Arthur Clarke - Firstborn

Bella couldn’t bear to repeat the platitudes she knew were expected of her. “I’m new to this. But it’s my job to make sure it was.”

That wasn’t enough. Nothing ever could be. She was relieved when she was able to use the excuse of another appointment to get out of the pillboxlike house.

For her appointment with Bob Paxton, Bella was driven to the Liv-ingstone Tower — or the “Euro-needle” as every Londoner still called it. The local administrative headquarters of the Eurasian Union, and sometime seat of the Union’s prime minister, it was a tower of airy offices with broad windows of toughened glass offer-ing superb views of London. During the sunstorm the Needle had been within the Dome’s shelter, and on its roof, which had interfaced with the Dome’s structure itself, was a small museum to those perilous days.

Paxton was waiting for her in a conference room on the forty-first floor. Pacing, he was drinking coffee in great gulps. He greeted Bella with a stiff military bow. “Chair Fingal.”

“Thanks for coming all the way to London to meet me—”

He waved that away. “I had other business here. We need to talk.”

She took a seat. Still shaken by her encounter with the Duflots, she felt this was turning into a very long day.

Paxton didn’t sit. He seemed too restless for that. He poured Bella a coffee from a big jug in the corner of the room; he poured for Bella’s security people too, and they sat at the far end of the table.

“Tell me what’s on your mind, Admiral.”

“I’ll tell you simply. The new sightings confirm it. We have a bogey.”

“A bogey?”

“An anomaly. Something sailing through our solar system that doesn’t belong there…”

Paxton was tall, wiry. He had the face of an astronaut, she thought, very pale, and pocked by the scars of radiation tumors. His cheek tattoo was a proud wet-navy emblem, and his hair was a drizzle of crew-cut gray.

He was in his seventies, she supposed. He had been around forty when he had led Aurora 1, the first manned mission to Mars, and had become the first person to set foot on that world — and then he had led his stranded crew through the greater trial of the sunstorm. Evidently he had taken the experience personally. Now a Rear Admiral in the new space navy, he had become a power in the paranoiac post-sunstorm years, and had thrown himself into efforts to counter the threat that had once stranded him on Mars.

Watching him pace, caffeine-pumped, his face set and urgent, Bella had an absurd impulse to ask him for his autograph. And then a second impulse to order him to retire. She filed that reflection away.

In his clipped Midwestern accent, he amplified the hints Edna had already given her. “We actually got three sightings of this thing.”

The first had been fortuitous.

Voyager 1, launched in 1977, having made mankind’s first re-connaissance of the outer planets, had sped on out of the solar system. By the fifth decade of a new century Voyager had traveled more than a hundred and fifty times Earth’s distance from the sun.

And then its onboard cosmic ray detector, designed to seek out particles from distant supernovae, picked up a wash of energetic particles.

Something had been born, out there in the dark.

“Nobody made much of it at the time. Because it showed up on April 20, 2042.” Paxton smiled. “Sunstorm day. We were kind of busy with other things.”

Voyager ’s later observations showed how the anomaly, tugged by the sun’s gravity, began a long fall into the heart of the solar system. The first significant object the newborn would encounter on its way toward the sun would be Saturn and its system of moons, on a date in 2064. Plans were drawn up accordingly.

“And that was the second encounter,” Paxton said. “We have readings made by Deep Space Monitor X7-6102-016— and then a record of that probe’s destruction. And third, the latest sighting by a cluster of probes of some damn thing coming down on the J-line. The orbit of Jupiter.” He brought up a softscreen map on the table. “Three points on the chart, see — three points on a plausible orbital trajectory. Three sightings of what has to be the same object, wandering in where it don’t belong.” He stared at her, his cold blue eyes rheumy but unblinking, as if challenging her to put it together.

“And you’re certain it’s not a comet, something natural?”

“Comets don’t give off sprays of cosmic rays,” he said. “And it’s kind of a coincidence this thing just popped up out of nowhere on sunstorm day, don’t you think?”

“And this trajectory, if it continues — where is it going, Admiral?”

“We can be pretty accurate about that. It deflected off Saturn, but it won’t pass another mass significant enough for a slingshot.

Assuming it just falls under gravity—”

She took the bait. “It’s heading for Earth, isn’t it?”

His face was like granite. “If it continues on its merry course it will get here December of next year. Maybe it’s Santa’s sleigh.”

She frowned. “Twenty-one months. That’s not much time.”

“That it ain’t.”

“If the alert had been raised when this thing passed Saturn, and, you say, it actually destroyed a probe, we’d have had years warning.”

He shrugged. “You have to set your threat levels somewhere. I always argued we weren’t suspicious enough. I had this out with your predecessor on a number of occasions. Looks like I was right, don’t it? If we survive this we can review protocol.”

If we survive this. His language chilled her. “You think this is some kind of artifact, Admiral?”

“Couldn’t say.”

“But you do believe it’s a threat?”

“Have to assume so. Wouldn’t you say?”

She could hardly gainsay that. The question was what to do about it.

The World Space Council had only a tenuous relationship with the old UN, which since the sunstorm had focused its efforts on recovery on Earth. The Council’s brief was to coordinate the world’s preparedness for any more threats from the unseen enemy behind the sunstorm, an enemy whose very existence had not in fact yet been officially admitted. Its principal asset was the navy, which nominally reported to the Council. But the Council itself was funded by and ultimately controlled by an uneasy alliance of the world’s four great powers — especially the United States, Eurasia, and China, who hoped to use space to gain some political ground back from the fourth, Africa.

And at the apex of this rickety structure of power and control was Bella, a compromise candidate in a compromised position.

In the short term, she thought, the three spacegoing powers might try to leverage the sudden irruption of an actual threat into some kind of advantage over Africa, which had become prominent since being relatively spared by the sunstorm. The tectonic plates that underpinned the Council might start to shift, she thought uneasily, just at the very moment it was being called upon to act.

“You’re thinking politics,” Paxton growled.

“Yes,” she admitted. As if this anomaly, whatever it was, was just a new item on the agenda of the world’s business. But if this was another threat like the sunstorm, it could render all that business irrelevant at a stroke.

Suddenly she felt weary. Old, worn-out. She found she resented that this crisis should be landed on her plate so soon into her chairmanship.

And, looking at Paxton’s intent face, she wondered how much control she would have over events.

“All right, Admiral, you have my attention. What do you recommend?”

He stepped back. “I’ll gather more data, and set up a briefing on options. Best to do that back in Washington, I guess. Soon as we can manage.”