Authors: Jack McDevitt
“In addition to the assorted calamities of the evening, we are also now threatened by a large object that we’ve come to call the
Possum
. Its real name is POSIM-38, and it’s slightly over a mile long. POSIM-38 is a piece of moonrock that was blown clear during the collision, and it has the potential, should it fall to Earth, to do irreparable damage to the environment.
“This object will make a close approach to Earth at eight forty-seven this morning. It will pass through the atmosphere, and it is then likely to go into an orbit that will decay, that
will bring it back
.
“It will continue to present a major hazard unless we act. And the reality is that we’ll never have a better opportunity to get rid of it than we have today. Therefore, I’ve ordered the air force to prepare a massive missile strike, which will be delivered
after it leaves the area of the Earth
.
“In this way—”
It was as far as he got.
A bolt of lightning exploded directly over the White House, the lights went out, flickered on and off a couple of times, and finally died altogether.
“We’re off the air, Mr. President,” said his producer.
“Can you get us back on, Herman?”
“In a few minutes. Maybe.”
The emergency lights came on.
Henry glanced down at the crowd of reporters. “You can see how things have been.” The remark drew a few tired smiles.
While he waited, he talked with them, explaining informally what the consequences might be if they failed to act against the Possum. Had he consulted with China? someone
wanted to know. He hadn’t; it wasn’t a Chinese issue. CBS asked if the administration would now budget seriously for Skybolt.
He began to explain that the administration had always supported the concept, and was about to fudge history when a young navy lieutenant stepped into the room from a side door and handed a piece of paper to Al Kerr. Kerr glanced at it, came forward immediately and handed it to the president. It read:
TIDAL WAVE IMMINENT
.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” Henry said, “we’d better continue the discussion elsewhere.”
No one needed an explanation. The journalists scrambled for their cars. The president turned to an aide. “Get Emily,” he said.
10.
AstroLab. 5:07
A.M.
Feinberg had been talking with Windy Cross about POSIM-38, requesting adjustments in the imaging process when
his
power failed. A minute later, the phone lines went out.
But Feinberg had become a very big player, bigger perhaps than he realized. Ten minutes after everything had gone down, an army helicopter descended onto the front lawn and a young captain introduced himself. His name was McMichael and he’d been assigned to provide whatever transportation or communication the professor might need. Then he asked confidentially whether the Possum was as dangerous as the president said.
Feinberg assured him that the danger couldn’t be overstated.
Somehow, despite everything, Wes Feinberg had missed the human dimension of the catastrophe. He knew what was
happening around the world, but his attention had been focused on orbital mechanics, and now, the dynamics of the Possum. He’d alerted the president as soon as he realized the danger. But he’d felt no real human involvement. Looking into McMichael’s gray eyes, feeling the man’s fear, he recognized his own detachment. He understood its derivation: his sense that there was nothing to be done about the rock, just as there had been nothing to do about the comet. His advice to the president that he act had been given despite the fact that Feinberg believed no action was feasible. That, lacking Skybolt, the world had no tool at hand with which to defend itself. The human race was caught in a game of cosmic billiards. It was probably going to lose, unless it got very lucky. And because he could only watch, he’d felt no emotional involvement other than his excitement at being here on this day.
The Possum would pass Earth by the barest of margins, literally roaring through the ionosphere, close enough to
see
with the naked eye. But it had enough momentum to avoid being dragged down. For him, the interest lay in the trajectory and velocity with which it would emerge.
“The president has made a public statement about the Possum?” he asked.
“Yes, sir. He was conducting a press conference, but it went off the air. Power failure in D.C.”
“Join the rest of the country,” said Feinberg. “What did he say about the Possum?”
“That he was going to nuke it, sir.”
“
Nuke it?
”
“Yes, sir.” He looked at his watch. “In a couple of hours, I guess. Right after it makes its pass over China.”
Feinberg sighed. “Get me through to him, Captain.”
“Sir, I’ll do what I can.”
Goddammed idiots. Don’t politicians ever ask questions before they make decisions?
The White House. 5:09
A.M.
They hurried the president and first lady through torrential rain across the west lawn, where three choppers were waiting. One lifted away as they slogged through the drenched grass. Actually, Henry was in better shape, despite his illness, than most of the middle-aged officeholders with him, and he ended by helping some of them. Kerr in particular was gasping and heaving before he’d gone more than a few steps.
The military people stayed on the fringe of the group to assist where needed. As Henry arrived at the waiting helicopter, a bolt of lightning illuminated the Capitol and the southeastern sky for what seemed a full minute. And he saw the wave. It looked to be literally a mile high, its white crest breaking over the top, a mountain of water racing down on them. The people coming up from behind gasped and scrambled into the helicopter. The chopper crew helped, literally dragging some in by the scruff of the neck while a Marine officer redundantly shouted, “
Move move move
.” Henry helped Emily up, and then he was unceremoniously hauled on board and passed none too gently from hand to hand. He heard Emily’s choked voice crying out Al’s name, saw Kerr stumble again, his legs twisted, falling forward while a young lieutenant tried to hold him up. Twenty yards beyond the chief of staff, a handful of reporters ran through the steaming rain. Now a voice behind Henry was saying, “
Go go
,” and the roar of the engines deepened and the chopper started to lift.
The president shouted for them to wait,
ordered
the pilot to set back down. Kerr was still on the ground, they didn’t have everybody, there was room for more. But hands dragged him away from the open door and someone said it was all right, the other chopper would pick up the stragglers. But Henry knew there were too many for the remaining aircraft.
He was in one of the big cargo carriers. It rose so swiftly it threw him onto the deck. A crewman fell on him and held
him. Someone else banged the door shut. “Hang on, sir,” said the crewman.
Heavy winds beat on the aircraft. Henry couldn’t see the wave anymore, couldn’t see anything in the dark interior, couldn’t get up to look because the deck swerved and rolled under him. Some of his aides had made it on board, some of the military people, a couple of the reporters, and one of the agents. But there’d been room for more. They’d left maybe twenty down on the lawn. Including Al.
The engines screamed. Henry found a handhold. There should have been a plan in place to get everybody out. Damn. His staff had screwed this up to a fare-thee-well. Or he had.
He felt especially responsible about the reporters. He’d called them to the White House, and had failed to make provision for them. As if he’d thought D.C. was a sacred place, somehow shielded from the catastrophe that was overwhelming the rest of the country.
The man who’d been on top of him, apparently satisfied that the president could no longer hurt himself, eased off. “Sorry, sir,” he said. He wore single silver bars.
“It’s okay, Lieutenant,” said Henry. He looked around, found Emily, and was frightened by her empty eyes. He tried to talk to her but she could not speak.
Lightning flickered in the compartment. Sheets of rain hammered at the windows. The chopper lurched and dipped and rose again. The lieutenant leaned toward the cockpit, spoke briefly, and then nodded: “We’re clear, Mr. President.”
“Did the other helicopter get off?”
He spoke with one of the pilots again. “Yes, sir. They’re in the air.”
The roar of the engines eased and Henry got to his feet. The world below was full of liquid darkness and electricity. The lights were out, the ground was dark; he could see no streets, no homes, no monuments. He shivered.
Lightning glimmered against a black torrent pouring across the rotunda. The Lincoln Memorial, half-drowned, flickered in and out of existence.
He eased into the cockpit. “Pilot, can you contact the other aircraft? The one that took off behind us?”
The pilot nodded. “Welcome aboard, Mr. President,” he said, and handed him a mike and a pair of earphones. “Bagel Three,” he said, “the president would like to talk with you.”
There was a long silence on the other end. Then: “This is Bagel Three. Glad you made it, Mr. President.”
“Thank you. Were you able to get the people on the ground?”
Another long pause, long enough that Henry knew the answer. “No, sir. Not all of them. There wasn’t time.” The voice on the other end had become somewhat high-pitched. “There was nothing I could do, sir.”
“I know, son. I was there.”
“We just barely got off as it was, Mr. President. If I hadn’t gone, everybody would have died.”
“It’s all right.” He took a deep breath. “Is Al Kerr there?”
Emily squeezed his shoulder while they listened to people at the other end call Kerr’s name. A jumble of voices, and then Henry heard him. “I’m here, Mr. President.”
“Thank God, Al. Al, how bad was it? How many’d they have to leave?”
“Ten, fifteen. I’m not sure, sir.” He didn’t elaborate.
“Al, have you looked out the window?”
Another massive bolt of lightning hit. They were flying over a broad sea, with here and there a monument or a piece of the State Department projecting out of the water. “Yeah,” said Kerr. “I saw it.”
Henry wondered how many people had still been in the city. Taking his advice. “Al, where are we headed?”
“It’s still dry at Camp David, sir.”
They were turning to the northwest, running over the quiet waters, riding in relative silence now, save for the storm. “Mr. President.” The pilot’s voice again, breaking in, bringing him back from some other place.
“Yes. What is it?”
“You’ve got a call. Man named Feinberg.”
“Patch him through, pilot.”
Some clicks in his earphones. And then Feinberg’s rasp: “Mr. President?”
“Hello, Wesley. You’ll be interested in knowing we’ve just lost Washington.”
“Mr. President, don’t do it.”
“Don’t do
what?
”
“Don’t nuke the Possum.”
Henry looked down at the drowned city. “I think we’ve had enough, Wesley.”
“
No!
If you persist, you’ll only make things worse.”
They were the last words Henry heard. He was about to reply, to ask how he could possibly make things worse, to observe that he was by God going to take the Possum out of the game, when someone screamed, the inside of the cockpit blurred, fire broke out, and the chopper’s nightlights died. He was half-conscious; trying to find Emily in the dark, and he knew he was falling.
TRANSGLOBAL COMMENTARY
. 5:10
A.M.
“The loss of power in the middle of the presidential press conference is the final straw in the assault against the public nerve. Probably never before in the history of the republic has the entire population stayed up all night. Millions have been driven from their homes, people have died in vast numbers, families are swept away in full view of TV cameras, and property damage mounts, God help us, into the trillions.
“The American people were surprised to see a presidential press
conference only hours after two presidential addresses. If they were expecting Mr. Kolladner to announce Armageddon, they were carried along by his unexpected spirit of confidence and optimism. His clear goal of calming the nation might have been obtained had he not suddenly disappeared from the world’s screens. In a hundred languages around the globe, voices explained that the transmission had been lost temporarily at its source, and that the telecast would continue momentarily.
“That news was followed, a few minutes later, by an announcement that a tsunami had struck Washington and continued all the way to Front Royal before exhausting itself against the Blue Ridge. The whereabouts of the president, as of this moment, are unknown. This is Judy Gunworthy with the Transglobal News Service, at the National Weather Service Office in El Paso.”
Micro Passenger Cabin. 5:43
A.M.
“Charlie.” It was Kerr again. But his voice sounded strange.
“Yes, Al. What’s wrong?”
“Charlie, we’ve lost the president.”
Charlie Haskell’s heart began to speed up. What had Harry Truman said on hearing of FDR’s death?
It was like a load of bullshit got dropped on me
.
1.
Manhattan. 5:45
A.M.
The effort to loot the local grocery store failed. Marvin and one of the accountants tore down a double-sized door to use as a raft, but their combined weight was too much and it capsized several times, dumping them into the flood. The accountant lost heart, and everybody else, including Larry, decided the smart thing would be to wait for the Guard. Finally Marvin set off alone. He came back an hour later, complaining that the store Louise had described was completely underwater. But he’d gotten off the raft, forced his way inside, and nearly drowned. He looked as if the story were true. He now joined those recommending they simply wait until help arrived. An unaccustomed whine had come into his voice, and Marilyn decided he didn’t look as good this morning as he had last night.
Never start a romance with somebody
, she thought,
until you’ve seen him in a flood
.
Louise’s refrigerator emptied out in a hurry, and the bottled water disappeared, despite all efforts at rationing. Her guests began to suggest that maybe they
should
make another effort to get canned goods out of the submerged store. “You can’t tell how long we might be here,” one of them said. Marv said he would not try it again under
any
circumstances.
A stock analyst who’d done a year at medical school pointed out that anybody going into the water, which was choked with corpses, risked typhus or some other ungodly disease. “Marv’s right,” she said. “We should wait.”
They were cut off from the rest of the world. The batteries in the TV had died, and there was nothing to do now but gaze out over the city, gray and forlorn in the morning light. A stench had begun to creep into the air.
Larry tried to play the role of defender and provider that he must have felt was expected of him. He assured Marilyn everything would be okay, asked whether she was all right, and gathered her into his arms when she got teary. He didn’t quite fit the part: Larry looked more at home in an office than in a crisis. But she felt it was nice of him to try.
She knew her husband would never have gone inside a submerged grocery store. But she also knew that, if he had, he wouldn’t have come back and whined about it.
There was sudden commotion behind her: people pointing to the northwest. A helicopter,
several
helicopters, were coming in from over the Hudson, flying in formation, staying low. They penetrated the concrete valleys and divided into pairs as they approached the Central Park area.
There were other people atop other buildings, and everybody was waving. One of the choppers came in close and hovered directly overhead. It was olive-drab. Military. A voice spoke through a loudspeaker: “Folks, please clear the roof.” Backwash from the rotors tore at her hair.
A soldier leaned out and gazed down at her. “How many of you are there?”
Quick estimate. “Thirty,” Marilyn said, but the words were blown away. She spread both hands three times. Somebody behind her was saying, “Tell them fifty, get as much as you can.”
The soldier signaled okay. The man who’d wanted to claim fifty, muttered, “Dumb bitch.” He was a little fat man with tufts of hair over his ears, framing a bald head. Larry heard the remark and went after him. The fat man started swinging wildly, and punched a woman who didn’t get clear
quickly enough. Then the circle of bystanders closed in to separate the two.
Marilyn felt proud of Larry at that moment. Not only because he’d defended her; but because the fat man was a department manager or some such thing at Bradley & Boone. Larry’s job had just disappeared. For him, it had been a more courageous act than braving the flood to find his wife.
She hadn’t felt this good about her marriage since the day she’d walked up the aisle.
The chopper came down until it was only a few feet overhead. Four cartons tumbled out. “Anybody need medical help?” asked the loudspeaker.
They glanced around at one another. “I’ve got a back problem,” shouted a thin, weak-eyed man Marilyn didn’t know. He didn’t look like the type who would readily consent to ride in a helicopter.
“Can you walk, sir?”
“I think so.”
“Good. Stay off your feet. The rest of you stay put. We’ll be back.”
The chopper lifted away. Larry made another lunge at the little fat man, and somebody told him to calm down. Marilyn could see that, under the indignant mask, her husband was quite pleased with himself.
TRANSGLOBAL SPECIAL REPORT
. 5:47
A.M.
“This is Angela Shepard at Camp David, Maryland. An army helicopter carrying President Henry Kolladner was reported down minutes ago outside Washington. The president had been evacuated moments before a sea wave swept over the capital, and was en route here, where a command post had been set up to coordinate the government’s response to the ongoing lunar crisis. The helicopter was apparently struck by lightning. Official sources are telling us that rescue units have been sent in, and that they still hold out hope.
“I talked to a member of the president’s staff who was on board an accompanying aircraft, and who asked not to be named. She was in tears, Don. She said the president’s helicopter caught fire and, in her words, ’fell like a rock.’ She added that she doesn’t believe anyone could have lived through it.”
Micro Passenger Cabin. 5:48
A.M.
“Charlie, it’s confirmed,” said the voice on his cell phone. “They found the wreckage.”
“He’s dead?”
“Yes.”
“Emily. What about Emily?”
“She was with him when it happened.”
“My God….”
Micro Flight Deck. 5:49
A.M.
“What is your status, Micro?”
“We are still here, Skyport. Life support looks good. The cargo deck has been penetrated again, but otherwise we’re okay.”
“We copy, Micro.”
“Fuel is almost gone.”
“Roger that. Continue to try to conserve. We’ll get to you as quickly as we can.”
They were currently moving at 8.1 kilometers per second, gaining speed as they fell toward Earth. Consequently, no rescue vehicle could be sent out to rendezvous until
after
they’d passed Skyport, which would happen around one-thirty
P.M.
“Are you in any danger at the present moment?”
“Negative.”
There was a hesitation at the other end. Then the bad news: “Micro, we project a solar orbit.”
“Roger.” Saber would have no fuel available for braking. So they would roar past the Earth satellite at present velocity
plus whatever they picked up firing the engine and falling down the gravity well. “Skyport, I make it that we’ll be moving too fast for a ferry to rendezvous.”
“Keep the faith, Micro. You have a VIP on board. Two of them, in fact.”
Saber ran the numbers through her computer. After they passed the planet, a ferry could chase them down, but the effort would require too much fuel. There wouldn’t be enough left after the rescue, not nearly enough, to brake into earth-orbit. The ferry and the Micro would
both
sail out into deep space. To add to her worries, they would start running out of air again around six
P.M.
That was a long way off, but this time there’d be no on board fix. Fortunately, however, there was an easy solution, and if Skyport didn’t think of it, she’d suggest it herself.
She signed off, rubbed her eyes, and looked at the radar screen, which was mercifully quiet again. She’d recovered Tony’s body and stored it below with Bigfoot. That had been a sad business. But at least his sacrifice hadn’t been to no purpose. Unless something took a wicked turn on her, the Micro would bring in Charlie Haskell and the other volunteers.
She’d tried to get through to St. Petersburg, to see how her family was. The Russian city had been struck by a series of withering electrical storms and subsequent flooding. But telephone communications were impossible. So, since there was nothing else she could do, she put it out of her mind.
The Micro still had to burn fuel occasionally, to move out of harm’s way. She wasn’t seeing the storms of pebbles and sand anymore. The debris now tended to be limited to boulders and slabs. But they were relatively infrequent, and no longer racing past the Micro. The microbus was moving far more quickly than it had been during the early minutes of the event, and the rocks were traveling more slowly.
A few were enormous. One in particular measured out at
more than eighty kilometers across. A moonlet. She reported it to the Orbital Lab at Skyport, where it turned out they’d already tagged it. The woman she talked to told her it was going into orbit.
“Good,” said Saber. “You wouldn’t want
this
thing coming down.”
The woman’s name was Tory Clark. And Tory made herself memorable to Saber by passing on a news item: “By the way,” she said, “they’ve confirmed the death of the president. Take care of Charlie Haskell.”
It had been a long night and Saber needed about thirty seconds to realize she was now carrying the president of the United States.
She knew she should simply fly the bus, but she couldn’t resist dropping down through the hatch to wish him well. To be the first to do so, because she was sure no one else in the passenger cabin had the information. Maybe even
he
didn’t know, although the lamp over his telephone circuit had been burning continuously. Poor son of a bitch, he’s half-dead up here and they still won’t leave him alone.
She approached his chair. He had the phone to his ear, listening, taking notes. She stopped beside him and waited. He glanced up at her, held up his hand, signaling her to wait a moment, and then, when he could, asked the person on the other end to wait.
“Yes, Saber,” he said, “what can I do for you?”
“Mr. President,” she said, pronouncing the word with effect, and drawing the attention of everyone around her, “I wanted to wish you good luck.”
That set off something of an explosion. Was it true? Had they found Henry Kolladner?
It had occurred to Charlie when he’d first gotten the news that Henry might have been fortunate. It was probably the only way he could have saved his reputation. Now he accepted
their good wishes, embracing Evelyn and Saber and shaking hands with Keith and the chaplain. Then he went back to the telephone.
Saber tried to find him some privacy, but the only accessible sections on the microbus were the galley and the washroom. The galley wasn’t very private and the washroom lacked ambiance. The new president would have to make do where he sat in the passenger cabin. He asked only that Keith Morley use nothing he overheard without getting specific approval.
Saber returned to the flight deck, and shortly afterward heard the hatch open. The chaplain’s smiling face looked up. “I hope you don’t mind,” he said. “I was wondering if I could see how this thing operates.”
She signaled for him to strap down in the copilot’s seat.
He looked out at the luminous Earth. After a few inconsequential remarks he fell into a contemplative silence. “The universe seems very neutral,” he said at last.
“How do you mean?”
“Not for publication.”
“Of course not.”
“Are you a believer?”
She thought about it. “I don’t know, Chaplain. Probably not.”
He nodded. “I cannot believe Jesus would permit what happened last night. Not the
Jesus
I know.” Saber didn’t know how to respond, understood that the comment needed no response. “Tell me, Saber,” he said after a moment, “is there life on Mars?”
“Yes,” she said, wondering what he was getting at. “But of a primitive order.”
The chaplain nodded. “Doesn’t matter how primitive. Conditions will allow what they will allow. Elsewhere conditions will be better. Right? Caribbean-style beaches. Cool,
moist valleys. Rolling plains. Other Scotlands exist out there somewhere.”
“Yes,” she said. “I’d think that would have to be so. It’s inconceivable that it isn’t.”
“Oh, it’s conceivable that we’re alone.
I
can conceive of it, and I wish it were so.”
“Why?” she asked. Everyone she’d ever known had wanted the search for alien life-forms, alien civilizations, to succeed. The notion that anybody,
anybody
, would prefer an empty universe shocked her.
“Because then the story of Jesus would make sense. But in a universe like
this
, where we suspect there are perhaps
millions
of other races like our own, his sacrifice hardly seems applicable to the existing nature of things.” The chaplain shook his head. “Either the crucifixion saves them all, or it does not. If it saves them all, we’re asked to believe that out of this plenitude of worlds, He chose ours for His demonstration.”
She could hear the chaplain’s doubts, welling up from some long-blocked inner spring. She could hear the capitalized pronouns, could hear the plea for intervention. “If the crucifixion does
not
save everyone, then it must be carried out, in one form or another, countless times in countless places. What then becomes of His agonies, of the special sacrifice made for
us
?”
She thought about it for several minutes. “I never did understand the logic of the crucifixion,” she said at last. “Maybe the point is supposed to be simply that he came.”
2.
Skyport, Me’s Restaurant. 5:51
A.M.
Rachel Quinn hadn’t slept. Like everyone else at the station, she’d been glued to the television. She recalled with mounting guilt her own anger that the Mars mission had been
wiped out. But then, she’d had no idea the arrival of the comet would trigger anything like this.
Nevertheless, buried in the relentless accounts of waves, storms, and earthquakes, there were some encouraging stories; heroes were appearing everywhere. In Fort Lauderdale a man in a motor yacht picked up survivors and rode out several tsunamis. Doctors stayed at their posts in Baltimore, chopper-riding cops scooped people off rooftops in Houston, teenagers hurried toddlers to safety in Savannah. When a wave his Vancouver Island, a man saved a group of his neighbors by piling them into a hydrogen balloon. He got clear with seconds to spare. In St. Augustine, a young woman helped several elderly couples climb an old stone tower to escape.