LOOKING AT THE STARS

CHAPTER 1 : Your Application's Failed

Knightsbridge

London

2015

When Mark Harris's wife heard the front door to the apartment slam shut, her heart sank. She could tell, by the force used to slam the Yale closed, that Mark's day had not been good.

'I'm in the kitchen,' she called. 'Shelling peas.'

Her husband audibly dropped his attache case on the sitting room floor, draped fabric on the settee – his overcoat – and grunted in reply. He came padding onto the kitchen floor in his stocking soles, making a face as the chill from the tiles sank into his feet. He thoughtfully gave her a hug from behind, kissing her neck and making her drop a few peas.

'How was your day?' he asked, backing off and trying to steal peas.

'Probably better than yours. Ellen let drop the hint that she's thinking of taking early retirement, so the school will need a new head.'

'Oh. Thinking of applying?'

'Maybe. Could you fill the kettle? And – how was your meeting?'

He sighed, deeply, and Marcie felt her stomach flip in sympathy.

'Not good. The European Space Agency isn't able to commit anything due to the need to get a political consensus. Which, unofficially, would take years to obtain. Years!'

He got out a bottle of Tokay and poured them both a glass. Marcie clinked her glass against his and looked earnestly at him.

'This job of your is eating you up.'

He nodded in agreement.

'It won't last much longer. If Martin and I can't get this project off the ground, he goes back to Cambridge and I go back to BAE Systems. The grant from Bonetti's trust is nearly gone.'

Marcie privately considered that this might very well be the best possible outcome, not saying it out loud because she wasn't stupid.

'You go and sit down, I'll put the potatoes on. The roast is already cooking.'

She joined him a minute later. The big plasma television was already on, Mark flicking it to a news channel to catch the early evening news. A bizarre-looking aircraft with twin fuselages was shown being flown with a voice-over describing the flight of the "White Knight", a project that was the personal brainchild of Sir Richard Branson, designed to create and service the potential market for space tourism –

Mark nearly choked on his glass of wine, sitting up abruptly and increasing the volume. He turned to look at Marcie with an expression of incredulity and amazement.

'That's it! That's it! Wait, I have to call Martin.' He fumbled his mobile open and dialled the first number that came up on speed-dial.

'Come on come on, pick up. Martin! This is Mark – are you home yet? No. Damn. Listen, when you get in, put on a news channel and wait for something called the White Knight to come up. Believe me, you'll know what I mean when you see it.'

He closed the phone and kissed Marcie with passion.

It took three days for them to arrange an interview with Sir Richard. The fact that both were members of the Bonetti Report's panel made the process a little easier. They didn't push the link too much, just in case it backfired – a lot of people didn't want to hear how close the world was to meltdown.

Their meeting made Mark nervous. Martin didn't show any great emotion. They were shown to a room more akin to an open-plan waiting room than the corporate office of a billionaire entrepreneur, with subdued lighting, big comfortable chairs, giant potted ferns, and desks scattered about.

Sir Richard, looking like a man about to go for a stroll down a country lane, gestured them both over to a cluster of chairs.

'Can I get you a drink? Anything hot or cold?'

Martin politely refused. Mark asked for orange juice. Minutes later a PA appeared with a tray holding a pot of tea and a glass of orange juice beaded with condensation.

'I must say, your call intrigued me. You put all your cards on the table, and no mistake. "We would like you to invest in a project that will cost billions, that you won't live to see completed, that will take decades to complete and which nobody else will help you with. It will, however, help to offset the consequences foreseen by the Bonetti Report." I think that's how it went.'

Martin grinned bleakly.

'We've spent so long talking to so many people that we cut the waffle.'

Sir Richard looked keenly at each man in turn.

'I don't think what you have to say would be "waffle", Mr McCarthy. Astrobiology research at Cambridge. And you, Mr Harris – Deputy Head of Systems Research at British Aerospace.' It was his turn to grin. 'Yes, I have checked up on you. Both of you were researchers for the Bonetti Report.'

Mark relaxed slightly, daintily and appreciatively sipping his fruit juice. If the entrepreneur was familiar with the Bonetti Report then things would run much faster. The Report had been a seven-day wonder earlier that year, before people got apocalypse-fatigue and it receded into the background, chased there by the perpetual bickering between Taiwan and China.

'The Report has been dismissed by some as scaremongering of the highest order, Sir Richard,' began Martin. 'How much have you read?'

'Not all of it - '

'Yes, it is quite weighty. Most people just read the Abstract and the Summary instead of the other twelve hundred pages.'

'Guilty!' laughed Sir Richard. He sobered up immediately. 'They still make scary reading. One half of the human race dead within a century.'

He caught the sudden darted glance between both scientists and realised they were keeping a secret.

'Ah. Yes. The fifty per cent total,' drawled Martin. 'That was actually a compromise that Professor Bonetti insisted on. The upper-bound figure was too depressing, so the Report only mentioned the lower-bound.'

Their interviewer didn't speak, only looked enquiringly.

'Ninety-two per cent extinction,' finished Martin, making Sir Richard look shocked. He didn't speak for several seconds.

Mark knew this reaction from their endless interviews with agencies and quangoes and panels and committees. At least three billion would die within the next century, maybe as many as five and a half billion, in unavoidable wars, famines, epidemics and pollution. That was the bottom line, what Bonetti had assembled his hundred experts to conclude, what he had spent every lire he had to calculate - and which nobody wanted to hear.

'Are we talking about the end of the human race?' asked Sir Richard, quietly. Mark shook his head.

'No, Sir Richard, not at all. Human beings are too numerous, too clever and too adaptable to get wiped out. What the Big Crash will do is reduce human civilisation to conditions as they were in, say, ten thousand BC.'

'And it's unavoidable?'

'It's unavoidable. Within a century.'

Sir Richard distractedly poured a cup of tea and stirred in milk. He took a sip, made a face and added sugar.

'There's really no way to avoid this Big Crash? None at all?'

Mark shook his head; Martin, not bothering if the interview came to a positive conclusion or not, offered more detail.

'You could only prevent it if you had a time machine. Go back a couple of hundred years and alter the development of technology, change society, divert politics, basically change everything. As things stand, we have what Emilio – sorry, Professor Bonetti – called the Principle of Convergence. All roads lead not to Rome, but to catastrophe.'

He didn't enlarge on the Principle of Convergence, which constituted a complete chapter in the Report, drawn up by ecologists, economists, logisticians and futurologists.

'Okay, so the human race faces an utter catastrophe. An unavoidable crisis. What does your "Human Salvation Project" offer to avert it?'

Mark had the grace to blush, while Martin merely sniggered.

'I'm sorry, I'm sorry. We had the publicists create a really impressive title, which we fondly imagined would catch people's attention.'

'Martin! I'm sorry, Sir Richard, we've seen so many people and gotten nowhere that we're – I think we're probably out of patience. The Human Salvation Project is only a title. What our side of the Project really want to create is a Bernal Sphere.'

Here he paused. This wasn't a conversational gap rendered in order to sip orange juice, or look over the giant office, or see how Sir Richard was dressed. He paused because he wanted to know-

'Aha. The original space station, from the nineteen-thirties.'

Martin's smug expression vanished, replaced by one of surprise and respect.

'You're familiar with the concept?'

'A little. Our planning people have come up with ideas involving habitats in outer space. Very long-term stuff, speculative and not very here-and-now.'

If both scientists hadn't been taken aback they might have exchanged another glance. Mark's briefcase held a centimetre-thick pad of blueprint flimsies that broke down the construction assembly of an orbital Bernal Sphere, from the largest component (laminated Lexan exterior walls) to the smallest (nuts, bolts, screws and trusses). To them, an orbital environment was merely next-year, or next-decade at the worst.

'You've put us on the back foot,' admitted Mark. 'Nobody else at your level has ever known what we're talking about.'

Partly, his response had been dulled by endless unsuccessful meetings across the world. To date he had met with thirty-two governments, NASA, the UN, the ESA, OPEC, NATO and other acronyms, a veritable word-salad of organisations that either couldn't or wouldn't help. His other colleagues, pushing less expensive or technical solutions, might be doing better, but not by much.

'Really! That's damn short-sighted of them. Ninety-two per cent of your country dying ought to concentrate the mind wonderfully, I would have thought.'

Both scientists gave the same rueful, woeful sneer.

'There were governments that were interested – such as Taiwan and Holland and Israel – but unable to help. There were those that could help but they weren't interested.'

'Once we got across the idea that this would take decades, every politician promptly lost interest. NASA said they might have a window in twenty or thirty years, after M3.'

'Why me?' asked Sir Richard.

'We never considered this as a private business venture. Until I saw the news article about the White Knight neither of us ever dreamt of approaching an entrepreneur.'

Mark didn't mention his knowledge of "Spaceshipone" because it simply wasn't relevant, being rather small and not up to their criteria in any way.

Sir Richard had promoted Virgin Galactic heavily, as the fledgling space-tourist industry remained small and fragile – the big recession had bitten heavily into budgets and thrown timing and launch dates off. His planned fleet of five spaceplanes able to take tourists to the edge of space was instead restricted to only two, with a third looking only possible at best and more likely never to happen.

'Your access to and control of lifting vehicles able to put components in orbit is crucial,' explained Mark. 'If you say "go" they go, and there's no worrying about costs or budgets or deadlines or elections.'

'I take it you have plans in that briefcase – well, leave them with me, let me look them over, talk to some of my experts and I'll get back to you.'

Two days later Mark got a call in the evening, from a number he didn't recognise.

'Hello?' he began, uncertainly.

'Mark? This is Richard Branson here. Count me in!'

Mark Harris and Martin McCarthy weren't alone in trying to recruit willing backers for an orbital repository or other forms of refuge-cum-repository. A lot of the staff who worked on the Bonetti Report took it upon themselves to lobby for the Human Salvation Project, but Harris and McCarthy were the first team to obtain concrete results and the first non-terrestrial alternative. After that initial decision, Sir Richard shrewdly made several recommended alterations in administration and the design of the giant Bernal Sphere, then left the project very much alone.

The long, looming shadow of the Bonetti Report had caused some of those in power – a prescient few – to consider other, cheaper and quicker alternatives to costly and complex orbital stations as havens. As yet, with no convincing cause, none of these options remained more than plans and outlines, all suggested by the other teams working for the HSP.