Stephen Baxter - Moonseed

The lad had done a good job of assembling the supplies his mother had asked for. They were stacked up in the hall, blankets and cans and camping gear and clothes. Good kid. Ted made a few suggestions. Anything run by battery, like torches and radios. Any batteries they had, in fact. His own old wind-up watch. Any kind of bottle or container they could find, filled up with clean water. Any medicines in the house. Clothes, for hot weather, cold, wet, snow. Towels, for Christ’s sake.

Jack showed him his own stuff, a shoebox of toys and books he was taking. Some kind of spaceship, wings shaped like a black sycamore seed, so worn from play it had hardly any paint left at all. A book, some trashy thing about a virtual reality Gulliver’s Travels theme park, the spine broken from rereading. And so on.

But the lad had only allowed himself this one box. He looked up at Ted seriously. He understands. Ted ruffled Jack’s hair.

Ted gave Jack the keys to the car, and said he should start packing up. Then Ted went to his bedroom, stripped off, and ran a deep, hot bath. There ought to be time for this, and it might be a while before he got another chance. He showered first, to scrape off the worst of the gash, and then climbed in.

Lying in the tub, he made plans.

As near as he could make out, it was as if an earthquake was hitting the area. So: when the earthquake comes, what do you do? He dug into his memory, the emergency training he’d had as a copper.

Run for the hills. But first, prepare the home. Batten down all loose objects. Fill the bath tub and the sinks with water. Switch off the electricity and gas. If he had time, put duct tape on the windows to prevent falling glass.

Find ways to mitigate the problem, not add to it.

He got out of the bath, towelled himself briskly, and pulled on fresh clothes.

He thought about Ruth Clark, a couple of doors down.

It would be murder trying to get Ruth to come away without her damn moggie. Well, he should try; there would be room in the car.

He walked out to the living room, drying his hair.

His relationship with Ruth had never exactly caught fire. And it had been inhibited further since Jane and Jack had come back home to live. Still, when he thought about the future, he’d always pictured Ruth somewhere in it. And he liked to think she thought of him the same way. And —

The floor was buckling, the carpet gathering in a fold.

Oh, Christ.

It happened in a second. It was as if the house had collapsed around him. Furniture fell, plaster showered down from the ceiling, his wife’s collection of painted plates tipped gently off the Welsh dresser to the floor.

He found himself on his knees, as if someone had tugged the floor out from under him.

He heard the house frame crack, a window explode somewhere. So much for planning. Where was the lad?…

Later. He had to get through this himself. If he could get under the big dining room table —

The floor bucked, and he was thrown flat.

Jack was screaming.

Ted rolled on his back. Jack was somehow standing in the doorway, clutching his box of toys; he was crying.

Ted tried to sit up.

But here came the TV set, a great heavy box spinning away from its spindly stand, looming, filling his world, too big for him ever to avoid.

In the clean room, there was blood on the wall and floor. Sprayed there, as if with a fine hose, already drying to brown. An incongruous splash of human weakness, here in the damaged heart of this place of science.

The glove box which had held Moon rock 86047 was the centre of it. The stainless steel frame was still intact, but the thick glass had been shattered and blown outwards. Jane saw the remnants of one of the long-sleeved gloves the workers had used to manipulate the sample in its box, blown out and shredded, hurled into a corner. There was nothing left of the tools and trays the box had contained.

There were glass fragments on the floor, and punctures in the wall tiles which spoke of the ferocity of the box’s bursting. A couple of the fluorescent ceiling light strips had been blown out, making the light here an even more dead grey than usual.

Henry was talking to the lab workers here, and to a young policewoman who was taking notes. The policewoman looked tired and harassed, Jane thought; it was surprising there weren’t more police here, firemen.

Or maybe not. It was turning out to be a strange day.

Elsewhere, she saw that this lab had been turned into some kind of geologists” war room. Big Sun workstations had been commandeered; one was displaying weather satellite information, and another was scrolling what looked like infra-red images of thermal activity in the area, more satellite images, multicoloured and full of detail. There were big geological maps of the area taped hastily to the walls, and equipment, most of it unrecognizable to her, was being set up on the benches or floor, some items still in their foam-lined metal cases.

Now Henry came to Jane. He was followed by a young woman in a scorched lab coat, who seemed excited.

Henry said, “Nobody was badly hurt. We were lucky. Some lacerations and burns.”

“Burns? What happened here?”

He grinned, his fascinated expression starting to match that of the girl researcher. “The sample blew up.”

“What sample?”

“86047. The Moon rock. It was just sitting in its box, and then—” He opened his hands in a popping motion. “Like a puffball fungus.”

“It was incredible,” the girl said. “We were monitoring the changes. Tee, pee, rho, all went off the scale—”

“Temperature, pressure, density,” Henry said drily. “Jane, meet Marge Case.”

Marge Case just kept talking. “ — and when we replayed the bang we detected gamma rays, X-rays—”

“Like Venus,” Jane said.

“Maybe,” Henry said. “More like fusion products, from the layers around the very centre.”

Jane looked back at the case; there was no sign of the Moon rock. “Where is it now? Converted to energy?”

“Oh, no.” The girl laughed, and Jane could have happily struck her. “Only a fraction of the mass was destroyed, we think. Maybe one part in ten to power eleven.”

Henry thought about that. “If it was all hydrogen, that would be a sphere maybe forty microns across. At fusion temperatures and pressures.”

Jane said, “And the rest of the Moon rock—”

“Is gone,” Henry said grimly. “Converted.”

“To Moonseed?”

“Some of it. We’ll find it if we scrape the walls, no doubt.”

“It’s just incredible,” said Marge Case. Think of it. We probably had higher-order string modes, here, in this lab.”

“For a squillionth of a second,” Henry said.

“But why?” Jane asked. “Why does it do this?”

Henry shrugged. “To propagate. The Moonseed will go on to infect normal matter, create more puffball-fungus explosions, and propagate further still.”

“Like what’s happening outside.”

“We think so,” Henry said. “Although the growth isn’t even. Olivine-rich basalt is the raw material of choice…”

Jane looked from one to the other. “I don’t understand you. You seem — excited.”

“Exhilarated,” Marge Case said.

“Really?”

“Of course.” Her eyes were moist, shining in the imperfect light. “Don’t you see? It’s not just the high-energy physics. This is the discovery of the century. This may be life from another world. An utterly different mode of biology.” She looked, to Jane, as if she hadn’t slept for days, as if she’d been living on adrenaline.

“What I mostly feel is frustrated,” Henry said. “We have no time to do the science. A study like this should take years. Teams all around the world. We’re doing little more than guesswork, here. And—”