leftovers, might be terrorists, might be Russian nationalists gone overboard, but it’s somebody out there.”
”But whatever it is, why…?” Shearson groped unsuccessfully for words.
Meeters looked at the tech in exasperation. “Think, Shearson-don’t you see what that is? I mean, what the hell else could it be? You said yourself you hadn’t seen anything like it since Chernobyl, and nobody builds power reactors in the middle of an oil field. Heat and radiation means that someone just cracked open a nuke and out there in the middle of nowhere that means a bomb, Shearson.” He jabbed a finger at the computer screen. “Someone’s hauling nuclear weapons around the arctic, and it’s nothing the Russians have told us about. Sure, we know they’ve got stuff they don’t tell us, selling goodies to the Third World, and we don’t like it but we live with it- but you don’t smuggle nukes from Russia to Iran or Pakistan across the fucking polar ice cap. Think a minute, Shearson-what’s straight across the ice cap from Siberia?”
”North America,” Shearson said. “But…”
”Damn right,” Meeters said, cutting him off. “We are! Maybe they’ve got missiles hidden out there, or maybe some damn fool’s hauling them over the pole by dogsled, I don’t know, but I do know that I, for one, don’t want any nukes coming into my neighborhood unannounced.”
”But, General, that’s crazy,” Shearson protested. “We aren’t giving the Russians a hard time. Why would anyone try to attack us now?”
”Why not?” Meeters said as he headed for the door. “You got a better explanation? Since when did being crazy mean it’s not happening?” He charged out of the room.
Shearson stared after him for a moment, then turned back to his console and began typing commands.
His hands shook as he typed.
General Emory Mavis, U.S. Army, frowned as he looked at the report Meeters had sent over.
Meeters thought it was a bunch of Russian crazies smuggling nukes over the pole; he didn’t see that any other explanation of the data was possible. Once upon a time Mavis might have thought so, too.
Now, though, Mavis took a broader view. He had learned that a whole slew of supposedly impossible things were possible after all. Unlikely, maybe, but possible.
That understanding was what had landed him his current position, one that existed off the books; officially he was retired. Unofficially he was, all by himself, a black-budget item, listed in what few records existed as “Esoteric Threat Assessment Capability.” Part of his job was to look at unlikely things and figure out just which unlikely possibility was fact. That was his specialty; that was why the White House kept him on call. That was why they’d called him off the golf course to look at this stuff.
Another part of his job was to advise the president on just what the hell to do about the esoteric threats that Mavis assessed, and if necessary to take charge and see that it got done.
Meeters thought it was a bunch of crazies smuggling nukes, but that was unlikely enough that the boys in the White House basement had gotten Mavis off the best run at the back nine he’d ever had at the Burning Tree Country Club to take a look at the report, apply his expertise, and come up with something to tell the president.
Heat and radiation in the middle of the Siberian wilderness-yes, Russian warheads were the obvious explanation, but were they the right one?
He reached for the phone on his desk, lifted the receiver, and tapped in a number.
When he heard someone pick up on the other end, before the other could start to speak, Mavis barked, “Mavis here. Get me Charles Westfield.”
He didn’t bother listening to the reply; he waited until he heard Westfield’s familiar voice say “Hello?”
”Dr. Westfield,” Mavis said. “I need to know what sort of heat and radiation you’d see if one of the Russians’ largest warheads cracked open. Fax me the figures ASAP.”
”Tonight?” Westfield said, startled.
”Now,” Mavis told him. “As soon as we’re done talking. You have the number?”
”I’m not sure…”
”Got a pen?”
Ten minutes later the fax machine whirred and began extruding paper.
Mavis looked at the numbers. He wasn’t a physicist himself, but he’d worked with enough of this sort of material to be able to make sense of what he saw.
It didn’t match what the satellites showed for Assyma. It wasn’t even close:
Mavis had expected that. Five minutes later he had Westfield on the phone again.
”You’re sure of these figures?” he asked.
”Yes,” Westfield said. No hesitation, no qualifications-just “yes.”
”Suppose a Russian nuke were damaged, enough to trigger a meltdown
…”
”Warheads don’t melt down,” Westfield interrupted. “You’ve got several times critical mass of highly enriched metal there-you put it together and it’s going to explode, not just melt into slag.”
”All right, it’s not a warhead, then,” Mavis said. “Let me fax you something, and you tell me what you make of it.” He pulled out the printout of the raw satellite data, before Shearson or Meeters had added any comments or interpretation, and fed it into the fax.
”It’s not a warhead, damaged or otherwise,” Westfield told him. “And it’s not a meltdown-too much heat, not enough neutron emission for a meltdown. Might be a low-yield burst of some kind-are there any seismic reports?”
”Good question,” Mavis replied.
It took hours and dozens of calls-to seismologists, CIA analysts, and several agencies that weren’t supposed to exist-before General Mavis was satisfied.
Whatever was out there in Siberia had appeared with a shock wave that fit the profile of a fair-sized meteorite impact rather than any sort of explosion-but if something big had fallen from the sky, there was no trace of its descent. It hadn’t shown up on the tracking radar that constantly scanned the skies all over Earth. The impact profile, working from seismographic records, indicated that the object had been traveling southeast at a fairly shallow angle when it hit; if it had been a meteor, then it should have been spotted on several radar screens.
The heat of impact should have dissipated fairly quickly, but that wasn’t what the infrared showed. The radiation profile didn’t fit a meteor, either.
The CIA didn’t have much to tell him about human activity; the technical stuff was comparatively easy to get and safe to pass along, while ground-level reports were risky. However, they said that a low-ranking officer had been rushed from Assyma to Moscow just hours ago, and was debriefed by several generals. Something was going on out there, all right but the CIA didn’t know what it was. They didn’t think the Russians knew exactly what was happening, either.
Mavis nodded as he considered that.
It all fit.
Something hot had fallen from the sky, something that hadn’t shown on radar, something that didn’t act like any sort of natural object, something that the Russians seemed as puzzled by as anyone…
A spaceship, Mavis thought.
He had dealt with spaceships before. It was something everyone kept quiet about, for several reasons, but Mavis knew about some previous visits by spaceships. None had been quite like this, though. Some parts of the profile matched, others didn’t.
Assuming that this time the ship hadn’t landed under its own power explained the mismatches perfectly.
All the other visitors had been the same species; Mavis wondered, as he looked over his own scribbled notes, whether perhaps Earth was their private preserve. Maybe there were cosmic NO TRESPASSING signs out there that kept away everyone else.
Whether there were signs or not, Mavis guessed that these were probably the same fellows, back again. And if that was the case, then Mavis knew who to call in to deal with them.
He reached for the phone.
