Stephen Baxter - Moonseed

Monica was at one end of a long conference table with Henry’s lectern at the far end, together with an overhead projector and a laptop computer, and three members of the President’s science team, boosted today by a suit from the Pentagon: Admiral Joan Bromwich, Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The Building was next door to the White House itself. In fact, when Monica looked past the small window-unit air conditioner and out the window she was looking along Pennsylvania Avenue.

So it was a big day for Henry, maybe the biggest in his career, the clearest sign there could be that Washington was taking him and his dire warnings seriously. And yet here he was standing at the lectern in dirty jeans and a shirt that looked as if it had been slept in and his thick black hair like a mop: the picture of disrespect, or independence of thought, or unconventionality, or whatever the hell other Hollywood-scientist clichés he thought he was projecting. How were the suits sitting around the table supposed to respond to him?

And how was she supposed to get through today, before she got back to her apartment, found the blessed oblivion of a few hours sleep?

Just don’t embarrass me, she thought. She, and many others, hadn’t forgotten how Henry had shot his mouth off on TV and the Internet and in the newspapers to campaign, over the head of NASA management, for his doomed Shoemaker missions. It didn’t help his credibility, today. She’d had to put her own reputation on the line to bring this meeting together. She would be very damaged if Henry fouled up today. Just don’t embarrass me.

She was surprised, in the circumstances, how much that still mattered.

And she was glad Alfred was here. She’d even, on his advice, consented to wear a hat, so the attendees could concentrate on the matter at hand rather than her latest chemotherapy Bad Hair Day.

She gathered her strength. “Let’s start.”

A rumble of assent from around the room.

“Dr Meacher, have you prepared a formal briefing?”

Henry tapped at his laptop, and images filled the projector screen. Maps of Earth, molecular structure charts and equations, energy expressions. He began without preamble. “We established conclusively that the Edinburgh outbreak flowed from the Moon rock, Apollo sample 86047.”

“Fucking careless handling,” Bromwich growled.

Henry wasn’t fazed. “We were doing geology. Not epidemiology.”

Monica said, “I don’t think apportioning blame is helpful right now, Admiral.”

Bromwich glowered.

“Anyhow,” Henry said, “that was the primary source. We’ve been able to trace secondary outbreaks, in the US and elsewhere, to the ash cloud that spread out from Edinburgh, through the stratosphere, around the planet.”

An animated image of the Earth. Lurid red pimples appearing everywhere. First they came in a belt at about the latitude of Britain, spreading westwards, across the US, Asia; and then more pimples and scars in most of the world’s geologically unstable regions: the Ring of Fire, the subduction volcanoes around the Pacific basin; the rift volcanoes in the middle of the Atlantic and other mid-ocean ridges; the hot-spot volcanoes, like Hawaii. In other places, more usually stable, the Moonseed seemed to be making its own volcanism by just digging its way towards the asthenosphere through old flaws in the crust, such as at Edinburgh itself.

Henry said, “The data here comes from worldwide sources, including our own USGS Earthquake Information Centre in Colorado and the Large Aperture Seismic Array in Montana—”

The Admiral said, “Dr Meacher, tell me what’s going to happen to us from here on in.”

He started to pull up charts. They showed the past records of cataclysmic geological events: volume of eruption, in cubic metres, plotted against repose time, in thousands of years… “Even for what’s likely to hit us in the short term, we have no precedent in historical times. The larger the magmatic event, the less frequently it occurs. But we have evidence that many eruptions in prehistoric times were larger — ten or a hundred times — than the huge eruptions we know about, like Thera and Tambora.”

Thera destroyed a civilization. Tambora was the greatest ash eruption of the current geological period; it caused the Year Without a Summer, in 1816. Ten or a hundred times as large.

“Are you saying,” Admiral Bromwich said, “that some of this stuff is — normal?”

“Yes. We’ve lived, as a species, through a quiescent period in Earth’s geological history. The Moonseed is a lubricant. Enhancing the problem. But what’s hit us so far is the violence of Earth itself, Admiral. A lot of this stuff could have happened at any time.

“Beyond this near-term stuff we’re predicting a timetable of escalation.”

“A timetable?”

“Depending on the thickness of the crust. In a month the Moonseed will penetrate oceanic crust — the sea bottom — where the plates are thin. Six weeks, a couple of months beyond that, we expect major events in plate boundary regions. Subduction zones, mountain-building areas, like the Pacific rim. And a month or so beyond that we’ll see the first breaches of the continental crust itself.”

There was a brief, shocked silence.

Henry delivered this with a chilling calm, Monica observed. He looked overworked, but calm. Hollow, He’s already accepted the logic of his argument. And its ultimate conclusion. That all this is just going to get worse and worse, until —

I hope to God, she thought, he has a plan.

Bromwich shook her head. “What do we tell the President?”

“Aside from the direct damage, expect climate changes,” Henry said. “All that ash in the stratosphere, blocking out the sun. The injection of so much heat, greenhouse gases, destruction of ozone — we have to model this. Figure out what it means for crops, this year and next.”

“Shit,” said the Admiral, and she scrawled notes on a pad in front of her. “Refugees. Crop failure. Starvation.”

“We’ll be lucky to avoid war,” Alfred said.

“The British are already dealing with this,” Monica put in.

“We’re not the damn British,” Admiral Bromwich growled.

Henry said, “The point is, we’re only seeing the start. This isn’t going to go away. We’re going to have to expect a movement of populations, from the more geologically unstable areas of the world, and from the areas most impacted by the Moonseed itself, like Scotland.”

“A movement? Where to? Where is the safest place to be?”

“Shelters,” Henry said. “Like greenhouses. Maybe subsurface. Maybe off planet.”

“Off planet?” That surprised Monica. “How? To make a colony viable, you’d have to sustain a breeding population — say, several hundred — independently of Earth.” Even the Space Station, which in its present form could hold all of three people at a time, depended on almost continual resupply from Earth.

The Admiral said, “Where the hell? Mars?”

Henry shook his head. “Not Mars. Too far. Too difficult.”

Monica said, “Mars or not, we don’t have the technology to sustain a colony off planet. If we had another century—”

“But we may not have another century,” Henry said evenly.

“Australia,” Alfred Synge said.

“What?”

“Australia. The oldest place in the world. All the mountains worn down to a nub. That’s where I’d go.”

That didn’t help, Monica thought, watching Henry. He has some recommendation. Some case he’s building, carefully. He isn’t ready yet.

I can’t read this guy. I wonder what the hell he wants.

Henry pulled up another chart. “That’s the short term. Further out, we have to expect something like an extinction event.”