Fiasco (33 page)

If so, the
Hermes
had first come upon the remains of an ancient battle, and then entered a "mined region," which triggered the sudden nocturnal attack. With this theory, the lack of a response to the Ambassador became understandable. If the abandonment of contact was not to be considered, then one had to declare all the tactics developed by SETI useless and seek other, more promising lines of action. The authors of the war-sphere model could not say if any successful tactic existed. They were in favor of departing from the prepared program and trying strategies that had no precedent.

The paper was also signed by Harrach and Kirsting.

This meant—what else?—yet another council. Though the
Hermes
had made up its power loss, Steergard felt that their position in perihelial orbit was the safest and maneuvered so that the ship would remain above Zeta, using the heat to power its own refrigeration. Because the orbit was forced (not stationary with respect to either the sun or Quinta), the considerable thrust provided them with gravity.

Accompanying Harrach to the meeting, Tempe remarked that space travel was made up of catastrophes averted at the last minute and long conferences.

Nakamura was the first to criticize the model of a war-sphere grown independent of its planet. Military devices might indeed disobey their creators when far from Quinta, but operational headquarters continued to function at closer range. Otherwise, the
Gabriel
would not have met with a coordinated attack from two sides.

The ocean of the northern hemisphere, with its white cap of polar ice, separated the two continents: the western, called Norstralia, twice the size of Africa, and the eastern, Heparia, so designated because of its shape, which resembled a flattened liver. Going by the pictures taken during the
Gabriel's
flight—the
Gabriel
was supposed to have landed near a starlike structure on Heparia—Nakamura established the starting points of the rockets. Both were at the equator but on opposite landmasses. True, they were obscured by clouds, and the rockets did not show, taking off, the typical exhaust flame, but he believed that either they had been catapulted or their drive had a negligible thermal component. Whether thrown by silent engines or by those employing a cold, particle-beam drive, the missiles heated upon breaking the sound barrier, which allowed one to trace the thermal part of their trails and extrapolate back to the launchers.

The fact that they emerged from the clouds almost simultaneously, two from the east and two from the west, was evidence of a prior synchronization of action and therefore of cooperation between command centers on both continents.

The authors of the model did not agree with the attack thus reconstructed—and, indeed, Nakamura was not able to prove such a course of events, because the atmosphere of Quinta swarmed with points of heat, which were thought to be produced by ice chunks falling into it from the slowly crumbling ring. Nakamura, they said, had chosen such points as could be attributed, with a bit of will and wishing, to the paths of the rockets.

The quality of the images obtained by the ship was poor, since the
Hermes
had gathered them from probes dispatched like electronic eyes while it hid behind the Moon at the perilune. Moreover, thousands of satellites orbited Quinta, some in the direction of the planet's spin and some in the opposite direction—but this revealed nothing of their origin: the adversaries could have launched their military satellites corotationlly or antirotationally. The fact that the satellites neither collided nor fought strengthened the authors of the "alienated war-sphere" in their conviction that the game remained "cold" and was based on checking, not destroying, the battle devices of the enemy. Once the satellites began to strike at each other, the cold war would enter the phase of heated escalation. For that reason—the authors held—the antagonistic orbiters stayed in check. In order to preserve the balance of forces, the space systems of both sides had to be able to identify each other. The
Gabriel,
however, was a foreign intruder and was therefore attacked. Rotmont illustrated this point with an example: two dogs growl at each other—but let a rabbit appear, and off they go side by side, chasing it.

Polassar, in spite of this, sided with Nakamura. True, it was not known whether the
Gabriel
was to have been captured by the rockets of one continent or of both continents. But the attack did take place with a precision that indicated planning. The signals sent by the Ambassador had been received on the planet, beyond any doubt. The lack of an answer, however, did not mean inaction or passivity.

Steergard did not take sides in the debate. The question of whether the
Gabriel
had been subjected to an attack planned by Quinta or undertaken by independent orbiters he considered of secondary importance. In either case, the planet was refusing contact. The real question was whether or not contact could be forced.

"By persuasion, no," said Harrach. "Nor by carrying out the original program. The more landers we send down, the more such encounters we'll have. They'll convert our emissaries into defensive units, until the overtures end with a rout or a battle. Since we don't want a battle and retreat is out of the question, we should drop all this delicate poking and prodding and show a little backbone instead. You can't make friends with a gorilla, or pacify it, by cautiously tugging on its tail."

"Gorillas don't have tails," said Kirsting.

"A crocodile, then. You know what I mean. The only thing left for us is a show of strength. If anyone has a better idea, let him speak."

No one spoke.

"Do you have a specific plan?" asked Steergard.

"Yes."

"Which is?"

"Cavitation of the Moon. The maximum effect with the minimum harm. They'll see it from the planet, but won't feel it. I had the idea some time ago. DEUS did the calculations for me just now. The Moon will come apart in such a way that the pieces stay in orbit. The center of mass will not be changed."

"Why?" asked the Dominican.

"Because the fragments will be circling Quinta along the same path as the Moon. The planet and the Moon constitute a double system, and since the planet is much heavier, the center of rotation is located close to it. I forget the numbers. In any case, the dynamic distribution of the mass does not change."

"The gravitational tides will change," Nakamura put in. "You took that into account?"

"DEUS did. The lithosphere will not move. At most, some shallow seismic foci will be activated. The rise and fall of the oceans will become weaker. That is all."

"And what good will this do?" asked Arago.

"It will be not only a show of strength, but a message. We'll send them a warning first. Shall I go into the details?"

"Keep it brief," said the captain.

"I don't want anyone to see me as a monster," said the first pilot with studied calm. "At the very beginning we showed them the calculus of logic, and conjunctions of the type 'If A, then B,' 'If not-A, then C,' and so on. We will tell them, 'If you do not answer our signals, we will destroy your moon, and this will be the first warning. We are determined: we want contact.' And then, once more, everything that the Ambassador has already beamed to them—that we come in peace, and that if they are presently engaged in some conflict we will maintain neutrality in it. Father Arago can read everything through. These announcements hang in the control room, and each member of the crew has received a copy."

"I read it," said Arago. "And what happens then?"

"We let that depend on their response."

"Do you think we ought to set a time limit?" asked Rotmont. "That would make it an ultimatum."

"Call it what you like. We don't have to give a precise time. It should be enough to tell them how long we will refrain from action."

"Besides retreat, are there other proposals?" asked Steergard. "No? Who is in favor of Harrach's plan?"

Polassar, Tempe, Harrach, El Salam, and Rotmont raised their hands. Nakamura hesitated. Finally he, too, raised his hand.

"Are you aware that they might answer before the deadline, and not in signals?" asked Steergard.

The ten of them sat around a large slab supported, like a table with one leg, on the openworked intersection of the girders that separated the upper, gravitational control room from the navigational, which was now empty. Only the flickering of the monitors above the consoles set along the walls, now brightening, now dimming, filled the space beneath them with moving light and shadow.

"Entirely possible," agreed Tempe. "My Latin isn't as good as Father Arago's. Had I come here simply out of an urge to come, I would not have voted 'for.' But we here are not ten astronauts. If the
Hermes
was attacked, after all its efforts at peaceful contact, that means that Earth was attacked, because Earth sent us here. Therefore, Earth has the right to say, through us,
Nemo me impune lacessit."

Sidereal operations, as phenomena of astronomical proportions, cannot be for the observer—despite the power liberated in them—an experience as profoundly moving as a flood or a typhoon. Even an earthquake, a thing submicroscopic on the scale of stars, exceeds the capacity of the human senses. True terror—or true enchantment—is produced in man by events that are neither too vast nor too minute. One cannot experience a star as one does a stone or diamond. The least of the stars, an ocean of oceans of eternal fire, even at a distance of a million kilometers becomes a wall of heat that outruns its horizons, and at close range it loses all shape, breaking up into chaotic vortices of blinding flame. It is only from a great distance that the cooler funnels in the chromosphere dwindle to sunspots.

But this same rule, making it impossible to experience immensity, operates in human affairs. One can feel compassion for the agony of an individual, of a family, but the extermination of thousands or millions of beings is a numerical abstraction whose existential content cannot be absorbed.

And thus the cavitational sundering of a heavenly body, be it planet or moon, presents a curiously undramatic spectacle; it not only takes place with dreamy slowness but, because of its soundlessness, seems make-believe, particularly since to behold it and not perish one must watch through a telescope or on the screen of a monitor. The sidereal surgeons viewed the developing explosion through filters placed in succession on the apertures of the lenses, in order to follow closely each stage of the disintegration. As a result, the image, shown selectively in monochromatic bands of the spectrum—now yellow as straw, now red as cinnabar—gave the effect of a child's kaleidoscope and not of a superhuman cataclysm.

Quinta was silent to the zero hour. The cavitation of the Moon was to be induced by eighteen missiles that would travel from a distant circle toward its equatorial surface along trajectories of the involute type.

Unfortunately, it turned out that DEUS was right in putting this operation outside the category of certain, predictable enterprises.

Had all the warheads hit the crust of the barren body at the same angle; had they converged around its heavy core, tunneling straight down like bullets; had they converted, with precision programmed to the second, that still-hot, semimolten core into gas—the chunks of the shattered moon, compared with which the Himalayas would be as crumbs, would have distributed themselves along the previous orbit, and the shock wave of suddenly liberated power would have caused only minor quakes, pushing the ocean to the continental shelves in a series of long tsunamis.

But Quinta interfered. Three of the
Hermes'
missiles, traveling moonward from the side of the planet, encountered heavy ballistic rockets. Crushing these into blazing clouds of gas, the missiles gave premature ignition to the sidereal charges they carried. As a result, the planned concentration of blows in the lunar core did not come about, and the cavitation took place eccentrically. Part of the southern crust and masses of deep rock began to tumble like an avalanche toward Quinta, and the rest—about six-sevenths of the Moon—went into a higher orbit. The reason was that the sidereals were supposed to have penetrated to the core along spirals, the cislunar missiles pushing the crumbling globe toward the Sun and the translunar toward the planet. But since it was precisely the intercepted ones that were to have protected the planet from a flood of meteors, about a hundred trillion tons of mountain formations fell toward Quinta, in a multitude of elliptical trajectories. A portion burned up from atmospheric friction, but the largest fragments—trillions of tons—fell in a wide pattern into the ocean, and those at the edge bombarded the shores of Norstralia. The planet took pieces of the moon in its side like a blast of buckshot at a sharp angle.

Within two-hundredths of a second after the detonation of the cavitational warheads, the Moon was wrapped in a yellowish cloud so dense that it seemed to swell. Then, very gradually, as if in slow motion, it began to come apart, splitting into irregular pieces like an orange torn by invisible claws, and from the cracks in the crust shot long streams of heat as bright as the sun. In the eighth second of the cavitation, billowing shock waves, aflame, gave the rent Moon the appearance of a burning bush in space. The light made the nearest stars pale.

In the control room everyone froze before the monitors. The only sound was the ticking of the chronometers counting as the selenoclasm progressed. Out of the coiling flame flew, enveloped in dust and dispersing like grapeshot, Alps, Cordilleras, Vesuviuses—until that monstrous cloud slowly began to open, and its initially round shape changed, lengthened… It was not necessary to look at the instruments to know that in a few hours the Moon would start falling to the planet. Whether luckily or unluckily, it hit far from the ice ring; it was not until midnight that a deflected swarm of fragments, in collisions that sparkled like fireworks just above the atmosphere, intersected the plane of ice.

Thus did the show of strength go awry and conclude in cataclysm.