Darlene's right leg dangled from the freestanding hammock, her bare foot inches above the patio brick. The hammock was nevertheless swaying, Kyle's longer leg rocking them gently. Her head rested on his shoulder. Blackie was curled up and purring on her lap. A mild breeze was blowing, moonlight was streaming. "Explain again why we hardly ever do this?"
He kissed the top of her head. "Because, Madam Undersecretary, you're usually off gallivanting around the world."
That was a half truth not worth debating. She swigged some no-longer-cold beer rather than respond. The past few months, he was in Houston as much as she was gone on her own, more varied travel. The President, true to his word, had gotten Kyle a shot at a payload-specialist berth on an upcoming NASA shuttle mission. The payload for whose calibration, operation, and, if need be, repair, Kyle would become responsible did upper-atmosphere measurements, the details of which eluded her. Kyle's understanding, of course, was infinitely deeper than hers and growing daily. (They'd been together long enough that she knew nothing was larger than infinite, but she didn't care. She just wouldn't express the thought.)
The astronauts she'd met were pilots and engineers, not scientific experts. That surely meant the payload could be operated without a full theoretical understanding of the measurement techniques, or the climate models in which the measured values would be used, or the abstruse controversies that swirled around competing climate models . . . but there was no way Kyle would be satisfied flying without that expertise. So when he wasn't training at Johnson Space Center, he was immersed in self-study of atmospheric physics. They were once again coming at a globally vital problem from two entirely different sides.
This time, thank God, the problem wasn't eating him up. She patted his arm.
"Beautiful, isn't it?"
That could have been a reference to togetherness, the weather, the patio and its wooded setting, or the cloudless night sky aglitter with stars. Had her companion meant any of those things, he wouldn't have been Kyle. "The full moon? Yes, it's gorgeous."
They were silently admiring its round perfection when, as if by the throwing of a switch, the moon went dark.
"Yes, I'm serious!" insisted Kyle. "How's the weather? Look out your window."
"Sunny and warm. Basically like every day." His old college buddy, who lived in LA, sounded puzzled and not a little peeved. "Why did you really call?"
"The sun's normal?" Kyle persisted into his cell phone. He'd outwaited a call-waiting signal. Dar ran inside to answer the house phone.
"Big bright yellow ball, intends to set in the west. Yes, it's normal. So this is about . . . ?"
"Gotta go—I'll explain later." He hung up over annoyed protests. Overhead, stars sparkled like diamonds, as brightly as ever. How, in a cloudless night sky, could the moon be ghostly dim when in California, where it was just after six, the sun was behaving?
There was no denying the apparition overhead.
He was swinging his telescope toward the spectral moon when his cell phone rang. Dar yelled from inside, "That's Britt. I transferred the call."
"Hi, boss." As best Kyle could tell, the moon, apart from having gone ashen, was unchanged. He'd studied it enough nights to trust his impression. "Yes, I know. Yes, the moon's gone dark and no, I can't say why." He unbent from his crouch over the telescope eyepiece. "But I'm on it."
Too many people jammed in a consequently overheated room. Too many speculations and too few facts. It was disquietingly like the arrival day of the Galactics.
Kyle fanned himself with a folder as he digested the latest findings. An obvious change from that earlier crisis was the medium of note taking: electronic whiteboards, read/writeable across the Internet, had replaced walls covered in Post-it notes. The Franklin Ridgers could as easily have coordinated from their offices, like the hundreds of scientists worldwide whose data they were collating. Crowding this room showed psychology trumping technology.
"That's one possible explanation shot to hell." Ellen Nakamura, a twenty-something new hire with spiky blue hair, hung up her cell phone. "Thank God." She threaded a path through the crowd to a terminal. On the big wall display marked "solar status" new text appeared: SOHO readings nominal. The Solar and Heliospheric Observatory probe was permanently stationed a million miles sunward from Earth, at an Earth-sun gravitational balance point. If SOHO, with its plethora of instrumentation and uninterruptible view of the sun, saw no variation in the sun's behavior, that was definitive. The sun was normal.
There weren't many ways to dim the moon. Moonlight was only reflected sunlight, so a solar problem could have been the root cause. Nakamura was right: thank God. If the sun were the source of the problem, they could all speedily freeze to death. A second wall was dedicated to an investigation of any unknown phenomenon impeding the light path from sun to moon, or moon to Earth. Regularly updated windows mirrored the findings of observatories worldwide. Some big light blocker in space, never mind where such a thing could have come from, would likely also darken some stars. No such dimmed stars were in evidence. That did not eliminate a filtering disk precisely sized and placed to obscure only and exactly the moon as viewed from anywhere on Earth. But how could such an object be held stationary, against the solar-wind pressure on such a huge expanse? "Matt. Any word on radar sweeps for a blocker?"
"He's stepped out," answered a voice Kyle didn't recognize. "But yes, there's news. Rear wall, lower left corner. Radar sees nothing between here and the moon."
"Thanks." So if there were a light-blocking object in space, it's not only precisely positioned and placed, it's radar-transparent. Stealthed. If such an object existed, and popped up out of nowhere, surely it would be an alien artifact. Spoiling the moonlight . . . Clean Slate couldn't be anything simultaneously so huge and so petty, could it?
"Heads up."
Kyle turned toward the call and saw a can of Coke lofted his way. He bobbled the catch. "Thanks, Matt. I clearly need the caffeine."
"What'd I miss?"
"Can't be a solar problem and doesn't look like something in space blocking the light." That left the moon suddenly absorbing light it had once reflected. That left the subject matter of a third wall, whose virtual caption read: lunar surface. The big observatories only confirmed what Kyle, with his amateur telescope, had decided minutes after the mysterious fadeout: the moon's surface, other than darkening, looked unchanged. Optical telescopes and radar pinging alike detected no change to the moon.
"Infrared." Matt whapped his forehead with the heel of his hand. "Matt, you dummy. Ellen! Do we have before-and-after IR images of the full moon?"
"I'm on it." Ellen started typing feverishly.
"Not dumb, Matt. Sleep-deprived, probably. Brilliant, certainly." It was almost five in the morning. Almost time for his chopper ride to Washington, to try to make sense of this for the President and an emergency cabinet meeting "If the moon is suddenly absorbing more sunlight, it'll be hotter."
"Here's before," called Ellen. "It's an archival shot from the three-meter IR telescope facility up on Mauna Kea." A new display window opened on the wall devoted to lunar-surface findings, showing a gray-scaled disc with occasional dark splotches. The gray-coded key confirmed the predominant lightly shaded areas were around 140oC. The dark patches, in the shadows, were as cold as -170 oC.
"What about a current IR view?"
"The file is downloading now. Go figure—the Internet's slow tonight." Ellen rubbed her eyes wearily. "Got it."
Yet another window popped up on the wall, and Kyle's eyes popped open with it. The surface of the moon was getting colder.
The details were far from clear, but at that instant Kyle knew what Clean Slate had to be. It was worse than anything he had ever imagined.