Lucian jumped back up out of his chair, grabbed his boss around the shoulders, and stared straight into his face through eyes half-mad with fear. “Earth is gone, dammit. I saw it happen with my own two eyes. I was on the surface, in the ob-dome, looking at it when it vanished. That’s what set off the quake. The tidal stresses vanished and the whole surface spasmed. There’ll probably be major aftershocks.”
Vespasian looked at him and swallowed hard. His face was sweating, and Lucian could see the light of fear in his eyes as well. “Planets just don’t vanish, Lucian,” he said in some sort of attempt at normal tones.
“This one did!” Lucian shouted. He gripped the older man’s shoulders harder, and then relaxed his grip, slumped down into his seat. He shut his eyes and forced himself to calm down. A planet. Yes, a planet. And everything on it. Eight billion people. All the oceans, all the ice caps and forests and animals, all the volcanoes and weather and deserts and trees. The molten core, the bottom of the ocean, the prairies and mountains. All of it gone.
No. No. He forced the thoughts, the fear, the panic from his thoughts. Don’t think about the Earth. Think about what we must do to save ourselves.
He opened his eyes and punched up the exterior surface camera that was permanently aimed at Earth.
“Look,” he said, not expecting to be believed. “That’s the camera locked down and targeted at Earth. Nothing there but stars.”
“So the camera was jostled in the quake,” Vespasian said in calming tone. “Dreyfuss, listen, I can use everybody I can get hold of right now, and I know maybe you’ve just been through a quake on the surface, but I don’t have time for this kind of—”
“Look at the background stars!” Lucian snapped. “That’s Gemini. Earth’s supposed to be in Gemini right now. Check with Celestial if you don’t remember.” Vespasian frowned and looked again at the camera. Lucian ignored him and punched up the playback on the camera. “Here we go. This is a replay off that camera for the last hour, in fast forward.”
Earth, or at least the recorded image of Earth, popped back into existence on the monitor screen. Clouds chased themselves across the surface, the terminator advanced over the globe as the playback rushed forward at high speed—and then, in a flash of blue-white, the planet wasn’t there anymore.
“Holy mother of God,” Vespasian said. “That can’t have happened. It’s got to be a camera malfunction.”
“Dammit, Tyrone, I saw it with my own eyes, and so did twenty-eight other people with me.”
“It’s nuts. It’s nuts. Optical illusion then.”
“Prove it. I’d love to be wrong,” Lucian said.
“I’ll do that,” Vespasian said. “Key this console to main ranging-radar output.” He punched a button on the intercom panel clipped to his belt loop. “Ranging radar, this is Vespasian,” he said into his headset. “Janie, scram your other operations for a moment and fire a high-power ranging pulse at Earth. Yes, now. I don’t care what the fuck else you got on your hands, you do it now.” Lucian switched in the radar operator’s audio and display screen.
“—kay, for Christ sake, here’s your damn pulse, Vespasian,” the operator’s voice announced angrily. The screen, cluttered with displays of dozens of craft in orbit, cleared as the radar op wiped her screen. A message flashed on the screen: ranging pulse fired. The display grid itself was blank.
And it stayed that way. After ten seconds, a new message flashed on the screen, no return, recycling. “Jesus Christ, what the hell kind of malfunction have we got here?” the radar operator asked. “We should have gotten a return in two-point-six seconds.” Now the radar operator’s voice was fearful.
“We don’t know, Janie,” Vespasian said in a hoarse voice. “Lucian here says Earth ain’t there no more. Do me a favor, recheck your gear and prove he’s crazy.”
He shut off the link and punched up another channel. “Comm, this is Vespasian. What’s your status on Earth comm channels?”
“Dead, every single one of them,” another disembodied voice announced from the speaker. “Must have been the quake. We’re running diagnostics now.”
Vespasian shoved Lucian out of the console chair and punched up an exterior optical circuit. The camera’s image of the surface popped up on one side of the screen while Vespasian did a celestial almanac lookup on the other side. He queried Earth’s current sky position as per the computer’s memory and fed it to the camera. The camera tracked smoothly, the current and ordered coordinates showing in a data line across the bottom of the screen. When the two matched, the field of view stopped moving—and displayed the same empty starfield Lucian had punched up three minutes before, as seen from another surface camera.
Lucian leaned over Vespasian and spoke in a steel-edged voice. “I don’t believe it either. I just know I saw it happen. Why, how, who or what did it, I don’t know. What I do know is that without Earth’s gravity as an anchor, every orbit and trajectory within a million kilometers of here is seriously screwed up. We’ve got to recalculate the orbit of every goddamn ship, satellite and habitat before they all start piling into each other. You get back to your own console and convince yourself. I’ve got to work on what we do next once you are convinced.”
Vespasian swelled himself up, as if ready to explode— and then stopped. He knew he was a tyrant, and sometimes a bully with his people—but he prided himself on knowing the truth when he heard it, and on accepting a little bullying himself when it was necessary.
Earth was gone. Getting people to believe that news was going to be a full-time job for Vespasian. He was having trouble enough convincing himself.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Tears for the Earth
Second by second, millisecond by millisecond, in slow motion, Earth disappeared again. The cloud of blue-white appeared, swelled up and engulfed Earth. Hiram ran the key frames back and forth again. Wait a second. It was tough to tell at this resolution and this angle, but it didn’t look like that cloud was a globe forming around Earth, but rather a disk-shaped body forming behind the planet, between the Earth and Moon. Hiram watched the monitor as the cloud moved forward, toward the camera and away from the Moon, sweeping over Earth, and then winked out of existence, leaving no trace of Earth behind.
What the devil was the cloud?
Hiram sat alone in the main control room, hunched over his computer panels, glad for the peace and quiet. He didn’t quite know or care what had happened to the rest of the staff. For a gifted scientist, there were a lot of things Hiram McGillicutty didn’t notice or understand. Like other people, for starters.
It was, in a way, a family trait. He had been born into one of the old pioneer families on Mars, and his greatgrandfather had been one of the earliest—and most obstreperous—of the Settlement World leaders way back when.
Hiram had not inherited his ancestor’s political skills, or even his marginal ability to understand people, but Hiram had certainly gotten the old boy’s single-mindedness. He had also gotten a full dose of another unfortunate family trait—an almost complete inability to see the other person’s point of view.
The rest of the station was in shock, struggling to come to terms with an incalculable loss. But Hiram was from Mars. He had never even visited Earth.