Moonseed

by Stephen Baxter

  The laser was an American Star Wars toy. Developed at Phillips Labs for the USAF, it was designed to be carried by a 747 aircraft, and used to shoot down short-range missiles. The technology was simple, light and robust, and no doubt inordinately expensive.

  Still, the technology was remarkable. The laser was fueled by hydrogen peroxide which was mixed with chlorine to produce oxygen atoms. At hypersonic speeds, the oxygen was forced with iodine into the lasing cavity, which was a container no bigger than a breadbox, with mirrors at either end. When the oxygen reacted with the iodine it emitted light which was bounced between the mirrors, before being released…

  The power generated by this miniature contraption was more than a megawatt.

  It had seemed absurd when Henry Meacher had requested this system. What was he expecting, dogfights with the Moonseed in orbit around the Moon? But now, it seemed, its true destiny was becoming clear.

  It was a simple matter to fix the laser in place on the outer hull, with silver wire and tape, so that its blunt nozzle pointed ahead of the Soyuz. Arkady used his sextant to check its orientation; it must point directly along the axis of the craft.

  When he closed the hatch and pressurized, he found the compartment filled with the sharp scent of space, the tang of scorched metal.

  Next, he considered the nuclear weapon, the B61–11 bunkerbuster, stowed here in the orbital compartment.

  The laser could be controlled from a laptop computer, which he would have close to him during the landing. He ensured that the nuclear weapon could be triggered from the same device.

  It was, thought Arkady, at heart a simple problem.

  Henry insisted that his nuclear device, the bunker-buster, must be delivered to a precise point, at the very center of the South Pole-Aitken Basin. But the nuclear device was in lunar orbit, on board Soyuz, and simply dropping it, at orbital speeds, would not suffice.

  But to leave orbit and land took energy to remove the velocity with which a spacecraft circled the Moon. The two landers used in the mission had expended that energy in the form of rocket fuel.

  Now there were no more landers available. And, just like the Apollo Command Module, Arkady’s Soyuz was not designed to land on the Moon.

  Nevertheless, it had been decided, it would have to, in order to complete this new mission.

  In the 1980s NASA had actually studied this mode of landing, if briefly. It opened up a new area of knowledge, tentatively called “harenodynamics,” which was a fancy Latin-derived term for “sliding.” Arkady had once attended a conference on lunar bases, industrialization and settlement, which had touched on the subject; when he raised it now with NASA’s Mission Control at Houston, it had not taken long for the back room people there to dig the material out of their archives.

  And even less time to express their disbelief.

  The trouble was, a Moon landing required a disproportionate amount of fuel. Because it had no air, either for frictional braking, or for supporting gliding or parachuting, the Moon gave its visitors no help on the way down.

  But harenodynamics was a way of forcing the Moon to help after all. If it could be made to work, it could provide a way of landing that would need just ten percent of the fuel of a conventional landing.

  The trouble was, nobody had ever tested the idea, even on Earth, let alone the Moon. And Soyuz wasn’t built for it anyhow; there was a consensus that you’d need significant advances in a number of material technologies to make the technique reliable, if it was possible at all.

  And besides, all pilots who looked at the papers hated the whole idea. If it was ever applied at all, surely it would be only for unmanned cargo drones.

  But—as Arkady had immediately realized when he heard Henry’s request—in the current circumstance, there was really no choice at all.

  He would go through with this because he had faith in Henry, and because he trusted Geena; her relationship with Henry had finished unhappily, but she would not select a fool.

  And besides, as far as he could see, it was only Henry who had fully understood the implications of the Moonseed infestation from the beginning, and so Arkady must do what was necessary to implement his plans.

  But on Earth, arguments raged on.

  There were hardly any scientists who were prepared to validate Henry’s grand proposal. The Americans’ greatest concern seemed to be allowing a Russian access to their prized weaponry.

  The Russian authorities were rather more focused on the humanity of it. TsUP at Korolyov at first flatly refused Arkady permission to proceed with this scheme. Breaking with custom, his personal physician was brought on the loop to try to persuade him to return to Earth. If he came home, perhaps some alternative plan could be found—for instance, perhaps an unmanned missile could deliver a nuclear weapon as Henry desired.

  But Arkady knew that could only cause delay. And it was self-evident that launches of any kind might soon become impossible from the surface of Earth; already many facilities at Canaveral had been destroyed in terrorist actions, and were in any event under threat from tsunamis. This might be the only chance.

  In an attempt to persuade Arkady to desist, they even flew in his sister to TsUP, and had her talk to him on the ground-to-air loop.

  It was never easy, Arkady had found, to talk to family and friends from space. Life in space—even on a routine Earth-orbit mission—was rather like a commercial airline pilot’s: hours of tedium, punctuated by moments of extreme terror. If you tried to describe the tedium, it was simply dull; if you talked about the terror, you sounded melodramatic—worse, you might finish up frightening the person who cared about you enough to call you.

  It made for awkward conversation.

  But his sister knew him, and was wise. Nor would she play the part demanded of her by TsUP.

  She spoke to him of simple family matters. Vitalik asked me to say hello, she said. Vitalik was Lusia’s son, Arkady’s nephew. He is at summer camp. He is getting happier. He swims in the sea, he rehearses plays, he is doing arts and crafts. It was different in our day.

  “Yes.” At the Soviet pioneer camps when Arkady was a boy, the children had been subject to meetings and political training, so much so they were sometimes deprived of sleep. Not everything about the breakup of the Soviet Union, they agreed, was necessarily so bad. And so on. Lusia spoke further of Vitalik’s small projects and achievements.

  She said nothing of his intentions, the fate of the world. She was simply saying good-bye, on behalf of the world, the family he had left behind.

  She knew, as he did, that his proposed course of action would mean the final sacrifice. Even if, by some miracle, he survived the landing itself, he could not hope to live through what followed.

  But then Henry and Geena were making as big a sacrifice.

  There was really no choice.

  It was a duty; it must be done.

  After a time, they fell silent, and he listened to the soft hiss of the static on the air-to-ground loop.

  And eventually, after much debate and protest, official permission was granted to proceed with the mission.

  First, Arkady had to change the plane of the orbit of his Soyuz.

  At present, the orbit was a ground-hugging circle, angled at some twenty-five degrees to the Moon’s equator, a shallow tilt. Now, Arkady needed a ground track that would take him over the Moon’s South Pole. So his orbit must be tipped up at a more jaunty angle, eighty degrees or more, so that he looped over both poles.

  Steering a spacecraft to a new orbit was not a question of turning a wheel, like a car. The Soyuz’s main propulsion system would have to burn at an angle to its present velocity vector, gradually pushing it sideways, like a tug hauling at a supertanker.

  The velocity changes required were well within the capabilities of Soyuz with its Block-D booster—which was, after all, capable of returning him all the way from lunar orbit and to the Earth—and it was a neat exercise in three-dimensional orbital mechanics, which Arkady conducted in
conjunction with the ground, to calculate the rocket burns required.

  But the maneuver would absorb most of the fuel reserve put aside for the return of Soyuz to the Earth, whether Arkady proceeded with the landing or not.

  And so it was that when Arkady felt the gentle push of the propulsion system at his back, he knew he was, already, committed.

  Arkady allowed himself a complete orbit, in his new polar orientation, before he began his descent.

  As he passed over the Earth-facing hemisphere of the Moon, he spoke to Geena.

  …Are you lonely up there? Do you miss me?

  “Yes,” said Arkady. Yes. But I cannot tell you how much. Not when the whole world, including your ex-husband, is listening in. “I even miss Baikonur.”

  Baikonur? The steppe?

  “The steppe has its beauty. At this time of year the grass and flowers have burned off, and the steppe has turned gray, save for the green of the camel thorn and the pale pink of the saxifrage flowers. Sometimes after the rain, puddles form, like little lakes, in the middle of the salty desert. Swans come to breed there!…”

  It sounds beautiful.

  “It can be.”

  Now, unexpectedly, Geena sang a song for him. Her voice was hesitant, not very tuneful, her Russian accent poor. But he recognized it immediately. It was a favorite from his childhood, On the Porch Together. Her voice was nervous and thin, reduced to a scratch by the radio loop, and it all but reduced him to tears. She had learned this song from his family, and had now brought it to the Moon for him. And she was filling his heart. Most Americans could never understand the importance of such simple human moments.

  And when she was done, Geena sang one of Yuri Gagarin’s favorites—so it was said, anyhow—called I Love You, Life. All the cosmonauts knew this one, and he joined in, but his voice was weak and he feared he would lose control.

  At last, without warning, he sailed around the rocky limb of the Moon, and the radio signal turned to mush, cutting short her song.

  He turned off the receiver, and drifted away into the empty, ticking cabin.

  In solitude once more, Arkady watched the shadows lengthen, and, for the last time, he sailed into the shadow of the Moon.

  It was necessary for his craft now to perform the final burn. As so often happened with the key events of this mission, it seemed, it must be done here, in the radio shadow of the Moon, when he was alone and out of touch with the Earth.

  But if it must be, it must be.

  He ensured that all the loose equipment in the craft was stowed away. Then he swam through to the descent module and sealed shut the hatch behind him.

  He climbed into his pressure suit. He fixed his gloves and helmet in place. He made to close his visor.

  He paused.

  He clasped his hands on his lap, closed his eyes, and intoned, “Help us, God.” It was just as if his family was with him, here in the sphere of the Moon. Then he straightened up to begin his work.

  He closed his helmet, and settled into the contoured couch at the center of the descent module. He pulled his restraints around his body, adjusted them, and locked them in place.

  Now, he need only wait for the computer to count down to the final burn.

  Arkady sailed over the Moon’s North Pole. The flat sunlight picked up particles swimming along with the Soyuz—flakes of paint or insulation—and if he banged his fist on the wall a whole shoal of them would be born. They seemed to sparkle as they moved away from Soyuz, but some of them floated nearby, as if tracking a current through water.

  Three, two, one.

  There was no noise. Not even a vibration. Just a gentle, steady, push in the back.

  Good engineering, he thought.

  Soon it was over.

  He had lost velocity, and the orbit of the Soyuz had become an ellipse. As he sailed around the Moon, he would come gradually lower, until—as he approached the South Pole, all of halfway around the Moon—he would reach his new orbit’s lowest point, which would graze the surface itself.

  So he was committed. His only regret was that he would die alone, without so much as touching another human being again.

  But then he would not be alone, on the Moon. Geena was there.

  In the dark, the attitude system fired. He could hear the hollow rumble of the vernier rockets, like somebody dragging a chain across the hull of the ship. The Soyuz was automatically turning itself around, for it must come down nose-first. Through his portholes he could see flashes, a pinkish spray of particles from the reaction control nozzles, like sparks from a fire.

  And then he flew into sunlight, without warning, as he had every two hours since entering this lunar orbit. As the light flooded over him, and the sun’s heat sank into the fabric of the ship, making the hull tick and expand, he felt a surge of renewal, of rebirth. He basked in the light, like a cat on a zavalinka, the earthen wall of a peasant’s house.

  Coupled by the emergency hoses like Siamese twins, moving awkwardly, clumsily, constantly fearful of breaking their contact, ever aware of the way their time on the Moon’s surface was diminishing…

  Thus, Henry and Geena labored to collapse their shelter, their only home on the Moon, and to load up the old Apollo Rover with their survival gear.

  When they were done the Rover was piled high with equipment. The collapsed shelter, a big pie dish, was tied to the back by nylon rope.

  “Like something out of The Beverly Hillbillies,” said Henry.

  “I always hated that show.”

  They clambered onto the Rover, and Geena pushed at the joystick.

  The Rover lumbered forward.

  It was a rocking and rolling ride, all the way to the rille complex. Every time it hit a mound or a depression or a crater rim—which was every few seconds—the Rover teetered precariously, obviously top-heavy.

  Geena followed yesterday’s tracks, but today they rolled right past the point where they’d parked.

  They approached the rim of a side rille, much smaller than Schröter’s Valley.

  “That’s it,” Henry said. “Pull over.” Henry got out of the Rover even before they stopped, but his hoses yanked him back, and he tumbled back into his seat.

  She rapped his helmet. “Do not do that again, asshole.”

  “Sorry.”

  They went through the complex and embarrassing ballet of getting themselves, as a joined pair, off the Rover.

  Together, they walked to the rille. Geena held Henry’s hand, to ensure they didn’t separate too far. She couldn’t feel his hand, inside the thickness of his glove. It was difficult to Moonwalk, joined like this; they had to synchronize their loping.

  The rille was small—only twenty or thirty yards wide, its walls deep-cut. Henry had picked it out from old low-orbit Apollo photographs. In the low sunlight, with the regolith’s tan sparkle, its eroded walls looked like a small mountain valley, she thought, somewhere above the snow line.

  “There,” said Henry. He pointed along the rille. “You see that?”

  She looked where he pointed. A few hundred yards along, the rille terminated; but she could see a kind of bridge of rock beneath which the valley continued, as if it entered a tunnel.

  “What is it?”

  “A lava tube. Our salvation. I knew there had to be one here. Maybe we can live through this after all. Come on. We haven’t much time.”

  This was Henry’s latest plan. She thought it was crazy. But she had to admit, now she’d slept on it, the idea of sacrificing her life without trying was less appealing than ever.

  So, with Geena clinging on to Henry’s hand, watching they didn’t foul the tubing that joined them, they loped back to the Rover and began to unload it.

  He fell inexorably from the empty lunar sky, every minute dropping five thousand feet and covering sixty more miles, the shadows lengthening as he rounded the curve of the Moon.

  He must fly down the visible face of the Moon, all the way to the south, before landing. His altitude would drop steadi
ly, sixty miles, forty, twenty, ten. He imagined his trajectory unwinding, a smooth curve shaped by gravity, kissing the surface of the Moon at just the point he intended, fifty miles short of the place he intended to deliver his nuclear weapon.

  He was still flying at orbital speed—three thousand miles per hour, about Mach Five—and he would keep up those speeds, accelerate in fact, all the way to the surface of the Moon. Nobody in history had ever flown so fast, so low, not even Geena.

  Certainly nobody had tried to achieve a touchdown at such speeds. And yet that was what he must attempt, today.

  Through the tight portholes of his Soyuz, he caught glimpses of the surface of the Moon. It was a spotlit bombing range under a black sky, fleeing under his prow, fresh craters and basin rim mountains and undulating mare plains crowding over the close horizon with an unwelcome eagerness.

  His view was completely sharp, of course. There was no cloud, no layer of muddy air, to obscure his view; and at times he would lose his sense of altitude. At such moments he turned away from the windows and trusted to his instruments, his infallible electronic senses, and to the precise mathematics that had guided him here.

  And now, as Arkady flew farther south, a new series of mountains—a ring of them, folded and eroded—came shouldering over the horizon toward him. They straddled the Moon, as if striving to block his further progress toward the Pole.

  This was, he knew, the mountainous rim of the great South Pole-Aitken Basin: the huge impact crater that straddled the South Pole of the Moon, the largest and deepest such crater in the whole of the Solar System, a walled plain as wide as the Mediterranean Sea.

  His Soyuz, like a little green bug, flew over the immense, eroded shoulders of the rim mountains. The mountains stretched before him and to either side, obviously ancient, colorless as plaster-of-paris models, a five-thousand-mile-long ring of shattered and folded Moonscape.

  He checked his clock. Fourteen minutes to his touchdown. He was still seventy-five thousand feet high, with almost a quarter of the Moon’s face still to traverse; yet he was already inside the great Basin.