Moonseed

She said, ‘What’s wrong?’

‘Did you hear that?’

‘One rock hitting another? Flintstone chic –’

‘The pitch was low. Basement rock will ring with a high pitch. This boulder is loose.’ So something is breaking up the basement here.

Not good, he thought. Not good at all.

He walked carefully around the puddle. ‘I wouldn’t tread in that thing if I were you.’

‘Why not?’

‘You were saying about dinner …’

‘No. You were saying about dinner.’

They worked their way down the hill, arguing. Henry stumbled occasionally in the deepening dark; each time he patted his jeans pocket to make sure his sample was safe.

Behind them, the puddle glowed softly in the wan Moonlight. Where it stirred, the rock flour rustled.

8

Towards the end of Geena’s eight-hour shift as capcom for Station, a problem came up with a seat liner for one of the Soyuz escape craft.

Because the seats in Soyuz were moulded to fit an individual astronaut or cosmonaut, liners had to be stored for every crew member on Station at any moment. But one of the Russian crew who had just been carried to Station, on board Space Shuttle Endeavour, was complaining that when she tried to install her seat liner into the Soyuz it didn’t fit her. So the ground controllers, in Moscow and Houston, had gotten into a wrangle about what the cosmonaut’s home vehicle was, and Geena found herself on the voice loops to Station trying to explain – in English and Russian – the home vehicle rules.

She read, ‘“The home vehicle for Shuttle-Station crew members is defined as follows. The home vehicle for Americans launched on the Shuttle is the Shuttle. The home vehicle for Americans on Station becomes the Shuttle immediately after the hatches are opened between Station and Shuttle. The home vehicle for cosmonauts launched on the Shuttle becomes the Soyuz, and becomes the Shuttle for cosmonauts on Station after – one – the seat liners are installed for the Station crew in the Soyuz, and – two – the Station crew are briefed on emergency procedures …”’

Traditionally, the Americans tried to use Russian, while the Russians replied in English. It was slow and painfully clumsy, but it did seem as if less mistakes got made that way.

The Russian Interface Officer, a heavy-set woman from New York, was at her side, checking the agreed English-Russian translations of technical terms and acronyms.

The Mission Control Center here at JSC hummed around her, rows of sleek black touch-screen workstations like Star Trek props, littered with coffee cups and yellow stickies and laptops and binders of mission rules. Beside her desk there was a huge recycling bin for soda cans. At the back of the room was a row of pot plants, their tubs littered with more soda cans. At the front of the room, the big screens carried computer-graphic images of the Station’s position and orientation in orbit, a view of the Earth from an external camera, and a shot of a science lab where a European astronaut was freezing saliva scrapings taken from the crew.

It was a familiar working place for Geena, so homely that coming in here was like taking an adrenaline antidote.

Bored to tears, she tried to focus on seat liners.

She’d spent the morning attending a press conference on the plans the boys from JPL were putting up for a fast probe to Venus. It had been exciting, energetic; in fact NASA as a whole had been energized by the Venus event, Geena thought. Whatever the ominous implications, the amount of attention space issues had received since then had been gratifying, and NASA’s speed and flexibility of response invigorating.

But even so, when you got to the coal face of manned spaceflight, it was still a crushing bureaucracy to work in.

The seat liner controversy went on and on.

The hardest thing about managing the Station project was not the technology or the work on orbit. Geena knew from experience that once on orbit, isolated in that collection of tin cans, people tended to drop their personal differences and work together. Integrating two forty-year-old management hierarchies on the ground had proven much more difficult.

Even the basic philosophy of operation of the two control centres differed. For instance, previous Russian space stations – Mir and the Salyuts – had been out of contact with their controllers for most of each day, because of a lack of ground stations around the globe. So the Russians had developed a shift system based on that fact, which differed from the American system. And they’d had to allow their cosmonauts more latitude in day-to-day operations and decision-making than American astronauts, checklisted to death, were generally permitted.

American and Russian mission controllers had worked together for some years now, on the Station assembly project and before that on the Shuttle-Mir docking missions, and had thrashed out a set of common procedures. NASA had given all its astronauts and controllers accelerated Russian language training, and had provided joint training and simulations, and so on.

But it was never going to be easy.

Day to day, they ticked along. But every time a real problem blew up, like this one, it seemed to go to the top of both hierarchies before resolution.

Gradually, the liner problem was eroded to bureaucratic smoothness. And, towards the end of the shift, she was able to snatch a little personal time on the loop with Arkady.

Of course, the whole of the MCC would listen in, as would TsUP, the Russian mission control at Korolyov; in fact a smart IBM computer somewhere would transcribe every word they spoke. But there was still room for a little intimacy. This was one area where the Americans had found they had had a lot to learn from the Russians; those guys seemed to have a better instinct for the internal needs of the people they thrust up there into orbit.

So, thanks to Russian mission rules, Geena and Arkady were allowed their air time.

She read him a poem Arkady’s mother said he had always liked, called Poltav Battle. And then they sang together, her own toneless grunts along with Arkady’s voice – more musical, but reduced to a scratch by the loop – an old Russian song called On the Porch Together. She got the odd stare from her fellow controllers, but she couldn’t care less about that.

When she was done, she had a warm feeling which persisted even after her shift broke up.

She left the MCC, and made her way out of Building 30. She’d been intending to go straight to her car and home.

But she hesitated.

It was late afternoon. Spring: the least offensive period in Houston’s calendar. There was blossom on the trees, and there were, she saw, birds nesting in the big air-conditioning grilles on the side of the faceless concrete block that was Building 30.

She walked to the central quadrangle of the campus, concrete paths criss-crossing the bristly grass between the buildings. No doubt, she thought, there would now be trails of ducklings quacking their way across the campus, if the ducks hadn’t been chased out of JSC twenty years ago for the noise and mess they made. We ain’t here for ducks.

She remembered her promise to figure out the context for Henry’s precious Moon rock. She hesitated. Maybe the spring air was making her mellow.

She walked over to Building 2, Public Affairs, to find out how she could get hold of Jays Malone. It turned out he was coming in the next day, for a lecture and a tour of the lunar colony studies going on here at JSC. She talked her way into an invitation to join the party.

The next day, Geena made her way to the back of a lecture room in the PAO building, while Jays Malone fielded questions about his work from the scattered handful of journalists.

Jays Malone turned out to be a big man, still muscular, slim and supple for his age, which was – Geena knew from the biographies – about 70. He was crisply tanned, right to the crown of his head, which was totally free of hair, polished to a billiard-ball shine. He looked a little dwarfed by the giant show cards his fiction publisher had sent over – Rocky Worlds – A Vision of the Future by a Man Who’s Been There …

Geena had never met Jays before. He had retired before she had even joined NASA. She’d seen him on Apollo retrospectives and the like, but he was a few generations too remote from her astronaut class to have made any difference to her career here.

Jays stood up to speak. He propped his leg up on a chair, leaned on his knee, held a mike with one hand, and when he spoke, his free hand fluttered around his head like a bird, as if out of conscious control.

So, Colonel Malone, why ‘Jays’?

‘It was my sister. When she was a kid she couldn’t say “James” right. It came out “Jays”. It stuck as a nickname.’

Is it true you changed your name by deed poll to Jays?

‘No. And it’s not true I trademarked it, either …’

Laughter. The journos were friendly enough, Geena realized, rows of faces turned to Jays like miniature moons.

Why the title?

‘Something that occurred to me on the Moon,’ he said. ‘Maybe Earth is unique. But the Moon isn’t, even in our Solar System. The Galaxy has got to be full of small, rocky, airless worlds like the Moon, Mercury. Right? I was only a quarter million miles from Earth, but if I looked away from Tom and the LM, away from the Earth, if I shielded my eyes so I could see some stars, I could have been anywhere in the Galaxy – hell, anywhere in the universe …’