At night they fell like brilliant snowflakes, with occasional bright crawling fireballs. But those were mostly grains of sand, or dust. Every now and then one would be large enough to make it to the ground, but most of those were man-made, the debris of thousands of satellites. (Ad Astra no doubt was pelted, but the iceberg had so much mass it stayed put in orbit.)

There were no casualties on Earth that first day, though seven thousand did die in space, mostly in the first few minutes. Worldwide havoc had been expected, especially from the Space Elevators, unraveling and lashing the surface of the Earth like huge bullwhips fifty thousand miles long—but they had been engineered with the possibility of disaster in mind, and the cables disintegrated into harmless dust as they fell. Two passenger carriers flamed into the land and sea, their human cargos ash.

So there was no danger to atmospheric craft, but the peril to spacecraft was real. Every cubic centimeter of space between Earth and where the Moon had been held a piece of gravel.

Eventually, in tens or hundreds or thousands of centuries, all that cloud of rock and gravel would settle into rings, like Saturn’s, very pretty and easy for a spaceship to avoid.

That was longer than Paul wanted to wait. And with us on Air Force One was a man who thought he wouldn’t have to: U.S. Air Force General Gil Ballard, the president’s defense secretary.

Namir coldly excused himself and went back to the press side of the huge plane. He later told me he had read the man’s remarks about our mission and left before he could make a scene in what looked like a ceremonial meeting.

I wished he had stayed. It might not have changed things, but it would have been good theater.

The meeting room in the middle of Air Force One was extravagantly massive, a projection of masculine power—heavy woods, fragrant leather, deep carpeting. General Ballard, a large, intense man, maybe sixty, blazing eyes and shaved bullet head, fit the room perfectly. He sat next to the president, facing us across the table.

“It’s just a different scale from what you did with ad Astra,” the general argued. We had used powerful lasers to vaporize things the size of grains of sand, and maneuvered out of the way of larger obstacles. “Same principle. Just going slower and dealing with more interference.”

I had mixed feelings. I wanted Paul to be happy, and he’d always said he could never be happy without space. But having space hardly seemed possible anymore. Or smart.

And after mourning for Mars, I started to feel a kind of long-repressed relief. I’ve spent half my life off Earth and was ready to try living here again. Imagine, oxygen and water and food that you didn’t have to recycle endlessly through yourself. Just let the planet do the recycling for you.