Stephen Baxter - Moonseed

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.