Impact (40 page)

Her father tucked the gun into his belt. “Follow my lead, stay cool—and be nice.”

93

Hunched against the storm, they made their way to the end of the pier and up the asphalt road leading to the complex of buildings on the crown of the island. The wind howled, lightning flashed, and the thunder mingled with the crashing of surf on the shore to create an continuous roar of sound.

As the road ascended the island, the Earth Station came into full view, occupying the highest ground, a big white geodesic dome rising over a cluster of drab cinder block buildings, with a radio tower and cluster of microwave antennas. Far from being a high-tech wonder, the Earth Station had a sad, neglected air about it, a feeling of desuetude and abandonment. The dome was streaked with damp, the houses shabby, the road potholed and weedy. Once whitewashed, the buildings had been so scoured and battered by storms that they had been partly stripped back to raw concrete. A large Quonset hut, open on one end, was filled with rusting equipment, stacks of I-beams, sand piles, and graying lumber. Below the station, in a protected hollow, stood several houses and what appeared to be a recreation hall. A scattering of gaunt, gnarled spruces—the only trees on the island—surrounded the houses, providing little shelter and less cheer. The rest of the island was barren, covered with grass, scrub, and knobs of glacially polished granite.

The road split and they took the fork leading to the Earth Station. A rusty metal door stood in a concrete entryway, the word trance on it, the first part effaced by weather, and was illuminated by a harsh fluorescent light that cast a pall over the dismal islandscape. Abbey reached out and tried the handle. Locked. She rang a doorbell set into a rusted plate.

Nothing.

She pushed the button harder but heard no ring inside, and finally resorted to knocking. A crackle of static sounded from a rusted grate next to the door, and a tinny voice came out. “What’s the matter, Mike, forget your key again?”

Abbey spoke into the grate. “This isn’t Mike. We made an emergency landing in your harbor. We need help.”

“What? Who’s that?”

“WE’VE BEEN SHIPWRECKED,” Jackie yelled into the grate, enunciating each word.

“Holy crap.” The door opened immediately. A balding, cadaverous man of about fifty stood in the doorway, the sad fringe of hair around his pate tied back in a long, thin ponytail. “Good God! Shipwrecked? Come in, come in!”

They filed into a stuffy annex, grateful for the warmth. An old bulbous television stood in the corner, screen filled with silent snow. On the table were scattered the remains of a midnight snack, candy bar wrappers, several Coke cans, and a coffee mug, along with several well-worn books—Eliot’s
The Waste Land
, Kerouac’s
On the Road
, Joyce’s
Finnegans Wake
.

“Are you all right?” the guard said, staring at them and almost babbling. “Did your boat sink? Sit down, sit down! Can I get you some coffee?”

“We’re fine now,” said her father, extending his hand. “My name’s Straw. Our boat’s in the harbor.”

“Coffee would be great,” said Jackie loudly.

“Right, hey, coming up.”

They sat down at the metal table and the man bustled over to a coffeepot warming on a hot plate and poured out coffee, bringing the steaming mugs to the table with jars of cream and sugar. Gratefully, Abbey dumped in huge amounts of cream and sugar, stirred, and drank.

“What the heck were you doing out there in that storm?” asked the man.

“It’s a long story,” said Abbey’s father, stirring his coffee.

“Do you want me to call the Coast Guard?”

“No, we’re safe now. Please don’t. They wouldn’t come out here anyway, until the storm’s blown over.”

“Of the northeasters I’ve seen out here,” said the fellow, “this is one of the bigger ones—especially for summer. You’re damn lucky to be alive.”

“Who else is on the island?” her father asked casually.

“There’s me and three others—two technicians and a communications specialist. We live in the houses down below.”

“With your families?”

“No families out here. We come for a three-month rotation, three on, three off. This is my fourth year. The pay’s great and you get a chance to unwind from the world. Read. Think. By the way, name’s Fuller. Jordan Fuller.” He stuck out a lanky hand and they introduced themselves all around.

Her father nursed his coffee. Rain battered the windows. Even at the top of the island, Abbey could hear the muffled thunder of surf on the rocks below.

“So you’re up here in this station all by yourself tonight?” her father asked, stirring.

“No, there’s a technician in the station. I’m sort of just security. Dr. Simic’s in the station now.”

“And when does he get relieved?”

“She. Not til seven.”

“We’d like to meet Dr. Simic,” Abbey said.

Fuller shook his head. “Sorry. Can’t go in there. Off limits.”

“Come on,” Abbey said, with a laugh. “I’ve been in there twice before. On school field trips.”

“Well, that’s different. We get a lot of school groups. But normally no one’s allowed in. Door’s kept locked at all times.”

“But you can open it, right?” her father asked, rising.

“Sure I can. Why do you ask?”

Her father removed the revolver from his pocket and laid it carefully on the table, keeping his hand on it. “Then please do it.”

94

The president was already standing impatiently at the far end of the Sit Room. The wall monitors were ablaze with CNN, MSNBC, FOX, and
Bloomberg.com
, the sound turned off, flashing images of the Moon, various talking-head astronomers, and the growing chaos caused by widespread power outages and computer failures.

Ford filed in with the rest and they all remained standing, waiting for the president to sit. But he did not sit down. The flat-panels switched over to videoconferencing mode, the images of generals, cabinet officers, and others popping up.

“All right,” said the president, “let’s have it.”

Lockwood nodded to an assistant and an image of the Deimos Machine flashed on the biggest screen at the end of the room.

“What you’re looking at, Mr. President, is a photograph taken by the Mars Mapping Orbiter on March twenty-third of this year of an object hidden in a deep crater on Mars’s moon, Deimos. Voltaire crater. Some background first: Mars has two tiny moons, Phobos and Deimos, named after the Greek gods of Dread and Terror. Both appear to be recently captured asteroids—recent as in half a billion years. Their almost perfectly circular orbits in the ecliptic have long puzzled astronomers, who’ve never been able to figure out how Mars could have captured these two asteroids into coincidentally perfect orbits unless a third body were involved, which removed some of the angular momentum from the other two and was flung away, never to be seen again. This has always seemed to astronomers to be a highly unlikely event.”

“What does this have to do with anything?”

“Mr. President, the idea has been raised that both Phobos and Deimos may have been placed in orbit artificially.”

“All right. Go on.”

Lockwood cleared his throat. “The object you see in this picture—which we’re calling the Deimos Machine—is clearly not natural. We believe it was built by an unknown, extraterrestrial intelligence. We believe it is the source of the gamma rays which the MMO has picked up. And we also believe it lobbed a lump of strange matter at the Earth on April fourteenth, and a larger piece at the Moon tonight, which as you know destroyed Tranquility Base. In this sense, it appears to be a weapon.

“A rough analysis of surface erosion from micrometeoroids and the accumulation of regolith around it indicates an age of between one hundred and two hundred million years old. All the satellites we have in orbit around Mars which can be redirected to Deimos are being redirected.

“Deimos is like a misshapen potato—it doesn’t rotate like a normal planet. It sort of tumbles. Obviously the Deimos Machine can’t fire unless Voltaire crater is oriented toward the Earth. And since it’s a deep crater, the orientation has to be fairly close. That doesn’t happen very often and not on a regular schedule.”

“And?”

“It was aligned in April, the night the strange particle struck. The next alignment was tonight. You saw what happened to the Moon.”

“When’s the next alignment?”

“Three days from now.”

“When will the satellites be in position around Deimos?” asked the president.

“Over the next few weeks,” said Lockwood.

“Why so long?”

“Most require gravitational and orbital assists. They don’t have the fuel to go jetting anywhere at a moment’s notice.”

“Isn’t it possible,” asked the president, “that repositioning our satellites around Deimos might be seen as an aggressive maneuver?”

“The satellites are small, fragile, and clearly unarmed,” said Lockwood. “But, yes, there’s a danger that anything we do—anything—might be misinterpreted. We’re dealing with alien thinking, even if it is alien A.I. It also might be defective. Malfunctioning.”

The DIA asked, “This ‘strange matter’ that you say was fired at the Earth—I don’t understand why it’s so dangerous. Just what does it do?”

Lockwood spoke. “It’s a form of matter that converts regular matter into strange matter on contact, like Midas turning everything he touched to gold.”

“How would that be dangerous?”

“For one thing, the Earth would shrink to the size of a baseball. And then, because strange matter is unstable, it would explode with force so great it would blow apart the solar system, driving strange matter into the sun, which would then explode, affecting our corner of the galaxy.” His deep, pebbly voice seemed to echo ominously in the room.

“So why did the last one go
through
the Earth without destroying it?”

“It was very small and moving fast. It converted some matter, but that matter accreted onto it and all of it exited the Earth on the way out. That’s why there wasn’t a huge explosion of ejecta, magma, and so forth when it emerged. No shock wave developed. It was like a hot knife through butter, essentially. Our geologists tell us the vacuumed-out hole sealed up behind it. The Moon, on the other hand, was a much bigger chunk. It was too fast to convert the Moon, but it was big enough to generate a huge shock wave that rang the Moon like a bell and ejected a stream of debris.”

“So all this alien artifact has to do,” the DIA said, “is lob another strangelet at the Earth and we’re dead.”

“That’s right. The key is speed. If it’s tossed at us at a slow enough speed to be trapped inside the Earth, we’re finished.”

A long silence settled in the room. “Any other questions?”

No one spoke. Finally the president said, “Why?
Why
is it attacking us?”

“We don’t know. We don’t even know if this is an attack. Maybe it’s a mistake. Bad programming. It’s been suggested . . .” he paused, “that the Deimos Machine might have been monitoring our planet for some time, picking up radio and television broadcasts and analyzing them. Perhaps it concluded we were a dangerous species that needed to be eliminated. Or it may have been placed there by a hyper-aggressive alien species which wanted to eliminate any intelligent life that might develop in our solar system, nip a challenge in the bud so to speak. It might also have just been woken up. The first shot on April fourteenth occurred only three weeks after Deimos was illuminated with radar from the Mars Mapping Orbiter.”

The president paced in front of the screen showing the Deimos Machine. “Any idea what these globes are, this tube?”

“We can’t begin to analyze it.”

Another round of pacing. “All right, what’s the recommendation of the OSTP? What the hell are we going to do?”

“Mr. President, we have no recommendation.”

A short, shocked silence. “That’s not what I asked you to do,” said the president, exasperation in his voice. “I asked for actionable advice.”

Lockwood cleared his throat. “Some problems are so far beyond our experience, so intractable, that it would be irresponsible to ‘recommend’ anything. This is one of those problems.”

“Surely you could come up with a plan to attack it—nuke it, whatever. General Mickelson?”

“Mr. President, I’m a military man. My instincts are to fight. I started off arguing for a military solution. But I’ve been persuaded by Dr. Lockwood that any aggressive move would be dangerous. Even the
discussion
of aggression might provoke another attack. The Deimos Machine might somehow be able to monitor our communications.”

“I don’t accept that.”

“That machine could destroy us in a heartbeat. We’re sitting ducks. Powerless. Any military response would take years to plan and launch and would be obvious, even if conducted under the tightest secrecy. Eventually we would have to loft something into space and it would take nine months to get to Mars. We can’t imagine that machine just sitting there waiting to be hit.”

The president looked at the director of NASA. “Nine months? Is that right?”

“At least. And the next window of opportunity for a major Mars launch is nearly two years off.”

“Sweet Jesus.”

“All we can do,” said Mickelson, “is gather more information about the artifact in a careful, nonaggressive fashion.”

“We don’t have time,” the president said. “You said it might fire again in three days. That thing’s like the sword of Damocles hanging over our damn heads!”

Mickelson spread his hands.

The president swore loudly, his cool blown. “Anyone else got a bright idea?”

Ford rose.

“Who are you?”

“Wyman Ford, ex-CIA. I was sent undercover to Cambodia to investigate the impact crater—or rather the exit hole.”

“Right. You’re the guy who blew up the mine.”

“Mr. President, this isn’t a problem just for the United States. The whole world has to confront it. We’ve got to put aside our differences. We need a massive mobilization of the world’s technological resources, the best and the brightest minds, a full court press. And in order to do this, everyone must know what we face here. The world
must
know.”