Moonseed (15 page)

He stepped forward to check the alignment. The view through the eyepiece was a disc of multicolored light, irreg
ular shapes of bright color. He twisted the analyzer disc to show up the colors.

“Take a look,” he said. “Try to keep both your eyes open. After a while, you won’t see anything through your other eye.”

She bent, and turned the analyzer as he showed her.

“What do you see?”

“It’s like a view down a kaleidoscope.” Jane straightened up. “Wow. I’m dizzy.”

“That’s your other eye cutting in. Forget it. The point of the ’scope is that you can see what minerals are present there, just by letting the thin slice filter polarized light.”

“Just like that? At a glance?”

“At a glance. Neat, isn’t it?”

“What am I looking at? Your bedrock?”

“No. That’s a reference sample. A lunar basalt from another suite, closer to the norm of the Apollo samples. Tell me what you see.”

She bent again. “Lots of small shapes, like a tiled floor. And, here and there, like pieces of stained glass window, rough discs and rectangles. Much larger shapes. Ships of glass, sailing among ice floes. As seen when on acid.”

He laughed. “What you’re looking at is a felted matrix of small elongate crystals of feldspar—that’s the gray stuff—pyroxene, yellow—and olivine, all the bright colors you can see, scarlet and yellow and pink and blue. And stuck in the matrix you have those bigger crystals, phenocrysts of pyroxene and olivine.

“Now.” He took out the slide, replaced it with another. “This is 86047. The bedrock. See if you can tell the difference.”

She looked.

“No olivine.”

“To a first approximation, yes.”

She straightened up, frowning. “So what?”

He lifted his white hat and ran a hand through his hair. “So, that’s
wrong.
I can’t figure out what process has taken
out the olivine here.

“Look—rock is made of silicon and oxygen, and other stuff. The basic structure formed by silicon and oxygen atoms is a tetrahedron. An olivine molecule is built around a single tetrahedron, with iron and magnesium atoms stuck on. So olivine is the most basic form, the mother of all silicates.

“Deep in the mantle, at high enough temperatures, olivine is all you find.

“But when a lump of mantle material rises and cools, more complex molecules can form. You put together the tetrahedra like building blocks. First you get pyroxene, which has single chains of tetrahedra, then amphibole, which has double chains, and then mica—”

“I’ve seen mica. Flaky stuff, thin, papery sheets that you can chip off with a fingernail.”

“Right. Mica is made up of sheets of the tetrahedra. But then, when the mica cools further, you have quartz. A three-dimensional lattice, a tough, hard crystal. So you are getting more and more complex silica structures, built of tetrahedra.”

“So what happened here?”

“I don’t know. It looks as if something has—accelerated the process, in this lump of Moon rock. Reworked the crystalline structure.”

“Reworked? How?”

“I’ve no idea. One tack we’re following is trying to replicate lunar mantle processes in the high-pressure labs.”

In these, he told her, you placed a small sample of your rock in a foot-high stainless-steel block called a bomb, and then pressurized it hydraulically, as far as twenty thousand atmospheres, which corresponded to pressures in the Earth’s mantle.

Sometimes the bombs failed, and lived up to their names. So the labs were run remotely, and had steel plates built into their walls, and blast chimneys.

But the high-pressure tests weren’t showing them any
thing they didn’t know already.

“In the meantime, we’re ordering up other studies. X-ray fluorescence work, and time on the ion microprobe they have here. That lets us study the composition of very small samples of the rock…” He scratched his head under his hat. “I’ll tell you something else odd. The samples I’ve been taking from the liquefaction patch, on Arthur’s Seat—”

“I’d like my bottle back sometime.”

“Yeah. I ran them through the ’scope, and a couple of other tests. They are deficient in olivine as well…”

She frowned.

“I can’t see any connection either. Spooky coincidence, huh.”

But she was hesitating. As if there
was
something, some connection, she wasn’t telling him.

He said, “You know, if this—whatever—is consuming olivine—”

“What?”

“The Earth contains a
lot
of olivine, in the mantle. No wonder that patch is growing. And it isn’t going to stop eating either.”

“Eating?” She laughed, a little nervously. “You make it sound alive.”

“I don’t know what the hell I mean.”

“Do you think we should tell somebody about this?” she asked.

“Like who?”

She shrugged. “The police.”

He blinked. That hadn’t occurred to him, that aspect of the situation. The
threat.
Maybe Geena was right that he had a one-dimensional mind.

“You know, I don’t like the inexplicable.”

“Oh, come on,” she said. “Be honest with yourself. I know you people. You have a puzzle, and that makes you happy. Something you have to figure out.”

He straightened up. “Buy me lunch and we’ll discuss it.”

She smiled.

“Listen, you want to see 86047 before you go? The bedrock sample. It’s in the case over there by the wall.”

She shrugged. “You’ve seen one Moon rock, you’ve seen them all.”

They made their way to the door, and squeezed into the improvised airlock together.

Behind them, in the central glove box, sample 86047 sat in the lab’s fluorescent light.

It had already been sliced in half and thin samples taken, by Houston technicians and Mike’s careful hands. In the harsh illumination it would have been difficult to tell for sure, but perhaps a careful observer might have noticed something odd about its flat, new surfaces, exposed for the first time since the formation of the rock, billions of years before.

The surfaces were glowing, softly silver.

And, with a rustle rendered inaudible by the layers of glass encasing the rock, a rain of fragments was whispering down from the exposed face.

Jane drove Henry to a multistory car park close to Waverley Station, and they walked along Princes Street.

You could still make out the deliberate design of the old streets here, Henry thought: a neat rectangular grid pattern, almost like a U.S. city. But whatever character the street had once had was pretty much obscured by the encrustation of plastic and glass of the modern department stores and fast food outlets. There was even a McDonald’s and a Dunkin’ Donuts.

“This is what we call the New Town,” Jane said.

“I know. 1760. You told me.”

“The Old Town is the medieval town that grew up around Castle Rock. Narrow, windy streets, coming down the glacial tail there…”

“You’ve been building this city for a thousand years, on top of an extinct volcano. I think you people are seri
ously crazy.”

“Well, maybe. In the Old Town they burned witches; in the New Town they bred lawyers and scientists.”

“Split personality.”

“Yeah. Jekyll and Hyde.”

“Right. Didn’t Stevenson come from Edinburgh?”

“Yes. Maybe we do have a split personality,” she said. “It was in Edinburgh that the crucial moments in the Act of Union were played out. Union with England.”

“Let me guess. Back in 1672.”

“Actually, 1707. It was the best for everybody. The alternative would have been civil war, or maybe war with England. What we gained was stability and prosperity. But what we lost was—something you can’t define. Edinburgh used to be a capital. It never would be again. So, I think we’ve all gone slowly crazy.”

“Conflicts in the programming,” Henry said. “A city called Hal.”

“Something like that.”

“You Brits amaze me. The way you’re so hung up on stuff that happened so long ago.”

“And
you
guys
have
no history. History sticks around.”

He glanced around, at Princes Street Gardens, the park which descended in the shadow of Castle Rock. “Was this a riverbed?”

“No. But it was a loch. Artificial. Used to dump their sewage in it—”

“And drown witches.”

“Actually, yes. They drained it, to make the New Town.”

“So, lunch…”

It was still early. After a debate they settled on a Seattle’s Best Coffee outlet, which Henry was surprised to find here, and they drank lattes and ate immense chocolate chip cookies.

It was a relief to get in out of the cold.

“Your work seems to be going better,” she said.

“You mean I’m not complaining so much.”

“How come?”

He couldn’t see any way to escape, so he pulled a package from his jacket pocket, and told her the truth.

It was a courier package from Houston. It contained a tape and a transcript of a conversation with Jays Malone, in which the old guy had evidently done his very best to ransack his memories, and provide Henry with the context he needed.

He tried to explain this to Jane. “Geology is about decrypting a tangled story: how a rock was formed, how it got where it was and what happened to it since is as important as what it’s made of. That’s what we call context. And that’s what Jays has given me here.” He scratched his head. “I’m no fan of Man-in-Space. Not when it cuts into good unmanned science missions.”

“Including your own.”

“Yes. But the astronauts weren’t bad geologists, on the whole, when they tried. Pilots are trained to be observers, after all, and they all had strong, flexible minds. I suspect they competed with each other to turn in good performances as scientists.”

Jane leafed through the little package, complete with a few sketch maps and diagrams in Jays’s spidery old man’s hand. There was a brief note in there, which Jane now found.

She eyed Henry. “So who’s Geena?”

He winced. “My ex-wife.”

She nodded, impassive, and handed him the note. “So what is this? Is she building a bridge?”

Henry glanced at the note again. Geena was about to go into purdah, working as a capcom on the current Station mission, and beginning the long process of training for her next flight…

“No,” he said. “Not a bridge. This is Geena waving farewell from the far side of the ravine.
Good luck with your life.
”

“Sad,” Jane said.

“History.”

“I think I’m starting to understand you,” she said, studying him.

He felt uncomfortable under the scrutiny. “You are?”

“You really are a true scientist. You like figuring out how the world works. You like the fact that it works logically at all. You find that comforting.”

He rubbed his cheek. “I guess that’s true. Take the Moon. The Moon is very different from the Earth, but the basic principles still apply. Like stratigraphy—”

“Like what?”

“On Earth, in general, younger formations lie on top of older formations. Think about the Grand Canyon. A big slice down through millions of years of sedimentary layers, older under younger, older under younger. And it’s the same on the Moon. The big impact that created the Mare Imbrium, for instance, pretty much blanketed the Moon with debris—all of about the same age. So you can tell almost at a glance, anywhere on the Moon, whether a given unit is younger or older than Imbrium. When I learned for the first time that on the Moon, the logic of geology works just the same as in Arizona…well. Isn’t it something?”

“It is to you anyhow. And you’re talking too much again.”

“I have the feeling,” he said slowly, “you are diagnosing me as an anal retentive.”

“I’m not diagnosing. I’m just trying to understand.”

He ran his spoon around the crusted rim of his cup. “I guess we don’t have much in common.”

“I think you’re wrong.”

“You do?”

“I seem to be tuned in to patterns in the universe too. Trends and laws. The difference is,” she said, “I don’t take much comfort out of what the patterns tell me about the future.”

They were silent for a while.

She leaned forward. “Do you have to go back to work?”

“Yes.” He thought about it. “No, not necessarily.”

“Maybe we could skip dinner.”

He looked into her eyes. “Oh.”

She said nothing.

He thought it over. “Let me pick up the tab.”

“No. My shout.”

They stood up.

They went back to Henry’s hotel room, in the Balmoral.

It was…memorable.

She was tender, loving, funny. Whereas Geena had always had that chilling air of assessing his athletic prowess the whole time.

But it wasn’t as if they were obvious soul mates. Jane was smart, and logical, but she was obviously coming to quite different conclusions about the world from his own.

Maybe they were complementary, somehow.

He remembered a story, he thought by Plato. How, at the beginning of time, human beings were split in two, by a malevolent god, into halves: male and female. They ran around the Earth thereafter, searching blindly, never happy.

Unless the two halves of a whole, by chance, met up and joined. Once joined, they were complete, and would never part again.

With Jane, it felt like that.

He hardly knew her, he realized. But he felt comfortable in her silence.

Later, lying beside her, he found himself thinking about the liquefaction patch.

He’d been up there, to the Seat, two or three times a week since they first found that puddle. And every time he’d found it had grown.

It was hard to be precise—much of the spread was subsurface—and he was only measuring with shoe leather any
how. But he was pretty sure the growth was exponential. Doubling every few days.

He recalled Jane’s question about telling somebody.

What the hell
was
this? And how, indeed, could it be stopped?

Because if it couldn’t—

He started to worry.

He leaned over in bed, and picked up the phone. “Can you tell me how to get an outside line?”

He got out of bed, and padded to the cupboard where he’d hung up his jacket. In his wallet he had a card with the number of VDAP, the Volcano Disaster Assistance Program at the U.S. Geological Survey.