Seveneves. Neal Stephenson

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.

      Doob thought of Sean Probst, now half a year into his quest to fetch a big piece of ice. He couldn’t believe it had been that long already.

      You could get used to anything. You got used to it and then time raced by, and before you knew it, time was up.

      He remembered people asking difficult questions around the time of Sean’s departure for the L1 gate. What the hell was this crazy billionaire doing? Clearly, it was not part of the official plan. The official plan did not seem to recognize a need for a huge piece of ice. But Sean Probst believed it was so important that he was willing to go up there personally and take care of the problem. There was a good chance he would die in the process, or come back so broken from radiation exposure and long-term weightlessness that his health would never recover. And so people had asked Doob what he thought Sean was thinking. And Doob, who hadn’t studied it at the time, had answered vaguely, saying that water was always a good thing to have in space: you could drink it, grow crops with it, use it for radiation shielding, split it into hydrogen and oxygen for rocket fuel, or pipe it through hoses to radiate excess heat into space. All of which was quite true, but sort of begged the question. It was so blindingly obvious that NASA must have thought of it already. What additional demand for water was Sean Probst seeing that NASA had failed to notice, or turned a blind eye to?

      Later Doob had figured it out based on background conversations with people at Arjuna and scuttlebutt reaching him through friends working on the planning of the Cloud Ark. It was all about propellant. The Cloud Ark would have to burn a lot of it. Sean didn’t think they had enough.

      So he had gone up there and done something about it.

      Because Sean wasn’t a talker. He was a doer. And as such he didn’t have to agonize, as Doob was doing now, about what he was going to say. What his public stance was going to be. How he was going to be positioned and perceived.

      “That’s a hundred days from now,” Doob said.

      He’d been silent for so long that the other occupants of the Oval Office were a bit startled. J.B.F.’s attention had wandered to a tablet on her desk, and Pete Starling was looking out the window.

      “I beg your pardon, Dr. Harris?” said the president, turning that gaze back upon him. But he no longer felt intimidated by it. He was going to go somewhere where she could never look at him again.

      “This is 260,” Doob said. “You said you wanted me to go up there around 360.”

      “Yes,” said Maggie Sloane, relaxing into an entirely new posture. “That’s not the first wave—which is going to be more exploratory, more of a dress rehearsal—but it would be the first real wave of Arkers going into space, and our thought was that we would embed you with them. You could partake of their experiences and show the people of Earth what a day in the life of an Arker consists of. Providing a sense of continuity.”

      Holy shit, Doob thought. Seven years a Ph.D. candidate, two postdocs at major European research institutions, a tenured position at Caltech, shortlisted for a Nobel Prize, and here he was, with the fate of the human race at stake, being positioned as an observer to provide a sense of continuity.

      “I can do that,” he said. And some other things as well, as long as I’m up there.

      What were they going to do, yank him back down to the planet?

      The worst they could do was to stop broadcasting his stuff, and that would be fine with him. There had to be something he could do up there that would be more useful than talking into a camera. Sean Probst had identified one problem with the Cloud Ark and taken action to remedy it; in a hundred days, what could Doob learn that might be useful? What actions could he take, once he got up there, to give the whole thing a better chance of success?

      “A hundred days,” he said. “Three months for me to spend with my wife and my kids and my embryo.”

      “Embryo?” Pete Starling repeated, not getting it.

      Margaret Sloane, mother of three, picked it up instantly. “Amelia’s pregnant?” she asked, with the warm smile that, until Zero, had been the normal response to such blessed events. Nowadays, people’s reactions were a bit more complicated, of course; but it was hard to shed old habits.

      “Not anymore,” Doob said.