Moonseed (68 page)

He climbed into his pressure suit. He fixed his gloves and helmet in place. He made to close his visor.

He paused.

He clasped his hands on his lap, closed his eyes, and intoned, “Help us, God.” It was just as if his family was with him, here in the sphere of the Moon. Then he straightened up to begin his work.

He closed his helmet, and settled into the contoured couch at the center of the descent module. He pulled his restraints around his body, adjusted them, and locked them in place.

Now, he need only wait for the computer to count down to the final burn.

Arkady sailed over the Moon’s North Pole. The flat sunlight picked up particles swimming along with the Soyuz—flakes of paint or insulation—and if he banged his fist on the wall a whole shoal of them would be born. They seemed to sparkle as they moved away from Soyuz, but some of them floated nearby, as if tracking a current through water.

Three, two, one.

There was no noise. Not even a vibration. Just a gentle, steady, push in the back.

Good engineering, he thought.

Soon it was over.

He had lost velocity, and the orbit of the Soyuz had become an ellipse. As he sailed around the Moon, he would come gradually lower, until—as he approached the South Pole, all of halfway around the Moon—he would reach his new orbit’s lowest point, which would graze the surface itself.

So he was committed. His only regret was that he would die alone, without so much as touching another human being again.

But then he would not be alone, on the Moon. Geena was there.

In the dark, the attitude system fired. He could hear the hollow rumble of the vernier rockets, like somebody dragging a chain across the hull of the ship. The Soyuz was automatically turning itself around, for it must come down nose-first. Through his portholes he could see flashes, a pinkish spray of particles from the reaction control nozzles, like sparks from a fire.

And then he flew into sunlight, without warning, as he had every two hours since entering this lunar orbit. As the light flooded over him, and the sun’s heat sank into the fabric of the ship, making the hull tick and expand, he felt a surge of renewal, of rebirth. He basked in the light, like a cat on a
zavalinka,
the earthen wall of a peasant’s house.

Coupled by the emergency hoses like Siamese twins, moving awkwardly, clumsily, constantly fearful of breaking their contact, ever aware of the way their time on the Moon’s surface was diminishing…

Thus, Henry and Geena labored to collapse their shelter, their only home on the Moon, and to load up the old Apollo Rover with their survival gear.

When they were done the Rover was piled high with equipment. The collapsed shelter, a big pie dish, was tied to the back by nylon rope.

“Like something out of
The Beverly Hillbillies,
” said Henry.

“I always hated that show.”

They clambered onto the Rover, and Geena pushed at the joystick.

The Rover lumbered forward.

It was a rocking and rolling ride, all the way to the rille complex. Every time it hit a mound or a depression or a crater rim—which was every few seconds—the Rover teetered precariously, obviously top-heavy.

Geena followed yesterday’s tracks, but today they rolled right past the point where they’d parked.

They approached the rim of a side rille, much smaller than Schröter’s Valley.

“That’s it,” Henry said. “Pull over.” Henry got out of the Rover even before they stopped, but his hoses yanked him back, and he tumbled back into his seat.

She rapped his helmet. “Do
not
do that again, asshole.”

“Sorry.”

They went through the complex and embarrassing ballet of getting themselves, as a joined pair, off the Rover.

Together, they walked to the rille. Geena held Henry’s hand, to ensure they didn’t separate too far. She couldn’t feel his hand, inside the thickness of his glove. It was difficult to Moonwalk, joined like this; they had to synchronize their loping.

The rille was small—only twenty or thirty yards wide, its walls deep-cut. Henry had picked it out from old low-orbit Apollo photographs. In the low sunlight, with the regolith’s tan sparkle, its eroded walls looked like a small mountain valley, she thought, somewhere above the snow line.

“
There,
” said Henry. He pointed along the rille. “You see that?”

She looked where he pointed. A few hundred yards along, the rille terminated; but she could see a kind of bridge of rock beneath which the valley continued, as if it entered a tunnel.

“What is it?”

“A lava tube. Our salvation. I knew there had to be one here. Maybe we can live through this after all. Come on. We haven’t much time.”

This was Henry’s latest plan. She thought it was crazy. But she had to admit, now she’d slept on it, the idea of sacrificing her life without
trying
was less appealing than ever.

So, with Geena clinging on to Henry’s hand, watching they didn’t foul the tubing that joined them, they loped back to the Rover and began to unload it.

He fell inexorably from the empty lunar sky, every minute dropping five thousand feet and covering sixty more miles, the shadows lengthening as he rounded the curve of the Moon.

He must fly down the visible face of the Moon, all the way to the south, before landing. His altitude would drop steadily, sixty miles, forty, twenty, ten. He imagined his trajectory unwinding, a smooth curve shaped by gravity, kissing the surface of the Moon at just the point he intended, fifty miles short of the place he intended to deliver his nuclear weapon.

He was still flying at orbital speed—three thousand miles per hour, about Mach Five—and he would keep up those speeds, accelerate in fact, all the way to the surface of the Moon. Nobody in history had ever flown so fast, so low, not even Geena.

Certainly nobody had tried to achieve a touchdown at such speeds. And yet that was what he must attempt, today.

Through the tight portholes of his Soyuz, he caught glimpses of the surface of the Moon. It was a spotlit bombing range under a black sky, fleeing under his prow, fresh craters and basin rim mountains and undulating mare plains crowding over the close horizon with an unwelcome eagerness.

His view was completely sharp, of course. There was no cloud, no layer of muddy air, to obscure his view; and at times he would lose his sense of altitude. At such moments he turned away from the windows and trusted to his instruments, his infallible electronic senses, and to the precise mathematics that had guided him here.

And now, as Arkady flew farther south, a new series of mountains—a ring of them, folded and eroded—came shouldering over the horizon toward him. They straddled the Moon, as if striving to block his further progress toward the Pole.

This was, he knew, the mountainous rim of the great South Pole-Aitken Basin: the huge impact crater that straddled the South Pole of the Moon, the largest and deepest such crater in the whole of the Solar System, a walled plain as wide as the Mediterranean Sea.

His Soyuz, like a little green bug, flew over the immense, eroded shoulders of the rim mountains. The mountains stretched before him and to either side, obviously ancient, colorless as plaster-of-paris models, a five-thousand-mile-long ring of shattered and folded Moonscape.

He checked his clock. Fourteen minutes to his touchdown. He was still seventy-five thousand feet high, with almost a quarter of the Moon’s face still to traverse; yet he was already inside the great Basin.

The land beyond the rim walls was revealed now. It was battered and scarred even beyond the norm he had come to expect for this small, ancient, rocky world, every square inch of it crowded with craters and rubble. The biggest craters here were major complexes in themselves, huge and eroded, many miles across, their giant flanks punctured by smaller, brighter newcomers.

In the shadows of the mountain ring, there were places where the sun could not have shone for a billion years—perhaps the coldest places, Arkady thought, in the Solar System.

It was there that Henry predicted water droplets from Moon-smashed comets would collect, snowing once into the shadows, and forever lying still. And it was there that Arkady must descend.

Ten minutes left. Fifty thousand feet: as high as he had flown, above Earth, before his first flight as a cosmonaut. And still he dropped, five thousand feet per minute, his descent as steady as aging, and the fleeing Moon rose to meet him, as inexorable as death itself.

His controllers at Korolyov were silent. There was, it seemed, nothing more to say.

And now, as the land fled beneath him, at last—for the first time, and utterly unwelcome—he felt the brush of fear.

The lava tube was maybe ten yards wide. Its entrance was strewn with rubble, evidently cracked off of the roof. When she shone her helmet lamp into its depths, it extended farther than her beam could reach.

“Good grief,” she said. “It’s
long.
”

Henry was moving into the tube, stepping carefully over the rubble-strewn floor, pulling their shared hoses behind him. To Geena, he was just a silhouette before the elliptical puddle of light cast by his helmet lamp.

She was forced to follow, reluctantly.

She was
spooked
by this place.

Of course she was being illogical. There could be nothing here to hurt her, not so much as a lunar rat. Nothing, in fact, had walked here since the tube’s formation, perhaps a billion years ago.

But even so…

“Look how sharp the rocks are,” Henry said. “No meteorite weathering here. Watch your step, Geena; this stuff could cut your suit to ribbons.”

“And you watch out for the damn hosepipe.”

“Yeah.”

“You know, the tube is bigger than I expected.”

“Well, this is the Moon. The last time I was in a lava tube was Hawaii. A couple of miles long…The lava on the Moon flows much more freely. That’s why you have the maria, great frozen puddles of the stuff. This tube might be ten miles long, maybe more.”

“Henry, help me with this damn shelter. If we don’t recharge our packs in the next couple of minutes, we’re screwed anyhow.”

“Yes, ma’am,” said Henry. He loped across to work with her.

When they had the shelter set up, they crawled inside.

They sat there in their EVA suits, fully pressurized, within their grimy inflatable shelter, sheltered by the rille lava tube, talking by torchlight.

Geena said, “How long before we see anything?”

“Maybe three hours after the detonation. The math is chancy.”

“That’s a long time to wait.”

“Not so long.”

“Tell me a story, Henry.”

“I don’t know any stories.”

“Tell me this is going to work.
How
much water is there at the South Pole?”

“I don’t know for sure. But the Moon is old, Geena. Enough time for a
lot
of volatiles to collect in the cold traps, where the sun never shines. Water and carbon dioxide. My models suggest there might be the equivalent of a thousandth the mass of a large cometary impactor, delivered by one process or another.”

“I’ll give you your thousandth,” she said. “So what?”

“Geena, a thousandth of a comet—if you melted it—could cover the Moon in water to a depth of a meter or so. A thousandth of a comet would contain enough carbon dioxide to form an atmosphere.”

The fans of her suit whirred patiently. She was sitting on a folded-up blanket, her suit stiff; now she came a little closer to him, as if seeking the human warmth trapped
inside the layers of his suit. “So how come
Prospector
detected so little?”

“Because it’s logical. A working-out of the laws of physics. Solar System processes. It has to be there hidden in the deep regolith.”

“Right. And your nuke is going to melt it all.”

“Oh, no.” He sounded surprised. “Don’t you get it? To melt all that ice would take the energy of…” He thought about it. “Maybe ten times Earth’s whole nuclear arsenal.”

“So how is the bunker-buster going to work?”

She could hear the grin in his voice. “Judo.”

Suddenly, she felt weary. She just wanted done with all of this, all these schemes and plans, one way or the other.

She closed her eyes.

“You’ve got to be a believer,” he whispered gently.

Arkady checked the controls set out before him. There were instruments and switches for the main systems, a TV screen, and an optical orientation viewfinder set up on a small porthole next to the panel; there were orientation controls on his right, and maneuvering controls to his left. His small laptop, with its weapons controls, was fixed to the couch to his right.

For the nuclear device, he had rigged a simple dead man’s switch. If possible, he would set the timer after a careful emplacement. But if power was lost, the device would detonate anyway.

His craft was prepared, and the weapons it carried.

He closed his hands around the joysticks that controlled the spacecraft’s systems. There was no computer program to control what he was going to attempt, with this poor Soyuz; he must lead it perhaps to its destruction himself.

He was ready.

Two minutes left. Just ten thousand feet now. The Moon ground fled beneath him, flattening, bellying up toward him.

His descent was actually very shallow—just ninety feet in every mile, much shallower than even a civilian airliner. His path, in fact, was almost tangential to the Moon’s surface. But his speed was gigantic. The pocked ground fled beneath him, like a scarred runway in the last few feet of a descent.

One minute.

Five thousand feet up, and he was still sixty miles from his goal.

The land seemed to flatten further, the close horizon receding.

And then he flew
past
the flank of a round-shouldered lunar mountain, gray, pock-marked. Its shadowed far side was limned by a graceful, powdery curve of sunlit regolith, and its summit was lost above him.

As soon as he perceived the mountain, it was gone, lost behind him, as unreachable as his childhood.