A curtain twitched up in a window of the lodge, and Doob looked to see Amelia, arms crossed, elbows on the windowsill, looking down at him from the room they had shared the last three nights. She had stayed inside so that she could watch it on the TV in the room, let him know how it had looked on video, how the commentators and pundits had framed it.
It was Thanksgiving week. School was out. She’d flown up to Eugene on Wednesday, rented a car, and driven here to be with him.
The staff at the lodge, still unaware of what was about to happen, had served the traditional turkey dinner on Thursday afternoon. The scientists, politicians, and military who had come here from all over the world to contemplate the end of days had tried to see the humor in the holiday. In a way, though, Doob actually was thankful. He was thankful that Amelia had come up to spend time with him. He was thankful that she had shown up in his life at exactly the moment when he most needed to have someone around.
On Day 7, when he had met Amelia and fallen for her in the same instant, he’d felt foolish. He’d wondered what was going on in his brain for it to react so. But she’d let him know, in the correct, even steely manner of an elementary school teacher, that the interest was reciprocated. The school where she taught was less than a mile from the Caltech campus and so they would get together for quick early dinners before she went home to grade papers and he went back to his office to check and recheck his calculations about the exponential, the White Sky. The split between the joy of new love and the growing awareness of what was going to happen was almost too wide for his mind to address. He would wake up every morning and enjoy those first few moments of consciousness before his mind swung uncontrollably to one topic or the other.
After he had come back from Camp David and the teleconference where he’d explained matters to the crew of the International Space Station, she had asked him what was troubling him, and he had told her. That night was the first time they had slept together. But they slept together four times before he found himself able to have sex. It wasn’t so much the dread of the catastrophe that got in the way. Disasters could be sexy. He’d had some of the best sex of his life while on the road to attend loved ones’ funerals. What weighed him down and left him impotent was the stress and distraction of having to communicate what he knew to one person at a time.
Problem solved. Everyone knew now.
Clarence wound up his announcement with some inspiring talk about how the young men and women who ascended to the safety of the Cloud Ark would build a new civilization in space and populate it with the genetic legacy of all mankind. Frozen sperm, eggs, and embryos would be sent up there too, so that even those who were left behind to die on the Earth’s surface could enjoy some hope that their offspring would one day grow to maturity in orbiting space colonies, and commune with their departed ancestors through digitally preserved letters, photographs, and videos. To Doob, this part of the talk seemed tacked on, something put in there just to hold out a glimmer of hope. But he knew that it was, in a way, the most important thing that any of the speakers would say today. The rest of the message had been stunningly grim, too shocking for most people to take in. The news anchors covering the announcement had been sworn to secrecy and briefed on it yesterday, just to give them some time to recover emotionally in the hope that they could hold it together on air. The announcement had to conclude with some straw for people to grasp at. This kindly, ancient Cambridge professor, hollowed out by cancer, speaking in the cadences of the King James Bible about the new world in the heavens that would be populated by the children of the dead, venerating their ancestors’ JPEGs and GIFs, was the closest thing to an uplifting message that anyone was going to see today. He had to sell it, and he did. And Doob and all the other scientists who were now running the Cloud Ark program, along with the world’s military and politicians and business leaders, had to follow through.
Moira Crewe, Clarence’s postdoc, and Mary Bulinski each got a hand under one of Clarence’s arms and helped him down the steps to the rim of the crater, where a few shell-shocked journalists had gathered to ask questions. For the most part, though, the place was dead quiet. None of the usual post-news-conference hubbub. Most of the networks had cut back directly to their headquarters.