The Omega Point

24. THE MOON

As soon as he’d disarmed the two young soldiers and assured himself that they meant no harm, Glen had gone outside to run the perimeter. He’d lost six of his sixteen men, but that still left enough of a force to reestablish a presence on the walls. They were a lot better off with a deeper defense, even if it had some light spots.

It was as he was crossing the broad lawn that led to the front gate, which was stuck open and thus guarded now by three men, that he noticed the moon.

He stopped, then focused his full attention on it. Over millions upon millions of nights, the moon has risen in peaceful splendor. But there is a reason that her face is marked by craters so enormous that they define her very form. They are a reminder and a warning that what has happened in the past can happen again.

He decided that he needed David to see this, and returned to the rec area where the survivors were assembled.

David could see by Glen’s expression that something was very wrong.

“You need to come outside.”

“What’s the problem?”

He nodded toward the door, and David followed.

“My God,” David said as soon as he saw the moon.

“What do you think it means?”

The face of the moon was unrecognizable. That strange, shocked expression that had fascinated human beings from time immemorial was turned in a new direction.

“It’s in motion,” David said, “the moon is rotating.”

Del and Mike had followed them out.

“Does this mean the end of the world?” Del asked.

Hardly hearing him, David watched in awe as this enormous cosmic event continued to unfold. Another object appeared in the sky, this one perhaps a tenth the size of the moon itself. As it crossed the face, it became a black irregular shadow. Size was impossible to judge, of course, but it was easily visible, so it was huge.

Once it crossed the face, it was lost to view because it was too black to reflect sunlight.

David knew what it was. It was an immense mass of debris of some sort from the supernova. He said, “I think if it strikes the moon, we’re going to see gigantic boulders thrown off. Some will fall back, but some won’t and the ones that don’t are headed here.”

“Which means… what?”

“Mike, it means devastating earthquakes. Tidal waves. Maybe worse. Much worse.”

As Del backed away from him, David saw a trapped animal come into his eyes.

“You think you know it all but you don’t know a damn thing!”

David did not challenge him, what would be the point? His fear and his anger would mean nothing, not in the face of what was coming.

The object reappeared, dark again as it crossed the moon’s face. With deceptive slowness, it arced downward. On the moon’s surface, then, there was a flicker of light. A moment later dust rose in a cloud so huge that it could be seen clearly as a haze spreading across the whole face, making it go out of focus.

Then a rain of gleaming specks emerged from this haze, some of them big enough that they could be seen to be tumbling, others nothing more than additions to a star field made faint behind the endless auroras and sick, purple-pink light.

David knew that these were actually huge stones, and that they would reach Earth in the next few days. But even before then—long before then—others were going to strike, and that could start happening at any moment.

“We got a problem,” Glen said. He wasn’t looking at the moon, and David followed his eyes toward the distant front gate.

“This is just the beginning,” David said.

“I can’t stop them this time, David.”

“We can dust ’em,” Mike said. “Give us back our guns.”

“No,” David said. “You need to let this happen. Just be sure they’re orderly, because there’re going to be more.”

The people began to hesitate, then to cluster in uneasy groups, when guards on the perimeter showed themselves.

“Go in and retrieve your weapons,” Glen told the two soldiers.

David saw men, women, and children, he saw dogs on leads, cats in carriers, people hauling suitcases and straining under heavy backpacks.

As people flooded into the compound, it became possible to observe great, long columns of them stretching off along the road as far as could be seen.

Glen called to his men, “Pull it in, stay in front of them!”

As the guards on the gate began backing up, the others came in off the walls.

Del fired his gun into the air.

“NO!” David said. “Not that.”

A woman tried to settle a barking dog, but other than that, there was silence from the whole enormous and swelling mass.

A man came forward, his hands in the air, a white handkerchief in one fist. “Please,” he said, “let our children come with you.”

“They know about the portal,” David said.

“How?” Mike asked.

“A lot more people are going to know about it. It’s going to be seen all over the world by the ones who need to see it.”

“Seen? How?”

“As time passes, it becomes more… I guess the best word is ‘focused.’ And the more focused it is, the more people see it.”

Mike shook his head.

“It’s hyperdimensional. It’s outside of space-time as we know it. What’s happening is that it’s growing in hyperspace, like a gigantic crystal made of time. Does that make sense to you?”

“No, Sir, it does not. But I assume it means that a whole lot of people are going to go through it.”

David drew on his now clear memories of what he’d learned in the class. “Around a million worldwide,” he said. He called to the crowd, “You’re welcome on the grounds. But the building is off limits, do not attempt to enter the building.”

To emphasize this, the security guards moved toward them in a line, arms linked. The crowd spread into the broad front garden, but there were still many more coming.

“Man, look at the moon,” Mike said. “Look at it!”

The orb was dark red from dust, and the familiar face was now gone.

What had been the dark side was now facing earth.

“Man, that sucker could be about to come out of its orbit,” Mike said. “If it hits us, we’re done.”

The last time the moon had rotated was four hundred and fifty million years ago, before even single-celled life-forms trembled in the waters. It had been struck, then, by an even larger asteroid—actually a small planet—and a huge piece of it had crashed to earth. The crater it had left remained the largest landform on earth. It is called the Pacific Ocean.

Now the whole crowd was watching, and people were coming out of the house, all looking up at the greatest cosmic spectacle that any man had ever witnessed.

From within the mass of them, there arose a female voice, clear in the cathedral silence of the moment.

“‘Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil.’” And although her tone was filled with fear and even the ragged edge of desperation, a chorus took up the lines, until by the time the final verse was uttered, it was a solemn chant, clear and determined, from many thousands of throats.

In the silence that followed, they watched as bright sparks flickered in waves across the new face of the moon.

“Jesus, it’s the fishing tackle lady,” Del said. He went into the crowd to the woman who had spoken out.

David saw that she and her husband and kids carried an extraordinary variety of angling equipment, and he thought that it might prove very useful if where they were going was as undeveloped as it appeared. So far, no matter what direction he had pointed the portal in, he hadn’t seen a sign of any sort of structure. He feared that a great many people were going to be thrown into a very primitive environment, and that was going to be a very hard situation for them to face, especially after the hellish conditions they were enduring here.

“It’s beautiful,” a voice said from behind them. David did not need to turn to know that Caroline was there. Suddenly and with great intensity, he remembered her body close to his, and her gentle, insistent ways.

“David,” she said, “I’m having a problem with the portal. It’s flickering. It looks like it’s failing somehow.”

Terror like lightning shot through him. He looked out at the crowd. “Don’t tell them,” he said, and followed her back into the building.