Jack McDevitt - The Moonfall

Kerr sighed.

Charlie listened politely to a series of questions about political appointments, requests from foreign governments, a policy statement on relocation camps, and other issues. He responded as best he could, and finally cut off his chief of staff. "I've got to go, Al. You know what we need. Get it done. Meantime, I'll try to move this rock off the road." SSTO Moscow Flight Deck. 4:04 A.M.

"O Gospodi!" Dmitri Petrovik, Moscow's copilot, did not look optimistic.

Conversation on the flight deck had all but died as they approached the Possum. It might have been that seeing it through a window was different from watching it on the screens, or that it was just too massive when measured against the tiny lights scattered around its surface and blinking immediately overhead. Fireflies trying to move a broken chunk of sidewalk.

"Moscow," came the American voice, "this is Mission Control. Good to see you. Directional beacon is on Channel Four."

"Privet, Mission Control." Gregor Gregorovich Ilyanik picked up the beam, locked on, and turned control over to the autopilot. "We have it."

"Moscow, as soon as you're anchored down we'll start to rock and roll. The sooner the better."

"Roger. We'll be ready in a few minutes."

Gregor tugged at his pressure suit. He was unhappy; it was bulky and warm and he'd developed an itch he couldn't reach. But they'd been instructed to wear the gear throughout the operation.

His helmet lay off to one side.

The black rockscape filled their windows. They glided slowly across its midnight mounds and valleys.

Kolya Romanovna, his flight engineer, was watching a map of the Possum scroll across the navigational display. A green triangle designated their assigned site out on the Plain adjacent to Arlington.

"Moscow," said the voice from Mission Control, "we will initiate as soon as you are down."

"They're in a hurry," said Kolya.

Gregor looked ahead at the cloud-shrouded Earth. "Ya tak i dumal," he said. "I'm not surprised."

Moscow slowed. To their port side, at about two hundred meters, he could see Arlington's lights. His thrusters fired gently, brief bursts, forcing them down. The landing gear was up, safely out of the way of the device that the workmen at Hartsfield had attached to his undercarriage.

"Ready?" asked Kolya.

"Da."

She touched the black button on the newly installed box on the right-hand side of her console. The landing-gear wells opened but the wheels didn't move. Instead, two self-seating pitons exploded from their sheaths and bit deep into the rock. Toward the rear of the undercarriage, another panel slid back and a third unit repeated the process.

The spacecraft shuddered with the jolts.

Kolya looked at her display. "We should be locked," she said.

Gregor sensed that they had indeed become a fixture on the rockscape. "How do you release it?" he asked.

Kolya opened the lid of the yellow control box and showed him the switch.

"Very good." He fingered his mike. "Mission Control, this is Moscow. We are ready to rock and roll."

Kolya looked at him, startled at his use of the American phrase. He grinned back. "Soon we shall see, no?" Antonia Mabry, Mission Control. 4:10 A.M.

"All vessels, this is Mission Control. I'll remind you that as a precaution, all personnel in the SSTOs and the Lowell should now be in pressure suits. We will initiate program in four minutes. Gentlemen, and ladies, start your engines."

"This is Keith Morley on board the Percival Lowell. We are riding with the Possum, which is now entering the exosphere. The exosphere extends out about ten thousand kilometers from Earth. A fleet of six space planes and three ferries are with us. The six planes and the Lowell have literally chained themselves to the Possum and are about to begin a complicated firing procedure which they hope, which we all hope, will lift this planet-killer into a higher and more stable orbit. The countdown has begun. We're going to stay right here and we hope you'll stay with us."

Antonia Mabry, Mission Control 4:11 A.M.

Unlike the moonbuses and ferries, whose power plants were either on or off, and operated with a constant power flow, the space planes and the Lowell were capable of modulating thrust. Feinberg, during the crush of the previous thirty-six hours, had sat with NASA engineers, reducing the mission objectives to a set of operational requirements. The requirements had been incorporated into a plan and passed on to a team of specialists to write a set of instructions. The instructions had been loaded into computers on board both the Mabry and the Kordeshev, to provide a backup against the possibility of an accident decapitating the project.

The program would be self-correcting, would monitor results from the seven drive ships through an array of sensors mounted on all three ferries, and would make adjustments as conditions warranted. One of the uncertainties that the planners faced, perhaps the one they perceived as most hazardous, was the possibility of a glitch in the software, which there had been no time to test.

It was this bug factor that was uppermost in Feinberg's thoughts. He was watching Mabry's radio operator, who'd set up shop in the passenger cabin (which had been appropriated for Mission Control) to expedite communications. He was talking not only with the other ships, but with the Orbital Lab, which was monitoring the operation for the rest of the scientific community.

Wes Feinberg had never doubted his own abilities. He'd left Massachusetts for Atlanta with his usual cool demeanor. His colleagues had wished him luck and openly admired his composure under what they perceived as enormous pressure. He'd reassured them everything was under control. But he'd no sooner lifted into the cool skies of New England before he'd begun to feel his first doubts. His teeth had been literally chattering during the conference at Hartsfield. He should have brought something to calm himself, but he didn't use tranquilizers, hadn't taken one since his father's funeral thirty years before. So he never thought of resorting to medication, and if using medication occurred to him now, he shrugged it away as an open display of weakness.

He tried to keep focused on the operation, to remember who he was, and why people had so much confidence in him. He'd gone over his own numbers time and again, like a man who keeps going back to make sure he's locked his front door. The problem was that, despite the surveys and analyses, he couldn't be sure of everything. He'd estimated, for example, the object's mass. He'd gauged the distribution of that mass. The tumble introduced a factor that, if not chaotic, could nevertheless only have been pinned down precisely by a reasonably extensive series of observations rather than the brief period for imaging they'd had. All in all, his calculations involved too many assumptions to allow any real degree of comfort.

Mabry was a hundred kilometers from the Possum, where it could more easily measure the movement of the object against marker stars. If they did not get the desired results, if the rock didn't accelerate according to plan, or did not change its attitude as required, Feinberg would have to make seat-of-the-pants adjustments. And that, he realized somberly, would be beyond almost anyone's capabilities. Maybe even his. Percival Lowell Flight Deck. 4:12 A.M.

Unlike the SSTO pilots, who had to conserve fuel, Rachel had seen no reason to shut down her power plant. She sat at the controls, with the president of the United States in the right-hand seat, looking straight ahead at the foreshortened landscape, the landscape that ran a hundred meters or so and curled up into a ridge that resembled an approaching wave. She was not comfortable. All her training, all her instincts, honed over a lifetime with high-performance vehicles, told her that when the computer in Orly Carpenter's ferry put the pedal to the floor, the Lowell was going to roar out of Jonathan Porter's cables, rip her belly apart on the rocks, and slam into the ridge.