“The appearance of a whole damn Moon in the sky is beyond comprehension. If as a consequence your house is smashed, your crops destroyed, family members injured or dead, you can’t blame the Moon, you can’t rage at the Tide. In another age you might have blamed God. But now you blame whoever you think ought to be helping you climb out of your hole, which generally means all branches of the federal government, and specifically this office.” She shook her head. “So polls don’t drive me one way or the other. Because whatever I decide, your stunt isn’t going to help me.”
“Perhaps not,” said Nemoto. “But it might help the people beyond this office. The people of the world. And that is what we are talking about, isn’t it?”
Malenfant covered her hand. Take it easy.
Della glared. “Don’t presume to tell me my job, young woman.” Then she softened. “Even if you’re right.” She turned to a window. “God knows we need some good news… You know about the “quakes?”
“Yes, ma’am,” Malenfant said grimly.
This was the latest manifestation of the Red Moon’s baleful influence. Luna had raised tides in Earth’s rock, just as in its water. Luna’s rock tides had amounted to no more than a few inches.
But the Red Moon raised great waves several feet high.
Massive earthquakes had occurred in Turkey, Chile and elsewhere, many of them battering communities already devastated by the effects of the Tide. In fault zones like the San Andreas in California, the land above the faults was being eroded away much more rapidly than before, thus exposing the unstable rocks beneath, and exacerbating the tidal flexing of the rocks themselves.
Della said, “The geologists tell me that if the Red Moon stays in orbit around Earth, it is possible that the fault lines between Earth’s tectonic plates such as the great Ring of Fire that surrounds the Pacific — will ultimately settle down to constant seismic activity. Constant. I can’t begin to imagine what that will mean for us, for humanity. No doubt devastating long-term impacts on the Earth’s climate, all that volcanic dust and ash and heat being pumped into the air… When I look into the future now, the only rational reaction is dread and fear.”
“People need to see that we are hitting back,” Malenfant said. “That we are doing something.”
“Perhaps. That is the American way. The myth of action. But does our action hero have to be you, Malenfant? And what happens when you crash up there, or die of starvation, or burn up on re-entry? How will that play in the polls?”
“Then you find another hero,” Malenfant said stonily. “And you try again.”
“But even if you make it to the Moon, what will you find? You should know I’ve had several briefings in preparation for this meeting. One of them was with Dr Julia Corneille, from the Department of Anthropology at the American Museum of Natural History. An old college friend, as it happens.”
“Anthropology?”
“Actually Julia’s specialty is palaeoanthropology. Extinct homs, the lineage of human descent. You see the relevance.”
“Homs?”
“Hominids.” Della smiled. “Sorry. Field slang. You can tell I spent some time with Julia… She told me something of her life, her work in the field. Mostly out in the desert heartlands of Kenya.”
“Looking for fossils,” Malenfant said.
“Looking for fossils. People don’t leave many fossils, Malenfant. And they don’t just lie around. It took Julia years before she learned to pick them out, tiny specks against the soil. It’s a tough place to work, harsh, terribly dry, a place where all the bushes have thorns on them… Fascinating story.” She picked up the scrap of bone from her desk. “This was the first significant find Julia made. She told me she was engaged on another dig. She was walking one day along the bed of a dried-out river, when she happened to glance down… Well. It is a fragment of skull. A trace of a woman, of a species called Homo erectus. The Erectus were an intermediate form of human. They arose perhaps two million years ago, and became extinct a quarter-million years ago. They had bodies close to modern humans, but smaller brains — perhaps twice the size of chimps’. But they were phenomenally successful. They migrated out of Africa and covered the Old World, reaching as far as Java.”
Malenfant said dryly, “Fascinating, ma’am. And the significance—”
“The significance is that the homs who rained out of the sky, on the day you lost your wife, Malenfant, appear to have been Homo erectus. Or a very similar type.”
There was a brief silence.
“But if Erectus died out two hundred and fifty thousand years ago, what is he doing falling out of the sky?”
“That is what you must find out, Malenfant, if your mission is approved. Think of it. What if there is a link between the homs of the Wheel and ancestral Erectus? Well, how can that be? What does it tell us of human evolution?” Della fingered her skull fragment longingly. “You know, we have spent billions seeking the aliens in the sky. But we were looking in the wrong place. The aliens aren’t separated from us by distance, but by time. Here—” she said, holding out the bit of bone ” — here is the alien, right here, calling to us from the past. But we have to infer everything about our ancestors from isolated bits of bone — the ancient homs” appearance, gait, behaviour, social structure, language, culture, tool-making ability — everything we know, or we think we know about them. We can’t even tell how many species there were, let alone how they lived, how they felt. You, on the other hand, might be able to view them directly.” She smiled. “Even ask them. Think what it would mean.”
Malenfant began to see the pattern of the meeting. In her odd mix of hard-nosed scepticism at his mission plans, and wide-eyed wonder at what he might find up there, Della was groping her way towards a decision. His best tactic was surely to play straight.
Nemoto had been listening coldly. She leaned forward. “Madam Vice-President. You want this Dr Corneille to have a seat on the mission.”
Ah, Malenfant thought. Now we cut to the horse-trading.
Della sat back in her rocker, hands settling over her belly. “Well, they sent geologists to the Moon on Apollo.”
“One geologist,” said Malenfant. “Only after years of infighting. And Jack Schmitt was trained up for the job; he made sure he was, in fact. As far as I know there are no palaeoanthropologists in the Astronaut Office.”
“Would there be room for a passenger?”
Malenfant shook his head. “You’ve seen our schematics.”
Della tapped her desk, and brought up computer-graphic images of booster rockets and spaceplanes. “You are proposing to build a booster from Space Shuttle components.”
“Our Saturn V replacement, yes.”
“And you will glide down into the Red Moon’s atmosphere in a — what is it?”
“An X-38. It is a lifting body, the crew evacuation vehicle used on the Space Station. We will fit it out to keep us alive for the three-day trip. On the surface we will rendezvous with a package of small jets and boosters for the return journey, sent up separately. The whole mission design is based around a two-person crew. Madam Vice-President, we just couldn’t cram in anybody else.”
“Not on the way out,” Della said evenly. “Two out, three back. Isn’t that your slogan, Malenfant?”
“That’s the whole idea, ma’am. And those outbound two have to be astronauts. The best scientist in the world will be no use on the Red Moon dead.”
“The same argument was used to keep scientists off Apollo.” Della said.
“But it is still valid.”
Nemoto said coldly, “The reality is that I must fly this mission because the Japanese funding depends on it. And Malenfant must fly the mission—”