Moonseed Read Free

course. It had to be a trick of the light. A scuff on his faceplate.
    …And then he saw it, sheltering beneath a hummock in the regolith. It was a dark basalt, a lava lump about the size and shape of a football. When he brushed away the regolith he could see it was protruding from a rock layer, like the ones he could see so clearly on the far side of the rille.
    Jays wanted to get this one right.
    He took careful photographs of the rock in its resting place. Then he tried to set up the gnomon beside it, the smart little tripod that would give him scale, local vertical and orientation compared to the angle of the sun.
    This was called documenting the sample. The idea was that back on Earth, if they knew exactly how the sample had been taken, the scientists would be able to reconstruct the geology of the area at leisure.
    But the documenting turned out to be a scramble. The slope was too steep for the gnomon, and he wasn’t sure the photographs would pick out the rock from its background. He did his best; but the guys in the geology back rooms didn’t always understand how tough their procedures were to follow once you were here… Still, surely the rock would be worth it.
    Of course the rock would be given a number of its own. A five-digit code: “eight” for Apollo 18, “six” because this was their sixth survey stop, and a number for the sample in the order they’d taken samples here, which had to be up in the forties or fifties already, he figured.
    He bent sideways, stiff in his inflated suit. He was able just to pick up the rock; it fit his hand as if it had been meant for him.
    He put his prize in a numbered Teflon bag. Then he photographed the place the rock had come from.
    Movement. The dust was stirring, where he’d lifted therock. When he looked again, the movement wasn’t there.
    Never had been there. Been out here too long, Jays.
    Tom was calling. They had to complete a rake sample, a random representative selection of the rocks here, and then move on.
    He had just arrived, having come all this way, and it was already time to leave.
    Jays took a last glance down inside the rille. He tried to peer down as deep as he could, straining to see to the bottom. The slope looked easy; he wished he could go a little farther, deeper into the rille. But he knew he mustn’t. He was a long way from Tom’s helping hands, if he ran into trouble. And anyhow, he was behind the timeline.
    He knew he wouldn’t mention what he’d seen to Tom.
    On impulse, he leaned over, scooped up another fragment of the bedrock sample, stuffed it inside a sample bag and crammed it into a pocket on his leg.
    Then, his bedrock under his arm, he snapped shut his sun visor and clambered back up the slope, toward Tom and the waiting Rover.
     
    After a four-billion-year wait, the visit with its burst of activity had lasted only three days, the final flurry of dust settling after only seconds.
    At Aristarchus Base, Rover tracks and footprints converged on the truncated base of the abandoned Lunar Module. The blast of the departed ascent stage’s engine had left a new ray system, streaks of dust which overlaid the footprints.
    Now the Moon was inert once more, the sculpted hills of the Aristarchus ejecta blanket rising above this puddle of pitted, frozen basalt, their slopes bathed in sunlight, shining like fresh snow.
    Waiting.
    In places, the disturbed dust stirred. Glowed softly silver.

1
    Geena Bourne woke up before dawn. She was, of course, alone in the apartment.
    She got up in the dark and walked around putting on lights.
    Henry had gone.
    Fled. But he’d taken nothing. No furniture, no carpets or curtains, no CDs or books, not even his own clothes. Nothing but his geology hammer, as far as she could see.
    Oh, and Rocky, their labrador, the Rock Hound.
    Shit.
    It was worse than if he’d taken everything, or trashed the place.
    Still, she knew where he’d be. She pulled a coat over her pajamas, got in the car and drove out, through