Stephen Baxter - Moonseed

When he picked up a box, because he couldn’t bend his suit, he had to hold it out in front of him. That meant he was constantly fighting his suit, like a weight-training exercise. Like that, he tired quickly, and had to take frequent rests.

The gravity was a sixth of Earth’s, but, oddly, when he hefted something heavy, it felt less than that — maybe a tenth. And when he got something moving, it just kept on going, but the motions were slow.

At that, Geena was making better progress.

“I don’t remember you as a fitness freak,” he said.

She grunted as she worked. “In space the hard work is done not by your legs, like on Earth, but by your arms and hands, which have to do all the work of hauling your mass around, gripping things, moving equipment. So in between missions I did a lot of upper body training.”

Henry could hear his breath rattling in his bubble helmet, his pulse pounding in his ears. “Smartass.”

At length they had the Shoemaker unloaded, their equipment scattered around. By now their Moon suits were coated with gritty charcoal-coloured dust, up to and beyond their knees.

“Now for the fun part,” Geena said. She reached up to the nearer of the clam-dishes and pulled a lanyard.

Latches popped open all around the clam-dish, which released its twin. The concertina-style fabric contained inside filled out to a cylinder. The clam-dishes moved apart, wobbling slightly, in utter silence.

When the habitat was fully opened it made up a rough cylinder maybe three yards long, sitting like a pale fat worm on the Shoemaker stage. It had a big US flag and the NASA roundel etched into its side.

Henry grinned. A typical NASA gadget. “Woah,” he said. “The world’s biggest squeezebox.”

“Shut up, Henry.”

“Another prototype?”

“You got it. Home sweet home. Here.” She handed him an equipment box. “Now we got to get all this stuff inside.”

He took the box, and turned to the hab.

They squeezed through the tight fabric hatch in their Moon suits, like two soot-covered bugs trying to get back into their chrysalises. Geena pushed buttons, and air hissed into the shelter. The Moon dust which had stuck to their clothing with such determination sprang away, filling the new air with a greyish cloud. The dust scattered over equipment boxes and the fabric walls of the hab. Henry hated to get Moon dirt all over everything, but there really wasn’t a choice.

His polarizing microscope, in its battered wooden box, looked utterly out of place here, a jarring piece of familiarity in this alien place, as comforting as he’d expected.

Geena got to work setting up an oxygen generator. Adapted from Space Station kit, it was a Russian design, a cylinder four feet long which worked by separating water into oxygen and hydrogen.

When Henry uncracked his helmet, he could smell the dust. It smelled like gunpowder.

It made Henry sneeze.

The dust in this shelter had never before been exposed to oxygen. So every grain was chemically active, like gunpowder just after it had been set off, and it was busily oxidizing, rusting away, not to mention reacting with his nasal passages.

Geena took her helmet off. Her short hair was plastered to her forehead.

They sat for a moment, breathing hard, facing each other, huge and clumsy in their pressure suits.

It was — awkward. Eight years of marriage, and here they were on the damn Moon, and he couldn’t think of a thing to say.

Looking into Geena’s ice blue eyes, he sensed she felt the same.

They got on with their chores, and their conversation stuck to the equipment.

They took off their gloves and helmets. Then, helping each other, each in turn stepped into a big stowage bag and pulled it up, and began to dismantle and shuck out of the suits. The stowage bag was needed to catch the rain of sooty Moon dust.

The hab module seemed smaller than it had looked from the outside, and it was tipped up by the Shoemaker’s awkward landing. There was only just room for a suited human to stand upright. Every time Henry rolled against the fabric wall the whole thing shook like a kid’s inflatable bouncer; he just hated the thought that this was all that stood between him and the high-grade vacuum outside.

They piled up their opened-out suits in a corner of the shelter. They would have to leave them to dry out before they would be usable again. The pressure suits, irradiated by the sun, smelled of ozone. And Henry found his faceplate was scarred, in several places. Tiny zap pits, from the invisible interplanetary sleet within which he’d been walking, micrometeorites labouring to wear away his protection. If he stayed out there long enough, he supposed, the hail of dust would wear him down, grind up his suit and flesh and bones, leaving nothing of him but a strange organic trace in the thick regolith layers, a part of the eroded-flat Moon.

Out of his suit for the first time since leaving lunar orbit, he inspected his own damage. His face, armpits, chest and crotch were pooled with sweat. The sweat didn’t drip down, as it did on Earth, but clung in place; he could scrape it off with his fingers but it stuck there too, wobbling like a viscous jellyfish.

His hands and forearms ached, and his fingers were sore — he even found blood underneath the nails of his right hand — and his wrists had been bruised where they bumped up against the seal rings on his suit.

By comparison, his hips and knees felt stiff from under-use; it was a pleasure to do a little stretching, to touch his toes and squat down, bending his knees, to flex his body in ways his encasing pressure suit never allowed. There was no doubt, though, that Geena was right; the Moon was a world for the hands and arms and upper body.

Geena opened a spigot on one of the boxes, and poured water into a shallow bowl. “Here. Wash. But go easy.”

The water poured slowly, and curled gracefully against the side of the bowl, licking upward in a slow tide, as if trying to escape.

Henry dipped his hands in. The meniscus bowed, reluctant to wet him. Geena had a little vial of liquid soap, and when he added that the water ran more easily over his hands. When he lifted his hands out of the water the liquid clung to his skin in a sheath maybe a half-inch thick. He held his hands over the bowl, and the water dripped back in fat globules.

The languid motion of the water was surprisingly pleasing, easy on the eye muscles. As if, he thought, this was the pace our systems were supposed to work at all along.

They pulled on blue Space Shuttle flight suits.

Geena showed him the hab’s systems. The life support was open-loop. There was no attempt to recycle any of it. The hab could support the two of them, Geena said, for maybe six days. The atmosphere in here was low-pressure oxygen; there were filter beds to take out carbon dioxide, which they would have to reload.

The power came from hydrogen-oxygen fuel cells, built into the Shoemaker, which would also supply more water. Their waste would go into bags or tanks, to be dumped over the side when it was time to leave. There were cold plates and radiators to control the temperature. There was a simple medical kit, germicidal wipes, some tools, equipment for the EVAs.

Cramped, dusty, fabric walls, tipped-up, crowded with gear: the hab was, he thought, like a tent in the Antarctic. Except for the two huge space helmets stacked in the corner.

Geena started to dig out food.

“Station rations,” she said. “In fact just the rehydratable stuff. You can add hot water, but we don’t have an oven.”

Henry looked at the rows of labelled plastic bags in dismay. “Fit for a king. Okay, what do you recommend?”

She dug out two packets. “Chicken, cashew nuts, rice.”