Chronospace Read Free Page B

again. “Just a passing thought.”
    Earth had completely disappeared; now all he could see was the black expanse of cislunar space. From behind him, he could hear the small handful of fellow passengers beginning to move restlessly in their seats. They had been travelling for a little more than eighteen hours now, following the shuttle’s departure from the Mare Imbrium spaceport. A private spacecraft owned and operated by the Chronospace Research Centre, the shuttle didn’t have the luxury accommodations afforded by the large commercial moonships. Everyone aboard was a CRC employee; some were returning from furlough, while others like Lea andhimself had their homes on the Moon. Yet because commercial craft weren’t permitted to dock at Chronos Station, you had to take the CRC shuttle or else try hitching a ride aboard a freighter.
    Thinking about their destination, Franc reached to the comp in the seatback in front of him. He ran his forefinger across the index, and the panel changed to display a forward view. Now he could see what the pilots saw from the cockpit: a cruciform-shaped station, each arm comprised of five cylindrical modules, with two spherical spacedocks located at opposite ends of its elongated central core. Within the rectangular bay of the closer dock, Franc could make out tiny spacecraft, while others hovered in parking orbit nearby.
    Out of curiosity, Franc touched his finger against the image of the spacedock farther away from the shuttle. As the shuttle completed an orbit around the station, for a brief instant he caught a glimpse of a small, saucer-shaped craft nestled within the hangar bays. Then, just as he expected, the scene was blotted out by a graphic inverted triangle.
     
    *** CLASSIFIED ** CLASSIFIED ***
REMOTE IMAGING NOT
PERMITTED
CRC 103-B
*DOWN*
     
    The screen wiped clean, to be replaced by the original index bar. “ Verdammt, ” Franc murmured in disgust. It was at times like this when the gentlemen in Security Division took their work a little too seriously. As if no one aboard a CRC shuttle had ever seen a timeship before . . .
    Lea chuckled. “You’re getting better with your explicatives.”
    “Cut it out.” He cast her a warning look. “I’ve been studying as hard as I can, and you know it.”
    Closing her eyes, she laid her head back against the seat.“I just hope you’ve learned your history better than your German. You’re going to need it.”
    Franc opened his mouth to object, then thought better of it. There was no sense in arguing with Lea when she was in one of her moods. So he tried to relax, but after a moment he touched the comp again, and passed the remaining minutes of the flight watching the shuttle complete its primary approach.
    As the spacedock filled the screen, he reflected that Chronos Station was just over a kilometer in length. It wasn’t very large, at least in comparison to some of the colonies in Lagrange orbit, yet it was amazing to think that, almost three hundred years ago, airships nearly this same size had been built—and actually flown!—on Earth.
    Franc smiled to himself. In just two days, they would see the Hindenburg. Then he’d offer Lea a pfennig for her thoughts.

Monday, January 14, 1998: 8:06 A . M .
     
    L ike so many physicists, David Zachary Murphy had fallen in love with science by reading science fiction.
    His love affair began when he was ten years old and saw Star Trek on TV. That sent him straight to his elementary-school library, where in turn he discovered, tucked in among more conventional fare like The Wind in the Willows and Johnny Tremain, a half dozen lesser-known books: Rocket Ship Galileo, Attack from Atlantis, Islands in the Sky, and the Lucky Starr series by someone named Paul French. He read everything in a few weeks, then reread them a couple more times, before finally bicycling to a nearby branch library, where he found more sophisticated fare: I, Robot; Double Star; Needle in a Timestack; Way Station;