Moonseed n-3

by Stephen Baxter

  “Watch me run, when it comes.”

  But the argument was ritual. Sixt knew Blue wasn’t going to move from this spot.

  Radar mounted on the Space Station had shown that the ground was uplifting, slowly but steadily, all across the Midland Valley of Scotland. False colour images showed a bulls-eye shape, ragged circles of increasing altitude. And, as ancient cones belched fire, the deformation was increasing in scale and rate.

  And Blue was right at the centre of things, right at the eye of that NASA false colour storm of new contours.

  Like most geologists, Blue had often chafed at the absurd rapidity of human attention spans, even lifetimes, compared to the slow grandeur of the geological processes he studied. He’d been attracted to volcanism because at least it enabled him to see things happen.

  And today, something strange — even unprecedented — was going to happen. On such a day, with such an event impending, this was the only place to be.

  They made Henry put on a POS, a portable oxygen system, for all of twelve hours before he entered the all-oxygen atmosphere of the EVA suit. The POS was just a face mask, an oxygen bottle, a pressure regulator and a lith hydroxide cartridge to scrub out carbon dioxide. The idea was to flush the nitrogen out of his system, to save him from the bends. After the first couple of hours it was as uncomfortable as hell.

  They were, it seemed, going to have to spacewalk to reach the lander.

  “Spacewalk?” Henry remembered movie images of Apollo astronauts, guys casually swimming through pressurized tunnels to their spacious and comfortable two-stage LM, with its big descent engine for landing, and smaller ascent stage to bring them home, and a cabin big enough to support two men for three days… “This isn’t Apollo, is it?”

  Arkady grinned. “It has been rather necessary to — improvise certain elements.”

  “How reassuring.”

  “But this is how we planned to reach the Moon: a space walk from a Soyuz derivative to a lightweight lander.” Arkady shrugged. “It is not impossible.”

  “But you never tested it out in practice.”

  “Since our launch rockets blew up on the pad, we never got the chance. To my eternal regret. Now. You must suit up.”

  Geena and Arkady began swimming briskly around the orbital compartment, pulling pieces of spacesuit from lockers. These suits were an American design and they looked bulkier and more rigid than the Russian design he’d worn to Earth orbit. There were inner coveralls of what looked like Spandex, and chunky outer suits that came in two halves, top and bottom. The halved suits swam fitfully around the cabin, as if half-alive.

  Arkady helped him prepare. “These are Space Shuttle EVA suits,” he said sternly. “They are called EMUs, for extravehicular mobility units—”

  “How did they know my size?”

  “They don’t,” Geena said stiffly. “One size fits all.”

  Arkady said, “The suit is like an independent spaceship. It will keep you alive for seven hours. Long enough to reach the surface of the Moon, all the way to the old Apollo site, if all goes well.”

  Henry had to strip to his underwear, and he switched from his oxygen mask to a scuba-diver mouthpiece. Arkady helped him climb into his Spandex mesh cooling garment. It was a one-piece affair, with water pipes woven into the fabric, and air ducts fixed to the limbs. It was a struggle to squeeze his legs down through the tight neck.

  When he was done, he had to hook a little rubber loop over each thumb, to stop the undergarment riding up his arms later.

  When he moved, he squeaked. “I feel like the Man from Atlantis.”

  Arkady looked blank. Geena didn’t react, her face white and set as she struggled with her own suit.

  Next came the outer suit. First there was the Lower Torso Unit, so-called, a bulky set of trousers with built-in boots. Arkady held the trousers steady while Henry swam into them.

  And now Arkady held up the Upper Torso Unit, the top half of the suit, complete with built-in backpack and chest computer, lacking only gloves and helmet. Henry had to hold his arms up — the thumb loops dragged at his hands — and slither upwards into the suit, threading his arms into the bulky sleeves. The suit was filled by a stiff polyurethane pressure bladder; it took a real strain before he managed to pull his arms down by his side and force his head through the steel ring at the neck.

  Arkady swam behind him, connecting umbilicals from the backpack to his undergarment. Then he showed Henry how to lock the two suit halves together; steel rings joined with faint clicks, and he pulled a fabric flap down over the joint.

  Arkady lifted a Snoopy-hat communications carrier onto his head, and showed him the instruments mounted on his chest. “This is your display and control module. You see it has a LED display which will warn you of any malfunction. Here is how to adjust the oxygen flow inside your suit…”

  Here came his gloves. There were a range of pairs in the lockers; he tried three or four before finding a pair which fit comfortably. The gloves fitted to his sleeves with a neat little snap-and-lock ring system. There were little rubber fingerpads, evidently to allow him to feel something of the world to which he was about to descend.

  Last came the helmet, a plastic bubble with a snap-on gold-plated visor. There was a sound of closure as Arkady lowered the bubble over his head and snapped it into its place at his neck. He found himself looking out through a wall of plastic that was, he noticed, scuffed and starred, evidently by long use in Earth orbit.

  Arkady showed him how to set the oxygen control switch on his chest to PRESS, and the suit built up an overpressure, so they could check for leaks.

  His ears popped.

  “The suit will preserve you,” Arkady said. Arkady’s face, peering in at him, was subtly distorted, the sound of his voice muffled, his words subtly masked by the gentle whoosh of air around his face. “It is good, mature technology, much better than the old Apollo suits. But you must anticipate problems. Remember the EMU has been designed for spacewalks in Earth orbit, not for Moonwalks. You may find the limbs stiff. And the suit is rather heavier than the Apollo design…”

  Locked in here, it was hard to focus on what Arkady said. He flexed his joints and fingers; they seemed to move well.

  He found he liked the suit, with its little glowing LED display and its snap-and-locks and flaps and zips. It had something of the feel of the interior of a quality car.

  But he wondered if he’d feel the same way after a couple of days inside it.

  He watched Geena. Her motions seemed stiff, a little hurried. But her face was already hidden by her gold visor, and she had become an anonymous snowman in the bulk of the suit, dwarfing Arkady, and Henry couldn’t read her.

  Arkady embraced Geena, and then came to Henry. After a moment’s hesitation, he wrapped his long Russian arms around Henry’s chest and squeezed. Henry could feel the hug, strong human muscles compressing the pressurized bubble he was sealed inside; the human contact was oddly reassuring, even considering who it came from.

  Then Arkady closed up the lockers, grabbed a few pieces of loose equipment, and swam down into the descent module and sealed the hatch behind him.

  Geena turned to a control panel crudely welded to the cabin wall, and twisted a switch. “Pressure to five psi.” Her voice was a flat crackle on the radio loop. He heard a remote hiss, dying rapidly. She turned the switch again. “Press to zero. Put your oxygen switch to EVA.”

  He obeyed. “So,” he said into his microphone. “Where’s the airlock?”

  She said, “We don’t have one.” And she turned to the wall hatch through which, just days before, he had climbed into the Soyuz down at Baikonur, and she twisted its handle, and opened it, to space.

  It was like opening the door of a log cabin on a bright spring day.

  The brightness was extraordinary; the sun was like a thousand-watt spotlight glaring into his helmet. For the first time he understood just how poky and dark the Soyuz had been.

  Geena fixed a thin tether to
a loop at her waist, and swam, without speaking, out of the airlock. Henry watched her feet disappear from his view.

  He pushed his head out of the hatch. A spray of metallic, glittering dust swarmed out around him, along with a couple of screws, a sheet of paper, a pencil.

  The curved green wall of the Soyuz was beneath him, a comforting anchor. Beyond that he could see the Moon, its cratered surface curving away from him in every direction, its details as sharp in the low sunlight as if it was a model just a few feet away, as if he could reach out and touch it.

  Away from that, there was nothing. The sky was utterly black, save only for the tiny blue splash of Earth. He couldn’t look directly at the sun; it was a mere source of light which failed to dispel the blackness beyond, a blackness, he realized, which went on forever. After the enclosure of the Soyuz, the change in scale was profound.

  He felt his lunch rising in his throat, and he really, truly did not want that to go any further in a pressure suit helmet. So he closed his eyes and hugged the wall of the ship, and tried to tell himself he was safe and snug, inside the stinking interior of the Soyuz, crammed between the wall and Arkady’s bony body…

  Geena could feel the oxygen blowing across her face, hear the warm hums and whirs of her backpack. She looked down at the bottle-green skin of the Soyuz. She could see — a mundane detail — that here and there the paint was bubbled, from the heat of the attitude thrusters.

  And when she looked along the cylindrical length of the Soyuz, she could see at one extreme the big, soft-looking contour of the strapped-on heatshield that was supposed to aerobrake them back to Earth orbit, and at the other, strapped to the hull, the angular, spidery form of the little lunar lander.

  She began to make her way towards the lander, hand over gloved hand, following holds built into the hull of the Soyuz. A tether trailed behind her. She felt her legs dangle behind her, inert and useless in the pressurized suit; the exertion sent a familiar warmth spreading through her arms and hands as she pulled herself along.

  It was just like the three EVAs she had made from Station in Earth orbit, she told herself. Or just like the sims she had done in the Vomit Comet, or the big weightless training facility, the pool at Ellington AFB…

  Except it wasn’t.

  There was no Earth looming alongside the craft like a blue wall of ocean and cloud, huge and enclosing; nor was there the feel of water around her, the murky forms of swimmers to assist her.

  When she raised her head from the metal surface before her, when she looked around, there was nothing. And if she let go, she felt, she was going to fall, all the way back down to that blue floor far below, like a trick diver aiming for a bathtub from a telegraph pole.

  “Hey.”

  She looked down. The upper half of Henry’s pressure suit, sharply lit, was protruding from the hatch; with his gloved hands he was paying out her tether.

  Henry said, “You look as if you’re going to leave fingerprints in that handrail.”

  When she looked to the hull before her, she could see how her hands had wrapped themselves around a rail.

  With an effort of will, she released the tension in her hands. The stiff gloves made her fingers pop open, as if spring-loaded.

  She turned to the blackness. It was just so damn dark out there.

  There had been no real training for this mission. None of the endless hours in the sims she’d endured during her Shuttle and Station training, so much simulation that the real thing had seemed somehow a disappointment by comparison.

  But she’d always understood the real purpose of all those sims. It wasn’t to train her. It was to beat the unfamiliarity out of her, to destroy her fear.

  For this mission, there hadn’t been the time for that. And here she was, exposed. More alone than she had ever been.

  She raised her right hand and, just for an instant, raised her gold visor.

  The sunlight was dazzling, glaring directly into her helmet and bouncing off the module’s sheer hull, and she screwed up her eyes. But the stars were still there: the sky crowded, the constellations immediately familiar.

  Somehow she felt reassured, anchored in the universe again.

  She closed up her visor and waited for her eyes to clear. Then she turned to her work.

  Henry and Geena were loosely tethered to the Soyuz, inspecting the lander.

  The Shoemaker was, Henry supposed, about the size of a small car. It was just a platform, with four spindly, open-strut legs protruding beneath it. There was a single rocket nozzle sticking out from under it, surrounded by four fat tanks containing propellant and oxidizer. And at the corners there were four little clusters of smaller rocket nozzles, attitude thruster assemblies, with flaring shields behind them. The whole thing was maybe six feet tall, from pads to the table surface, and on top of the table there were a couple of open metal rectangles, the size and shape of door frames.

  And that was all: no more than the prototype unmanned craft he’d inspected at JPL, before his program was canned, minus the elaborate sample-return stage on top.

  Henry’s training, which had focused on the hazards of launch and reentry, hadn’t covered this. He looked around. “Where’s the rest of it?”

  Geena’s voice was tight. “You’re not helping, Henry.”

  “No, I mean it. I see the landing stage, but where’s the cabin? Where are the seats? Where’s the ascent stage?”

  “Come here.”

  With one hand anchored to a strut, she grabbed his shoulder and spun him around. She guided him backwards, into the right-hand door frame. The metal rectangle neatly encompassed his backpack; Geena snapped latches, and the pack was secured, and so was Henry. He was stuck there, like a turtle glued by its shell, his arms and legs dangling.

  “Put your feet down here.” She guided his feet to a little sloping shelf on the top of the platform.

  He placed his feet where she showed him. There was a handrail in front of him, and he grabbed onto that, and he felt a little more secure. Not much, though. And in fact, the little foot platform made him feel as if he was tipping forward, about to fall off the damn thing.

  Geena swam into place beside him, in the left-hand frame, and locked herself in. There they stood, side by side. There was a small control console in front of her, with a couple of simple hand-controllers.

  She turned a switch, and there was a gentle shove beneath his feet. Latches had opened, releasing the platform, and some kind of spring-loading pushed it away from Soyuz.

  Henry was suspended in space: just him, Geena, and a dining-room table with a rocket mounted beneath it.

  “Oh, my God.”

  “Don’t bend the handrail,” Geena said.

  “You have got to be kidding. This is all there is. Isn’t it?”

  “It’s called the open-cockpit design concept.”

  “Jesus Christ, Geena.” The whole craft, Henry thought, would probably have fit inside the ascent stage of the old Apollo LM, which was, in Henry’s memory, starting to look luxurious. “What idiot designed this thing?”

  “The idiot who was trying to show how he could bring your samples back from the Moon for under a billion bucks.”

  “By leaving out the spaceship?”

  “Look, the bright guys at JSC studied the open-lander concept. In fact the Shoemaker design was based on the concepts they dreamed up then. It’s feasible. It’s all about saving weight. There’s hardly anything of this craft but the rocket and its fuel…”

  Henry looked down, at the pocked face of the Moon sliding beneath his feet. He was naked, he thought, about to fall to another world, utterly defenceless.

  Geena tested her reaction control thrusters. She closed her hand over her little controller, and the engines banged, rattling the platform and swivelling it this way and that. Henry could see little streams of exhaust crystals, gushing out in perfect straight lines, glittering briefly in the sunlight.

  The old LM ascent stage cabin had just been a bubble of aluminum, he
reminded himself. But right now, even a canvas tent around him would have been better than nothing.

  With no warning, Geena worked the thrusters again to tip the Shoemaker up. Now its engine bell faced the way they were travelling, and suddenly Henry was flying over the mountains of the Moon, face down, feet first.

  “God damn it, my sphincter just clenched. I never felt that before.”

  “Take it easy,” Geena said tightly.

  They sailed into the shadow of the Moon.

  Sunset was sudden, like a light turning off. His bubble helmet cooled, and started to get a little damper; as the temperature dropped, the environmental control system was having trouble removing all the moisture from the air.

  Shoemaker, Houston, you are go for DOI, over.

  “Roger, go for DOI. Do you have AOS and LOS times?”

  Roger, LOS at 103:16 and AOS at 103:59, over…

  DOI, AOS, LOS. More acronyms, Henry thought. Well, DOI must be descent orbit initiation. And LOS and AOS referred to loss and acquisition of signal; for, like so many of this mission’s most crucial moments, the descent burn would take place on the far side of the Moon, out of sight of Earth, and far from assistance.

  The descent orbit burn would put them into a lop-sided ellipse of an orbit with a high point of sixty-nine miles, kissing Arkady’s circular orbit, and after skimming for three hundred miles around the Moon’s lighted face, they would reach a low point of nine miles: just fifty thousand feet high, close enough to touch the mountains of the Moon. And there they would burn their engine again, and fall all the way to the surface.

  That was the plan.

  There was no air on the Moon. Air would have made it easy, he thought. With air you wouldn’t need all this fuel. You could glide down, like the Space Shuttle returning to Earth, or even batter your way in with a heatshield and fall into the ocean under parachutes, the way the Apollo astronauts used to.

  On the Moon, there was nothing to help you down. All you could do was bring along a rocket motor, and all the fuel you needed, and stand on it as it descended, all the way to the surface of the Moon. Like riding an ICBM back down into its silo, Henry thought bleakly, and about as stable. And expensive as all hell, considering the fuel load it took to bring an ounce of payload here…