Moonseed n-3

by Stephen Baxter

  He checked his watch: 9.00 a.m., British time.

  “How far are we from work, Mike?”

  He shrugged. “A few minutes. Do you want to check in first, freshen up—”

  Henry scratched the stubble on his cheeks. “Hell, no.” He grinned. “First impressions are vital. Let’s go see that Moon rock.”

  Mike pulled away from the kerb.

  The Edinburgh University Department of Geology and Geophysics turned out to be part of a sub-campus called the King’s Buildings, a couple of miles south of the city centre. Most of the science and engineering departments lived out here, Henry learned, along with a couple of government research institutes. The department itself was housed in a building called the Grant Institute of Geology, a blocky 1930s frontage with rambling modern extensions to the rear.

  The suburbs of Edinburgh ran away to the north. To the south there was an open area, trees and grassland, that turned out to be a golf course.

  From Mike, Henry learned that Edinburgh was in fact pretty much ringed by golf courses.

  When Henry and Mike walked up to the entrance a couple of undergraduates came out, carrying notebooks. They both seemed to have pierced tongues — my God — and, in their lurid war-paint sunscreen, to Henry they looked about twelve years old.

  There was a security check at the door. Henry signed the book, alongside where Mike had already filled in his name for him. He’d spelled it wrong: HNERY.

  Oh, Henry thought.

  The entrance hall was 1930s grandiose, but its glory was faded. There were portraits of the department’s great men on the walls, and three granite slabs with lists of former professors. But the slabs weren’t up to date, and the hall was cluttered with a couple of fish tanks and a small seismology station. Mike shrugged. “We’ve been putting in stuff for the undergraduates. That’s a salt water aquarium over there, and this seismology station is live. Educational. But we have to scramble for the funding. And it costs a couple of hundred quid for every word you get carved on those big granite tombstones up there…”

  Thus, thought Henry, times change, and not always for the worse.

  Mike gave Henry a quick tour of the department.

  The core of the Institute was the handsome old 1930s building, tall ceilings, oak panels, echoing; the modern extensions were cramped and rambling, with cheap ceiling tiles and linoleum floors. But, like every geology lab Henry had ever been in, the place was cluttered with samples. Even in the corridors there were big oak chests of drawers, all neatly numbered by hand-drawn labels. There were basement storage areas for the bigger samples — the foundations would have had trouble with the weight otherwise — and the rocks there were stored in open pallets or, sometimes, in cruder containers, like photocopier paper boxes. There was a cold room where ocean floor core samples were stacked up, in grimy metal tubes; Mike pointed out the department’s milk store here, ready to fuel the British need for a continual tea supply.

  Rocks everywhere, all carefully labelled and tracked by a full-time curator. Grad students were encouraged to discard whatever they didn’t absolutely need for the future, but Henry knew that no geologist would willingly give up a single grain of sand.

  To Henry it felt like coming home, after the crush and squalor of the plane, the jangling confusion of his first jet-lagged encounter with Edinburgh.

  The clean lab, where the Moon rock would be processed, was a couple of storeys up. Henry was expecting a close cousin of the Lunar Curatorial Facility back home at JSC.

  Well, there was a small, cramped airlock chamber here, a couple of wooden doors, like JSC. But there were no bunny suits or hats. It was just another lab, dusty, lined with grubby-looking wooden benches. There were fume cupboards on the walls, with safety notices, but their doors were ajar. Mike said the room had mostly been used, previously, by oceanographers looking for trace elements in sea water, like osmium or helium. At least there were steel-and-glass glove boxes sitting on the antique wooden benches, cheerfully bolted in place. And there were rocks, nondescript lumps, inside each of the boxes.

  There was nobody working here right now. Too early in the morning, maybe.

  “…The samples here are mostly just dummies,” Mike said. “A couple of meteorites and stuff. We really wanted to learn how to handle the samples. The containers are under positive pressure. I mean, the interiors contain air at a higher pressure than outside, so if there is any breach of containment the lunar material would be blown outwards, rather than have earthly contamination blow inwards. By comparison, if we were looking at radioactive material the pressure would be negative — air would be sucked inside a box in a breach, so that radioactivity would be contained. We store the samples in ultra-dry nitrogen…”

  I know, Henry thought as Mike chattered nervously on. I know.

  The positive pressure made the gloves, of black rubber, stick out from the boxes like questing arms, two or three feet long. As Henry walked past, the gloves seemed to bat at his chest, blindly.

  “This clean room,” said Henry mildly, “doesn’t seem too clean to me. The lab at NASA is like Fort Knox.”

  Mike looked defensive. “We’re trying to establish positive pressure in the room as a whole, but we’re having some trouble.”

  “Trouble?”

  “It’s kind of leaky. We don’t have the funding you guys have. And—”

  Henry laughed. “My friend, I couldn’t give a rat’s ass. Moon rocks are just rocks. We’ll just roll up our sleeves and scrape off the shit. What do you say? Come on, show me one of these fancy boxes NASA has paid for.”

  Mike grinned, still nervous. He led Henry to a glove box.

  Henry knew from long experience that putting your hands into the gloves was a trick. You had to position your fingers over the fingers of the glove section, and then ram your arm into the aperture, pushing the glove right-side out by main force. It was easy to get your fingers in the wrong hole. And once inside the thick, somewhat stiff gloves, it was impossible to feel anything, and your hands got hot quickly. Learning to do delicate work in these things took time.

  He noticed Mike had gotten his hands in there, ready to work, in seconds. Now he was picking up tools inside the box, confidently.

  “We’re working to the same standards as you do at Houston,” he said. “The tools are Teflon, aluminum alloys and stainless steel. Stuff that won’t corrupt the rocks. The samples are sliced with lubricant-free handsaws and power saws, stainless steel blades edged with diamond.”

  “How do you find those things to work with?”

  Mike shrugged. “Buggers. The lack of lubricant makes the saws heavy and difficult to work, and the blades wear out quickly. But you get the job done. You need strong arms, though.”

  “That you do.”

  Mike pulled his arms briskly out of the gloves, and led Henry to the largest, best-lit case in the room, right at the centre. And there, on a small pedestal, sat sample 86047, an unprepossessing fist-sized lump of coal-black basalt, untidy and inert. Beside it rested a small plastic cube, labelled up-down and with the four points of the compass.

  Mike bent to the case, and the fluorescent lighting underlit his face, making him look even younger.

  “Here it is,” he said. “I can’t quite believe it’s here. That it’s — you know — real. That some guy picked it up on the Moon, and now it’s here.”

  “Believe it. You know about the documentation trail on these babies?”

  “Sure…”

  In principle each Apollo sample had been photographed before it was picked up off the surface. The photo was the clue to the rock’s context. For instance, the pattern of shadows from the unremitting lunar sunlight gave the clue to its orientation. Since the scientists knew exactly when the rock was picked up, and where, and how high the sun would have been in the black lunar sky at that moment, they could position the rock in a strong light to recreate the shadows in the photograph, and so work out the rock’s precise orientation. Then they photographed the rock a
gain alongside the small dice-like orientation cube. The cube stayed with the rock forever after. All this was important because, for instance, the underside of the rock would have been protected from the sun, and so processed differently.

  “…Great theory,” said Henry sourly. “But it heads out the window when your astronaut fouls up. The orientation we have here is just a best guess. Shit. This rock sits there a billion years, waiting to be found, and we screw it up in the first second of contact…”

  Two people bustled into the lab: a greying, portly older man, and a woman of about twenty-seven.

  The man shook Henry’s hand. “Dr Meacher.”

  “Henry, please.”

  “Dan McDiarmid. I’m heading up the investigation here, from our side of the pond. Welcome to Edinburgh.”

  “Good to meet you, Danny.”

  McDiarmid flinched but held his ground. “We weren’t expecting you quite so — informally.” He was eyeing Henry’s stubble.

  There wasn’t a trace of Scottish in his accent, as far as Henry could tell. He knew the type, he thought. His creative days long past, McDiarmid had used whatever reputation he had earned to win power and wealth, to turn himself into a Great Man.

  Authority. The antithesis of science.

  Now the woman pressed forward, thin and intense, sharp blue eyes. “Marge Case,” she said. “I took my degree at Cambridge, and a doctorate in lunar feldspathic breccia crystallization history—”

  “I know about your work.” Henry noticed both McDiarmid and Case had just ignored Mike; in fact Case had literally pushed past Mike to get to Henry.

  Henry retrieved his hand from Case. “Hey. Mike. Stick around.”

  Mike turned, confused. “You want me to get you a coffee?”

  “Hell, no, I don’t want a coffee. Well, yes I do, but not right now. Just hang loose, bubba.”

  McDiarmid said with evident difficulty, “We want to offer you every hospitality and resource. Marge here will work as your lead technician, and—”

  “Sorry.” Henry reached out to Mike, got hold of the shoulder of his jacket, and pulled him back. “Post’s taken.”

  Case looked at Mike with precisely the reaction Henry had expected. “But I have a doctorate in—”

  “You said already. I’m sure Mike and I can find you something to do.” Henry put his arms around their shoulders, and began to lead them to the door; McDiarmid followed, hands fluttering over his belly. “We’re going to be one big family,” Henry said. “Just like the Waltons. Do you get the Waltons? Now, Mike. Where do we get that coffee?”

  When he was done tormenting Case and McDiarmid, he relented and let Mike drive him back to the Balmoral.

  Mike drove in silence, apparently confused. Henry wondered if he was being cruel to him, in some obscure way.

  Am I just playing games with this guy? Or do I really think he will do a better job than Marge Case?

  Well, sure he did.

  But maybe he was being too smart at filling in Mike’s life story.

  Henry suppressed a sigh. When the divorce from Geena was finalized — when he learned the Shoemaker was canned and he was going to have to leave Houston — it was as if his life was ending. He was glad when that crummy BA 747 left the tarmac at Houston Intercontinental, because it was like a little death.

  But, unlike whatever lay beyond death, Edinburgh contained people, and choices, and already, just a few hours here, Henry had, on a whim, made two enemies and one dubious friend. And for what?

  Anyhow, it was done.

  Mike dropped him at the hotel, and Henry lugged his suitcase inside. Mike drove back to the King’s Buildings; he said he wanted to start work, preparing for the first samples from 86047.

  Henry checked in.

  The room rate was quite fantastically expensive. What was it with Brit hotels? Henry wasn’t paying, but he hated to waste money; the sooner he got out of here the better.

  Still, his room wasn’t so bad. A big double bed — a duvet, not blankets — and a kettle and a whole stack of tea bags and a mini bar, and complimentary sunscreen in the bathroom. He was on the fifth floor, and he was looking east; he would get the sun in the morning.

  He took off his shoes and his stinking socks, and padded to the window.

  Looking north beyond the city’s roof tops he could see the Firth of Forth, a dreamy-blue arm of the sea. Calton Hill pushed out of the foreground. Calton was one of the ancient volcanic plugs that underpinned the city. It was coaled with grass, and crowned by absurd-looking classical-style buildings, such as an open portico — some kind of unfinished temple, it seemed — and a telescope lower.

  Mike had been right that Edinburgh was the home of geology. The old igneous structures here had been studied right from the beginning of the discipline. In fact James Hutton in the eighteenth century, based in Edinburgh, was the first to come up with modern theories of the processes that shaped Earth — the first man in history, perhaps, to understand the extent of the vast deserts of geological time that surrounded him.

  Henry wondered, briefly, how that must have felt: to be the only human on the planet who knew…

  I ought to sleep, he thought.

  He tried the TV. There were five main channels and cable and satellite. The main channels were full of soaps and other daytime bullshit. He found a British news channel called Sky and watched that for a while, but the news meant little to him. There was a story about problems for the Government over integration into Europe, and some kind of IRA bomb threat that had caused gridlock in Birmingham, and, my God, a riot in some part of Scotland — what looked like a dire residential area called the Gorbals, in Glasgow — a spokesman who said in a thick accent, We never accepted the Union of the Parliaments, and that’s that. It turned out he wasn’t talking about the modern devolved assembly but the abolition of a Scottish Parliament in favour of a single British one, which had happened, for God’s sake, in 1707. And then commentators on the Irish stuff talked about some guy called William of Orange, who had his fifteen minutes of fame in 1688.

  1707, 1688. Dates from prehistory for North America, dates as remote as 5000 BC.

  There was no US news at all.

  He tried to remember the last British news story he’d noticed back home. Some royal bullshit, probably.

  Britain, he was coming to see, was built on a long and complex history. Shame they hadn’t got more of it right, he thought.

  But then that was complacent. Britain was peaceful and prosperous and proud of itself and, hell, even pretty democratic. The US should last to be a thousand years old; then we’ll see what shape we’re in…

  He flipped around until he found CNN. Lying on his bed, he studied baseball scores, one of his routines for conning himself to sleep.

  But, though he was tired, he was not sleepy, and some part of him was reacting to the fact that it wasn’t even midday outside, and the day was a-wasting.

  He’d done a lot of travelling in the course of his career. Bui he’d never yet got used to this planet-hopping.

  He considered raiding the room’s mini-bar. Or maybe he should go back to the institute and rattle McDiarmid’s cage a little more. Or maybe he should just go find a USA Today.

  Bored, sour, he got up, pulled on a fresh T-shirt, and walked out of the room.

  He found himself on Princes Street, a broad, straight road that ran east to west. It seemed to be the spine of the shopping area, and it was crowded with traffic and shoppers. The pedestrians were all in big floppy hats and baggy white clothes with their faces smeared with cream.

  The street’s north side was lined with plastic shop frontages, and on its south side there was a park called Princes Street Gardens: set in a valley, crammed with monuments and features. Pretty. But, Jesus, it was cold, a breeze gusting down the street like it was a wind tunnel. Henry, with just his T-shirt, wrapped his arms around his chest. Maybe he’d get more tolerant to this when he got over the loss of Houston’s muggy, comfortable warmth.

&nbs
p; Anyhow, if he was lucky he’d be out of here before winter came.

  He got his orientation quickly.

  He could see the asymmetrical profiles of Calton Hill and Castle Rock from here, with the heart of the city stretching between them, and Arthur’s Seat on the outskirts of the city, a blocky, uncompromising mound. The glaciers had flowed east over this place, scraping off the younger sedimentary rocks and leaving these three igneous plugs exposed. All three plugs had been left with a sharp western face and a long, shallow eastern debris scarp. To Henry, musing, it looked as if some gigantic explosion had overwhelmed the area from the west, leaving these tails of debris, sheltered by the plugs.

  He walked to the west along Princes Street. The shops were full of the new radiation-proofed clothing lines, heavily advertised. Here was a realtor — no, an estate agent — with a lot of properties price-hiked because they had cellars, or room for underground development.

  He passed the train station entrance and the roof of an underground mall, decorated with obscure statues of what looked like abseilers. He came to a steep road called the Mound, which twisted up the glacial tail to the Castle, a brooding pile on top of its own basaltic plug. The Castle looked as out of place, viewed from this glitzy plastic shopping area, as a bubo in the armpit of a supermodel.

  He thought about climbing up there, taking a look around.

  Or, he could go back to that little mall by the station, get under cover, and have a coffee.

  He went back to the mall.

  It turned out to be a complex of staircases and escalators and glass-walled elevators. It was brightly lit and crowded, though muzak pumped out from too many places. There were fountains, with more of those bizarre stainless steel abseilers.

  At least it was warmer here. But he couldn’t find anything that looked right. What he’d really like to find, he thought, was a big out-of-town-style Barnes and Noble, lined with books, with a fat Starbucks coffee shop on the end of it. You’re getting parochial, Henry.