He was asleep. For a few seconds Gail stood in the doorway of the familiar bedroom, watching as he snored softly. To her surprise the place was clean. His clothes were neatly folded over a chair, and what she could see of him was scrubbed and clean shaven.
But his face was painfully thin.
She checked her watch: 10:30 A.M.
In the old days, he was up by six. It was an irritant she had learned to live with, as she ignored his puttering around until she later joined him for breakfast.
That was another life.
Letting him sleep, Gail left the bedroom and wandered into his office. Again total neatness, in contrast to the chaos of tapes, disks, books, and paper strewn about the room the day she left. He had two terminals going at the same time, she remembered, each hooked into a different data base, neither ever being turned off. She also remembered their bitter words, when he refused her request to use one of the terminals after her portable crashed while she was uploading to the network.
On the evening telecast of that day, she had to use someone else’s copy.
Now there was just the one terminal, turned off, the keyboard placed with mathematical precision in front of the screen.
“Gail?”
She turned. He stood in the doorway, blinking sleepily. “Hi, Freddy.”
He did not seem particularly surprised as he asked, “What are you doing here?” For all the expression in his voice, he could have been inquiring about the weather.
She shrugged. “I was worried. You won’t answer my messages.”
He nodded. “Give me a few minutes to do this and that, then we will talk.”
Gail watched as he went into the bathroom and closed the door. “This and that” was an expression from their intimate days, and her heart skipped a beat when he used it. On the other hand, neither of them had ever completely closed the bathroom door.
Guess there’s not much of the old magic left, Gail mused sadly, as she went into the kitchen and busied herself putting out fruit juice, milk and a couple of bowls of cereal.
When he came in, clad in a white shirt and slacks that once fitted but now hung on his scrawny frame like an older brother’s discards, the journalist had to force herself not to overreact. She simply commented, “You have lost weight.”
“I know.” He grinned. “Guess I had better start eating again.”
She went to the autochef and called up a preset program. It had not been changed. “Eggs, toast, and bacon just as you used to like them. OK?”
“OK,” Degruton agreed as he began to spoon up the cereal.
During the next half hour Gail did most of the talking while he ate and drank profusely. It was a chatty onesided conversation in which she described her new job at the network, the day she spent in the company of the Secretary General at the World Assembly Building, her new corner office on the 130th floor, and the delight of her parents when she introduced them to the cast of the eternally running soap,
Finally, he pushed himself away from the table. “Thank you.”
“For the food or the talk?”
“Both. But especially for the talk.” “In the trade, it’s known as verbal diarrhea.”
“In your case, that is like calling a rose a skunk cabbage. Gail, you are the only person I know who can make even a discussion of potato blight interesting.”
“Potato blight? When did—?” She took a deep breath. “Dammit Freddy, I am having the hardest time not discussing you!” She glared at him. “No, not just you. Us!”
Degruton reached over and patted her hand. “I know, and I apologize.”
But if she was gentle—
Instead, he said, “As much as anyone, you are the one to blame for the past few weeks.”
The letdown was so complete, she could only gasp. “Freddy!”
“After all, you did spend a lot of time and energy trying to get me to call off Dinoshift. So when we finally got home and found everything as it was supposed to be, I was tempted to make you eat your words.”
“But you didn’t.”
“Didn’t have the heart for it. Instead, I knocked myself out reviewing the whole project from conception to end. I did not know what I was looking for anymore than you knew what was wrong, but the further I got into it, the more I had a nasty feeling I was missing something fundamental; like not seeing the forest for the trees.”
Gail said helplessly, “Freddy, I don’t—”
He was remorseless. “Your instincts were right, of course. I did miss something. And it is because of my bloody stupidity, life for all of us—all of humanity—may become very precarious.”
Gail just stared at him. Physically, Degruton had lost a lot during the past few weeks. But his eyes were bright, and his words were those of a man who knew exactly what he was saying. She licked her lips. “What have you found that is so—” she fluttered her hands, “—devastating?”
He beckoned. “In my office.”
She followed him into the unusually neat room, and sat down as he tapped keys. He said over his shoulder, “We were looking for the killer asteroid. Right?”
She nodded. “And we found it.” “Meanwhile, the ship’s sensors were scanning the local region of space.”
Gail shrugged. “I learned enough while I was on board to know space is not as empty as it seems. The computer routinely plots the movement of every bit of cosmic flotsam within range, and alarms the bridge if anything is a potential threat.”
“Exactly. Not being particularly imaginative, the computer doesn’t give a damn what it detects, as long as whateveritis isn’t on a collision course with the ship. In fact, unless instructed otherwise, the computer even ignores any object which changes direction.”
“Like a ship, you mean.” Gail thought a moment, added, “Makes sense, I suppose. There are a lot of ships—” Her eyes widened. “But not sixty-six million years ago!”
“And even in our time, not above the ecliptic.” Degruton grinned. It was a peculiarly humorless expression. “You are almost ahead of me, dear.”
He pointed at the monitor. “See that trace? It was noted and recorded while we were determining the trajectory of the asteroid. Course approximately paralleling that of the rock, but separated from it by a couple of hundred thousand klicks. Now look at the trace from about the time Bertha exploded, and continuing until we time- shifted out of there.”
