Voyage. Stephen Baxter

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 is only our mayfly life spans which restrict us all from seeing this.

      ‘And now you may be going to the Moon! You must grasp this opportunity, and go there with open hearts and minds. Believe me when I say that I would give anything to exchange places with you.’

      Chuck Jones stepped forward and spat a piece of gum onto the dusty ground. ‘Yeah, well, we won’t be going either unless Dave Scott and Jim Irwin drive their Lunar Roving Vehicle over a goddamn cliff on one of these dumb jaunts. They’ll be taking the last Apollo to the Moon, and not us. So I think you should cut the speeches, Prof, and let’s get on with the checklist, and get this over.’

      He kicked a piece of ancient anorthosite out of his way, and stalked out of the valley.

      There should have been at least four astronauts on this field trip. But the good old guys seemed to have lost heart in what they saw as pointless training exercises, after the program cancelations Fred Michaels had announced earlier in the month. At least these three had turned up, but Jones’s attitude was turning the whole thing into a walk through Purgatory.

      York was pretty uniformly appalled by the astronauts she’d met so far. Ben was clearly atypical. And she couldn’t believe guys like Jones; they were like relics from some grisly Flintstones version of the 1950s. The whole bunch of them seemed utterly self-obsessed, to her.

      Well, screw them.

      She and her friends at Berkeley had done little, over the last couple of months, but follow the fall-out from the events at Kent State, in May. Some of them were preparing their own demonstrations in support and sympathy. She was prepared to bet Chuck Jones – probably Bleeker too, even Ben – hadn’t even heard of the Kent State trouble, the way it was tearing the country apart. They were so cocooned inside their precious programs.

      She felt blind, unreasoning anger, almost a hatred of these astronauts, and the system that had produced them.

      As he stumped over the landscape, Chuck Jones could barely see the rocks around him. He just kept on going over and over the events of the last few days.

      Fred Michaels, Associate Administrator, had come to the Astronaut Office in Building 4 personally, to wield the axe. He’d stood there in his waistcoat, plump as a seal, in front of a room full of sports shirts and crew cuts.

      Michaels’s personal presence wasn’t much consolation, for Chuck Jones.

      Michaels was here to announce, tersely, that the bean counters were cutting all the remaining Moon flights – save only for one more, Apollo 14, which was due to fly early in 1971.

      Jones couldn’t believe it; in a few words, Michaels was shredding his, Jones’s, one-and-only chance of a Moon flight.

      There was some argument from the floor, but Michaels slapped down their questions. ‘It’s for the good of the program, damn it, the longer-term good of the Agency. We’ve done what we’ve had to do. And Tom Paine –’ the NASA Administrator – ‘doesn’t like this any more than I do. Less, even. But we’ve had to accept this, to give us all a future. I’m sure most of you men understand that.’

      Sure, Jones thought, you might understand it in your head. But, when you’ve just had the flight you’ve trained for over years taken away, you can’t take it in your fucking gut.

      And the anguish in the Office had gotten all the greater when Deke Slayton stood up, his face like granite, to announce that it had been decided that this last mission, 14, should be upgraded to a J-class, a sophisticated scientific expedition. So 14 would get the advanced LM with the Lunar Rover, and the Service Module with orbital instrument pallet, which had been assigned to Apollo 15. And with 15’s equipment had come its landing site: a place called Hadley, in the foothills of the lunar Apennines.

      But 15’s original crew – Dave Scott, Jim Irwin and Al Worden – were already in intensive training for the Hadley site.

      So, Deke said, he was standing down Alan Shepard and his crew, who had been the prime assignment for Apollo 14. Scott and his crew had been promoted to 14 instead, and they’d take their backup crew of Jones, Bleeker and Priest with them. The date of the flight would be put back a few months, to give Boeing a chance to get the Rover ready, and let Grumman finish their LM upgrades. Deke said he’d expect Shepard’s crew to pitch in and support Scott’s training from here on in.

      Jones saw Al Shepard walk out of that meeting, his face like a tombstone. You didn’t want to cross Al at the best of times, and it was obvious that despite his seniority he hadn’t been taken into confidence about the rearranged