Professor Hanover Klingst sat in the dark, watching out his office window as the August moon rose up over a dusty, dry North Bergen. The room was bathed in starlight and the only noise was his rapid breathing as he looked heavenward, the cosmos reflected in his glasses. His last assistant had gone home hours before.

    His reverie was uninterrupted, no phone rang, no voices sprang from his computer, telling him he had mail, and even the crickets were silent, perhaps aware of the sparkling behemoth that hung from the night sky.

    Klingst never tired of seeing his creation as it majestically passed overhead, raining its broken, glittering bits down into the ionosphere. Each tiny prism gleamed as it turned, then disappeared into a vaporous wet puff.

    For six months now, the Phoebe Project had orbited the earth, a ball of ice that was slowly replenishing the dry rivers and streams that a century’s worth of human hubris and neglect had created.

    Professor Klingst had designed the near-lightspeed craft, the Mercurion, that had snatched Phoebe, the ice ball moon, from its ancient path around Saturn and dragged it across the solar system and into earth orbit. The idea, praised by far-out visionaries and pooh-poohed by beancounters, was to melt the icy moon to replenish the precious water that an overheated Mother Earth was boiling off into space. Most scientists agreed that this celestial kidnapping could be humanity’s salvation, but as the nuts and bolts and costs of the Phoebe Project became apparent, the scientific community was at once excited but divided.

    "It will never work", squeaked Stephen Hawking in his robotic monotone.

    "It’s an elegant solution to a very big problem", announced Bill Gates, whose company then designed the software to run the automated project. Of course, Gates was better at putting together funds than the ex-felon Klingst, and the project became reality. NASA wasn’t involved, the organization that had given us the first men on the Moon and Mars had long before been downsized and privatized to the point where it had simply disappeared.

    Project Phoebe was now in full operation. The moon was being systematically chopped up into village sized chunks of ice by Klingst’s ultimate scientific triumph, the Pick. It rode alongside Phoebe in orbit, a shiny metal claw wielding a giant ice pick that struck the moon every three minutes, knocking off colossal bits of frozen water that fell from orbit, saturating the upper atmosphere.