style="font-size:15px;"> ‘What works?’
‘Venus. Not Jupiter – Venus. Kiss good-bye to Verne – we don’t need those immense nuclear rockets after all!’
‘Dad, I –’
Sylvia linked Gregory’s arm. ‘Good-bye, dear. Drive safely.’
‘I’ll call when I’m home, Mom.’
Dana looked back once, at the end of the block. Sylvia was waving, but his father had already gone back to his shop.
Thursday, July 9, 1970 San Gabriel Mountains, California
It was nearly noon; from a burned-blue sky the sunlight bore down on York’s bare head and shoulders.
Jorge Romero had led them all into a little valley that afforded a good view of the hills. Now he went bounding up to a twisted old ironwood tree. ‘This tree is your LM. You’ve just landed on the Moon. Now I want each of you to come stand over here and describe what you see.’
The three astronauts – Jones, Priest, Bleeker – stared back, all but anonymous in their baseball caps, T-shirts and chromed sunglasses.
Romero’s question wasn’t hard, York knew. This was an interesting area: non-lunar, but with easily visible geologic relations among colorful rock units. But the stances and expressions of the astronauts betrayed a mixture of bafflement, embarrassment and resentment.
Christ, York thought. This trip is going to be a disaster.
But Romero was windmilling his arms at them. ‘Come on! The one thing you’re always short of on the Moon is time. You – Charles. Come over here, and start us off.’
With a kind of lazy grin at Bleeker, Chuck Jones went strolling over to Romero. He leaned against the tree, beside Romero, and began to summarize what he could see.
Romero was maybe fifty now, York supposed, but he was vigorous and supple, apparently still full of energy; his sunburned nose stuck out from under his sunglasses, and a few strands of graying hair licked out from under his floppy hat. York had taken in a graduate lecture of Romero’s some years back. Working out of Flagstaff, Romero was a great field geologist as well as a geochemical analyst. He had immediately struck her as someone who could not fail to inspire the most reluctant of students – such as your average beer-swilling, wise-cracking pilot-astronaut hero, for instance.
So when Ben Priest had told her that Romero had agreed to give the Apollo 14 crews, prime and backup, some geologic training, and Ben had invited her along to help out, she’d been pleased.
‘… No, no, no! What about the layers in that mountainside over there?’
‘Look, Professor –’
‘And you have missed the most important feature of the landscape altogether!’
Jones looked baffled; he was squat, solid, dark, and the thick primate hair on his hands and arms seemed to bristle with anger. ‘What “important feature,” for Christ’s sake?’
‘Look here.’ Romero knelt and picked up a handful of fragments, of a white rock, from the floor of the valley. ‘Can you see? Such rocks are everywhere – are they not? – now that you observe.’
Jones had had enough. ‘This is a goddamn boot camp.’ He kicked at one of Romero’s white rocks. ‘Ben, this is a fucking waste of time. Our program is compressed enough without this crap.’
‘Come on, Chuck,’ Adam Bleeker said easily. ‘You haven’t given it much of a chance.’
‘Fuck it, and fuck you,’ Jones said. ‘Listen up: we’re only the goddamn backup crew for Apollo 14. That’s the first thing; we probably won’t even make it to the Moon. Two. The target is the lunar Apennines, not goddamn California. So why am I here tripping myself up on a pile of Californian rocks? Three. I’m an aviator. I don’t see why I need to know a fucking thing about the geology of the goddamn Moon to do my job.’
‘Look, Chuck –’ York stepped forward.
The look he gave her then – of sheer, undiluted contempt – made her hesitate, just long enough for Romero to raise his hand.
‘Now, now. Of course Mr Jones here is absolutely right.’
Jones looked startled.
‘It doesn’t matter how much you know about the San Gabriel mountains. Of course not. It doesn’t really matter what you know about the Moon. What does matter to me, though, is that for you to make your mission into a full-up success, you’re going to have to learn how to observe.’
A full-up success. Ben Priest was suppressing a grin; York wondered if he had coached Romero to throw dumb-fighter-jock slang at Jones.
It caught Jones off balance, anyhow. He bent and picked up a piece of the white rock. ‘Just tell me what the hell the relevance of this is.’
‘It is called anorthosite,’ Romero said evenly. ‘And it is our best guess that this was the primary component of the Moon’s primordial crust.’
‘Really?’ Adam Bleeker stepped forward now, and took the piece of rock from Jones – as if it was the only sample of anorthosite in the valley, York reflected wryly. ‘How so?’
Jones still glowered, but for now he was sidelined from the conversation, and Romero was back in control.
‘When it first formed, the Moon was probably entirely molten. Then the outer hundred miles or so cooled to form a crust of anorthositic rocks – bright rocks, just like these. The main components of anorthosites, you see, like plagioclase, are light; heavier minerals, including those rich in iron and magnesium, sank into the body of the Moon. Now, the anorthosite – we think – dominates the brighter, older areas we see on the Moon’s face, while the dark maria are cooled seas of lava.’
Bleeker was grinning at the idea. ‘So the maria really were seas, once.’
York nodded. ‘It must have been a hell of a sight, back then: oceans the size of the Mediterranean brimming with red-hot, molten lava …’
She tailed off. Jones, his eyes hidden by his sunglasses, was watching her as she spoke, and cracking some joke to Ben Priest. Something crass, about the way she moved her eyebrows up and down when she was talking.
Ben looked uncomfortable, caught between a grin with his crew commander and embarrassment for his friend.
And York was silenced, just like that. She felt as if she was sixteen again, gawky, clumsy, infuriated.
With a fling of the arms, a grand actor’s gesture, Jorge Romero walked a few yards away. ‘Listen to me. I want you to leave this place as better observers, after today. But I also want you to leave with something else: a sense of the great drama of geology.’ He glanced around. ‘When you look at a valley like this, you see a few dusty old rocks, perhaps. But I see immense processes which churn the surfaces of worlds, frozen in time as if by a flashbulb. I am sure Natalie has the same perception. It
