“ ‘You only have to see the rocks once,’ ” Lucian replied in a tired voice. He didn’t bother telling her that that bit of folk wisdom had the power of a proverb among the Conners. People said it to explain that something once new was getting stale, old, was something you didn’t need anymore.
Lucian currently felt all of those things. He certainly didn’t need to see the rocks again. His mind was on other things. On how long until he could bring the tour group back, on how much of the spiel he still had to give, on how many more herds of groundlings he would have to drag around to clear his casino debt.
He glanced at his watch. That was time enough to let them wander the dome, ogling on their own. Lucian clapped his hands together and stepped up onto a low dais built into the dome’s floor. “All right, folks, all right. Gather around, if you please. I’ll be pointing out several of the landmarks visible from here. First and foremost of these is of course the Earth, directly over my head.”
As if they were all attached to the same swivel control, the sea of heads surrounding Lucian all pivoted upward at once. A forest of arms sprouted up as the groundlings pointed out home to each other. Lucian had given up wondering why they did that. Did any of them seriously think their friends were incapable of finding Earth in the sky?
Lucian looked up himself to see what sort of real estate and weather were visible at the moment. Earth was in waning half-phase, the terminator just about to reach the coast of North America, with clear weather over most of the daylight quadrant. Good. That put Africa front and center. A nice, well-known, easy-to-recognize piece of geography plainly visible with no damn cloud cover hiding it. Much preferable to when the Pacific was socked in and he was reduced to showing where Hawaii would be if it were big enough to see and the clouds weren’t there. He tried to pump a little enthusiasm into his voice, just for the form’s sake.
“As you can see, the Sun is just rising over the coast of North and South America, and there’s clear weather over most of the Atlantic. Can anyone spot the coast of Africa?”
The murmur of voices swept toward a crescendo as the groundlings eagerly pointed out the perfectly obvious to each other. Next step. He could explain how the South American coast matched up with Africa. He looked up at the Earth and began.
“Very good. Now, if you look toward the dark side of the planet, you can just see—”
He saw it. He saw it happen. One moment the Earth was there, and then, suddenly, in a weird, twisted flash of blue light, it wasn’t. He blinked, unbelieving.
The Earth wasn’t there anymore.
Around him, the tourist voices rose again, a bit uncertainly. “Is it an eclipse?” one of them asked.
“Hey, sonny, is this some kind of joke?”
“Did the polarizers switch on in the wrong place?”
“No, dummy, this dome isn’t polarized. It’s got that Sun-blocking gizmo on the control arm outside.”
“It must be a power failure. All the lights on Earth went out.”
“Yeah, right, including the Sun?”
“Hey, mister, you ever seen anything like this before?”
“Young man, what in heaven’s name is going on?” Mrs. Chester demanded in an imperious voice, as if Lucian were responsible for preventing disasters.
Lucian ignored the welter of voices and stared at the impossible sky, his mind racing for an explanation. What in the name of God could create the illusion of a planet vanishing? He dreamed up a half dozen theories. A black dust cloud wandering through the Solar System, a bad prank by some grad students on one of the space habitats, flinging a king-size occulting disk in front of Earth, a sudden weird flaw in the dome’s glass that filtered out Earth-colored light. But none of his ideas made sense, or were even physically possible.
Then if there were no way to make it seem the Earth was gone, then it had to be that—
Lucian never had the chance to complete the terrifying thought. The first moonquake hit.
The Moon’s entire existence had been shaped by the tidal stresses imposed by Earth’s massive gravity well. Internal stresses in the Moon’s crust, stresses that had existed before the first trilobite ever swam Earth’s seas, were suddenly no longer there. With the strain patterns of a billion years suddenly relieved, the Moon’s crust snapped, like a rubber band let go after being stretched out. The first of the shock waves smashed into the surface, sending everyone in the dome sprawling.
Lucian, standing on the low tour-guide dais, was flung into the air, tumbling end over end in the Moon’s leisurely gravity.
It was the quake that convinced Lucian of the impossible truth. The sudden, appalling shock of the very ground beneath his feet, flinging him about, made the disaster real. He slammed into the floor of the dome and clung to it, digging his fingers into the rubber matting.
Suddenly his mind was clear. A legend spoke to him, and told him what to do.
“Accept the situation, think and act,” his father’s voice whispered to him. His father, Bernard Dreyfuss, hero of the SubBubble Three disaster. A thousand—ten thousand more would have died, if Bernard Dreyfuss had not kept his head. “Most people panic when they are in danger. Not our family.” That was family lore, the family law, Lucian told himself. “We think in a crisis, boy,” his father had told him. “That’s why we survive. When the terrible, the frightening, the incredible happens, accept it and act while the others are still in shock. It’s in your blood to do it. Trust that and act.”
He looked up in the sky. All his life, all the centuries humanity had lived on the Moon, all the endless millions of years before that, the Earth had hung in that one spot in the Lunar sky, the one unmoving object among the wheeling Sun and stars. It had hung there, always.
And it wasn’t there now. Damn it, accept that. No one was going to believe it, but accept it. It had happened. How? How had it been wrecked? Had it exploded?
Stop it. Accept the incredible. The how of it didn’t matter just now. The ground below his feet rattled again, and he heard a little girl whimper in fear. It refocused his mind. He could do nothing for the people of Earth, but the loss of the planet had consequences here, now.
And he had responsibilities. For starters, the people in this dome. He did not even notice that he had stopped thinking of them as tourists and groundlings.
They needed help. If the ground danced again, and the dome cracked this time… He had to get them safely down below, down into the panicked ant heap the city must be by now…
It struck him that down below they wouldn’t know about Earth yet.
Earth. Dear God, Earth. He looked again at the frightened people all around him. Earth people. They needed help. Help in getting below to safety, help in avoiding panic.
Keeping their minds off whatever had just happened to their world was vital. Focus them on the immediate danger. Don’t let them have time to think.
Lucian stood up carefully, adopting the cautious, wide-legged stance of a man expecting the ground to give way. “Everyone, please listen carefully.” He must have gotten some sort of tone of authority into his voice; they all quieted down and turned to him. Calm them. Downplay the situation. “You are in no immediate danger, but safety regulations require the evacuation of these domes after even a minor tremor.” There was nothing remotely “minor” about the temblor they had just experienced, but Lucian was perfectly willing to minimize the danger if it calmed these people and got them the hell out of here.