The Medusa Chronicles (6 page)

“Which hasn't actually flown yet,” Seth pointed out.

“Right,” Mo said. “And even with a Saturn V, even with just a single bomb, we can't slow down. All we could manage is a flyby—a fast intercept.”

Sheridan rubbed his chin. “Well, that could still work, if you hit the thing with ten nukes at once, fire off ten Saturn Vs. Couldn't it?”

Seth said, “We don't have ten launch pads—”

“We could build more. Money won't be an object, believe me.”

“We haven't got ten Saturns either. I think we'll only have—what, five, six?—built by June of '68 when that thing hits.”

“We can build more Saturns—”

“It won't work,” Mo insisted. “A high-speed flyby in formation, a simultaneous detonation—it's just too damn complicated.
Even if
we build the Saturns and the pads. The best we can do is to fire them off in sequence, every few days, have them sail past the rock, and set off their nukes one by one.”

Sheridan snapped, “And what use is that? You just said a hundred-­megaton warhead is too small to destroy the thing.”

“So we don't destroy it.” Mo looked at Seth. “We deflect it.”

“Deflect?”

“Think about it. Set the bomb off at the moment of closest approach, just above the surface.”

Seth stared at him. “My God. Yes. But how much delta-V would that buy you?”

“Depends on how far out we can go to meet the thing . . .”

*  *  *  *

It took them ten minutes of scrawled figuring at the board. Seth was vaguely aware of Sheridan wisely sitting back and keeping his mouth shut.

Finally they turned to face him. “Okay,” Mo said heavily. “Probably some MIT Brainiac will second-guess all this, but we think we can do it. How much push you'd get from a nuke would depend on how close you could get to the rock, and the nature of the surface and so forth.”

“Also,” Seth said, “the further out from Earth you meet the rock the better, because the less deflection you need to achieve to shove this thing aside. The systems in Apollo-Saturn have a sixty-day limit, which means we can't reach Icarus at all before it comes within twenty million miles—”

Sheridan cut through that. “How many detonations do you need?” he snapped.

Mo and Seth shared a look. Then Mo said, “Maybe just one could do it. One hundred-meg. Just possibly. But maybe not, and besides a single nuke could fail. We should send up a whole string of the things—”

“And we'd need some kind of monitoring probes to measure the deflection—”

Sheridan slammed his briefcase shut. “I've heard enough. God damn it, gentlemen, you may or may not have saved the world, but you sure as hell have saved my ass. I'm calling the President.”

He bustled out, taking the briefcase.

Mo stared at Seth. “Well, Tonto, now we've done it.”

“What if we're wrong?” Seth glanced at the blackboard. “If we screwed the pooch . . .”

“
That
would be worse than the world coming to an end. But hey, it would all be over soon enough.” He grinned. “Eat, drink and be merry, Tonto.”

But Seth didn't feel like joking. Mo was a bachelor. Seth, suddenly, could only see the faces of his little boys.

*  *  *  *

“But despite all the efforts I and others have spent in building up NASA and all its facilities, America is not the world's only spacefaring power.
Perhaps we can do this alone, but every man is stronger with a partner at his side. That's why I am calling on our Soviet counterparts to come to the table in trust and friendship, so that, in a combined project under the leadership of Senator Kennedy, your experts and ours can work out how best to pool our resources to achieve this monumental goal . . .”

Twenty-four hours on from a Sunday Seth Springer had expected to spend on a sailing boat, here he was not yards from Lyndon Baines Johnson himself at his presidential podium, with New York Senator Robert Kennedy at his side, and Administrator Webb, George Lee Sheridan and two goofing-off astronauts behind him.

Mo grinned and whispered, “LBJ, LBJ, how many kids did you save today?”

Seth shushed him. “Those TV lights, though. Johnson doesn't even look like he's sweating.”

“That's make-up for you,” Sheridan murmured. “Believe me, he's sweating on the inside. He doesn't want to be the president who failed to stop the end of the world. On the other hand he's not going to stand again in '68, you know. And who is his most likely successor for the Democrat nomination?”

“Bobby Kennedy,” Mo breathed. “Whose guts LBJ hates. And who he just named as his Icarus czar.”

“LBJ! What a guy! With one bound he's taking credit for establishing NASA, which is now going to save the world, he's defusing the Cold War by inviting the Russians to join in,
and
he's making sure his most realistic successor for the presidency is going to spend the next year staring at rocket equations instead of campaigning.”

Now the President had finished speaking, and faced a clamour of questions from the floor.

Sheridan put his heavy arms around the astronauts' shoulders. “So that's that. Now let's get out of here and go find Deke Slayton. I got another assignment for you two . . .”

TWO

ADAM

2107–2199

8

There was a game he liked to play, every time the medics brought him back to consciousness. Could he tell where he was, just from the nerve signals reaching his brain?

Earth was easy. If he woke up sensing a one-gravity pull, it could only be one place in the solar system. There were other places with close-enough gravitational pulls—the surface of Venus, the outer atmospheric layers of Saturn—but there were certainly no cybernetic surgical clinics there. Of course, he had rarely been back to Earth itself since that decades-ago drama on the
Sam Shore
. Times had changed; the public mood now tended to regard him as a disturbing relic from the past, and when he was in the vicinity of his home world he felt a lot more comfortable staying in the elderly elegance of Port Van Allen, a thousand kilometres out in space. And, with time, Hope Dhoni had acknowledged the growing prejudice and transferred the supervision of Falcon's treatment and recovery to a medical facility at Aristarchus Base, on the surface of the Moon. But even that had not lasted long before Hope felt obliged to move her entire clinic and team out to the burgeoning human settlement on Ceres.

So, was he on the asteroid now? The gravitational pull was certainly too low for Earth or Moon, but not weak enough for Ceres. Titan, perhaps?
There were settlements on Saturn's moon, certainly, but that chill satellite was an unnecessarily cumbersome setting for a clinic. Callisto, moon of Jupiter? A moon with a significant and permanent human presence—the largest in Jovian space aside from Ganymede—lying safely outside the giant planet's radiation belts. There was a scientific facility there, at Tomarsuk Station; Hope had mentioned it, for her daughter was there, studying the biochemistry of the subsurface ocean. But no, this felt weaker even than Callisto. Somewhere else again—further out still . . . ?

“Howard? Can you hear me? It's Hope. I've just reconnected your auditory and vocal circuits. See if you can respond.”

“You're coming through loud and clear.”

“How do you feel?”

“Confused. Adrift. In other words, same as usual.”

“That's helpful. Were you dreaming?”

He had been, he realised. “Just remembering a day I made a snowman. Or tried to.”

Falcon heard the clatter of a keyboard, the beep of a stylus. “I'm going to switch on your vision in a moment. If you're able, lock onto my face.”

“You make me sound like a weapons system.”

There was an intrusion of brightness, formless and white. Soon shapes and colours coalesced, and Falcon heard the whirr of focusing elements and the click of filters as his vision optimised to the environment.

A room took shape around him, all clean geometries, walls and ceilings a grid of white tiles. A window was off to one side, just a rectangle of darkness. Around him were various surgical devices, robots sheathed in sterile transparent covers, looking as if they were fresh from the showroom. Doctor Hope Dhoni stood a little closer than the machines, dressed in a green surgical smock, a sterile cap on her head, mask hanging limply from the straps around her neck, her gloved hands clasped before her. She was “standing,” but he was sure now that the ambient gravity was much less than a tenth of a gee. The young nurse who had cared for him at Luke Air Force Base was in her sixties now, and any cosmetic intervention had been graceful; her expression seemed as gentle as it had ever been.

“I see you, Hope. You look well. Not a day older.”

“If that's not flattery your imaging system needs adjusting.”

“How long did you keep me under this time?”

He didn't spend much time around humans these days, but he was still capable of recognising her smile. “How long do you think?”

He still had no firm idea of where he was, nor of the immediate circum­stances leading up to the surgery. “Feels longer than last time. Months, rather than days or weeks.”

“Make it a couple of years.”

“Years!”

“It sounds worse than it was. We ran into some complications, it's true. In doubt, we always prefer to back off and consider our options. You're too valuable to risk a mistake.”

“So I just lie there on the slab while you organise an academic conference to decide where to cut next?”

“If I told you that was alarmingly close to the truth, would it upset you? There were some good papers, actually. Better safe than sorry, Howard—that's always the motto. And besides, there have been some political problems. The risk was low. We kept you cool, slowed your cellular metabolism down as far as it would go.”

Cautiously he shifted his point of view to take in as much of himself as his position allowed. He found he was speaking to her from an angled position, like a patient raised up in a bed. But there was no bed. He had come around—been switched back on, to be precise about it—in a heavy-duty cradle, a metal framework supporting his mechanical anatomy. A cradle that might have been used to move spacecraft parts around a clean-room. Looking down, he surveyed the armoured cylinder that now sufficed for his life-support system: a bronze cylinder, replacing the old golden-­statuette edition, narrower from front to back, and somewhat sleeker in design, with a definite taper from the top to the bottom.

Things were coming back to him, at last. Memories of pre-operative briefings, long discussions with Hope and her team. Falcon had sat through hours of it, watching the doctors argue over images and schematics of his
insides. Falcon was no physician, he did not pretend to understand the planned medical work, but the machinery was more his field. His support systems had been subjected to a complete redesign, improving not only their reliability but also expanding the range of conditions that Falcon could easily tolerate. The new cylinder, being more compact, would allow Falcon to squeeze into the smaller, nimbler spacecraft of the mid twenty-­second century. Its internal fusor was of the latest design, and would not need replacing for many decades. And so on. Along with that overhaul, some of the living parts that he still carried with him had been eliminated, their functions supplanted by smaller, more robust and efficient machines.

His wheeled undercarriage had yet to be reattached to the base of the cylinder, and he knew a range of new ambulatory systems had been designed too, to be swapped in as desired. But, he saw, his new arms were already in place—more powerful, more dextrous than those they replaced.

“May I?” he asked, flexing a hand experimentally.

“Go ahead.”

He swept his hand before his face, marvelling at the complexity and precision of joints and actuators. “I used to impress Geoff Webster with card tricks. I almost wish there were a fly in here. I could impress you by snatching it out of the air.”

“No flies on Makemake, Howard.”

He looked at her for a moment, wondering if he had heard correctly. “Makemake!” A dwarf planet: a ball of ice in the Kuiper Belt, far from the sun. “Well, that explains the gravity. Let me guess: about one thirtieth Earth normal?”

“One twenty-eighth, so they tell me, not that I'd ever know the difference. That ability of yours is starting to worry me—no one should be
that
good at proprioception.”

“I have no recollection of coming here.”

“You were already under. There was no point waking you. But Make­make wasn't where we meant to operate. Ceres was the original suggestion, remember?”

His memories were becoming clearer by the second. “I even remember the approach and docking. So what happened?”

“There've been more political changes since you went under, starting on Earth, but spreading out into the wider solar system. There's a new . . .” She searched for the right words. “Social conservatism. A deepening backlash against certain trends in advanced cybernetics.”

“By which you mean me. Well, they've been suspicious of me for decades.”

“It's a lot more extreme than before. You know we'd already had to move your care to Ceres. There were moves to block further surgery on you altogether: petitions to the World Government, vetoes in the Security Council. Not long after we put you under, Ceres started to come under pressure to suspend our surgical foundation. They've trade links to Mars, and Mars is one of the greatest strongholds of the new conservatism, aside from Earth itself. The psychology is interesting, actually, and complex.”

“Oh, good.”

“I think perhaps Earth folk are clinging to an indigenous nature that they nearly lost, while the Martians are hanging on to their own humanity in an utterly inhuman environment . . . Fortunately for us, Makemake stepped in. They were willing to provide an alternative facility here at Trujillo Base.”

“Nice of them.”

“This lab is brand new—even the best facilities on Ceres can't compare to what they've got here. There's a lot in it for the colonists here as well. You're exactly the prestige commission they needed to prove their competence. And as it happens, Makemake has turned out to be a good choice for an entirely different reason.”

“Which is?”

“We're on the edge of the Kuiper Belt, Howard. Apparently there's a problem out there which the various government agencies would like you to look into.”

“Government agencies that, given the public mood, would no doubt prefer to see the back of me?”

“Just because you're a headache to them in some ways, doesn't mean you aren't useful in others.”

“And they wonder why people are cynical about politicians. All right. Give it to me straight. Who's got themselves into trouble they can't get out of? One of those bloody Springers again?”

“Not them. And not who.
What.
It's something to do with the Machines. The robots. The brave new children of Conseil. You ought to remember. You played your part in bringing them into being.”

“Nice to feel appreciated,” Falcon said.

Hope nodded. “Isn't it? Now then—does it hurt when I do
this
?”