The AR, at last, poured a black liquid into the plastic lid of the flask. Webb took it and sipped at the warm tea. His stomach was churning and he was beginning to feel nauseous. “Who diverted the asteroid?”
The civil servant remained silent.
“There’s some risk attached to this, right?” Webb peered closely at Walkinshaw, but the man had the eyes of a poker player.
The AR turned to Walkinshaw. “A wasted journey,” he said contemptuously. “Turn the Sea King back. I’ll get Phippson at UCL.”
“Phippson? That idiot?” Webb said in astonishment.
The AR waited.
“But the man’s a total incompetent.”
The AR cleared his throat.
“He couldn’t find the full moon on a dark night!”
The AR stubbed the tobacco in his pipe, a smirk playing around his lips.
“Damn you, Sir Bertrand,” Webb said.
Sir Bertrand removed his pipe, exposed his teeth and emitted a series of loud staccato grunts, his shoulders heaving in rhythm. Webb was enveloped by a wave of nicotine-impregnated breath. He gulped the tea and handed the flask lid back to the Astronomer Royal, who was grinning triumphantly.
Walkinshaw’s eyes half-closed with relief. “Very well. The country is grateful etcetera. Now the quickest route from here is the polar one. After this briefing—” Walkinshaw glanced at his watch “—which must end in four minutes, we will be dropped off on a quiet beach near the Cuillins. You
will carry straight on to Reykjavik Airport. There you will board a British Airways flight to New York. It’s the quickest route we could devise from this Godforsaken land.”
He pulled out a buff envelope from a briefcase. “Your ticket, some dollars, an American Express number on which you can draw, and a passport.”
“How did you get my photograph?”
“You would be amazed, and at four o’clock this morning. You are Mister Larry Fish, a goldsmith. A precaution in case unfriendly eyes are watching the movements of asteroid people. What do you know about gold, Webb?”
The Sea King was sinking fast, and Webb’s stomach rose in his diaphragm.
“Atomic number seventy-nine, isn’t it? The least reactive metal but alloys with mercury.”
Walkinshaw assimilated this answer. Then he said in a toneless voice, “In no circumstances hold any sort of conversation with anyone en route.”
“Unfriendly eyes,” Webb said. He felt almost paralysed with fear. “So there is some risk attached to this?”
“My goodness no,” said Walkinshaw blandly.
“If there is trouble nevertheless?”
“Never heard of you. You’re a crackpot.”
“A popular opinion in some circles anyway,” Webb replied, giving the Astronomer Royal a look. The AR stared unflinchingly back.
The long backbone of the Cuillins was hidden by low, fast cloud sweeping in from the Atlantic. They stepped out into low, fast sleet sweeping in from the Atlantic. Fifty yards away on the black sand, a dark insect was poised to jump. It was bigger than a house. It had mysterious protrusions, and a row of windows along its dark side, and huge twin rotors throwing spirals of water into the wind. The sand under the Sikorsky was rippling and the Sea King was suddenly a child’s toy.
Webb stared in alarm at the monstrous thing.
Walkinshaw shouted, “The Air Force will make sure you catch the plane at Reykjavik. Sign the credit card as Larry Fish. Any expenditures must be accounted for but you shouldn’t need it.”
“Then why give me it?”
“A precaution,” was the enigmatic response. “I am informed that you know the Goddard Institute at Broadway. You are expected there around now. Still, they tell me you can beat the Sun at polar latitudes. Something to do with the Earth turning, but we pay you people to know about things like that, don’t we, Bertrand?”
“What about my tent?”
“Webb,” the AR replied with a show of infinite patience, “Have you quite grasped the situation? The issue here is not your scientific research, nor your evident fear of flying nor the fate of your blasted tent. The issue is the survival of the West. His Majesty’s Air Force have laid on travel gear in the Chinook, and His Majesty’s Astronomer will personally dismantle your tent and return it to your office.”
“I’ll be missed at the Institute,” Webb pleaded.
“The hell you will!” the Astronomer Royal roared. “Nobody knows what you do in that damned basement all day. Anyway, you sent a note saying you’ve extended your leave. My secretary does signatures.”
“I’m not getting into that contraption!” Webb finally shouted, but he knew he would.
“Just find the asteroid, Webb,” the Astronomer Royal shouted back. “And quickly! And keep your mouth shut!”
The freezing rain drove into the Astronomer Royal’s wrinkled face, and he screwed up his eyes as the massive helicopter rose and tilted over the sea. He watched as it dwindled upwards and vanished into the clouds. He puffed reflectively on his pipe, the wind blowing a thin stream of smoke across the beach.
Walkinshaw looked worried. “Bertrand, are you sure about this? What sort of man spends Christmas alone on a mountain, in a blizzard, calculating?”
“A hermit, of course. Speaking as his Director, he’s a nightmare.”
“In what way?”
“He’s restless, the very devil to control. Needs a woman if you ask me. He keeps diverting from well-established lines of research into cosmological speculation. There’s no funding for stuff like that these days, and anyway nobody quite understands what he’s about. However he pursues his ideas with great exuberance and determination.”
“Family?”
“I know little of it except that he comes from a large, poor one with no sort of academic background.”
“Then I understand him,” Walkinshaw declared. “A large family with little privacy will make him invent his own private space, a world in which he can daydream. Hence the cosmological speculation. And the need to compete with siblings will make him pursue his own ends with determination. Throw in an exceptional intelligence and there you have him.”
A deeply sceptical expression came over the AR’s face. “Very neat, Walkinshaw, wonderfully glib. I don’t suppose you’re into palmistry as well as amateur psychology?”
“His evident unworldliness has the same source. There is no great ingenuity without an admixture of dementedness. Seneca said that, not me. Still, Bertrand, I’m worried. We need a team player for this one, not some go-it-alone eccentric.”
The Astronomer Royal smiled a thin, sour smile. “That, I fear, is a problem for our American cousins. After all, they wanted him. Indeed, they were very insistent.”
Outside the warm Kennedy terminal, a gust of icy air hurt Webb’s ears, watered his eyes and froze his ankles, and he found that the Royal Air Force had given him a suit transparent to wind. A man with a Cossack hat rode a strange, shaking machine which sucked up dark-streaked snow from the road and sprayed it at him. The morning sky was a menacing, dull grey. He headed for the airport bus but two men, warmly wrapped against the cold, emerged from the background and intercepted him. “Mister Fish? I am Agent Doyle of the FBI, and this is my colleague Agent O’Halloran. Forgive us if we don’t show our badges in a public place. Would you come this way, please?”
Webb settled into the back seat of a nondescript Buick with darkened windows. The car was deliciously warm. Agent O’Halloran took it silently over Brooklyn Bridge towards Central. Patches of crystal blue sky were beginning to show through the cloud. On Broadway, they continued north to the edge of Black Harlem. Good smells drifted from delicatessens and coffee shops. The snow was deep at the side of the road, and the breaths of pedestrians steamed in the bitter cold.
They stopped at the entrance to the Goddard Institute, an anonymous doorway with neither sign nor symbol to proclaim its NASA affiliation. Webb stepped out of the car. Across the street, rap music was blasting out of a stereo from a first-floor window. A phalanx of black children swooped down threateningly, but at the last second split and reconverged
past him with marvellous precision. The stereo went off with a swipe, and the skateboarders swept off round the corner, ghettoblasters screeching. The limousine drove off.
“Mister Fish, good morning, we’ve been expecting you,” the stout, black guard at the desk said cheerfully. “First floor, elevator’s over there.”
On the first floor was a door with a sheet of paper saying “Do Not Enter” pinned on it. Webb knocked and a key turned. The room was bleak and almost unfurnished, apart from a green baize table strewn with notepads and water carafes. Four people sat around the table. The man who had opened the door, slimly built with close-cropped hair and light blue eyes, shook Webb’s hand. “Welcome to New York, Doctor Webb,” he said. “Have a seat and we’ll get on with it.”
Webb sat down and looked round the table. The smell of cigar smoke hung lightly in the air. Through it Webb thought he detected a sour odour which he could not place. Three of the faces he knew; the others were strangers.
Noordhof’s tone was informal but decisive. “First, gentlemen, a small organizational matter. This is a USAF project and as of now you are under my direction. The Europeans included, by consent of your respective governments. Does anyone object to this?” He looked round the table.
“Okay. Now we’re all here, let me make the introductions. Proceeding from my right, we have Herbert Sacheverell, from the Sorel Institute at Harvard.” A man of about forty, his red hair standing vertically on his scalp, thin, greasy-skinned and wearing a dirty black headband, nodded at the assembled group. “Doctor Sacheverell is our top asteroid man.” Jesus, Webb thought, America’s answer to Phippson: who put that loud-mouthed clown on the team? Sacheverell’s expression returned the compliment.
“Next to him we have Jim McNally, Director of NASA.” McNally, a slim, balding man of about fifty, dressed in a business suit with a slight, up-market shimmer to it, smiled and said Hi.
“The American contingent is completed by Wilhelm Shafer. What can you say about a hippie with one and a half Nobel Prizes?”
There was no need; a huge intelligence clearly lay behind Shafer’s restless grey eyes. He was, like McNally, about fifty; he wore a copper-coloured T-shirt decorated with a Buddha, and an elastic band held his long grey hair back in a ponytail. He grinned and nodded towards Leclerc and Webb. For Webb, the presence of the awesome Willy Shafer on the team underlined the gravity of the emergency as much as any lecture by the Astronomer Royal.
“On my left, let me introduce our two European partners. Oliver Webb, still catching his breath, is the British asteroid man. Next to him we have André Leclerc. André knows as much as anyone in the West about the space capabilities of the former Soviet bloc.” A tall, gaunt man, with a red bow tie and a black and white goatee beard, smiled and bowed to the centre of the table.
“And I’m Colonel Mark Noordhof. I know a thing or two about missile defence technology.”
“Who needs the Brits?” Sacheverell asked, staring at Webb with open hostility. “We have all the know-how we need in the States.”
“In part this is politics,” said Noordhof. “An attack on America is also an attack on NATO. If we get zapped on Monday the Russians could roll over Europe on Tuesday. But the essence is we need the best for this one.”
Sacheverell continued to glare, his eyes tiny through his thick spectacles. “Webb is a bad choice.”
Noordhof added: “And security. Sure, we’re up to our ears in civilian experts but what if they started dropping out of sight wholesale? We can’t treat this like the Manhattan Project. So, we’re using minimum numbers, drawn from a widely dispersed net. Small is beautiful is what the President wants. Kay, now let’s get down to it.”
Noordhof produced a cigar and played with the cellophane wrapping. He continued: “My brief comes from the President. I have to lead a team which will find the asteroid, estimate where and when it will impact if it does, estimate the impact damage, and determine whether it can be destroyed or diverted. I report directly to the SecDef, Nathan Bellarmine. He in turn informs the President, the DCI and the Joint Chiefs of our progress. The resources of these people are available to us and that’s some awesome resources. If you want the Sixth Fleet in Lake Michigan, ask and it shall be given unto thee.”
“Seek and we shall find,” said Shafer. “I hope.”
“Understand this,” said Noordhof. “This is not some cosy academic conference. This is a race, and the prize is survival. We have no precedent for this situation, no experience we can call on. We have to make up the rules as we go. Comments, anyone?”
“I’m not long out of bed,” Webb said. “How do we know that an asteroid has been diverted towards the States?”
“I’ll pass on that for now.”
“What are the political implications? Does it connect to the Red Army takeover?” Leclerc asked, speaking good Parisian English.
“That we don’t know.”
“We need a handle on the time element,” Sacheverell said. “It could be hours, weeks, months, years before the asteroid hits.”
A smoke ring emerged from Noordhof’s puckered lips. “We’ve been given five days to identify the asteroid and formulate an effective deflection strategy. This is Monday morning. Deadline is Friday midnight.”
Sacheverell laughed incredulously. “In the name of God . . .”
Noordhof continued. “And I’m authorized to say this. If at the end of five days we have failed to identify the asteroid,
the White House will then formulate policy on the assumption that it will never be found before impact. I think it’s safe to assume that aforesaid policy will be highly aggressive.”
Shafer said quietly, “I think the Colonel is telling us that either we find the asteroid by midnight on Friday or the White House will retaliate with a nuclear strike.”
The room went still. Sacheverell paled, McNally flushed purple and Leclerc puffed out his cheeks. Noordhof leaned back and took a leisurely puff, whirls of blue smoke curling upwards. Webb felt suddenly nauseous.
“So we split the effort. Item One. Our masters want to know what will happen if the asteroid hits. Which one of you eggheads wants to take that one?” Noordhof looked round the table.