"Indeed, you have not," Bent said placatingly. "Is it possible there are factions among your kind that oppose your actions? Someone perhaps trying to sabotage your work?"
"This is not likely."
"Can you offer any other explanation?" Bent asked, clearly frustrated.
"No explanations are apparent to us. Our craft is not equipped to dismantle worlds."
Arthur produced another packet of photos and spread them before the robots. "Half a year ago, a moon of the planet we call Jupiter—are you familiar with Jupiter?"
"Yes."
"The sixth moon, Europa, disappeared. We haven't been able to locate it since. Can you explain this to us?"
"No, we cannot. We are not responsible for any such large-scale phenomenon."
"Can you help us solve these mysteries?" Bent asked, a hint of desperation coming into his voice. He was clearly experiencing the same sense of dread that had long since come over all associated with the Furnace bogey. Things were not adding up. Lack of explanations at this stage could be tantamount to provocation . . .
"We have no explanations for any of these events." Then, in a conciliatory tone, "They are puzzling."
Bent glanced at Arthur: We're getting nowhere. "Perhaps we should begin with our regular schedule of discussions for the day."
The robot did not speak for several seconds. Visibly-unnerved, Bent tensed his clasped hands on the desk.
"Possibly there is a problem of communication," it said. "Perhaps all of these difficulties can be overcome. Today's session is not important. We will cancel this meeting and meet again later."
With no further word, ignoring the polite objections of Quentin Bent, the Shmoos rose, backed away from the table, and passed through the hatchway. Desert heat once again beat in on the men in the trailer before the hatch closed.
Stunned by the sudden end of the interview, they simply stared at each other. Bent was on the edge of tears.
"All right," he said, standing. He glanced at the TV monitor perched high in one corner. Cameras conveyed the Shmoos' return to the Rock. "We'll see—"
A sharp crack and a roar rocked the trailer. Arthur fell from his chair in seeming slow motion, bumping into Rotterjack's chair, thinking on the way down, It's begun. He landed on hands and butt and quickly got to his feet, pulling on a table leg. Bent pointed to the monitor, still functioning though vibrating in its mount. The Shmoos were gone.
"They blew up," he said. "I saw it. Did anybody else see it—on the screen? They just exploded!"
"Jesus," Rotterjack said.
"Is somebody shelling them?" Forbes asked, looking sharply at Rotterjack and Arthur.
"God knows," Bent said. They scrambled outside the trailer and followed a raggedly organized team of scientists and soldiers down the path to where the Shmoos had last been seen. Fifty meters down the path to the Rock, three craters had been gouged in the dirt, each about two meters in diameter. The robots had left no sign—neither fragments nor burn marks.
Quentin Bent stood hunched over with hands on his knees, sobbing and cursing as he looked up across the blinding noonday plain at the Rock. "What happened? What in bloody hell happened?"
"There's nothing left," Forbes said. French nodded vigorously, his face beet red. Both kept glancing at the Americans: their fault.
"Do you know?" Bent asked loudly, turning on him. "Is this some goddamned American thing?"
"No," Arthur said.
"Airplanes, rockets ..." Bent was almost incoherent.
"We didn't hear any aircraft ..." French said.
"They destroyed themselves," Arthur said quietly, walking around the craters, careful not to disturb anything.
"That's bloody impossible!" Bent screamed.
"Not at all." Arthur felt deeply chilled, as if he had swallowed a lump of dry ice. "Have you read Liddell Hart?"
"What in God's name are you talking about?" Bent shouted, fists clenched, approaching Arthur and then backing away, without apparent aim. Rotterjack stayed clear of the men and the craters.
"Sir Basil Liddell Hart's Strategy"
"I've read it," Rotterjack said.
"You're crazy," French said. "You're all bleeding crazy!"
"We have the incident on tape," Forbes said, holding up his hands to calm his colleagues. "We must review it. We can see if any projectile or weapon struck them."
Arthur knew very well he was not crazy. It was making sense to him now. "I'm sorry," he said. "I'll explain when everybody's in a better frame of mind."
"Fuck that!" Bent said, regaining some composure. "I want the physics group out here immediately. I want a message sent to the Rock now. If there's a war beginning here, let's not give the impression we started it."
"We've never sent or received transmissions from the Rock," Forbes said, shaking his head.
"I do not care. Send transmissions, as many frequencies as we can handle. This message: 'Not responsible for destruction of envoys.' Got that?"
Forbes nodded and returned to the trailer to relay the orders.
"Mr. Gordon, I'll try very hard to put myself in a suitable frame of mind. What the hell has strategy to do with this?" Bent asked, standing on the opposite side of the three craters.
"The indirect approach," Arthur said.
"Meaning?"
"Never come at your adversary from an expected direction, or with your goals clear."
Bent, whatever his state of mind, caught on quickly. "You're saying this has all been a ruse?"
"I think so."
"But then your Guest is a ruse, too. Why would they tell us they're going to destroy the planet, and then make that seem like a sham . . . tell us they're going to save us, and that's a sham, too?"
"I don't know," Arthur said. "To confuse us."
"Goddammit, man, they're powerful beyond our wildest dreams! They build mountains overnight, travel across space in huge ships, and if what you say is true, they dismantle whole worlds—why bother to deceive us? Do we send greetings to bleeding ants' nests before we trample them?"
Arthur could not answer this. He shook his head and held up his hands. The heat made him dizzy. Oddly—or not so oddly—what worried him most now was how the President would react when he learned what had happened here.
"We have to talk to Hicks first," he told Rotterjack as they climbed aboard a truck to be taken back to the outer perimeter.
"Why? Aren't we all in enough trouble already?"
"Hicks . . . might be able to explain things to the President. In a way he'll listen to."
Rotterjack lowered his voice to a whisper in the back of the vehicle. "All hell's going to break loose. McClennan and Schwartz and I will have a real fight . . . Whose side are you on?"
"I beg your pardon?"
"Are you voting for Armageddon, or do we have a chance?"
Arthur started to reply, then shut his mouth and shook his head.
"Crockerman's going to flip when he hears about this," Rotterjack said.
Arthur called Oregon from Adelaide's airport while waiting for the Army limo to pick up the United States group. He was exhausted from the day and the long flight back. It was early in the morning in Oregon and Francine answered with a voice full of sleep.
"Sorry to wake you," Arthur said. "I'm not going to be able to call for a couple of days."
"It's lovely to hear from you. I love you."
"Miss you both desperately. I feel like a man cut loose. Nothing is real anymore."
"What can you tell me?"
"Nothing," Arthur said, pinching his cheek lightly.
"Well, then, I've got something to tell you. Guess who called?"
"Oh, I don't know. Who? Not—"
"You guessed it. Chris Riley. He told me to write it down. 'Two new unusual objects the size of asteroids have been discovered, each about two hundred kilometers in diameter. They have the albedo of fresh ice—almost pure white. They are traveling in highly unusual orbits—both hyperbolic. They may or may not be huge, very y
oung comets.' Does this make any sense to you? He said it might."
"Fragments of Europa?"
"Isn't this romantic?" Francine asked, still sleepy. "He said you might think that."
"Go on," Arthur said, his sensation of unreality increasing.
She continued to read the message. " 'If they are fragments of Europa, they are traveling along virtually impossible paths, widely separated. One of them will rendezvous with Venus next year, when Venus is at . . .' Just a second. Got another page here ... 'at superior conjunction. The other will rendezvous with Mars in late 1997.' Got that?"
"I think so," Arthur said.
"Marty's asleep, but he told me to tell you that Gauge will now sit and heel at his command. He's very proud of that. Also, he's finished all the Tarzan books."
"Attaboy." His eyes closed for a moment and he experienced a small blackout. "Sweetheart, I'm dead on my feet. I'm going to fall over if I don't get to sleep shortly."
"We both hope you're home soon. I've gotten used to having you around the house. It seems empty now."
"I love you," Arthur said, eyes still closed, trying to visualize her face.
"Love you, too."
He climbed into the limo beside Warren and Rotterjack. "What have you heard about two ice asteroids?" he asked them.
They shook their heads.
"One will probably resurface Venus, and the other will wreak havoc on Mars, both next year."
Warren, despite his exhaustion, gaped. Rotterjack seemed puzzled. "What's that have to do with us?" he asked.
"I don't know," Arthur replied.
"Funny damned coincidence," Warren said, shaking his head,
"They're going to hit Venus and Mars?" Rotterjack asked, the implications sinking in slowly.
"Next year," Arthur said.
The presidential science advisor drew his lips together and nodded, staring out the window at passing traffic, light this late hour of the evening. "That can't be coincidence," he said. "What in the name of Christ is going on?"
25
November 1, Eastern Pacific Time
(November 2, USA)
Wait Samshow moved with a long-accustomed grace on the ladders of the Glomar Discoverer, sliding his hands along the rails as his feet pumped in a blur down the steps, stuffing his chin into his clavicle to remove his leather-brown, freckled, and sun-spotted bald pate from the path of passing bulkheads. Whatever effects of age dogged him on shore vanished; he was more spry at sea than on land. Samshow, a long-legged, narrow-faced bean pole of a man, had spent more than two thirds of his seventy-one years at sea, serving ten years in the Navy from 1942 to 1952, and then moving on to forty years of research in physical oceanography.
Deep in the ship's hold, spaced across an otherwise empty cargo bay, were his present crop of children: three upright, man-high, steel-gray cylindrical gravimeters measuring the gravity gradients of the trench ten thousand meters below. The Discoverer was on its sixth pass over the Ramapo Deep. The sea outside the hull was almost glassy, and the ship moved forward at a steady ten knots, as stable as bedrock, ideal for this kind of work. They could probably get accuracy to within plus or minus two milligals over the average of all six runs.
Samshow descended into the hold, his feet hitting the cork-covered steel deck lightly. His much younger partner, David Sand, smiled at him, face a corpselike green and purple in the glow of the color monitor. Samshow presented the covered aluminum plate he had carried down from the mess.
"What's the bill of fare?" Sand asked. He was half Samshow's age and almost half again his weight, strong and wide-faced, with eyes pale blue, a tiny Scots button of a nose, and a full head of wiry auburn hair. Samshow removed the plate's cover. Deep in the elder oceanographer's thoughts, Sand had become one of many sons; he treated younger assistants with the tough-minded affection he would have bestowed on his own child. Sand knew this, and appreciated it; in his entire career, he would probably have no better teacher, partner, or friend than Walt Samshow.
"Fried sole, spinach pie, and beets," Samshow said. The ship's Filipino cook took pride in his special Western meals, served twice a week.
Sand grimaced and shook his head. "That'll make me pretty heavy—might affect the results." Samshow set the plate down beside him and glanced at the gravimeters, spaced in a triangle in two corners and the middle of the opposite bulkhead.
"Wouldn't want to ruin an incredible evening," Sand murmured. He tapped a few keys intently, nodded at the display, and applied a fork to the beets.
"That good?"
"Damned near perfect," Sand said. "I'll eat and you can spell me in an hour."
"Your eyeballs are going to fall right out on the floor," Samshow warned.
"I'm young," Sand said. "I'll grow another pair."
Samshow grinned, returned to the ladder, and ascended through the maze of corridors and hatches to the deck. The Pacific lay around the ship as thick and slow as syrup, rippling iridescent silver and velvet black. The air was unusually dry and clear. From horizon to horizon the sky was filled with stars to within a few degrees of a fresh sliver of moon, a tiny thing lost in the yawn of night. Samshow rested his feet on the anchor chain near the bow and sighed in contentment. The week's work had been long and he was tired in a way he enjoyed, contented, deep in the mellowness brought on only by satisfactory results.
He glanced at his pocket navigator, tied in to a Navstar signal. The first approximation on the illuminated display read, >E142°32'10" N30°45'20"<, which put the Discoverer about 130 kilometers east of Toru Island. In four more hours, they would swing around again for a seventh pass.
He belched contentedly and began to whistle "String of Pearls."
Samshow had outlived one wife after thirty years of stormy, blissful marriage, the true love of his life, and now had two fine women who doted on him when he was ashore, about seven months out of the year. One was in La Jolia, a plump rich widow, and another was in Manila, a black-haired Filipina thirty years younger than he, distantly related to the long-gone and lamented President Magsaysay.
It was a warm, strange dry night, quiet and still, a night for deep thinking and old memories. He felt a sudden onslaught of laziness; the hell with science, the hell with perfect results and plus or minus two milligals. He'd rather be walking some beach watching breakers explode with phosphorescence. The feeling passed but left its mark; it was one of the few ways his body told him he was getting old. He turned and stepped over the chain, then froze, catching something odd in the upper half of his vision.
He jerked his head back. A tiny point of light arced rapidly from the north: a satellite, he thought—or a meteor. He could barely see it now. The point had almost lost itself among the stars when it suddenly brightened to blowtorch intensity, throwing two distinct flares southward at least three degrees. The flares lighted the entire sea in stark, eerie pewter, and then went out. The much dimmer object passed directly overhead. He made a mental note of the position—about four o'clock high— and was working on which constellation it had appeared in, when the object brightened again about twenty degrees farther south, much smaller, barely a pinprick. He had never seen a meteor like it—a real stunner, an on-again, off-again fireball.
"On the bridge! Heads up!" he yelled. "Hey! Everybody, look at this!"
The prick of light fell slowly enough to track easily. In a few minutes, it met the horizon and was gone, leaving tiny patches of green and red swimming in his vision.
Where it had struck, a column of water and steaming spray arose, barely visible in the moonlight, radiating a halo of cloud about ten degrees above the horizon.
"Jesus," Samshow said. He started for the bridge to ask if anyone else had seen it. Nobody had replied to his shout. He was halfway up the steps when a horrendous gonglike shudder rang through the ship. He paused, startled, and finished his climb to the bridge.
The first officer, an intense young Chinese named Chao, glanced at Samshow from the controls. The bridge and most instrumen
tation were illuminated in dull red, not to impair night vision. "Big storm coming," Chao said, pointing to the ship's status display screen. "Fast. Typhoon, waterspout. Don't know."
Four men leaped onto the bridge from three different hatches, and voices squawked on the intercom from around the ship.
"A meteor," Samshow explained. "Went down just like that, made a big spout about thirty kilometers due south."
Captain Reed, twenty years younger than Samshow but even more gray and grizzled, came onto the bridge from his cabin, nodded curtly, and gave him a dubious glance. "Mr. Chao, what is this coming?"
"Blow, Captain," Chao said. "Damn big storm. Coming fast." He pointed to the enhanced radar images. Clouds rushed at them in a blue and red scythe. The storm was already visible through the glass forward.
David Sand came from belowdecks huffing, red-faced, and swearing. "Wait, whatever that was, it's just screwed up everything. We have a—Jesus Christ!" He recovered from the sight of the approaching front and began swearing again, "it was going just fine, and now there's a jag on the graph."
"Jag?" Captain Reed asked.
"Extremely short wavelength anomaly. Deep decline, zero for an instant, then a slow increase—it's ruined! We'll have to recalibrate, maybe even send all three tubs back to Maryland."
The captain ordered the ship turned bow-on to face the storm. Warnings, whistles and shouts and electric bells, sounded all around the ship.
"What's happening?" Sand asked, concern finally replacing his anger.
"Meteor," Samshow said. "Big one."
The front hit seven minutes after Samshow saw the fireball strike the horizon.
The ship fell forward into canyonlike wave troughs, its bow knifing ten and fifteen meters into the black water, and then rode upward over the crests, the bow now pointing at the rain-lashed sky. Samshow and Sand tightly gripped rails mounted on the bridge bulkheads, grinning like fools, while the crew worked to control the ship and the Captain stared stonily forward.
"I've been through worse!" Samshow shouted at his partner over the roar.
"I haven't, I don't think," Sand shouted back.