He dug into the Astronomical Ephemeris and converted Vincenzo’s Catholic date to the appropriate Julian Day. From then on, Webb hoped, it would be plain sailing.
He started with Nereus.
Two little spots on the screen, one yellow and one blue, began to whirl rapidly around a fixed central disc, eventually coming to an abrupt halt with 28.11.1613 (Greg.) showing in the top right-hand corner of the screen. The process had taken about twenty minutes. The spots were nowhere near each other. On to the second asteroid on the easy-to-shift list. And then the third.
Over the English Channel, as the little jet sank along its approach path, and Webb punched in a succession of increasingly implausible candidates, it began to look as if Nemesis was not amongst the known Earth-crossers. At the moment the wheels made screaming contact with the runway he scored off the last candidate in his list of possibles. None of them had fitted Vincenzo’s observation. Either good men had died chasing a phantom, or Nemesis was an asteroid known only to the Russians.
Webb settled into the back of a ministerial Jaguar and started on the Mission Impossibles, the asteroids which could not realistically be shifted in orbit. The car sped him along the M25 at a hundred miles an hour; either the driver was taking a chance or the police had been asked to turn a blind eye.
There was nothing else to be done. They were impossible because they were too fast to shift, but deadly — because of their speed — if somehow diverted nevertheless. He made the identification just as the car turned off on to the M40. He ran the program again, pushing the accuracy as far as he dared. The program now took thirty agonizing minutes to complete, but the result was identical, and suddenly the multiple insanities which had dominated his life these past few days — the Inquisition, the mad bee-keeper, the crazy old fascist lady, the greedy assassin and his weird and wicked companions — all were sloughed out of his mind and dumped in the dustbin of history. I’ve beaten the lot, he thought triumphantly. He picked up the carphone, tingling with excitement, and dialled through to the Astronomer Royal’s ex-directory home number.
“Sir Bertrand, I have it. I’m about fifteen minutes from the Institute.”
“Say no more.”
Webb stood at the front door of the Institute, flapping his arms in the early morning cold. Traffic was non-existent. He exchanged hellos with a group of noisy revellers, the young men in dinner suits, their ladies shivering in ball gowns, dinner jackets covering their bare shoulders. After half an hour a dark Rover turned off Broad Street, the wet road glistening in its headlights. The car mounted the pavement outside the Bodleian and stopped, its headlights switching off. The figures inside made no move to leave the car, and he couldn’t make them out; they might have been lovers.
Ten minutes later the Astronomer Royal’s Jaguar also turned off Broad Street and drove past the Rover, along Park Road. The AR emerged, wrapped in a long black coat, a Homburg and a heavy white scarf. A gust of icy air blew round the corridor as the AR opened up, locking the door behind them and putting the bolts into floor and ceiling.
Webb led the way without conversation to his basement room. He cleared a space at his desk and they leaned over Vincenzo’s manuscript, opened at the page with the moving star. The AR, his breath misting in the unheated air, looked at it and then at Webb, eyebrows raised.
“Well?”
“The Latin says it’s a moving star.”
“Laddie, I was reading Ovid when you were still in nappies. What’s the significance of this?”
“The point is, nothing else in Vincenzo’s notes stands out. Apart from the moving star, all he records are Saturn’s rings, star clusters, Moon craters and so on. This can only be a close encounter with a celestial missile.”
“Did you get me out of bed at four o’clock in the morning for this?”
Webb’s heart sank. “I did.”
“I was rather hoping that your identification, when you made it, would be based on a solid foundation. You seriously claim that this identifies the asteroid?”
I don’t believe I’m hearing this. “Yes sir, I do.”
Sir Bertrand looked at Webb incredulously from under his bushy eyebrows. “Yes, Webb, I’m afraid that is your style, the inverted pyramid. I have long been aware that solid groundwork, on which this Institute has built a world-class reputation, is too tedious for you. I am also aware that you are given to flights of, shall we say, speculative fancy. However, on this occasion you have excelled yourself. You build a superstructure which would have us identifying an asteroid, panicking half the planet if it got out, firing spacecraft into the blue and triggering incalculable political repercussions. And you do it on the basis of two points on a four hundred-year-old manuscript.”
“Sir Bertrand, I grant you I sometimes feel as if I’m wading through treacle in this place, but would you like to tell me what else it could be?”
“A simple misidentification of a star. Or an internal reflection in a flawed lens. And they were all flawed four centuries ago. A comet unconnected with the asteroid in question. Or even a couple of variable stars which winked on and off on successive nights.”
“Men have killed for this manuscript.”
“I don’t want to know that.”
“It’s relevant information. They haven’t killed because Vincenzo saw an internal reflection.”
“Utter bilge. I cannot endorse your identification.”
“I don’t know why people are even bothering with your seal of approval. What do you know?” Webb was past caring.
“Perhaps because high officials in America would rather place the future of their country in a pair of safe hands, rather than those of some immature young maverick. From what I am now hearing, they were wise to do so.”
“I’m about to give you the name of this asteroid, Sir Bertrand. And when I do, keep in mind that its orbit is chaotic. A chaotic orbit means two things. One, a tiny perturbation applied early enough can yield a huge change in orbit. Two, to exploit the chaos you need to know the orbit with fantastic precision. Phaenomenis Novae not only identifies the asteroid, it gives a four hundred-year time base, exactly what they needed for high-precision manoeuvring.”
“Webb, do you not understand?” The Astronomer Royal’s tone was despairing. “We need solid, hard-headed evidence, not wild speculation.”
“When they decided to use this particular asteroid, they must have known of this close encounter. They must have raked through every manuscript they could find covering the period, and then decided to get rid of the only two copies of Vincenzo in existence. The one at the Bodleian, and this one, stolen from the Helinandus Collection sixty years ago.”
“You are deranged. Perhaps you should take to writing cheap thrillers.”
“Take a look at this,” Webb said. He fed in a disk, typed at the keyboard and stood back. The Astronomer Royal sat down heavily on Webb’s chair and watched the two little spots rapidly trace out orbits. “I’m running time backwards in the Solar System. The blue one is the Earth, hence the circular track. The yellow one, that’s the suspect.”