Free New Earth by Ben Bova Page A

“countdown clock is started. You launch in three minutes.And counting.”
    Jordan sank back into the chair’s padding and squirmed a little to make the safety harness clasping his shoulders more comfortable. He glanced at Brandon, who was staring straight ahead. Pretending to be a spaceship captain, Jordan thought, smiling inwardly. Bran will never grow up, not completely. That’s my department. I’m the sober brother, all grown up and serious; he’s stillsomething of a boy.
    “Pumping out hangar deck,” Hazzard’s voice stated flatly.
    Inside the cockpit they barely heard the clatter of the pumps sucking the air out of the hangar. Jordan felt himself tensing, though: excitement, fear, wonder, worry—all of them bubbling inside him.
    “Rotating,” said Hazzard.
    The rocketplane turned slowly toward the air lock hatch. Out of the corner of his eye, Jordansaw his brother lick his lips.
    “Opening air lock hatch,” Hazzard announced.
    The massive hatch slid open silently. Jordan saw the infinite darkness of space, speckled by bright unblinking stars. Where’s the planet? he wondered.
    “Launch in fifteen seconds.”
    As the synthesized voice of the automated countdown system ticked off the seconds, the rocketplane rolled to the edge of the open hatch.Despite himself, Jordan tensed in his chair. Then the rocket engine roared to life and Jordan felt a hard, firm push against his back. The rocketplane flung itself out of the hangar and into empty space.

 
    THE MOON
    Then mighty Achilles prayed to his mother, Thetis the Silver-Footed, “Mother, my lifetime is destined to be so brief that ever-living Zeus, sky-thunderer, owes me a worthier prize of glory.”

    H OMER,
The Iliad

 
    ANITA HALLECK
    Given the choice between long life and glory, Anita Halleck chose long life. She was more than halfway through the second century of her life as she stood beneath the glassteel dome of the observatory atop Mt. Yeager, staring wistfully at the Earth.
    The observatory was an empty shell now, a tourist attraction instead of a working astronomical facility, little more than a transparentdome and a set of plush couches ringing the circumference of the circular chamber, with virtual reality rigs for tourist visitors dotting its floor. Almost all of the astronomical studies undertaken on the Moon were done at the Farside observatory, which Halleck had been briefly involved with many years earlier.
    The lunar nation of Selene lay buried beneath the worn, slumped mountains that circledthe giant walled plain of Alphonsus. Above the barren, airless, pockmarked plain hung the glorious blue-and-white globe of Earth, more than half full at the moment, a glowing beacon of life and warmth set in the dark and sterile depths of space.
    Halleck sighed inwardly. Nearly a century earlier she had opted to have her body filled with therapeutic nanomachines, virus-sized mechanisms that destroyedinvading bacteria and viruses, cleansed her blood vessels of dangerous plaque, rebuilt damaged cells, acted as a superhumanly efficient immune system to protect and preserve her body.
    The result was long life. Despite her years, Halleck was as tall and youthful as she had been a century earlier, slim waisted and long legged with a long sweep of chestnut hair draped dramatically over one shoulderand falling halfway down to her belt.
    But the cost was to be exiled from Earth, never permitted to set foot on the planet of her birth, the world of humankind’s origin. Nanotechnology was totally banned on Earth. No one carrying nanomachines in her body was allowed even to visit.
    More than twenty billion people crammed in there, Halleck thought. How many crazies, how many fanatics, how manyidiots who could turn nanomachines into an unstoppable plague that would destroy everyone and everything? No wonder they banned nanotech.
    And now the second phase of the greenhouse warming was sweeping across the world, drowning cities, reshaping continents, killing