Both men clung to the balustrade, staring towards Scotland, trying to pick out a change in the light.
13
To Ted’s surprise, they survived the night, the two of them crouched in the ruins of St Giles’. No food or water, but that scarcely mattered now.
And with the dawn came the sound of thunder. Ted went outside, with Hamish’s collar grasped in his hand — Hamish-Bran seemed passive, beaten — and he climbed a ruined wall, looking for a vantage.
The Moonseed was on the move. The Moonseed pool was spreading like a silvery stain across the ground. The remains of buildings, of homes, with whatever tokens and bodies and memories they held, were cracking and falling, subsiding into the glowing mass. Ash was rising in diffuse clouds. There was a stink of ozone.
Inexorable. The word might have been coined for the stuff.
Where Holyrood Road used to be, a man, a soldier, was running before the spreading, flaring pool, somehow separated from his mates. He was far enough away to be reduced to a stick figure, his face a white blur.
He wasn’t running fast enough. The Moonseed was faster.
Ted pointed. “Look.”
“What? For God’s sake, what?”
“Did you ever see anything like that? The fox that couldn’t outrun the hounds. The child caught by the tide. Jesus, Jesus.”
In the last moment, that white point of a face turned to Ted, as if imploring.
“Nothing I can do,” Ted murmured. “Not any of us. It’s a tide of death. Come all the way from the stars, to wreck our homes, and kill us… And there are always little bastards like you, out to make it worse for everybody else.”
The Moonseed pool, hissing, overwhelmed the soldier. It was mercifully brief, from Ted’s point of view. One minute he was there, the next, in a flail of limbs, he was falling, and gone.
And now Ted turned to face east.
It was coming, crackling, bursts of light like a second dawn, the sound of rock breaking open like eggshell, washing up Castle Rock in a tide of light. Seconds left, no more.
“What do you think?” Ted asked gently. “Still expecting a great beam-up to that party in the sky?”
Bran was begging now. “Let me go. Oh Jesus, oh shit, let me go.”
Ted tightened his grip on Bran’s collar. “Burning witches in the Highlands, eh. Good for them. Maybe the Highlands will survive. Maybe the Highlanders will come back down here, like William Wallace, and stuff the bloody Moonseed back where it came from. Eh?
The smell of ozone was stronger. Just like the beach, he thought. He remembered what Henry had told him, nuclear fusion or fission or some damn thing going on as the Moonseed spread. He smiled.
“Maybe we’ll get a sun tan,” he said to Bran.
Bran, panting, his trouser legs stained wet, turned a dirt-streaked, tearful face up to him. “What? You crazy old fucker. What?”
The tears made him look young, the calculation and cunning gone from his face. He was younger than Michael had been, Ted remembered suddenly.
But Michael would never get any older. And neither would this boy.
…And now, after all this, he suffered an instant of doubt. This is only a kid. What right have I got to be judge and jury?
But there was no time. For now the Moonseed swept on him like a wave, buildings cracking and bursting into debris and falling, that fusion light bright all around him. All choice was ended, and that, for Ted, was a huge release.
He had time to see the Cathedral collapse. Big sandstone blocks just exploded out of the walls, as the church’s structural integrity vanished at a stroke, nine hundred years of building and preservation wiped out in a few seconds. There were massive blocks flying through the air towards him — Bran was screaming again — the Cathedral would kill them both, if it got the chance.
But before the blocks arrived, the wall he was standing on crumbled and collapsed. He was dropping, into a surging, silver-grey pool.
He closed his eyes, and fell into Moonseed.
It was soft and warm. Not like rock at all; like something alive, moving over his skin, exploring.
Something was grabbing at his hand. Bran.
He shook him loose; a creature like Bran should die alone.
The pressure built up around him. He was trapped, a fly in amber.
He opened his mouth to breathe. Something forced its way in — softly scraping, neutral temperature — scratching his mouth and throat as it pierced him.
No more air, then.
If Bran was right — Christ, the pressure on my chest — if Bran was right after all, he would be with Mike in a moment.
There was light beyond his closed eyelids, shining pink through the flesh. Streaks like meteors in his vision.
Michael, Jane, Jack. He’d done all he could for them. There would be no room in whatever was left of the world for an old fool like him. His doubt was gone now; to rid the world of a blight like Hamish Macrae was a worthy price for the remnant of his life.
A single instant of heat, unbelievable pressure, as the ancient volcanic plug gave way, and the surviving Castle buildings were blown apart, the fragments hurled high in the air.
14
So here was Henry back at Johnson Space Center, the heart of NASA, which he’d fled with such ill feeling. The old Saturn V still lay beside the entrance drive, as it had for decades, its most recent refurbishment leaving it sparkling white, like a Disney mockup. The mid-June air was heavy and humid, particularly after the clarity of Scotland, and the sky even here was an oppressive blue-grey dome, laden with ash.
From the security building, Henry was escorted to the Astronaut Office. He walked across the campus, the blocky buildings of oyster shell and glass, a solidification of a 1960s future that had never quite come to pass. Concrete paths criss-crossed between the buildings, lacing across bristly, bottle-green grass; the paths, Henry had observed in the past, never seemed to take you where you wanted to go, and he had developed a habit of jaywalking over the lawns, something that had not improved his popularity around here.
Today, following the girl from security, he stuck to the path.
There seemed to be a lot of people around, groups of them running between the buildings, carrying laptops and vu-graphs and folders of mission rules and procedures. There was a sense of urgency, in fact, that hadn’t been apparent in the time he’d spent here before. JSC, the centre of the nation’s space effort, had with time become just another place where big government work was done, with the nine-to-five schedules and leisurely pace that entailed.
Not now, though. Now, there were things to be done, missions to be mounted, a sense of urgency the place hadn’t known since the Apollo days.
All because of me, he thought. Jesus.
But then, it was as if NASA had been waiting for this call to arms since the curtailing of Apollo.
It seemed to Henry that once he had gotten through Monica Beus’s OSTP review, the official initiation of the scrambled Moon program had been extraordinarily fast.
He had to make another presentation, more formal, to the National Space Council: another presidential advisory group, this one chaired by the Vice President himself. And away from his own involvement, support built up. He read of Congressmen being hauled into the White House to be pressured into supporting the emergency bill authorizing the release of federal funds to NASA to implement the program. Opponents in the Senate, who appeared to think this was just another NASA job-creating publicity stunt, tried to filibuster the bill. But the White House orchestrated public opinion and concern, focusing on fence-sitting senators, who soon started to feel the heat from their home districts.
Maybe it shouldn’t have been such a surprise, Henry thought. This President had emerged from Congress herself; she was said to be the most skilled Chief Executive at dealing with Congressmen since Johnson. And that was just as well given the sexual harassment charges still being laid against her.
And when she went public — as, of course, she must have a
nticipated — she found herself, as the first President since Kennedy to approve a start-up Moon program, riding on a wave of popular approval. The language of the commentators was helpfully blunt. This is America. We aren’t going to sit here and let some nano-bug screw us over like in Scotland. Let’s go to the Moon and kick butt…
The comforting myth of American can-do, Henry thought: the idea that we can do something, President and military and nuclear fleets and spaceships, act to save ourselves just like in the past. Maybe it was all a delusion, wish fulfilment. But when it was harnessed behind a coherent project, the can-do myth was powerful indeed.
And the approval ratings it was giving the President didn’t hurt either.
So NASA had been given the funds and go-ahead to assemble the mission. But the decision was being made in stages; the approval to launch was still being withheld. It seemed to Henry that there was still a component of the public’s thinking — and hence of the Administration’s — that wished for this problem to go away. More rationally, the President was being urged to wait until the results of attempts to disrupt the Moonseed — with conventional bombs, nukes and other methods — were known. Maybe it wouldn’t be necessary to risk the lives of astronauts in this jaunt to the Moon.
So the Prez was hanging fire, waiting for the news to get worse, as it surely would.
…Here was Henry, delivered to the heart of the Astronaut Office. It was just a plain-looking briefing room filled with hard-backed chairs. It could have been a briefing hall in any large corporate or government building, he thought, anywhere in the country. All there was to betray its true nature were the rows of Shuttle mission plaques on the walls, nearly a hundred of them dating back to 1981, the bold, patriotic designs and rings of crew names commemorating forgotten missions, strangely old-fashioned.
Henry had never been here before, inside the lair of the hero jock pilots; his interest had always been solely in unmanned space exploration, and he would never have come to Houston, centre of the manned effort, at all, if not for the location of the extraterrestrial samples facility here.
And here, waiting for him in a grubby blue Shuttle astronaut’s coverall, was Geena, his ex-wife, with others he didn’t know. Geena had a look he’d come to recognize. I really, really don’t want to be here, with you, Henry…
“Henry,” she said, “we’re going on a little trip together.”
He frowned. “The Cape?”
“Further than that,” she said sourly.
And then he saw it, and his heart sank. “The Moon. You’re going to the Moon, with me.”
“No,” she snapped. “You’re going with me. I’m the fucking mission commander.” She eyed him. “It isn’t my fault. Thanks to you I’ve been involved in this from the start. Championing it. Who else would they pick?”
“Not the kind of scenario you generally have to think about in marriage guidance counselling sessions, huh.”
“Just as well we didn’t have any,” she said heavily. “As long as we’re both professional about this we’ll get through it.”
“Maybe.” He grinned. “It sure does appeal to my sense of irony.”
“Henry—”
“Aren’t you going to introduce me to your colleagues?”
With Geena was a mission designer she introduced as Frank Turtle, a skinny, owlish, bearded guy in bell-bottom jeans who was probably older than he looked. And there were a couple of astronauts: both men, both aged around forty, both with hard-muscled arms folded across their sports shirts. They regarded Henry with evident distaste, and said as little as they had to.
Turtle, it turned out, had been at the heart of devising this improvised lunar mission from the start, and so had found himself catapulted upwards in terms of responsibility — if not, Henry suspected, in such tangibles as his salary, the size of his office, and the colour of his carpet. He looked as if the responsibility was crushing him.
Frank Turtle coughed. “Dr Meacher, we’ve tried to devise a training program to get you through as much as possible in the time we’ve got. There are three main phases. Suitability, where the medicos assess if you could survive a space mission at all. Generic training, in emergency procedures, weightlessness, so on. Finally crew training, where you’ll be taken through the launch and docking procedures.” He scratched his receding hairline. “It’s going to be a scramble; I don’t know what resources we can offer you. I don’t think NASA personnel have ever been so stretched. For instance we’re going to have to force through Shuttle launches to take up the spacecraft components. We’re all working double shifts… equivalent to a pace of sixteen Shuttle launches in a year, if we had to keep it up that long…”
Geena said to Henry heavily, “Guys like Frank in operations and Mission Control, and the engineers at the Cape, and the flight crews, are the true heroes of this, Henry. The greatest pace we achieved in the history of the Shuttle program was nine launches, in the year before Challenger. I have guys working their asses off, doing double or triple shifts. Just don’t forget it. This mission isn’t about you. It’s about them.”
The astronauts eyed him coldly.
He wondered what to say. “I’m grateful.”
None of them was comfortable. He sensed anger. Frustration. Henry could see conflict in Geena’s face, and Frank Turtle’s.
It wasn’t hard to understand why.
NASA tended to think of itself as a heroic agency, capable of taking on whatever challenges were thrown at it. But the truth was, all the way back to Mercury, they had never launched a manned mission without every aspect of it being timelined, checklisted, simulated and rehearsed, over and over, until every possible glitch had been identified and contingency-planned, until the crew knew the mission so well they were actually desensitized to its dangers.
Running a mission like this — making it up as they went along — was alien to a NASA culture that went back half a lifetime. Culture shock for us all, he thought, with a certain relish.
Geena was still talking. “Your suitability training will be performed here, in the US. Your crew training will take place in Star City. The generic training will be at a mixture of locations; we’re agreeing the objectives with the Russians now, and—”
“Woah. Star City? Isn’t that Moscow?”
Turtle said, “Our launch manifest is full, in the window we have. You’ll be taken to orbit in a Russian Soyuz.” He smiled, weakly. “The Russians are working with us. Planet in peril. Hands across the sea. All that stuff.”
“Oh.” Oh, shit.
Geena grinned, with relish of her own. She said sweetly, “Didn’t anyone tell you? And by the way.”
“What?”
“I’m running your training.”
He was to be flown to Brooks Air Force Base in San Antonio, to report to the School of Aerospace Medicine there. And Geena was going to take him there, in a T-38, flying from Ellington Air Force Base close to JSC.
The T-38s were supersonic jet trainers which the astronauts used to maintain their flying proficiency, and they used them as personal taxi cabs, taking themselves and their colleagues back and forth between NASA sites at Houston and the Cape and Alabama and elsewhere. The pilots had been flying the little planes since the 1960s, and they were a familiar sight in the skies over Houston.
But Henry had never flown one before. And certainly not one piloted by his ex-wife.
It took him an hour just to get suited up, in a flight suit, helmet, boots, parachute, survival kit. The tech had to walk him from the personal gear room to the runway, because Geena was already in the cockpit.
Close to, the T-38 was, he conceded, an elegant piece of engineering, a sleek white cylinder with a vanishingly small wingspan, barely wide enough to accommodate two adult human beings under tiny blister canopies.
Geena didn’t acknowledge him as he walked up. The tech helped him climb into the cockpit, and he closed his canopy, and found himself staring at the back of Geena’s helmeted head.
As soon as he was
aboard she taxied the jet to the end of the runway. Dials and sticks moved back and forth in his cockpit, a baffling choreography. The jet roar was too loud for him to hear anything through the intercom, if anybody troubled to speak to him, and in his helmet he was sweltering in the cockpit, trapped in a bubble of Houston heat.
When he breathed through his oxygen mask he could smell burned rubber.
The jet accelerated suddenly, throwing him back into his seat. The T-38 was in the air in seconds, and then took off like a dart, tipping itself up and rising almost vertically. The needle nose shot through thin cloud, and when he looked back the ground was turning to a faint grey-green, interspersed with cloud shadows. Ahead, the sky was fading to a rich purple, and — if he read the dials right — they were already at forty-five thousand feet, higher than any commercial jet.
Geena levelled off, and looked back at him.
Suddenly, unexpectedly, exhilarated by being hurled up here, into this bowl of height and speed and light, he gave her a jaunty thumbs-up.
Her voice crackled in the intercom. “So you haven’t upchucked yet.”
“I won’t upchuck.”
“There’s a bag in your flight suit leg pocket.”
“I won’t upchuck.”
“We ought to be sending pilots to the Moon, not scientists with their heads up their backsides. It’s an old argument.”
“Geena, all our arguments are old arguments,” he said.
“This flight is part of the training. Part of your familiarization with the forces you’ll be experiencing during the launch and reentry. Did they tell you?”
“Geena, there is no they. You are they.”
“Remember where that bag is.”
And she threw the plane into a snap roll, a one-hundred-eighty-degree turn in seconds, and then barrel rolls and a parabolic arc and a steep dive over the Gulf of Mexico. Henry’s helmet was bumped against the canopy, and his body strained at the harnesses restraining it, and sunlight and shadows wheeled around him.
Ultimately, he was proud he lasted all of ten minutes before using the bag.
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