Stephen Baxter - Moonseed

But then, looking at the televised chaos of the evacuation, he wondered what percentage of the refugees had finished up on any kind of official record anyhow.

The Brits just weren’t ready for this.

Why should they be? Britain floated like a rocky raft in the stable centre of a tectonic plate. It should have happened to us, he thought. Americans. We’d have been ready.

Up to now, anyhow. In the long term, if the Moonseed could not be limited, no experience with disaster management was going to stave off the bad rain that was coming down on them all. Maybe his instinct to get to the centre of things, to figure out a way to propagate his bad news, was mistaken. Maybe it was all futile anyhow.

He should have stayed with Jane.

He called Blue Ishiguro. He got Blue’s mobile; Blue had evacuated himself, along with Marge Case and the rest of the department.

We are intending to continue our studies, Blue said. We will continue to go back in to the site as long as it remains stable.

“What about McDiarmid? Where the hell is he?”

Your esteemed leader. Nowhere to be seen. The smart money is that he long since decanted himself to London or maybe further afield.

“Asshole,” Henry said.

You never know how far a frog will jump until you punch him.

That got a laugh out of Henry.

Blue remained serious. Henry, we have nothing but bleak hypotheses here. Now that the Moonseed has got into the mantle, as it surely must have —

“Yeah.” Even now it must be breeding down there, in the slushy layers beneath the continents. Building its fat little superstring bombs.

Although we may contain the surface effects—

“Hell, we can’t even do that.”

It is difficult to see what can stop it.

“I know,” Henry said.

We can’t evacuate forever, Blue said. Eventually we will run out of planet.

The light in his window was fading. The end of the day. Eventually we will run out of planet.

Of course it wouldn’t come to that. They’d find some way to combat this thing, or else it would self-limit. But still, maybe somebody should be thinking about extreme contingencies.

Now, what the hell was stirring at the back of his mind?

“Blue, I’ll call you back.”

Henry—

He put the phone down.

He lay on the bed, as the light deepened, and tried to let the thought coalesce, in the recesses of his head.

An official car came to pick him up the next morning. A black Daimler, for Christ’s sake. He sank into soft leather in the back. His escort, one of the squaddies, followed him, looking even more uncomfortable.

A police escort, two outriders, took them at a brisk pace through the London traffic.

They turned off Whitehall into Downing Street, through heavy steel barriers. Henry got out of the car, in front of what was maybe the world’s most famous front door: in fact just a polished black door set in a mundane-looking terrace.

There were press ranked up on the other side of the road, behind a cordon. There was an explosion of flash bulbs, a bank of TV lights that glared despite the brightness of the day.

“Henry!” “Henry Meacher!” “What are you going to tell the Government, Dr Meacher?” “Is Britain doomed?” “This way, Henry!”

A policeman at the door saluted him. “Christ,” said Henry, unnerved. “How did they get my name? You’d think I was the Prez come to call.”

The copper, a grizzled forty-year-old who looked as if he had seen it all, just nodded, face stern and blank.

The door opened, as if automatically, and some kind of butler let him into a pretty impressive hallway. The butler was a big, balding, well-muscled guy. A plain clothes cop, no doubt.

A young suited man shook Henry’s hand. “Dr Meacher? My name’s Pearson. I’m the Prime Minister’s PPS — uh, political secretary.”

“The Prime Minister?”

“Didn’t you know you were seeing him? He’s waiting for you upstairs in his study. I’ll tell him you’re here.”

The aide ran off up the narrow staircase. Henry was left standing with the Bruce Willis butler.

It was just a smart old town house, on the surface. But Henry knew there was more to it than met the eye. For instance there were corridors that led to the other houses in the row, such as Number Eleven, the residence of the Chancellor of the Exchequer, the finance minister. So, behind the facade, this was all one big house, like the Beatles” shared home in Help!; he half-expected to see John Lennon playing a Wurlitzer come ascending from the floor.

It was hard to believe you could run a modern country from such a place, but evidently the Brits managed.

“So this is Number Ten,” he said to Bruce Willis.

“How true, sir.”

“It seems kind of — poky. What’s that big place down the corridor? The pool room?”

“We call it the Cabinet Room, sir.”

The political secretary returned, and escorted him up the stairs. The walls were lined with portraits of what looked like previous Prime Ministers. Henry recognized some: Churchill, Thatcher, Major, Blair, Portillo.

The Prime Minister was standing in front of the window.

Over the PM’s grey-suited shoulder was a hell of a view, of what looked like Horse Guards Parade. A couple of other people — a man and a woman, both sweating in heavy suits — were sitting in hard-backed chairs before the desk. The desk itself was a mess; its green leather top was covered by loose papers and scribbled notes and a big map of Britain. There were plates of abandoned sandwiches on the window sill, and a half-drunk bottle of red wine and three glasses leaving stains on the desk. It looked as if meetings had been going on here through the night.

The Prime Minister turned and came forward. He looked tired, his face slack, his thick hair greyer than Henry remembered from TV. “I’m Bob Fames,” he said. “Dr Meacher, thank you for coming.”

“It’s, umm, an honour.”

Fames introduced the others. The man, so fat his belly strained the buttons of his off-white shirt, was called Dave Holland, and he was the environment minister. The woman, a thin, intense Asian, was called Indira Bhide. Her title was Home Secretary, which meant, as Henry understood it, she was the most senior interior minister.

Fames said, “We have projections from our own science advisers. But Professor McDiarmid tells us you’re the best qualified to brief us on this phenomenon.”

Henry wasn’t expecting that. Was McDiarmid uncharacteristically avoiding the credit for Henry’s work on the Moonseed — or, more likely, trying to avoid the heavy shit?

“Tell us what we’re dealing with here, Dr Meacher,” Fames said. Henry spread his hands and summarized what he’d found out about the Moonseed. “It eats rock. It prefers igneous rocks — basalt, for instance. Volcanic rocks. It is spreading across surface rock, subsurface rock, and down into the mantle. Also, after the Arthur’s Seat incident, it is also spreading through the mantle itself, and through the stratosphere in the form of dust.”

“I’m told it slowed down, after the Edinburgh eruption.”

“Yes. I expected that.”

“You did?”

“It doesn’t just grow. It builds things. Structures in the rock. Now it’s into the deeper rock, we think it is busy building. But its spread will resume.”

Holland pulled his lip. “So you say.”

“Yes.”

“Not everyone agrees with you.”

He’d been expecting that. “They haven’t had time to study it the way I have.”

They were staring at him, their faces grave — Christ, they’d already lost a city, they’d already presided over Britain’s biggest peacetime disaster — but, even so, not grave enough.