Stephen Baxter - Moonseed

So it’s my fault if Columbia blows on the pad, today?

But he let her talk. He understood how hard it was to overcome a generations-old culture; if this was her way of working it out of her system, fine.

…Despite the countdown, the launch was somehow unexpected.

There was a flare of dazzling yellow flame, liquid and vibrant, from the solid rocket boosters, and then the whole unlikely stack lifted smoothly off the ground, twisting as it rose. It trailed a cloud of white smoke, illuminated from within by yellow-red fire, and a throaty, crackling noise that seemed to ripple down from the sky.

The energy was palpable, like a seismic event. But it had been made by human hands. All around him, people were whooping, laughing. Crying.

Geena looked at Henry, her face shadowed by booster light. “ Now do you see what it was all about?”

Moved, he said, truthfully, “Yes.”

“We could have been on Mars by now,” she said. “On the moons of Jupiter. We could have had colonies big enough to survive off the planet.”

“Maybe we could have. But we don’t. And now—”

“And now, we have to struggle like hell just to get back to the goddamn Moon, which we abandoned in 1972. You still sure you want to go through with this?”

“I don’t think I have a choice.”

The Shuttle rose on its stack of billowing smoke, and a warm wind pulsed over them as rocket light glimmered from the patient Atlantic.

When he got back to his room, there was bad news from Scotland, and elsewhere.

Jane was woken by the gentle tone of her mobile phone.

She propped herself up on her shoulder, and took the call in a whisper. Then she folded up the phone and put it away.

It had been Henry, calling from NASA.

The surge which had killed her father had subsided. But now, it seemed, the Moonseed’s spread had started again: out of Edinburgh, and elsewhere.

She gave herself one second, before letting that sink into her consciousness. She closed her eyes and relished the warmth of the Red Cross blankets wrapped around her, the soft, untroubled breathing of her son a few feet away.

Time to move on.

If they could never be comfortable in this lashed-up Rest Centre, at least, with all their efforts, they had made it into a kind of home, efficient and clean. She’d become unreasonably proud of Jack, the way he’d coped with the disruption to his life and settled down to work here. After the first few days informal schooling had started up, but Jack and the other children had still been expected to help with the adult work. Doing his bit.

But he shouldn’t have to “do his bit’, she thought bitterly. He should be able to grow up untroubled, like every other British kid since 1945. She ought to have been able to protect him.

But that wasn’t possible. It never had been.

Maybe she had been lucky to have had this interval of peace. But now, it was all starting again.

She opened her eyes. The last of her peace was gone, her warmth disturbed. She pushed back the sheets.

She shook Jack awake, silenced him with a fingertip to his lips. He nodded and reached for his shoes.

They’d talked about this. Slipping out into the dark. Getting a lead on everybody else, the unfortunates who didn’t have boyfriends in NASA.

Betraying them, maybe even leaving them to die.

We discussed this. We’ve done all we can here. Now things are going to get worse, a lot worse. Now’s the time to think of ourselves. The family. That’s what counts now.

With their bags, they slipped out to the theatre car park.

To the west, over the heart of Scotland, the sky was glowing red. There was a distant sound, like thunder.

And it was raining: a thick, sticky black rain Henry had called tophra, laden with soot and ash.

They hurried to the car. She had been careful to leave it close to the exit. Jane let Jack into the back, loaded the bags into the boot, and put the key into the ignition.

“We’re going,” said Jack, ten years old.

“Yes.”

Go east, Ted had said, the last time she saw him. Follow the coast. Get past Dunbar and you’ll be out of the Midland Valley, and you ought to be home free.

For a time, anyhow.

There was the sound of a siren somewhere. Lights were coming on in the theatre.

And then there were two, she thought.

They climbed into the car. Being here, her hands on the wheel again, was strangely comforting. The car was a piece of home, of the old life. A haven.

She started the car, pulled out of the car park, and headed east.

The outskirts of Musselburgh were already congested with pedestrians, mostly, it seemed, fleeing as she was to the east. The tophra fall, thick now as a black snow, made it gloomy, and people were groping their way along with flashlights and umbrellas. Most of them had shirts or pieces of cloth fixed over their faces. She passed one woman who looked to have been overcome by an asthma attack; a doctor was attending her with an inhaler and what was probably a steroid shot, something to keep her moving.

Out of town, the traffic moved freely at first, and as they achieved more distance from the city, the tophra fall thinned out. But the A1, the road east out of Musselburgh, was a car park.

So Jane swung north at Tranent, and hit the coast at Port Seton. The power station here, chimneys and boxes of corrugated iron and glass, was still working.

Then she followed the coast road to Longniddry, and then through Aberlady across the bay to the A-road that led to North Berwick.

The traffic was moving on the coast roads, but it was almost solid. One bad accident, a single burst radiator, would clog up the whole damn thing. Her son’s critical path to safety was littered with the dodgy cars and lousy driving of thousands of panicky strangers. Terrific.

Every radio channel was given over to news and evacuation instructions, and she turned it off. There was one music tape in the car which she played over and over, as the car limped on.

She knew the coast well from her own childhood. It was a peaceful place, beaches and caravan parks and golf courses, a place where families came to spend time together. Day trips, sausage sandwiches and tea and cake in little cafes.

Here was Jack’s childhood: grimy, underfed, in mild shock, huddled into a car seat, clutching a battered sycamore-shape spaceship to his chest, eyes as wide as saucers. It worried her that he’d barely said a word for days. But she would have to think about that later, when she had secured his survival.

It wasn’t so far. Fifteen or twenty miles to Dunbar. She had plenty of petrol. If she could do it she would run as far as Berwick-upon-Tweed, the first big coastal town to the south, inside England. Surely they would be safe enough there.

But they had to get there first.

She tried not to look back, at the orange glow and palls of smoke and lightning that played to the west. She tried not to think of her father, or Mike, or Henry. There was nothing she could do for any of them now, or they for her. Time enough for them later.

For now, Jack was her whole world.

The ground shook, every few minutes; she could feel it through the car’s suspension.

The car edged forward.

Going through Berwick, she got a good view of North Berwick Law, a tight volcanic cone, six hundred feet high. It seemed to be smoking.

Past Berwick, the traffic stalled completely.

A man — forty-ish, thin, in a grimy business suit — clambered onto the road from rough ground beyond. He glanced up and down the row of cars, evidently selected Jane’s, and walked up to it.

Before she could react, he had yanked open the driver’s side door. “Out of the car,” he said, and to make his point he grabbed her sweater at the shoulder and pulled her sideways. She wasn’t wearing her seat belt, and she spilled sideways onto the road, grazing her knees; the pain was startling.