Nemesis (40 page)

“Sir Bertrand, I have it. I’m about fifteen minutes from the Institute.”

“Say no more.”

Webb stood at the front door of the Institute, flapping his arms in the early morning cold. Traffic was non-existent. He exchanged hellos with a group of noisy revellers, the young men in dinner suits, their ladies shivering in ball gowns, dinner jackets covering their bare shoulders. After half an hour a dark Rover turned off Broad Street, the wet road glistening in its headlights. The car mounted the pavement outside the Bodleian and stopped, its headlights switching off. The figures inside made no move to leave the car, and he couldn’t make them out; they might have been lovers.

Ten minutes later the Astronomer Royal’s Jaguar also turned off Broad Street and drove past the Rover, along Park Road. The AR emerged, wrapped in a long black coat, a Homburg and a heavy white scarf. A gust of icy air blew round the corridor as the AR opened up, locking the door behind them and putting the bolts into floor and ceiling.

Webb led the way without conversation to his basement room. He cleared a space at his desk and they leaned over Vincenzo’s manuscript, opened at the page with the moving star. The AR, his breath misting in the unheated air, looked at it and then at Webb, eyebrows raised.

“Well?”

“The Latin says it’s a moving star.”

“Laddie, I was reading Ovid when you were still in nappies. What’s the significance of this?”

“The point is, nothing else in Vincenzo’s notes stands out. Apart from the moving star, all he records are Saturn’s rings, star clusters, Moon craters and so on. This can only be a close encounter with a celestial missile.”

“Did you get me out of bed at four o’clock in the morning for this?”

Webb’s heart sank. “I did.”

“I was rather hoping that your identification, when you made it, would be based on a solid foundation. You seriously claim that this identifies the asteroid?”

I don’t believe I’m hearing this
. “Yes sir, I do.”

Sir Bertrand looked at Webb incredulously from under his bushy eyebrows. “Yes, Webb, I’m afraid that is your style, the inverted pyramid. I have long been aware that solid groundwork, on which this Institute has built a world-class reputation, is too tedious for you. I am also aware that you are given to flights of, shall we say, speculative fancy. However, on this occasion you have excelled yourself. You build a superstructure which would have us identifying an asteroid, panicking half the planet if it got out, firing spacecraft into the blue and triggering incalculable political repercussions. And you do it on the basis of two points on a four hundred-year-old manuscript.”

“Sir Bertrand, I grant you I sometimes feel as if I’m wading through treacle in this place, but would you like to tell me what else it could be?”

“A simple misidentification of a star. Or an internal reflection in a flawed lens. And they were all flawed four centuries ago. A comet unconnected with the asteroid in question. Or even a couple of variable stars which winked on and off on successive nights.”

“Men have killed for this manuscript.”

“I don’t want to know that.”

“It’s relevant information. They haven’t killed because Vincenzo saw an internal reflection.”

“Utter bilge. I cannot endorse your identification.”

“I don’t know why people are even bothering with your seal of approval. What do you know?” Webb was past caring.

“Perhaps because high officials in America would rather place the future of their country in a pair of safe hands,
rather than those of some immature young maverick. From what I am now hearing, they were wise to do so.”

“I’m about to give you the name of this asteroid, Sir Bertrand. And when I do, keep in mind that its orbit is chaotic. A chaotic orbit means two things. One, a tiny perturbation applied early enough can yield a huge change in orbit. Two, to exploit the chaos you need to know the orbit with fantastic precision.
Phaenomenis Novae
not only identifies the asteroid, it gives a four hundred-year time base, exactly what they needed for high-precision manoeuvring.”

“Webb, do you not understand?” The Astronomer Royal’s tone was despairing. “We need solid, hard-headed evidence, not wild speculation.”

“When they decided to use this particular asteroid, they must have known of this close encounter. They must have raked through every manuscript they could find covering the period, and then decided to get rid of the only two copies of Vincenzo in existence. The one at the Bodleian, and this one, stolen from the Helinandus Collection sixty years ago.”

“You are deranged. Perhaps you should take to writing cheap thrillers.”

“Take a look at this,” Webb said. He fed in a disk, typed at the keyboard and stood back. The Astronomer Royal sat down heavily on Webb’s chair and watched the two little spots rapidly trace out orbits. “I’m running time backwards in the Solar System. The blue one is the Earth, hence the circular track. The yellow one, that’s the suspect.”

While the little blue Earth whirled on its circular orbit, the yellow spot representing the asteroid traced out an elongated ellipse; two trains, each on a different track. The tumbling digital calendar measured the progress of the Wellsian time machine as it hurtled back through the internal combustion era, the wars and revolutions, the fall and rise of kingdoms, backwards through the years in minutes. And as time passed, it became clear that the yellow ellipse was not fixed in space, but was slowly rotating as the asteroid sped round it. On several
occasions it happened that, unknown to the creatures inhabiting the blue spot, the yellow one passed dangerously close overhead, and that the things which mattered so much to them—wars, treaties, revolutions, history—were within an ace of being swept aside in a single, incinerating half-hour. The yellow and blue spots approached more and more closely and then, finally, touched. The whirling spots stopped, fused together on a single pixel of the screen, and the calendar froze. On the twenty-eighth of November, 1613 AD.

“The same night Vincenzo saw the moving star,” Webb said. “I’ve also checked the background constellation and the angular rate, and they fit. It’s beyond coincidence.”

The Astronomer Royal expelled a great lungful of misty breath. He tossed his hat on the desk and wandered over to Webb’s bookcase, pretending to read the titles. Webb gave him time.

“We had a near miss then?” the AR finally said, flicking through the pages of
Methods of Mathematical Physics
.

“Yes, sir. It passed within seventy thousand kilometres of the Earth.”

“What?” Putting the book down. “That’s treetop level!”

“And easily seen in Vincenzo’s telescope, especially if it’s an old cometary sungrazer, maybe slightly outgassing a few centuries ago. The surprise is that others didn’t spot it.”

“Which asteroid is this?”

“Karibisha. Eccentricity point seven, orbital inclination just 2.5 degrees, which guarantees a succession of close encounters over the centuries. Semi-major axis just over 2.1 AU.”

“Is it hard to detect?” the AR asked.

“Practically impossible. By the way, ‘Karibisha’ is a Swahili word of welcome.”

“A word of welcome. How beautiful, even at four o’clock in the morning. With an eccentricity like that no wonder it’s hard to see.”

Webb nodded in agreement. “It’s coming at us out of the Sun. It will be invisible right up to the last few days or hours.”

Sir Bertrand put the book back and ran his hands through his white hair. He picked up a telephone. “The perfect weapon. We’re in the nick of time. If you’re wrong, Webb . . .”

“Unfortunately there’s a problem,” Webb said.

“Yes?” Tension suddenly edged into the Astronomer Royal’s voice. His fingers hovered over the telephone dial.

“That impossible hundred-day guideline which NASA are using for the rendezvous project.”

“What of it?” The AR steeled himself like a man waiting for a punch.

Webb delivered it. “Nemesis hits in forty.”

carnival
[ML
<
carnem levare
, to remove meat] 1. the period of feasting and revelry just before Lent. 2. a programme of contests,
etc
.

Forty days.

Catch Karibisha a minimal five days from impact. To achieve this, spend ten days getting to it (the spacecraft’s speed is optimistically half that of the death asteroid; therefore ten days of travel by the spacecraft on the way out is covered in five by Karibisha on the way in).

Subtract those ten days of travel time from the forty to impact.

The balance is the time which remains to prepare and launch the spacecraft.

It’s simple
: cut the one hundred days of spacecraft preparation to thirty, or die.

“Doctor Merryweather? I’m sorry to disturb you at this hour . . . my name is Rickman, Walt Rickman . . . no, we haven’t met, sir . . . Chairman of Rockwell Industries, the Aerospace Division . . . I have a problem . . . it’s pretty late here too—I’m calling from Downey, California.”

“Is that your sister, honey?”

Merryweather struggled up to a sitting position on his bed. “Okay, Mister Rickman, I guess I’m awake. What can I do for you?”

“I’m told you’re the best weather man in Texas.”

“Not at three in the morning.”

“That’s right, sweetie, tell her to take a taxi.” Merryweather waved his wife to silence with an annoyed gesture.

The Rockwell Chairman’s voice had a worried edge to it. “I’ve just been wakened by my engineers at Canaveral. You know the Venus probe we’re launching?”

“Of course.”

“They’re catching a launch window in six hours. They’ve broken out of the
T
minus six hour hold and have started on the tank chilldown and propellant loading.”

Merryweather scratched his head. “So what, Mister Rickman?”

“Something bizarre is going on out there. The MMT at Johnson are ignoring the Weather Launch Commit Criteria. My engineers think they’ve gone mad.”

“Who is the Flight Director at Johnson these days?”

“A guy called Farrell.”

Merryweather’s wife was poking his ribs. “Joe Farrell. He’s rock solid, Mister Rickman.”

“Doctor Merryweather, that’s a five-billion-dollar bird out there and they’re ignoring the wind criteria and my people tell me that if they attempt a launch the Shuttle will hit the gantry on the way up.”

“Mister Rickman. There are ten first-class meteorologists out at JSC and an equally good team at Canaveral. On Shuttle weather support they have about a hundred years of corporate experience between them. If they say it’s okay to launch, believe me, it’s okay to launch.”

“It’s the SMG who’ve asked for you. They want you at Johnson. You’re expected and authorized. I spoke to Senator Brown.”

The statement brought Merryweather up short. The chief of the Spaceflight Meteorology Group, after he himself had retired from the post, was Emerson, a young, slightly anxious but highly able man. If George Emerson was asking for his former boss, something bizarre was indeed going on. Merryweather had one last shot: “If FD is violating the
launch commit criteria he’ll be overruled by his own MMT.”

“Except that it’s not working out that way. The Mission Management Team seem to be hypnotized or something. Look, my engineers are a hard-nosed bunch and they’re telling me something weird is going on out there.”

Merryweather said, “This is a joke, right?” There was a silence at the other end of the line. “Okay, maybe I should get on over.”

“A helicopter is on its way and should reach you in five minutes. You have no overhead wires or other impediments in your back garden? Restricted entry to the prime firing room begins in two hours but I’ve fixed you up with a badge. I’m grateful, Doctor.”

“Don’t be. I have no official standing now and I can’t influence events. I’m just curious.”

Cut an improbable one hundred days to an impossible thirty. How?

In an organization as open to public scrutiny as NASA, internally and externally, with an ethos of safety and careful, meticulous planning drummed into its soul following the Challenger and Columbia disasters, how?

First explain to your top managers and your celestial mechanicians and your flight design analysts that sleep is hazardous to their health. Then, with due authorization and swearings to secrecy, tell them why. Then step back; get out of their hair.

Abandon flotation tanks and prolonged astronaut training. Stick the inexperienced mission specialists into existing Hamilton Standard space suits, show them the oxygen switch and the waste management facility, and tell them to touch nothing else.

Use experienced Shuttle pilots and arrange it so that the mission specialists, safely inside the orbiter, tell them how to prime the nukes during EVA. Don’t get that bit wrong.

Abandon all thought of spacecraft environmental testing, simulated mission environments and the like.

Use big hunks of old interplanetary mission and operational support planning. Tear out the pages that don’t apply. Do likewise with the computer programmes on board and on the ground.

Improvise.

Pray.

KSC press release no. 257-02

The Venus probe passed an important milestone today when it was hoisted atop the Air Force inertial upper stage, prior to being loaded into the Frontiersman Space Shuttle. The operation was begun at midnight precisely and it was on the upper stage by 1 a.m. Until now, IUS and the probe it carries have been undergoing integration and testing at the Payload Hazardous Services Facility (PHSF) at Kennedy Space Center. Verification tests will begin immediately and are expected to be complete within twenty-four hours. Probe close-up activities will begin on the following day, February 13, leading to its encapsulation inside the Shuttle cargo bay. The long crawl to Launch Complex 39-B on Cape Canaveral Air Station will then begin.

“In this weather? Idiots.”

“Sir?” The young Air Force pilot, startled, looked across at the white-haired meteorologist.

“Just talking to myself, son. It happens when you get to my age.”