Two full days after the Scatter Cloud hit the moon, it was still the only thing being talked about on the news channels. Samantha frowned as she sat in front of her television watching a man talking in front of a large map. It looked like a weather map, but instead of a weather forecast it had large areas of blue showing those areas that would be flooded at lunar perigee. She changed channel irritably to see a man standing in a street interviewing passers by and asking them what plans they were making to deal with the crisis. An elderly couple told him that they had no intention of leaving their house, even though it would soon be under two metres of water. “We've lived there for fifty years,” the stooped, grey haired man declared, putting one arm around his equally frail wife. “We can't be going through all that upheaval at our time of life.”

Another channel had a reporter standing in the middle of a wide expanse of moorland, empty except for the occasional clump of gorse and bracken. A subtitle at the bottom of the screen said that it was Dartmoor, the site of one of the new refugee cities the government was going to build. The reporter was talking to two people. One of them was a government spokesman who was saying that they couldn't build on farmland because they would need every inch of it for food production when half of it had been ruined by salt water. The other men, meanwhile, turned out to be an environmentalist who was protesting the spoiling of a protected national park. Samantha cursed the man's stupidity and changed channel again.

The next channel had a science guy looking at infra red images of the moon. The eastern hemisphere was one almost continuous sea of magma now, she saw. There was a scattering of islands around its perimeter, the remains of lunar highlands, but they were gradually sinking as the rock below them melted, eating away at their foundations. The science guy was saying that, if the ocean continued to grow at the same rate, the last piece of solid ground would disappear within two or three weeks.

Samantha changed channels quickly, not wanting to be reminded of the torment her daughter was going though. The girl was becoming very upset by the moon's transformation. She had memorized the features on the moon the way other children memorized the lyrics of their favourite pop songs or the statistics of a football team, and now all those features were melting away and all her hours of patient, fascinated study would soon be for nothing. The little girl felt betrayed and traumatised. She had torn down all the moon posters that had once adorned her bedroom walls and thrown away every toy with a lunar motif. The day before, Samantha had caught her crying bitterly and had hugged her tightly for nearly an hour before the little girl finally went to sleep.

Samantha knew how she felt. She had studied the moon all her life, made it her life’s work. She had become the world's foremost authority on the moon. Becoming the world's foremost authority on anything was an amazing achievement, and the moon had been the centre of the entire science community's attention as the Chinese had drawn up their plans for a permanent moon base. Now, though, lunar geography and geology had become dead subjects. Her career was dead. Her whole life’s work was dead, and it was hitting her almost like a bereavement.

Finally, she found a channel showing a quiz show and she put down the remote control with relief. She could sit down in her comfy armchair and forget what was happening for a while. Pretend that everything was normal until it was time to go pick up her daughter from school. She thought about going back to the university for a little while, but what would be the point? They would only be watching the moon's torment, documenting it for posterity, and she really couldn't face that right now.

She watched the show for a while, trying to think of the answers before the contestants could and trying to keep track of how much money she would have won if she'd been on the show, but she was restless and found it hard to pay attention. She kept fidgeting on the chair, sitting this way, then shifting to sit that way, until eventually she stood with a sigh of exasperation. She couldn't relax with everything that was happening at the moment, and she guessed that she was far from alone in that. What she needed, she decided, was to burn off some of her nervous energy, and so she decided to go to the shops.

She would buy some food, she decided as she turned off the television and went around the house making sure everything was safely locked up. She had plenty of tinned and frozen food, enough to last them for several weeks, but she didn't want to touch it so long as there was still fresh food in the shops. She put on her warm coat, made sure she had her shopping card in her purse, and left the house.

There was a small, local supermarket just a few hundred metres down the road, and she turned left into Barnaby street to head towards it. Like everyone these days, she glanced up into the sky, even though she knew that the almost full moon was still below the horizon. The sky was on everyone’s minds at the moment, and she was as helpless to resist its call as everyone else. The sky was covered with grey clouds, though. The moon would have been hidden from view even if it had been up there.

Slushy snow covered the ground, it squished under her feet with every step. Footing was treacherous and she had to be careful not to slip. She decided to walk on the strip of grass that ran beside the road rather than the footpath itself. Tyre tracks in the road showed that very few cars had driven along it since the overnight snowfall, but as she walked one drove past her, stuffed full of people and belongings and its roof rack piled high with more belongings. A family beating the rush inland, away from the shore. They must have family somewhere, willing to take them in, she decided.

The road sloped downhill. She'd called up an elevation map of Bristol earlier that day, telling the tablet to mark in blue all those areas less than twenty metres above sea level. Other people must have done the same thing, because after the road dropped below the twenty metre level the number of houses with For Sale signs outside them rose dramatically. She wondered whether they really expected anyone to buy them. Property values in this part of town must have already dropped effectively to zero. She saw a man with a smug look on his face sweeping the snow from the front drive of a house just above the twenty metre level. His less fortunate neighbours further down the hill must already be hating him, she thought. She found herself hoping that the high tide rose higher than expected and flooded his house as well. A little uncharitable of her, she reflected, but she wasn’t feeling very charitable right now. She was miserable and she wanted nothing more than to share it around. Of course, if the tide did rise higher than expected, that increased the risk to her own house. It wasn't that much higher than the house of the smug man, after all.

How long will it be before they have more accurate flood predictions? she wondered. They must have created some computer models by now! Maybe they had, and they hadn't released the news because it was too alarming. Maybe the waters would rise higher than expected. Maybe much higher! Neil might know, she thought. Maybe she should have gone to the university after all. She would go tomorrow, she decided. They'd probably be doing little more than packing everything away, ready to relocate to higher ground, but seeing them would do her good. In the meantime she'd give Neil a phone call as soon as she got home. See if he had any news for her, good or bad.

The shop was packed with people, but not with food. People were panic buying, that great British reaction to any event more serious than a heavy snowfall. Other countries thought it very amusing that the British treated any moderately serious weather event as the end of the world, so she’d been expecting this. There'd be something, though. People wouldn't still be crowding the shop if it was completely empty. It might only be packets of dried rice, but that was still a good meal and it would delay the moment when she had to start eating into her secret stash.

She entered the shop and squeezed her way along the packed aisles. Things were even worse than she'd thought. Everything that could even remotely be counted as food had already gone. Even the biscuits and breakfast cereals had gone. People were wandering up and down the same aisles again and again, staring at the same shelves as if they thought food might have miraculously appeared there since the last time they'd looked. Someone was asking the man behind the counter when he'd be getting another delivery and everyone in the shop paused to hear the answer. Usually about ten, tomorrow, the man replied, looking scared.

Most of the customers filed silently out, but to Samantha’s surprise some of them remained, pulling phones from their pockets. She moved close enough to one of them to listen to what she was saying, and heard her telling her husband that she was going to wait there overnight for the delivery. “Can you bring me a sleeping bag, please, and a flask of hot soup,” she said. One of the other customers, also overhearing, stared at the woman in alarm and hurried out faster, risking a slip on the slushy pavement as she left. She was going to come back, Samantha realised, with a sleeping bag and a flask of hot soup of her own. By the time the delivery truck arrived the next morning, there would be a whole crowd of people waiting for it, men and women who'd been camped there all night. The shop would barely be restocked before it was empty again! Fights might well break out. People were scared, and it would only get worse. At the moment there was still plenty of food in storage, but that wouldn’t last. Soon there would be riots, violence, deaths, and she gave silent thanks that she'd been able to stock up in advance. The food she'd hoarded would, hopefully, carry her and Lily through the worst of it. By the time it ran out, the government would hopefully have gotten things sorted out and the country would be settling down again.

She hurried out of the shop before someone recognised her and demanded an update on what was happening, as if she would have any more idea than anyone else. Her job, her expertise, had allowed her to know before everyone else, but by now everyone knew as much as she did. All the news channels and commentators had made sure of that. There was nothing more she'd be able to tell them.

She decided to continue along the street, down towards the river. There was a church on the corner, and even though it wasn't Sunday the sound of music and singing drifted out into the street. Church attendance had spiked sharply just in the couple of days since the news had hit, and the priests and pastors, the imams and the rabbis and all the others were taking advantage of it, holding emergency church services while delighting in the sudden resurgence of their power and influence in society. As if a big man in the sky would come and put everything back to normal, she thought contemptuously as she walked carefully by on the slippery path. It was the big man in the sky who'd caused all this in the first place!

The town of Camby stood on the river Avon, which was a couple of hundred metres wide at this point, and there was a rather nice walk along the riverside which was usually packed with tourists during the summer months. In winter it was usually deserted, and so she was surprised to see quite a crowd of people roaming the riverside, wandering across the slush covered grass right up to the river's edge where the ground dropped thirty centimetres down to the water. There was a morose atmosphere among them, and Samantha realised that they had come to say a sad goodbye to it. The river wasn't tidal here, or at least it never had been. Soon, though, there would be salty sea water covering the grass to a depth of several metres. When it receded, there would be sand and seaweed where the crowds were standing now. As the grass and trees were killed over successive perigee tides it would eventually become just another bare mudflat stinking of salt and fish, the ground cracking open as it was dried by the sun.

The river would still be there after perigee, of course. As the moon temporarily receded to its original distance from the Earth the shoreline would return to its current position, at least until the moon made its next close approach. The high waters would leave a permanent mark on the town, though. Every building she could see would be left uninhabitable, would eventually be destroyed by waves crashing upon them. Sooner or later, maybe years from now, maybe sooner, the perigee tide would coincide with a major storm that would destroy every man made structure less than twenty metres above the current sea level. Piers and breakwaters were designed to withstand that kind of punishment, but the average building was not. Soon, instead of having to walk half a mile to find the beach, the smug man she'd seen earlier would find sand and seaweed right on his doorstep and nothing left between him and the waters edge, half a mile away.

She continued along the river to where the footpath passed under the motorway where it crossed the river on a high bridge. The M5 was one of the busiest, most important roads in Britain, and a fifty kilometre stretch of it was now destined to be flooded for several hours every two weeks, with only the bridge itself rising above the waves. Even when the waters fell again, it would have to be cleared of debris before it was safe to use again, assuming it survived the inundation. Would the authorities go to the bother when they’d have to do it all over again just two weeks later? If they didn't, there would be a lot of heavy traffic using smaller roads passing through small towns and villages, one of the many smaller side effects of the Scatter Cloud’s passing that few people had probably considered yet. All these hundreds, maybe thousands, of smaller consequences might eventually have a bigger impact on the world than the small number of big consequences, she thought as she strolled on, under the bridge and the traffic she could hear thundering past above.

She looked up at the huge concrete structure. Not one of the world’s prettiest bridges, she'd always thought. It was bleak and functional, nothing but great blocks of concrete sitting on top of ugly grey pillars. It was big, though. Four lanes each way with a road surface thirty metres above sea level. Pausing under it, she looked up and experienced a shiver of vertigo as those grey, concrete pillars rose up and up above her. She imagined sea water lapping at those pillars, two thirds of the way up towards the dark underside of the road, and it brought home the magnitude of what was about to happen in a way that nothing had before. She suddenly found himself craving the comfort and safety of her own home. She could close the door behind her, make herself a nice cup of tea and pretend that it wasn't happening, that it had just been a horrible nightmare from which she was now waking up.

She cursed herself as a coward and made herself continue on, past the motorway and on towards the dockyard area. Once one of Britain's most important docks, a certain amount of cargo did still pass through it, but the area had mostly been redeveloped over the past few decades to become a major tourist resort. Even now, in the middle of winter, there were cars parked outside the hotels and visitors strolled around the restaurants, bars and shops, some of them right on the waterside. There were windsurfers out on the water and not all the yachts were moored in the harbour. In the past there had been a street market every Sunday, but there would be no market this week. That was the day that the moon would come barrelling past the Earth, its gravity tearing at the oceans and the very crust of the planet itself. That was the day that everything she was looking at now would be swallowed by the sea to emerge, a few hours later, ruined beyond all further use.

She looked at her watch. Just past noon. She was getting hungry and it was still three hours before Lily would need collecting from school. She decided to go get something to eat. It would be her own way of saying goodbye. She followed the river path towards the harbour, therefore, to where it joined the dock road running down to the waterside.

As she got closer, she saw that there were more people here than she'd first thought. The restaurants were full, packed to bursting with customers and the sounds of conversation. Not happy conversation, though, or at least not entirely happy. More like the kind of conversation that takes place in a wake after a funeral. Outside, people wrapped up in warm coats were taking photographs of themselves and each other against the background of brightly coloured shops, yachts and advertising hoardings.

The air was chilly but the sun was shining brightly enough to create warmth against south facing walls. There was a salt smell in the air from the choppy sea, and gulls walked confidently between the people standing on the paved areas and sitting in the painted metal benches. More gulls flew overhead on the lookout for scraps of food dropped on the ground. Everything was peaceful, tranquil. Everything had a sense of normality that Samantha suddenly found achingly poignant, as if she was looking at old photos in an album showing a way of life that had already vanished.

She looked briefly at the shops, thinking she might be able to buy some food here, but most of them were gift shops for the tourists and those that did sell food were just as empty as the corner shop near her home except for burgers and hot dogs cooked and eaten on the spot, and even they were selling for nearly three times the normal price. She bought two burgers anyway, thinking to make it her main meal of the day, so that she would only have to cook a proper meal for Lily that evening. A small snack would be enough for herself. She asked for double onions on the slabs of meat (might as well get my moneysworth, she thought) and squeezed generous dollops of brown sauce under the top buns. Then she wrapped one of them in a paper towel and tucked it in a coat pocket while she ate the other.

As she ate, she passed a young man peering intently at the screen of his phone and she smiled to herself in amusement. The man had, presumably, come here to enjoy the docks one last time, so he could remember them as they were when they were gone, and there he was with his nose in his phone oblivious to the rest of the world. What was he looking at, she wondered, that couldn’t wait until he was back home? She moved on, putting him out of her mind...

“Betty!” he suddenly cried out, though. “Betty! Come look at this!” Nearby, two young women and another young man looked round from where they'd been gazing out over the water. “What is it, Brett?” one of the woman asked.

“It's the Chinese,” Brett replied in a loud voice, loud enough for everyone in the area to hear. “They say they've got a plan to stop the moon!”

Betty hurried over to see what he was looking at on his phone while Samantha stared in puzzlement. Stop the moon? What did that mean? Despite herself, curiosity drove Samantha over to look over the other woman's shoulder while others also crowded around, some pulling out their own phones.

Brett had one of the news channels on his phone. On it, a Chinese looking spokesman was giving a statement to camera and the young man turned up the volume so everyone could hear what he was saying. “...which will ensure that our planet does not feel the full force of the moon's gravity as it passed us by. We regret that there will still be disruption. Even the brilliance of our scientists cannot entirely prevent it, but the wonderful device that they have created in response to this time of crisis will ensure that it is far less than would otherwise have been the case. Seismic incidents will be greatly reduced, and the tidal bulge will be no higher than five metres, on average, although local geography will cause this to vary from one place to another...”

“What's he talking about?” demanded Samantha. He had to grab the man’s shoulder and pull him around to face her before she could drag his attention away from his phone.

“I missed the start of it,” he replied. “They say they're going to launch a space probe that'll stop us feeling the full force of the moon's gravity.”

Samantha felt the momentary surge of hope ebbing away. “That's impossible,” she said. “It must be a hoax.”

“This is the BBC,” he replied. “If it's a hoax, it's convinced them!”

“They're just reporting what the Chinese are telling them,” said another man who'd been watching the same broadcast on his own phone. “Perhaps it's the Chinese who've been hoaxed.”

“Look!” said Brett, holding his phone up. “It's James Surrey!”

Samantha leaned closer to look, and saw that the Chinese spokesman had been replaced by one of the BBC's most popular newsman. “That was an official statement read on behalf of the Chinese Government,” he said. “The Chinese have offered no information regarding the nature of their new invention, but...” There was a pause while he looked around at people off camera around him. “But many of my colleagues are scientifically well informed and the prevailing opinion here in the studio is that it has to be... That they cannot see how such a thing could be done. I expect we'll be... Yes. We'll be getting some expert opinion on the subject. The BBC is currently trying to reach some scientists and experts to come on the show and tell us what they think. We'll bring you the very latest as we get it. Er, I understand we can now... Yes. Another spokesman for the Chinese government is about to speak.”

James Surrey vanished from the screen, to be replaced by another Chinese looking man. “Jiang Deyao, President of the People's Republic of China, has confirmed the authenticity of the statement just made by Hu Shiying. The brilliant scientists of the People's Republic of China have indeed made a very great breakthrough in science that will allow the...”

Samantha broke away and hurried over to a relatively empty part of the dock, then pulled her own phone from her pocket. She hurriedly called Neil Arndale's number and paced up and down impatiently while she waited for him to answer. “Sam?“ he said at last. “How you doing...?”

“Neil!” she almost shouted. “Is it true?”

”Is what true?”

“The Chinese. What they're saying.”

“What are you talking about?”

Samantha cursed under her breath. “Find a television,” she said. “The Chinese just issued a statement. They say they can protect the Earth from the moon's gravity.”

“What? That's impossible!”

“Turn on the bloody telly!”

There was a pause and the sound of shuffling from the other end. She heard some muffled conversation between Neil and another man and then some more voices whose tone and quality told her that they were coming from a television. “It's the BBC!” she said, not knowing if he still had the phone close enough to his ear to hear.

The voices from the television grew louder as Neil turned up the volume. The Chinese spokesman was still reading his statement telling everyone how brilliant their scientists were and that the extraordinary claims they were making were true, but then he was cut off. “Some BBC guy's just come on,” she heard Neil say.

“So, to recap,” said the BBC guy, and Samantha recognised the voice of James Surrey again. “The Chinese government has just issued the extraordinary claim that they are able to protect this planet from most of the moon’s gravity. They claim that they will launch a probe within the next day or two that will rendezvous with the moon just before it’s closest approach to Earth and that this probe will somehow shield the Earth from the moon's gravity. Now I don’t have to tell you just how extraordinary this claim is. Everyone I've spoken to in the studio is extremely sceptical, to say the least. I've just been informed that Leonard Green, the Government’s Chief Scientific Advisor, has been contacted and is even now on his way to this studio. He should be here within an hour or two, and then we’ll hear what his take on all this is...”

“Sam? You there?” said Neil.

“Still here. So, what do you think?”

“Well, it's crazy! It can’t be done! It's... It's pure science fiction. It has to be a hoax. The Chinese government will probably issue a statement soon saying that someone's been spoofing them. Wait a minute...” There was a short pause. “The guy on the telly’s saying that the Chinese government has issued a statement confirming the claim! They're showing Jiang Deyao himself standing at a podium. He’s speaking in Chinese with subtitles. I suppose the guy doing the subtitles might be in on the hoax...”

“Use the translation app on your phone,” said Samantha. “Find out what he’s really saying.”

“Right.” There was another pause. “The translation is the same as the subtitles,” he said. “He’s really saying it. Maybe he really believes it! Maybe it’s some kind of ploy by his enemies to make him look ridiculous on television. Destroy his credibility so he can be deposed. Something like that.”

“Maybe,” said Samantha. “Guess we'll know in a day or two. Look, I'll pop in tomorrow, Okay? Give you a hand over there. I've been selfish, leaving it all to you.”

“Not at all, there's virtually no work as such going on over here. Watching the moon melting, gathering as much data as we can. You can watch the live feed from your own home as easily as you can here.”

“Yeah, I've been doing it. I just want to help. Guess I just want the company really. See you tomorrow then.”

“Look forward to it.” There was a click as he cut the connection, and Samantha began the long walk home.