Moonseed. Stephen Baxter

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СКАЧАТЬ had looked as if it held life traces; Edinburgh had got a piece of that too.

      And Henry was being sent along with the rock. There was valuable work to be done here, genuine research. But …

      But she’d been with him long enough to understand how he felt.

      The cancellation of Shoemaker was like the cancellation of his whole career; it meant he wasn’t likely to meet the long-term objectives he had set himself, like all scientists, objectives which underlay his choice of particular projects.

      Digging aimlessly into 86047 was, by comparison, no consolation.

      The visitors were still here. A tech opened a cylindrical case inside a glove box, and pulled out a Moon rock: small, fist-sized, nondescript, sawn in half. Geena could see the vertical burns of the saw. The visitor had his picture taken with it, his grinning face outside the glass, the rock held by a black-gloved hand inside the glass, the camera angled so as to avoid the flash’s reflection from the glass.

      And in the sterile light of the lab, the ancient rocks from the Moon – many of them older by a billion years than any rock that had survived on Earth – sat, wizened and lumpy and wilfully irregular, like resentful old men in a rest home.

      3

      Monica Beus was with Alfred Synge, on the Hawaiian island of Oahu.

      She emerged from the dark crater into the blinding light of the sun. She pulled on her sunglasses and checked her floppy hat. She’d snapped Alfred’s head off when he showed up with this big hat for her. For the sun, he said. But he was right, of course; the chemotherapy had left her so bald her scalp would fry like an egg, and she was too damned stubborn, naturally, to wear a wig.

      So be it. She wore the damn hat, and forgave Alfred for his residual love for her.

      Breathing hard from the climb, she clambered on top of an old gun emplacement with a bunch of other tourists and studied the view.

      She was at the highest part of Diamond Head crater, here on Oahu. She was surrounded on three sides by Pacific Ocean. The water was royal blue, laced with whitecaps, in its beauty showing no signs of the problems Venus had brought: the plankton die-backs, the collapse of the food chain in some parts of the oceans, depletion of stocks of fish and mammals. In the south she could see windsurfers skimming over the waves, radiation-proof skinsuits gleaming, their elegance and speed a balance between forces, aerodynamic and gravitational. In the west, the sun was already dropping towards the horizon. To the north the Miracle Mile along Waikiki Beach was a thin, golden strip of sand walled off from the interior by slab-like high-rise hotels. Sun, sand, sea, tourists.

      And when she looked back she could see into the crater of a volcano two million years dead.

      They found a seat. Alfred dug under his poncho and pulled out a laptop; without preamble, he started showing her images of Venus.

      ‘Before and after,’ he said drily. He retrieved a classic Venus-from-space image, the featureless pool ball. ‘Venus was our neighbour,’ he said. ‘At its closest, only a hundred times as far away as the Moon. And it wasn’t so different from Earth in size. But that’s as good as it gets. Otherwise, it was a hell-hole. Fifty miles of carbon dioxide, laced with a little sulphuric acid. So hot the rocks glowed, dull orange.’

      He showed her surface images, craters and domes and valleys and mountains, constructed from a radar survey by the Magellan spacecraft. ‘Venus was covered by volcanism. There were flood lavas and volcanic cones and domes, and other features which don’t have any analogues on Earth. We didn’t see plate tectonics, like Earth; we think Venus was a one-plate planet dominated by hot-spot volcanism. My favourite hypothesis is that there was a catastrophic global resurfacing every half-billion years.’

      ‘A what?’

      ‘The crust melting, globally. There are problems with the heat flow from the interior otherwise … It would be like five hundred million years of geology crammed into a few centuries. Now,’ he said. ‘After. An image taken by the Hubble this morning.’

      There was no evidence of a spherical shape. She made out a crudely-defined, blurred oval, with extensive tails, like a comet’s.

      Alfred said, ‘You’re looking at a cloud of atmospheric gas, mostly frozen, and ground-up rock.’

      ‘The rock’s from the surface?’

      ‘Mostly the mantle, as far as we can tell. Most of the mass is still concentrated near the point where the centre of gravity of the planet used to be. We tried radar pulses from Arecibo, and … Well. Monica, we can’t find a solid object there any more. The substance of the planet is spreading out along the orbit. The ring probably won’t stay stable; the perturbation by Earth’s gravity will –’

      ‘Hold it. Alfred, I can’t follow you. You’re saying that Venus no longer exists.’

      ‘Not as a coherent solid, no.’

      ‘That’s impossible. How much energy would it take to destroy a planet?’

      He considered. ‘Well, roughly speaking, you would have to lift every piece of rock to escape velocity, out of Venus’s own gravity well. There’s a quantity called the gravitational binding energy … For Venus, which had eighty per cent of Earth’s mass, it works out as ten to power thirty-two joules – umm, something like a thousand billion times our nuclear arsenal.’

      ‘Just for the record, we aren’t talking about your global volcanic resurfacing here, are we?’

      He smiled. ‘Even that would be quite a spectacle, if it occurred in the lifetime of this astronomer. But no, it’s orders of magnitude beyond that.’ He rubbed his nose, smearing the gaudy sun block there. ‘Those are big numbers. But there’s another way of looking at it. If you consider the energy density required, averaged over the planet’s volume, it isn’t so high. Something like a tanker of gas per cubic yard or so, I guess.’

      ‘What are you telling me?’

      ‘We think we are looking at some funny physics over there, Monica. Which is why you and the rest of the particle physicists are going to have to work on this with us.’

      ‘Funny physics?’

      ‘Look at this.’ He pulled up results from a cosmic ray detector, tracks left in bubble chambers, accompanying analysis. ‘We’ve found some strange products from the Venus event. Some exotic beasties, escaping from that particular zoo. Have you seen this result?’

      A spider-web of tracks, of splits and decay events and spirals and tiny explosions.

      She whistled. ‘No. I’d remember.’

      ‘Well, the results haven’t made it onto the nets yet. The authors are still checking.’

      ‘I don’t blame them,’ she said. ‘If this is right –’

      ‘You’re looking at a particle with a charge a fraction of an electron’s. Which is something we’ve never seen before.’

      ‘And this mass –’ She looked at him. ‘Alfred, this is the signature of an elementary particle СКАЧАТЬ