time together, and the first act of something else, the something else that had brought them together, that had brought him to Europe in the first place, and something he had not given a thought to these past two days, nor cared to.
But finally, fortified by Cognac at the museum bar, they went inside.
There was a short history of space travel told with models and holograms. There was a whole Ariane booster rocket and a mock-up of a Hermes space shuttle you could crawl around inside. There were satellites and deep-space probes and space suits and an EVA maneuvering system you could play with yourself. The usual stuff.
But then they went into the Géode, the 360-degree surround theater, where an ESA promotional film shot in full-circle high-definition Dynamax video was being shown, and that wasn’t the usual stuff at all, that took Jerry’s breath away, and, in the end, almost made him want to cry.
The full-surround HD Dynamax video process warped him immediately into the reality the moment the film started as no color hologram could, for while the image might not be truly three-dimensional, you weren’t looking at it, you were inside of it, it filled your entire field of vision no matter how much you craned your neck around like a spectator at a tennis match, and the sound had been disced from a central point in each setup, giving the sound track quite perfect 3-D reproduction of reality.
He stood at a departure gate looking out on a busy airport which Nicole told him was Charles de Gaulle. And taxiing slowly past him, decked out in conventional red, white, and blue Air France livery like an ordinary commercial airliner, was the Daedalus, the European spaceplane that was about to enter prototype production.
It had the sleek proportions of the old Concorde or the American B-l bomber, but it was twice the size, with a payload of a hundred passengers in this configuration. Like the B-l, it had swing wings, extended now for takeoff and atmospheric flight. There was a huge intake under the nose aft of the cockpit for the main engine and twomuch smaller ones where the wings joined the fuselage for the auxiliary turbojets, and a weirdly recurved exhaust bell at the rear.
As a voice babbled in technical French which Nicole was at a loss to translate, the Daedalus taxied past the terminal, turned onto the runway, lit its turbofans, and somewhat ponderously took to the air.
The scene abruptly changed. Now Jerry was riding in some impossible magic helicopter way up above a fluffy white cloud bank as the Daedalus rose through it toward him, its wings swinging back halfway into the fuselage as the main Rolls-Royce engine took over with a shattering roar and a long gout of thin blue flame, burning liquid hydrogen and atmospheric oxygen compressed by the speed of passage into the main intake like a conventional ramjet.
Up, up, and away like Superplane, the Daedalus rose, far faster than any so-called speeding bullet, with the magic helicopter tracking with it from above, as the sky deepened to violet, to black, and the Earth below showed a curve, and the wings retracted completely into the fuselage, and it was burning its fuel with internal liquid oxygen, like a rocket.
Then the rocket cut out, and the spaceplane was matching orbits with a rather Russian-looking space station, ungainly globular Cosmograd modules cobbled together awkwardly and painted a dim dingy green. Four space-suited figures maneuvered the most ungodly version of a scaled-up sat sled into position below the Daedalus and fixed it there with rather ridiculous magnetic clamps—a silly ungainly mess with rocket nozzles out of a cheap old science-fiction movie that would have torn the Daedalus to pieces if actually fired up in that position.
But in the HD Dynamax video version, the klutzy thing worked, of course, and the spaceplane blasted off toward Geosynchronous Orbit on a tail of unrealistic orange flame.
The view changed again. Jerry was standing in another
But finally, fortified by Cognac at the museum bar, they went inside.
There was a short history of space travel told with models and holograms. There was a whole Ariane booster rocket and a mock-up of a Hermes space shuttle you could crawl around inside. There were satellites and deep-space probes and space suits and an EVA maneuvering system you could play with yourself. The usual stuff.
But then they went into the Géode, the 360-degree surround theater, where an ESA promotional film shot in full-circle high-definition Dynamax video was being shown, and that wasn’t the usual stuff at all, that took Jerry’s breath away, and, in the end, almost made him want to cry.
The full-surround HD Dynamax video process warped him immediately into the reality the moment the film started as no color hologram could, for while the image might not be truly three-dimensional, you weren’t looking at it, you were inside of it, it filled your entire field of vision no matter how much you craned your neck around like a spectator at a tennis match, and the sound had been disced from a central point in each setup, giving the sound track quite perfect 3-D reproduction of reality.
He stood at a departure gate looking out on a busy airport which Nicole told him was Charles de Gaulle. And taxiing slowly past him, decked out in conventional red, white, and blue Air France livery like an ordinary commercial airliner, was the Daedalus, the European spaceplane that was about to enter prototype production.
It had the sleek proportions of the old Concorde or the American B-l bomber, but it was twice the size, with a payload of a hundred passengers in this configuration. Like the B-l, it had swing wings, extended now for takeoff and atmospheric flight. There was a huge intake under the nose aft of the cockpit for the main engine and twomuch smaller ones where the wings joined the fuselage for the auxiliary turbojets, and a weirdly recurved exhaust bell at the rear.
As a voice babbled in technical French which Nicole was at a loss to translate, the Daedalus taxied past the terminal, turned onto the runway, lit its turbofans, and somewhat ponderously took to the air.
The scene abruptly changed. Now Jerry was riding in some impossible magic helicopter way up above a fluffy white cloud bank as the Daedalus rose through it toward him, its wings swinging back halfway into the fuselage as the main Rolls-Royce engine took over with a shattering roar and a long gout of thin blue flame, burning liquid hydrogen and atmospheric oxygen compressed by the speed of passage into the main intake like a conventional ramjet.
Up, up, and away like Superplane, the Daedalus rose, far faster than any so-called speeding bullet, with the magic helicopter tracking with it from above, as the sky deepened to violet, to black, and the Earth below showed a curve, and the wings retracted completely into the fuselage, and it was burning its fuel with internal liquid oxygen, like a rocket.
Then the rocket cut out, and the spaceplane was matching orbits with a rather Russian-looking space station, ungainly globular Cosmograd modules cobbled together awkwardly and painted a dim dingy green. Four space-suited figures maneuvered the most ungodly version of a scaled-up sat sled into position below the Daedalus and fixed it there with rather ridiculous magnetic clamps—a silly ungainly mess with rocket nozzles out of a cheap old science-fiction movie that would have torn the Daedalus to pieces if actually fired up in that position.
But in the HD Dynamax video version, the klutzy thing worked, of course, and the spaceplane blasted off toward Geosynchronous Orbit on a tail of unrealistic orange flame.
The view changed again. Jerry was standing in another
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