Feinberg was happy to go. And not only because of the celestial event. He was a bachelor, a man who'd devoted his life to astronomy and discovered it wasn't quite enough. The trip to Beaver Meadow got him out of the apartment he'd grown to detest, and threw him in with a new group of people. The reality of his existence puzzled him. He'd accomplished everything he'd ever wanted, had gone well beyond what he'd thought possible. Yet he sensed that something round and dark had moved across the essence of his own existence, blocking off the light.
Beaver Meadow wasn't a big facility. It had only three telescopes, the largest being a forty-five-inch Clayton-Braustein reflector, which would relay images onto an eighteen-foot wallscreen. The observatory had reserved a prime-location computer for him, overlooking the wallscreen. The director, Perry Hoxon, asked whether he required anything else.
Hoxon was a busy and innocuous little man. Feinberg explained he was not working on a specific project. In fact, he would have been content to sit quietly outside on one of the benches in the adjoining park, and simply enjoy the eclipse. But yes, he was certainly grateful for the prime location. (He would in fact have been irritated had it not been offered.)
Now, as the event unfolded, he wondered whether he shouldn't have gone outside and watched from the parking lot. Several hundred people had crowded into the facility. Kids were laughing, babies crying, and there was a minimum level of conversation that did not subside even during the final moments before totality. Feinberg had seen the phenomenon before, an utter lack of respect for what was happening, people who had dropped by the observatory on the way to a supermarket. Then the last of the light ran off the screen. Bright spikes and beads flashed into existence, haloing the dark disk. The diamond ring effect. A few people cheered, as if someone were about to score a touchdown. He sighed and concentrated on the event, shutting out the rest of the world. How unlikely, and how fortunate, that Sun and Moon were the same apparent size! No other world in the solar system could experience an event even remotely like this. If he, Wesley M. Feinberg, had been designing the system, this was exactly the sort of spectacular effect he would have wanted to create for the one intelligent species among the worlds. And he wasn't sure he'd have thought of it.
A noise in the auditorium recalled him to the present. The voice was male, filled with impatience: "I'll wait in the car." How dull and unimaginative the general population was.
"Professor Feinberg?"
He looked away from the screen. One of the observatory's interns, a very young man who seemed intimidated in his presence, held out a piece of paper. "Sorry to disturb you, Professor. This just came for you."
He took it, nodded, pushed it unread into his pocket, and went back to the eclipse. The solar corona was magnificent: Plumes and streamers a million miles long blazed out of the darkened disk. The spectacle rose and fell with mathematical precision, a cosmic symphony in light and power. He watched, hearing now only his own heartbeat, willing himself closer, trying to grasp the enormity of what he was seeing.
"Professor. I think there's some urgency." A new voice this time. Hoxon. At first Feinberg wasn't sure what the man was talking about. Then he remembered the message. He fished it out of his pocket.
It was from the Orbital Lab:
WES,
At the bottom of the page, in a box, there was a set of coordinates. The object was square in the middle of Pisces.
"I'll be back," he told Hoxon. He wanted to be out in the eclipse anyhow, away from the crowd, away from the auditorium. He wanted to wrap himself in the event, taste it, draw it into his soul.
He buttoned his sweater and hurried quickly across the parquet floor and out into the parking lot. It was unseasonably cold, and he pushed his hands into his pockets. The observatory was located in a nature center. The walkways and lawns were deserted. Feinberg picked out Van Maanen's Star, looked to its left, and saw a light that shouldn't be there. He cackled and pumped his right arm in the air with pure pleasure.
3.
Moonbase, Grissom Country. 12:49 P.M.
Sam Anderson had been agent in charge of the vice president's Secret Service detail for six months. He was not happy. The assignment should have been relatively straightforward. They were in a limited-access zone. Residents of Moonbase had all passed psychological screenings to eliminate nut cases, and the visitors were VIPs who, in a less restricted area, would have been traveling with their own security units.
Nevertheless, it was not a comfortable situation. Of course, on assignment, Sam was never comfortable. He always assumed that a potential assassin existed, looking only for the opportunity. And Moonbase put him at several distinct disadvantages.
People here tended to live and work in close proximity to one another. In the corridors and meeting rooms, it was literally impossible to maintain a ring around "Teddy," their code-name for Haskell. It was, of course, a reference to the TR sketches and memorabilia that the vice president kept in his office. Sam's favorite was a doctored photo showing Theodore Roosevelt and Charlie Haskell, both in buckskin, standing together outside the Dakota Saloon in the Badlands.
Firearms were prohibited at Moonbase. No exceptions, Sam had been told when he tried to argue the point. Consequently, the agents carried only stun guns. They wouldn't be worth much if someone else had gotten a revolver past the sensors.
Backup was, of course, far away. Moonbase had no security force worthy of the name. The assumption was that its residents would abide by the policies and live by the rules. A person who drank too much and created a problem could be dealt with. But a couple of people with criminal intent, if they were able to smuggle weapons into the facility (which Sam thought would not be all that difficult), could pretty much have their own way. He wondered whether the lunar operation would suffer a minor disaster before they got smart and installed a tough, efficient police detail.
Something else worried him. It took a while to get used to moving around at one-sixth g. If the agents had to respond to an emergency, he wasn't sure how efficient they were going to be. Quick moves tended to cause people to bounce off walls.
Sam was thirty-eight years old, twice divorced, had one child by each marriage. He was a graduate of Ohio State, where he'd run the two-twenty better than anyone else in the school's history. He'd majored in poli-sci, gotten a commission and served as a naval officer for four years. A fellow officer had convinced him of the many advantages and the glamor of the Secret Service. He'd joined, while the friend changed his mind at the last minute and went to law school, where he'd learned to make big bucks defending the indefensible.
Sam's first assignment had been to the Detroit office.
There was, of course, no glamor to speak of, but the pay was decent and he enjoyed the work. A man couldn't ask for more than that. He'd done well, shown a flair for the intelligence desk, and been twice promoted. Eventually he drew an assignment with the White House unit. This time next year, he expected to be Special Agent in Charge at one of the major stations.
Sam was six-feet even and right out of central casting for agents: spare, chiseled features; alert brown eyes; and conservatively cut black hair. On duty, he fell easily into the polite cool monotone that was almost a parody of Hollywood agent-speak. But nobody seemed to mind, and at retirement parties and award luncheons, his colleagues never missed a chance to mimic him. It always got a laugh.