Stephen Baxter - Time

candidate.

And the Earth, she read, was overdue for a giant volcanic event, one of a scale unseen in all of recorded history. The result would be a “volcano winter” comparable to nuclear-war aftermath.

Or the radiation from a nearby supernova could wipe the Earth clean of life; she learned that the Earth, in fact, was swimming through a bubble in space, a bubble blown clear in the interstellar medium by just such a stellar explosion.

And here was something new to her: perhaps a new ice age would be triggered by the Earth’s passage through an interstellar cloud.

The report concluded with more outlandish speculations. What about annihilation by extraterrestrials? What if some alien species was busily transforming the Solar System right now, not even aware that we existed? .

Or how about “vacuum decay”? It seemed that space itself was unstable, like a statue standing on a narrow base. It could withstand small disturbances—”small,” in this case, including such things as galactic-core explosions — but a powerful enough nudge, properly applied, could cause the whole thing to tip over into … well, a new form. The take-home message seemed to be that such a calamity would be not just the end of the world, but the end of the universe.

Et cetera. The list of apocalypses continued, spectacular and otherwise, at great length, even to a number of appendices.

The report authors had tried to put numbers to all these risks. The overall chance of species survival beyond the next few centuries it put as 61 percent — the precision amused Maura — a result they described as “optimistic.”

That wasn’t to say the world would be spared all the disasters; that wasn’t to say the human race would not endure death and suffering on giant scales. It wasn’t even a promise that human civilization in its present form would persist much longer. It was just that it was unlikely that the world would encounter a disaster severe enough to cause outright human extinction. Relatively unlikely, anyhow.

Whether or not the world was ending, the prediction itself was having a real effect. The economy had been hit: crime, suicides, a loss of business confidence. There had been a flight into gold, as if that would help. This was, the think tankers believed, ironically a by-product of a recent growth in responsibility. After generations of gloomy warnings about Earth’s predicament, people had by and large begun to take responsibility for a future that extended beyond the next generation or two. Perhaps in the

1950s, the world two centuries hence would have seemed im-

possibly remote. Now it seemed around the corner, awfully

close, within the bounds of current plans and thinking.

It was ironic that people had begun to imagine the deeper future just as it was snatched from them.

Above all we must beware Schopenhauerian pessimism, she read. Schopenhauer, obsessed with the existence of evil, wrote that it would have been better if our planet had remained lifeless, like the Moon. From there it is only a short step to thinking that we ought to make it lifeless. It may be that this motivates some of the destructiveness seen recently in our urban communities, although the disruption caused by the so-called “Blue children “phenomenon at a fundamental level — that is, nuclear family level — is no doubt contributing.

It was a complex of responses, an unstable species sent into a spin by the bad news from the future. Perhaps what would bring down humankind in the end was not nature or science, but a creeping philosophical disaster.

In the midst of all this, Malenfant was summoned to appear before the House Committee on Space, Science, and Technology in Washington, D.C., an appearance that might be — as Maura realized immediately — his last chance to save his sorry ass.

Emma Stoney:

On the morning Malenfant was due to give his testimony,

Emma — nervous, unsleeping — was up early.

She took a walk around Washington, D.C. It was a hot, flat morning. The traffic noise was a steady rumble carried through the sultry air.

She followed the Mall, the grassy strip of parkland that ran a mile from the Capitol to the Lincoln Memorial. The grass was yellow, the ground baked hard and flat, though it was only April. The heat rose in waves, as if she were walking across a hot plate. From here she could see several of the nation’s great buildings: seats of government, museums. A lot of neoclassical marble, grandly spaced: This was an imperial capital if ever there was one, a statement of power, if not of good taste.

She considered going to see the asteroid-exploration VR gallery Malenfant had donated to the Air and Space Museum. Typical Malenfant: influencing public opinion with what was ostensibly a gesture of generosity. Maybe another day, she thought.

She reached the. Washington Monument: simple and clean, seamlessly restored since its ‘08 near-demolition by Christian libertarians. But the flags that ringed it were all at half-mast in recognition of the American lives lost in the latest anti-American terrorist outrage in … she’d forgotten already. France, was it?

And then she turned, and there was the White House, right in front of her: still — arguably — the most important decision-making center on the planet. There was what looked like a permanent shantytown on the other side of the road, opposite the White House, panhandlers and protesters and religious crazies doing their stuff in full view of the chief executive’s bedroom window. Police drones buzzed languidly overhead.

D.C. was dense, real, crusted with history and power. Compared to this, Malenfant’s endeavors in the desert and off in space seemed foolish, baroque dreams.

Nevertheless, here Malenfant was, ready to fight his corner.

Maura eyed Emma. “So, about Malenfant. What is it with you two?”

“Umm?”

“I can’t understand how come you’re still together.”

“We’re divorced.”

“Exactly.”

Emma sighed. “It’s a long story.”

Maura grunted. “Believe me, at my age, everybody has a long story.”

To loosen them both up, Maura Della had taken Emma as a special guest to the House gym, in the basement of the Rayburn House Office Building. It was smaller than Emma had expected, with a pool, steam and massage rooms, a squash court, and exercise equipment. Maura and Emma had opted for a swim, steam, and massage, and now Emma felt herself relax as her mechanical masseur pounded her back with plastic fingers.

They had married young — he in his thirties, she in her twenties.

Emma had had her own career. But she had been excited at the prospect of coming with him, of following his charming, childlike, outlandish dreams of a human expansion into space. She had known her public role would be as an air force wife, perhaps as a NASA wife, and those institutions were old and hidebound enough that she knew she would be forced to let her career shadow his. Raising air force brats, in fact. But the truth was they were partners, and would be for life.

But Malenfant had washed out of NASA at the first hurdle.

She had been stunned.

He had come back silent, sullen. He had never told her what

went wrong; she had learned not to press him on it.

And after that, nothing had been the same.

He was floored by his setback for a whole year before he resigned from the air force and started finding other directions to channel his energy. That had been the start of Bootstrap Incorporated, of Malenfant’s journey to riches and power. Emma had worked with him, even in those early days. But he had started to push her away.

“I still don’t understand why,” she told Maura. “We’d planned children, family years, a home somewhere. Somehow, all that had disappeared over the horizon. And then—”