“I thought we were safe!” The man was saying. “We were well above the twenty metre line. I checked again and again. The man on the telly said that some people just above the line might get flooded anyway, because of tidal bores, the tunnelling effect of the local terrain, that kind of thing, so I checked. I checked again and again, because that’s what you do when you've got a family to look after. Right?”

Margaret nodded numbly. She'd been hearing similar stories all night. People who'd prepared, taken precautions, and then lost loved ones when the tsunami hit. She'd listened to harrowing accounts of a titanic wall of water sweeping towards them like the wrath of God, sweeping away lives and buildings with casual contempt. She’d heard numbed survivors telling of how they had tried to hold onto wives and children, only to have them pulled relentlessly from their grasp by the power of the water. When the floodwaters had subsided, the survivors had wandered desperately here and there searching for the people they'd lost, hoping against hope to find them alive, huddling with a group of fellow survivors perhaps. Occasionally, one of her patients had indeed had that good fortune, but more often than not they were desperate to have their injuries patched up as quickly as possible so that they could return to the search. Margaret suspected that some of them would still be searching for years to come, never allowing themselves to entirely give up hope.

Over the long hours until dawn, it had slowly sapped the life and the spirit from Margaret until she was now just going through the motions, like a robot. She no longer tried to offer words of comfort and support. She just cut up sheets and blankets to make bandages to bind injuries and tie splints to broken bones. There was nothing else she or any of the others could do for them. Looking around the makeshift infirmary, she saw the same numbed expressions of the faces of the other amateur medics, and even on the trained doctors and nurses, people who must have seen similar scenes before. It was the endless succession of patients, she knew. Usually, after some kind of disaster, whether it was a collapsed building or one of the very rare road traffic accidents that still happened from time to time, there would be horror and distress for a while, but then the last of the patients would have received their initial examination and treatment and things would settle down. Here, though, they just kept coming and coming.

She finished tying the bandage and moved on to the next patient without a word. He probably thought she was callous and uncaring, or maybe he'd seen the dead look in her eyes and guessed the reason for it. Margaret had already forgotten about him, though, and was removing the damp, muddy clothes from the next young man, cutting with a pair of scissors. He’d received some kind of penetrating injury to his chest and had cuts and scratches pretty much everywhere else, as if the rushing waters had thrown him against rocks and boulders. He looked silently up at her as she cut away the last of his clothing, as if he wanted to say something but was unable to summon the energy. There was little she could do for him, she saw. She dried the area around the sucking wound in his chest and taped a piece of plastic over it to seal it, allowing him to breathe easier. Then she carefully cleaned his other injuries one by one, watching him wince with pain as she gently pulled each wound open and flushed it out with water. Just tap water, the only water they had. She couldn't do anything for the pain he was in, they had run out of pain medication long ago. They also had nothing left with which to fight infection. He would just have to take his chances. At least he wasn't bleeding badly from anywhere. That was one thing to be grateful for.

When she'd finished, she wrapped bandages around his injuries. He’d have to wait until a proper nurse could see him, to sew him up properly. Finally she draped a sheet over him to protect his modesty and looked around to see who was next.

“Mum,” said a voice from behind her. She was in such a state of numbed exhaustion that it took her a moment to recognise it, but then she felt a hand touching her arm and he moved in front of her, into her field of view. “Oh God, mum! Are you alright?”

“Richard,” said Margaret, smiling wearily. “How are the others?”

“They're fine. I came to see how you are! God, you look terrible! Come on, time to have a rest.”

“I can't. There are more patients...”

“There's plenty of others. You look done in! Come on, I’ll take you back to the hanger. You need a rest.”

“I'm fine. These people need me.”

“You are not fine! You've done your bit. Time to rest now.” He pulled her, gently but irresistibly, towards the door. Margaret resisted at first, staring back at the roomful of moaning, groaning patients and exhausted medics, but then she gave in and allowed her son to lead her away.

Outside, she was surprised to see that it was full daylight. In fact, to judge from the sun’s height in the sky, it was half way to noon. Across the field, the engineers were erecting a temporary fence across the breached section, but the main gates of the airfield were open and a steady stream of casualties and injured were being brought in by friends and relatives, to be met by guards who checked to make sure they really were injured before taking them to the infirmary she had just left. Word must have spread, she thought. And there were probably similar streams of injured heading towards every other hospital, military base, anywhere else where people thought they might be able to get help. The country's entire medical system must be overloaded. Must be laughably inadequate to cope with the magnitude of the current emergency.

“And this is just the beginning ” she said to herself. “The moon's in a new orbit now. This is going to happen somewhere in the world every twenty seven days. They say it’ll happen here again in about four months. We won't even have begun to recover from this within four months!”

“Next time we'll be better prepared,” said Richard.

“No we won't! This time around we had food and medical supplies stockpiled, but we must have just about run out of everything already. How will we feed the millions of displaced people next time? How will we treat them? Think about how much farming land we've lost. Think about how many factories and industrial centres were destroyed by the floods. If this were a one time event, we'd rally and we'd rebuild, like we did after the second world war, but this is going to happen again and again. Forever! It will be worse every time until we're finally thrown all the way back to the stone age!”

“Civilisation will survive on high ground...”

“Will it? The high ground will be swamped by refugees. You saw what happened here. The crowds burst in, we couldn't keep them out. It'll be the same everywhere. It’ll be like the zombie apocalypse except the zombies will be living people, people that normal, decent people will want to help. If it were a real zombie apocalypse, that would actually be easier because you could just massacre the zombies. You can't do that to living people.”

“You were in there too long,” said Richard. “I should have come to get you long before.”

“I have to go back...”

“You're not going back. That place did something to you. Took your thoughts to dark places. If you go back it’ll crush you.”

“Someone's got to help all those people! We can't just leave them!”

“Someone else can take a turn. There're plenty of people in the hanger, people who don't have families to look after. It's time they took a share of the load.”

“There's people outside who already think we're withholding food and medical supplies. I heard the casualties talking to each other. At the moment they’re just hungry. Soon, they'll be starving. What'll happen then?”

“The authorities will sort something out.”

“How? What'll they do?”

“I don’t know, but they’ve probably already got a plan set up. This country was badly hit, but most of the rest of the world wasn’t. The government can buy food, enough to feed everybody.”

“The rest of the world wasn't hit as badly this time! Next time the moon comes close, another part of the world will be hit by floods and tsunamis. And another next time. Soon, food will be in short supply everywhere! There's going to be starvation all around the world. There'll be riots, violence on a scale never seen before! The death toll will be enormous! Things might stabilise, civilisation might recover, when the world's population has dropped to a fraction of what it is now.”

“You need to sleep. Things’ll look better when you’re rested, you'll see.” They'd reached the hanger and Richard opened the door to take her through, but as they headed back to where he'd left the rest of the family he had the awful feeling that his mother's dark prophecies might turn out to be all too accurate...

☆☆☆

Stuart and Jessica Kerr sat in their car, staring at the bank terminal on the other side of the street, about thirty metres away. “She's had plenty of time to get here by now,” said Jessica, tapping her fingernails on the glove compartment impatiently. “She must have gone to another.”

“Probably,” her husband replied. He was lounging in the drivers seat, watching a small insect marching up the windshield. Occasionally a passer by would approach the terminal. If it was a woman he would perk up momentarily, but they always went right by it without stopping. He would stare at them as they passed the car, looking for Japanese features in their faces. If they noticed his interest he would look hurriedly away, but usually not in time to avoid a look of suspicion appearing on their faces. Sooner it later, he thought, one of them's going to call her husband to report a suspicious couple loitering in a car and things might suddenly get hairy. He didn’t like aggressive confrontations.

“So how long do we wait?”

The desire to leave, to just drive away, rose strongly inside him, but he forced it back down. This was important! The future of the world might literally depend on it! “Let’s give it a bit longer,” he said therefore. “She may still turn up.”

“She's probably gone to another. We're wasting our time here.”

“So what do you suggest? There's dozens of these things within a few miles of here. Do you want to stake out another? Which one? Suppose she comes to this one five minutes after we've left?”

“Exactly, which means there’s no point being here any more. We've lost her. We should just go home, I miss the kids. Neil said he'd call us if she contacted him.”

“Let’s give it five more minutes, just in case.”

His phone rang. He pulled it from his pocket, hoping it was Neil Arndale, but it just said unknown number. He answered it anyway. “Hello,” he said.

“Is that Stuart Kerr?” a woman's voice asked.

“Yes. Who is this?”

“My name is Samantha Kumiko. I understand you've been looking for me.”

Stuart sat upright in his seat. “Samantha!” he said, staring across at Jessica. She also sat upright and stared back. “Thank God! Listen, it’s very important that we meet. We need your knowledge of the moon. Is there somewhere we can meet?”

“Why? What's this about?”

“Look, this is going to sound crazy, but I swear I'm serious. I'm a member of a group of scientists, that is, me and my wife are members of this group, and we have a plan to, er.. “ He paused, fully aware of just how crazy his next words would sound. “We have a plan to move the moon back into its original orbit.”

“That’s impossible! You're crazy!”

“We have a mass dampener, like the one the Chinese used. You remember that? The whole world saw the moon's atmosphere pulsating as they turned it on and off.”

“Yes, I remember.” There was a pause as if she was digesting the news. “Okay, so how can I help you?”

“We plan to attach a spacecraft to the moon by a cable. Then we'll reduce the mass of the moon almost to nothing and pull it back into its original orbit.”

There was another long pause. Stuart imagined her thinking that the very idea was ridiculous. She would disconnect the call, dismiss him as a madman and refuse to answer any return calls he tried to make to her. But she’d seen the Chinese mass dampener in operation! Somehow, impossibly, someone really had invented a device that could remove virtually all the mass from the moon! She’d seen the proof with her own eyes! The whole world had! Stuart waited as patiently as he could while Samantha worked her way through the logic.

“So, how can I help?” Samantha asked at last.

“We need to know where on the moon to anchor the cable. It can't be a place riddled with fault lines or we'll just rip a big chunk out of the moon and leave the rest in its new orbit. We need a large, stable region big enough that, even if it does pull free, it’ll have enough mass in the intervals when the dampener’s turned off for it to act as a gravity tractor and pull the rest of the moon after it.”

“Bristol University has a lunar tectonic fault map. I helped create it. Neil Arndale should be able to send you a copy.”

“I would imagine there are other factors to consider, all of which would have an impact on an area's suitability. I was hoping we could take you up to Wetherby to meet the rest of the team and we can brainstorm it together.”

There was another long pause and Stuart tried to imagine how the proposition sounded from Samantha's standpoint. A strange man was asking her to go away with him. Her house had burned down, and the child’s clothes wrapped with tape they’d found suggested that they’d had a run in with some bad criminal types. Samantha was probably traumatised and suspicious, and had a little girl to protect. He handed the phone to Jessica. “Talk to her,” he said.

Jessica took the phone. “Hello, Samantha?” she said. “My name is Jessica, I'm Stuart’s wife. We went to your house first, we saw what happened to it. We saw you'd been in your neighbour’s house and we found, I mean, we know something bad happened to you.”

“I was raped,” said Samantha quietly.

“Oh God! I'm so sorry...”

“My daughter was bound and gagged with duct tape and we were left there to burn alive.”

Jessica stared at Stuart. He was leaning over to put his head close to hers, close enough to hear what Samantha had just said. She saw him mouth the word shit.

“Samantha,” said Jessica softly. “I'm so sorry for what happened to you. I don't want to sound callous, but bad things have been happening to a lot of people over the past couple of days, and this is just the beginning. We have this one opportunity to fix things, to put the moon back where it belongs. In another couple of weeks the moon will be completely molten and it will no longer be possible to attach anything to it. We need your help. Thousands, maybe millions, of people have died already. Millions more will die if the situation remains unchecked. You can help save those people. Will you help us?”

“I really want to, but my daughter and I have been through a lot and we just want some time to, to recover and, and...”

Stuart took the phone back. “After what you've been through, I can understand your reluctance to meet up with a couple of complete strangers that you have no reason to trust. Perhaps there’s somewhere public we can meet up. Somewhere with lots of people around. We can answer all your questions, provide whatever reassurances you need.”

“Neil Arndale is on his way to pick me up. I've asked him to put himself out for me.”

“Perhaps we can all meet up together. You, us and Neil, at his home. We can provide proof that we really are who we say we are. Please, Samantha, this is important! There are a lot of lives at stake!”

There was another pause, but not as long this time. “When Neil gets here, I'll ask him if that's okay,” she said. “If he says it’s okay for you to come to his house, then we'll meet there.”

“Thank you, Samantha,” said Stuart with relief. “You'll call us back?”

“I'll call you back,” Samantha promised, and hung up.

☆☆☆

Three hours later, Samantha and Lily were in Stuart's car, driving north. Samantha was in the front passenger seat while Lily was in the back, with Jessica. The little girl was bright and chatty, she seemed to have taken an instant liking to her new travelling companion. Jessica was asking her how she was getting on in school and Lily was telling her all about her classmates. Which ones she liked and which ones she didn't like as much. Samantha was listening with a smile of relief, and Stuart could guess the reason for that. The little girl seemed to have suffered no lasting harm from what had happened to her. She was going to be alright.

“Is her father anywhere around?” he asked Samantha. She just shook her head and Stuart decided not to press it. It was clearly not something she wanted to talk about. “Perhaps she'll have a new father one day,” he said therefore.

“Maybe,” said Samantha. She turned her head to look out the window. They were driving along a road that had been deep underwater this time yesterday. There were wooden and plastic objects hanging from tree branches high over their heads and they’d seen several wooden fences that had been swept away by a torrent of water. A snow plough had been along shortly beforehand, pushing aside the dune shaped ridges of soil, sand and other detritus that had been left on the road, but the smaller side roads were still mostly impassable, blocked in places by entire trees that had been uprooted and thrown around like matchsticks. The car's navigation system told them that the way ahead was clear, though, and they'd decided to trust it rather than take a long detour to the south.

“I suppose all these plants are going to die,” said Samantha, probably just to change the subject.

“Depends,” said Stuart. “Only the top few inches of soil have probably been affected by salt yet. The grass and other small plants might die, but the larger plants have roots that go down into soil that hasn't been contaminated. If there are no more high tides, rainfall will eventually wash the salt out and the ground will recover. The large plants will survive, and new grass seeds will germinate. Five years from now, you might not be able to tell that anything happened.”

“If your crazy plan works.”

“If it works, yes.”

“What if it doesn't?”

“Then areas like this will be flooded repeatedly. The salt will eventually percolate deeply enough to kill everything. There are plants that can tolerate salt, maybe they'll grow in those places where the water doesn't cover them too deeply, but being repeatedly covered with several metres of water will kill anything. One day, if we fail, this entire area will be a lifeless expanse of mud. Perhaps new forms of life will evolve to exploit this new ecological niche over the next few million years.”

“And do you really think you have a chance of success?”

“We have a man willing to risk his life trying. He's going to go up into space in an old Mercury capsule perched on top of a Star Pigeon! We have scientists and governments who are backing the mission. They must think it’s worth trying.”

“Maybe they're just desperate.”

“Maybe they are. The more you think about what the moon's going to do to us, in the years and centuries to come, the more you think we have to try.”

Samantha shook her head in amazement. “The moon's always been our friend. It stabilised the Earth’s axial tilt. It protects us from asteroids. It was going to be our stepping stone out into the solar system.”

“It still will be, when we've put it back where it belongs.”

Samantha nodded and looked back out the window at the devastated world they were driving through. Even if they succeeded, it would be the work of a generation to repair the damage the moon had done with just one close approach. Poor old England might never be the same again, or any of the other countries on the North Sea. She thought about other places around the world that had been devastated by floods, earthquakes and tsunamis, some much worse than England, and other countries that had, so far, barely been touched. About a hundred volcanoes had erupted around the world, though. Vast clouds of dust and smoke were rising to blanket the world. A volcanic winter was coming that might last for several years and it was precisely those countries that hadn't been touched by the oceans that would be hardest hit by the long winter. Countries near the centre of continents, far from the stabilising warmth of ocean currents. Eastern Europe, most of Russia, the central American states. They were probably feeling smug at the moment. They wouldn't be feeling quite so pleased with themselves this time next year.

Stuart put on some music. Something classical that Samantha couldn't identify. It was soothing, though, and the car was warm and comfortable. The stress of the past twenty four hours was beginning to catch up with her and she found herself growing drowsy. She leaned her head back against the headrest and dropped off to sleep.