Moonseed (64 page)

He was out of breath in a few steps.

Still, he persisted.

He paused for a breath. He turned and looked back at the skeletal Rover. It looked like an ugly toy: squat and low, sitting there in a churned-up circle of dust. Its orange fenders and gold insulation were the brightest things on the surface of the Moon. A few yards behind him, Geena was laboring up the slope after him, her arms full of gear, her red commander’s armbands bright.

…
He was on the Moon,
he remembered suddenly; this was no routine hike.

The return of perspective was unwelcome.

He remembered some of the early, now lost, theories of the Moon’s surface. One geologist called Thomas Gold had warned that the Moon would be covered in a layer of fluffy dust dozens of feet thick. Armstrong and Aldrin would have to drop colored weights to the surface before they landed; if the weights sank, they would have to abort their landing immediately, before their LM was swallowed. Gold had clung to those views even after unmanned craft had safely settled on the surface, but happily for Apollo 11 he had been proven wrong…

Maybe.

Now that he was approaching the nest of the Moonseed, Henry wondered whether Gold had been more correct than he knew. What if the layers of basaltic strata beneath his feet, infested by Moonseed, were indeed Gold’s dust?

He continued.

He reached a flat crest, and came suddenly on the rille: Schröter’s Valley. It was a gap in the landscape in front of them. It wound into the distance, its walls curving smoothly through shadows and sunlight.

As he walked farther, the surface of the mare sloped gently toward the rille rim, and the regolith was getting visibly thinner. The rille walls themselves sloped at maybe twenty-five or thirty degrees.

He stopped, where the slope was still gentle.

The sun was behind him. The far walls were in full sun
light, and Henry could see
layers:
distinct layers of rock, poking through the light dust coating. They looked like layers of sedimentary rocks on Earth, sandstones or shales, laid down by ancient oceans, the myriad deaths of sea creatures. But what he was seeing, here, had nothing to do with water, or life. The story of the Moon, laid out for him here, was different.

These layers were lava flows. Over hundreds of millions of years, a succession of outpourings had flowed out of the Moon’s interior, covering and recovering the valley floor, building up the ground here.

But then, pulsing out of Cobra’s Head, a lava river had coursed down the slope of the older landscape, a brief band of light cutting savagely into the older layers. The flow cooled from the edges, the hardening rim confining the central channel. Eventually the channel even roofed over with hardening rock, and the lava stream cut deeply into the underlying mare basalt.

But the brief eruption of heat subsided rapidly. The remnant of the lava drained away and cooled, leaving a tunnel in the rock. Along much of its length the roofed-over tunnel collapsed, exposing its floor to the sunlight.

This will do, he thought.

Henry walked along the rille edge, until he came to a place where a boulder, four or five feet tall, was embedded in the inner wall of the rim. He sat down in the dirt, resting on his hands; the regolith crunched beneath his butt. He put his feet flat against the rock and started to push. It was hard to get any traction; the friction between his butt and the ground was so low he kept sliding backward. Eventually he found a way to brace his arms at an angle behind him, and get more purchase.

Geena joined him. “What in hell are you doing?”

His exertions weren’t budging the rock, but they were lifting him up off the ground, to which the low G only casually stuck him. “Help me. It’s a tradition.”

“More science, Henry?”

“Hell, no. Come on.”

She sat down beside him. She pressed her feet into the face of the boulder and pushed, alongside Henry.

“Rock rolling,” Henry said between grunts of effort. “No geology field trip is complete until you’ve sent a boulder crashing down into a caldera, or a forested hillside—”

The boulder came out of its regolith socket with a grind he felt through his knees. With an eerie grace, the rock tipped forward. He tried to keep pushing, but it was gone, and there was no pressure under his feet; he slid a little way down the slope.

He leaned forward to see. As the rock started to fall it was a little like watching some huge inflatable, on Earth, bounding slowly down a hillside; but at length, as the low gravity worked in the resistance-free vacuum, the rock picked up speed. He watched it until it had plunged out of sight, in the deep shadow of the rille. It left a trail in the regolith, a line of shallow craters that looked as if they had been there for a billion years.

He listened for a while, but there was, of course, no noise, no crack as it reached that remote bottom.

“Um,” said Henry. “Kind of fast. Suddenly I feel vertiginous.”

On his butt he worked his way back up the slope, and stood up, yards from the eroded rim. He had left a track like a sand worm in the regolith. When he stood up his butt and legs were coated with dark gray dust; he tried to beat it out but only succeeded in grinding the stain deeper into the fabric.

Geena was surveying the area. She pointed. One set of tracks continued from this point, deeper into the rille.

The ghost of Jays Malone was close here, he thought.

She said, “You ready?”

“Let’s get it over.”

She took the rope from her shoulders, and knotted it professionally around Henry’s waist, taking care not to snag his backpack or his chest controls. Then she wrapped a length of it around a Chevy-sized rock, and took some slack herself.

For a moment they faced each other. Henry could see himself reflected in her gold visor, slumped forward in a simian pose under the weight of his backpack. But he could not see Geena’s face.

Behind her, he could see the camera on the Lunar Rover fixed on them, watching analytically.

He ought to say something. But this was Geena, for God’s sake. They were
divorced.
In full view of the world, what were they supposed to say now, as he prepared to confront an alien life form?

She said: “I’ll be here.”

“I know.” He licked his lips.

He thought he could see her nod, inside her helmet.

He picked up his tools and turned.

He walked forward, toward the rille. He went over a smooth crest, and started descending into the rille itself. But there was no sharp drop-off; like every other surface here the rim was eroded to smoothness, and the footing was secure. The rope trailed behind him, reluctant to uncurl and lie flat in this weak gravity.

Just to be sure of his footing, he clambered back up the slope. There were no problems.

He turned, and bounded several yards back down the slope. Even from here he couldn’t see the bottom of the rille; it was still hidden by the broad shoulder of the valley.

The footing was good here. The Moon, shaped by impacts, was littered with rocky rubble. But this close to the edge, a lot of those fragments would have tumbled into the rille, carrying off the dust, and that had left the regolith here very thin—

Suddenly his left foot disappeared, out from under him. “Shit.”

He looked down with surprise. His leg was just sinking into a pit of soft dust, softer and deeper than any other place he had come across, anywhere on the Moon.

He brought his right foot forward, but he caught it on a rock, and he fell with some force onto his hands and
knees. His leg came loose of the dust pit, but his momentum rolled him forward, and the roll carried him over on his right-hand side.

“Henry. Are you okay?”

“Just a little soft here. I caught my…I stumbled over that rock.”

“You need me to help you?”

“No.”

He pushed his way to his feet, bouncing upright like a mannequin. He stepped back a little way from that patch of soft dust. It was a rough disc, he saw—and it
swirled,
gently.

Just as he’d seen in Scotland, on another planet, just as he’d predicted, he had found it here.

“Henry?”

“I’m fine.”

He carried on down the slope, following the tracks of Jays Malone as he had searched for his piece of lunar bedrock.

…And then he saw it, sheltering beneath a hummock in the regolith: an irregular-shaped crater in the regolith, scuffed by footprints. It was the original resting place of sample 86047, here on the Moon, a rock that had traveled a quarter-million miles from this spot, to his lab in Edinburgh.

He bent sideways, awkward in his suit, and ruffled the surface of the regolith with his fingertips, with reverence.

Then he straightened up. The tracks didn’t go any farther, any deeper into the rille. The ghosts of Apollo couldn’t help him anymore; and when he passed out of line of sight of Geena he wouldn’t be able to speak to her. Now, at last, he had to go where no human had traveled before.

He raised his gold sun visor. For now, he wouldn’t need it.

Clutching his equipment, trailing the rope behind him, he marched on down the slope, into the shadow of the rille wall, alone.

It was dark here, the only light scattered from the far side of the rille.

He lit his helmet torch. It cast an ellipse of light on the regolith surface before him, and back-scattering illuminated a short way beyond that. He had to keep his head down so the light showed him where his feet would come down, so he could see only a few feet ahead of himself at any time.

He was truly, he thought, approaching the heart of darkness.

At first he moved cautiously. But the slope here, sandblasted by micrometeorite rain, was still gentle. Walkback limits, he thought; he could afford to go a little faster.

He lengthened his stride. Soon he was bounding in slow-motion leaps, sailing over the rocks and dust. When he landed he sent up sprays of dust which collapsed back immediately to the surface, like handfuls of gravel.

The trick with the light now was to keep it focused on the spot he was likely to land, rather than directly under his feet; it took some coordination, but he was getting the hang of it.

He allowed himself a moment of exhilaration. Hot shit, he thought; this is the way to do a field trip.

But now the ground was getting steeper, the regolith layer thinner; the sprays raised by his footfalls were diminishing.

He tried to slow. But he’d underestimated his momentum; old Sir Isaac was pushing at his back, and the surface under his feet was slithery. He leaned back and tried to dig his heels in, but that succeeded only in tipping him over backward.

He slid six, ten feet on his butt, deeper into the rille. In his stiff Shuttle suit it was like sliding down a ski slope in a box.

He tumbled to a halt.

He sat there in darkness, breathing hard, his torch showing him only a few yards ahead, so close was the rille’s horizon now.

His rope gathered itself up, went taut, and he got a good hard tug on the chest. Geena, telling him to behave himself.

Well, she was right. It was going to be a lot harder coming back up.

He got up and slapped ineffectually at his thighs, trying to dust himself off. He held onto the rope, and stepped cautiously, ever deeper, his feet scraping now over almost bare basalt.

He came to a place where the slope was steeper than one in one. There was a basalt ledge here, a place where one of the lava strata had become exposed; it made a place to stand. When he looked up, his torch showed him the rille wall tipping up and away from him, dauntingly steep and tall.

He wasn’t sure he could go any farther in. This would have to do.

He took his instrument bag off his shoulder, and placed it carefully at the back of the ledge. Then he got to his knees, and crept forward to the lip of the ledge. The suit fought him the whole way, but he crawled determinedly.

He stuck his head over the edge.

His torchlight splashed down over the steepening rille wall. More basalt layers. He inspected them briefly, noting their thickness, their difference in composition.

The whole history of mare volcanism was laid out here, clear as a road map. He longed for a couple of grad students, a truckload of sample bags. Maybe just by visual inspection, a couple of samples, he could achieve some good science here…

But he knew he mustn’t. His objective lay farther on, and he must hurry to achieve it before his life support limits cut him short.

He lifted his head, and let his torch beam play farther down the slope.

It looked as if the base of the rille, here, was no more than thirty or forty feet below him. The surface was smooth, silvery and flat.

It looked as if a river of some fluid had been dammed here.

Moonseed dust.

He raised his head further. His ellipse of light lengthened, until the glow became too attenuated to make out. As far as he could see, across the width of the rille, and to left and right along its length, the Moonseed dust lay, shimmering in his torchlight. It looked as if a river of mercury had come lapping through the rille’s dusty walls.

He found a loose rock, a fist-sized pebble an arm’s-length away. On impulse, he picked it up. He looked at the big astronaut’s Rolex on his wrist, set its timer, and dropped the rock.

He watched the rock fall, at first with dreamy slowness, and then with greater, more Earthlike velocity as the slow gravity had time to work. If he got the timing right he would be able to calculate pretty accurately how far below him that surface was…

In the light of his torch, the rock hit the surface, and disappeared. The Moonseed dust closed over it without a ripple, as if it had never existed.

He checked his watch. Four seconds. The Moonseed was forty-two, forty-three feet below him.

He knew he had to wait for the results of his seismic analysis. But already he knew what he would find out.

The whole damn Moon was rotten with Moonseed, just as he’d suspected.

And yet the Moon was still here, unlike Venus.

He crawled to the back of the ledge. He worked his way along the ridge, setting out his instruments, little tin can boxes containing sensitive seismometers, shrouded in thermal blankets. The seismometer signals would be analyzed as real-time data and in terms of frequency to record the ground’s vibration. He set up combinations of theodolites
and electronic distance meters that might give some clue as to the deformation of the ground, even here on the side of the rille. And he deployed, close to the rim of his ledge, a small cospec, a correlation spectrometer, that would be able to measure emission rates of any gases it could detect. The instruments would be connected to a central data collection and communications unit and batteries by multiplex cables, that he plugged into the backs of the boxes.