DOOB HAD SLEPT SO POORLY HE SUSPECTED HE HADN’T SLEPT AT ALL. But the clock said it was about dot 15. When he’d climbed into his sack it had said dot 9. He must have dozed off for a while. But he didn’t know when.
His nightly videoconference with Amelia hadn’t gone well. It hadn’t gone badly—they hadn’t raised their voices, or come to tears—but at first it had been all about what had just happened in Kourou, and after that there’d been a failure to connect. He’d noticed the same thing with Henry.
They were running out of things to say to each other. That was ghastly, but it was true. His family members were all preparing to meet their maker in two or three or four weeks. The government had been handing out free euthanasia pills to anyone who wanted them; thousands had already swallowed them and bodies overflowed the morgues. Mass graves were being dug with end loaders. Meanwhile, Doob was preparing for—to be blunt, to be honest—the greatest adventure of his life.
He wished, at some level, that they were already dead.
He had spoken those seemingly unspeakable words to Luisa several days ago and she had nodded. “Happens all the time,” she said, “with caregivers of terminal Alzheimer’s patients, or similar cases. An enormous sense of shame and guilt comes with it.”
“But Amelia doesn’t have Alzheimer’s, she’s—”
“Doesn’t matter. Seeing her, talking to her, makes you feel bad. And at some level, your brain wants the thing that makes you feel bad to go away. Simplest reaction in the world. Doesn’t make you a bad person. Doesn’t mean you have to give in to it.”
Those thoughts had led to more tossing and turning—if those were the right words for not being able to sleep in a loose sack in zero gravity—as he had wrestled with the question of “When?” Predicting it on Day 720, plus or minus a few, had been all well and good back on Day 360. But Day 700 was now approaching its end, and the “plus or minus” thing was seriously bothering him. Lately they’d narrowed it down to “plus or minus three days,” but that was in response to political pressure. It wasn’t a legit scientific move. And it meant something different to scientists. Laypersons understood it as “certainly between 717 and 723.” Scientists would instead say that if you could repeat the experiment of blowing up the moon a large number of times, and keep track of the time-to-White-Sky separately in each case, the numbers would fall into a normal distribution, a bell-shaped curve, with about two-thirds of the instances falling within that range.
Which meant that the remainder would fall outside of that range—and some would fall well outside of it. It was not out of the question that it could happen tomorrow—that it could be happening right now—while Doob floated in a goddamned sack.
So when Dinah came and woke him up just after dot 15, he wasn’t angry at her. More relieved.
Basic politeness prevented him from saying so, but she looked a wreck. Not in the sense of being over-the-top emotional. Just drained and beat up.
“You know about Guiana?” she asked him over her shoulder as they wended their way back to the Mining Colony.
“Yeah.”
“Okay.”
She said nothing further until they were in her shop. Doob could see the wreckage of old-school communication all over the place: many sheets of paper taped to the available surfaces, dull pencils drifting around, loose pages from the “employee manual” with blocks of characters crossed out. “I had to tell Sean to knock it off,” she admitted. “I’m used up. Can’t do it anymore. Need to get some sleep. This shit is difficult, you have to be precise. Keying slow enough for Sean to copy the transmission is like walking slow.”
“Walking slow?”
“You know,” Dinah said. “Anyone can walk at a normal pace. That’s easy. But when you have to walk at half speed, like because you’re accompanying someone who has trouble getting around? It’s exhausting.”
“Got it.”
“When I started to beg off, he changed his topic. To that point it was all, ‘Hey, what’s going on, how many people are on the Ark?’ but when I applied a little time pressure he started talking about sensitivity analysis.”
Doob laughed.
“Wow,” Dinah said, looking at him keenly. “Not the reaction I expected.”
“I’ve been awake for hours thinking about it,” Doob said.
“So you know what he means? Because I’m just a dumb clodhopper, I had to ask him.”
“I assume he means, how certain are we really that it’s going to happen on Day 720? And just how unstable is the system?”
“Yep, that’s what he means.”
“The closer we get, the more it’s like a nuclear reactor about to go critical, or, well—”
“Pick your metaphor, I get it,” Dinah said.
“Anything that’s that unstable can be set off by random noise in the system. Things that we inherently cannot predict. Pretty soon it’s going to be so on edge that just looking at it funny will set it off. We just don’t know which rock is going to trigger the avalanche.”