Chronospace by Allen Steele Page A

the screens on either side of him. “We can always scrub the launch, if you’re not . . .”
    “Sorry. Didn’t meant to insult you.” He pushed himself toward the hatch. “Tell us when you’re ready.”
    “I always do. Just make sure your people are strapped in.”
    Franc left the flight deck, floated across the passageway to the passenger compartment. As he expected, Lea and Tom were already in their couches, the seats turned so that they could see the broad flatscreen on the far wall. Lea looked up as Franc pulled himself along the ceiling rungs to the middle couch. “Everything set?” she asked.
    “Uh-huh. All we have to do is wait.” He pushed himself into the vacant couch, then reached for the lap and shoulder straps. Out of the corner of his eye, he noticed that Hoffman was anxiously watching the status panel next to the screen, his hands gripping the armrests of his couch so tightly that his knuckles were white. “Hey, Tom,” he said softly, “don’t damage the upholstery.”
    “Sorry.” Hoffman managed a nervous smile. “First time.”
    “Relax.” Franc gave him an easy grin as he cinched his straps tight. “It’ll be over so quick, you’ll barely know it happened.”
    If the transition into chronospace went well, of course. There was no sense in reminding Hoffman of what would happen if something went wrong. The smallest, most seemingly insignificant miscalculation by Oberon’ s AI and the wormhole would collapse in upon itself, forming a quantum singularity which would instantly destroy the timeship. If that happened, they’d find out what it was like to be stretched into spaghetti just before they were obliterated. Such catastrophic accidents had never occurred, or at least not to a timeship carrying a human crew, yet everyone in the CRC was aware of the fate suffered by primates aboard test vehicles during the late 2200s.
    Now he was spooking himself. Deliberately casting the thought from his mind, Franc turned his attention to the wallscreen. It displayed a rear-view projection behind the Oberon; propelled by its negmass drive, the timeship was quickly moving away from Chronos, and now the space station was a small toy receding in the distance. Farther away, a small band of bright stars moved above the limb of the Earth: orbital colonies, solar-power satellites, other spacecraft. Even now, Chronos traffic controllers would be closely monitoring Oberon ’s flight path, making sure that the sixty-kilometer sphere of space surrounding the timeship was clear of any other vehicles.
    “T-minus one minute.” Metz’s voice in his headset was terse. “Wormhole generators coming online.”
    He felt Lea’s hand stray to his lap. He glanced at her, caught the look in her eyes. She wasn’t saying anything in front of Tom, but she was nearly as anxious as he was. Franc briefly clasped her hand, gave her a comforting smile. She nodded briefly, then returned her gaze to the status panel. Displayed on a smaller screen was a wire model of Earth’s gravity well. Oberon was coasting along a steep incline deep within the well; it was here, using the planet’s natural perturbation of spacetime, that the timeship’s wormhole generators would soon open a tiny orifice in the quantum foam.
    “Thirty seconds and counting,” Metz said.
    Franc closed his eyes, forced himself to relax. Imagine a pinhole in a sheet of tightly stretched rubber, he told himself. You push your finger against the pinhole, and it grows a little larger, dilating outward. You exert a little more pressure, and now the hole expands, large enough for you to stick your finger through. Yet you don’t stop there; you keep pushing, and now you can insert your hand . . . now your arm . . . now your entire body . . .
    “Ten seconds,” Metz said.
    He opened his eyes, saw the planet rushing toward him. The timeship was hurtling toward Earth’s atmosphere. If it remained on this course for four or five more minutes, the