by Ben Elton
It was all right though, Sly had one of his own.
185: WELCOME TO STARK
Welcome to the Stark project, Rachel. I’ve told you that the world is dying. It is, believe me, it really is. But, the vanishing point isn’t total. One grain of sand is going to slip through — I and my colleagues are getting out. This construction area is to be the launch site for the Star Arks, a small fleet of rockets that will carry us away and with us everything we need to start again, to build a new world. This, if you like, is the dawn of creation. Genesis.’
Necessarily there was a pause, Sly’s statement was not the sort to which there is a stock answer. Eventually Rachel said:
‘Well, Darth Vador, this is fascinating, but don’t you think it’s the sort of fantasy you should have had when you were six?’
‘We’re going to the moon, Rachel, and from there we will watch the earth die.’ Obviously Sly was aware that it was all going to sound a bit far-fetched, so he set about trying to make it convincing. ‘It’s over twenty years since the Americans landed on the moon, isn’t it?’ Sly continued. ‘Haven’t heard much about it since, have we? Not a squeak really. All that huge effort, a whole generation ago, and then nothing. Why do you think that is, Rachel?’
‘I’m sure you’ll tell me,’ said Rachel wearily. It was clear that whatever else this loony intended he wasn’t in a mood to let her go.
‘We bought it,’ said Sly, and Rachel was surprised. Sly was pleased he had finally solicited something other than disbelief or contempt.
‘You bought the moon?’ she asked.
‘Not me,’ said Sly, ‘I was only fifteen at the time. I’ve only been a party to the Stark project for a few months. But the then members of the consortium bought it. The US government had stuck a flag in it, just the way the British once stuck a flag in Australia, and like the British the Yanks thought that meant they owned it. Well, there wasn’t much they could do with it at the time, the whole project had been a prestige affair anyway, so we made them an offer, and they sold it to us, along with all the research, technology and hardware that had gone into getting to it in the first place.’ Sly could see that he had given Rachel real cause for thought. It had, after all, been a whole generation since the moon shots, and it was true that nobody had been back since.
‘The original reasons given were potential mineral research and all that,’ Sly continued. ‘Which was partly true as well. In those days the super-rich still thought that earth’s Vanishing Point could be avoided and that the moon would just become another place to make money. Since then the situation has changed a lot. The importance of a bolthole like the moon has become rather clear.’
‘Bolthole!!’ exclaimed Rachel. ‘Don’t be ridiculous, you can’t live on the moon. There’s no air and…and…well there’s nothing, no food, no…Oh God I don’t even know why I’m talking to you. The whole thing is just bloody ridiculous.’
‘You’ve got no idea what we can and cannot do, Rachel,’ said Sly glaring at her and trying to be tough and commanding. ‘The richest people in the world have been working on this for nearly three decades. Think about it, three decades before the moon shot they had only just developed a jet engine. What do you think we can achieve so long after?’
‘I don’t know, but whatever it is it can’t possibly be a viable alternative to slogging it out on earth, however bad things get,’ protested Rachel, amazed at herself that she was even discussing it.
‘I keep telling you!!’ said Sly, for the first time slightly losing his cool. ‘Don’t kid yourself, the earth’s illness is not like a normal disease that you just presume one day ‘they’ll’ come up with a cure for. There is no cure, it’s dying, all our research is conclusive, we have to try and get out, however unpleasant or difficult the prospect. Don’t you see?’
‘No, it’s insane, you’re mad, this is all ridiculous. I don’t even know why I’m talking to you…‘ said Rachel, also losing her cool. Sly pressed on.
‘For fifteen years now we have been blasting off the necessary equipment, leaving it floating up in space ready for us to reclaim, should the need arise. The orbit of the moon is one vast warehouse of spinning hardware: 65 per cent of the hundreds of commercial satellite launches that have taken place over the years haven’t carried communications satellites at all. They’ve carried dead weight of hardware, everything from food to frozen sperm. Thousands of tonnes of it has built up and it’s all been left, spinning around the earth or the moon, all armed with little booster rockets, waiting for the time when we will fire them down onto the moon’s surface. And that time is almost upon us. Come on, I’ll show you something,’ said Sly.
He grabbed Rachel by the hand, which was the first time they had ever touched, and led her to the door.
186: NOAH’S WORKSHOP
It is very difficult to take in something really impressive. This is probably a good thing because if the mind was truly capable of comprehending the magnificence of, say, a great cathedral, or the strangeness of most fish, we would probably all go mad.
Certainly Rachel had considerable trouble getting her head around the creation that Sly was so spaciously showing off for her benefit. She felt as she had used to feel at school when faced with Shakespeare; she knew it was huge stuff and she could sort of see why, but the truth was it still failed to penetrate in a genuinely moving manner.
First Sly showed Rachel one of the biggest holes in the ground she had ever seen, a massive concrete chasm, filled with tiny figures working on things in it.
‘I reckon some of those guys must be beginning to think it’s a strange kind of hotel they’re building,’ said Sly. ‘Still, fuck ‘em, they’re getting paid more than they could ever have dreamed of, and they’re all foreign anyway. So fuck ‘em. I don’t guess anyone’s going to be over anxious to rock the boat and lose a job like this, especially with the depression we’ve got going right now. What do you think of it?’ said Sly turning to Rachel with a degree of proprietorial pride.
‘What is it?’ she asked, not really wanting to hear. ‘It is one of the six largest launch silos in the world,’ said Sly, ‘the other five are all within three miles of here…’
They stared over the edge together in silence, then Sly mused, ‘and the Lord said, make it a fuck of a lot of cubits tall, and a fuck of a lot of cubits wide,’ getting biblical for a minute.
They drove in Sly’s Jeep to one of many warehouses. Sly showed her four huge, silvery rolls of a kind of gossamer thin metallic mesh. ‘Three hundred and fifty miles of solar cells, woven into a flexible fibre,’ Sly said. ‘This will be part of the payload of one of the three unmanned launches which will blast simultaneously with the Star Arks…’
And even in all the strangeness of her situation, Rachel found herself snapping…‘Unstaffed.’
‘Yes, sorry, unstaffed. Hopefully our new world won’t be a sexist one,’ Sly continued in the sort of tone Hitler must have used when he was guaranteeing Czechoslovak neutrality.
‘Everything we need is already up there but the consortium has always reserved one final set of launches to allow for improved technology. Obviously, at the last minute we want to take the very best the world has to offer. These solar cells make the ones we sent up five years ago obsolete. They’ll provide the power of four nuclear plants, and no chance of pollution you see.’
‘That’s nice,’ said Rachel, for want of anything better.
Sly continued, ‘The idea is that with the human launch we establish a kind of camp which will be supplied entirely artificially, from what we take with us on the blast. This is why the silos are so big, there’s a lot to take. It’ll be a bit cramped, but we’ll live in the camp while we concentrate on building a self-sufficient world…’
As they walked through the warehouse, Sly felt obliged to confess some doubts. ‘It all sounds all right. I suppose it might work, it might not. Quite exciting really. These solar sheets will simply be flown up and left spinning in the moon’s orbit with the rest of t
he junk until we are ready to boost them in. The estimate is approximately five years. Everything will stay in orbit until we are ready to bring it in. There’s even a micro-film library floating up there. Wonder when we’ll need that, not for ages I suppose. Bet it’s all Keynes and Adam Smith anyway. That’s the trouble with setting off with a bunch of bankers…Apparently we’re taking with us from earth enough of everything for five years. After that we’re on our own. But I’m told our only real job will be to create a viable atmosphere, after that all else will follow on…’
‘Just create it, eh?’ said Rachel.
‘Yes, it will be done with plants, photosynthesis, all that biology business, the plants will use the available carbon dioxide and the sunlight to create oxygen. The water comes from under the surface.’
Rachel’s mind was reeling, as Sly had intended that it should. He knew how she felt, he had felt exactly the same way when the whole terrible, enormous, cowardly, craven project had been put to him.
‘There are seventy-five members in the Consortium,’ said Sly, adding casually, ‘each can take a partner. Then there is a scientific and work team of fifty who have been indoctrinated into Stark. They will also be allowed a partner, but one who will be required to have some medical or scientific skill. All told, there will be two hundred and fifty individuals in the Arks. A decade from now they will be all that is left of the human race. But we are taking a lot of frozen embryos. I suppose if the water runs out we can always drink them.’ This was a joke but not one that Rachel appreciated.
‘We’re also taking a lot of animal foetuses all frozen in suspended animation. Same principle as Noah really, but a bit more high tech. And obviously we aren’t taking the nasties. No cockroaches for instance, although what’s the betting a couple of the bastards manage to sneak into the ship.’
They wandered into another warehouse.
‘See that,’ said Sly, pointing at a box that on opening appeared to contain an ice-making machine. ‘That’s a kind of filter. It can get the horrid bits out of sweat and piss and all that, so you can drink it again. Apparently a very large percentage of the water that we will require we actually take up in our own bodies, clever eh?’
Rachel believed him. She could not believe that she believed him, but she did.
‘You know that if the world finds out that, having made a pretty substantial contribution to the mess we’re all in, you’re all pissing off, well there’s probably going to be a fair degree of protest,’ said Rachel. ‘Yes, we know that,’ Sly replied.
‘I mean they’ll probably all march up here and tear you limb from limb and torch the whole disgusting dump,’ Rachel continued.
‘I don’t think so, Rachel,’ said Sly. ‘I reckon they’ll come up here, all right, but they’ll be trying to get on the Arks, mass panic. Billions of people trying to be one of the two hundred and fifty. But if people did find out, I doubt they would believe it, you didn’t until you saw it and I’m not about to show it to anybody else. But no one will know. Between us the members of the Stark Group own far too much of all the newspapers and TV and radio stations in the world, Soviets excluded of course, but we just ignore them and they just ignore us. Imagine if the Chairman of the Central Committee of the Politburo or whatever it is, tried to tell the world that good old Tex Slampacker, who has done so much for little children in hospital, was going to fuck off and leave them all to Eco-doom. Nobody would believe him would they?’
Rachel asked the question she’d been meaning to ask for some time.
‘Why have you showed me?’ she said.
Rachel was not at all a vain person but she had guessed his answer. ‘Because, Rachel, I want to take you with me,’ Sly said.
187: A HELL OF A DATE
Well, of course, Rachel had been propositioned before, she had some small experience of chat-up lines that went beyond a casual ‘what about it?’ She had been promised meals, asked on holiday, CD had even offered to devote what remained of his life to making her happy. But no one had ever offered to save her from a dying planet. No man had ever asked her to go with him to the moon and stay there. And of course, if what Moorcock said was true, then nobody had ever offered to save her life before. The whole situation was one that would confuse anybody. ‘Why me? Haven’t you got a girlfriend, a wife?’ she asked.
‘No,’ said Sly. ‘I have no one to take and I want to take you.’
‘To the moon?’
‘To the moon.’
‘You do realize,’ said Rachel, ‘that this is tantamount to asking me to marry you?’
‘Of course,’ replied Sly.
‘And you’ve known me for about five minutes?’ she continued.
‘Look,’ said Sly, ‘I have no one to take, all right, no one I would even dream of considering. I liked you the first moment I saw you, the whole situation’s insane anyway. I’m acting on instinct.’
Rachel said she’d think about it.
188: TIME RUNS OUT
The next morning Durf arrived and Sly, like Tyron, was asked to kindly join him in the project control room. He brought bad news.
189: HANGING ON THE END OF A CHAIN
Gentlemen, I have received predictions from the Domesday Group which have convinced me that Vanishing Point is upon us. I have alerted principal Stark shareholders to proceed to this location forthwith. Once enough have arrived for us to be quorate, I shall propose immediate departure, suggesting that we deploy the eight day count-down procedure as agreed in Helsinki.’
Sly and Tyron just stared at him. There isn’t a lot one can say to a man who has just told you that you are emigrating to the moon in eight days. Perhaps sensing the need for small- talk Durf added, ‘Personally I wouldn’t eat that crabmeat sandwich.’
Sly and Tyron stared at him again. In fact, they just carried on staring at him since they hadn’t stopped from the first time. There was a plate of sandwiches on the desk. They had come with the coffee, Tyron had absentmindedly picked one up.
‘I am reliably informed,’ said Durf, ‘that the long feared TT O has occurred in a food layer stretching from microorganisms right up to simple animals.’
Eight days? Sandwiches? TTO? Sly, at last, found his feet. ‘Durf, what the fuck are you talking about, you patronizing, one-eyed, South African bastard.’ Sly’s attitude did not surprise Durf. After all, he was a patronizing, one-eyed, South African bastard.
‘What is the long feared TT O and what is the problem with the sandwiches?’ asked Sly, deciding that things would probably move faster if he was less confrontational.
‘TTO, is Total Toxic Overload and it is the point at which a species becomes so compromised by toxic waste that it becomes a liability to the food chain. Unfortunately, only man is capable of recognizing this problem and isolating the offenders…’
Only Durf could have called a polluted microbe an offender.
‘If we are told that a tuna has been contaminated with mercury, then we do not eat it. But all other creatures who include tuna in their diet will, of course, continue to eat it, and hence become compromised themselves.’
Durf had the politicians’ habit of sanitizing unpleasant things by refusing to describe them properly. Hence ‘polluted’ became ‘compromised’ and, no doubt, ‘polluted to death’ would be ‘terminally compromised.’
Durf continued his description of the terminally compromised food chain. ‘Each creature is poisoned by its diet and then itself becomes the poisoned diet of a superior creature. In this manner the poisons gather momentum on their way up to the top of the food chain where sits man. Man eats everything from simple crustaceans to highly evolved mammals, hence it is fair to say that we consume the accumulated pollution of all other species.’
The sandwich fell from Tyron’s limp grasp. It lay on the floor, poised and vicious, like a scorpion, primed and ready to kill.
‘Well, that’s great isn’t it?’ said Tyron.
‘Now that the entire base of the food chains have achieved, or will soon
achieve, TT O…‘ Durf spoke as if the base of the food chain should get a prize for this,’…we can assume that within a single season, all animal food on earth will be poisoned and entirely inedible. This, combined with the world crop failures, which are now a regular feature of our greenhouse summers, means…’
‘It really is all over,’ Sly spoke slowly, like a person just waking up and trying to remember where they are.
‘There can be no doubt about it,’ said Durf. ‘The nuclear pollution in the Northern Hemisphere has forced a far greater reliance on food from southern seas. With the wreck yesterday of the toxic waste ship, Ataria C42, off Shark Bay, that source, already massively strained, collapses altogether. There is virtually nothing left to eat on earth. We have polluted all of it. This is why I am calling in the shareholders. With their permission we will start the eight day count-down.’
‘Well you’ve got my permission, let’s bugger off while we still can,’ said Tyron. ‘But the rockets are only just in place,’ said Sly. ‘We can’t possibly be ready?’
‘We have to be ready, Mr Moorcock,’ Durf insisted, ‘otherwise we go with what we have. Nagasyu is only a few hours sail from the west coast with the remaining hardware. I have every confidence in him. We will achieve what is necessary.’
‘And then I suppose we walk on water for an encore,’ Sly found Durf’s manner irritating, ‘although with the shit that’s in it these days, we probably could walk on water.’
‘It is not a question of miracles, Mr Moorcock, but careful planning. Planning that commenced considerably before your own indoctrination into Stark,’ said Durf, who sometimes forgot that he was an employee. ‘The only problem that seriously concerns me is that of the American journalist. My men have not so far located her in or around Bullens Creek. I am confident that she knows nothing and has no means of alerting people, even if she had something to say —’