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informed."
"Certainly." It would be an excuse to ask where you and the
Chairman will be. "Perhaps Marina and the children could visit you?'
"That has been arranged."
"Then no more remains to be said." Bondarev put the
telephone down and stared out the window.
"You are frightened," Lorena said.
"Yes."
9 ANTICIPATIONS
Space will be colonized-although possibly not by us. If we lose our
nerve, there are plenty of other people on this planet. The
construction crews may speak Chinese or Russian-Swahili or
Portuguese. It does not take "good old American know-how" to
build a city in space. The laws of physics work just as well for
others as they do for us.
--Robert A Heinlein
COUNTDOWN: H MINUS TWO DAYS
The meeting was called for 0900, but they were still straggling in at
a quarter past. Some had hangovers. All had stayed up too late.
Too bad, Jenny thought. They'll have to get used to military
hours. She had a strong urge to giggle. Suppose they didn't?
Maybe they'd make Cheyenne Mountain adapt to the hours science
fiction writers kept...
They took their places in the lecture room, but they tended to
sit for a moment, then get up and gather in clumps. Most of them
talked at once. Working with the science-fiction people was an
educational experience. They had no reverence for anything or
anyone, except possibly for Mr. Anson, and they argued with him;
they just didn't call him names.
They'd spent the past days learning about U.S. and Soviet
weapons. Now it was time to examine what was known about the
aliens.
Not that there's anything to know. Our best photos don't
show details. Just that it's damned big.
One of the men, the one with the heavy mustache, began
before she could. "Major Crichton, I assume that the government
has been no more successful in communicating with the aliens than
all the private attempts were?"
"Correct. We've tried every means of communication we can
think of."
"And a few no one would have thought of," Sherry 'Atkinson
added. They all laughed, remembering that the mayor of San Diego
had persuaded the citizens of his city to blink their lights on and off
while they were in the alien ship's view.
"With no result," Jenny said. "Our best prediction is that the
alien ship will arrive day after tomorrow. Sometime day after
tomorrow. We can't predict it closer than that, because the ship
has begun random acceleration and deceleration."
"As if it didn't want us to know the precise ETA," Curtis said.
"ETA?" Atkinson asked.
"Estimated Time of Arrival" Jenny said. "And yes, we've
thought of that."
"It might be their engines aren't working properly." Atkinson
looked thoughtful. "Or that the concepts of time and regularity
don't mean much to them."
"Bat puckey," Curtis said. "If they're space travelers, they have
to have clocks."
"Doesn't mean they use them," someone said.
Jenny spoke through rising voices. "Lieutenant Sherrad will
review what we know." The chatter stopped.
Sherrad was a Regular Navy man hoping for his bad foot to
heat so that he could go back to sea. Jenny wasn't quite sure how
he'd been assigned to Colorado Springs, but she did know the
Admiral thought well of him. His father had been a classmate.
The Navy seemed to have even more of that sort of thing than the
Army. He ran new blowups of films taken by the Mauna Kea
telescopes as far back as the late l970s. A few showed a flickering
star that must have been the alien ship, although at the time no
one had realized it.
Sherrad showed each film in sequence. Then again. He brought
the lights up and waited, as if teasing the audience.
"Son of a bitch."
"What, Joe?"
"It dropped something."
Sherrad nodded. "It does look that way."
It took me four hours to see that, Jenny thought. Maybe there
is a good reason to have these birds here-.
"Our best guess is that it came from the southern region of
the Centaur, dropped something heavy, rounded the sun, and went
to Saturn," Lieutenant Sherrad said. "Decelerating all the way."
"They knew where they were going, then."
"Well, Dr. Curtis, it does seem so."
Jenny nodded approval. Sherrad had memorized the
doctorates.
Voices arose from one of the clumps. "Okay, they refueled at
Saturn-"
"Why not Jupiter?"
"It takes less delta-V to slow down for Saturn. Jesus, but they
must have been going on the last teacup of fuel for that to
matter!"
"Jupiter could have been around on the other side-"
"Could we see it again?" Anson asked.
Sherrad waited until they were quiet. "Certainly. We also have
the computer simulation."
The room darkened again.
Black dots speckled a white field: a negative of the night sky.
Astronomers generally preferred to use negatives; it was easier to
see the spots that were stars. The scene jumped minutely every
few seconds. The stars stayed where they were-the photographs
had been superimposed-but one dot jumped too, and grew Larger.
"These were taken from Mauna Kea observatory. Notice the
point that jumps. When we realized what we had, we made same
graphs-"
The first showed a curve across the star background, not very
informative.
"And this is what it would look like from above the Sun's north
pole."
Three faintly curved lines radiated from a central point. Near
that point, the sun, they were dotted lines-of course, no camera
would have seen anything then-and they almost brushed the solar
rim. The Navy man's light-pointer traced the incoming line. "It came
in at several hundred miles per second," he said, "decelerating all
the way. Of course the Invader wasn't seen near the sun, and
nobody was even looking for it then. This-" The light-pointer traced
a line outward. "We have only three photos of it, and of course
they could be artifacts, garbage. If they're real, then this one
wasn't under power when it left the sun. It was dropped." The third
line ran nearly parallel to the second, then curved away. 'This
section was under power, and decelerating at around two gravities,
with fluctuations. We've got five photos, and then it's lost, but it
might well have been on its way to Saturn."
"Not good," said a voice in the dark.
The lights came on. The Navy man said, "Who said that?'
"Joe Ransom." He had a gaudy mustache and the air of self-
assurance the SF writers all seemed to share. "Look: they dropped
something to save fuel. Could have been a fuel tank-"
"I'd think it was a Bussard ramjet," someone interrupted.
Ransom waved it away. "It almost doesn't matter. They
dropped something they needed to get here. They probably
planned to. Odds are they didn't take enough fuel to stop inside
the solar system without dropping-well, something massive,
something they didn't need any more, something that served its
purpose once it got them from Alpha Centauri or wherever. If-"
Burnham jumped on it. "A Bussard ramjet wouldn't be any use
inside the solar system. You need a thousand kilometers per
second to intercept enough fuel-or there are some alternate
versions, but you still-"
Ransom rode him down. "We can't figure out what it was yet
and we don't care. They used it to cross, and then they dropped it.
Either they figure to make someone build them another one, or
they're not going home. You see the problem?"
Something icy congealed in Jenny's guts. They don't expect to
go home. Maybe a Threat Team isn't such a bad idea. I'll have to
call the Admiral.
Meanwhile, the meeting was degenerating into isolated clumps
of conversation. Jenny spoke up to resume control. "Enough!" The
noise dropped by half. "Mr. Ransom, you said Alpha Centauri.
Why?"
"Just a shot in the dark. It's the three closest stars in the sky,
and two of them are yellow dwarfs, stars very like ours."
"Stars?"
"Yes. What we call Alpha Centauri, meaning the brightest star
in the Centaur constellation, is really three stars: two yellow ones
pretty close together, and one wretched red dwarf."
"Our own sun's a yellow dwarf," Curtis said.
"Interesting," Lieutenant Sherrad said. "Our astronomers say
the object came from the Centaur region. Is Alpha Centauri really a
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