Moonseed

‘That you do.’

Mike pulled his arms briskly out of the gloves, and led Henry to the largest, best-lit case in the room, right at the centre. And there, on a small pedestal, sat sample 86047, an unprepossessing fist-sized lump of coal-black basalt, untidy and inert. Beside it rested a small plastic cube, labelled up-down and with the four points of the compass.

Mike bent to the case, and the fluorescent lighting underlit his face, making him look even younger.

‘Here it is,’ he said. ‘I can’t quite believe it’s here. That it’s – you know – real. That some guy picked it up on the Moon, and now it’s here.’

‘Believe it. You know about the documentation trail on these babies?’

‘Sure …’

In principle each Apollo sample had been photographed before it was picked up off the surface. The photo was the clue to the rock’s context. For instance, the pattern of shadows from the unremitting lunar sunlight gave the clue to its orientation. Since the scientists knew exactly when the rock was picked up, and where, and how high the sun would have been in the black lunar sky at that moment, they could position the rock in a strong light to recreate the shadows in the photograph, and so work out the rock’s precise orientation. Then they photographed the rock again alongside the small dice-like orientation cube. The cube stayed with the rock forever after. All this was important because, for instance, the underside of the rock would have been protected from the sun, and so processed differently.

‘… Great theory,’ said Henry sourly. ‘But it heads out the window when your astronaut fouls up. The orientation we have here is just a best guess. Shit. This rock sits there a billion years, waiting to be found, and we screw it up in the first second of contact …’

Two people bustled into the lab: a greying, portly older man, and a woman of about twenty-seven.

The man shook Henry’s hand. ‘Dr Meacher.’

‘Henry, please.’

‘Dan McDiarmid. I’m heading up the investigation here, from our side of the pond. Welcome to Edinburgh.’

‘Good to meet you, Danny.’

McDiarmid flinched but held his ground. ‘We weren’t expecting you quite so – informally.’ He was eyeing Henry’s stubble.

There wasn’t a trace of Scottish in his accent, as far as Henry could tell. He knew the type, he thought. His creative days long past, McDiarmid had used whatever reputation he had earned to win power and wealth, to turn himself into a Great Man.

Authority. The antithesis of science.

Now the woman pressed forward, thin and intense, sharp blue eyes. ‘Marge Case,’ she said. ‘I took my degree at Cambridge, and a doctorate in lunar feldspathic breccia crystallization history –’

‘I know about your work.’ Henry noticed both McDiarmid and Case had just ignored Mike; in fact Case had literally pushed past Mike to get to Henry.

Henry retrieved his hand from Case. ‘Hey. Mike. Stick around.’

Mike turned, confused. ‘You want me to get you a coffee?’

‘Hell, no, I don’t want a coffee. Well, yes I do, but not right now. Just hang loose, bubba.’

McDiarmid said with evident difficulty, ‘We want to offer you every hospitality and resource. Marge here will work as your lead technician, and –’

‘Sorry.’ Henry reached out to Mike, got hold of the shoulder of his jacket, and pulled him back. ‘Post’s taken.’

Case looked at Mike with precisely the reaction Henry had expected. ‘But I have a doctorate in –’

‘You said already. I’m sure Mike and I can find you something to do.’ Henry put his arms around their shoulders, and began to lead them to the door; McDiarmid followed, hands fluttering over his belly. ‘We’re going to be one big family,’ Henry said. ‘Just like the Waltons. Do you get the Waltons? Now, Mike. Where do we get that coffee?’

When he was done tormenting Case and McDiarmid, he relented and let Mike drive him back to the Balmoral.

Mike drove in silence, apparently confused. Henry wondered if he was being cruel to him, in some obscure way.

Am I just playing games with this guy? Or do I really think he will do a better job than Marge Case?

Well, sure he did.

But maybe he was being too smart at filling in Mike’s life story.

Henry suppressed a sigh. When the divorce from Geena was finalized – when he learned the Shoemaker was canned and he was going to have to leave Houston – it was as if his life was ending. He was glad when that crummy BA 747 left the tarmac at Houston Intercontinental, because it was like a little death.

But, unlike whatever lay beyond death, Edinburgh contained people, and choices, and already, just a few hours here, Henry had, on a whim, made two enemies and one dubious friend. And for what?

Anyhow, it was done.

Mike dropped him at the hotel, and Henry lugged his suitcase inside. Mike drove back to the King’s Buildings; he said he wanted to start work, preparing for the first samples from 86047.

Henry checked in.

The room rate was quite fantastically expensive. What was it with Brit hotels? Henry wasn’t paying, but he hated to waste money; the sooner he got out of here the better.

Still, his room wasn’t so bad. A big double bed – a duvet, not blankets – and a kettle and a whole stack of tea bags and a mini bar, and complimentary sunscreen in the bathroom. He was on the fifth floor, and he was looking east; he would get the sun in the morning.

He took off his shoes and his stinking socks, and padded to the window.

Looking north beyond the city’s roof tops he could see the Firth of Forth, a dreamy-blue arm of the sea. Calton Hill pushed out of the foreground. Calton was one of the ancient volcanic plugs that underpinned the city. It was coated with grass, and crowned by absurd-looking classical-style buildings, such as an open portico – some kind of unfinished temple, it seemed – and a telescope tower.

Mike had been right that Edinburgh was the home of geology. The old igneous structures here had been studied right from the beginning of the discipline. In fact James Hutton in the eighteenth century, based in Edinburgh, was the first to come up with modern theories of the processes that shaped Earth – the first man in history, perhaps, to understand the extent of the vast deserts of geological time that surrounded him.

Henry wondered, briefly, how that must have felt: to be the only human on the planet who knew …

I ought to sleep, he thought.

He tried the TV. There were five main channels and cable and satellite. The main channels were full of soaps and other daytime bullshit. He found a British news channel called Sky and watched that for a while, but the news meant little to him. There was a story about problems for the Government over integration into Europe, and some kind of IRA bomb threat that had caused gridlock in Birmingham, and, my God, a riot in some part of Scotland – what looked like a dire residential area called the Gorbals, in Glasgow – a spokesman who said in a thick accent, We never accepted the Union of the Parliaments, and that’s that. It turned out he wasn’t talking about the modern devolved assembly but the abolition of a Scottish Parliament in favour of a single British one, which had happened, for God’s sake, in 1707. And then commentators on the Irish stuff talked about some guy called William of Orange, who had his fifteen minutes of fame in 1688.

1707, 1688. Dates from prehistory for North America, dates as remote as 5000 BC.

There was no US news at all.

He tried to remember the last British news story he’d noticed back home. Some royal bullshit, probably.

Britain, he was coming to see, was built on a long and complex history. Shame they hadn’t got more of it right, he thought.

But then that was complacent. Britain was peaceful and prosperous and proud of itself and, hell, even pretty democratic. The US should last to be a thousand years old; then we’ll see what shape we’re in …

He flipped around until he found CNN. Lying on his bed, he studied baseball scores, one of his routines for conning himself to sleep.

But, though he was tired, he was not sleepy, and some part of him was reacting to the fact that it wasn’t even midday outside, and the day was a-wasting.