Stephen Baxter - Moonseed

He turned to the desk, and pulled the Britain map towards him. “Look. Here’s Edinburgh, Right now, we think the outbreak is around two months old, and it’s maybe four miles across. In another couple of months it will be out as far as here.” He stabbed at a point twenty miles to the east of Edinburgh. “What’s this? Some kind of nuclear plant?”

“Torness,” said Bhide quietly.

“Okay. A few weeks after that, it will reach here.” An urban sprawl at the western end of the Midland Valley, Glasgow. “And you won’t get the slow burn you had in Edinburgh. It will sweep over the city in a day.” He studied them. “Somewhere about then, it’s going to be moving faster than most people can walk. After that it will dig through the crust and—”

“Dear God,” said Holland. “What about the rest of Britain? North England — even London—”

Henry shrugged. “The projections are chancy. And we have to expect more incidents as it eats into old magmatic structures — dead volcanoes, weaknesses in the crust — and, given time, the Moonseed will attack the crust itself. The ocean floor is about five miles thick; the Moonseed will take a few weeks to get through that and down to the asthenosphere. The continental crust is more like fifty miles thick—”

“What happens then?”

Henry looked for the right expressions. “The scale of the irruptions is going to increase.”

“Beyond anything we’ve yet seen?”

“Beyond anything in recorded history.”

Fames withdrew to his window, and the sunlight streaming in there silhouetted him, masking even his posture.

Holland said briskly, “So how can we stop this thing?”

“We don’t know. We’re trying to find a way. It can be inhibited. The Moonseed has to form, umm, certain crystalline structures before it can spread effectively. If you disrupt those structures, we think it can be slowed down.”

Holland looked confused. “What do you mean, disrupt?”

“Mechanically. Break it up. Bomb it.”

“Nuclear weapons? We couldn’t sanction—”

“No,” said Henry firmly. “The radiation from a nuke would probably feed it more than inhibit it. Carpet-bomb the infection sites with conventional weapons. Water helps.”

“Water?”

“Under high pressure. Flood it wherever you can. The earlier you can catch a new infection site the better your chance of disrupting its growth, we think.”

“You think?” snapped Holland. “Damn it, man, don’t you know?”

“No, sir, I don’t. At Edinburgh we did some lab tests but we didn’t have time to test any of this in the field.”

“But at least we can slow it down.”

“I think so. You can buy some time.”

Holland said, “What about further afield? Beyond the sea. Ireland, the continent—”

“We think it will be inhibited by the ocean. The Moonseed likes dry rocks and sunlight. But it will migrate eventually, even if it has to go through the mantle.”

“Evacuation,” Bhide said. “That’s what we’re looking at, if Dr Meacher is right. First the Scottish Midland Valley towns. We can send people to the highlands and islands in the far north, to northern England, and out of Britain altogether. To Northern Ireland. Eire. France.”

“We’ll have to think about the royals,” Fames said abruptly. “Get them to Canada maybe. Christ. The bloody royals. The King will hate it; he despises the Canadians…”

Holland stepped forward, angry. “Oh, this is all rot. Do you have any idea what you’re talking about?” he snapped at Bhide, and Henry saw old rivalries tense between them. “These are all short-term palliatives. If this gentleman is right, inside a few months, we would have to evacuate the country. It’s impossible. The capacity of the airports, the sea ports, the Channel Tunnel… Dr Meacher, we’re talking about moving sixty million people.”

“Of course it’s impossible,” Bhide said gently. “But we have to try. What else can we do?”

“But where would we go?” the Prime Minister asked softly. “It would be a new diaspora. The British, without Britain.”

Holland took a glass of wine and gulped it down. “Christ, here we go,” he muttered to Henry. “He went catatonic like this when the Euro collapsed.”

Bhide said nothing.

Fames said, staring out the window, “I have to go on TV tonight. A message to the nation. If you were in my shoes, what would you say, Dr Meacher?”

Henry took a breath. “Sir, you have to look at the probability that the machinery of government in this country isn’t going to last for much longer.”

Bhide nodded. “We still have regional government contingency plans from the Cold War days—”

“You have to go beyond that,” Henry said. “You have to plan for a time when you will not be able to govern at all. People must understand that ultimately their lives, the lives of their families, will be their own responsibility.”

“My last act,” Fames said, “will be abdication.”

“No, sir. Education.”

“And,” Bhide said, “we have to keep trying. We must buy time, as Dr Meacher says. And if the scientists can come up with some solution—” She looked to Henry.

“As soon as I’m done here I’m going to America to keep working on just that, ma’am. But—”

“Yes?”

“Right now, we’re nowhere near a solution.”

Fames was silent, gazing through the window.

Holland took another glass of wine; he dribbled spots of it down his shirt. “Catatonic,” he mumbled. “Bloody catatonic.”

When they let Henry go, the butler character led him out through a back way, through the basement which led past the ruins of an old Tudor tennis court; he didn’t want to face the press again.

At the end of their first day in the Rest Centre, Ted didn’t make it to bed until one in the morning.

He had a little trouble finding Jack. But the lad had not only put himself to bed, he’d found a bed in the first place: in a remote corner of the theatre’s main amphitheatre, a couple of fold-up cots that looked as if they’d been supplied by the RAF, along with National Health Service blankets and International Red Cross sheets. The cot was a little sharp-edged but comfortable enough, even for an old codger like himself.

Ted had even had some food, a bowl of thick soup served by a stern-looking woman from the Women’s Institute.

If it wasn’t for the presence of dozens of other people in the room — and their pets, including one snoring Alsatian — he’d have been happy.

Sleep came easily, and was disturbed only a couple of times by the dogs barking.

And when he woke, in the light that marked another day, Jane’s face was before him.

He sat up — his chest sent pain shooting through his frame — and he reached out and cupped her face. “You found us.”

She was sitting on the edge of Jack’s bed. “It wasn’t so hard. Although I looked for you in the medical area. You old bugger.”

He shrugged. “Too much to do. Michael—”

She caught his eye, and shook her head, subtly.

The day felt a little colder.

“What about Henry?”

Her face turned hard. “He’s not here. He has his own agenda.”

Ted didn’t press the point.

He glanced down at Jack. The boy was awake, and looking up at them with big, wet eyes.

Jane frowned, and bent over him. “Jackie? What is it?”

At first he shook his head, but she pressed him.

“I wet the bed! I wet the bloody bed…”

The Alsatian started barking, and pulling at its short lead.

The days after that were both better and worse than the first.

There were more volunteers now, in place to do more useful things. Registration was slick and smooth, with older schoolkids able to take details down straight onto their computers, which were linked in some way Ted utterly failed to understand, and the kids were able to retrieve immediately data on friends and relatives.