Arm over arm they hauled the booster into position, having been joined by the third man as soon as his duties at the arm permitted him to leave it. A slight tumbling began when the two masses touched but nothing vigorous enough to interfere with the task of fastening them together.
The French team went about its work with practiced precision. Though they lacked actual experience in free-fall before this mission, they seemed to be doing very well. After much tugging the ponderous masses were joined, and the new booster’s four arms gripped the warhead firmly. The EVA team then pondered the removal of the target’s original booster.
After the first few minutes of this Grimm began to sweat nervously. He had good reason. Nobody knew how long the pulse would continue to immobilize the target’s sensors. For all they knew it could fail anytime and the thing would go off in spite of all their efforts.
Finally, he fired a steering jet for a millisecond just to get the EVA crew’s attention, then motioned for them to come aboard.
This was acknowledged by a prearranged gesture. The men outside had evidently concluded the extra booster could not be easily removed. They used the booster’s attitude jets to manually align the mass, then set the timer and boarded.
Grimm decided against moving Endeavor. Though the risk of collision was minimal he hesitated to take it. He thought it was better to stay put while the satellite’s booster fired.
The rest of the operation was flawless. The bucket’s new engine burned for a full two minutes, killing its forward motion rapidly, driving it lower and lower. The side benefits of Grimm’s decision not to move became apparent. By staying put they were in position to see the show. Grimm watched with great satisfaction while the bomb turned cherry red from friction with the atmosphere. A spectacular but silent explosion followed when the remaining propellant and the bucket’s charge detonated in unison.
Grimm donned his helmet against the possibility that collision with stray slugs would decompress Endeavor. He didn’t know whether any of these would reach their orbit, which was fairly high, but he could see others enter the atmosphere, rise to incandescence, and finally traverse thousands of kilometers while they burned to dust.
Grimm was not the only spectator.
In the darkened capital it was 0600 hours, Greenwich Mean Time. Sumpter stood alone on the roof of the White House, gazing up at the sky, watching the most extravagant fireworks display human eyes had ever seen. Although mission control supposedly had contact with the shut-tie they had not been able to tell him very much about what Endeavor was doing. This visual feast was Sumpter’s first confirmation his solution had worked.
There had been a price. Briefly, nothing electromagnetic worked. Powerplants shut down. Radio and telephone communication ceased. Even automobile engines could not be started, the flux was that intense. That would pass, but immense masses of electromagnetically stored data would have been obliterated.
On Earth’s surface most of these effects were very brief, except for the communication interruption. In space, fortunately, it had lasted longer. In hours the Earth’s own magnetic field would disperse the pulse, just as it had the first time man had done this some forty years before.
Back then it had been a catastrophe, sobering to the extent that both the US and the Soviet Union had spent billions trying to find out how to shield from it. Neither had been willing to risk a communications blackout while the other side’s nuclear bombers might be sneaking up.
It was ironic, Sumpter thought, that what once threatened to obliterate civilization had now saved it. He knew that it was time to get on with his own mission.
All the gloom was gone. The immediate crisis was over. Casualties had been very light. Less than a thousand people had been unlucky enough to be in situations where the blackout was lethal. Most of those had brought disaster on themselves by ignoring warnings issued before the blast.
For Sumpter and most of the world, all this morning’s news was good, and the breakfast conference at the White House was as much a celebration of what had been accomplished as it was a working meeting.
“The Swiss were stubborn, at first,” Powers said with a chuckle, “but with them business is business and the thought of some doper screwing it all up for good scared the pants off them. Their ambassador admitted to me that while the system was down they lost hundreds of millions of francs just in unearned interest. That clinched it. After that they coughed up their records. Then we knew who the terrorists were, where they were and how to nail them. Now, to the dopers, we’re the terrorists!” The chuckle became a roar.
It infected Sumpter, who grinned from ear to ear. He had known all along that none of what happened in the international drug trade occurred without the complicity of the corrupt regimes in the producing countries, Baribeau had explained how all that worked. Now, with the rest of the world fully appreciative of the consequences of letting this go on, something had finally been done about it. These regimes would quickly be toppled by concerted and determined international pressure, after which teams of experienced and determined reformers would move in to reconstruct their ruined economies.
With the kind of incentive the world now had to do it nationalistic interests would be forced to yield to collective action. The public would demand it. Ordinary people everywhere had suddenly realized that organized international crime had taken the place of world war, that it was a worldwide menace, and that the greatest crime of all was political corruption. People who had formerly been apathetic about it now clearly saw how intimately this touched their lives.
“Yes, sir, it’s a brand new world out there,” Baribeau remarked, “a turning point in human civilization.”
Sumpter did not truly appreciate how literally true that statement was until the meeting broke up and he and Baribeau settled in to a private conversation in Sumpter’s office. Of late he had discovered that this guy was more than just a member of his cabinet, he had become a friend, a mentor, a confidant.
“We’ve got the people behind us now, Sam,” he said with a new confidence.
“Yes, we have, Mr. President. That’s true, maybe for the first time since Washington’s day. But that could be a bad thing as well as a good one. It’s also the reason why you might want to consider quitting after one term.”
“What?! How can I do that, with all the work that’s left to do? Why would I want to?”
“Because maybe it’d be good for public morale, and maybe it would help preserve your place in history.”
Sumpter was now staring in disbelief at Baribeau.
“You can’t top what you just did, Mr. President. From now on your stock can go only one way, down. Nothing else I can think of would be worse for this country—or the world, for that matter. You’re a crisis leader, Mr. President, you’re a fixer. The trouble is that except when society faces mortal peril competent people like you are pariahs nobody wants to have around.” He paused, watching the words penetrate, like so many daggers, into a man who called him “friend.”
Baribeau was agonized by this, nevertheless he knew he could not stop now. “I can see you don’t understand,” he added. “Let me explain. I realized there was something extraordinary about you when we met. I knew instantly that you were one of history’s rare and exceptional people who pop up when they’re most needed. Like Winston Churchill was, for instance. Nobody else but him could have pulled Britain through the early days of World War II, yet as soon as the voters knew it had been won they turned him out of office. He was such a monumental personage that even this could not detract from his greatness.