So, thanks to Russian mission rules, Geena and Arkady were allowed their air time.
She read him a poem Arkady’s mother said he had always liked, called Poltav Battle. And then they sang together, her own toneless grunts along with Arkady’s voice – more musical, but reduced to a scratch by the loop – an old Russian song called On the Porch Together. She got the odd stare from her fellow controllers, but she couldn’t care less about that.
When she was done, she had a warm feeling which persisted even after her shift broke up.
She left the MCC, and made her way out of Building 30. She’d been intending to go straight to her car and home.
But she hesitated.
It was late afternoon. Spring: the least offensive period in Houston’s calendar. There was blossom on the trees, and there were, she saw, birds nesting in the big air-conditioning grilles on the side of the faceless concrete block that was Building 30.
She walked to the central quadrangle of the campus, concrete paths criss-crossing the bristly grass between the buildings. No doubt, she thought, there would now be trails of ducklings quacking their way across the campus, if the ducks hadn’t been chased out of JSC twenty years ago for the noise and mess they made. We ain’t here for ducks.
She remembered her promise to figure out the context for Henry’s precious Moon rock. She hesitated. Maybe the spring air was making her mellow.
She walked over to Building 2, Public Affairs, to find out how she could get hold of Jays Malone. It turned out he was coming in the next day, for a lecture and a tour of the lunar colony studies going on here at JSC. She talked her way into an invitation to join the party.
The next day, Geena made her way to the back of a lecture room in the PAO building, while Jays Malone fielded questions about his work from the scattered handful of journalists.
Jays Malone turned out to be a big man, still muscular, slim and supple for his age, which was – Geena knew from the biographies – about 70. He was crisply tanned, right to the crown of his head, which was totally free of hair, polished to a billiard-ball shine. He looked a little dwarfed by the giant show cards his fiction publisher had sent over – Rocky Worlds – A Vision of the Future by a Man Who’s Been There …
Geena had never met Jays before. He had retired before she had even joined NASA. She’d seen him on Apollo retrospectives and the like, but he was a few generations too remote from her astronaut class to have made any difference to her career here.
Jays stood up to speak. He propped his leg up on a chair, leaned on his knee, held a mike with one hand, and when he spoke, his free hand fluttered around his head like a bird, as if out of conscious control.
So, Colonel Malone, why ‘Jays’?
‘It was my sister. When she was a kid she couldn’t say “James” right. It came out “Jays”. It stuck as a nickname.’
Is it true you changed your name by deed poll to Jays?
‘No. And it’s not true I trademarked it, either …’
Laughter. The journos were friendly enough, Geena realized, rows of faces turned to Jays like miniature moons.
Why the title?
‘Something that occurred to me on the Moon,’ he said. ‘Maybe Earth is unique. But the Moon isn’t, even in our Solar System. The Galaxy has got to be full of small, rocky, airless worlds like the Moon, Mercury. Right? I was only a quarter million miles from Earth, but if I looked away from Tom and the LM, away from the Earth, if I shielded my eyes so I could see some stars, I could have been anywhere in the Galaxy – hell, anywhere in the universe …’
The audience shifted, subtly, showing he had hit the wonder nerve. With the younger ones anyhow.
But Geena knew he was cheating a little. There could have been no time for such reflection during those busy three days on the Moon; such insights had come from polishing those memories in his head, over thirty years, like jewels, until he probably couldn’t tell any more what was raw observation on the Moon, or the maundering of an old man.
Your books are full of geology. But you weren’t trained in geology for your Apollo flight …
‘That’s not quite true,’ Jays said, and he expanded.
The Apollo guys had some training from geologists attached to the project – they’d be taken to Meteor Crater, Arizona, or some such place, and taught to look – they had to try to be geologists, at least by proxy, in a wilderness no true scientist had ever trodden before them. But in the end Jays had spent three days bouncing across the Moon, wisecracking and whistling and cussing; for the point of the journey was not the science of the Moon, of course, nor even the political stuff that pushed them so far, but simply to get through the flight with a completed checklist and without a screw-up, so you were in line for another.
But for Jays, there never had been another. After returning home he was caught up in the PR hoopla, stuff he’d evidently hated, stuff that led him to drink a lot more than he should. And by the time he’d come out of that he found himself without a wife and out of NASA, and too old to go back to the Air Force.
Jays talked about all this now. ‘It was a time,’ he said with a smile, ‘I still think of as my Dark Age.’
The audience was silent.
‘But I kept in touch with the studies of the Moon rocks we brought back. I showed up at lunar and planetary science conferences. And that got me interested in geology. I took a couple of night classes, even made a few field trips, over the years. For a while it was just a way to fill up time between Amex commercials and daytime talk shows. But I soon came to know a lot more about the Earth than I ever did about the Moon.’
And, he said, gradually, the geology stuff had hooked his imagination.
Death Valley, for instance: one of the most famous geological showpieces in America. But if you managed to look beyond the tourist stuff about bauxite miners and mule trains, what you had there was a freshwater lake, teeming with wildlife and flora, that had gotten cut off from the sea. Over twenty thousand years 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