He was glad when they started passing the Blue laws and hauling off the smart little assholes to those prison schools in Nevada and New York.
Ironically, the only paying, legal job Bob had ever gotten in his life had been at MIT, the nest of the killer nerds. At the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, even the walls bore the names of scientific gods: Archimedes and Darwin and Newton and Faraday and Pasteur and Lavoisier.
Bob worked in the kitchens, just a slop-out hand.
Even so, despite his resentment, he probably wouldn’t have come up with his plan if not for the end-of-the-world news.
He’d listened to what the president had to say. That the doom-soon news was only a prediction, a piece of math. That the Blue children were just children, no matter how strange they seemed. That they mustn’t react negatively; they mustn’t resort to despair and destruction.
Bob had thought about that.
He’d seen the TV shows and followed the chat groups. For sure the world was going to end, it seemed, even if nobody knew how. But there was a whole host of possibilities, from nuclear war to the air going sour to these genetic mutants, the Blues in their silver base on the Moon, taking over the planet.
And every one of these horrors, it seemed to Bob, was caused by science.
After that Bob had known what he had to do.
He had thought it would be hard to get hold of the raw materials. But that hadn’t been hard at all, as it turned out. Just as it hadn’t been hard for him to assemble the clean, beautiful machine that was birthing in his cellar.
Patiently he assembled his machine, testing each part before he added it, whistling.
Maura Della:
In western Europe the birthrate had dropped dramatically, as, it seemed, people tried to spare their unborn children the horror of existence. Conversely, the Japanese seemed to be descending into hedonistic excess. The unborn, who do not yet exist, have no rights; and therefore we are entitled to burn up the world. . .
And all over the world, old scores were being settled. There had been border conflicts all over the planet, including three limited nuclear exchanges. In southern Africa there had been outbreaks of Rift Valley fever, an ethnic-specific disease that killed ten times as many whites as blacks. Some people were turning to religion. Others were turning against it: there had been several assassination attempts on the pope, and something like a jihad seemed to be raging in Algeria. In the Middle East, a major Islam-Christianity conflict was looming, with some Muslim commentators arguing that the Christians were trying to accelerate the apocalypse of their Gospels.
America wasn’t spared, of course. Science labs and technology institutes and corporations all over the country had been subject to attack, with the destruction of MIT being the worst single incident. As for the remnant Blue children, they had already long been targets; now there were commentators — even on network TV — describing the helpless kids as angels of the Apocalypse.
And so it went.
Amidst all this, the business of government went on; and as ever it was just one damn thing after another, as Maura and others strove to contain the damage.
The Cruithne issue was containable.
There had been more probes to the asteroid, endlessly photographing and measuring, to no damn purpose as far as she could see. There was talk of sending more humans, volunteers to pass through the artifact. Maura doubted such missions would be approved. What was the purpose, if no data could be sent back?
Personally, she backed the USASF suggestion: to irradiate the surface of Cruithne, make it uninhabitable for a thousand years, and let the future, the damn downstreamers themselves, deal with it.
Notwithstanding Malenfant’s illegal launch — the strange artifact he had encountered, the failure of the military task force sent after him, the apparent deaths of all concerned, the exodus of the enhanced squid — all of that had taken place on a rock off in space somewhere. The Cruithne picture show was just too far away, too abstract, too removed from people’s experience to deliver any real sense of threat, and already fading in the memory.
There were even rumors that the whole thing had been faked: mocked-up images beamed down from some satellite by the FBI, the United Nations, rogue Third World powers, or some other enemy intent on destabilization, or mind control, or whatever else sprouted from the imagination of the conspiracy theorists. (And of course, as Maura knew well, there was a small department of the FBI set up to invent and encourage such false rumors.)
But the Blue children were different.
Maura had been startled by the fact that people, on the whole, seemed to applaud the use of the nuke. What was causing the current wave of panic was the fact that the attempt — the last resort, the source of all power in the Western mind — had failed.
And then — spectacularly, inexplicably — the children had flown to the Moon. Their escape in that damned silver bubble had been tracked live on TV, as was their subsequent three-day flight to the Moon, and their feather-gentle landing in Tycho, one of the brightest craters on the Moon’s near side.
The children were viewed with awe or terror or greed. In some parts of the world they were being used as weapons. Elsewhere they were seen as gods, or devils; already cities had burned over this issue.
In some places the children were simply killed.
Americans, of course, had responded with science. In America, kids were now studied and probed endlessly, even before they were born. If evidence of Blue superabilities was found, or even suspected, the children were taken away from their parents: isolated, restricted, given no opportunity to manipulate their environments, granted no contact with other children, Blue or otherwise.
There were even, in remote labs, experiments going on to delete, surgically, the source of the Blues’ abilities. Lobotomies, by another name. None of it was successful, except destructively.
The purpose of all this was control, Maura realized: people were trying, by these different stratagems, to regain control over their children, the destiny of the species, of their future.
But it was futile. Because up there, in that silver speck sitting in the lunar dust, there is where the future will be decided…
And meanwhile the Moon hung up there night after night, colonized somehow by American children, and the constantly circulating space telescope pictures of that strange silver dome on the lunar surface, like a mercury droplet, anonymous and sinister, served as inescapable symbols of the failure of the administration — of America — to cope.
And yet, Maura thought, cope she must; and she labored to focus on her mounting responsibilities.
After all, even in the worst case, we still have two centuries to get through.
Reid Malenfant:
Malenfant fell into light — searing white, brighter than sunlight — that blasted into his helmet. He jammed his eyes shut but could still see the glow shining pink-white through his closed lids, as if he had been thrown into a fire. There was no solid surface under him. He was falling, suspended in space. Maybe he had pushed himself away from Cruithne.
Emma, squirming, slipped out of his grasp. He reached for her, floundering in this bath of dazzling light, but she was gone.
He felt panic settling on his chest. His breathing grew ragged, his muscles stiffening up. He’d lost Emma; he had no idea where Cornelius was; he had no surface to cling to, no point of reference outside his suit.
And all of this was taking place in utter silence.