Larry sat there, watching the monitor screen in frozen horror. The comm people were already jumping up, checking their gear. “It’s everything,” one of them said. “All commlinks with Earth just went dead.”
“That’s crazy. Check back at central.”
Everything. Larry sat, motionless, his heart pounding. They would search for an answer, a malfunction in their gear.
But Larry knew. No evidence, no explanation, but he knew. Somehow, impossibly, the beam, the harmless gravity-wave beam, so weakened at that range it could not have squashed a fly or mussed a child’s hair—
Somehow it had vaporized the Earth.
Eyes began to turn toward Larry. Eyes that were no longer friendly, or excited. Yes, he thought, they ‘ll all be willing to admit it was my experiment now.
Eyes bored into his head. One pair of eyes in particular. Raphael, behind him, seething with terror and rage. Larry could feel the director’s malevolent stare drilling into the back of his skull.
Two thoughts echoed in his head, one incredible, the other simply insane.
Larry Chao had destroyed the Earth.
And somehow, Simon Raphael was going to see to it that it came out of Larry’s pay.
Part Two
CHAPTER SIX
The Amber of Time
Gerald MacDougal reached out and slapped the alarm buzzer. Two in the morning. Vancouver, British Columbia, was a lovely city, but it had a major flaw: it was in the wrong time zone. Like the Moon and the domed Settlements and virtually all the other space installations, VISOR worked on Universal Time. Greenwich Mean Time as they insisted on calling it here.
Two a.m. here. That was ten in the morning on VISOR, ignoring the speed-of-light delays. Ten a.m., Tuesdays and Saturdays, were Marcia’s assigned slots for sending view messages home. If she even got that much chance. She had sent a twenty-word-text message the night before warning about watching some gravity experiment from Pluto, just after 1000 UT. Right on top of her sending time slot.
Gerald stretched and yawned. Venus was about ninety degrees from conjunction at the moment, which worked out to a ten-minute speed-of-light delay, plus a split second or two while the Earth-orbiting comsat picked it up and relayed it around to his receiver. He had time to wake up a bit before Marcia’s weekly message came in. He could have let his comm system pick it up and could have played it back later, of course, but he preferred to see the view message immediately, the moment it came down. That way he would know what Marcia had been doing and saying ten short minutes before. It was the one time when that was possible. God, he missed her.
He stood up, walked to the window, and looked down at the splendid city laid out before him. His hometown. Aside from the time zone, there was no place on Earth he’d rather be. And, as far as his work was concerned, no place on Earth was where he ought to be. Gerald was a big man, tall, muscular and tough, with curly brown hair and a solid jaw. He got restless waiting, and was too often forced to convince himself that patience was a virtue.
Back to space soon, he promised himself, not quite believing it. There was still hope. To Venus, and VISOR, and his wife and his work.
Strictly speaking, the primary subject of Gerald MacDougal’s work did not exist. One of his career goals was to wipe out anything that resembled it.
Gerald was an exobiologist, a student of life off the planet Earth. The flaw, of course, was that there wasn’t any life beyond Earth. Except, of course, such Earth-evolved life that continued to evolve even off planet. Every human being, every plant, every animal brought along to the Settlements carried microscopic life-forms by the billions.
Anywhere humans went, viruses, bacteria, and other microbes, disease-causing and benign, traveled as well. Normal medical practice was enough to keep most of the nasties at bay inside the sealed colonies—but some microbes escaped the domes, tunnels, ships and habitats to the outside environments. Virtually all of them died the moment they left the controlled environment. But a few survived. And of those survivors, a very few managed to reproduce, and evolve, often at a ferocious rate.
Earth-derived microbes lurked in the soil around Martian cities, living off dome leakages of air, moisture and organics; lived inside the rock of mining asteroids, dining on a witches’ brew diet of complex hydrocarbons; lived as mildew-like patches in airlocks all over the Solar System, absorbing air, moisture and bits of organic matter whenever the locks were pressurized, encysting when they went into vacuum.
Even to Gerald, who should have been used to such things by now, the tenacity of life in such circumstances was incredible. It was proof to Gerald that there was a God. No random sequence of events could have produced living things capable of such feats. Evolution existed, yes; Gerald was no creationist. But there was a divine hand guiding evolution.
A divine hand that worked in mysterious and sometimes horrifying ways. For a few, a terrifying few, of the outsider organisms came back inside the domes and the spacecraft. Most such Returnees were wiped out by the drastically different environment, but some readapted to life back inside. That was when terror struck. Hardened by their generations outside air, light and pressure, some Returnee organisms bred hellaciously back inside, carrying in their genes the ability to digest unlikely things. Plastics, metal, resin compounds, semiorganic superconductors. And some of them, ancestors of disease organisms, retained the ability to infect the human body.
There were microorganisms that could cause disease in humans and also eat through pressure suits and air domes from the inside. Or dissolve the superconducting wires of power grids. Or jam valves in fusion systems.
From a human perspective, the Returnees were a nightmare. But God, Gerald had long since decided, did not have a human perspective. The Good Lord wanted all life, everywhere, to have a chance. Humans and microbes were equally His children, equally miraculous. He wanted all His children to have a chance at life, from the most high unto the least. If some individuals of one species had to die so another species might survive, was that not the way of all Nature? Why should humanity be exempt?
He did not see any contradiction between admiring the dogged survival skills of the Returnees and coldbloodedly seeking to destroy them. The wolf lives at the expense of the deer, and the buck may kill the wolf to defend his herd. Neither is right or wrong. Even the lamb lives at the expense of the foliage it crops—and many a thorn will stab at a lamb unwary enough to dine on the wrong plant. All that lives must draw life from others, and must defend itself against the assault of other species. So too with humanity.
Gerald’s goal was to wipe out all off-planet microscopic life outside the human-made environments. He knew he could never achieve his goal, and this knowledge gave him a certain strange comfort. But it was not enough. The destruction of life, however needful, did not fulfill Gerald.
He wanted to create life, be God’s tool in the work of making a whole new world full of life—but now that dream was fading. The circumstances were so frustrating.
The terraforming of Venus was technically possible. No one questioned that any longer.
Gerald’s work would have played a part in it, too. The Isolated Exobiology Facility would have been an ideal source of terraforming microbes. The simplest of gene engineering would have produced microbes to break down the noxious atmosphere, to fix nitrogen to soil, to remove carbon dioxide and produce water, to convert the acid-leached rocks to soil.