Stephen Baxter - Moonseed

“Any success?”

I’m getting tired of meetings with people in suits. Decisions. Directives. None of it is real, Jane, compared to what’s happening out there. The physical reality of the Moonseed, in the rock. You can’t executive-order all that out of existence.

“I understand.”

…And people always want to believe it’s going away.

His voice was flat. Something had changed him.

“Henry, what are you trying to tell me?”

There was silence for long seconds, digitally perfect.

I’ve been working on the science out here. Options to stop the Moonseed. Short and long term. Teams of us, across the planet. And I’ve become convinced.

“What about?”

That we can’t stop it.

She tried to take that in. “There must be a way.”

No. No happy ending, Jane. No neat solution. It doesn’t work like that, it seems. The Moonseed is implacable.

“Is this why you called me?”

No. Yes. I suppose so. It’s difficult. Jane — do you believe me?

She massaged her forehead. “I don’t know.”

The trouble is, we have no one to surrender to.

“I’m not joking, Henry.”

Neither am I. I’m sorry.

“How long—”

The math is uncertain. Earth is big. Decades, probably.

“This wasn’t the future I expected when I was growing up.”

You, the great prophet of environmental doom?

“I think on some level I believed we would be able to do something. We were making a mess of the planet, fine, but it was within our capabilities to stop. All we needed was the will. And then there’s the movies. Science fiction. Disaster films. The world is ending, but the heroes can always do something.”

Yeah. But in real life the future was always finite, Moonseed or not.

“Not this finite. We used to talk about a billion years, Henry. Now you’re talking about decades…” Not even long enough for Jack to have kids of his own, and watch them grow, and grow old himself. Whatever years he does have, he’ll spend on the run. Fleeing from the bloody Moonseed.

Henry said, All any of us can do is our best, by each other, by whatever duty we perceive.

“Not much comfort.”

I’m sorry, he said.

“It’s not your fault. It’s not anybody’s.”

No. Not even Mike’s.

“Are they going to send people back to the Moon?”

That’s what I’m campaigning for. I suppose it would be another one in the eye for astrology.

She laughed, softly. “Tell me your birthday.”

He told her.

She thought for a while. “Well, there you are. Your sign is Sagittarius, the sign of exploration. The sign that’s linked with spaceflight. And your dominant planet is Pluto. Planet of transformation. So the omens are good.”

Gee. How spooky.

“Of course I don’t believe in astrology. But then I’m a Scorpio, and Scorpios are always sceptical.”

A long pause, transatlantic crackles.

For a while I’m not sure if I cared if it ended or not. But now I’ve met you. And —

“What?”

His voice was hesitant. Do you think we could have had a future together?

“Hell, I don’t know.” She laughed. “I suppose it’s possible.” She thought it through more carefully. “Yes. It’s possible. We would have had some incandescent arguments.”

I’m sorry I walked out on you, the way I did.

She took a breath. “I understand.”

The truth of it was, she did understand. It was as he’d said. All any of us can do is our best, by each other, by whatever duty we perceive.

It tore me apart.

“But you can’t expect a mother to see it your way. Right then I’d have mobilized the resources of the planet to unite me with Jack if I could, for one more day, and to hell with the rest.”

I understand. Anyhow, that’s the reason.

“What?”

The reason I care. It’s you, Jane. You, and Jack, and even Ted and Mike, damn it. It’s you. It took me a while to figure it out… The world can end, but not if it takes you.

Henry’s voice, accent enhanced by the phone’s tiny speaker, was a dry whisper, from a million miles away. Dust blowing across the dry bottom of one of those lunar seas, she thought.

“For Christ’s sake, Henry,” she said, “you’re the nearest thing to a hero I’ve got. If you feel like that come up with a better option.”

I don’t feel like much of a hero.

“Listen,” she whispered. “Here’s something to protect you. I see the Moon, / The Moon sees me, / God bless the priest / That christened me… / I see the Moon, / The Moon sees me, / God bless the Moon, / God bless me.”

Pretty.

“Yeah. Now you try it.”

The words came drifting back to her. I see the Moon, / The Moon sees me…

As it turned out, Frank Turtle responded quickly, and, using some of the material from his failed return-to-the-Moon pitch, Geena and Frank worked up a convincing-looking presentation within a few days.

They had Jays and others dry-run them, and then they presented to Harry Maddicott, JSC director. He sat, sleek and replete with lunch, as Geena and Frank worked through the spiel tag-team style. But Maddicott was more supportive than Geena had expected. He advised them to take it to at least one more center before going to the NASA Administrator, however.

So the next day they flew down to Alabama, to the Marshall Space Flight Center at Huntsville. This was the centre which had originally been built up around von Braun’s core team of German rocket engineers; this was the center which believed its engineers had pulled off Apollo-Saturn despite the dead-weight of the rest of NASA, and in their approach to engineering they were as conservative as all hell.

The review was tough, confrontational, detailed, laced with that conservatism. Von Braun didn’t fly to the Moon that way, and we sure don’t need some kid from Texas coming here telling us how to fly to the Moon now. Soon Frank was sweating, trying to cover questions to which he hadn’t had time to assemble answers.

But Geena kept pushing. She had the group break into study forums to thrash out issues, and had Frank make conference calls to Houston and other centers, and soon Frank’s rough sketch was being worked into something credible. And, once the Marshall guys started to believe that, hey, this was something they could actually build, they got remarkably enthusiastic. They even started to advise Geena and Frank on how to present to the other centers.

Jays told her she shouldn’t be surprised by the speed of all this. “Hell, we did this before. We’ve been to the Moon. The Moon is a walk around the block. And we’ve been waiting thirty years to be asked to go back… These Marshall folks are tough on bullshit, but they want to make this work.”

And then, only four days after that brainstorm in the Outpost, Geena found herself in NASA Headquarters in Washington, briefing someone called the Associate Administrator for Exploration, and at last the NASA Administrator herself.

The Administrator, a tough woman of fifty with a helmet of steel-grey hair, made a decision after thirty minutes. “She has kind of a lot on her mind right now. I’ll take it to the President myself.”

Monica Beus distrusted Henry Meacher from the moment he stood at the lectern in front of the OSTP.

She knew he’d just come from giving testimony over in the Russell Senate Office Building on Capitol Hill, before the Senate committee on commerce, science and transport. And now here he was in Room 476 of the Executive Office Building to give a briefing to this subcommittee of the Office of Science and Technology Policy, which reported to the President herself.