Stephen Baxter - Moonseed

They swam up into the orbital module. When Geena opened the hatch, Henry could smell hot metal: the Soyuz hull, which had been exposed to vacuum.

Jesus, he thought. This is real.

And when he looked into the Station, at human faces grinning at him, Henry felt an unexpected gush of emotion. It really meant something, he found, to fly up through all that rocket energy and rattling metal, and arrive somewhere.

Here was Arkady, waiting on the other side of the hatch. He was hanging with his head down, his body disappearing into the dimness beyond. He was wearing a Green Bay Packers T-shirt, cut-off jeans and thick socks.

Geena reached out a hand to him. He pulled her up, and they embraced. But they broke when Henry came blundering up behind.

“Pay the cab fare,” Henry said to Arkady. “I got no change.”

Neither of them laughed. Henry looked from one to the other. Suddenly, unexpectedly, he felt like a gooseberry.

“We do not have much time,” Arkady said gravely.

Geena checked her watch, a big Moonwalker’s Rolex strapped to her arm. “TLI is minus fifty.”

“What’s TLI?”

“Trans-lunar injection. When we leave Earth orbit, for—”

“The Moon. Minus fifty what? Hours?”

She grinned. “Minutes.”

He gaped at her. “You guys are crazy.”

“The launch window is complicated, Henry. It will last about a day — after that the plane of our orbit will drift and we’ll have to wait a month — and we have pushbutton opportunities of a minute or so, once an orbit—”

Arkady put a hand on his shoulder. “We will take care of it. If you need to defecate, I would recommend you do it here, in the departure lounge, so to speak. It will be rather more comfortable than later.”

Henry shrugged him off. “What is it with you astronauts and my toilet functions? I’ll take my chances.”

“As you wish.” Arkady floated off.

Henry struggled after Geena, through the Station. He hadn’t got his sea legs yet, and he kept getting his elbows or his clumsy feet hung up.

It was dark in here. The habitable compartments made up a kind of cramped corridor, strung out together, patchily lit by floods. There was a constant rattling of machinery, thumps and bangs and whirs. Oddly, he couldn’t smell anything at all, save a little sparky ozone. That made a certain sense. The air was recycled, with carbon dioxide absorbent and contaminant filters. It must be dry, clean, healthy. And it must be irradiated by the raw uv coming in the windows, ionized to ozone.

The windows were small, well-separated portholes. They were grimy, coated with dusty fingermarks. Any dirt in the air up here was going to stay there, he supposed, until it stuck to some surface, or got sucked out by the filters.

After all you couldn’t open a window to let out the fug.

The walls were covered by thick insulation blankets. Every square inch of usable surface seemed to be crammed with equipment: boxes of electronic gear, pipes and air-ducts lashed together with silver tape, crudely lagged. Cables were strung about everywhere, floating like seaweed. It was like some old geezer’s home workshop, he thought, encrusted by years of make-do-and-mend, pieces of equipment crudely taped to the walls, instrument panels and air scrub cartridges and exercise gear sticking out at every angle, and towels hanging like flags from colour-coded holders on the walls.

This wasn’t so much a science platform as a survival shelter, he thought. It was strange to think of humans struggling to survive in all this dimness and clutter, while the silence and beauty of space, of the Earthscape itself, hung beyond the scuffed walls.

Right now there were five people up here, in a Station built for three: himself, Geena and Arkady plus two regular crew. Everybody was working but himself, it seemed, hauling equipment and supplies back and forth along the cramped modules. Less than an hour to TLI, Henry thought, and they were still loading. So much for checklists. He wondered what crucial item was being forgotten, what key mistake was being made, right this minute…

He saw Arkady carrying his petrological microscope, ugly wooden box and all, and he felt obscurely reassured.

Geena introduced the crew briefly. There was a tough, competent-looking woman of about fifty called Bonnie Jones, and a guy called Sixt Guth. Sixt had to be at least sixty, Henry thought: fit and lithe, his head totally free of hair, as if it had worn smooth. He was struggling with a pack of consumables, but he stopped to shake Henry’s hand. That left something on his palm, Henry realized, a kind of grey sheen.

Sixt saw him looking. “Sorry. Metal dust,” he said. “From the Progress.”

“The Progress?”

“The supply ships the Russkies use. Like unmanned Soyuz. Pieces of shit. Half of them are looted for food by the ground crews in Kazakhstan.” Sixt winked at Henry. “So you’re going to the Moon. I envy you.”

“Maybe I should be envying you.”

“You know, the thing of it is, you get tired of watching the Earth, from orbit. After two or three months up here, you want to go some place.”

“And now we are.”

“You, anyhow. I just hope there’s somewhere for you to come back to.”

Geena drifted past, beckoned Henry, and he followed.

Bonnie pushed past them, hauling equipment. She barged into Henry’s back, knocking him aside.

He took a moment to recover. “What’s eating her? Jealousy?”

“No,” Geena said. “Well, maybe a little. Mostly she resents your being here. The interruption to her routine.”

“Wow.”

“You get a little cabin fever up here.”

They came to another tunnel, set in the floor, with an open hatch.

He said, “And what’s down this rabbit hole?”

She said softly, “ The Moon…” And she pushed him through the hatch.

It was just another Soyuz capsule, another crude ball of earthy Russian metal. Geena pushed him through the orbital module to the descent module, pointed at the right-hand seat and told him to buckle up.

For a few minutes longer the hatch above his head stayed open, and he could hear the crew frantically jamming last-minute cargo into the orbital module above him.

The Soyuz was basically the same design as the one in which he’d ridden to orbit. But there were some differences in the instrumentation: a small laptop computer, duct-taped to a wall, English labels hand-printed and stuck over some of the Russian gear. He got the sense of improvisation, of beat-the-clock preparation, of this simple little craft being hastily upgraded to be capable of taking three humans to the Moon, and back again.

The sense of hurry was not reassuring, right now.

Geena came swimming down. She wriggled over to the left-hand seat and pulled a checklist from a plastic pouch stuck on the wall.

Arkady followed, muscular limbs in a blue jumpsuit, crowding into the centre seat.

So the crew was complete, thought Henry. Geena was trained to fly the lander; Arkady would handle the Soyuz; and he was Mister Moon. Given the circumstances they were a well-matched crew. Complementary.

So why, then, was the atmosphere so stiff?

“Fifteen minutes to TLI.”

Radio voices responded to Geena, from the mission controls in Korolyov and Houston, English and Russian voices ticking through checklist items. Geena responded in kind, her Russian tinged with California.

“Shouldn’t we be wearing spacesuits?”

She turned to him, distracted. “The launch window is kind of tight here.”

“So, shut up, Henry.”

“Shut up, Henry.”

Arkady’s knees were jammed up against Henry’s. Try as he might, Henry just couldn’t get away from that gouging physical contact. The Soyuz seemed much more crowded with three than with two.