“Did you catch any of them?” Fredda asked.
“No,” said Justen. “Clean away, all of them. And no immediately obvious leads, either. The serial numbers were removed from everything. Every piece of hardware they used was the most common type in use, and there were no fingerprints anywhere on the bus. Whoever it was, they made sure they didn’t leave behind anything that would point to them. We haven’t really started the investigation yet, of course, but they certainly haven’t made our job easier.”
“You mean you can’t find out who did this?” Fredda asked, gesturing to the chaos all about. She found it hard to believe there were no leads in such a mass of wreckage.
“Oh, we can find them,” Justen said. “Just not quickly, or easily. It helps us that there are only so many groups that it could be, but even so, the investigation is going to need some luck. An informant, a little scrap of paper left behind, someone hearing a rumor two months from now.”
“There isn’t going to be an investigation,” Kresh said, staring fixedly at the burned-out wreck of the airtruck. “Not one that finds out that sort of thing, at any rate.”
“Sir? What do you mean?”
“I mean you can find out whatever you like in private,” Kresh said. “But then put it all in a file and forget about it for the time being. Later on, perhaps we can deal with the guilty parties in an appropriate manner—if there is a later on. But for now, I for one am praying that whoever did this had the sense to have a goodly number of cut-outs and a nice, compartmentalized, need-to-know organization, without any one person you might be able to catch who knows too much. And I say let thanks be given that they all got away.”
“Alvar! What are you saying?” Fredda demanded.
Her husband looked toward her for a moment. “I’m saying we don’t dare catch these people. Not just yet.” He turned back toward Devray and sighed wearily. “Trace the airtruck, and the groundbus. Find out what you can. But you and I know already that this was either the Settlers or the Ironheads—unless it was some gang hired by the New Laws, though I regard that as highly unlikely. But I’m going to need to deal with all three of those groups, and soon. I’ll need their cooperation. I can’t work to enlist Beddle’s support at the same time my police are trying to arrest him.”
“So you think it was the Ironheads,” Devray said, plainly unwilling to let the investigation ride
“It could be any of them,” Kresh said. “It could be anyone who doesn’t want a comet dropped on them. And I must say I can hardly blame anyone for being opposed to that.”
Governor Alvar Kresh looked over the ruins of the landing pad once more, and glanced down toward the wreckage in the plaza below. “I don’t have the slightest doubt that someone will try disrupting the situation again. They will do everything they can to stop any move toward redirecting the comet.”
“What comet?” Devray asked. “What are you talking about? What does this have to do with a comet?”
“Our own Dr. Lentrall here wants to crash a comet into the planet to enhance the reterraforming project,” said Kresh. “And someone wanted him out of the way so it wouldn’t happen.”
“A comet!” Devray repeated. “Crash a comet into the planet?”
“That’s right,” Kresh said. “There’s good reason to believe it would revitalize the entire ecosystem.”
“But you’re talking as if you’ve made up your mind!” Fredda protested. “You can’t have! Not just like that! Not so quickly!”
“I haven’t made up my mind,” Kresh said, his voice suddenly very tired. “I won’t be able to do so until I have talked with you for more than the half a minute we had before”—he gestured toward the wreckage—“before all this. Until I can consult the Terraforming Control Centers on Purgatory. But I will have to decide, and soon. I am sure of that.”
“But, but, a matter like this—something this big—you have no right to decide it on your own,” Fredda said. “There has to be a referendum, or a special Council session, or, or something.”
“No,” said Kresh. “That can’t be.”
“You’re going to play God with the whole planet, with all our lives, all by yourself? You can’t do that!”
“In a perfect world,” said Kresh, “what I’d do is discuss it with everyone, and have a nice, thorough debate of all the issues at hand, with a nice, fair, majority-rule vote at the end. Because you’re right. I have no right to decide all by myself. But I have no choice but to decide all by myself. Because I also have no time. No time at all.”
“Why not?”
Davlo Lentrall nodded absently to himself and looked toward Fredda. “That’s right,” he said. “I don’t think I explained that part of it to you this morning, did I?”
“What part?” she demanded.
But Lentrall seemed, somehow, reluctant to say anything more, and simply looked toward the governor.
“Alvar?” Fredda said, prompting him.
“The part about time,” said Kresh. But he seemed as unwilling as Lentrall to say more.
“Go on,” she said. “One of you at least, please go on. What about time?”
Kresh nodded toward Lentrall. “The comet was rather close when he discovered it,” he said. “And, of course, it is getting even closer with every passing moment. Even for a comet, it’s moving at extremely high speed, relative to the planet. It will be here very soon.”
“Just how soon is soon?” Fredda asked.
“If we leave it alone, it will make its closest approach to Inferno in about eight weeks. Fifty-five days from now. If we divert it, it will hit the planet at that time.”
“Fifty-five days!” Fredda cried out. “But that’s too soon! Even if we did decide to do this… this mad thing—we couldn’t get ready in that little time.”
“We have no choice in the matter,” said Davlo, his voice wooden and emotionless. “We can’t delay it. We can’t wait until it comes back around, centuries from now. It will be too late, by then. The planet will be dead. But he hasn’t told you the worst part yet.”
“What?” Fredda demanded. “What could be worse than only having eight weeks.”
“Only having five,” Kresh said. “If we are to divert the comet, we have to do it within the next thirty-six days. After that, it will be moving too fast, and be too close for us to deflect it enough.”
Justen Devray shook his head in wonderment. “It can’t be done,” he said. “And even if it could—how can you crash a comet into the planet without killing us all?”
Governor Alvar Kresh laughed, a harsh, angry sound that had nothing of joy or happiness about it. “That’s not the question,” he said as he looked out over the wreckage that surrounded them all. “The planet’s recovery is on a knife edge. It’s incredibly fragile. Any of a hundred things could destabilize it, wreck it, send it into an ice age we’d never get out of. If the comet drop works, it could save us all. And yes, if we get it wrong, it could kill us all. But it might be that only the comet can save us. There is no way to know for certain. So the question is this—is there anything, anything at all, I can do, that won’t get us all killed?”
CALIBAN FOLLOWED A precise two steps behind Prospero as they made their way down the pitch-black underground passage. Prospero, understandably concerned about the dangers of an ambush, had shut off his built-in infrared emitter, and insisted that Caliban do the same. Prospero was navigating down the corridor by sheer dead reckoning. In theory, there was no particular reason why a robot could not move from a known position to another known position, working strictly from memory. In practice, it was a difficult thing to do, especially moving at any sort of speed, while trying to move quietly as well, and Prospero was doing both those things.