Odyssey Read online

  Hutch looked at Maureen, wondering what she would see during her lifetime. Maybe, if Amy’s father had his way, she’d watch the government shut down the interstellar effort. He was right, of course, to worry about the home world. But it didn’t have to be a choice between staving off the greenhouse or continuing deep-space expansion.

  FTL was not pork. Maybe it was time for the Academy to adopt a new motto.

  “Bathroom, Mommy,” said Maureen.

  LATER THEY TOURED the station’s maintenance section and looked at engines. But Amy wasn’t all that interested, so they went back up to the main concourse while the senator’s daughter talked about where she’d go if she had command of the Peifer. “Out to Betelgeuse,” she said. “And to a black hole.” She grinned. “I’d love to see a black hole.”

  “There aren’t any close enough to reach,” said Hutch, wondering if you really could see a black hole. That was a flight she’d like to make herself.

  “And I’d love to see some of the monuments.”

  At first Hutch didn’t put it together. Then she realized Amy was talking about the enigmatic creations left scattered around the local stars thousands of years ago by the inhabitants of Beta Pac III. The Monument-Makers. “There’s one on Iapetus,” she said.

  Amy was holding Maureen’s hand. “I know.”

  Maureen’s attention had gone elsewhere. “Over there, Mommy,” she said, pointing at Big Bang Burgers.

  Hutch looked at Amy. “Hungry?”

  “I could eat,” she said.

  They started across, but had to give way while a pair of preoccupied middle-aged types, a man and a woman, hurried past. They were shaking their heads, both talking at once. Hutch tried to listen, but the only phrase she caught was “—How this could happen—”

  They disappeared around the curve of the mall. She took the girls into the Big Bang and both ordered more than they could eat. Shortly after the food arrived, hamburgers, salads, and french fries, Hutch saw John Carter hurry past. Carter had gone through life listening to jokes about his name. At the moment, he was carrying on an animated conversation with his commlink, and he looked tense. Carter worked with the station operations group, which was responsible for scheduling departures and arrivals. They were not connected with the Academy team, which coordinated and tracked missions.

  “What’s wrong, Hutch?” asked Amy. There was a tremor in her voice.

  “Nothing, Amy,” she said. “Why do you ask?”

  “You look worried.”

  The tables in Big Bang Burgers were almost filled. Through one of the viewports, the Milky Way was visible, far brighter than it ever appeared from the ground. Hutch’s mother claimed never to have seen it. Too much glare. Hutch herself rarely noticed it in the sky over Washington.

  Somebody else charged past. Two of them. Going the other way. What was happening? She opened her link to Mission Ops. One of the watch officers, a woman, replied. “Mason.”

  “This is Hutchins,” she said. “What’s going on?”

  Mason sounded relieved. “If you’d called a couple minutes ago, ma’am, I’d have told you maybe the end of the world.”

  THE ACADEMY’S OPERATIONS center was located down one level from the main concourse. Peter Arnold was on duty. Three or four technicians were grouped around him. They were staring at one another. Nobody was saying anything. “How big was the asteroid?” Hutch asked.

  Peter looked simultaneously relieved, embarrassed, grateful. Like a man who’d just walked out of a building and seen it explode behind him. “I do think,” he said, “somebody’s looking out for us.”

  “Big,” said one of the technicians.

  “Where?”

  “Just passed us. Came within two thousand klicks.”

  Maureen didn’t understand what he was saying, of course, but she caught the tone and squeezed against her mother. “Are you serious, Peter?”

  “Do I look as if I’m kidding?”

  “We never saw it coming?”

  “Somebody in McCusker’s looked out and saw it as it passed.” McCusker’s was one of the dining areas. Peter took a deep breath. “I heard you were here.” Then he noticed Maureen and Amy and managed a smile. “Yours?”

  “The little one.”

  He said hello, and Amy asked whether they had any pictures of the asteroid.

  “Let me play it for you.” He spoke to the AI and one of the monitors came on. The asteroid was a flattened, potato-shaped object, tumbling slowly, end over end. The long blue arc of the Earth merged into the picture.

  “How big?” Hutch asked.

  “Four kilometers. Over four. They’re telling us it would have been lights out for everybody. If it had gone down.” The object was growing smaller. The Earth dropped gradually away. “That’s taken from one of the imagers here, on the station.”

  “I can’t believe we never saw it coming,” said Amy. She looked at Hutch for an explanation.

  Had it hit, Hutch knew, it would have thrown substantial amounts of debris into the atmosphere. Winter would have set in. Frigid, desperate, permanent. Unending. An infant born that day, and enduring for a normal span of years, would not have lived long enough to see the freeze end.

  She opened a channel to station operations. “This is Priscilla Hutchins. May I speak with François, please?” That was François Deshaies, the director.

  “Wait one, Ms. Hutchins.”

  She turned back to Peter. “Let the commissioner know.”

  “Okay.”

  She heard François’s voice. “Hutch. I assume you’re calling about the rock.”

  “Yes. Any more out there? Sometimes these things travel in packs.”

  “We’ve been looking. Don’t see anything.”

  “Okay. François, how much warning did we have?”

  “We didn’t see it until the last minute.” He sounded uncomfortable. “We didn’t know whether it was going to hit or not until it had passed. C’est embarrassant.”

  “Could have been worse.”

  “Priscilla, I must go. We are getting traffic.”

  Peter was whispering into his link, watching her, and saying yes to somebody. Finally, he signaled her. “He wants to talk to you.”

  She switched over. “Hello, Michael.”

  “It’s getting a lot of play,” he said.

  “I’m not surprised.”

  “How come we didn’t know about it before time?”

  She wanted to say he should ask his buddy Senator Taylor. “The old Skywatch program was shut down years ago.”

  “Skywatch? What the hell’s that?”

  “It was a few dozen independent astronomers who tracked Earth-crossers. But the Congress cut off their funds, so now they’re down to a handful of volunteers.”

  “Hell, I don’t care about that. What about our operations people?”

  “It’s not the Academy’s responsibility, Michael. It’s not what we do. Technically, it’s up to the station.”

  “That’s not going to sound like a very good answer when the questions start coming. Which I’m waiting for now.”

  “Michael, we don’t even have sensing equipment. We ride along on the gear that Union uses. And now that I think of it, it’s not their job either. They track flights. In and out. And that’s all they do.”

  “Well,” he said, “there’s going to be hell to pay. Asquith out.”

  She smiled at that last one. Asquith out. As if he’d ever been in.

  AS ARRANGED, SENATOR Taylor, with two security types, was waiting for them at Reagan, in the reception area. He collected his daughter and asked whether she’d enjoyed herself.

  “Yes, Dad,” she said. “We were on board the Peifer.”

  “Good.” He looked at Hutch with an expression that suggested weariness. “You had an exciting day up there.”

  “You mean with the asteroid?”

  “Yes.”

  “It was a near thing,” she said.

  “It’s ridiculous, Hutch. All
the money we spend and look what happens.”

  “We need to spend it a little more intelligently, Senator. Fund the Earth-crosser program. It’s nickels and dimes.”

  “We have telescopes all over the world. And satellites. You name it. And nobody sees this thing coming?”

  “You need something specifically dedicated to the task. A lot of—”

  He put up a hand. “It’s okay. I hear you.” He told Maureen how pretty she looked. Looked at the child while he spoke to Hutch. “Thanks,” he said. “I appreciate your doing this.”

  “You’re welcome. It was a pleasure to have Amy along.”

  Amy looked from Hutch to her father. She seemed hesitant. “If you and Maureen go up again sometime,” she said, “I’d love to go with you.”

  “You’re on,” said Hutch.

  One of Taylor’s security people took Amy in tow, and they headed for the exit.

  LIBRARY ENTRY

  The world narrowly averted a cataclysm today when a giant asteroid passed within less than a thousand kilometers. It is the closest known approach in historic times. Those who are expert in such things tell us the result, had it crashed, would have been global catastrophe.

  The aspect of this event that is most troubling is that, given a reasonable advance warning, turning it aside would have been quite simple. But for reasons that are as yet unclear, the people manning the sensors and telescopes at Union never even saw it coming. The word is that they noticed the killer rock only moments before it would have impacted.

  How close did it come?

  It skimmed across the atmosphere. It could not have been closer. It was rather like having a bullet part our hair.

  So who’s responsible? You can bet there’ll be an investigation. And somebody needs very much to be hung out to dry. The only real question at the moment: Who?

  —Moises Kawoila,

  Los Angeles Keep, Saturday, February 21

  BEEMER SHOULD GET MAXIMUM

  The unprovoked attack on a local clergyman should be dealt with severely. Violent crime has been on the rise during recent years. It is time to get serious with these thugs. The Henry Beemer incident is particularly outrageous. Beemer doesn’t even have the justification that the assault occurred during a robbery. In this case, it was simply a mindless act, intended to inflict harm on an innocent man of the cloth. Nothing less than the maximum sentence is called for.

  —Derby (North Carolina) Star

  chapter 11

  The term congressional hearing is an oxymoron. No congressional hearing is ever called to gather information. Rather, it is an exercise designed strictly for posturing, by people who have already made up their minds, looking for ammunition to support their positions.

  —Gregory MacAllister, “I’ve Got Mine”

  It was never possible to determine who first saw the asteroid. The guy in the restaurant had been first to report it to the operations center. But he said a young boy pointed it out to him. Two technicians working on a solar observatory in high Earth orbit at about the same time called their supervisor when they noticed a star moving through the sky. A group participating in an outdoor prayer service in Lisbon claimed to have seen the object and watched it for two minutes before it disappeared over the horizon.

  Several calls were made to the Central Observation Group, and within seconds tracking devices in orbit and telescopes in northern Spain and the Caucasus broke off their current schedules and swung toward the object.

  Word flashed around the world. The ultimate near miss. Close enough, in the words of the director of the Anglo-Australian Observatory at Epping, “to leave a few singed tail feathers.”

  By the end of the day, scientists were being interviewed on all the talk shows. While they disagreed on the level of risk posed by Earth-crossers, they were unanimous in predicting that eventually one of the rocks would hit. There was a lot of talk about dinosaurs. The headline on The Guardian summed it up:

  IT’S JUST A MATTER OF TIME

  Experts explained that there was really no need to be concerned about such objects because we had the capability to divert or destroy them. “But somebody,” said the CEO of Quality Systems, Inc., “needs to let us know it’s coming.”

  “So why didn’t we see it?” Tor asked Hutch that evening, as they sat in their living room while Maureen played with a toy train.

  “The Newhouse administration eliminated funding for the Skywatch program almost twenty years ago,” she said. “Attempts to revive it keep getting scuttled, most recently with help from our good friend Senator Taylor. We’ve had a tracking program, off and on, using volunteers and private funding. But we need a more substantive effort. The odds against getting hit in any one president’s administration are so astronomical”—she said it with a straight face—“that nobody takes it seriously. It’s frustrating. All they have to do is pay a few people to watch the damned things. It would cost pocket change. But they can’t be bothered.”

  Tor was a big guy, even-tempered, quiet, easygoing. When Hutch got frustrated and came home in a rage—as she periodically did—because of bureaucratic shortsightedness and mismanagement, he was always there, suggesting they head out to dinner, get a couple of drinks at Barbie’s, and maybe spend the night at the theater. (There was a local repertory company that was quite good. Tor frequently talked about trying out for a part, but he wouldn’t do it unless she agreed to audition also. Hutch, though, was inclined to stage fright. “I’ll do it,” she said, “if I can play a corpse. Or carry a flag, or something. I don’t want any speaking parts.”)

  The frustration came with the territory, she told herself. She’d accepted the directorate and all that went with it. Still, when someone like Harry Everett came in and told her she was betraying her old comrades, the people who made the Academy work, it hurt. She hadn’t told Tor about that conversation. Wasn’t sure why. It might have been there was some truth to the charges.

  “So what are you going to do?” he asked.

  An image of the asteroid floated in the center of the room. It was part of a newscast, but they’d turned the sound down. “Maybe we got a piece of luck,” she said.

  He followed her gaze. “The asteroid?”

  “It should remind people why they have to have an off-Earth capability. There are other big rocks out there.”

  “Maybe you should get Samuels to call a press conference Monday. Talk about it a little bit.” Maureen pulled her train through the room and out onto the porch. It was supposed to be a glide train, but it only rose off the ground when you put it on the magnetic track. That was too much trouble.

  SHE SPENT SUNDAY with Maureen and Tor, but had a hard time thinking about anything other than the asteroid. Monday morning, as she flew toward the Academy in her taxi, she looked down at the Virginia forests and thought of the vast distances she had traveled and how sterile the universe was. So few places could function as home to a tree. Humans took vegetation, and the biosystem as a whole, for granted. A forest seemed like the most natural thing in the world. Provide a patch of earth, some sunlight and water, and voilà, you got trees. But you needed other things that weren’t so readily apparent. A regular orbit. A stable sun. Lots of distance between you and other celestial objects. It was not the sort of thing that would occur to you if you didn’t get much beyond Virginia.

  But anyone who’d gone out on the superluminals had a different mind-set. Robert Heinlein, back in the twentieth century, had gotten it right: the cool, green hills of Earth. What a treasure they are. Once you got off-world, the nearest forest was on Terranova, orbiting 36 Ophiuchi. Nineteen light-years away. How long would it take her taxi, cruising lazily through the gray early-morning mist, to cover nineteen light-years?

  It dropped her at the rooftop terminal, and she strolled down to her office on the main floor, happy that the world was still intact, sobered by the thought of what might have happened. The Heffernan passengers were safe, the asteroid had missed, and all was well.

  Or s
o it seemed until Marla wished her good morning in the voice she reserved to indicate something was happening.

  “What?” asked Hutch.

  “The commissioner wants you to keep your schedule clear this morning. He’s going to want to see you.”

  “Did he say when?”

  “No. ‘Later.’”

  “Did he say what about?”

  “No, ma’am.”

  A smarter executive than Asquith would be summoning her to bestow congratulations on the recovery of the Heffernan, well done, join me later for lunch, I’m buying. But generally you only heard from Michael when there was a problem.

  She poured herself a cup of coffee and switched on the newsnets. There were Abdul and his partners being welcomed at Union, handshakes and smiles all around. There, in the middle of her office, was the Heffernan, gray and black, its eagle markings illuminated by its rescuer’s navigation lights. It was a satisfying moment. There was more heat to come, of course, but she could tolerate that. What she wouldn’t have been able to handle was the knowledge someone had died because she hadn’t stood her ground.

  “It’s hard to believe, Gordon,” said a female voice-over, “that the Heffernan was right here in the solar system and they never realized it.”

  The solar system is a big place, lady.

  “I suspect,” said Gordon, “there are some red faces over at the Academy. Which brings us to the near miss we had yesterday. How could they not notice a rock that big? Four kilometers long.” The asteroid appeared to Gordon’s right, rotating slowly. It was nickel-iron, he reported, a relic from the formation of the solar system. Billions of years old.

  “Nickel-iron,” said the woman, “means it would have made a bigger splash when it hit than simply a rock asteroid.”

  She switched over to Worldwide, which had climatologist Joachim Miller talking about the Antarctic ice pack. “It’s melting fast, and it could slide into the sea at any time,” he said. “If it does, look for the ocean levels around the world to rise a hundred-seventy feet.”