Laurence expected someone else to jump in and argue with him, but everybody was hanging on his words for some weird reason. So Laurence said, “As long as humanity survives, the best part of planet Earth will have endured. I mean, you wouldn’t do anything without a backup plan, right? So this is just our backup plan, in case Plan A fails.”

They’d been meeting a few hours, and people were starting to come together behind the notion of developing the wormhole generator as an absolute last resort. Especially since the alternative was just packing up and going home, and waiting for the worst to happen.

At last, Milton spoke up again. “Thank you, all of you, for sharing your perspectives. This is not going to be an easy decision to make, and we’re not going to finish making it today. For now, though, I hope we can all agree to keep moving forward. With safeguards in place, as Anya suggested, to keep the device from being activated without overwhelming likelihood of a true doomsday occurrence. But I will say this: I believe it’s coming. The only question in my mind is the timescale. It could be six months or sixty years, but at some point, if things keep going along these vectors, we will be in a place where we are poised to end ourselves. We can only hope there will be enough warning before it happens to allow us to get some people out.”

The exact nature of the safeguards was left vague.

Everybody left the server room reeling with tension headaches and moral torment. Tanaa and Jerome rushed off to the storage closet, the only place with privacy in the entire compound, for some emergency nookie. For everybody else, there was a pleasant surprise: Someone had delivered two dozen pizzas while they’d been debating the fate of the world. Nobody had eaten pizza in months, since they got to Denver. Laurence grabbed three wide slices, folding the first slice lengthwise and stuffing it in his mouth.

The sun had gone down, and the one tree on the front lawn of the industrial park campus was making an evil silhouette against the outsized moon. Laurence ended up changing seats so he could eat pizza with his back to the big window, but he could still feel the world breathing down his neck. He looked over at Isobel, and she nodded at him, with one eye half-shut in a kind of minimalist smile.

Chapter 26

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