She touched his arm a little wistfully. She relished his passion, his energy. But he was oddly like Eugene Mangles, in a way: as Eugene’s obsession was his work, so Bud’s was evidently the Moon and its future—to the exclusion of herself, she thought. “Bud,” she said. “You sold me. But for now, all I want the Moon to do is to save the Earth.”
“We’re working on it. Even though we all know it won’t be enough.”
The shield couldn’t provide perfect cover. It had had to be designed to block the sunstorm’s peak-energy bombardment in the visible light spectrum, but could do nothing about an anticipated accompaniment of X-rays, gamma rays, and other nasties, peripheral in terms of the storm’s total output, but potentially devastating for the Earth. “We couldn’t do it all,” she said.
“I know. I keep telling my folk that. But even so it doesn’t feel enough, whatever we do … Look. I think they’re ready for a test.”
The cargo pellet was in place on the gleaming track. The crane withdrew. She saw the pellet start to move: slowly at first, a ponderous start that told of its mass, and then more rapidly. That was all there was to it. There were no special effects: no flaring fire, no billowing smoke. But as the generators poured their energies into the launcher she felt a tingle in her gut, perhaps some biochemical response to the mighty currents flowing just a few hundred meters away.
The pellet, still accelerating, shot out of sight.
Bud clenched a fist. “Today all we can do is dig another hole in Clavius’s floor. But in six months tops we’ll be firing to orbit. Imagine riding that thing, riding the lightning across the face of the Moon!”
On the Moon’s surface, rovers were already racing to retrieve the cargo pellet, spraying up rooster tails of dust behind them. And the crane was moving back into its position, ready for another run.
20: Human Resources
Eugene sat in his room, hands folded on a small table. The room was without decoration or personalization—minimal even by the standards of the Moon, where everything was filtered through the huge expense of being shipped up from Earth. He didn’t even have a closet, just the packing carton that must have brought his clothes to the Moon in the first place.
Eugene remained an enigma to Siobhan. He was a big, handsome boy. If you knocked him cold and rearranged his limbs a bit he’d have made a great fashion model. But his posture was slumped, his face creased up with concern and shyness. Siobhan thought she had never met anybody with a greater contrast between his inner and outer selves.
“So how are you feeling, Eugene?”
“Busy,” he snapped back. “Questions, questions, questions. It’s all I get, day and night.”
“But you understand why,” she said. “We’ve already started building the shield, and on Earth they are making other preparations. All on the basis of your predictions: it’s really quite a responsibility. And unfortunately, Eugene, right now it’s only you who can do that for us.” She forced a smile. “If you’re building a shield thirteen thousand kilometers across, a mistake in the sixth decimal place means a mismatch of a meter or more—”
“It gets in the way of the work,” he said.
She stopped herself from snapping back, I amthe Astronomer Royal. I’ve done the odd bit of science myself. I do understand what it takes. But we’re talking about the safety of the world here. For God’s sake stop being such a prima donna … But she glimpsed real misery in his downcast face.
After all, she reflected, it wasn’t likely somebody as unworldly as this would be any use at prioritization or time management. Eugene surely had no mental equipment for handling conflicting demands—and probably no tact in dealing with those making such demands, from Prime Ministers and Presidents on down.
And then there was his public notoriety.
Siobhan had the feeling that even now, despite all the grave scientific pronouncements and political pontificating and arguing, most people didn’t really believe, in their guts, that the sunstorm was going to happen. Alvarez’s initial announcement had triggered a wave of alarm, flurries of speculation on the stock markets, flights into gold, and a sudden surge of interest in properties in Iceland, Greenland, the Falklands, and other extreme-latitude locations wrongly imagined to be relatively safe from the storm. But for most people, as the world kept turning and the sun kept shining, the sense of crisis quickly faded. Vast defensive programs, like the shield, were being mobilized, but even they weren’t visible yet to most people. It was still a phony war, the analysts said, and most people had forgotten about it and just got on with their lives. Even Siobhan found herself fretting about the long-term cosmological projects she’d been forced to abandon.
But in a world of billions there was a fraction of a percent imaginative enough, or crazy enough, to take the threat to heart—and a fraction of them looked for somebody to blame. As the man who had figured out the sunstorm, there were plenty prepared to dump their fear on Eugene. There had even been death threats. It had been a mercy he had stayed on the Moon, she thought, where his safety was relatively easy to assure. But even so he must have felt as if he were being flayed alive.
She got out her softscreen and began making notes. “Let me help you,” she said. “You need an office. A secretary …” She saw panic in his eyes. “Okay, not a secretary. But I’ll set up somebody to filter your calls for you. To report to me, not you.” But I think you will need somebody here on the Moon to hold your hand, she thought. An idea struck her. “How’s Mikhail?”
He shrugged. “Haven’t seen him.”
“I know he has his own priorities.” The Space Weather Service, which had suddenly grown from an obscure near joke to one of the most high-profile agencies in the solar system, was almost as inundated as Eugene himself. But she had seen Mikhail work with Eugene; she had a sense the solar astronomer would be able to get the best out of the boy. And, given the way Mikhail looked at Eugene, it would be a task Mikhail would perform with competence and affection. “I’ll ask him to spend more time with you. Maybe he could move back here to Clavius; he doesn’t have to be physically at the pole station.”
Eugene showed no notable enthusiasm for the idea. But he didn’t reject it outright, so Siobhan decided she had made some progress.
“What else?” She bent forward so she could see his face more clearly. “How are you feeling, Eugene? Is there anything you need? You must know how important your welfare is, to all of us.”
“Nothing.” He sounded sullen, even sulky.
“What you found is so important, Eugene. You could save billions of lives. They’ll build statues to you. And believe me, your work, especially your classic paper on the solar core, is going to be read forever.”
That provoked a weak smile. “I miss the farm,” he said suddenly.
The non sequitur took her aback. “The farm?”
“Selene. I understand why they had to clear it all out. But I miss it.” He had grown up in a rural area in Massachusetts, she remembered now. “I used to go work in there,” he said. “The doctor said I needed exercise. It was that or the treadmill.”
“But now the farm’s been shut down. How typical that in trying to save the world we kill off the one bit of green on the Moon!”
And how psychologically damaging that might be. In trying to figure out these spacebound folk she had read stories of cosmonauts on the first, crude, tin-can space stations, patiently growing little pea plants in experimental pots. They had loved those plants, those small living things sharing their shelter in the desolation of space. Now Eugene had shown the same impulse. He was human after all.