Valya switched to a view of the Galactic. “That’s taken from the shuttle,” Valya said.
The hotel glittered in the light from the two suns, a sprawling, mostly open framework. “How long have they been working out here?” he asked.
“I think about nine months.”
“Doesn’t look as if they got very far.”
“Don’t know,” she said. “I’m not up on construction projects.”
From the perspective of the imager at the hotel, the asteroid was rising, climbing higher above the curve of the world. Getting bigger. Overwhelming the sky.
Bill appeared in his captain’s uniform. “One minute to impact,” he said. “It’s closing at thirteen kilometers per second.”
It blocked off the sun.
MacAllister held his breath.
“Twenty seconds,” said Bill.
Somebody on the shuttle let go with a string of profanity.
The perspective changed. He was looking at a moonscape, and it was as if they were in a plunging ship. Going down.
Then the screen blanked.
THEY PICKED UP Karim and his three companions without incident. MacAllister accepted thanks from everyone for the rescue, even though he’d just been along for the ride. Valya broke out more wine, and they converted the return flight into a celebration. They talked about how big the asteroid had been, and how good it was to get on board the Salvator. How nice to be able to snuggle inside a set of bulkheads again.
MacAllister had never before considered the human propensity to put up walls everywhere. He’d always thought of it as a need for privacy from other people. But he decided that even more important, walls were a way of setting aside a portion of space from the rest of creation, of blocking out the vastness that, seen too vividly, wounds the soul.
It was exactly the kind of line that, uttered by someone else, he would have ridiculed. What the hell did it mean?
As much as he’d enjoyed having Valya to himself, something had changed, and MacAllister was grateful for fresh company.
“I’ll tell you,” Karim said, “we were never really sure we were out of the thing’s path. I kept thinking suppose the numbers were wrong. Or the sensors had screwed up? That son of a bitch kept getting bigger. We were supposed to be clear, but you couldn’t tell that sitting out there watching it. And there was a lot of debris running with it.”
Two of the other three were women. “Closed my eyes,” one of them said. “I thought we were dead.”
Later, as they enjoyed a rowdy meal, Karim commented that management must have known what it was doing after all.
“How do you mean?” asked MacAllister.
The other male laughed and helped himself to some grapes.
“We were three or four months behind,” said Karim. “They had us out here, but we were always short of resources. Never had the people to do the job right.”
“The way things turned out,” the guy with the grapes said, “it’s just as well.”
They spent much of the return voyage singing. One of their favorites was “I Been Workin’ on the Platform.”
Famed editor Gregory MacAllister helped rescue a group of construction workers stranded in the path of a giant asteroid today. MacAllister was onboard the Salvator when it arrived in the Capella system to snatch four people who’d escaped from a construction site in a shuttle….
— London Daily Telegraph, Thursday, April 30
chapter 32
Plato is correct about democracy. It is essentially mob rule. And once the mob gets an idea into its collective head, it’s almost impossible to get it out, or modify it in any way. In an era of mass communication and irresponsible media, it can be a deadly characteristic.
— Gregory MacAllister, “Women and Children Last”
The news from the Salvator and the museum was uniformly good. They’d gotten the engineers and construction workers out of the Galactic without a hitch; the Cavalier would arrive shortly to pick them up and bring them home; and the media were already circulating MacAllister’s first-person account of the rescue. From the museum, Eric mentioned something about Amy and a bad dream, but that hardly seemed consequential. “She’ll be fine when she gets home,” he added. “This place gets pretty spooky at night.”
Senator Taylor, watching reports while the asteroid closed in on the hotel, told Hutch that he and Amy would not go through anything like this again. Hutch knew that would ultimately be Amy’s decision, but she kept her opinion to herself.
She saw a report that Orion was filing an insurance claim for the hotel. The risk, of course, had been apportioned among a half dozen companies, and there were already rumors they would refuse to pay because the policy didn’t cover acts of war.
Charlie Dryden called to ask where Asquith was. “I can never reach him when I need him,” he complained.
The commissioner was at a conference in Des Moines. He had a talent for being out of town when crises loomed. It was his philosophy, he claimed, that his people should be able to make decisions without him, so he frequently turned off his commlink. That would have been okay, except that he didn’t back his staff if they made calls with which he didn’t agree, or that didn’t go well. It was one thing to take a subordinate aside and explain the preferred course of action; it was quite another to back away publicly and imply to the media that someone in the organization had acted without authority. He always claimed he named no names, and thereby protected his people, but everybody knew. Hutch had been through it a few times, had taken him to task, and had even threatened to resign. When driven to the wall, Asquith always apologized, privately, and promised it wouldn’t happen again; but he seemed unable to help himself.
Dryden was seated by a window overlooking a body of water. He wore a light blue jacket and a string tie. “I wanted to say thanks for getting our people out of the Galactic,” he said. “If not for the Salvator, I hate to think what would have happened.”
Hutch returned his smile. “It was our pleasure, Charlie. I’m glad we were in a position to help.”
“I understand there were no injuries.”
“They’ve reported everybody’s okay. This time tomorrow, they should all be on their way home.”
“Good.” He sat back, relaxed. Over his shoulder, she could see a sailboat tacking in a brisk wind. “On another subject, what’s your sense about these moonriders?”
“I honestly don’t know what to think, Charlie. I don’t know what they are, and I can’t imagine what they’re trying to do. It doesn’t look as if the world is prepared to deal with them.”
“We became complacent.”
“I guess we did.” Certainly, she had. A widespread assumption had developed that everything we could see in the surrounding cosmos belonged to us. And there was nobody out there to dispute any of it.
“I think we need a navy,” he said.
“A battle fleet?”
“Yes.”
“It would cost a fortune.”
A flock of ducks or geese, something, fluttered down onto the water. “Hutch, it’s the price of security. In uncertain times.”
TWENTY MINUTES LATER, one of her staff sent over a segment of the Blanche Hardaway Hour that she thought might be of interest.
Blanche was a tall, fragile-looking but utterly ruthless blonde. She did a daily tabloid show, lots of scandal, lots of moralizing, lots of the cheapest sort of politics, regular attacks on the Academy as a waste of money.
She had a guest, but he was just sitting there while she went on a tirade. “ — To wait around any longer and take chances with lunatic aliens,” she was saying. “Congress should get on the stick and take action. We don’t want to wait for the World Council to get in gear. This is not one of those things they can talk to death and pass a bill on sometime in the next century. I’ve been saying for years now that we cannot assume we’re alone, as we have been doing. And we cannot assume that anybody we meet out there is going to be friendly. We need armed ships. Guns, Frederick. A navy. An armed fleet that will demonstrate to these creatures, whatever they are, that they better not mess with us. Now, am I right? Or have I missed something?”