Alpha 4, page 22
“I’m-sorry-moddom, but you must understand that we have many standbys for each flight. Your seats were doubtless filled long ago.”
“You don’t understand. I know we’ve missed this flight What I want to do is transfer our reservations to the next flight.”
“I’m-sorry-moddom, but our instructions are strict. We cannot under any circumstances issue alternative tickets to no-shows.”
“Now that’s just silly. We weren’t entirely no-shows. After all, our baggage is already on today’s flight. What’s the point of shipping all that baggage and then not sending the people it belongs to?”
“I’m-sorry-moddom, but I’m sure the people who took your seats will find some use for it.”
“No, they won’t.” Juli began to cry, and at least half the tears were real. “No, they won’t; it’s almost all just keepsakes. Things that w-won’t be valuable to anybody b-but us.”
The agent had doubtless had to slosh his way through gallons of previous tears. “I’m-sorry-moddom, but regulations do not permit us to issue a second set of tickets.”
“Oh, damn your regulations! Now listen, my... husband is the head of one of these groups of ten people, a, a cadre leader.”
“There are hundreds of those, moddom. We are not allowed to treat them any differently than anybody else.”
“But he’s not just an ordinary cadre leader. He’s somebody that Secretary de Tohil Vaca particularly wanted to go. The Secretary told him so, personally.”
“I’m-sorry-moddom, but surely any faceless person could claim that over the telephone.” In the background, people were shouting at him to answer another phone.
“If I were just anybody, how would I know the project code?”
“These things leak, moddom. Now if you’ll excuse me—”
“Wait a minute,” Juli said desperately. “Why would just anybody be asking for tickets under these particular names? You should have some sort of list with the names on them.”
“Yes, moddom, we do, but for today’s flight only. We cannot issue second chances.”
“If you called the Secretary—” And then, right in the middle of this sentence, which in fact she did not know how she was going to end, she remembered that Alex’s priority number was different from the secret project code number. She said: “My husband has priority number FHGR-One.”
There was a long silence, except for the dim pandemonium in the background. She could only pray that the agent was looking the number up.
At last he was back. “I have confirmed the priority, moddom. I am therefore issuing you two reservations for tomorrow’s flight.”
“Oh... thank God. And thank you, too.”
“Please bear in mind, moddom, that this is the last chance. The last, the final, the ultimate chance. Are you sure you understand that?”
“Yes, I do,” she said gratefully. Her relief was so great that instead of flipping the hang-up toggle, she hit the shower toggle instead, and was promptly drenched with salt water. She hardly noticed.
The panic ebbed, but she was still worried. They might have all been killed, or anyhow hospitalized, on the very eve of escape. Oh God. She called the Brackette de Poisson.
And God damn them, they were there. They were all there.
Now free to feel completely unadulterated rage, she left a message for them with the management, put on her gas mask, snatched up the cats, and stamped out to flag down a water scooter.
The eight were still there when she arrived (after parking the grumbling cat carrier in the expensive supermarket next door, by polite but firm request of the restaurant’s manager)—the eight who had survived Alex’s playing God: three males (Fan, Goldfarb Z, and a man she placed vaguely as an engineer from Alex’s office) and five females (Gradus, Girlie, Goldfarb Z’s wife Y, Polar Pon’s wife Irene, and Will Emshredder’s divorced daughter Evadne).
Scanning this much constricted remnant of the old crew, and registering just exactly who remained of it here, Juli realized that more than the pains of choice and of partings had been involved here. There had also been a considerable spectrum of selfless sacrifice. With the realization, her righteous indignation began to simmer down toward the slightly more manageable level of simple resentment.
They all had indeed been drinking, but they did not look drunk. On the contrary, they were steady, quiet, and somber. As for Alex, he did not look guilty, or even contrite; only inexplicably sad.
“Why are you all just sitting here?” she demanded, but with much less vehemence than she would have believed possible only a few minutes ago. “Alex, I got us another reservation, I fought like mad for it, but you have to pick it up right now—we won’t be able to get another!”
“I’m sorry, sweetheart,” he said in a low voice. “You pick yours up if you want to. I wish you would. But we’re leaving ours for the standbys.”
“What?” she said, feeling dizzy. “Standbys? You’re—you’re not going?”
“No,” he said, lower still. “We’re staying here.”
Juli felt as though she had been gored by two icicles. Then she at long last let the hysteria sweep through her. Blindly, she let them lead her to a chair. They all tried to comfort her, more or less clumsily—only the women thought to produce handkerchiefs—but the clouds had been gathering for too long to be checked now.
“And I, I p-packed everything so carefully—all the, all the things I loved—the things you g-gave me—”
“Sshh, dear,” a woman’s voice said. “It’s all right.”
“It’s not all right, it’s not all right! Now we’ll not only die—we’ll die without our things! Oh, Alex, I p-picked out a b-book for each of us—our tooth brushes—my t-t-t-t—”
The rest came out in a howl, about which she could do absolutely nothing. Pats rained gently on her from various angles, making her cringe and want to fight at the same time. She knew definitely that that last word was going to have been “teddy bear” and waited for them to laugh; but nobody did.
The woman’s voice said:
“Juli, love, it doesn’t matter... really it doesn’t. No matter how else we die, we all die naked.”
Perhaps—she would never know—this truism would have done Juli no good at all had it come from any other source; but she just at this point recognized the voice as that of Girlie Stonacher, the last person in the dying world from whom she would have expected the consolations of philosophy, even of the tritest sort. She got herself under partial control with a humiliatingly juicy sniffle, and allowed the woman to finish mopping her face.
Only then could she manage to look again around the circle, out of eyes she was sure were as red as her nose. After a pioneering hiccup, she said:
“Alex, why didn’t you tell me? Instead of leaving me alone in that awful warehouse, getting scareder and scareder—while you sat here with all the friends we—”
“I did tell you, Juli,” he said. “I remember telling you very distinctly. I even remember when, and where.”
Juli still felt so frustrated and confused that under any ordinary circumstances she would have believed him gladly. After long suspicion of men in general, she had come to believe that Alex really did have an odd sort of trick memory, especially after drinking; where some of her previous lovers had had convenient blackouts, or at least blank spots where their promises had been lodged, he instead quite convincingly—to both of them—remembered things that hadn’t happened at all, in particular things he hadn’t told her but knew he should have, and hence readily admitted to. It had been a source of trust, though not one she would have felt comfortable explaining to anyone else, even a woman.
But these were not ordinary circumstances. “Alex,” she said, “I don’t believe you.”
Clearly, this didn’t surprise him. Instead, at last, he did look shamefaced.
“Well,” he said, “Juli, the fact is, I didn’t tell you. You see, I wanted you to go on that flight. I wanted you to have the chance, whatever I’d decided about myself. After all, we could still be wrong.”
That did it. Juli’s sorrow and hurt vanished; she was right back to being furious again.
“Wrong about what?” she fumed, clenching her fists until the nails bit into her palms. “Won’t somebody in this high-and-mighty crew tell me why we’re all committing suicide? I’d kind of like the chance to make up my own mind!”
“I told you so,” Gradus said to Alex. “But you wouldn’t listen to me.”
“Juli,” Alex said. “I can’t explain it myself. I don’t have the training, or the terms. And I couldn’t quite face up to asking you to listen to hearing your life being explained away by Fan, with my consent. He’s been wrong before.”
“Do you believe him, Alex? Enough to stay behind?”
“Yes.”
“Then I don’t resent anything but your thinking that I’d want to go without you. Fan, explain it, will you? I’d really like to know. And somehow I’m not surprised to find you pronouncing our funeral oration. It seems sort of comfortable. Please speak, Fan, please.”
“Thank you,” Fan said. “I rise to the occasion.”
But in fact he did not rise; he sat where he was, and spoke very quietly.
The only thing that puzzled me at first (Fan said) about our fairy friend de Tohil Vaca’s theory—which made perfect sense otherwise—was the fact that he wasn’t going to the Moon. That didn’t seem to be in character with what I knew about the man. I talked to Alex about it, since after all I only know the Secretary by reputation, and Alex seemed surprised by it, too.
Alex gave the Secretary the benefit of being a more complex man than he had seemed. I never give any man such credit until he’s proved it by a lifetime of complex reactions. The Secretary’s history didn’t deserve it; his public history, it seemed to me, accurately reflected what little depths he had. He certainly had never struck me as a natural martyr.
So I looked at the theory again. The Secretary had also told Alex that he wasn’t a scientist, and by God, on that second look, I found out why he’d said so.
The theory is right, mind you. But the Moon Project is wrong. The Moon is no safer now than the Earth is. As the ice melts and the two precessional movements of the Earth’s axis get more and more out of synch, the Earth’s center of gravity also is shifting. That will make the earthquakes even more violent, but we don’t have to worry about that now; enough is enough; es ist vollbracht.
But in addition, the Earth-Moon system is a binary system—a pair of twin planets, or at least close enough to being one dynamically. Other planets have satellites bigger than the Moon: for instance, there’s Saturn’s satellite Titan, which is actually bigger than Mercury. But nowhere else in the solar system can you find a satellite which is a quarter of the size of its primary.
One result of this is something we’ve known about ever since Herschel’s time. The Moon raises very large tides on the Earth—that is, it exerts a significant amount of gravitational energy on the sea, the atmosphere, and even on the crust. Now, every action has an equal and opposite reaction, as poor old Newton told us, and the reaction has to show up somewhere. And it does. It shows up in the Moon’s angular momentum, so that the Moon has been gradually drawing away from the Earth for millennia. I forget the rate—something in the nature of a few hundred feet per year, but I could be wrong by several orders of magnitude.
Suddenly—very suddenly—there’s going to be a lot more mobile water on the Earth for the Moon to affect. Result: the Moon’s velocity in its orbit is going to increase, equally suddenly. Viewed on a geological time scale, it will be one hell of a lurch.
And at the same time, something still more drastic will be happening. Because the Moon is so big in proportion to the Earth, the Moon never has revolved around the exact center of the Earth. Instead, the two bodies revolved around a common center, which was inside the Earth, but not at the Earth’s center.
Both these centers—the center of revolution of the twin planets, and the Earth’s center of gravity—are now shifting, both independently and in relation to each other. This change will feed back to the Moon, too. And there is still some vulcanism on the Moon—enough to shake it up drastically, since compared to the Earth, the Moon is a low-density, rather fragile world. While new mountains are being built here at home, all the sheer escarpments of the Moon will be tumbling down on our colonies—those that great fissures in the surface haven’t swallowed in advance.
I suspect that this process has already started, and that it’s why the commercial flights to the Moon were cancelled so arbitrarily five or so years ago. Or maybe not; I’m just guessing. If it hasn’t started, it will surely start soon.
I wish with all my heart that we’d had the sense to seed one of our planets—or the stars, it could have been done—a long time in the past. Did you know there was a starship in the planning stage in 1965? Well, there was. Even then it was clear to some people that the Earth was too small and too vulnerable for us to risk the whole future of our race on it alone. But instead, we killed off space-flight almost entirely—and that’s that.
And so (Fan continued) in the end I agree with Juli. If I have to die, I too want to die with my things—under which I mean to subsume my world, my history, my heritage, my race. Not in some warren underneath a desert world that’s fit for nothing but a quarry for tombstones. Naked we come into the world, but we do not all die naked; we have a choice. We can die naked on the Moon—or we can go to Hell with Shakespeare.
I don’t find the choice very difficult.
There was a small color 3V in operation over the bar at the rear of the restaurant, which Juli had ignored from the beginning. If she had noticed it at all, she supposed she had assumed that it was tuned to a baseball game, the only channel 3V sets in bars ever seemed able to receive; and the audio volume was gratefully low.
But in the silence following Fan’s peroration, she realized that the announcer was talking about the resumption of traffic to the Moon, and the imminent launching. Glancing up at the little hologram tank, she saw the ship that she and Alex were supposed to be on. It looked exactly like two raw onions, one white, one red, joined by a mutual sprout. It occurred to her that they would probably work better if they were boiled. The red sphere, the 3 V announcer was overexplaining, was the power sphere, which had to be kept separated from the people, because of the radiation.
The vessel’s immense size showed, however, by comparison with the crowd of spectators. There did seem to be a lot of them, held back only with difficulty by armed guards. The background murmur from them did not sound festive.
She felt tears beginning to come again.
“It seems so cruel,” she said, almost to herself. “Luring all those people on such a hopeless journey. And so wasteful. Do you suppose the government really doesn’t know? About the Moon?”
“Sure they know,” Fan said. He reached for his beer bottle, but ten seconds earlier it had turned into counter polish. “They just don’t care. Or maybe it’s just that they’ve been lying to us for so long, they couldn’t tell us the truth if they wanted to.” Morosely, he mopped up his invention with his sleeve.
“Fan, that’s a guess,” Alex said. “And let me remind you, I do know de Tohil Vaca, and you don’t except by reputation, just as you said. I still don’t think he’s the villain you make him out to be. He knows there’s a risk, and he told me—I think he told all the potential trippers—that there’s a risk. He didn’t say exactly what it was, but if he had, nobody would have wanted to go at all.”
“And maybe,” Goldfarb Z said, “he hopes that at least a few of the bases will survive, after all. That would explain the effort, the expense, the deception, and so on. Otherwise, why bother?”
Fan snorted. “Impossible... Herr Ober, another beer here!... And even supposing that... no, damn it, I want a glass bottle, not one of those dissolving ones... even supposing a few bases do survive, they won’t have the resources, or the population, or the spirit to put together a second jump to Mars. If there are any survivors on the Moon—and I insist, it’s impossible that there will be—they’ll just die a little later of attrition. People can’t hope if there aren’t enough of them to keep each other hoping.”
“Fan, as a psychologist you’re a pain in the ass,” Irene Pons said. “There’s one thing you have to give de Tohil Vaca. He’s given his passengers the chance to roll the dice. Which is more than we’ve got the courage to do. And I’ll bet he knew exactly how many of us would chicken out, too.”
“I do not play,” Fan said stiffly, “with loaded dice. But since you insist, I’ll give de Tohil Vaca one gold star: He did say, more or less vaguely, that the dice were loaded. It’s a limited form of honesty, but honesty it is.”
“And decency,” Juli said. “Even pity.”
“Pity? Juli, I love you, but sometimes you’re rather hard to follow.”
“I mean, here I am, with Alex, and people I love around me—and I’ve even still got Splat! and Hausmaus. So—I mean, oh well, that’s not so bad, after all. But for most of the people who’re going on the trip... do you think they’d be going if they had anyone to love? Someone to help them look death in the eye? And for them, isn’t it better to have a little hope? Better than just to stand around, waiting for the end, like so many snowmen waiting for a thaw?”
“By God, Juli,” Goldfarb Z said softly, “I love you too.”
“It’s a nice notion,” Fan said, “but it’s Juli’s alone, I’m afraid. That kind of motive doesn’t ordinarily move governments into spending billions of dollars on a foredoomed project.”
“What good is a dollar now?” Alex demanded. “And what else would be worth spending it on instead? Now? Not sewage, I can tell you that, and the Secretary knows it. He told me so, and damn bluntly, too.”
Fan shrugged. “I can’t quite see them breaking the thinking habits of a century,” he said. “But on the other hand, it doesn’t cost me a cent to give them credit for compassion. Blessed be thee, de Tohil Vaca.”
