Shafer reappeared with a wodge of papers stapled together. There was a knock at the door and the Great Dane started a deep-throated baying. Sacheverell walked into the kitchen. “Get down, you slobbering idiot!” Shafer yelled.
“Nice friendly dog, Shafer,” said Sacheverell, while it eyed him, growling, from under the swing doors.
“Yeah,” said Bellarmine. “Makes for a nice secure house. Anyways, the media think I’m on vacation at Nixon’s old place. Right. I’m here for a briefing. Get started.”
Shafer said, “Jim, drop that for now. Let’s go next door.”
Next door was a large living room. One wall was taken up by a long blackboard covered with equations. At the far end of the room a bay window looked out over the sea. Books and papers were scattered over wicker chairs, television, computer, couch, floor.
Bellarmine made his way through the clutter to the big bay window. The floor creaked and SecDef felt it give a little. On the beach below, a few girls sat topless, drinking wine and chattering. A hundred yards out at sea some young men were skilfully balancing on surfboards while big Pacific waves rolled under them and broke up hissing on the sand, or hit an outcrop of rock over to the right with a Whump! and an explosion of spray. Shafer appeared through the swing doors with a bottle of Jack Daniel’s. “Sir, come back from the window. We had a landslip and you’re overhanging the cliff. We’re propped up by timbers, but I don’t know how long my beach house has got before it slides into the sea.”
Bellarmine turned from the window and shared a couch with a clutter of journals and books. The others settled down on casual chairs, except for McNally, who shared a cushion with the Great Dane in front of a wood fire.
The Secretary of Defense spoke slowly and clearly, as if to make sure his words were fully assimilated. “In just over ten hours’ time I report to an extraordinary meeting of the National Security Council. The President, the Chiefs of Staff, myself and others may take certain decisions on the basis of information given me here. I need three things from you people. First, do you confirm the damage estimates given us by Sacheverell? Some of us had difficulty taking his stuff on board. Second, have you come up with some means of nullifying this threat? Third, have you found this asteroid? Now, Colonel, what exactly has your team delivered? What about the simulations Sacheverell here showed us? Is he serious?”
Shafer, standing at the swing doors, poured himself a whisky. “They sent me your little cartoons, Herb, and I’ve done a few runs of my own. Of course we don’t know what they’ve posted us but I’ve guessed we’re in the hundred-thousand-megaton ballpark, give or take. I broadly agree with your calculations. If and when Nemesis hits, America will be incinerated.”
Bellarmine looked blankly at the Nobel physicist.
“You missed out on a few little details,” Shafer continued. “Nuclear reactors scattered over the countryside, petro-chemical smog from burning oil, coal deposits set on fire for a few centuries, stuff like that. And you weren’t quite right on the fireball. It’s primarily the blanket of fire spreading over the top of the atmosphere that will set us alight down below: Ernst Öpik saw that way back in the fifties. Another little oversight, Herb, was the counterflow, the air rushing to fill the vacuum left by the rising fireball. Still, since we’re all dead by then, I don’t suppose we care.”
Bellarmine pointed dumbly at the Jack Daniel’s. Shafer crossed the room with the bottle and filled his glass, continuing the critique as he did. “And I guess you used a pretty coarse grid for your ocean simulations, Herb. It’s not just the tsunami you have to worry about. It’s the plume of water thrown forty miles into the air, and the superheated steam shooting around. The sea bed would crack open and you’d get a rain of molten boulders thrown for one or two thousand miles. God knows what would happen to coastal areas. In your San Diego scenario people would have broiled before they drowned. And if you’d used an ocean-wide grid you’d have found that the coastal areas don’t get hit by one wave. They get hit by a succession, at more or less fifty-minute intervals. You’d replace seaboard cities by mudflats.”
“Okay,” said Bellarmine, “I believe you. If it hits we’re finished. Now the sixty-four thousand-dollar question and I want to hear a good answer. Colonel, have you found Nemesis?”
Noordhof said, “No, sir.”
There was a heavy silence.
Noordhof broke it. “Mister Secretary, you gave us five days. It’s unreasonable. And we have almost no chance of picking it up by telescope until collision is imminent. We’re down to Webb.”
“Forget it,” said Sacheverell, sounding peeved.
Shafer said, “Look, we’re not even sure of the major types of hazard. We just don’t know what’s out there. The British school think that fireball showers or dark Halleys or giant comets are an even bigger risk than your Nemesis-type asteroids.”
“Unmitigated crap,” declared Sacheverell.
“So what now?” Bellarmine asked.
The Nobel physicist moved some books and sat down on a wicker chair. “Another drink, I guess.”
There was a knock and the sound of footsteps. Shafer roared at the Great Dane, and disappeared through the swing doors. Someone was saying “Oh Jerusalem! City of Joy! I made it!” Judy Whaler walked into the room.
“You’re five minutes late, Judy. Mister Secretary, may I present our nuclear weapons expert?” Bellarmine nodded.
“Carburettor trouble,” Whaler explained, sinking into a wicker chair. “Kenneth’s looking after the shop but I have bad news about that. The forecast for tonight is thickening cirrus over southern Arizona.”
Bellarmine’s voice was grim. “Let me be clear about this. Are you saying the Nemesis search is over?”
“The telescopic search, yes. We won’t make your midnight deadline, Mister Secretary.”
There was a silence as they absorbed Judy’s words.
“You heard about the Rome thing?” Noordhof asked, thrusting a large Jack Daniel’s into her hands.
She nodded and took a big gulp. “Kenneth told me. First André and now Ollie.”
Noordhof said, “We don’t know what’s going on over there.”
“Where does this Webb’s ancient manuscript come in?” Bellarmine wanted to know.
The Colonel answered, “It’s gone missing, which drew Ollie’s attention to it in the first place. His idea was that if you had an observation hundreds of years old it would give you a long time base and a very accurate orbit, which is what the Russians would need to target the asteroid. If there really is a moving star recorded in the book, we could use it to work out which asteroid it refers to, and so identify Nemesis.”
Sacheverell said, “Mister Secretary, it’s a fantasy thing. We can forget it. Webb should never have been on the team.”
Shafer shook his head. “I disagree. The Italian business suggests that Ollie is on to something.”
The Colonel asked, “With only ten hours left to identify Nemesis, and Arizona clouded over, we’re just about finished. Can’t you give us more time?”
“No. Because every day carries the risk that Nemesis will hit before we’ve had time to take appropriate action. Because the longer we delay the greater the risk that Zhirinovsky learns that we know about Nemesis and decides to pre-empt any punch we might want to deliver. Because no matter what time you’re given you’ll always want more. The NSC want answers by midnight tonight. Your failure to deliver does not buy you more time.”