Jack McDevitt: The Moonfall

"Wonderful thing, nature," said the banker. "Beautiful."

Horace mumbled an appropriate response.

Over the course of an hour or so, the event concluded, the eclipse passed, and the banker went in to breakfast. Amy didn't show up, and the Merrivale plowed through a sea that remained gray and unsettled.

Horace stayed in his chair a long time. A damp chill had stolen over him. Later, wandering the decks, he saw Amy and her daughter at a dining table with several others. She was deep in animated conversation with a man Horace had seen going off the high-dive yesterday. He lingered for a moment but she never looked up.

It was as if the shadow that fell across the ship had touched the heart of the world.

• • • Space Station L1, Percival Lowell Flight Deck. 8:03 A.M.

There was never a time we didn't know that the canals were bunk, that Percival Lowell's network of interconnecting lines, and the areas that darkened in the summer as the water flowed, were just so much self-delusion. Adams and Dunham, in 1933, before I was born, showed that Martian oxygen was less than one-tenth of a percent of the terrestrial level. That should have been enough. But people still hoped, even as late as when I was in high school during the sixties. Until Mariner 4 sent back those godawful pictures just after Thanksgiving 1964 and we knew we were looking at the end.

Rachel Quinn's grandfather had wanted to be an astronomer, but he went to the wrong college because it was local and it didn't cost much. He had to take what they offered and somehow he ended up as an accountant. But he owned a marvelous telescope, one through which Rachel had seen Jupiter's moons and the demon star Algol and the Great Comet of 2011. And she too had thought what a pity it was that Mars had no canals.

The thought was in her mind a lot these days as they prepared for launch. How different this mission might have been, had there been someone at the other end. Welcome, people of Earth. Well, Mars has some primitive biological forms, but nothing that would take note of her arrival.

She wondered why the drive to find other beings among the lights in the sky was so strong. It was, in fact, so deeply ingrained that no one ever seemed to make the point that we'd be far safer if we were alone.

Launch was twenty-two days away. Sunlight blazed through the windows and gleamed off Lowell's silver prow. They were at the Lagrange One station, popularly known as L1, suspended between Earth and Moon, fifty-eight thousand kilometers above the lunar surface. And they were ready to go. The ship's nuclear power plant had been tested in the Mojave Desert and in lunar orbit; its navigational systems were already locked on Mars; its survey gear was loaded; spare parts were on board; and the video library was in place. One of the technicians had programmed its control circuit to ask Rachel each morning a variant of the question, "Is it time yet?"

NASA had invited schoolchildren around the world to name the nuclear-powered vessel that was going to Mars. The winner would receive a trip out to L1 to get photographed with the six astronauts and to watch the launch. Hundreds of thousands of suggestions had poured in, names in all the languages of Earth. An army of secretaries and junior assistants and interns had culled through the deluge, relaying those that seemed to have originality and flavor to a panel of judges. There'd been rumors of animosity and deadlock, and one judge did in fact resign, but the panel eventually emerged with its choice: the Percival Lowell.

There was irony in calling the Mars vessel after a man who had been both monumentally wrong, and persistent in that error until his death. But he had dreamed, the winner said, for all of us. Without him, we would not have had Barsoom or the Chronicles. The irresistible ache that carries us outward was born with Percival Lowell. That was the phrase that stuck in Rachel's mind. She didn't agree with it, but you could make a plausible argument for it.

The child was Chinese, a high school senior from Canton, who was scheduled to arrive in two weeks with the rest of the crew. So far, other than herself, only geologist/flight engineer Lee Cochran was aboard.

Rachel didn't much care what sort of name they stenciled on the hull as long as the ship was ready to go. And for the first time in her experience with government projects, everything seemed set with time to spare.

The Lowell consisted of a long central stem, with flight deck and crew areas forward and the nuclear engine at the rear. Crew areas, but not the flight deck, could be rotated to simulate.07 g. It wasn't enough to make the trip comfortable, but it approached the effect generated on the station itself, and was almost half lunar gravity. A lander was tucked under the belly of the craft. Sensor dishes, telescopes, feeder ports, and antennas projected from the hull.

The engines were powered by a Variable Specific Impulse Plasma drive. The system, electrodeless, electrothermal, radio-frequency heated, and magnetically vectored, had been designed during the late 1990s, but not actively developed until President Culpepper took the decision to push for a Mars mission as the natural second step after the establishment of Moonbase.

Years ago Rachel had flown a prototype moonbus on powdered aluminum and liquid oxygen. Now she sat atop a nuclear monster that would take her across the interplanetary void.

It was a nice feeling.

The hatch to the flight deck opened and Lee poked his head in. "Hello, Rache. What are you doing here?"

She was seated in the pilot's chair. The day's simulations were over and she felt almost guilty, as if she'd been caught playing solitaire with the computer. "Smelling the roses," she said. It seemed now that her entire life had been directed toward this moment, had been intended to get her into this seat. And she was making it a point to savor the success. She'd wanted it when she was ten years old, peeking through Grandpop's telescope. It had been in the back of her mind when she went to flight school, when she was flying patrols over Zagreb, and when she'd begun piloting the buses between the lunar installations and L1. When Culpepper announced nine years ago that the nation would go to Mars, Rachel Quinn had fired off an application before the speech ended. "Where should I be?" she asked Lee.

"It's Monday. Director's breakfast."

She'd forgotten. Yesterday she had lunch with the vice president, who'd been passing through to do the honors at the Moonbase ribbon-cutting ceremony this afternoon. Today it was to have been bacon and eggs with the station director. Tomorrow it would be another lunch, this time with a Chinese delegation of diplomats and industrialists. It seemed as if the most time-consuming part of her job was rubbing shoulders with every VIP who arrived on L1. And with the Mars flight imminent, and Moonbase officially opening today, there'd been a horde of heavyweights.

Lee frowned. "Another faux pas for the NASA team."

Rachel shrugged, trying to suggest she had more important things to do. But in fact they were well ahead of schedule.

Most of the Lowell jutted outside the station. Only the forward sphere, which contained the flight deck, was enclosed within a pressurized bay. She looked down at a single technician switching umbilicals. "I'm ready to go, Lee," she said.

So was the ship. It was now only a matter of briefings and politics.

Lee sat down in the copilot's seat. An image of Mars, wide and bleak and rust-colored, floated in the overhead display. "It'll come soon enough," he said. "Meantime, I think you ought to get yourself over to the breakfast. You're the star of the show these days, and it wouldn't look real good if you ignored the director."

Rachel frowned. "I hate the politics involved with these things." Actually, she didn't. Not all of it, anyhow. She'd enjoyed meeting the vice president yesterday. But it was part of the astronaut code that all groundhuggers, even vice presidents, were comparative unfortunates. Members of an inferior species.