The Medusa Chronicles (5 page)

Webster nodded sagely. “You used the argument yourself, Howard, when you pitched the
Kon-Tiki
mission. Jupiter's atmosphere was going to be a tricky environment, with high-speed winds, turbulence, electrical storms and whatnot. To pilot the ship was going to need skill and experience and swift reaction times, and you couldn't yet program all that into a computer . . .”

“Well,” Springer said, “today we've seen what machines can do, if only we let them off the leash.”

“You're right, Captain Springer,” Embleton said. “This humble Conseil will never be forgotten. The machine that saved the President—that's how the headline writers will have it. The machine that went where no human could go.”

“Not even you, Commander Falcon,” said Hope Dhoni, and she slipped her hand in his once more.

Ham 2057a reared up to face Conseil. “Yes. Machine, thinking for itself. A new kind of being in your world.”

Falcon looked down at him. “As simps were.”

Ham grunted. “You understand
us
now, at least. You gave us home. You declared us Legal Persons (Non-human). How will you treat
these
fellows?”

Hope Dhoni smiled at the robot. “Well, it's your day, Conseil. You saved
our lives! I suppose that since you were—activated—all you've heard has been orders from humans. No more orders for you, I guess. So what now?”

And the machine hesitated.

Falcon expected the usual programmed reply:
May I serve you?

He was stunned when Conseil said softly, “I am not quite sure what to do next. But I will think of something.”

INTERLUDE:

APRIL 1967

The camera angle had panned down, taking in an expanse of blocky white buildings, laid out campus-like amid neat areas of lawn and roadway. The point of view zoomed in to show squared-off cars, men in suits, and then narrowed to one building, then one window of that building. And then with one dizzying swoop through the glass, into an air-conditioned office. Lots of photographs and flags, cabinets and framed documents, a desk with a calendar and a briefcase . . .

“The Apollo Moon programme is cancelled,”
the man behind the desk was saying. “But the good news is you two good old boys are gonna get the chance to save the world.” George Lee Sheridan smiled hugely.

The two astronauts just stared at this man, a big, bold, brassy southerner. All Seth Springer knew about Sheridan was that he was some kind of functionary based at NASA HQ in Washington, DC, a monument to bureaucracy that the astronauts studiously stayed away from. Now here he was in Houston, in the very office of Bob Gilruth, head of the Manned Spaceflight Center. And with this perplexing, bewildering news.

Mo Berry leaned over to Seth. Mo was short, calm, with an economy of motion: classic test pilot. Now he murmured, “Told you. Chief's office on Sunday—bandit country, Tonto.”

Seth didn't feel like laughing. He glanced out of the window at a deep blue Texas sky, over the green lawns and blocky black-and-white buildings. Only a couple of hours ago, he and Pat had been planning to pile their two boys into the car and go sailing on Clear Lake, one of their first expeditions of the year. Now this.

And Seth Springer had come a hell of a long way to be told he had lost his chance at the Moon, just like that.

Seth was thirty-seven years old, and had committed his life to NASA. He'd been born into a service family, and his own first port of call had been the Army, passing through West Point. But with a love of flying that had come to him from who knew where, he'd soon gone across to the Air Force. He'd seen duty in France, making flights over green river valleys that were rehearsals for Cold War combat. But an itch to excel had driven him to a posting at the USAF's test pilot school, at Edwards Air Force Base in the Mojave Desert, all Joshua trees and rattlesnakes and rocket planes.

But even that hadn't proven enough when NASA had started recruiting astronauts. Too young for the initial cadre that flew Mercury, Seth had scraped into NASA's third recruitment round in June 1963.

Before the disaster of the Apollo cabin fire in January, Seth believed he had got himself into a good place here. He had become an expert in guidance and navigation systems. He'd backed up one Gemini flight—the one flown by Mo Berry—and he didn't begrudge that. Mo was a little older than Seth, a Navy man who had seen combat in Korea, and had made an earlier NASA recruitment round. Despite his lack of seniority, Seth was already in the crew rotation schedule drawn up by Deke Slayton, head of the astronaut office, and if all went well he would at least get to fly one of the early Apollo test and development missions. If things progressed beyond
that
, he ought to get a seat on one of the lunar flights themselves. That was what he'd devoted his career, hell, his whole life, towards.

And now this stuffed shirt was telling him that all this was gone? Just like that?

“Sir—Mr. Sheridan—”

“Shucks, call me George, everybody else does. And we're going to get to know each other pretty well in the next sixty weeks or so.”

“Sixty weeks . . . ?”

Mo said sombrely, “Look, is this something to do with the fire?”

Everybody was sombre when they spoke of the fire, and the 27th of January was a date that would be forever etched into NASA's collective memory. Some short-circuit had ignited the oxygen-rich atmosphere inside a prototype Apollo capsule, killing three astronauts, holing the lunar programme itself below the waterline, and sending everybody involved with NASA and its contractors into feverish recovery mode.

But Sheridan said, “No, son, it isn't the fire. It sure doesn't help, though, that
this
has landed in the middle of that fallout.” He plucked a cigar from a case and began the elaborate ritual of unwrapping it, cutting it, lighting it. “Because, while Apollo's big, it's nothing as big as Icarus is gonna get.”

And that was the moment Seth Springer first heard the name that was going to shape the rest of his life.

Mo asked, “Icarus? What's that?”

In answer, Sheridan pulled a copy of the previous day's
New York Post
out of his briefcase. The cover had a still from the old movie
When Worlds Collide
, and a blazing headline:

KILLER SPACE ROCK DOOM

While the astronauts tried to take this in, Sheridan dug into his briefcase once more, and produced a photograph of a hole in the ground. “Recognise this?”

“Sure,” Mo said. “Meteor Crater, Arizona. We trained in there—along with a few other holes, including some dug out by nukes.”

“You know what it is? How it was made?”

“Impact by a meteor,” Seth said.

“As the name suggests, Tonto,” Mo said dryly.

“You know all about impact craters, right? Because you're going to be crawling all over them on the Moon in a couple years' time. As for Meteor
Crater, according to the notes I have, a rock about fifty yards across made a hole in the world that's the best part of a mile wide. That was a long time ago, though. Now take a look at this.”

He showed them a photograph of a domed building against a starlit sky.

“Palomar,” Seth said immediately.

“Right. World famous observatory in San Diego County.” Sheridan consulted a briefing note from his case. “In June 1949, an astronomer called Walter Baade made a discovery, a streak of light on a photograph taken with a Schmidt camera, and don't ask me what
that
is. The streak—the mass that moved across the view field during the exposure—turned out to be an asteroid, a new one. But not just any asteroid. Most of those babies drift safely around out in the asteroid belt, which is somewhere beyond Mars—am I right?
This
one, when Baade saw it, was only about
four
million miles from Earth.” He produced a chart of the object's orbit, a diagram the astronauts immediately understood: an ellipse that cut through the circles of planetary orbits. “And they called it Icarus.”

Mo leaned forward, fascinated. “So this rock follows a very eccentric orbit. It goes all the way out to the asteroid belt at aphelion, then dives closer to the sun than Mercury, at perihelion.”

Sheridan eyed him. “At ap-ho-what now?”

Seth grinned. “White man speak with forked tongue. Farthest and nearest to the sun, sir.”

Mo looked up. “No wonder they called it Icarus, with all that sun-diving. And no wonder it comes close to the Earth. It cuts right across our orbit—well, it would if it was in the same plane.”

“Right. This baby travels around its orbit in a little more than a year, and mostly Earth is nowhere nearby. But every nineteen years it comes close. And the closest approach is always in the month of June, for some reason.”

“Nineteen years,” Seth said. “So after 1949 . . . June 1968. That's the next encounter. Next year.”

“Right,” Sheridan said. “But again, it
should
come no closer than four million miles.”

Seth said, “
Should
come no closer . . . ?”

Sheridan nodded. “What I'm about to tell you is classified. Wartime, you know, I worked for RCA, Radio Corporation of America. Honest war work. Stayed with them after the war when they developed what became BMEWS—”

“Ballistic Missile Early Warning System.”

“Very powerful radar. NASA has been working with the Air Force on more powerful systems yet. You can see the application for space research. You could track craft in deep space, manned or otherwise—”

“Ours or theirs,” Mo said evenly.

Sheridan looked at him steadily. “Best not to speculate, airman. Anyhow, a couple of weeks back we decided to try to find Icarus, as a test. It's a nice big target, we know its path, and although it's a hell of a long way away just now, we figured we should get an echo back from it.”

“But you didn't,” Seth guessed.

“No, we didn't. Damn thing took some finding, in fact, and when we did find it and tracked it a little to figure out its new path—”

Mo asked, “How the hell can an asteroid have changed course?”

Sheridan shrugged. “Your guess is as good as mine. Maybe Icarus took some kind of hit in the asteroid belt. Like a kiss on a pool table.”

Seth thought he saw it, in one big flash. “
It's going to hit
, isn't it?”

Mo looked shocked. “Shit on a stick, Tonto.”

“
That's
why we're talking about this. It won't miss the Earth by four million miles this time. It's going to hit—my God, in June next year?” That month had a particular significance to him and it took him a moment to place it. It would be when Joseph, his older son, would be finishing his first year at school . . .

“There's your sixty weeks,” Mo said grimly.

“You got it,” Sheridan said.

“And if this thing does hit . . .”

“Remember Meteor Crater? Dug out by a rock that was fifty yards across? Icarus is a
mile
across. Most likely impact point is the mid-Atlantic, east of Bermuda . . .”

In his briefcase of horrors, Sheridan had some preliminary estimates
of the consequences. Seth was appalled. The rock would unleash twenty, thirty times as much energy as an all-out nuclear war. A crater maybe fifteen miles across would be punched in the sea bed. Ocean waves hundreds of feet tall would scour the Caribbean, Florida, and the Atlantic seaboards of America and Europe alike. And with maybe a hundred million tons of rock vaporised and hurled up into the atmosphere, there would be a sun-screening layer of dust in the air that might persist for years, creating a deadly winter.

Sheridan was watching them, gauging their reaction. “I have the feeling you guys are getting it a lot faster than I did. Took some persuading for me to accept this wasn't just some tempest in a teacup.”

Mo shook his head. “We have to stop this bastard, sir.”

“Right,” Sheridan said. “So tell me how we do that.”

“Us?”

“
You.
Let me tell you what happened in the couple of days since we figured this out. We reported up through the NASA hierarchy to the President's Science Adviser. And
he
walked in on the President.”

Mo prompted, “And the President . . . ?”

“LBJ asked Jim Webb,” the NASA Administrator, “to come up with options for NASA to respond to this. So Jim asked me to handle it, and now—

Mo glanced at Seth. “And now he's asking us, Tonto.”

“At noon tomorrow the President is going to address the nation from the press office, right here at Houston. Why here? Because this is where LBJ's going to tell the world how this threat from space is going to be countered by the space agency he did so much to set up in the first place. Now, since I got handed this hot potato I already got everybody from MIT college kids to the Mercury Seven working on this. But right now it's you two I need to rely on, and I picked you because Deke Slayton tells me you're the best of the best . . .”

Or, more likely, Seth thought sourly, nobody else was around this Sunday morning.

“So tell me. How do we use Apollo-Saturn technology to deflect an asteroid?”

Mo got up and paced. “We're a nuclear power,” he said simply. “We nuke it.”

Seth said, “But how do you blow up an asteroid? I guess, in theory, you'd want a bomb big enough to dig a crater the size of the rock itself—in this case a mile. Which is maybe ten times as deep as Meteor Crater.” He got to his feet, walked over Bob Gilruth's thick pile carpet to a blackboard, wiped it clean of what looked like notes on the Apollo fire, and began to scribble. “As I recall the depth of Meteor Crater is five hundred feet. Mr. Sheridan, do you have the megaton equivalent of the strike that created that?”

Sheridan looked through his papers. “Ten megatons.”

“Okay.” Seth scribbled numbers. “So we're going to need a lot more than that. Somebody in the weapons business must have done studies of energy expended against crater depth—”

Mo nodded. “So ten megatons bought a five-hundred-foot hole. Shit. Even if it scaled as simple linear, we'd need a hundred megatons: ten times the depth, ten times the power. If it was inverse square, we'd need, umm—” Out came Mo's slide rule, which he never travelled without. “A gigaton. And if it's inverse cube—”

Seth eyed Sheridan frankly. “I think we need a rule, sir. No secrets between us.”

“Go on,” Sheridan said cautiously.

“Chances are even a single hundred-megaton bomb wouldn't be big enough for the job. Now, I'm in the USAF. I
know
we have fifty-megaton nukes in the arsenal, in development anyhow . . .”

“I could get you hundred-megs.” Sheridan sighed. “There are programmes that could be accelerated.”

Mo said, “But not gigatons.”

“We'll have more than one bomb. But you're the spacemen—if you need a gigaton, why not just deliver ten of these things to rendezvous at the asteroid, the way you had your Gemini craft link up in space? Set them off together.”

Seth was doubtful. “The timing would be critical—one nuke going up
a microsecond early would destroy its brothers before they had a chance to detonate.”

“It's not just that,” Mo said, his voice abstracted, his slide rule a blur in his hands. “We
couldn't
deliver the nukes to the rock in the first place. Not if we're to decelerate and drop them off. The only rocket we've got that could throw a bomb weighing tons across interplanetary space is the Saturn V.”