25

 

 

November 1, Eastern Pacific Time

(November 2, USA)

 

Wait Samshow moved with a long-accustomed grace on the ladders of the Glomar Discoverer, sliding his hands along the rails as his feet pumped in a blur down the steps, stuffing his chin into his clavicle to remove his leather-brown, freckled, and sun-spotted bald pate from the path of passing bulkheads. Whatever effects of age dogged him on shore vanished; he was more spry at sea than on land. Samshow, a long-legged, narrow-faced bean pole of a man, had spent more than two thirds of his seventy-one years at sea, serving ten years in the Navy from 1942 to 1952, and then moving on to forty years of research in physical oceanography.

Deep in the ship's hold, spaced across an otherwise empty cargo bay, were his present crop of children: three upright, man-high, steel-gray cylindrical gravimeters measuring the gravity gradients of the trench ten thousand meters below. The Discoverer was on its sixth pass over the Ramapo Deep. The sea outside the hull was almost glassy, and the ship moved forward at a steady ten knots, as stable as bedrock, ideal for this kind of work. They could probably get accuracy to within plus or minus two milligals over the average of all six runs.

Samshow descended into the hold, his feet hitting the cork-covered steel deck lightly. His much younger partner, David Sand, smiled at him, face a corpselike green and purple in the glow of the color monitor. Samshow presented the covered aluminum plate he had carried down from the mess.

"What's the bill of fare?" Sand asked. He was half Samshow's age and almost half again his weight, strong and wide-faced, with eyes pale blue, a tiny Scots button of a nose, and a full head of wiry auburn hair. Samshow removed the plate's cover. Deep in the elder oceanographer's thoughts, Sand had become one of many sons; he treated younger assistants with the tough-minded affection he would have bestowed on his own child. Sand knew this, and appreciated it; in his entire career, he would probably have no better teacher, partner, or friend than Walt Samshow.

"Fried sole, spinach pie, and beets," Samshow said. The ship's Filipino cook took pride in his special Western meals, served twice a week.

Sand grimaced and shook his head. "That'll make me pretty heavy—might affect the results." Samshow set the plate down beside him and glanced at the gravimeters, spaced in a triangle in two corners and the middle of the opposite bulkhead.

"Wouldn't want to ruin an incredible evening," Sand murmured. He tapped a few keys intently, nodded at the display, and applied a fork to the beets.

"That good?"

"Damned near perfect," Sand said. "I'll eat and you can spell me in an hour."

"Your eyeballs are going to fall right out on the floor," Samshow warned.

"I'm young," Sand said. "I'll grow another pair."

Samshow grinned, returned to the ladder, and ascended through the maze of corridors and hatches to the deck. The Pacific lay around the ship as thick and slow as syrup, rippling iridescent silver and velvet black. The air was unusually dry and clear. From horizon to horizon the sky was filled with stars to within a few degrees of a fresh sliver of moon, a tiny thing lost in the yawn of night. Samshow rested his feet on the anchor chain near the bow and sighed in contentment. The week's work had been long and he was tired in a way he enjoyed, contented, deep in the mellowness brought on only by satisfactory results.

He glanced at his pocket navigator, tied in to a Navstar signal. The first approximation on the illuminated display read, >E142°32'10" N30°45'20"<, which put the Discoverer about 130 kilometers east of Toru Island. In four more hours, they would swing around again for a seventh pass.

He belched contentedly and began to whistle "String of Pearls."

Samshow had outlived one wife after thirty years of stormy, blissful marriage, the true love of his life, and now had two fine women who doted on him when he was ashore, about seven months out of the year. One was in La Jolia, a plump rich widow, and another was in Manila, a black-haired Filipina thirty years younger than he, distantly related to the long-gone and lamented President Magsaysay.

It was a warm, strange dry night, quiet and still, a night for deep thinking and old memories. He felt a sudden onslaught of laziness; the hell with science, the hell with perfect results and plus or minus two milligals. He'd rather be walking some beach watching breakers explode with phosphorescence. The feeling passed but left its mark; it was one of the few ways his body told him he was getting old. He turned and stepped over the chain, then froze, catching something odd in the upper half of his vision.

He jerked his head back. A tiny point of light arced rapidly from the north: a satellite, he thought—or a meteor. He could barely see it now. The point had almost lost itself among the stars when it suddenly brightened to blowtorch intensity, throwing two distinct flares southward at least three degrees. The flares lighted the entire sea in stark, eerie pewter, and then went out. The much dimmer object passed directly overhead. He made a mental note of the position—about four o'clock high— and was working on which constellation it had appeared in, when the object brightened again about twenty degrees farther south, much smaller, barely a pinprick. He had never seen a meteor like it—a real stunner, an on-again, off-again fireball.

"On the bridge! Heads up!" he yelled. "Hey! Everybody, look at this!"

The prick of light fell slowly enough to track easily. In a few minutes, it met the horizon and was gone, leaving tiny patches of green and red swimming in his vision.

Where it had struck, a column of water and steaming spray arose, barely visible in the moonlight, radiating a halo of cloud about ten degrees above the horizon.

"Jesus," Samshow said. He started for the bridge to ask if anyone else had seen it. Nobody had replied to his shout. He was halfway up the steps when a horrendous gonglike shudder rang through the ship. He paused, startled, and finished his climb to the bridge.

The first officer, an intense young Chinese named Chao, glanced at Samshow from the controls. The bridge and most instrumentation were illuminated in dull red, not to impair night vision. "Big storm coming," Chao said, pointing to the ship's status display screen. "Fast. Typhoon, waterspout. Don't know."

Four men leaped onto the bridge from three different hatches, and voices squawked on the intercom from around the ship.

"A meteor," Samshow explained. "Went down just like that, made a big spout about thirty kilometers due south."

Captain Reed, twenty years younger than Samshow but even more gray and grizzled, came onto the bridge from his cabin, nodded curtly, and gave him a dubious glance. "Mr. Chao, what is this coming?"

"Blow, Captain," Chao said. "Damn big storm. Coming fast." He pointed to the enhanced radar images. Clouds rushed at them in a blue and red scythe. The storm was already visible through the glass forward.

David Sand came from belowdecks huffing, red-faced, and swearing. "Wait, whatever that was, it's just screwed up everything. We have a—Jesus Christ!" He recovered from the sight of the approaching front and began swearing again, "it was going just fine, and now there's a jag on the graph."

"Jag?" Captain Reed asked.

"Extremely short wavelength anomaly. Deep decline, zero for an instant, then a slow increase—it's ruined! We'll have to recalibrate, maybe even send all three tubs back to Maryland."

The captain ordered the ship turned bow-on to face the storm. Warnings, whistles and shouts and electric bells, sounded all around the ship.

"What's happening?" Sand asked, concern finally replacing his anger.

"Meteor," Samshow said. "Big one."

The front hit seven minutes after Samshow saw the fireball strike the horizon.

The ship fell forward into canyonlike wave troughs, its bow knifing ten and fifteen meters into the black water, and then rode upward over the crests, the bow now pointing at the rain-lashed sky. Samshow and Sand tightly gripped rails mounted on the bridge bulkheads, grinning like fools, while the crew worked to control the ship and the Captain stared stonily forward.

"I've been through worse!" Samshow shouted at his partner over the roar.

"I haven't, I don't think," Sand shouted back.

"It's exhilarating. Something truly exotic—a real first. An observed large meteor fall in midocean, and its results. We'd better alert all coasts."

"Who's going to write the paper?"

"We'll do it together."

"I locked down the equipment after the anomaly. We'll have to make another run when this clears up."

The Discoverer, Samshow thought, would weather the storm easily enough. It was not going to be a long blow. When he was sure of this, as the violent rain and waves declined, he retired to his quarters to look up the facts and figures and equations he would need to understand what had just happened. Sand staggered down the stairs and corridors, stopping in Samshow's hatchway long enough to say he was going to check again on his blessed gravimeters.

The next day, when it was their turn to present the story by radio to the expedition's chiefs in La Jolla, they had still not sorted out their findings.

One thing puzzled them both immensely. All three gravimeters had registered the "jag" simultaneously. Shock had not caused the anomaly; the gravimeters had been designed to be carried aboard aircraft as well as ships, and could weather relatively rough treatment handily. Besides, the shock had occurred after the appearance of the spikes.

Sand put together a list of hypotheses, and revealed one candidly to Samshow when they were alone. "It's simple, really," he said in the galley over a late breakfast of corned-beef hash and butter-soaked wheat toast. "I made some calculations and compared the spikes on the three traces. The three tubs aren't really far enough apart to make the results authoritative, but I checked the digital record of each spike and found a very small time interval between them. I can explain the time interval in only one way. Doing a tidal analysis, and subtracting the ship's reaction as a gravitated object, the traces show an enormous mass, about a hundred million tons, traveling in an arc overhead."

"Coming from what direction?" Samshow asked casually.

"Due north, I think." 

"How far away?"

"Anywhere from a hundred to two hundred kilometers."

Samshow considered that for a moment. Whatever the fireball had been, it had been far too small to mass at anything like a hundred tons, much less a hundred million. It would have spread the Pacific out like coffee in a cup if it had been a mountain-sized meteoroid. "All right," he said. "We ignore it. It's an official anomaly."

"On all three gravimeters?" Sand asked, grinning damnably.

 

 

PERSPECTIVE

 

NBC National News Commentator Agnes Under,

November 2, 1996:

The newest twist in a very twisted election year, the arrival of visitors from space, almost defies imagination. United States citizens, recent polls show, are in a state of rigid disbelief.

The Australian extraterrestrials have arrived on Earth too soon, some pundits have said; we aren't ready for them, and we cannot begin to comprehend what they might mean to us.

Presidential candidate Beryl Cooper and her running mate, Edgar Farb, have been on the offensive, charging that President Crockerman is hiding information provided by the Australians, and questioning whether in fact the United States is not behind the destruction—some say self-destruction—of the robot representatives in the Great Victoria Desert.

The American people are not impressed with these charges. How many of us, I wonder, have fixed any emotional or rational response at all? The scandal of the destruction of the extraterrestrials refuses to spread; the Australian government's accusations of American complicity have been practically ignored around the world.

We have lived our lives on a globe undisturbed by outside forces, and now we are forced to expand our scale of thinking enormously. Western liberal tradition has encouraged an inward-turning, self-critical kind of politics, conservative in the true sense of the word, and President Crockerman is the heir to this tradition. The more forward-looking, expansive politics of Cooper and Farb have not yet struck a chord with Americans, if we are to believe the recent NBC poll, which gives Crockerman a rock-steady 30 percent lead just three days before voters go to the polls. This, without the President issuing any statements or making any policy regarding the Great Victoria Desert incidents.