But now that she had ended up here after all, one glance was enough to make her see why prosaic minds had named the stretch of land between Sinus Iridum and Mare Imbrium the Land of Mist. A flat, iridescent barrier stretched out from horizon to horizon, over a kilometre high and not in the slightest bit suited to lifting Chambers’ mood. It weighed down on the land desolately, hopelessness which had turned into dust. No one in their right mind would feel the desire to cross it.
But Hanna’s wheel tracks led right into it.
He had driven down the path for several hundred metres, then veered off in a north-easterly direction. According to Julian, he was travelling along the imaginary line that linked Cape Heraclides to Cape Laplace. Giving in to the conflicting hope that their opponent might be a survival expert, and possibly the better pathfinder, they followed in his tracks. Amber continued to study her maps, but as good as their services had been so far, here they proved to be useless. Everywhere they looked, visibility was cut short by mist, sometimes after a hundred metres, but mostly after just ten. There was no horizon now, no hills, no mountain ranges, only Hanna’s solitary tracks on his way into the unknown. Something that fed on life itself crept up out of the dust, weighed heavily on Chambers’ ribcage and unleashed in her the childlike longing to cry. The Moon was dead matter, and yet until now she had seen it as strangely alive, like an old and wise human being, a wonderful Methuselah, whose wrinkles preserved the history of creation. Here, though, history seemed to have been erased. The familiar powdery consistency of the regolith, its gentle slopes and miniature craters, had given way to crumbly uniformity, as if something had glided over and subjected it to an eerie transformation. For a moment, she thought she could make out the edge of a small crater, but it vanished into dust before her eyes, mere hallucination.
‘There’s nothing left here to get your bearings from,’ said Julian to Amber. ‘The beetles have changed the landscape permanently.’
Beetles? Evelyn stopped. She couldn’t recall ever having heard of beetles being on the Moon. But whatever they were up to, in her eyes it amounted to desecration. All around them, it looked as though someone had inflicted grievous bodily harm on the satellite. This crumbly stuff was the ashes of the dead. It was racked up in parallel, shallow ramparts, like powerful furrows, as if something had been ploughing the ground.
‘Julian, it looks awful here,’ she said.
‘I know. Not exactly the dream destination for tourists. People only ever come here if there are problems the maintenance robots can’t cope with.’
‘And what in God’s name are the beetles?’
‘Look over there.’ Julian raised his arm and pointed ahead. ‘That’s one.’
She squinted. At first she just saw the sunlight flickering on the dust particles. Then, amidst enigmatic grey tones, a silhouette came into view at an indefinable distance from them, a thing of primeval appearance. It slowly pushed its hunched, strangely weightless-looking body forwards, making bizarre details visible: a rotating jaw system beneath a low, oblate head, which rummaged industriously through the regolith, insectoid legs spread out wide. Unrelentingly, it kept adding to the dust across the plateau, causing it to whirl around as it continued to eat and move forwards. The microscopic suspended matter enshrouded its bulky body, surrounding its legs like a cocoon. By now, Evelyn was pretty sure she knew what she was looking at, except all her perceptions were stunted by the impression of just how inconceivably powerful the beetle was. The nearer they got to it, the more monstrous it looked, stretching out its humpback, which was covered in enormous, glinting, shell-like mirrors, a mythical monster, as tall as a high-rise building.
Julian bore down on it. ‘Momoka, stay behind me,’ he ordered. ‘We have to stick together. If we want to stay on course, we can’t avoid getting close to these machines. They’re sluggish, but sluggishness is relative when you consider their size.’
The visibility got worse. By the time the velvety regolith was under their wheels again, just before they reached the beetle, its torso was outlined, dark and threatening, against the clouded sky. For its enormous height, it was astonishingly narrow.
It disappeared behind plumes of whirling dust. As the giant lifted one of its powerful, many-jointed legs and took a step forwards, it seemed to Evelyn as if it was ever so slowly swivelling its stooped skull around to look at them. The rover juddered softly. She put it down to Momoka driving over a bump on the ground, but an inner certainty told her it had happened at the very moment when the beetle rammed its foot into the regolith.
‘A mining machine!’ Rogachev turned round to stare at the vanishing silhouette. ‘Fantastic! How could you have kept that from me for so long?’
‘We call them beetles,’ said Julian. ‘On account of their shape and the way they move. And yes, they are fantastic. But there are far too few of them.’
‘Do they turn the regolith into this – stuff?’ asked Evelyn, thinking of the crumbly wasteland.
Julian hesitated. ‘As I said, they transform the landscape.’
‘I was just wondering, I mean, I wasn’t really sure how the mining takes place. I thought, I mean, I expected to see something along the lines of drilling rigs.’
As soon as the words had left her mouth, she felt ashamed for discussing mining techniques with Julian so casually, as if forgetting that Momoka had been confronted with Locatelli’s deformed corpse just half an hour before. Since their departure from the Cape, the Japanese woman had not uttered a single word, but she was certainly driving the rover with care. She had retreated within herself, in an eerie, ghostly way. The creature behind the reflective visor pane steering the vehicle could easily have been mistaken for a robot.
‘Helium-3 can’t be produced in the same way as oil, gas or coal,’ said Julian. ‘The isotope is atomically bound into the moon dust. Around three nanograms per gram of regolith, evenly distributed.’
‘Nanogram, wait a moment,’ pondered Evelyn. ‘That’s a billionth of a gram, right?’
‘So little?’ Rogachev was stunned.
‘Not that little,’ said Julian. ‘Just think, the stuff was stored up over billions of years by solar wind. Far over half a billion tonnes in total, ten times as much as all the coal, oil and gas reserves on Earth! That’s a hell of a lot! It’s just that, in order to get to it, you have to process the moon surface too.’
So that’s what you call it, thought Evelyn. Processing. And out of that comes a wasteland of crumb-like debris. Feeling uneasy, she stared off into the glistening distance. Far behind them, a second beetle was creeping through the dust, and suddenly the terrain became ugly and crumbly again.
‘And yet it’s an astonishingly low concentration,’ Rogachev persisted. ‘It sounds to me as though vast amounts of lunar soil would need to be processed. How deep do those things burrow down into the ground?’
‘Two to three metres. Helium-3 can still be found even five metres down, but they get most of it from above that.’
‘And that’s enough?’
‘It depends what for.’
‘I mean, is it enough to supply the world with helium-3?’