In the Ocean of Night Read Free Page B

cloud.
    NASA hoped the controversy would stimulate funding for an Icarus flyby. The Agency, ever press-conscious, needed support. It had come a long way from the dark days of 1986, when the explosion of the
Challenger
had begun a fundamental shift in Agency thinking. NASA went on to develop the transats—trans-atmospheric rocket-airplane combinations that flew a good piece of the way to the upper atmosphere, then boosted into orbit on rocket thrust—but it had been badly mauled. As soon as it could, it edged away from the milk-run, commercial and military business of carrying tonnage into orbit. NASA was trying to become a primarily scientific agency now.
    Icarus seemed a pleasantly distant spectacle. Its sudden, bright, fan-shaped coma was larger and prettier than Halley’s Comet’s rather disappointing apparition in 1985. The
Los Angeles Times
dubbed it “the instant comet.” People could see it, even through suburban smog. It made news.
    But in the winter of 2017, the question of Icarus’s composition became more than a passing, academic point. The jet of gas spurting from the head of what was now Comet Icarus seemed to have deflected it. The dust cloud was moving sidewise slightly as it followed Icarus’s old orbit, and it was natural to assume that if a core remained, it was somewhere near the center of the drifting cloud. The deflection was slight. Precise measurements were difficult and some uncertainty remained. But it was clear that by mid-2019 the center of the cloud and whatever remained of Icarus would collide with the Earth.
    “Len, how’s it look from your end?” Nigel said. “Pretty dull. Can’t see much for the dust. The sun’s a kind of watery color looking through the cloud. I’m off to the side pretty far, to separate your radio and radar image from the sun’s.”
    “Where am I?”
    “Right on the money, in the center of the dust. On your way to Bengal.”
    “Hope not.”
    “Yeah. Hey—getting a relay from Houston for you.” A moment’s humming silence as the black pitted world turned beneath him. Nigel wondered whether it was made of the original ancient material that formed the solar system, as the astrophysicists said, or the center of a shattered planet, as the popular media trumpeted. He had hoped it would be a snowball of methane and water ice that would break up when it hit Earth’s atmosphere—perhaps filling the sky with blue and orange jets of light and spreading an aurora around the globe, but doing no damage. He stared down at the cinder world that had betrayed his hopes by being so substantial, so deadly. The automatic cameras clicked methodically, mapping its random bumps and depressions; the cabin smelled of hot metal and the sour tang of sweat. No leisurely strolling and hole-boring expeditions with Len, now; no measurements; no samples to chip away; no time.
    “Dave again, Nigel. Those magnetic field strengths sew it up, boy—it’s nickel-iron, probably eighty percent pure or better. From the dimensions we calculate the rock masses around four billion kilograms.”
    “Right.”
    “Len’s radar fixes have helped us narrow down the orbit, too. That ball of rock you’re looking at is coming down in the middle of India, just like we thought. I—”
    “You want us to go into the retail poultry business,” Nigel said.
    “Yeah. Deliver the Egg.”
    Nigel lit a panel of systems monitors. “Bringing the Egg out of powered-down operation,” he said mechanically, watching the lights sequence.
    “Good luck, boy,” Len broke in. “Better look for a place to plant it. We’ve got plenty of time. Holler if you need help,” he said, even though they both knew full well he could not bring the
Dragon
module into the cloud without temporarily losing most communications with Houston.
    Nigel passed an hour in the time-filling tasks of awakening the fifty-megaton fusion device that rode a few yards behind his cabin. He repeated the jargon—redundancy checks, safe-arm