“Only the females.” She stretched her slim legs out on the coffee table between them, nudging papers aside with her bare feet. “What about you?”
“The ladies? I have an effect on them. But haven’t had time to explore the subject. I notice you paint your toenails, ma’am.”
“I hope you paint yours, Oliver. Otherwise we have nothing in common.”
Noordhof marched in and switched on a light. He took one look at the exhausted scientists, blinking in the light, and said, “You two. Get to bed before you collapse, and that’s an order. You’re no damn use in that state.”
Judy waved and more or less staggered towards the dormitory. Webb felt his way along the pitch black corridor and stepped outside. The snowy landscape glowed softly in the light of the Milky Way and the stars. He breathed in the scented air, letting his eyes, strained by hours of terminal-staring, adapt to the dark.
The IAU circulars had revealed nothing.
Mars was high in the south, a bright red, unwinking beacon which, in a couple of hundred years, would hold a teeming human population, a population which would marvel at the havoc their ancestors had wreaked on the beautiful blue planet. A few lights were scattered over the desert far below.
He strolled on to the road which, that morning, he had pounded down with Leclerc and Whaler. Some animal screamed in the distance, a prolonged scream which set Webb’s nerves jangling.
The next step would be the SPITZER catalogue and maybe some ultraviolet stuff, maybe even going as far back as the IUE which had closed down in 1997. But he knew it wouldn’t wash; these were shots so long they had to be a last resort.
Something.
Something; a new idea trying to climb out from his subconscious. But what?
The animal screamed again, closer; or was it another animal? And what makes an animal scream in the night?
Suddenly cold and nervous, Webb turned back towards the observatory. He was asleep within two minutes of collapsing into bed.
Webb was in the cloister of a monastery, hiding behind a potted palm. In the cobbled central courtyard, hooded monks were building a scaffold. The carpenter, a monk with Noordhof’s face, had a row of six-inch nails protruding from his grinning mouth. They were hammering the scaffold together at superhuman speed, only the scaffold turned out to be a big wooden cross and the hammering was overwhelming and it transformed into an urgent tapping at Webb’s door, dragging him from his lurid subconscious world into the real one. The dream faded and Webb thought that perhaps Judy had overdone the chillies.
“Oliver!”
Feeling drugged, the astronomer heaved himself out of bed, put on a robe and opened the door, blinking in the subdued light of the hallway. Judy; still in her dressing gown, still with tousled blonde hair and tired, strained eyes. “Kenneth called. They think they’ve found something. He’s gone up in the cable car with Herb.”
Webb followed Judy down to the darkened conference room. Noordhof and Shafer were clustered round a terminal, the light from the screen giving a blue tinge to their faces. Shafer was in boxer shorts and singlet, and his hair was drawn back into a ponytail by an elastic band. Noordhof was fully dressed. The colonel moved aside and Webb looked at a hundred thousand stars. A wisp of nebulosity crossed the bottom of the screen, probably a remnant from some past stellar cataclysm. The starfield wasn’t drifting: someone had set the telescope for a long exposure.
“You see the little triangle of stars near the middle? The top one has moved.” Judy said.
“What’s its angular rate?” Webb asked.
“Extremely low,” Shafer said. “About a pixel an hour.”
“So it’s either heading away from us or straight at us.”
“It’s coming at us,” Shafer informed Webb. “It’s slowly brightening.”
“Have you any orbit at all?”
The physicist pointed to an adjacent terminal. The centre of the screen showed a coin-sized disc. A series of near-parallel lines criss-crossed the screen, the longer ones going from edge to edge; each line passed through the centre of the disc. “This is one of Herb’s programmes. We’re projecting the two-sigma error ellipses on to the target plane.”
“Only you don’t have distance information so the ellipses come out like lines.”
“That’s the problem. You see they’ve been shrinking as the data accumulate, but they still pass through the Earth. Collision is a definite possibility.”
“I agree, Willy, but so is a miss. These are still long lines. We need an accurate orbit and we’re not going to get that with a one-hour time base.”
“You said it yourself, Ollie. The Earth’s gravity pulls things in when they get close. In the last stages these lines will shrink to a point.”
“What are the chances, Ollie? Is this Nemesis?” Noordhof asked anxiously.
“At a minimum, it’s going to be a very close encounter.”
“What does that mean? Do I wake the President or not?”
Another elongated ellipse suddenly appeared on the screen, shorter than its predecessors. Its centre still passed firmly through the coin-sized Earth.
“This is it, right?”
Webb lowered his head in thought. “Mark, we’re not going to answer your question with the orbital dynamics to hand.”
“But we can’t wait. Not if this is the big one.”
Webb asked, “Do we have brightness information?”
Shafer nodded. “Herb says its magnitude has gone from twenty-one point five to twenty-one point two in the last hour.”
“I thought we weren’t looking fainter than seventeen?”
Shafer shrugged. “Mark ordered it. He’s still fixated with Baby Bears.”
Noordhof said, “Screw you, Willy. I made the right call and there’s the living proof.”
“Kenneth and Herb are trying to get its spectrum with the ninety-four-inch,” Judy volunteered.
Webb said, “At m equals 21? Full marks for effort. Look, the orbital accuracy is horrendous but we might be able to use δm. Anyone got a calculator?” Shafer thrust one into Webb’s hand. “Point three magnitude change translates into a roughly thirty per cent brightening in the last hour.”
“Maybe it’s just a rotating brick,” Shafer suggested.
“Too much light change in too short a time. Chances are the bulk of it is due to its approach. With inverse square its distance from us has decreased by fifteen per cent in the last hour. A spectrum is pointless. It’ll be on us in seven or eight hours.”
Shafer said: “Jesus.” The tone sounded more like a sudden conversion to Christianity than an oath.
Noordhof had an unlit cigar between his fingers. “If this is Nemesis we’re dead. Is it Nemesis?”
“Willy’s point about rotation is partly right. We just don’t know the approach rate precisely enough to be sure.”
“Wonderful!” Noordhof snarled. He crushed the cigar and threw it to the floor.
“Let’s guess it’s approaching at twenty kilometres a second. In six hours that puts it”—Webb tapped buttons on the calculator—“Crikey. Less than half a million kilometres away. What’s the time?”
Noordhof looked at the big railway clock. “Four fifteen.”
“From the way you guys have been operating I guess Kenneth’s supernova telescope has picked this thing up near the meridian. We’re probably looking at an eighty per cent sunlit face rather than a night-time crescent.”
“Make this quick, Webb,” said Noordhof. “The White House are going to need every second we can give them.”
Webb crossed to the blackboard and used his sleeve to wipe a clear space. There was just enough light to scribble. “A one-kilometre carbonaceous asteroid has magnitude 18 at one AU. This thing is 0.003 AU away which with inverse square luminosity would make it a hundred thousand times brighter than that, size for size. Use the magnitude/brightness formula