Moonfall

by Jack McDevitt

  “Okay. I’m fine.”

  Something splashed across his visor.

  Liquid. He tried to wipe it away. But nothing happened, and in the strange light his arm didn’t look right.

  The liquid was coming out of his sleeve and he couldn’t see his left hand.

  Couldn’t feel his left hand.

  Darkness welled up around the edges of his vision. There was pressure in the sleeve. The suit was sealing.

  But the light was slipping away.

  Micro Passenger Cabin. 2:31 A.M.

  Charlie was well along on his second oxygen tank. There were only a couple more available, which meant, unless they restored life support, they would begin to have problems around four o’clock.

  It was impossible to see what was happening from the windows of the passenger cabin. Tony had gone down below the curve of the hull, and they’d heard the banging while he worked on the hatch. Charlie wanted to ask Saber how the operation was going, but he was reluctant to distract her. He’d learned the hard way that ordinary people can ask questions or make complaints and nobody thinks much of it. But a person with political standing becomes a jerk very quickly. So he waited, trading anxious glances with Evelyn, who was also trying to stay out of the way.

  Morley sat gloomily, his hands pressed against his oxygen mask. He looked defeated, a sharp contrast to his positive and energetic on-air personality. The chaplain had been trying to adopt a fatalistic attitude to insulate himself against emotional rushes. “Not much we can do except ride it out,” he’d say, or, “We’re in the hands of the Lord.”

  They certainly were.

  Charlie had been surprised when Saber warned them that more turbulence was coming. Turbulence was a funny name for the rocks he watched whistle past his window. When she’d started the engine and rolled to one side, he’d concluded that Tony must have gotten inside.

  But now the engine was quiet again. There was no sound belowdecks, and the Micro rode through an ominous silence.

  Evelyn tried to radiate confidence. “It’s okay,” she said. “They know what they’re doing.”

  Might not make any difference, Charlie thought.

  The PA system clicked on, but no one spoke. Evelyn glanced at him again. The delay drew out until Charlie knew it could only be bad news.

  The chaplain was peering through his window. “Houston, Houston,” said Morley softly, “we have a problem.”

  The chaplain caught his breath. “Outside,” he whispered.

  They were dragging Tony at the end of his line. He looked deflated. Inanimate. He was spinning slowly, hands over feet.

  As the angle changed, and the illumination from the ship’s outboard lamps crept over him, Charlie saw that Tony’s left hand was missing. At first he thought it was a trick of the light. But it wasn’t.

  Charlie Haskell wasn’t yet old enough to have confronted, before this week, the imminent possibility of personal death. He assumed there’d always be a tomorrow. Now he looked out at Tony Casaway, he thought about Bigfoot in his airless compartment, and he shivered. Casaway had come back for them. Bigfoot had stayed behind to give them a chance.

  Charlie was not a believer. He did not expect to be called to account and assigned a score for what he had done or left undone. His parents had believed in a mechanical world, a place of evolving hardware and software, no deities need apply. We just haven’t figured it all out yet, his father was fond of saying. Things get more complex and we don’t know why. But that doesn’t mean we have to ascribe it to divine providence.

  Charlie had endured a brief flirtation with Lutherans, as a result of joining a church basketball team. He’d been glad to escape. Later, when he entered politics, he’d been advised to pick a church. Any church. And just show up once in a while. He’d taken the advice and picked several. He could never take them seriously, but he discovered that they became more significant to his success as he moved higher in public office.

  In Charlie’s view, the bottom line was that if he died out here, it was all over. He envied Mark Pinnacle, who could face the worst dangers with relative equanimity because he believed that Paradise waited beyond the gate. He had only to explain to himself why Jesus had sent the comet. No big deal for a Christian.

  For a realist like himself, life was a more complex game, in which one occasionally got run down by the software. Nothing personal.

  “I have to tell you,” Saber’s voice said, breaking through his reverie, “that Captain Casaway is dead. I monitor no life signs from his suit.” Her voice trembled.

  The chaplain unbuckled and would have gone to her assistance, but Evelyn touched his arm and went up the ladder.

  Nobody said much while she was gone. Charlie, Mark Pinnacle, and Morley ostentatiously avoided looking out the window. They heard low, intense conversation on the flight deck.

  Morley’s gaze touched Charlie’s. “He never got to C deck,” he said.

  Charlie nodded. “I know.”

  “He didn’t get to the air lines.”

  “I know.”

  “What are we going to do?”

  It was a good question.

  Skyport Orbital Lab. 2:33 A.M.

  Windy, at the far end of the ops center, murmured an obscenity.

  “What?” Tory asked.

  “Big one.” He pointed, enhanced the image, and brought up its numbers. It was sliced away on one side, as if someone had taken a hot knife to it, cut it the way you might cut a pineapple. It might have been a severed piece of fruit, flat along the bottom, somewhat longish, tumbling end over end and simultaneously rotating on its long axis, which measured—

  —One and a half kilometers.

  “My God,” she said.

  They relayed the data to their consumers.

  It became POSIM-38. And quickly, the Possum.

  6.

  THE ACTION TEAM, WBKK NEWS HELICOPTER. 3:07 A.M.

  Cliff Beaumont reporting from Miami Beach:

  “For God’s sake, if you’re within the sound of my voice, get under cover.” (Camera reveals a churning sea illuminated by lightning strikes. An enormous black funnel flickers in and out of the picture.) “This thing will hit Miami Beach in a few minutes. If you have a storm cellar, get to it. If not, look for an interior room. We’re several miles away, but we’re getting some of the wash and we’re going to have to set down. In any case, get out of the open.”

  AstroLab. 3:11 A.M.

  As soon as the data from Skyport firmed up, Wes Feinberg was on the phone to the White House. They’d given him a code so he could talk directly with Mercedes Juarez. That wasn’t his preference. Mercedes was too much a respecter of persons and authority. What Feinberg needed was someone who wasn’t averse to crashing bureaucratic blockades and going right into the Oval Office. He’d wanted a line to the president (“Impossible!”) or at least to Al Kerr (“Mr. Kerr is an extremely busy man.”). The world might come to an end, but Mr. Kerr would be too busy to notice.

  “Can you put me through to the president?” he asked Juarez.

  “I would if I could, Professor Feinberg. He’s been in the situation room all night.”

  “Yes. Well, you might tell him he has a situation.”

  “What precisely is wrong?”

  “This would work better if I could speak to him directly. He may have a worst-case scenario.”

  “You’re probably talking about the report that NASA sent over a few minutes ago.”

  “I don’t know. What did the report say?”

  “It’s classified.”

  “That makes it hard to talk about it, doesn’t it?”

  Juarez’s tone stiffened. “Professor Feinberg, if you want to give me details, I’ll see that they get to him.” Or don’t waste my time.

  “All right. We have a big one coming in. Its catalog number is thirty-eight. It’s going to pass through the upper atmosphere later this morning. The chances are good it’ll slow down enough to go into orbit. If it does, tell him to expect the
orbit to decay pretty quickly. What I’m trying to say is that I think the damned thing’ll be coming down. You got that?”

  For a long minute there was silence on the other end. Then: “How big? When’s it coming? Where?”

  He wondered what the NASA report had said. “It’s one and a half kilometers across. You understand what that means?”

  “Yes,” she said. “I think so.”

  “Tell him. If he has any options, he may not have much time to use them.”

  “I’ll get the word to him.”

  “He needs to talk to me.”

  Boston. 3:16 A.M.

  The wave wasn’t particularly big, in the context of the evening. It rolled across Logan Airport and Winthrop, which had been abandoned barely ten minutes earlier, after a warning had chased out the few diehards who remained. It was barely eight feet high when it swept through downtown Boston. Other waves went ashore at Plymouth on the south, and Gloucester on the north. The disaster was compounded at Marblehead when a major pileup blocked Route 114 and trapped thousands in the path of the sea.

  At Plymouth, the Commonwealth Electric power station was destroyed. That caused an overload in Boston and Providence, and the system began shutting down. By four-fifteen the entire Northeast was without power.

  Every major city on both coasts was now entangled in a desperate flight. Police forces disintegrated as officers scrambled to rescue their own families. Hospitals and other emergency services broke down for the same reason. Those who gave up trying to get out of town and sought refuge in local churches and community centers often found them locked. Military and National Guard units could move quickly only by air.

  So far there had been no tsunamis on the West Coast. Experts were cautiously optimistic.

  The media was perhaps enjoying its finest hour. Mobile news teams were everywhere, dropping out of the sky to record and interview the terror-stricken and the desperate.

  “Where are you headed, Mrs. Martinik?”

  “Anywhere….”

  People living in Denver, Kansas City, Indianapolis experienced a different kind of agony. There was hardly anyone who didn’t have kids, friends, relatives in the path of the waves. But phone lines were down throughout the stricken areas.

  Conditions elsewhere in the world were mixed. East Africa, the Middle East, and Asia had so far suffered less severely because they had not been directly exposed to the event. But debris was still falling, and the Earth’s rotation was pushing them into the line of fire. Europe was being hit hard. Thousands were believed dead from Rome to the Gulf of Riga. Kiev in the Ukraine had, like Carlisle, been decimated by a meteor shower. Pôrto Alegre and Valparaíso had been inundated.

  There was some good news: A tidal wave reported approaching Vancouver failed to arrive. At Pearl Harbor, the navy evacuated thousands of dependents onto warships in the face of approaching tsunamis. In Glasgow, city officials used trains, buses, and good planning to perform a similar feat.

  Nations had already begun to assist one another with little regard to national borders. Russian military forces had arrived with food and medical aid at Kiev. While Poles rescued Latvians at Riga, Germans rescued Poles along the Pomeranian Coast. Italian relief agencies showed up in eastern France. Canadians were reported en route to New York.

  There were some that night who were concluding, whatever else might happen, the human race would never be the same.

  Skyport Orbital Lab. 3:18 A.M.

  Skyport was a geostationary satellite, orbiting permanently above the Galapagos Islands. The sky over the eastern Pacific was alight with the fine webwork of meteor showers. Tory knew what was happening on the ground. Along the Gulf Coast and in Mexico, giant storms had been generated by abrupt changes in temperature and air pressure. Hurricane-velocity winds and driving rain struck Mobile, New Orleans, Tampico, and Veracruz. The TV carried images of crushed bodies and broken wheelchairs, of soggy teddies and overturned buses. At Virginia Beach a desperate father tried unsuccessfully to save his kids from a wave by tying them to trees; at Wilmington a hospital attempted to ride out the rising sea, and lost its patients and virtually its entire professional staff. A Coast Guard helicopter off Atlantic City ran into wind shear at the wrong moment and went down in mountainous seas. Heroism and tragedy were everywhere.

  Tory watched with eyes swollen from fighting back tears. Her own family lived in the area around St. Louis, so they at least were safe from the general devastation. But the POSIMs continued to go down, and she provided as much warning as she could. Usually it was thirty to forty minutes. It wasn’t much, but it was a hell of a lot better than zero. And she was a big part of it, the woman they’d wanted to send home, at a time when they should have been beefing up.

  She watched POSIM-27 sizzle into the atmosphere and disappear somewhere off Brazil. The cities of the Americas were usually ablaze with light, even at this hour. But tonight substantial sections of both continents had gone dark. Even the river of illumination that ran from Boston to Miami was at best patchy.

  From here, from her perch thirty-six thousand kilometers over the Pacific, she sensed a rhythm to the strikes, a pattern of light and intensity and timing. Despite all that was happening below, this cosmic symphony was the most beautiful thing she’d ever seen.

  White House, Oval Office. 3:20 A.M.

  Henry was staring at the papers scattered across his teakwood desk, and at the images coming in on his notebook screen from Miami. His eyes were blurred, his head was warm, his hands were trembling. Emily had pleaded with him to call his personal physician, to get something to calm him down. But the last thing he needed now was a tranquilizer.

  How many had died tonight?

  They’d never know; and if there’d been a revolver handy, Henry Kolladner would have done the right thing and put a bullet in his head.

  The door opened and Kerr looked in. “Henry?” he said.

  The only light in the room, aside from the notebook, came from his desk lamp. He looked at it, a memento from the president of France. “I made the wrong call, Al.” He felt drained, empty. “We should’ve started evacuating the cities as soon as we knew.” He’d learned his lesson. Minutes before the eleven forty-five address, he’d committed the resources of the government to a complete evacuation of coastal cities throughout the nation. Too late, of course. Far too late.

  “Sir, we did what we thought was right.”

  He shrugged. “It doesn’t matter, Al. We’ve got a lot of dead people out there. It didn’t have to happen.”

  For a long time neither man spoke. Then Kerr said, “Feinberg’s been on the line again.”

  The despair in his voice was evident. Henry swung the chair around slowly and looked at his chief of staff, transfixing him.

  “What is it this time?”

  “POSIM-38. The one we got the NASA report about.”

  The president took a long breath. POSIM-38 would pass through the skies over China later that morning. It was big, but it was going to miss. “It is still going to miss, right?”

  “Yeah. I just got off the line with him. The problem is that he says it’ll be back.”

  “What?”

  “He says it’ll slow down during its passage through the atmosphere, and it’ll start looping around the Earth. He can’t say for sure, but he thinks it’ll come down. Maybe pretty quick.”

  “My God. That son of a bitch is, what, ten blocks long?” Henry, for the first time, felt his disease. Like a living thing, it crept into his intestines and his lungs and curled around his spine. He found it hard to breathe.

  “He says it’s the trigger. If it lands, it’s lights out everywhere. Ice age, famine, you name it.”

  “When?”

  “He doesn’t know. Depends on what happens to it as it passes through the atmosphere.”

  “Worst-case scenario?”

  “Could be a couple of days.”

  Henry wiped perspiration from his brow and dug through the papers on his desk until he found
the one he was looking for. “NASA says no immediate threat.” His stomach felt as if it were wrapped in steel bands. “This Feinberg, is he—?”

  “Our people think he’s the best there is.”

  “Okay. Well, we’re not going to sit here and take it. We’ll nuke the son of a bitch.” He tapped his finger on the NASA document. “It says here, closest approach at eight forty-seven. We’ll take it out this morning and be done with it.”

  “I agree, Henry.”

  “Have NASA check Feinberg’s numbers. See if they come up with the same results. Meantime, get Wilson on the line.” Wilson was the air force chief of staff. “If NASA concurs with Feinberg, we’ll do it.”

  Kerr violated his usual procedure by making a couple of quick calls while Henry waited, setting the process in motion. Then he turned again to the president. “There’s something else we need to talk about, Henry. The District is vulnerable. I think we need to move inland ourselves. Just in case. I’ve taken the liberty of setting up an alternate command center at Peterson AFB.”

  Henry wanted to laugh, but his throat was dry. “Peterson? You want me to go to Colorado and sit on a mountain?”

  “Peterson’s not on a mountain, Henry.”

  “People hear Colorado, they think mountains. How’s it going to look if the president, who told everybody to stay home, don’t worry about the waves, everything’s under control—if the goddam president clears out and heads for the mountains?”

  “People are going to be too busy to think about how it looks, Henry. Afterward, they’ll be glad the government still has a head.”

  “Like hell they will. Not this head.”

  “Henry, we’ve got aircraft out there, and satellites, more spotters than we know what to do with, but the waves are hard to see. Until they get close. They’re coming, some of them, at three hundred miles an hour.” His eyes got round and hard. “You’ve got a lot of people working with you, Henry. If you want to expose yourself, it’s one thing, but you have your staff to think about.”

  And Emily. But Emily had recognized the dilemma, had refused to leave when he’d suggested it earlier that evening.