Act of God (12 page)

Sam spoke up for the first time in this session. "Mr. President, gentlemen, I want to point out something Dr. Ciano and I discussed recently that hasn't been brought up here. All the people here who are charged with such responsibility are going to leave this room ready to push buttons when something big goes bang on the American continent. I have to point out that there is a tiny but finite possibility that a real meteor or comet strike could occur at any time and it'd be a real shame to wipe out life on Earth because a brainless chunk of rock or ice hit us at the wrong time. From what Ugo tells me, comets often break up in the inner solar system, so there could be repeated hits, just like a real attack."

"Come on, now," General Moore said, "the chances are so small that—"

"Small or not, General, they're there," Ugo said. "Gentlemen, since we're on the subject of ice let us not forget the Titanic . That ship was as unsinkable as the technology of the time could make it. To sink, she just about had to collide with an iceberg, and she had to collide just right to open up her bottom. The chances were a million to one that the two would hit just right and they did. First time out."

The President steepled his fingers and thought, not for the first time, that he should have taken his mother's advice and become a priest.

"Missed your chance, Ugo," Sam said as they walked away from the White House. "Why didn't you tell the President you should head the project? He probably would've given it to you, out of sheer spite."

Ciano grinned slyly. "Think you're smart, don't you? Well, old Ugo's smarter. I don't wanna be head of the department, even if I am the man best qualified for the job."

"How come?" Sam asked.

"Because the head of a U.S. government department don't get to go up in no rocket," Ugo said. Try as he might, Sam could get no more out of him.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

SOVIET SPACE STATION
VOLGA

The red light came on above the communicator and it whistled shrilly for attention. "
Nevsky
to
Volga! Nevsky
to
Volga!
Korsakov here. My intership scooter is not operational. Glitch in the propulsion system. I need someone to come and fetch me."

"Hold on a minute, Korsakov," the communicator on duty said. He punched a switch to alert the crew quarters, interrupting a game of free-fall handball. "Attention! Korsakov needs help. He's stuck on the
Nevsky
. Scooter's down."

"Again?" said Bulganin, the chief pilot. "Tell him we're on our way."

The communicator addressed the
Nevsky
's pilot. "We'll send out rescue within five minutes. Can you hold out?"

"No problem. I have enough oxygen for two more hours at least."

"We'll haul you back here well before two hours are up.
Volga
out."

"Thanks,
Volga
.
Nevsky
out."

Fifty minutes later, the hermetic inner lock of the space station opened and two bulky, space-suited figures floated through, already undoing their helmets. Korsakov was a small, middle-aged man with a deeply-seamed face. Just now his graying hair was confined under the close-fitting coif that the cosmonauts had nicknamed the "bathing cap." He climbed out of the spacesuit and arranged it carefully in its locker, then he kicked the locker door shut with a practiced foot, turning the motion into a push-off toward the door to the main work area. He pulled himself along, utilizing struts and handholds, acknowledging the greetings of his fellow cosmonauts. Like him, they were clad in gray jumpsuits and white coifs.

Space Station
Volga
was a Spartan work-place, as bare and functional as a ship under construction. Simulated gravity was to be induced by spinning the entire station, but that could not be done until the station was fully operational. Then it would be relatively comfortable, with furniture and recreation areas—but not for four more years.

Korsakov pulled himself into a small office marked "Station Director." "Korsakov reporting, Comrade Director." The Director himself was floating in the center of the office, upside-down to Korsakov's orientation, but one quickly lost all sense of proper juxtaposition in free-fall. Korsakov locked his boots into a pair of slots in the surface that one day would be the floor. From a big leg-pocket in his jumpsuit he took a small plastic flask and tossed it to the director. It crossed the room in a perfectly straight line, without the gravity-induced trajectory of earthly missiles.

The director caught the flask expertly. "Thanks, Aleksandr." He flipped the cap from the tube and took a sip, then tossed the flask back.

"Report," the Director ordered.

"Comrade Director,
Pionyer I
is now fully equipped and ready for testing."

"Excellent! Tomorrow, we check out the entire system except for the thruster. The nuclear-powered ion-drive system will be field-tested after everything else is checked out and proven satisfactory. Wouldn't want to send the test crew out on an inadvertent cosmic Odyssey without a fully operational life-support system, now, would we?"

"No, Comrade Director," Korsakov concurred, taking a nip of the vodka and tossing the flask back to the Director. "If that thruster malfunctions, even just a little, it would be a long time before we could get a rescue party to them."

The Director took another drink and made a face at the flask. "It never tastes the same when it's been put in plastic. If I had my way, Korsakov, I would test the thruster in a much safer environment. According to our original timetable, this phase of the testing was to begin two years from now. We could still make it to Mars and back by the official date, if we cared to. Not only have they changed the destination to a comet, which is a most flimsy target, if you ask me, but they have stepped up the schedule dangerously. The risk factor is much too high now. What do they think this is, a war?"

Korsakov declined to answer the rhetorical question.

"I wonder who our administrators have been listening to of late. I can't imagine that Tarkovsky is doing this. His projects are ambitious, but he's the most careful planner in the whole space program. Well, it's not the first time the amateurs have taken over. Have you heard that there's a faction that wants a political education officer assigned to every space station? Political education! As if we were a pack of teenaged Army privates. Ah, well, we can only do our best to stay ahead of the capitalists." This last was added pro forma to avoid sounding like a dissident.

Korsakov carefully paid no attention to the Director's grumblings. He wasn't interested in politics. What Korsakov liked was engines. The new engine was the greatest propulsion system ever devised. "If all goes ahead on schedule and barring any problems in the life-support systems, we should be able to blast off for the comet rendezvous in two weeks." Korsakov was as enthusiastic as the Director was doubtful. "With the tankful of water coming up on the next space truck, the reaction mass tank will be full and have enough left over for fine maneuvering to match the comet's velocity perfectly at the time of encounter."

The Director just grunted and took another sip of the vodka. He did not like sending men out on what might be a one-way mission, but he was merely director of Space Station
Volga
and just now he was glad that he did not hold a higher post. "You may get there alive, but if you don't succeed in securing enough ice to feed your thruster, you won't be coming back. Besides, if there is too great a concentration of dust grains and rocks in the ice, I am not that confident that the water separation system will work."

"You sound like my maiden aunt Nina," Korsakov said. "She's a chronic worrier, too. Look, should it turn out that way, I won't be the first cosmonaut not to come back. If we'd wanted to be safe, we could have nice easy teaching jobs back on the ground. This time the risk is worth it, for sure. We've been in orbit and on the moon for years, but always within the Earth's gravity. This is man's first expedition into deep space, and I'm the pilot."

The Director tossed back the vodka flask. "You're crazy, Korsakov, but I wish I was going along."

CHAPTER TWELVE

WASHINGTON, D.C.

General Stephen Hart was Administrator of the United States Space Defense Agency, known in the popular press as the Star Wars program. The chatter of conversation in the briefing room died down as he came in, dressed in his civvies. It was a habit he had acquired from his early press conferences. It seemed to make people nervous to see men in military uniform running space projects. He took his place at the head of the long table, setting his briefcase neatly next to his chair. At his nod, the Marine MP stepped outside the room and shut the door. Others seated at the table were Hart's top administrators and his two new acquisitions: Sam Taggart and Ugo Ciano.

"Ladies, gentlemen," Hart began, "you have had two weeks to assess our options to counter the threat posed by Project Ivan the Terrible from the viewpoint of your own specialty." He glanced at the piles of reports neatly piled in front of each participant. He continued, his voice neat, clipped, accustomed to commanding undivided attention.

"We'll start with an overview. Regi, go ahead with your report."

Reginald LaCroix, Associate Administrator for Future Planning, stood up and made his way to the end of the table opposite the general. He was dressed in a fashionably-cut brown suit, artfully tailored to minimize his middle-aged midriff bulge. He ignored the modern vuegraph projector on the table. The General's aversion to darkened meeting rooms was well known, and the idiosyncrasies of generals were usually honored. In any case, all the tables and figures were in front of all the participants.

"As you'll see on the cover page summary, it will take a minimum of one year to adapt the prototype of the nuclear fission powerhouse to the engineering model of the ion drive. It's a miracle we even have those models, with the budget that department's been operating on.

"Our first manned interplanetary probe ship was planned with an engine using liquid hydrogen for maximum efficiency and not atomic hydrogen obtained from water for reaction mass. The use of ice water from comets, broken down to hydrogen and oxygen, is an intriguing possibility. Unfortunately, we have not been working on that."

Deputy Administrator Gerald Hayward spoke up at this point. "Why did nobody in our agency or NASA suggest this idea? It seems simple and obvious. The Russians have been working on it for a number of years."

"It was the usual failure of two departments to make connections. No astronomer thought to point out to our engineers that comets are basically gigantic cosmic iceballs. Likewise, nobody on the engineering end thought to mention that ice would be nice to have for manned interplanetary flight. I suspect, though, that if we studied all the minutes of all the planning meetings we've had and went through all the reports and suggestions and helpful letters that have been sent to us, in all probability we would find exactly this course suggested to us. Perhaps many times.

"We all know, though, that once an agency is committed to a particular course of action, it becomes next to impossible to change that course. All such alternatives are waved away while we proceed with the original plan. Now, let's look at what's on hand."

Fussing with his glasses, LaCroix consulted his notes.

"There is a long range program to consider the use of pulverized asteroidal rocks for reaction mass but that won't be a practical engineering proposition, probably for a few more decades. A bright young man in the engineering development division thinks that we might be able to develop the capability to use water in our nuclear propulsion system in about three years, if given enough resources."

Administrator Hart spoke up. "Could you speculate for us on the time it might take for us to send a round-trip mission to a comet dogging the heels of the Soviets in order to monitor and, should it prove necessary, interdict their mission?"

LaCroix poured a glass of water before answering his boss. "The possibility of sending our manned mission to a comet within one year is so slight as to be negligible. The chances of being ready in two years are remote but not ridiculously so. In my opinion, if given top national priority, it could become a practical proposition in three years."

"If the Soviets," Hart went on, "manage to complete their Ivan the Terrible mission in, say, two years, what options do you see for us?"

"This is something Dr. Ciano and Mr. Taggart and I were discussing recently," LaCroix told him. "I think Dr. Ciano should give us his thoughts on this matter, which I am sure you will all find very well taken."

Ciano cleared his throat and put on his best ivy-league voice. Sam had been insisting that Low Brooklynese was a no-no in the world of high achievers. "Tarkovsky is a Russian, and like most Russians he's careful and cautious. They're willing to take big risks but they're seldom reckless. I don't think they'll try a massive ice-bomb attack without testing it first. I'm sure that their first mission will be to go out and bring back some cometary material and place it in Earth orbit where they can study it, maybe make last-minute trimmings so they can be absolutely certain how much mass they're dealing with.

"If current theory is correct and comets are of mixed ice and rock, there'll be some of each brought back. When they're ready, they'll inject it at the trajectory they want and study the results. Most probably they'll drop them on Siberia. There's a remote possibility they'll try an ocean drop, with a Soviet fleet or scientific station nearby. Sometime in the next couple of years we're going to hear about one or more blasts in remote areas, with little or no loss of life. I'm ninety percent sure that the figures will be consistent with a mixed drop of ice and rock. When that happens, we'll know that they're ready to get serious."

"Would they tip their hand like that?" objected Hart.

Sam held up a stack of tabloid clippings. "They've been softening us up for it for months, now. Everywhere you go you see these things. There's even a few books out now on meteor and comet hits. Astronomers and nutcase alarmists are all over the talkshows. A new book has come out on the Tunguska blast and I heard there's even a movie in production about it. Apocalyptic fundamentalists are claiming that all the signs are in order for the end, or at least for a big disaster to punish us all for our worldliness. Hell, in the atmosphere that's developing, people are going to be disappointed if something big doesn't drop from the sky.

"Incidentally, concerning these stories that started showing up in the tabs: we've determined that the initial stories of supposed Soviet scientific predictions were leaked to the sensational press by the information office of the USSR's London embassy. It seems that American and British tabs exchange stories a lot." There was a subdued mutter at this revelation.

"That still leaves us with the question of our options in case the Soviets get their offensive under way before we send a mission to track them," Hart said, bringing the discussion back on course. "What then?"

LaCroix resumed his recitation. "Our first option is to shoot the Soviet mission down while it is still near the Earth. Clearly, we have the capability to do that right now. The price of that course could be to touch off a war, perhaps a nuclear one. This option would therefore be acceptable only if we are already in a state of war with the Soviets."

"Let's not discount that possibility entirely," Hart said, coolly.

"Um, yes, well, our second option would be to send a multi-megaton warhead to every comet with an orbit attractive for Ivan the Terrible. There aren't that many suitable comets, so the scope of this task is logistically manageable. The technology for it is already here. There are, however, major objections. On the diplomatic front, it would certainly create an uproar in the international community, enabling the Soviets to do a great deal of damage without dropping a single iceberg on us. Besides, as Dr. Ciano has pointed out, we would be destroying irreplaceable assets for our future exploration of the solar system."

"Precisely," Ciano said. "To do that would be the equivalent of—" he waved his hands, searching for an analogy, "dealing with the Indian wars by permanently poisoning every water source west of the Mississippi. Those comets may be absolutely essential to sustaining viable colonies in space."

"That brings us to option number three," LaCroix resumed. "Establishing an in-depth, layered, defense system against the iceberg bombs, in essence a whole battery of defenses, forcing them to run a veritable gauntlet before getting a clear shot at us. Once again, our course would be littered with obstacles. For one, it would be frightfully expensive. For another, conventional explosives might only result in altering the trajectories of the icebergs without vaporizing them. We would almost certainly have to use nuclear warheads, with all the problems that entails.

"The greatest problem, though, is how to find the damned things. The icebergs will be towed back to Earth by continuous-boost spaceships and it'll be almost impossible to anticipate their trajectories. The main problem here is that the icebergs are much too small for detection by any surveillance system in operation or on the drawing boards. We might look for the firing of the auxiliary rockets on the icebergs but they'll be activated only briefly and even that will probably take place just before their entry into the atmosphere. It would be futile to aim heat-seeking missiles at the exhaust from the auxiliary rockets."

"Lasers?" hazarded somebody.

"Way down the line," LaCroix answered. "They've been greatly overrated for long-range defense. Even under crash priority we couldn't develop an orbiting laser system that's up to this job in under ten years. And ten years we just don't have."

"So there are our options," Hart announced. "All of them have serious ifs and buts, which we'll now discuss in depth. Our one saving advantage, if it exists, is Dr. Ciano's assertion that the Russians will want to test their new technology first. That makes sense to me, and I think it's about the only thing that's going to save our butts." For the first time, he leaned back in his chair, "Now there was a time not so long ago when the first option anybody would've considered is the one nobody has mentioned here: a nuclear strike with ICBMs. The one way to preempt such an attack as we think they're contemplating is to hit them first and without warning. Well, there was a time we could've done that, but not now; they've been getting ready for that for forty years now. Good thing, too, since it seems that even if they never got off a shot our weapons alone could touch off an ice age that'd finish us as surely as losing a nuclear exchange. That's the past, anyway. Let's talk about the present and the all-too-near future."

The conference went on for the rest of the day. In late afternoon, Hart called a short coffee break. It was perfectly plain that nobody was going to be home for supper this evening. Everywhere, the chill-eyed presence of the MPs was a sobering pall. "Jeez," Ciano muttered to Sam, "I feel like a goddam convict."

"Do secret work for the government," Sam told him, "and you'll always feel like a convict. Start acting like one, too."

"Yeah?" whispered Ugo out of the side of his mouth. "How do ya mean?"

"Well, for instance," Sam murmured confidentially, "you start whispering when you could be talking right out loud."

"No shi—" Ugo began to mutter, then his eyes went wide. "The hell you say!" he shouted. He turned and stamped away in a diminutive huff. Sam smiled for the first time that day.

They returned from the coffee break to find that Hart had been busy even during the brief rest period. "Gentlemen, ladies, I've just been informed that we have a new status. This is now the first executive meeting of the Department of Space Defense, of which I am now Secretary, pending a routine ratification and confirmation by Congress. Head of Project Bounty Hunter," he winced slightly at the title, "will be Colonel Bart Chambers, who is at this moment selecting his team for the pursuit and interdiction mission.

"Make no mistake about it: what we have here is a crash priority program in which time is of the essence, far more so than in the moonshot program or even the Manhattan Project. We'll be taking chances we would ordinarily consider unacceptable. Lives may well be lost. This is a matter of national survival, and sacrifices will be made accordingly. On the plus side, you won't have to contend with the usual media coverage and interference."

"You realize, of course," Ciano put in, "that this means our contributions to the future of man in space may go uncredited. If we do our work right, we'll have laid the groundwork for humanity as an interplanetary species and prevented a world war, and nobody will ever know about it, or what really happened."

"I'm sure we can all live with that," Hart said. "Ladies and gentlemen, let's get to work."

In the parking lot, Sam headed for his new car, a late-model Japanese import that he preferred to recent Detroit products, but which was a poor substitute for his old Chevy. Ciano caught him before he could reach his new, unfamiliar machine.

"Look what I got," Ciano said, pointing at a massive limousine with a uniformed driver leaning against its fender.

"You're coming up in the world, Ugo. Congratulations."

"Sam," Ugo continued, "I made an appointment for us to meet with the Assistant Secretary for Crew Training at ten tomorrow morning. Guy by the name of Hubert Rollins."

For a moment Sam didn't say anything, just stood there looking troubled. Then, "Look, Ugo, I'm not a scientist, I'm not an astronaut and I'm not an administrator. You don't need me any more. I've pretty well wrapped up all my reports. My presence at this meeting today was mainly to provide continuity between the initial investigation and the inception of the space defense project. I've put in for a transfer. With rough times in the offing, my superiors have started being polite again. There's talk of some important missions for me."

"Not a chance. Cancel your request. You and me and Laine and Fred are sticking together until Ivan's finished. I wouldn't feel the vibes was right if we was split up. Right now I can just about write my own ticket, and I can do it for the rest of us, too. Between my new position and your connections in Intelligence, I think we can get what we all want.