Amongst the thousands of X-ray flashes picked up by CHANDRA, there might just be a signature of a different sort. Or maybe even the wide-angle camera on SPITZER had picked up a fading infrared glow as the debris from the crater dispersed into the zodiacal dust cloud. Or the Hubble had picked up something.
The first thing was to calculate the signatures that would discriminate between natural astrophysical processes and the effects of a bomb. He would have to investigate a wide range of physical processes. Maybe the hefty thump of 14 MeV neutrons from the thermonuclear fireball yielded a characteristic signature; or the timescale for dispersal of the dust yielded a light curve unlike that from any eclipsing binary. Webb sighed and pulled over a coffee table with a dish of Liquorice Allsorts and jelly babies. It was going to be a long session.
Lunch came and went unnoticed. Colleagues came and went through the common room; Webb was not disturbed. The level of the sweets in the dish next to Webb slowly declined. Around six in the evening Judy went into the kitchen and the smell of curry soon wafted around the common room. Kowalski appeared shortly afterwards, dressed in his Eskimo suit, and then Shafer and Noordhof emerged from the conference room, arguing about something; their voices changed to a low murmur but Webb appeared not to notice. Someone handed Webb a coffee and switched on a lamp. The sun set. Papers scrawled with formulae piled up on the coffee table. The sweets disappeared.
Around midnight Webb completed his calculations: he had his electromagnetic signatures. The best bet had turned out to be the simplest: an unexplained flash of light, seen in the telescope of some amateur comet hunter somewhere on the planet. It might just have been recorded in the IAU Circulars, the electronic clearing house for transient and unexpected astronomical phenomena.
He looked at his watch in surprise, and realized that he hadn’t eaten. There was a plate of chicken curry, boiled rice and a Nan bread in the microwave oven. He fired it up, was tempted by the can of Red Stripe on the kitchen table but decided against it. He gulped the food down and then went straight through to the conference room along the now darkened corridor. The room too was dark apart from the light from the terminals. Judy and Sacheverell were sitting at terminals. Starfields were drifting across their vision.
“How did the briefing go, Herb?” Webb asked.
“No sweat,” Sacheverell said without looking up.
“We’re filtering out the main belters automatically,” Shafer said, “otherwise we’d snarl up.”
“And between Spacewatch, Flagstaff and ourselves we’ve found thirty Earth-crossers already,” Judy said. “Thirty-one,” she added as the terminal beeped.
“How are you handling them?” Webb asked.
“No sweat.” Sacheverell again. “The Teraflop is coping with everything we throw at it. We come back to the new ones after an hour or two. Look.” He pressed a terminal key and the single picture was replaced with a dozen small squares, each centred on a bright spot. The little pictures, like frames from a movie, showed clearly that the spot was drifting against the stellar background. “Usually they’ve moved several pixels, sometimes dozens. We might not get an orbit but if it has a strong tangential drift we know it’s not an immediate hazard.”
“Where are you searching?” Webb asked Shafer.
“Where you expect to find them,” Sacheverell interrupted. “In and around the ecliptic plane. I hope you’re not going to start on crap about high inclination dark Halleys.”
“They’re not practical weapons, Herb. Anyway it doesn’t matter where you look, you haven’t a hope.”
Sacheverell looked up from the screen. “Hey, we finally agree on something.”
“But don’t tell the Colonel what we’re agreed on. He’s already had a bad day.” Webb sat down at a spare terminal and quickly typed into the Internet. Once into the IAU Circulars, he began to read every one, starting from the most recent and going back through time. Each unexplained flash of light, each gamma ray burst, each surge of X-rays reported in the sky, had to be matched against the theoretical expectations he now carried in his head. It was a slow, painstaking, tedious grind.
Around 3 a.m. Judy disappeared, and half an hour thereafter Webb too felt he had to take a break. He wandered across the darkened hallway to the dimly lit common room and flopped down in an armchair. The urge to sleep was almost irresistible. There was a smell of perfume. “Hey, Mister!” Judy said in a soft voice. “Not even Superman could keep that up.” Startled, he saw that Judy was in the armchair opposite. In the dim light he could just make out that she was wearing a long green dressing gown; her hair was tousled and her blue eyes were strained with tiredness.
Without thinking, he said, “What’s a nice girl like you doing in nuclear weapons? You should be having babies.”
She bristled, but then burst out laughing when she detected Webb’s sly grin. “Webb the sexist! I’m sure. I’m in nukes for the same reason you’re in astrophysics, Oliver. I love the subject.”
He felt unable to think. When he spoke, the words were slurred with exhaustion. “So the lady loves nukes. I still can’t think why.”
In spite of her exhaustion, enthusiasm came through in her voice. “Think of a nuclear fireball in the first microsecond of its formation. The power to devastate a small country in something the size of a beachball. There’s a wonderful purity about a nuke, Ollie. It sweeps away everything; even elements are transmuted. It’s as near as we can get on Earth to the Creation.”
“You make getting nuked sound like a religious experience,” Webb replied, hardly caring what he said. “But you want to destroy things, and I want to understand them. I happen to think we were created from something like your fireball.”
“The Big Bang?” she asked.
Webb shook his head. “The nucleus of the Galaxy. This is something that nobody in their right mind believes. But I still say women are for childbearing. They’re supposed to create, not destroy.”
“All females defend their young. Having had our babies we need to protect them. I do create, Oliver, I create peace. Is that not a noble pursuit in a barbaric world? You have the nerve to sit there and bask in the purity of your subject, with Nemesis on the way in? We can only manage miserable ten-megaton firecrackers, but you? You go cosmic.”
“I also love dogs,” said Webb.
“I prefer cats. And cars. I can strip a Pontiac to its gudgeon pins and reassemble it in a day.”
Webb said, “You can strip me to my gudgeon pins any day. I’m a fair cook, and I climb mountains.” He thought, This conversation is getting surreal.
She shook her head. “I’d rather fly over them in my Piper. But maybe you can cook me a dinner some time.”
Webb’s skin tingled at the invitation and he thought, hell I must still be alive. “Which brings me to boyfriends. Got any?”
“Lots of them, all strictly platonic. So far I find nukes more interesting.”
“Are all nuclear physicists as beautiful as you?”