caught a lot of people and bugged them a while ago-the same way I was, remember? So they could use the people as spies? But we’ve located most of those people and debugged them. The Scarecrows haven’t done anything aggressive since then, not even their submarines.”
I frowned. “How did you know they had subs on Earth?”
“Figured it out, Dan. All the bugged people turned out to have been at sea. The only Scarecrow object from the scout ship landed in the sea. Had to be. Only,” she said without pleasure, “the damn things aren’t easy to find. Every navy in the world’s been looking. No luck. There was this one Turkish destroyer that thought it had one and depth-bombed it, only it turned out to be an Italian submarine. But nobody ever actually saw one-well, until you brought us yours, I mean. We don’t even know how many of the things there are-probably at least a dozen-“
“Twenty-six,” I said. “Twenty-five besides the one I brought in.”
“Oh,” she said, dampened. “Well, if you’ve got some way of locating them, probably they could be depth- bombed for real.”
I stared at her. “Are you crazy? The subs aren’t the problem. The Belov-The Scarecrow are the problem! They can wipe us out any time they like!”
She gave me a strangely indulgent look. “Not really, Dan. We know what they’re capable of. Dopey told us. What he said,” she went on, sounding a lot like a mother telling her two-year-old that there aren’t really any monsters under the bed, “was that the Scarecrows could tweak a big near-Earth-passing asteroid out of its orbit and dump it on the Earth and kill us all that way. You know. Like the old KT event that killed the dinosaurs. Well, that’s what Threat Watch is all about, Dan. You don’t know what Threat Watch is, though, do you? It’s what’s been keeping us busy at the Observatory; I was working there, keeping track of all the findings, when they called me about you. Every decent telescope in the world is searching for objects with orbits that can come anywhere near us. We’ve mapped just about everything bigger than a panel truck for ten or twelve AU in every direction, whether they’re asteroids or comets or can’t-tell-which. I promise there’s absolutely nothing big that’s in an orbit that can come anywhere near hitting us for a minimum of two years. And there isn’t any tweaking going on, either. Threat Watch hasn’t found a single object that shows any signs of interference with its ballistic orbit.”
I wasn’t willing to be convinced. “All right, but that isn’t the only weapon they’ve got, Patrice. They’ve turned some suns into novas-“
She was smiling tolerantly at me. “Our sun, Dan? You’re not much of an astrophysicist, are you? Can’t happen. Our sun isn’t that kind of star.”
She seemed so confident. I stared at her. “You’re sure?”
“As sure as I can be. No, the asteroid impact is the only scenario that makes sense, and trust me, we’ve definitely got at least two years grace on that one, Dan. Every observatory’s computer models agree on that.”
Two years. I thought about two years for a bit. It was a lot better than no margin at all, but I couldn’t help asking, “And then?”
She gave my hand a reassuring pat. “Ah, by then we’ll be ready for them, Dan. There are big new spaceships building all over the world. Fighters. High-mass ships with plenty of delta-V. And weapons!”
I frowned. “So if the Scarecrows nudge an asteroid, we’ll nudge it back?”
“Better than that, Dan. We’re going to go after the poppa. I said ‘fighters’; we’ve located the Scarecrows’ scout ship, and when we’re ready we’ll go out and blow the damn thing up. Then we’ll nudge any asteroid that looks like trouble out of the way.” She gave my arm a friendly squeeze. “It’s okay, Dan. Honest. We haven’t just been sitting still and waiting for the bomb to hit. We’ll be ready when the time comes.”
So that was good news, right? If Patrice was correct, and she sounded really sure of herself, the human race wasn’t just going to let itself be taken over or wiped out without a fight-exactly as I had boasted to Pirraghiz and Beert. But the funny thing was that it didn’t feel as good as it ought to. I mean, to me personally. What it felt like was that I’d been filling myself full of magnolious notions of coming back a hero to save the world, and it wasn’t looking that way at all. The damn situation seemed to be saving itself just fine without me.
While all that was soaking in I felt the chopper change course. A minute later the pilot got on the horn. “Folks,” he said, his voice sounding peculiarly amused, “we’re only a couple of I minutes from the Camp Smolley landing pad, but they’ve told us we have to orbit for a while. There seems to be some tricky traffic ahead of us. Matter of fact, if you look out of your left-hand windows, you can probably see it as we turn.”
We did look, and boy, we saw it, all right. I’d never seen anything like it in my life. It was a giant blimp-copter, shaped like an immense fat sausage, its red and green lights blinking, and it was settling down toward the earth.
I don’t mean I’d never seen blimp-copters before. Actually I’d even been in one, years earlier, when we were retrieving some wreckage for evidence from a bombed-out survivalist compound. This one was a whole lot bigger. In the early dawn light it looked like an airborne ocean liner, and the funniest part was that slung under it was some other large thing that was shrouded in tarpaulins. It took me a moment to figure it out, but then I sucked in my breath. “My God,” I whispered. “That’s my submarine!”
Up ahead Hilda was complaining furiously to the pilot because the way her life-support box was strapped down, she couldn’t turn and look out. I didn’t blame her. It was something to see.
The blimp-copter pilot seemed to be pretty good at his job. Slowly his whirly blades pulled the big bag down, jockeying this way and that, a meter or two at a time, until his load was resting on a wheeled metal cradle between two low buildings. Then the aircraft sat there without moving for two or three minutes. Nothing seemed to be happening, except that the envelope of the big sausage wrinkled and shrank a little, almost invisibly.
If I hadn’t seen a blimp-copter in action before, I wouldn’t have known what was going on, but I was able to explain it to Patrice, who had loosened her seat belt and leaned over me to get a better look. “He’s pumping some of the helium back into the high-pressure tanks to cut the lift,” I said into her ear. “Otherwise he wouldn’t have neutral buoyancy when he lets go of the load, and the rotors couldn’t handle it.”
“Wow,” she said, craning her neck. She was practically in my lap. It had been a long time since I had had so much woman so close, so warm and smelling so good. I put my hand on her shoulder-to steady her-and she turned her head to look quizzically up at me.
I thought-no, I still think-that what had crossed her mind just then was something about kissing. It certainly crossed mine. Kissing Pat Adcock had been a dream, yearned for most thoroughly for a long time, and now our lips were not much more than twenty centimeters apart.
They didn’t get any closer. She didn’t move any nearer and neither did I. She was Pat Adcock, all right, but she
