“If they could only wait a few years,” Anderson said. “We’ll be rebuilding Devon’s World. Right now Deucalion has to take precedence.” Originally, the towing job had been a very long-term project, twenty-eight years from Deucalion’s original orbit to New New. After the war they knew they had to speed it up. This was why so much amateur talent had been pressed into repairing the farms: most of the regular construction crews were frantically building mass-driver engines and solar-powered tugs to haul them out to intercept Deucalion. If things went according to schedule, they would cut down the remaining transit time for the asteroid from nineteen years to five.
“It’s just happening too fast,” O’Hara said. “If two thousand women have two-point-eight babies a year for five years, that’s twenty-eight thousand new mouths to feed. With six or seven hundred deaths per year, overall, that’s a population increase of about ten percent.
“And if they all grow up to be Devonites, we have a regular yeast culture on our hands. In a couple of generations, every other person is going to be bald and holy and fucking anything that moves.” O’Hara skimmed a flat pebble out over the lake; it skipped twice, curving to the right. “I wouldn’t like to be Coordinator.”
“Change of heart?” Ogelby said. That was her ambition.
“I don’t know anymore. I may just sit and watch.”
2 
When O’Hara returned to work there was a message at her console telling her to go to Level 6, Room 6000, and talk to Saul Kramer. The woman she was working for didn’t know anything about it, but a quick directory check showed that Kramer was in charge of personnel at the Department of Emergency Planning. That was pretty exciting, as was the unusual request for a face-to-face meeting—you expect a Ranking Bureaucrat to talk to you through memos, or at most on the cube.
Her excitement took an anxious twist as she approached Room 6000. A man about her age, vaguely familiar, came out the door and walked swiftly by without greeting her, his face pale and grim.
A white-haired woman in the stark anteroom glanced at a console and asked whether she was Marianne O’Hara, and said that Mr. Kramer would see her. As O’Hara pushed open his door she remembered where she had seen the young man. Module 9B, the quarantine—a surge of adrenaline shocked her and she stopped halfway through the door, took a breath, and realized it couldn’t be. She didn’t have the plague; if that were it she wouldn’t be walking around free.
Kramer’s desk was littered with paper, a rare sight. He even had a recycler in the corner, with a stack of new paper beside it. A dramatic-looking man, completely bald, large and muscular, with pale gray eyes. He looked up at her with concern. “O’Hara? Are you all right?”
She laughed nervously. “I just frightened myself with a thought—that man who just left…”
“Lewis Franconia.” He gestured. “Have a seat.”
“We were together in the quarantine.”
He nodded vigorously. “No coincidence.”
She sat down and clasped her hands together, to stop the shaking. “Something showed up?”
“What-no, nothing like that, nothing medical. It’s just no coincidence that you were both on Earth recently. That’s true of almost everybody who’s come in here today.”
When O’Hara didn’t say anything, he continued. “We have a favor to ask of you. A very big favor.”
“For Emergency Planning?”
“We’re implementing it. But the request comes straight from the Coordinators.”
“I’ll do what I can.”
“We need a group of people to go back to Earth.”
“Earth?” She leaned forward. “Now? What about the plague?”
“You’ll be isolated in spacesuits. Sterilized by vacuum before you get out of them.” He shuffled some papers. “This is absolutely secret. Whether you say yes or no, you can’t tell anybody about it. Not even your husbands.”
“All right.”
“You know why New New survived the war.”
“Sure. You can’t hurt a mountain with a shotgun.”
He nodded. “The missiles that got the Worlds were designed, built, and put to bed more than eighty years ago. They were set afloat by the Americans to use against Socialist military satellites, but they weren’t deactivated after the Treaty of 2021. Just retargeted, in case the Worlds did something the States didn’t like. Fortunately for us, they were designed for use against relatively small, fragile targets. To destroy New New would take a direct hit from a large hydrogen bomb.”
“I understand.”
“Well, that’s just what we’re faced with. They have a hydrogen bomb and they plan to use it on us.” He waved at the cube on the wall, which was showing a map of Africa. “From Zaire.”
She stared at him. “Who has a hydrogen bomb? How could they get it here?”
He sorted through papers and handed her two sheets. “Read this. It’s utterly fantastic.”
It was no secret that many of the survivors on Earth thought the Worlds were responsible for the war. An energy boycott against the United States had precipitated the revolution that within hours escalated into nuclear war.
So here was a group that had decided to do something about it: revenge. Die Schwerter Gott, the Swords of God, a group of young Germans who had managed to remove the warhead from a missile that hadn’t fired. They were moving it to the spaceport in Zaire, one of two launch facilities that had survived the war. There was a shuttle on the pad; they planned to load the bomb into the cargo hold and launch a suicide mission.
“But that’s not possible, is it? There aren’t any engineers left, no pilots.”
“It is barely possible. That shuttle is one of the luxury designs from Mercedes. Very fast, very wasteful of fuel, but it can take twenty or so people from Earth to high orbit in one go, two days’ flight. It’s automated to a fare-thee-well; anyone who can read the manual and punch a computer could get it here. They couldn’t dock safely, not without a skilled pilot, but that’s immaterial to them.”
She handed back the papers. “You want us to go to Earth and stop them?”
“Actually, what we hope is that you’ll get to Zaire before they do. They’re having trouble transporting the bomb; there’s no air transport left in Europe. They’re moving it overland to Spain, where they’ll get a boat to Magreb. That’s how we found out about them, intercepting radio messages while they were arranging for the boat.”
“What if we get there too late?”
“You’re stuck. Our shuttle will get you there, but you have to take theirs to get back.”
“Is there anybody there, at the spaceport?”
“The telescope shows a few people wandering around. No organized activity; no communications we’ve been able to monitor.”
“But they aren’t likely to let us just walk in and hijack their shuttle.”
“Who can say? You might scare them all off when you land.”
“I suppose.” She shook her head. “I have to make a decision right away, can’t talk to anybody?”
“Just to me. You have to decide before you leave this room.”
“When would we be taking off?”
He looked at his watch. “About seven hours from now. You go from here straight to the hub.”
O’Hara stood up and crossed the room. She stared at the cube for a minute. “I just don’t understand. Why me? Just because I’ve been to the Zaire spaceport?”
“Partly because you’ve been there. Partly because…there may be violence. Not many people in New New have any experience with that.”
“You seem to know an awful lot about me,” she said evenly. “Who gave you that bit of information? One of my husbands?”