Stephen Baxter - Moonseed

They ran him up to five Gs. That wasn’t so bad; he ought to be able to withstand as much as fifteen Gs. But it was enough to keep his chest pressed against his backbone, and he felt he had to force his rib cage open just to take a breath.

Stopping, he found out, was the worst part. When he slowed the sideways forces started to kick in, Coriolis forces, and he felt as if he was tumbling, and threw up heavily before they could haul him out of the cage, his vomit probably laced with barium.

To familiarize him with the Space Station, now being used as an orbital construction shack for the Moon spacecraft, he was taken to the Sonny Carter Neutral Buoyancy Laboratory. This was located up near Ellington Field.

The weather that day was clear after some days of cloud, and the sky was streaked by toy-like T-38s, astronauts anxiously keeping up their flying hours. Henry suffered a corny NASA moment, when he found himself at the entrance plaza of the facility looking up at a slab of blue July sky framed by a Stars and Stripes, while a T-38 flew past a milky Moon.

But Venus was already rising, a malevolent smear of light.

The Carter facility turned out to be a gigantic rectangular pool, all of forty feet deep. Henry was kitted up in a bulky, multi-layered pressure suit, with a heavy backpack to keep him alive. Inside his bubble helmet, enclosed, he could smell lint and metal and the hiss of air; his own breathing was noisy.

He was lowered into the pool on a frame elevator. Divers took his arms and helped him into the water. The colour of the water was a deep blue — just because of its depth, not because of any additives — and it was so deep the divers who accompanied the astronauts on their dives had to undergo decompression procedures. The astronauts, in their pressure suits, were pretty much immune to pressure changes.

He could feel the resistance of the water, see its bluish haze extending around him, but in his bubble of air he was as dry as desert dust, cut off. Beside the graceful, seal-like divers, he felt clumsy, stiff, barely able to move. He wondered if he would feel so isolated in space.

The pool was full of gigantic toy-like trainers: an open Shuttle payload bay so he could practise hand-cranking the big doors closed, and huge pieces of Station, through which he swam.

Sonny Carter, it seemed, was an astronaut who had died in a plane crash. This facility seemed like a good memorial to Henry. The pool afforded him moments of peace, of slowness and relative control, little oases in the chaos that had overtaken his life.

And a day later he was called away to make a parachute jump. He resisted this, but Geena insisted he had to do it once, under controlled conditions, so he knew he could hack it if he had to do it for real.

He was given a couple of hours” familiarization, and then he was taken up in a Chinook. Geena, of course, went first. She didn’t hesitate in the open doorway but stepped straight out, her static line cracking sharply behind her.

When it was Henry’s turn, he leaned out of the doorway — it was impossible to believe he was standing here, on a platform in the air, with nothing separating him from the ground — but he could see Geena’s parachute, bleached white against the pale green of the ground. Somehow that sight dissolved his own fears, and he jumped without hesitation.

A few seconds of free fall, of the wind plucking at him as he approached terminal velocity, and then the chute opened behind him, and he fell into his harness like a doll.

The descent was tranquil. He could hear sounds from the ground, cars and sirens, though they were muffled, and he thought he heard bird song.

He didn’t want it to end. It was like being back in the pool again.

But it didn’t last.

In the middle of all this he tried to keep up with the developing science of the Moonseed, and the bad news from around the planet, and to work on the mission itself: at least, that limited part of it he could control. The surface EVA schedule. The detailed science objectives. Where he wanted to land. The equipment he needed to take. How it would be deployed on the lunar surface.

He demanded, but didn’t get, some practice time implanting seismographs wearing a spacesuit.

Frank Turtle looked miserable. “We haven’t had time to work up anything on those lines,” he said. “They mothballed all the old Apollo facilities, like the Peter Pan rig.”

“We’re just going to have to wing it,” Geena said grimly.

Henry wondered what a Peter Pan rig was.

But it was academic, because there was no time to pursue this before he was dropped in the Nevada desert, close to Reno, with Geena and a couple of cohorts from the Astronaut Office, for three days of survival training: what to do if your spacecraft comes home off course.

They had nothing but a little water and basic survival gear. They made a tent of parachute fabric, and waited out the heat of the day. At night they had to hunt lizards and snakes. Here was one situation where Henry, veteran of hundreds of days in the field, was able to fare a little better than the rest. The astronauts looked enviously at his knife, for instance, inside the hollow handle of which he had stored matches and fish hooks, held in place with candle wax, and he showed them how to make frying pans from pieces of aluminum foil, and so forth.

On the second night he spotted Geena hoarding her water. He came to sit with her.

“Rationing the water doesn’t help,” he said.

“Huh?”

“Try that and you’ll pass out. This is the desert. You need a certain amount of water to keep from dehydration. You should drink the water you have until it’s gone, and if you have not been picked up by then, well, you die of thirst.”

She glowered at him, but made no move to comply. “Some people are blaming you,” she said.

“What?”

“For the Moonseed. The way it got out, at Edinburgh.”

The truth was, nobody knew how it had got out, save himself and Jane — and Mike, who couldn’t atone any more. He eyed her. “Do you blame me?”

“I don’t know. You’re Henry. I knew you were an asshole long before any of this stuff.” She glanced at him, then away. “No. I guess not. You aren’t cast for the role of cosmic villain. Or hero. You aren’t big enough.”

“I don’t think anybody is.”

They sat in silence.

“How’s Rocky?” he asked at last.

“With my mother, in San Francisco,” she said. She stood up. “As if you care.”

She stalked away to her sleeping bag.

“Drink your water,” he said softly.

On his last day in the US, he was taken to the Cape to see a Shuttle launch, probably one of the last there would ever be, its payload bay crammed with final pieces of equipment and fuel pods, a half-billion dollars” worth of firepower aimed at getting him to the Moon.

He stood on a beach with Geena, to the south of the launch complex. To the west, towards inland, the sunset was volcanic, tall and colourful. And in the south-east there was a blue-black sea, a bruised purple sky. And the Shuttle was picked out by floodlights, the orbiter a graceful white moth against the rusted brown of its gantry.

The Cape was crowded. It seemed a million people had turned out here to watch the spaceships that symbolized the nation’s fight-back against the creeping geologic menace. It was like Apollo, said the old-timers.

Geena stood with him. She said, “Do you know what has gone into this launch?”

“What?”

“Ball-breaking work. Henry, Columbia, over there on the pad, was turned around from its last mission in two weeks. We already have two orbiters in space right now. We only have two simulators; we’re sending this crew up untrained. We think the operational safety of the Shuttle system was pegged at 95%, after Challenger. But that’s thanks to the safety checks. We have no idea what risks we’re running now. We don’t even have time to calculate them.”