And his scheme to rescue Emma seemed as absurd and quixotic as many of his opponents at home had argued.
But what else could he have done but come here and try?
Nemoto was walking around the clearing experimentally, slim despite the bulky orange escape suit and the parachute pack still strapped to her back. Her gait was something like a Moonwalk, halfway between a walk and a run “Fascinating,” she said “Walking is a pendulum-like motion, an interchange between the body’s gravitational potential energy and the forward kinetic energy. The body, seeking to minimize mechanical energy spent, aims for an optimal form of gait — walking or running — at any given speed. But the lower the gravity, the lower the speed at which walking breaks into running. It’s all a question of scaling laws. The Froude number—”
“Give me a break, Nemoto.”
She stopped, coming to stand beside him. And, before he could stop her, she unlocked her helmet and removed it.
She grinned at him. She looked green about the gills, but then she always did. And she hadn’t dropped dead yet.
Malenfant lifted his own helmet over his head. He kept his hand on the green apple pull that would activate his suit’s emergency oxygen supply. His Snoopy hat comms unit felt heavy, incongruous in this back-to-nature environment.
He took a deep breath.
The air was thin. But he’d anticipated as much, and the altitude training he’d gone through reduced the ache in his chest to a distant nuisance. (But Emma, he remembered, had had no altitude training; this thin air must have hurt her.) The air was moist, faintly cold, what he would describe as bracing. He could smell green, growing things — the autumn smell of dead leaves, a denser green scent that came from the forest.
And he could smell ash.
Nemoto was inspecting a small portable analyser. “No unanticipated toxins,” she said. “Thin but breathable.” She stripped off her Snoopy hat, and started to shuck off her orange pressure suit. “In fact,” she said, “the air here is healthier than in most locations on Earth.”
After their three days in space cooped up in a volume no larger than the interior of a family car, Malenfant was no longer shy of Nemoto. But he felt oddly self-conscious getting naked, out here in the open, where who-knew-what eyes might be watching. But he began to unzip his suit anyhow. “I can smell ash.”
“That is probably the Bullseye,” Nemoto said. The big volcano had been observed to erupt more or less continuously since the Red Moon’s arrival in Earth orbit, perhaps induced by the tides exerted by the Earth on its new Moon. “You should welcome the ash, Malenfant. This is a small world, with no tectonic activity, Weathering here is a one-way process, and without a restorative mechanism all the air would eventually get locked up in the rocks, with no way to recycle it.”
“Like Mars.”
“And yet not like Mars. We don’t yet understand the geological and biological cycles on the Red Moon. Perhaps we never will. But the injection of gases into the air by the Bullseye surely serves to keep the atmosphere replenished. What else do you notice?”
He raised his head, sniffed, listened.
“Birdsong,” Nemoto said. “An absence rather than a presence.”
“No birds? It ought to be easier for them to fly here, in the lower gravity.”
“But the air is less dense. Wings would have less lift than on Earth. The bird would require more muscle power, respiration… We may see gliders, and flightless birds. But we cannot expect the diversity we see on Earth.”
A pity, Malenfant thought.
Malenfant donned T-shirt, shorts, a thin sweater, and a bright blue coverall, and then pulled his boots back on. He was glad of the warmth of the clothes; the air here was damp and cold, though the sun’s heat was sharp. Nemoto dressed the same way. They tucked their heavy Gore-Tex escape suits back into the lander, against the time when they would be needed during the return to Earth — an eventuality Malenfant was finding increasingly hard to visualize.
Malenfant settled his comms pack on his shoulder. This was a specialized piece of gear manufactured for them by technicians at the Johnson Space Center. On top of a small but powerful transceiver package sat a tiny, jewel-like camera. Antennae were built into their coveralls, and the signals were relayed by small comsats orbiting low around the Red Moon The deal was that save for emergency the controllers would keep their mouths shut during the surface stay (which they insisted on calling an extra-vehicular activity, with, to Malenfant’s mind, an absurd emphasis on the vehicle they had arrived in, as opposed to the place they had come to). But in return the ground had control of the cameras.
Soon the little camera on Malenfant’s shoulder was swivelling back and forth with a minute whirring noise. “Good grief,” he said. “I feel like Long John Silver.”
Nemoto laughed, as she usually did when she detected one of his jokes. He wasn’t sure whether she understood the reference or not.
With her own camera working, she walked across the flattened clearing. She began to load small sample bags with fast, random selections of the vegetation and the underlying crimson soil; these were contingency samples, to be lodged in the loader against the event that they had to leave here in a hurry. She found a shallow puddle, covered with a greenish scum, and she pushed the probe of her sensor pack into it. “Water,” she said. “Though I wouldn’t recommend you drink it.”
Malenfant, his own camera peering here and there, turned to face the way the lander had come down, from the west. The route was somewhat easy to spot. The lander, suspended beneath its blue parafoil, had come bellying down out of the sky, crashing through the trees with abandon, and had left a clear trail of its glide-down in snapped trunks, crushed branches and ripped-up bits of parafoil. The trail terminated in this small clearing, where shattered tree trunks clustered close around the lander’s incongruous black and white carcass.
Malenfant stalked around the lander, inspecting the damage. The whole underside was scored, crushed and gouged. Heat-resistant tiles had been plucked away and scattered through the forest, and all the aerosurfaces were scarred and crumpled.
The only good thing you could say about that landing was that it wasn’t his fault.
After scouting out the Red Moon from orbit for a few days, the crew and the mission planners on the ground had settled on the largest settlement they had spotted as a suitable target for the landing. (Not that they could tell who or what had built that settlement…) It was close to the delta where the great continental river completed its long journey to the ocean. The plan had been to come down on a reasonably flat, open plain a few miles to the west of the Beltway, the thick belt of forest at the continent’s eastern coast, close enough to that big settlement for Malenfant and Nemoto to complete their journey on foot. Later, the follow-up rocket pack would rendezvous with the lander on the ground.
That was the plan. The Red Moon hadn’t proven quite so cooperative.
As soon as the lander had ducked into the thicker layers of this little world’s surprising deep atmosphere, strong winds had gripped it. The mission planners had expected the unexpected; there had been no time or resources to model the Red Moon’s meteorology in detail. But none of that had helped ease Malenfant’s mind as he lay helpless in his bucket seat, buffeted like a toy in the hands of a careless child, watching their landing ellipse whip away beneath the lander’s prow.
The lander’s autonomous systems had looked actively for an alternative site suitable for a safe and controlled landing. But another gust stranded the lander over the Beltway itself. When it realized that it was running out of altitude and that soon it would reach a line of cliffs, beyond which there was only ocean — the lander had taken a metaphorical deep breath and dumped itself in the forest.