5

In his London hotel room, waiting for transport to the US, Henry tried to nail down the thought that Blue’s remarks had sparked.

Okay, address the worst case. The Moonseed was already spreading globally. What if it couldn’t be stopped? What then?

Eventually we will run out of planet. But not, he thought, of planets.

What was he thinking of? Evacuating the world, when they ran out of planet? Like When Worlds Collide?

It was, of course, impossible. And even if you evacuated a handful of people, you needed somewhere to go, somewhere you could live off the land and not in a spacesuit.

Ideally, somewhere immune to the Moonseed.

…The thought coalesced, like crystals forming in supersaturated solution.

Damn it, maybe there was such a place. But it was a hell of a long way away. And he might be wrong anyhow.

The only way anyone would know would be by sending someone there…

Suddenly, he realized he had to talk to Geena.

From memory, he called the number of her new apartment in downtown Houston. He got an answering machine, saying she wouldn’t be back for days. Dumb, Geena. An open invitation to the bad guys.

He tried JSC, but the receptionist there didn’t seem to believe who he was, and wouldn’t put him through.

He tried the press office.

He got nowhere trying to prove his identity. If he wanted to hear an astronaut, they said, he should log onto the World Wide Web in a couple of hours, to watch an online chat between a group of astronauts, in training for upcoming missions, and a bunch of schoolkids from Iowa. It sounded to him as if the NASA guys had been fielding a lot of shit all day, no doubt the usual end-of-the-world demands and queries and accusations of cover-up that NASA always got when something bad came down.

He thought about that online chat. Maybe there was a way he could break into that.

But he’d left his laptop in Edinburgh. Part of the sunset now. Besides, this hotel room wasn’t exactly geared up for the information age. The telephone cord literally disappeared into the wall rather than terminating in a regular point.

Shit.

He found a telephone directory under the bed. Yellow Pages. It took a while to figure the classifications, but he found what he needed quickly.

He got dressed. He pulled on the jacket the Army guys had given him — a little tight but expensive, smart casual — and stumbled out of the room.

He was carrying his shoes, so he could get down the corridor without a sound, and give his military escort the slip. Apart from the creak of antique floorboards, he did pretty well.

In the hotel lobby, he pulled on his trainers. He pushed his way out of the hotel, into what was left of the daylight.

He called into a news store and bought a Central London map. He directed himself through side streets to Charing Cross Road, and then south, towards the river.

On foot, London seemed overwhelmingly strange. Red pillar boxes. Traffic that was snarled up everywhere you looked, but which still stopped for you at pedestrian crossings, one hundred per cent of the time. Churches and statues and blue plaques telling you who lived in this or that anonymous-looking old house, five centuries ago.

The sun was still up, visible above the clustering rooftops. It was surrounded by a fat opalescent corona, sprawling and misshapen. What volcanologists called a Bishop’s Ring.

Charing Cross Road was lined with bookstores, though they were mostly small and cramped compared to the big mall and out-of-town stores he used back in the States.

He reached Trafalgar Square: Nelson’s Column, the triumphalist stone lions growling at his feet, odd echoes of what the British thought of as their great days, the mock-classical front of the National Gallery looming over everything. The Square was crowded with tourists and hucksters — not an Anglo-Saxon face in sight — and fat, waddling pigeons for which you could buy feed from the hucksters, should you so choose.

There were shoppers and browsers and people hurrying to and from work, wrapped up in their own concerns, not even seeing Henry unless he all but collided with them. Homeless guys, curled up in the doorways in their sleeping bags, repeating their endless mantras, “Spare some change please…” More of that than he’d expected. He had to step over them sometimes, so crowded were the pavements. It seemed unreal.

Except for lurid headlines on the stands of the local paper, the Evening Standard, and the shimmering rad-ponchos everywhere, there was no sign of what was coming down in the north of the country. As if the Earth was flat and infinite, the stars just lights in the sky, the future endless and unthreatened. As if some kind of alien nano-bug wasn’t eating up the country.

It struck him that Britain was an alien country — he was a true foreigner here, common language or not. Britain was geologically placid, hadn’t been seriously invaded since 1066, hadn’t suffered a civil war since the seventeenth century, and had been at peace since 1945. It was hard for him to empathize with what that calm history must do to shape the psyche of the people here.

For sure, they weren’t going to start panicking just because of a little geological excitement in Scotland.

He cut down the Strand and found the place he was looking for, a cyber cafe in a side street off the main road. It was a small place but clean and bright and crammed with terminals, but only full to half of its capacity. Maybe all the cybernauts had their own equipment now.

He bought a coffee and credits and sat down. As he drank the coffee, he realized he couldn’t remember when he’d last eaten.

He got right back up and went to the counter, and came back with a plateful of sandwiches in plastic boxes, a bag of the potato chips the Brits called crisps, a slab of cake laced with chocolate. As he logged in, he crammed the food in his mouth, chewing mechanically.

He tried Geena’s e-mail, but she’d evidently changed it again. So that left the chat room.

Geena and her buddies were already talking to the schoolkids from Iowa or Ohio or wherever the hell it was.

› My name is Amy Im asking for my brother whose in a diferrent class but hes like whats it like in space › This is Brett. It’s hard to answer that question, Amy. You look down at the Earth, and you think, good Lord, how small it looks. You feel strangely the whole time, because there’s no gravity, and you’re confined in your ship or your space station or your space suit. You feel very close to the people with you, your team, even if they aren’t Americans. You miss your family. Amy, you’d even miss your brother, ;-). › This is Geena. You pass from light, brilliant unfiltered sunlight, into darkness, spangled with stars, and back again, every forty-five minutes. It’s magical. When you come down, that’s what you remember, I think. It’s like going to a magical place, a secret place, that you want to share, that only a few people know about…

And so on.

Henry broke in. It was easy enough; NASA only used a few passwords on such occasions.

› My name’s Henry. I have a question for Mrs Meacher.

There was a blank period in the chat room. He, her ex-husband, was the only person on the planet who had ever called Geena that, and then only to needle her.

› Geena, I’m all right. I’m sure you’d want to know that. › Who is this? This is Mrs Bates. You aren’t in my class. › This is Geena. Yes. Yes, I’m glad to know it. Call me. › I tried. You won’t believe how these Brits are keeping me dangling. I need your help. How would you put together a mission to get back to the Moon? › Who *is* this? › This is the Administrator. This session is closing. › This is Mrs Bates. See what you’ve done, you ass-wipe cracker? › What time period? A couple of years? This is Geena.