Nemesis (10 page)

“The man who discovered the small bodies which orbit Jupiter, and named them the Medicean planets, deserves honour in return. And the Pope is the lawbreaker here,” the Grand Duke pointed out. “In any case, what can he do?”

“He could induce his unruly relatives to go to war with you . . .”

“—God preserve me from these Barberinis . . .”

“. . . and he could excommunicate you. In that eventuality
the citizens of Florence are also bound to be excommunicated unless they remove you from office. Without pardon for their sins, they risk an eternity of damnation. It could create a dangerous situation for the House of Medici.”

The secretary concurred. “Some day this city will sink under the weight of its sin.”

“So. I allow Barberini to tweak my nose? My legal authority to be flouted?”

Aldo said, “Better than blood in the streets, Altezza.” He added slyly: “And His Holiness will not live forever.”

“Aldo, you have the mind of a poisoner. I do not wish to hear more.” The Grand Duke paced up and down in thought. Then he turned to his secretary. “Go to Rome. Ask His Holiness to bless me. Wish him a long and happy life. Aldo is right, as always. I do not seek trouble with the Holy Office. But do what you can for Vincenzo. I do not want him to burn.”

The secretary bowed and turned to leave. The Grand Duke called after him. “Enzo, I do want the return of Vincenzo’s works. Some day they must take their place in the Palatina.”

“And if the cost of saving Vincenzo is a quarrel with the Holy Office?”

The Duke sighed. “Do not bring me back a quarrel, Enzo.”

Noordhof, sensing an atmosphere, said, “Okay you people, take a short breather. Then break into our agreed teams. Reconvene here at sixteen hundred.”

Webb and Whaler noisily transferred dishes to a dishwasher. Sacheverell came back from the toilet. He jacked up a radiant smile. “Hey, Miss Nukey, how about some ping-pong?”

Webb experienced a moment of pure distilled hatred. Judy, however, just shook her head politely. Sacheverell shrugged, and shortly he and McNally were thrashing a ping-pong ball in the common room. Shafer had put some frozen packet into the microwave oven and was watching it intently. Noordhof and Kowalski went into an intense discussion over more coffee.

Webb interrupted them. “Colonel, I have a friend, Scott McDonald, with a robotic Schmidt on Tenerife. I could operate it from here.”

Noordhof’s eyes showed surprise. “You don’t say?”

“I didn’t know it was operational,” Kowalski said.

“It isn’t. It’s still being commissioned, which means there’s no pressure of time on it. It should be free over Christmas. I can link in to Scott’s Oxford terminal, with his permission, and control it from here.”

“I’ll think about it, Oliver.”

It was Webb’s turn to show surprise. “What’s to think about? We need all the eyes we can get on the sky. With a
nine-hour time difference we can seriously extend the night sky coverage.”

“There are security considerations.”

“Mark, let’s not get too paranoid. Operating a telescope remotely is what you’re supposed to do with a remote telescope. The control signals will route through Oxford.”

“I said I’d think about it.”

Webb sighed. “It’s your country.” He retreated to his room, had a quick shower and then rummaged in the dormitory cupboard. There was a heavy Shetland wool pullover, left by some visiting observer. Red and yellow lightning stripes weren’t his fashion statement but it was warm.

“Oliver.” Leclerc startled him. The Frenchman was looking worried. He spoke quietly, almost conspiratorially. “Oliver, we have to talk.”

“Sure.” Webb took him into his room and closed the door firmly.

Leclerc looked at Webb uncertainly. “Oliver, there is something very strange going on here.”

My opinion exactly
, Webb was tempted to say, but instead waited for him to continue. But Leclerc was judging his man, clearly in an agony of doubt as to how far he could trust Webb.

A brisk knock at the door. “Join me in a run, Oliver? Or are you still feeling fragile?” Judy, bouncing up and down outside Webb’s door.

“One minute!” he called out, and there was the sound of retreating footsteps.

“We’ll talk later,” Webb said quietly.

“We must. But only you and me. Nobody else.”

Judy, in a grey tracksuit, jumped up and down outside the building, waiting for her colleagues. Webb emerged. She beckoned him over, taking advantage of their eye contact to assess him with a swift female intuition. His muscular frame and untidy, curly brown hair gave the impression of an outdoor type rather than the quiet academic he clearly was;
subtle lines around his jaw suggested a determined streak, and around his blue eyes an unusual intelligence; but at the same time there was a sort of naivety about him. She sensed that he could be humorous, but that he was also shy, even awkward in company. It made for an interesting and unusual colleague.

Webb trotted over to Judy, stretching in the crisp fresh air and the sunlight.

“This is a working run, right?” Webb said.

“Absolutely!” Judy exclaimed, jumping. “We need it to clear the cobwebs.”

Leclerc appeared a minute later, taking no chances: he was wearing last night’s Eskimo suit. Parisian elegance peeked defiantly over the fur-lined collar in the form of a spotted red bow tie. Webb had never before seen a jogger in a bow tie; unaccountably, the minor eccentricity put Leclerc up in Webb’s estimation.

“
Wagons ho!
” she called out. They took off on a slow trot down the road.

She smiled broadly at Webb. “That was fun. What gives with Sacheverell and you?”

“Herb is a mafia hit man. He’s a bully, a megaphone, a weather vane, a party apparatchik of the lowest order . . .”

“But Oliver,” Judy laughed, “he’s our top man in the field.”

“Sure, if you measure scientific excellence by media coverage.”

Leclerc was taking it wide at the hairpin bend, puffing. “Why the seething hatred, Oliver? Academic rivalry? Or did he reject some paper?”

Judy was beginning to speed up. Webb let her get ahead. “Not at all, it’s because I care about truth. Herb rewrites history in a way that would make Stalin blush. He rigs conferences, stuffs his own people on committees, manipulates opinion . . .”

“Ah, now we’re getting to it,” suggested Leclerc. “He succeeds where you have failed to communicate your . . .”

“ . . . but his scientific talent is minimal. He’s never had an original thought in his life. He’s put the field back a decade.”

“Oliver,” Judy called over her shoulder, “we don’t need stunning new insights for this one. An identification will do.”

“Herb will try to take over this show and if he succeeds we’ll screw up.”

Judy was now loping. In spite of her shorter legs Webb, beginning to pant, was having difficulty keeping up. Leclerc was beginning to trail. “I think you just like a good fight.”

“My dear Doctor Whaler, you malign me. I’m a quiet academic taken away under protest from an important piece of research.”

“More important than the planet?”

“So, they kidnapped you too, Oliver?” Leclerc asked, catching up with an effort.

“It was more like an offer I couldn’t refuse. What about you, Judy? Don’t they abduct people in flying saucers in this neck of the woods?”

“No abduction. I just drove here from Albuquerque. The Pontiac is mine.”

“Oliver, how many objects are we dealing with out there?” Leclerc was red-faced.

“The known Earth-crossers? About a thousand over a kilometre across. And Spacewatch are finding new ones at the rate of two or three a night.”

“I didn’t know interplanetary space is so crowded. I’m surprised life on Earth has survived.”

“It nearly hasn’t. It was almost wiped out at the Permo-Triassic. Big Daddy’s a mouse compared with some of the stuff out there. Hephaistos and Sisyphus are ten kilometres across. They’d yield a hundred million megatons. But it’s not a simple impact thing.”

Judy was now well ahead. The men were gasping. “Bear track!” she called over her shoulder, and the men followed her off the road on to a narrow path through the trees.

“Not a simple impact, Ollie. Meaning?” The ground under
the snow was a soft carpet of pine needles. They had adopted a loping motion and were descending at a fair pace, but it did leave Webb wondering about the return trip.

“Chances are the big ones come in as part of a swarm.” Webb was weaving through low, snow-covered branches. “It’s more in the nature of a bombardment episode, with supercomets disintegrating to dust and choking off sunlight for thousands of years at a time. We think the planetary system is surrounded by a huge cloud of comets, reaching nearly to the stars. The whole solar system, comet cloud included, orbits the Galaxy in a two-hundred-million-year cycle. But as it goes round and round it also goes up and down like a carousel. So, we go up and down through the plane of the Galaxy. Every thirty-six million years we hit the Galactic disc.”

“Which disc we see as the Milky Way,” Judy said, scarcely out of breath.

“I saw it last night. From here it’s brilliant. Anyway, because the Galactic disc has a concentration of stars and massive nebulae, every thirty-six million years when we go through it we get gravitational tides which perturb the comet cloud. The comets are thrown out of their old orbits, they come flooding into the planetary system, the Earth gets bombarded and we have great mass extinctions. Therefore life goes in thirty-six-million-year cycles. Old life is swept away to make way for the new.”

“Not so fast!” Leclerc shouted. They stopped. Leclerc leaned forward, resting his hands on his knees and taking big gulps of breath. Webb looked up. The observatory was out of sight. Their voices were muffled in the snowy woods.

“
Alors!
All those years you mock the astrologers, and now you tell us our fate does lie in the stars. Where are we now, Oliver, in this great cycle?”

“We’re slap bang in the disc now, and we’re due for another mass extinction.”

“This Galactic connection,” Judy mused. “Is it relevant to Nemesis?”

“Could be. Some of the Earth-crossers are just strays from the asteroid belt. Herb will tell you they all are, but there are also serious people who think that. However I reckon that, because we’re at a peak of the extinction cycle, maybe half are degassed comets. A comet comes sunwards and grows a nice tail so you can see it from a hundred million miles away. But after a time so much dust from its tail has fallen back on to the nucleus that it chokes off. The comet becomes blacker than soot and almost undetectable. It becomes a soft-centred asteroid.”

“I see the relevance,” said Judy, panting a little. “If it’s a main belt stray it’s a cannonball. If it’s a degassed comet it’s a snowball disguised as a cannonball. Get it wrong when you try to deflect it and we have ourselves a nice little mass extinction. If we have no time to drill holes in Nemesis, the big picture becomes part of the equation. Up or down?”

Leclerc pointed downhill, and they set off again, Judy still leading. After five minutes the snow began to thin and the Ponderosa pines were giving way to scrub oak, through which they caught glimpses of sunlit Arizona desert in the far distance.

“Oliver, how should we be short-listing for Nemesis?” Leclerc asked.

“Whatever asteroid the Russians used, it had to be reachable. What could they reach, André?”

“For deep space missions the Russians launch from Earth orbits two hundred kilometres high. Even with Proton boosters, their cosmonauts could not rendezvous with and return from any asteroid with an interception speed of more than”—Judy was leaping over a fallen tree, light as a gazelle “—say six kilometres a second.” The men took it together like a couple of Heavy Brigade chargers.

“That means we’re looking for asteroids in Earth-like
orbits, that’s to say low eccentricities, low inclinations and semi-major axes close to the Earth–Sun distance. There are at least half a dozen Nemesis-class asteroids which interweave with the Earth’s orbit. They have plenty of launch windows with?
δV
in the range four to six kilometres a second, round trip times three months to a couple of years.”

“In energy terms they are surely easier to reach than the Moon,” Leclerc suggested.

“Much. We’ve already soft-landed on a couple. You know, we could check out the orbits of these in short order.”

“Maybe the cosmonauts weren’t bothered about returning,” Judy called back.

That hadn’t occurred to Webb. “A suicide mission?”

“Why not? Save on re-entry fuel, put it into reaching a more distant asteroid. Would you die for your country, Ollie?”

“My love of country is undying. André, say Judy is right. What δ
V
will you give me?”

Leclerc exhaled, “For a one-way ticket? We must relax the criteria to twelve kilometres a second.”

“That means they could have reached anything in the inner planetary system.”

“Merde!”
They pounded on down, exhaled breaths steaming.

“There’s another tack,” Webb said. “Very few kilometre-sized asteroids
could
be diverted on to us. It has to be a near-misser, a potentially hazardous asteroid that already passes between us and the Moon.”

“So what does that do to your list?” Judy asked. They were now half loping, half scrambling down the steep mountainside at speed; by unspoken consent they had abandoned thought of the return climb.

“Depends how big a punch the Russians could deliver and how long a start they had. If they had summoned up a hundred-megaton punch say five years ago they could have gone for quite a few hazardous objects in the kilometre class. There are plenty of asteroids which pass close by. Too many.”

“Like two trains going round intersecting tracks, Oliver,” suggested Leclerc, puffing. “You only have a collision when they reach the point of intersection at the same time.”

They slowed; Judy went down on her backside, and edged down some scree. Webb said, “What you and I ought to do, André, is match past Russian interplanetary probes to asteroids along their track. The further in the past they deflected it, the bigger the shift they could have achieved by now.”