George Martin - Aces High

"Say, Doctor, what're these dark splashes all over the walls?"

Tach glanced up. "Oh, those? Dried blood, of course." Trips paled and his eyes bulged a bit. Tachyon realized he'd run roughshod yet again over Earther sensibilities. For a folk so robust, Terrestrials had such tender stomachs.

Still, even he was amazed at the savagery vented on the penthouse lab. There was a mindless quality to it, a palpable psychic emanation of fury and malice. Given the limited imagination of most police he'd encountered, Tachyon was no longer surprised they found Doughboy a plausible suspect; they thought him a demented freak, a caricature from a slasher flick, and that certainly described Dr. Warner Fred Warren's assailant. Yet Tach was more convinced than ever that vast gentle child was incapable of such an act, however provoked.

The Informer editor had vanished, overcome with emotion no doubt. "Hey, Doe, come look at this," Trips called. He was bending over a drafting table scattered with star-speckled photographs, peering intently at one edge.

Tach bent down beside him. There was a thin patch of gray, wrinkled, like a bit of tissue paper that had been wetted, stretched on the plastic surface, and left to dry. There was a curious membraneous quality to it that tickled the fringes of cognition.

"What is this stuff?" Trips asked.

"I do not know." His eyes skimmed curiously over the photographs. A date penciled on the edge of one caught his eye: 4/5/86, the day Warren was murdered.

From a pocket Cap'n Trips produced a little vial and a scalpel in a disposable plastic sheath. "Do you always carry such implements?" Tach asked as he began to scrape up a few flakes of the gray stuff.

"Thought they might come in handy, man. If I was gonna be a detective and all."

Shrugging, Tach turned his attention to the photograph that had caught his eye. It was the top of a small stack. Picking it up, he discovered a dozen or more photos which to his untrained eye all seemed to show the same star field.

"All right, Doc, Captain," an unfamiliar voice blared from behind. "Give us a big smile for posterity."

With a dexterity that surprised even himself, Tach half-rolled the photos and slipped them into one voluminous coat sleeve even as he spun to face the intruder. Martha Quinlan stood inside the door beaming while a young black man dropped to one knee and bombed them with a camera flash that could have driven a laser beam to Mars.

With a certain reluctance Tach let his fingers slip from the outsized wooden grips of the. 357 magnum neatly concealed in a shoulder rig beneath his yellow coat. "I presume you've an explanation for this," he said with fine Takisian frost.

"Oh, this is Rick," Quinlan warbled. "He's one of our staff photographers. I simply had to have him come down and record this event."

"Madam, I'm afraid I do not do this for publicity," Tach said, alarmed.

Unfolding himself, Rick waved a reassuring hand. "Don't sweat it, man," he said. "It's just for our files. Trust me."

"Tezcatlipoca," Dr. Allan Berg said, tossing the print back on top of the mound of books, papers, and photos under which his desk putatively lurked.

"Say what?" Trips said.

"1954C-1100. It's a rock, gentlemen. Nothing more, nothing less."

The little office smelled strongly of sweat and pipe tobacco. Trips stared out the window at the afternoon Columbia campus, watching a gray squirrel halfway up a maple tree cussing out a black kid walking past with a scuffed French-horn case.

"A curious name," Tachyon said.

"It's an Aztec deity. A pretty surly one, I gather, but that's the way it goes: you find an asteroid, you get to name it." Berg grinned. "I've thought about hunting for one to name after me. What the hey-immortality of a sort." He looked like a goodnatured Jewish kid, eager eyes, long oval face, big nose, except that his curly unkempt hair was gray. He had a blue shirt and brown tie under a sweater so loosely woven you could just about fish with it. His manner was infectious.

"It's big enough to, like, do some damage if it hits?" Trips asked. "Or is that more exaggeration?"

"No, ah, Captain, I can assure you it's not." He stumbled a little over the honorific. "Norms, especially in the New York area, had pretty well had to accustom themselves to the ways of aces, especially those who chose to emulate the comic-book heroes of yore and don colorful costumes. And Cap'n Trips was weirder than most."

"Tezcatlipoca's a nickel-iron oblong roughly a kilometer by a kilometer and a half, weighing a good many million metric tons. Depending on the angle at which it struck, it could create devastating tidal waves and earthquakes, it could produce effects such as those hypothesized for a nuclear winter, it could quite conceivably crack the crust or blow away much of the atmosphere. It would almost certainly be the greatest catastrophe in recorded history-I might give you a better estimate if I took time to work it all out on paper."

"But I won't. Because it's not going to hit the planet." He sipped coffee from a cracked mug. "Poor Fred."

"I admit I was rather startled that you spoke so sympathetically of him when I called you, Dr. Berg," Tachyon said. Berg set the cup down, stared at the tepid black surface. "Fred and I went to MIT together, Doctor. We were roommates for a year."

"But I thought everybody said Dr. Warren was just some kind of crackpot," Trips said.

"That's what they say. And he was a crackpot, much as I hate to say it., But he was not just any crackpot."

"I fail to see how a trained scientist could espouse the theories for which Dr. Warren was so, ah-"

"Notorious, Doctor. Go ahead and say it. You sure you won't have any coffee?" They refused politely. Berg sighed. "Fred had what you call a will of iron. And he had a romantic streak. He always felt there should be fantastic things out there-ancient astronauts, alien machines on the moon, creatures unknown to science. He wanted to be the first to go out and rigorously prove so many things respectable scientists scoffed at." His mouth slipped into a sad smile. "And who knows? When Fred and I were kids, people thought the idea of intelligent life on other planets was farfetched. Maybe he could have pulled it off."

"But Fred was impatient. When he didn't see the results he wanted-why, he started seeing them anyway, if you know what I mean."

"So it was as Dr. Sagan said in his article in the Times," Tachyon said, "Dr. Warren fastened upon a rock which falls by the Earth at regular intervals and embued it with menace."

Berg frowned. "With all due respect, Dr. Sagan got it wrong this time. Gentlemen, Dr. Warren had an infinite capacity for self-deception, but he wasn't just some fool the Informer dragged in off Seventh Avenue. He knew how to use an ephemeris, was surely cognizant of 1954C-1100's history."

"He was a trained astronomer, and as far as technical and observational details go, a damned fine one." He shook his shaggy head. "How he could talk himself into believing this nonsense about Tezcatlipoca, God alone knows."

Trips was polishing his glasses on his fantastic bow tie. "Any chance he could've been right, man?"

Berg laughed. "Forgive me, Captain. But Tezcatlipoca's newest approach was spotted and plotted eight months ago by Japanese astronomers. It does in fact intersect the Earth's orbital path, but well clear of the planet itself "

He stood up, smoothed down his sweater, which had ridden up to the center of his stomach. "That's the pity, gentlemen. Oh, not this"-patting incipient paunch-"but the disservice Fred performed his fellow scientists. Our instruments are so much more sophisticated than they were even last time Tezcatlipoca passed, in 1970. And yet any astronomer who dares twitch his telescope in its direction will wind up lumped with von Daniken and Velikovsky forevermore."