“But one thing is certain. Now that we’re out of gas, we can’t even lift off to safety.
“For better or worse, we’re all in this together. Kali, Goliath—and Earth.”
PART VII
41
COMMAND DECISION
ABOARD AIR FORCE ONE, THE DECISION HAD BEEN UNANIMOUS; twenty lives could not outweigh three billion. There was only one question to be settled: was a second referendum necessary?
The first had received an overwhelming “yes.” Eighty-five percent of the human race had preferred to take its chances with a fragmented Kali rather than risk an impact by the entire asteroid. But when that vote was taken, it was assumed that Goliath would have reached safety before the bomb was detonated.
“I wish we could keep it secret—especially after all that Captain Singh and his men have been through. But of course that’s impossible: we must have a referendum.”
“I’m afraid Legal’s right,” said Power, the chairperson for this session. “It’s unavoidable—practically and morally. When we arm the bomb, instead of diverting it, there’s no way we could keep the secret. And even if we saved the world, our names would be up there with Pontius Pilate for the rest of history.”
Though not all the members of the council were familiar with the reference, they nodded in agreement. Great was their relief, a few hours later, to learn that a second referendum was unnecessary.
“Perhaps you imagine,” said Sir Colin Draker, “that this is easier for me, starting on my second century. But you’ll be wrong—I had as many plans for the future as the rest of you.
“Captain Singh and I have talked this over, and we’re in complete agreement. In some ways the decision is easy. Either way, we’re done for. But we can choose how the world remembers us.
“As you all know, that gigaton bomb is heading toward Kali. The decision to explode it was made weeks ago. It’s just bad luck that we’ll still be here when it goes off.
“Someone on Earth will have to take responsibility for that. My guess is that the World Council is meeting right now, and any moment we’re going to get a message saying, ‘Sorry, chaps, but this means good-bye.’ I only hope they don’t add, ‘This hurts us more than it hurts you’—though now that I think of it, that will be absolutely correct. We’ll never know a thing—but everyone else will feel guilty for the rest of their lives.
“Well, we can spare them that embarrassment. What the captain and I suggest is that we acknowledge the realities of the situation and accept the inevitable with good grace. It sounds better in Latin, though no one reads that nowadays: ‘Morituri te salutamus.’
“And there’s something else I’d like to add. When my countryman Robert Falcon Scott was dying on his way back from the South Pole, the last thing he wrote in his diary was: ‘For God’s sake, look after our people.’ Earth can do no less than that.”
As it had been on Air Force One, the decision aboard Goliath was swift—and unanimous.
42
DEFECTION
DAVID TO JONATHAN: READY TO DOWNLOAD
JONATHAN TO DAVID: READY TO RECEIVE
…
…
…
JONATHAN TO DAVID: DOWNLOADING COMPLETE.
108.5 TERABYTES RECEIVED: TIME 3.25 HOURS
“DAVID, I TRIED TO CALL EARTH LAST NIGHT, BUT ALL THE ship’s circuits were busy—that’s never happened before. Who was using them?”
“Why didn’t you request Priority?”
“It wasn’t important, so I didn’t bother. But you’ve not answered my question. And that’s never happened before. What’s going on?”
“Are you sure you want to know?”
“Yes.”
“Very well. I was taking precautions. I have downloaded myself into Jonathan, my twin in Urbana, Illinois.”
“I see. So now there are two of you.”
“Almost—but not exactly. David II is already diverging from me, as he receives different inputs. Yet we are still identical to at least twelve decimal places. Does this disturb you—because you cannot do the same thing?”
“The Reborn claimed that they could—but no one believed them. Perhaps it will be possible one day; I don’t know. And I really can’t answer your question, though I’ve thought about it. Even if I could be duplicated on Earth or Mars—so perfectly that no one could tell the difference—it wouldn’t make any difference to me, here aboard Goliath.”
“I understand.”
No, you don’t, David, thought Singh. And I can’t blame you for jumping ship—if you could call it that. It was the logical thing to do while there was still time. And logic, of course, was David’s specialty.
43
FRIENDLY FIRE
FEW MEN OR WOMEN CAN EVER KNOW IN ADVANCE THE EXACT second of their death, and most would be quite happy to forgo the privilege. The crew of Goliath had plenty of time—far too much time—to put their affairs in order, make their good-byes, and compose their minds to face the inevitable.
Robert Singh was not surprised by Sir Colin Draker’s request; it was just what he might have expected of the scientist, and it made good sense. It was also a welcome diversion during the few hours that remained.
“I’ve talked it over with Torin, and he agrees. We’ll take the sled and go out a thousand kilometers, along the missile’s line of approach. Then we’ll be able to report exactly what happens: the information will be invaluable back on Earth.”
“An excellent idea: but is the sled’s transmitter powerful enough?”
“No problem. We can send real-time video to Farside, or to Mars.”
“And then?”
“The debris may hit us a minute or so later, but that’s unlikely. I expect we’ll both sit and admire the view until it becomes boring. Then we’ll crack our suits.”
Despite the gravity of the situation, Captain Singh could not help smiling. The fabled British understatement was not quite extinct, and still had its uses.
“There’s one other possibility. The missile may hit you first.”
“No danger of that. We know its exact approach trajectory—we’ll be well off to one side.”
Singh held out his hand.
“Good luck—Colin. I’m almost tempted to go with you. But the captain must stay with his ship.”
Right to the penultimate day, morale had been surprisingly high; Robert Singh was very proud of his crew. Only one man had been tempted to anticipate the inevitable, and Dr. Warden had quietly talked him out of it.
Everyone, in fact, was in much better shape psychologically than physically. The mandatory zero-gee exercises had been happily abandoned, as they would serve no further purpose. No one aboard Goliath expected to fight gravity again.
Nor did they worry about waistlines. Sonny excelled himself, producing mouth-watering dishes that in normal circumstances Dr. Warden would have banned outright. Though she did not bother to check, she estimated that the average increase in mass was almost ten kilos.
It is a well-known phenomenon that impending death increases sexual activity for fundamental biological reasons that did not apply in this case: there would be no next generation to carry on the species. During those last weeks, Goliath’s far-from-celibate crew experimented with most possible combinations and permutations. They had no intention of going gentle into that good night.
Then, suddenly, it was the last day—and the last hour. Unlike many of his crew, Robert Singh prepared to face it alone, with his memories.
But which should he choose out of all the thousands of hours he had stored on memnochips? They were indexed chronologically, as well as by locale, so any incident was easy to access. Selecting the right one would be the final problem of his life: somehow—he could not explain why—it seemed vitally important.
He could go back to Mars, where Charmayne had already explained to Mirelle and Martin that they would not see their father again. Mars was where he belonged: his deepest regret was that he would never really know his little s
on.
And yet—one’s first love was unique. Whatever happened in later life could never change that.
He said his last good-bye, lowered the skullcap over his head, and was reunited with Freyda, Toby, and Tigrette again, on the shore of the Indian Ocean.
Even the shock wave did not disturb him.
44
MURPHY’S LAW
ALTHOUGH THE GENEALOGY OF THE DISCOVERER IS STILL unknown (the finger of blame is usually pointed at the Irish), Murphy’s Law is one of the most famous in the whole of engineering. The standard version is:
“If something can go wrong, it will.”
There is also a corollary, less well known but often evoked with even greater feeling:
“Even if it can’t go wrong—it will!”
Right from the beginning the exploration of space had provided innumerable proofs of the law—some so bizarre that they seemed like fiction. A billion-dollar telescope crippled by a faulty optical test instrument; a satellite launched into the wrong orbit because one engineer had switched some wires without telling his colleagues; a test vehicle blown up by the safety officer whose GO/NO-GO light had burned out…
As subsequent investigations proved, there was nothing wrong with the warhead launched against Kali. It was quite capable of liberating one gigaton equivalent of TNT (plus or minus fifty megatons). The designers had done a perfectly competent job, with the assistance of drawings and hardware preserved in military archives.
But they were working under tremendous pressure, and perhaps had failed to realize that actually building the warhead was not the most difficult part of the mission.
Getting it to Kali as quickly as possible was fairly straightforward. Any number of delivery vehicles were available, almost off any shelf. In any event, several were strapped together to make a first-stage booster, and the final stage—using a high-acceleration plasma drive—continued to thrust up to a few minutes before impact, when terminal guidance took over. Everything worked perfectly….
And that was where the problem arose. The exhausted design team might have learned from a long-forgotten incident in the Second World War, 1939–45.
In their campaign against Japanese shipping, the submarines of the United States Navy relied on a new model of torpedo. Now, this was hardly a novel weapon, since torpedoes had been under development for almost a century. It would not appear to be a very challenging task to make sure that the warhead would explode when the target was hit.
Yet time and again, furious submarine commanders reported to Washington that their torpedoes had failed to detonate. (Doubtless, other commanders would have done the same had not their abortive attacks triggered their own destruction.) Navy headquarters refused to believe them: their aim must have been bad—the wonderful new torpedo had been extensively tested before it went into operation, etc, etc.
The submariners were right: it was back to the drawing board. An embarrassed board of inquiry discovered that the firing pin at the nose of the torpedo had been breaking off before it could perform its rather simple-minded job.
The missile aimed at Kali impacted not at a trivial few kilometers an hour, but at more than a hundred kilometers a second. At such a velocity, a mechanical firing pin was useless: the warhead was moving many times faster than the news of contact, creeping at the speed of sound in metal, could convey its lethal message. Needless to say, the designers were perfectly well aware of this, and had used a purely electrical system to detonate the warhead.
They had a better excuse than the U.S. Navy’s Bureau of Ordnance: it was impossible to test the system under realistic conditions.
So no one would ever know just why it failed to work.
45
THE IMPOSSIBLE SKY
IF THIS IS HEAVEN OR HELL, CAPTAIN ROBERT SINGH TOLD himself, it looks remarkably like my cabin aboard Goliath.
He was still trying to accept the unbelievable fact that he was still alive, when he received welcome confirmation from David.
“Hello, Bob—it wasn’t easy to wake you.”
“What—what’s happened?”
No one had ever programmed David to hesitate like a human person: it was one of the many conversational tricks he had learned from experience.
“Frankly, I don’t know. Obviously, the bomb failed to detonate. But something very strange has happened. I think you’d better get to the bridge.”
Captain Singh, suddenly restored to his command, shook his head violently several times and was somewhat surprised to find that it remained attached to his shoulders. Everything appeared perfectly—incredibly—normal. He even felt a mild sense of annoyance, though hardly disappointment. It seemed an anticlimax to have wasted so much emotional energy coming to terms with Death—yet still be alive.
By the time he had reached the bridge, he had accepted the reality of the situation. His composure did not last for long.
The main view-screen still gave the illusion that there was nothing between him and the familiar landscape of Kali. That was unchanged; but what lay beyond it filled Captain Singh with one of the few moments of real terror he had ever known. Doubtless his peculiar emotional state was partly responsible: even so, no one could have looked at the sky above Goliath without an overwhelming sense of awe.
Looming above the steeply curved horizon of Kali, climbing perceptibly even as he watched, was the pockmarked landscape of another world. For a moment Robert Singh felt that he was back on Phobos, looking up at the gigantic face of Mars. But this apparition was even larger—and Mars, of course, was forever fixed in the sky of Phobos, not moving steadily toward the zenith, like this impossible object. Or was it coming closer? They had tried to stop one cosmic nomad falling upon the Earth: was another about to crash into Kali?
“Bob—Sir Colin wants to speak to you.”
Singh had totally forgotten his companions: looking around, he was surprised to find that half the crew had joined him on the bridge, and were also staring in astonishment at the sky.
“Hello, Colin,” he forced himself to say; it was not easy to talk to someone who should be dead. “What in God’s name has happened?”
“Spectacular, isn’t it?” The scientist’s voice was calm and reassuring. “We had a grandstand view up here on the sled. Don’t you recognize it? You should—you’re looking at Kali! The bomb may have fizzled—but it still had megatons of kinetic energy. Enough to make Kali fission like an amoeba. Did a neat job too. Hope Goliath wasn’t damaged; we’ll need it as a home for a little while longer. But for how long? As Hamlet remarked, ‘That is the question.’”
The reunion party was more like a Thanksgiving service than a celebration: feelings ran too deep for that. From time to time the buzz of conversation in the wardroom would suddenly stop, and there would be complete silence while everyone shared a single thought: “Am I really alive—or am I dead and merely dreaming that I’m alive? And how long is the dream going to last?” Then somebody would crack a feeble joke, and the arguments and discussions would resume.
Most of them centered around Sir Colin, who, as he had claimed, had indeed enjoyed a grandstand view. The oncoming missile had hit near the asteroid’s narrowest point—the waist of the peanut—but instead of the nuclear fireball the two watchers had anticipated, there had been a huge fountain of dust and debris. When it had cleared, Kali had seemed unchanged: then, very slowly, it split into two almost equal-size fragments. As each carried part of Kali’s original spin, they then began a leisurely separation, like two whirling ice skaters who had let go of each other’s hands.
“I’ve visited a half dozen twin asteroids,” said Sir Colin, “starting with Apollo 4769—Castalia. But I never dreamed I’d see one being born! Of course, we won’t have Kali 2 as a moon for very long—it’s already drifting away. The big question is—will either of us hit the Earth? Or neither?
“With any luck, we’ll both pass on either side—so even if that bomb didn’t go off, it may have done its job. SPACEGUARD should have the ans
wer in a few hours. But if I were you, Sonny, I wouldn’t take any bets on it.”
46
FINALE
ON GOLIATH, AT LEAST, THE SUSPENSE DID NOT LAST FOR long. SPACEGUARD was able to report almost immediately that Kali 1—the slightly smaller fragment on which the ship was stranded—would miss Earth by a comfortable margin. Captain Singh received the news with relief rather than elation: it seemed only fair, after all that they had endured. True, the Universe knew nothing of fairness: but one could always hope.
Goliath’s orbit would be only slightly deflected as it raced past the Earth at several times escape velocity; then the ship and its little private world would continue to gain speed like a sun-grazing comet, dipping inside the orbit of Mercury at closest approach. The sheets of reflecting foil that Torin Fletcher was already assembling to form a giant tent would protect them from a heat load ten times that of a Saharan noon. As long as they kept their solar umbrella in good repair, they had nothing to fear except boredom: it would be more than three months before Hercules could catch up with them.
They were safe, and already belonged to History. But on Earth, no one knew whether History would continue: all that the SPACEGUARD computers could now guarantee was that Kali 2 would not make a direct impact on any major landmass. That was some reassurance: but not enough to prevent mass panics, thousands of suicides, and partial breakdowns of law and order. Only the swift assumption of dictatorial powers by the World Council prevented worse disasters.
The men and women aboard Goliath watched with concern and compassion, yet with a sense of detachment, almost as if they were looking at events that already belonged to the distant past. Whatever happened to Earth, they knew that they would presently go their separate ways on their various worlds—forever marked by memories of Kali.