Moonseed n-3

by Stephen Baxter

  The medical testing, run by Air Force and NASA doctors, struck Henry as brutal and invasive. Hospitals were mostly a mystery to Henry, who had been spared illness save for popped shoulders and busted fingers, the work hazards of the field geologist. Now he found that such exotica as barium meals and enemas and endoscopic probes of the intestines were not just exquisitely painful but also utterly humiliating.

  It wasn’t even as if he was genuinely ill, in which case he’d have to endure one or two such tests, and even then they’d be spaced apart. Henry was hit by one after another.

  For instance the endoscopy was going to be so painful, he was told, he’d normally be given a shot of Valium in advance. But he’d already had Valium for the gastroscopy, so he had to do without it. And when he went in for his chest X-rays he still had the electrodes over his chest which had been fixed there to monitor his heart, and so the X-rays were marked by small black dots. And so on.

  Some of the tests were more relevant to spaceflight. The medicos checked the balance mechanism in his ears, by pouring hot water into one ear, or cold water, and then swapping over. By watching his eyes, seeing if they flickered, the doctors claimed to be able to tell if the temperature differential made him dizzy, and how much.

  He was put into a spinning chair, and told to close his eyes and tip his head up and down, from his knees to the head rest. A few minutes of this was enough to make him want to throw up, which, it turned out, was the idea.

  Back at JSC, he was put through altitude chamber tests.

  The chamber was a big metal box with thick glass portholes, through which protruded TV lights and cameras. It turned out that some of the cameras belonged to the doctors, and some to the press; such was the public interest in the mission he was already a reluctant media star.

  He was taken up to a simulated forty-four thousand feet, and the air bled out of the chamber slowly. When the air was down to a quarter sea-level pressure, his lung sac expanded so much it ached; his bowels distended, making him fart explosively. Eventually the air pressure got so low he was forced to pressure-breathe into his oxygen mask: when exhaling, he had consciously to force air out of his lungs.

  He had never in his life had to control, consciously, his breathing. It scared him.

  They took him back to sea level. And then, without warning, they hit him with a rapid decompression test.

  Suddenly he was at twenty-five thousand feet, and in the middle of a simulated bail-out. The air was sucked out of his lungs, and pain stabbed in his ears; when they returned the air, the room filled up with a cloud of condensed vapour.

  He wasn’t sure what the surgeons were learning from such things. But he was learning, brutally, a lot more respect for his ex-wife and the other pilots.

  The tests got tougher.

  Sealed inside a dummy spacecraft he was slammed into deep pools so that he could practise unhooking his harnesses, opening the hatch, swimming to the surface and activating his survival systems. He was sent up in the Vomit Comet, a converted transport plane which followed elaborate parabolic loops through the sky so that, falling freely inside the aircraft, he could experience weightlessness for twenty or thirty seconds at a time. During the first he was made to sit still, to find out how it was going to feel: like, it turned out, going over the lip of the world’s biggest roller-coaster, and never coming down. On the second loop he was allowed to move around, floating from ceiling to floor, wall to wall. At the end of every loop he had to make sure his feet were on the floor before the plane went into its recovery. He practised moving large masses, throwing a medicine ball to Geena, feeling the reaction as he was pushed backwards. Henry learned how to brace himself, to get the reaction he needed, and to judge the centre of mass of a complex object, to learn to shove and control without sending it rolling.

  Then he was put through another flight where he had to do the whole thing again, but wearing a spacesuit.

  The next day Geena flew him to Johnsville, Pennsylvania, to the Navy’s Acceleration Laboratory, for a ride in what the technicians here called, cheerfully, the County Fair Killer. It turned out to be a centrifuge, a cage with a seat and other equipment which got spun around inside a circular room. During the launch he would be given a protective G-suit to wear, but for now he had nothing to protect him, save exercises on tensing his muscles and holding his breath, to make his blood pressure well up.

  When you thought about it, he realized, a centrifuge was a symbol of the high frontier. Only pilots of high-performance aircraft and astronauts would be accelerated to the rates that kind of centrifuge could provide. He found out later that NASA didn’t even have any centrifuges of its own any more. The Shuttle ride to orbit was so gentle the astronauts were subjected to no more G than you’d suffer on a moderate switchback ride.

  On the other hand, during the most crucial stages of launch and reentry, Henry would not be in the hands of NASA.

  It didn’t seem so bad when it started. A mix of fairground ride and James Bond torture chamber. But the force was eyeballs-back, as the pilots called it, an intense pressure on his chest, as if a ton of bricks was being piled on there. Breathing got more difficult, and he could feel his face distending. He felt oddly self-conscious; there was a closed-circuit TV camera fixed on his pancaked face through the whole experience.

  They ran him up to five Gs. That wasn’t so bad; he ought to be able to withstand as much as fifteen Gs. But it was enough to keep his chest pressed against his backbone, and he felt he had to force his rib cage open just to take a breath.

  Stopping, he found out, was the worst part. When he slowed the sideways forces started to kick in, Coriolis forces, and he felt as if he was tumbling, and threw up heavily before they could haul him out of the cage, his vomit probably laced with barium.

  To familiarize him with the Space Station, now being used as an orbital construction shack for the Moon spacecraft, he was taken to the Sonny Carter Neutral Buoyancy Laboratory. This was located up near Ellington Field.

  The weather that day was clear after some days of cloud, and the sky was streaked by toy-like T-38s, astronauts anxiously keeping up their flying hours. Henry suffered a corny NASA moment, when he found himself at the entrance plaza of the facility looking up at a slab of blue July sky framed by a Stars and Stripes, while a T-38 flew past a milky Moon.

  But Venus was already rising, a malevolent smear of light.

  The Carter facility turned out to be a gigantic rectangular pool, all of forty feet deep. Henry was kitted up in a bulky, multi-layered pressure suit, with a heavy backpack to keep him alive. Inside his bubble helmet, enclosed, he could smell lint and metal and the hiss of air; his own breathing was noisy.

  He was lowered into the pool on a frame elevator. Divers took his arms and helped him into the water. The colour of the water was a deep blue — just because of its depth, not because of any additives — and it was so deep the divers who accompanied the astronauts on their dives had to undergo decompression procedures. The astronauts, in their pressure suits, were pretty much immune to pressure changes.

  He could feel the resistance of the water, see its bluish haze extending around him, but in his bubble of air he was as dry as desert dust, cut off. Beside the graceful, seal-like divers, he felt clumsy, stiff, barely able to move. He wondered if he would feel so isolated in space.

  The pool was full of gigantic toy-like trainers: an open Shuttle payload bay so he could practise hand-cranking the big doors closed, and huge pieces of Station, through which he swam.

  Sonny Carter, it seemed, was an astronaut who had died in a plane crash. This facility seemed like a good memorial to Henry. The pool afforded him moments of peace, of slowness and relative control, little oases in the chaos that had overtaken his life.

  And a day later he was called away to make a parachute jump. He resisted this, but Geena insisted he had to do it once, under controlled conditions, so he knew he could hack it if he had to do it for real.

  He was given a couple of hours
” familiarization, and then he was taken up in a Chinook. Geena, of course, went first. She didn’t hesitate in the open doorway but stepped straight out, her static line cracking sharply behind her.

  When it was Henry’s turn, he leaned out of the doorway — it was impossible to believe he was standing here, on a platform in the air, with nothing separating him from the ground — but he could see Geena’s parachute, bleached white against the pale green of the ground. Somehow that sight dissolved his own fears, and he jumped without hesitation.

  A few seconds of free fall, of the wind plucking at him as he approached terminal velocity, and then the chute opened behind him, and he fell into his harness like a doll.

  The descent was tranquil. He could hear sounds from the ground, cars and sirens, though they were muffled, and he thought he heard bird song.

  He didn’t want it to end. It was like being back in the pool again.

  But it didn’t last.

  In the middle of all this he tried to keep up with the developing science of the Moonseed, and the bad news from around the planet, and to work on the mission itself: at least, that limited part of it he could control. The surface EVA schedule. The detailed science objectives. Where he wanted to land. The equipment he needed to take. How it would be deployed on the lunar surface.

  He demanded, but didn’t get, some practice time implanting seismographs wearing a spacesuit.

  Frank Turtle looked miserable. “We haven’t had time to work up anything on those lines,” he said. “They mothballed all the old Apollo facilities, like the Peter Pan rig.”

  “We’re just going to have to wing it,” Geena said grimly.

  Henry wondered what a Peter Pan rig was.

  But it was academic, because there was no time to pursue this before he was dropped in the Nevada desert, close to Reno, with Geena and a couple of cohorts from the Astronaut Office, for three days of survival training: what to do if your spacecraft comes home off course.

  They had nothing but a little water and basic survival gear. They made a tent of parachute fabric, and waited out the heat of the day. At night they had to hunt lizards and snakes. Here was one situation where Henry, veteran of hundreds of days in the field, was able to fare a little better than the rest. The astronauts looked enviously at his knife, for instance, inside the hollow handle of which he had stored matches and fish hooks, held in place with candle wax, and he showed them how to make frying pans from pieces of aluminum foil, and so forth.

  On the second night he spotted Geena hoarding her water. He came to sit with her.

  “Rationing the water doesn’t help,” he said.

  “Huh?”

  “Try that and you’ll pass out. This is the desert. You need a certain amount of water to keep from dehydration. You should drink the water you have until it’s gone, and if you have not been picked up by then, well, you die of thirst.”

  She glowered at him, but made no move to comply. “Some people are blaming you,” she said.

  “What?”

  “For the Moonseed. The way it got out, at Edinburgh.”

  The truth was, nobody knew how it had got out, save himself and Jane — and Mike, who couldn’t atone any more. He eyed her. “Do you blame me?”

  “I don’t know. You’re Henry. I knew you were an asshole long before any of this stuff.” She glanced at him, then away. “No. I guess not. You aren’t cast for the role of cosmic villain. Or hero. You aren’t big enough.”

  “I don’t think anybody is.”

  They sat in silence.

  “How’s Rocky?” he asked at last.

  “With my mother, in San Francisco,” she said. She stood up. “As if you care.”

  She stalked away to her sleeping bag.

  “Drink your water,” he said softly.

  On his last day in the US, he was taken to the Cape to see a Shuttle launch, probably one of the last there would ever be, its payload bay crammed with final pieces of equipment and fuel pods, a half-billion dollars” worth of firepower aimed at getting him to the Moon.

  He stood on a beach with Geena, to the south of the launch complex. To the west, towards inland, the sunset was volcanic, tall and colourful. And in the south-east there was a blue-black sea, a bruised purple sky. And the Shuttle was picked out by floodlights, the orbiter a graceful white moth against the rusted brown of its gantry.

  The Cape was crowded. It seemed a million people had turned out here to watch the spaceships that symbolized the nation’s fight-back against the creeping geologic menace. It was like Apollo, said the old-timers.

  Geena stood with him. She said, “Do you know what has gone into this launch?”

  “What?”

  “Ball-breaking work. Henry, Columbia, over there on the pad, was turned around from its last mission in two weeks. We already have two orbiters in space right now. We only have two simulators; we’re sending this crew up untrained. We think the operational safety of the Shuttle system was pegged at 95%, after Challenger. But that’s thanks to the safety checks. We have no idea what risks we’re running now. We don’t even have time to calculate them.”

  So it’s my fault if Columbia blows on the pad, today?

  But he let her talk. He understood how hard it was to overcome a generations-old culture; if this was her way of working it out of her system, fine.

  …Despite the countdown, the launch was somehow unexpected.

  There was a flare of dazzling yellow flame, liquid and vibrant, from the solid rocket boosters, and then the whole unlikely stack lifted smoothly off the ground, twisting as it rose. It trailed a cloud of white smoke, illuminated from within by yellow-red fire, and a throaty, crackling noise that seemed to ripple down from the sky.

  The energy was palpable, like a seismic event. But it had been made by human hands. All around him, people were whooping, laughing. Crying.

  Geena looked at Henry, her face shadowed by booster light. “Now do you see what it was all about?”

  Moved, he said, truthfully, “Yes.”

  “We could have been on Mars by now,” she said. “On the moons of Jupiter. We could have had colonies big enough to survive off the planet.”

  “Maybe we could have. But we don’t. And now—”

  “And now, we have to struggle like hell just to get back to the goddamn Moon, which we abandoned in 1972. You still sure you want to go through with this?”

  “I don’t think I have a choice.”

  The Shuttle rose on its stack of billowing smoke, and a warm wind pulsed over them as rocket light glimmered from the patient Atlantic.

  When he got back to his room, there was bad news from Scotland, and elsewhere.

  15

  Jane was woken by the gentle tone of her mobile phone.

  She propped herself up on her shoulder, and took the call in a whisper. Then she folded up the phone and put it away.

  It had been Henry, calling from NASA.

  The surge which had killed her father had subsided. But now, it seemed, the Moonseed’s spread had started again: out of Edinburgh, and elsewhere.

  She gave herself one second, before letting that sink into her consciousness. She closed her eyes and relished the warmth of the Red Cross blankets wrapped around her, the soft, untroubled breathing of her son a few feet away.

  Time to move on.

  If they could never be comfortable in this lashed-up Rest Centre, at least, with all their efforts, they had made it into a kind of home, efficient and clean. She’d become unreasonably proud of Jack, the way he’d coped with the disruption to his life and settled down to work here. After the first few days informal schooling had started up, but Jack and the other children had still been expected to help with the adult work. Doing his bit.

  But he shouldn’t have to “do his bit’, she thought bitterly. He should be able to grow up untroubled, like every other British kid since 1945. She ought to have been able to protect him.

  But that wasn’t possible. It never had been.

 
; Maybe she had been lucky to have had this interval of peace. But now, it was all starting again.

  She opened her eyes. The last of her peace was gone, her warmth disturbed. She pushed back the sheets.

  She shook Jack awake, silenced him with a fingertip to his lips. He nodded and reached for his shoes.

  They’d talked about this. Slipping out into the dark. Getting a lead on everybody else, the unfortunates who didn’t have boyfriends in NASA.

  Betraying them, maybe even leaving them to die.

  We discussed this. We’ve done all we can here. Now things are going to get worse, a lot worse. Now’s the time to think of ourselves. The family. That’s what counts now.

  With their bags, they slipped out to the theatre car park.

  To the west, over the heart of Scotland, the sky was glowing red. There was a distant sound, like thunder.

  And it was raining: a thick, sticky black rain Henry had called tophra, laden with soot and ash.

  They hurried to the car. She had been careful to leave it close to the exit. Jane let Jack into the back, loaded the bags into the boot, and put the key into the ignition.

  “We’re going,” said Jack, ten years old.

  “Yes.”

  Go east, Ted had said, the last time she saw him. Follow the coast. Get past Dunbar and you’ll be out of the Midland Valley, and you ought to be home free.

  For a time, anyhow.

  There was the sound of a siren somewhere. Lights were coming on in the theatre.

  And then there were two, she thought.

  They climbed into the car. Being here, her hands on the wheel again, was strangely comforting. The car was a piece of home, of the old life. A haven.

  She started the car, pulled out of the car park, and headed east.

  The outskirts of Musselburgh were already congested with pedestrians, mostly, it seemed, fleeing as she was to the east. The tophra fall, thick now as a black snow, made it gloomy, and people were groping their way along with flashlights and umbrellas. Most of them had shirts or pieces of cloth fixed over their faces. She passed one woman who looked to have been overcome by an asthma attack; a doctor was attending her with an inhaler and what was probably a steroid shot, something to keep her moving.