Phytosphere

by Scott Mackay

  31

  Gerry called a meeting in Section A of the H. G. Wells Ballroom two days later.

  He had Ian and Stephanie at the door checking everybody who came in. Nectarians filed in by ones and twos, and they all had special invitations in their hands—not just anybody could come. Many had donated to Hulke’s campaign for reelection. Some were union leaders. Others had highly placed

  managerial positions at the various hotels and casinos. Some owned cannabis bars. A large contingent of showgirls came. In short, invited to the meeting was a broad cross-section of Lunarian society, representative of Hulke’s core constituency; people whose mere presence would put pressure on the mayor.

  Hulke arrived somewhere in the middle of it, peering around, trying his best to look at ease. He walked up the aisle with his usual mellow gait, but his face was red, his shoulders riding higher on his body than they usually did. He looked as if he had been outdanced at a dancing competition.

  He came to the platform. “Gerry… I hope you don’t mind if I’m skeptical about this.”

  “Kafis is lying.”

  “Not about turning this place into a self-sustaining paradise. We had a meeting this morning. He showed me the plans.”

  “We can save Earth.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  He decided that Hulke needed forgiveness. “I’m glad you’re here anyway.”

  “You’re not going to change our minds, Ger.”

  “Look, here comes Luke.”

  Luke Langstrom shuffled up the aisle.

  When he finally reached them, Luke gave Gerry a bow. “I admire your persistence.”

  “Thanks for coming, Luke.”

  “Wouldn’t miss it for the world.”

  The mayor and Luke drifted off and took seats on the brown, stackable chairs.

  Gerry kept his eye on Hulke. Hulke watched the door. The mayor saw more and more of his campaign supporters and contributors come in. It was as if Hulke could sense the noose tightening, just what Gerry needed. At last Hulke got so nervous that he came back up to the front.

  “Gerry, you’ve invited some extremely… influential people.”

  “What I have to say tonight involves everybody on the Moon.”

  “Where did you find these names?”

  He shrugged. “Stephanie helped me.”

  Hulke frowned. “A lot of these people…” He gestured out at the ballroom. “They’re coming out of respect. Because you’re an Earthman. I don’t want you to get your hopes up.”

  “How would you like to go down in history as the man who saved Earth?

  “Considering I’m going down in history as the man who save the Moon—”

  “It’s not enough, Malcolm.”

  “Gerry, I’m not your enemy. I have to be practical.”

  “I know who my enemy is. Do you see any Tarsalans around?”

  “No.

  “Look, there’s Ira. Christ, he looks pissed.”

  Hulke turned around and spotted Ira. “I better head him off at the pass.”

  Hulke left.

  The mayor and Ira met halfway up the aisle and exchanged some words.

  Mitch, who was sitting behind the table on the platform, shifted nervously.

  At the back, Ian and Stephanie closed the doors. Ian started spraying a spray can of the commercially available debugging aerosol into the air. Some people glanced at him, curious about what he was doing.

  Others seemed to know. One thing Gerry knew for sure: The Tarsalans had to have macrogenic airborne surveillance units in the room. And, in fact, a moment later the charged particles from the spray can attached themselves to the various flying listening devices, making them glow as if with a phosphorescent dust. Like ice crusting on the wings of aircraft, the areosol finally brought the devices, one by one, to the floor.

  Ira left the mayor, came to the platform, and in the midst of a dozen miniature crash landings had a few hot, quiet words with Mitch.

  Gerry walked over to lend Mitch support. The small, unassuming technician was really the hero in all this.

  But then Ira swung on Gerry unexpectedly. “Do you have any idea how unstable those early prototypes are?”

  Gerry glanced at Mitch. “You told him?”

  Mitch looked as if he were hanging by thumbscrews. “He’s my boss.”

  Ira had gone red in the face. “You could have gotten everybody killed at Copernicus. And why did you have to initiate the fields in the first place? Those two units were put on ice for a good reason.”

  “Ira, sit down. Don’t go blaming Mitch. I’m the one behind it all. If there are any charges to be laid, or bills to be paid, I’m your man. I’m not entirely unfamiliar with sitting in jail. And I’m so far in debt already, a little more’s not going to hurt.”

  “Why isn’t Kafis here?”

  “Because I didn’t invite him.”

  “I think Kafis should be included in any official meetings.”

  “In case you haven’t noticed, this isn’t official. This is just Gerry shooting the breeze.”

  “Which is what you’ve been doing all along.”

  Ira walked away in a huff and took his seat.

  Ian continued to spray the aerosol into the air. Stephanie, meanwhile, switched off the lights. As the last remaining bugs crash-landed on the red carpet, they luminesced like daubs of neon paint. Gerry walked to the microphone and pointed to the bugs.

  “You see those?” he said. “The Tarsalans are recording everything that’s going on right now. Let’s get rid of their bugs. This meeting is for humans only. If those nearest the surveillance units could please step on them?”

  He watched various audience members step on the macrogenic listening devices.

  “This whole demonstration serves a twofold purpose,” he said. “Number one: We’re getting rid of their bugs. Number two: No matter what some people might say, we’re still at war with the Tarsalans. And we have to be careful because now we have some of them on the Moon, two hundred, in ships out in the Alleyne Crater. And they’re offering us a deal. They say they’ll make the Moon a self-sustaining home for us. In return we must let them live here as refugees. They say they’ve inventoried every screw, nut, and bolt on the Moon, and that if we’re careful, we can maintain independent life support here indefinitely. They tell us that Earth is lost and that, during the attack on the TMS, the phytosphere control device was destroyed by U.S. troops. They tell us that there is nothing to be done for Earth. And after spending the last forty-eight hours studying the inventory on the Moon for myself, I have to agree with them—we don’t have the materials to fix the situation on Earth. Indeed, the engineering materials needed to destroy the phytosphere are considerable, and they are not on the Moon, yet, paradoxically, not out of our reach either.”

  He glanced around to see what effect this statement had on everybody; at least they were all listening.

  “But before we get into a discussion of just what the engineering necessities might be, we should take a look at what exactly we have to do to destroy the phytosphere. Because that’s what this meeting is all about.”

  The mayor stood up. “Uh… Gerry, my man… with all due respect, the Moon cannot at this time embark on a project to destroy the… uh… phytosphere.”

  “And that’s why I’m glad you’re here, Malcolm. Because I think there should be some political discussion. I see several council members here… and even some members of the media…and is that Richard Glamna from the LBC I see? And I guess the political question of the hour—and I’m sure the one that’s on everybody’s mind, and the one people are going to take to their graves with them if they don’t answer it morally—is how do we live with the deaths of twelve billion people on our consciences without even trying to help them? Because it is possible to help them. There is a way we can save the Earth.” He felt mildly buoyed by his own statements, and thought this was what Neil must feel like a lot of the time, making bold proclamations like this. “If we star
t working now, we can destroy the phytosphere in as little as four weeks.”

  And here he outlined in layman’s terms all the research he had done since the middle of June: his work on the flagella, on gravity, on how gravity affected the flagella—and it was like he was in Jarrell Hall again, because every time he gave a lecture, he understood his material better; and it all made perfect sense to him. The flagella acted not only as connecting limbs, but also as a kind of brain stem that looked after the lower functions, those basic muscular and hormonal roles that made the phytosphere behave the way it did. He thought of the simple physics of a force activating the triggering system: the carefully calibrated dance of gravity between the Earth and the Moon. And it was fortuitous that he was an ocean scientist, and that there should be tides involved, and that it was the tides in the phytosphere that had finally tipped him off to the whole system. As he explained more and more background, the room grew silent and an atmosphere of belief seemed to ferment in the air, the genesis of comprehension, and a faith that this thing—this magnificent but terrifying darkness of the Tarsalans—could at last be defeated.

  He showed the tape from Copernicus—poor Kev floating the ridiculous Smallmouth 2 up into the laboratory-created phytosphere, the orbiting Platform 2, the stress band, and the whole shroud disintegrating when the gravitational pressure became too great.

  Then he went through for them the exact measurements he had taken, particularly how much they had to increase the Moon’s gravity—how forceful they had to make the stress band—just what they had to do to the phytospheric tides in order to break the whole thing apart.

  “What many of you don’t know is that at one time the Moon was a lot closer to Earth. Geological evidence suggests much higher tides a million years ago. Why were the tides higher? As a hydrographer, I’ve made an in-depth study of this phenomenon. The tides were higher because the Moon’s gravitational pull was stronger. The Moon’s gravitational pull was stronger because it was that much closer back then.

  I believe the Tarsalan phytosphere control device is a gravitational field apparatus. They have a technological culture that is over a million years old. Follow the natural history of the two technological cultures we know, us and the Tarsalans, and you see we learn to control, one by one, the forces that surround us. Fire, wind, electromagnetism, fission, fusion, solar…and in the singularity drive, humankind is now taking its first small steps at controlling gravity. A million years from now, controlling gravity will be child’s play for us, just as it is for the Tarsalans. Have you ever wondered why the TMS doesn’t spin; why it doesn’t employ that particularly primitive technique for establishing artificial gravity? What about the thousands of other, smaller Tarsalan craft? Same thing. They don’t need to spin because the Tarsalans have devised a more advanced way of controlling this fundamental force.”

  Ira interrupted him. “In other words, you’re telling us something we already know, that Tarsalan engineering capability is far more advanced than ours. Gerry, they’ve taken our inventory. Say you’re right, and a gravitational device of some sort is what controls the phytosphere. Say in fact that the phytosphere control device U.S. Forces destroyed actually operated on gravitational principles. Don’t you think the Tarsalans would build a new one and save the Earth if they had the materials in inventory? I have an idea of what it takes to create an artificial gravitational field. Each time we burn one of our singularity drives, we get a gravitational field as a side effect. We’re talking cutting-edge physics here.

  And to make a gravitational field strong enough to destroy the phytosphere, you would need laboratory resources so vast that I don’t think they could be developed by us or by the Tarsalans in the remaining time Earth has left. You give us a timetable of four weeks. Gerry…that’s just too much to believe.

  Especially when so far you’ve given us nothing.”

  “I’ve got the timetable right here, Ira. You can take a look for yourself.”

  “But how do you expect to develop and implement an artificial gravitational field on such a gargantuan

  scale when we have such minimal resources on the Moon? If you combined every singularity drive we have, you wouldn’t even reach one one-thousandth of the power you would need for something like this.

  No offense, Gerry, but I think this meeting is adjourned.”

  “I never said I was going to develop and implement an artificial gravitational field.”

  “Then why are we here, and where is this going?”

  “If you’ll let me discuss the physics of the thing…” He motioned at all his measurements.

  Ira threw up his hands. “Be my guest. You’re the scientist.” He loaded the word with derision.

  “Going back to what I was saying about the Moon—a million years ago it was a lot closer to Earth, and its gravitational pull was that much stronger.” He looked around at his audience—showgirls, movers and shakers, cannabis bar owners, small-time councilors, pimps, and prostitutes—and he knew they all had mothers and fathers, perhaps brothers and sisters, and even children. A great emotion swelled in his chest as he thought of Glenda, Hanna, and Jake. “I don’t need anything like a complex Tarsalan gravitational device. I just need simple physics. And simple physics tells me that we can save the Earth. It tells me that it’s our duty and responsibility to save our suffering fellow human beings on Earth. And as for the engineering miracles involved? They’re not miracles at all. The math is so perfectly juvenile that even a child can understand it.”

  He leaned forward over the lectern. “I need a mass of sufficient size to act upon the Moon, a force that will push the Moon, in the short term, two thousand miles closer to the Earth. This repositioning of the Moon will exert the necessary gravitational force to destroy the phytosphere. To get that result, I require a planetoid-sized body roughly twelve miles across striking the Moon at approximately a hundred miles per second. This will degrade the Moon’s orbit the necessary distance, and thereby increase its gravitational pull enough to fracture and destroy the phytosphere.

  He lifted his hands because he saw Ira rising with what looked like a million objections.

  “Ira, please… stop.”

  “What happens to the Moon when this planetoid-sized body strikes it at a hundred miles per second? I mean…Ger…why don’t you just hand out loaded revolvers and we can get it over with?”

  “If the Moon had an atmosphere, Ira… if the Moon had oceans… but it doesn’t. It’s just a rock. Fire a bullet at a big rock and see what happens. Not much. Mitch and I have done the calculations. If a body this size were to hit the Earth, you’re right, it would be a planet killer. But not so on the Moon. The Moon is designed to take hits. It’s been taking hits nonstop for the last four billion years. A body this size strikes the Moon, and yes, I admit, it will hit the surface with a force of nineteen million megatons, create a peak-ring crater two hundred and twenty-five miles across and six miles deep, and generally shake up the Moon. But it won’t be a planet killer. Everybody will survive. And there’ll be minimal damage to the Moon’s infrastructure.”

  “Why should we believe you?” asked Ira. “And how are you going to pull it off?”

  Gerry turned to Mitch. “Mitch?”

  Mitch nodded and got up. “Uh…Ira…it’s possible. And it’s feasible with the…the inventory AviOrbit has on hand. We take the FMC Transit Collective drives and we boom them—like a big log boom. We

  take them out to the asteroid belt. We already have our…designated body. Gaspra, if you want to know, as it more or less coincides with our dimensional requirements. I’m really sorry, Ira, for going behind your back like this.”

  “You’re not going to use the FMC Transit Collective drives.”

  Mitch kept going, despite being cowed. “We boom these drives together and we take them out to the… asteroid belt. I know… I know… pretty wild… but, you know, I’ve gone over all the math… and actually I’ve had some of the telemetry guys… and we boom them to one o
f our freighters… we were thinking the Prometheus, because she’s just been freshly serviced and fueled, and she’s ready to go…”

  Mitch continued to outline the whole scheme in a quavering voice: how they would fly the Prometheus to the asteroid Gaspra because Gaspra was ideally located in relation to the Moon at this point in its orbit; how they would then anchor the Prometheus to the “front” of the asteroid, then drill the five FMC

  Transit Collective Drives into the body of the asteroid and lay in a collision course for the Moon; explained that the crew would consist of himself as engineering specialist, Gerry as science specialist, and Ian Hamilton as pilot; and how, at the last moment, as Gaspra came within striking distance, the crew would eject in a special survival pod.

  “And what’s beautiful about the math is that it allows for a certain margin of error, especially in terms of our angle of descent, and in the way the strike zone doesn’t have to be a hundred percent accurate but just what Gerry is calling a generalized region of effectiveness… so, as Gerry says, the math is, well, juvenile.” He quickly added, “Don’t take that in any insulting way.”

  Ian Hamilton got so fed up with Mitch’s apologetic tone that he bounded down the aisle of the H. G. Wells Ballroom and leaped to the platform in the Moon’s weak gravity.

  “Goddamn it, Ira, you’re fired. You’re fired, you’re fired, you’re fired. We’re going to take those damn FMC drives, we’re going to bolt them into Gaspra, and we’re going to ram Gaspra down the Moon’s goddamn throat.” He spoke with the fervency of a man who was desperately trying to redeem himself, who was trying to make up for all the bad things he had done in his life. “And the three of us up here are the only ones who have guts enough to do it. I mean…where are your balls? Do you really want to go for this Tarsalan deal? You really want to trust those fatheads after what they did to the Earth? Tell ’em, Ger. Tell ’em that they’re nothing but a bunch of goddamn liars.”