Nemesis (46 page)

The phone rang. Noordhof said, “They’ve picked it up at Gran Sasso, Nice and Tenerife, and the HST are locked on. Goldstone have it on radar.”

“Orbit?”

“The Harvard-Smithsonian, JPL, Finland and Palomar all agree on perigee. It’s somewhere in an east–west narrow arc about ninety miles wide. A fair drive south of here.”

“Collision probability?”

“Still fifty-fifty.”

Webb put the receiver down and looked at his watch. It was just past three o’clock. Nemesis, alias Karibisha, would come in at 06:15, in just over fifteen hours.

If it existed.

Webb wiped sweat from his eyelids. He took a few deep breaths, and tried to keep his voice steady. The sweat on his palms made the receiver slippery.

Judge Dredd answered with a tired “Yeah.”

“How did it go?” Webb asked.

“Ollie! It’s a bummer. I just could not get root access to the Teraflop. It’s no often I’m beat but there you are.”

Webb groaned.

“I’m awfie sorry about that, Ollie.”

“You tried. Thanks, Jimmy.”

“Real sorry. Mind you, I got your answer.”

“What?”

“Oh aye, it was easy. I just gave the Tenerife telescope instructions through Eagle Peak and the Oxford terminal at one and the same time. I got different pictures from both. Either yon telescope points in two directions at once or the Eagle Peak pictures are a barefaced fraud.”

Webb felt himself going light-headed. “Jimmy, you’ll never know how grateful I am. I’ll see you next week. Meantime remember the second half of our deal.”

“Which is?”

“Keep quiet about this or I’m in trouble.”

The reply was pained. “You’re in trouble! What about me? If the Social found out I was earning on the side . . .”

Webb put the receiver down. The light-headedness was worse; a feeling of detachment began to wash over him, as if his soul was outside, looking down on his tormented mind from a point just below the ceiling. He went to the toilet and sat on the lid with his eyes closed and his head in his hands.

Judy was tapping at the French window. She had a bright yellow towel under her arm and was wearing a crocheted, cream-coloured bikini with a matching shawl draped round her shoulders. Webb hauled himself from his exhausted sleep into the conscious world.

She put her arm in his. Webb let himself be led down a long hill, past swimming pools and through acres of landscaped garden. Her arm was trembling slightly. The touch of her skin, the inflexion of her voice, the intimacy of her presence, even the hint of perspiration from her body, all these he found both delicious and disturbing.

He sensed that she had something to tell him.

A jellyfish on stilts, as they approached, turned out to be an enormous geodesic umbrella underneath which was a small sub-tropical jungle of orchids and palm trees. They stood on a little hump-backed bridge under the umbrella and watched the volcanic spring water bubbling below. The air was acrid and sulphurous, and the woman led him along a narrow path through the tropicana. Away from the hot spring the air was heavy with scent. Butterflies the size of handkerchiefs were flitting around the palm trees and the orchids. Judy looked around conspiratorially, and they sat down on a bench. “I’ve something to tell you.”

She paused. A jeep was approaching down the hill at speed.

“Yes?”

The vehicle braked to a halt outside the dome, a little American flag fluttering on its bonnet.

“Spill it, woman!” Webb swallowed a lump in his throat.

She put a protective hand on Webb’s. “Oliver, we’re both in great danger here.”

A squat GI with a head like a bullet was clambering out. Judy leaned forward. “Later. We mustn’t speak of this in the hacienda.”

The soldier was on the hump-backed bridge. “Compliments of Colonel Noordhof, folks,” he said in a Brooklyn accent. “He would like you to join him for a light snack. Gee it stinks in here.” The soldier took them briskly back up the hill, in a straight line which shaved swimming pools and ploughed through flower beds as necessary.

They met up in the big restaurant, all wood and tall ceilings with an enormous empty fireplace. Aztec descendants wore white jackets and hovered around with impassive expressions. Their calmness mystified Webb. Either they believed their government’s reassurances about Nemesis or they were indifferent to vaporization; neither seemed likely. Judy had reappeared in a short denim skirt, white cotton top and walking boots. She wore long dangling silver earrings and was carrying a canvas shoulder bag. After the frantic exit from Mexico City, Noordhof seemed in a good humour, and if the astronomer’s nerves had been less taut he would have missed the occasional appraising glance in his direction. The soldier kept cracking jokes about Jane Fonda; from their content, Webb assumed they had a military circulation. They had enchiladas stuffed with chicken and a sauce with little jalapeño peppers in it, and candied sweet potatoes for a side dish. Two dishes of sauce, one red and one green, were placed in front of Webb.

“The waiters use this as a test of virility,” Noordhof explained. “The green sauce is for ladies and wimps. The red one is for real men.”

“I don’t hold with these stunted concepts of masculinity,”
Webb declared. He dipped a thin slice of a turnip-like vegetable into the green sauce, nibbled it, turned red, spluttered and then tried to swallow the Orinoco River. The Aztecs smiled their approval.

“Or was it the other way round?” Noordhof wondered.

They finished off with a dessert of baked bananas with egg whites and sweet condensed milk poured over them, washing it down with coffee spiced with vanilla and cloves, poured over cream and crushed ice.

Finally, Noordhof looked at his watch and said, “You want to check out the setup at ground zero, Doc?”

“What about my siesta?” Webb asked, bloated.

They heaved themselves up the wooden steps of the hacienda. The jeep was waiting at the front door. Judy and Webb sat in the back. Bullet Head revved the engine and they took off smartly down the hill and out of the complex, driving towards the sun, and the hinterlands.

The road was narrow and dusty. A few family homes, little more than corrugated iron huts with three walls, were scattered around the fields, with scraggy children playing happily enough, or heaving buckets of water. The soil was thin and stony, and broken up by outcrops of rock. Eventually, even the houses petered out, and the cacti took over, tall, emaciated giants standing like motionless Triffids. Buzzards were gliding in big lazy circles high in the mountains. Sacheverell’s scenario again; but it hadn’t described the hot, humid air which streamed past the army jeep. Webb’s shirt was sticky with sweat. Metal was painful to touch. Judy wore dark sunglasses and her vaquero hat. Ahead of them, low on the horizon to the south, dark clouds were building up.

As they drove steadily south, towards the dark horizon, the temperature rose inexorably. For a mile behind them, a long billowing wake of dust marked out their trail. Webb’s throat turned into a hot, desiccated tube, and he felt his face going the colour of beetroot. Noordhof’s conversation began to wilt, and then died, and they headed out, into the
deserted inferno, in a mood of grim endurance. Still jetlagged, Webb tried to stretch out, laying his head back on the seat.

There was a blonde, Nordic maiden. Her eyes were glacier-blue and she was wearing a white gown. She was up to her waist in a pool of turquoise meltwater which cascaded down from Buachaille Etive Mor, spraying them both. She smiled enigmatically, and waded forwards carrying an icefilled tumbler of Coke on a silver tray. She held the tray out to Webb. He stretched out for the cold drink, but there was the sudden roar of an avalanche, and a rock struck him on the head, and there was a crash of gears and a heavy lurch, and the ice maiden was gone, and a pitiless sun was burning into his eyes. The jeep was slowing, the driver turning off the road. They started to bump and grind along a little donkey track. The track snaked its way upwards through foothills, weaving its way around boulders. The soldier worked hard on the wheel, cursing and begging your pardon ma’am, while the jeep’s suspension squealed in complaint. Ahead of them was a wooden hut, an anomaly in these primordial surroundings, like a telephone booth on a mountain top. The jeep reached it and stopped with a groan. A red-faced soldier emerged hastily and came to attention. His shirt was sticky with sweat.

Noordhof stepped out of the jeep and stretched himself. His brow was damp with sweat. He grinned wolfishly. “That was the easy bit. Epicentre dead ahead. From here on in we walk.” He returned the soldier’s salute smartly, and led the group off in single file.

The air was even hotter, and it was scented. As they climbed up, they were surrounded by the drone and clicking of a billion invisible insects. Irrationally, Webb began to feel hemmed in, overwhelmed. We are the true rulers of the Earth, they were saying; you are the temporary guests; we were here a billion years before you, will be here a billion years after you have gone.

They scrambled upwards over boulder-strewn ground in grim silence. Once a twin-rotor helicopter passed, thundering overhead, a jeep swinging below it on a long cable. It disappeared over the horizon ahead and the insects returned. After half an hour of it, the ground began to level out and they began to see signs of ancient cultivation. The path was taking them through terracing. There was a hilltop ahead and as they approached it, structures began to appear in silhouette against the sky. Reaching the summit, they found themselves looking out over a small city. Some community long gone had levelled the ground. Stone pyramids, temples and walls were everywhere. Hundreds of camouflage-green tents were laid out about half a mile to the right, and the city was swarming with soldiers.

Noordhof waved an arm around. “Ground zero. The place of decision.”

“My feet are killing me,” Webb said.

“I have to see the boss,” said Noordhof, leaving them; he had slipped into a brisk, military style, marching rather than strolling. Judy and Webb had simultaneously spotted a van with an open side and an awning. The woman who handed out tumblers of iced Coke was middle-aged, wrinkled and wore a shapeless khaki overall, but to Webb she was the Ice Maiden of his dream. They downed two each in quick succession and Webb thought that maybe there was a God after all.

A GI sidled up. He looked about sixteen. He was small, freckled and had ginger hair cut almost to the scalp. “You the Brit?”

Webb nodded.

The soldier licked his lips nervously. “Say, this asteroid thing—the line is it’s going to miss. Or we wouldn’t be here, right?”

“Right,” Webb said reassuringly.

The young soldier wasn’t reassured. “You can give it to me straight, sir. We really are okay?”

A tall, thin bespectacled sergeant approached. “Are you in pain, Briggs?”

“No, sarge.”

“That’s strange, because I’m standing on your hair. Get it cut.”

The soldier hurried off. “Say, can I show y’all around?” the sergeant asked, nominally nodding in Webb’s direction before fixing a grin on Judy. Webb wandered off with a wave.

There were bas-relief carvings around the sides of the squat, stony buildings: armed warriors, human sacrifices, arms and legs and dismembered trunks. Waiting for the skygod. On one side of a truncated pyramid Webb recognized a stylized cosmic serpent, winged and feathered, the ancient symbol of catastrophic skies from the Norse lands to Sri Lanka, from China to Mexico: the ancient giant comet, father of a hundred Karibishas.

He climbed the ancient steps of a pyramid. A thick black cable trailed up and on to the observing platform, and wound its way into the base of a big shiny paraboloid staring fixedly at a point on the blue sky. The blue lightning logo of Mercury Inc. was painted near the top of the dish. The Valley of Morelos, flanked by steep-sided mountains, stretched to the southern horizon. Whoever once controlled this ancient hilltop also controlled the valley, and passing traffic, and probably territory far beyond. The thunderclouds to the south were building up rapidly. Big Daddy, when he came, would approach from there.

“You’re looking at thirty megabytes a second, son,” a voice said. A short, white-haired man in a khaki shirt, with a belly overhanging his belt, was looking up at Webb. Small blue eyes were set back in a round head.

“I’m impressed.”

“We use it to patch straight into the White House via one of our geosynchronous DSPs. You also link straight in to your Whitehall number through this selfsame dish so once
the Holy Passover occurs you just pick up that phone over there and let ’em know. So you’re the Brit who identified Nemesis. General Arkle.”

“How do you do, sir?”

“I do fine. What’ll we see?”

“At two hundred miles impact parameter? A rapidly rising moon. It’ll cross the sky in a few seconds, going through all the phases of the moon as it passes. My guess is Nemesis will have a rough, pitted surface.”

Arkle nodded thoughtfully. “And if it’s a bit closer?”

“Say it touches the stratosphere. It’ll leave a black smoky trail, and tomorrow will be dark.”

“Closer still?”

“In that case, General, Nemesis won’t seem to move much. We’ll see a small crescent, very bright, low in the morning sky, coming from over there.” Webb pointed in the direction of the thunderclouds. “The crescent will grow very fast—in a few seconds it will form a yellow arch straddling the sky from horizon to horizon.”

“And what then?”

“The sky will go incandescent, but I doubt if our brains will have time to register the fact.”

“And then goodbye America. We should have zapped the bastards long ago.”

“There’s a lot riding on your communications, General, and there’s a thunderstorm on the way,” Webb said, pointing south. “What if your system is struck by lightning?”

“We got two of everything in this man’s army. Two backup systems, two generators”—the soldier’s hand swept over the plateau—“and the best communications men in the world, all here just so you and I can make a ten-second call.”

“Maybe the Russians know about this. Maybe they’ll try to knock you out, for the sake of confusion. What about spetsnaz activity?”