Seveneves - Страница 33

Down on the Earth, it was August, the second-to-the-last August that there would ever be. A dozen new or reconditioned spaceports had come into operation. Heavy-lift rockets could now be launched to Izzy from eight different locations around the world. Around those launch pads, rocket stages and three different styles of arklet were beginning to pile up like so much ammunition at a firing range.

DAY 260

“You’re going, Dr. Harris,” said Julia Bliss Flaherty.

From time to time Doob became distracted by the sheer oddity of the fact that he now met with the president on a regular basis. It was a lot less weird, in the big scheme of things, than the fact that the moon had exploded and that everyone was going to die. But his mind, born and raised in a world free of such prodigies, was more comfortable being freaked out by little things, such as talking to the president. In the Oval Office. With her science advisor Pete Starling on one side and the White House communications director on the other. And a butler pouring ice water into crystal tumblers.

He saw the usefulness of the butler. But what was the point of having the communications director here? Margaret Sloane was good at her job, and the perfection of her grooming was a perpetual source of wonderment, but it had become pretty clear that she was out of her depth in any technical discussion beyond “big rocks from space are dangerous.”

They were all looking at him as if he was expected to say something.

What had been the president’s words? You’re going.

Did that mean he was on his way out? Going to be replaced by someone younger and more web-savvy, like Tav Prowse?

Into the awkward silence, Margaret Sloane poured an explanation. “Your skills and your presence have done so much to calm the waters. To give the people of the United States, and of Earth, something to pin their hopes on in the guiding concept of Our Heritage. Your willingness to roll up your sleeves, go to places like Moses Lake, Baikonur, the rocket factories — that has all been so appreciated. But we feel that the time has come—”

“To replace me with a fresh face, I get it,” Doob said. “To tell you the truth, that’s fine. I would like to spend more time with my kids and my new wife. Tav will do a great job.”

For once, the president looked flummoxed. Her eyes flicked toward Margaret.

“That’s not where we were going with it at all,” said Margaret. “We need you — the people of the world need you — to take the next step — to advance to a higher level.”

“We are asking you,” said the president, a bit testy with Doob’s slowness and with Margaret’s breathy and roundabout phrasings, “to travel into space on or about Day 360, and to become part of the population of the Cloud Ark.”

“I don’t want to go!” Doob blurted out. It was rare for him to forget himself in that way, so he then just sat for a few moments, stunned by his own ineptitude.

“Dr. Harris,” said the president after a few moments, “as you probably know from your high school civics class, the person who sits where I’m sitting has a lot of powers. One of them is that I can grant reprieves and pardons for convicted criminals. Every inmate who goes to the execution chamber in Texas goes there in part because I made the decision not to pardon him or to commute his sentence. I have never exercised that power in the case of a death row inmate. In effect, however, I am exercising it in your case now.”

The president paused there for a moment, and Doob became aware that she was waiting for his attention.

He was staring at a flower arrangement on the table in front of him. Wondering how long it would be before anyone cultivated flowers on the Cloud Ark. He reached for his tumbler and took a sip of water.

J.B.F. unnerved him when she was like this. It took a certain conscious and deliberate act of will for him to peel his eyes off the flowers and look up into her eyes. They stared back at him wide and unblinking.

“By virtue of being on the surface of this planet, you are under a death sentence,” said the president. “I just pardoned you. You can go into space and live. I cannot. Do you understand that, Dr. Harris? I cannot even pardon myself in this case without flagrantly violating the Crater Lake Accord, which makes national leaders and their families ineligible. Now, what the hell is your problem?”

Doob’s honest answer, had he voiced it, would have been most impolitic: I have become convinced that the Cloud Ark scheme cannot possibly succeed. I have been playing along in public just to keep people happy. I would rather die quickly on the ground with my loved ones than slowly, alone, in space.

“There are others who deserve it more than I do,” he said. And in the same moment he cursed himself for saying something so lame. So easily refuted. Because in all honesty he was a fine choice for inclusion on the Cloud Ark’s roster.

“I couldn’t disagree more!” exclaimed Pete Starling, with a nervous chuckle. “Doob, you’re going to be so useful up there, I’m afraid you’ll never get a moment’s rest! You have multiple core competencies with surprisingly minimal Venn. You can pivot from working on astrophysics problems, to teaching the young Arkers, to podcasting to folks on the ground, without skipping a beat!”

Doob turned to look into Pete Starling’s eyes as he was saying those words and understood, with a shock like diving into cold water, that Pete was lying.

Not about Doob’s usefulness. In that he was sincere. He was lying about something more fundamental.

He didn’t believe that the Cloud Ark was going to work any more than Doob did.

He needed Doc Dubois to go up there and lie for him.

Now, Doob was a scientist who had spent decades of his life training in a particular discipline, namely, to seek and to speak the truth. Even among hard scientists — a notoriously blunt crowd — he had a reputation for saying what he thought. Never mind whose feelings he wounded, whose careers got damaged as a result. This seemed to come across, somehow, on camera. The very reason that so many people trusted him when he went on TV was that he was a straight shooter, he said things that offended the powerful, he stirred things up, and he didn’t care. Certain of those moments had been enshrined forever in YouTube clips and Reddit memes: taking down a Republican senator who didn’t believe in evolution, destroying a climate change denier in an impromptu sidewalk confrontation, reducing a movie star to tears on the Today show by telling her that her stand against childhood vaccination made her personally responsible for the deaths of thousands of babies.

So, in a way, there were two questions in his head at the same time: whether he would lie, and whether he could lie.

As to the first question, was it okay for him to lie if it would make billions of people go to their deaths a little happier?

As to the second, would people sense it? Would they detect a shift in the tone of his voice, the set of his face, when he was just standing there in front of the camera talking shit?

That was the real question. Whether he could pull it off. Because if he couldn’t pull it off — if he couldn’t lie convincingly — then there was no point in even trying.

And he was pretty sure that he couldn’t do it.

One of the ice cubes in Doob’s glass let out a little pop as it underwent thermal fracturing.

Doob thought of Sean Probst, now half a year into his quest to fetch a big piece of ice. He couldn’t believe it had been that long already.

You could get used to anything. You got used to it and then time raced by, and before you knew it, time was up.

He remembered people asking difficult questions around the time of Sean’s departure for the L1 gate. What the hell was this crazy billionaire doing? Clearly, it was not part of the official plan. The official plan did not seem to recognize a need for a huge piece of ice. But Sean Probst believed it was so important that he was willing to go up there personally and take care of the problem. There was a good chance he would die in the process, or come back so broken from radiation exposure and long-term weightlessness that his health would never recover. And so people had asked Doob what he thought Sean was thinking. And Doob, who hadn’t studied it at the time, had answered vaguely, saying that water was always a good thing to have in space: you could drink it, grow crops with it, use it for radiation shielding, split it into hydrogen and oxygen for rocket fuel, or pipe it through hoses to radiate excess heat into space. All of which was quite true, but sort of begged the question. It was so blindingly obvious that NASA must have thought of it already. What additional demand for water was Sean Probst seeing that NASA had failed to notice, or turned a blind eye to?

Later Doob had figured it out based on background conversations with people at Arjuna and scuttlebutt reaching him through friends working on the planning of the Cloud Ark. It was all about propellant. The Cloud Ark would have to burn a lot of it. Sean didn’t think they had enough.

So he had gone up there and done something about it.

Because Sean wasn’t a talker. He was a doer. And as such he didn’t have to agonize, as Doob was doing now, about what he was going to say. What his public stance was going to be. How he was going to be positioned and perceived.

“That’s a hundred days from now,” Doob said.

He’d been silent for so long that the other occupants of the Oval Office were a bit startled. J.B.F.’s attention had wandered to a tablet on her desk, and Pete Starling was looking out the window.