‘It took a month for their Moon to spiral all the way down from its usual orbit and towards the Earth,’ said Casey, continuing his narration. ‘We’ve got evidence there was some kind of attempt to build a ship at record speed, presumably to blast a few survivors off towards Mars, but I think they realized pretty soon that wasn’t going to work.’

‘Why not?’ somebody shouted out. Someone else laughed, and I realized that many of those people around me, rather than being appalled, were in fact enjoying the spectacle.

‘There’s no way to create a long-term sustainable living environment under that kind of time limit,’ Casey replied easily. ‘They could have survived for a couple of years maybe, perhaps a little longer, but no more than that. I guess they decided they’d rather die quickly with the rest of humanity than face a long, slow death with no possibility of rescue.’ He shrugged. ‘Either that, or they killed each other fighting for a berth on the ship.’

‘I’m not sure I can watch this,’ I muttered to Nadia.

‘Stick around,’ she muttered. ‘You need to get hardened to stuff like this, Jerry.’

‘Now this mission,’ Casey continued, ‘was about collecting observational data for a change, instead of bloody artefact retrieval. Specifically, it was about. . .’ He frowned and glanced over at Wallace. ‘What the hell did they call it again?’

‘“The interaction between two co-orbiting bodies following a quantum-phase trigger event”,’ Wallace replied.

‘Yeah,’ said Casey. ‘That. Whatever the fuck that is.’ That got him a few laughs from around the room.

I swallowed hard as the show continued. Whoever had been wielding the hand-held camera had somehow managed to keep a steady focus on the surface of the moon as it rushed towards them, the cracks in its surface growing yet wider. I couldn’t imagine what kind of fortitude it took to just stand there and watch, instead of screaming and running.

I glanced back at the main projection, and saw there was something odd about the shape of both worlds. Their outlines were becoming distended where they were closest, as if they were being twisted out of shape.

Over the next minute the darkness separating the two worlds reduced to a narrow gap, then a sliver and, finally, nothing. The moon had by now become egg-shaped, with enormous fissures reaching around to its far side. Brilliant incandescent light flared where the two bodies met, and from that moment on they appeared to merge into each other, the moon sinking deep into the Earth’s crust like a pebble dropped into wet mud. I saw lunar craters melting into molten slag before they, too, were sucked deep within the Earth’s embrace.