Stephen Baxter - Moonseed

And there was something else, a silvery-grey texture to the air, as if everything was veiled by a fine smog, leaching out the colours. It was the reflected light from the quicksand, tinging the air grey: quicksand, rock chewed-up and transformed by something from the Moon, glowing silver-grey by the light of the wreck of Venus.

This is a strange time, she thought uneasily.

She got in the car and snapped on the radio, flicking it to a rock channel. She started the car and turned south, towards Henry’s lab.

If Ted can face this, so can I.

It was a little after seven. The early commuter traffic, heading towards the city centre, was already building up. Men in suits, fewer women, strictly one to a car. More than usual? Less? She couldn’t tell. But there were other vehicles: a lot of four-wheel-drives and people movers, Ford Galaxies and Renault Espaces, some laden with possessions and kids, moving in every direction, east, west, north — every direction away from the Seat, to the south. Early evacuees?

Evidently Ted wasn’t alone in his intuition.

Of, course there were some who would relish this.

Perhaps there were survivalists, even here in respectable suburban Scotland, waiting for it all to fall apart — heading for the highlands with their cans of corned beef, ready to aim illicit shotguns at anyone who came begging. Or maybe they just wanted some place more challenging to take their 4WDs than the car park of Sainsbury’s. Riding out the cosy catastrophe, in Barbour jackets and Land Rovers.

“Fuck them,” said Jane aloud. In a year such folk would be starving, chasing sheep around the highlands, and in two years they would be dead.

There was a queue of cars forming already outside the hypermarket. There was even a line of pedestrian shoppers forming outside the Iceland supermarket.

Frozen food. Smart. Not that she’d thought to exclude that from the list she’d given Jack. But the kid was brighter than she was, in many ways; he’d probably figure that out for himself.

She ought to make sure he put in tampons, though.

When she reached the Holyrood Road she found herself in a stationary queue of traffic. She got out of the car and walked a little way forward, until she could see to the head of the queue. There was a pair of police cars parked crudely across the carriageway, blocking the way, and a tape stretched more symbolically across the road. Some cars were already being turned around and were coming back; the drivers looked irritated, business types with meetings they needed to get to.

The queue was moving, slowly; she realized that it was simply compressing, drivers inching forward in frustration, as if they could clear the obstacle by sheer psychic pressure.

We’re fragile, she thought. Everything is full, run to capacity, pared to the bone in the name of efficiency. The slightest disruption and everything freezes up.

The murky light of Venus was reflected from the roofs of the cars ahead of her, curved splashes of new light.

The wind changed, and blew in from the east, from Abbeyhill. There was a smell of burned meat. She could hear sirens. A helicopter flapped over her. She looked up. It was in camouflage green, Army or Navy.

Was this how it was starting? Was this the end of normality, of the routine of life? Would chaos and pain spread out from here, growing like the rock infection Henry had identified?

Her father would be able to cope with such conditions. That silent strength had always been an irritation to her, as she’d moved through adolescence and upwards. What use was a father who was a kind of heroic pillar? What could he do but intimidate her, make her aware of her own weakness?

But, she recognized, there were times when such strength was, simply, essential. Essential for survival.

The radio carried newsflashes. Incidents all over the eastern side of the city, fires and power outages and even collapsing buildings.

She shivered.

The receptionist at the lab didn’t know about Mike, and told her Henry hadn’t come in that morning. “But you might try the car park.”

The car park?

Jane suppressed her irritation, and went back outside.

In the car park, in one corner, she found a Portakabin, a squat cuboid, uncompromising yellow. A plastic packing case was being used as a step before the open door. A fat bundle of cables — power and data feeds, she supposed — snaked into the Portakabin from an open window in the main lab building.

She knocked on the frame of the open door. There was no reply. She stuck her head inside, shielding her eyes against the light. Henry was there, in the middle of clutter, with his back to her. He was sitting on a plastic chair, hunched over a workbench.

“Henry?”

He put down a soldering iron and turned around. “Hi.”

She stepped inside. It was like an electronic hobbyist’s den; there were circuit boards and soldering irons and oscilloscopes and meters of all kinds, scattered over the benches and the floor. On the bench where Henry had been working there was a gigantic parts rack, row on row of little plastic drawers containing banana plugs, wires, leads, clips, resistors, capacitors, transistors. The glowing screen of a laptop sat at the centre of the bench. And beside the bench there was a bizarre cairn of gear, a stepped pyramid of what looked like a car tyre inner tube topped by plastic plates and Styrofoam sheets and lengths of hose, all topped by a clutter of electronic gear.

There was a complex smell here, she thought: over-strong coffee, the ozone-rich stink of electronic equipment and burned solder. And Henry, of course, the warm scent she had so quickly gotten used to.

She said, “Have you seen Mike?”

“What?”

“Mike.”

“No. I—”

“Do you think he’s in the lab?”

“He hasn’t been around. What’s wrong?”

“He didn’t come home. Ted is worried.” She told him about the train crash. “I’m worried too.”

He stood up. “We’ll find him. I think I know where he is.”

She glanced around. “What the hell are you doing in here, Henry?”

“I’m building an STM. A scanning tunnelling microscope.” He looked at her. “It’s a device that uses quantum effects to… Well. The point is you can study individual atoms. You can move them, even.”

“Why? What for?”

“So I can study the Moon rock. Why else?”

“There must be STMs in the lab.”

“Dream on, baby. But I need one, so I have to fall back on good old Yankee can-do… This pile of tyres and Styrofoam is the shock absorber.” He grinned. “Low tech but effective. I scrounged a piezo to fix the needle to. I use a loudspeaker coil to move the needle in towards the sample.” He looked at her, to see if she was understanding. “A coil from a telephone headset. I can move my needle to an accuracy of less than an angstrom. That’s less than an atomic diameter. I can feel my way across the atoms on the surface of a sample, like working along a river bottom. I—”

“Henry,” she said, “why are you in the car park?”

“Because the liquefaction is coming.”

“The what?”

“The quicksand. Jane, it’s coming this way. Running through the old igneous structures in the bedrock. The only uncertainty is when it gets here. The lab block over there is a warren. I don’t want to get caught in that.”

“But the university people—”

“ — won’t listen. So I’m making my protest, out here. This way, I might persuade more people to take this seriously.” He stood up and held her shoulders. “Never mind. Let’s go find Mike.”

They considered taking her car, but the roads were impossible. The career types had gone to work, but now the survivalists in their laden 4WDs were mixed up now with the school run.