Moonfall

by Jack McDevitt

  Which reminded him. He went up the ladder—he was getting good at zero-g moves now—and came in behind Saber. “Hello, pilot,” he said.

  She raised a hand without looking around. “Hello, Mr. President.”

  “I understand we’re not going to Pluto after all,” he said.

  “Oh,” she said. “You know about that. No, we’ll be okay. We were never at risk.”

  He slid into the copilot’s chair. “You’re sure?”

  “Yes, sir,” she said.

  “Anything I ought to know about?”

  “No, Mr. President.”

  “If there’s another problem, I’d like to be informed,” he said.

  “Yes, sir. I didn’t think of it as a problem. I mean, I knew they had the Lowell in reserve.” She smiled up at him. Saber was, he decided, a beautiful woman. Somehow, there hadn’t been time to notice before. “I thought you had enough to worry about. Getting the Micro back was my job.”

  “Do we have any fuel left at all?”

  “We’ve got a couple hundred pounds. Not very much. I’m trying to save it.”

  “Okay. What’s the drill on the rescue?”

  She relaxed a little. “Lowell will catch up with us around four. We’ll transfer over and cut the Micro loose. They haven’t sent me an ETA yet, but I’d guess we’ll get back to the station by late evening. That’s only a guess. I don’t know what the capabilities of the Lowell are.”

  Charlie looked at the myriad blinking lights and telltales on the Micro’s displays. “Can we see the Possum from here?”

  She touched a key, and the rock appeared on a heads-up screen. “That’s the view from one of the satellites.”

  The media descriptions said the Possum looked like something that had been cut in half. One side was flat, the other curved and rugged. It was more oblong than spherical, almost resembling a club. He was glad that idea hadn’t occurred to anyone in the media. He watched it tumbling slowly across the display.

  Saber’s fingers moved over the keyboard. “Here’s something to compare it with.” An image of the Micro blinked on. It shrank until it was almost invisible against the object. “That’s us.” She pressed another key, and a series of micro-icons lined up along the length of the rock. “There are sixty-one of them,” she said. “End to end.”

  “And how big are we?”

  “Twenty-eight meters and change, blister to treads. We’re pretty compact.”

  “We’ll be well rid of the thing,” he said.

  The Possum exerted a near-hypnotic influence. He watched it turning, watched, on another screen, the blue globe of Earth.

  The second image, Saber explained, was from the Micro’s telescopes.

  The distance between the vice presidency and the office of the chief executive, Charlie was discovering, is measured in light-years. It might be that no one really understands that who hasn’t stood on both sides of the chasm. A few hours ago he was only worried about saving himself. That concern now seemed almost trivial.

  The third decade of the twenty-first century had, until a few days earlier, been a good time for the planet. A hundred million Chinese were driving cars, almost everyone agreed that military incursions were in bad taste, the old economic cycle of boom and bust appeared to have been tamed, and the great powers had discovered that collaboration was more fruitful than competition. Technology was providing better lives for almost everybody. Science was forging ahead, and people now lived longer and stayed younger than ever before. Most cancers were curable; powersats supplied virtually unlimited energy; and the long struggle to reverse environmental damage had finally turned the corner. In the United States, racial tensions had been steadily easing, GNP was up every year, crime rates and population growth were down.

  This is not to say there were no problems. There were far more people than the world’s natural resources could comfortably support, and ancient traditions and religious groups fought every effort to reduce the numbers. There was still too much crime, and too much of it violent, particularly in Russia, the United States, and China. A recent survey of American adults by USA Today suggested that three-eighths of the population were functionally illiterate. This was the highest ratio of any industrialized society, and it continued to climb steadily. The advantages of participating in the global communications network were still not available to a quarter of the U.S. population, and to more than a third of those living in other Western nations. Every major government carried a staggering burden of debt.

  These were the problems a Haskell administration would have reasonably expected to confront. Anticipating the possibility of victory in the fall, Charlie had already staffed out work and formulated some ideas on his own. He’d talked to the people on the front lines, teachers and parents and cops and emergency room physicians and first-line supervisors in a wide range of occupations. He thought he was ready to assume the burdens of the presidency with a series of initiatives to attack these problems across a broad front.

  As things had turned out, he could hardly have been less prepared.

  Saber frowned and touched her earphone. “Wait one,” she said and looked at Charlie. “For you, Mr. President.” But his lamp hadn’t lit up, so the call wasn’t coming in on his private channel. “Do you want to talk to a Wesley Feinberg?”

  “I’ve got it.” Charlie opened his cell phone. He’d never met Feinberg, but he knew him by reputation. And Al had briefed him on his part in the planning. Called him a trouble-maker. “Good morning, Professor Feinberg. This is Charles Haskell.”

  “Mr. President.” The voice was strained. “I’ve been trying to get through to you for hours. Are you still planning to execute the nuclear strike against the Possum?”

  “Yes,” said Charlie. “Of course.”

  “Don’t.”

  Charlie’s heart sank. “Why not?”

  “We don’t know enough to be able to change its trajectory. That’s what we really need to do. But we don’t know how.”

  “So we give it a try. What’s to lose?”

  “What’s to lose? Mr. President, you blow it apart and you’ll create a cloud of radioactive particles and debris that would be just as likely as the Possum to come back around and hit us later. Except that, if it were to happen, the consequences would be even worse.”

  “Worse how? My information is that the Possum would kill a few more millions. Maybe send us back to a dark age.”

  “Mr. President, a healthy radioactive cloud would have a good chance to kill everybody on the planet. I’m talking about an extinction event.”

  Charlie visualized a storm of hot pebbles ripping into the global landscape and the oceans, hot particles settling into the atmosphere, hot rain pouring down out of diseased clouds. “Why didn’t you tell this to Henry?”

  “I did. Or I tried to. I was talking to him when we got cut off. I think it was probably at the time his helicopter went down.”

  “What did he say?”

  “He didn’t have a chance to say anything.” Saber was watching Charlie. “You must stop the attack,” Feinberg went on. “It will gain nothing, but it raises the stakes dramatically for us if it comes down.”

  “But it might not come down. Is that right?”

  “There’s no way to be sure.”

  “For God’s sake, Feinberg, isn’t there a way to find out?”

  “After it leaves the atmosphere, give us a few hours.”

  A few hours would put it out of range of the missiles. They’d have to wait, and hit it inbound. His own people had advised him that was a much more dangerous procedure. “Are you at all optimistic? Is there a chance it’ll just go away?”

  “Give me a few hours, Mr. President.”

  After the call, Charlie sat for almost ten minutes. He refused all calls and considered his options and the potential consequences. He thought about Feinberg’s reputation, and he’d read enough between the lines of Al Kerr’s account to understand the scientist had given Henry good advice.

>   But a lot of people thought the nukes were a good way to get rid of the goddam thing. If Charlie failed to pull the trigger and it came around and hit them, who was going to get the blame?

  On the other hand, would it matter who got the blame?

  He looked at his watch. The birds would fly in less than an hour. Beside him, Saber was very quiet. “You overheard all that?”

  “I heard your end.”

  He punched in Al Kerr’s number.

  5.

  Fax Received and Broadcast by C-Span. 8:26 A.M.

  We’re all on a bus, the whole human race. The bus is tearing along a road that’s mostly empty. But there are a few rocks on the road, and maybe once in a while another vehicle, and we’ve just discovered there’s no driver.

  —Dan White, Oklahoma City

  Skyport Orbital Lab. 8:41 A.M.

  Substantial pieces of the World Wide Web were missing. Whole networks had dropped out of sight; power companies had gone down; telephone systems had collapsed. Still, the redundancies and bypasses that had accreted over the years served it well, and it stayed up and running. If one’s telephone company was still operational, access to the Web remained.

  Skybolt’s champions became especially visible on-line. There was a flood of I-told-you-so comments. And the names of congressmen who had been prominent in attacking the project were being-posted for general consumption.

  The Possum was still approaching, but it had passed behind the curve of the Earth and was consequently no longer directly visible from Skyport’s onboard observatory. The best images now were coming in from ground-based telescopes. Tory and Windy watched the show on their main display.

  POSIM-38’s lack of symmetry, its resemblance to a flattened club, or possibly (as someone had suggested) a sliced squash, gave it a unique identity. The prevailing explanation for its shape was that one side had been more directly exposed to the blast and that combustible materials had boiled off, leaving a relatively smooth, cooling residue. The flat side was promptly dubbed the “Plain,” as opposed to the rounded, heavily scored rear, which astronomers were calling the “Back Country.” A ridge formed a kind of spine, running lengthwise through the Back Country. It was the only feature on the terrain that did not seem to have been smoothed by the melting of the rock. Someone called it “Solitary Ridge,” and the name stuck.

  It was six minutes away, approaching at 10.7 kilometers per second. Tory was relaying everything she had to her consumers, one of whom, she’d been informed, was the new president of the United States. “He’s personally interested,” the NASA higher-ups had told her with great solemnity.

  Damned well he should be. She hoped he’d be smart enough to get the point.

  A klaxon went off somewhere, signaling another penetration of the space station. Windy’s eyes met hers. The prospect that a rock might rip through the bulkhead at any time tended to be distracting. She tried to push the thought into a corner of her mind and refocus on the Possum.

  It was coming in over the western Pacific, where it would enter the atmosphere at an acute angle. The NASA Goddard Flying Observatory, positioned over the East China Sea, was sending them test pictures of clear, star-filled skies.

  Ordinarily, the networks would have given the event extensive coverage, but on this Sunday morning it was all but preempted by the reports of continuing calamity from around the world. The scene of immediate disaster had moved well into the Pacific now, as Earth turned on its axis. Rock rained from the skies along Asian coasts, destroying Tokyo, and damaging Shanghai, Hong Kong, and Singapore.

  Tory was tied into Feinberg’s private channel on the AstroLab circuit. But the astrophysicist was off the line now. The BBC had interviewed him about an hour ago. The Possum would come very close, he said, but he assured the viewers it would miss.

  Others were less certain. The Chinese had already announced their intention to register a complaint that their American allies were waiting until after it passed before using their missiles. They hinted darkly that the Americans secretly hoped it would fall on China. The secretary of state, in a predawn press conference, commented that he wasn’t concerned, that if the Possum merely put on a fireworks display and continued on its way, as expected, the Chinese would have nothing to complain about; and that if it did hit China, and the scientists were correct that it was big enough to end civilization, then there’d be nobody around to listen to the complaint. He smiled at his remark.

  A timer was keeping track: Two minutes to atmospheric contact. Three minutes to closest approach.

  The station klaxons had stopped wailing. A voice over the intercom informed Tory that sections of D deck, the main promenade, had lost pressure and were temporarily closed.

  A news bulletin appeared on the screen: the Americans were canceling the missile strike. No explanation given. Press conference at ten o’clock.

  One minute.

  The Possum was by no means the only big object out there. At last count, sixty-two others had been designated and tagged. But none constituted an immediate threat. The biggest, POSIM-55, was a true extinction rock. It was four times the size of the Possum. Enough to finish everyone except maybe the cockroaches. Fortunately, it was going into a relatively stable orbit. In fact, she thought, despite the terrible losses, we’ve been lucky. It could have been far worse. And the rain of ejecta had noticably eased during the last couple of hours.

  “There’s still a lot of debris out there,” said Windy. “When this is over we should recommend the airlines stay on the ground a few more days.”

  Ten seconds.

  It was moving in quickly now, skimming across the face of the planet, the Pacific far below, the Asian mainland coming up fast. The virtual imager tracked it into the blue-black haze of the ionosphere. As she watched, the Possum began to redden, pieces fell away, and wisps of smoke formed contrails.

  The screens dedicated to the Flying Observatory had not yet picked it up. Two of the displays showed enhanced telescopic images; the third was a naked-eye view. She watched intently and then saw it, a sharp white line drawn through the shimmering blue haze. Its closest approach to the surface would be at two hundred kilometers.

  Other imagers on the ground tracked it. A CNN reporter, standing with a camera team on a hillside near Hainan, caught it as it burst into flame. People standing with him gaped and sighed. The long fireball streaked across their sky. Then the roar of its passage broke on them, deep and guttural. It took the witnesses by surprise and they covered their heads. A few shrieked and threw themselves to the ground.

  It rumbled among the constellations, a celestial locomotive with the boiler ripped open and its fiery insides exposed. And then it disappeared in the west, toward Wuhan.

  “Looks good so far,” said Windy, his voice tense.

  Mobile stations at Chengtu and in the Himalayas caught it as it began to dwindle. At Lahore, it became quieter, more sedate, and seemed smaller. The roar was gone. The Afghans saw only a long pink line in the sky, and somewhere over the land of the Mullah, it winked out.

  Tory had a link open to the AstroLab and she heard their applause. “Bye-bye, baby,” said a delighted female voice.

  AstroLab. 8:58 A.M.

  Feinberg was constitutionally unable to celebrate. He was by nature reticent, reserved, reclusive. For him, the local Wal-Mart was more remote than Cygnus X-1. Years before, Feinberg had had the good fortune to be at Palomar when Supernova 2017A exploded in the Lagoon Nebula, NGC6523. The Lagoon is in Sagittarius, less than five thousand light-years away. It had been so far the astrophysical event of the century. But while his colleagues celebrated, Feinberg had been forced to pretend. He understood his own personality well enough; he knew that he’d never learned to enjoy himself. Even this morning, when (at least in his own mind) he’d intervened to save the president from a potentially disastrous decision, it would not have been his nature to take several of his colleagues out for a round of eggs and pancakes, and relish the moment.

  Instead,
when the dust settled, he simply went home.

  He’d been up for the better part of five consecutive days, and he was exhausted. The sky was finally growing clear, and he didn’t see that he could do any more. Cynthia Murray, his number two, would track the Possum, and when she knew what it was going to do, she’d call him.

  Outside, the trees were full of birds and it was as if nothing had happened.

  MEET THE PRESS, SPECIAL EDITION. 9:00 A.M.

  In Atlanta with Judy Almayer, New York Times; Fred Chiles, Boston Globe; Karl Nishamura, Los Angeles Online; and moderator Pierce Benjamin, NBC News; with special guest Julian Moore, director of the Minority Alliance.

  NBC: Dr. Moore, your organization issued a demand an hour ago calling for the dissolution of the presidency and its replacement by a rotating executive council, subject to a parliamentary system providing quick recall.

  Moore: That’s correct. And it isn’t a position we’ve adopted lightly.

  NBC: What precisely do you propose? That we junk the Constitution?

  Moore: It’s a rich man’s constitution, Mr. Benjamin. Devised by the rich, for the rich.

  N.Y. Times: But wouldn’t that be shooting yourself in the fool? After all, if you eliminate the Constitution, what’s left to protect ordinary people? The people you claim to represent?

  Moore: The Constitution, I’m sorry to say, has always been an instrument of evasion. People who’ve been oppressed have to get on their feet and demand their rights.

  Boston Globe: But doesn’t the Constitution provide the only real protection for those rights? To what other human document would you appeal?

  Moore: Maybe we need to write one. I’d remind you, Mr. Chiles, that the Constitution coexisted quite happily with slavery. Until the slaves just decided they weren’t going to take it any more.

  L.A. Online: But the Constitution was the lever with which Lincoln worked.

  Moore: That’s standard schoolboy history. The Union Army was the lever, and the spine of the Union Army, after 1863, was its black troops.

  NBC: Hold on a minute. Let’s not wander off into a side street. Dr. Moore, if you abolished the present government, with what would you replace it?