Moonseed n-3

by Stephen Baxter

  Laughter.

  Of course, propagandizing was exactly what Jays was doing.

  Jays had said on a multitude of talk shows how he was dismayed by the Shuttle program — a clumsy, compromised, primitive design, just a V-2 with air conditioning, it seemed to him — and by the lack of any serious consideration being given to any more advanced follow-up.

  For the fact was there were smarter ways to get into space, to reach the Moon and beyond. For instance, orbits of spacecraft passing between the Earth and the Moon were actually unstable, because of the tweakings of the lumpy gravity fields of Earth, Moon and sun. If you gave your spacecraft the right kind of push, in the right direction, at the right time, you could use that instability to make your spacecraft drift to the Moon. It would take longer to get there than the three days it had taken him, but that wasn’t necessarily a problem, for it would be at a fraction of the cost in fuel and mass in low Earth orbit.

  “Then,” he said, “once you are on the Moon, there’s oxygen, and water, and materials for rocket fuel, and materials to make glass and concrete… Once you are on the Moon, with all those resources out of Earth’s deep, heavy gravity well, hell, you can go anywhere!”

  It was a vision he shared with a handful of others, inside and outside NASA: how, with a little imagination, the Solar System could, after all, be opened up for colonization, with the Moon as the key.

  Unfortunately, nobody with any power, financial or political, wanted to listen. Even to somebody who had been there.

  So he began to work in more subtle ways. He joined the board of the National Space Society, for instance. He published his conceptual studies wherever he could, and plugged them on chat shows. He started to work his ideas into his fictions, building up a body of work that, piece by piece, it seemed to Geena, amounted to a kind of schematic of the future, a ladder to history.

  Robert Heinlein had done something similar, back in the “40s and “50s, and so nurtured the minds of the youngsters who would go on to run NASA, and touch the Moon. Now — in less optimistic times, with a deeper understanding of how God-awful difficult the whole enterprise would be — Jays Malone was trying the same trick.

  “I tell you,” he said, “I’ve given up on you guys. Your generation. All this New Age crap. But there are always the kids. Always the kids.”

  Jays talked on, taking the questions — dumb, perceptive, intrusive, whatever — with a clumsy, good-humoured grace.

  She waited until the autograph queue had dissipated, and approached Jays.

  Jays regarded her gravely. “I know you. Geena Bourne. You just came down from Station.”

  “Yes.” She felt vaguely surprised that he should follow the current program so closely. “I’m glad to meet you.”

  “You are?”

  “I’d like your help. I need to talk to you about 86047.”

  A frown crossed his face.

  Geena told Jays what she wanted. She hoped that if they went through the moment at which he collected rock 86047 one more time — with the help of the mission transcript and such documentation as existed — they would be able to reconstruct the rock’s context sufficiently to help Henry.

  Jays was resistant. “I’ve been over those damn three days a hundred, a thousand times. What more is there to say?”

  “Henry thinks there’s plenty you could tell him.”

  “Oh, he does. It was my piece of bedrock, you know.”

  “86047.”

  “Yeah. I guess I risked my life to collect it. And they let it sit in the vault for a quarter-century.”

  “Not any more.” She outlined Henry’s project. “That’s why the context is so important—”

  Jays glared. “How the hell was I supposed to document it?”

  “Well, that’s the point, Jays—”

  “I had to hang upside down in that damn rille to capture it in the first place. Those geology back-room guys weren’t there. They couldn’t see how hard it was to follow their precious procedures, if you were there. I told them that.”

  And so on. A one-way conversation.

  “Anyhow,” he said to Geena, “there’s no good reason to ignore a rock like that for so long. I mean the attention they all gave that Genesis rock from Apollo 15—”

  Ah, Geena thought. That was it. Rivalry with the other crews, the trophy fish they brought home. Even after all this time.

  “But now,” she persisted, “late in the day or not, Henry is going to study it. But he needs your help. I need your help.”

  He regarded her, his eyes pale blue.

  Jays let her drive him out to his home.

  She drove along NASA Road One east through the Clear Lake area — marinas, apartment complexes, parks. When the road reached the coast and turned up to go north towards the Port of Houston, they came to Seabrook. This was an old run-down village, with wooden houses mounted on five-feet stilts.

  Jays’s house must once have been handsome, but now it was faded by sun and busted down by the weather and neglect. Some of the houses in the area were being restored now, but not Jays’s. It looked, in fact, like a prop from Gone With The Wind.

  It was kind of a nice area, Geena supposed, to retire. The houses would catch the light off of the ocean in the mornings. But it reeked of age.

  The house was full of age too. A ticking clock. A dog, a quiet spaniel. A litter of aviation trophies, slowly gathering dust. A bookshelf with a row of his science fiction books, skinny hardback volumes. In the middle of it all, on a walnut coffee table, there was a double picture frame: Jays as a kid, gappy grin and slicked-back hair; and an image of Jays the man in his brief prime, bouncing over the tan brown lunar surface, suit glowing in the sun, on his way to one checklisted task or another.

  It was the home of an old man who had been alone too long.

  Jays made her a cup of coffee. Full of caffeine and cream, it was all but undrinkable, but she drank it anyway. For himself, he cracked a beer.

  “So,” he said. “You’re trying to help out your ex-husband. Kind of complicated.” He smiled like a grandfather. “Not sure I ought to get involved.”

  “Well, he blames me for canning his project.”

  “The Shoemaker. Is he right?”

  “I don’t think so. I spoke out against it. But you know how this stuff works.”

  He nodded and took a pull of his beer. “You didn’t do him any damage. But you weren’t too smart about your marriage.”

  “I was speaking up for Man-in-Space.”

  “Sure,” he said drily. “Chewing the balls off of your husband had nothing to do with it.”

  “It wasn’t like that.”

  “And now you want to make it up with him.”

  “No. It’s done. I just don’t want it to finish in bitterness. We’ve got our whole lives ahead.”

  He nodded. “Smart. A lot of sleepless nights to get through. Sometimes I wish… Well,” he said, “you think we should go back to the Moon?”

  “No. I heard what you said. But we ought to get on with Station. The space lobby is always divided. We should get behind the project we have.”

  “Bull.” He crumpled the can, seemed to be thinking about another, then decided against it. “We’ve been fooling about in Earth orbit for too long. We didn’t need Station to go to the Moon. If we want to go to the Moon then we should go to the Moon. Learn to live off the land. You can’t do that in LEO.” He eyed her. “Not that it would be easy. Some of the space buff types who come to see me seem to think it would be like the pioneer days, setting off into the western desert. It won’t be. We got to the Moon for three days apiece, two guys for just three days, and we had to bend the national economy backwards to do that. Up there, you have to haul along every drop of fuel you need to land, and the dust eats away at any equipment you have, and the volatiles in your seals boil away in the vacuum, and you have to bake the air you breathe out of the rock. Not impossible, but not easy.

  “And all we got to work with,” he nodded a head
to the west, “is NASA. A Cold War museum. You ever think about that? What we’d actually do if some kind of When Worlds Collide situation came along, the dinosaur killer maybe, and we had to set up a colony off-world, fast? Hell, we wouldn’t have a hope.” He drained his beer. “People who say the Moon is easy are talking out of their asses. You can colonize a desert with Stone Age technology. On the Moon, you need to be smart…”

  Sure, Geena thought. Sure, let’s all dream about the Moon. That’s fine, if you don’t have to live and work in the space program as it exists, today, in the real world. Which means Station, like it or not.

  “Can we talk about your rock?”

  He was avoiding her eyes. He was reluctant — but also unwilling to show it.

  There was something he wasn’t telling her, she thought. Something he knew about that rock he wanted to keep to himself. She had no idea what that could be.

  He sighed. “Okay, lady. I don’t know what good it will do, but you got a deal. What do you want me to do?”

  She got out her tape recorder, and replayed the voice transcripts of those remote moments when he’d found the rock that became known as 86047.

  …Okay, Joe. It’s a block about a foot across. I’d say it’s an olivine basalt. It’s almost rectangular and the top surface is covered in vesicles, large vesicles. It almost looks like a contact here between a thin layer of vesicles and a rock unit that’s a little lighter in colour with fewer vesicles And I think I can see laths of plage in it, randomly oriented, two or three millimetres across… So, in his living room, with a view of an ocean already tinted dark blue by the light of the setting sun, the old man listened to the words he’d once spoken on the Moon, and, as he descended in his mind once more into that lunar rille, he dredged up fragments of description and memory, which Geena noted down.

  When she was done, Geena left Jays to his solitary peace. On impulse, she drove on east and north through the darkening, faded grandeur of Seabrook, and it seemed as if maybe all the relics of the Space Age might one day end up here, washed along the coast by some intangible tide of time.

  But when she went just a little further north she entered industrial areas. The Dixie Chemical Company, the Graver Tank Mfg Co. Inc., and so on. Further on still, on the Bay Area Boulevard, there were a lot of space-related industrial concerns: Lockheed Martin, Honeywell Space Systems, IBM, Hughes Aircraft, on roads called Moon Rock Drive and Saturn Road. Symbols that space wasn’t yet quite dead, a sepia-tinted memory, an impossible dream of the generation of Heinlein and von Braun.

  It was like coming back to the present, she thought, from a dismal descent into the dead past. She opened her window to let fresh air into the car, and turned the radio to a rock channel.

  9

  Constable Morag Decker swung her patrol car into Viewcraig Gardens and immediately ran into a jam.

  She counted three sets of roadworks, a scene of wooden separators and flashing yellow lamps and hard hats and jack-hammers. There were vans belonging to the gas company and British Telecom, and another from a private contractor that looked as if it was responsible for cable repairs, bumped up onto the kerb on both sides of the road. The traffic wasn’t too heavy, in the middle of this Monday morning, with the sun rising high above Arthur’s Seat. But the tailbacks already stretched hundreds of yards to either side.

  Maybe she should call the station.

  It was unusual for more than one crew to be vandalizing the road surface at any one time. For now, the traffic was moving okay, but she could see the signs of frustration in the way the drivers edged closer together and glared at the crews as they passed. One accident, even something trivial, and the road would be blocked.

  Today was April 1st. She wondered if this congestion was the result of some misbegotten joke.

  She frowned as she thought it over.

  At twenty-five, Morag had had her uniform for just a year. At her last appraisal her sergeant’s most cutting comment had been about the way she refused to take responsibility on the ground. She was always too willing to pass the buck up the line, so he said.

  She didn’t entirely agree. She thought reporting up the line was generally pretty responsible, in fact; information to support good decision-making had to be the key to any reasoned response. So she’d been trained, and so she believed.

  But her sergeant was of an older school, toughened in the English inner city riots of the early 1980s, when the police were essentially at war with a hostile public. I remember my community policing training. A video shot through the back of a riot shield in Toxteth. My God, the looks on the faces of those yobs…

  Her own presence, gliding through here in the marked police car, was having a visibly calming effect. Maybe a copper on the spot wouldn’t be a bad idea during the rush hour, later in the day. She deferred the decision.

  In the meantime she had a more immediate problem: nowhere to park.

  She was in luck. Ted Dundas was out in front of his house, prodding vigorously at a garden verge. When she pulled alongside she opened her window and leaned out.

  Ted straightened up, leaned on his hoe and nodded. “Morag. Come to see me?”

  “No such luck. But I need to get this beastie off the road. Can I—”

  “Use the drive?” He dropped his hoe and, with an alacrity that belied his years and beer gut, he hopped over a low wall and opened the wrought-iron gate.

  That was Ted for you: helpful without pressure or hassle. He’d been one of the most helpful elements in the station when she’d joined last year; she genuinely regretted his retirement from the force.

  She briskly reversed the car into the drive. She climbed out, carrying her peaked cap.

  On impulse, she looked east, towards Arthur’s Seat. The air was — odd. She thought she could smell ozone, like at the coast, or maybe before a storm But the clouds were high and thin. And the light above the Seat seemed strange Yellowish.

  Morag reached out to lock her car As her fingers approached the handle, a blue spark leapt from her fingertips to the metal; there was a tiny snap, and her fingertips burned sharply. She snatched her hand back, involuntarily. “Shit.”

  “Language, Constable,” Ted said. “I’ve been doing that all morning.”

  “Storm weather, you think?”

  “Maybe. What are you up to here?”

  “A call from a Mrs Clark. Lost her cat. Insisted on a personal call.”

  Ted nodded. “Two doors down. Ruth’s a widow. Be kind to her, Morag.”

  “I will.” He calls her Ruth. Interesting. Gossip for the station canteen later.

  She locked the car without any further static shocks, nodded to Ted, and walked down the road.

  Ruth Clark, Ted Dundas’s neighbour, was a slim, intense woman on the upper margin of middle age; evidently the cat meant a great deal to her.

  Morag took the cat’s description: a tabby, five years old, female. Unusually intelligent and sensitive. (Right.)

  She looked around the boundary of Mrs Clark’s fairly shabby suburban garden. There was no sign of cat droppings — but then, said Mrs Clark, Tammie was too smart to do her business in her own garden and she always used the neighbours’, oh, yes.

  On the other hand, there was no sign that anything amiss had happened to Tammie. No rat poison put down by a pissed-off neighbour, for instance.

  Missing cats weren’t a police priority. There wasn’t anything Morag could do but assure Mrs Clark that they would circulate the details of the cat, and suggest that she do her own searching — circulate notices to the neighbours, for instance — and then she endured a little routine vitriol at the general incompetence and apathy of the police.

  “Even my phone’s been off since I got up. I had to walk down the road to the public phone box and you wouldn’t believe the filth…”

  Morag got out as quickly as she could, reported into the station, and walked back up the road to Ted Dundas’s.

  She sat in his kitchen — warm, smelling so thickly of bacon she
could feel her arteries furring up just sitting here — and let him make her a mug of strong tea. He boiled up a pan on a battered camping stove, propped up on his gas hob.

  “The gas is off,” Ted explained. “You saw the repair crew in the road. Bunch of bloody cowboys,” he said amiably. “I heard old Dougie at number fifteen complaining about it, and he said he’d heard someone else had called them in to look at a leak. Dougie heard that because they’d come to borrow his mobile phone; their phone was out.”

  Mrs Clark’s phone had been cut too. “Ted, what about your phone line?”

  “Snafu. But I have a mobile. But you can hang the bloody phone; what bothers me is the cable TV. I was watching the baseball from Japan. Got to the fourth innings before it cut out.”

  “Um.” Cable and phone lines and gas lines, all out. Morag turned over the possibilities. Was it possible one of those cack-handed crews, doing some innocent repairs, had cut through the other service lines? It wouldn’t be the first time. Or what about deliberate vandalism?

  “You own a cat, don’t you, Ted?”

  “The cat owns me, more like.”

  “I just can’t see what people like about the bloody creatures.”

  “Aye, well, cats are unpleasant and unnecessarily cruel predators. And it’s soggy and sentimental to think anything else.”

  “But you keep one anyhow.”

  “I told you. I think Willis keeps me.” He poured her more tea. “We have a partnership of equals, me and that animal.”

  “Where is he now?”

  He eyed her. “Not here.”

  The house shuddered gently.

  Concentric ripples on the meniscus of her tea, like a tube tram passing far beneath the foundations. Except there was no metro in Edinburgh. Or maybe like a heavy lorry rolling by, shaking the ground.

  But Viewcraig Street was a cul-de-sac.

  She glanced up at Ted. He was watching her carefully.

  “Funny weather,” he said.