Moonseed

by Stephen Baxter

  There were shoppers and browsers and people hurrying to and from work, wrapped up in their own concerns, not even seeing Henry unless he all but collided with them. Homeless guys, curled up in the doorways in their sleeping bags, repeating their endless mantras, “Spare some change please…” More of that than he’d expected. He had to step over them sometimes, so crowded were the pavements.

  It seemed unreal.

  Except for lurid headlines on the stands of the local paper, the Evening Standard, and the shimmering rad-ponchos everywhere, there was no sign of what was coming down in the north of the country. As if the Earth was flat and infinite, the stars just lights in the sky, the future endless and unthreatened. As if some kind of alien nano-bug wasn’t eating up the country.

  It struck him that Britain was an alien country—he was a true foreigner here, common language or not. Britain was geologically placid, hadn’t been seriously invaded since 1066, hadn’t suffered a civil war since the seventeenth century, and had been at peace since 1945. It was hard for him to empathize with what that calm history must do to shape the psyche of the people here.

  For sure, they weren’t going to start panicking just because of a little geological excitement in Scotland.

  He cut down the Strand and found the place he was looking for, a cyber cafe in a side street off the main road. It was a small place but clean and bright and crammed with terminals, but only full to half of its capacity. Maybe all the cybernauts had their own equipment now.

  He bought a coffee and credits and sat down. As he drank the coffee, he realized he couldn’t remember when he’d last eaten.

  He got right back up and went to the counter, and came back with a plateful of sandwiches in plastic boxes, a bag of the potato chips the Brits called crisps, a slab of cake laced with chocolate. As he logged in, he crammed the food in his mouth, chewing mechanically.

  He tried Geena’s E-mail, but she’d evidently changed it again. So that left the chat room.

  Geena and her buddies were already talking to the schoolkids from Iowa or Ohio or wherever the hell it was.

  > My name is Amy Im asking for my brother whose in a diferrent class but hes like whats it like in space

  > This is Brett. It’s hard to answer that question, Amy. You look down at the Earth, and you think, good Lord, how small it looks. You feel strangely the whole time, because there’s no gravity, and you’re confined in your ship or your space station or your space suit. You feel very close to the people with you, your team, even if they aren’t Americans. You miss your family. Amy, you’d even miss your brother,;-).

  > This is Geena. You pass from light, brilliant unfiltered sunlight, into darkness, spangled with stars, and back again, every forty-five minutes. It’s magical. When you come down, that’s what you remember, I think. It’s like going to a magical place, a secret place, that you want to share, that only a few people know about…

  And so on.

  Henry broke in. It was easy enough; NASA only used a few passwords on such occasions.

  > My name’s Henry. I have a question for Mrs. Meacher.

  There was a blank period in the chat room. He, her ex-husband, was the only person on the planet who had ever called Geena that, and then only to needle her.

  > Geena, I’m all right. I’m sure you’d want to know that.

  > Who is this? This is Mrs. Bates. You aren’t in my class.

  > This is Geena. Yes. Yes, I’m glad to know it. Call me. I tried. You won’t believe how these Brits are keeping me dangling. I need your help. How would you put together a mission to get back to the Moon?

  > Who *is* this?

  > This is the Administrator. This session is closing.

  > This is Mrs. Bates. See what you’ve done, you ass-wipe cracker?

  > What time period? A couple of years? This is Geena.

  How long?

  He tried to think it through.

  The propagation of ash and dust in the stratosphere was well modeled, and they had a good handle now on the surface propagation of the stuff. But he didn’t know how the Moonseed would spread in the mantle.

  If they were going to the Moon, they would have to go while they still could, before the launch gantries at Canaveral sank into the sand or tipped into the Atlantic…

  > Try a few weeks.

  > Impossible. I think. I %$33$%

  > This session is cl&%$£$#

  …and he was out of it; the chat room emptied.

  Maybe that was enough. Geena would find a few bright back room guys, see what kind of straw men they could come up with, let the naysayers throw their rocks.

  This was the stuff NASA was good at. Responding to an emergency. It was an organizational tic that irritated the balls off him when he was trying to push his projects through, but now it might be useful.

  If there was a way to get to the Moon fast, NASA would find it.

  He finished his food and stepped outside. The sky had turned pink-gray.

  On a whim, he cut down a couple more streets and walked to the Embankment that lined the northeast bank of the river. The Thames was broad and placid and clean. There was a garden here, cut through by a roadway, and he found a place he could sit and look at Waterloo Bridge and the big modern concrete buildings squatting like toads on the south bank, the Queen Elizabeth Hall and the National Theater.

  The sun had set to the southwest, behind the rooftops of London. The horizon was tinged with a silvery luster. Above that a yellowish haze, like L.A. smog, filled the western sky. The haze changed in color and extent, ranging from a greenish yellow through orange and deep scarlet.

  As he sat there and watched, the dusk crept on, and orange and olive tints washed through the whole of the sky—even to the east, over the river, which shone like copper in the light. Deep scarlet was gathering in the west now, even as the first stars started to appear, directly above him.

  The sunset colors faded for a time, and the deep summer blue filtered down the sky, making it look almost normal. But now a new surge of bloodred seeped into the western sky, and looked set to linger long after the conclusion of a normal sunset.

  Volcano sky. Shit. He’d seen nothing like it since Pinatubo.

  He was getting cold, and he was tired as hell, and he got out of his seat to look for a cab.

  He was due to leave the next day, for Washington. He wondered if he’d ever see Britain again.

  23

  Geena set up a meeting at the Outpost, with Jays Malone and the young missions-operations whiz he knew called Frank Turtle. When she arrived Jays and Frank were already here, sitting at a table with a couple of empty bottles apiece; she ordered a fresh round, with a Diet Coke for herself.

  After introductions the guys resumed their conversation.

  “…We were planning a shit-load of weird stuff before Challenger blew,” said Frank Turtle, talking rapidly, a little nervously, perhaps overawed. “We were going to launch Galileo and Ulysses on Shuttle. Because both of those ships were going to Jupiter—and because the launch window was tight—we’d actually have had two Shuttles on orbit at the same time.

  “Not only that, you’d have had both of those ships with liquid oxygen/hydrogen loads in the payload bay. And we never truly figured how we were going to handle that. We didn’t know how to keep the load topped up on the pad. Would you run cryogenic lines through the skin of the orbiter? And we couldn’t figure out a way to dump it fast enough in case of an abort. For instance you might be flying an RTLS abort, which is a powered fly-around back to the Cape, a hell of an aerobatic maneuver which we’ve never, in fact, tried. And in the middle of this you’d have to dump your forty thousand pounds of LOX and hydrogen, separately.

  “Or what if you do a transatlantic abort and finish up at some airfield in Africa? How are you going to process the stuff there? It takes three days to get the C–130s out there, and in that time you could get an explosive build-up of gases in your payload bay. Well, hell, after Challenger we just never looked at that a
gain…”

  Geena was content to listen for a while, absorbing their personalities, the bar’s atmosphere.

  The Outpost was a beat-up old bar off NASA Road One, not far from the Johnson Space Center. The NASA folk held launch parties and postmission parties here. It was just a low-roofed wooden shack, its walls plastered with aging Shuttle crew signed photos, crew patches and other memorabilia. One of the photos had been airbrushed Soviet-style to remove an unpopular female astronaut from her one and only spaceflight. There was a scuffed shuffleboard deck and a pool table.

  But not everybody was a NASA nut. There were plenty of good old boys who looked like they had their heads on upside down, sitting in a wall around the bar and glowering at strangers, cradling Buds and watching basketball on the noisy TV.

  Geena didn’t particularly like it here. The Outpost was a close, dark wooden box. It was photogenic, and a lot of times you couldn’t move in here for the TV crews. But what depressed her was the sense of antiquity, the walls encrusted with layers of yellowed photos lying over older pictures, like Henry’s geological strata. The Space Age reduced to a nostalgia object.

  But it was inevitable, she supposed; after decades the space program had developed its own history and peculiar human traditions, like everything else people ever did, from baseball to religion to politics.

  Or maybe she was just sour because she didn’t want to be here, that somehow her life was still tangled up with Henry’s.

  Geena studied Frank Turtle. She realized belatedly that Jays’s description of him as “young” was entirely relative. Frank had to be forty-five at least. But he dressed young, which she thought was a good sign, in a crumpled denim jacket and jeans and open shirt, and with a tangled mop of graying black hair over thick Coke-bottle glasses.

  He wore an electronic button-badge showing the Venus explosion, cycling through that startling burst of light every few seconds.

  As he talked, she learned Frank Turtle had done a series of jobs at JSC, getting hands-on experience of space operations by working on Shuttle operations as a mission designer and flight controller. In common with a lot of people here, she suspected he had applied for some of the astronaut recruitment rounds, in his early days. But for the last few years—hell, she realized, more than a decade—he had worked for a department called the Solar System Exploration Division; and, with his buddies, Frank’s job was to blue-sky the future. If you had to get to Mars in a decade—how would you do it? NASA had to be positioned to answer questions like that, when the call came, and that was Frank’s job.

  Of course NASA had been waiting for that call since 1969, and it hadn’t come yet. But Frank and his like were still prepared, constructively dreaming, ready to respond.

  A lot of careers got kind of stuck at NASA. There was a shit-load of recruitment back in the early 1960s, when NASA ramped up for Apollo, and a lot of those guys were still around now. They liked to work for NASA, and there was really nowhere else for them to go anyhow, and even with all the downsizing over the years it was still difficult for the federal government to shed people from a place like JSC. So here they all are, aging Boomers, getting older and grayer and using up space; and here was Frank’s generation, in the line behind them, no doubt creating their own logjam in the resource pool.

  “…So,” Frank said to her now, wiping a spume of Coors from his mouth. “You want to talk about going to the Moon. Why the hell?”

  Because my ex-husband thinks the world is going to end. “I can’t really say right now,” she said.

  “It’s something to do with the stuff they’re calling the Moonseed, isn’t it?” Frank smiled. “We ain’t dumb, you know.”

  “I’m sorry—”

  “That’s okay.” He held up his hands. “Frankly I’m more interested in getting us back there than why the hell we go. If you came up with a reason, good for you. Now. Jays said you’re looking at a fast return.”

  “Yes.”

  “How fast? Ten years, five?”

  “Try five weeks.”

  Frank held her gaze for a few seconds, letting that sink in.

  “You think it’s impossible,” she said.

  “Have I said that?” He sat back and studied her. “I do wonder if you know what you’re asking for. With all respect.”

  “You know,” Jays Malone growled, “we’re farther from the fucking Moon now than we were in 1961.”

  “There are certainly a lot of barriers,” Frank said. “In a way Apollo fooled us. Apollo wasn’t a lunar exploration system. All Apollo could do was deliver two guys to a place on the near side of the Moon, not too far from the equator, for three days, at a certain time in the lunar morning. And that was it, and even for that you had to fire off a Saturn V every time. There was no real expansion capability, no logical follow-up.”

  “Von Braun was right,” Jays grumbled. “They should have built the fucking Nova. Forty million pounds of thrust, six times the Saturn V. So big you’d have had to launch it from a barge in the Atlantic. If we had the Nova we’d have been on Mars by now.”

  Oh, Christ, Geena thought. Back to the Sixties.

  “We had it all,” Jays went on, “and we threw it away. You know, even when Armstrong landed on the Moon, Nixon was ripping apart the space program. NASA worked up a plan that would have had fifty people on the Moon by 1980, Americans on Mars by 1985. Instead it took twelve years after Armstrong to get the Shuttle to orbit, and NASA could start campaigning for the next step, the Space Station.”

  “A reason for us all to keep our jobs,” Frank said dryly.

  “Well, Reagan said it should be built by 1994. And there would have been an orbital transfer vehicle—”

  “Yeah, the OTV,” Frank said to Geena. “Now if we had that, we really would be able to get to the Moon quickly. The OTV would have ferried people between low Earth orbit and geostationary, where they put the comsats.” He smiled. “You know, I was there when Michael Duke and Wendell Mendell had their epiphany, as they called it. They figured it takes almost the same energy to go from LEO to GEO as it does to go from LEO, all the way to the Moon. So if we had the OTV, we’d be able to get back to the Moon. That was the start of the Lunar Underground…”

  Geena had actually been part of that: she’d attended a workshop in Los Alamos in 1984, and then a symposium in Washington, D.C. The bright-eyed enthusiasts there, mixed in with a few Apollo-era vets like Duke and Mendell, didn’t attempt to justify a lunar return. They just assumed it would happen, probably by the mid–90s, when Station and the OTV gave the country the capability again. It was a lot of fun, even if, to Geena, most of it was utterly unrealistic.

  Still, she remembered now with an odd tug of nostalgia, it was at the Washington symposium that she’d first met Henry. A wild-eyed geologist with some kind of sketched-out scheme for extended lunar colonies, self-sufficient cities of lunar glass big enough for thousands of people, fueled by all the ice he believed existed at the Poles. Even then he talked about terraforming the Moon.

  Those eager youngsters lobbied hard, and got NASA to set up an Office of Exploration which looked at ways to return to the Moon and push on to Mars.

  “We spent years devising mission architectures,” said Frank, nostalgically. “All those imaginary voyages. Christ, we could have piled up the vu-graphs we generated and just climbed to the Moon.”

  “But then came Challenger,” Jays said brutally. “And that was the end of that.”

  “Yeah. We didn’t even fly again for two years. And all the plans we had were frozen…”

  “I was there when Bush made that speech at the Air and Space Museum,” Jays said. “Twenty years after Apollo 11. The Space Exploration Initiative. We’d finish the Station, go back to the Moon, on to Mars. But we screwed ourselves. NASA came up with a report that said it would take half a trillion dollars to get to Mars. And Congress killed it, zeroed out the budget by ’91, ’92. The OTV was canceled—”

  “They even killed off the Lunar Polar Orbiter,” Frank
said. “An unmanned probe, that we’d been studying for twenty years. What a waste.”

  “Which is why I say,” Jays said to Geena, “we’re farther away from the Moon than we were in 1961…”

  Geena leaned forward. “Okay. I heard how cruel life is. I heard how hard it is to achieve this. Now tell me how we do it.”

  Frank looked up at her. “Five weeks?”

  “Five weeks.”

  His eyes, hooded by his thick spectacles, narrowed.

  “The logic of how you get to the Moon hasn’t changed since 1969,” said Frank Turtle.

  Frank started sketching on the back of a napkin: schematic mission profiles with the Earth shown as a flat floor, the Moon as a ceiling above it, and little rockets and landers clambering between the two, like medieval angels flying between Heaven and a flat Earth.

  “You need some way to get to Earth orbit, or beyond. Then you need some kind of transfer vehicle, to drive you to the Moon. You need a habitat to sustain you on the journey. And you need some kind of lunar lander, like Apollo’s, to drop you to the surface and bring you back up again. For an extended stay you probably need to double all that, to drop a shelter or surface-stay resources in place.

  “Now, Earth’s gravity well is deep. If you want to send a ton to the Moon, you need to throw seven tons from Earth’s surface, most of it lox propellant. Which is why we needed a Saturn V for Apollo.

  “But today we don’t have a Saturn V, a heavy-lift capability. The Shuttle’s payload capability is a fraction of Saturn’s. You’d need four Shuttle launches for every lunar mission, or some similar number with low-payload expendables. Like our Titan IV, the Russians’ Proton, the Europeans’ Ariane—”

  Jays said, “If we’d built the National Launch System, we’d have heavy-lift now. But they canned that in ’92.”