Something had done this. Or someone.

But who? How? Why? And what, if anything, was going to protect the Earth from a similar cosmic visitation?

If, she thought bleakly, it isn’t already here.

…And in the dark and warmth of an Edinburgh night, Henry tried to explain to Jane what they were finding, in the lab.

“There are two aspects to this. Two structures, if you like. 86047—”

“The Moon rock.”

“ — is coated in a layer of quicksand dust.”

“The same as the Arthur’s Seat stuff?”

“Presumably.”

“Are they connected, then?”

“I don’t know. It would be kind of a coincidence for this stuff to show up in two places independently. We’re not running a clean facility in there. Maybe there’s been some kind of — breach of quarantine.” Quarantine. The word disturbed her, and she tried to figure out why. He said, “Even the surface dust is like nothing we’ve seen before.”

His matter-of-fact tone chilled her. “What do you mean?”

“Each grain has a structure. On the outside there’s a shell of silicate — a rock — although even that’s a mineral we haven’t seen before. Super-quartz, we’ve been calling it.”

“And inside the shell—”

“We don’t know. Whatever is there is beyond the level of resolution of our techniques. Certainly subatomic. Its structure changes with time. Its primary resource is olivine. Mantle rock. Whatever is inside the super-quartz shell is presumably the active agent, whatever starts the transformation of the rock the dust settles on.”

“You make it sound like a machine.”

“Maybe it is. Lots of tiny machines, eating olivine, using forces we can’t identify to tweak crystal structures.”

“Machines, inside tiny eggs of rock.”

“The Moon rock as a whole has a greater structure. Silicate again, at first, on the surface, but the density and complexity seems to increase, beyond what we can resolve, towards the centre… It’s a kind of funnel, I think. In three dimensions.”

“A funnel?”

“Building regions of successively greater density and pressure, towards the heart of the rock. I think it has a purpose.”

“What?”

“The compression of matter and energy. Jane, the way to make a new element, to turn matter from one element to another, is to go to high energy density. Atomic nuclei can fuse or fission—”

“Like in a nuclear weapon.”

“Or the heart of the sun. Right.”

“And that’s what creates the miniature explosions,” she said. “When the quicksand spreads.”

“Yes. But they mightn’t be mini fusion explosions. There are higher densities. You can go all the way up to a threshold called the Planck energy—”

Planck energy. “Where all the forces of nature unify. And the strings begin to vibrate in higher modes—”

“Yes.” He studied her. “Where did you hear about string theory?”

She thought. “I heard a TV comment by an American scientist. A physicist called Monica Beus, I think.”

“I know of her.”

“She used string theory to explain the spectrum of the radiation from Venus.”

His eyes narrowed.

She tried to read his face. “Henry, what does this mean? How can there be Planck energy levels in a chunk of Moon rock?”

He shrugged. “The energy itself isn’t so great. It’s about the same as the chemical energy in a tank of automobile gas. The difficulty is that to reach Planckian energy densities you have to focus all that energy on one proton or electron. That’s what we try to do in our supercolliders, but we don’t come anywhere near, not to within factors of hundreds of trillions. The Moon rock structure is a much smarter solution. I think the Moon rock is being turned, particle by particle, into a mini-collider. An energy lens. It’s elegant.”

“How? Who by?”

“I don’t think there’s a who. Unless you call a virus a who.”

“A virus? Not a machine, then? You think this thing is alive? Like a plague?”

“Jane, I’m just a rock jockey. I don’t know what alive means. I’m just speculating about what I’m observing.”

“Henry, what does this mean? Is there a link between what’s happening here, and whatever happened to Venus?” She tried to make out his face, on the pillow beside her, in the dark. “Is the Earth under threat, like Venus?”

He was silent for a while.

Then he said, “You know, what we’re doing, in the lab, isn’t really science any more. We’re scarcely documenting.” He looked at her and grinned, sheepishly. “It’s kind of an emergency situation. I’m worried about the quicksand growth, which doesn’t seem to be self-limiting. We’re focusing on looking for ways to disrupt its growth. It’s fairly easy, if you catch it early. Just flood it; the reaction with water under pressure stops the formation of the crystal structure. And hide it from the light. Solar ultra-violet seems to trigger the process: kick-starts it, before the energy density gets high enough to self-sustain. We think some kind of supra-molecules are forming there, trapping photons to rebuild themselves: change molecular shape, separate charges… But they are fragile. Hell, if you catch it early enough, you can just kick it apart. But—”

“What?”

“Once it gets into the mantle, out of our reach, there will be no way of stopping it.”

And it’s growing, she thought, every day spreading a little further down the flanks of Arthur’s Seat, and into its rocky heart. And then—

Kaboom, she thought. Like Venus. That’s what Henry is thinking now.

Breach of quarantine; infected rock.

And she remembered a walk up Arthur’s Seat, a vial of dust, scattered on basalt.

My God, she thought.

Mike.

Later, when Henry was asleep, she got up and looked into Jack’s room. The boy was sleeping, his hair spilled on his pillow. She felt torn. She wanted to hold him, as if he was a baby again. But she knew she mustn’t wake him.

Already, she found her tentative acceptance of what Henry had said was slipping away.

Denial, she thought. I’m in denial. Well, maybe. She just didn’t want to believe in this stuff. Not with Jack in the world.

She went back to bed.

14

She was woken by thunder. Henry was already gone.

She lay in her bed, still only half-awake, the flat morning sunlight already warming the outside of her drawn curtains.

Thunder.

She thought it over. Like giant footfalls in the distance. Like a door slamming deep underground.

Thunder, on a morning that was obviously clear and calm?

Was it more than that? Had something actually jolted her awake?

She reached for her watch. Not long after 6.00 a.m.

Jack stood at the door, in his Hibs soccer-strip pyjamas. “Mum?”

“Go back to bed. It was only thunder.”

“Granddad’s up. He says it was an explosion.”

“Where’s Uncle Mike?”

“I don’t know. Should we get dressed?”

Now her father came to the door. He was already wearing his battered old donkey jacket, and he was pulling his trousers over his pyjama bottoms.

“Dad, what was that noise?”

“I’m not sure. It came from Abbeyhill.” The area just north of Arthur’s Seat, a half-mile away. “I’m going over there.” He glanced at Jack. “I think this wee fellow should have a day off school today.”

“What are you talking about?”

“We’ll pack our bags.” He ruffled Jack’s mop of sleep-stiffened hair. “We’ll go for a holiday on the coast for a couple of days, will we?”

“Dad, I can’t just take him out of school. Where’s Mike?”

“Not here.” Ted glanced at her empty bed. “Neither is yer man, I take it,” he said.

“No.”

“I think you’d better find Mike,” Ted told her. “We should be together.”

“But the shop—”

Another thunderclap. Or explosion. Smaller, crisper this time.