Nemesis (6 page)

(e) he was now on a remote mountain site surrounded by backwoodsmen.

(f) And he thought,

I don’t need this
.

Money, Webb had learned soon after he joined the Institute, drove everything. Science was something you snatched in precious moments in between writing grant applications and publicity handouts. And in between meetings: the management loved meetings. The science, he had also learned, had to be Approved. The streetwise might aspire to soft carpets and executive desks, but the iconoclast stayed in an icy basement. The point of Buachaille Etive Mor had been to escape, get to work on real science. Webb wondered how they had found him, in that remote mountain setting.

What I do need is deep, dreamless, eight hours of sleep
. He had a shower, washing away the camping and travel, and wrapped himself in a large white towel. The beautiful, climactic moment came when he approached the bed, weary muscles
tingling in anticipation of flopping down on it. He savoured the moment, he flopped, and there was a sharp knock on the door.

Noordhof was in Command Mode. “The cable car. Five minutes. Observing suits in the dormitory cupboard.”

You’re in the army now
, Webb thought.

The tiny silver cable car barely took four people and had the feel of something cobbled together by an enthusiast with a Meccano set. Noordhof, Sacheverell and Webb squeezed in, dressed like Eskimos, with Sacheverell taking up three quarters of Webb’s bench. A notice said

On no account stand up, change seats, shake the car or lean out of the window. Keep clear of the door handle in transit.

Kowalski marched over to a control panel, pressed a red button and pulled a lever. On the panel, a row of lights flashed on. There was a clash of engaging gears, a loud whining, and a large metal wheel started to turn. He trotted swiftly to the car and climbed in next to Webb, pulling the door shut just as the cable took up the slack and the car started to move. “It’s quite safe,” he said. “If you work it by yourself just remember to get in quickly.”

From about fifty yards up, the ground faded into the mist and they lost nearly all sense of motion; they were sitting in a gently swaying cable car, immersed in a co-moving grey bubble. After some minutes they cleared the mist. Far above, almost over their heads, was a pinnacle of rock, still in sunlight. On its summit Webb could barely make out a building. Near-vertical rock faces fell away from it in every direction; lines of ice filled the ridges and angles. Webb looked up at the dizzying height and thought
Why not? What more can they throw at me?
Below them, the receding cloud turned out to be fairly localized, and they could see the track they had taken in the Firebird, twisting through the forest. Beyond it, the desert was now dark.

Webb assumed that his hypothetical Meccano enthusiast had known all about wind-pumped resonances, and metal fatigue, and the tensile strength of tired old steel. He was delighted to see that Sacheverell was even more terrified than him. There was sweat on the man’s brow and his eyes were staring. He produced a handkerchief and wiped his face with it. Mischievously, Webb turned the screw a little. Trying to sound casual, he asked Kowalski: “Ever been an accident with this?”

Kowalski looked at him curiously and glanced quickly at Sacheverell. Then he nodded solemnly. “Once.”

The car began to sway, a long, slow oscillation as the cable vibrated like a bowstring. After some minutes the vibration died and the car’s upward climb slowed; the machinery seemed to be struggling. Only a few yards away was an icy, vertical rock face; the car was being hauled almost vertically up its cable. Sacheverell giggled, but it was a bit high-pitched. The car edged up and slotted into a gap in a concrete platform projecting into space. They piled out. There was a gap of nine inches between car and platform, and about three thousand feet of air below the gap.

Eagle Peak was a spacious natural platform, about a hundred yards by eighty. Its perimeter was marked out by a stone wall about four feet high. There were two observatory domes, copper-coloured in the light of the sinking desert sun. One small, no more than fifteen feet in diameter; it was dwarfed by its companion, about a hundred feet across. The air was wonderfully clear, and bitterly cold.

Kowalski took them into the little dome. He picked up a metal handset from mobile steps and pressed a button. The dome was filled with the noise of machinery as the shutter opened. Temporarily Webb had the illusion, familiar to an astronomer, of standing on a rotating platform underneath a static dome. Kowalski rotated the dome until the sinking sun streamed into the open slot. In the centre of the circular building stood a circular metal platform about three feet tall
and six wide. The top of the platform was clearly built to rotate, and two stanchions rose from it, supporting between them what looked like a big dustbin about three feet in diameter and six feet long.

“The supernova patrol telescope,” Kowalski said with, Webb thought, a touch of pride. “With an altazimuth mounting,” he added, mentioning the obvious, “to save weight. This is a fast survey instrument and it needs to travel light. For supernova searches we’re just measuring the apparent magnitudes of galaxies, looking for any change which might indicate a stellar explosion. Speed is the priority and we don’t need long exposures.”

Webb asked, “How faint do you go?”

“Magnitude twenty-one in ten seconds, over a one-degree field. The instrument has a pointing accuracy of one arc second. We no longer need equatorial mountings now that we can use computers to update the altitude and azimuth of the target star. The slew rate, galaxy to galaxy, is less than a second. It is probably the best supernova hunter in the business.”

It was an impressive instrument.

Sacheverell tittered. “Forgive me, Doctor Kowalski, but it has as much chance of finding Nemesis in six days as I have of winning the lottery.”

“Will you cut out talk like that,” Noordhof said.

Kowalski smiled politely and said, “Now let me show you the other telescope.”

They made for the monster dome. By now the sun was down and Kowalski switched on the light to reveal a telescope about sixty feet tall, on a classical equatorial mounting. He led them up metal stairs to a circular balcony. They spread themselves around the balcony and looked across at the giant, battleship-grey instrument. A metal plaque said “Grubb Parsons 1928”; it had been shipped over from the UK or Ireland at some stage. Mounted piggy-back on the main frame was a secondary telescope, and next to it a mobile platform, with a guard rail, which would raise and lower
the observer depending on where the big telescope was pointing in the sky. Attached to the bottom of the telescope, at the location of the eyepiece, was a metal box about four feet on each side, from which cables trailed across the metal floor to a bank of monitors clear of the instrument. At the prime focus of the telescope, far above their heads, was a cylindrical cage. The cage contained the secondary mirror. It also came with a chair and harness; the observer had to supply the steel nerves.

It was twenties technology, a masterpiece of precision and power, updated for the new millennium with cutting edge instrumentation. As a tool for discovering Nemesis, Webb would without hesitation have gone for a pair of binoculars.

“This is of course the ninety-four-inch reflector,” Kowalski said. “As you see we have set up a spectrograph at the prime focus. The atmospheric seeing at this site is excellent. In good conditions it can be sub-arcsecond, and I’ve even seen it diffraction-limited.”

“I hope you don’t expect to find Nemesis with this,” Sacheverell said in a tone of incredulity.

Webb said, “The Grubb Parsons will be very useful if we do find Nemesis. We can use it for astrometric backup to get a high-precision orbit, and we’ll need it to get a spectrum.”

“What do you want a spectrum for?” Noordhof asked.

“Nickel iron or shaving foam, Colonel? We’d be able to work out the surface mineralogy which might be vital in formulating a deflection strategy. However, first catch your hare.”

Noordhof gave Webb a look. “That’s what you’re here for, Mister.”

Kowalski said, “The Grubb can only be operated from up here. If you want broadband spectrophotometry you have to change the optical filters, which means you have to go into the cage. But we can control the supernova patrol telescope from down below. It can sweep the whole sky to magnitude twenty-one in a month.”

Sacheverell’s head shook inside his fur cape. “It’s not nearly good enough. Nemesis is a moving target.”

By now the desert was black; the sky was dark blue and stars were beginning to appear, unwinking in the steady air. Far below, Base Camp was a tiny oasis of light in the dark. The little car swayed in space as Sacheverell, Webb and Noordhof squeezed in. The cable car lurched and Kowalski ran out of the wheelhouse, jumping in just as the car launched itself into space. He pulled the door shut with a tinny
Clang!
and in a second they were sinking fast.

Sacheverell was looking at the dark cliff drifting past a few yards away. His breath misted in the freezing air. In a tone of exaggerated casualness, he asked: “About this accident. What happened?”

“It was a lightning strike. The car stopped half-way down with one of our technicians in it, and it was three days before anyone noticed. This was last winter.”

“He survived?”

“Heavens no. We had to thaw the corpse out on a kitchen chair before we could get it in a body bag. You should have heard him cracking.”

A look of pure horror came over Sacheverell’s face, and Kowalski grinned. He’d had his revenge.

The red door was solid and heavy—or maybe, Webb thought, he was just feeling fragile. It had a small brass label marked “Conference Room.”

The conference room was brightly lit, like a stage, and measured about twenty feet by twenty. There was a heavy dark blue curtain on the left, a long blackboard on the right, and an old-fashioned circular clock, looking like railway station surplus, on the wall straight ahead. Its hands showed three minutes past midnight. Otherwise every foot of wall in the nerve centre was taken up with desks, computer terminals, printers, scanners and deep bookshelves stuffed with scientific journals, books and gleaming brass instruments from an earlier era.

The centre of the room was taken up with a long pine table, already scattered with papers. There were deep leather armchairs scattered around, their dark blue matching the curtain, and working chairs around the big table, and seven colleagues on these chairs awaiting Webb’s dramatic entrance, and vertical, disapproving wrinkles above Noordhof’s lips. “Webb, you’re three minutes late. I’ll say it again: this isn’t some cosy academic conference. If Nemesis is coming in at twenty miles a second, you’ve just cost us three thousand, six hundred miles of trajectory. Half the diameter of the Earth. The difference between a hit and a miss.”

Webb flopped down at the end of the table. “I’m feeling a bit fragile.” The soldier shot Webb a venomous look and
then turned to Sacheverell. “Let’s get into this. Herb, what’s the state of play in the hazard detection arena?”

Sacheverell leaned back in his chair. “As you’d expect, the big players are the Americans. We have two main civilian programmes, one in New Mexico, and one right here in Arizona. Lowell Observatory have a point six-metre Schmidt at Flagstaff, just a few mountains to the north of us, and the University of Arizona have Spacewatch Two on Kitt Peak, to the south. And the University of Hawaii are just starting a massive programme on Maui, one of the Hawaiian Islands. It’s a sixty-million-buck project, financed by the USAF.”

“Is that it?” Noordhof asked.

“There are photographic programmes but if you don’t have a CCD you’re not in the game. Put a charge-coupled device at the eyepiece of your telescope and you’ll get as much light in two minutes as you would with a two-hour exposure hour on a Kodak plate. In that two minutes Flagstaff can cover ten square degrees of sky down to magnitude twenty. Spacewatch Two covers only one square degree, but it gets down to twenty-one in half the time.”

“Sacheverell has overlooked the rest of the world,” Webb pointed out. “For example, the Japanese have a private network of amateurs and they’ve also started with a pair of one-metre class telescopes. The Italians have a small-scale network centred round their instruments in Campo Impera-tore, Asiago and Catania. The French and Germans have a one-metre Schmidt on the Côte d’Azur.”

Sacheverell waved his hand dismissively. “I don’t want the survival of America to depend on a bunch of Japanese amateurs. As for the Italians, they’re penniless. Half the time their telescopes are lying idle. We’re detecting three Earth-crossers a night.”

Kowalski said, “And we have our upstairs telescopes. We operate our Schmidt remotely, as a robotic telescope, from this room. Normally we feed in a pre-selected list of galaxies
over there but we could just as easily scan the sky looking for a moving object.”

Noordhof tapped the table. “Like I said in New York, you people have every conceivable facility at your disposal.”

“You mean Pan-STARRS?” McNally asked, round-eyed. “The Hawaiian system?”

“Ay-firmative. With immediate effect, it’s yours.”

“What are their CCD chips in these systems like?” Webb asked.

Sacheverell waved sheets of paper. “While our token Brit is feeling fragile I’m downloading from Albuquerque, with the Colonel’s help. They’re large format, high quantum efficiency, fast readout. They perform close to the theoretical limit.”

Shafer was scribbling furiously on a yellow notepad. He had dispensed with his ponytail and his long grey hair was swept down over his shoulders. “What’s the sky coverage with these Pan-STARRS telescopes?”

Sacheverell said, “Nine square degree starfields, reaching mag twenty with twenty-second exposures. They don’t go as faint as Spacewatch Two but like I say their CCDs have fast readout. They can carry out a saturation search in half the time of Spacewatch. Spacewatch has depth; Albuquerque has breadth.”