THE ROVER CAME over the hill to the north, kicking up a cloud of ice particles as it sped down the slope. At any other time, Bandicut would have been terrified by the sight of the robot driving his buggy that way, hanging off the side like a remora fish, the buggy slewing to come straight toward him before braking to a stop. Now, he was simply too numb to care.
"John Bandicut, survey strips Three A through Five B are completed. What further needs do you have?" Napoleon squawked, raising itself up on the cowling of the rover as Bandicut climbed back in. It looked as though it were trying to peer into the driver's compartment to see what he was planning to do next.
/Charlie?/ he asked, buckling himself in.
/// Place your hand on the robot, please. ///
Bandicut reached out and touched Napoleon. He found the gesture oddly calming, like petting a dog. /Are we releasing it now?/
/// Yes.
Recon Thirty-nine,
terminate and delete special programming Beta.
Confirm. ///
"Termination confirmed," squawked the robot. "John Bandicut, do you have further needs?"
"Ah . . . negative, Nappy. Go ahead and take up your regular station, I guess."
As the robot unjacked and let itself back down onto the moon's surface, Bandicut suddenly realized that, according to his work orders, he was to stay out here for three more hours before returning to base. He didn't think he could stand to wait that long. /Charlie, if that's really true, about the comet—/
/// It is. ///
/—then we've got to get back! Do you have all the orbital data? Is that what all that gibberish was, from the translator?/
/// Some of it.
And yes, I can give you the figures,
but they're a complex interaction.
I'll be able to show you better in the VR room. ///
/Never mind showing me. Can you show the people who can do something about it?/
/// John—remember?
There's only one person
who can do something about it.
And that's you. ///
Bandicut swallowed, his blood rushing. /Charlie, what can I do? We've got to notify somebody!/
/// We've been through this before.
Your planet has no defense.
Not against this. ///
Bandicut had trouble catching his breath. /No, but—what about—fusion warheads—?/ He was clenching and unclenching his fists. Napoleon was looking back at him from the top of the knoll.
/// Perhaps you should start driving.
I'm afraid, John, that warheads are not the answer.
It is likely they would only split the comet,
and make its effects all the more devastating. ///
/But we should at least warn people,/ Bandicut whispered.
/// Please start driving.
Your people would not believe a warning from us.
The comet is behind the sun, hidden
from the only stations that might confirm its orbit.
Please start driving. ///
Bandicut snapped the joystick forward, and the buggy lurched ahead, wheels churning on nitrogen ice. "Exo-op control, Unit Echo," he croaked, pressing the long-range comm. "I'm coming in early. This ankle cast is killing me. Copy?"
"COPY, ECHO. HI, BANDIE. SHALL I ALERT, AH, ANYONE IN PARTICULAR?" answered the cheerful voice of Georgia Patwell.
Bandicut sighed. "Negative, control. See you soon." At least he was grateful for Dr. Switzer's casual treatment. If he hadn't had an excuse to come in early, he would have gone crazy for the next three hours.
He thought, actually, that he might go crazy anyway.
*
/// Don't forget the daughter-stones. ///
/Eh?/ An image flickered, and he remembered the three points of light from the translator flying to him and dropping into his suit pocket. /What was that, anyway?/ he asked, driving into the hangar area.
/// Daughter components of the translator.
They're essential for what we have to do.
Keep them with you at all times. ///
/Uh, okay./ Rolling to a stop, he secured the buggy and hurried inside. After dressing, he reached into the suit outer pocket to find three small, translucent stones. They looked like glass marbles, one obsidian, one ruby red, one glittering white. He thought he saw a faint sparkle of light glowing within the white one, but it died immediately, and there was no other sign that they were anything other than glass stones. /What should I do with them?/ he asked, rolling them in the palm of his hand. He immediately envisioned dropping them and watching them disappear under various immovable objects.
/// They'll stay in your pocket
if you direct your thoughts to them,
asking them to.
I'll tell you more about them later.
Let's go. ///
Bandicut shrugged and dropped the stones into his pocket. Then he grabbed a terminal to submit his field report, and called Switzer's office to say that he wanted the cast taken off. He was told to come by in two hours. Perfect. He headed straight for the lounge.
Locking himself into a VR room, he switched on a solar-system realtime program and perched on a stool, surrounded by a panoply of stars, with a glowing sun floating in space some distance away. At Charlie's request, he put on a neurojack headset and adjusted the controls until all nine of the planets were enlarged enough for their features to be recognizable in the dark interplanetary gulf—the outer planets with their cloud-bands and rings, Mars a rusty pebble, Earth a blue-and-white gem. He dimmed the stars, so that they hung in the background like an infinite tapestry, while allowing him to see clearly the movements of the planets.
/// Splendid.
The translator can make do with raw numbers.
But this makes it much easier to visualize,
doesn't it? ///
/I guess so. What exactly are we visualizing?/
/// In a manner of speaking . . . EineySteiney pool.
I'm downloading the orbital data now.
Waiting for the VR program to process it . . . ///
EineySteiney pool? Bandicut thought.
/// There we go.
First I want you to see the orbits of
the planets and all significant tracked objects
as they were several years ago.
This is based upon the information
we took from your library. ///
The image dimmed; the planets shifted positions in their orbits as the program made the time-based adjustments, and there was a momentary blurring of the myriad of tiny points of light that represented known asteroids, comets, and satellites. When everything became clear again, the overall picture looked much the same.
/// Now—I want you to see the gaps
in your routine observations,
based upon the locations of your
telescope and radar stations
which would be tracking the movements
of small bodies. ///
The holoimage was suddenly crisscrossed with swaths of soft illumination, emanating from various points on the Moon, Mars, Ceres, and several other stations. Some of the swaths were moving. A significant portion of the solar system remained in shadow, however—more than half the sky.
/// A century or two ago,
Earth-based amateurs might have spotted the danger.
That was before air and light pollution
made it impossible.
Now let's subtract the coverage
from two solar-orbiting sats
that are no longer being monitored. ///
/Wait,/ Bandicut protested, as two swaths of light blinked off at locations a third of the way around the sun from Earth. /Are those sats really out of service?/
/// As far as I know, they're still functioning.
But their transmissions have been turned off.
Because of budget cuts,
no one was analyzing the data. ///
/Well, damn it—/
/// I'm just laying out the facts.
Now, look here— ///
Bandicut watched, as the quarx rearranged the solar system. Everything blurred, then stabilized. A small pointer winked on and tracked a tiny point of light as it drifted through the dark emptiness far outside the orbit of Pluto. /What's that?/
/// That's your planet's nemesis,
a dark comet as it was some years ago,
orbiting in the Kuiper Belt.
I'm going to give you brief snapshots
of its movements since then. ///
The image changed, in shifting freeze-frames, as the planets spun around the sun, the nearer planets moving quickly and the outer planets swinging with ponderous slowness.
/// As you can see,
it has passed through observation swaths
several times.
It has never been named,
but its presence is recorded in your astronomers'
compressed databases, as one among thousands
of extremely faint transitory objects
whose orbits have never been calculated.
If its orbit had been derived,
it would have been listed as safe.
Indeed, here it floats
at the edge of interstellar space,
bothering no one. ///
/So where's the problem?/ Bandicut stirred restlessly.
The image changed, and zoomed across the solar system to bring that one comet's movements into closer relief. Bandicut felt his heart skip a beat as the comet's course seemed to bend inward suddenly, then a little later, bend inward again. He watched nervously as it fell toward the sun, across the solar system. /What's happening? What diverted it?/
/// Its companions out here . . . ///
A pointer blinked momentarily at several other points of light, jumping from one to the next.
/// The chaotic movement
of half a billion bodies, John.
I've compressed the effect here,
because it would take hours to show you
all the tiny changes to its orbit
over the millennia.
Our data become more uncertain
the farther back we go,
but our projections right now are quite clear.
Even if your people had been watching,
they could not have predicted
these course changes.
You have not yet mastered the necessary nuances
of dynamical chaos. ///
Bandicut bristled. /But your translator has?/
/// Yes. ///
Bandicut grunted. /But are you saying that all of this is just a projection? You don't have actual observations?/
/// We have verified the first part of the prediction,
from your most recent databases.
Earth has not noticed the course change,
but it has occurred,
and the data are there in your libraries. ///
/So they could find it from that, after all,/ Bandicut said hopefully.
/// No.
At the time of these observations,
the orbit was still innocuous.
It had not yet passed close to Uranus. ///
He watched as the point of light zoomed inward, toward the gaseous green planet, represented here as a grape-sized ball of light. The object's course bent sharply as it passed through Uranus' gravity well and spun out again, toward the sun.
/// There's the slingshot. ///
/I'm sure they would have seen that!/
/// Afraid not.
That passage occurred while Uranus was
out of observation.
See?
It's in the shadows.
And the only active Uranus probes
were looking the other way.
We checked. ///
Bandicut swallowed nervously. It all made sense, if the image here were accurate. /But how did you see it, then?/
/// We didn't.
This is a projection,
based upon the earlier data.
But it's a good projection.
John, I've never known the translator to miss
—not even once—
on its orbital projections.
You could say it's a sort of specialty. ///
Bandicut cleared his throat. He wanted to believe the quarx, but all of this was making him very uneasy. /So . . . when do we see it again?/
/// Earth-based observations
won't catch it until a few weeks before contact.
Now look at this— ///
The comet sped inward through the patchwork of observation swaths, neatly missing all but the very edge of one field of view. Bandicut had to admit that the chances of its being noticed at that point were slim, at best.
/// It wasn't noticed.
We're still in past tense, here.
But there was one data point
dismissed as noise
that was consistent with our projections. ///
/Still—if we told them where to look for it—/
/// It's too late for that, John.
And even if it weren't,
you know,
we'd still have this little problem
of credibility. ///
/What problem?/
He heard a sigh, and felt something strange, and was aware that the quarx was doing something through the VR neurolink. /Charlie, you still there?/
"Right here," said a voice in front of him. A hologram blinked on: a bizarre-looking creature wielding a teacher's pointer. It looked vaguely like a dinosaur, with a knobby head and bent-looking fins running down its back.
"What the fr'deekin' hell is that supposed to be?"
"An alien presence," rumbled the monster. "I searched the records for an indication of how your fellow humans might view me, if they believed in my existence at all. According to your VR library, this is typical of what humans conjure up in their minds when they think of aliens." The quarx-dinosaur turned awkwardly. "This representation is called Godzilla. Now tell me—do you think your people would listen to a warning about impending disaster from—"
Bandicut shook his head angrily. "Stop, Charlie! Is this a serious discussion?"
"Very," said the lizard.
"Then conjure up another image. Look human, for Chrissake. We would not transmit a message from some goddamn antique monster holo."
"Okay, but do you understand what I'm saying?" The reptile blurred and vanished. A man's image appeared, a salt-and-pepper-haired, vaguely jovial, grandfatherly figure. It was probably an image of some actor, or American president—but thankfully, Bandicut didn't recognize the face. The human gestured with the same pointer. "Can we . . . talk like this?" he rumbled throatily.
"Yes," Bandicut said tensely.
"Good." Charlie turned and pointed to the image of the comet, now plunging slowly, it seemed, toward the sun. "Okay, then. Let's assume your astronomical union caught a glimpse of this before it disappeared behind the sun. Even then, they couldn't have established its orbit with certainty, and if they had, they wouldn't have thought it a danger."
"Why not?"
"Because there's a final change that will be occurring, very soon, with the comet behind the sun." The Charlie-image rapped its pointer in the palm of its hand. "The translator has predicted a solar flare which is occurring now on the far side of the sun. That's been confirmed by sat readings. That flare is affecting the solar wind and radiation through which the comet is passing. That will be causing propulsive outgassing of vapors as the comet passes close to the sun. This projection was made by analyzing course-change behaviors already observed, in conjunction with certain mathematical chaos-functions which are not in your scientific lexicon."
"Charlie—?"
"I understand your feelings. But I'm not bullshitting you, as your people might say. The translator has predicted it, using functions which your astronomers would not understand and would not believe."
Bandicut glared. "If these functions are so useful, how about explaining them to me!"
The quarx-human turned up his hands. "John, I can't explain the math. But I can show you a few of the metaphase-space projections." He gestured, and a graphics window opened in one corner of the solar system. Within it, complex three-dimensional attractor patterns twisted and circled.
"That's helpful. Let's see . . . I'd say it looks like a serpent on heavy drugs, sewing a button on a cape," Bandicut responded sardonically.
"Well, it's a temporal-probability path of the comet, mapping tumbling characteristics and derived analysis of the thing's physical structure, based upon known data and a complex stacked array of behavior patterns, cross-correlated with the projections of solar activity."
"Charlie—"
"The thing is, all of these apparently random factors are not really random; they're just chaotic—extremely sensitive to tiny changes. This form of chaos analysis uses a lot of minute detail—but it also uses patterns and metapatterns, and derives still deeper patterns from those. The truth is, John, your language doesn't have all the words necessary to explain it. It comes perilously close to—well, I have often wondered if it is not so much predicting the future as viewing it. The translator denies this, but—" The quarx-human shook his head.
Bandicut stared at the alien, and felt very much like a dumb animal. He hated the feeling.
Clearing his throat, Charlie turned to look soberly back at him. "Anyway, this is the kind of thing on which the translator just doesn't miss. It really doesn't. It's been doing this sort of thing for about a billion years."
Bandicut gestured noncommittally. "Okay. The translator doesn't miss. But they still might spot it coming around the other side."
"They might, indeed." Charlie nodded vigorously. He turned and sped up the image. "I'm sure they will, in fact. But too late. There are only forty-seven days left, John. Forty-seven days. The thing is in a fast, highly elongated orbit. Here, look." He pointed to Earth. "I've programmed in everything Earth has that could conceivably reach the comet and change its course. The comet will start blinking when it's too close for the best course change to be good enough. Watch."
"I'm watching," Bandicut said in irritation.
The comet emerged close to the sun, arcing toward Earth's orbit. An armada of ships began to climb out of Earth's gravity well, curving toward the sun. The fleet was barely a fourth of the way from Earth to the comet when the comet began blinking.
"This is an optimistic assessment," Charlie said, as the blinking point of light continued closing with Earth. "The ships just aren't fast enough—and they don't have the clout we need. The best they could do is change the point on Earth where the impact will occur." The comet and Earth converged, and there was a flash. "Boom." Charlie threw up his hands.
Bandicut didn't say anything for a moment. He had no idea what to say.
"How bad would it be, you're wondering?" the quarx-human said. "History is littered with end-of-the-world scares, after all—right?" Bandicut didn't answer. The quarx was reading his thoughts accurately. "So how do we know this isn't just another false alarm?" Charlie gazed at him. "Think of the dinosaurs. Think of nuclear winter. That comet is about seven kilometers across—almost as large as the one that turned the dinosaurs into fossils. If it hits the Earth at that speed, it will explode with a thousand times more energy than all of the nuclear weapons ever amassed on Earth going off together."
"But—"
"Think of so much dust and soot in the atmosphere that photosynthesis ceases—and all food-bearing crops die out. Then think of war."
"You can't know this," Bandicut insisted.
The quarx-human shrugged sadly. "Forty-seven days. I know it's difficult for you to hear. And your reservations are correct, in the sense that all of humanity will not necessarily become extinct. There will no doubt be pockets of survivors, including those off-planet. But Earth's population will be drastically reduced. Probably by ninety percent or more."
Bandicut was swaying dangerously on the stool. He stood, stumping slowly around the solar system, trying to get a handle on the situation. "So . . . I seem to recall that you . . . had a plan?" He cocked his head. A feeling of extreme surrealism was coming over him, almost but not quite like silence-fugue. "Isn't that what you said?" he asked. There was no reason to be angry at the quarx, he thought. But it made no difference; he was angry.
Charlie nodded stiffly. "That's what this is all about, John. That's why we're going to have to—" he hesitated "—steal a ship."
Bandicut stared at him for a breathless instant, then barked a laugh. "I'm glad you have a sense of humor, Charlie, I'm glad you have a sense of humor. Because that's about the most inane thing I've ever heard in my life." He shuddered to silence, because he knew that this Charlie didn't have a sense of humor like that. "What do you . . . really . . . have in mind?"
The quarx-human stepped toward him. "We have to steal a ship, John," he said softly. "We have to steal it, and go out there and stop that comet from hitting Earth."
Bandicut swayed dizzily and wondered if he was getting enough oxygen. Was he still underground in the cavern, dreaming all this? He took a long, deep breath. "That's ridiculous," he said finally. "You just showed me how ships from Earth couldn't possibly get there in time. And we're about a hundred times farther away than any of them."
"True," Charlie agreed.
Bandicut erupted angrily. "So you claim you have these wonderful orbit projections, but you don't even know that someone out here at fucking Neptune, even if he could somehow steal a ship that could make it that far, couldn't possibly reach the inner solar system in time. That's just—"
"The others don't have the translator," Charlie interrupted calmly.
Bandicut clamped his teeth shut. "What?"
"They don't have the translator."
"That's your fr'deekin' answer?"
"That's my answer," said the wide-eyed hologram. "The translator can do what your ships can't."
Bandicut sat speechless, staring at the unblinking alien.