Moonseed (34 page)

Henry said,
All any of us can do is our best, by each other, by whatever duty we perceive.

“Not much comfort.”

I’m sorry,
he said.

“It’s not your fault. It’s not anybody’s.”

No. Not even Mike’s.

“Are they going to send people back to the Moon?”

That’s what I’m campaigning for. I suppose it would be another one in the eye for astrology.

She laughed, softly. “Tell me your birthday.”

He told her.

She thought for a while. “Well, there you are. Your sign is Sagittarius, the sign of exploration. The sign that’s linked with spaceflight. And your dominant planet is Pluto. Planet of transformation. So the omens are good.”

Gee. How spooky.

“Of course I don’t believe in astrology. But then I’m a Scorpio, and Scorpios are always skeptical.”

A long pause, transatlantic crackles.

For a while I’m not sure if I cared if it ended or not. But now I’ve met you. And—

“What?”

His voice was hesitant.
Do you think we could have had a future together?

“Hell, I don’t know.” She laughed. “I suppose it’s possible.” She thought it through more carefully. “Yes. It’s possible. We would have had some incandescent arguments.”

I’m sorry I walked out on you, the way I did.

She took a breath. “I understand.”

The truth of it was, she did understand. It was as he’d said.
All any of us can do is our best, by each other, by whatever duty we perceive.

It tore me apart.

“But you can’t expect a mother to see it your way. Right then I’d have mobilized the resources of the planet to unite me with Jack if I could, for one more day, and to hell with the rest.”

I understand. Anyhow, that’s the reason.

“What?”

The reason I care. It’s you, Jane. You, and Jack, and even
Ted and Mike, damn it. It’s you. It took me a while to figure it out…The world can end, but not if it takes you.

Henry’s voice, accent enhanced by the phone’s tiny speaker, was a dry whisper, from a million miles away. Dust blowing across the dry bottom of one of those lunar seas, she thought.

“For Christ’s sake, Henry,” she said, “you’re the nearest thing to a hero I’ve got. If you feel like that come up with a better option.”

I don’t feel like much of a hero.

“Listen,” she whispered. “Here’s something to protect you.
I see the Moon, / The Moon sees me, / God bless the priest / That christened me…/ I see the Moon, / The Moon sees me, / God bless the Moon, / God bless me.
”

Pretty.

“Yeah. Now you try it.”

The words came drifting back to her.
I see the Moon, / The Moon sees me…

26

As it turned out, Frank Turtle responded quickly, and, using some of the material from his failed return-to-the-Moon pitch, Geena and Frank worked up a convincing-looking presentation within a few days.

They had Jays and others dry-run them, and then they presented to Harry Maddicott, JSC director. He sat, sleek and replete with lunch, as Geena and Frank worked through the spiel tag-team style. But Maddicott was more supportive than Geena had expected. He advised them to take it to at least one more center before going to the NASA Administrator, however.

So the next day they flew down to Alabama, to the Marshall Space Flight Center at Huntsville. This was the center which had originally been built up around von Braun’s core team of German rocket engineers; this was the center which believed its engineers had pulled off Apollo-
Saturn despite the dead-weight of the rest of NASA, and in their approach to engineering they were as conservative as all hell.

The review was tough, confrontational, detailed, laced with that conservatism.
Von Braun didn’t fly to the Moon that way, and we sure don’t need some kid from Texas coming here telling us how to fly to the Moon now.
Soon Frank was sweating, trying to cover questions to which he hadn’t had time to assemble answers.

But Geena kept pushing. She had the group break into study forums to thrash out issues, and had Frank make conference calls to Houston and other centers, and soon Frank’s rough sketch was being worked into something credible. And, once the Marshall guys started to believe that, hey, this was something they could actually
build,
they got remarkably enthusiastic. They even started to advise Geena and Frank on how to present to the other centers.

Jays told her she shouldn’t be surprised by the speed of all this. “Hell, we did this before. We’ve been to the Moon. The Moon is a walk around the block. And we’ve been waiting thirty years to be asked to go back…These Marshall folks are tough on bullshit, but they
want
to make this work.”

And then, only four days after that brainstorm in the Outpost, Geena found herself in NASA Headquarters in Washington, briefing someone called the Associate Administrator for Exploration, and at last the NASA Administrator herself.

The Administrator, a tough woman of fifty with a helmet of steel-gray hair, made a decision after thirty minutes. “She has kind of a lot on her mind right now. I’ll take it to the President myself.”

27

Monica Beus distrusted Henry Meacher from the moment he stood at the lectern in front of the OSTP.

She knew he’d just come from giving testimony over in the Russell Senate Office Building on Capitol Hill, before the Senate committee on commerce, science and transport. And now here he was in Room 476 of the Executive Office Building to give a briefing to this subcommittee of the Office of Science and Technology Policy, which reported to the President herself.

Monica was at one end of a long conference table with Henry’s lectern at the far end, together with an overhead projector and a laptop computer, and three members of the President’s science team, boosted today by a suit from the Pentagon: Admiral Joan Bromwich, Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The Building was next door to the White House itself. In fact, when Monica looked past the small window-unit air conditioner and out the window she was looking along Pennsylvania Avenue.

So it was a big day for Henry, maybe the biggest in his career, the clearest sign there could be that Washington was taking him and his dire warnings seriously. And yet here he was standing at the lectern in dirty jeans and a shirt that looked as if it had been slept in and his thick black hair like a mop: the picture of disrespect, or independence of thought, or unconventionality, or whatever the hell other Hollywood-scientist clichés he thought he was projecting. How were the suits sitting around the table
supposed
to respond to him?

And how was
she
supposed to get through today, before she got back to her apartment, found the blessed oblivion of a few hours sleep?

Just don’t embarrass me, she thought. She, and many others, hadn’t forgotten how Henry had shot his mouth off on TV and the Internet and in the newspapers to campaign, over the head of NASA management, for his doomed
Shoemaker
missions. It didn’t help his credibility, today. She’d had to put her own reputation on the line to bring this meeting together. She would be very damaged if Henry fouled up today. Just don’t embarrass me.

She was surprised, in the circumstances, how much that still mattered.

And she was glad Alfred was here. She’d even, on his advice, consented to wear a hat, so the attendees could concentrate on the matter at hand rather than her latest chemotherapy Bad Hair Day.

She gathered her strength. “Let’s start.”

A rumble of assent from around the room.

“Dr. Meacher, have you prepared a formal briefing?”

Henry tapped at his laptop, and images filled the projector screen. Maps of Earth, molecular structure charts and equations, energy expressions. He began without preamble. “We established conclusively that the Edinburgh outbreak flowed from the Moon rock, Apollo sample 86047.”

“Fucking careless handling,” Bromwich growled.

Henry wasn’t fazed. “We were doing geology. Not epidemiology.”

Monica said, “I don’t think apportioning blame is helpful right now, Admiral.”

Bromwich glowered.

“Anyhow,” Henry said, “that was the primary source. We’ve been able to trace secondary outbreaks, in the U.S. and elsewhere, to the ash cloud that spread out from Edinburgh, through the stratosphere, around the planet.”

An animated image of the Earth. Lurid red pimples appearing everywhere. First they came in a belt at about the latitude of Britain, spreading westward, across the U.S., Asia; and then more pimples and scars in most of the world’s geologically unstable regions: the Ring of Fire, the subduction volcanoes around the Pacific basin; the rift volcanoes in the middle of the Atlantic and other midocean ridges; the hot-spot volcanoes, like Hawaii. In other places, more usually stable, the Moonseed seemed to be making its own volcanism by just digging its way toward the asthenosphere through old flaws in the crust, such as at Edinburgh itself.

Henry said, “The data here comes from worldwide sources, including our own USGS Earthquake Information Center in Colorado and the Large Aperture Seismic Array in Montana—”

The Admiral said, “Dr. Meacher, tell me what’s going to happen to us from here on in.”

He started to pull up charts. They showed the past records of cataclysmic geological events: volume of eruption, in cubic meters, plotted against repose time, in thousands of years…“Even for what’s likely to hit us in the short term, we have no precedent in historical times. The larger the magmatic event, the less frequently it occurs. But we have evidence that many eruptions in prehistoric times were larger—ten or a hundred times—than the huge eruptions we know about, like Thera and Tambora.”

Thera destroyed a civilization. Tambora was the greatest ash eruption of the current geological period; it caused the Year Without a Summer, in 1816.
Ten or a hundred times as large.

“Are you saying,” Admiral Bromwich said, “that some of this stuff is—normal?”

“Yes. We’ve lived, as a species, through a quiescent period in Earth’s geological history. The Moonseed is a lubricant. Enhancing the problem. But what’s hit us so far is the violence of Earth itself, Admiral. A lot of this stuff could have happened at any time.

“Beyond this near-term stuff we’re predicting a timetable of escalation.”

“A timetable?”

“Depending on the thickness of the crust. In a month the Moonseed will penetrate oceanic crust—the sea bottom—where the plates are thin. Six weeks, a couple of months beyond that, we expect major events in plate boundary regions. Subduction zones, mountain-building areas, like the Pacific rim. And a month or so beyond that we’ll see the first breaches of the continental crust itself.”

There was a brief, shocked silence.

Henry delivered this with a chilling calm, Monica observed. He looked overworked, but calm. Hollow. He’s already accepted the logic of his argument. And its ultimate conclusion. That all this is just going to get worse and worse, until—

I hope to God, she thought, he has a plan.

Bromwich shook her head. “What do we tell the President?”

“Aside from the direct damage, expect climate changes,” Henry said. “All that ash in the stratosphere, blocking out the sun. The injection of so much heat, greenhouse gases, destruction of ozone—we have to model this. Figure out what it means for crops, this year and next.”

“Shit,” said the Admiral, and she scrawled notes on a pad in front of her. “Refugees. Crop failure. Starvation.”

“We’ll be lucky to avoid war,” Alfred said.

“The British are already dealing with this,” Monica put in. “We’re not the damn British,” Admiral Bromwich growled.

Henry said, “The point is, we’re only seeing the start. This isn’t going to go away. We’re going to have to expect a movement of populations, from the more geologically unstable areas of the world, and from the areas most impacted by the Moonseed itself, like Scotland.”

“A movement? Where to? Where is the safest place to be?”

“Shelters,” Henry said. “Like greenhouses. Maybe subsurface. Maybe off planet.”

“Off planet?” That surprised Monica. “How? To make a colony viable, you’d have to sustain a breeding population—say, several hundred—independently of Earth.” Even the Space Station, which in its present form could hold all of three people at a time, depended on almost continual resupply from Earth.

The Admiral said, “Where the hell? Mars?”

Henry shook his head. “Not Mars. Too far. Too difficult.”

Monica said, “Mars or not, we don’t have the technology to sustain a colony off planet. If we had another century—”

“But we may not have another century,” Henry said evenly.

“Australia,” Alfred Synge said.

“What?”

“Australia. The oldest place in the world. All the mountains worn down to a nub. That’s where I’d go.”

That didn’t help, Monica thought, watching Henry. He has some recommendation. Some case he’s building, carefully. He isn’t ready yet.

I can’t read this guy. I wonder what the hell he wants.

Henry pulled up another chart. “That’s the short term. Further out, we have to expect something like an extinction event.”

Bromwich frowned. “I thought it was some big rock from space that killed the dinosaurs. I seem to remember listening to one of you assholes pitching for a Star Wars system to blast the rocks out of the sky. Like the one that’s coming in 2028—”

“The Cretaceous extinction was actually relatively minor,” Henry said. He pulled up more data from his laptop. “The Permian event was maybe the most significant Earth has suffered. Two hundred and fifty million years ago. A single giant continent, Pangaea, dominated the planet…Half the number of known marine families disappeared. Only two out of a hundred and thirty genera of brachiopods survived. All forty genera of the large fusulinid foraminifers were—”

“Enough,” Monica said.