Fiasco (44 page)

Seen from the projection room, the atmosphere that encircled the planet was an extremely thin layer. The great magnitude of this astroengineered amputation could be seen safely only by the inhabitants of the tropical regions—until the shock wave reached them, faster than sound. The photon beam, moving millimeter by millimeter at the muzzle of the solaser, crushed planes of ice hundreds of miles across at the target. Only at the planet's southernmost point was there nothing yet to show the fury of the broken disk, which every minute shed hundreds of cubic kilometers of shattered ice. Now, within a cloud thrust high above the atmosphere, the laser beam became visible; it struck in the heart of the cloud like a well of fire. The spectrometers now recorded not churning steam but ionized free oxygen and hydroxyl radicals. In the control room, the minutes became an eternity. The ring, wobbling like a cracked top, lost its clear shine, was riddled by dark holes. The northern hemisphere began to swell, as if the planetary crust itself were being inflated, but it was only that the impact of the ice debris was throwing air, fire, and snow out into space. At the equator, the laser beam, a drill of blue-white heat along the tangent, bored persistently into a mushroom-shaped explosion, until the cloud cover of Quinta darkened to a dull-pearl plain in the west, while the east blazed in jetting eruptions toward the stars.

No one spoke. Recalling those minutes later, they realized that they had expected a counterattack; had expected that
they
would at least try somehow to parry the blow falling on the very heart of the war-sphere that had taken a century to build. That the Quintans even now were readying themselves to strike at the source of the cataclysm, visible against the face of the sun—since it was five times as bright. But nothing happened. Above the planet there rose, wider than the planet, a column of smoky white dust; it spread into a many-lobed mushroom covered with continually splitting rainbows, cruelly beautiful. And the cutting beam still stabbed through layers of mist like an incandescent wire of gold taut between the Sun and the planet. The planet itself seemed to veil its face gradually with distended cirrocumuli, as if in self-defense against the incredibly thin and yet so destructive ray, which jabbed at the remaining shards of ice as they sank into the atmosphere. Then it was only at moments, from between the swollen clouds, that there were glints of the remnants of the ring, still orbiting in its death agony.

Steergard ordered the solaser shut off after the sixth minute: he wanted to keep its remaining power in reserve. The solaser went out as abruptly as it had flashed on, and let them know—in the infrared—that it was changing its position. Locating it was simple, elementary, even when it was extinguished, because of the Planck spectrum typical of stationary bodies forced to radiate by the proximity of the chromosphere. So the girders ejected, from small throwers, a dust that burned in the sun, and the solaser carried out its move behind this screen, folding up into the shape of a closed fan.

DEUS worked at top capacity. It recorded the results of the blow, the fate of countless satellites that climbed from lower orbits into an atmosphere expanded by explosions and died there in fiery parabolas. At the same time DEUS informed them that the copy of the
Hermes
could also have been crushed by a magnetodyne attack in field concentrations on the order of a billion gauss. DEUS had a fourth hypothesis as well, involving implosive cryotronic bombs. The captain instructed it to file those data in the archives.

They were still in stationary orbit in the shadow of Sexta when Steergard summoned Nakamura and Polassar, to present them with a handwritten ultimatum. For its transmission they were to use the holographic eyes; these would be burned out by emitting so strong a signal, but Steergard was willing to pay that price.

The ultimatum was straightforward.

YOUR RING WAS DESTROYED IN RESPONSE TO THE ATTACK ON OUR SHIP WE ARE GIVING YOU FORTY-EIGHT HOURS IF YOU ATTACK US OR FAIL TO ANSWER WE WILL ONE SWEEP AWAY YOUR ATMOSPHERE AND TWO INITIATE A PLANETOCLASM OPERATION IF HOWEVER YOU RECEIVE OUR ENVOY AND HE RETURNS UNHARMED TO OUR SHIP WE WILL REFRAIN FROM STEPS ONE AND TWO THAT IS ALL

The Japanese asked the captain if he was actually prepared to blast the atmosphere. For the cavitation of the planet, he added, they lacked the power.

"I know. I'm not sweeping away the atmosphere. I'm counting on their belief that I will. As for using the sidereals, I'd like to hear Polassar's opinion. Even behind an empty threat there should stand some real force."

Polassar's reply came reluctantly.

"It would put a dangerous overload on the sidereals. We
could
pierce the mantle. If we disturb the foundation of the continental plates, the biosphere perishes. Bacteria and algae survive. Is this worth discussing?"

"No, that's enough."

Both felt it was necessary to learn the scope of the catastrophe, which was extremely difficult. Holes in Quinta's envelope of noise indicated that hundreds of transmitting stations had been knocked out, but without an
SG
it was impossible to determine, even approximately, the extent of the damage to the technological infrastructure on the large continent. The effects of the cataclysm now began to take their toll in the southern hemisphere and other continents. Seismic activity increased violently: on the sea of clouds appeared dark patches. All the volcanoes must have been belching magma with gases containing cyanide. DEUS estimated the mass of the ice that had reached the surface of the ground and the oceans to be between three and four trillion tons. The northern hemisphere had suffered much greater devastation than the southern, but the ocean had risen everywhere and invaded all coastal regions. DEUS cautioned that it could not determine how many fragments of the ring had fallen to the planet in solid form and how many had been melted, for this depended on the exact size of the ice chunks, which was unknown. If they exceeded a thousand tons, they lost only a small fraction of their mass in the densest layers of air. But DEUS was unable to give a definite denominator.

Harrach, who was on duty at the controls, was not part of the conversation that went on in the projection room above his head, but he heard it—and unexpectedly broke in.

"Captain, could I say something?"

"What now?" Steergard was irritated. "It wasn't enough for you? You'd like to grind them to a pulp?"

"No. If DEUS is speaking the truth, forty-eight hours won't suffice. They'll need to pull themselves together."

"You've joined the doves too late," snapped Steergard.

But the physicists agreed that the pilot had a point. The deadline for answering was moved to seventy hours.

Shortly afterward Harrach found himself alone. He put the controls on automatic—he had had his fill of looking at Quinta, particularly since the reddish smoke from innumerable volcanic eruptions had spread over the churning white of the planet and darkened to a dirty brown like clotted blood. It was not blood. He knew that, but did not want to watch it. In accordance with Steergard's orders the ship began revolving in place like the outstretched arm of a pivoting crane, which provided them with makeshift gravity, thanks to the centrifugal force, felt most strongly in the control room at the prow. In the mess hall, where the crew now gathered, the rotation enabled one to sit at a table without the acrobatics of weightlessness. The precessional effects, characteristic of a gyroscope, made Harrach sick to his stomach, even though he had sailed often on Earth and the worst pitching and yawing never brought on nausea.

He could not sit. What he had desired had come to pass. Looking at it rationally, he bore no responsibility for the cataclysm. He was certain that everything would have transpired the same even if he had not flown into a rage or got into those pointless arguments with poor, blameless Arago. No, nothing would have been different had he minded his own business and kept his mouth shut. He jumped up from his seat at the controls, to stretch his legs, but then was driven to pace the navigation area, back and forth. There was no other outlet for his anger, which kept returning to him like an echo, pressing him not to wait, not to sit with folded hands. So he looked at the climatic disturbances (if only they were just climatic!) of the stricken planet. He would gladly have switched off the image, but was not allowed to do that. The ellipsoid interior of the room was ringed by a railed walk that separated the upper level from the lower. Staggering on feet wide apart, like a sailor on a heaving deck, he ran up and jogged around and around the gallery. One might have thought that the man was taking up exercise on an indoor track.

On girders that came together like the spokes of a great wheel, between cross-braces secured to the ceiling, was the center of operations. Deep, velcroed chairs surrounded a terminal that was a low, truncated cone. At its sides, in front of each chair, flickered an empty green screen. On the cone table lay the discarded draft of the ultimatum, in Steergard's characteristically sharp-angled handwriting. Moving between the chairs, Harrach did a thing that no one ever would have expected of him. He turned the paper over—the written side down—and glanced around to see if anyone was watching. But only the flickering screens mimicked motion. He sank into the chair usually occupied by the captain and looked in both directions. Between the girdered supports, silvery plastic, were wedge-shaped windows opening downward, through which he could see the navigation area, also flickering with tiny lights—of various colors—and the glare that came steadily from the main screen, the dull light of Quinta. Harrach put his elbows on the slanted console and buried his face in his hands. Had he been able, he would have sobbed for this Sodom and Gomorrah.

He appeared calm. He did not say good-bye to anyone. None of his comrades got into the elevator with him when it was time. In an ordinary white spacesuit with the helmet tucked under his arm, he watched the sequentially flashing numerals of the passing levels. The door opened by itself. In the high-domed launch chamber stood a surprisingly small rocket, of spotless silver—having not yet traveled through an atmosphere, whose heat would blacken its prow and sides. He approached it, past open-worked metal that gave a muffled echo to his steps, and he felt an increase in weight: a sign that the
Hermes
was accelerating, to provide him with a good push at takeoff. He looked around. High up, at the intersection of the curved girders, was a ring of strong fluorescent lights. He paused in their shadowless glare to put on his helmet. The cabin hatchway opened above him. The buckles, pulled tight, clicked; automatically he touched the wide rim of the metal collar and inhaled oxygen. He was now cut off from the air that filled the chamber. The pressure was a little high, but it corrected itself immediately. The platform, onto which he stepped, rose. The hatchway, dark a moment before, lit up from within, and the moving platform touched its threshold and stopped. Without haste, lifting his large boots across the threshold, he moved his flexible glove along the tube of the handrail, bent down, and eased himself in feet-first. With both hands he swung from the grips on the transom and lightly dropped inside. The hatchway closed. A growing musical whistling could be heard; it was the gastight hood that had been suspended above the rocket but now fell onto it; hydraulic pistons pressed the hood to the casing of a propulsion funnel, so that the ship would not lose air on takeoff or be poisoned by the flaming exhausts of the engines.

Easily, as in a simulator, he took the ribbed hoses of the heating-cooling system and fit them into the appropriate sockets of his suit. The catches snapped immediately, showing that the couplings were engaged. He was now connected to the rocket. Its wall padding began to inflate and inflated until he was totally enveloped, swaddled, but only to the armpits, so that he had his hands free. There was no more room than in an Egyptian sarcophagus. These one-man landers had in fact been called "coffins." The countdown lever was on his right. Directly in front of his face shone, through the glass of the helmet, the dashboard: analog dials, digital counters for altitude, power, an artificial horizon, and—in the middle—a rectangular screen, still blank. When he pushed the lever, all the indicator lights flashed on, winking at him in a homey, friendly way, assuring him that everything was ready: the main engine, the eight correctionals, the four retros, the ionosphere loop parachute and the large emergency one (but the screen, with rapidly fading points, reassured him that there could be no emergency, drawing a perfect, precise curve of flight from the
Hermes
—represented by a green asterisk—to the swell of the planet's outline). With a fractional delay, the third parachute, a cascader (known as a "spare tire"), announced its presence. He had experienced such moments before and savored them. He trusted these little blinking, palpitating lights—green, orange, and blue—knowing that they could flare red, like a bloodshot eye in terror, because there was no such thing as a trouble-free device, though everyone had taken great pains to see that nothing would go wrong. The automatic was already counting down from two hundred. It seemed to him that in the speaker he could hear the breathing of the people assembled in the control room, and that it was against this living background of bated breath that the indifferent, mechanical voice rattled off numbers in decreasing progression.

At ten, he felt a slight quickening of the pulse, and frowned, as if rebuking his insufficiently disciplined heart. True, almost no one was spared a little tachycardia upon takeoff, even a routine takeoff, and this circumstance was anything but routine. He was glad that no one spoke to him, but when the time-honored "zero" was pronounced and he felt a shudder pass through man and projectile joined into one, a soft voice reached him, from someone who evidently stood some distance from the microphones: "God be with you." These words surprised him, although perhaps—who knows?—he
did
expect them from that man. But there was no time now for such reflections. The craft, borne powerfully yet gently by a hydraulic paw, as if a giant steel hand gloved in satin were pushing it up and out a cylindrical chute, separated from the ship. He could not move in the balloonlike insulation, but weightlessness claimed him for two or three seconds before the engines began to roar. For an instant he saw the hull of the ship rush by at the upper edge of the monitor, but that might have been his imagination. The rocket—named
Earth,
as he had requested—did a somersault; the pinpoints of stars flew at an angle across the screen; Quinta swam by among them, a white disk, and disappeared. His craft, sweeping the darkness with bursts from the correctional nozzles, fell on course: the trajectory of its actual flight matched the one plotted by the computer point for point. He ought to have called the
Hermes
by now, but kept silent—reveling in his solitary flight.