“What’s left of them, you mean,” Len said. “The famine cycles have killed millions already, and they’ve been migrating out of the impact area for over a year now. Since the Indian government broke down nobody knows how many souls we’re talking about, Dave.”
“That’s right. But if you don’t care about them, Len, think about the dust that will be thrown into the upper atmosphere. That might bring on another Ice Age alone.”
Nigel finished chewing on a bar of food concentrate. He felt a curious floating tiredness, his body relaxed and weak. The stimulants he had taken left him alert, but they could not wash away the lassitude that seeped through his arms and legs.
“I don’t want to kill them, Dave,” Nigel said. “Stop being melodramatic. But we’ve got to admit that what we can learn from this relic may be worth some human life.”
“What do you propose, huh? What jackass scheme have you got?”
“That we stay here for a week, ten days, stripping the inside of whatever we can. You fly us additional air and water—use one of the unmanned intercepts that’s carrying a warhead right now. We’ll get clear of Icarus in time for the other interceptors to home on it, and we’ll use the Egg, too.”
“Sounds like it might work,” Len said, and Nigel felt a surge of anticipation. He was going to do it; they couldn’t turn him down.
“You know those interceptors aren’t reliable in that dust cloud—that’s why you guys are out there now. And the closer to Earth we hit Icarus, the less the net deflection before zero hour. If anything screws up at the last minute it might still smack into us.”
“The risk is worth it, Dave,” Len said.
“You’re really going along with him, Len? I had hoped—”
“We’ve got hopes, too,” Nigel said with sudden feeling. “Hopes that we might learn something here that will get the human race out of the mess it’s in. A new physical concept, some invention that might come out of this. The beings who built this were superior to us, Dave, even in size—the doorways and corridors are big, wide.”
“The risk, Nigel! If the Egg doesn’t do the job and—” “We’ve got to take it.”
“—we sent you men out there to do a job. Now you’re—”
Nigel wondered why Dave sounded so calm, even now. Perhaps they had told him to be deliberately cool and not provoke anything more. He wondered what his parents thought of this, of his taking a stand for exploration at the cost of people’s lives. Or whether they knew of it at all—NASA had probably stopped news coverage as soon as they knew something was wrong; it wasn’t just a heroic life-saving mission any more. He noticed his hands were trembling.
“Wait a minute, wait,” Dave said. “I didn’t mean to blow up that way, you guys. We all know you think you’re doing the right thing.” He paused amid the quiet burr of static, as though marshaling his words.
“Something new has come into the picture, though. I’ve just been handed the recomputed trajectory, allowing for the reduced Icarus mass. It makes a difference, a big one.”
“How’s that?” Nigel said.
“It was coming in pretty oblique to the top of the atmosphere already, you remember. With less mass, though, it’s going to skip a bit—not much, but enough. It’ll skip like a flat rock on a pond, and then drop. That takes it clear of the Indian subcontinent, and moves the impact point west.”
Nigel felt a thick weight of dread form in his stomach. “The ocean?”
“Yes. About two hundred miles out.”
The finality of it consumed him. An ocean strike was vastly worse. Instead of dissipating energy as it ripped through the mantle rock, Icarus would throw up from the sea floor a towering geyser of steam. The steam jet would fan out across the upper atmosphere, leaving a planet swathed in clouds, driving great storms over a sunless world. The tidal wave splashed up would smash every coastal city on Earth, and most of civilization would vanish in hours.
“They’re sure?” Len said.
“As certain as they can be,” Dave said, and something veiled in his voice brought Nigel back out of his contemplation.
“Cut off Houston for a minute, Len,” he said.
“Sure. There. What is it?”
“How do we know David isn’t lying?”
“Oh…I guess we don’t.”
“It seems a little funny. A big rock skipping on the top of the atmosphere—one of the astrophysicists mentioned it in a briefing, but he said for a mass as large as Icarus it couldn’t happen.”
“What about for a tenth of that mass?”
“I don’t know. And—damn it!—it’s crucial.”
“An ocean strike…If that happens, billions of people…”
“Right.”
“You know…I don’t think I want to…”
“I don’t either.” Nigel paused. And something flitted across his mind.
“Wait a second,” he said. “Something odd here. This rock is hollow, that makes it lighter.”
“Sure. Less mass.”
“But that will make it easier to fragment, too. The chances of having a big chunk of rock left around after we set off the Egg is less, too.”
“I guess so.”
“But why didn’t Dave mention that? It makes the odds better.”
A silence.
