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"Gentlemen, the President would not have listened to me no matter what I said.
He hoped for a sympathetic ear, and I tried to provide that, but I am as
adamantly opposed to his policy regarding the spacecraft as I imagine you are,
Mr....Mr...."
"What _do_ you recommend we do with the spacecraft? Should we destroy it?"
"I doubt that we could, actually."
"So you _do_ hold defeatist views "
Reuben trembled with excitement. _Washington, D.C._
He had enough money saved to go there. Big town, though. Where would Trevor
Hicks be in Washington, D.C.?
He listened closely, hoping to pick up clues. By the end of the show, he had a
fair idea where to begin.
The next morning, at dawn, Reuben stood in the door to his parents', his
father's, bedroom. His father stared at him from the bed, blinking at the
orange hall light behind his son's silhouette.
"I've got to leave now, Pop."
"So sudden?"
Reuben nodded. "It's important."
"Got a job?"
Reuben hesitated, then nodded again.
"You'll call?"
"Of course I'll call," Reuben said.
"You're my son, your momma's son, always. You remember that. Make us proud."
"Yes, sir." Reuben went to the bed and hugged his father and was surprised
again at how light and frail he seemed. Years past, his father had loomed a
muscled giant in Reuben's eyes.
"Good luck," his father said.
Reuben pulled the overcoat around him and stepped out into the early morning
frost, his boots crunching and slipping on the glazed steps. In one deep side
pocket, the metal spider lay curled tight as an untried puzzle. In the other
jingled two hundred dollars in change and bills.
"Good-bye, Momma," he whispered at the locked door.
36
The afternoon had been tiring and the early evening showed signs of being even
more strenuous. Samshow had already attended the public presentation of two
papers in rooms filled half with geologists and half with TV correspondents
and camera crews, ever hopeful of finding new revelations. What they got for
the most part were technical presentations on resources discovery, migration
of metallic ores in deep crust, and discussions of pinpointing Middle Eastern
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underground nuclear tests.
Samshow had left the last presentation and wandered into the spacious white-
tiled men's rest room of the St. Francis.
He glanced up at his image in the mirror. Two young men in business suits,
hair trimmed short, faces shaved so clean they might have been beardless
adolescents, took positions at the urinals.
"This oxygen reading bothers the hell out of me," said one.
"Not just you," said the other.
"There's no place for it to come from. Increase by one percent." He shook his
head as he zipped up. "More of that, and we'll all be drunk."
He rejoined Kemp and Post and they walked to the elevator, squeezing in beside
four bewildered elderly tourists and two middle-aged geologists dressed in
jeans and old sweaters. Arthur Gordon had arrived too late on Saturday to
attend their first scheduled meeting. He had invited them to come to his room
at seven, to talk and perhaps join him for late dinner after.
The hotel room was small. Post and Kemp sat on the bed, leaving the two guest
chairs for Samshow and Gordon. Arthur shook Samshow's hand firmly and offered
ice water. As he poured the glass in the bathroom, he asked, "Is there any
consensus on this object supposed to be burrowing through the crust?"
He returned and handed Samshow the glass.
"None," Post said. Samshow agreed with a small nod.
"Maybe there's no consensus, but nobody doubts that something's there," Kemp
said.
"Are you convinced your meteor sighting and the seismic traces are connected?"
Arthur asked Samshow.
"I suppose I am," Samshow replied. "The South American traces we predicted did
occur."
"And the object is still making noise."
"I talked with my company stations in Manila and Adak this morning," Kemp
said. "Still grumbling like an old bear."
"Are the sounds weakening at all?"
"We think so. Our measurements aren't so precise we can be sure at the
moment."
Post removed an electronic notepad from his pocket. "That's probably
deceleration because of drag."
"And the second object...?" Arthur prodded.
Somebody knocked at the door. "That's Sand, probably," Samshow said. Post got
up to open the door.
Sand came in clutching a thick bunch of computer printouts. "Naval Ocean
Systems just came through. I pulled these off the conference printer after
setting up a data link." He spread the sheets out on the table. "There's half
a dozen folks downstairs who can't wait to look these over, but since Mr.
Gordon made the arrangements, I thought he should be the first. I've also got
more on the oxygen figures, and Coomaraswami in Sri Lanka has distributed a
paper on..." He pulled a stack of copies from his briefcase and handed them
around the room. "On reduction of mean sea levels."
"Jesus," Samshow said. He took a copy and scanned it quickly. "Jesus H.
Christ."
Arthur hefted the printout and pursed his lips. "What about the second
object?" he asked again.
"Actually, that's shown..." Sand stood beside his chair and riffled through
the sheets. "Right here. Wave analysis of the microseisms. There are two
objects, orbiting around the center of the Earth within the mantle and the
inner and outer cores. They are slowing down at the rate of about one percent
a day..._and,_" Sand said, almost triumphantly, "the supercomputers at UCSD
have duplicated the effects using several different models. The best model
requires an object less than a few centimeters wide, very long hundreds of
meters long traveling at between two and three kilometers a second."
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"What in _hell_ would do that?" Samshow asked. [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]