Mr. Koyama accepted the congratulations of the telegrapher and put down the telephone. He gazed with a frown at the chart he had on his desktop. It suggested something that he suspected he was the only one to notice. It was the kind of thing that was only noticed by people who spent their nights on rooftops, counting the hours and days, shrugging off the dew, and staring at bits of the night through long refractive lenses.
The Koyama-style comets seemed to possess not only weird organics and uncommon velocity, but an even stranger periodicity. Every three months, more or less, a new Koyama type comet appeared near the sun. It was as if the Oort Cloud were shrugging off a ball of organic compounds to mark each new Terran season.
Smiling, Mr. Koyama savored the idea of the sensation his observation would cause, the panic among cosmographers trying to work out new formulas for explaining it. His place in astronomy would be assured. Koyama comets were proving as regular as planets. In a way, he thought, it was lucky the Swarm had landed, because otherwise the observation might have been made earlier..
The thought echoed slowly in his mind. Mr. Koyama's smile turned to a frown. He looked at his chart and performed some mathematics in his head. His frown deepened. He took out a pocket calculator and confirmed his calculations. His heart lurched. He sat down- quickly.
The Swarm: a tough kilometers-long shell protecting vast quantities of biomass. Something like that would be vulnerable to changes in temperature. If it got near the sun it would have to bleed off excess heat somehow. The result would be a fluorescence not unlike that of a comet.
Suppose the Swarm were in a fast orbit with the sun at one focus and the Earth at the other. With the Earth in motion relative to the sun, the orbit would be complicated, but not impossible. But with all the sightings of Koyama-type comets, it should be possible to pinpoint the approximate location of the Swarm. A few hundred hydrogen-tipped missiles would then end the War of the Worlds in bang-up style.
"Muthafucka," breathed Mr. Koyama, a strong word he had learned from GIs during the occupation. Who the hell should he tell about this? he wondered. The IAU was the wrong forum. The Prime Minister? The Jieitai?
No. They would have no reason to believe an obscure retired businessman who called up raving about the Swarm. No doubt they got enough of those calls as it was.
He would call up his comrades from Mitsubishi. They had enough clout to see that he got heard.
As he reached for the phone and began to dial, Mr: Koyama felt his heart begin to sink. His place in astronomical history was assured, he knew, but not as he wanted. Instead of six comets, all he had discovered was a damned lump of yeast.
HALF PAST DEAD
By John J. Miller I.
Brennan followed the Mercedes full of Immaculate Egrets to the gate of the cemetery in a gray BMW he had stolen from the gang three days before.
He stopped a hundred yards behind them, his headlights off, while one of the Egrets got out of the Mercedes and swung open the graveyard's sagging wrought-iron gate. He waited until they went on into the cemetery, then he slid out of the BMW, took his bow and quiver of arrows from the back seat, slipped his hood over his head, and crossed the street after them.
The six-foot-high brick fence around the graveyard was stained with city grime and crumbling with age. He pulled himself over it easily and dropped down inside without a sound.
The Mercedes was somewhere near the center of the cemetery. The driver killed the engine and turned the headlights off as Brennan watched. Car doors opened and slammed shut. He could hear or see nothing significant from where he stood. He had to get closer to the Egrets.
It was a dark night, the full moon often hidden by thick, shifting clouds. The trees growing wild inside the cemetery screened most of what city light there was. He moved slowly in the darkness, the sounds of his passing covered by the wind blowing with a hundred whispering voices through the branches overhead.
A shadow shifting among shadows, he moved behind an old slab tombstone canted like a crooked tooth in the mouth of an unkempt giant. He watched three of the Egrets enter a mausoleum that had once been the crowning glory of the cemetery. The monument of a once rich, now forgotten family, it had been allowed to sink into decay like the rest of the graveyard. Its marble stonework had been eaten away by acid rain and bird droppings, its giltwork had flaked away over years of neglect. One of the Egrets stayed behind as the others went through the wrought-iron door into the interior of the mausoleum. He closed the door behind the others, and leaned against the front wall of the sepulcher. He lit a cigarette and his face shone briefly in the flame of the match. It was Chen, the Egret lieutenant Brennan had been following for the last two weeks.
Brennan crouched behind the tombstone, frowning. He had known since Vietnam that Kien was channeling heroin to the States through a Chinatown street gang called the Immaculate Egrets. He had scouted the gang and latched onto Chen, who appeared to rank fairly high in the organization, with the hope of finding hard evidence to link the Egrets to Kien. He had witnessed a dozen felonies over the last few weeks, but had uncovered nothing concerning Kien.
There was one inexplicable thing. The past several weeks had seen an incredible influx of heroin into the city. It was so plentiful that the street price had plummeted and there had been a record number of o.d.'s. The Immaculate Egrets, through whom the drug flowed, were selling it at cut-rate prices, stealing customers right and left from the Mafia and Sweet William's Harlem crowd. But Brennan had been unable to discover how they were getting their stag so cheaply and plentifully.
Skulking behind a tombstone was getting him nowhere. The answers, if the graveyard had any, would be in the mausoleum.
His mind made up, he drew an arrow from the quiver velcroed to his belt and nocked it to the string of his bow. He breathed deeply, smoothly, once, twice, caught his breath, and stood. As he did he glimpsed the name pecked into the weathered rock of the tombstone. Archer. He hoped it wasn't an omen.
It wasn't a difficult shot, but he still called on his Zen training to clear his mind and steady his muscles. He aimed a foot lower and a little to the left of the glowing cigarette tip, and, when the time was right, let the string slip from his fingers.
His bow was a four-wheel compound with elliptical cams that, once the tension point was reached, reduced the initial pull of one hundred and twenty pounds to sixty. The nylon bowstring thrummed, sending the shaft through the night like a hawk swooping on an unsuspecting target. He heard a thud and a strangled groan as the arrow struck home. He slipped out of the shadows like a cautious animal, and ran to where Chen lay slumped against the mausoleum wall.
He tarried long enough to make sure that Chen was dead and to leave one of his cards, a plastic-laminated ace of spades, stuck on the arrowtip protruding from Chen's back.
He nocked another arrow to his bowstring and creaked open the wrought-iron door that closed off the interior of the tomb. Inside, a stairway led down a dozen steps to another door haloed by a dim, steady light that burned in a chamber beyond. He waited for a moment, listening, then went down the stairs silently. He stopped at the door of the inner chamber to listen again. Someone was moving around inside. He counted to twenty, slowly, but heard only quiet, scuffing footsteps. He'd come this far. There was no sense in turning back now.
Brennan dove through the door, and came up on one knee, bowstring drawn back to his ear. One man wearing the colors of the Immaculate Egrets was in the room. He was counting plastic bags of white powder and marking the tally on a sheet of paper on a clipboard. He opened his mouth wide in astonishment just as Brennan released the arrow. It struck him high in the chest and knocked him backward over the kneehigh pile of keys.