tiny oasis of light in the dark. The little car swayed in space as Sacheverell, Webb and Noordhof squeezed in. The cable car lurched and Kowalski ran out of the wheelhouse, jumping in just as the car launched itself into space. He pulled the door shut with a tinny
Clang!
and in a second they were sinking fast.
Sacheverell was looking at the dark cliff drifting past a few yards away. His breath misted in the freezing air. In a tone of exaggerated casualness, he asked: “About this accident. What happened?”
“It was a lightning strike. The car stopped half-way down with one of our technicians in it, and it was three days before anyone noticed. This was last winter.”
“He survived?”
“Heavens no. We had to thaw the corpse out on a kitchen chair before we could get it in a body bag. You should have heard him cracking.”
A look of pure horror came over Sacheverell’s face, and Kowalski grinned. He’d had his revenge.
Eagle Peak, 24 h 00, Monday
The red door was solid and heavy—or maybe, Webb thought, he was just feeling fragile. It had a small brass label marked “Conference Room.”
The conference room was brightly lit, like a stage, and measured about twenty feet by twenty. There was a heavy dark blue curtain on the left, a long blackboard on the right, and an old-fashioned circular clock, looking like railway station surplus, on the wall straight ahead. Its hands showed three minutes past midnight. Otherwise every foot of wall in the nerve centre was taken up with desks, computer terminals, printers, scanners and deep bookshelves stuffed with scientific journals, books and gleaming brass instruments from an earlier era.
The centre of the room was taken up with a long pine table, already scattered with papers. There were deep leather armchairs scattered around, their dark blue matching the curtain, and working chairs around the big table, and seven colleagues on these chairs awaiting Webb’s dramatic entrance, and vertical, disapproving wrinkles above Noordhof’s lips. “Webb, you’re three minutes late. I’ll say it again: this isn’t some cosy academic conference. If Nemesis is coming in at twenty miles a second, you’ve just cost us three thousand, six hundred miles of trajectory. Half the diameter of the Earth. The difference between a hit and a miss.”
Webb flopped down at the end of the table. “I’m feeling a bit fragile.” The soldier shot Webb a venomous look andthen turned to Sacheverell. “Let’s get into this. Herb, what’s the state of play in the hazard detection arena?”
Sacheverell leaned back in his chair. “As you’d expect, the big players are the Americans. We have two main civilian programmes, one in New Mexico, and one right here in Arizona. Lowell Observatory have a point six-metre Schmidt at Flagstaff, just a few mountains to the north of us, and the University of Arizona have Spacewatch Two on Kitt Peak, to the south. And the University of Hawaii are just starting a massive programme on Maui, one of the Hawaiian Islands. It’s a sixty-million-buck project, financed by the USAF.”
“Is that it?” Noordhof asked.
“There are photographic programmes but if you don’t have a CCD you’re not in the game. Put a charge-coupled device at the eyepiece of your telescope and you’ll get as much light in two minutes as you would with a two-hour exposure hour on a Kodak plate. In that two minutes Flagstaff can cover ten square degrees of sky down to magnitude twenty. Spacewatch Two covers only one square degree, but it gets down to twenty-one in half the time.”
“Sacheverell has overlooked the rest of the world,” Webb pointed out. “For example, the Japanese have a private network of amateurs and they’ve also started with a pair of one-metre class telescopes. The Italians have a small-scale network centred round their instruments in Campo Impera-tore, Asiago and Catania. The French and Germans have a one-metre Schmidt on the Côte
Clang!
and in a second they were sinking fast.
Sacheverell was looking at the dark cliff drifting past a few yards away. His breath misted in the freezing air. In a tone of exaggerated casualness, he asked: “About this accident. What happened?”
“It was a lightning strike. The car stopped half-way down with one of our technicians in it, and it was three days before anyone noticed. This was last winter.”
“He survived?”
“Heavens no. We had to thaw the corpse out on a kitchen chair before we could get it in a body bag. You should have heard him cracking.”
A look of pure horror came over Sacheverell’s face, and Kowalski grinned. He’d had his revenge.
Eagle Peak, 24 h 00, Monday
The red door was solid and heavy—or maybe, Webb thought, he was just feeling fragile. It had a small brass label marked “Conference Room.”
The conference room was brightly lit, like a stage, and measured about twenty feet by twenty. There was a heavy dark blue curtain on the left, a long blackboard on the right, and an old-fashioned circular clock, looking like railway station surplus, on the wall straight ahead. Its hands showed three minutes past midnight. Otherwise every foot of wall in the nerve centre was taken up with desks, computer terminals, printers, scanners and deep bookshelves stuffed with scientific journals, books and gleaming brass instruments from an earlier era.
The centre of the room was taken up with a long pine table, already scattered with papers. There were deep leather armchairs scattered around, their dark blue matching the curtain, and working chairs around the big table, and seven colleagues on these chairs awaiting Webb’s dramatic entrance, and vertical, disapproving wrinkles above Noordhof’s lips. “Webb, you’re three minutes late. I’ll say it again: this isn’t some cosy academic conference. If Nemesis is coming in at twenty miles a second, you’ve just cost us three thousand, six hundred miles of trajectory. Half the diameter of the Earth. The difference between a hit and a miss.”
Webb flopped down at the end of the table. “I’m feeling a bit fragile.” The soldier shot Webb a venomous look andthen turned to Sacheverell. “Let’s get into this. Herb, what’s the state of play in the hazard detection arena?”
Sacheverell leaned back in his chair. “As you’d expect, the big players are the Americans. We have two main civilian programmes, one in New Mexico, and one right here in Arizona. Lowell Observatory have a point six-metre Schmidt at Flagstaff, just a few mountains to the north of us, and the University of Arizona have Spacewatch Two on Kitt Peak, to the south. And the University of Hawaii are just starting a massive programme on Maui, one of the Hawaiian Islands. It’s a sixty-million-buck project, financed by the USAF.”
“Is that it?” Noordhof asked.
“There are photographic programmes but if you don’t have a CCD you’re not in the game. Put a charge-coupled device at the eyepiece of your telescope and you’ll get as much light in two minutes as you would with a two-hour exposure hour on a Kodak plate. In that two minutes Flagstaff can cover ten square degrees of sky down to magnitude twenty. Spacewatch Two covers only one square degree, but it gets down to twenty-one in half the time.”
“Sacheverell has overlooked the rest of the world,” Webb pointed out. “For example, the Japanese have a private network of amateurs and they’ve also started with a pair of one-metre class telescopes. The Italians have a small-scale network centred round their instruments in Campo Impera-tore, Asiago and Catania. The French and Germans have a one-metre Schmidt on the Côte
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