The old man flopped down, drained. The cardinals, virtually accused of heresy, sat stunned. Terremoto’s expression had gone through all the stages of amazement, horror and finally outrage as Vincenzo’s audacious statement had proceeded. Their Eminences filed out without a word.
That night, Vincenzo slept not in the luxurious apartment of a Holy Office official, but in a damp cell in the Castel Sant’ Angelo. And while he slept, his judges discussed his case by candlelight, and decided on their next step: the territio realis.
The White House, East Wing Theatre, 21h00
Sacheverell sat, his stomach churning, in the front row of the little theatre. The door opened and a tall, elderly man peered in. His shirt sleeves were rolled up and he was wearing an outrageously multi-coloured waistcoat.
“Coffee, son?” the old man asked.
“Thank you, sir. Two sugars.” The man shuffled out. Minutes passed, while Sacheverell’s mouth dried up. Then the door was opened with the push of a foot and the man reappeared, a paper cup in each hand. He sat down beside Sacheverell and passed a cup over. The astronomer noticed that the old man had one sock black, one blue.
“Two sugars. Now before we get started. We’re farmers; we’re bankers; we’re lawyers. Me, I’m just a country boy from Wyoming. So keep it simple.”
“Will do, Mister President.”
“Okay. This will be new to most of the people here. I’ve had a preliminary briefing from the Secretary of Defense and he tells me this asteroid thing will devastate us when it hits. But what does he know? You’re the horse’s mouth, son, and that’s where I want to hear it from.”
“I’ll do my best, sir,” Sacheverell gulped.
The President grinned. “What is an asteroid anyway?”
“An asteroid is a lump of rock, sir, going around the Sun just like the planets. They’re a few miles across and blacker than soot, very hard to find. Maybe there are a thousand or two big ones in orbit between the planets. It could be half a million years before one of them hits the Earth but when it does you get a giant explosion.”
“How giant?”
“Say a big one hit Mexico City. The blast wave would hit us here at three hundred miles an hour. Now with an ordinary explosion, say from a bomb, the blast is just a sudden wind, over in a fraction of a second. But with this one, a wind following the blast would go on for hours. Air temperature while it’s blowing would be four or five hundred degrees Centigrade, more or less like the inside of a pizza oven.”
“That was quite a speech, son. But I thought you said these things are only a few miles across.” The President’s country-boy grin had faded as Sacheverell had talked.
“It’s their speed, sir. You have to think of it as a big mountain covering twenty miles every second. When it hits the ground it vaporizes in about a tenth of a second. You could get half a million megatons easy. I’ve prepared a movie which should give an idea what to expect.”
The door opened and half a dozen men wandered in and spread themselves around the little theatre. Sacheverell had spoken to two of them, Heilbron and Hooper, only a few hours previously. Heilbron caught Sacheverell’s eye and nodded. The Secretary of Defense sauntered over and sat down beside Sacheverell. He was about fifty. Away from the television cameras, Sacheverell noticed, Bellarmine had a slightly jaundiced complexion and a receding hairline. “Hail!” he said. The Chief nodded amiably. Sacheverell, wedged between the President of the United States of America and the Secretary of Defense, felt his skin tingling.
Heilbron walked over. “Mister President, I’ve got a movie.”
“Okay let’s get into this,” said President Grant. He finished the coffee and crumpled the paper cup, letting it fall to the floor. “Seems we’re in for a matinée performance.”
Heilbron stepped up on to the dais and picked up a short pointer. The lights went down. Maps and photographs appeared in succession on the screen. Heavy-jowled Slavic faces appeared under fur hats. Heilbron kept waving the pointer flamboyantly. A shaky amateur movie showed a military transporter leaving some camp surrounded by a tall barbed-wire fence; another showed tarpaulin-covered train wagons being hauled across an icy, blasted landscape. When the dark conical shape of the hydrogen bomb appeared the President said “Stop!” and the movie froze, the black shape filling the screen in blurred close-up.
Grant stood up, the picture of the bomb illuminating his face and chest. “Jesus, is that it?”
“Just about, Mister President. We’ve intercepted a coded message from Phobos but it’s got us beat.”
“Rich, this strikes me as paper thin.”
“Sir, we’ve often had to act on less. I believe the balance of probability is strongly tipped towards a hostile act against us.”
“By whom?” The Russians alone? Khazakhstan? The whole damned Federation?”
Heilbron shrugged.
“Just what is the significance of this?” the President asked, turning grimly to Sacheverell.
Sacheverell put down his cup and walked nervously to the dais. Heilbron sat down wearily in Sacheverell’s chair, and the President sat on the edge of the little platform, his knees crossed. Suddenly, in the half-light, the astronomer found himself facing men who had shed their homely television faces, men with calculating eyes, and ice in their veins, and powers beyond those of the gods. He fought back a surge of near panic.
“Sir, it is technologically possible to divert a near-Earth asteroid on to a collision course with any given country.” Sacheverell realized with horror that his mouth had dried up, he was almost croaking. “It would take state of the art technology and extreme precision. The technique would be to blast some material off the asteroid at an exact place and time, diverting its orbit. The problem would be controlling the devastation, which could spill over into neighbouring countries. My movie illustrates a range of possibilities. Movie, please.”
The projector whirred quietly at the back of the room. Mysterious numbers and crosses appeared on the screen. A black and white title read
Impact: 107 Mt, vertical incidence.
Assailant: Nickel iron, tensile strength 400 MPa, H2O = 0.00 by mass.
Target: Bearpaw shale, tensile strength 0.2 MPa, H2O = 0.14 by mass.
The title disappeared, replaced by a grid of lines covering the bottom half of the screen. The only movement was a tumbling of numbers on the top right of the screen, next to a label saying Lapsed time =. The audience waited.
A green spot came in rapidly from the top. It struck the grid. The lines buckled, and formed a hole with a raised rim. Green splodges hurried off the edge of the screen. Away from the hole the grid of lines was vibrating at high speed, like a violently shaken jelly. The lines vanished and there was an old movie taken at the Nevada test site. There was a timber-framed, Middle America house. At first, nothing was happening. But then the paintwork started to smoke, and curtains were burning. And suddenly the house was splintered wood and smoke streaking into the distance and Sacheverell was saying this is what to expect a thousand kilometres away.