A few hours later Chadwick had another long conversation with Pierre. When that was over he said to Egg, 'In about four hours, when the moon is over Washington, Pierre will teach the Americans a lesson they'll never forget.'
'He's a friend of all mankind,' Egg murmured.
'Eggs must be broken—'
'Ah, for the lunar omelet.'
'They will thank him someday. Few revolutions are bloodless.'
'Nor conquests, as I recall.'
'The people of the earth must learn to obey, for their own good. Fear will teach them that lesson.'
'Let's hear it for fear,' Egg muttered, but Chadwick apparently decided that he had argued enough and ignored the remark. As he floated away he unconsciously adjusted the fanny pack.
Two hours later Egg was the only one in the saucer awake. The sleeping men were suspended in makeshift hammocks, which merely kept them from floating into something — or each other — while they slept.
As Egg sat staring at Newton Chadwick, he realized that Chadwick had forgotten to snap his fanny pack in place on his last visit to the head. He could clearly see the snap, and it was unlatched. A portion of the pack hung through a gap in the hammock netting that held the sleeping man.
It appeared one could merely pull the pack another few inches though that hole and open it.
If the deed were done quietly enough, Egg mused, perhaps Chadwick wouldn't awaken.
Rn> and Charley missed the president's speech. They were too busy supervising the installation of the water bladders and checking for leaks. A leak on the ground would be a gusher under four Gs of acceleration. Going to the moon waist deep in water didn't seem like a good idea.
When they had the new bladder tanks full and all their gear stowed, Charley and Rip shook hands with the air force personnel and climbed aboard. Outside the hangar, the moon had risen just as night fell. This was the night of the full moon.
Charley and Rip both found themselves taking long looks at the moon as the saucer sat bathed in moonlight outside the hangar while Charley programmed the flight computer.
Six minutes after Rip closed the hatch, the saucer rose from the earth on a cone of white-hot fire. The fireball appeared like a rising sun to many on the south side of the metropolitan area.
The president was packing papers in the Oval Office— which was probably going to go up in a cloud of splinters in just a few hours — when the saucer's deep roar rattled the windows and chandeliers of the executive mansion. He stood frozen, listening intently, until the noise of the saucer had faded completely. Then he smiled.
When they had completed the lunar orbit inser-tion burn and were coasting on course for the moon, Rip checked the plumbing for leaks. It was difficult moving in and out of the tight spaces when weightless. He felt like a worm crawling around the pipes and pumps. Finally he wiggled clear and reported to Charley, who was still sitting in the pilot's seat working with the flight computer.
'Everything is dry,' he said.
When he reached her and got a look at her face, the grim-ness he saw surprised him. 'Charley…'
'Pierre is going to trash Washington,' she said bitterly.
'He was going to do that sooner or later. You know that.'
She finished with the computer and sat staring at the moon, which was well off to her left.
'How far do you think these antiprotons will travel in a vacuum?' she asked Rip.
He glanced at her. She was staring at the moon. 'I don't know,' he said. 'Want to try an experiment?'
'Why not,' she muttered, and turned the saucer so that the moon was directly in front of them.
'We don't even know how fast the antiprotons go,' Rip said. 'So we don't know whether it will take seconds or minutes or hours for them to get there. The chance of a hit is mighty small.'
'Infinitesimal,' Charley agreed.
The crosshairs of the optical sight had appeared on the canopy as she spoke. She looked to see where the lines intersected, then directed the computer to fine-tune the saucer's position, which moved the crosshairs slightly. Of course, they were so thick that at this distance the junction covered miles of the moon's surface.
The lunar base was… there, on the edge of that sea, to the south of that mountain range, which could only be seen at this great distance as a fine shadow line.
The small light appeared on the sight. The antimatter weapon was discharging.
She tweaked the crosshairs in the direction the moon was traveling in space as the weapon continued to fire a stream of antiprotons into the vacuum.
After thirty seconds, when the crosshairs were on the edge of the lunar orb, she stopped the discharge.
'Well,' Rip said, his disappointment audible, 'that was a nonevent. It's not like I expected the moon to blow up, but still…'
'Sort of like tossing a pebble into the Atlantic,' Charley said, and sighed. She was still thinking of those spaceplanes. She rubbed her face.
'I'm so tired,' she murmured, and unfastened her seat belt. Rip reached for her, and she floated into his arms.
Traveling at half the speed of light, the antimat-ter particles shot through the vacuum of space, across the empty two-hundred-thousand-mile gulf that separated the coasting saucer and the moon. As they did they dispersed slightly, so by the time the particles reached the moon they fell like rain across a ten-mile swath of the lunar surface.
Still moving at half of the speed of light, each particle shot through the dust and rock of the lunar surface until it encountered a proton speeding in its orbit around an atom's nucleus. When they collided, the two particles spontaneously obliterated each other, releasing a colossal burst of energy. Sometimes the detonation took place with inches of the surface; sometimes, depending on the density of the material, it happened much deeper, at a depth of several feet.
Although each explosion was quite large in relation to the size of the particles involved, the particles were indeed very small, so the explosions resembled large firecracker detonations.
The vast majority of the particles fell across the empty wasteland, and no living thing was there to witness their self-destruction. The wave marched across the lunar surface, and by sheer chance, one edge of it crossed the French lunar base. Most of the antimatter particles detonated harmlessly, although one did pass through a solar power cell. It met its opposite particle six inches deep in the rock underneath, and the shards of rock blasted upward by the explosion destroyed the power cell. Since there were hundreds of power cells, the loss of one was undetected by the voltage-monitoring equipment.
Those two dozen antimatter particles that impacted the soil over the lunar base met their positrons in the rock, before they reached the caverns underneath, and the explosions rocked the base. Dust fell from the overhead; people felt the triphammer concussions, which triggered the seismic and air-pressure-loss alarms. As alarms clanged throughout the base, people dove frantically for their space suits, just in case.
Two of the particles penetrated the cover above the anti-gravity beam generator and telescope. One detonated a foot deep in the rock floor, showering the room with dust and bits of rock, while creating a nasty small crater. The other went off simultaneously six inches under the surface; the resulting explosion severed a data cable between the telescope and the main computer.
Julie and Pierre Artois and Claudine Courbet were at the console, inputting the coordinates for the major buildings they planned to pulverize in Washington, D.C., during the next hour. They looked around wildly, trying to understand what was happening, as the gong and wail of the alarms sounded even while the debris slowly settled from the explosions.
'What was that?' Pierre demanded.
No one answered. When it became clear that the base wasn't losing air, and the alarms had been reset and were once again silent, he and Julie and Claudine took stock. That was when they discovered that the telescope was inoperative. Seconds later Claudine found the severed cable.
'A meteor shower,' Pierre said dismissively. All his life he had minimized difficulties and then plowed his way through.
