A digital clock ticked off the seconds. A glass panel with a world map showed the current position of the Apollo capsule.
Apollo-Soyuz, Sharps reminded himself, and he grinned, because if the one hadn’t gone, the other wouldn’t have either. U.S.-Soviet rivalry was still good for something. Sometimes. To force U.S.-Soviet cooperation, if nothing else.
Pity we’re having communications problems. Power losses on Hammerlab. Didn’t anticipate that. Should have. But we didn’t think it would be this close when we threw Hammerlab together.
“How close?” Sharps said.
Forrester looked up from his computer console. “Hard to say.” He played his fingers across the keys like E. Power Biggs at the Milan Cathedral organ. “If that last input hadn’t been garbled, I’d know. Best estimate is still around a thousand kilometers. If. If that garbled reading was right. And if the one I threw out because it didn’t fit the others is wrong. There are a lot of ifs.”
“Yeah.”
“Taking shots… number thirty-one filter… handheld…” They could barely recognize Rick Delanty’s voice.
“One of your accomplishments,” Dan Forrester said.
“Mine? Which one is this?”
“Getting the first black astronaut a mission,” Forrester said, but he said it absently, because he was studying squiggles on the oscilloscope above his console. He did something, and one of the TV pictures improved enormously.
Charlie Sharps looked at the approaching cloud. He saw it only as a batch of not very sharply focused grays, but one thing was evident — it wasn’t moving sideways at all. The seconds ticked on relentlessly.
“Where the devil is Hamner?” Sharps asked suddenly.
Forrester, if he heard, didn’t answer.
“…path of outer edges of nucleus; say again, Earth… Outer… impossible… may strike…” The voice faded.
“Hammerlab, this is Houston, we do not copy, use full power and say again; I say again, we do not copy.”
More seconds ticked off. Then, suddenly, the TV pictures on the screens swam, blurred and became clearer, in color, as Apollo used the main telescope and full transmission power.
“Jesus, it’s coming closer” Johnny Baker’s voice shouted. “Like it’s going to hit…”
The TV screens changed rapidly as Rick Delanty kept the main telescope trained on the comet head. The comet grew and grew, shapes appearing in the maelstrom of fog, larger shapes, details, lumps of rock, jets of streaming gas, all happening even as they watched. The picture swung on down, until the Earth itself was in view…
And flaming spots appeared on the Earth. For just one long moment, a moment that seemed to stretch out forever, the pictures stayed there on the TV screen: Earth, with bright flashes, light so bright that the TV couldn’t show it as more than bright smears and lapses of detail.
The picture stayed in Charlie Sharps’s mind. Flashes in the Atlantic. Europe dotted with bright smears, all over, with a big one in the Mediterranean. A bright flash in the Gulf of Mexico. Any west of that wouldn’t be visible to the Apollo, but Dan Forrester was playing with the computer. All the data they had, from any source, was supposed to go into it. Speakers were screaming. Several of them, on different channels, different sources, riding over the sudden static.
“FIREBALL OVERHEAD!” someone’s voice shouted.
“Where was that?” Forrester called. His voice was just loud enough to go over the babble in the room.
“Apollo recovery fleet,” came the answer. “And we’ve lost communications with them. Last words we got were: ‘Fireball southeast.’ Then ‘Fireball overhead.’ Then nothing.”
“Thank you,” Forrester said.
“Houston, HOUSTON, THERE IS A LARGE STRIKE IN THE GULF OF MEXICO; I SAY AGAIN, LARGE STRIKE THREE HUNDRED MILES SOUTHEAST OF YOU. REQUEST YOU SEND A HELICOPTER FOR OUR FAMILIES.”
“Jesus, how can Baker be so calm about it?” someone demanded.
What damn fool is that? Sharps wondered. New man. Never heard the astronauts when there’s a real problem. He glanced over to Forrester.
Dan Forrester nodded. “The Hammer has fallen,” he said.
Then all the TV screens went blank, and the loudspeakers hissed with static.
Two thousand miles northeast of Pasadena, in a concretelined hole fifty feet below ground, Major Bennet Rosten idly fingered the .38 on his hip. He caught himself and put his hands on the Minuteman missile-launch-control console. They strayed restlessly for a moment, then one went to the key on its chain around his neck. Bloody hell, Rosten thought. The Old Man’s got me nervous.
He had justification. The night before, he’d got a call direct from General Thomas Bambridge, and the SAC Commander in Chief didn’t often speak personally to missile squadron commanders. Bambridge’s message had been short. “I want you in the hole tomorrow,” he’d said. “And for your information, I’ll be up in Looking Glass myself.”
“Goddam,” Major Rosten had answered. “Sir… is this the Big One?”
“Probably not,” Bambridge had answered, and then he’d gone on to explain.
Which wasn’t, Rosten thought, very reassuring. If the Russkis really thought the U.S. was blind and crippled…
He glanced to his left. His deputy, Captain Harold Luce was at another console just like Rosten’s. The consoles were deep underground, surrounded by concrete and steel, built to withstand a near miss by an atomic bomb. It took both men to launch their birds: Both had to turn keys and punch buttons, and the timing sequence was set so that one man couldn’t do it alone.
Captain Luce was relaxed at his console. Books were spread out in front of him: a correspondence course in Oriental art history. Collecting correspondence degrees was the usual pastime for men on duty in the holes, but how could Luce do it, today, when they were unofficially on alert?
“Hey, Hal…” Rosten called.
“Yo, Skipper.”
“You’re supposed to be alert.”
“I am alert. Nothing’s going to happen. You watch.”
“Christ, I hope not.” Rosten thought about his wife and four children in Missoula. They’d hated the idea of moving to Montana, but now they loved it. Big country, open skies, no big-city problems. “I wish—”
He was interrupted by the impersonal voice from the wiregrill-covered speaker above him. “EWO, EWO,” the voice said. “EMERGENCY WAR ORDERS, EMERGENCY WAR ORDERS. THIS IS NO DRILL. AUTHENTICATION 78-43-76854-87902-1735 ZULU. RED ALERT. RED ALERT. YOUR CONDITION IS RED.”
Sirens screamed through the concrete bunker. Major Rosten hardly noticed as a sergeant came down the steel ladder to the entrance and slammed shut the big Mosler Safe Company bank-vault door. The sergeant closed it from the outside and twirled the combination dial. No one would get into the hole without blasting.
Then, as regulations required, the sergeant cocked his submachine gun and stood with his back to the big safe door. His face was hard, and he stood rigidly, swallowing the sharp knot of fear.
Inside, Rosten punched the authentication numbers into his console, and opened the seals on an envelope from his order book. Luce was doing the same thing at his console. “I certify that the authentication is genuine,” Luce said.
“Right. Insert,” Rosten ordered.
Simultaneously they took the keys from around their necks and put them into the red-painted locked switches on their consoles. Once inserted and turned to the first click, the keys couldn’t be withdrawn without other keys neither Luce nor Rosten had. SAC procedure…
“On my count,” said Rosten. “One. Two.” They turned the keys two clicks. Then they waited. They did not turn them further. Yet.
It was mid-morning in California; it was evening in the Greek isles. The last of the sun’s disk had vanished as two men reached the top of the granite knob. In the east a first star showed. Far below them, Greek peasants were driving overloaded donkeys through a maze of low stone walls and vineyards.