I don’t feel like much of a hero.

“Listen,” she whispered. “Here’s something to protect you. I see the Moon, / The Moon sees me, / God bless the priest / That christened me… / I see the Moon, / The Moon sees me, / God bless the Moon, / God bless me.”

Pretty.

“Yeah. Now you try it.”

The words came drifting back to her. I see the Moon, / The Moon sees me…

9

As it turned out, Frank Turtle responded quickly, and, using some of the material from his failed return-to-the-Moon pitch, Geena and Frank worked up a convincing-looking presentation within a few days.

They had Jays and others dry-run them, and then they presented to Harry Maddicott, JSC director. He sat, sleek and replete with lunch, as Geena and Frank worked through the spiel tag-team style. But Maddicott was more supportive than Geena had expected. He advised them to take it to at least one more center before going to the NASA Administrator, however.

So the next day they flew down to Alabama, to the Marshall Space Flight Center at Huntsville. This was the centre which had originally been built up around von Braun’s core team of German rocket engineers; this was the center which believed its engineers had pulled off Apollo-Saturn despite the dead-weight of the rest of NASA, and in their approach to engineering they were as conservative as all hell.

The review was tough, confrontational, detailed, laced with that conservatism. Von Braun didn’t fly to the Moon that way, and we sure don’t need some kid from Texas coming here telling us how to fly to the Moon now. Soon Frank was sweating, trying to cover questions to which he hadn’t had time to assemble answers.

But Geena kept pushing. She had the group break into study forums to thrash out issues, and had Frank make conference calls to Houston and other centers, and soon Frank’s rough sketch was being worked into something credible. And, once the Marshall guys started to believe that, hey, this was something they could actually build, they got remarkably enthusiastic. They even started to advise Geena and Frank on how to present to the other centers.

Jays told her she shouldn’t be surprised by the speed of all this. “Hell, we did this before. We’ve been to the Moon. The Moon is a walk around the block. And we’ve been waiting thirty years to be asked to go back… These Marshall folks are tough on bullshit, but they want to make this work.”

And then, only four days after that brainstorm in the Outpost, Geena found herself in NASA Headquarters in Washington, briefing someone called the Associate Administrator for Exploration, and at last the NASA Administrator herself.

The Administrator, a tough woman of fifty with a helmet of steel-grey hair, made a decision after thirty minutes. “She has kind of a lot on her mind right now. I’ll take it to the President myself.”

10

Monica Beus distrusted Henry Meacher from the moment he stood at the lectern in front of the OSTP.

She knew he’d just come from giving testimony over in the Russell Senate Office Building on Capitol Hill, before the Senate committee on commerce, science and transport. And now here he was in Room 476 of the Executive Office Building to give a briefing to this subcommittee of the Office of Science and Technology Policy, which reported to the President herself.

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?”