He pulled out a buff envelope from a briefcase. “Your ticket, some dollars, an American Express number on which you can draw, and a passport.”
“How did you get my photograph?”
“You would be amazed, and at four o’clock this morning. You are Mister Larry Fish, a goldsmith. A precaution in case unfriendly eyes are watching the movements of asteroid people. What do you know about gold, Webb?”
The Sea King was sinking fast, and Webb’s stomach rose in his diaphragm.
“Atomic number seventy-nine, isn’t it? The least reactive metal but alloys with mercury.”
Walkinshaw assimilated this answer. Then he said in a toneless voice, “In no circumstances hold any sort of conversation with anyone en route.”
“Unfriendly eyes,” Webb said. He felt almost paralysed with fear. “So there is some risk attached to this?”
“My goodness no,” said Walkinshaw blandly.
“If there is trouble nevertheless?”
“Never heard of you. You’re a crackpot.”
“A popular opinion in some circles anyway,” Webb replied, giving the Astronomer Royal a look. The AR stared unflinchingly back.
The long backbone of the Cuillins was hidden by low, fast cloud sweeping in from the Atlantic. They stepped out into low, fast sleet sweeping in from the Atlantic. Fifty yards away on the black sand, a dark insect was poised to jump. It was bigger than a house. It had mysterious protrusions, and a row of windows along its dark side, and huge twin rotors throwing spirals of water into the wind. The sand under the Sikorsky was rippling and the Sea King was suddenly a child’s toy.
Webb stared in alarm at the monstrous thing.
Walkinshaw shouted, “The Air Force will make sure you catch the plane at Reykjavik. Sign the credit card as Larry Fish. Any expenditures must be accounted for but you shouldn’t need it.”
“Then why give me it?”
“A precaution,” was the enigmatic response. “I am informed that you know the Goddard Institute at Broadway. You are expected there around now. Still, they tell me you can beat the Sun at polar latitudes. Something to do with the Earth turning, but we pay you people to know about things like that, don’t we, Bertrand?”
“What about my tent?”
“Webb,” the AR replied with a show of infinite patience, “Have you quite grasped the situation? The issue here is not your scientific research, nor your evident fear of flying nor the fate of your blasted tent. The issue is the survival of the West. His Majesty’s Air Force have laid on travel gear in the Chinook, and His Majesty’s Astronomer will personally dismantle your tent and return it to your office.”
“I’ll be missed at the Institute,” Webb pleaded.
“The hell you will!” the Astronomer Royal roared. “Nobody knows what you do in that damned basement all day. Anyway, you sent a note saying you’ve extended your leave. My secretary does signatures.”
“I’m not getting into that contraption!” Webb finally shouted, but he knew he would.
“Just find the asteroid, Webb,” the Astronomer Royal shouted back. “And quickly! And keep your mouth shut!”
The freezing rain drove into the Astronomer Royal’s wrinkled face, and he screwed up his eyes as the massive helicopter rose and tilted over the sea. He watched as it dwindled upwards and vanished into the clouds. He puffed reflectively on his pipe, the wind blowing a thin stream of smoke across the beach.
Walkinshaw looked worried. “Bertrand, are you sure about this? What sort of man spends Christmas alone on a mountain, in a blizzard, calculating?”
“A hermit, of course. Speaking as his Director, he’s a nightmare.”
“In what way?”
“He’s restless, the very devil to control. Needs a woman if you ask me. He keeps diverting from well-established lines of research into cosmological speculation. There’s no funding for stuff like that these days, and anyway nobody quite understands what he’s about. However he pursues his ideas with great exuberance and determination.”
“Family?”
“I know little of it except that he comes from a large, poor one with no sort of academic background.”
“Then I understand him,” Walkinshaw declared. “A large family with little privacy will make him invent his own private space, a world in which he can daydream. Hence the cosmological speculation. And the need to compete with siblings will make him pursue his own ends with determination. Throw in an exceptional intelligence and there you have him.”
A deeply sceptical expression came over the AR’s face. “Very neat, Walkinshaw, wonderfully glib. I don’t suppose you’re into palmistry as well as amateur psychology?”
“His evident unworldliness has the same source. There is no great ingenuity without an admixture of dementedness. Seneca said that, not me. Still, Bertrand, I’m worried. We need a team player for this one, not some go-it-alone eccentric.”
The Astronomer Royal smiled a thin, sour smile. “That, I fear, is a problem for our American cousins. After all, they wanted him. Indeed, they were very insistent.”
The Goddard Institute, New York
Outside the warm Kennedy terminal, a gust of icy air hurt Webb’s ears, watered his eyes and froze his ankles, and he found that the Royal Air Force had given him a suit transparent to wind. A man with a Cossack hat rode a strange, shaking machine which sucked up dark-streaked snow from the road and sprayed it at him. The morning sky was a menacing, dull grey. He headed for the airport bus but two men, warmly wrapped against the cold, emerged from the background and intercepted him. “Mister Fish? I am Agent Doyle of the FBI, and this is my colleague Agent O’Halloran. Forgive us if we don’t show our badges in a public place. Would you come this way, please?”
Webb settled into the back seat of a nondescript Buick with darkened windows. The car was deliciously warm. Agent O’Halloran took it silently over Brooklyn Bridge towards Central. Patches of crystal blue sky were beginning to show through the cloud. On Broadway, they continued north to the edge of Black Harlem. Good smells drifted from delicatessens and coffee shops. The snow was deep at the side of the road, and the breaths of pedestrians steamed in the bitter cold.
They stopped at the entrance to the Goddard Institute, an anonymous doorway with neither sign nor symbol to proclaim its NASA affiliation. Webb stepped out of the car. Across the street, rap music was blasting out of a stereo from a first-floor window. A phalanx of black children swooped down threateningly, but at the last second split and reconverged past him with marvellous precision. The stereo went off with a swipe, and the skateboarders swept off round the corner, ghettoblasters screeching. The limousine drove off.
“Mister Fish, good morning, we’ve been expecting you,” the stout, black guard at the desk said cheerfully. “First floor, elevator’s over there.”
On the first floor was a door with a sheet of paper saying “Do Not Enter” pinned on it. Webb knocked and a key turned. The room was bleak and almost unfurnished, apart from a green baize table strewn with notepads and water carafes. Four people sat around the table. The man who had opened the door, slimly built with close-cropped hair and light blue eyes, shook Webb’s hand. “Welcome to New York, Doctor Webb,” he said. “Have a seat and we’ll get on with it.”
Webb sat down and looked round the table. The smell of cigar smoke hung lightly in the air. Through it Webb thought he detected a sour odour which he could not place. Three of the faces he knew; the others were strangers.