Stephen Baxter: Last and First Contacts

‘You’re enjoying getting back in the saddle, aren’t you, Mum?’

Maureen shrugged. ‘Well, the last couple of years weren’t much fun. Nursing your Dad, and then getting rid of the house. It’s nice to get this old thing back on again.’ She raised her arms and looked down at her quilted gardening coat.

Caitlin wrinkled her nose. ‘I always hated that stupid old coat. You really should get yourself something better, Mum. These modern fabrics are very good.’

‘This will see me out,’ Maureen said firmly.

They walked around the verge, looking at the plants, the weeds, the autumn leaves that hadn’t been swept up and were now rotting in place.

Caitlin said, ‘I’m going to be on the radio later. BBC Radio 4. There’s to be a government statement on the Rip, and I’ll be in the follow-up discussion. It starts at nine, and I should be on about nine thirty.’

‘I’ll listen to it. Do you want me to tape it for you?’

‘No. Bill will get it. Besides, you can listen to all these things on the websites these days.’

Maureen said carefully, ‘I take it the news is what you expected, then.’

‘Pretty much. The Hawaii observatories confirmed it. I’ve seen the new Hubble images, deep sky fields. Empty, save for the foreground objects. All the galaxies beyond the local group have gone. Eerie, really, seeing your predictions come true like that. That’s couch grass, isn’t it?’

‘Yes. I stuck a fork in it. Nothing but root mass underneath. It will be a devil to get up. I’ll have a go, and then put down some bin liners for a few weeks, and see if that kills it off. Then there are these roses that should have been pruned by now. I think I’ll plant some gladioli in this corner—’

‘Mum, it’s October.’ Caitlin blurted that out. She looked thin, pale and tense, a real office worker, but then Maureen had always thought that about her daughter, that she worked too hard. Now she was thirty-five, and her moderately pretty face was lined at the eyes and around her mouth, the first wistful signs of age. ‘October 14 th, at about four in the afternoon. I say “about”. I could give you the time down to the attosecond if you wanted.’

Maureen took her hands. ‘It’s all right, love. That’s about when you thought it would be, isn’t it?’

‘Not that it does us any good, knowing. There’s nothing we can do about it.’

They walked on. They came to a corner on the south side of the little garden. ‘This ought to catch the sun,’ Maureen said. ‘I’m thinking of putting in a seat here. A pergola maybe. Somewhere to sit. I’ll see how the sun goes around later in the year.’

‘Dad would have liked a pergola,’ Caitlin said. ‘He always did say a garden was a place to sit in, not to work.’

‘Yes. It does feel odd that your father died, so soon before all this. I’d have liked him to see it out. It seems a waste somehow.’

Caitlin looked up at the sky. ‘Funny thing, Mum. It’s all quite invisible to the naked eye, still. You can see the Andromeda Galaxy, just, but that’s bound to the Milky Way by gravity. So the expansion hasn’t reached down to the scale of the visible, not yet. It’s still all instruments, telescopes. But it’s real all right.’

‘I suppose you’ll have to explain it all on Radio 4.’

‘That’s why I’m there. We’ll probably have to keep saying it over and over, trying to find ways of saying it that people can understand. You know, don’t you, Mum? It’s all to do with dark energy. It’s like an antigravity field that permeates the universe. Just as gravity pulls everything together, the dark energy is pulling the universe apart, taking more and more of it so far away that its light can’t reach us any more. It started at the level of the largest structures in the universe, superclusters of galaxies. But in the end it will fold down to the smallest scales. Every bound structure will be pulled apart. Even atoms, even subatomic particles. The Big Rip.

‘We’ve known about this stuff for years. What we didn’t expect was that the expansion would accelerate as it has. We thought we had trillions of years. Then the forecast was billions. And now—’

‘Yes.’

‘It’s funny for me being involved in this stuff, Mum. Being on the radio. I’ve never been a people person. I became an astrophysicist, for God’s sake. I always thought that what I studied would have absolutely no effect on anybody’s life. How wrong I was. Actually there’s been a lot of debate about whether to announce it or not.’

‘I think people will behave pretty well,’ Maureen said. ‘They usually do. It might get trickier towards the end, I suppose. But people have a right to know, don’t you think?’

‘They’re putting it on after nine so people can decide what to tell their kids.’

‘After the watershed! Well, that’s considerate. Will you tell your two?’

‘I think we’ll have to. Everybody at school will know. They’ll probably get bullied about it if they don’t know. Imagine that. Besides, the little beggars will probably have googled it on their smart phones by one minute past nine.’

Maureen laughed. ‘There is that.’

‘It will be like when I told them Dad had died,’ Caitlin said. ‘Or like when Billy started asking hard questions about Santa Claus.’

‘No more Christmases,’ Maureen said suddenly. ‘If it’s all over in October.’

‘No more birthdays for my two either,’ Caitlin said.

‘November and January.’

‘Yes. It’s funny, in the lab, when the date came up, that was the first thing I thought of.’

Maureen’s phone pinged again. ‘Another signal. Quite different in nature from the last, according to this.’

‘I wonder if we’ll get any of those signals decoded in time.’

Maureen waggled her phone. ‘It won’t be for want of trying, me and a billion other search-for-ET-at-home enthusiasts. Would you like some tea, love?’

‘It’s all right. I’ll let you get on. I told Bill I’d get the shopping in, before I have to go back to the studios in Oxford this evening.’

They walked towards the back door into the house, strolling, inspecting the plants and the scrappy lawn.

June 5 th

It was about lunchtime when Caitlin arrived from the garden centre with the pieces of the pergola. Maureen helped her unload them from the back of a white van and carry them through the gate from the drive. They were mostly just prefabricated wooden panels and beams that they could manage between the two of them, though the big iron spikes that would be driven into the ground to support the uprights were heavier. They got the pieces stacked up on the lawn.

‘I should be able to set it up myself,’ Maureen said. ‘Joe next door said he’d lay the concrete base for me, and help me lift on the roof section. There’s some nailing to be done, and creosoting, but I can do all that.’

‘Joe, eh.’ Caitlin grinned.

‘Oh, shut up, he’s just a neighbour. Where did you get the van? Did you have to hire it?’

‘No, the garden centre loaned it to me. They can’t deliver. They are still getting stock in, but they can’t rely on the staff. They just quit, without any notice. In the end it sort of gets to you, I suppose.’

‘Well, you can’t blame people for wanting to be at home.’

‘No. Actually Bill’s packed it in. I meant to tell you. He didn’t even finish his induction at Webster’s. But the project he was working on would never have got finished anyway.’

‘I’m sure the kids are glad to have him home.’

‘Well, they’re finishing the school year. At least I think they will, the teachers still seem keen to carry on.’

‘It’s probably best for them.’