Stephen Baxter - Moonseed

Ted put down his case and leaned to talk to Jack. “Now then,” he said. “I know I complained at that lady.”

“But you were wrong.”

“Yes, I was wrong. Logging everybody in is one of the most important things that can happen here.”

“Without that, mum can’t find us.”

“That’s right. Are you any use with a computer?”

“What model? What language? I know C++, mark-up—”

“Never mind.” He pointed. “You see the wee girl over there.” It was the teenage runner he’d noticed before, carrying registration slips to a pc. The table where the pc was set up was piled high with unentered slips.

Jack nodded uncertainly.

“Say I sent you. Say you’ll help her with her forms. If she’ll let you type in the stuff, fine. If she just wants you to bring her the forms, well, that’s fine too.”

“All right, Granddad.” The lad looked dubious. Probably he was more doubtful about the prospect of approaching a fourteen-year-old girl, Ted reflected, than getting involved in the greatest evacuation exercise in Britain since wartime. At that, Ted envied him.

“But the first thing you can do is bring her a cup of tea. Or a Coke, or whatever. And the lady on the desk there too.”

“Where will I get the tea?”

“Do I look as if I know? You’ll find it, lad.”

“What about you?”

“I’m going to see the manager.” He bent, painfully, and looked Jack in the face. “But you listen. I’ll be right here, in this theatre. You’ll be able to find me any time you want me.”

“And you can find me too, Granddad.”

He nodded. “I’ll take you up on that. And your mother will be along soon. But for now, we’ve got work to do.”

Ted ruffled the lad’s hair and, taking care not to look back, he turned and limped off to find the manager’s office.

The door of the theatre manager’s office was open; a small, harassed-looking woman was shouting into a phone about how she didn’t have the resources to handle this, not to mention a complete lack of training, and if something wasn’t done about it soon… First bad sign, Ted thought. Should be a line of people at this door, waiting for instructions. This woman isn’t running anything but a phone bill.

“Excuse me,” he said.

She put her hand over her phone and scowled. “Who are you?”

“Ted Dundas.” He flashed his old, now blood-stained warrant card.

“Retired,” she said wearily.

“But not deactivated.”

“Mr Dundas—”

“Ted.”

“I think I have all the help I can handle right now.”

“You do?” Ted turned, as if to go. “That’s good. You’ll need it. Because I was wondering what percentage of the population of Edinburgh you were thinking of lodging in this establishment. And for how long.”

“What?”

“You’ve got people streaming in. I don’t see too many streaming out.” He studied her. “You haven’t been trained for this, have you?”

Her mouth turned to a thin line. She was near the edge, he realized. She was just the manager of a small provincial theatre, a place that was a one-line backup on some local authority contingency plan that had never been expected to come to pass. And now, this. And everybody stretched thin, nobody around to help. Except an old arse like me.

Tact, Ted. Never your strong suit.

“Mr Dundas, I’m in charge here.”

“I know you are.” He held up his hands. “But I can see you don’t have what you need. No training. No emergency box. No call-out list. It’s all just been dumped on you.”

She hesitated.

“Yes,” she said. “Yes, it has.”

He nodded. “You don’t need to keep everybody here, to begin with. Billet them. Find volunteers here, with their cars, waiting to take people away, to put them up in their homes. It just takes a little organization. Maybe I could help with that.”

“But the registration—”

“You can register them going out as easy as coming in. Maybe there will be some who won’t have to pass through the centre, physically, at all.”

“We won’t have enough volunteers. Hosts.”

“Get some more.” He pointed to her mobile phone. “Use that. Find a ham radio operator. Start tapping into the communication networks that already exist. Are there media people here?”

“Media?”

The telly. They are going to be here, and in your face. Use them. Find somebody to be a media spokesman.”

“Spokesperson.”

“Whatever… If a local radio station is still operating—”

The manager frowned, then scribbled a note.

He ought to speak to whatever copper was in charge here, probably a bronze-level commander. The sooner they could be persuaded to let the mobile and self-reliant pass on and out of here under their own steam, the better.

“What about resources?” Ted asked now.

“We have the social services and the volunteer agencies—”

“You never have enough blankets and warm clothing,” he said sharply. “Start an appeal. The local people. The ambulance service, the RAF… How about food?”

“Well, we have a canteen in the theatre. And I’ve been on to the school meals adviser for the town.”

“Good. What about cutlery? Paper plates? What about special needs? Vegetarians. People with medical requirements. Ethnic diets. Whatever.”

She said nothing.

“You know you have some unattached kids here, don’t you?” he said. “They may be orphans, I suppose. Even they don’t know yet…”

She was looking at him, her eyes wide.

He said gently, “I think you ought to get your senior staff in here, don’t you?”

Sweating in his heat-resistant space suit in the late spring sunshine, laden with cameras and seismometers and thermocouples, Blue Ishiguro climbed the east flank of Arthur’s Seat.

Here, the uneven spread of the Moonseed had not yet turned the rock to flour, and the ancient basalt plug persisted. But the grass and heather were dying back, he saw, poisoned by emissions of gas. The ground underfoot was distinctly warm, even through the thick soles of his boots. From small depressions in the ground, gas and steam seeped.

Blue bent to collect samples in glass bottles, which he tucked into pockets in his suit. He steadily described what he saw into a throat mike; his words would be captured by a miniature tape recorder inside the suit and transmitted to his colleagues, safely removed from the area.

Sweat pooled under his eyes, and he wished he could reach inside the suit. He was sandwiched, he thought, trapped between the hot May sun and this burning ground. And if I don’t get out soon, I will fry like a chunk of fish in a tempura grill.

Of course, it might already be too late. There was no reason to suppose normal volcanological wisdom would apply here.

But that wisdom was all any of them had to go on.

And besides, the fact that this was a new phenomenon increased its attraction for Blue. The chance to study something new — to collect data from a genuinely new phenomenon, to push out the boundaries of understanding…

To atone, he thought. Because I could not, in the end, do anything to save Kobe.

Was that his motivation, as Henry Meacher believed? Perhaps. It scarcely mattered; for now the job was the thing, the only objective reality.

Blue moved on, cautiously, taking his samples and readings, towards the heart of the disturbance, the primary Moonseed pool itself.

He felt a tremor, a deep shifting in the ground. The catfish is stirring, he thought, deep in the mud.

…Wish I was a Spaceman / The Fastest Guy Alive…

Singing, coming from over the crest of the Seat. There were people, still here.