Moonseed (45 page)

Garry thought about the new volcanism he’d witnessed from the air: the deep wound the Moonseed had dug into the continent’s oldest, hardest rocks, that even the Colorado could only scratch, the silver patches there.

Maybe they had bought some breathing time, at least.

He knew his mother said efforts like this were only superficial. More about making people feel good, feel they were fighting back, than about canning the Moonseed.

But hell, maybe that was all anybody could do.

He wished he could do as much, by analogy, for his mother.

In the oily interior of the Chinook, he stared at the metal frame ceiling, until the rotors roared and he was lifted, and he closed his eyes.

36

Henry and the mission planners were receiving a briefing, by a quiet young military officer, on the systems they were installing to support the nuke.

“We removed the code box, the permissive action link. For your purposes we engineered a time fuse and detonator and matched them with the warhead. You will have a timer, but you will be able to abort the detonation at any time up to the final moment.” The young man, earnest and soft-spoken, referred to the bomb as a “monkey.”

The nervousness this topic roused in the program managers and controllers and astronauts intrigued Henry. These were hardened, experienced people; why should the idea of carrying a weapon into space spook them so much?

Unless it was the very fact that a weapon was now deemed to be necessary.

Since the 1950s, if not earlier, the Solar System had been assumed to be an empty, barren place, a wilderness of gas and rock and ice, a stage on which man’s drama could be played out. A place to take a camera, not a gun. Now, suddenly, it looked as if that assumption was not true.

And they were
scared…

That was when Henry got the message about some kind of problem at Torness.

He ran back to his quarters. There were several messages waiting for him, from academic contacts, the Scottish authorities, Blue Ishiguro.

Torness.
He remembered the map he’d inspected with
the Prime Minister. Twenty miles from Edinburgh, to the east; exactly along the route Jane said she was going to follow.

Since he told her to get out of Musselburgh he’d tried a slew of ways to get in touch with her, and had failed every time.

Torness wasn’t the only nuclear installation to have suffered a catastrophic failure, as the quakes and fissures and volcanism and floods hit, all around the world.
Nuke stations going up like firecrackers. All we need.

It was the peculiar fortune of the human race, he thought, to have encountered this problem just when it was smart enough to build such things as nuclear reactors but not smart enough to shut them down safely.

He had to do something for Jane.

He contacted Geena, and called in some more favors.

By the time he was done he had a guarantee. If Jane made it out of Scotland, if she was found, she’d be flown out of Britain, to the relative safety of the States.

It was all he could do for her, as it turned out, because the latest blocking moves, in House and the Senate, were overcome, and the authorization came for them to be shipped to Russia.

On his last day in America, Henry received two packages. One was a cancellation of his life insurance policy. The other was an olivine necklace, a string of bottle-green beads.

He tucked the necklace into the little pouch of personal effects he was being allowed to take, all the way to the Moon.

A USAF transport plane took them into Moscow. Henry tried to sleep, during the long haul over the North Pole.

He woke up during the descent into Moscow. He glimpsed green-clad hills below, an ancient landscape
where Nazi and Soviet soldiers had fought to the death: humans sacrificed in waves in the cause of nations which no longer existed, offerings to vanished gods.

He didn’t know what was in the minds of the Administration that had made them progress their decision this stage further. Some of the attempts to disrupt the Moonseed had worked, like the cataclysmic flooding of the Grand Canyon. Elsewhere, they had failed.

Like the backpack nuke that had, against his advice, been dropped on a Moonseed patch that had been set up in Nevada.

The nuke had made a predictable mess, but basically the flood of gammas and X rays had
accelerated
Moonseed propagation. Monica Beus led a study that showed, taking into account the energy returned by the accelerated activity of the Moonseed in those Nevada rocks, that the gamma-fired Moonseed had delivered an energy return in a feedback factor measured in the
billions.

As Henry had suspected. In fact he was counting on that, for his secret plan to save mankind, although when he put it like that he found himself staring in the mirror and wondering exactly how crazy he was.

Anyhow he contacted Monica, asking for more specific measurements.

He suspected it was the failure of the nukes that had triggered the Administration, finally, into acting. Henry had never expected a nuclear attack to succeed—quite the opposite—but he supposed it had to be tried. And its failure resonated like the failure of a god, like the death of Superman, confirming their worst fears.

After the Nevada failure, in fact, there had been questions asked about the need to carry a nuke on the Moon trip. Henry had insisted; and everybody seemed too busy to argue with him.

Still, though, the Administration’s step-by-step commitment to the project wasn’t complete; it wasn’t yet con
firmed that they would actually be allowed to launch. As if, Henry thought bleakly, they still expected things to somehow get better.

He managed to sleep through most of the bus journey out of Moscow to Star City.

Star City, more formally known as the Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Center, was the place the cosmonauts lived, along with the instructors, administrators and mission planners. It was a purpose-built town of four or five thousand people; its atmosphere, to Henry, was somewhere between a university campus and a military barracks.

They were greeted with a lunch banquet in a building called the recreation center—and it was literally a banquet, Henry found to his amazement, with cognac and champagne; the Russians were treating their contribution to this mission as a cause for celebration. Henry joined in enthusiastically, despite frosty glares from Geena. He figured that if he got stoked enough there would be no more training today, at any rate.

He was introduced to Arkady Berezovoy, a tall, dour, strong-looking cosmonaut who, it seemed, would be riding to orbit with them, and so would be joining in the training from now on. It turned out that Geena and Arkady knew each other already; they had worked on Station assignments.

When Henry was introduced, Arkady grasped his hand firmly and looked into his face, searchingly. Henry was left puzzled.

After lunch they were taken for a tour of Star City.

Everything seemed built on an immense, heroic scale, a legacy of the Soviet days. He was shown a giant mock-up of the old Mir station, a spacesuit display, and a hydro pool where the Russians planned their spacewalks. There was a culture center, and a giant memorial to Gagarin. The first cosmonaut of them all stood heroically, one hand behind his back, looking up at the stars.

There was even a planetarium, intended, Arkady told him seriously, for the cosmonauts to learn interplanetary navigation for the Soviet mission to Mars which had never come. In the planetarium foyer was a mock-up of the spacecraft which could have achieved the mission, perhaps in the early 1990s, assembled from hauntingly familiar components: Energia heavy-lift boosters, a Mir-based habitat module, a Mars lander built around Proton booster rocket stages.

But those dreams were long gone.

He was taken to gladhand the staff at TsUP, Russia’s mission control at the unremarkable little town of Korolyov, outside Moscow. The control room looked like a small cinema, with a big screen to show the Station’s trajectory curving over Earth’s surface, and four rows of consoles dating from the 1980s. Under the screens there were two big sponsors’ banners, one from a U.S. computer firm which had supplied the latest set of pcs that supplemented the older equipment, and one, bizarrely, from the Red October chocolate factory, with a slogan about celebrating “shared Russian traditions of quality.” The most useful piece of equipment looked to be a plastic model of the Space Station, which got more attention from the controllers than the screen images.

The cosmonauts still earned a decent wage, but even that was mostly funded by American money funneled through the Station project, and many of the engineers and controllers, bringing home less than a couple of hundred bucks a month, worked as cab drivers and cleaners in Moscow to cover their bills.

It seemed to Henry the disparity between space dream and reality was even harsher here than in the U.S.

Most of the training forced on him here, it turned out, was in emergency procedures.

Henry was heavily briefed on what to do if a Station module was slow-punctured by a micrometeorite, and what
would happen if there were a failure of the booster in the early stages of launch (an escape rocket would haul the manned capsule clear—a lot of noise and shaking, high Gs, probable unconsciousness, a spell in hospital). It wasn’t that there was anything for him to
do
in such an eventuality, but it was thought better for him to know what would hit him.

Henry, exhausted, disoriented, overtrained and bewildered, didn’t agree.

He was trained for emergency landing. The Soyuz was designed to come down on land, somewhere in the Soviet Union, and there would be choppers to pick him up. In theory. But he was taken to the bush in Kazakhstan, a place the capsule might come down where helicopters wouldn’t be able to land, and he practiced getting into a recovery chair lowered from a helicopter.

And he underwent what the American managers called water egress training. With Arkady and Geena, he was dropped in a mocked-up Soyuz entry module into the Black Sea. It was a July day and it was hot—around thirty Centigrade—and the three of them, stiffly noncommunicative, struggled in the hot, cramped capsule, bobbing in the sea, to change out of their spacesuits and into survival gear. It took three hours to get ready, and when Arkady finally opened the hatch, steam gushed out, and briny sea air replaced the stink of vomit that had come to dominate in the capsule.

They had to float in the water, holding onto each other in a triangle. The rescue crews left them there for another hour before fishing them out, and barely a word passed between them.

And in the middle of all this robust Russian training, they were visited by Frank Turtle and his team, red-eyed from jet lag and overwork, with bundles of charts and vu-graphs and laptops, who took Geena and Arkady through the procedures they were working out in such haste: procedures for the real mission, beyond the technicalities of Soyuz and Station—the flight to the Moon itself.

But still, final approval for launch didn’t come.

Then, one August morning, Henry was woken, to see the new images, of fire and ash and flood coming out of the west coast of America, and he knew there would be no more hesitation.

37

The editorial review was
not
going well. And, Joely Stern thought with dismay, it was only 9:00
A.M.

Cecilia Stanley, her editor, read from the copy glowing on her screen “…
And from there Earthquake and Thunder went south…They went south first and sank the ground…Every little while there would be an earthquake, then another earthquake, and another earthquake…And then the water would fill those places…‘That is what human beings will thrive on,’ said Earthquake…
Shit, Joely. Earthquake and Thunder. What is this,
Sesame Street
?”

Joely kept her temper. She’d already lost it once too often in this job.

As an insurance, though, she had her ID in her pocket, in case she was fired on the spot.

“It’s a Yurok myth,” she said evenly.

Sitting behind her desk of expensive dressed stone, Cecilia was a severe, toothy woman of thirty-five. A classic corporate climber; a devourer of souls, thought Joely. “And just what,” Cecilia said in her cool way, “
precisely
is a Yurok?”

“They’re the natives of this region. The Pacific coast. The legend seems to be a reference to a massive quake in this region in prehistoric times. 1700. A folk memory.”

“If it’s prehistoric, how do you know it was 1700?”

Smartass. “Because they cross-correlated it with a tsunami that washed up across the Pacific, in Honshu.”

“Where?”

“Japan. And that
was
recorded. And, look, the legend describes what
should
happen. When the fault gives way
the edge of the North American plate slips forward, and what used to be an upward fold in the plate catapults into a downward fold. The sea rushes in, and brings in sediment. And that enriches the land, like the man said. It’s happened several times. They’ve found layers of sea bottom mud and sand over ancient peat.”

Cecilia rubbed her eyes. “Sea bottom mud. Native Americans nobody heard of. Look, Joely, this just isn’t what we’re looking for.” She glanced at Joely. “I’m expecting anger from you here.”

Joely thought it over. She said carefully, “I think I used up my anger. I used it up on all the times you undermined my authority by sending out my copy to those shit-for-brain buddies of yours scattered around the corporation, and having them blind-side me with their E-mails.”

“Joely—”

“All this after you said I had autonomy. At least now you’re being straight with me.”

“This isn’t personal,” Cecilia said. “It’s editorial. Don’t you get that? I don’t want nursery school songs about
peat,
for Christ’s sake. I want NASA and the USGS and FEMA. Now, if you could have gotten hold of that guy Meacher, the one who’s been shooting his mouth off about going to the Moon, we might have something—”