Helen looked at Levine and knew, from the stony certainty on his face, that he wanted no interruptions.
'No, sir.'
Every face in the room looked at her. She didn't even try to read Levine's. Some bridges needed burning. 'That just isn't correct. Even if we don't manage to intervene before the zenith, we've still got some time. The best guess we have is that the zenith is close to midday UTC. That's six am in Washington. It's not going to get hot enough or high enough to give the Children the potential for major damage in the US until the sun's moved around a little, say four hours or so. We don't have to rush into anything right now.'
'Thank you, Miss Wagner,' Clarke said. 'I hear what you all say and I agree. My decision is we wait, gentlemen. We wait and we work. Now, is somebody going to tell me how we find those people out there?'
Dan Fogerty raised his eyebrows at Levine, who was going red across the table, then shuffled the report in front of him, stood up, and began to speak.
DAY THREE
June 21
SOLSTICE
CHAPTER 44
Close Quarters
'Nice view,' Bill Ruffin said. He and Mary Gallagher had just left the ship, attached to it by the long umbilical tethering line that snaked out in their wake. They had enough oxygen to last three hours, enough tools, as David Sampson had put it, to build a damn space station if they wanted. Sundog hung in front of them looking dead and still and gigantic. The earth sat below, radiant and blue. A few cloud systems drifted across the Pacific like stray feathers caught in a tantalizingly slow wind.
Ruffin had been in space enough to have gained an intimate feel for his position in relation to the land below. You couldn't measure locations in conventional terms here, you had to depend on technicalities like inclination and azimuth to define where you were. They found Sundog locked into an equatorial orbit that was just unpredictable enough to avoid easy detection. But to Ruffin there was an easier way to think of this place, and the analogy always came to him, on every EVA. If he reached into an imaginary pocket on his space suit and dropped an imaginary nickel, an imaginary gravity, unaffected by the very real atmosphere beneath him, would take it down in a dead straight line to hit the face of the earth. In this case around two hundred miles west and a touch north of the Gilbert Islands. They had come across Sundog when the satellite was poised above the gigantic empty blue waters of the Pacific, and that was perfect. He didn't want Charley trying to mess with the thing while they got on with their work. That way the Children might spot some disruption in the power curve and start looking for a reason. This was the down time on the satellite's flight around the world. There was no one to burn for an hour or two, until Tokyo came up on the horizon. They had room to get this right.
'Forget the view,' Schulz said in Ruffin's earpiece. 'We're getting real close to this thing now and I want you to make damn sure she doesn't hear us.'
'No dissenting voices here,' Mary Gallagher said. She peered at Ruffin. In space, buried deep within their bulky suits, they looked like awkward intruders, creatures out of their element. That part always scared her a little. The Shuttle was like flying, a rush of adrenaline at takeoff and landing, and a lot of routine in between. EVA was always tension, from the moment you stepped outside the ship to the point you got back and breathed its dank, stale air again. There was so much to go wrong in this empty, bleak place, and from what she'd seen this was likely to be the longest space walk in the brief history of the science. It felt deeply odd to be doing this under the command of people she didn't even know. NASA control at Houston was now in the back seat. Once the satellite was in their sights, they passed the entire command process over to La Finca and left it to them to take the thing down.
'You got this?' she said, and flicked the floatcam on. The three-foot-high round cylinder with the rotating lens moved gently in front of them.
'Yeah,' Schulz replied.
'Good,' Ruffin said, 'you have control of the thing. We got enough junk to contend with.'
The engineers had done a fine job with Lieberman's blueprint for the shades. Packed into four compact tubes was a tightly rolled web of rigging with gas pump canisters sewn inside. Expanded, they could cover the solar panel wings of the satellite with room to spare. Compressed, they looked like a set of business equipment being hauled along for an exhibition. The canisters followed in his wake as Ruffin floated gently toward the satellite, propelled by nothing more than the momentum of his departure from the Shuttle hull. The ground crew had ruled out the use of any small impetus devices to let them navigate the gap between the ship and Sundog. Something like that could have triggered the defence mechanism. So instead he and Gallagher had just taken aim, pushed themselves gently off into space, and waited as they floated the four hundred metres or so toward the big black sails. It was hit or miss, but there really was no choice. And it looked as if they were going to get it right the first time around, which was good news, even though everyone had factored in three attempts. Ruffin was glad they weren't going to have to reel themselves in along the line for a second go. He shared Mary Gallagher's enthusiasm for bringing the EVA to a rapid close.
'Remind me about the superstructure of this thing,' he said. They were midway between the Shuttle and the satellite and, in his estimation, would probably be able to touch the thing in under two minutes. He thought he knew this by heart anyway, but some reassurance wouldn't go amiss. 'What can I touch? What can't I touch?'
'Okay,' Schulz's voice said. 'There are no alarm systems on the exterior. We assumed that the only physical visitors we were likely to get were friendly ones. So, in theory, you can touch what you like.'
'In theory,' Mary Gallagher echoed.
'Precisely,' Schulz said. 'What will trigger a response is if you fire up anything with much of a power surge. The Shuttle's down to standby, right?'
'Affirmative,' Sampson said at the helm of Arcadia.
'We can confirm that too,' the NASA controller added.
'Nice to know you're still there,' Ruffin said to the team back home. 'When do we go back onto your work schedule?'
'When that thing's dead, Bill,' the familiar voice said. "Then we get you three out of there real quick and back home for a few beers.'
'Done,' Ruffin said. 'So I can touch any part of this thing I want when we get close to it?'
'Provided you stay away from the earth side,' Schulz confirmed.
Ruffin peered at the approaching hunk of metal. Close up it looked positively threatening, a big black mass of aluminium and silicon. They were now aimed almost dead centre at its heart. If they continued on their present course, he ought to be able to reach out and grab one of the giant wings, steady himself and Gallagher too, get back in line with the satellite, and move on to their next task, assembling the shades.
'Don't touch the panels themselves,' Lieberman added quickly.
'Hey, Professor. Why might that be?'
'They're fragile. If you hold too hard, the silicon could break, and that will surely do something to the power flow. Maybe it could notice.'
'Understood,' Ruffin confirmed, and rolled the floatcam in front of him. 'You see where we're headed?' Sundog was closing fast and soon he would have to make a decision about which piece of it was going to stop their movement, prevent them floating right through and over to the earth side of the system and, for sure, triggering a response. 'You guys see the support strut for the panel closest to me?'
'Got it,' Schulz and Lieberman said simultaneously.