“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
Walt 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 beanpole 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 Jolla, 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 instrumentation 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?”