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  Earle met the President's gaze evenly. "God help us, Mr. President, if they don't work, period." He turned to leave.

  "One more thing, Willy."

  The Science Advisor paused. "Yes, sir?" From the wall, Andrew Jackson seemed to be watching him intently.

  "If this doesn't come off as planned, we could get the blame for whatever angle of approach the object eventually takes."

  "I know that, sir. This is an unprecedented situation. There are no guarantees. The only thing we know for certain is that if we don't do something, and do it quickly, the asteroid will eventually strike the surface. It's only a question of where, and of how many will die."

  Fraser nodded. "Then you'd better get going. You have people you need to talk to, and I have to make some phone calls."

  "Right, Mr. President." Earle left the Chief Executive reaching for one of the three telephones on his desk. It was the direct line to Moscow. Not that it mattered what he and President Kubiltov said to each other. All that mattered now was setting off the right-size packages in the proper places on the surface of a fast-moving rock the size of a small Iowa town.

  The immediate priority was finding the best people to deliver those packages.

  Chapter 2

  It was Low's favorite place in the city. Down by the water, close to where the incomparable bridge spanned the inconceivable crack in the exquisitely beautiful coastal mountains. To impoverished immigrants from Asia and the Pacific Basin, it doubtless still was a golden gate. To the residents of Marin County, it was a shorter commute. To tourists from around the country and around the world, the ultimate souvenir picture.

  Today the entire length was visible, devoid of mist. That would disappoint the tourists, he knew. More than a few expected the fog to perform on cue, as if the city had giant fog machines installed outside the gate to create just the right photo-op when the tour boats were cruising by.

  Fog or not, Low loved the bridge. There was no more gracile public structure in the United States. Simple and functional, the Taj Mahal of the Far West. He never tired of looking at it.

  Off to his right, the Alcatraz boat was just leaving. A covey of gulls swooped low in search of edible debris. Two harangued him raucously.

  He held up the empty sack from the fast-food restaurant. "Sorry, guys. No more French fries. Try something radical. Go look for fish." Thoroughly urbanized, the gulls refused to believe him. They settled on a nearby wave-washed rock and eyed him petulantly, in spite of the fact that he'd finished his meal twenty minutes earlier. He didn't blame the gulls. French fries were an easier catch than tuna fry.

  There weren't many people out on the point today. Besides himself, he'd seen only two couples. The point was inherently romantic, a fine place to smooch. Cold as it was, with the wind skipping in past the Farallons, you naturally gravitated to your companion in search of body heat. In contrast, Low was alone, unless one counted the fish and the crabs, the plovers and the gulls.

  After morning rush hour, the bridge quieted down. He could see the first wall of fog, hovering well outside the gate, waiting for the slight change in temperature that would allow it to roll in and smother bay and city. That business about creeping in on little cat's feet was baloney, Low knew. The fog was an eager opportunist, charging forward to fill every crack and crevice the instant it was meteorologically permissible.

  He settled back in his heavy coat, altogether comfortable with his solitude and cholesterol-laden lunch. He did not expect to be disturbed.

  That's when he saw a familiar face coming toward him. Harry Page. The NASA representative looked the same as he had the last time they'd met, at the conclusion of some inane official function. Low's last official function. How long ago had that been? Well over a year, anyway.

  Now he was here, picking his way awkwardly over the rocks, an anxious expression on his wide, bearded face. It didn't bode well for the rest of the afternoon. It presaged formal conversation, which Low wanted no part of.

  He could get up quickly, pretend he didn't see the visitor, and make a dash for his car. Page could never catch him. But Low knew there would be another car somewhere up above, on the access road, probably parked right next to his own. A featureless black or white, wholly functional government car. There would be a driver waiting for Page, and perhaps an assistant.

  Resignedly, he wondered what Harry wanted. It must be important for them to send him all the way out here instead of communicating by phone or fax. Important enough to disturb his retirement. He consoled himself a little with the knowledge that Page probably wasn't looking forward to the encounter either.

  Then it was too late to attempt a graceful exit, because the NASA rep was waving to him and calling his name. Sensing coming awkwardness, the gulls took flight, deciding to try their luck down by the wharf.

  An indifferent Low slipped the crumpled, greasy bag into a jacket pocket. It was the kind of sloppiness that would never have been tolerated on a shuttle mission, and he luxuriated in it, delighting in his Earth-bound status. He had an uneasy sensation that it was about to be disturbed.

  "Boston!" Page waved again, with studied enthusiasm. "How ya doin', Boz?"

  "I'm fine, Harry. Pull up a rock." Page did his best, and Low watched him squirm uncomfortably. "What brings you out to the edge of the continent?" Low already knew the answer: he waited to hear the corollary.

  Page winced. The rocks didn't suit him. Though the two men were about the same age, what was left of the NASA rep's hair was streaked with gray. Low always believed the radiation in Washington was more damaging than any to be encountered in space.

  "Partly the food, Boz. I had breakfast down on Fisherman's Wharf this morning. Dungeness crab omelet. Can't get that inside the Beltway."

  Riding high in the water, a Liberian-registered container ship was entering the gate, steaming smoothly beneath the bridge. On its way to pick up cargo bound for Yokohama, Low thought. Or Singapore, or Djakarta. He sighed. There was no escape there either. The bureaucrats had conquered the planet, and you had to coexist with them no matter where you lived.

  "How long you been looking for me?"

  "Since then. I was told this was one of your favorite places." His smile, at least, seemed sincere. "We've missed you, Boston. The program misses you. I still don't understand why you didn't take that administrative position down in Houston. I'll never be offered that kind of salary if I live to be ninety."

  "Same reason I opted out of the whole program, Harry." Picking up a small pebble, he chucked it bayward. It struck the water with a satisfying splook. "I didn't know what I wanted next, but I knew I wanted out."

  Page squinted at the place where the thrusting bridge pierced the underside of Marin. Sunlight ricocheted off the chilly water, harder on his blue eyes than on Low's.

  "You heard about the rock?"

  Low made a noncommittal noise. "Anybody who hasn't?"

  Page chuckled. "Some rice farmer in Bangladesh, maybe, or a Mongol family out on the steppe. Everybody's heard about the rock. You see people all the time, just stopping to stare up at the sky. Wondering if it's going to come down near them. Wondering if it's going to come down on them."

  Low didn't reply. He was as guilty as anyone else. Especially at night, when you could see it pass overhead. Knowing that with each pass it was sinking a little lower, coming a little nearer. Vindication at last for Chicken Little.

  A green crab was ensconced on the moist sand by his feet, using one claw to shove food into its mouthparts like a miner panning for gold. Its body was the size of a silver dollar.

  "Anybody ever figure out how the whole astronomical establishment managed to miss its approach?" he heard himself asking.

  "Not yet." Page didn't see the crab. Like most of his kind, Page rarely took the time to look down and see what was happening right at his feet. "They're still arguing about it. We're just damn lucky it went into an elliptical instead of coming straight down on top of Saint Louis, or something. At least this way we ha
ve a little time to try and do something about it."

  "Damn right about that." Low continued to watch the crab. Unlike him, it was perfectly suited to its profession.

  "You know that the rock's in a rapidly decaying orbit."

  "I'd heard." Low heaved another pebble waterward. A scavenging gull darted toward it, veered off when she saw it wasn't an edible. Her rowdy cry was reproaching. Behind the two men, a young couple in dark jackets were wrapped up in each other, oblivious to gulls, bridge, water, city, and the world in general. Low envied them.

  "What are they planning to do about it?"

  Page shook his head dolefully. "Man, you really are out of the loop, aren't you?" When Low didn't react, the rep continued. "The Russians are providing us with some state-of-the-art excavation packages. Really sharp stuff, minimal residual rads. Only, they're not going to be used for widening canals or exposing deep ore bodies."

  "Kick it out into deep space?" Low inquired casually.

  Page shook his head again. "Too much bang required. Probably blow it into a thousand pieces. Big, dangerous pieces. The intent is to just nudge it, stabilize the existing orbit."

  "That's asking a helluva lot of the explosives people."

  "It's all been worked out." Page exuded confidence. "Even where the poppers are to be placed. Nobody expects any surprises. The operation's already been carried out a hundred times."

  "Computer simulation," Low murmured.

  "In Houston and at Langley. Results match up every time, to enough places to reassure even the committee people. No margin for error."

  "There's always margin for error." Low frowned. The crab had moved on. "Be an awful mess if somebody's figured wrong and it comes down faster."

  "They haven't and it won't." Page changed approach. "The President and Congress are kind of enamored of the rock's potential. They see it as a mile-long space station."

  Low let out a derisive snort. "I'll bet the toy manufacturers are ahead of the station designers. So they could have a zero-gee bowling alley, so what? Unmanneds can do it safer, cheaper, and better." His left eye twitched, but Page didn't see it.

  "Sure they can, but a big, solid platform is an easier sell. Sexier. There's a lot to be said for it, Boston." He leaned a little closer. "We've got to pacify the rock anyway. Why not try to put a favorable spin on it?"

  "I suppose." Raising his eyes, Low favored his visitor with that special gaze. The one that only people who have seen the Earth as a blue-white marble possess. It didn't unsettle Page. He'd been the recipient of it many times before, from a number of men and women. Dealing with it, and them, was part of his job. He could handle complex equations and engineering problems, but he could also handle people. Which was why he had been sent to the coast instead of one of the others.

  Besides, he'd known Boston Low off and on for more than ten years. As much as anyone could get to know Boston Low.

  Like a point guard spotting an opening to the basket, the fog was starting to make its move. Soon both bridge and bay would be hidden by thick white mist, and the mournful howling of the foghorns would resound across the waters like a pride of homesick lions calling to one another in the night. He blinked at his old acquaintance.

  "You want me to fly it, don't you, Harry?"

  "Not me, Boz." Page glanced up and back toward the road, where others waited. "It's not up to me one way or the other. They wouldn't listen to me if I tried to talk to them about it. I was asked to come and tell you. I did try to tell them what I thought your answer would be."

  Low looked away, welcoming the fog. "Then there's no point in my repeating it, is there?"

  "It's not that simple. This is a national, an international, emergency, and this is no ordinary shuttle flight."

  "No shuttle flight is ordinary," Low mumbled, for lack of a better response. "Remember the Enterprise?"

  "Of course I remember." Everyone remembered Low's second flight as commander. A mistake in fueling, contradictory calculations ... to this day no one knew how the shuttle had been allowed to lift off without enough fuel to make a proper reentry. The very real possibility of burning up on approach. The near supernatural manner in which Low had adjusted, compensated, finessed and tweaked the shuttle's trajectory, skipping it into the upper atmosphere and then out again, in and out, slowing it without the use of the nonexistent fuel, making calculations and decisions without the use of a computer, until it arrived safely at Edwards missing half its nose tiles but without anyone aboard suffering anything more lethal than a deep bruise.

  It was called flying, a skill half forgotten in an age of massive parallel computing and redundant backups, of ground control and preordained flight paths. It made Boston Low a national hero. He'd accepted it all quietly and gracefully while turning down all but a few of the endorsement offers. Just enough to supplement his NASA pension.

  And when the acclaim had begun to die down, when the reporters no longer camped out on his doorstep waiting for sound bites, he had firmly and without fuss retired. Not to the rolling hills of Virginia or the space centers of Houston or Canaveral, nor to the glamour of Los Angeles nor the perpetual nightlife of New York, but to a simple two-bedroom condo in northwest San Francisco, proximate not to power brokers and politicos but to panhandlers, prostitutes, tourists, illegal immigrants, and the best Chinese food in North America.

  Also fog and seagulls. There was a lot of both in Boston Low.

  "They want you," he heard Page saying. "They want you bad."

  "Who wants me?" He smiled. The crab had returned and was peering up at him from beneath a rock with eyes like black-tipped pushpins.

  "The agency. The project scientists and supervisors. The President and Congress."

  "I'm forty-two, Harry. I've commanded two shuttle missions and participated in five. Ever heard of pressing your luck? I've had my fill of empty space. The Enterprise did that to me. The only space I want to explore anymore is the one inside of me." Tilting back his head slightly, he waved at the sky.

  "There's nothing up there to draw me back, and plenty to keep me here. It's dead out there, Harry. Dead and lifeless and cold. When you gaze out and see the whole Earth floating beneath you, it's beautiful, but when you look anywhere else, all you see is the cold empty. Black emptiness. Death."

  "Boston, listen...," Page began.

  "No, you listen, Harry." Low used the voice that made even multiple-term senators shut up. "I've had enough, understand? I'm not afraid, I'm not scared. I've just had enough. That's why I retired. It's called being sensible. So it doesn't matter who 'wants' me."

  He looked away, and both were silent for several minutes before Page spoke again, his voice soft hut insistent.

  "Don't tell me you aren't even a little hit curious to see what's up there, to see what it's like? This is an extraterrestrial, probably extrasolar visitor. This isn't like you, Boz. I remember you being a lot of different things, but indifferent wasn't one of 'em."

  "I know what's up there, Harry. I know what it's like. So do you, so does the rest of the establishment. It's a big chunk of rock and metal. That's all. As dead as its immediate environment and no different from the tens of thousands that are drifting around right now between Mars and Jupiter. This one's just a little closer, that's all. Interesting? Sure. Special? I don't think so."

  Another moment of reflection, then, "Look, Boston, I don't know how to go about telling you this. As someone who's always spoken his mind, I'm not comfortable with it at all."

  Low grinned. "You don't speak your mind, Harry. You're a government functionary and you say what they tell you to say. You're a good government functionary, though. I'll give you that."

  Page grinned back, though much of it was forced. "Okay, so I'm a professional B.S.'er. Call it what you want. As a good government functionary, listen to me. You can't get out of this one, Boz. Even the Russians want you, dammit. And everybody, they're going to get you. So you might as well get used to the idea."

  Low wasn't in the least i
mpressed. "You can make a man do a lot of things, Harry, but you can't make him fly a space shuttle. You don't want to make him fly a space shuttle."

  Page raised both hands defensively. "I told you, it's not me. It's everyone else."

  "What are they gonna do, Harry? Threaten me? What are they going to threaten me with? Death, dismemberment? The IRS?"

  "I warned them they couldn't intimidate you. I told them it wasn't possible."

  Low nodded slowly. "Once you've been Out There, common, ordinary terrestrial threats no longer carry much weight. They all seem pretty much"—he searched for the right description—"weightless."

  "Why do you think," Page responded, "they want you to lead this mission? Nothing bothers you, Boston. You're not only not afraid of them, you're not afraid of anything. Everything you're telling me right now underscores your appropriateness for this project."

  Low gazed out across the water, wishing the fog would hurry up. You couldn't hurry fog, though. "You're very clever, Harry. Too damn clever. That's why they sent you."

  A diffident Page leaned back against a rock. "Just being straightforward." Reaching down, he picked up a pebble of his own and threw it. It didn't reach the water. "You ever think about where that rock's going to come down if it isn't dealt with, Boz? If it isn't pushed just right?" He gestured expansively. "It or a big hunk of it might come down right here. Right in the bay, or on the bridge. Or on your house."

  "Could happen anytime in the future too. If not this rock, another."

  "Yeah, but not everybody has your fatalistic outlook on time, Boston. If you won't think about yourself, think about all those others. Think about your neighbors. Think about me."

  "I am thinking about all the others." Low wanted to take the crab home, but knew it wouldn't live long. "All the others who are qualified to command a mission like this. There's Terrence..."

  "Terrence the Trance?" Page gave back a look of disbelief.