Charta 40.
Fixa A distabat a Jove 23 semidiametres: in eadem linea sequebatur alia fixa B, quae etiam precedenti horam observata fuit.
Something.
Webb stared dully at Vincenzo’s scrawl.
Take it slow.
A star had moved. Vincenzo had shown it in position A, whereas in the previous hour it had been in position B.
By now Webb had looked at this drawing several times. Jupiter, the orbiting planet, is a moving target seen from Earth, itself an even faster-moving platform. The giant planet therefore drifts against the stellar background. Centre a telescope on Jupiter, and any nearby star will seem to drift past it from one night to the next, reflecting mainly the Earth’s motion.
But that rate of drift was maybe one degree a day. On the scale of Vincenzo’s drawing, this star had moved about ten Jupiter diameters. Vincenzo would probably have been looking at Jupiter near opposition, when the disc of the planet was not quite resolvable by eye, maybe fifty seconds of arc. The star had therefore moved five hundred seconds of arc, or eight minutes of arc, or about one eighth of a degree, in the course of an hour. Three degrees a day.
This star was moving.
A moving star, seen in a small telescope nearly four hundred years ago.
An asteroid, tumbling past the Earth.
Through his exhaustion, Webb smiled. Nice one, Vincenzo.
And good evening, Nemesis.
Martini, Bianca, Giselle and Claudia
Webb looked at his watch through unfocused eyes.
Half an hour to midnight. At midnight, Bellarmine’s “aggressive posture” would come into play, a stance based on the working assumption that America was destined for annihilation. But that was midnight in Washington: to get there, the meridian had to cross the Atlantic, a journey taking six hours.
Six hours and thirty minutes to get out of this time warp, away from medieval Italy, back to the real world with real people, and computers and telephones; and then identify Nemesis from Vincenzo’s little sketch, and make the vital call.
Six and a half hours, six of them drawing on the curvature of the Earth.
He put the book securely in his inside pocket and fastened the little button. He crossed to the bedroom door and opened it quietly. Harsh light flooded on to the stairwell. There might have been a faint scuffle downstairs, like a dog turning on its side: probably from the kitchen. The smell of the evening’s spaghetti sauce met him faintly as he passed. A dog’s head in outline rose under the kitchen table, ears raised in silent curiosity: Benito. The Führer would be around.
Quietly, Webb opened the main door and then he was out, on a warm starry night, with a ten-million-dollar manuscript.
There has to be a catch.
The light from Webb’s bedroom illuminated the grounds as far as the wall. The half-moon was rising, and there were dark, still shadows which might contain anything. He stood next to the fountain, listening to it tinkling down and holding his face up to the delicate spray. Then he strolled round towards the back of the house. To Webb’s taut nerves, his footsteps were jackboots on gravel, crashing through the still of the night. He reached the wall and leaned on it, looking out over the valley. The stone was cold on his hands, the countryside asleep. The fields were dark too, and filled with gnarled old witches frozen in grotesque shapes: olive trees, barely visible in the dark. And beyond was a black mass, the cathedral, a still giant lowering over a jumble of shadows.
Just getting some fresh air.
He lay on the wall, put a leg over and rolled. It was an alarming drop and he hit the earth with a solid thump, then rolled some more into a perfumed bush. He jumped up, gasping, and ran into the dark, keeping low against the wall. The wall curved away and there were twenty yards of open field to the road.
The road was too open. He changed his mind in mid-flight and turned through a right angle, charging down the field, towards the witches, not daring to glance behind. It took him into the light from his bedroom, a billion-candlepower searchlight flooding the field like a football stadium.
Webb weaved from side to side, hearing stretched to the limit and expecting at any second to hear the noisy panting of running dogs. His back muscles ached in agonized anticipation of a bullet smashing its way through his backbone.
He reached the trees and dodged wildly through them, but he was now out of sight of the villa and the mountain beyond. He stopped, puffing, and looked fearfully back up, leaning against a tree while blood pounded in his ears.
No dogs, no riflemen, and it can’t be this easy.
Webb suddenly realized that he could be under surveillance from right here, amongst the trees. Time passed, as he let his eyes adapt and his breathing get back under control. Time to peer into the twisted black shapes surrounding him.
A faint scuffling, maybe thirty yards away. No doubt some animal.
Again. Closer.
Far, far away, he heard the whine of a car. It passed.
Webb turned and stumbled towards the village. A thin branch hit him painfully in the face, scratching his cheek. Through the trees he could glimpse lights twinkling on the plain beyond the autostrada. The olive grove came to an end at what seemed to be an ancient defensive ditch about thirty feet deep. The ditch stretched off to the right and merged with a steep, rocky slope in the distance. To his left, Webb could make out the rear of the cantina, about fifty yards away, with the road just beyond it.
No sound of pursuit. No scuffling from the shadows.
Stealthily, he moved to the edge of the trees. He literally felt weak at the knees. There was a low wall and on the other side of it the road leading into the village. Inky, jagged shadows lined the cobbled road. Moonlight reflected brilliantly from a small open window in the village.
He climbed the wall and stepped quietly on to the cobbled road. He kept in the shadows as much as possible on the way down to the village, and stopped in the shadow of the first building, a derelict wine cellar. The smell of sour wine drifted out of a grilled window.
Too many shadows; but quiet. Quiet like a cemetery.
A dog howled, the sound coming from about fifty yards ahead. Webb froze, terrified. Another one, back up the hill, took up the wolf call. He looked behind: underneath his bedroom — that would be the kitchen — another light had come on. The animals subsided. He padded hastily along the medieval street, almost tip-toeing on the cobbled stones, and almost within arm’s length of the houses on either side. If a trap had been set, this was the place. Into the cathedral square. Light was flooding out of the open cathedral doors.
The cathedral bells crashed into life. Webb literally jumped in fright. He flew across the square. A final short stretch of houses. People were coming out of doors. He almost ran into an elderly couple in the near-dark “Buon Natale!” he shouted, and then he had cleared the village, the cobbles giving way to a rutted track with vines and olives on either side.
He loped down, and then he was running full pelt down the deserted track, with the sound of the bells in his ears. About half a mile down from the village the track joined on to the slip-road for the autostrada and he slowed, puffing and laughing with relief. The man at the autostrada toll was reading a newspaper, cigarette dangling from mouth. Webb passed unnoticed.
He crossed the deserted autostrada and sat on a low wall, baffled. It had been too easy. In a minute a car’s headlights appeared, approaching from the south. He stepped on to the autostrada, still breathless. The headlights flooded him; he waved his hands, suddenly realized that the car had appeared suspiciously on cue, and stumbled back off the road, crouching behind the wall in an agony of uncertainty. The car passed at speed, its exhaust roaring into the distance.