The man kept calling back, upping his offer. But Cosmo Pagan was no fool. If his face wasn't before the public, he had no public. No public, no publicity. No publicity, no career. He stopped taking the nameless man's calls and got down to the serious business of informing his public.
This time Pagan asked that his wife, Venus, interview him for CNN. In fact, he demanded it. The last guy had asked hard questions. And since Venus Pagan was still pretty sharp looking for her age, it was nice to show her off once in a while.
The interview was conducted in his private observatory by satellite hookup. Cut down on commuting costs that way.
"Dr. Pagan..."
"Call me Cosmo. After all, we are man and satellite."
Venus Pagan smiled with professional coolness. "In your view, are comets dangerous?"
"When Halley came around in 1910, a lot of people thought so. They threw end-of-the-world-comet parties. Spectrographic analyses of the comet's composition showed traces of cyanogen gas, and for a while people worried our planet would be gassed to death when it passed through Halley's tail. Gas-mask sales boomed. But long-period comets like Halley and Hale-Bopp don't come very close to earth spacially speaking."
It was in the middle of his dissertation that the first satellite images of the Baikonur Cosmodrome disaster were broadcast. It was supposed to be a military secret. But in the post-Cold War world, commercial satellites had the same global overviews as spy satellites. The brief bidding war for the pictures was won by CNN. The photos were rushed to the hot studio in midtelecast.
"Dr. Pagan. I mean, Cosmo."
"Call me honey, angel."
"We've just been handed satellite images taken of Baikonur Cosmodrome in Russian Kazakhstan. It's been scorched in three places. These images resemble satellite photos we've seen of the Bio-Bubble and Reliant catastrophes. Can you shed any light on this latest event?"
Dr. Pagan accepted the photos, which were also broadcast in a floating graphic insert beside his head. He got very pale very fast.
"I might be mistaken," he said, "but there appear to be three impact sites-if that is what they are-which suggests to me cometary fragments. Asteroids don't travel in packs."
"No comet fragments were found here in the U.S.," Venus probed gently.
"This may be a broken-comet phenomenon we are witnessing. Understand that Earth is always revolving. As was the case with Jupiter when those fragments struck. Though they entered the Jovian atmosphere in a straight line, they impacted in a string along the planet's surface because Jupiter moved between each impact. A similar string of eight ancient impact craters across the Plains states has recently come to light. They're lakes now."
"If this is a broken comet falling to earth, could other pieces be speeding toward us now?"
"Yes," Dr. Pagan admitted unhappily, "they could. And there's no telling where they could impact. Even on me."
He looked sick at the very thought, and his fear was not lost on the American public he sought to reassure.
"Did you know that the number of scientists scanning the heavens for deadly asteroids is about the size of the staff of a McDonald's restaurant?" he added in an uneasy voice.
AT FOLCROFT, Dr. Harold W Smith was baffled. He was running on sheer nerve and Maalox as he grappled with the threat that seemed now to be directed at the space programs of two nations.
He had told the President that the third strike would suggest a pattern. It did. One that suggested a rival space-faring nation.
That left the Japanese, the French and the Chinese. Of these possibilities, the Chinese seemed the most likely culprits. But the technology-whatever it was-seemed beyond Chinese capabilities. This, in turn, made Smith flash on the Japanese. They were working on a space-shuttle program of their own. The first test flight had ended with the HYFLEX prototype sinking into the Sea of Japan. It was possible that that failure caused Nippon Space to turn to Russia's shuttle fleet for lift.
But what would their motive for attacking the U.S. be?
Smith was reconsidering French Ariane involvement when Remo called from Budapest with a possible answer.
"Have you looked into the Paraguay thing yet?" he asked.
"What Paraguay thing?" countered Smith.
"People at Baikonur told us a Paraguay company hired that last Russian shuttle flight."
"Paraguay?"
"Want me to spell it?" asked Remo.
"No, and why are you shouting?"
"Habit," said Remo, lowering his voice. "The company is called ParaSol. One word. Capital P as in 'Paraguay.' Capital S-o-l. That's all I know."
Smith attacked his keyboard. "I am researching it now."
Remo's voice took on an awed quality. "Smitty, we were on ground zero when that thing hit three times."
"What did you see?"
"A hot time. Looked like a giant magnifying glass scorched the ground."
Smith paused. "You think it was solar?"
"We saw a sun dog before it struck."
"Solar..." said Smith.
"Mean anything to you?"
"A breakthrough in solar power could explain such a thing. The extreme, concentrated heat. The relatively compact size of the orbital device. If it takes its energy from the sun, it would need little in the way of on-board power."
"My money's on solar."
On Smith's screen, up popped a block of data.
"I have something on ParaSol," he said.
"What's it say?"
Harold Smith's voice sank. "The data is in Spanish. I will have to have it translated."
"Get to it."
"Hold the line, please," Smith replied, trying to type while cradling the blue handset against his shoulder and right arm. His rimless glasses slid off his patrician nose, and he miskeyed something, erasing his entire screen.
"Damn."
"What now?" asked Remo. "I gotta go soon. They're about done refueling the Yak."
"Where is your next refueling stop?"
"Wherever they'll let us set down. We're not particular."
"Call me from there."
"Will do," said Remo, hanging up.
Smith went to work recovering the data. In the middle of the automatic translation, his system alerted him of another broadcast of consequence. It came on automatically as Smith had programmed it to.
He found himself watching Dr. Cosmo Pagan lecturing the nation on comets.
"All comets come from a stellar marvel called the Oort Cloud way beyond our solar system. Our sun's gravitational pull yanks them toward it, and they slingshot around back into deep space. As they approach the orb of day, the pressure of solar winds on these dirty snowballs-as we astronomers like to classify them-creates the long ghostly tail that is so wondrous to behold. Hale-Bopp's tail promises to be the most spectacular of the century once it reemerges from its solar sleep. We are living in very interesting times, galactically speaking, with all these near-Earth objects booming by and falling to Earth."
Smith was logging off when the camera went to the woman interviewing Pagan.
She was an attractive, fortyish brunette. But Smith's bleary gray eyes weren't on her face, but on the identifying chyron at the bottom of the screen.
It read Venus Mango-Pagan.
The name Venus Mango rang a clear bell in Smith's steel-trap mind. Returning to his system, he punched in the name and hit Search.
He got his answer immediately. The name Venus Mango had surfaced on the phone records of BioBubble director Amos Bulla a number of times. All incoming calls. None outgoing. Many calls over a period of four years.
Smith brought up the file with precise finger pecks. The calls went back to the time the BioBubble had changed from a prototype Mars colony to its later, ecological-research incarnation. Exactly.
Smith's earlier search had revealed that Venus Mango was a CNN science correspondent. That simple fact had eliminated her as a possible BioBubble backer. Journalists are not usually wealthy people.