Phase Space (23 page)

Bado sets the TV camera on its stand. Slade hops down into Pam Crater, spraying lunar dust ahead of him.

Slade takes a pair of cutting shears from his tool carrier, gets hold of the Surveyor’s TV camera, and starts to chop through the camera’s support struts and cables. ‘Just a couple of tubes,’ he says. ‘Then that baby’s mine.’

The camera comes loose, and Slade grips it in his gloves. He whoops.

‘Outstanding,’ Bado says. He knows that for Slade, getting to the Surveyor, grabbing a few pieces of it, is the finish line for the mission.

Slade lopes out of the crater. Bado watches his partner. Slade looks like a human-shaped beach ball, his suit brilliant white, bouncing happily over the beach-like surface of the Moon.

Bado thinks of a human hand, pressing silently against the window of a burning capsule.

He is experiencing emotions he doesn’t want to label.

‘Hey, Slade,’ Bado says.

‘What?’

‘Come here, man.’

Slade obediently floats over to him, and waits. He has one glove up over his chest, obscuring the tubes which connect his backpack to his oxygen and water inlets. His white oversuit is covered in dust splashes.

Carefully, clumsily, Bado pushes up Slade’s gold sun visor. Inside he can see Slade’s face, with its four-day growth of beard. He touches Slade’s suit, brushing dust off the umbilical tubes. Patiently, Slade submits to this grooming.

Then Bado gets hold of Slade’s shoulders with his pressurized gloves. He pulls Slade against his chest. Slade hops forward, into his embrace. Bado puts his arm over the Stars and Stripes on Slade’s left shoulder, but he can’t get his arms all the way around his partner.

Their faceplates touch. Slade grins, and when he speaks Bado can hear his voice, like an echo of the radio, transmitted directly through their bubble helmets. ‘Get you,’ Slade says softly. ‘Aren’t you afraid I’m going to make a grab for your dick?’

‘I figure I’m safe locked up in this suit.’

Slade laughs.

For a while they stay together, like two embracing balloons, on the surface of the Moon.

They break.

The TV camera sits on its tripod, its black lens fixed on them.

Bado takes a geology hammer and smashes the camera off its stand.

Bado stands harnessed in his place beside Slade. In his grimy pressure suit he feels bulky, awkward.

Slade says, ‘Ascent propulsion system propellant tanks pressurized.’

‘Roger.’

‘Ascent feeds are open, shut-offs are closed.’

The capcom calls up. ‘Everything looks good. We want the rendezvous radar mode switch in LGC just as it is on surface fifty-nine … We assume the steerable is in track mode auto.’

Bado replies, ‘Stop, push-button reset, abort to abort stage reset.’

Slade pushes his buttons. ‘Reset.’ He grins at Bado.

The guys on the ground are playing their part well, Bado thinks. So far it is all being played straight-faced, as they work together through the comforting rituals of the checklists.

The Agency must have decided that the crew has finally gone crazy. Bado wonders how much of this will ever become public.

Looking at the small, square instrument panel in front of him, Bado can see that the ascent stage is powered up now, no longer drawing any juice from the lower-stage’s batteries. The ascent stage is preparing to become an independent spacecraft for the first time. He feels obscurely sorry for it. It isn’t going to fly any more than he is.

‘One minute,’ the capcom says.

‘Got the steering in the abort guidance,’ Slade says.

Bado arms the ignition. ‘Okay, master arm on.’

‘Rog.’

‘You’re go, Apollo,’ says the capcom.

‘Clear the runway.’ Slade turns to Bado. ‘You sure you want to do this?’

Actually, Bado is scared as hell. He really, really doesn’t want to die.

‘Adam and Eve?’ he asks.

‘Adam and Eve. This is the best way, man. A chance to leave something behind.’

Bado makes himself grin. ‘Then do it, you fairy.’

Slade nods, inside his bubble helmet. ‘Okay. At five seconds I’m going to hit ABORT STAGE and ENGINE ARM. And you’ll hit PROCEED.’

‘Roger,’ says Bado. ‘I’ll tell you how I’d think of you, man.’

Slade looks at him again.

‘Out there,’ Bado says. ‘Floating across the face of the Moon, in all that sunlight. That’s how I’d remember you.’

Slade nods. He looks at his instruments. ‘Here we go. Nine. Eight. Seven.’

The computer display in front of Bado flashes a ‘99’, a request to proceed.

Slade closes the master firing arm. ‘Engine arm ascent.’

Bado has been through enough sims of this sequence. In a moment there should be a loud bang, a rattle around the floor of the cabin: pyrotechnic guillotines, blowing away the nuts, bolts, wires and water hoses connecting the upper and lower stages of the LM.

But they have disabled the guillotines.

Bado presses the PROCEED button.

The cabin starts to rattle. The ascent stage engine has ignited, but its engine bell is still buried within the guts of the LM’s descent stage.

The over-pressure builds up quickly.

Slade says, ‘I think –’

But there is no more time.

The ascent stage bursts open, like an aluminium egg, there on the surface of the Moon. Sunlight drenches Bado’s face.

I will tell the story much as I set it out in my journal at the time. Old-fashioned, I know. But I can’t think of any better way to tell how it happened to me.

If there is anybody to read it.

Bob ran one last check of his skinsuit. He did this without thinking, an ingrained habit for a fourteen-year-old born on Mars. Then, following Lyall, he let the lock run through its cycle, and he stepped out of the tractor and onto Martian dirt.

This was Isidis Planitia, a great basin that straddled Mars’s northern plains and ancient southern highlands. It was late afternoon, a still day at the start of the long, languid Martian autumn. Everything was a cruddy red-brown: the dirty sky, the lines of shallow dunes lapping against the walls of an enclosing crater.

A cloud of camera fireflies hovered around his head. The moment was newsworthy, Mars’s youngest resident visiting the oldest. Bob ignored the flies. They had followed him around all his life.

Meg Lyall was standing with her arms spread wide, as if crucified. She turned around and around, with the creaky, uncertain motions of great age, enjoying Mars.

Bob stood there, hideously embarrassed.

She said, ‘You want to know the best thing about modern Mars? Skinsuits.’ She flexed her hand, watching the fabric crumple and stretch, waves of colour crossing its surface. ‘Back in ’29 we had to lock ourselves up in great clunky lobster suits, all hard shells and padding, so heavy you could barely take a step. Now it’s like we’re not wearing anything at all.’

‘Not really.’

She looked up at him, her rheumy eyes Earth-blue. ‘No. You’re right. It’s not
really
like walking over a grassy field, out in the open air, is it? Which is what you think you’ll be doing in six months’ time.’ She looked up at Earth’s bright glint. ‘Sixty years after the Reboot, Earth is a world of fortresses. Even the grass is under guard. But maybe they’ll let you walk on it even so. After all, you’re famous!’

Resentment sparked easily, as it always did. ‘You won’t put me off going.’

‘Oh, no.’ She seemed shocked at the suggestion. ‘That isn’t it at all. You have to go. It’s very important. There may be nothing
more
important. You’ll see. Walk with me.’

He couldn’t refuse. But he wouldn’t let her hold his hand.

April 2008

Tricester is in Oxfordshire, England. It is a strange place, I suppose: both old and new, an ancient leafy village in the shadow of a huge particle accelerator facility called Corwell, a giant circular ridge of green landscaping. It is a place crowded with history.

My name is Marshall Reid, by the way. I am a science teacher at the village school.

Here’s how it begins for me.

On a bright spring afternoon I lead a field trip of eleven school-children to the Corwell plant. As we troop past the anonymous buildings there is an emergency, some failure of containment, and a blue flash overwhelms us all. I am dazzled but unhurt. Some of the children are still, silent, as if distracted, others very frightened. They all seem unharmed.

There are predictable fears of a radiation leak. The guides quickly herd us into a holding area.

Miranda Stewart is called in, and introduced to us. She is Emergency Planning Officer for the region, the local authority official in nominal charge of such operations, supposedly coordinating the various emergency services. She is 50-ish, a Geordie, a former soldier. I like her immediately; she is a reassuring presence.

But Stewart is overwhelmed by the techs and suits and experts from the environment ministry. Scientists in protection gear crawl scarily over the site with Geiger counters.

We teachers and pupils are held in the middle of all this, sitting
in our neat rows, surrounded by officials and police and medics, our mobile phones besieged by anxious parents. We are all bewildered and scared.

Reluctantly Stewart concedes that the village should be cordoned off, proper tests run on the inhabitants and the local crops, and so on. But no alarm will be raised; there will be a cover story about a chemical leak.

The police set up blocks around the plant and village. There is press attention, and Green protesters quickly appear at the barriers. Emma, my wife, encounters this perimeter, returning from work in London.

Emma, at 31 a little younger than me, is a PR consultant. She misses life in the capital. Emma is seven-months pregnant. To her, the Corwell incident is the final straw; this is not a safe place to raise a kid. Later that day we argue again about moving back to London. But I am devoted to my job, and loyal to the kids. The argument is inconclusive, as usual.

Meanwhile, at the plant (so I learn later), the technicians are finding no signs of radiation damage. But one technician, checking surrounding foliage, finds a nest of mice – a nest without babies.

I have the feeling this is only the start of something larger. Hence my decision to keep this journal.

When Bob looked back, he saw that the tractor had already sunk behind Mars’s close horizon. He had no idea where they were going. He wasn’t enjoying the oily feel of his suit’s smart material as it slithered over his skin, seeking to equalize temperature and pressure over his body. It was like being held in a huge moist hand.

He’d only stepped on the raw surface of Mars a dozen times in his life. It was a frozen desert – what was there to see? He had spent all his life rattling around in the cramped corridors of Mangala or Ares or Hellas, surrounded by walls painted the glowing colours of Earth, purple and blue and green.

Earth! He could see it now, a blue-white evening star just rising, the only colour in this whole rust-ridden landscape – Earth, where he had dreamed of escaping even before he had realized that he was a freak.

He was the youngest child on Mars: the last to be born, as colonists abandoned by Earth dutifully shut down their lives. A little later he had been orphaned, making him even more of a freak.

He owed Mars nothing. He didn’t fit. Everybody stared at him, pitying. Well, another week and he was out of here: the only evacuee Earth would allow.

But first he had to get through this gruesome ritual of a visit with Meg Lyall.

On she talked.

‘I guess you’re used to the fireflies. Surely they are going to watch you all the way home. Just like when I rode the
Ares
out here, back in 2029 …’ More old-woman reminiscing, he thought gloomily. ‘There we were in our big ugly hab module, and we were surrounded by drifting cams the whole way out. At first I figured people were watching to see us screw, or take a dump, or fight. But it turned out the highest ratings were for ordinary times, when we were just working calmly, making our meals, sleeping. Like watching fish in a tank. But you’ve never seen a fish. Maybe even then people were too isolated. Now it’s a lot worse, of course. But we’re social animals; we need people around us … What do you think?’