Moonseed n-3

by Stephen Baxter

  With gentle tugs, the pad rats showed Henry he should strip naked once more. He unzipped his NASA flight suit and pulled off his underwear; it was crammed unceremoniously into a bag and removed, taking his human warmth, leaving him feeling shrivelled and exposed.

  Now came another standing bath of alcohol, and he was handed more underwear to put on. A medic pulled a heavy belt closed around his waist, thick with equipment. He guessed there was a cardiograph in there, maybe something to measure his breathing.

  And now a garment was lifted towards him by three pad rats.

  “My God. It’s a spacesuit,” he said, wondering.

  The pad rats looked back at him blankly.

  The spacesuit was a floppy white mannequin, its limbs held stiffly out, as if it was already half-alive. Henry watched it approach, feeling a deep reluctance to climb inside. But the pad rats lifted and manipulated him as confidently as if they were packing a souvenir doll in Styrofoam.

  The suit was open at the front, and the pad rats helped him slide his legs down through the stomach. There seemed to be two layers to the suit, an inner layer of some tough, rubbery material and an outer layer of a rough artificial fabric, coated with flaps, zippers and pockets. The rats lifted up the back and chest part of the suit, and he had to struggle to push his arms into the heavy sleeves.

  When he was inside they lowered a helmet over his head, its visor open, and when it was locked at his neck they sealed up the hole in the suit through which he’d entered. The material at the front of the suit was pulled into a bunch, tied with a fat rubber band, and tucked inside his suit, which was then sealed up by two thick zips. It felt as if he had a cushion tucked under his shirt.

  All this took place before a big glass window. Beyond the window there were rows of seats, filled by people with notebooks and cameras and tape recorders. The apparatus of the press. But there was little sense of urgency, and the seats were half-empty.

  Maybe these weren’t really pressmen, he thought, but historians.

  Or obituary writers.

  He was helped to his feet, and he tried walking around. The suit was stiff, and every step required a conscious effort. Evidently the suit was internally wired for strength.

  Geena, wrapped up in her own suit, was grinning at him.

  Now he looked at Geena, he had to admit these Russian spacesuits looked pretty cool. They were basically all white, including their boots, with copper metal rings at neck and wrists for helmet and gloves, and the zippers making a neat V-shape at the front. They even had handy little pockets in their legs where you could store your gloves.

  Geena said, “How do you feel?”

  “Like John Glenn.”

  “Don’t insult your suit,” Geena warned. “In space, it is your only true friend.”

  A pad rat took hold of him now, and closed down his helmet. He felt it settle into the seal at its rim. The voices outside became indistinct murmurs, his own breathing sounded like a rattle. He felt as if he had been excluded from the outside world, shut away into this shell by the pad rats.

  By contrast, they seemed to be swarming over Geena, touching her and beaming up into her smiling face, as if they were trying to root her to the Earth.

  The pad rats connected his suit to an air pipe, and he heard a hiss as air was pumped in. He felt his ears pop; a pressure test, then. As the suit filled up the limbs became stiffer. Experimentally he tried to move an arm; it was like wearing a car tyre inner tube.

  The pad rats, miming, showed him a knob on his chest. When he turned it, the high-pressure air hissed out, and he was allowed to flip up his visor.

  He picked up his battered microscope box — it looked enjoyably unhygienic in this operating-theatre atmosphere — and he was led out of the building, to a kind of parade ground.

  There were small white squares painted on the ground, like cue marks in a TV game show. Geena took one mark and pointed to the other, where Henry went to stand. There were people all around, pad rats and suited managers and technicians. Geena’s square was marked “KK’, and Henry’s “KI” — acronyms for mission commander and researcher, as it turned out.

  Henry looked down at himself. His white spacesuit gleamed like snow in the sunshine.

  A military man walked forward, decorated with ribbons and medals. Evidently an Air Force general. Geena saluted, spoke in Russian, and repeated in English. “My crew and I have been made ready, and now we are reporting that we are ready to fly.”

  The general nodded, and spoke in thickly accented English. “I give you permission to fly.” He glanced at Henry, but seemed to look through him.

  Geena nodded to Henry, and led him towards another bus, this one silver and blue. He had to walk past ranks of silent workers. Close to, many of them looked gaunt, underfed, dressed shabbily. Maybe they would normally cheer, he thought. Maybe they somehow resent me being here.

  Or maybe they’re as scared as I am.

  It was difficult to sit down on the bus in his stiff suit, but he made it. The bus pulled away with a lurch.

  It wasn’t long before the rocket came into view.

  The booster was a pillar, squat and solid: coal grey, save for an orange band at its mid-section, and a bulge at the top, a white-painted faring which hid the Soyuz capsule he would ride to orbit. At the base the booster flared gracefully, where four liquid-fuel rockets were strapped to the pencil-slim core stage.

  It was a hundred and fifty feet tall. White vapour slid down its flanks, as if the booster were already rehearsing the great leap upwards it would take in just a few hours.

  Its three big supporting gantries had already been tipped back, resting close to the ground, so that it was as if the rocket stood at the heart of a metal flower. He could see a slim tower with an elevator to carry the crew to their capsule. The whole stack stood on a sky-blue platform — it looked like some kind of mobile launcher — and a flame pit, a channel cut in the Earth and lined with concrete, stretched away around it.

  This was fifty-year-old technology. The booster was a derivative of an old ICBM design. The first Sputnik had been flown aboard a booster basically the same model as this. So had Yuri Gagarin. He couldn’t work out whether that was reassuring or terrifying.

  The bus lurched to a stop at the base of the booster. Henry followed Geena out. People stood around, watching them: technicians, managers, generals, politicians, wives, even a couple of kids running around between the legs of the adults. Henry clutched his microscope box to his chest. He couldn’t believe they let so many people get so close to what was basically a liquid-fuel bomb.

  Geena led him to a short flight of metal steps, which were set right against one of the fat first-stage boosters.

  Henry looked up at the booster. Foreshortened, it was like a busted-off piece of the Kremlin. But the booster was uncompromisingly real, dominating its flat surroundings. There seemed no doubt, at last, that these guys were serious: they really were going to lock him into that little capsule at the top of this thing and fire him off into space.

  He took his first step on the metal stair. One foot in the dust of Earth, one on metal. This is the moment, he thought, when I leave the Earth. All the rest is detail.

  He wondered where Jane was, right now, what she was thinking.

  He lifted his other, spacesuited foot, and climbed the stair.

  Geena led him to the elevator cage at the base of its tower. A single pad rat stood in here. When Henry and Geena had crowded in, their pressure suits billowing, there was barely room to stand without touching.

  “Penthouse, please,” Henry said. Nobody laughed.

  The elevator lifted up with a clatter. Henry looked out through the bars of his cage. A few pad rats remained, their faces turned up to his. The bus was already pulling away.

  So here he was, rising past the flank of an ICBM.

  It was like climbing the spire of some huge metal cathedral. White mist billowed around him — the cryogenic fumes smelled, oddly, like wet dust — and he co
uld see ice, great sheets of it, condensed and moulded against the smoothly curved flanks of the rocket. The ice shone in the sunlight, but beneath the surface sheen, the metal of the booster was cold and dark. He could have touched the damn booster, run his gloved hand over that metal flank.

  The elevator clanked to a halt alongside the heavy faring that shielded the Soyuz. More pad rats were waiting on a small platform that led to a round hatch cut in the side of the faring. Geena strode forward, and climbed in first.

  Henry looked down. The booster flared gracefully under him, two cone-shaped strap-on boosters clearly visible. The flame pit was a concrete scar in the ground, but it was dwarfed by the immense flatness of the steppe, the land coated with a dull green, flattened by a heavy blue sky.

  He heard the wind moan, and the booster swayed, creaking.

  Following the pad rats” mimed instructions, he turned and sat down on the lip of the hatch. The pad rats pulled a protective cover off his helmet, and hauled outer boots off his feet.

  The last pad rat, a heavy-set older man, looked him in the eyes. “Ni pukha, ni pera.”

  “Huh?”

  “May nothing be left of you, neither down nor feather.” He grinned. “I am wishing you luck. Now you must tell me to go to hell.”

  When in Rome… “Go to hell.”

  The pad rat took his hand, and receded slowly, over the metal platform; Henry, unexpectedly, found himself clinging to this last human contact, his last hold on Earth.

  The fatherly pad rat let go.

  Henry swung his legs inside. He had to climb through the faring to get to the spacecraft, which was completely enclosed inside its protective cover.

  And so he entered the Soyuz.

  He was in the orbital module. It was a cramped cabin, like a small box-room, its walls lined with storage compartments and handholds. It was just about big enough for one person to stretch out. The hatch behind him was a circle of bright daylight. Another hatch, open, was set in the floor, leading to another compartment called the descent module.

  He lowered his feet through the floor hatch and twisted down into the space below. It was cramped in here, with three upturned frame seats in a fan shape, side by side. The inner walls were lined with yellow insulation blankets, and there were bundles of equipment: a life raft, parachutes, survival clothes.

  Geena was already in the left-hand seat, working through a checklist. Stiff in his suit, Henry wriggled until he had lowered himself into the right-most seat.

  And so here he was, lying on his back, tucked up inside an antique Russian spacecraft that had been assembled by guys who probably hadn’t even been paid for half a year…

  22

  As Henry had predicted, the Moonseed dug through the continental crust beneath the Midland Valley of Scotland, the primary infection site, and things rapidly got worse.

  Jane picked up what she could, from the news broadcasts and her limited contact with Henry.

  It sounded as if the ancient volcanic plugs all over Scotland were breaking open. There was some kind of event at the Binn of Burntisland, across the Forth from Edinburgh. That cut off the northern escape routes, then. To the west, closer to Glasgow, more vents were going up in strings, from Fintry to Dumbarton and along the Campsie Hills.

  In the open air, she could hear it, feel it. Explosions, floating on the air. Shudders transmitted through the ground. As if the Earth itself was waking.

  Time to leave.

  Jane and Jack had reentered the national database of refugees at the Rest Centre they stopped at in Berwick. If you could call it a Rest Centre. The second-wave evacuation camp was a crude tent city, hordes of people clustered around medic tents and food trucks, malnutrition and disease and open sewers. A Third World scene, in prosperous Scotland. It took twenty-four hours after they arrived there for a policeman to come find them, and drive them out to a field on the edge of town, where an Army Air Corps helicopter was waiting for them.

  They were to be flown to the US, thanks to some obscure string-pulling by Henry, and, she suspected, his ex-wife. She wasn’t about to argue.

  But air traffic, even the military stuff, was utterly screwed up, because of the pressure the flood of refugees was putting on the requisitioned commercial fleets and military transport, and because of the mess the Midland Valley disturbances had made of the air space there.

  So Jane had found herself hopped over to Prestwick by an Army Air Corps Gazette — actually, that had been rather fun, especially for Jack — and now here she was on an ageing 747, a British Airways airliner crammed with Scottish families, part of the great flood of refugees fleeing Britain, eight hundred of her fellow citizens seeking succour in a foreign land.

  She got a seat in First Class, and, remarkably, the crisp, rather snooty BA stewardesses in here were still serving champagne before the take-off.

  But even here, the cabin was crowded with refugees, adults and squalling infants and grumbling, distressed old people; the overhead lockers overflowed with hastily packed suitcases, even carrier bags. There was great distress, in some cases from injury, more often because of what had been left behind: family members, mothers and sons and grandparents, even pets; homes that had been the focus of lives for, in some cases, decades.

  Waiting for take-off, Jack buried his nose in a book, and Jane receded into herself.

  She ran a poll of her anatomy, her stomach and breasts and throat; surreptitiously she checked the moles on her legs.

  She hated being so aware of her body. So frightened of it, in fact. So far she’d found little to concern her, little she couldn’t dismiss as hypochondriac overreaction. But nevertheless she had been exposed, with Jack, to whatever foul sleet had come pumping out of Torness, when she had taken them both blundering past so carelessly.

  Maybe she deserved to soak up the hard rain, for her stupidity. Not Jack, though. Not Jack.

  She watched him while he slept, inspected him too. She didn’t want to voice her concerns, for fear of frightening him — or perhaps, she thought, for superstition, as if the evil when uttered might become real.

  At last the jet surged down the runway, and Jane glanced out at the tarmac, sliding off beneath the wing. The take-off run was unusually long, she thought. Something to do with the heat of the air, probably. The plane lifted, and banked right before settling on its airway, its invisible track across the sky.

  When they were airborne, Jack asked to be taken up to the cockpit; a smiling stewardess complied. When he was gone — out of her sight for the first time in days — Jane closed her eyes. She felt safe here, in the hands of professionals; she felt she could relax.

  She sank into the seat, and a small chorus of aches rose from her body…

  She slept for a while.

  There was a flash, visible even through her closed eyelids, coming from the window to her right. Lightning. She turned and watched absently. There it was again. Roiling black clouds, too distant to be any threat.

  Jack wasn’t here, presumably still up in the cockpit.

  There was hazy cloud outside the window now.

  Sparks flashed across her window, miniature forks, like scale model lightning bolts. St Elmo’s Fire, she thought, discharges from an electrically charged cloud.

  She leaned in her seat so she could look forward to the wing.

  The whole of the wing was enveloped in a cold glow. St Elmo flashes broke out across the metal, and flecks of light streamed beneath the leading edge like tracer bullets.

  She could smell ozone. Puffs of smoke, of some kind, were seeping out of the air conditioning nozzles above her.

  The seat belt light came on with a soft chime.

  “Jesus,” somebody said. “Look at the engines.”

  Jane looked.

  The two engines on the wing were illuminated from within, as if by a magnesium flare. Shafts of lights shone forward, like searchlight beams, flickering as the fans turned and strobed the light.

  One engine flared more brightly. There
was a brief impression of the strobing reducing in pace. Then the electrical fire-light died.

  The plane tipped to the right, subtly.

  “Jesus…”

  There was a thumping noise. The other engines were surging. Dying.

  Acrid smoke was curling across the cabin floor. The cabin lights had dimmed, but bright electrical light was shining in through the windows; it was as if the whole wing had caught fire.

  The sounds of subdued distress had been replaced by a chatter of concern.

  But under the chatter, Jane could detect an eerie silence.

  No engine noise. All four must have gone.

  And now, beyond the wing, she could see a cloud, an ash tower that looked as if it was reaching to the sky, black and shot through with lightning.

  She stood up. A stewardess came to force her down again, but Jane insisted. “Get me to the flight deck. My son’s there.” The stewardess led the way.

  The Soyuz was shaped like a pepper-pot. Its main body was a squat cylinder called the instrument-assembly module, which housed fuel tanks, oxygen, water supplies, ancillary equipment, and the big retro-rocket that would, in a normal flight, be used to return them from low orbit to the Earth. On top of this sat the descent module, a dome-shaped tent of metal, where Henry would sit to ride to orbit. And over this was fixed a bulbous misshapen sphere called the orbital module, with equipment for operations on orbit.

  The Soyuz had been designed, all those years ago, as the core of a system that should have taken Soviets to the Moon. It had never gotten that far. Instead the Soyuz had become an orbital ferry, carrying cosmonauts to three generations of space stations: the old half-military Salyuts, the Mir, and now the International Space Station. When it was time to return to Earth, the orbital compartment and the service module would be cast off to burn up, and only the descent module would reenter and parachute to the land, somewhere in the echoing heart of Asia.

  The descent module was unbelievably cramped, even compared to the Apollos he’d seen in museums. It was just a crude stretched hemisphere of thick metal, so small your legs would be jammed up against the next guy’s, and it was impossible to straighten them out.