Authors: Jack McDevitt
They started at the rear of the
Lowell
, using the laser drill. When the rock had been softened to a sufficient depth, they inserted a polycrete-coated spike. At a signal from his remote, flanges sliced out all along the central core, locking the spike in place. “It’ll take about an hour to cool,” he said. “Then you’d need a bomb to move it.”
When they finished planting the spikes, they attached the cables, looped them over the hull, and used a series of clips, clamps, and connectors to lock them in place. When they were finished, Jonathan stepped back to admire the work.
He watched as the woman they called Saber walked around, tugging on the lines, as if that could possibly tell her anything worth knowing. It was the equivalent of kicking the tires.
Percival Lowell
Utility Deck. 3:58
A.M.
“
Kordeshev’
s approaching. Time to go, folks.” It was Rachel’s voice on the PA.
Jonathan, Doc Elkhart, the chaplain, and Evelyn gathered by the main airlock, awaiting transfer to the ferry. They were being moved out for several reasons: They’d be less at risk; there were more people than p-suits on board
Lowell
, and everyone would be required to wear a p-suit during the upcoming operation; they were a strain on the life-support system; and finally, if things went wrong, it would be easier to evacuate five people than nine.
Charlie, Saber, and Morley shook their hands and wished them well, “This has been quite a ride,” said Pinnacle.
Charlie nodded. “It’s not over yet, Mark.”
Evelyn was slow to let go. He smiled at her and she squeezed his arm. “You’ve been outstanding, Mr. President,” she said.
Minutes later they were gone, and Morley retreated to prepare for his next telecast. Saber had stayed on because she had some technical background and might be able to help in an emergency.
“Mr. President?” Rachel’s voice from the flight deck.
“Go ahead, Rachel.”
“Mr. Kerr is trying to reach you. And the Russian plane is on the scopes. We’re all here.”
“Good,” said Charlie. “Put Al through.”
There were more questions, problems dealing with the UN, issues rested to terrorist acts in the Midwest, a general breakdown of the whole structure of civilized life along the frontiers of the catastrophe. Law enforcement agencies, where they still existed, were too busy coping with the general emergency to confront organized military groups. Several small towns in the Northwest and in West Virginia had even been seized by individuals who were trying to install themselves as local dictators.
“We’re not going to let it happen,” Charlie told Kerr. “But right now we’re looking at first things first. Tell the governors to concede nothing. You can reassure them we’ll give whatever support is needed to put down insurrection. Issue a statement to that effect in my name. I’ll be home tonight and we can start looking at options. Meantime, make the calls, Al. You know what I want.”
“Okay, Charlie. I’ll tell them.”
“Just hang on, okay? Are we still running the government from Camp David?”
“Yes.”
“What kind of shape’s the White House in?”
“The water’s gone down. But the place is wrecked.”
“You mean, what—carpets, furniture, that sort of thing?”
“Yeah. We’ve had OSHA people in. They’ve declared it unsafe. It’ll be months before it’s usable.”
“Al,” said Charlie, “the whole world’s unsafe right now. I want the White House reopened by tonight. When I come back, that’s where I’m headed.”
“But Charlie—”
“I don’t care about the furniture. Just see that it’s got telephones and lights. Get a situation room up and running. Prop up the walls if you have to. And make sure there’s a flag flying over the place.”
Kerr sighed.
Charlie listened politely to a series of questions about political appointments, requests from foreign governments, a policy statement on relocation camps, and other issues. He responded as best he could, and finally cut off his chief of staff. “I’ve got to go, Al. You know what we need. Get it done. Meantime, I’ll try to move this rock off the road.”
SSTO
Moscow
Flight Deck. 4:04
A.M.
“
O Gospodi!
” Dmitri Petrovik,
Moscow
’s copilot, did not look optimistic.
Conversation on the flight deck had all but died as they approached the Possum. It might have been that seeing it through a window was different from watching it on the screens, or that it was just too massive when measured against the tiny lights scattered around its surface and blinking immediately overhead. Fireflies trying to move a broken chunk of sidewalk.
“
Moscow
,” came the American voice, “this is Mission Control. Good to see you. Directional beacon is on Channel Four.”
“
Privet
, Mission Control.” Gregor Gregorovich Ilyanik picked up the beam, locked on, and turned control over to the autopilot. “We have it.”
“
Moscow
, as soon as you’re anchored down we’ll start to rock and roll. The sooner the better.”
“
Roger
. We’ll be ready in a few minutes.”
Gregor tugged at his pressure suit. He was unhappy; it was bulky and warm and he’d developed an itch he couldn’t reach. But they’d been instructed to wear the gear throughout the operation.
His helmet lay off to one side.
The black rockscape filled their windows. They glided slowly across its midnight mounds and valleys.
Kolya Romanovna, his flight engineer, was watching a map of the Possum scroll across the navigational display. A green triangle designated their assigned site out on the Plain adjacent to
Arlington
.
“
Moscow
,” said the voice from Mission Control, “we will initiate as soon as you are down.”
“They’re in a hurry,” said Kolya.
Gregor looked ahead at the cloud-shrouded Earth. “
Ya tak i dumal
,” he said. “I’m not surprised.”
Moscow
slowed. To their port side, at about two hundred meters, he could see
Arlington’
s lights. His thrusters fired gently, brief bursts, forcing them down. The landing gear was
up
, safely out of the way of the device that the workmen at Hartsfield had attached to his undercarriage.
“Ready?” asked Kolya.
“
Da
.”
She touched the black button on the newly installed box on the right-hand side of her console. The landing-gear wells opened but the wheels didn’t move. Instead, two self-seating pitons exploded from their sheaths and bit deep into the rock. Toward the rear of the undercarriage, another panel slid back and a third unit repeated the process.
The spacecraft shuddered with the jolts.
Kolya looked at her display. “We should be locked,” she said.
Gregor sensed that they had indeed become a fixture on the rockscape. “How do you release it?” he asked.
Kolya opened the lid of the yellow control box and showed him the switch.
“Very good.” He fingered his mike. “Mission Control, this is
Moscow
. We are ready to rock and roll.”
Kolya looked at him, startled at his use of the American phrase. He grinned back. “Soon we shall see, no?”
Antonia Mabry
, Mission Control. 4:10
A.M.
“All vessels, this is Mission Control. I’ll remind you that as a precaution, all personnel in the SSTOs and the
Lowell
should now be in pressure suits. We will initiate program in four minutes. Gentlemen, and ladies, start your engines.”
TRANSGLOBAL SPECIAL REPORT
. 4:10
A.M.
“This is Keith Morley on board the
Percival Lowell
. We are riding with the Possum, which b now entering the exosphere. The exosphere extends out about ten thousand kilometers from Earth. A fleet of six space planes and three ferries ore with us. The six planes and the Lowell have literally chained themselves to the Possum and are about to begin a complicated firing procedure which they hope, which we all hope, will lift this planet-killer into a higher and more stable orbit. The countdown has begun. We’re going to stay right here and we hope you’ll stay with us.”
3.
Antonia Mabry
, Misssion Control. 4:11
A.M.
Unlike the moonbuses and ferries, whose power plants were either on or off, and operated with a constant power flow, the space planes and the
Lowell
were capable of modulating thrust. Feinberg, during the crush of the previous thirty-six hours, had sat with NASA engineers, reducing the mission
objectives to a set of operational requirements. The requirements had been incorporated into a plan and passed on to a team of specialists to write a set of instructions. The instructions had been loaded into computers on board both the
Mabry
and the
Kordeshev
, to provide a backup against the possibility of an accident decapitating the project.
The program would be self-correcting, would monitor results from the seven drive ships through an array of sensors mounted on all three ferries, and would make adjustments as conditions warranted. One of the uncertainties that the planners faced, perhaps the one they perceived as most hazardous, was the possibility of a glitch in the software, which there had been no time to test.
It was this bug factor that was uppermost in Feinberg s thoughts. He was watching
Mabry’
s radio operator, who’d set up shop in the passenger cabin (which had been appropriated for Mission Control) to expedite communications. He was talking not only with the other ships, but with the Orbital Lab, which was monitoring the operation for the rest of the scientific community.
Wes Feinberg had never doubted his own abilities. He’d left Massachusetts for Atlanta with his usual cool demeanor. His colleagues had wished him luck and openly admired his composure under what they perceived as enormous pressure. He’d reassured them everything was under control. But he’d no sooner lifted into the cool skies of New England before he’d begun to feel his first doubts. His teeth had been literally chattering during the conference at Hartsfield. He should have brought something to calm himself, but he didn’t use tranquilizers, hadn’t taken one since his father’s funeral thirty years before. So he never thought of resorting to medication, and if using medication occurred to him now, he shrugged it away as an open display of weakness.
He tried to keep focused on the operation, to remember
who he was, and why people had so much confidence in him. He’d gone over his own numbers time and again, like a man who keeps going back to make sure he’s locked his front door. The problem was that, despite the surveys and analyses, he couldn’t be sure of
everything
. He’d estimated, for example, the object’s mass. He’d gauged the distribution of that mass. The tumble introduced a factor that, if not chaotic, could nevertheless only have been pinned down precisely by a reasonably extensive series of observations rather than the brief period for imaging they’d had. All in all, his calculations involved too many assumptions to allow any real degree of comfort.
Mabry
was a hundred kilometers from the Possum, where it could more easily measure the movement of the object against marker stars. If they did not get the desired results, if the rock didn’t accelerate according to plan, or did not change its attitude as required, Feinberg would have to make seat-of-the-pants adjustments. And that, he realized somberly, would be beyond almost anyone’s capabilities. Maybe even his.
Percival Lowell
Flight Deck. 4:12
A.M.
Unlike the SSTO pilots, who had to conserve fuel, Rachel had seen no reason to shut down her power plant. She sat at the controls, with the president of the United States in the right-hand seat, looking straight ahead at the foreshortened landscape, the landscape that ran a hundred meters or so and curled up into a ridge that resembled an approaching wave. She was not comfortable. All her training, all her instincts, honed over a lifetime with high-performance vehicles, told her that when the computer in Orly Carpenter’s ferry put the pedal to the floor, the
Lowell
was going to roar out of Jonathan Porter’s cables, rip her belly apart on the rocks, and slam into the ridge.
“
Two minutes
,” said the voice from
Mabry
.
Lee Cochran was seated behind the president, trying to look relaxed. Keith Morley was in back somewhere. They were all wearing p-suits.
“Rachel, you okay?” asked Charlie.
That was an embarrassment. Here she was, sitting beside a
politician
, for God’s sake, and he was cooler than she was. She wondered if he was aware what would happen if Jonathan’s collection of pegs and wires didn’t work. “Sure,” she said.
He tugged at his harness, trying to get comfortable in the p-suit, which was simply too bulky. That he was a big man himself did not help conditions. “Answer a question for me,” he said. “If this whole operation’s being handled by computer from the ferry, why are we even here? The pilots, I mean?”
“We’re backups,” she said. “In case something goes wrong. Anyhow, I doubt they had time to write the programs for a completely automated operation. This is a little bit rushed.”
“
One minute
.”
“Okay,” she said. “Get ready. Here we go.”
SSTO
Arlington
Flight Deck. 4:13
A.M.
The engines rumbled reassuringly.
A week ago George had been looking forward to an evening with Annie Blink, a bright, magnetic blond, a lady with an absurd name who said yes her name was a problem and she had every intention of changing it eventually but she was being careful because she didn’t want to go through the rest of her life with another funny name and people trying to hold back grins when she introduced herself. And to tell the truth, George,
Culver
sounds suspect.