Jack McDevitt - The Moonfall

"We'll be well rid of the thing," he said.

The Possum exerted a near-hypnotic influence. He watched it turning, watched, on another screen, the blue globe of Earth.

The second image, Saber explained, was from the Micro's telescopes.

The distance between the vice presidency and the office of the chief executive, Charlie was discovering, is measured in light-years. It might be that no one really understands that who hasn't stood on both sides of the chasm. A few hours ago he was only worried about saving himself. That concern now seemed almost trivial.

The third decade of the twenty-first century had, until a few days earlier, been a good time for the planet. A hundred million Chinese were driving cars, almost everyone agreed that military incursions were in bad taste, the old economic cycle of boom and bust appeared to have been tamed, and the great powers had discovered that collaboration was more fruitful than competition. Technology was providing better lives for almost everybody. Science was forging ahead, and people now lived longer and stayed younger than ever before. Most cancers were curable; powersats supplied virtually unlimited energy; and the long struggle to reverse environmental damage had finally turned the corner. In the United States, racial tensions had been steadily easing, GNP was up every year, crime rates and population growth were down.

This is not to say there were no problems. There were far more people than the world's natural resources could comfortably support, and ancient traditions and religious groups fought every effort to reduce the numbers. There was still too much crime, and too much of it violent, particularly in Russia, the United States, and China. A recent survey of American adults by USA Today suggested that three-eighths of the population were functionally illiterate. This was the highest ratio of any industrialized society, and it continued to climb steadily. The advantages of participating in the global communications network were still not available to a quarter of the U.S. population, and to more than a third of those living in other Western nations. Every major government carried a staggering burden of debt.

These were the problems a Haskell administration would have reasonably expected to confront. Anticipating the possibility of victory in the fall, Charlie had already staffed out work and formulated some ideas on his own. He'd talked to the people on the front lines, teachers and parents and cops and emergency room physicians and first-line supervisors in a wide range of occupations. He thought he was ready to assume the burdens of the presidency with a series of initiatives to attack these problems across a broad front.

As things had turned out, he could hardly have been less prepared.

Saber frowned and touched her earphone. "Wait one," she said and looked at Charlie. "For you, Mr. President." But his lamp hadn't lit up, so the call wasn't coming in on his private channel. "Do you want to talk to a Wesley Feinberg?"

"I've got it." Charlie opened his cell phone. He'd never met Feinberg, but he knew him by reputation. And Al had briefed him on his part in the planning. Called him a troublemaker. "Good morning, Professor Feinberg. This is Charles Haskell."

"Mr. President." The voice was strained. "I've been trying to get through to you for hours. Are you still planning to execute the nuclear strike against the Possum?"

"Yes," said Charlie. "Of course."

"Don't."

Charlie's heart sank. "Why not?"

"We don't know enough to be able to change its trajectory. That's what we really need to do. But we don't know how."

"So we give it a try. What's to lose?"

"What's to lose? Mr. President, you blow it apart and you'll create a cloud of radioactive particles and debris that would be just as likely as the Possum to come back around and hit us later. Except that, if it were to happen, the consequences would be even worse."

"Worse how? My information is that the Possum would kill a few more millions. Maybe send us back to a dark age."

"Mr. President, a healthy radioactive cloud would have a good chance to kill everybody on the planet. I'm talking about an extinction event."

Charlie visualized a storm of hot pebbles ripping into the global landscape and the oceans, hot particles settling into the atmosphere, hot rain pouring down out of diseased clouds. "Why didn't you tell this to Henry?"

"I did. Or I tried to. I was talking to him when we got cut off. I think it was probably at the time his helicopter went down."

"What did he say?"

"He didn't have a chance to say anything." Saber was watching Charlie. "You must stop the attack," Feinberg went on. "It will gain nothing, but it raises the stakes dramatically for us if it comes down."

"But it might not come down. Is that right?"

"There's no way to be sure."

"For God's sake, Feinberg, isn't there a way to find out?"

"After it leaves the atmosphere, give us a few hours."

A few hours would put it out of range of the missiles. They'd have to wait, and hit it inbound. His own people had advised him that was a much more dangerous procedure. "Are you at all optimistic? Is there a chance it'll just go away?"

"Give me a few hours, Mr. President."

After the call, Charlie sat for almost ten minutes. He refused all calls and considered his options and the potential consequences. He thought about Feinberg's reputation, and he'd read enough between the lines of Al Kerr's account to understand the scientist had given Henry good advice.

But a lot of people thought the nukes were a good way to get rid of the goddam thing. If Charlie failed to pull the trigger and it came around and hit them, who was going to get the blame?

On the other hand, would it matter who got the blame?

He looked at his watch. The birds would fly in less than an hour. Beside him, Saber was very quiet. "You overheard all that?"

"I heard your end."

He punched in Al Kerr's number.

Fax Received and Broadcast by C-Span. 8:26 A.M.

We're all on a bus, the whole human race. The bus is tearing along a road that's mostly empty. But there are a few rocks on the road, and maybe once in a while another vehicle, and we've just discovered there's no driver. -Dan White, Oklahoma City Skyport Orbital Lab. 8:41 A.M.

Substantial pieces of the World Wide Web were missing. Whole networks had dropped out of sight; power companies had gone down; telephone systems had collapsed. Still, the redundancies and bypasses that had accreted over the years served it well, and it stayed up and running. If one's telephone company was still operational, access to the Web remained.

Skybolt's champions became especially visible on-line. There was a flood of I-told-you-so comments. And the names of congressmen who had been prominent in attacking the project were being posted for general consumption.

The Possum was still approaching, but it had passed behind the curve of the Earth and was consequently no longer directly visible from Skyport's onboard observatory. The best images now were coming in from ground-based telescopes. Tory and Windy watched the show on their main display.

POSIM-38's lack of symmetry, its resemblance to a flattened club, or possibly (as someone had suggested) a sliced squash, gave it a unique identity. The prevailing explanation for its shape was that one side had been more directly exposed to the blast and that combustible materials had boiled off, leaving a relatively smooth, cooling residue. The flat side was promptly dubbed the "Plain," as opposed to the rounded, heavily scored rear, which astronomers were calling the "Back Country." A ridge formed a kind of spine, running lengthwise through the Back Country. It was the only feature on the terrain that did not seem to have been smoothed by the melting of the rock. Someone called it "Solitary Ridge," and the name stuck.