Moonseed (50 page)

Geena reached out a hand to him. He pulled her up, and they embraced. But they broke when Henry came blundering up behind.

“Pay the cab fare,” Henry said to Arkady. “I got no change.”

Neither of them laughed. Henry looked from one to the other. Suddenly, unexpectedly, he felt like a gooseberry.

“We do not have much time,” Arkady said gravely.

Geena checked her watch, a big Moonwalker’s Rolex strapped to her arm. “TLI is minus fifty.”

“What’s TLI?”

“Trans-lunar injection. When we leave Earth orbit, for—”

“The Moon. Minus fifty what? Hours?”

She grinned. “Minutes.”

He gaped at her. “You guys are crazy.”

“The launch window is complicated, Henry. It will last about a day—after that the plane of our orbit will drift and we’ll have to wait a month—and we have pushbutton opportunities of a minute or so, once an orbit—”

Arkady put a hand on his shoulder. “We will take care of it. If you need to defecate, I would recommend you do it here, in the departure lounge, so to speak. It will be rather more comfortable than later.”

Henry shrugged him off. “What is it with you astronauts and my toilet functions? I’ll take my chances.”

“As you wish.” Arkady floated off.

Henry struggled after Geena, through the Station. He hadn’t got his sea legs yet, and he kept getting his elbows or his clumsy feet hung up.

It was
dark
in here. The habitable compartments made up a kind of cramped corridor, strung out together, patchily lit by floods. There was a constant rattling of machinery, thumps and bangs and whirs. Oddly, he couldn’t smell anything at all, save a little sparky ozone. That made a certain sense. The air was recycled, with carbon dioxide absorbent and contaminant filters. It must be dry, clean, healthy. And it must be irradiated by the raw uv coming in the windows, ionized to ozone.

The windows were small, well-separated portholes. They were grimy, coated with dusty fingermarks. Any dirt
in the air up here was going to stay there, he supposed, until it stuck to some surface, or got sucked out by the filters.

After all you couldn’t open a window to let out the fug.

The walls were covered by thick insulation blankets. Every square inch of usable surface seemed to be crammed with equipment: boxes of electronic gear, pipes and air ducts lashed together with silver tape, crudely lagged. Cables were strung about everywhere, floating like seaweed. It was like some old geezer’s home workshop, he thought, encrusted by years of make-do-and-mend, pieces of equipment crudely taped to the walls, instrument panels and air scrub cartridges and exercise gear sticking out at every angle, and towels hanging like flags from color-coded holders on the walls.

This wasn’t so much a science platform as a survival shelter, he thought. It was strange to think of humans struggling to survive in all this dimness and clutter, while the silence and beauty of space, of the Earthscape itself, hung beyond the scuffed walls.

Right now there were five people up here, in a Station built for three: himself, Geena and Arkady plus two regular crew. Everybody was working but himself, it seemed, hauling equipment and supplies back and forth along the cramped modules. Less than an hour to TLI, Henry thought, and they were still loading. So much for checklists. He wondered what crucial item was being forgotten, what key mistake was being made, right this minute…

He saw Arkady carrying his petrological microscope, ugly wooden box and all, and he felt obscurely reassured.

Geena introduced the crew briefly. There was a tough, competent-looking woman of about fifty called Bonnie Jones, and a guy called Sixt Guth. Sixt had to be at least sixty, Henry thought: fit and lithe, his head totally free of hair, as if it had worn smooth. He was struggling with a pack of consumables, but he stopped to shake Henry’s hand. That left something on his palm, Henry realized, a kind of gray sheen.

Sixt saw him looking. “Sorry. Metal dust,” he said. “From the Progress.”

“The Progress?”

“The supply ships the Russkies use. Like unmanned Soyuz. Pieces of shit. Half of them are looted for food by the ground crews in Kazakhstan.” Sixt winked at Henry. “So you’re going to the Moon. I envy you.”

“Maybe I should be envying
you.
”

“You know, the thing of it is, you get tired of watching the Earth, from orbit. After two or three months up here, you want to
go
some place.”

“And now we are.”

“You, anyhow. I just hope there’s somewhere for you to come back to.”

Geena drifted past, beckoned Henry, and he followed.

Bonnie pushed past them, hauling equipment. She barged into Henry’s back, knocking him aside.

He took a moment to recover. “What’s eating her? Jealousy?”

“No,” Geena said. “Well, maybe a little. Mostly she resents your being here. The interruption to her routine.”

“Wow.”

“You get a little cabin fever up here.”

They came to another tunnel, set in the floor, with an open hatch.

He said, “And what’s down this rabbit hole?”

She said softly, “
The Moon
…” And she pushed him through the hatch.

It was just another Soyuz capsule, another crude ball of earthy Russian metal. Geena pushed him through the orbital module to the descent module, pointed at the right-hand seat and told him to buckle up.

For a few minutes longer the hatch above his head stayed open, and he could hear the crew frantically jamming last-minute cargo into the orbital module above him.

The Soyuz was basically the same design as the one in which he’d ridden to orbit. But there were some differences in the instrumentation: a small laptop computer, duct-taped to a wall, English labels hand-printed and stuck over some of the Russian gear. He got the sense of improvisation, of beat-the-clock preparation, of this simple little craft being hastily upgraded to be capable of taking three humans to the Moon, and back again.

The sense of hurry was
not
reassuring, right now.

Geena came swimming down. She wriggled over to the left-hand seat and pulled a checklist from a plastic pouch stuck on the wall.

Arkady followed, muscular limbs in a blue jumpsuit, crowding into the center seat.

So the crew was complete, thought Henry. Geena was trained to fly the lander; Arkady would handle the Soyuz; and he was Mister Moon. Given the circumstances they were a well-matched crew. Complementary.

So why, then, was the atmosphere so stiff?

“Fifteen minutes to TLI.”

Radio voices responded to Geena, from the mission controls in Korolyov and Houston, English and Russian voices ticking through checklist items. Geena responded in kind, her Russian tinged with California.

“Shouldn’t we be wearing spacesuits?”

She turned to him, distracted. “The launch window is kind of tight here.”

“So, shut up, Henry.”

“Shut up, Henry.”

Arkady’s knees were jammed up against Henry’s. Try as he might, Henry just couldn’t get away from that gouging physical contact. The Soyuz seemed
much
more crowded with three than with two.

And now Sixt’s Moonlike face loomed briefly in the open hatch, and he nodded gravely, before he slammed the hatch shut.

Once more, Henry was sealed in.

Henry heard a hiss as the short tunnel between Station and Soyuz was evacuated. Then the clamps that held the craft together were released, and a spring connector pushed the Soyuz away. The undocking was a small symphony of thumps, bangs and obscure jolts.

Then the light in the porthole beside him started to change.

He could see the great powder-gray structure of the Station once more, drifting away from him. The Station was lined up so its long axis pointed down toward the center of the blue Earth, and its big solar panels trailed after it in its orbit. He wondered dimly if the Station’s position had something to do with stability: maybe the orientation was tweaked that way by the Earth’s faint tides, and the solar panels felt the soft breeze of the remnants of the atmosphere, even so high, so that the Station sailed like some immense ship through this silent ocean.

Arkady saw him looking. “When Station is operational we will line it up with the long axis in the direction of flight. That eliminates tidal effects, from our zero-G manufacturing experiments—”

“When it’s operational.”

Arkady smiled sadly.

The checks continued, in English and Russian. Henry could follow maybe half of what was spoken, pick up maybe ten percent of the sense.

…
Roger, Geena, this is Houston. We’re all set here. We’re even ahead of schedule.

“Rog.”

Green lights here. Your attitudes look like they’re on the nose…

The basic Russian systems seemed to have been augmented by American electronics, to handle the extra functions required of the ship on this Moon flight. Arkady mostly worked at the basic Soyuz controls, while Geena tapped on
her laptop. They worked pretty smoothly, all things considered, but sometimes they stumbled, and they had to repeat what they were doing in English and Russian.

The Soyuz turned in space, firing its attitude thrusters. Every clattering thruster pulse felt like a punch in the back. Henry could feel the shove of his couch and the hull wall, physically swinging him around.

Now there was another clatter he recognized. “We docked with something.”

“Very good,” said Geena dryly. “We just picked up our booster stack, Henry.”

They flew into Earth shadow. When Henry peered through his window he could see fans of crystals spewing out in geometrically perfect straight lines from the attitude thrusters: rocket exhaust, in Moonlight.

Geena said, “The five-minute light is on. We should have the thirty-second light in—ah, five seconds—coming up—two, one,
light.
”

Very good. We got TM confirmation. Timing is perfect, you guys.

“Roger that.”

I’ll count you down to autosequence and you’ll call at five…Confirming, flight directors have been around the horn at Houston and over in Korolyov, and we confirm you are go for TLI. Geena, you are go for TLI.

He asked, “What’s an autosequence?”

“The program for firing the rockets,” Geena said.

“The rockets that will take us to the Moon?”

“You got it,” she murmured.

“Yes.” Arkady’s voice was somber. “But the ship is smart. It has aligned itself with the horizon and with the stars, and is ready to fire the new engines strapped to it. I am not concerned. The ship is much wiser than we are…”

“Umm,” said Henry. “I just wish they’d had time to test this stuff.”

“You can’t have everything,” murmured Geena. “Henry, this is going to be eyeballs-out.”

“What the hell does
that
mean?”

Here we go. Countdown to autosequence. We’ve got—ah—ten, nine, eight, seven, six, five—

Geena flipped a switch. “Arm.”

Three, two, one, sequence.

“Got it,” Geena said. “Right in the groove. Green on the attitude. She’s holding like we’re locked in cement.”

“Copy that.”

Here we go. Coming up to the five count.

“Roger.”

Coming up—now—five, four, three, two—

Henry gripped the frame of his chair, and braced his back.

—one—

“Oh, shit.”

Zero.

He heard a low, deep rumble. Henry felt himself fall forward into his straps, as if he was falling into the nose of the cabin. The push was sharp, initially, then settled down to a steady thrust, a little more than Earth-normal gravity.

“Eyeballs-out, hell,” he said.

“Didn’t have time to design it out,” Geena shouted back. “Sorry.”

Henry turned and looked out his window.

He was flying over the Pacific night. He could see the light of the engine, a pale orange spot, reflected in the wrinkled Moonlit hide of ocean. Anybody down there, looking up, would be able to see the burn, see the first Moonship in a generation veering off into space.

But already Earth was sliding past his window. He could
feel
the craft sliding sideways, pushing out of Earth orbit, heading for the Moon.

You’re looking good here. Right down the old center line.

“Thirty thousand feet per second,” Geena said. “Thirty-three. Thirty-four. Thirty-five…”

After a couple of minutes the thrust shut down, without warning. Henry watched the others, but they didn’t seem concerned. There was a series of metallic bangs.

“Second stage,” Arkady said evenly. “Three, two, one—”

Another jolt from the ship’s nose, eyeballs-out again, a thrust that lasted for two more minutes. Then that died—and the ship flipped over—and a final meaty push in the small of his back.

The computer shut down the engine. The push died in an instant, and Henry felt himself pitch up out of his couch.

So it was done, so quickly. He was moving at more than twenty-four thousand miles an hour, fast enough to coast all the way to the lip of Earth’s gravity well, and then downhill to a rocky Moon. But inside the little descent module, with its homely clatter of vents and fans and generators, there was no sense of speed.

Arkady cut loose from the booster stack. Working the Soyuz’s attitude thrusters with two handheld joysticks, he turned the spacecraft so the windows were pointing back toward the Earth.

The discarded booster stack looked immense, glowing in the unfiltered sunlight. Henry saw it was made up of three fat, squat cylinders, bound together in some kind of rough framework. Geena told him what he was seeing: the upper stages of three American-built boosters called IUSs, which had been docked to the Soyuz’s nose. The final push had come from a Russian engine called a Block-D, strapped to the back of the craft. The Block-D, incidentally, would deliver them to the Moon. The booster stack was dumping exhaust, spewing sheets of sparkling ice particles into space, sheets which spiraled out as the stage turned. It was like some immense lawn sprinkler, Henry thought.