The Jupiter Theft

They seemed to think that the Cygnus source was a political problem. Make the right policy decision and it would go away. Now they’d assembled this ad hoc committee and allowed him to drop his bombshell.

Over in the corner, a government newsie from the Federal Broadcasting Agency was taping the proceedings with a holoscan. An NIB agent was supervising him, carefully collecting each spool as it was finished and locking it away under seal.

“Why not?” the undersecretary insisted. “We give you fellows a big enough budget to fritter away out there in space. Can’t you fire a rocket at it or something? Blow it up with a nuclear bomb?”

Ruiz looked helplessly at Fred Van Eyck for support. Fred was the only person present who knew an asteroid from a black hole, but he refused to meet Ruiz’s eye.

Ruiz took a deep breath. “Mr. Undersecretary,” he said, choosing his words carefully. “We’re talking about a stellar object approaching the solar system at very nearly the speed of light. Try to imagine a body many times larger than Earth giving off energy equal to an explosion of ten to the fourteenth power megatons every second. That’s on the order of a trillion times our most powerful fusion device. It would be like trying to stop a forest fire by throwing a firecracker at it.”

The undersecretary thrust his jaw out stubbornly. “But couldn’t you—”

“Let me put it another way,” Ruiz said. “If you launched a nuclear bomb every hour on the hour for the next hundred million years, and timed them all to arrive at once, you might make an impression on an X-ray source like the Cygnus object. That’s assuming, of course, that you could deliver them within a million miles of the thing without having them melt. And that you could intercept a target that’s traveling at close to the speed of light.”

Out of the corner of his eye Ruiz saw Fred Van Eyck wince.

“Damned scientists bring us nothing but trouble,” the Undersecretary grumbled. “They ought to cut off your appropriation.”

Someone cleared his throat. It was Hoskins of the Civil Liberties Control Board. “Dr. Ruiz, do I understand you to say that there’s no way we can… evade this thing?” He coughed delicately. “That is to say, couldn’t a select group of persons—government officials and so forth, and their families—wait it out on the Moon, or on Mars?”

“No, Mr. Hoskins. Mars will be baked to a cinder too. There’s no place to hide.”

At the far end of the curving table, just out of range of the holoscan, General Harris, NIB’s owlish director, drummed his fingers on the transparent plastic surface. “How about digging in?” he said. “Caves, underground shelters?”

Ruiz stared unflinchingly into the hooded eyes. “The Earth’s crust will be sterilized,” he said. “Down to the bacteria at the bottom of the deepest mine shaft.”

There was a stirring around the table. The magnitude of the situation was finally beginning to sink in.

“But this is serious!” The speaker was Norman Slade of the Public Opinion Monitoring Board. He was a waxy, narrow-faced man in one of the iridescent kaleidosuits that were popular this season among middle-aged swingers. He made a gesture with one hand, and the lenticule-impressed patterns on his sleeve rippled across the spectrum with a three-dimensional effect. “If this gets out to the public, there’ll be no controlling the population in the large urban centers. We’ll have panic, rioting, civil breakdown. And every half-baked terrorist group will—”

“How long can we keep it under wraps?” interrupted the Public Safety Commission’s Rumford. He turned a large shaggy head toward the NIB director. “Who knows about this so far?”

“We moved in while Dr. Ruiz was still en route to Earth. A junior astronomy resident at Farside alerted us in time. We were able to place the duty tech under arrest and seal off the observatory. Dr. Mackie is cooperating, of course. We don’t think anybody on the Farside staff talked to anybody outside, but we’ve canceled all leaves from the Moon anyway. We’re censoring all transmissions from there.”

“How about the Chinese?” Rumford said.

“That’s classified,” General Harris said blandly.

The hell with them, Ruiz thought. Maliciously, he said: “You can assume the Chinese know everything we do. They monitor our transmissions with their synchronous lunar satellite, including what goes in and out of the Farside computer. And they’ve got a pretty good observatory of their own in the Jules Verne crater.”

“The Chinese will keep it under wraps too,” Slade said confidently. “They won’t want to panic their own population.”

Rumford shook his great mane. “The danger is that the Chinese might decide to leak the information here. Stir up our Rads. Exploit the unrest.”

That was too much for Ruiz. He exploded. “For heaven’s sake, don’t any of you people have any conception of what this is all about? We’re talking about the end of all life on Earth—about six months from now! How is anybody going to exploit that?”