theHand’ s bridge and his gaze seemed to find Ritser Brughel.
“Congratulations, Ritser. You are well placed. Rita tells me you have already achieved a close synch with the ground nets. We have some good news of our own. The Accord Intelligence chief is visiting Southmost. Her opposite number in the Kindred is already there. Short of accidents, things should be peaceful for a while more.”
Nau sounded so sincere and well-meaning. The amazing thing was that Ritser Brughel was almost as smooth: “Yes, sir. I’m setting up for the announcement and network takeover in—” He paused, as if checking his schedule. “—in fifty-one Ksec.”
Of course, Nau didn’t reply immediately. The signal from theHand had to be bounced out of radio shadow to a relay and then across five light-seconds of space to L1. Any reply would take at least another five seconds coming the other way.
Sharp on ten seconds, Nau smiled. “Excellent. We’ll set the pacing here so everybody will be fresh when the workload spikes. Good luck to all of you down there, Ritser. We’re depending on you.”
There were a couple more rounds in their dance of deception; then Nau was gone. Brughel confirmed that all comm was local. “The go codes should come down any time, Mr. Phuong.” Brughel grinned. “Another twenty Ksec, and we fry some Spiders.”
Shepry Tripper gaped at the radar display. “It’s—it’s just like you said. Eighty-eight minutes, and there it is coming out of the north again!”
Shepry knew plenty of math and had worked for Nethering almost a year. He certainly understood the principles of satellite flight. But like most people, he still boggled at the notion of “a rock that gets thrown up and never comes down.” The cobblie would chortle delight when some comsat came trucking over the horizon at the time and azimuth that the math had predicted.
What Nethering had done tonight was a prediction of a different order, and he was just as awed as his assistant—and a whole lot more frightened. They had had only two or three clear radar bearings on the narrow end of the aurora. The thing had been decelerating even though it was well outside of the atmosphere. The Air Defense site at Princeton had not been impressed by his report. Nethering had a long-term relationship with those people, but tonight they treated him like a stranger, their autoresponse thanking him for his information and assuring that the matter was being taken care of. The world network was full of rumors of a high-altitude nuke. But this had been no bomb. Departing southward, it had appeared to be in low orbit… and now it was coming back from the north, right on schedule.
“Do you think we’ll be able to see it this time, sir? It’s gonna pass almost right over us.”
“I don’t know. We don’t have any scope that can slew fast enough to track it overhead.” He started back toward the stairs. “Maybe we could use the ten-inch.”
“Yeah!” Shepry raced around him—
“Button your breather! Watch the power cords!”
—and was out of sight, banging up the stairs.
But the little cobblie was right! There were fewer than two minutes until the object was directly overhead, then a couple more before it was gone again. Huh. Maybe not even time for the scope. Nethering paused, grabbed a widefield 4-ocular from his desk. Then he was running up the stairs after Tripper.
Topside, there was a faint breeze, a cold that bit like tarant fangs, even through his electric leggings. The sun would rise in about seventy minutes; dim though its light was, the best part of his observing time would be gone. For once it just didn’t matter. Serendipity was up from the good cold earth this night.
There was at most a minute until the mystery came overhead. It should be well above the horizon now, gliding southward toward them. Nethering moved around the curved wall of the main dome, and stared into the north. From the equipment closet ahead of him, he heard Shepry struggling with the ten-inch, the little scope they showed the tourists. He should be helping the child, but there was really no time.
Familiar starfields extended crystal clear down to the horizon. That clarity was, for Obret Nethering, what made this little island truly paradise. There should be a fleck of reflected sunlight rising slowly across the sky. It would be very faint; the dead sun was such a pale thing. Nethering stared and stared, straining for the slightest motion-triggered gleam…. Nothing. Maybe he should have stuck with the radar, maybe right now they were missing their one chance to get really good data. Shepry had the ten-inch out of the closet now. He was struggling to get it aligned. “Help me, sir!”
They both had guessed wrong. Serendipity might be an angel, but she was a fickle one. Obret turned back to Shepry, a little ashamed for ignoring him. Of course, he was still watching the sky, the swath just short of the zenith where there should be a tiny speck of light. A bite of blackness flickered across the glowing pile of the Robber’s Cluster. A bite of blackness. Something… huge.
All dignity forgotten, Nethering fell on his side, brought the 4-ocular up to his lesser eyes. But tonight it was all he had…. He turned slowly, tracking along his guess at a sky-path, praying he could recapture his target.
“Sir? What is it?”
“Shepry, look up… just look up.”
The cobblie was silent for a second. “Oh!”
Obret Nethering wasn’t listening. He had thething in the 4-ocs field and all his attention was on keeping up with it, on seeing and remembering. And what he saw was an absence of light, a silhouette that raced across the galactic swath of star clouds. It was almost a quarter of a degree across. In the gap between star clouds it was invisible again… and then he saw it for another second. Nethering almost had a sense of the shape of it: a squat cylinder, downward-pointing, with a hint of complexity sticking out amidships.
Amidships.
The rest of its track crossed lonely starfields down to the southern horizon. Nethering tried in vain to follow it all the way. If it hadn’t been for its crossing the Robber’s Cluster, he might not have latched on to it at all.Thank you, Serendipity!
He lowered the 4-ocs and stood. “We’ll keep watch a few more minutes.” What other junk might be flying along with the thing?
“Oh, please, let me go below and put this on the net!” said the cobblie. “More than ninety miles up, and so big I could see its shape. It must be half a mile long!”
“Okay. Go ahead.”
Shepry disappeared down the stairs. Three minutes passed. Four. There was a glint sliding across the southern horizon, most likely a Low-Comm S satellite. Nethering pocketed his 4-ocs and climbed slowly down the stairs. This time, Air Defense would have to listen to him. A good part of Nethering’s contract money came from Accord Intelligence; he knew about the floater satellites the Kindred had recently begun launching.This is not oneof ours, and not one of the Kindred’s. And all our warfare is reduced to pettysquabbling by this arrival. The world had been so close to nuclear war. And now… what? He remembered how old Underhill had gone on about the “deepness in the sky.” But angels should come from the good cold earth, never from the empty sky.
Shepry met him at the bottom of the stairs. “It’s no good, sir. I can’t—”
“The link to the mainland is down?”
“No. It’s up. But Air Defense brushed me off just like they did on the first pass.”
“Maybe they already know.”
Shepry jerked his hands in agitation. “Maybe. But something perved is happening on the gossips, too. The last few days, crank postings have pounded the ceiling. You know, end-of-the-world claims, snow-troll sightings. It’s been kind of a laugh; I even did some counter-crapping of my own. But tonight the cranks have totally pounced.” Shepry paused, seemed to run out of jargon. Suddenly he looked very young and uncertain. “It’s… it’s not natural, sir. I found two postings that described just what we saw. That’s about what you’d expect for something that just happened over midocean. But they’re lost in all crazy crap.”
Hmm. Nethering walked across the room, settled down on his old perch beside the control bays. Shepry fidgeted back and forth, waiting for some judgment.When I first came to the observatory, the controls covered threewalls, instruments and levers, almost all analog. Now most of the gear was tiny, digital, precise. Sometimes he joked with Shepry, asking him whether they should really trust anything they couldn’t see the guts of. Shepry had never understood his lack of faith in computer automation. Until tonight.
“You know, Shepry, maybe we should make some phone calls.”
