“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. “Walt, 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.
“It’s exhilarating. Something truly exotic — a real first. An observed large meteor fall in midocean, and its results. We’d better alert all coasts.”
“Who’s going to write the paper?”
“We’ll do it together.”
“I locked down the equipment after the anomaly. We’ll have to make another run when this clears up.”
The Discoverer, Samshow thought, would weather the storm easily enough. It was not going to be a long blow. When he was sure of this, as the violent rain and waves declined, he retired to his quarters to look up the facts and figures and equations he would need to understand what had just happened. Sand staggered down the stairs and corridors, stopping in Samshow’s hatchway long enough to say he was going to check again on his blessed gravimeters.
The next day, when it was their turn to present the story by radio to the expedition’s chiefs in La Jolla, they had still not sorted out their findings.
One thing puzzled them both immensely. All three gravimeters had registered the “jag” simultaneously. Shock had not caused the anomaly; the gravimeters had been designed to be carried aboard aircraft as well as ships, and could weather relatively rough treatment handily. Besides, the shock had occurred after the appearance of the spikes.
Sand put together a list of hypotheses, and revealed one candidly to Samshow when they were alone. “It’s simple, really,” he said in the galley over a late breakfast of corned-beef hash and butter-soaked wheat toast. “I made some calculations and compared the spikes on the three traces. The three tubs aren’t really far enough apart to make the results authoritative, but I checked the digital record of each spike and found a very small time interval between them. I can explain the time interval in only one way. Doing a tidal analysis, and subtracting the ship’s reaction as a gravitated object, the traces show an enormous mass, about a hundred million tons, traveling in an arc overhead.”
“Coming from what direction?” Samshow asked casually.
“Due north, I think.”
“How far away?”
“Anywhere from a hundred to two hundred kilometers.”
Samshow considered that for a moment. Whatever the fireball had been, it had been far too small to mass at anything like a hundred tons, much less a hundred million. It would have spread the Pacific out like coffee in a cup if it had been a mountain-sized meteoroid. “All right,” he said. “We ignore it. It’s an official anomaly.”
“On all three gravimeters?” Sand asked, grinning damnably.
NEC National News Commentator Agnes Linder, November 2, 1996:
The newest twist in a very twisted election year, the arrival of visitors from space, almost defies imagination. United States citizens, recent polls show, are in a state of rigid disbelief.
The Australian extraterrestrials have arrived on Earth too soon, some pundits have said; we aren’ t ready for them, and we cannot begin to comprehend what they might mean to us.
Presidential candidate Beryl Cooper and her running mate, Edgar Farb, have been on the offensive, charging that President Crocker-man is hiding information provided by the Australians, and questioning whether in fact the United States is not behind the destruction — some say self-destruction — of the robot representatives in the Great Victoria Desert.
The American people are not impressed with these charges. How many of us, I wonder, have fixed any emotional or rational response at all? The scandal of the destruction of the extraterrestrials refuses to spread; the Australian government’s accusations of American complicity have been practically ignored around the world.
We have lived our lives on a globe undisturbed by outside forces, and now we are forced to expand our scale of thinking enormously. Western liberal tradition has encouraged an inward-turning, self-critical kind of politics, conservative in the true sense of the word, and President Crockerman is the heir to this tradition. The more forward-looking, expansive politics of Cooper and Farb have not yet struck a chord with Americans, if we are to believe the recent NEC poll, which gives Crockerman a rock-steady 30 percent lead just three days before voters go to the polls. This, without the President issuing any statements or making any policy regarding the Great Victoria Desert incidents.
26
Mrs. Sarah Crockerman wore a solemn, stylishly tailored gray suit. Her thick brown hair was carefully coiffed, and as she poured Hicks a cup of coffee, he saw her hands were immaculately manicured, the fingernails painted a metallic bronze, glinting softly in the gray winter light entering through French windows behind the dining table. The dining room was furnished in coffee-colored Danish teak, spare but comfortable. Beyond the second-story windows lay the broad green expanse of the U.S. National Arboretum.
Except for a Secret Service agent assigned to Hicks, a stolid-faced fellow named Butler, they were alone in the Summit Street apartment.
“The President kept this flat rented largely at my insistence,” she said, replacing the glass pot on its knitted pad. She handed him the cup of coffee and sat in the chair catercorner from him, her nyloned knees pushing up against the table leg as she faced him. “Few people know it’s here. He thinks we might be able to keep the secret another month or two. After that, it’s less my private hideaway, but it’s still here. I hope you appreciate how much this secret means to me.”
Butler had gotten off the phone and now stood by the window, facing the doorway. Hicks thought he resembled a bulldog, and Mrs. Crockerman a moderately plump poodle.
“My husband has told me about his preoccupations, naturally,” she said. “I can’t say I understand everything that’s happening, or…that I agree with all of his conclusions. I’ve read the reports, most of them, and I’ve read the paper you prepared for him. He is not listening to you, you know.”