So, in a way, there were two questions in his head at the same time: whether he would lie, and whether he could lie.
As to the first question, was it okay for him to lie if it would make billions of people go to their deaths a little happier?
As to the second, would people sense it? Would they detect a shift in the tone of his voice, the set of his face, when he was just standing there in front of the camera talking shit?
That was the real question. Whether he could pull it off. Because if he couldn’t pull it off — if he couldn’t lie convincingly — then there was no point in even trying.
And he was pretty sure that he couldn’t do it.
One of the ice cubes in Doob’s glass let out a little pop as it underwent thermal fracturing.
Doob thought of Sean Probst, now half a year into his quest to fetch a big piece of ice. He couldn’t believe it had been that long already.
You could get used to anything. You got used to it and then time raced by, and before you knew it, time was up.
He remembered people asking difficult questions around the time of Sean’s departure for the L1 gate. What the hell was this crazy billionaire doing? Clearly, it was not part of the official plan. The official plan did not seem to recognize a need for a huge piece of ice. But Sean Probst believed it was so important that he was willing to go up there personally and take care of the problem. There was a good chance he would die in the process, or come back so broken from radiation exposure and long-term weightlessness that his health would never recover. And so people had asked Doob what he thought Sean was thinking. And Doob, who hadn’t studied it at the time, had answered vaguely, saying that water was always a good thing to have in space: you could drink it, grow crops with it, use it for radiation shielding, split it into hydrogen and oxygen for rocket fuel, or pipe it through hoses to radiate excess heat into space. All of which was quite true, but sort of begged the question. It was so blindingly obvious that NASA must have thought of it already. What additional demand for water was Sean Probst seeing that NASA had failed to notice, or turned a blind eye to?
Later Doob had figured it out based on background conversations with people at Arjuna and scuttlebutt reaching him through friends working on the planning of the Cloud Ark. It was all about propellant. The Cloud Ark would have to burn a lot of it. Sean didn’t think they had enough.
So he had gone up there and done something about it.
Because Sean wasn’t a talker. He was a doer. And as such he didn’t have to agonize, as Doob was doing now, about what he was going to say. What his public stance was going to be. How he was going to be positioned and perceived.
“That’s a hundred days from now,” Doob said.
He’d been silent for so long that the other occupants of the Oval Office were a bit startled. J.B.F.’s attention had wandered to a tablet on her desk, and Pete Starling was looking out the window.
“I beg your pardon, Dr. Harris?” said the president, turning that gaze back upon him. But he no longer felt intimidated by it. He was going to go somewhere where she could never look at him again.
“This is 260,” Doob said. “You said you wanted me to go up there around 360.”
“Yes,” said Maggie Sloane, relaxing into an entirely new posture. “That’s not the first wave — which is going to be more exploratory, more of a dress rehearsal — but it would be the first real wave of Arkers going into space, and our thought was that we would embed you with them. You could partake of their experiences and show the people of Earth what a day in the life of an Arker consists of. Providing a sense of continuity.”
Holy shit, Doob thought. Seven years a Ph.D. candidate, two postdocs at major European research institutions, a tenured position at Caltech, shortlisted for a Nobel Prize, and here he was, with the fate of the human race at stake, being positioned as an observer to provide a sense of continuity.
“I can do that,” he said. And some other things as well, as long as I’m up there.
What were they going to do, yank him back down to the planet?
The worst they could do was to stop broadcasting his stuff, and that would be fine with him. There had to be something he could do up there that would be more useful than talking into a camera. Sean Probst had identified one problem with the Cloud Ark and taken action to remedy it; in a hundred days, what could Doob learn that might be useful? What actions could he take, once he got up there, to give the whole thing a better chance of success?
“A hundred days,” he said. “Three months for me to spend with my wife and my kids and my embryo.”
“Embryo?” Pete Starling repeated, not getting it.
Margaret Sloane, mother of three, picked it up instantly. “Amelia’s pregnant?” she asked, with the warm smile that, until Zero, had been the normal response to such blessed events. Nowadays, people’s reactions were a bit more complicated, of course; but it was hard to shed old habits.
“Not anymore,” Doob said. “We froze the embryo. My only condition is that it travel up into space with me.”
“Consider it done,” said the president, in a tone, and with a look, that told them the meeting was over.
DAY 287
“Got any tater-related humorous items for me?” Ivy asked. “’Cause oh, man, could I ever use some comic relief.”
Dinah wasn’t sure how she felt about Ivy looking to her doomed family as a source of casual amusement, but as they were only some 433 days away from the end of the world, she didn’t really think there was much point in getting shirty about it.
The situation did breed a kind of coarseness toward those stuck on the ground. It was humanly impossible to extend to seven billion people the full sympathy that each of them deserved. Dinah had begun to hear instances of dark humor over the radio, and had noticed herself being at least a little bit amused by it.
Nor was that dark humor restricted to Arkers, as Dinah’s family demonstrated. They were intelligent people — you had to be, to do what they did — but they went in for a certain brand of mining-camp humor, heavy on the practical jokes and novelty items that you’d never see in a boardroom or a faculty lounge. And once they’d latched on to something that they thought was funny, they’d never let go of it. A half-serious Morse code message about planting a flat of potatoes, transmitted by Rufus shortly after the Crater Lake announcement, had sprouted into a whole subgenre of running jokes about the preparations that the MacQuarie clan was making for the Hard Rain. In her occasional care packages from the ground, Dinah was now accustomed to finding fingerling potatoes, still with real dirt on them, or plastic parts for Mr. and Mrs. Potatohead toys. She even had a rusty old Idaho license plate duct-taped to the wall of her shop now, emblazoned with the slogan FAMOUS POTATOES, courtesy of Rufus, who’d gotten it from a mining industry pal in that state’s silver-rich panhandle.
“Is that a no?” Ivy asked.
“Oh, I have potato shit all over the place now,” Dinah said. “I’m just no longer sure that they’re joking.”
“What do you mean?”
“At first I thought it was their way of saying, ‘We know we are screwed, no point in being babies about it, let’s laugh it up until the end.’ But now I’m starting to ask myself what it is they’re doing. I mean, they’re up there in the Brooks Range with all of this equipment. They could drive down to Fairbanks any time they feel like it, and from there go anywhere in the world. Check out the pyramids. See the Mona Lisa. Visit old friends and family. Instead they’re up in the most godforsaken place I’ve ever seen, doing what?”