4

Henry became conscious again, long before she got him back to the shelter.

“We have to get back,” were his first words.

“I know. We’re going.”

“I have to start analysing the data.” He looked at the hoses which snaked between their backpacks. “Thanks for saving my life.”

“Pleasure.”

“I don’t think my fall affected the station I set up.”

“You checked as you fell to your doom, did you?”

“Yes,” he said, without irony.

They bounced across the surface of the Moon, back to the shelter.

She parked as close as she could to the shelter. It wasn’t easy to get inside; linked by the hoses with their fragile couplings, they had to move like Siamese twins, taking care over every step.

Once inside, she checked the shelter’s air and took off her helmet and gloves. She could feel a gush of moist heat escaping from the joints at her wrists and neck; it was a relief to shuck off the suit and move freely.

Henry went straight to work. He set up his pc, checked the data link to the remote station he’d set up in the rille, and started tapping at his keyboard. And he prepared some of his samples on slides for his ridiculous high-school microscope.

He worked feverishly. She knew Henry of old; in this mood, whatever his physical state, he wouldn’t be dissuaded. It used to irritate her. In fact she thought of Henry as a workaholic. Well, maybe he was. But right now, she realized, whatever understanding Henry achieved today, here on the Moon, might be crucial for them all.

So she let him work, and contented herself with a health check; he didn’t seem to have been permanently harmed by his brush with the Moonseed.

She tended to her equipment. That pesky Moon dust had continued to etch into her gear, she found. It was now ground deeply into the fabric of her suit, and even when she tried to scrape it out with her fingertips she only succeeded in working it into her fingers and under her nails. The metal seals at wrist and neck were getting quite badly corroded. And the handle of Henry’s geology hammer had had its rubber coating worn away to bare metal.

She recharged her backpack. She took a look at Henry’s, but it was ruined beyond her capability to repair it here. When they next left the shelter they would have to do it bound together once more.

She made some food. A hot drink: camomile tea, one of Henry’s favourites. She made him drink and eat, and he complied, but he didn’t seem to notice what he was being fed.

She sipped her own tea. Even freshly made, it didn’t seem hot enough. One of the old clichés of lunar travel, she thought: water boils at lower temperature in low pressure. Well, it was a fact of physics, and here she was living it out.

Still, the tea was a comfort.

Afterwards, she pulled on her sleeping bag and lay down. She ought to try to get some sleep, she knew; God alone knew what the next day was going to bring. She considered filling her bag with water from the tank. In the circumstances, though, the drizzle of radiation seemed the least of her worries.

She closed her eyes, and listened to the tapping of Henry’s fingers on the keypad of his laptop, his characteristic, soft, under-the-breath mutterings — frustration, surprise, satisfaction. Just like old times, she thought. As she drifted, the drizzle of key taps seemed to stretch out, as if Henry was some scientifically-minded robot, slowly running down.

Maybe she slept.

Henry tapped her on the shoulder. He was hollow-eyed, but he seemed healthy enough. He was chewing on a rice cake.

“You okay?”

“Yeah,” she said.

“But you’re wide awake.”

“I am now.”

“I’m sorry,” he said.

“You aren’t working.”

He shrugged. “I think I’m done for now. Monica Beus sent me another e-mail. Smuggled it past the NASA smiley-face censors.”

“And?”

“And what? The world is coming to an end. Where do you want me to start?”

The event in Scotland, its scale unprecedented in the lifetime of the human species, had shaken the world on every level — physical, political, economic. Governments were collapsing all over. Someone had taken out the UN building in New York with a backpack nuke. Britain had invaded the Republic of Ireland, seeking living space.

The NASA satellite pictures were scary. White infra-red blurs that were whole populations, running. Black scars showed where thousands, millions, had died. People were fleeing in herds, seeking safety where none existed anywhere on Earth, all dignity gone.

After the collapse of the international order, wars had flared all over, in every troublespot you could think of, nuclear, chemical, biological, conventional. But it hadn’t taken long for the collapse and general chaos to reach a point where large-scale warfare was impossible, and the conflicts descended into low-level, low-tech — but nonetheless bloody — local brushfire.

“Good news,” Henry said humourlessly. “Famine is killing more people than war. Oh, and NASA centers have been coming under attack.”

“Why, for Christ’s sake?”

He shrugged. “You got to blame somebody.”

He was talking too fast, his mood strange.

She pushed her way out of her sleeping bag. “Show me what you have.”

He brought over his laptop. The screen showed a sphere in false colours, yellow, orange and red, slowly rotating, semi-transparent so she could see to its core.

He asked, “What does this look like?”

Under a near-intact crust, the sphere was riddled with pockets and chambers. The core was picked out by a hard, dark blue knot. “A rotten apple.”

“It’s the deep structure of the Moon.”

“Right.”

He explained how he’d produced this image.

The Moon was a quiet planet.

It wasn’t just the lack of air. The Moon had some seismic activity. In fact the heaviest quakes were imposed by the Earth, every month, “deep forming Moonquakes” caused by the dark tides Earth raised in the rocks of the waterless Moon. And there were occasional “shallow Moonquakes” — smaller, isolated events, of which nobody knew the cause. There were even occasional landslides, caused by impacts or quakes.

But the Moon’s seismic violence was only a hundred-millionth part of the energy that racked the Earth.

On the airless Moon there could be no sound, of course. But the Moon, paradoxically, transmitted sound well, through its solid structure. The Moon had “high Q’, Henry told her. That meant that when you hit the Moon, as he had done with his implanted charges, it would ring like a bell. And if you set a seismometer on the surface, it could pick up your footsteps as you lumbered away in your spacesuit.

What all this meant was that Henry’s networks of seismometers were a powerful tool for unravelling the meaning of the rocky waves that passed through the Moon’s interior.

“…I have a database and analysis program here called BOB II,” he said. He brought up lists of commands. “A neat piece of work. Command-drive, interactive. It’s adapted from the data analysis suite VDAP uses — the volcano disaster people — for the real-time analysis of time series data of seismic events in crisis situations. And—”

“Henry, I don’t care about the software. Tell me what this means.”

For answer he reduced the Moon’s image, and paired it with another. “This is what we called a puffball rock, from Edinburgh. Just a couple of feet or so across. Rotten with Moonseed, ready to blow.”

It was an irregular elliptical shape, something like a potato. But it showed the same pattern of pockets through its structure as the Moon.

“You’re telling me the Moon is a puffball rock.”

“I’m telling you the Moonseed has infested it, as it did rocks on Earth.” There were differences of detail, but the patterns of the two infestations were the same. “You can see the relative scaling of these chambers — the way they cluster, like bubbles butting up against one another. We find the same in smaller rocks. Even dust fragments.”