Moonseed n-3

by Stephen Baxter

  The footing was good here. The Moon, shaped by impacts, was littered with rocky rubble. But this close to the edge, a lot of those fragments would have tumbled into the rille, carrying off the dust, and that had left the regolith here very thin—

  Suddenly his left foot disappeared, out from under him.

  “Shit.”

  He looked down with surprise. His leg was just sinking into a pit of soft dust, softer and deeper than any other place he had come across, anywhere on the Moon.

  He brought his right foot forward, but he caught it on a rock, and he fell with some force onto his hands and knees. His leg came loose of the dust pit, but his momentum rolled him forward, and the roll carried him over on his right-hand side.

  “Henry. Are you okay?”

  “Just a little soft here. I caught my… I stumbled over that rock.”

  “You need me to help you?”

  “No.”

  He pushed his way to his feet, bouncing upright like a mannequin. He stepped back a little way from that patch of soft dust. It was a rough disc, he saw — and it swirled, gently.

  Just as he’d seen in Scotland, on another planet, just as he’d predicted, he had found it here.

  “Henry?”

  “I’m fine.”

  He carried on down the slope, following the tracks of Jays Malone as he had searched for his piece of lunar bedrock.

  …And then he saw it, sheltering beneath a hummock in the regolith: an irregular-shaped crater in the regolith, scuffed by footprints. It was the original resting place of sample 86047, here on the Moon, a rock that had travelled a quarter-million miles from this spot, to his lab in Edinburgh.

  He bent sideways, awkward in his suit, and ruffled the surface of the regolith with his fingertips, with reverence.

  Then he straightened up. The tracks didn’t go any further, any deeper into the rille. The ghosts of Apollo couldn’t help him any more; and when he passed out of line of sight of Geena he wouldn’t be able to speak to her. Now, at last, he had to go where no human had travelled before.

  He raised his gold sun-visor. For now, he wouldn’t need it.

  Clutching his equipment, trailing the rope behind him, he marched on down the slope, into the shadow of the rille wall, alone.

  It was dark here, the only light scattered from the far side of the rille.

  He lit his helmet torch. It cast an ellipse of light on the regolith surface before him, and back-scattering illuminated a short way beyond that. He had to keep his head down so the light showed him where his feet would come down, so he could see only a few feet ahead of himself at any time.

  He was truly, he thought, approaching the heart of darkness.

  At first he moved cautiously. But the slope here, sandblasted by micrometeorite rain, was still gentle. Walkback limits, he thought; he could afford to go a little faster.

  He lengthened his stride. Soon he was bounding in slow-motion leaps, sailing over the rocks and dust. When he landed he sent up sprays of dust which collapsed back immediately to the surface, like handfuls of gravel.

  The trick with the light now was to keep it focused on the spot he was likely to land, rather than directly under his feet; it took some coordination, but he was getting the hang of it.

  He allowed himself a moment of exhilaration. Hot shit, he thought; this is the way to do a field trip.

  But now the ground was getting steeper, the regolith layer thinner; the sprays raised by his footfalls were diminishing.

  He tried to slow. But he’d underestimated his momentum; old Sir Isaac was pushing at his back, and the surface under his feet was slithery. He leaned back and tried to dig his heels in, but that succeeded only in tipping him over backwards.

  He slid six, ten feet on his butt, deeper into the rille. In his stiff Shuttle suit it was like sliding down a ski slope in a box.

  He tumbled to a halt.

  He sat there in darkness, breathing hard, his torch showing him only a few yards ahead, so close was the rille’s horizon now.

  His rope gathered itself up, went taut, and he got a good hard tug on the chest. Geena, telling him to behave himself.

  Well, she was right. It was going to be a lot harder coming back up.

  He got up and slapped ineffectually at his thighs, trying to dust himself off. He held onto the rope, and stepped cautiously, ever deeper, his feet scraping now over almost bare basalt.

  He came to a place where the slope was steeper than one in one. There was a basalt ledge here, a place where one of the lava strata had become exposed; it made a place to stand. When he looked up, his torch showed him the rille wall tipping up and away from him, dauntingly steep and tall.

  He wasn’t sure he could go any further in. This would have to do.

  He took his instrument bag off his shoulder, and placed it carefully at the back of the ledge. Then he got to his knees, and crept forward to the lip of the ledge. The suit fought him the whole way, but he crawled determinedly.

  He stuck his head over the edge.

  His torchlight splashed down over the steepening rille wall. More basalt layers. He inspected them briefly, noting their thickness, their difference in composition.

  The whole history of mare volcanism was laid out here, clear as a road-map. He longed for a couple of grad students, a truck-load of sample bags. Maybe just by visual inspection, a couple of samples, he could achieve some good science here…

  But he knew he mustn’t. His objective lay further on, and he must hurry to achieve it before his life support limits cut him short.

  He lifted his head, and let his torch beam play further down the slope.

  It looked as if the base of the rille, here, was no more than thirty or forty feet below him. The surface was smooth, silvery and flat.

  It looked as if a river of some fluid had been dammed here.

  Moonseed dust.

  He raised his head further. His ellipse of light lengthened, until the glow became too attenuated to make out. As far as he could see, across the width of the rille, and to left and right along its length, the Moonseed dust lay, shimmering in his torchlight. It looked as if a river of mercury had come lapping through the rille’s dusty walls.

  He found a loose rock, a fist-sized pebble an arm’s-length away. On impulse, he picked it up. He looked at the big astronaut’s Rolex on his wrist, set its timer, and dropped the rock.

  He watched the rock fall, at first with dreamy slowness, and then with greater, more Earth-like velocity as the slow gravity had time to work. If he got the timing right he would be able to calculate pretty accurately how far below him that surface was…

  In the light of his torch, the rock hit the surface, and disappeared. The Moonseed dust closed over it without a ripple, as if it had never existed.

  He checked his watch. Four seconds. The Moonseed was forty-two, forty-three feet below him.

  He knew he had to wait for the results of his seismic analysis. But already he knew what he would find out.

  The whole damn Moon was rotten with Moonseed, just as he’d suspected.

  And yet the Moon was still here, unlike Venus.

  He crawled to the back of the ledge. He worked his way along the ridge, setting out his instruments, little tin-can boxes containing sensitive seismometers, shrouded in thermal blankets. The seismometer signals would be analysed as real-time data and in terms of frequency to record the ground’s vibration. He set up combinations of theodolites and electronic distance meters that might give some clue as to the deformation of the ground, even here on the side of the rille. And he deployed, close to the rim of his ledge, a small cospec, a correlation spectrometer, that would be able to measure emission rates of any gases it could detect. The instruments would be connected to a central data collection and communications unit and batteries by multiplex cables, that he plugged into the backs of the boxes.

  All these instruments were improvised from lightweight gear deployed by VDAP to gather real-time data on volcanic events. It was tr
ue that what he was investigating here was no volcano, but even volcanology was a young science; he hadn’t had any smarter ideas on what to bring here, to this infestation on the Moon.

  He actually enjoyed setting up the science gear: plugging cables into their sockets, testing power couplings and data transmissions. It was simple work, no more complex than putting together a back-yard barbecue. Yet it was good for his soul to have some familiar tasks to get through, here amid all this strangeness. He moved between the instruments, the fans of his backpack whirring, the oxygen blowing cool over his face.

  When the science station was set up, he stepped back from it, towards the edge of the basalt ledge. He ran his eye over the connections one more time, making sure he hadn’t missed something dumb, checking all the power lights were switched on. He didn’t want to have to come back down here and fix anything.

  However, it all looked fine. Now all he had to do was climb out of here, trailing a comms link cable behind him, so the station could talk to the surface, and so to Earth and the shelter.

  But there seemed to be a softness, beneath the tread of his right foot.

  He looked down sharply. He was maybe four feet from the lip. But suddenly the rock surface was crumbling like wet sand.

  The last three or four feet of the ledge just disappeared, in a half-circle extending maybe a yard around him. Under a surface of some kind of duricrust, he realized, this whole ledge was rotten with Moonseed dust. Suddenly he was falling, amid a cloud of dust, and there wasn’t a damn thing he could do about it.

  Moonseed sparkled in the light of his torch.

  Falling on the Moon:

  Dreamlike slowness.

  In the first second — the first one or two rattled heartbeats — he only fell through a couple of feet. He fell stiffly, his suit starfishing around him, as if he was in some body-shaped coffin.

  Two seconds, and, picking up speed inexorably, he had fallen ten feet. The rope was coiling behind him, still fixed to his waist. How much was there left? Enough to stop him hitting the Moonseed river?

  Would he just drag his anchor rock off the lip of the rille after him?

  Three seconds, maybe twenty feet, and at last his speed was becoming respectable. No air here, so no terminal velocity; if there was a hole all the way to the centre of the Moon you would just keep on falling, accelerating steadily, until—

  His feet hit the surface of the Moonseed river.

  It worked its way up his legs, to his waist, sluggish ripples spreading out from him. His speed slowed rapidly as the resistance of the dust built up. He could feel the pressure of the dust on his legs, crumpling the inflated pressure suit.

  Now he was sinking slowly, as if into treacle. He tried to keep his arms out.

  Up to his waist. He couldn’t move his legs.

  He would presumably reach some level at which he would be buoyant. The dust was all but a fluid; Archimedes” principle would work, even here. How deep would that be? So deep that the pressure of the dust would crack his visor, ramming itself into his mouth and nose and eyes? Or maybe the end would be less spectacular: eventually, the heat trapped by the dust would surely kill him… The dust was up to his chest now. But his rate of descent was slowing. He tried to kick at the dust; maybe if he could lie on his back he could float like a swimmer on the Dead Sea. But he couldn’t move his legs, not so much as an inch; it was as if his pressure suit was embedded in concrete.

  But the rope was taut, pulling at his waist. Geena. She was trying to drag him out of here.

  He lifted his hands, and grabbed at the rope which snaked out from his waist like an umbilical cord. He could feel the tension; he imagined Geena at the surface, hauling, digging her feet into the regolith.

  It was working. He could feel the dust falling away from his legs. Maybe he was out of it already.

  He kept pulling, and Geena kept hauling, and he could feel himself rise with dreamy grace. Maybe he was going to live through this after all…

  But now he became aware of a new problem. He couldn’t hear the pumps and fans of his backpack any more, nor feel the breath of oxygen over his face.

  When he looked down at his chest panel, there was nothing but red lights. The heat, the pressure of the dust had killed it.

  But right now he felt fine. Better than fine, in fact. He felt alert, confident. When he looked up above, he could see a line of white light, the sunlit upper face of the rille. Actually, he felt a little high.

  He had no doubts, suddenly, that he would live through this; in a couple of minutes he would be with Geena, and then back to the shelter, and Earth, and in a few years it would be no more than a sea story he could share with Jane…

  He was flat against the rock face, being dragged upward, almost passively.

  Now he was approaching daylight. He was being hauled up the shallow upper slope of the rille, like a swordfish being landed on some Greek island beach.

  He seemed to be lying on his back. The sun, a ball of white light, flooded his helmet. He turned his head towards it and let all that pure light pour into his open eyes. It was really quite beautiful. And there were colours, like the kaleidoscopic sparkle of a granite thin slice in his petrological microscope, all around him, the colours of the Moon.

  But now there was somebody before him, a snowman figure loping around him as if in a dream. He — or she — reached down and closed something over his face, and the world turned to gold.

  He closed his eyes.

  Gold, grey, black.

  Henry’s backpack was just a ruin. Crushed and overheated. Even his emergency oxygen supply, from the purge tanks, seemed to have failed. He was clearly suffering hypoxia. A few more minutes of this and he would suffer permanent brain damage.

  Geena dug hoses out of her backpack. She coupled her own emergency air supply to Henry’s. That would be enough for an hour or so. Then she hooked up more hoses so Henry could share her supply of cooling water; he’d broil before they got back to the shelter otherwise.

  She was tempted to peer into his helmet, to see if he was breathing, if he was responding. But it wouldn’t do any good. What could she do, take off his gloves to see if his fingernails were blue?

  She pulled him up. He half-stood, inert, like a statue, so stiff was his suit. She managed to get his arm over her shoulder, her arm around his waist. Under lunar gravity he only weighed a couple of stone, but he was awkward, a stiff, massive shape. As she hauled him back towards the Rover, his feet dragged in the regolith.

  It was going to be a race back to the shelter, to get Henry inside before that emergency pack expired. At least driving back would be easier. They only had to follow their own tracks back, to be sure of their destination.

  But if anything else went wrong — if a fault developed with her own backpack, or the thirty-year-old Rover — it was quite possible neither of them would live through this.

  She tried to hurry, forcing Henry forward, across the slippery regolith.

  4

  Henry became conscious again, long before she got him back to the shelter.

  “We have to get back,” were his first words.

  “I know. We’re going.”

  “I have to start analysing the data.” He looked at the hoses which snaked between their backpacks. “Thanks for saving my life.”

  “Pleasure.”

  “I don’t think my fall affected the station I set up.”

  “You checked as you fell to your doom, did you?”

  “Yes,” he said, without irony.

  They bounced across the surface of the Moon, back to the shelter.

  She parked as close as she could to the shelter. It wasn’t easy to get inside; linked by the hoses with their fragile couplings, they had to move like Siamese twins, taking care over every step.

  Once inside, she checked the shelter’s air and took off her helmet and gloves. She could feel a gush of moist heat escaping from the joints at her wrists and neck; it was a relief to shuck off the suit and move fr
eely.

  Henry went straight to work. He set up his pc, checked the data link to the remote station he’d set up in the rille, and started tapping at his keyboard. And he prepared some of his samples on slides for his ridiculous high-school microscope.

  He worked feverishly. She knew Henry of old; in this mood, whatever his physical state, he wouldn’t be dissuaded. It used to irritate her. In fact she thought of Henry as a workaholic. Well, maybe he was. But right now, she realized, whatever understanding Henry achieved today, here on the Moon, might be crucial for them all.

  So she let him work, and contented herself with a health check; he didn’t seem to have been permanently harmed by his brush with the Moonseed.

  She tended to her equipment. That pesky Moon dust had continued to etch into her gear, she found. It was now ground deeply into the fabric of her suit, and even when she tried to scrape it out with her fingertips she only succeeded in working it into her fingers and under her nails. The metal seals at wrist and neck were getting quite badly corroded. And the handle of Henry’s geology hammer had had its rubber coating worn away to bare metal.

  She recharged her backpack. She took a look at Henry’s, but it was ruined beyond her capability to repair it here. When they next left the shelter they would have to do it bound together once more.

  She made some food. A hot drink: camomile tea, one of Henry’s favourites. She made him drink and eat, and he complied, but he didn’t seem to notice what he was being fed.

  She sipped her own tea. Even freshly made, it didn’t seem hot enough. One of the old clichés of lunar travel, she thought: water boils at lower temperature in low pressure. Well, it was a fact of physics, and here she was living it out.

  Still, the tea was a comfort.

  Afterwards, she pulled on her sleeping bag and lay down. She ought to try to get some sleep, she knew; God alone knew what the next day was going to bring. She considered filling her bag with water from the tank. In the circumstances, though, the drizzle of radiation seemed the least of her worries.