The damned skimobile was slow to start. He twisted the ignition key hard, several times, but the motor refused to catch. George swore to himself. It couldn’t be the battery, he had checked it just the day before.
A flicker of light across the growing darkness caught at the corner of his eye. George looked up and saw the aurora shimmering over the mountains. Green, palest pink, ghostly yellow, the Northern Lights danced over the mountaintops in rhythm with the moaning wind.
George swallowed hard and finally got the motor to cough itself to life. He opened the throttle all the way and raced homeward. This was no night to be out in the cold and dark.
Chapter 20
The lecture hall was about half filled. It had originally been a movie theater for the military personnel of Kwajalein, and Stoner found himself hoping they would show films in it again. But this evening it was a lecture hall, a gathering place, a social focus for the scientists and technicians of Project JOVE.
Nearly a hundred and fifty men and women sat uncomfortably on the government-issue metal folding chairs. Jeff Thompson sat next to Stoner, in one of the rearmost rows. Jo Camerata was nowhere in sight. Big Mac and Tuttle were down in the front row, within one step and a hop of the speaker’s podium.
The buzzing of scores of conversations died away as McDermott climbed heavily up onto the little platform at the front of the hall. Cavendish stepped spryly up alongside him, carrying his own chair. He opened it and sat down behind McDermott, who leaned ponderously on the shaky little podium. An older Russian came up alongside Cavendish and took the chair that had already been placed there.
“Good evening, ladies and gentlemen.” Big Mac’s rasping lecture-hall voice was met by a shrill scream of feedback from the microphone.
He glared at the audio technician sitting off to one side of the room behind a deskful of black boxes, while everyone else winced at the loudspeakers set into the rafters of the hall’s wooden ceiling.
“Mac doesn’t need a microphone, for god’s sake,” Stoner muttered. Thompson grinned and nodded.
McDermott used the microphone anyway, which amplified his voice into a booming, echoing thunder that rattled the walls of the building. He introduced Academician Zworkin, the astronomer who headed the Russian team. The old man—gray thinning hair, grayer pallor to his face, rumpled gray suit despite the heat—got slowly to his feet and came to the podium. He pulled the goosenecked microphone down to his own level.
“Thank you, dear Professor McDermott,” he said in a high, thin, singsong voice. His English was quite good: the accent was from Oxford.
Addressing the seated crowd, Zworkin said, “Although I have attended two of the SETI conferences over recent years, I am far from being an expert on extraterrestrial intelligence. But then, who is?”
A polite murmur of laughter rippled through the audience.
“My own field of specialization is planetary astronomy. I am not an astrophysicist or an astrochemist. I am, if such a word is possible, an astro-geologist. I am not quite sure what I am doing here, among you, except that I was too old and slow to avoid being picked for this job.”
The audience laughed once again, but Stoner realized, He’s warning us not to expect any great ideas out of him. He’s beyond his depth here and he wants to get back home as soon as possible.
Zworkin then began introducing each of the fifteen Russian scientists. All but one of them were men, although several of them were accompanied by their wives. Who were pointedly not introduced.
A lanky, gangly Russian stood up, looking slightly flustered and boyish despite his scraggly, graying beard. Zworkin introduced him as Professor Kirill Markov, of the University of Moscow, a linguist.
He’s the one I wrote to! Stoner realized. I’ve got to talk with him.
The introductions finished, McDermott took over the podium again.
“We’re going to be working together on this project for some months,” he said in the tones of a high school football coach. “I’d like to ask Dr. Cavendish to summarize where we stand right now.”
Cavendish smiled his way to the podium.
“Right,” he said, like a ritual throat-clearing. “I haven’t prepared any slides or graphs…thought that we’d all be digging into the details quickly enough.” He hesitated a moment, as if gathering his thoughts. “The, ah…object that entered the solar system last summer and engaged in a rather lengthy flyby of Jupiter, is now approaching Earth. It has been accelerating as it comes toward us, and our current projection is that it will reach its nearest distance to Earth on or close to fifth July.”
“The acceleration,” one of the Russians asked, “is this normal—I mean, natural?”
“Quite. In essence, the object is falling freely as it comes closer to the Sun, you see, and the solar gravitational pull is accelerating it. No, it has not shown any signs of life or purpose since it left Jupiter’s vicinity and altered its course to head our way.”
“Then it is inert now?”
“Dead as a rock, as far as we can tell,” Cavendish said. “It’s just coasting along.”
“What size is it?”
“Any data about its shape?”
“Surface brightness?”
Cavendish held up both his long-fingered hands to stop the questions from coming faster than he could answer them.
“Well, it’s rather larger than a breadbox…”
The Americans in the audience laughed. The Russians exchanged puzzled glances with each other.
“Actually,” Cavendish went on, “we don’t know very much as yet about its true size, mainly because we haven’t a firm fix on its intrinsic brightness. If it’s made of highly reflective material, then it must be rather small—on the order of a hundred meters or less.”
“What is the maximum size it could be?”
Cavendish hiked his eyebrows and searched through the audience for help. “Anyone care to make an educated guess?”
Stoner called out, “It can’t be more than a few hundred meters across, at most. From the mass measurements we made during the Jupiter encounter, it must be very small, with negligible mass—about what you would expect if you put three or four Salyut or Skylab space stations together.”
Zworkin turned in his chair. “Then it is large for a spacecraft.”
“But tiny in comparison to an asteroid or even a very minor meteor,” Stoner said.
“I see.”
Cavendish tapped the microphone and all eyes focused back on him. “The object is still too far out for accurate radar measurement of its size, although within the next few weeks it should get close enough for a go at it.”
“Why not use the Goldstone or Haystack radars?” someone asked.
“Why not Arecibo?”
McDermott got to his feet and said from where he stood, “Security. Our governments have agreed to keep this project as quiet as possible, to protect the people from undue shock and panic.”
“We can track it with the Landau facility,” Zworkin said, his voice barely audible without the microphone.
“Actually,” Cavendish broke in, trying to regain control of the discussion, “since the object is rushing toward us, all we need do is wait for a few weeks and we should be able to snap its photograph with Brownie cameras.”
“One question on my mind,” said a woman—not one of the Russians—from her chair, “is this: how do we go about making contact with it?”
“By radio, I should think,” Cavendish answered.
“What about lasers?”