She opened a channel to station operations. “This is Priscilla Hutchins. May I speak with François, please?” That was François Deshaies, the director.
“Wait one, Ms. Hutchins.”
She turned back to Peter. “Let the commissioner know.”
“Okay.”
She heard François’s voice. “Hutch. I assume you’re calling about the rock.”
“Yes. Any more out there? Sometimes these things travel in packs.”
“We’ve been looking. Don’t see anything.”
“Okay. François, how much warning did we have?”
“We didn’t see it until the last minute.” He sounded uncomfortable. “We didn’t know whether it was going to hit or not until it had passed. C’est embarrassant.”
“Could have been worse.”
“Priscilla, I must go. We are getting traffic.”
Peter was whispering into his link, watching her, and saying yes to somebody. Finally, he signaled her. “He wants to talk to you.”
She switched over. “Hello, Michael.”
“It’s getting a lot of play,” he said.
“I’m not surprised.”
“How come we didn’t know about it before time?”
She wanted to say he should ask his buddy Senator Taylor. “The old Skywatch program was shut down years ago.”
“Skywatch? What the hell’s that?”
“It was a few dozen independent astronomers who tracked Earth-crossers. But the Congress cut off their funds, so now they’re down to a handful of volunteers.”
“Hell, I don’t care about that. What about our operations people?”
“It’s not the Academy’s responsibility, Michael. It’s not what we do. Technically, it’s up to the station.”
“That’s not going to sound like a very good answer when the questions start coming. Which I’m waiting for now.”
“Michael, we don’t even have sensing equipment. We ride along on the gear that Union uses. And now that I think of it, it’s not their job either. They track flights. In and out. And that’s all they do.”
“Well,” he said, “there’s going to be hell to pay. Asquith out.”
She smiled at that last one. Asquith out. As if he’d ever been in.
AS ARRANGED, SENATOR Taylor, with two security types, was waiting for them at Reagan, in the reception area. He collected his daughter and asked whether she’d enjoyed herself.
“Yes, Dad,” she said. “We were on board the Peifer.”
“Good.” He looked at Hutch with an expression that suggested weariness. “You had an exciting day up there.”
“You mean with the asteroid?”
“Yes.”
“It was a near thing,” she said.
“It’s ridiculous, Hutch. All the money we spend and look what happens.”
“We need to spend it a little more intelligently, Senator. Fund the Earth-crosser program. It’s nickels and dimes.”
“We have telescopes all over the world. And satellites. You name it. And nobody sees this thing coming?”
“You need something specifically dedicated to the task. A lot of — ”
He put up a hand. “It’s okay. I hear you.” He told Maureen how pretty she looked. Looked at the child while he spoke to Hutch. “Thanks,” he said. “I appreciate your doing this.”
“You’re welcome. It was a pleasure to have Amy along.”
Amy looked from Hutch to her father. She seemed hesitant. “If you and Maureen go up again sometime,” she said, “I’d love to go with you.”
“You’re on,” said Hutch.
One of Taylor’s security people took Amy in tow, and they headed for the exit.
The world narrowly averted a cataclysm today when a giant asteroid passed within less than a thousand kilometers. It is the closest known approach in historic times. Those who are expert in such things tell us the result, had it crashed, would have been global catastrophe.
The aspect of this event that is most troubling is that, given a reasonable advance warning, turning it aside would have been quite simple. But for reasons that are as yet unclear, the people manning the sensors and telescopes at Union never even saw it coming. The word is that they noticed the killer rock only moments before it would have impacted.
How close did it come?
It skimmed across the atmosphere. It could not have been closer. It was rather like having a bullet part our hair.
So who’s responsible? You can bet there’ll be an investigation. And somebody needs very much to be hung out to dry. The only real question at the moment: Who?
— Moises Kawoila,
Los Angeles Keep, Saturday, February 21
The unprovoked attack on a local clergyman should be dealt with severely. Violent crime has been on the rise during recent years. It is time to get serious with these thugs. The Henry Beemer incident is particularly outrageous. Beemer doesn’t even have the justification that the assault occurred during a robbery. In this case, it was simply a mindless act, intended to inflict harm on an innocent man of the cloth. Nothing less than the maximum sentence is called for.
— Derby (North Carolina) Star
chapter 11
The term congressional hearing is an oxymoron. No congressional hearing is ever called to gather information. Rather, it is an exercise designed strictly for posturing, by people who have already made up their minds, looking for ammunition to support their positions.
— Gregory MacAllister, “I’ve Got Mine”
It was never possible to determine who first saw the asteroid. The guy in the restaurant had been first to report it to the operations center. But he said a young boy pointed it out to him. Two technicians working on a solar observatory in high Earth orbit at about the same time called their supervisor when they noticed a star moving through the sky. A group participating in an outdoor prayer service in Lisbon claimed to have seen the object and watched it for two minutes before it disappeared over the horizon.
Several calls were made to the Central Observation Group, and within seconds tracking devices in orbit and telescopes in northern Spain and the Caucasus broke off their current schedules and swung toward the object.
Word flashed around the world. The ultimate near miss. Close enough, in the words of the director of the Anglo-Australian Observatory at Epping, “to leave a few singed tail feathers.”
By the end of the day, scientists were being interviewed on all the talk shows. While they disagreed on the level of risk posed by Earth-crossers, they were unanimous in predicting that eventually one of the rocks would hit. There was a lot of talk about dinosaurs. The headline on The Guardian summed it up:
IT’S JUST A MATTER OF TIME
Experts explained that there was really no need to be concerned about such objects because we had the capability to divert or destroy them. “But somebody,” said the CEO of Quality Systems, Inc., “needs to let us know it’s coming.”
“So why didn’t we see it?” Tor asked Hutch that evening, as they sat in their living room while Maureen played with a toy train.
“The Newhouse administration eliminated funding for the Skywatch program almost twenty years ago,” she said. “Attempts to revive it keep getting scuttled, most recently with help from our good friend Senator Taylor. We’ve had a tracking program, off and on, using volunteers and private funding. But we need a more substantive effort. The odds against getting hit in any one president’s administration are so astronomical” — she said it with a straight face — “that nobody takes it seriously. It’s frustrating. All they have to do is pay a few people to watch the damned things. It would cost pocket change. But they can’t be bothered.”
Tor was a big guy, even-tempered, quiet, easygoing. When Hutch got frustrated and came home in a rage — as she periodically did — because of bureaucratic shortsightedness and mismanagement, he was always there, suggesting they head out to dinner, get a couple of drinks at Barbie’s, and maybe spend the night at the theater. (There was a local repertory company that was quite good. Tor frequently talked about trying out for a part, but he wouldn’t do it unless she agreed to audition also. Hutch, though, was inclined to stage fright. “I’ll do it,” she said, “if I can play a corpse. Or carry a flag, or something. I don’t want any speaking parts.”)
The frustration came with the territory, she told herself. She’d accepted the directorate and all that went with it. Still, when someone like Harry Everett came in and told her she was betraying her old comrades, the people who made the Academy work, it hurt. She hadn’t told Tor about that conversation. Wasn’t sure why. It might have been there was some truth to the charges.
“So what are you going to do?” he asked.
An image of the asteroid floated in the center of the room. It was part of a newscast, but they’d turned the sound down. “Maybe we got a piece of luck,” she said.
He followed her gaze. “The asteroid?”
“It should remind people why they have to have an off-Earth capability. There are other big rocks out there.”
“Maybe you should get Samuels to call a press conference Monday. Talk about it a little bit.” Maureen pulled her train through the room and out onto the porch. It was supposed to be a glide train, but it only rose off the ground when you put it on the magnetic track. That was too much trouble.
SHE SPENT SUNDAY with Maureen and Tor, but had a hard time thinking about anything other than the asteroid. Monday morning, as she flew toward the Academy in her taxi, she looked down at the Virginia forests and thought of the vast distances she had traveled and how sterile the universe was. So few places could function as home to a tree. Humans took vegetation, and the biosystem as a whole, for granted. A forest seemed like the most natural thing in the world. Provide a patch of earth, some sunlight and water, and voilà, you got trees. But you needed other things that weren’t so readily apparent. A regular orbit. A stable sun. Lots of distance between you and other celestial objects. It was not the sort of thing that would occur to you if you didn’t get much beyond Virginia.