Moonseed (58 page)

“I can’t feel anything.”

“It’s too subtle to see. The instruments know, though.”

“The mascons,” he said. “Mass concentrations. The Moon is a lumpy old world. It’s plucking at us. Playing with us.”

She grunted. “I wish it would leave us the hell alone. I sure wasn’t expecting turbulence out here.”

“Turbulent gravity…Oh my,” he said, looking ahead. “Oh, my.”

Aristarchus himself was shouldering over the horizon.

The crater’s walls were a great rampart, visibly circular, which rose out of the Imbrium plain like the walls of some impossible city. And already Henry could see Jays Malone’s rille: Schröter’s Valley, a dry valley gouged into the sandy surface of the Moon by a brief, late spasm of lunar volcanism.

The crater stunned him with its magnitude. The energies that had gouged out this monster—shattering the rock and melting the very floor—had been truly stupendous, far beyond human capability, as far ahead in the future as he cared to look. And yet, he knew, even this great impact had been a pinprick compared to the gigantic, primeval events which had gouged out the great basins, the final formative bombardment that had shaped the geology of the Moon.

It was as much as humans could do, he thought, to send them this far, two tiny people, encased in air and water, descending cautiously on their candleflame. How could they hope to shape events here, on this cosmic battleground?

The whole exercise, his grandiose, half-formed schemes, seemed futile before they even started.

But now the Powered Descent burn began, this toy lander’s rocket engine jarring to life once more.

Henry was tipped toward the vertical. He could
feel
how his center of mass was swung through space. Now, the
Shoemaker
would stand on a tail of rocket flame, all the way to the surface of the Moon.

Twenty-one thousand feet. Velocity down to twelve hundred fps, Geena. Still looking very good.

“Copy.”

Seven minutes into the burn.

“We’re only about ten miles from the landing site,” Geena said now. She looked down past her toes. “We ought to see the landing site soon.”

Shoemaker, you’re looking great. Coming up on nine minutes.

And then, at seven thousand feet, the
Shoemaker
’s engine throttled down.

“High gate,” Geena said.

“Wow!”

Henry could feel the sharp reduction in thrust, as if the brakes had suddenly come off. It was momentarily exhilarating. He was, after all, riding a rocket ship to the Moon; there
ought
to be moments like this…

The long brake was over now, and the
Shoemaker
pitched up for the final descent; now it would come down on its rocket tail.

Henry settled gently against the platform. The lander was still supporting him, but the Moon’s gentle gravity was tugging at him now: he could feel the Moon, for the first time.

And there was the Moon itself: a ghostly, black-and-white panorama, not much more than a mile under his feet, flying past at unreasonable speeds. But he was so close, now, that the glow of the engine bell was reflecting back up at him from the flanks of the taller peaks. Human fire, reflecting from the Moon.

“Oh, shit,” said Geena.

“Yeah. That maneuver—”

“No, not that.
Look
at this place. Where the hell’s the Apollo?”

The Moon was a thousand craters, a thousand pools of shadows. Henry felt an instant of panic. How could they map-read, how could they find their orientation in a landscape like this?

…But suddenly he picked out the rille again, a scar in the Moon, sinuous and twisting, a trowel trench dug into wet clay. And there—a needle-point, glittering brightly, its morning shadow stretching behind it—was the old Apollo lander.

He pointed. “We got it.”

“I see it,” said Geena. “Holy cow. Right ahead of us. The computer is taking us straight in.”

“I guess those geeks at NASA knew what they were doing after all.”

“I guess.”

It was essential to use the Apollo site as a beacon, because that was the site from which Jays Malone had traveled to pick up the fateful rock, 86047; and because that was where Houston had sent their supplies, on the second
Shoemaker
lander, unmanned. If they couldn’t find the second
Shoemaker
they wouldn’t even have the fuel to return to orbit.

The
Shoemaker
turned, its thrusters banging, tipped up through about fifty degrees now. Henry’s viewpoint changed, and he realized the
Shoemaker
was flying
beside
a mountain. They were already so low that its rounded flanks shouldered all of five or six thousand feet above him, pale brown curves bright against the black sky.

For a moment he lost the sense of powered flight, and it seemed to him he was drifting, weightless, among these huge shapes.

Looking good, Shoemaker.

“Five thousand feet high, a hundred feet per second,” Geena said. “Right on the nose.”

Shoemaker, you are still go for the landing. Four thousand feet. Three thousand. Descending at seventy feet per second.

A lot of Apollo astronauts had burned up their fuel by coming in along a stair-step pattern. Maybe they hadn’t trusted their landing radar data; maybe they hadn’t trusted the evidence of their own eyes. But the autoland, blindly confident in the thirty-year-old maps in its computer memory, was just going to bring them on down. And so it did, in a smooth steep nerveless glide that brought the ridges and craters and hummocks exploding into unwelcome relief.

The Apollo site was still a long way ahead.

“Something’s wrong,” he said.

“No.” Geena was staring at the little bank of instruments before her, concentrating on the
Shoemaker.
She was looking internally, he realized, thinking about the machine they were riding, not externally, at the
Moon.

And the Moon was not behaving as it was supposed to.

“Look up, Geena. We’re coming down short. Maybe you should take over and bring us in.”

“No. I told you. We’re autoland all the way to the ground.”

“Neil Armstrong did an override.”

“Neil Armstrong hadn’t been here before. We have. We have maps, Henry. We have photographs. Now shut up and let this thing land itself.”

A thousand feet above the Moon, and he was flying toward a bright field of craters, their shadows stretching away from him across the Moon. The
Shoemaker
was coming in at a low angle, unreasonably quickly, like an artillery shell lobbed across some ancient battlefield; and Henry was riding the shell, feet first.

Let Geena do her job, he told himself. Trust her.

But they were still coming down
hard,
and now there wasn’t even a sign of Apollo.

It seemed to Blue, now, that he was actually rising into the air, as if Dumfoyne was a raft which he was riding in a swelling lava sea.

Perhaps he should have brought an altimeter.

Lava from the main vent overwhelmed Strathblane, it seemed in moments. The neat buildings, the rich green fir trees, exploded and burned, as the lava, enclosed in a stretching sack of cooling rock, surged through the streets.

There were faults everywhere now, fissures and lava fountains. Already most of the vegetation had burned off. As if the whole area was turning into one giant caldera.

For now he was safe, here at the summit of Dumfoyne. The hill, and its nearby twin Dumgoyne, were little islands of stability, in a sea of fissures and vents and lava fountains.

Dumfoyne was a raft he was riding to the sky.

His voice transmission was still getting through, although his sky was covered, now, by an ugly, roiling cloud of steam and ash, through which lightning sparked continually. But the reception was too poor for his instruments’ telemetry to penetrate, and, regretfully, he folded up his instruments and collapsed his laptop.

…
incredible, Blue. We can’t believe these radar readings. There must be a magma volume production rate of millions of cubic meters a second…

That compared to hundreds of cubic meters, Blue knew, in an eruption of the size of Mount St. Helens.

…
as if we’re seeing a million years of geology compressed. Mauna Loa, built in a day.
Mauna Loa in Hawaii was Earth’s largest volcano, stretching seven miles above the ocean floor.

“But this may be bigger than Mauna Loa,” Blue said, unsure if Sixt could hear him. “Bigger than anything on Earth.”

There had been no volcanism on Earth on this scale for a hundred millennia. Twice as long as humans had existed.

Perhaps this was Olympus Mons come to Earth, he thought. The giant Martian shield volcano, so huge its caldera poked out of the thin atmosphere. Mars, come to Earth.

The ground lurched, swelling further.

“Geena, we’re coming in short.”

“The autoland is—”

“Going to bring us down in the wrong damn place! Can’t you see that?”

Now, he could see, she actually closed her eyes. “You don’t know that.”

He thought furiously, trying to figure out how this could have gone wrong…“Mascons,” he said.

“We know where the mascons are. We mapped them with
Prospector.
We allowed for them.”

“We know where they
were.
Geena, if we’re right about the Moonseed—”

“Oh. Maybe the mascons shifted.”

“Right. Geena, if we land right but in the wrong place, we’ve failed. You know that.”

“Henry, I can’t handle this—”

That wasn’t Geena.

Abruptly he realized she was descending, deep into some unexpected funk. He felt irritation rise; he felt like screaming at her, rerunning the breakup of their marriage.

But right now, she was the only pilot he had.

It’s the lack of training, he thought. They didn’t have time to desensitize her. She’s not used to being in a situation she can’t anticipate, control to the last degree.

But that’s where we are now.

He tried to concentrate on the altimeter, to read off their diminishing altitude. There could be minutes left, no more.

“Tell me about piloting,” he said. “If you don’t like where you’re landing—”

“You have four alternatives. You can go left, right, short, or go over. Going left or right is a hairy thing.”

“Good. And landing short—”

“You got to come down dead. You can’t see what you’re going into.”

“Like a copter. So—”

“You land long.”

She opened her eyes and looked at him, and he could see a kind of desperation in her face.

“That’s it, Geena. Land long. Go ahead.”

She looked forward, as if seeing the fleeing surface of the Moon for the first time. She grasped a switch with her clumsy gloved hands, and flipped it to
ALTITUDE HOLD
.

The
Shoemaker
pitched forward, sharp enough to jolt him. Now it was almost level, and it skimmed forward, over unfamiliar, empty terrain.

“All
right,
” Henry whispered. “Five hundred and thirty feet,” he said. “Looking good.”

“Kind of sluggish,” she muttered.

“You’re doing fine…”

But the Moon rushed up at him—it was like riding a glass-walled lift—and new terrain swept over the horizon. A young, fresh crater slid under the
Shoemaker
’s angular prow. Henry made out details inside the crater: a square, blocky shape, a few scattered pieces around it, all of it casting long angular shadows at the center of a rough disc of discolored land.

The attitude thrusters pulsed, making the
Shoemaker
’s frame shake. When Henry looked down he could see his restraints rattling silently.

The silence of the flight was eerie. Unnatural. No engine noise, no wind whistle. Not even a plume of smoke erupting from their engine. Just this platform, the two of them, and the sun and the Earth and the Moonscape wheeling past them, under a black sky.

The craft responded sluggishly, but the 8-ball in front of Henry tipped sharply, and the cratered landscape tilted, before righting itself again. He tried to help Geena, to follow the readings on the little computer screen. “Three hundred fifty feet, down four feet per second. Horizontal velocity pegged…Three hundred thirty, down six and a half…”
He was Buzz Aldrin, he realized suddenly, relaying information to her reluctant Armstrong; it was all just as it had been before.

And suddenly the blocky lunar-floor shapes before him resolved, and there was the old Apollo site, right in front of him. He could see the boxy shape of the abandoned LM descent stage, little glittering packages around it.

The Moon’s surface was discolored, in a rough circle centered on the LM stage. At first he wondered if that was some kind of raying from the LM’s ascent and descent engines. Then he understood.

The marking was footprints from American boots: after thirty years as fresh in the lunar regolith as if they’d been made yesterday.

And he could see a shadow, fleeing across the textured ground: it was a platform bristling with antennae, set on four spindly legs, elongated by the low sunlight—and there were two skinny forms, side by side, his own shadow and Geena’s, sailing across the surface of the Moon itself. The
Shoemaker
shadow was surrounded by a kind of halo, sunlight reflected brightly straight back the way it had come.

Henry smiled. “I do believe we have found what we came for.”

And now there was a surge, upward, that threw Blue onto his back; ash particles spattered his face. He could actually feel the acceleration this time, as if he was being carried aloft in a high-speed elevator.

But it wasn’t like a quake; the motion didn’t have that sharp, characteristic suddenness. Basic Newtonian physics: nothing moved a mass of rock like this
suddenly.

Storm clouds gathered above him, turbulent, agitated. The air was being displaced, rammed upward toward the tropopause.

The end game must be close.

The ground stabilized again, if briefly, and he got to his knees. He was starkly alone here, now, on this chunk of rock; his instruments had gone.