He had last seen Dr. Moira Crewe at the Crater Lake announcement, where she had been assisting her mentor, Clarence Crouch, the Nobel Prize–winning geneticist—the poor sod who had been given the job of explaining the Casting of Lots to the world. Since then Clarence had died of cancer in his Cambridge house, surrounded by biological samples and scientific memorabilia that would not long survive the onset of the Hard Rain. No doubt it had been a blessing for him. Doob had lost track of Moira after that, but of all the people on Earth she was one of the most obvious candidates for inclusion on the Cloud Ark. She was of West Indian ancestry, wearing her hair in finger-length dreadlocks that had adapted pretty well to zero gravity—better than white-people hair, for sure. Moon face had added a few years to her apparent age, but Doob knew her to be in her late twenties. Raised in a dodgy part of London, she’d gone to a posh school on scholarship and went on to earn a biology degree at Oxford. She had gone to Harvard for her Ph.D., working with a project there on de-extinction. Her general charisma, and an accent that Americans found charming, had made her into the most well-known spokesperson for that project. She had done TED talks and other public appearances describing her lab’s efforts to bring the woolly mammoth back to life. After a brief sojourn in Siberia, working with a Russian oil billionaire who wanted to create a nature preserve stocked with formerly extinct megafauna, she had returned to the UK and begun postdoctoral work with Clarence.