Moonseed. Stephen Baxter

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СКАЧАТЬ of the hazards and their prediction of eruption, more than fifty thousand people had been evacuated to safety, days before Pinatubo’s devastating eruptions.

      Henry, fresh from college, had done little more than carry the gear, but it had been his first exposure to real field work, and to a major geological event. And to what it could do to people.

      So they gassed about that.

      ‘Not that we were so smart about Pinatubo,’ Henry said. ‘You remember Sister Assumpta?’

      Blue laughed. ‘Of course.’ This was the nun who had walked into the Philippine Institute of Volcanology to tell the assembled scientists, peering at their instruments in the artificial light there, that, begging their pardon, the mountain had just exploded. And so it had, clearly visible from her village; but that nun’s soft-spoken message was the first warning anybody had.

      So they talked about that for a while. Then Henry went up to buy some more drinks, and they talked about the time in Colombia when Blue had absent-mindedly walked over terrain so hot that when he took off his boots his socks were smoking … and so on.

      Blue kept up, but he looked thin and frail compared to the booming, bovine gaijin around him, and every now and again he would turn away and cough deeply into a huge handkerchief, the phlegm liquid in his throat. He had visibly crumbled in the few years since Henry had seen him last, and that was a true pisser.

      Blue wasn’t admitting to any of it, but the word was he had asthma, and maybe heart trouble. Which was why VDAP hadn’t allowed him out of Vancouver and into the field for a couple of years, and – no doubt – why Blue had been so keen to come for a jaunt to Britain, on Henry’s obscure and ambiguous invitation.

      Blue was driven to keep working. Everyone who knew him knew that, and knew why. Kobe.

      But that wasn’t Blue’s fault. Why the hell should he have to give up, to retire, to succumb to the betrayal of his body?

      Henry felt a deep, unfocused anger boiling up inside him. Age. It was so damn medieval that they all had to submit to such a thing. He himself was already old enough to feel the weight of age descending on his own bones. It just went on and on, it seemed, wearing you down, taking out everybody from the best and brightest on down. And nobody got a reprieve, not so much as a day off from it.

      He thought of the patch on Arthur’s Seat, spreading like the liver spots on the thin skin of Blue’s bird-boned hand. Was that what it was? – a sign that even the Earth, in the end, grew old?

      You’ve drunk too much of this British piss, he thought. The next time he went to the bar he came back with Becks, which was the nearest they had to a clean American beer.

      12

      He arranged to meet Blue up on the Seat the next afternoon.

      In the morning, with a mildly banging head, he made his way to the lab.

      He made a run around the building, checking on the progress of his samples in the various labs. Here was the X-ray fluorescence spectrometer, for instance, an anonymous grey box which looked like an industrial-strength photocopier, into which ground-up fragments of his rocks were fed in tiny platinum egg cups. X-ray fluorescence would tell him about elemental abundances in fine detail.

      He was promised by the prep technician that his samples would be in place by the end of the day.

      The ion microprobe was the department’s million-pound pride and joy. It was set up in a gloomy lab crammed with humming electronic equipment. The heart of the probe was a chest-high complex of stainless steel tubing and chambers. Rock samples, coated in gold plate, were fed into a vacuum chamber and bombarded with fine beams of caesium or oxygen ions, focused by intense electromagnets. There was a little optical microscope you could use to watch the ion beam cutting its little crater into the surface of the sample, like a kid with a magnifying glass scorching his initials on the barn door. But the sample areas were just microns across, only a couple of atoms deep. The layers of atoms, sputtered off into a mass spectrometer, revealed the elemental composition of the sample, and such details as the temperature the crystal structures formed at.

      It was an impressive piece of equipment – one of just four in geology labs around the world – or at least it seemed so until you realized that Motorola alone had four of the beasts, for use in their silicon chip quality control procedures. The academic community was undoubtedly the poor relation of business and government, and in Britain things seemed to be even worse than in the States.

      Henry’s work, it seemed, was next in the queue behind a meteorite analysis that was overrunning, after an all-night run. He argued, but got nowhere, and left fuming.

      Anyhow, he suspected the composition of the samples wasn’t nearly so important, in this case, as their structure. And that was going to be difficult to study here, without the right tools.

      When he got to the clean room Mike was there, bright-eyed and depressingly keen, eager to go over the results of X-ray diffraction analyses he had run on samples taken from 86047. The results were simple traces, peaks and troughs. Mike had run the images through the computer already, and was compiling the results when Henry arrived.

      But Mike looked flustered, and he was rushing to be ready; Henry had a sinking feeling he had been up all night with this.

      At Henry’s request, he had also run through some of the bizarre grains Henry had scooped up from the Arthur’s Seat dust pool, or whatever the hell it was.

      X-ray diffraction was a step beyond the use of polarized light. The wavelength of visible light was much bigger than atomic size. X-rays had a wavelength just about the size of a typical atom, so they could show atomic structure: the crystal structure of silicates, for instance. The spacing of the peaks and troughs on Mike’s results showed the crystallographic spacing of the sample. The trick was to map back from these simple patterns to figure what the underlying crystal structure must be.

      It was complex. But diffraction results were unambiguous. And every so often you would run into a new crystal form.

      And that, Henry realized with an odd stir of anticipation and dread, was what seemed to have happened here.

      And not just with the Moon rock, which you might expect with such an exotic sample. There was, Mike said, something different about the Edinburgh sample, too.

      They looked at the 86047 results first. Mike had prepared a summary diagram on a pc screen.

      Inside the Moon rock’s potato-shaped profile, roughly sketched with graphic software, Mike had marked layers, as if the rock was a misshapen onion.

      ‘I took samples from all the way through the rock,’ Mike said. ‘You can see it has this structure –’

      ‘Structure? What are you talking about? It’s a rock sample. It ought to be a homogenized lump –’

      ‘Nevertheless,’ Mike said. He sounded nervous, maybe pissed off, and Henry made a conscious decision to back off. Mike said, ‘This is predominantly olivine.’ He pointed to a band marked in red, just inside a grey band that made up the surface of the rock. ‘Then, going inward, we have, in order, layers of tourmaline, a pyroxene mix, amphiboles, mica, quartz.’ That took his finger to the core of the rock, which he’d left as white.

      ‘So СКАЧАТЬ