LITMIR.BIZ

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out the bung; it came loose with a soft pop.

      She sniffed the vial. ‘I can smell wood smoke.’

      ‘That’s the Moon dust. It’s never been exposed to free oxygen before. It’s oxidizing. Burning. Here.’

      He tipped up the vial, and tapped its base; the Moon dust poured into Jane’s palm. It was just a few grains; there really was hardly any of it.

      Jane pushed at it with the tip of her little finger. ‘It’s sharp. Like little needles.’ She lifted her fingertip and inspected it. ‘It’s stuck to my skin. Oh, well …’

      She tipped her hand, and let the grains scatter. They sparkled briefly before dispersing.

      Talking, arguing, they made their way down the flank of Arthur’s Seat, towards the Dry Dam. Above them, the sky brightened.

      … They were just grains of basalt, falling through the air.

      A little piece of the Moon, come to Scotland. But, though different from any terrestrial samples, the grains themselves were unremarkable.

      They fell now to a massive plug of agglomerate. They would not be found again, by the most determined petrological inspection.

      … Except that where they fell, the bare rock glowed, softly silver, in spots a fraction of an inch wide.

      6

      The debriefing session for Geena’s mission was held in the Teague Auditorium in JSC Building 2, the Public Affairs Office. Geena had to sit behind a desk on a stage with the four others from her crew, bathed in the glare of TV lights. As clumsy young sound technicians tried to fix microphones to their lapels and ties, the astronauts chatted awkwardly, like newsreaders under the credits.

      Geena had to shield her eyes to see the audience. She could see the platform on which the NASA TV cameras were mounted, and before it a thin scattering of journalists – mostly science correspondents, mostly men, mostly bearded, many of them familiar to her. This briefing wasn’t a formal press conference but had become a post-flight tradition; the idea was for the crew to come share their experience with colleagues and families. So there were engineers and controllers and mission managers from Mission Control and the science backrooms, here at Houston, and some pad technicians and managers from the Cape; but there were also grandmothers and little kids, relatives or friends of the crew.

      There was nobody to see Geena.

      That was her choice. Such events made her cringe, without her mother wanting to muscle in too.

      It was a sparse crowd, and it looked as if today the audience was filled out with a tram-load or two of spectators from the Space Center, the flashy visitors’ centre on the edge of the JSC complex. The gaggle of tourist types sat together in their slacks and T-shirts, cameras dangling from their necks.

      At last the proceedings began.

      First there was a long ceremony of team awards, presented corporate-style by the director of JSC. Every astronaut who flew got a ‘Spaceflight Medal’ specific to the mission, pinned on her chest. When it was her turn, Geena got up to a ripple of polite applause, her palms sweating, suddenly as nervous as a grade school kid on show-and-tell day.

      The Center director was a man called Harry Maddicott, somewhere in his sixties, hair slicked back, waistcoat stretched over an ample gut, fat and sleek and self-satisfied as a seal. He grinned at her as he pinned her medal to her suit jacket lapel, taking obvious care not to let his hands stray anywhere near her breast.

      Next came the awards for the mission controllers, ‘outstanding performances’ by the Flight Dynamics Officer and the Guidance, Navigation and Control Officer and even the Public Affairs Officer. There were awards for the guys who planned the EVAs, the mission’s spacewalks – even though the EVAs, which Geena had been scheduled to take part in, had both got cancelled because of a loose screw that stuck the Shuttle orbiter’s hatch mechanism.

      Then, to Geena’s embarrassment, she was called up again. She was given an EVA credit because – Maddicott said – she and her partner had got suited up and taken to vacuum, even though they never left the vehicle, and that counted for the record. Then the mission commander got up and gave the two of them a special award: the balky screw, smaller than her thumbnail, that had fouled up the hatch. It was wrapped up in a plastic bag, for them to saw in half and mount on wood, half each.

      It was moments like this that made her realize what NASA was really all about: it was forty years old now, a well-entrenched piece of Government bureaucracy, where ceremonies like this were an essential part of motivation, the little plaques and medals and in-jokes a measure of the development of your career.

      All the applauding NASA managers here seemed to be white males, it struck her, even though the astronauts, the showcase, were a reasonable mix of ethnicity, creed and sex. Many of the managers were of that sleek rotundity that comes to men of bulk and stature in such positions. Men of influence. She looked at Harry Maddicott, for instance. With his jowls grey and dragged down by gravity, it was difficult to remember that he had only been in his twenties during the era of flower power. How had he looked then? And yet now he had seamlessly become the kind of man who seemed to emerge from each generation to run the country, as long as Geena had been alive, and probably a lot longer before.

      The inevitability of her own likely metamorphosis with age, into some female equivalent of Maddicott, depressed her. Well, Henry probably thinks I’m there already.

      She tried to pay attention to the continuing presentations. There was a slide-and-video show of highlights of the mission. Images of the Mission Control Center here at JSC, guys sitting at their blue workstations with their jackets over the backs of their seats, scratching their bellies and working with mind-numbing slowness. The Shuttle’s docking with Station was more fun to watch, with intercuts between computer graphics of the converging spacecraft and the Station docking adapter making a slow geometric sense, the Shuttle flying up an invisible cone to its target, the black dots of the adapter’s Space Visioning System which helped the computers bring the huge spacecraft together. But this too proceeded with glacial slowness, the two huge machines converging at no more than an inch a second.

      Now there were pictures from their stay in orbit on Station, usually of an astronaut – sometimes herself – struggling with some incomprehensible piece of equipment in a cluttered interior.

      Here was Bonnie Jones, the other woman on the crew, floating around the Shuttle with her long greying hair loose and in a fan around her. As a crewmate, that had driven Geena quickly crazy. Of course the media outlets loved it; Henry told her there had been at least two daily occurrences of ‘bad hair day’ jokes. Later in the mission, Bonnie had tied her hair into a rope-like ponytail, which swung around behind her. The novelty of that wore off after the first crew member got a hairy slap in the face.

      Geena was, of course, all for equal access to space. But she thought women like Bonnie ought to cut their damn Barbie-doll tresses to a crewcut for the duration; that wasn’t such a sacrifice.

      The show limped on. The movement of objects in zero gravity, a milky-slow ballet, had some appeal. But the audience started getting restive, the kids and old people bored. The fact was, the novelty of watching nondescript people performing incomprehensible tasks soon palled, zero gravity or not.

      There was a brief sequence of Arkady Berezovoy on board Station, using a Station power tool, floating upside down. He grinned out of the screen, it seemed directly at her. He spoke to camera in his thick, earthy, accented English: It was like a dream when Shuttle came floating up to Station. Last night I slept on the Shuttle for the first time. It was unusual. Station had become my whole universe. After 128 days in space, I couldn’t believe anything existed beyond its walls …

      Arkady was still on orbit. Listening to his voice, Geena realized how much she missed him.

      The most striking images, the ones that stunned the audience to silence, were those of the Earth: the visible evolution of the three-dimensional diorama of clouds and ocean

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