It was thirty years later.

Samantha was escorted to the VIP viewing gallery by a charming young Italian man with a sexy accent. Three rows of padded chairs had been arranged on a raised platform with a canopy fluttering in the light breeze to shield them from the afternoon summer sun. Most of the other guests had already arrived. Politicians, celebrities, sportsmen, most of whom she only knew from television appearances, but as she threaded past them to find her seat she found to her delight that she'd been seated next to people she knew. Eddie Nash, now looking dignified and statesmanlike with his beard and grey hair, his wife, Susan, and the younger of their two children, twenty two year old Philip. All looking very smart in their expensive clothes. Eddie called out her name in greeting when he saw her, and the three of them stood while she seated herself.

“You’re late,” said Eddie jovially. “We were worried you weren't going to make it.”

“My flight had to divert to Rome to avoid some bad weather,” said Samantha, still feeling annoyed about it as she smoothed out her long, blue dress. “The hire car drove me at breakneck speed, it must have had special permission to violate the speed limits, but I still missed Lily being taken out to the launch pad. I heard it on the radio commentary.” She gazed out at the spaceship standing on the horizon three miles away. The Tycho Brahe. It looked like no other rocket that had ever been launched, or even imagined. The payload was huge, nearly a thousand tons. A great white cylinder the size of an office block studded with windows, docking ports and other structures. An entire space station being launched all in one go by rocket stages that, while among the largest ever made by man, looked ridiculously small in comparison, like a marrow balanced on a pencil. “So she’s inside?” she asked.

“Yes, we saw them walking to the bus. They all waved to the crowds when their names were called by the loudspeaker, and your daughter has that special way of waving, distinctive even in a spacesuit.”

Samantha smiled sadly. She'd promised herself she'd be here, she'd promised Lily. She wondered whether her daughter had looked up at the VIP gallery looking for her, and what sad thoughts had gone through her mind when she hadn't seen her. She brightened at the thought that she'd be able to talk to her after the launch. She'd be able to explain and apologise, and Lily would understand. On the other hand, maybe Lily hadn't given her mother a thought. This was the pinnacle of her career, after all. The culmination of years spent studying and training. Her head was probably full of things she had to do and remember during the launch and after their arrival in orbit in preparation for their transfer to lunar orbit. It had probably never occurred to her to see if her mother was among the spectators. She sighed. It was a nice thought but she knew it was a fantasy. Lily had looked, and had seen that she wasn't there. She would have known that she would have been there if she possibly could, so maybe she was worrying that something dreadful had happened to her. Hopefully, the worry wouldn't distract her at a critical moment.

She took her phone from her pocket and started the ESA app, going through the menus until she found the life feed from crew launch cabin two. There was Lily, sitting in the second row among eleven other astronauts and scientists, all wearing their helmets but with the visors open. There were twelve more in launch cabin one and the pilot, co-pilot and engineer in the cockpit. The first time in history that so many people had been launched together. She didn't care about history, though. She only cared about Lily, and she just stared at her for some minutes, reassuring herself that she was safe, so far, and wishing that her daughter could see her.

She put the thought out of her mind with an effort. “So this is Philip,” she said, holding out her hand. He shook it with a smile. “I've heard so much about you!”

“It's all lies,” he replied earnestly. “It was my evil twin.”

Samantha laughed. “I hear you're following your father into exotic materials research. Maybe you’ll be the one who finally cracks coherent matter.”

“I think we're still a few generations away from that,” the young man replied. “Most of what we learn just tells us how insanely impossible it is, but the aliens...” He gave a start as he realised there were people within earshot who weren't cleared to know about the alien spacecraft. Fortunately, they all seemed too engrossed in their own conversations to have overheard. He continued in a lower voice. “We know that coherent matter is possible, and that’s ninety percent of the way to actually figuring out how to create the stuff. We'll get there one day.”

Samantha nodded. “So, any young ladies in your life yet?”

Philip looked embarrassed. “Nobody special,” he said. “They tend to get a little put off by them.” He nodded his head towards the dark suited EDOC agents standing at the back of the raised gallery. Their ‘bodyguards', one of whose duties was to kill them if they thought their charges were about to be successfully kidnapped. Samantha gathered that Philip was as much under their ‘protection’ as his parents. They must be worried that they’d told him the secrets of the mass dampener, even though they had both sworn never to do any work on the device again.

“And where's your daughter?” Samantha asked Eddie. “I thought she might be here as well.”

“Jackie’s back in the Eastern States,” replied Susan, her voice heavy with worry. Her eyes widened with fear. “She's joined the Harris campaign.”

“She's a grown woman,” said Eddie, although he was also clearly worried for her. “She can do whatever she wants. She's determined that Ezekiel Graham doesn't serve a fifth term and that democracy is restored...”

“You could have stopped her!” said Philip, rounding angrily on him. “People disappear over there! Graham controls the police, the courts, the army...”

“They can't do anything to her so long as she has her bodyguards,” said Susan, glancing over her shoulder at the dark suited men. “Bodyguards working for EDOC.” The Exotic Devices Oversight Committee was the international organisation responsible for keeping the mass dampener, and other devices deemed to be extraordinarily dangerous, from spreading beyond those people and nations that already possessed them. “Graham has no need to extract the mass dampener from her because he already has the mass dampener. In fact, he has as much reason as EDOC to make sure she doesn’t get kidnapped by other countries. She may actually be safer in the Eastern States than she would be in most other countries. And besides, it’s not as though she has a high profile job over there. She's basically a secretary.”

“She's our daughter,” said Eddie. “That makes her high profile. Whenever Harris is on the telly, they always make sure she’s in shot, standing in the background, and everyone knows who she is. Whenever a reporter talks to her, she makes no secret of her opposition to Graham, and people who say things like that disappear over there.”

“How long’s she been doing this?” asked Samantha.

“About three years.”

“That's quite a long time, isn't It? If something were to happen to her, wouldn’t it have happened by now? Maybe the fact that she’s your daughter is protecting her. She’s too famous to just disappear.”

“That's what we're hoping,” said Eddie. “We just want her out of there. We tell her so every time we talk to her, but she’s so stubborn...”

“We should never have gone back there,” said Susan. “It's my fault.”

“It's your home,” said Eddie gently. “Of course you wanted to go back there.”

“Oklahoma was my home. It's been buried under snow for the past thirty years.”

“But the snow’s gone now,” said Samantha. “It's virgin country, just waiting for a new wave of settlers. Do you think the eastern and western states will re-unify now that the centre of the continent is becoming habitable again?”

“The Western States will want nothing to do with the Eastern States so long as the Graham regime is in place,” said Eddie. “And even if they do re-unify, Graham will consider himself the natural ruler of the whole USA. He's got geography on his side. The White House, Washington D.C... He sees the Western States as traitors polluted by atheism and Satanism.” He gave a sardonic laugh. “How you can be atheist and Satanist at the same time...”

A loud voice suddenly burst from the loudspeakers. “Ladies and gentlemen, the mission management team have just given their final go decision. The countdown has resumed at T minus nine minutes. If you look, you will see the access arm being retracted. The crew now cannot leave the spaceship except by triggering the abort system, in which case the two crew cabins and the cockpit will eject themselves from the rest of the spaceship and deploy parachutes in order to descend slowly to the ground.”

A hubbub of conversation broke out from the stalls lined up along the perimeter of the launch field. Samantha tried to estimate how many people were gathered there. Thousands, certainly. All gathered to watch the launch of the first purpose built modified mass launch vehicle. The payload’s mass reduced and the propellant’s mass increased so that a small amount of fuel could launch a huge payload.

“I couldn't believe it when I heard they were actually doing it,” said Eddie, frowning as he stared out at the huge spaceship. “It's bad enough that we know how to build mass dampeners without going ahead and actually doing it.”

“Lily told me it’s impossible to steal it without stealing the whole spaceship,” replied Samantha. “And even so, they're taking no chances. There must be a whole army here, guarding it. I saw tanks out on the periphery, and I’m pretty sure I saw anti aircraft missiles beside the airport buildings.”

“It would only take one man to sneak in and take a look at the device,” said Eddie, though. “He could take a few photos to sell on the black market, maybe showing just enough to give some clever scientist the clues he needs to make one of his own. And then it'll be out and that’s when the whole world will go to hell!”

“It's going to get out sooner or later,” said Susan. “Technology always does. Look how hard they tried to keep the atom bomb secret. At least atom bombs need rare and expensive radioactive materials. If you can control the supply of uranium and plutonium you can keep atom bombs out of private hands. The mass dampener, though, can be built from stuff you can buy from any scientific equipment supplier. Pretty much every part has innocent uses.”

“All the more reason not to make it easier for them!” He waved a hand at the Tycho. “That thing is a mistake! It should never have been made!”

“No, all the more reason why it should be made!” said Philip though. “If there's one thing the angry moon taught us, it's that the Earth is much too small and fragile a basket for mankind to keep all its eggs in.”

“Robert A. Heinlein,” said Samantha.

“Right. We need to go out into space. We need to colonise the rest of the solar system, because it’s only a matter of time before some lunatic gets hold of a mass dampener and tears this whole planet apart. It's bad enough that the Eastern States has it. Their whole government consists of Christians who believe that the world has to end before the Day of Judgement can come.” Susan gave him a sharp glance but said nothing.

“The spaceship has activated its own power units,” said the loudspeakers. “The external power feeds have been disconnected. The astronauts have been instructed to lower their visors. The countdown is now at T minus five minutes.”

“There's another reason we have to go back into space,” said Samantha. “A reason why this ship, the first of its kind, is going to the moon. A reason why Lily’s on board, the world's foremost expert on the moon.” The others looked at her expectantly. “The moon's behaving strangely,” she said.

“Strangely how?” asked Eddie.

“It’s cooling more slowly than expected, for one thing, as if there's a source of heat somewhere inside. Also, it has no magnetic field. None at all.”

All three members of the Nash family stared in surprise. They all had the education to know how strange that was. The moon didn't have much iron in its core, but there was enough that all that churning, liquid metal should have been acting as a dynamo, generating a magnetic field, just as the molten iron in the Earth’s core did. “What could cause that?” asked Eddie.

“There's only one thing we can think of,” said Samantha. “The Scatter Cloud. The thing that knocked the moon out of its orbit in the first place. We still have no idea what it was made of. Just that it was millions of tiny particles, just a few millimetres across, each weighing thousands of tons and stable without any outside pressure needing to be exerted on it. Some kind of exotic matter unlike anything we’ve ever seen, unlike anything predicted by even the most outlandish theory. All that strange matter is now sitting at the core of the moon. Almost five percent of the moon's total mass! Who knows what’s going on beneath the magma ocean? And who knows what it'll mean for us?”

“What's the worst case scenario?” asked Eddie, his eyes wide with fear.

“Worst case? Maybe Scatter Cloud matter isn't stable. Maybe it’s slowly decaying into normal matter and giving off heat in the process. Maybe some kind of chain reaction is taking place in which it decays faster and faster, culminating in an explosion big enough not only to blow the moon apart but take the Earth with it.”

“The Scatter Cloud came from outside the solar system,” pointed out Eddie. “It's been travelling for millions of years. It must be stable!”

“Just because it’s stable in small pieces doesn’t mean it’s stable in large amounts. Like Uranium. That's what we need to know, that's why they're going. They have to find out what’s going on right at the heart of the moon, and whether it’s dangerous.”

“All very well,” said Eddie. “I agree with you, we need to know. I just wish they hadn’t used a mass dampener to do it. I keep thinking of the aliens, wondering what happened to them.”

“They lived three hundred million years ago,” pointed out Samantha. “For all we know, they lived for millions of years longer living happy, fulfilling lives until they eventually just faded away from boredom. Or maybe they're still out there somewhere.”

“You think? They came here once. They never came back.”

“That we know of.”

“They used materials that last forever. The alien spaceship looks immaculate, as if it were made yesterday. Every nut, every screw, every empty baked bean can they ever used while here on Earth should still be around somewhere. Buried in a coal seam maybe, but in hundreds of years mining coal all we've found is the ship itself. If they'd come back, if they'd built cities, even if they'd just built a research outpost to study the local wildlife, there’d have been something!”

“So you think their civilisation ended shortly after their ship crashed here? And you think it was something to do with the mass dampener?”

“All forms of technology are polluting in one way or another, either in their manufacture, the use to which they're put or their eventual disposal. Why should the mass dampener be any different? I think it has a side effect, like burning coal caused acid rain and climate change, and I think it kicked them in the ass. And I think it'll kick us in the ass too if we keep using it. The moon behaving strangely, maybe that’s the beginning of it. Maybe it's already too late even if we stop using it now.” He shook his head. “The trouble is that we have no idea how it works. We don't even have the beginnings of a theory! We think we know that energy comes and goes from some other dimension, and that’s it. It's crazy to use such a powerful device that we know absolutely nothing about, and our children or our grandchildren may curse us one day for our recklessness.”

His words left the others feeling uncomfortable and a little nervous, but then the voice came over the loudspeaker again telling them that the main engines would be activated in thirty seconds. Samantha reached out and grabbed Eddie's hand, squeezing tightly. She was staring at the spaceship as if it was her daughter with an old style revolver held to her head, one bullet somewhere in the cylinder. Eddie heard her breathing grow faster and shallower and he gave her hand a reassuring squeeze back. “It's going to be okay,” he told her. “No rocket’s gone wrong in fifty years. It's a perfected technology. And even if it wasn't , there are so many failsafes and emergency systems... Lily's probably safer in there than we are here.” She stared at him, knowing he was right, but it didn't help. Her hand was cold and clammy and her eyes were wide with fear.

“Main engine start in ten seconds,” said the loudspeaker. “All systems green. Main engine ignition in five, four, three, two, one...”

Smoke billowed from the base of the rocket and it rose with a speed that belied its size. All of a sudden it gave the impression of being far smaller and closer than they knew it was. It was a rather pitiful affair compared to the spectacular launches of the pre-mass modifying era, but Samantha's hand still tightened painfully in Eddie's grip as the huge spaceship gathered speed, rushing upwards and leaving a thin trail of smoke behind it. The four of them stared up at it as it shrank, until the rocket was too small to be seen and the payload looked like a toy balloon, tiny with distance, that some careless child had lost hold of.

Conversations began again in the crowd, and the voice from the loudspeaker told those who were listening how high the spaceship was and how fast it was going. Samantha could only sit there, though, her thoughts and prayers following after her daughter as the spaceship got steadily smaller above them. Eventually, all that could be seen was a tiny gleam of sunlight reflected from the hull. A moment later even that vanished, leaving nothing but a cloudless blue sky in which the pillar of smoke the rocket had left behind was gradually being dispersed by the gathering wind.

The End