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.

a.s.s, he was thinking. But he kept his expression neutral as he looked around the horseshoe table at the a.s.sorted 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 s.p.a.ce 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 a.s.sembled this ad hoc committee and allowed him to drop his bombsh.e.l.l.

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 s.p.a.ce. 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 everysecond . 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, youmight make an impression on an X-ray source like the Cygnus object. That's a.s.suming, 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.

"d.a.m.ned 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 s.h.a.ggy 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."

"How about the Chinese?" Rumford said.

"That's cla.s.sified," General Harris said blandly.

The h.e.l.l with them, Ruiz thought. Maliciously, he said: "You can a.s.sume 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 informationhere . 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 exploitthat? "

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 cla.s.sified until further notice."

"And you want a pliantcofrade 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 ma.s.s."

"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 ma.s.s-"

"Horace! Wait a minute! What do you mean bycurrent ma.s.s?"

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 ma.s.s of the Cygnus object seems to be decreasing."

"Decreasing? By what factor?"

"It's lost about two percent of its ma.s.s in the last four days."

"What about X-ray and gamma emission?"

"That's decreasing too."

"You meanincreasing! That ma.s.s is turning intosomething! "

"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 a.s.suming 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 sc.r.a.p 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 gla.s.ses 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 h.e.l.l is going on, Hernando?" Larrabee's voice blurted, sounding aggrieved. "One of my chief a.s.sistant 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 m.u.f.fled "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.

Mackie came back on the screen, looking anxious. "I a.s.sume I'm plugged in to the computer," Ruiz said.

Without waiting for an answer, he began typing his query. He could see Mackie turning to follow the proceedings on some screen out of camera range. The answer came back in the fraction of a second it took Ruiz to lift his fingers from the keys.

"Well?" the NIB director said.

"The Cygnus object is slowing down," Ruiz said. "That's what it's doing with all the ma.s.s it's throwing away. The energies involved would have to be... enormous... for it to decelerate like that."

"Never mind all that!" Harris snapped. "What does it mean?"

"Mean?" Ruiz pa.s.sed a hand wearily over his eyes. "It means we've got a reprieve. By the time the Cygnus object arrives, it'll be a good deal more tame. And considerably shrunken."

"Time," the general mused. "If it's slowing down, we'll have more time to get ready..."

"Didn't you hear what I said? You can call off your d.a.m.ned national emergency. If the trend of those curves continues, it won't be shedding any dangerous amount of X-rays and gamma radiation by the time it gets here. It won't be colliding with interstellar hydrogen at relativistic speeds any more! And it won't have as large a gravitational scoop. And its cross section will be smaller."

The NIB director looked at the screen. "Do you verify that, Dr. Mackie?" he said.

There was a three-second delay, and Mackie jerked into response. "Er... we'll have to continue our observations for some time, of course, but-"

"Why don't you tell him the Cygnus object's rate of deceleration, Horace?" Ruiz said.

Mackie maundered on until Ruiz's words reached him, then said: "Uh... why, approximately nine hundred eighty centimeters per second per second."

"Is that figure supposed to mean something to me?" Harris said.

"It's an interesting coincidence, that's all," Ruiz said. "The Cygnus object happens to be braking at just about one gravity."

"I don't see..."

"Don't you understand yet, man?" In his impatience, Ruiz had reverted to his New Manhattan accent.

"It's not pa.s.sing through any more! It's going to park here!"

Chapter 4.

The saloon smelled of fresh paint and new insulation. They were still putting the finishing touches on it.

Tubular metal scaffolding was stacked haphazardly against the bulge of the far wall, where carpenters and foam wrights were installing a small stage to be used for concerts and amateur theatricals. Rows of mismatched folding and inflatable chairs had been hastily set up for the meeting. The curving chamber was one of the few places in the American sector of the ship that was roomy enough to seat this many crew members at once.

Jameson filed in with the rest, looking over the heads in front of him. There was a lot of joking and goodnatured jostling. It felt good having weight on his feet again. They'd been spinning the Jupiter ship at a full g for a couple of days now as part of the final shakedown-though during the actual voyage the 200-meter ring would be stressed at only two-thirds of a g.

A small, wiry man in a stained overshirt b.u.mped into him; it was Kiernan, one of the hydroponicists.