Moonseed (60 page)

And now Geena was calling him, telling him to come with her to the Apollo site.

He put the rock back where he had found it, back where it had lain for a billion years, and loped away through the morning sunlight.

Side by side, Geena and Henry crossed the few hundred yards to the Apollo site. They kept quiet, concentrating on learning how to walk.

Walking, in fact, took more of his attention than he expected, distracting him from the geology.

His suit would have been too heavy for him even to lift on Earth. And, being pressurized, it was about as stiff as a rubber tire. But because of the low gravity, his mobility wasn’t much reduced from what he could manage on Earth.

He found that trying to walk heel-to-toe, as he did on Earth, was difficult and seemed to eat up energy. He kept tumbling away from the surface, as if he was walking across a trampoline; he didn’t feel as if he was stuck down properly to this light little world, and his overpowered Earth muscles kept throwing him off.

The best way to move was something like a lope. He would push off with one foot, shift his weight, and land on the other foot. It seemed to him he was covering ten feet or more with every step. But that couldn’t be right; the Moon must be fooling him again.

However far it was, however long he was up, every step kept him off the ground for several heartbeats, and he had to watch where he came down, on a rock or in an ankle-snapping crater. The trick was to anticipate each next step as he flew across the ground, shifting his weight and pushing off as soon as he landed, working rhythmically, like loping across a stream. It was demanding, and he couldn’t take his eyes off the ground for long. But he could relax in mid-step, unlike a runner on Earth, and it was amazing how that simple thing conserved his energy. It seemed to him he would take a long, long time to get tired.

He could sense his inertia, though.

It was hard to get moving; he had to thrust his body forward to get underway, as if he was walking into a wind. And to stop, he had to dig in his heels and lean back. He felt as if he was scuffing at this pulverized surface to which he was lightly bonded, trying to move his massive Earth bulk.

It was the separation of mass and inertia; the gravity here was so weak the effects of his mass were reduced, and inertia dominated. Sir Isaac Newton, you should have been up here.
You
understood all this, without having to fly to the Moon.

When he got tired, the stiffness of his suit actually helped. He could stop where he was and just slump inside his suit, and if he gave up the effort of trying to move the damn thing he could just rest against it.

When he looked across to Geena, she was loping along in much the same way. With her body dipping, stiff-legged, at every stride, she looked like a giraffe running across some Godforsaken piece of veldt, dipping into the swelling crater pits. He stifled a laugh.

…The surface was nothing but craters. Emphasize that:
nothing
but craters.

The main craters ranged in size, mostly from a foot across to maybe twenty yards, and from a few inches to maybe ten yards deep. It was like the frozen surface of some ocean, shaped by wavelike swells of a characteristic length and spacing.

But there were smaller pits as well, right down to zap pits on every rock he picked up, and he knew that if he took a glass to the fragments of regolith he’d find more craters right down to the limits of visibility, the rocks themselves like little Moons, as if this was a fractal landscape.

After four billion years of incessant pounding, there wasn’t a square inch that hadn’t been pulverized and racked up into a saucer-shaped dip of one size or another, not a footfall but where he crunched on regolith, a flour of pulverized rock. The terrain was just saturated, like the desiccated remnant of some Civil War battlefield.

He focused on the experience: the soapy feel of the fresh regolith, the gentle swell of the surface. As he loped across the land he might as well have been on the surface of some ocean, rolling quietly.

…And at Aristarchus Base, Rover tracks and footprints converged on the truncated base of the abandoned Lunar Module. The LM formed the center of a circle of scuffed regolith, littered with gear.

Geena walked respectfully up to the old LM. It was a squat box on legs, a little taller than she was. There was a ladder fixed to the front leg; when she ran a gloved hand over it she found dust clinging to its rungs, left by departing feet, more than thirty years ago.

The gold-colored Kevlar insulation on the descent stage was discolored, and in some places it had split open and peeled back. Geena tried to smooth it back with her gloved hand, but it just crumbled under her touch. The bird was evidently thoroughly irradiated. The paint had turned to tan, and where she looked more closely she could see tiny micrometeorite pits, little craters dug into the paintwork. Another million years of this erosion and there would be nothing left of the Apollo.

She looked for Henry. He was studying the ALSEP science station that the astronauts had set up. She loped over to join him.

The instruments were laid out in a star-shape over an inert patch of the Moon, and connected by gold-colored cabling to a central telemetry transmitter and a power plant—a thermoelectric nuclear generator, now long inert. Henry pointed out the sights like a tourist guide. Here was the seismometer, like a paint can on top of a silver drop cloth. This irregular ball in a squat box on legs must be the solar wind spectrometer. Three booms, spread out like the petals of a flower, made up the lunar surface magnetometer. And so on. All the instruments were boxes covered by gold-
colored insulation and white paint, covered with dust from long-gone astronaut footsteps, now blistered by years of sunlight.

There were packing brackets everywhere, dumped on the closely trodden ground.

When she turned away, she tripped on an ALSEP cable.

She didn’t even know it; Henry had to tell her. She couldn’t see her own feet as she walked, because of the chest-mounted control unit in her way, and she couldn’t even feel the cable through the inflated layers of her suit. The cable itself hadn’t unrolled properly. It seemed to have kept a kind of “memory” of being rolled, and once unrolled it wouldn’t lie flat, in one-sixth G.

Near the LM was much evidence of departure. The surface was littered by exhausted lithium hydroxide canisters and LM armrests, two abandoned backpacks, urine bags and food packs: garbage thrown out of the LM, the detritus of three brief days of exploration.

And the LM was surrounded by glittering fragments, for its foil insulation had been split and scattered by the blast of the departed ascent stage’s engine. There was a new ray system, streaks of dust which overlay the footprints.

On a rise three hundred feet away sat the Lunar Rover, with its camera blindly pointing to a sky into which its masters had disappeared.

Perhaps fifty yards from the LM, a U.S. flag stood on its pole, held stiffly out on the windless Moon by a piece of wire. It had fluttered only once, as the brief blast of the LM’s ascent stage engine had rushed over it, and now it was tipped over, at an angle of thirty or forty degrees to the vertical.

Geena loped over to the flag.

She got hold of the staff, raised it straight, and tried to push it into the regolith. The staff would go in four or five inches easily, but then she came up against stiff resistance. Still, she managed to balance it, almost upright.

The relentless beating of sunlight had worn away at the fabric, and its colors—the red stripes, the blue star
field—were no longer factory bright. But the flag was the most colorful object on the Moon.

When she turned away from the flag, she saw a pattern in the dust. In the low sunlight she couldn’t make out what it was, and she walked around it.

A single line of footsteps led to this patch in the regolith, then turned back. And here was the object of that minor expedition: a name, written in the lunar dust, by a gloved finger. TRACY. A name written up here so it would last forever, on the unchanging lunar surface. He—Jays or Tom—had thought nobody would ever see this.

She shivered. Maybe it was a feeling she was walking through a graveyard. Or maybe it was exultation. After all, she was here. We can still do it, by God. We got here, just like before.

She turned, taking care not to spray dust over the scrawled name, and walked away.

The second
Shoemaker,
with their supplies, had come down clumsily. One of its four legs had settled into a nasty pit of a crater, and the whole thing was tilted at maybe ten degrees to the horizontal. But when Geena hopped up to the platform to check its systems, it looked otherwise intact.

The
Shoemaker
looked identical to their own, except that its upper surface was covered with a glittering Kevlar insulation blanket. Geena pulled that away; it fell oddly—low gravity, no air—it was stiff as molded steel until it hit the ground, where it crumpled softly.

There were no crew standing frames here, Henry saw. Instead there was a pair of big, clam-shaped discs, maybe two yards across, pressed up against each other, with some kind of fabric compressed between them. There were equipment boxes and fuel tanks crowded around, black and white and gold.

Geena started to undo restraints on the boxes. “Help me,” she said. “We have to unload all of these.”

Clumsily, Henry hopped onto the platform, and bent to help her.

So, here he was, working on the Moon. It was harder than he expected. His Space Shuttle inner tube suit was unbearably stiff at the waist and knees, and it took a lot of perseverance to lean over and bend. And the stiffness of his gloves made it hard to close a grip; he had to fight a monkey impulse to pull his gloves off and use his bare hands.

When he picked up a box, because he couldn’t bend his suit, he had to hold it out in front of him. That meant he was constantly fighting his suit, like a weight-training exercise. Like that, he tired quickly, and had to take frequent rests.

The gravity was a sixth of Earth’s, but, oddly, when he hefted something heavy, it felt less than that—maybe a tenth. And when he got something moving, it just kept on going, but the motions were slow.

At that, Geena was making better progress.

“I don’t remember you as a fitness freak,” he said.

She grunted as she worked. “In space the hard work is done not by your legs, like on Earth, but by your arms and hands, which have to do all the work of hauling your mass around, gripping things, moving equipment. So in between missions I did a lot of upper body training.”

Henry could hear his breath rattling in his bubble helmet, his pulse pounding in his ears. “Smartass.”

At length they had the
Shoemaker
unloaded, their equipment scattered around. By now their Moon suits were coated with gritty charcoal-colored dust, up to and beyond their knees.

“Now for the fun part,” Geena said. She reached up to the nearer of the clam dishes and pulled a lanyard.

Latches popped open all around the clam dish, which released its twin. The concertina-style fabric contained inside filled out to a cylinder. The clam dishes moved apart, wobbling slightly, in utter silence.

When the habitat was fully opened it made up a rough cylinder maybe three yards long, sitting like a pale fat worm
on the
Shoemaker
stage. It had a big U.S. flag and the NASA roundel etched into its side.

Henry grinned. A typical NASA gadget. “Woah,” he said. “The world’s biggest squeezebox.”

“Shut up, Henry.”

“Another prototype?”

“You got it. Home sweet home. Here.” She handed him an equipment box. “Now we got to get all this stuff inside.”

He took the box, and turned to the hab.

They squeezed through the tight fabric hatch in their Moon suits, like two soot-covered bugs trying to get back into their chrysalises. Geena pushed buttons, and air hissed into the shelter. The Moon dust which had stuck to their clothing with such determination sprang away, filling the new air with a grayish cloud. The dust scattered over equipment boxes and the fabric walls of the hab. Henry hated to get Moon dirt all over everything, but there really wasn’t a choice.

His polarizing microscope, in its battered wooden box, looked utterly out of place here, a jarring piece of familiarity in this alien place, as comforting as he’d expected.

Geena got to work setting up an oxygen generator. Adapted from Space Station kit, it was a Russian design, a cylinder four feet long that worked by separating water into oxygen and hydrogen.

When Henry uncracked his helmet, he could smell the dust. It smelled like gunpowder.

It made Henry sneeze.

The dust in this shelter had never before been exposed to oxygen. So every grain was chemically active, like gunpowder just after it had been set off, and it was busily oxidizing, rusting away, not to mention reacting with his nasal passages.

Geena took her helmet off. Her short hair was plastered to her forehead.

They sat for a moment, breathing hard, facing each other, huge and clumsy in their pressure suits.

It was—awkward. Eight years of marriage, and here they were on the damn Moon, and he couldn’t think of a thing to say.

Looking into Geena’s ice blue eyes, he sensed she felt the same.

They got on with their chores, and their conversation stuck to the equipment.

They took off their gloves and helmets. Then, helping each other, each in turn stepped into a big stowage bag and pulled it up, and began to dismantle and shuck out of the suits. The stowage bag was needed to catch the rain of sooty Moon dust.

The hab module seemed smaller than it had looked from the outside, and it was tipped up by the
Shoemaker
’s awkward landing. There was only just room for a suited human to stand upright. Every time Henry rolled against the fabric wall the whole thing shook like a kid’s inflatable bouncer; he just hated the thought that this was all that stood between him and the high-grade vacuum outside.