Phase Space

by Stephen Baxter

  The stars were coming out now, pushing through the remnants of the blue blanket of day. It was a good clear night: no rain, a light dew and the weather girl said there’d be no fall-out threat.

  … I am saying that we have to be prepared! If America is going to survive in this tough old world she has to show that she’s prepared to meet any threat, to fight to the last with utter inhibition, whenever she’s asked to.

  Ladies and gentlemen, we won the Cold War with Project Control. Now I’m asking you to endorse our next great task, the demonstration of our will to all of Africa and Asia and Europe: the Sunday Punch …

  LeMay was offering Burdick the chance to return to the Moon. Now, that would be a hell of a thing. Burdick wasn’t too old to fly. Such was the demand for experienced astronauts, with more than sixty Shuttle flights a year, there were plenty of creaky veterans older than Burdick still scooting about up there, including his old buddy Harry Singer, for instance, now so racked by calcium depletion – so they said, anyhow – that he couldn’t come back down again.

  It would be interesting to see the Earth from space again. They sent up Walter Cronkite himself a year ago, when they inaugurated the new Shuttle fleet: fully reusable now, with the DC-10-sized orbiter riding to space on the back of a 747-sized winged booster, just like the first designs back in ’69 before the Congressional budget-choppers got ahold of the programme. It had been a hell of a thing to hear that familiar dark brown voice booming down from orbit.

  But Cronkite’s descriptions of the Earth – the scarred steppes of Asia, the smoking rubble of eastern Europe, even the spreading darkness at the heart of America’s own cities – didn’t coincide much with his own recollections. Cronkite even claimed to have seen, from orbit, the destruction of Sioux City, Burdick’s own home town, by rebelling students and anarchists. It was a little hard to verify such things. The news was pretty heavily censored these days, for valid reasons of national security.

  Still, Pax Americana somehow hadn’t worked out quite the way everyone thought.

  Anyhow it was too late for Burdick. His time had come and gone. He was content to watch, now.

  And besides –

  Sunday Punch. That cosmonaut defector he’d brought down from orbit, Sergei Kozlov, sent him long letters about the dangers of the project.

  … You aren’t like these others, my friend, these young ones in their un-American uniforms. You must see that some of them actually want it all to end – to pull down the house – to destroy all the little people, dirty and squabbling and unpredictable, who don’t understand their giant schemes …

  Hell, Burdick wasn’t qualified to judge what Kozlov said. Kozlov was just some Russian who’d grabbed the opportunity to stay in the US, when it came to him, with both hands. He’d even managed to get his family out before the Chinese invasion and all hell finally broke loose over there.

  But Burdick had to admit to a few doubts himself, deep in his gut. There were always unexpected consequences, of whatever you did.

  Anyhow here came the Lockheed PowerStar: a brilliant flare of light, like a high-flying plane, climbing steadily over the dome of the sky.

  It was time. He called Fay. She came out with more lemonade, and settled down beside him.

  The power station was a rectangle of black solar cells, twenty miles long and four wide, with a cluster of Shuttle External Tank hab modules bolted to its spine, as productive as ten nuke plants, so relieving the lack of Mid-East gas that had half-crippled the economy for two decades now.

  Pretty soon, it was said, the US wouldn’t need the rest of the planet at all.

  If Burdick had one regret about his retirement it was that he hadn’t got up to orbit to see them putting the plant together, working the beam builders as they extruded their three-hundred yard lengths of foamed steel. It had made for great TV.

  And there was a little firefly spark, climbing up the sky, right alongside the power plant: the orbiter Eagle II, commanded by Tom Gibson, carrying Burdick’s only son Philip on his first spaceflight. A hell of a thing: two generations of Burdicks, climbing into space.

  The rookies seemed to be getting younger every year, to Burdick. Phil Jr was only 22. Well, it was an expansive programme. It ate up crew members.

  Unexpected consequences.

  Sunday Punch was such a damn huge blow, who could say what the consequences would be? Certainly not Burdick.

  Not that he admitted as much to Sergei Kozlov, or Fay, or anyone else. He’d learned to keep a lot of his thoughts to himself. It was a lesson he’d learned on the surface of the Moon, in the rubble of Apollo 11. There were some things better left unsaid. Truth was just another weapon anyhow.

  He watched as the PowerStar slid down the sky, taking Phil’s slowly converging orbiter with it, until it was lost in the deep blue haze on the horizon.

  He sipped his lemonade. He could feel dew on his cheeks already. It made his skin-cancer scars itch.

  He could always stay out another ninety minutes until Phil came round the Earth again. But it was kind of cold.

  Fay had fallen asleep anyhow, her careworn face slack, the shadows on her lined face like pools of black oil.

  September 1997:

  The Florida beach was empty. The sand was hard and flat. A little way inland, there was a row of scrub pines, maybe ten feet tall. The moonlight shadows at their roots were like pools of black oil.

  Burdick limped south.

  The Moon, to the east, was fat and full, its silver light glimmering off the hide of the Atlantic. To Burdick, here in the grass, the Moon looked like it always had, when it had floated over the Iowa farm of his boyhood, when he’d gone barnstorming over those ash-grey plains with Harry Singer.

  But not much longer, he supposed. Not if that old Sunday Punch worked like it was supposed to.

  The wind was coming off the ocean. It wasn’t cold, but he shivered anyhow, as he thought of the fallout shit it was probably blowing over him, across the sea from Asia. But he was wearing his facemask, and the easterly wind ought to keep the Canaveral crap away from him anyhow.

  A flatbed truck had been crudely parked in the dune grass. Burdick could see its tracks, snaking back over the sand. And here were scuff marks where some kind of equipment had been hauled off the back and over the sand, down towards the water.

  It looked like Kozlov had been telling the truth about coming down here, whatever he was planning.

  Burdick wondered what the hell he was doing here, standing in a radioactive sea breeze, on the night of Sunday Punch. But then, he had no place else much to go, not since the Chinese shot down Columbia II, with Phil aboard, and Fay had followed him to the grave soon after. The house in Iowa, his lawn, lost its appeal after that, and he started drifting. But there were travel restrictions in place across the country, and after the Guatemalans took out San Antonio, with a nuke on an old Soviet SS-25, you weren’t allowed in or out of Texas at all.

  Difficult times. Oddly, through his enigmatic, disjointed letters, Kozlov, the old enemy, had come to seem a friend.

  Anyhow, here he was.

  Singing came drifting up from the water’s edge: thick and heavy, like black Russian bread. The voice of an old man. Something going on down there. Somebody moving around, silhouetted by moonlight, a heavy bear of a man hauling tubes and rods and clamps, singing softly, building something.

  Equipment was scattered on the young sand. Fat white tubes, pieces of some kind of scaffolding, a little electronic gear. What looked like a small refrigerator, a massive metal box, sitting there in the sand casting a long Moon shadow.

  ‘Sergei.’

  The singing stopped. The bear figure straightened up, showing no surprise. ‘Ah. Dobry vyechir.’

  ‘The Moon – luna – eta ochin kraseeva.’

  He could see Kozlov’s broad, weather-beaten face split into a grin. ‘Very beautiful. I expected you.’

  ‘Yeah.’ And somehow, Burdick had expected to find just this: Sergei Kozlov building some
kind of rocket, here on an American beach.

  Burdick took his gun from his pocket. A Saturday-night special, point 22. He limped forward, over sand that crunched under his feet.

  Kozlov looked at the gun. ‘Oh, Philip. Kak zhal. That such a weapon should lie between us.’

  ‘What the hell are you doing here, Sergei? This looks like a rocket.’

  ‘It is a rocket. A bath-tub rocket. The heart is a block of sugar, encased in this tubing, my central core and strap-on boosters. Nitrous oxide passes down a hollowed centre, for oxidizer. Fibreglass tubes, and sugar for fuel. A fantasy of small-town America. Workshop rockets into space. Not even expensive. And yet this rocket of mine can reach orbit.’

  Burdick kept the gun up. ‘Are you crazy? What are you going to do, shoot down the fucking Shuttle?’

  Kozlov bent, stiffly, and stroked the white metal box. ‘The payload,’ he said. ‘It is a gene bank. Do you know what that means?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Spores. Dehydrated. Shielded against the radiation of space. This little capsule will last a thousand years, in its high orbit, protecting its fragile cargo. And then it will drift down to Earth. It has a crude but effective heatshield. Oak, actually, as the Chinese use. The capsule is designed to burst open in the air, releasing its microscopic passengers, to scatter on the wind.’

  ‘Spores? Why? What’s the point?’

  Kozlov looked up at the Moon, where black-uniformed Americans, volunteers all, were circling and watching, Tom Gibson and Harry Singer amongst them, waiting for this ultimate demonstration to the world – hell, the solar system – of American competence and will. Kozlov said, ‘But didn’t your heart lift, as you walked on that ancient landscape?’

  ‘Nothing there but rocks. What use is the Moon, except for this?’

  ‘Undoubtedly, you are correct,’ Kozlov said sourly. ‘After Sunday Punch, at last we squabbling Asiatics and Europeans and Africans will throw down our arms, shed our centuries of racial and religious division, and accept your cold logic. How right you were never even to attempt to understand us! Perhaps even your own people will accept that logic, beyond the diminishing minority who are protected by these new black-leather police and soldiers of yours. All human problems will be solved, for all time.

  ‘Of course, you are correct. So shoot me now, Philip, for I am only a foolish old man who might endanger your great project. However –’

  ‘What?’

  ‘You have always known,’ Kozlov said. ‘About the Eagle. The unfortunate incident which destroyed Armstrong and Aldrin, so long ago. Even we could see the truth, through the grimy lenses of the Lunokhod.’

  ‘That there was no bomb.’

  ‘No Soviet sabotage.’ Kozlov worked his shoulders. ‘A simple malfunction.’

  ‘Yeah …’

  The Eagle has landed, Armstrong had called.

  Burdick had been in the Viewing Area in back of Mission Control, just a rookie, jammed in with astronauts and brass and dignitaries and relatives, looking out over rows of controllers, just young guys, sweating through their shirts. It was only a few seconds after the landing, and the descent engine had just shut down, up there on the Moon, and most everybody was still cheering Armstrong’s words.

  But Burdick could see something, in the set of the shoulders of TELMU, the Lunar Module controller.

  Pressure and temperature were rising in one of the descent stage’s fuel lines. There had to be a blockage in there.

  ‘Frozen fuel,’ Kozlov said. ‘A slug in a fuel line. Frozen by liquid helium.’

  ‘Yeah. We had to stand there and watch while the engine heat approached the slug.’

  The fuel was unstable. It was supposed to be. And when that engine heat reached it, that slug would explode like a small grenade.

  The phone lines were open, between the control room and the back rooms and Grumman, the manufacturers out at Bethpage. The Grumman people said to launch immediately in the ascent stage, and leave the problem behind. But the Command Module was in the wrong place for a pickup. Maybe they ought to burp the descent engine, at ten per cent power. But they didn’t know if the LM was tilted. If its attitude was wrong it might just topple over.

  Indecision.

  Okay, said Buzz Aldrin, on the Moon. Okay. It looks like we’re venting the oxidizer now.

  That was all.

  The vox loops went quiet, and the telemetry on all the screens turned ratty and dropped out, and that was all there was.

  ‘We couldn’t exactly conduct a forensic investigation up there, Harry and me,’ Burdick said. ‘But –’

  ‘It was just the fuel line. A simple malfunction.’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘It was nothing to do with us.’ Kozlov smiled. ‘We were not so smart, as to be able to reach to the Moon to disrupt your plans!’

  Burdick shrugged. ‘The lie was simpler. More useful. We were at war, Sergei. I never had a problem with that.’

  ‘I’m sure you didn’t. Even though, in a sense, all of this –’ he waved a hand vaguely ‘– is your fault. If only that fuel-line blockage had melted, if only Apollo 11 had turned into the dull triumph it was supposed to be. If only you’d told the truth. But you do not see that. You are a good man, my friend, in your own way. You always did your duty. It has left you as a lonely old man on a wrecked world, but you always did your duty. And now I am asking you to perform a higher duty.’

  ‘Higher?’

  ‘Help me now. We will build this rocket and fire it off together. Two old fools, relics of a Space Age. Together in the last of the moonlight. Humour me.’

  ‘What do we have to do?’

  ‘Assemble the scaffolding. It is a gantry. You see, we are rebuilding Cape Canaveral, here in the radioactive sands of Florida.’

  Burdick considered, for long seconds.

  He checked his astronaut’s Rolex. There were only a couple of minutes to go anyhow.

  Burdick picked up tubes of steel, and clamps, and started to figure out how it would all fit together.

  They had it half-built when the Sunday Punch went off.

  It was a hell of a thing. You could see it, across a quarter of a million miles, the surface of the Mare Imbrium billowing up into space, as the demonstration planet-buster went off beneath it, a quarter of the Moon’s grey old face convulsing in an instant.

  Much of the material immediately started to fall back into the new crater, a scar glowing yellow-red, but Burdick could see some of it scattering around the rest of the Moon in a huge raying, pounding over those ancient maria. Some of the material dispersed, already cooling, into space.

  ‘So,’ Burdick said to Kozlov. ‘What do you think?’

  Kozlov grinned as he hefted a stabilizer fin. ‘Unexpected consequences. The first rocks will be here in twelve or thirteen hours: the big fellows, tumbling into our gravity well, punching through the atmosphere. And a ring will form around the Earth, fat and dense, blocking the sunlight. The temperatures will drop thirty, forty degrees. The ring will hail out slowly, as tektite meteorites. But the ice will last a thousand years. Perhaps a little less, if we are lucky.’ He shrugged. ‘Something will survive, of course, in the deep rocks and in the ocean ridges. Our capsule carries eukaryotes, multi-cellular organisms –’

  ‘To start the whole damn thing over again.’

  ‘Perhaps they will be lucky: wiser than us, not so wise as you. Come. Help me with this tail section. We have time yet.’

  The two of them laboured on, assembling their rocket, two old men moving slowly and stiffly around the beach, as the moonlight turned blood red.

  WORLDS

  In that Houston sky outside, in the blizzard of possible worlds, there had been small Earths: wizened worlds that reminded her of Mars, with huge continents of glowering red rock. But some of them were huge, monster planets drowned in oceans that stretched from pole to pole. The Moons were different too. The smallest were just bare grey rock like Luna, but the largest were almost Earth-like, showing thi
ck air and ice and the glint of ocean. There were even Earths with pairs of Moons, or triplets. One icebound Earth was surrounded by a glowing ring system, like Saturn’s.

  Kate had found it hard not to flinch; it was like being under a hail of gaudy cannonballs, as the alternate planets flickered in and out of existence in eerie, precise silence.

  SUN-DRENCHED

  Bado crawls backwards out of the Lunar Module.

  When he gets to the ladder’s top rung, Bado takes hold of the handrails and pulls himself upright. The pressurized suit seems to resist every movement; he even has trouble closing his gloved fingers around the rails, and his fingers are sore already.

  He can see the small TV camera which Slade deployed to film his own egress. The camera sits on its stowage tray, on the side of the LM’s descent stage. It peers at him silently.

  He drops down the last three feet, and lands on the foil-covered footpad. A little grey dust splashes up around his feet.

  Bado holds onto the ladder with his right hand and places his left boot on the regolith. Then he steps off with his right foot, and lets go of the LM.

  And there he is, standing on the Moon.

  He hears the hum of pumps and fans in the backpack, feels the soft breeze of oxygen across his face.

  Slade is waiting with his camera. ‘Okay, turn around and give me a big smile. Atta boy. You look great. Welcome to the Moon.’ Bado sees how Slade’s light blue soles and lower legs are already stained dark grey by lunar dust. Bado can’t see Slade’s face, behind his reflective golden sun-visor.

  Bado takes a step. The dust seems to crunch under his weight, like a covering of snow. The LM is standing in a broad, shallow crater. There are craters everywhere, ranging from several yards to a thumbnail width, the low sunlight deepening their shadows.

  Bado feels elated. In spite of everything, in spite of what is to come, he’s walking on the Moon.