the lake had dwindled and become more and more saline; the trees and bushes died off and the topsoil washed away, exposing the bedrock, and the lake’s inhabitants were forced to adapt to the salt or die …
His first piece of fiction, a short story, was slight, a tale of a human tribe struggling to survive on the edge of such a lake.
Nods, from the sf enthusiasts in the audience. The Drying. It had won a prize.
The story sold for a couple hundred bucks to one of the science fiction magazines, Jays said he suspected for curiosity over his name alone. A novel, painfully tapped into a primitive word processor, followed soon after. He hadn’t read sf since he was a kid, but now he rediscovered that sense of time and space as a huge, pitiless landscape that had impelled him towards space in the first place.
Are you arguing for a return to space, in your books?
‘I guess so. I think we need to be out there. You don’t need to know much geology to see that … On Earth, in a few thousand years the ice will be back, scraping the whole damn place down to the bedrock again, and I don’t know how we’re proposing to cope with that. And then there are other hazards, further out …’
The next big rock. The dinosaur killer.
‘It’s on its way, maybe wandering in from the Belt right now, with all our names written on it … Or maybe there is some other hazard, waiting out there to bite us. But I’m not propagandizing here. This is just fiction, right? I want your beer money, not your vote.’
Laughter.
Of course, propagandizing was exactly what Jays was doing.
Jays had said on a multitude of talk shows how he was dismayed by the Shuttle program – a clumsy, compromised, primitive design, just a V-2 with air conditioning, it seemed to him – and by the lack of any serious consideration being given to any more advanced follow-up.
For the fact was there were smarter ways to get into space, to reach the Moon and beyond. For instance, orbits of spacecraft passing between the Earth and the Moon were actually unstable, because of the tweakings of the lumpy gravity fields of Earth, Moon and sun. If you gave your spacecraft the right kind of push, in the right direction, at the right time, you could use that instability to make your spacecraft drift to the Moon. It would take longer to get there than the three days it had taken him, but that wasn’t necessarily a problem, for it would be at a fraction of the cost in fuel and mass in low Earth orbit.
‘Then,’ he said, ‘once you are on the Moon, there’s oxygen, and water, and materials for rocket fuel, and materials to make glass and concrete … Once you are on the Moon, with all those resources out of Earth’s deep, heavy gravity well, hell, you can go anywhere!’
It was a vision he shared with a handful of others, inside and outside NASA: how, with a little imagination, the Solar System could, after all, be opened up for colonization, with the Moon as the key.
Unfortunately, nobody with any power, financial or political, wanted to listen. Even to somebody who had been there.
So he began to work in more subtle ways. He joined the board of the National Space Society, for instance. He published his conceptual studies wherever he could, and plugged them on chat shows. He started to work his ideas into his fictions, building up a body of work that, piece by piece, it seemed to Geena, amounted to a kind of schematic of the future, a ladder to history.
Robert Heinlein had done something similar, back in the ’40s and ’50s, and so nurtured the minds of the youngsters who would go on to run NASA, and touch the Moon. Now – in less optimistic times, with a deeper understanding of how God-awful difficult the whole enterprise would be – Jays Malone was trying the same trick.
‘I tell you,’ he said, ‘I’ve given up on you guys. Your generation. All this New Age crap. But there are always the kids. Always the kids.’
Jays talked on, taking the questions – dumb, perceptive, intrusive, whatever – with a clumsy, good-humoured grace.
She waited until the autograph queue had dissipated, and approached Jays.
Jays regarded her gravely. ‘I know you. Geena Bourne. You just came down from Station.’
‘Yes.’ She felt vaguely surprised that he should follow the current program so closely. ‘I’m glad to meet you.’
‘You are?’
‘I’d like your help. I need to talk to you about 86047.’
A frown crossed his face.
Geena told Jays what she wanted. She hoped that if they went through the moment at which he collected rock 86047 one more time – with the help of the mission transcript and such documentation as existed – they would be able to reconstruct the rock’s context sufficiently to help Henry.
Jays was resistant. ‘I’ve been over those damn three days a hundred, a thousand times. What more is there to say?’
‘Henry thinks there’s plenty you could tell him.’
‘Oh, he does. It was my piece of bedrock, you know.’
‘86047.’
‘Yeah. I guess I risked my life to collect it. And they let it sit in the vault for a quarter-century.’
‘Not any more.’ She outlined Henry’s project. ‘That’s why the context is so important –’
Jays glared. ‘How the hell was I supposed to document it?’
‘Well, that’s the point, Jays –’
‘I had to hang upside down in that damn rille to capture it in the first place. Those geology back-room guys weren’t there. They couldn’t see how hard it was to follow their precious procedures, if you were there. I told them that.’
And so on. A one-way conversation.
‘Anyhow,’ he said to Geena, ‘there’s no good reason to ignore a rock like that for so long. I mean the attention they all gave that Genesis rock from Apollo 15 –’
Ah, Geena thought. That was it. Rivalry with the other crews, the trophy fish they brought home. Even after all this time.
‘But now,’ she persisted, ‘late in the day or not, Henry is going to study it. But he needs your help. I need your help.’
He regarded her, his eyes pale blue.
Jays let her drive him out to his home.
She drove along NASA Road One east through the Clear Lake area – marinas, apartment complexes, parks. When the road reached the coast and turned up to go north towards the Port of Houston, they came to Seabrook. This was an old run-down village, with wooden houses mounted on five-feet stilts.
Jays’s house must once have been handsome, but now it was faded by sun and busted down by the weather and neglect. Some of the houses in the area were being restored
