss, and with butterflies in his stomach, he stared outside. Part of the roof extended before his eyes. He didn’t know what he had expected: an outlet, a balcony, a gangway, regardless of the fact that none of it made any sense up here. The circular level had no floor – it was an open structure with a diameter of four hundred metres, surrounded by a steel ring, massive enough that railway lines could have passed through it, and fitted with payloads and manipulators. A radial arrangement of supporting constructions led from the torus to the other areas. Beyond that solar park, glittering in the sunlight, radiators circulated and spherical tanks hung from crane-like cantilevers. Batteries
of floodlights illuminated huge hangars, the birthplaces of future spaceships. Tiny astronauts floated below the belly of a steel giant, overseeing the installation of rows of seats by robot arms. Bizarre machine-creatures, half man, half insect, crisscrossed the area, carried parts in locust arms, crawled with segmented grasping claws around the scaffolding and girders, carried out soldering work and riveted prefabricated components. Their android faces seemed to have been inspired by the character Boba Fett, the always helmeted contract killer from
Star Wars
, leading inevitably to the conclusion that Julian Orley had been involved in their development – Orley with his enthusiasm for science-fiction films, who always managed to transform quotations into innovations.