“That’s not where we were going with it at all,” said Margaret. “We need you—the people of the world need you—to take the next step—to advance to a higher level.”
“We are asking you,” said the president, a bit testy with Doob’s slowness and with Margaret’s breathy and roundabout phrasings, “to travel into space on or about Day 360, and to become part of the population of the Cloud Ark.”
“I don’t want to go!” Doob blurted out. It was rare for him to forget himself in that way, so he then just sat for a few moments, stunned by his own ineptitude.
“Dr. Harris,” said the president after a few moments, “as you probably know from your high school civics class, the person who sits where I’m sitting has a lot of powers. One of them is that I can grant reprieves and pardons for convicted criminals. Every inmate who goes to the execution chamber in Texas goes there in part because I made the decision not to pardon him or to commute his sentence. I have never exercised that power in the case of a death row inmate. In effect, however, I am exercising it in your case now.”
The president paused there for a moment, and Doob became aware that she was waiting for his attention.
He was staring at a flower arrangement on the table in front of him. Wondering how long it would be before anyone cultivated flowers on the Cloud Ark. He reached for his tumbler and took a sip of water.
J.B.F. unnerved him when she was like this. It took a certain conscious and deliberate act of will for him to peel his eyes off the flowers and look up into her eyes. They stared back at him wide and unblinking.
“By virtue of being on the surface of this planet, you are under a death sentence,” said the president. “I just pardoned you. You can go into space and live. I cannot. Do you understand that, Dr. Harris? I cannot even pardon myself in this case without flagrantly violating the Crater Lake Accord, which makes national leaders and their families ineligible. Now, what the hell is your problem?”
Doob’s honest answer, had he voiced it, would have been most impolitic: I have become convinced that the Cloud Ark scheme cannot possibly succeed. I have been playing along in public just to keep people happy. I would rather die quickly on the ground with my loved ones than slowly, alone, in space.
“There are others who deserve it more than I do,” he said. And in the same moment he cursed himself for saying something so lame. So easily refuted. Because in all honesty he was a fine choice for inclusion on the Cloud Ark’s roster.
“I couldn’t disagree more!” exclaimed Pete Starling, with a nervous chuckle. “Doob, you’re going to be so useful up there, I’m afraid you’ll never get a moment’s rest! You have multiple core competencies with surprisingly minimal Venn. You can pivot from working on astrophysics problems, to teaching the young Arkers, to podcasting to folks on the ground, without skipping a beat!”
Doob turned to look into Pete Starling’s eyes as he was saying those words and understood, with a shock like diving into cold water, that Pete was lying.
Not about Doob’s usefulness. In that he was sincere. He was lying about something more fundamental.
He didn’t believe that the Cloud Ark was going to work any more than Doob did.
He needed Doc Dubois to go up there and lie for him.
Now, Doob was a scientist who had spent decades of his life training in a particular discipline, namely, to seek and to speak the truth. Even among hard scientists—a notoriously blunt crowd—he had a reputation for saying what he thought. Never mind whose feelings he wounded, whose careers got damaged as a result. This seemed to come across, somehow, on camera. The very reason that so many people trusted him when he went on TV was that he was a straight shooter, he said things that offended the powerful, he stirred things up, and he didn’t care. Certain of those moments had been enshrined forever in YouTube clips and Reddit memes: taking down a Republican senator who didn’t believe in evolution, destroying a climate change denier in an impromptu sidewalk confrontation, reducing a movie star to tears on the Today show by telling her that her stand against childhood vaccination made her personally responsible for the deaths of thousands of babies.
So, in a way, there were two questions in his head at the same time: whether he would lie, and whether he could lie.
As to the first question, was it okay for him to lie if it would make billions of people go to their deaths a little happier?
As to the second, would people sense it? Would they detect a shift in the tone of his voice, the set of his face, when he was just standing there in front of the camera talking shit?
That was the real question. Whether he could pull it off. Because if he couldn’t pull it off—if he couldn’t lie convincingly—then there was no point in even trying.
And he was pretty sure that he couldn’t do it.
One of the ice cubes in Doob’s glass let out a little pop as it underwent thermal fracturing.