Jane called, ‘What are you doing?’
‘Measuring.’
‘Why?’
‘It’s an annoying thing geologists do. Can you smell anything?’
‘Apart from bullshit, you mean.’
‘Work with me here.’
She took a deep breath. ‘Nothing but the grass and the haars.’
‘Nor can I.’
‘Is that good?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Is it bad?’
‘When was the last time you were up here?’
She shrugged. ‘A couple of weeks.’
‘And it wasn’t here then?’
‘No.’
He returned to her. ‘Listen, do you have a bottle? Maybe make-up. Perfume or somesuch.’
‘I don’t wear perfume.’
‘Anything, then.’
As it happened, she did have something. It was a sample of an aromatherapy oil she’d been given by a salesman at the shop. She’d tucked it in a pocket and forgotten about it.
He took the bottle, unstoppered it, and tipped out the oil.
‘Hey.’
‘I’ll pay you.’
He shook the bottle dry, and then, carefully, he scraped the bottle along the top of the rock flour puddle.
When he was done, he stoppered the bottle and tucked it in a pocket of his jeans.
‘What is that stuff?’
‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘Maybe I’ll be able to find out.’
She looked around. ‘It really is getting dark now.’
‘Yes.’
But he hesitated.
He walked to an outcrop of basalt near the pool, picked up a loose lump of rock, and hit the outcrop. He frowned at the result.
She said, ‘What’s wrong?’
‘Did you hear that?’
‘One rock hitting another? Flintstone chic –’
‘The pitch was low. Basement rock will ring with a high pitch. This boulder is loose.’ So something is breaking up the basement here.
Not good, he thought. Not good at all.
He walked carefully around the puddle. ‘I wouldn’t tread in that thing if I were you.’
‘Why not?’
‘You were saying about dinner …’
‘No. You were saying about dinner.’
They worked their way down the hill, arguing. Henry stumbled occasionally in the deepening dark; each time he patted his jeans pocket to make sure his sample was safe.
Behind them, the puddle glowed softly in the wan Moonlight. Where it stirred, the rock flour rustled.
8
Towards the end of Geena’s eight-hour shift as capcom for Station, a problem came up with a seat liner for one of the Soyuz escape craft.
Because the seats in Soyuz were moulded to fit an individual astronaut or cosmonaut, liners had to be stored for every crew member on Station at any moment. But one of the Russian crew who had just been carried to Station, on board Space Shuttle Endeavour, was complaining that when she tried to install her seat liner into the Soyuz it didn’t fit her. So the ground controllers, in Moscow and Houston, had gotten into a wrangle about what the cosmonaut’s home vehicle was, and Geena found herself on the voice loops to Station trying to explain – in English and Russian – the home vehicle rules.
She read, ‘“The home vehicle for Shuttle-Station crew members is defined as follows. The home vehicle for Americans launched on the Shuttle is the Shuttle. The home vehicle for Americans on Station becomes the Shuttle immediately after the hatches are opened between Station and Shuttle. The home vehicle for cosmonauts launched on the Shuttle becomes the Soyuz, and becomes the Shuttle for cosmonauts on Station after – one – the seat liners are installed for the Station crew in the Soyuz, and – two – the Station crew are briefed on emergency procedures …”’
Traditionally, the Americans tried to use Russian, while the Russians replied in English. It was slow and painfully clumsy, but it did seem as if less mistakes got made that way.
The Russian Interface Officer, a heavy-set woman from New York, was at her side, checking the agreed English-Russian translations of technical terms and acronyms.
The Mission Control Center here at JSC hummed around her, rows of sleek black touch-screen workstations like Star Trek props, littered with coffee cups and yellow stickies and laptops and binders of mission rules. Beside her desk there was a huge recycling bin for soda cans. At the back of the room was a row of pot plants, their tubs littered with more soda cans. At the front of the room, the big screens carried computer-graphic images of the Station’s position and orientation in orbit, a view of the Earth from an external camera, and a shot of a science lab where a European astronaut was freezing saliva scrapings taken from the crew.
It was a familiar working place for Geena, so homely that coming in here was like taking an adrenaline antidote.
Bored to tears, she tried to focus on seat liners.
She’d spent the morning attending a press conference on the plans the boys from JPL were putting up for a fast probe to Venus. It had been exciting, energetic; in fact NASA as a whole had been energized by the Venus event, Geena thought. Whatever the ominous implications, the amount of attention space issues had received since then had been gratifying, and NASA’s speed and flexibility of response invigorating.
But even so, when you got to the coal face of manned spaceflight, it was still a crushing bureaucracy to work in.
The seat liner controversy went on and on.
The hardest thing about managing the Station project was not the technology or the work on orbit. Geena knew from experience that once on orbit, isolated in that collection of tin cans, people tended to drop their personal differences and work together. Integrating two forty-year-old management hierarchies on the ground had proven much more difficult.
Even the basic philosophy of operation of the two control centres differed. For instance, previous Russian space stations – Mir and the Salyuts – had been out of contact with their controllers for most of each day, because of a lack of ground stations around the globe. So the Russians had developed a shift system based on that fact, which differed from the American system. And they’d had to allow their cosmonauts more latitude in day-to-day operations and decision-making than American astronauts, checklisted to death, were generally permitted.
American and Russian mission controllers had worked together for some years now, on the Station assembly project and before that on the Shuttle-Mir docking missions, and had thrashed out a set of common procedures. NASA had given all its astronauts and controllers accelerated Russian language training, and had provided joint training and simulations, and so on.
But it was never going to be easy.
Day to day, they ticked along. But every time a real problem blew up, like this one, it seemed to go to the top of both hierarchies before resolution.
Gradually, the liner problem was eroded to bureaucratic smoothness. And, towards the end of the shift, she was able