The floor started to move again. She clung to the window frame, trying to stay on her feet. This was an up-and-down whiplashing that no building was going to be able to withstand. More cracking sounds, as the walls broke open, letting in the daylight—a stink of sulfur—and she was thrown to the floor, which was splintering under her.
The ceiling came crashing down at her…. But, before the ceiling debris reached her, the floor fell away.
She was falling through the stories, arms and legs limp, pursued by a shower of debris. Maybe the building itself was falling, even as it fell to pieces all around her, as the ground flexed, giving up its stored energy.
A last moment of daylight, before a rush of heat, and a wall of water that slammed her sideways—
In Star City, Moscow, Russia, Henry Meacher watched the destruction of Washington State on CNN.
There were few pictures coming out of the area itself. Nobody left alive to send any, of course.
The best images came from the satellites and the Space Station: the band of smoke and flame laced along the western seaboard, the sea churned to mud and froth for hundreds of miles from the coast. You could pick out the cities by their dull burning glow, Seattle and Tacoma and Olympia and Vancouver, as far south as Portland. The experts said it was a series of firestorms that would not burn themselves out for many hours.
It would be a spectacular sight at night. Keep tuned, folks.
The economists speculated about the impact on the world’s economy of the loss of the Seattle region, Boeing and Microsoft and…The tame scientists, gabbling at each other, blamed the explosion of Mount Rainier for setting off an earthquake which had been overdue anyhow. And the wilder ones blamed Rainier itself on the bizarre infection the commentators were calling Moonseed.
Evidently, the whole of the locked subduction zone had given way.
There seemed to have been sympathetic earthquakes in Chile, causing severe damage there. The rest of North America seemed to have been spared, but unusual wave motions had been observed on the Great Lakes and other large bodies of water, in some places violent enough to tear boats from their moorings.
And in Alaska, hit by two earthquakes, the Yakutat glacier had changed its direction and was spilling ice slabs into the sea.
Henry wondered how much longer news like this would remain free and uncensored.
Henry pulled out his laptop, and checked the data against his predictions. The spread rate of the Moonseed, from both primary and secondary infection sites, had reduced drastically as the Moonseed had sunk into the crust. Nevertheless events were unfolding much as he’d expected.
It had taken some thirty days for the ocean crust to be breached, around seventy for the first deep breaches at the continental margins to be achieved, like the one which had caused the Seattle event.
But this was just the start. There would be an escalation of such gigantic seismic events, from now until—
Well, he thought, until the end.
Time to act, Henry thought. If not now, never.
The telephone started to ring.
And when he put the phone down again, he knew that, finally, there would come a day—in mid-August, just a week from now—which would be his last on Earth, perhaps forever.
38
He slept badly, with disturbed dreams.
There was a knock at the door, repeating gently.
He didn’t know where the hell he was, or what time it was.
He looked for his watch, and couldn’t find it, but it was useless anyhow as he hadn’t reset it since Houston. He pulled a towel around his waist and padded to the door.
Standing there was a doctor—it was obvious that was what he was, a little guy in a white coat with a black bag—and Geena, his ex-wife. Geena was wearing some kind of blue coverall and carried a little bag of groceries.
“You didn’t used to have to knock,” he said hoarsely.
“Different days, Henry. Can we come in?”
“Oh, shit,” said Henry, remembering. “You’re wearing a flight suit, aren’t you? It’s the day.”
Geena grinned, perhaps with a little malice. “The Russians say we are to share a great honor, this day,” she said.
Geena and the doctor bustled into the room. Henry backed off, and retreated to the bathroom. A last refuge of privacy.
He had spent his last night on Earth in Leninsk, the city that had grown up on the back of Baikonur Cosmodrome. They had arrived late. This was what they called the cosmonauts’ hotel, the Kosmonaut, a low, modern building screened by what looked like elm trees—karagach, a young Russian told him. His room was a tiny suite, a doll’s-house Hilton of a thing, with a living room, a bedroom and a bathroom.
The room was like something out of the 1950s: carpets, net curtains, a fridge. Nothing inside the fridge but Diet Coke, labeled in Cyrillic. The bath had taps and a showerhead. But there was no plug—not in the hand-basin either—and the ceramic was cracked and stained.
Now, when he lifted the toilet lid, the ancient ceramic was so dark he couldn’t see the little puddle of water at the bottom. He had to admit it took a little willpower to lower his butt once more to this cracked Russian po.
When he flushed there was a sluggish trickle, of dirty brown water.
He tried the shower. It ran cold. There was a small sign in Cyrillic which apparently told him for which quarter-hour of the day he could expect hot water.
Farewell from Earth, he thought.
He toweled himself down. When he emerged, the doctor was waiting for him.
“Ya pravyeryoo daulyeniye.”
“Huh?”
The doctor, miming what he wanted, pulled out a blood pressure cuff and wrapped it around Henry’s arm. Then came a stethoscope, lung capacity measures, an eyepiece for peering into his mouth and ears, other simple tests. The stethoscope disc was cold on Henry’s chest.
Geena stalked around the room. She looked down on Henry’s discarded socks and underpants, as if from a great height.
The doctor backed off. “Vi nye balni. Odivaitis, pazhalsta.”
Henry looked at Geena.
“You are healthy,” said Geena. She shrugged. “I speak astronaut pidgin. He says you may get dressed. There are clothes in the closet.”
Henry went through to his bedroom. Hanging up in the wardrobe there was a blue NASA flight suit—it had a little U.S. flag stitched to it, but not his name—and there were long johns, socks and T-shirts in the dressers. He washed again—the water was still cold—and when he emerged the doctor was waiting for him, here in the bedroom, his last sanctum. With mimes, the doctor insisted he had to be rubbed down with an alcohol swab.
Henry submitted. The alcohol was cold on his flesh.
When the doctor had gone Henry got dressed quickly. All the clothes fit. There were light training shoes, and he slipped those onto his feet.
He picked his own clothes up from the floor. He considered putting them into the trash. Then, carrying the clothes, he walked back out to the lounge.
“I look like a tour guide at Disneyland,” he said to Geena.
“You look fine.”
Henry held his clothes out to the doctor. “Will you look after these for me?”
The doctor nodded; his round, Moonlike face split into a smile. “Da.”
“It’s just shit, but it’s all I have left.”
“I think he understands,” Geena said. “He has been around cosmonauts a long time.”
“I’m not a cosmonaut.”
“By the end of today you will be. Now.” She lifted her grocery bag, and inside there was heavy Russian bread, and little packets of salt and water. She laid out the stuff on the crude coffee table that was the centerpiece of Henry’s living room. She poured the salt into a depression in the top of the loaf. Then she broke off a piece of the bread, dipped it in the salt, and bit into it.
Henry took some bread and bit off a piece. It was heavy and strongly flavored. “An old Russian custom?”
&nb
sp; “That’s right. They do this tradition stuff better than we do.” Geena slapped her thigh. “Into the saddle!”
She really has gone native, he thought.
“Hi ho Silver.”
Geena put down the bread. “Look, Henry. I know how you must be feeling. I know you’ve had no real time to prepare. But I’m trained for this. Some of it, anyhow. I’m with you all the way; you won’t come to harm.”
To his chagrin, Henry found he was reassured. “Thanks.”
The doctor said, “Schastleevava pootee! Nye nada peet alkagolya.”
“Have a good journey,” Geena translated. “But drink no alcohol.”
“There goes my plan for the day.”
“Here.” Geena handed him a pencil.
“What’s this?”
“Sign your name on the door.”
Henry did so, adding his signature to a patina of graffiti here. “Another cosmonaut ritual?”
“Dating back to Gagarin himself.” Geena smiled.
Henry picked up his polarizing microscope.
He was taken for breakfast, in an opulent dining hall. The food was meat drowned in butter and sour cream. Henry was hungry, but when he bit into the meal he could almost feel his arteries furring up. This was no place to be a vegetarian, it seemed.
There were others here, mostly men, some in uniform: cosmonauts, doctors, managers, engineers. They ate breakfast too, but largely in silence. He could sense them staring at him, but when he looked directly toward them they looked away.
Heavy cutlery clinked on thick china plates.
He leaned to Geena. “What’s with these guys? Are they jealous?”
“Some are. The other cosmonauts here. Some have waited years for a flight into space, and now they have to watch two Americans fly their ship—”
“I know, I know. Here I am, taking their berth. Just like JSC. What about the rest?”
“Only the most senior managers are here. It’s an honor for them.”
“Why? What’s the fascination? The fact that we’re going into space?”
Geena turned to him, pale blue eyes as empty as church windows. “No. The fact that we’ll probably die.”
When he was done he was led, with Geena, from the building, into the fresh air. It was midmorning now. The sky was high and blue, the air hot with a billowing breeze. This was Kazakhstan. He was far to the north here—farther north than Chicago, for instance—but he was still in the heart of the world continent, and it was a land of hot, parched summers and glacial winters.
They walked down a little path that wound between rows of elms, to a car park that might have been located outside any mall in any city in America. There were buses, police cars, what looked like press vehicles with TV cameras stuck to their roofs.
Cape Canaveral, it was not.
There was an air of casual cheerfulness, of slow progress to their ultimate destination. People came up to Geena, and offered comments, backslaps and jokes. It was very different from the way he’d followed Geena through launches at Canaveral: informal, as if this was some huge family vacation.
But nobody spoke to Henry. It was as if, he thought, he had left the planet already.
They clambered aboard a bus. An Orthodox priest stood by the door and blessed them, mumbling incomprehensibly. Henry bowed back, more for the benefit of the old priest than himself. He stowed his polarizing microscope under his seat.
The bus pulled slowly away. There was a convoy of police cars around them, lights flashing.
They were evidently still in the outskirts of Leninsk. The town looked like 1930s Chicago. A lot of the money the Americans had put into the Russian Space Agency, to finance the Russian contribution to the International Space Station, had flowed into Leninsk and got stuck; and now the town was, according to Geena, like a Wild West city.
Soon the low apartment buildings were giving way to the open scrubland beyond. Local people turned out to see them go, glum-faced peasant types, short and solid, lining the road, their faces following the bus like flowers following the sun. They wore improvised-looking Venus hats, or carried parasols.
All of them, thought Henry, here to watch the Americans go to their deaths.
Then there were no more people. He blinked around fuzzily at a huge, empty plain.
Glimpses of semi-infinite steppe.
They passed a river bank: green, blue, spring, everything very earthy. On the bank there was a kind of teepee, a squat tent of what looked like sheepskin. The word yurt floated into Henry’s mind. Some old guy was moving around it, dressed in heavy furs despite the spring temperatures; he glowered at the bus, looking like Genghis Khan’s uglier brother.
This was an old, rusty country, he thought. People had been living like this for centuries before anybody in the west even knew Henry’s continent existed, and maybe they would prosper here long after the more fragile Western culture collapsed.
Ten miles out of Leninsk, they came to what looked to Henry like an aging industrial park, a complex of factories and laboratories that stretched away over the plain, with lox tanks and lines of cabling and pipes. Geena said this was the MIK assembly area, where the Russians manufactured and assembled their spaceships. Henry could see how the rail links and roads and scattered buildings and launch pads of the complex stretched for miles across this immense plain. This cosmodrome was a Cold War relic, built in the 1950s; it was much bigger than the American equivalent at Canaveral.
Geena pointed out some of the sights. The Russians put together their boosters lying on their side, and then hauled them out by rail to the launch pad, to be erected by hydraulics. At launch the boosters actually sat on turntables; the rockets were much dumber than American designs, and had to be pointed like July 4 firecrackers to hit the right azimuth.
Most boosters, built by whatever nation, were launched to the east, the way the Earth rotated, to pick up a little extra energy. In case anything went wrong and the booster fell back, you needed a clear area to the east of your pad. That was why Canaveral had been built on the U.S. east coast, with the whole Atlantic to drop rockets into.
Here, though, it was different. The Soviets had built their pads in the heart of their continent, with the empty belly of Asia stretching hundreds of miles to the east, a waterless ocean of rock and scrub.
But the place had seen better days, Henry learned. Baikonur was guarded by army recruits who were sometimes not paid for months on end, who had rioted several times, and who had been reduced to supplying their needs by looting the supplies for the cosmonauts loaded aboard the Space Station’s Progress resupply ships.
Reassuring.
They came to a small, insignificant building that turned out to be the cosmonauts’ preparation block.
Henry got down from the bus. There were more people here, waiting to greet him: pad rats, he supposed. Geena nodded, smiled, quipped and shook hands. The pad rats were all wearing surgical-style facemasks, over which they stared at him. Even so he could tell not one of them was smiling at him.
They were led to a big room, something like a hospital ward. There were strip lights in the roof, and a gleaming tiled floor, and two couches; amid piles of equipment, more technicians in lab coats and facemasks waited for them.
With gentle tugs, the pad rats showed Henry he should strip naked once more. He unzipped his NASA flight suit and pulled off his underwear; it was crammed unceremoniously into a bag and removed, taking his human warmth, leaving him feeling shriveled and exposed.
Now came another standing bath of alcohol, and he was handed more underwear to put on. A medic pulled a heavy belt closed around his waist, thick with equipment. He guessed there was a cardiograph in there, maybe something to measure his breathing.
And now a garment was lifted toward him by three pad rats.
“My God. It’s a spacesuit,” he said, wondering.
The pad rats looked back at him blankly.
The spacesuit was a floppy white mannequin, its limbs held stiffly out, as if
it was already half-alive. Henry watched it approach, feeling a deep reluctance to climb inside. But the pad rats lifted and manipulated him as confidently as if they were packing a souvenir doll in Styrofoam.
The suit was open at the front, and the pad rats helped him slide his legs down through the stomach. There seemed to be two layers to the suit, an inner layer of some tough, rubbery material and an outer layer of a rough artificial fabric, coated with flaps, zippers and pockets. The rats lifted up the back and chest part of the suit, and he had to struggle to push his arms into the heavy sleeves.
When he was inside they lowered a helmet over his head, its visor open, and when it was locked at his neck they sealed up the hole in the suit through which he’d entered. The material at the front of the suit was pulled into a bunch, tied with a fat rubber band, and tucked inside his suit, which was then sealed up by two thick zips. It felt as if he had a cushion tucked under his shirt.
All this took place before a big glass window. Beyond the window there were rows of seats, filled by people with notebooks and cameras and tape recorders. The apparatus of the press. But there was little sense of urgency, and the seats were half-empty.
Maybe these weren’t really pressmen, he thought, but historians.
Or obituary writers.
He was helped to his feet, and he tried walking around. The suit was stiff, and every step required a conscious effort. Evidently the suit was internally wired for strength.
Geena, wrapped up in her own suit, was grinning at him.
Now he looked at Geena, he had to admit these Russian spacesuits looked pretty cool. They were basically all white, including their boots, with copper metal rings at neck and wrists for helmet and gloves, and the zippers making a neat V-shape at the front. They even had handy little pockets in their legs where you could store your gloves.
Geena said, “How do you feel?”
“Like John Glenn.”
“Don’t insult your suit,” Geena warned. “In space, it is your only true friend.”
A pad rat took hold of him now, and closed down his helmet. He felt it settle into the seal at its rim. The voices outside became indistinct murmurs, his own breathing sounded like a rattle. He felt as if he had been excluded from the outside world, shut away into this shell by the pad rats.
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