Stephen Baxter - Moonseed

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 modelled, 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 c! %$£$#

…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-grey.

On a whim, he cut down a couple more streets and walked to the Embankment that lined the north-east 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 Theatre.

The sun had set to the south-west, behind the rooftops of London. The horizon was tinged with a silvery lustre. Above that a yellowish haze, like LA smog, filled the western sky. The haze changed in colour 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 colours faded for a time, and the deep summer blue filtered down the sky, making it look almost normal. But now a new surge of blood-red 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.

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 over-awed. “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 manoeuvre 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 again…”

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 post-mission parties here. It was just a low-roofed wooden shack, its walls plastered with ageing 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.