The driver was looking at something in his rear mirror.
“Well, has he or hasn’t he?”
“That’s the thing, Mister Secretary. We tell the Brits what’s going on, they send out one of their people to nursemaid Webb, and the last thing we hear is that Webb’s minder gets seven rounds from a Beretta 96 pumped into him and is then run over with his own hired car. Now if Webb has been chasing some chimera, how come his minder gets bumped off?”
“Unless he did it himself,” suggested Bellarmine. “What’s the word on him?”
“He’s just disappeared. Nobody knows where he is.”
“And how does that leave the great asteroid hunt?” Bellarmine asked.
A decrepit white car sailed by them, filled with students. A long-haired girl blew a kiss and then the car was past. Bellarmine’s driver blew out his cheeks in relief.
“In chaos.”
The driver slowed down and turned off at a sign saying “Solana Beach”; the Buick followed. He manoeuvred a few turnings and drove along a street with notices on pavements and in windows saying “No Vacancies,” “Real English Beer,” “Debbie’s Delishus Donuts $1.50.” Bellarmine stared out at this other America, at the little holiday groups on the sidewalks eating delishus donuts and wearing kiss-me-quick hats, strange people who were content to stroll aimlessly, without benefit of sharp-eyed protectors or jostling reporters.
Then the driver skimmed past an elderly woman with thick spectacles trying to reverse an orange Beetle, and turned into a quiet row of shabby beach houses. He drove slowly along for fifty yards and pulled to a stop at one of them. The street was absolutely quiet. No signs of life came from within the house. Heavy lace curtains hid its interior. A window shutter was dangling half off; the next storm would finish it. The driver frowned.
“Stay put, sir. That’s an order.” In the driving mirror, he watched the manoeuvrings of the orange Beetle. It eventually kangaroo’d off round the corner. “Okay, sir. Let me check out the house.”
“Clem, it’s okay. You’re strung up like a violin string,” said Bellarmine.
“Sir, this is irregular. I’d be a lot happier if one of us checked it out.” Clem saw waiting assassins, Bellarmine dying in a pool of blood on the sidewalk, terrifying congressional inquisitions.
“Forget it. Come for me in a couple of hours. And cheer up, man. If the golfball buzzes you know where I am.”
The cars drove off and Bellarmine waved Noordhof on into the house. The Secretary of Defense stood on the sidewalk, alone. He felt a strange exhilaration. The second most powerful man in the world had an overwhelming but unfulfillable urge: to go for a stroll.
Bellarmine walked up the concrete driveway and round the side of the house. There was a dirty white side door, half open, facing into a small hallway, cluttered with buckets, sacks of dog meal, logs and boots. A deep-throated baying came from within the house. A voice shouted “In here, Mister Secretary.” Bellarmine, who hated all dogs, stepped into the untidy hallway. A door opened and he froze with fear as the Hound of the Baskervilles rushed for him, baying excitedly.
“Get down, Lift-off! Welcome to my beach house, sir. I’m fixing us up with a royal concubine.”
Bellarmine followed the ponytailed scientist along the corridor and through slatted swing doors. The kitchen was brightly lit, surgically clean and chaotic. Rows of gleaming sharp knives dangled from hooks on a wall. On a worktop next to a large stove was a half-empty bottle of Jack Daniel’s, a supermarket chicken and a clutter of spices and unopened bottles of wine and liquor. A small balding man of about fifty, wearing an apron which made him look like a big Martini bottle, was chopping spring onions. His movements were slow and deliberate, as if the process was unfamiliar to him.
“Do you guys know each other?” asked Shafer, disappearing through another set of swing doors. The Director of NASA put down the vegetable knife, wiped his hands on the apron and shook hands with the Secretary of Defense. Bellarmine nodded; the NASA Director said I guess we sing for our supper here and Bellarmine said he’d do a fan dance if it got him answers. Then a voice from next door shouted “Help yourself to a drink!” Bellarmine poured two large sherries, emptied one and filled it up again.
Shafer reappeared with a wodge of papers stapled together. There was a knock at the door and the Great Dane started a deep-throated baying. Sacheverell walked into the kitchen. “Get down, you slobbering idiot!” Shafer yelled.
“Nice friendly dog, Shafer,” said Sacheverell, while it eyed him, growling, from under the swing doors.
“Yeah,” said Bellarmine. “Makes for a nice secure house. Anyways, the media think I’m on vacation at Nixon’s old place. Right. I’m here for a briefing. Get started.”
Shafer said, “Jim, drop that for now. Let’s go next door.”
Next door was a large living room. One wall was taken up by a long blackboard covered with equations. At the far end of the room a bay window looked out over the sea. Books and papers were scattered over wicker chairs, television, computer, couch, floor.
Bellarmine made his way through the clutter to the big bay window. The floor creaked and SecDef felt it give a little. On the beach below, a few girls sat topless, drinking wine and chattering. A hundred yards out at sea some young men were skilfully balancing on surfboards while big Pacific waves rolled under them and broke up hissing on the sand, or hit an outcrop of rock over to the right with a
Whump!
and an explosion of spray. Shafer appeared through the swing doors with a bottle of Jack Daniel’s. “Sir, come back from the window. We had a landslip and you’re overhanging the cliff. We’re propped up by timbers, but I don’t know how long my beach house has got before it slides into the sea.”
Bellarmine turned from the window and shared a couch with a clutter of journals and books. The others settled down on casual chairs, except for McNally, who shared a cushion with the Great Dane in front of a wood fire.
The Secretary of Defense spoke slowly and clearly, as if to make sure his words were fully assimilated. “In just over ten hours’ time I report to an extraordinary meeting of the National Security Council. The President, the Chiefs of Staff, myself and others may take certain decisions on the basis of information given me here. I need three things from you people. First, do you confirm the damage estimates given us by Sacheverell? Some of us had difficulty taking his stuff on board. Second, have you come up with some means of nullifying this threat? Third, have you found this
asteroid? Now, Colonel, what exactly has your team delivered? What about the simulations Sacheverell here showed us? Is he serious?”
Shafer, standing at the swing doors, poured himself a whisky. “They sent me your little cartoons, Herb, and I’ve done a few runs of my own. Of course we don’t know what they’ve posted us but I’ve guessed we’re in the hundred-thousand-megaton ballpark, give or take. I broadly agree with your calculations. If and when Nemesis hits, America will be incinerated.”
Bellarmine looked blankly at the Nobel physicist.
“You missed out on a few little details,” Shafer continued. “Nuclear reactors scattered over the countryside, petro-chemical smog from burning oil, coal deposits set on fire for a few centuries, stuff like that. And you weren’t quite right on the fireball. It’s primarily the blanket of fire spreading over the top of the atmosphere that will set us alight down below: Ernst Öpik saw that way back in the fifties. Another little oversight, Herb, was the counterflow, the air rushing to fill the vacuum left by the rising fireball. Still, since we’re all dead by then, I don’t suppose we care.”
Bellarmine pointed dumbly at the Jack Daniel’s. Shafer crossed the room with the bottle and filled his glass, continuing the critique as he did. “And I guess you used a pretty coarse grid for your ocean simulations, Herb. It’s not just the tsunami you have to worry about. It’s the plume of water thrown forty miles into the air, and the superheated steam shooting around. The sea bed would crack open and you’d get a rain of molten boulders thrown for one or two thousand miles. God knows what would happen to coastal areas. In your San Diego scenario people would have broiled before they drowned. And if you’d used an ocean-wide grid you’d have found that the coastal areas don’t get hit by one wave. They get hit by a succession, at more or less fifty-minute intervals. You’d replace seaboard cities by mudflats.”
“Okay,” said Bellarmine, “I believe you. If it hits we’re finished. Now the sixty-four thousand-dollar question and I want to hear a good answer. Colonel, have you found Nemesis?”
Noordhof said, “No, sir.”
There was a heavy silence.
Noordhof broke it. “Mister Secretary, you gave us five days. It’s unreasonable. And we have almost no chance of picking it up by telescope until collision is imminent. We’re down to Webb.”
“Forget it,” said Sacheverell, sounding peeved.
Shafer said, “Look, we’re not even sure of the major types of hazard. We just don’t know what’s out there. The British school think that fireball showers or dark Halleys or giant comets are an even bigger risk than your Nemesis-type asteroids.”
“Unmitigated crap,” declared Sacheverell.
“So what now?” Bellarmine asked.
The Nobel physicist moved some books and sat down on a wicker chair. “Another drink, I guess.”
There was a knock and the sound of footsteps. Shafer roared at the Great Dane, and disappeared through the swing doors. Someone was saying “Oh Jerusalem! City of Joy! I made it!” Judy Whaler walked into the room.
“You’re five minutes late, Judy. Mister Secretary, may I present our nuclear weapons expert?” Bellarmine nodded.
“Carburettor trouble,” Whaler explained, sinking into a wicker chair. “Kenneth’s looking after the shop but I have bad news about that. The forecast for tonight is thickening cirrus over southern Arizona.”
Bellarmine’s voice was grim. “Let me be clear about this. Are you saying the Nemesis search is over?”
“The telescopic search, yes. We won’t make your midnight deadline, Mister Secretary.”
There was a silence as they absorbed Judy’s words.
“You heard about the Rome thing?” Noordhof asked, thrusting a large Jack Daniel’s into her hands.
She nodded and took a big gulp. “Kenneth told me. First André and now Ollie.”
Noordhof said, “We don’t know what’s going on over there.”
“Where does this Webb’s ancient manuscript come in?” Bellarmine wanted to know.
The Colonel answered, “It’s gone missing, which drew Ollie’s attention to it in the first place. His idea was that if you had an observation hundreds of years old it would give you a long time base and a very accurate orbit, which is what the Russians would need to target the asteroid. If there really is a moving star recorded in the book, we could use it to work out which asteroid it refers to, and so identify Nemesis.”
Sacheverell said, “Mister Secretary, it’s a fantasy thing. We can forget it. Webb should never have been on the team.”
Shafer shook his head. “I disagree. The Italian business suggests that Ollie is on to something.”
The Colonel asked, “With only ten hours left to identify Nemesis, and Arizona clouded over, we’re just about finished. Can’t you give us more time?”
“No. Because every day carries the risk that Nemesis will hit before we’ve had time to take appropriate action. Because the longer we delay the greater the risk that Zhirinovsky learns that we know about Nemesis and decides to pre-empt any punch we might want to deliver. Because no matter what time you’re given you’ll always want more. The NSC want answers by midnight tonight. Your failure to deliver does not buy you more time.”
Shafer poured Bellarmine his fourth drink of the evening. “And nullifying the threat?” SecDef asked. “Say you magically identify it in the next few hours? Presumably you hit it with the Bomb?”
“We got those coming out of our ears,” said Noordhof.
“If my experience as Secretary of Defense has taught me anything, it’s this. There is no problem that can’t be solved with the use of enough high explosive.”
Noordhof said, “Sir, we need to know what we’re targeting. The Bomb is no good if we create a shower of fragments or a big dust ball heading for us.”
“I think I’ve found the solution to that,” said Judy, her voice betraying satisfaction. She put down her drink and walked over to the blackboard. She drew a string of dots joined by a straight line. Next to it she depicted an irregular shape with an arrow pointing towards the line. “We make a necklace from small atomic bombs, maybe neutron bombs. We fire the probe at Nemesis, as nearly head-on as we can. As the probe approaches it shoots off little neutron bombs in such a way that they’re strung out in a line. The line cuts in front of Nemesis like so, and we set the bombs off in sequence, each one bursting just as it reaches the asteroid, say a kilometre or two above its surface.”
“Nemesis has to run through a bomb alley,” said Shafer.
“Yes. They’re just toys, each one no more than a dozen Hiroshimas, so that each one gives a gentle push to Nemesis, not enough to break it up even if it’s made of snow. But the cumulative effect is a big push, the same as if we’d given the asteroid a single hefty punch. We’re going to explode the bombs directly in front of Nemesis, to brake its forward motion so as to let the Earth get past before the asteroid reaches our orbit. That’s more energy-efficient than a sideways deflection.”
McNally said, “In the frame of reference of Nemesis it’s just peacefully coasting along and suddenly bombs appear out of space and start exploding in its face. It’s simple.”
“All truly brilliant ideas are simple,” Shafer asserted. “And we can space the neutron bombs thousands of kilometres apart so they don’t interfere with each other.”
“Simple in principle but extremely difficult in practice,” she said. “I have a detailed design study under way at Sandia. One way or another, we’ll have something workable within the hundred-day guideline.”
Bellarmine clapped his hands together in satisfaction.
“Well done, Doctor Whaler. McNally, what you have to do is deliver her atomic necklace. What do you have to say about that?”