The court convened again in the late afternoon. A clerk awakened them and led the old astronomer and his lawyer down the stairs and along the corridors.
There was only one witness. A small, stooped man in priest’s habit, with a hooked nose and dark, blotchy skin, hurried into the room. Vincenzo turned to Marcello Rossi in alarm. “Grandami!” he whispered. “What is that man doing here?”
“He is your character witness.”
“What? But this man is my sworn enemy. He hates me. Who has done this to me?”
“Terremoto.”
At that moment, Vincenzo knew he was doomed.
The Martians
Then it reached them.
The two generals and the civilian watched from the comfort of their brown leather armchairs as the combat crew frantically checked through their systems, mag tapes spinning and a babble of messages flooding in. The winking red lights had vanished from the map. The lists of refuelling points and aircraft aloft reappeared. The Blackjacks were almost home. The MiGs were far out over the Sea of Japan. The Kola peninsula was deserted. Winton was cool, Pino was grey and sweaty. Hooper, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, noted with disapproval that someone was hyperventilating.
A telephone rang, the pink one. Wallis observed his own hand trembling as he picked it up.
General Cannon was looking down, telephone to his ear. “Put me on loudspeaker.” Wallis pressed a button and the general’s voice boomed round the room. “April Fool,” it said.
“Sir?” said Wallis, looking up at his commanding officer. Mortified, Wallis found that his voice was as shaky as his hand.
“Somebody just stamped on the mountain. Roof sheared clean off and fell on you. You’re dead, son.”
“General Cannon, what was that?”
“Martians,” the voice boomed.
“Men from Mars?” Incredulously. The combat crew, to a man, stared up at the general.
“Affirmative.”
“Sir, Martians aren’t allowed. They’re not in SIOP.”
“Foggy, how do you know there are no little green men out there? We wanted to test how the system reacted to something crazy and the only way was to spring it on you. Operation Martian Scenario. Y’all did just fine. We have you on home movies and it’s a whole lot of use to us upstairs. You and your crew’ll have a full debriefing at the end of this shift. Then maybe you’ll want to get drunk.”
Wallis was aware of the eyes of his combat crew on him. In the confines of the steel office, the rage, fear and bewilderment were tangible. He took a deep breath and a chance with his career. “General Cannon, sir, with respect. Damn you to hell.”
There was an electric silence. Then a deep, genie laugh echoed round the office. “Son, I’m already there.”
“Doctor Sacheverell, your assessment?” Cannon asked.
“I’ll need to run a few Monte Carlo simulations. But at a first guess I’d say prompt casualties two hundred million. Dead that is,” said the civilian. “Two sugars, please.”
“Nice one,” said Cannon, pouring coffee. “You’ve solved the population explosion.”
“We’d be looking for a few survivors in freak conditions,” Sacheverell continued. “People down mines, stuff like that. Material devastation with this scenario is quite severe though. Maybe cities reduced to dust or rubble over fifty per cent of mainland USA.”
Hooper and Sacheverell might have come from different planets. Whereas Sacheverell was thin and stooped, Hooper, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, was almost as wide as he was tall. Where Sacheverell had a greasy complexion, Hooper had a deeply wrinkled, tanned face. Where the astronomer had a shock of vertical red hair and a headband, the soldier’s hair was short, white and fine. Where Sacheverell dressed like a basic slob, with an untidy grey suit and garish red tie on a turquoise shirt, the soldier was immaculate. And where Sacheverell was stirring coffee, Hooper banged a fist angrily. Coffee spilled into the saucers. “Almighty Christ, am I supposed to believe this? Rubble? Dust?”
“And there’s no question of any industrial or political infrastructure surviving,” Sacheverell added, hastily picking up cup and saucer.
“Cool it, Sam. Doctor, talk about the C-cubed systems,” Cannon said.
“With this particular scenario, they collapse. But it is a bit way out and in general I can’t be sure. I’d have to get into some heavy analysis on ionospheric plasmas and I don’t have time for that.” Nor the competence, Sacheverell added to himself. “I guess you have to expect a big electromagnetic pulse over most of the country.”
“This is pure crap,” Hooper said, flipping through the pages of Sacheverell’s hastily constructed scenario. “Our command systems are nuclear hard.” In a flash of inspiration, Judy Whaler had laid the report out like a film script, fictitious descriptions of fireball impacts linked together with phrases of the “Meanwhile in San Diego” type. Appended to the Hollywood scenario, and bearing as much resemblance to it as Dr. Jekyll to Mr. Hyde, was a spartan appendix written in the measured language of science, liberally sprinkled with equations, tables, ifs and buts. The CJCS, Sacheverell noticed, was sticking to the film script.
“Not hard enough,” Sacheverell said. “A successful Russian first strike only delivers five thousand megatons, most of that near the ground. For all we know there’s a million megatons on the way in. Even at one per cent efficiency, that’s like a million amps under a potential of a million volts flowing overhead for ten seconds.”
Cannon stirred his coffee thoughtfully. “That would melt your fillings, Sam.”
Hooper shook his head angrily, as if rejecting the whole concept. “PARCS and PAVE PAWS would have picked your asteroid up on the way in.”
Sacheverell shook his head too. “Your radar software filters out signals with long delay times, so you only pick up stuff very near the Earth. It wouldn’t have shown up on the radars until the last minute.”
“So? We’ll re-programme.”
“You could, at the risk of swamping the computers with small space junk. Even so military radars have a limited range. By the time they detected the asteroid it would be a couple of hours from impact, far too late to stop it. Anyway, you have practically nothing covering the southern sky.”
Cannon said, “Look, Sam, anything we got into the air would get its wings ripped off even if we were C-cubed operational. This applies to TACAMO as much as Bomber Command. I can’t even guarantee we could contact Mitchell’s Trident fleet in time.”
“Let me get this right,” said Hooper, bewildered. “Are you seriously telling me that if this thing hits we’re wiped out and we can’t hit back?”
“Mitchell’s fleet would mostly survive,” said Cannon, “but so what? The point is, the thing would just be a great natural disaster. You heard Wallis on the phoney NORAD circuit: there was no attack, no enemy, nobody to hit back at.”
The Chairman, JCS, stood up. He walked over to the window and looked out through the Venetian blinds. The rasp of a Prowler penetrated the triple glazing and the room trembled, very slightly. He turned, his back to the window.
“Realistically, how much warning do we get?”
Sacheverell put down his coffee. “If it approaches the night hemisphere you might see it in binoculars an hour before impact. Assuming you knew exactly where to look. It would be visible to the naked eye maybe fifteen minutes from impact.”
“Mister, what I want to know is, when do the phones start ringing?”
“When you see it as a bright moving star. Say twenty seconds from impact.”