Stephen Baxter - Moonseed

“What?”

“Do you think there’s a glow up there? To the north?”

Holland looked out over Whitehall, the Foreign Office and Treasury and Home Office: the great houses of the state, pompous as wedding cakes, and, as events had proved, just about as powerless.

Fames stared past it all, to the far north, looking for the glow.

The light of Scotland burning, Holland thought bleakly.

“No, I bloody well can’t see any such thing, Bob,” he said bluntly, “and even if I could it wouldn’t make a damn bit of difference.”

“No,” Fames said. “I suppose not.”

Holland tried his best to project the bluff boyishness that — even if fake — had got him so far in life.

“Now then, Bob. The preparations are going well. We’re gearing up to receive a flood of evacuees in the south, from the most threatened areas. All the emergency powers are in place now, and the police and the military are being briefed on various contingencies. We’ve got the Green Goddesses out.” A fleet of emergency fire engines, dating from the war. “Those bloody things. We only have a thousand or so left operational. And they are so old now you can’t get spares, and the rubber parts have perished… Well. There’ve been a few oddities. The police have had to assign men to patrol church services, would you believe. Riots, by people locked out. They say it’s like managing football matches used to be.”

Fames didn’t react.

“Further out — well, the scientists are floundering, I think,” Holland said. “They don’t agree on what this Moonseed bugger is, or how fast it will spread, or whether it can be stopped. In the best case, perhaps we can contain it in Scotland. Perhaps it’s already contained, in fact. Somehow exhausted.”

“Do you believe that?”

“I don’t know. I suppose the next few days or weeks will tell. But if it can’t be contained, if it’s going to spread further—”

“Then what if it does? What do we do then?”

“Then we continue to make plans.”

“Plans?”

“We’ve already got the airports geared up.” Heathrow and Gatwick and Stansted and Manchester and Birmingham and Luton, all of Britain’s great terminals. “The air traffic boys confirm we can handle up to a million passengers a day. A 747 in the air every three minutes, packed to the gills.

“As to destinations, we can load as many as we like into Northern Ireland in the short term, of course. It’s going to be important to keep the ferry ports in Liverpool and Wales functioning as long as possible. The Scousers are organizing volunteer squads to break up any Moonseed infection, to keep the ports and roads open. Heroic. The bloody French are being no help at all, as you’d expect; they say we can take people out through the Chunnel, but they’ll be sent straight on somewhere else.

“All of the ports are ready, of course. We’re going to ask you to front an appeal to small-boat owners to come to the aid of the party.”

Fames, in profile, smiled. “Dunkirk in reverse.”

“That’s it. That’s exactly the note to strike. Spirit of the Blitz. I’m glad your instincts are still with us, Bob.”

But the flattery did nothing to disturb the ominous calm within which Fames seemed locked.

Holland went on, “But we’ll never be able to get everybody out. The chronically ill, the very old, perhaps. The awkward squad who just won’t move anyhow. The emergency planning boys estimate perhaps fifteen per cent could never be evacuated no matter how much time we have.”

“Fifteen per cent, of sixty million.”

Holland blustered on, “We’ve already moved the bulk of the gold reserves to Belfast. The Arts Council have pulled together a committee on works of art to be exported. There are architects who want to set up an archive somewhere of plans and photographs of the finer buildings.” He coughed, and glanced around, for eavesdroppers. “On your instruction we’re working on the Ireland option.”

“Ireland?”

“The military option. Invasion. It’s feasible, though diplomatically it would be—”

“Disastrous. We would be pariahs.”

Perhaps, Holland thought. But needs must. He didn’t want to say any more, even here.

“We’re setting up alternate seats of government, in Belfast and the Scillies. We have to think about moving ourselves, sooner rather than later… Bob, are you taking in all this?”

“Oh, yes,” Fames said. “Every word.” He stared into the north. “We’ve already lost so many lives. How many more?”

Holland hesitated.

“Just too big,” Fames said. “Just too bloody big. Sixty million. We can’t conceive of such a number. In our hearts, we’re all still in some Stone Age village, where everybody knows everybody else. Sixty million. It’s beyond us.

“And yet here they all are, Dave, all sixty million, crammed into this fragile little country of theirs, and all of them looking to me for guidance. Maybe there is no such thing as government.” He looked at his hands. “No such thing as power. Look at us. We couldn’t even manage the economy, if truth be told. And now, this plague from space, this natural disaster, has shown us up for what we are. Posturing puppets.”

“But we carry on,” Holland said. In fact he understood how Fames felt. He’d had to wrestle with this in his own demons, and he’d stiffened his resolve, and he’d come to believe every word he said now. “We do what we can. We keep on trying until the ground opens up under Whitehall.”

“Like Churchill. At the gates of Buckingham Palace, facing off the Germans with his tommy gun.”

“That’s the spirit. We save what we can. We govern. We let the country carry on in an orderly way, as long as we possibly can.”

“But what’s the point, Dave? What’s the point if this—” He waved a thin hand into the darkness. “—if this bloody black meteor is heading straight for us?”

Holland hesitated, considering a morale-boosting, upbeat answer. But Fames was clearly beyond that.

At last he said: “Dignity.”

“What?”

“Dignity. When you come down to it, what else is there, for any of us?”

Fames reflected on that for a long time.

Holland found himself shivering. The traffic noise was dying to its minimum, as the small hours approached.

Holland hated to be awake at such a time, the dead of night when the horrors arose, the fears of powerlessness and mortality which seemed to be overwhelming Fames now, which could be banished during the day with its illusions of light and movement and control…

Fames said, “I’m planning to resign, Dave.”

That startled him. “You can’t. Not now.”

“I must. This is all too—” He waved his hands again. “—too big for me. I’m done for, Dave. You take it, if you want.”

Despite himself, despite the circumstances, Holland felt a deep, atavistic thrill at the words.

Power, real power, at last. He became intensely aware of where he was, poised above the chambers he could soon command, surrounded by the machinery of state, as if he was the huge, ugly Victorian mechanism which drove Big Ben itself.

He tried to focus his mind on Fames, the suffering man before him.

“There will have to be an election,” he said.

“You must do as you see fit.”

“It wasn’t your fault,” Holland said. “How could it have been?”

“But it was on my watch.”

There was a sound like thunder, or distant guns, far to the north.

Both men clung to the balustrade, staring towards Scotland, trying to pick out a change in the light.

To Ted’s surprise, they survived the night, the two of them crouched in the ruins of St Giles’. No food or water, but that scarcely mattered now.