Eagle Peak was a spacious natural platform, about a hundred yards by eighty. Its perimeter was marked out by a stone wall about four feet high. There were two observatory domes, copper-coloured in the light of the sinking desert sun. One small, no more than fifteen feet in diameter; it was dwarfed by its companion, about a hundred feet across. The air was wonderfully clear, and bitterly cold.
Kowalski took them into the little dome. He picked up a metal handset from mobile steps and pressed a button. The dome was filled with the noise of machinery as the shutter opened. Temporarily Webb had the illusion, familiar to an astronomer, of standing on a rotating platform underneath a static dome. Kowalski rotated the dome until the sinking sun streamed into the open slot. In the centre of the circular building stood a circular metal platform about three feet tall and six wide. The top of the platform was clearly built to rotate, and two stanchions rose from it, supporting between them what looked like a big dustbin about three feet in diameter and six feet long.
“The supernova patrol telescope,” Kowalski said with, Webb thought, a touch of pride. “With an altazimuth mounting,” he added, mentioning the obvious, “to save weight. This is a fast survey instrument and it needs to travel light. For supernova searches we’re just measuring the apparent magnitudes of galaxies, looking for any change which might indicate a stellar explosion. Speed is the priority and we don’t need long exposures.”
Webb asked, “How faint do you go?”
“Magnitude twenty-one in ten seconds, over a one-degree field. The instrument has a pointing accuracy of one arc second. We no longer need equatorial mountings now that we can use computers to update the altitude and azimuth of the target star. The slew rate, galaxy to galaxy, is less than a second. It is probably the best supernova hunter in the business.”
It was an impressive instrument.
Sacheverell tittered. “Forgive me, Doctor Kowalski, but it has as much chance of finding Nemesis in six days as I have of winning the lottery.”
“Will you cut out talk like that,” Noordhof said.
Kowalski smiled politely and said, “Now let me show you the other telescope.”
They made for the monster dome. By now the sun was down and Kowalski switched on the light to reveal a telescope about sixty feet tall, on a classical equatorial mounting. He led them up metal stairs to a circular balcony. They spread themselves around the balcony and looked across at the giant, battleship-grey instrument. A metal plaque said “Grubb Parsons 1928”; it had been shipped over from the UK or Ireland at some stage. Mounted piggy-back on the main frame was a secondary telescope, and next to it a mobile platform, with a guard rail, which would raise and lower the observer depending on where the big telescope was pointing in the sky. Attached to the bottom of the telescope, at the location of the eyepiece, was a metal box about four feet on each side, from which cables trailed across the metal floor to a bank of monitors clear of the instrument. At the prime focus of the telescope, far above their heads, was a cylindrical cage. The cage contained the secondary mirror. It also came with a chair and harness; the observer had to supply the steel nerves.
It was twenties technology, a masterpiece of precision and power, updated for the new millennium with cutting edge instrumentation. As a tool for discovering Nemesis, Webb would without hesitation have gone for a pair of binoculars.
“This is of course the ninety-four-inch reflector,” Kowalski said. “As you see we have set up a spectrograph at the prime focus. The atmospheric seeing at this site is excellent. In good conditions it can be sub-arcsecond, and I’ve even seen it diffraction-limited.”
“I hope you don’t expect to find Nemesis with this,” Sacheverell said in a tone of incredulity.
Webb said, “The Grubb Parsons will be very useful if we do find Nemesis. We can use it for astrometric backup to get a high-precision orbit, and we’ll need it to get a spectrum.”
“What do you want a spectrum for?” Noordhof asked.
“Nickel iron or shaving foam, Colonel? We’d be able to work out the surface mineralogy which might be vital in formulating a deflection strategy. However, first catch your hare.”
Noordhof gave Webb a look. “That’s what you’re here for, Mister.”
Kowalski said, “The Grubb can only be operated from up here. If you want broadband spectrophotometry you have to change the optical filters, which means you have to go into the cage. But we can control the supernova patrol telescope from down below. It can sweep the whole sky to magnitude twenty-one in a month.”
Sacheverell’s head shook inside his fur cape. “It’s not nearly good enough. Nemesis is a moving target.”
By now the desert was black; the sky was dark blue and stars were beginning to appear, unwinking in the steady air. Far below, Base Camp was a tiny oasis of light in the dark. The little car swayed in space as Sacheverell, Webb and Noordhof squeezed in. The cable car lurched and Kowalski ran out of the wheelhouse, jumping in just as the car launched itself into space. He pulled the door shut with a tinny Clang! and in a second they were sinking fast.
Sacheverell was looking at the dark cliff drifting past a few yards away. His breath misted in the freezing air. In a tone of exaggerated casualness, he asked: “About this accident. What happened?”
“It was a lightning strike. The car stopped half-way down with one of our technicians in it, and it was three days before anyone noticed. This was last winter.”
“He survived?”
“Heavens no. We had to thaw the corpse out on a kitchen chair before we could get it in a body bag. You should have heard him cracking.”
A look of pure horror came over Sacheverell’s face, and Kowalski grinned. He’d had his revenge.
Eagle Peak, 24h00, Monday
The red door was solid and heavy — or maybe, Webb thought, he was just feeling fragile. It had a small brass label marked “Conference Room.”
The conference room was brightly lit, like a stage, and measured about twenty feet by twenty. There was a heavy dark blue curtain on the left, a long blackboard on the right, and an old-fashioned circular clock, looking like railway station surplus, on the wall straight ahead. Its hands showed three minutes past midnight. Otherwise every foot of wall in the nerve centre was taken up with desks, computer terminals, printers, scanners and deep bookshelves stuffed with scientific journals, books and gleaming brass instruments from an earlier era.
The centre of the room was taken up with a long pine table, already scattered with papers. There were deep leather armchairs scattered around, their dark blue matching the curtain, and working chairs around the big table, and seven colleagues on these chairs awaiting Webb’s dramatic entrance, and vertical, disapproving wrinkles above Noordhof’s lips. “Webb, you’re three minutes late. I’ll say it again: this isn’t some cosy academic conference. If Nemesis is coming in at twenty miles a second, you’ve just cost us three thousand, six hundred miles of trajectory. Half the diameter of the Earth. The difference between a hit and a miss.”
Webb flopped down at the end of the table. “I’m feeling a bit fragile.” The soldier shot Webb a venomous look and then turned to Sacheverell. “Let’s get into this. Herb, what’s the state of play in the hazard detection arena?”