The moon was beginning to loom large, Samantha saw as she waited outside the school. It was now three times closer than its previous orbit had ever brought it to the Earth and was three times bigger in the sky. Everyone who went outside, or who went close to a window, paused for a moment to stare up at it and feel a shiver of primordial fear. It was half full now, which should have meant that craters and mountains were picked out in beautiful detail by the sun shining sideways across them, but half of those craters and mountains no longer existed and those that were left were hidden, along with the magma ocean that now covered nearly half the surface, by the thick layers of clouds that shrouded them.

The clouds had details of their own, though, she saw. The supersonic winds that blew from the hot, molten side to the cold, frozen side of the small world left streaks in the thick, volcanic dust running parallel across the dividing line between the moon's light and dark sides. There was also a ragged line of lighter patches running north to south where the clouds were rising higher than everywhere else and being lit by the sun. Each patch must mark the site of a massive fountain of molten rock, she mused, where magma was gushing out from cracks in the crust as it slowly broke apart in advance of the growing magma ocean.

There was enough material there for generations of researchers, she thought, and she really ought to be right at the forefront of things, studying the convulsions of the tortured moon and learning things about their natural satellite that might otherwise have remained unknown for centuries to come. The idea of returning to work sickened her, though. She had loved the moon too much to take any joy in its present condition. She had explained this to Neil and other former colleagues, but her phone kept ringing anyway with journalists, astronomers and other scientists wanting her views on something or other to do with the moon.

The latest had been the Chinese mission, of course. Was it really possible? some journalist had asked her, and of course she'd answered No! It's not bloody possible! and then cut the connection with a savage jab of her finger at the screen. What were they playing at? she wondered yet again as she paced up and down in front of the iron railings like a tiger in a cage. Anyone with three functioning brain cells knew that you couldn't just turn off an object's mass like that! The Chinese were obviously up to something else up there, and no doubt there were plenty of people all around the world trying to work out what, but people like her probably wouldn’t find out until years later, if at all.

The reaction of the church authorities had amused her, though. When being interviewed by journalists on television, they all said that they were praying for the success of the mission and encouraging their followers to do the same, but it was obvious that their hearts weren't in it. Church attendance had skyrocketed in the last few days and all the priests and ministers and rabbis and imams were loving it! The supremacy of God in the world, the pitiful triviality of all man's works in the face of what the Almighty could do, was bringing about a resurgence of religious power and influence that they hadn't thought possible!

If the Chinese mission succeeded, though, then it would all be undone. It would be the mastery of mankind that would be affirmed, possibly bringing about the final collapse of religious belief that academics had been talking about for a hundred years. It wouldn’t have been so bad if a crew of Christian astronauts were doing it. Then the various churches of the world could have claimed that they were acting on behalf of God, that they were doing His work. Some people might have wondered why God had knocked the moon into its new orbit only to inspire his followers to put it back again, but the Church had ways of fielding questions like that. Good, God fearing Christians had done it, and that would have been what mattered. For the Chinese to do it, though... A nation of idolaters and atheists who cared nothing for the Christian God! The old ‘God moves in mysterious ways’ thing just wouldn’t cut it this time and the church authorities knew it. It was obvious even to the least observant and perceptive of people that the church was secretly praying for the mission to fail.

The radio was playing music in her ears, which then stopped for the news headlines. It was all about the moon, of course. High tides overwhelming sea defences across half the world and low tides leaving vast stretches of sea bed exposed across the other half. All large ships, both civilian and military, were heading out into deep water to ride out the event. There was news of earthquakes and volcanic eruptions as well, including some in parts of the world that had never known such things before. One such earthquake, a five on the Richter scale, had had its epicentre in South Wales, just a few miles away. She'd felt it herself, around midday, as she was getting herself some lunch. Just a minor tremor in the greater scheme of things, but a harbinger of what was to come.

The main event would be tomorrow, when the moon made its closest approach. A period of about six hours as the passage of the moon and the rotation of the Earth meant that the moon would seem to linger over the Atlantic Ocean, hanging almost motionless in the sky. Every television channel and internet site was still giving warnings and advice, and the refugee camps for people fleeing coastal cities were still only half complete. There were riots as people protested the government’s stockpiling of food and medical supplies, and people suspected of hoarding were being attacked, their homes broken into. That had worried Samantha more than anything else as she thought about her packed freezers and the piles of tinned food in the cupboard under the stairs. Things were going to be bad, and that was just in Britain, one of the richest countries in the world. What it would be like in poorer countries threatened the sanity of anyone who thought about it for too long.

She felt her eyes being dragged back towards the horizon, where the huge moon hung above the rooftops, soon to drop out of sight until the next morning. Was it her imagination, or were the clouds thinning on its eastern limb? There was a redness beginning to shine through that she hadn't noticed before, as if the magma ocean were gradually becoming visible. She supposed it was possible. As the air was heated and rose, it would spread out sideways in all directions, pushing the clouds ahead of it, and there were no longer any magma geysers in that area to create new smoke. The magma ocean would be giving off gas, of course, but it would mainly be transparent gas, like carbon dioxide. Maybe even water vapour! Now that was an exciting possibility! She knew from her past work that there was a great deal of water trapped inside the moon, deep below the surface. Maybe there would soon be water clouds drifting across the face of the moon, condensing and falling as rain to evaporate again as it neared the molten rock below.

It wouldn’t last, of course. The water would be split by sunlight into hydrogen and oxygen and the hydrogen would be lost to space, but that would probably take a very long time. There might be pretty clouds drifting across the moon’s magma ocean for thousands of years to come. She chuckled to herself at the realisation that she still couldn’t stop thinking like a scientist, like a lunar astronomer, even though she was pretty much determined to give up that profession and find some other way of making a living. She could teach, she thought. She would enjoy teaching science. Perhaps even get a job at the new Bristol University, wherever it turned out to be, but as a teacher rather than a researcher. It might even give her the chance to keep in touch with the University's ongoing research projects... No. She was done with research. Let someone else pry out the moon's secrets. To her it would be too much like attending the autopsy of an old friend.

The school bell rang and Samantha turned to face the school. A few minutes later children began to emerge, running to be met by parents or walking in groups of two or three, chatting and giggling. She spotted Lily walking alone, her satchel slung over one shoulder, and noted her unhappy, downward looking face with concern. The other children had been teasing her about the moon again, she guessed. Lily had always been a popular girl among the other pupils, she knew, but everyone knew who her mother was, and everyone knew that Lily was also obsessed with the moon and that was a lure that her classmates couldn’t resist. They called her Moon Girl now and pretended to blame her for all the upheavals the world was undergoing. Lily was smart enough to deflect the abuse by treating it as a joke and going along with it, but it was taking its toll, wearing her down a little bit at a time, and Samantha found herself hating the other girls for it. She'd spoken to the teachers, but she knew there was only so much they could do without making it worse. If they punished the bullies, the abuse from Lily’s classmates might turn from joking to genuine hatred.

“You okay, Sweetheart?” she asked, putting her arms around the little girl.

“Yes.”

“Have they been calling you names again?”

“Not too much. They're just joking.”

“I know you don’t like it, but the trick is to pretend that you don’t care. That way they'll soon get bored and start making fun of someone else.”

“I know. You told me yesterday.”

“Does it work?”

“I think so.” She was lying, Samantha knew, but she let it go.

“I hate the moon!” the little girl suddenly burst out. “I used to love it but now I hate it! I'm sorry!”

“Yes, I know,” said Samantha. “I hate it too.”

Lily stared at her in astonishment. “I thought you loved it!”

“I used to, but not any more. The moon's going to kill a lot of people very soon. I know it’s silly to hate it, because it’s just a big lump of rock, but I hate it anyway.”

Lily kept on staring at her, and there was suddenly such adoration in the little girl's face that it almost made Samantha burst into tears. “Come on, Sweetheart,” she said, struggling to keep her voice steady. The love she suddenly felt for her daughter was so powerful that it made it difficult to speak. “Let's go home.” Lily took one of her mother’s hands in hers and they walked back to the car together.

The doors opened for them, they got in and the seatbelts fastened themselves across the two passengers. “Home, M’lady?” the car asked.

“Home, Parker,” Samantha replied. The car waited for another car to go past, then pulled out into the street.

“Were there many children absent from your class, Lily?” she asked as they sped along the road.

”A few,” Lily replied. “Mary wasn't there today, or Tina or Habiib. I heard Sonja tell Claire that she's going to live with her aunt in Chipping Sodbury tonight.”

Samantha nodded. Bristol wasn't a coastal city. It was a river city and, even though large parts of it were destined to be inundated, most of it wouldn’t be. Samantha and Lily lived twenty nine metres above sea level, and the latest flood maps were predicting that the water wouldn’t rise higher than twenty five metres here. Samantha knew how the predictions were made and had confidence in them. They said that the shopping centre she mainly relied upon for her weekly groceries would remain above water, and so would the roads linking them with the rest of the country. Once the initial panic was over and the country settled down into its new reality, food supplies would be regular and reliable. In a way, it was good fortune that they were so close to the flood zone because it meant that they wouldn’t be overwhelmed by refugees fleeing the rising waters. They would all go further inland and pass them by. She felt safe remaining in her home, therefore, and apparently most of the families whose children attended St Randall’s Primary School felt the same way.

They all lived several metres higher above sea level than Samantha did, though. As the car drove downhill they passed streets where most of the people had left, probably staying with relatives for the duration of the first perigee until they saw whether their houses survived the event. If that proved to be the case, they would probably return and stay at home for future perigees, but for the time being the part of the city in which she lived had turned into a ghost town. There was scarcely a parked car to be seen as they entered their street, and the windows of the houses they passed were dark and empty. Last night’s snowfall still lay largely undisturbed despite it being mid afternoon. It gave the street an eerily post apocalyptic feel, as if some disaster had already befallen. Samantha and her daughter sat in an uncomfortable silence as the car reversed itself into their drive, therefore. As the seatbelts released them and the doors opened, an eerie silence greeted them, broken only by the distant sound of an aircraft passing far overhead. Somehow, the sound only served to make the silence even deeper and more powerful, though, and they both hurried for the door.

“Are we going to be okay, mummy?” asked Lily as her mother stood in front of the door camera and the house computer read her face. “When the moon goes past?”

“Yes, Sweetheart,” said Samantha confidently, reaching a hand over to give her daughter’s hair a playful ruffle. “We're going to be just fine.” Then the door opened and Lily dashed in, the television already turning itself on. The sound of a children’s program broke the silence and created a cosy atmosphere as Samantha closed the door to shut out the cold, empty world outside.

☆☆☆

Frank was staring at the two metre whiteboard, Eddie saw as he entered the small lecture hall. The board was covered with notes and equations, some of it of a nature that even Eddie, who had an advanced degree in mathematics, found totally unfathomable. Alice had told him that he often spent time here, while waiting for an experiment or as simulation to finish, trying to find a way to model what the mass dampener did.

Frank had admitted that he had no idea how the alien device worked, Alice said, but that he might be able to figure out what it did, in much the same way that an ancient Greek philosopher might be able to figure out how an internal combustion engine worked while knowing nothing about chemistry or electricity. He might be able to trace the mechanics of the engine, from the pistons to the clutch to the gearbox, for instance, and in the same way Frank was hoping to be able to trace the mathematics of the mass dampener. He would spend hours in here, therefore, or in any vacant room with a whiteboard onto which he could download his equations, and then just stare at it while things went on in his head that few other human beings could comprehend.

Eddie was a theoretical physicist, that being the reason Ben had chosen him for the project, but he was also a practical engineer and he had spent most of the time since his arrival staring at the reverse engineered prototype mass dampener, trying to figure it out. It was one hundred per cent human technology, so he thought he ought to be able to figure out what was going on when it was turned on, and just a little while ago something had occurred to him that had made him stand up straight and tremble with excitement. Probably it was nothing. Probably he’d made a mistake, misunderstood something, overlooked something obvious. Or perhaps, he dared to hope, he'd had a genuine insight, something that hadn’t occurred to anyone else in the fifty years they'd been studying the alien ship. He needed to talk to Frank, he decided. The slightly older man would probably see where he'd made the mistake and point it out to him, patiently and with consideration for his feelings, and Eddie would leave humbled and embarrassed. Or perhaps not...

Frank was so totally engrossed in the equations that he completely failed to hear Eddie approaching. Eddie stood beside him for a few moments, watching as the other man's eyes scanned across the arcane symbols and then closed as he tried to visualise something, something that could not he displayed on any computer screen. Eddie hesitated to disturb him, in case he derailed some important train of thought, but then Frank opened his eyes again and this time he saw the other man standing beside him. ‘Eddie!” he said, smiling. “Sorry, I tend to lose myself in my own little world...”

“Sorry to disturb you,” said Eddie. ‘Is this a bad time?”

“Not at all! What can I do for you?”

Eddie's eye had been caught by an equation near the top of the board, though. “Is that the Holmes-Palekar equation?” he said. “You think the mass dampener uses higher dimensions?”

Frank reached up to touch the equation and drag it down to eye level. A couple of other equations moved aside to make room for it. “It would explain many things if it made use of a Douglas-b manifold. We know that there are at least thirteen dimensions, with all but four of them rolled up small so that we don't notice them..." He paused with an embarrassed smile. "Sorry. Cyclically reduced. I'm so used to lecturing to high school kids..."

Eddie smiled back. "It's okay. Rolled up small is just how I think of it. So you think that the mass dampener re-orders them according to their Hawking quotient."

“Something like that. So far, the only thing in its favour is that it fits what we know about it, but we know so little that a great many different theories would fit. I'm trying to think of a testable prediction. Something that could prove the idea to be completely wrong.”

Eddie stared at the wall, thinking. “I may be able to help you there,” he said after a moment. “I wanted to talk to you because something occurred to me while I was looking at your prototype. With a slight adjustment, I think it might be possible to increase an object's mass, instead of reducing it. If your theory is right, it would be re-ordering the rolled up dimensions according to their inverse Hawking quotient."

“What adjustments are you talking about?” asked Frank.

Eddie produced his phone and displayed a diagram of the prototype mass dampener on it. “You see, at the moment you have polarised phonons going into the superfluid lens here, focusing them onto the photino crystal here.”

“Yes. Something similar seems to happen in the original alien devices. We just substituted each part of the alien device with a piece of our own tech that we thought did more or less the same thing. It works, sort of. I think of the prototype as like the Flintstones’ car. Replace the wheels with cylinders of rock, replace the engine with Fred’s feet and so on. You end up with a sort of a car that sort of works without having the slightest idea how a fuel cell works, or a nanoprocessor.”

Eddie grinned. “I like that!” he said. “Bedrock technology! Well, what I thought was, what if we did this?” He activated a short animation that showed the prototype rearranging itself, the components attaching to each other in a different order. “You see? Now the superfluid lens focuses the phonons here instead...”

Frank stared at the diagram for a few moment, then closed his eyes. Eddie stared at him in fascination. Behind those eyelids, a private laboratory was coming to life. A laboratory of the imagination in which particles and forces interacted with each other. In which miracles of advanced physics could take place without a single superconducting coil or crystal pump. Eddie wished he could see what Frank was seeing right now. Wished he could peer into the others man's head and get a glimpse of what a true genius’s thought processes looked like. If only it were possible! Some kind of telepathy...

Frank opened his eyes and stared back at Eddie. “Where did you get this idea from?” he asked.

“I don't know, really. I was just looking at the prototype, trying to make sense of what each bit did, and it just sort of came to me.”

“Some people can do that, apparently. Natural insight, they call it. I've never trusted the idea. Science should be orderly, systematic. You gather as much data as possible, you look for patterns. You devise a theory, use it to make a prediction and then conduct an experiment to test the prediction. Each step follows logically from the previous one. You can break the process down into a series of steps so simple that you can explain it to a six year old. This kind of wild intuition, though. Simply jumping to a conclusion without bothering with the intervening steps. I've always thought it to be lazy, sloppy.”

“I'm sorry, I shouldn’t have disturbed you...”

Eddie turned to go but Frank grabbed his arm to stop him. “I said I used to think that. This idea of yours. I would never have thought of it. Maybe a few years from now I'd have arrived at it by slow, logical steps... The more I think about it, though, the more I think it’s an idea worth trying, even if it has no practical applications. Why would you want to increase an object's mass?”

“The exhaust problem.”

“The what? The exhaust... What problem?”

Eddie stared at him. “We thought about pushing the moon back into its original orbit, remember? But the exhaust of a rocket engine would have its mass reduced, along with the moon...”

“Build a mass amplifier!” said Frank, becoming excited in turn. “A small one, just big enough for its area of effect to surround the rocket engine, cancelling out the mass dampener. The moon has minuscule mass, but the rocket and its exhaust has full mass.”

“Exactly!”

‘It won't work, though.”

“Eh? Why not?”

“You'd have to anchor your rocket engine to solid ground, so it can push it. It also has to be on the moon's trailing hemisphere, because we want to push the moon forward. Move it faster so that it moves into a higher orbit.”

“Yes. So what?”

“So the moon now turns on its axis once every fifteen days or so. It used to be every twenty seven days, but the impact of the Scatter Cloud left it with a faster spin. We need to give the moon a push when it’s at apogee, the furthest point in its orbit...”

Eddie stared in horror as he got it. “fourteen days after apogee, when it’s once again four hundred thousand kilometres from the Earth, it will have made nearly two full rotations. The magma ocean will be on its trailing hemisphere.”

“And if we wait for the moon to complete another orbit around the Earth, the whole moon will have become molten. We'll have lost the opportunity until it cools enough for a solid crust to form again. Hundreds of years from now.”

“More like thousands,” said Eddie, feeling crushed. “Vacuum is one hell of an insulator Dammit, I really thought I was on to something for a moment! Eddie Nash, saviour of the world.”

“The world will be fine, Ed. Once we're past the period of adjustment life will go on just as it always has.”

“But millions will die during the first perigee! Thousands more in the second. People will die every perigee from earthquakes and other disasters. I thought I could save them!”

“The first perigee would have happened anyway. Even if we could do it, we couldn't have done it until the moon was back out there, at its proper distance.”

Eddie nodded in frustration. “Dammitl There has to be a way! We have this one opportunity to save the Earth from thousands of years of calamity. This one opportunity while the Moon is still mostly solid. There has to be a way!”

“Not one that I can think of. Come on, let's see if your mass amplifier works. If it doesn't, it doesn't matter what way round the moon is facing.”

Eddie nodded, but his enthusiasm for the idea had all but vanished. “Why not?” he said. Frank gave him a friendly pat on the shoulder, then gently guided him out of the room and towards the main laboratory.