Stephen Baxter - Moonseed

As he watched the Earth got smaller.

They were receding so fast — he hadn’t expected this — that the Earth visibly shrank, even as he watched, as if he was riding some cramped elevator car.

Arkady pulsed the hand controllers once more. The booster stack receded, still rotating slowly, turning at last into a star-like point surrounded by a dim haze of vented propellant. And there came a time when Henry looked away, just for a moment, and when he turned back he’d lost the booster in the blackness.

The light of Earth and sun was so bright out there he couldn’t see the stars. The little craft was alone in space, sliding unpowered through the dark; and all the universe was either inside this little metal bottle, within a few inches of his outstretched hand, or thousands of miles away.

The three of them looked at each other, wondering what they had done, in such haste.

A little later, they flew through the shadow of the Earth.

The eclipse took more than an hour. They could see their home planet as a hole in the stars, ringed by a rainbow of sunlight refracted through the atmosphere. And in the centre of the planet, they could see a faint grey-blue glow: it was the light of the Moon, shining down on the belly of the Pacific. It was an eclipse of the sun by the Earth, a sight no human in all history could have seen before the Apollo adventure, and no human had seen since. A hell of a thing, Henry thought.

It was going to take them three days to get to the Moon, just as it had Armstrong and Aldrin.

Three days. There was really no other way to do it, as long as you were constrained by chemical rocket engines: a hard push that burned up your fuel to launch you out of Earth orbit, a slowing climb up to the point where the Earth’s gravity balanced that of the Moon, and then a steady fall down to the Moon itself, where you would have to slow again to enter lunar orbit. Like climbing up one hill and down another, Henry thought.

And as long as humans flew this way, it was going to take them those three days, just as it always had.

Henry tried to sleep.

Geena had hung up three light sleeping bags in the orbital compartment of the Soyuz, where there was just enough room to stretch out straight. Henry climbed into one, and Geena zipped him up, with a reasonable amount of tenderness, and so there he hung, suspended like a bat.

He had supposed that sleeping in zero G would be like the most comfortable bed imaginable, but it didn’t seem to be working out that way. He missed the pressure of a pillow under his head, the security of a heavy duvet over him. Even field trips weren’t like this. He was missing Earth’s heavy gravity field, gluing him safely to that big ball of rock.

And the damn bag was too big. If he’d been Arkady’s size it might have been okay, but he wasn’t. He was rattling around in here, and every time he moved the neck gaped open and cold air rushed in.

Besides, whenever he felt himself drifting away, some deep part of his brain warned him that he was falling, and he clutched at his sleeping bag.

He burrowed deeper into the bag, shutting out the light and noise.

His heart, powerful enough to withstand a planet’s gravity field, was too strong up here. His pulse boomed in his head.

And the cabin was full of noises — the clatter and whir of pumps and fans and extractors — and every so often some mechanical gadget would change its tone, startling him awake once more. It was like trying to sleep inside some huge refrigerator, with the added frisson of knowing that on these rattling Russian machines depended his life.

He wasn’t aware of drifting off.

…He came to when Geena reached into the bag, grabbed him under the chin and hauled his head out by main force. He found himself coughing, gulping at cool air.

“Are you okay?”

“I think so.” His head felt stuffy, as if he had been standing on his hands. But he was the same way up as when he’d gone to sleep. He shook his head, and that was a mistake; the cabin started to move around him. “Oh, wow.”

Geena stood before him, looking into his face. “Think about it. No convection, right? So if the carbon dioxide builds up in your sleeping bag you choke yourself.”

“Much you care.”

“A corpse in a Soyuz is about as welcome as a fart in a spacesuit, as we say.” She was looking into his eyes. “How do you feel?”

He took an inventory.

The left side of his head hurt. For some reason, he found that if he pressed the back of his head it helped a little. His feet felt numb, as if there was no blood at all down there. His nose was stuffy.

He reported all this to Geena. She laughed.

“Your eyes are red as shit, too. It’s just the blood pooling in your head; your fluid balance hasn’t adapted yet.”

Gingerly, he started to push himself out of the sleeping bag. Strangely, the experience of zero G seemed still more bizarre than it had yesterday.

“Where are we?”

“Eleven hours since TLI. Seventy thousand miles from home.”

The light was shifting. He looked out the porthole.

Earth and sun swung gently around the craft, as if the Soyuz was creating its own tiny sunrise and sunset. Geena had put the craft into barbecue mode, a slow hour-long roll in the sunlight to even up the heat load.

Everything was rolling.

“Oh, shit.”

Suddenly he was retching.

It was just a spasm, barely painful. But suddenly here was a greenish sphere, the size of a tennis ball, floating in space in front of him. It was oscillating slowly, thick and languid, pea-green and quite beautiful.

Geena was scrabbling in a locker. “Christ, Henry.” She handed him a plastic bag, and he held it before his face, catching most of the rest.

Under some complex combination of surface tension and air currents, the loose sphere of puke split in two. One half headed for the wall, the other for Geena.

Henry ventured, “Kind of pretty, isn’t it? And look at the way they are moving. Equal and opposite. Conservation of momentum, I guess. And—”

Geena was watching in horrified fascination. She didn’t seem able to move out of the way.

The blob hit her square on her chest. The magic of zero G dissipated instantly, and the puke spread out over her white T-shirt, viscous, sticky and lumpy.

She started dabbing at it with wet towels. “Henry, you asshole.”

“I never said I was a spaceman.”

The other lump of vomit reached a locker door now. Instead of sticking, it broke up into a dozen smaller globules, that rebounded and set off over the cabin.

Arkady came floating up from the descent module. “I could smell — oh.” He laughed. “Time to hunt butterflies, I think.”

He took a handful of wet wipes, and he and Geena started to chase over the cabin, snagging the vomit spheroids out of the air. Henry just hung there being still, trying not to worry about which way was up.

Twenty-eight hours out; a hundred and forty thousand miles from home. A day after TLI, they were already more than halfway to the Moon.

Wrapped in a blanket, Henry hung before a window, staring out.

He could see the Earth every once in a while, as it slid past his window. He could tell it was a fat round world, floating in space, much more three-dimensional than the Moon; the huge highlight cast by the sun from the oceans ensured that, as if the Earth was a huge steel ball under a spotlight. Every time the planet came by, it dwindled. He couldn’t see the change if he watched, but if he turned away from it and looked back, it was a little smaller and more distant.

Now, with the planet reduced to the size of a baseball, he found he’d lost his sense of what he was looking at. He was supposed to be a geologist, for Christ’s sake. But the real Earth was no map: it was swathed in cloud, and the countries weren’t colour-coded.