Contact - Carl Sagan [123]
"We jus' flake off tiles by the handful when we re-enter, and then we jus' stick `em back on again before liftoff," one of the astronaut-pilots explained to her.
Beyond general good health, there were no special physical requirements for the flight. Commercial launches tended to go up full and come back empty. By contrast, the shuttle flights were crowded both on the way up and on the way down. Before Intrepid's latest landing the previous week, it had rendezvoused and docked with Methuselah to return two passengers to Earth. She recognized their names; one was a designer of propulsion systems, the other a cryobiologist. Ellie wondered what they had been doing on Methuselah.
"You'll see," the pilot continued, "it'll be like fallin' off a log. Hardly anybody hates it, and most folks jus' love it."
She did. Crowded in with the pilot, two mission specialists, a tight-lipped military officer, and an employee of the Internal Revenue Service, she experienced a flawless liftoff and the exhilaration of her first experience in zero gravity longer than the ride in the high-deceleration elevator at the World Trade Center in New York. One and a half orbits later, they rendezvoused with Methuselah. In two days the commercial transport Narnia would bring Ellie down.
The Chateau-Hadden insisted on calling it that-was slowly spinning, one revolution about every ninety minutes, so that the same side of it was always facing the Earth. Hadden's study featured a magnificent panorama on the Earthward bulkhead-not a television screen but a real transparent window. The photons she was seeing had been reflected off the snowy Andes just a fraction of a second ago. Except toward the periphery of the window, where the slant path through the thick polymer was longer, hardly any distortion was evident.
There were many people she knew, even people who considered themselves religious, for whom the feeling of awe was an embarrassment. But you would have to be made of wood, she thought, to stand before this window and not feel it. They should be sending up young poets and composers, artists, filmmakers, and deeply religious people not wholly in thrall to the sectarian bureaucracies. This experience could easily be conveyed, she thought, to the average person on Earth. What a pity it had not yet been attempted seriously. The feeling was…numinous.
"You get used to it," Hadden told her, "but you don't get tired of it. From time to time it's still inspiring."
Abstemiously he was nursing a diet cola. She had refused the offer of something stronger. The premium on ethanol in orbit must be high, she thought.
"Of course, you miss things-long walks, swimming in the ocean, old friends dropping in unannounced. But I was never much into those things anyway. And as you see, friends can come by for a visit."
"At huge expense," she replied.
"A woman comes up to visit Yamagishi, my neighbor in the next wing. Second Tuesday of every month, rain or shine. I'll introduce you to him later. He's quite a guy. Class A war criminal-but only indicted, you understand, never convicted."
"What's the attraction?" she asked. "You don't think the world is about to end. What are you doing up here?"
"I like the view. And there are certain legal niceties." She looked at him querulously.
"You know, someone in my position-new inventions, new industries-is always on the thin edge of breaking some law or other. Usually it's because the old laws haven't caught up with the new technology. You can spend a lot of your time in litigation. It cuts down your effectiveness. While all this"-he gestured expansively, taking in both the Chateau and the Earth-"doesn't belong to any nation. This Chateau belongs to me, my friend Yamagishi, and a few others. There could never be anything illegal about supplying me with food and material