The four of them watched it in silence until it disappeared almost beneath their feet. A minute later, the window was full of Earth, blue and dazzling against the threadbare fabric of the night. Beneath the swirling clouds he could make out the brownish outlines of the continents, the elephant wrinkles of mountain chains, the patches of lucent green at the poles, where the Arctic wastes had been planted in snow rice. It all seemed familiar and comforting and close.
“What do you suppose we’ll find when we get there?” Maggie said in a voice that was almost a whisper.
Jameson knew what she was feeling. It got to you every once in a while, that moment of strangeness when you caught a glimpse of that distant spark and realized it was a place. That you were actually going to go there across that enormous dark gulf, with a hundred members of your species, in a fragile hollow ring of drawn metal and spun plastic foam.
Maggie was looking directly at him. He saw her shiver.
“On Io,” Berry said, “sulfur and sodium. On Callisto, lots of pebbles. What else?”
“Why not life?” Sue said. “No, wait minute, listen! After all, Callisto’s got an atmosphere of sorts, and it’s far enough from Jupiter so that it doesn’t get the same dose of radiation as the other three Galilean satellites. Dmitri says that, given ammonia frost and evaporate salts, and the existence of molecular hydrogen…”
In a few moments the four of them were having the usual animated argument about life on the Jovian moons—life on Jupiter itself. It was the major after-hours pastime of the entire Jupiter crew, Americans and Chinese alike. Soon it would be settled once and for all.
“…I see a giant lipid, floating in a pool of methane,” Berry was saying, stroking his scraggly beard and peering into his beer as if it were a crystal ball. He had an exaggerated gypsy accent. “A very complex molecule, like chicken fat. No, no, it’s not a lipid after all! It’s a lipoprotein, in a cloud of sulfur! It’s saying ‘Earth-man beware…’ ”
Jameson stopped listening. He was staring into the bowl of stars at his feet. Earth was gone. Jupiter swung into view again among the wheeling stars. It was clear and steady-bright, and it was half a billion miles away.
Maggie said it for him. She caught his eye across the table and said, “It’s a long way down, isn’t it.”
Chapter 3
“Can’t you scientist fellows do something to stop it?” demanded the Undersecretary for the Department of Urban Safety. He was a large, beefy man in a conservative lace suit over a crimson body stocking.
“No,” Ruiz said bluntly.
Ass, he was thinking. But he kept his expression neutral as he looked around the horseshoe table at the assorted bureaucrats sitting there. There wasn’t a flicker of comprehension on any of those well-fed faces, except perhaps for Fred Van Eyck, deputy administrator for the Space Resources Agency.
The conference room was deep underground, buried beneath the National Intelligence Bureau’s reinforced-concrete antheap somewhere north of Washington. They had hustled him here as soon as he arrived on Earth. They had told him it was because the huge parabolic antennae on the roof of NIB headquarters offered a convenient—and secure—channel of communication with the Moon. But they hadn’t allowed him near a communications terminal since his arrival.
Ruiz was tired, and his legs ached from the unaccustomed gravity. His body clock hadn’t had time to adjust to terrestrial rhythms. His head was muzzy, and there was a bad taste in his mouth, and he felt seedy in the vending-machine disposasuit he’d been wearing for the last two days. They had promised him an audience with the President, but so far he’d spent most of his time talking to a parade of obvious gumshoes from the NIB and the Reliability Board.
They seemed to think that the Cygnus source was a political problem. Make the right policy decision and it would go away. Now they’d assembled this ad hoc committee and allowed him to drop his bombshell.
Over in the corner, a government newsie from the Federal Broadcasting Agency was taping the proceedings with a holoscan. An NIB agent was supervising him, carefully collecting each spool as it was finished and locking it away under seal.
“Why not?” the undersecretary insisted. “We give you fellows a big enough budget to fritter away out there in space. Can’t you fire a rocket at it or something? Blow it up with a nuclear bomb?”
Ruiz looked helplessly at Fred Van Eyck for support. Fred was the only person present who knew an asteroid from a black hole, but he refused to meet Ruiz’s eye.
Ruiz took a deep breath. “Mr. Undersecretary,” he said, choosing his words carefully. “We’re talking about a stellar object approaching the solar system at very nearly the speed of light. Try to imagine a body many times larger than Earth giving off energy equal to an explosion of ten to the fourteenth power megatons every second. That’s on the order of a trillion times our most powerful fusion device. It would be like trying to stop a forest fire by throwing a firecracker at it.”
The undersecretary thrust his jaw out stubbornly. “But couldn’t you—”
“Let me put it another way,” Ruiz said. “If you launched a nuclear bomb every hour on the hour for the next hundred million years, and timed them all to arrive at once, you might make an impression on an X-ray source like the Cygnus object. That’s assuming, of course, that you could deliver them within a million miles of the thing without having them melt. And that you could intercept a target that’s traveling at close to the speed of light.”
Out of the corner of his eye Ruiz saw Fred Van Eyck wince.
“Damned scientists bring us nothing but trouble,” the Undersecretary grumbled. “They ought to cut off your appropriation.”
Someone cleared his throat. It was Hoskins of the Civil Liberties Control Board. “Dr. Ruiz, do I understand you to say that there’s no way we can… evade this thing?” He coughed delicately. “That is to say, couldn’t a select group of persons—government officials and so forth, and their families—wait it out on the Moon, or on Mars?”
“No, Mr. Hoskins. Mars will be baked to a cinder too. There’s no place to hide.”
At the far end of the curving table, just out of range of the holoscan, General Harris, NIB’s owlish director, drummed his fingers on the transparent plastic surface. “How about digging in?” he said. “Caves, underground shelters?”
Ruiz stared unflinchingly into the hooded eyes. “The Earth’s crust will be sterilized,” he said. “Down to the bacteria at the bottom of the deepest mine shaft.”
There was a stirring around the table. The magnitude of the situation was finally beginning to sink in.
“But this is serious!” The speaker was Norman Slade of the Public Opinion Monitoring Board. He was a waxy, narrow-faced man in one of the iridescent kaleidosuits that were popular this season among middle-aged swingers. He made a gesture with one hand, and the lenticule-impressed patterns on his sleeve rippled across the spectrum with a three-dimensional effect. “If this gets out to the public, there’ll be no controlling the population in the large urban centers. We’ll have panic, rioting, civil breakdown. And every half-baked terrorist group will—”
“How long can we keep it under wraps?” interrupted the Public Safety Commission’s Rumford. He turned a large shaggy head toward the NIB director. “Who knows about this so far?”
“We moved in while Dr. Ruiz was still en route to Earth. A junior astronomy resident at Farside alerted us in time. We were able to place the duty tech under arrest and seal off the observatory. Dr. Mackie is cooperating, of course. We don’t think anybody on the Farside staff talked to anybody outside, but we’ve canceled all leaves from the Moon anyway. We’re censoring all transmissions from there.”