Seveneves

“There’s a lot about this Cloud Ark thing that I, and my associates, don’t know yet. We can’t sit around waiting for perfect knowledge. We have to act immediately on long-lead-time work that addresses what we do know. And what we do know is that we need to bring water to the Cloud Ark. Physics and politics conspire to make it difficult to bring it up from the ground. Fortunately, I own an asteroid mining company. We have already identified some comet cores in easy-to-reach orbits. We’re narrowing down the list. And we’re preparing an expedition.”

Konrad well understood the timing of such missions. “How long, Sean?”

“Two years,” Sean said.

“Well,” Ivy said, “I guess you’d better get on it, then. How can we help?”

“Give me all of your robots,” Sean said. He turned to look at Dinah.

“SINCE WE HAVE DECLARED OPEN SEASON ON BULLSHIT …” DINAH began as soon as she had gotten Sean Probst alone in her shop.

Sean held both of his hands up like a fugitive surrendering to the FBI. “Where would you like to begin?”

“You said that you have identified some comets. That you were narrowing down the list. That’s crap. You wouldn’t have come up here without a specific plan.”

“We’re going after Greg’s Skeleton.”

“What?”

“Comet Grigg-Skjellerup. Sorry. Somebody’s offspring called it Greg’s Skeleton and the name stuck.” Sean always referred to children as offspring.

She’d heard of it. “How big is that?”

“Two and a half, three kilometers.”

“That’s a lot of arklet fuel.”

Sean nodded. He crossed his arms over his body and looked around the shop.

“Hard to move something that big.”

Still no answer.

“You’re going to jam a nuke into it and turn it into a rocket, aren’t you?”

He raised his eyebrows briefly. Since this was the only plausible way of moving something that huge, he didn’t consider it worthy of an extended answer.

“We got really lucky on the timing,” he remarked.

“You’re going to fly a radioactive ice ball the size of the Death Star back here just as the shit is hitting the fan—then what?”

“Dinah, I need to share something with you in confidence.”

“Well, it’s about fucking time is all I can say.”

DAY 73

Doob had almost been to space once, about ten years ago. An acquaintance of his who had made a lot of money in hedge funds had dropped twenty-five million dollars on a twelve-day trip to the International Space Station aboard a Soyuz capsule. It was traditional for the customer to designate a backup—a sort of understudy—who would take his place in the event of some illness or mishap. Since the backup might be swapped in at any time up to shortly before launch, they had to go through all the same training as the customer. And that was really the point, as far as the hedge fund man was concerned. An introvert, he needed someone who could act as a connection to the general public and put an appealing face on the whole thing. So he had selected Doc Dubois as his understudy. They’d set up a website and a blog, and arranged for photographers to follow Doob’s progress through the training program, with occasional glimpses of the hedge fund man in the background. In effect, Doob had acted as a publicity decoy. No one made any bones about this. Doob had been more than happy to do it. The training had been great fun, the hedge fund man had been generous in his spending on the website, and Doob had been able to produce a lot of good video explaining fun facts about spaceflight.

And there had even been the small chance that he might go. A week before the scheduled launch, he had flown to Baikonur, bringing his wife and kids with him, video crew in tow. They had watched in a certain amount of amazement as the launch vehicle, a fantailed Soyuz-FG, had been towed horizontally across the steppe on a special train, complete with smoke-belching locomotive, to the launch pad. And this really was little more than a pad, a concrete slab on the almost lunar surface of the Kazakh steppe with a few pieces of apparatus around it to hoist the rocket up off the train and pump fluids into it. The contrast with the NASA way of doing things was stark to the point of being somewhat hilarious. Doob’s youngest son, Henry, eleven years old at the time, had failed to pay attention to the elevation of the mighty rocket to its vertical position because he was distracted by the sight of a couple of stray dogs copulating a hundred meters away from ground zero. The launch bunker, shockingly close to the pad, had a little vegetable patch out in front of it where the technicians were growing cucumbers and tomatoes; they explained that the concrete wall soaked up sunlight during the day and helped keep the vegetables warm at night.

Three days before launch, the hedge fund man had been nipped by a stray dog while rehearsing a launch pad escape sequence, and everything had been thrown into disarray as the dog was chased across the steppe by militiamen in wheeled vehicles, locals on horseback, and a helicopter gunship. After they had run it to ground they had shipped it off to a veterinary lab to be checked for rabies. Only three hours before launch, word had come back that the dog was clean. Doob’s name had been struck from the manifest and replaced by that of the hedge fund manager. Both relieved and disappointed, Doob had stood on terra firma, very close to the launch pad. Tavistock Prowse had come out to cover the launch. He had come equipped with all kinds of electronic gadgets that had seemed cool at the time. He had stood there on the steppe, facing Doob and the rocket, aiming a video camera at him and catching his narration as the giant vehicle had fired up its engines and hurled itself into the sky.

More than anything else, that image had made Dr. Harris into Doc Dubois and launched his career. It had also led, within days, to divorce proceedings initiated by his wife. She had a number of complaints about his performance as a husband, many of long standing, some that she could barely articulate. But somehow all of them had been summed up and crystallized by the fact that, after largely ignoring his responsibilities as a husband and father for several weeks while training for this launch in Russia, he had spent the actual moment of launch not gathered in a safe place with his children but outside, dangerously close to the rocket, with his bro Tav, ingratiating himself to millions of followers with excited and hilarious commentary.

One way or another, Doob had been paying for it ever since. Partly in the negative sense of suffering just penalties for his sins but partly in the more positive sense of spending time with his kids when he could. And this had become more difficult as they had graduated from school and gone out into the world. He was making a particular effort to do it now that they were all under a death sentence.

On A+0.73, Doob flew into Seattle, rented an SUV, and drove to the campus of the University of Washington. Along the way he stopped at a couple of outdoor stores to pick up some camping equipment. This was now expensive. People had begun hoarding that sort of thing in anticipation of a collapse of civilization. But only a few people. Most understood that there was little point in taking to the hills when the Hard Rain began. Freeze-dried food and backpacking stoves were difficult to come by, but down sleeping bags and fancy tents were still in stock.

Henry was now a junior in the computer science department, living with some of his friends near the campus in a rental house, a classic Seattle down-at-heels Craftsman bungalow half digested by blackberries and English ivy.

In a certain way it made no sense anymore to speak of anyone as being a student at a particular stage in a degree program. And yet people went on thinking this way, kind of in the way that someone who has just been diagnosed with a terminal illness will go on getting up and going to work every morning, not so much out of habit as because the knowledge of impending doom makes them wish to assert an identity.

He was tempted to park the SUV illegally, since, according to his calculations, the authorities were not likely to catch up with him and demand payment of the parking ticket before the end of the world, but it seemed that most of the people of Seattle were still obeying the rules and so he did likewise.

He found Henry, all four of his housemates, and five other students all crammed into the ground floor of the bungalow, keeping it warm in the January chill with their body heat and the warmth emanating from a rat’s nest of PCs, laptops, and routers. A quick census of empty pizza boxes suggested that they had been working all night.

“I’ll explain it to you while we drive” had been Henry’s promise to his dad when Doob had asked him on the phone last night what he was doing. This morning, other than getting up from his La-Z-Boy to give his dad a hug and tell him “I love you,” he didn’t have much more to say.

Every parent of a teenager gets used to it: the moment in a child’s life when he or she decides that certain facts are just too much trouble to explain to Mom or Dad. The parents can’t, and needn’t, know every last little thing. They just have to accept this, be content with what they can glean on their own, and move on. Henry, of course, had passed through that veil some years ago. Doob had swallowed his pride and accepted it as every parent must. It was part of growing up. But back in those days the subject matter had been fundamentally uninteresting: the size of Henry’s collection of Magic: The Gathering cards, the weight lifting program assigned him by his football coach, and who had a crush on whom at school. It was easy for Doob to pretend he didn’t care about that stuff.

What he was seeing over the shoulders of the students in this room looked a good deal more interesting. And that, in a way, hurt.

All of them, of course, knew that Henry was the son of the famous Doc Dubois. While trying to play it cool, they all sought a chance to shake his hand and say hi. Doob chewed the fat with them while his eyes strayed to the stuff they had blue-taped to the walls of the bungalow: printouts of CAD drawings, schedule grids, Gantt charts, maps. He was obviously looking at some sort of engineering project in the works, but he couldn’t make out what, exactly. On the kitchen table a MakerBot was producing a small plastic part, watched intently by a young woman who was talking on her phone in a mix of English and Mandarin.

Conversation was interrupted by the beep-beep-beep of a backup alarm, loud and growing louder. Someone pulled the front door open, letting in a wash of wet, cool Pacific air, to reveal a Ryder box truck backing up onto the lawn, heading straight for the front door. Some unkillable instinct in Doob’s head made him glance disapprovingly at the muddy ruts it was leaving in the lawn, made him issue a little tut-tut-tut at these irresponsible youth for damaging the grass—grass that in two years would be a thin smear of carbon black over a lifeless cake of hardened clay, presuming it didn’t suffer a direct hit and become part of a huge glass-lined crater.

The truck didn’t stop soon enough and wrecked a wooden banister beside the front steps.

Everyone laughed. The laughter had a curious tone, a mixture of childish delight with something darker, expectant of much worse to come.

These kids were really adapting better than he was.

He had no idea what was going on, but it seemed to involve throwing everything into the back of the box truck. He stood around for a while with his hands in his pockets, since he didn’t know which stuff was going and which was staying. But when they threw in the sofa it became clear they were abandoning the house. He began helping. After a certain point the box truck filled up. Then they began pulling things out of it and putting them back in in a more orderly style. Doob finally hit his stride, stepping into the role of wily old man with excellent packing skills and pointing out ways to use the space more efficiently.

Eventually someone went and got another box truck. Apparently the rental agency was letting them take them for free. Some day laborers wandered down the street from a home improvement center and helped pack. The home improvement market had gone bust. Doob saw traces of Amelia in their faces and wondered how they had first heard the news.

Six of the kids packed themselves and their computers, clothes, and as many tools as they owned or could borrow into the SUV that Doob had rented at the airport. They roped a couple of bicycles and some camping gear to the luggage rack. Doob had no idea where they were going, or why, but they seemed to be planning to construct a new civilization out of blue tarps and zip ties.

They ended up in a caravan of twenty vehicles, headed east out of town at about two in the afternoon. At this time of the year, at Seattle’s high latitude, that gave them about two hours of remaining daylight.

Most of the kids fell asleep immediately. Henry, riding shotgun, made a touching effort to stay awake and then fell into slumber. Henry was a sweet kid and Doob knew that when he woke up he would apologize. But Henry wasn’t a parent, and he didn’t understand that when you were, almost nothing was more satisfying than seeing your kid sleep.

So, feeling as content as it was possible to be under the circumstances, Doob drove into the darkling mountains with his SUV-load of slumbering passengers. The caravan gradually dissolved into the general stream of traffic. Most of the passenger cars peeled off at the suburban exits, before the road began to gain serious altitude. Doob wondered, as he always did, what the hell they were doing: Continuing to go to jobs and school, just to fill the days before the end? But it was none of his business.

Beyond Issaquah, any vehicle still on the interstate was probably headed for the high cold desert on the east side of the mountains. A few people were still interested in skiing—skiing!—but those cars were easily identified. Most of the other vehicles fit the general description of those that had been a part of their original caravan from the university: heavy-laden box trucks, SUVs and pickups with provisions and camping gear.

Doob realized that he had somehow become a sort of Okie.