“What?”
Noordhof grinned sadistically. “What’s the beef, Herb? You have five hours and maybe you’ll even find time to shave. Prepare something non-technical, maybe a movie. This is your schedule: At thirteen hundred, you’re collected upstairs by chopper and transferred to a jet at Kirtland Air Force Base. You arrive Cheyenne Peak at fifteen hundred and brief the brass. They’re fixing up a little simulation and want your help. At twenty hundred you sit in on a DCI briefing in Washington and at twenty-one hundred you brief the President.”
Sacheverell, looking stunned, appealed to Judy Whaler. He tried another angelic smile. “Can you help me? Maybe with some simulations.”
Judy gulped down the last of her boiled egg, gave Noordhof a look of disbelief and said, “Give me an hour, Herb. I need to talk to Ollie.” Sacheverell scurried out of the room, shoulders hunched, heading either for the conference room or a toilet.
“Please can I have a helicopter too?” Shafer asked.
“Within the hour. Just keep your mouth firmly shut and that includes chatting to the pilot. And make damn sure you’re back here with answers at twenty-one hundred precisely. That applies to all of us.” Webb got a heavy stare.
“I’ve been going through the kitchen cupboards,” Webb said. “Kenneth, you’re brilliantly stocked with spices.”
Kowalski grinned. “Doctor Negi is a regular observer here.”
“We have to eat. This evening I’ll take an hour and make a curry that will transport us straight to heaven. I didn’t mean it that way,” Webb added.
McNally said, “I don’t seem to be getting through to you, Mark. No hardware exists that will enable me to deflect Nemesis a week or a month from today.”
Noordhof blew one of his smoke rings. “I’ll tell you why you’re wrong, Jim. Because if you’re right, we’re dead.”
Judy brushed eggshell from her well-filled blouse. She looked at Webb with wide eyes and said, “Didn’t Herb do well.”
Webb displayed his teeth. The oaf hadn’t uttered a single original thought. He’d missed out on nuclear reactors scattered to the winds; catastrophic chemical imbalances in the atmosphere; invisible, scalding steam sweeping over doomed seaboards. He’d missed out on the typhoid and the bubonic plague which would surely sweep through surviving populations, deprived of the most basic amenities. He’d missed out on the fact that the big tsunami would hit again and again as the ocean sloshed, maybe half a dozen times or more over a few hours. Most of all he’d missed out on the cosmic winter: the darkened post-impact sky, below which nothing would grow; the freezing gales which would turn what was left of America into a blasted Siberian wasteland in the weeks following the crash; and the terrifying risk of a climatic instability which would close down the Gulf Stream and switch off the monsoon, bringing calamity far beyond American shores.
On the other hand, Webb thought, quite a few of these things had been missed by others; and he had to admit Sacheverell had done a moderately competent Internet search. For an idiot.
And now, Webb thought, everybody knows what to expect and it’s simple. There will be little warning. A huge burning mountain will be thrown to earth; it will set the earth ablaze with falling hail and fire; it will darken the sun and moon; and it will plunge us into a smoking abyss.
Vincenzo’s Woman
The sky was still dull blue, and a light early morning mist was hugging the Tuscan fields, when the soldiers of Christ came for Vincenzo.
The monk was awakened by a violent shaking of his shoulders. His woman was over him, her grey hair brushing his face and her eyes wide with fear. “Vincenzo! Robbers!”
He threw back the sheets and ran to the window, pulling open the shutters. Horses were clattering into the courtyard below.
There was a heavy thump from below. It shook the house, and came again. The woman screamed, but the thump-thump continued, and then there was the sound of splintering oak, and running footsteps on the marble stairs. A youth of about sixteen ran into the room. He wore a white jerkin, a white cap and striped black and white tights. He was breathing heavily, had an excited gleam in his eyes, and he was carrying a short, broad-bladed sword. It looked new and unused. He stared at Vincenzo and then turned his eyes to the woman. He seemed uncertain what to do next. He was staring excitedly and kept swinging the sword.
An older man, stocky and bearded, followed him into the room. “Get dressed!” he ordered Vincenzo, ignoring the woman. More men ran in. They started to haul open drawers and cupboards, flinging clothes on to the floor and overturning chairs and tables which got in the way. Vincenzo’s woman threw on a woollen dress, and then grabbed the young man’s arm. Flushing with humiliation, he turned to hit her but stopped as a man, dressed in a long dark cloak embroidered with golden crucifixes, stepped into the bedroom.
The man approached the old monk. “Vincenzo Vincenzi, son of Andrea Vincenzi of Padua, you are under arrest.”
“Why? What have I done?”
“You are being taken to Bologna, where you are to be tried for heresy.”
The woman screamed in fright, and settled down to a torrent of abuse delivered in an increasingly excited voice. The old monk tried to pacify her and finally persuaded a terrified maidservant, peering round the door, to take her down to the kitchen.
The monk had hardly finished buckling his tunic when they bundled him downstairs. An open carriage was waiting. Early morning dew was beginning to steam off the red pan-tiled roofs where the sunlight touched them. A cluster of servants, some of them half-dressed, gaped from the shadows of a cloister. As the carriage clattered out of the courtyard, Vincenzo looked back and glimpsed a cart into which his notebooks and instruments were being tossed — including his perspective tube which, they were later to say, had been invented by the heretic Galileo if not by Satan himself. Minutes later the soldiers, clearly in a hurry, mounted up and galloped out of the courtyard, the cart rattling noisily over the cobbles.
Vincenzo’s mistress had dashed out of a back door from the kitchen just as the soldiers were leaving the front, fleeing along a broad gravel path through a garden scattered with cypress and myrtle trees, statues and tinkling fountains. She ran the two kilometres to her brother’s house and arrived in a state of near collapse. Her brother, a prosperous wool merchant, had a stable with half a dozen horses. A servant saddled one up and she set out for Florence, forty kilometres away, trailed by her brother whose horsemanship was constrained by age and gout. Entering the city through the Gate of the Cross, with the exhausted horse slowed to a trot, she headed for the city centre. She used Brunelleschi’s cathedral dome and the tall bell-tower of the Old Palace as landmarks to find her way to the Ponte Vecchio. Across it, at the Grand Ducal Palace, she dismounted and tied the horse to an iron ring next to a window.
A soldier with a pikestaff, his tunic bearing the fleur-delys of the Medici family, stood at an archway. She approached, almost too breathless to speak. “I must have an audience with His Highness.”
The soldier stared with astonishment, and then laughed. “Franco! Come here. Your grandmother wants a word with the Duke. Maybe he didn’t settle up last night.” A stout man appeared from within, his mouth stuffed and a thick sandwich in his hand. He took in the work-worn hands, the wrinkled face and the cheap woollen dress at a glance. “Try the back entrance. He’s helping out in the kitchens.”