Phase Space

by Stephen Baxter

  ‘Bado. Look up.’

  ‘Huh?’ Bado has to tip back on his heels to do it.

  The sky above is black, empty of stars; his pupils are closed up by the dazzle of the sun, and the reflection of the pale-brown lunar surface. But he can see the Earth, a fat crescent.

  And there, crossing the zenith, is a single, brilliant, unwinking star. It is Apollo, in lunar orbit.

  A cloud of debris surrounds the craft, visible even from here, a disk as big as a dime held at arm’s length.

  Slade touches his shoulder. ‘Come on, boy,’ Slade says gently. ‘We’ve got work to do.’

  After the EVA, back in the LM, Bado has to ask Slade to help him take off his gloves. His exposed hands are revealed to be almost black, they are so bruised.

  They get out of their suits. Bado climbs into a storage bag, to catch the rain of sooty Moondust, and strips down to his long johns.

  After a meal, they sling their Beta-cloth hammocks across the LM’s cramped cabin. Bado climbs into his hammock. Without his suit, and in the Moon’s weak gravity, he weighs only twenty-five pounds or so; the hammock is like a feather bed. Slade, above him, barely makes a dint in his hammock.

  It is dark. They have pulled blinds down over the triangular windows. Bado is inside a cosy little tent on the Moon, with the warmth of Slade’s body above him, and with the thumps and whirs of the LM’s systems around him.

  But he can’t sleep.

  In his mind’s eye, Al Pond dies again.

  It is before the landing. Just after separation, of LM and CSM, in lunar orbit.

  Inside the Lunar Module, Bado and Slade stand side by side, strapped in their cable harnesses. In front of Bado’s face is a small triangular window. It is marked with the spidery reticles that will guide them to landfall on the Moon. Through the window Bado can see the CSM: the cylindrical Service Module, with its big bell of a propulsion system nozzle stuck on the back, and the squat cone of the Command Module on the top.

  Drenched in sunlight, Apollo is like a silvery toy, set against the Moon’s soft tans.

  Bado can picture Al Pond, who they have left alone in the Command Module.

  Pond calls over, ‘You guys take it easy down there.’

  ‘We will,’ says Slade. ‘And we’ll clean up before we come back. We don’t want to get Moondust all over your nice clean ship.’ It is the kind of iffy thing Slade is prone to saying, Bado thinks.

  ‘You better not,’ calls Pond. ‘ … Hey. I got an odd smell in here.’

  Bado and Slade glance at each other, within their bubble helmets.

  Slade says, ‘What kind of smell?’

  ‘Not unpleasant. Sharp. Like autumn leaves after an early frost. You know?’

  That could be smoke, Bado thinks.

  ‘I got a couple of lights on the ECU control panel,’ Pond calls now. ‘I’ll go take a look.’ His voice gets muffled. ‘Okay. I got the ECU panel.’ This is a small, sharp-edged metal panel, just underneath the commander’s couch; lithium hydroxide air-scrub canisters are stored in there. ‘I can’t see nothing. But that smell is strong. Ow.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘The metal handle. I burned my hand. Okay. I got it open. About a foot length of the cabling in here is just a charred mess. Blackened. And there are bits of melted insulation floating around the compartment. Oh. I can see flames,’ Pond calls distantly. ‘But they’re almost invisible. It’s kind of like a blue ball, with yellow flashes at the edge, where the flame is eating away at the cabling. Man, it’s beautiful.’

  Fire in zero gravity, fed only by diffusion, is efficient; there is little soot, little smoke. Hard to detect, even to see or smell.

  There are miles of wires and cables and pipes behind the walls of the Command Module’s pressurized cabin. The fire could have got anywhere, Bado realizes.

  Solenoids rattle. Slade is firing the LM’s reaction thrusters.

  Bado asks, ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘Backing off.’

  The LM responds crisply.

  ‘I fetched an extinguisher,’ Pond calls. ‘Woah.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I got me a ball of flame. Maybe a foot across. It just came gushing out of the hatchway. It’s a soft blue. It’s floating there.’

  The two craft pass into the shadow of the Moon.

  Pond has fallen quiet.

  Bado leans into his window. The silvery tent of the Command Module looks perfect, gleaming, as it recedes.

  There is a small docking window, set in the nose of the CSM. Through this window Bado sees a bright light, like a star.

  A human hand beats against the glass of the docking window.

  The Command Module’s hull bursts, abruptly, silently. There is a single sheet of flame, blossoming around the hull. Then black gas billows out, condensing to sparkling ice in an instant.

  The silver hull is left crumpled, stained black.

  Bado keeps doing mental sums, figuring their remaining consumables.

  He looks at his watch. They are already half-way through their nine-hour sleep period.

  He thinks about the mission. They have christened the landing site Fay Crater, after Bado’s wife. And their main objective for the flight is another crater a few hundred yards to the west that they’ve named after Bado’s daughter, Pam. Surveyor 8, an unmanned robot probe, set down in Pam Crater a couple of years ago; the astronauts are here to sample it.

  Now they are here, Bado thinks bleakly, those names don’t seem such a smart idea. Bado doesn’t want to think about Fay and the kids.

  Slade, of course, doesn’t have a family, and offered no names at the mission planning sessions.

  One of the LM’s cooling pumps changes pitch with a bang.

  Slade whispers from above. ‘Bado. You awake, man?’

  Bado snaps back, ‘I am now.’

  ‘That goddamn suit was killing me,’ Slade says.

  ‘How so?’

  ‘I think the leg is too short. The left leg. Every time I walked it pulled down on my shoulder like a ton weight.’

  Bado laughs. ‘We’ll have to fix it before the next EVA.’

  ‘Yeah. Hey, Bado.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘You ever read any science fiction?’

  ‘What science fiction?’

  ‘Think about what we got here. A dead world. And two people, stranded on it.’

  ‘So what?’

  ‘Maybe we don’t have to just die. Maybe we can populate the Moon.’ He laughs. ‘Adam and Eve on the Moon, that’s us.’

  Bado feels anger and fear. Again it’s the kind of iffy thing Slade is always saying. He wants to lash out. ‘Oh, fuck you, Slade.’

  Slade sighs. Bado can see him shifting in his hammock. ‘You know, you fit right in with this job, Bado. We’re not supposed to be humans, are we? And I truly believe that you’re more afraid that I’m going to grab your ass than of what happens when the goddamn oh-two runs out, in a couple of days from now. Listen, Bado. I’m cold, man.’

  ‘Fuck you.’

  Slade’s voice rises, brittle. ‘We’re two human beings, Bado, stuck here in this goddamn tin-foil box on the Moon, and we’re going to die. I’m cold and I’m scared. Al Pond had to die alone –’

  ‘Fuck you, Slade.’

  Slade laughs. ‘Ah, the hell with you,’ he says eventually. He turns over in his hammock, swings his legs over, and floats to the floor. He sits on the ascent engine cover. His face is in shadow as he looks in at Bado. ‘So. You going to help me with this leg, or what?’

  Bado gets out of his own hammock and folds it away. Slade hauls on the layers of his pressure suit. Bado kneels down in front of Slade and starts unpicking the cords laced around Slade’s calf. To adjust the suit’s fitting, he will have to unknot every cord, loosen it a little, and retie it.

  It takes about an hour. They don’t say anything to each other.

  They prepare for their second, final EVA. Their traverse is a misshapen circle which will take them arou
nd several craters. They will follow the timeline in the spiral-bound checklists on their cuffs.

  They climb easily out of Fay Crater. They both carry tool pallets, containing their TV camera, rock hammers and core tubes, Baggies for Moon rocks.

  Bado has worked out an effective way to move. It is more of a giraffe-lope than a run. It is like bounding across a stream; he is suspended at the peak of each step. And every time he lands a little spray of dust particles sails off in perfect arcs, like tiny golf balls.

  On the hoof, Bado tries to give the guys on the ground a little field geology. ‘Everything’s covered in dust. It’s all kind of reduced, you can see only the faintest of shadings. But here I can see a bigger rock, the size of a football maybe and about that shape. Zap pits on every side, and I can see green and white crystals sticking out of it. Feldspar, maybe, or olivine…’

  Nobody is going to come up here to collect the samples they are carefully assembling. Not in a hundred years. But the geology back-room guys will get something out of his descriptions.

  Slade is whistling as he runs. He says, ‘Up one crater and over another. I feel like a kid again. Like I’m ten years old. All that weight – it’s just gone. What do you think, huh, Bado? Now we’re out and moving again, maybe this isn’t such a bad deal. Maybe a day on the Moon is worth a hundred on Earth.’

  They take a break.

  Bado looks back east, the way they have come. He can see the big, shallow dip in the land that is Fay Crater, with the LM resting at its centre like a toy in the palm of some huge hand. Two sets of footsteps come climbing up out of Fay towards them, like footsteps on a beach after a tide.

  His mouth is dry as sand; he’d give an awful lot for an ice-cool glass of water, right here and now.

  ‘Adam and Eve, huh,’ Slade says now.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Maybe it will work out that way after all. We’re changing the Moon, just by being here. We’re three hundred pounds of organic stuff, dropped on the Moon, and crawling with life: gut bacteria, and cold viruses, and –’

  ‘What are you saying?’

  ‘Maybe there will be enough raw material to let life get some kind of a grip here. When we’ve gone. Life survives in a lot of inhospitable places, back home. Volcano mouths, and the ocean deeps.’

  ‘Adam and Eve,’ Bado says. ‘I choose Adam.’

  Slade laughs. ‘You got it, man.’

  They lope on, to the west. Bado can hear Slade’s breath, loud in his ears.

  Bado thinks about Slade.

  Everyone in the astronaut office knows about Slade. And Bado came in for some joshing when the crew roster for this flight was announced. Three days on the Moon? Better make sure you take your K-Y jelly, man.

  Bado defended Slade. None of that stuff mattered a damn to his piloting abilities.

  Anyhow, outside the Agency Slade is painted as the bachelor boy. He has even put up with getting his photograph taken with girls on his arm.

  Noone knows, the Agency assured Bado. Noone will think anything questionable concerning you.

  Slade stops. He says, ‘Hey. We’re here.’ He points.

  Bado looks up.

  He has, he realizes, reached the rim of Pam Crater. In fact he is standing on top of its dune-like, eroded wall. And there, planted in the crater’s centre, is the Surveyor. It is less than a hundred yards from him. It is a squat, three-legged frame, bristling with fuel tanks, batteries, antennae and sensors, and its white paint has turned tan.

  Bado sets the TV camera on its stand. Slade hops down into Pam Crater, spraying lunar dust ahead of him.

  Slade takes a pair of cutting shears from his tool carrier, gets hold of the Surveyor’s TV camera, and starts to chop through the camera’s support struts and cables. ‘Just a couple of tubes,’ he says. ‘Then that baby’s mine.’

  The camera comes loose, and Slade grips it in his gloves. He whoops.

  ‘Outstanding,’ Bado says. He knows that for Slade, getting to the Surveyor, grabbing a few pieces of it, is the finish line for the mission.

  Slade lopes out of the crater. Bado watches his partner. Slade looks like a human-shaped beach ball, his suit brilliant white, bouncing happily over the beach-like surface of the Moon.

  Bado thinks of a human hand, pressing silently against the window of a burning capsule.

  He is experiencing emotions he doesn’t want to label.

  ‘Hey, Slade,’ Bado says.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Come here, man.’

  Slade obediently floats over to him, and waits. He has one glove up over his chest, obscuring the tubes which connect his backpack to his oxygen and water inlets. His white oversuit is covered in dust splashes.

  Carefully, clumsily, Bado pushes up Slade’s gold sun visor. Inside he can see Slade’s face, with its four-day growth of beard. He touches Slade’s suit, brushing dust off the umbilical tubes. Patiently, Slade submits to this grooming.

  Then Bado gets hold of Slade’s shoulders with his pressurized gloves. He pulls Slade against his chest. Slade hops forward, into his embrace. Bado puts his arm over the Stars and Stripes on Slade’s left shoulder, but he can’t get his arms all the way around his partner.

  Their faceplates touch. Slade grins, and when he speaks Bado can hear his voice, like an echo of the radio, transmitted directly through their bubble helmets. ‘Get you,’ Slade says softly. ‘Aren’t you afraid I’m going to make a grab for your dick?’

  ‘I figure I’m safe locked up in this suit.’

  Slade laughs.

  For a while they stay together, like two embracing balloons, on the surface of the Moon.

  They break.

  The TV camera sits on its tripod, its black lens fixed on them.

  Bado takes a geology hammer and smashes the camera off its stand.

  Bado stands harnessed in his place beside Slade. In his grimy pressure suit he feels bulky, awkward.

  Slade says, ‘Ascent propulsion system propellant tanks pressurized.’

  ‘Roger.’

  ‘Ascent feeds are open, shut-offs are closed.’

  The capcom calls up. ‘Everything looks good. We want the rendezvous radar mode switch in LGC just as it is on surface fifty-nine … We assume the steerable is in track mode auto.’

  Bado replies, ‘Stop, push-button reset, abort to abort stage reset.’

  Slade pushes his buttons. ‘Reset.’ He grins at Bado.

  The guys on the ground are playing their part well, Bado thinks. So far it is all being played straight-faced, as they work together through the comforting rituals of the checklists.

  The Agency must have decided that the crew has finally gone crazy. Bado wonders how much of this will ever become public.

  Looking at the small, square instrument panel in front of him, Bado can see that the ascent stage is powered up now, no longer drawing any juice from the lower-stage’s batteries. The ascent stage is preparing to become an independent spacecraft for the first time. He feels obscurely sorry for it. It isn’t going to fly any more than he is.

  ‘One minute,’ the capcom says.

  ‘Got the steering in the abort guidance,’ Slade says.

  Bado arms the ignition. ‘Okay, master arm on.’

  ‘Rog.’

  ‘You’re go, Apollo,’ says the capcom.

  ‘Clear the runway.’ Slade turns to Bado. ‘You sure you want to do this?’

  Actually, Bado is scared as hell. He really, really doesn’t want to die.

  ‘Adam and Eve?’ he asks.

  ‘Adam and Eve. This is the best way, man. A chance to leave something behind.’

  Bado makes himself grin. ‘Then do it, you fairy.’

  Slade nods, inside his bubble helmet. ‘Okay. At five seconds I’m going to hit ABORT STAGE and ENGINE ARM. And you’ll hit PROCEED.’

  ‘Roger,’ says Bado. ‘I’ll tell you how I’d think of you, man.’

  Slade looks at him again.

  ‘Out there,’ Bado says. ‘Floating
across the face of the Moon, in all that sunlight. That’s how I’d remember you.’

  Slade nods. He looks at his instruments. ‘Here we go. Nine. Eight. Seven.’

  The computer display in front of Bado flashes a ‘99’, a request to proceed.

  Slade closes the master firing arm. ‘Engine arm ascent.’

  Bado has been through enough sims of this sequence. In a moment there should be a loud bang, a rattle around the floor of the cabin: pyrotechnic guillotines, blowing away the nuts, bolts, wires and water hoses connecting the upper and lower stages of the LM.

  But they have disabled the guillotines.

  Bado presses the PROCEED button.

  The cabin starts to rattle. The ascent stage engine has ignited, but its engine bell is still buried within the guts of the LM’s descent stage.

  The over-pressure builds up quickly.

  Slade says, ‘I think –’

  But there is no more time.

  The ascent stage bursts open, like an aluminium egg, there on the surface of the Moon. Sunlight drenches Bado’s face.

  MARTIAN AUTUMN

  I will tell the story much as I set it out in my journal at the time. Old-fashioned, I know. But I can’t think of any better way to tell how it happened to me.

  If there is anybody to read it.

  Bob ran one last check of his skinsuit. He did this without thinking, an ingrained habit for a fourteen-year-old born on Mars. Then, following Lyall, he let the lock run through its cycle, and he stepped out of the tractor and onto Martian dirt.

  This was Isidis Planitia, a great basin that straddled Mars’s northern plains and ancient southern highlands. It was late afternoon, a still day at the start of the long, languid Martian autumn. Everything was a cruddy red-brown: the dirty sky, the lines of shallow dunes lapping against the walls of an enclosing crater.

  A cloud of camera fireflies hovered around his head. The moment was newsworthy, Mars’s youngest resident visiting the oldest. Bob ignored the flies. They had followed him around all his life.