Nemesis by Bill Napier Page A

d’Azur.”
    Sacheverell waved his hand dismissively. “I don’t want the survival of America to depend on a bunch of Japanese amateurs. As for the Italians, they’re penniless. Half the time their telescopes are lying idle. We’re detecting three Earth-crossers a night.”
    Kowalski said, “And we have our upstairs telescopes. We operate our Schmidt remotely, as a robotic telescope, from this room. Normally we feed in a pre-selected list of galaxiesover there but we could just as easily scan the sky looking for a moving object.”
    Noordhof tapped the table. “Like I said in New York, you people have every conceivable facility at your disposal.”
    “You mean Pan-STARRS?” McNally asked, round-eyed. “The Hawaiian system?”
    “Ay-firmative. With immediate effect, it’s yours.”
    “What are their CCD chips in these systems like?” Webb asked.
    Sacheverell waved sheets of paper. “While our token Brit is feeling fragile I’m downloading from Albuquerque, with the Colonel’s help. They’re large format, high quantum efficiency, fast readout. They perform close to the theoretical limit.”
    Shafer was scribbling furiously on a yellow notepad. He had dispensed with his ponytail and his long grey hair was swept down over his shoulders. “What’s the sky coverage with these Pan-STARRS telescopes?”
    Sacheverell said, “Nine square degree starfields, reaching mag twenty with twenty-second exposures. They don’t go as faint as Spacewatch Two but like I say their CCDs have fast readout. They can carry out a saturation search in half the time of Spacewatch. Spacewatch has depth; Albuquerque has breadth.”
    Webb said, “I’m impressed. Herb, impress me even more. Tell us what you’ve got in the southern hemisphere.”
    Sacheverell hesitated. “Okay, we’re weak there.”
    “What’s your point, Oliver?” Noordhof asked.
    “We have almost no coverage of the southern sky. Nemesis could sneak up on us from south of the celestial equator when all our telescopes are scanning the sky to the north. Maui can look south to a limited extent, and the ESO Schmidt in Chile might have picked it up serendipitously if they hadn’t shut it down.”
    “The British closed down the UK Schmidt in Coonabarabran,” Sacheverell accused Webb, pointing a skinnyfinger in his direction. “Why did you guys leave yourselves with no asteroid-hunting capability?”
    “The giggle factor. Our Minister for Science thought the impact hazard was a joke.”
    “Are you telling me half the sky is uncovered?” Noordhof asked in dismay.
    “It’s worse than that. I’m thinking of the Atens.”
    “Excuse me?”
    “I hate to add to our troubles, but there’s a blind spot about thirty degrees radius around the sun. Anything could be orbiting inside it. An Aten is an asteroid with an orbit which puts it inside the Earth’s orbit, and therefore in the blind spot, most of the time. Only a handful have been discovered but nobody knows how many there really are. Now say the Russians discovered one on a near-Earth orbit.”
    Noordhof acquired a thoughtful look. Leclerc had been writing in a little red leather Filofax. He looked up and said, “The probability that we would independently discover it is remote. It would hide in sunlight until it pounced. An Aten makes a lot of sense as a weapon.”
    Webb continued, “Sacheverell’s telescopes are all geared up to search the sky around opposition. They’re pointing high in the night sky, far from the sun. But if an Aten is coming at us, it won’t be there. It will come at us low in the sky, close to the sun. Most of Herb’s telescopes can’t even reach that low. If Nemesis is an Aten you might see it before dawn, or just after dusk, a few days before impact. Binoculars would do.”
    Noordhof took a cigar from his top pocket. “I need a consensus on the detection issue. Can you people deliver or not?”
    Shafer had finished his scribbling. Now he stood up and moved over to the blackboard.