To Benacerraf, the view from space showed her not so much the delicacy of Earth, but the tenuous grasp of humanity, even on this single planet, even after four billion years of life’s adaptation, down there at the bottom of that murky gravity well.
Humans were restricted to a shell around the surface of Earth, no thicker than an hour’s car ride. In the depths of interplanetary space, where Earth and Moon were reduced to faint specks, man had left no mark but a handful of ageing spacecraft, a thin hiss of radio static… and Discovery.
The Universe was huge, empty, dead. It knew nothing of mankind and all its works. Benacerraf had travelled beyond Venus; she had seen that for herself. Here she was scooting over the surface of Earth itself, and she still thought so.
At such times, the thought of life aspiring to anything but to cling to the surface of that big ball of rock down there seemed absurd.
She was alone up here, on the flight deck. She didn’t even know where the others were right now.
It made you think, if the four of them couldn’t stand each other enough even to be together even for the few hours of this flyby of the home world.
But she was going to stay up here. It was, after all, one hell of a view. And she had a duty to perform.
Discovery was passing behind the planet, crossing over its night side, so from Benacerraf’s point of view the fat gibbous disk began to narrow, soon approaching a crescent.
The crescent thinned rapidly as it grew, as if the light were bleeding from its tapering horns. Soon it was so huge that Benacerraf had to crane her neck to see its full extent.
And then, with a flare of gold and red, the sun passed beyond the horizon.
Discovery,flying over oceans, plunged into Earth’s huge shadow. Now, the spacecraft inhabited a new landscape, which revealed itself to Benacerraf as her eyes dark-adapted.
Over the night hemisphere of Earth, a huge aurora glowed. It was a curtain of green light that appeared to extend from the fleeing spacecraft all the way to Earth’s horizon, at the pole. Beneath, the aurora blended in with the airglow, the luminous gas layer high in the atmosphere excited by the sun’s radiation. And Benacerraf could see noctilucent clouds, very high decks illuminated by the airglow, like the surface of a thin, milky sea. Above the aurora, very faint, she could see streamers, very thin striations which seemed to extend down from much higher altitudes, spokes aligned with the Earth’s magnetic field.
The aurora’s curtains and folds seemed to be on the same level as Discovery — the orbiter was near its closest approach now, just a couple of hundred miles above the planet — and Benacerraf had a rare sense of motion, of speed, of sailing through some invisible sea, populated by these bergs of cool light.
It was the most beautiful thing Benacerraf had ever seen. And a hell of a relief from the bleak emptiness of interplanetary space, where it never felt like she was going anywhere. Damn, damn. How could I abandon all this?
Discovery was revisiting Earth for its final gravity assist before Jupiter; Earth was, in fact, the most massive object between the sun and Jupiter.
By passing so close to Earth — coming within a couple of hundred miles of its surface — Discovery had become briefly coupled to Earth, like, Benacerraf thought, a child grabbing hold of a merry-go-round propelled by the strong arms of its father. When Discovery flew on, it would have picked up energy from the encounter — the equivalent of thousands of pounds of additional fuel — and Earth’s store of energy would be reduced; forever after the planet would circle the sun a little slower.
Benacerraf remembered a Public Affairs Officer trying to explain this at a JSC briefing, a couple of months before the launch. A reporter asked if the resulting slowdown in the Earth’s orbit around the sun would do harm to the environment. On the podium, there were the usual shaking of heads and rolling of eyes. Then Bill Angel had said, mockingly, that NASA would just have to launch another spacecraft and make it fly by Earth on the opposite side…
General laughter.
It had left a sour taste in Benacerraf’s mouth. That reporter had been entitled to a better answer than that. There was too much bullshitting of the ignorant, when it came to science and engineering, she thought. You only had to look at the history of the civil nuclear power program to see that engineers didn’t deserve any kind of implicit trust, that they had a duty to answer as fully as possible every question and concern from the public, however dumb it might seem.
And anyhow, Angel’s answer had been wrong tactically; because after that the questioning had gotten very hostile, for instance on what contingency plans NASA had to shoot Discovery down if something went wrong — if the ship came barrelling in towards a collision with Earth, with the payload bay full of uranium…
And maybe all that arrogance had contributed, in the end, to the decision to dump Benacerraf and her crew: to cut off the retrieval program, even to close down the resupply missions.
Benacerraf and the others had half-expected such a sentence from the beginning, she suspected, even as they’d formulated the unlikely mission profile, over Chinese food in her house at Clear Lake. And, oddly, it hadn’t seemed so hard to take when the news first came in, as they sailed around the sun at the boiling heart of the Solar System.
But now, so close to Earth, it was much more difficult. To sail over that blue-glowing landscape, so close, to be within a couple of thousand miles of Jackie and the kids — and not be able to reach them — was pretty much unbearable.
For this closeness was an illusion. She was separated from Earth now by intangible barriers of energy and velocity, as impenetrable as the huge distances of the Solar System. There was no way Discovery could shed all its hard-won kinetic energy, and allow them to sail safely home.
Benacerraf was not going home, ever again. Her only destination now was Titan, a cold dark hole, out on the chilly rim of the System.
Suddenly, the sunrise was approaching, far ahead, at the rim of the roof which the Pacific hemisphere had become.
A blue streak, deep and beautiful, spread around Earth’s huge curve. Then a golden brown began to seep into the light. Abruptly the gold flooded out the blue, becoming as bright as rocket light, and spreading around the horizon; a fingernail arc of the sun appeared at the horizon, and the shadows of clouds fled across the ocean towards Benacerraf.
Blight white light flooded the cabin, as the sun hauled itself over the limb of Earth.
It was, Benacerraf realized, almost certainly the last Earth sunrise she would ever witness.
…There was a sharp tap, directly in front of her, making her jump.
Holy shit, she thought. It had sounded for all the world like a fingernail on the window.
She released her restraints and pushed herself out of her chair, head first towards the window before her.
She could see a tiny crater there, maybe a sixteenth of an inch in diameter. It picked up the flat sunlight coming over the ocean, and gleamed like a raindrop on the outside of the glass.
She knew she was in no danger. The exterior window was a half-inch thick, and two further panes lay behind that; there was a total of two inches of glass between her and the vacuum.
Maybe this little dink had been caused by something natural, a micrometeorite. Maybe. On the other hand, Discovery was flying right through the altitude where the maximum density of man-made debris had accumulated: bits of broken-up satellites, droplets of frozen fuel, nuts and bolts. She was willing to bet that if she dug down into that little pit, she’d find a flake of some cheap Chinese paint, or a droplet of frozen urine from the Mir.