“How about the Chinese?” Rumford said.
“That’s classified,” General Harris said blandly.
The hell with them, Ruiz thought. Maliciously, he said: “You can assume the Chinese know everything we do. They monitor our transmissions with their synchronous lunar satellite, including what goes in and out of the Farside computer. And they’ve got a pretty good observatory of their own in the Jules Verne crater.”
“The Chinese will keep it under wraps too,” Slade said confidently. “They won’t want to panic their own population.”
Rumford shook his great mane. “The danger is that the Chinese might decide to leak the information here. Stir up our Rads. Exploit the unrest.”
That was too much for Ruiz. He exploded. “For heaven’s sake, don’t any of you people have any conception of what this is all about? We’re talking about the end of all life on Earth—about six months from now! How is anybody going to exploit that?”
The NIB director looked at him coldly. “We appreciate your feelings, Doctor. We understand that as a scientist your perspectives are different. But we’ll expect your full cooperation. I remind you that the penalties for violating provisions of the National Information Act are quite severe.”
Ruiz stared back just as coldly. “I understand completely. Don’t worry, I’ll keep my mouth shut.”
“Fine. I’ll also remind you that the penalties extend to the withholding of information, intentional or otherwise.”
“What information?” Ruiz asked angrily. “I’ve been kept in isolation since I left the Moon five days ago. I haven’t the faintest idea of what data the observatory may have developed since then.”
“All transmissions from the Moon have been classified until further notice.”
“And you want a pliant cofrade like Mackie at that end of the cover-up, do you? That’s it, eh? I’m not a member of the club. Let me tell you something, General. You know it already. You need my help, whether you like it or not.”
Ruiz was shaking when he finished, his skin covered with cold sweat, and he cursed himself for it.
The NIB director looked at him shrewdly. “What is it that you want, Doctor?”
Ruiz took a breath. “Send me back to the Moon.”
“That’s impossible … for the time being.”
“Then let me talk to Mackie. And I’ll need a computer terminal.”
Ruiz waited. The terminal was what he really wanted. He knew, realistically, that they weren’t going to let him return to Farside.
The NIB director pursed his lips. “All right,” he said finally. He pressed a buzzer, and an aide came in. “Take Dr. Ruiz back to his quarters,” he said.
Ruiz limped out, following the aide past the armed guards. No one spoke to him. Before the door swung shut behind him, he could hear them starting to argue. Fred Van Eyck’s voice cut in, soothing and reasonable: “…no harm in letting him…”
His quarters were comfortable, impersonal, and windowless. There was a fold-out kitchen, well stocked with food and liquor, and a small bath. There was no phone or holoset, but a previous occupant had left a collection of battered and fading erasabooks and some spare spools in a drawer. Ruiz took a shower; put on a paper robe he found in the closet, and sat down to wait.
An hour later the door opened and two grim-faced agents came through, wheeling a portable computer terminal with a standard communicator plugged in to it. They nodded at Ruiz and hooked it into a thick socket in the baseboard. They left, and General Harris entered, followed by a silent man in a nondescript polka-dot suit. The man did things to the terminal and it came to life. He stepped back, lounging against the wall, not bothering to conceal the holocorder in his hand.
“All the signals go through a scrambler circuit,” the NIB director said, tight-lipped, “but watch what you say anyway.”
The screen flickered, and Ruiz was looking at Horace Mackie’s long, mournful face. In the background was the banked instrument panel of the monitor booth at Farside. An armed guard in NIB green hovered just behind Mackie.
Mackie squinted at him. “Dr. Ruiz, is that you? Listen, I had nothing to do with my being named acting director—”
The NIB chief leaned past Ruiz and shut off the sound. Mackie’s lips continued to move for the next second and a half, until the image from Earth reached the Moon. The armed guard said something to him, and he flushed. The sound went on again.
“Never mind all that, Horace,” Ruiz said gently. “Just give me what you’ve got.”
Another second-and-a-half delay, and Mackie nodded. “We still haven’t picked up the thing optically. It seems to be a dark body, of about two-thirds Jovian mass.”
“Is that all?” Ruiz said, surprised.
“Yes, we’ve had a fix on it for the last four days with the big gravitational wave detector at L-5, and we’ve been taking more or less continuous readings of perturbations of the outer planets, and the computer estimates that the current mass—”
“Horace! Wait a minute! What do you mean by current mass?”
It was another second and a half before Mackie knew he’d been interrupted. He blinked and said: “That was the next thing I was going to tell you. The mass of the Cygnus object seems to be decreasing.”
“Decreasing? By what factor?”
“It’s lost about two percent of its mass in the last four days.”
“What about X-ray and gamma emission?”
“That’s decreasing too.”
“You mean increasing! That mass is turning into something!”
“No, no, we’re quite sure. X-ray luminosity is definitely decreasing on what seems to be the beginning of a hyperbolic curve.”
The NIB director growled in his throat. “What’s going on? What’s this all about?”
“Shut up,” Ruiz said. He leaned forward into the screen. “Horace, listen to me. Have you checked for parallactic shift since I left?”
Mackie looked uncomfortable. “Uh, no. They won’t let me communicate with Dr. Larrabee. I’m assuming the previous estimate holds—minus, of course, the distance it would have traveled in five days at approximately light-speed.”
Ruiz turned to the NIB director. “I want to talk to Mars,” he said.
Harris hesitated a bare fraction of a second. His craggy face and bald dome looked like something carved out of granite. His Nibs, the press liked to call him. He turned steely eyes on Ruiz. “Write down what you want to ask Dr. Larrabee,” he said.
Ruiz tore off a corner of his robe and scribbled on it. The man in the polka-dot suit left his position by the wall and took the scrap of paper from him. General Harris nodded imperceptibly, and the man left.
“It’ll be at least an hour,” Ruiz said.
“I’ll wait,” the general said. He walked over to the pull-out kitchen and poured two glasses of Brazilian scotch. He handed one to Ruiz. Ruiz switched off Mackie’s face and took a sip.
An hour and a half later the console buzzed and the screen lit up with the words: stand by for voice transmission. Ruiz put down his drink and turned up the sound.
“What the hell is going on, Hernando?” Larrabee’s voice blurted, sounding aggrieved. “One of my chief assistant bottle washers for Io these past three years turns out to be an NIB goon, and he tells me—” There was a faint scuffling sound, and Larrabee’s muffled “Get your hands off me, Grover…” and a fade-out. After a moment, Larrabee came back with “Here are the numbers. I’ve fed them to the Farside computer, as you asked.” He read off the base angles, sounding curt, and then the transmission abruptly terminated.