But it was entirely business when Gail entered SD Control as Degruton and a couple of colleagues anxiously watched data scroll across a screen. “How’s it coming?”
Without looking around, Mary Scheaffer waved a hand. “Hi, Gail.”
“That bad, huh?”
“Not really. Just the usual glitches.” Gail glanced at the countdown display on the bulkhead. “Seventeen hours to go. Are we going to make it?”
“Damn right we are.” Mike Brown, the other member of Degruton’s primary team, swung his chair around and grinned at the tousle-haired journalist. Even at forty-two, with no makeup, a touch of gray in her dark hair, and clad in a baggy coverall, the journalist continued to attract the appreciative male eye. Mike added, “What about your doubts, lady? Still have them?”
She shrugged. “I am like a lot of people, I guess. Intellectually I know we can’t change our own past, and have proved it. But gut-wise—”
Her mind went back four years, to the first full-scale test of SD. She remembered the nerve-wracking hours during which she wondered if man had finally tweaked nature’s nose once too often—
From a site in Nebraska, they time-shifted to around 500 a.d. and released a few horses into the broad grasslands of first-millennium America. A dozen mares, a few foals and a couple of stallions galloping away across the prairie, hardly seemed enough for the nucleus of a viable population. Yet Alternate 1-2125, the modern-time equivalent which was the result of that experiment, turned out to be a revelation—with Europe still in the steam age, and its few North American coastal colonies warily co-existing with a continent-spanning Inca Federation.
Unlike Prime, in which a few hundred mounted conquistadors under the leadership of Cortes and Pizarro conquered the Americas for Spain, in Al the thundering cavalry regiments of the Inca had been more than enough to snuff out the European upstarts.
Despite Gail’s misgivings, the return to Prime was anticlimactic, proving what Degruton and her own common sense always insisted—that because Prime’s past was unalterably written into the fabric of spacetime, its present, although older by the six weeks subjective time they were away, remained as familiar as an old and comfortable shoe.
Yet the nagging voice remained, like a constant itch that could not be scratched—
Gail blurted, “It’s not so much what we re doing, Mike, as the degree of what we’re doing! Introducing a few horses a few hundred years before their time did not seem such a big deal, yet look how that ended up! Now we are about to do something on a global scale .” She took a deep breath. “All at once!”
Aware Degruton was also looking at her, she snapped, “What is the matter, Freddy dear? Am I repeating myself again?”
“I am afraid you are, dear.” He smiled and rubbed a hand through what was left of his hair. “Anyway, do you think you can stop it?”
It was not a challenge; he was not that type. It was a simple question.
Gail admitted wearily, “Of course not. I only report events, I don’t influence them.” She hesitated. “But I do try, don’t I?”
“Damn right you do. Fortunately our dedication is immune even to your charms.” Degruton stretched aching muscles and yawned. “Anyway, one or a thousand new alternates, it doesn’t really matter. Prime will still be there when we get back; slightly soiled and slightly glorious as always, but there.”
Gail whispered. “But we’re about to create a whole new Earth. Totally different—”
“Create?” Degruton shook his head. “It beats me why you insist on looking at it that way. We are not God, you know.”
“I know. It is what worries me.”
Although the calculations were meticulous and had monopolized the Luna Institute’s computers to the extent a deputation of angry cosmolo-gists demanded Degruton either stop or get out, the results were still based on theory. So when one of the detects reported a mass approximately where and when it was supposed to be, excitement was tempered by doubt as they waited for refinement of the incoming data.
“Coincidence?” Mike wondered aloud. “Or just bloody good luck?”
“We will know for sure in an hour or two,” Degruton muttered as he watched the wavering blip on the screen.
“Why so long?” Gail asked.
“The detects are pretty widely spread, in space as well as time. Twenty-Three is doing its best, which is not too bad for a probe the size of a basketball. Eight is coming within range, and Forty-Eight is not far behind. Those three should give us a pretty good fix.” “But you launched more than a hundred!”
He looked up. “I’d have launched a thousand if we had the budget and room for that many.”
“Three percent.” Mary paused, added thoughtfully, “You know, that’s not so bad.”
Degruton nodded. Based on data from thousands of core samples taken in and around the asteroid’s supposed impact point near the Yucatan peninsula, the computer’s projection of the incoming trajectory turned out to be both surprising and fortuitous. The asteroid had been a rogue; a solitary interstellar interloper arcing into the Solar System from high above the ecliptic. Unlike the countless anonymous chunks of cometary debris which had always orbited the Sun, this was a loner which theoretically could be located. Hopefully, they had done exactly that.
Mike checked the readings. “Minus sixty-six million years, give or take a couple of hundred thousand. Close enough, I’d say. Let’s arm Bertha.”
Degruton shook his head. “Not yet. Bertha stays asleep and harmless until we are absolutely sure.”
So they waited as the cloud of tiny detects which had been launched in a fan-shaped pattern north of the Sun, flickered in and out of time and space. Snug in its bulge on the underside of the Francis Bacon, enough explosive power to cinder half a continent or divert an asteroid continued its mechanical slumber.
The pattern on the screen changed.
“Eight is within range,” Mike reported.
“And—?”
“Just a sec.” Mike checked the scrolling figures. “Intersect in 290 days.”
“Intersect?” Gail queried.
“With Earth’s orbit. So far the data’s not complete enough to determine if there will be actual impact. Whatever it is could still miss by a couple of million klicks.”
“Equivalent to a bullet parting your hair,” Mary explained solemnly. “Unpleasant, but not fatal.”
“Not this baby,” Mike declared flatly. “It’s it!”
“What makes you so sure?” Gail asked as she tried to ignore the sinking feeling in the pit of her stomach. “As Mary just said—”
“—If it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck—”
“—It is the asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs,” Degruton interjected tiredly as he lifted both hands and rubbed his temples. He took a deep breath, pressed a switch. “Gerry? Time to wake up Bertha.”
The voice of Captain Geraldine Fuchs echoed the doubts of Gail Sovergarde. “Are you sure? I don’t want to commit on a hunch.”
“You are watching the data?”
“Of course.”
“Then be honest, Gerry. You know damn well it’s no hunch.”
A sigh. “When will you know enough to commit for launch?”
“We have enough to commit right now. We can tweak Bertha’s course as more data comes in.”
“OK. We need half a day for checkout. Launch any time after fourteen hundred hours tomorrow.”
Later, Gail slipped out of SD Control and hauled herself up the access well to the bridge. She found the captain alone, standing in front of a direct vision port and staring at the stars. The captain did not turn around as the journalist entered. Instead, she wondered aloud, “Do you think we will ever get there?”