Moonseed (21 page)

Henry was talking to the lab workers here, and to a young policewoman who was taking notes. The policewoman looked tired and harassed, Jane thought; it was surprising there weren’t more police here, firemen.

Or maybe not. It was turning out to be a strange day.

Elsewhere, she saw that this lab had been turned into some kind of geologists’ war room. Big Sun workstations had been commandeered; one was displaying weather satellite information, and another was scrolling what looked like infrared images of thermal activity in the area, more satellite images, multicolored and full of detail. There were big geological maps of the area taped hastily to the walls, and equipment, most of it unrecognizable to her, was being set up on the benches or floor, some items still in their foam-lined metal cases.

Now Henry came to Jane. He was followed by a young woman in a scorched lab coat, who seemed excited.

Henry said, “Nobody was badly hurt. We were lucky. Some lacerations and burns.”

“Burns? What happened here?”

He grinned, his fascinated expression starting to match
that of the girl researcher. “The sample blew up.”

“What sample?”

“86047. The Moon rock. It was just sitting in its box, and then—” He opened his hands in a popping motion. “Like a puffball fungus.”

“It was incredible,” the girl said. “We were monitoring the changes. Tee, pee, rho, all went off the scale—”

“Temperature, pressure, density,” Henry said dryly. “Jane, meet Marge Case.”

Marge Case just kept talking. “—and when we replayed the bang we detected gamma rays, X rays—”

“Like Venus,” Jane said.

“Maybe,” Henry said. “More like fusion products, from the layers around the very center.”

Jane looked back at the case; there was no sign of the Moon rock. “Where is it now? Converted to energy?”

“Oh, no.” The girl laughed, and Jane could have happily struck her. “Only a fraction of the mass was destroyed, we think. Maybe one part in ten to power eleven.”

Henry thought about that. “If it was all hydrogen, that would be a sphere maybe forty microns across. At fusion temperatures and pressures.”

Jane said, “And the rest of the Moon rock—”

“Is gone,” Henry said grimly. “Converted.”

“To Moonseed?”

“Some of it. We’ll find it if we scrape the walls, no doubt.”

“It’s just incredible,” said Marge Case. “Think of it. We probably had higher-order string modes,
here,
in this lab.”

“For a squillionth of a second,” Henry said.

“But why?” Jane asked. “Why does it do this?”

Henry shrugged. “To propagate. The Moonseed will go on to infect normal matter, create more puffball-fungus explosions, and propagate further still.”

“Like what’s happening outside.”

“We think so,” Henry said. “Although the growth isn’t even. Olivine-rich basalt is the raw material of choice…”

Jane looked from one to the other. “I don’t understand you. You seem—excited.”

“Exhilarated,” Marge Case said.

“Really?”

“Of course.” Her eyes were moist, shining in the imperfect light. “Don’t you see? It’s not just the high-energy physics.
This is the discovery of the century.
This may be life from another world. An utterly different mode of biology.” She looked, to Jane, as if she hadn’t slept for days, as if she’d been living on adrenaline.

“What I mostly feel is frustrated,” Henry said. “We have no time to do the science. A study like this should take years. Teams all around the world. We’re doing little more than guesswork, here. And—”

“What else?”

“…Awe, I guess,” he said. “Geologists get used to thinking big. Big timescales, huge energies, gigantic events. But I’m not used to seeing all that intrude into my own life.”

“But we’re talking about a threat to the city,” Jane said. “Screw this guff about biology and science.”

“Jane—”

“You think I’m being hysterical. But somebody needs to express what we’re really saying, here. This isn’t just some intellectual puzzle.”

Marge smiled sadly. “Isn’t it?”

Jane watched Henry. “I need to get out of here. I have to find my family.” And, here was the unspoken thought, I could use your help.

He was meeting her eyes. But now there was hesitation.

What he has here is important. His work. Maybe more important than anything else. Not for me, though. He is going to have to choose.

But now Henry had turned away. He was looking down.

Then she felt it. The floor was shaking.

It was slight at first, almost imperceptible, but within
seconds it grew stronger. There was noise, a deep bass rumble, with grace notes added by the rattling of equipment on the benches and shelves of the room. Glass tinkling. As if some gigantic eighteen-wheeler were driving past, shaking the ground.

The shaking stopped.

Jack Dundas stood in the living room doorway. Everything was smashed to pieces. The big patio doors had smashed apart. He saw his mother’s collection of CDs spilled on the floor, the player smashed beside them.

Granddad, Ted, was lying on the floor. He was on his back, his hands over his chest. He had his eyes closed.

“Granddad? Are you dead?”

Jack took a step forward. Glass fragments crunched under his trainers. He looked down; it was one of his own school photos, a grinning geeky kid in a red sweater, the frame smashed.

He went to Ted. He put his toy box down beside his grandfather. Was he dead?

He had seen reruns of old hospital shows like
Casualty
and
ER,
so he knew what to do. He reached forward nervously, and touched Ted’s neck. The skin was warm. There was a pulse.

Ted coughed, and gasped for breath.

“Granddad? Granddad?”

Ted’s eyes were still closed. There was, Jack saw, blood soaking his shirt around his hands. Jack reached down and took his grandfather’s wrists. They were thick and coated with wiry hair. He pulled Ted’s arms away from his chest, exposing a ripped shirt, and a bloody wound.

The wound was grisly. There was a piece of fractured rib protruding from the chest wall, surrounded by blood. The blood was bubbling.

Jack sat back, helpless, shocked.

“Jack.”

The voice was a croak, and it made the lad jump. His grandfather’s eyes were alert, on him.

“Help me. You can do it, lad. Make me sit up.”

Jack put down his box, crawled around behind Ted, and helped Ted to half-sit up, resting his head against his lap.

“That’s it…now put your hand over the wound.”

“I can’t.”

“Do it, Jack!”

Jack reached out and put his palm tentatively over the wound. Ted reached up and covered the lad’s hand with his own, pressing the hand into the wound. The feel of bone and broken flesh and
bubbling
made Jack want to heave, but his grandfather’s hand was warm and solid and steady.

“Good lad. Now seal the wound.”

“What?”

“Or else my lung will collapse. Find something that won’t leak. Anything.”

Jack looked around, scraped around in the litter on the floor. He found a clear plastic magazine envelope.
New Scientist,
he saw; his mother’s subscription.

“How about this?”

“All right. Now. I’m going to breathe out. As hard as I can. Push me forward.”

The breath came out in a wheeze, and Jack pushed at his shoulders, trying to help.

Ted’s words were a gasp. “Put the patch over the wound.”

Jack slapped the plastic envelope over the hole in Ted’s chest, gratefully taking his hand away from the bloody wound.

“Good lad. Bandages. You need bandages. In strips. Quickly. The bathroom…”

Jack gently lowered Ted’s head to the floor—guiltily wiped his bloody hand on the rug—and went to the bathroom.

No bandages. He’d packed them already in the car.

He went to the front door, which had come off its hinges and was hanging drunkenly in its frame, so he had to step over it. The tarmac of the drive was cracked, but the car seemed intact. The boot was still open, and he quickly found the rolls of bandage where he’d packed them.

He looked around the street. There were no cars on the road. All the houses were—ruined. As if stomped by a giant. One of them, where Pete McAllister lived, was on fire. But he couldn’t see any fire engines.

He hurried back to the living room with his bandages.

“Good lad. All right. Around my chest—fix the patch in place—”

Jack started to wind the bandage around Ted’s chest, over the patch. Under Ted’s whispered instruction, he made sure each layer overlapped the others.

Ted watched calmly, his head resting against a tipped-up armchair. “You’re saving my life, lad,” he said. “Don’t you ever forget that. A hell of a thing to do when you’re ten years old.”

“Ten and three quarters.”

“And three quarters. Don’t forget your shoebox when we leave.”

In the lab, people were standing silently, as if hypnotized. A polystyrene coffee cup was edging its way across a bench surface, neat concentric ripples marking its surface.

It’s unnatural, Jane thought. That’s why we’re transfixed. The floor isn’t supposed to move under us.

“Those are harmonic tremors,” Henry said. “Magma moving.”

Marge Case said, “It’s consistent with what we’ve been monitoring. Swarms of shallow microquakes.” She turned to Jane. “Shallow because this isn’t some deep tectonic movement, but a movement of magma close to the surface…”

The shuddering subsided.

“If VDAP were here they would already have called a Level D alert,” Henry said. “At least. And—”

“If there is some kind of eruption,” Jane said, “what will it be like? Arthur’s Seat is old. Surely—”

“It won’t do much damage?” Henry looked glum. “Jane, we don’t know what to expect. The best guess is that the old magma, broken up by the Moonseed, will be viscous, with a lot of trapped superheated steam.”

“So very explosive,” said Case. “And—”

There was a jolt, and a sharp crack.

“The building frame,” said Henry.

“I have to get home,” Jane said. “Christ, if it’s come this far—”

She started toward the door. It was like trying to walk in a moving subway train.

“Look,” said Marge Case softly.

A wave was passing through the floor, through its substance, a neat sine wave a few inches high. The floor tiles buckled, or popped away from where they were glued. “Good God,” said Marge, and she giggled. “Floor surf.”

It happened in an instant.

The floor lurched under Jane, like a plane in turbulence, and she was thrown to her knees. She landed hard, her knees and the balls of her hands taking the impact. She felt as if she had been punched. The shock of it, the physical power, was like a violation.

And now the floor
tipped,
and she was sliding. Someone screamed. She looked for Henry.

Suddenly equipment was flying off the shelves on the walls, electronics boxes and tools and glass dishes, raining down. And the people were clinging to the floor, or skidding down the sudden slope, trying to stay on their feet.

She saw a heavy set of weighing scales come tumbling down in a neat parabola, and hit a lab-coated man in the back of the neck, evoking a sharp, clean snap. He fell forward, arms and legs loose, and rolled down the tilted floor.

The lights flickered. One of them exploded in its housing in the ceiling. Then they failed, and she was in darkness.

Jane was still sliding down the floor, in pitch darkness. It was a childhood nightmare, a mundane world turned monstrous, dragging her down into some pit she couldn’t even see.

Everyone seemed to be screaming now. More explosions from above. A crash, a stink she couldn’t recognize, and she found herself coughing. Christ alone knew what chemicals they kept in here; there had to be a danger of toxic fumes, fire.

She scrabbled at the broken floor; her fingers closed around the lip of a dislodged floor tile, and she hung onto that. The tile ripped her nails, but she wasn’t falling any more.

Somebody came skidding down the floor, and hit her side. The impact was huge, uncontrolled; a thick hand scrabbled at her clothes, trying to get a grip. She knew she couldn’t hold this new weight, and her own.

She should kick this guy away. She knew that’s what she should do.

He didn’t get a hold. He fell away into the dark, sparing her the decision.

Now there was a new series of deep, grinding cracks. Light from below; a throaty explosion of collapsing brickwork, the grind of tearing metal. She risked a look down. The wall beneath her had broken up, and huge chunks of it were falling away, letting in the daylight. Glimpses of the car park, maybe fifty feet below, the cars still parked in their mundane rows.

And, silhouetted before the light, people scattered like dolls, trying not to tumble any farther. Marge Case was clinging to the square leg of an analysis table, bolted to the skewed floor. One hand was bloody, and flapped at her side like a broken wing; she was holding on to the table with her other hand, one set of fingers.

The whole building had tipped up, Jane realized. Like
that movie.
The Poseidon Adventure.

A fat man lost his grip, went rolling down the floor, and fell neatly through one of the holes in the wall. He fell screaming. Jane could see him for a couple of seconds, suspended in the air, still clawing monkeylike for a grip on something, anything, before he fell out of sight.

When he reached the car park there was a meaty punch, a sack of liquid breaking open on an unyielding surface.

“Jane! This way!”

Henry had climbed to the comparative sanctuary of the doorway, with the policewoman and others. Henry was reaching down to her.

She looked up at him, calculating. She could reach a table leg no more than inches from her, push herself up on that, then half-stand on the leg to get to Henry’s hand.

Marge Case was screaming behind her, begging for help, almost incoherently.

Perhaps Jane could reach her. But she might fail. This is ridiculous, she thought. I don’t have time for this. I have to get to Jack.