If it had been me, would I have had the strength to act as Henry has done? To communicate, to risk mockery and ridicule?

After all, she wouldn’t live to see the end, whatever happened.

There is no hope. Yet we must act as if there is.

Yet there was still something in Henry’s manner she didn’t understand. Something he didn’t want to tell them.

Or something he wanted to achieve.

She said, “Dr Meacher, give us your third recommendation.”

“We need to go back to the Moon. To Aristarchus, where Jays Malone picked up that rock.”

The Admiral frowned. “Why?”

Because the Moon is the key, thought Monica. That’s the centre of his case.

Henry said, “We have the question Professor Petit raised. We know the Moon is infected with Moonseed — but the Moon hasn’t been destroyed. Why not? We’ve learned all we can here. Something on the Moon must be inhibiting the Moonseed. We have to understand what.”

Monica watched him. This is what he wants, she realized, on some deep intuitive level. The Moon mission. This is what he’s seeking from us, today.

But, she sensed, there’s something he wants to achieve up there beyond what he’s telling us.

But he fears ridicule, obstruction, if he tells us about it…

“I agree,” she said immediately.

Henry looked at her, surprised. He said, “We have to go quickly. While we still can. Before we’re overwhelmed. It may be in a few months we won’t be capable of mounting a Moon mission, whether we want to or not.”

The Admiral nodded. “How the hell? I thought we smashed up all the Moon rockets, or put them in museums.”

“We did,” Henry said. “But NASA has a way.”

Monica said softly, “When can you leave?”

He looked startled. “Me?”

“Who else?”

“Dr Beus, I’m a rock hound, not an astronaut.”

“Difficult times,” the Admiral said. “We all have to think out of the box, Dr Meacher.”

Henry subsided, looking confused, calculating. But he leaned forward again. “There’s something else.”

“What?” the Admiral said.

“Weapons. We need to take weapons.”

Petit gasped. “You can’t be serious.”

The Admiral considered. “I suppose the premium will be on compactness, lightness. A battlefield nuke, maybe. Lasers—”

“My God,” said Petit. “If you were a man, Admiral, I’d say this was turning into a testosterone fest. Nukes to the Moon? We signed the Outer Space Treaty in 1967. If I remember my history, we undertook not to place in orbit, or emplace on the Moon or any other body or station in space, nuclear or other weapons of mass destruction. We pledged to limit the use of the Moon and other celestial bodies exclusively to peaceful purposes. We prohibited their use for establishing military bases or testing weapons—”

Monica said bluntly, “We signed that treaty primarily with the Soviet Union. A country which doesn’t exist any more. We shouldn’t let that stand in our way.”

“I’ll dissent from the recommendation,” Petit said.

“That’s your privilege, sir.”

“You space buffs make me sick. History can be torn up, just so you have your Buck Rogers dreams back again. The Russians—”

Bromwich smiled comfortably. “Who cares about the Russians? What can they do? Think about it. We’re now the only superpower on the planet. The Russians can’t stop us. So fuck them.”

Monica noticed that, as Henry let this dispute run on, he wasn’t volunteering what he wanted his weapons for.

Alfred Synge was smiling at Henry. “To return to the Moon. You know, I envy you…”

The Admiral looked around the table. “Dissenting voices or not, I think we have our recommendation for the President. We back Dr Meacher’s proposal for a Moon mission, if it can be mounted. But in parallel we set up programs to mitigate the effects of the Moonseed, here on Earth.”

Henry was nodding.

“And,” said the Admiral, “we should continue to study the basic science of the thing, see if we can come up with an antidote. Whatever.”

Nods around the table.

Monica was content to let the Admiral take over. She’d expected it anyhow, and she didn’t disagree with any of her conclusions.

The Moon mission, though, was going to be the key, she sensed. That was what Henry Meacher had wanted when he walked in here, and it was what he was walking out with: a manned lunar flight, with a weapon.

Maybe he is smarter than he looks.

As the meeting relaxed into break-up informality, the Admiral drummed her fingers on the table. “Tell me this, gentlemen. Just what in hell are we dealing with here? Underneath all the science. Is the Moonseed here to destroy the world? Like some kind of Berserker?”

“I have a theory,” Henry said quietly. “Off the record.”

“Off the record,” said Bromwich.

“Think about a starship,” Henry said.

Petit laughed, sat back in his chair, and folded his arms.

Henry went on doggedly. “It’s a slow affair. Restricted to low velocities by relativity, by lightspeed and energy requirements. Maybe it’s driven by some kind of low-tech thing, like a solar sail. Whatever. It reaches a star system. Like the Solar System.” He closed his eyes. “It’s surrounded by a cloud, of something like the assemblers the nanotechnologists talk about.”

“The Moonseed,” said Bromwich.

“Yes. As it passes through the System, the assemblers hit on local resources. Principally small rocks, floating in space, asteroids and comets. There’s an awful lot of that stuff floating around out there; no need to go all the way down into a planet’s gravity well to retrieve it. It takes the rocks apart, and makes—”

“What?” Petit demanded.

“I don’t know.” Henry spread his hands. “Starship parts. I think, if we go back into the Moonseed pools, that’s what we’ll find.”

Petit just laughed.

“But if it does reach a planet,” Henry said, “the Moonseed goes further.”

Alfred spread his hands. “That’s true. Venus now seems to be some kind of black hole factory. Extremal black holes, which flee at the speed of light. I know it sounds implausible, but—”

“Good God,” Bromwich said. “I hate this sci-fi stuff. Why the hell?”

Alfred said, “Maybe it’s a starship drive. How about that?”

Henry smiled. “Even I never thought of that. A black hole rocket. Well, why not? The exhaust velocity would be lightspeed. The specific impulse—”

Admiral Bromwich was shaking her head. “So where is this fucking starship?”

Henry shrugged. “I don’t have all the answers. Maybe the starship has gone. Maybe it was destroyed. Perhaps the Moonseed have been here a long time. It could be the starship got here when the Solar System was forming — lots of debris just floating around, the planets not yet stabilized. The System would be a dangerous place back then — but better adapted for the Moonseed, no planets yet, just a thin cloud of rock flour. The kind of system such a ship would aim for. But dangerous. Maybe it suffered some kind of catastrophic accident.”

“And,” said Synge, “if the Moonseed has been around that long—”

“Maybe it has evolved, somehow. Or devolved. Maybe it forgot how to make anything except itself. Maybe it forgot how to make a starship drive properly.”

“So Venus is a screw-up,” said Alfred.

“If there was a ship,” Bromwich said doggedly, “where did it come from? Where was it going?”

“…Maybe there was no ship,” Monica Beus said. “Maybe the ‘ship’ was a hive. Then you don’t need to speculate about motive, or destination: nothing above survival, reproduction, propagation.”

And as she framed the thought, she shuddered. On some deep level, she felt she had stumbled on a truth, in this insight. My God. A hive. What are we dealing with here?

Or maybe her own morbidity was polluting her thinking. Projecting the cancer that was eating her up onto the whole damn universe.

They talked further, and the speculation, mostly led by Alfred, got wilder.