Uncle Ira stepped forward then and shook my hand. "Congratulations. You are now free to be as big an asshole as you want without endangering the careers of anybody else around you. Their lives, however, you can still endanger, so do please be careful."
Danny Anderson shook my hand too-despite his apparent physical strength, his grip was surprisingly gentle. "Congratulations." His tone was mordant and not particularly warm.
Lizard just sighed and rubbed the bridge of her nose tiredly.
"What?" asked Wallachstein.
"If we could only be this clever acting against the worms," she said, "we wouldn't have to be this clever acting against our own army."
Wallachstein's expression hardened. "You would have to get serious, wouldn't you?"
"Sorry. It's been a long war. I'm tired."
Uncle Ira nodded knowledgeably. He stepped forward and put both his hands on Lizard's shoulders. For a moment, he looked almost fatherly. "Yes, I did it for McCarthy," he said softly, "but I also did it for you. Tell me that you're happy."
She blinked back tears. "We're pregnant," she said. "I'm very happy."
"Good. I'm glad." Uncle Ira took her into his arms then and kissed her gently, then hugged her tightly, then looked her in the eyes again, and then kissed her a second time. "You take care of yourself, and you take care of the baby, and when you get back to Houston, we'll see about your transfer to Luna. Him too, if you insist." He nodded in my direction.
"Yeah, him too," Lizard said. "I'm starting to get fond of him."
Danny Anderson tapped Uncle Ira on the shoulder then. "My turn." He swept Lizard into his arms like a long-lost brother, leaned her back over his forearm and kissed her like no brother ever kissed his sister. When they finally surfaced for air, Lizard was red in the face and breathless. "Gee, Danny," she blushed. "If I had known you could kiss like that-" She stopped herself, unable to finish the sentence. She looked genuinely amazed as she gave him the once-over; up and down. "What a waste."
"Yeah," he grinned lasciviously. "It's times like this I wish I were a lesbian."
They both laughed then and fell into each other's arms for one more hug. This time when they broke apart, Danny turned to me. Somehow he looked taller than ever. "Take good care of yourself." He clapped me once on the shoulder, then said to Wallachstein, "We're out of time. Zymph will be angry if we keep her waiting."
Wallachstein started to step past me, then stopped. For a moment, he looked like he didn't know what to say. Finally, he didn't say anything. He just put his hand sadly on my head and rumpled my hair briefly. "Take care of her, Jim. Or I'll kill you."
And then he followed Danny Anderson aftward to the service exit.
I turned back to Lizard. We looked across the intervening space at each other. "Goodness," I said. "People come and go in the strangest ways around here."
"Hot Seat," April 3rd broadcast: (cont'd)
ROBISON:… Okay, tell us about your plan for victory. But I've gotta warn you. I don't know how much more of this crap I can take before my gorge becomes buoyant.
FOREMAN: Don't pretend to be a bigger fool than you already are, John. You know the facts as well as anybody. The largest military effort in human history is directed at controlling and containing the Chtorran infestation here on Earth. We're constantly rethinking our military procedures. The worms are adapting. So are we. We've discovered that a frontal military assault on a Chtorran camp is an ineffective investment of our energies. You've seen the pictures of the Rocky Mountain blast site. It's coming back crimson. Our Terran species can't compete on bare ground. As satisfying as it might be to nuke every worm camp on the planet-and we certainly have the weapons to do so-in the long run, it would be a terrible mistake. We'd only be clearing the ground for the next generation of the infestation.
ROBISON: Yeah? So, what are. we doing instead? Worm fences? A little Styrofoam and soe razor-ribbon. And you call that a plan-?
FOREMAN: I thought you said you did your research, John
ROBISON: Polymer-aerogels? Do you really think that a little bit of silicon aerosol is going to stop a worm?
FOREMAN: As a matter of fact, we've seen it work. We've laid down great fields of the stuff. Aerogel is made of glass and sand, so it's cheap to manufacture. We can just about do it on-site. It's the least-dense solid ever made, so we get a lot of coverage for a very small investment of mass, and it's one hundred percent operational one hundred percent of the time. It's the perfect worm-fence, because a worm can't see it, can't feel it, can't smell it, can't taste it; there's absolutely no way a worm can detect it. To a human it looks like very faint smoke or haze lying on the ground; but to the worms it's completely invisible-it has something to do with the way their eyes work. They blunder right into it. They just keep moving forward. There's almost no sensation to the stuff, so the worm doesn't even know it's there until it's too late. And the stuff is amazing, John. It's as tenacious as it is light. Before the worm knows what's happening, there's this invisible wall on all sides. No matter which direction the creature pushes, the tangle of resistance just keeps getting thicker and thicker as more and more of the threads wrap up around it. The worm's own movements pull the threads around and around itself like a giant spider web. The more it moves, the more it gets wrapped. All those long threads of aerogel have an incredible amount of cumulative inertia. The poor worm can't even eat its way out; the stuff clogs its mouth, its teeth, its whole digestive system. This stuff can immobilize a worm in minutes. It just rolls in and closes up. Even staying perfectly still doesn't work. After the threads have been disturbed, they contract, they pull, they stretch. They stick. There's no escape. Any worm who tries to push through this stuff is going to be webbed. No other worm can get in-not to help, not to rescue, not even to communicate-without also being caught; so there's not even a way for the word to spread among them that this kind of trap exists.
FOREMAN: (continuing after commercial) Right now we can manufacture aerogel with a half-life as short as a week or as long as three years. We can spray a wall of this stuff around a city, or we can set traps in the thickest parts of a worm infestation. It's nontoxic and biodegradable, so you can use it anywhere. The Japanese love the stuff. They've been using it to create a whole new industry: worm farming. Chtorran oil. Chtorran sushi. Chtorran hides. It's a growth industry on the Asian mainland. See, that's the kind of solution that human beings are good at.
ROBISON: (unconvinced) Foamed smoke? You're telling me that foamed smoke is going to save us?
FOREMAN: Save you? No. It's going to take a lot more than foam to save you, John. I think it would take at least an industrial-strength miracle. But as for the rest of us? Yes. The United Nations Control Agency has already authorized the division of the planet into ecological zones, with aerogel barriers installed everywhere. What we ultimately intend to do is put down aerogel barriers around every major infestation as fast as we can identify them. This, we expect, will stop or at least slow down, the growth of the infested areas. If we can isolate the reservoirs of infection, we will have won a major victory…
Once it is airborne, the manna spore begins to unravel into long gossamer strands, slightly sticky, and very fragile-even more delicate than spider silk. The threads of an unraveled spore may be several centimeters long.