Dark was the Night

or a retire<

engineer on the

Voyager space program,

the past may be ;¦ more alive than the \ present, but no one I can save him from oblivion

E

| 1946

I rom high above the earth, Bruno Kranick watches himself, as a boy of 11, chop off the first two fingertips of his hand. Little Bruno, in Craw-luidsville, Indiana, a year after the war, building an orgone accumulator with the Isotalo twins. None of them had a clue what an orgone accumulator was, other than that it made you feel good in prob­ably illegal ways. That's what Bruno was after, anyway: a feeling that would change life's rules. The twins were ripping a piece of sheet tin with a hacksaw when Bruno, the project manager, decided they were taking too long. An ax was the right tool for this job, at least until he reached out to steady the wiggling tin.

Thanks to the cognitive enhancement drug he's volunteered to test, Bruno, at age 75, watches his childhood self once again trot to the back door of the Kranick bungalow, his mauled hand wadded tight in a T-shirt to stop the spurting. He holds his hands high over his head, like he learned in the Scouts, his Lincoln Log arms waving as if God had a question and Bruno had the answer, one that started out white but was quickly turning red. The boy was dead calm, so thick with shock that even this catastrophe seemed perfectly man­ageable. Born an engineer.

He had forgotten how nuts his folks went when he stood on the back porch behind the kitchen and showed them his chopped-off digits. They rushed him into the Pontiac Torpedo and, with his father at the wheel, backed down the long, blind drive. Meanwhile, Uncle Bob, his mother's undraftable brother, had run back to the accident site and found the delinquent pieces of finger lying in the dirt. He tore back across the driveway and banged on the hood with one hand, waving the tips in the air with his other. Take these! They can sew them back on! At the sound of some­thing smacking the car, Bruno's father jerked the wheel and wrapped the Pontiac around the ancient oak at the driveway's mouth.

His mother begged a car off the neighbors—Samuelson?—and between them, his parents got the boy to the county hospital, where the surgeons saved Bruno but not his distal phalanges. His mother took it hard; as soon as Bruno regained consciousness after surgery, she started mourning the piano lessons. On the third day, the Isotalo twins showed up at Bruno's bedside. They were sorry, they told him; they hadn't meant to run away after he chopped his fingertips off, but they'd heard their mother calling them for dinner.

For Bruno's convalescence, his father bought him a ham radio, with dials even a maimed kid could manipulate. Bruno

would never pitch in the majors, but he could talk to New Zealand. It was the trade-off of his dreams. He got a ticket and a call sign—Whiskey two niner Lima Zulu Alpha—and three years later logged his hundredth country. He talked with thousands of airwave explorers, egging one another on from their dank, equipment-crammed lairs across the face of the globe.

But something bothered young Kranick. All those signals flying through the atmosphere and not a single one from anywhere more inter­esting than Earth. He asked his father. Where was everybody?

His father, a bright man for an actuary, needed Bruno to spell the problem out.

The galaxy is big, right?

More stars than a boy could hope to count.

And the universe?

More galaxies than a boy would ever know.

So it should be an endless party out there. But it's quieter than a deaf person's chess club.

His father smiled. You'd need a stron­ger receiver.

But enormous radio telescope arrays were hearing no messages either. Young Bruno asked the Fermi question the same year Fermi did. And for an answer,

all either one of them got was the silen-tium universi, the Universal Silence.

As it turned out, Bruno's clipped fin­gers proved no great handicap. They didn't even keep him out of the service. The ham rig got him into the Signal Corps in postarmistice Korea, where he met Min Jee, and that Army stint paid for his Caltech education, once he returned stateside with his bewildered war bride. Hacking off his fingers led Bruno to his career. And it left him with two fewer arthritic joints, at day's end.

But the Silence of the Universe: That phantom pain would plague him all the way to the grave.

1962

The consolidol comes out each evening before dinner, in a nasal mist that tastes like the murky lakes of his childhood. To participate in this Phase I clinical trial, end-of-life Bruno has flown out to an otherwise pointless Midwestern city in late autumn 2010 and joined a group of 36 foggy geriatrics who gladly risk a stroke for a chance at this memory enhancer that has worked miracles in rats. It's his last shot to contribute to any project, and while he has no love for big pharma, a stroke seems merciful, given the other endgame he's been dealt. The field trials are looking for Goldilocks can­didates: not too demented yet but not too sharp anymore—just fuzzy enough. Though he misplaces his condo keys daily, Bruno has not yet misplaced his condo. He's still lucid enough to know that the drug can't hurt him any more than another year will.

In his monk's cell at the inpatient testing facility on the night of the third dose, he looks out on a thick copse at a squirrel casting paranoid looks over his shoulder while burying a black wal­nut. He feels a wave of excitement and envy, with no idea where either sensa­tion comes from. He can't decide which feeling is more absurd in a body as old as his. Then, on nothing but what the consolidol does to his neurotransmit-ters, he's sitting in the cafeteria at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, June of'62, eating a grilled cheese (the era's mira­cle health food), gossiping with one of the brilliant old founding farts who four years earlier put Explorer 1 into orbit and discovered the tremendous torus of plasma ringing Earth. Not even con­solidol can retrieve the old guy's name anymore. The man was a Da Vinci of early cosmic ray detectors, one of mil­lions of pioneering engineers whom the world would never remember. And on this spring day, over lunch, the man broke news to Bruno that changed the race's destiny.

Bruno, at 27, had come to a land of freakish endless summer thick with the scent of (continued on page 148)

Ill WAS THE

(continued from page 78) jacaranda. The halls he haunted teemed with hundreds of the brightest people alive. His team was perfecting a vidicon camera that might one day look back and snap the globe it left behind. The future shone stupidly bright. Nothing did more for progress than a good arms race, and the globe's two mortal foes between them had launched a couple dozen spacecraft in half a dozen years. JPL had smacked one into the Moon two months earlier, and they were sending one to Venus in August.

But that heady rush was sobered by one massive catch. The pitiless laws of physics bricked in humanity behind a wall that nobody from Pasadena to Mos­cow could see their way around or under. Mariner had already pushed the limit of how much combustion you could squeeze through a thruster. Bigger rockets were coming, but even the fastest would take half a lifetime to putz their way to any moderately ambitious target, by which time their payloads would be long expired. Mankind was trapped in the inner planets for as far into the future as any instrument could peer.

The cosmic-ray Da Vinci played with the strings of melted cheese oozing from his sandwich, toying with the momen­tous news. With a dazed smile, he said that a new kid at JPL, a mathematician grad student named Minovitch, no older than Bruno, seemed to have come up with something big. The revolving planets themselves could impart massive amounts of energy to a probe, simply by pulling it along in their wakes.

Bruno pictured a payload, as small as a mid-range U-Haul, coming in along the plane of Jupiter's orbit, sucked toward the Jovian surface even as that surface raced breakneck in its own solar loop. Then the craft skidded off tangent to the planet at just the right moment, flung outward by a slingshot 10 times the size of the earth.

Bruno was skeptical. He asked: How much would we gain?

Cosmic Ray da Vinci poked Bruno in the sternum with a greasy finger, forever staining Bruno's best tie.

For a planet the size of Jupiter and a vehicle the size of Mariner? Tens of thou­sands of kilometers an hour.

Two feelings washed over Bruno at once: bitter jealousy that he hadn't thought of something so obvious, and gratitude that someone else had. A brightness out of nowhere left him with a helpless, shit-eating grin too big for his face to contain, much like the ones that had ached for days after the births of his sons.

We're free, he said.

Da Vinci tipped his head into the breeze of the evidence.

On the ride home on Route 66 that evening, Bruno aired out the radio, one ridiculously buoyant tune after the other. A girl named Little Eva sang, So come on,

come on, do the Loco-motion with me—music so vital and innocent it sounded like enlightenment or brain damage. America waking up, taking off its clothes, ready to cut loose. The tune made its way outward from the planet in all directions at 300 mil­lion meters per second. Before long, the stars would hear it.

Whether because of the consolidol or a powerful placebo effect, old Bruno retrieves that distant evening with sur­prising resolution: the starter hacienda on South Allen waiting for him as if he still lived there. Min Jee at the door, still alive and frightened by all his needless smil­ing. Number One son tackling his calves even before Dad can get across the liv­ing room, babbling in that mix of human and prelapsarian tongues. Bruno recalls it all in agonizing detail, everything except for what he and this woman could have been thinking, playing house and build­ing spacecraft and having kids as if they weren't still children themselves.

He watches the two-year-old tug him to the bedroom where the newborn lay cack­ling in his crib. And while Min Jee sat in the front room, doing freelance calcula­tions for the lab on an electronic adding machine the size of a suitcase, Bruno and Number One son played with the new­comer, chattering to him in a dialect that met the infant's otherworldly hubbub half­way. Bruno bobbed a toy orrery mobile just above Number Two son, as if fishing, while the infant grabbed at the colored felt balls with squeals of delight and rage as the globes slipped in and out of his grasp. And Number One son, laughing like a banshee—He's gonna grab it! He's gonna do it! He can't! He will!

The felt planets spun and the tiny arms reached, and Oh my boys, still-young Bruno thinks while old Bruno listens in from deep space, my lucky, lucky boys: You will go to the Moon.

1965-1969

Old Bruno settles into the daily ritual of a clinical trial. Every morning, one of three different PAs pokes and prods him, taking his vitals and his less than vitals. They rap him with a rubber tomahawk and shine a penlight into his eyes. Every day he must reassure them that the drug isn't making him feverish. He has run hot—100.1—his whole life. He explains his pathological fear of the arm cuff and what it does to his blood pressure, but they write the spikes down anyway. Every little anomaly makes them nervous. And it should, with millions in R&D on the line. If the drug works, it'll be a gold mine, outgrossing all the erec­tion drugs put together. But if one of these 36 test rabbits kicks off while no one is looking, it will set the race for dementia preventatives back by a decade.

They test his balance, reflexes, muscle strength: things impossible to fake. A tech draws two vials of blood for a full blood count. And every other morning, a pleasant but guarded psychologist takes him through a gauntlet of timed

cognitive tests. What month will it be half a year from now? Repeat this sentence, back­ward: Everyone enjoys a walk in the park on a sunny day. Find four things that are differ­ent between these two scenes.

In the afternoons he walks, although there's nothing but suburban mixed commercial scrubland for miles in every direction. In the evenings, after dinner with the other subjects, when the only con­versation consists of who is feeling what mental effects, he sits under the trees, sneaks a cigarette and tries to remember the names of his colleagues from half a century ago.

The guy who realized that humanity had a once-in-176-year chance staring it in the face was named Flandro. Gary. Another damn summer intern; half the crucial contributions to the third great age of exploration came from 20-somethings. In '65, Flandro pointed out that in another dozen years, all the outer planets would line up. Humans had one fleeting shot to put together a Grand Tour that would pay a visit to every stop between here and the edge of the solar system.

By then, Apollo ruled. The only thing the politicians could talk about was get­ting to the Moon and fortifying it before the Reds could steal it out from under us. To Bruno, the Moon was nothing but a lifeless Azores, good only as a first stepping-stone to the real prizes. Half the wizards at JPL resented manned flight: too costly and risky, too patheti­cally tethered to near-Earth. A bumbling human could do nothing that a fault-tolerant robot couldn't do better. Bruno dined with genius systems guys who fig­ured that earthlings ought to spend a few lifetimes flinging around better and better probes in all directions, just to get a feel for the place. Unfortunately, the systems guys would never run the coun­try; that job belonged to the Innies, those who could not think much beyond the stratosphere. And the Innies knew that for most people on Earth, an adventure needed heroes at the helm. The only dra­mas worth heavy funding had to involve some chance of someone dying.

But Flandro's discovery—that one shot for a Grand Tour—did something, even for the Innies. Miss that tiny window, and wait another two centuries. Now there was a dare worth a few hundred million. It promised great returns in national prestige, even long-range security—a race that both the Innies and the Outies could love. JPL's group of mixed special­ists, 5,000 people strong, had a bit over a decade to pull off the most spectacular journey in history.

The vidicon team took a fair amount of shit along the way. The slow-scan cam­eras they assembled were not, perhaps, the sexiest instruments on the sensor list. The craft would carry low-field and high-field magnetometers, a charged-particle detec­tor, a plasma spectrometer, a cosmic ray subsystem, ultraviolet and infrared spec­trometers and, oh: a couple cameras with

a spinning filter wheel, to snap some pretty pictures for the crowds back home. The ribbing got old, but the cameras got increas­ingly brilliant. Bruno worked on controlling the things through the flight-data subsys­tem. That meant bridging two different teams, and he soon became the messenger that both cultures wanted to kill. The days filled with impossible problems and miser­able setbacks. But the months were glorious in their returns.

The years, for their part, went by like a two-minute drill. Another child. Two chaotic moves into new houses. A couple thousand trips back and forth to work. A quick jour­ney back to Korea after the death of Minnie's father, to a split country of hardscrabble peo­ple who spooked his suburban SoCal boys, raised on the Romper Room pledge of alle­giance. Bruno camps on the oak deck behind the inpatient facility, estimating: three kids, five years, 500 grams of hair and nail clip­pings, 400 kilos of diapers, 12,000 kilos of food, 30,000 kilos of fuel.... Crossing the universe in a small, closed boat....

The calculations take forever. He's fuzzy and unsure. Simple arithmetic trips him up, and his guesses waver. The drug may be doing something, but not enough. The cloud is swallowing him.

Bruno outdoors, underdressed, watches a freak early snowfall hit the hairs of his arm. The spectacular kaleidoscopes of crystal— each uniquely assembled from the fixed vee of water's covalent bonds—touch the flam­ing sun of him and vanish. One by one the white specks surrender to clear half globes, gelid on his papery skin. But there's strength in numbers. The scattered flakes in the air start to thicken. The pellets hit him and lin­ger a little longer, cheeky, taunting. Soon they veil him.

At dinner he sits next to an ex-nun and onetime schoolteacher who still seems pretty sharp. She's curious about him. You worked for NASA?

Well, he explains, it's complicated. JPL: its own federally funded, private-university-affiliated rogue state.

Were you involved with the Moon landing?

They only ever want to know about the Moon. Before he can think of something sar­donic, a former bond trader asks: So where were you all when the Eagle landed? The sto­ries pour out. Everyone wants to take their drug-tuned cortices out for a test spin.

Two things bother Bruno:

Too many people in this group report

good results. A 36-participant trial should

have several controls. But almost everybody

in the facility says they feel brighter than

they did last week. It maddens him to think

that life may offer no better antidote than a

mix of hope and placebo.

He himself has no strong memory of

the Moon landing. He must have been busy.

He does remember the waves of collective

euphoria, the next season's sudden collapse

of interest and the quick fall of the ax.

So why don't we have colonies on Mars by now? the bond salesman teases. You guys promised.

Everyone turns to Bruno. He wants to flip Bond Boy the bird. The two-phalange ver­sion has great startle value. We got you to

Neptune, he says. And you know what it cost you? Eight cents a year, per person.

Embarrassed silence falls over the whole table. Bruno scratches his head, ruffling his last few wisps of hair. This drug makes me cranky, he says. He points to the bond sales­man's plate. You gonna finish those fries?

1971

Sleep is an aborted mission tonight. Older fields of cosmic debris must be navigated first, thanks to the nootropic that he now can't believe he has volunteered to take. He'd drop out, but he can't bear to screw up the sample. Would the field-testing docs take his anxiety flare-ups seriously if he told them? Fat chance. They will bury in a heartbeat anything short of thrombosis. It would take far worse side effects to derail their next blockbuster.

He lies in bed, hearing his pulse pound in his ears. The Ghost of Christmas Past sits on the foot of Bruno's bed, hustling him back into earthly politics. Nineteen seventy-one, the holiday party at JPL: a gathering as cheer-filled as a child's funeral. The Grand Tour project managers, huddling around the punch bowl, slugged back paper cups of wassail in volume sufficient to numb the insult and sterilize their injuries. Bruno recalls most of their names now, but he doesn't need to. They're a single person, raging against President Lazy Shave—Tricky Dick Nixon himself, handing out pink slips from the White House.

That asshole. It's still 1960 for him. He's doing this to stick it to the Kennedys. First he kills the ERC in Cambridge....

And Fletcher doesn't do squat to fight back....

Now the bastard wants to starve us to death.

Still a little money for the shuttle, though.

The shuttle? Piece of flimsy crap. I've seen better spacecraft given away free inside cereal boxes.

Not even a spacecraft. Low orbit. What can you do in low orbit? And it'll run five times the price of a probe, every time they launch it.

Bruno made the rounds. The room was full of carnage. Pasadena's Tet. Lots of folks threatening to bail out into industry or higher ed. The Soviets were beaten; the Innies had seen Americans golfing on the Moon, and now they were bored. The party was over. The Grand Tour was dead. The budget included a meager sum for a trip no farther than Saturn. Most of the rest of the money was for military satellites, even while America's wire-guided troops in Nam were being beaten by bamboo punji stakes.

Bruno found the imaging team leader in a quiet corner, eating Weihnachtsstollen and listening to Jim Nabors Christmas songs.

You're the only one in this room who isn't traumatized, Bruno said.

It's a bloodbath, his boss conceded. His voice hedged.

But...?

The man turned to Bruno with a deniable grin visible from 40 years away.

But we still have our once-in-a-lifetime alignment. You think anyone around here is going to stop at Saturn? Washington doesn't have to know, until years from now

and a billion kilometers too far to call the puppy back.

The imaging leader looked out the lou-vered window, and Bruno followed his gaze. Somewhere in the empty blue, the Grand Tour was rising from its own ashes, in bits and pieces added discreetly onto the offi­cial mission. And to the sound of "O Holy Night" sung by America's most beloved country bumpkin, Bruno feels himself drop­ping into a lovely unconsciousness that looks a whole lot like deep space.

1977

Two craft, each the size of a motel room, a decade in the making, would sit atop gar­gantuan Roman candles and be jacked into outer space. The mere thought of entrust­ing his life's work to anything so iffy as

a rocket corroded Bruno's stomach. He'd always been a miserable gambler, and years of explor­ing all the ways a machine could go wrong had left him a total coward. And yet: His cameras in space, snapping pic­tures like the most shameless of tour­ists, a billion clicks from home. Never such godly excite­ment again.

Voyager 2 would launch first, on August 20. Voyager 1, set for tighter trajec­tories, would follow two weeks later. Both were hopeful mon­sters, ungainly hodgepodges of 65,000 parts all talk­ing to one another. Antenna dish, polyg­onal instrument bus and gawky booms, the whole kludge crammed with as much miniaturized computing power as would fit, all wrapped in thermal blankets and powered by ther­moelectric generators

nibbling on precious radioisotopes that, with luck, would carry the robotic vessels up next to the giant outer planets, then out of the system, beyond the solar winds and into interstellar space. But before anything else, each would have to break through the atmosphere on a pillar of fire.

The checkout process racked up 3,500 significant problems and failures. The last months built to a wild crisis of swap-outs and ad-libs, what the punch-drunk crews took to calling "critical late activities." Fumes from a distant paint job wiped out a bank of delicate sensors. The 10 final weeks were a hell of continuous emergency shifts. On a rare trip home one night, Bruno mistook Number Three son for Number Two. Min covered for him—told the boy it was just Daddy's joke.

The craft launched from Florida while thousands of JPL personnel crouched around screens in the giant control room in California, munching on peanuts. They'd honored the ritual since the Ranger mis­sions in the '60s, when peanut eating was empirically proven to determine the differ­ence between disaster and success.

The Centaur rocket did its job. But the trauma of launch sent V-2 into a ner­vous breakdown. Its onboard computers responded to the underestimated vibrations by curling up like a hedgehog. During the dozen recovery attempts, Bruno was sure that the whole enterprise was lost. When ground controllers at last coaxed the stunned creature back to life, he checked himself out for three days of medical leave.

Bruno had opposed the two items of extra-

neous baggage that each craft carried. The aluminum plates engraved with the names of 5,400 contributors to the project struck him as fulsome. Millions of people had built Voyager, across the centuries. Why launch just these few names into deep space? He pictured aliens reading the plaque millions of years on: Kranick—what is that, Hungarian?

The Golden Record made him laugh. Sagan had come up with the starry-eyed scheme: a record, with stylus attached, to be played by any space-faring civilization that found the 12-inch-wide message in a bot­tle in an empty ocean countless light-years wide. The record cover showed instructions for playing, complete with a handy diagram of the transition states of a hydrogen atom, to help with the timing. No human on Earth

aside from the designers could decode the instructions. Noncarbon life-forms that relied on remote taste and thermal hearing were going to struggle.

And once the aliens smacked their rep­tilian foreheads with their tentacles and figured it out—Ach, we need a spindle! And some speakers!—the real lesson in bewilder­ment would be just starting. Ninety minutes of music, heavy on the Teutonic: It was like the Nazi rocketeers were still running the program. An hour of Sagan's future wife's brain waves. Then the photos: Sand dunes. A supermarket. The Golden Gate Bridge. A water hole. A gymnast. One hundred and fifteen images in all, selected for total inco­herence. Of course, the designers didn't dare include a photo of any naked bodies. Wouldn't want extraterrestrials to see any

glossies of our front private parts.

No Vietnam? Min Jee asked. No Holo­caust, Bruno? No nuclear stockpiles?

No Sex Pistols? Number One son asked. Three tracks of Bach? You guys are liars.

Bruno told his family that the whole stunt was a waste of payload that could have been used for more interesting things.

I don't know, Dad, Number Three said. They'll be out there for a while. A lot could happen in a billion years.

The engineer cuffed his cub and challenged him to a death match of Pong.

1978

The psychologist tests his memory with a handheld app that reminds Bruno of his boys' ancient favor­ite game, Simon. His numbers rise slowly over the course of a week. At first he can

handle no more than five consecutive flash­ing colors, at best. By week's end, with some effort, he's back on par with what he could do before the start of his mental falloff. Get­ting old, as an actress whose name he forgets once said, is not for sissies.

His focus seems to strengthen too, although that may be from quitting the internet cold turkey.

A sexy young researcher in her late 50s trains the test subjects on something new every day. She records their anagram exer­cises with a stopwatch, a notebook and a camera the size of a joy buzzer. She drills them in vocabulary lists. She has them read a dense article about homeland security, then asks for details a day later. She teaches them a European board game with a million

little colored pieces of cardboard and wood. Bruno plays with the former nun, a retired insurance agent and a crippled musician who mutters sardonic things to himself as he makes his moves. None of them could have managed the game without the drug. The game takes three hours, and it traces the arc of civilization from first flowering to final collapse. Humanity loses in the end, but it's a footrace.

The drug is definitely juking him up. Everything reminds him of something else. He can sit for long periods of time, his mind circling a single idea, like a pilgrim winding around the flagstone labyrinth at Chartres. Just by sitting still for an hour, he can re-create, as if on silent Super 8 film, the Kranicks' single-file hike up on a ridge trail in the Sierras, summer of '78, a year after launch. He has taken the family up north on the vacation he's promised Min since before the birth of their surprise fourth child, eight years earlier.

The trail pitches and rises, through scrub oak, madrone, Douglas fir, ponderosa pine. The route gains a few hundred feet on a switchback, then loses them again as the hik­ers press on. The youngest boy fades but insists he's fine. Bruno keeps to the rear of the parade, nursing him along, sometimes carrying him on his shoulders. Min and the older boys are 50 yards down the trail, dip­ping down toward a ravine, when they turn smack into a mountain lion. Any one of them could reach out and scratch its ears.

The animal is so beautiful it's unreal. Before Bruno can credit it, the boys go into the drill—that bit of nature-boy lore he taught them to add color to their camp­ing experience. They're magnificent. They make themselves big, arms out wide, claws down to their wrists, teeth bared. They back slowly up the path toward Bruno, who has snagged the little one to keep him from running down to the puma for a better look. He wills Min Jee to make her­self big and fierce. Big has always been a problem for her; fierce isn't going to hap­pen in this lifetime. He's afraid to yell at her, for fear of spooking the cat. But the woman isn't even trying. She's just staring,

perfectly happy to get maimed or worse, for a close-up glimpse of something so perfect. She stands and looks, memorizing every muscle, and the animal stares back, bewil­dered by this crazy little human female. They stand locked in that glance for an eternity—at least two whole minutes—until little Sam, still in Bruno's grip, bleats, Mom? His tiny voice sliding upward, at last breaks the spell. The puma decides all six of them are rabid. It turns on its haunches and slips down into the ravine.

Bruno shoots down the path in a flash, grab­bing Min, shaking her. She just looks at him, much as she looked at the mountain lion. Did you see it, Bruno? Alien intelligence. Right here.

That night, back at camp, they make a fire. They cook a stew Bruno learned how to make in the Army. Min Jee plays her uke and they all sing. Fire and song—some atavistic legacy it will take another million years of evolution to shake. The afternoon's encounter is already just a scrapbook thing. The two oldest boys huddle up to a portable radio and listen to the Dodgers bungle the series, until their batteries die and put them out of their misery. Bruno sets up the tele­scope, and the five boys and their woman mascot have a star party. The blackness above them splits open like a pomegran­ate. Seeds everywhere.

Sam asks, Can we see the Voyagers?

No, Bruno says. But we can see where they're going.

The boys take turns, bickering over the IDs and accusing one another of hogging the scope. Next time Bruno looks, they will be gone, disappeared down some worm-hole into jobs at Northrop Grumman, HP, UPS and GE, with kids of their own, from another planet, raised on social networking and digital growth hormones Bruno can't begin to grasp. But for a moment they're here, around the fire, and loving the long view this night affords them.

Even Min has a look, although without her glasses she can barely find the eyepiece. It's very beautiful, she admits. But when she lifts her head from the scope, he hears her murmur. Why go anywhere, Bruno? Every­thing's right here.

1979

Past Mars, through the asteroid belt, whip­ping through the frozen black at unthinkable speeds for a year and a half. But the real dan­gers were all on Earth. The probes needed weekly tending. Data had to be downloaded from the eight-track, and new routines fed to the computers across the swelling emptiness. Too many uneventful months and the brain goes slack. Routines relaxed; maintenance slipped. A week went by when the minders simply forgot. Abandoned to silence, Voyager 2 dropped into standby, as programmed. Controllers scrambled to switch it back and couldn't. Small failures cascaded across the shaky loops of systems that connected humans, code and hardware. Two weeks of frantic fire drill managed to burn out the primary receiver. But the reawakened craft plunged on, one frail component away from being lost forever.

Endless boredom punctuated by frenzied bursts: Bruno needs no cognitive enhancer to retrieve from his brain the brutal cycle of those months. But lost until the sixth day of the consolidol trials is that late afternoon in a greasy spoon in West Hollywood with his youngest son, the day when the first Jupi­ter close-ups hit the news. He and Sam were having purple cows, playing chem lab with the booth's condiments, when a pair of out­rageous punks took the booth next to theirs. Sam couldn't get enough of the spiked hair, the first he'd ever seen on any earthling. Bruno, more intent on the skull pendants and Magic Marker swastikas scribbled across the pair's forearms, was trying to get the boy to stop gawking.

Then Jupiter came down to Earth. Mosaics from V-l's narrow-angle camera splashed across the hulking TV above the fountain bar. Everybody in the franchise stopped to look, even the cook and wait­resses. The giant planet zoomed in to fill the frame. Bright, sandy, hallucinogenic bands swirled across the gaseous surface, and in their midst spun a cyclone the size of three Earths, a storm that had raged for centuries and would still be raging centuries after everyone on Earth was dead. Some­thing new had entered human thought; nothing in history compared with it. The overthrow of Pol Pot, the fall of the Shah, the French tanker catastrophe in Ireland, snow in the Sahara, China's invasion of Vietnam, the kid who shot up that San Diego elemen­tary school because she didn't like Mondays: All the urgencies of this year would vanish, while humanity's next adventure was just getting started.

The punks in the next booth watched, hypnotized. Fucking/wcA.' the green one said. Would you look at that?

Sam sat smirking, sipping, watching, beaming, the kind of adulation no parent gets from a child after the age of 10. You did that, Dad. You.

Me and a million others, Bruno told the boy.

2010

The ex-nun has a spell in the night. It comes on like a heart attack, and the second-shift medical staff go into their emergency drill. Three dozen people in their pajamas, awak­ened by panic, cower in the hall, wondering

which of them will go next. The only thing that Bruno wants consolidol to help him remember now is what in creation ever prompted him to squirt the untested stuff up his nose in the first place.

After a nightmarish hour, the nurses gather them all into the large common room and announce that Lisa Keane has simply had a bad reaction to MSG, which slipped into the dinner's salad dressing by accident.

The reprieve only intensifies the drug's effects. The dinnertime debates—on every pretty trinket topic imaginable—grow faster, sharper, hungrier. Bruno's fellow test rab­bits start a series of evening lectures. Old crusts who two weeks ago could barely work the USA Today crossword puzzle rehearse and perform a very funny read-through of A Midsummer Night's Dream.

On night eight, he's awakened by terrible groans coming through the wall. The guy in the next room, having the massive seizure that so good a drug must necessarily extract as payment. Bruno rushes into the hall, call­ing the nearest night nurse. He throws open his neighbor's door, ready to do his 1980s-era first aid. In the dark, two startled voices shriek, then giggle. He mumbles an apology and withdraws in shame.

1980s

Jupiter flings the probes outward at twice their approach velocity. Even with that crazy boost, the probes are another two years get­ting to Saturn. When the pictures come back this time, they're insane. Odd-shaped moons with massive craters. Methane oceans with ridiculous surface densities. Shepherd moons that stabilize the rings. A thou­sand unexpected ringlets. Rings filled with spokes, kinks and braids that defy explana­tion. There's data enough for scientists to dine out on for decades.

The public watches, briefly entranced again. But the world itself has grown vastly more interesting in the years since Jupiter. Your basic arcade Donkey Kong has more raw power than both Voyagers put together. The Innies are on the ascendant, Bruno can feel it. But he has more immediate anxiet­ies. The Saturn flyby sends Voyager 2 into a fit. First, the pictures turn blurry. Then shot after shot beams down to the moni­tors at JPL, one after the other, photos of empty space.

He drops into a span of hellish frenzy. The last good chance to look beyond Saturn that humans might get for 176 years slips away as the drunken tourist keeps taking pictures of his fingertips and shoes. For three days Bruno doesn't see his family, or remember he has one. The dream of the outer planets disintegrates by the minute.

Those few days become Bruno's life's work, the peak of the arc leading up from his lost fingertips and downward again into oblivion. He and a handful of colleagues work at the rescue, methodical, panicked, until they can no longer see. Even sim­ple commands take an hour and a half, at the speed of light, to reach the crippled machine. At last they trace the problem to overdriven gears on the scan platform. They've been pointing the camera too quickly at too many objects for its lubricant to handle. Half of Saturn is lost. But with

forced rest and physical therapy, Uranus and Neptune can be saved.

Another planetary slingshot; another four and a half years, hurtling through the dark. Everything on Uranus is new. Magnetic poles more than halfway down to the equator. Ten new moons and mind-boggling weirdness on the old ones. Ariel, with bizarre cryo-volcanic terrains. Miranda, the ice moon, covered in chevrons and inexplicable race­track grooves, chunks mashed together like a jumbled plum pudding. Every world rewrites the rules.

But the public is done with space. The news keeps coming back, each fact more fantastic and desolate than the last. We're here alone. We're not going anywhere. Every place that humans might visit is infi­nitely bleaker than home. Four days after the nearest approach, on the day of the press conference to introduce Uranus to Earth, the Challenger explodes. And with it explodes all Bruno's hopes for humanity's real adventure in space.

He passes 50, then 51. The Wall comes down, and the web goes up. His youngest son gets accepted to Princeton. Somewhere along the three-year trip to the outermost planet, the Voyager team is gutted. There's

no more cash. They trim to a skeleton crew, then trim again. Bruno sees his own end coming, long before he sees the thousand-mile-an-hour winds of Neptune and its geyser-riddled, minus-390-degree Fahren­heit moon, Triton.

1990s

Twelve doses of consolidol, and he stands helpless in the bedroom of his last real home, watching his wife pack. He's supposed to stop her. He marvels at her efficiency, her method. She works from a rigorous mental checklist: things to take with you when you leave forever. She works as if he's become invisible, which he has.

He's supposed to say something, at least ask why. But he knows why. He even knows where, within a margin of error: a new start, in one of the world's cities that his sons have colonized. Start again, someplace unknown, near one of the four boys with their three wives and five happy, computer-savvy kids, none of whom yet see that the joyride is over, that we will cook the earth, poison the oceans and kill the atmosphere, right at the moment when we've started to figure out how the whole system works.

Min Jee packs two enormous cases, each heavier than she can hope to lift. She sees him

eyeing the bags, doing the load estimate.

Wrong again, Bruno? I've done it wrong again?

You're doing fine, he says.

I can't do anything right, can I? Can't even pack a bag.

Who told you that?

Her voice is quiet, factual—Mission Con­trol. You, Bruno. Every day for 40 years.

Insufficient fault tolerance: guilty as charged. He does not defend himself or ask for lenience. Words are worthless, promiscuous liars. He can think of no reply to her ancient accusations, the theme song of their life together, but the old fail-safe. The Great Silence.

That's all I get? Silent treatment? Every­one's a fool except you?

More silence. Silentium universi.

Then she is yelling at him, bursts of high-pitched Korean. His chopped-off fingers tremor against his bare skull, like a wasp bat­ting a screen. How strange and cold, to think that he knew more Korean on the night he went to meet her parents in Namwon than he does now. How he loved learning Hangul, those perfect, artificial symbols of sound, a clean code all its own.

Faster than it came, her anger vanishes to wherever it has always hid, these 40 years. She sits on the foot of the bed, wiping her nose on her sweatshirt. She jerks up again and grabs one of the bags with both hands. It lifts an inch and thumps back to the floor.

Min, he says. Stop. You'll hurt yourself. Let me.

Worse than silence. Her mouth twists and opens in a hideous gash, but no sounds come out. Her face reddens and her eyes squeeze shut. She sits on the suitcase, strug­gling to breathe. He takes a step toward her, but her arm thrusts out. Their four decades have been just this: long periods of empty peace, crossing the vacuum together in a frail boat, followed by the catastrophes of close approach.

Minnie, he says. Please.

Her words skitter out of her, the cackle of someone receiving a life sentence. Oh God, Bruno. You should have married a robot.

He does not say what she has known for­ever, what she knows now, what she will remember again next year, over breakfast, wondering why she didn't leave again, this time. You should have married someone who understood humans.

2000s

When planetary exploration fizzled out at last, Bruno went to work for Kodak. He worked for a decade and a half, making digital SLRs. It was a living. The kind of video cameras he had built were as crude as ancient artifacts, replaced by shiny new charge-coupled devices he didn't really understand. He was always one step behind, the person the team had to carry. They gave him an $8,000 digital camera the day he retired. He'd be lucky to get a couple of hundred for it now on eBay. In the first 24 hours after he retired, people uploaded more raw data to personal scrapbook sites than existed in the world on the day he joined J PL. Glass half empty or half full? To an engineer, the damn glass was twice as big as it had to be.

One day in the third week of the trials, he walks to the pet superstore in a nearby big-box ghetto. There, in the aquarium department, he buys some pH strips and a cheap handheld refractometer. That evening, when the nurses hand out the consolidol before dinner, he palms his dose. He tests it that night. From everything he can guess about the likely chemistry of nootropics, he concludes that what he's been squirting up his nose these past 10 days is probably saline.

He goes to bed relieved that the images will now stop. But he wakes up in a sweat, the same way Min did. And with a pound­ing headache like the one she complained of, apologetically, bewildered, a minute before dying of a burst aneurysm. He tries to slow his heart down but can't. He tries to remember how many years ago Min died, and the simple math eludes him. Then he pegs it to the one timeline he knows bet­ter than his own. She went three days after Voyager 2 crossed Termination Shock, into the heliosheath. September 2007. Make it three years.

In the morning, he's beyond wired. After breakfast and a nostril full of salt water, he paces around the large common room, look­ing for something he can't identify. Two dozen people sit around the room training their newly focused brains on one another, their net pages, desperate flame wars, hand­held role-playing games, the private bubbles of music enveloping them in bliss. Demen­tia will be conquered, all minds returned to the runaway pleasures of the day. The race needs no richer exploration.

Think this stuff will make us grateful?

The question comes not from his own brain but from Lisa Keane, the erstwhile schoolteacher nun, at his elbow.

He wants to say: Lasting gratitude is not an option. Instead, he says: How do you feel about walking?

They check out at the front desk. Lisa fills in the log sheet. For Destination? she prints, Unknown. Under Time Out? she writes Yes.

They walk for a long time. She does the talking—her teenage religious expe­rience, a stupid decision at 19, her fight with the abbess just when the whole world was defrocking, the decades spent teaching 10-year-olds how to make baking-soda vol­canoes and pinhole cameras.

I'm sorry, she apologizes. It's the stuff. It gives me that awful, first-day-of-school feeling.

Bruno nods.

She asks: You think it's really a cure?

Bruno shrugs, but even his two shoulders disagree. No final cure for what people have.

They end up in an ice-cream parlor, undoing anything good the walk might have done them. The problem with consolidol, she says, is that I can now remember what ice cream tasted like when I was seven.

A tune plays over the sound system, dark Delta blues. He has heard the song before, and it maddens him that he can't say where. This is how things will go, from here on: the lights blinking out all over, until they all go dark.

What's that song? he asks.

Her eyebrows fall; she hasn't noticed it.

She listens long enough to know that it's alien. She pulls a phone out of her shoul­der bag, taps an app and holds the device up in the air, toward the music's source. The sound enters the phone, turns into bits, floods a processor thousands of times more powerful than anything onboard either Voyager. The patterns fly up to a geosyn­chronous satellite, get beamed back down to massive server farms across the continent, where they're matched against a database of every song ever recorded. Who needs to remember anything? She brings the device back down and shows him the screen. Blind Willie Johnson. He closes his eyes: It's a track on the Golden Record, making its way into interplanetary space.

He holds out his hand, and she puts the phone in it. He whisks his amputated fin­gertips back and forth, pinching, twisting, tapping virtual keys, calling up pages from across the planet. He hands the device back.

A picture, mostly black, with pale aber­rant bands angling top to bottom. The Voyagers' parting shot.

What's this? she asks.

He indicates a single bright pixel

floating in nothing. Earth, he says. From 4 billion miles away.

2029

The Voyagers keep sending back essential data, measuring the change from solar to interstellar winds. Then the fuel runs out, and the last remaining project member shuts down all systems. The lab becomes a sarcoph­agus that will not rust or decompose or wear away but will coast forever in the void.

294231

Voyager 2 sails four light-years from Sirius, the brightest star in the sky. Earth has long gone dim.

577256880

Craft found. Instructions decoded. Though pitted with micrometeorites, the disc plays. A Balinese dancer. Monument Valley. 'Jaat Kahan Ho." Old man with dog and flow­ers. C Major Prelude. An hour of human brain waves. "Dark Was the Night, Cold Was the Ground."

The Silence of the

Universe: That

phantom pain would

plague him all the

way to the grave.

Ariel, with bizarre

cryovolcanic terrains.

Miranda, the ice moon,

covered in chevrons and

grooves. Every world

rewrites the rules.