Channing chewed her lip, her face pale in the gloom.
“This is the calm before the storm—a very long storm, quite probably,” Kingsley finished morosely, taking a long pull at his drink.
Benjamin told her about the trajectory Kingsley had displayed. “It’s moving faster, cutting the time to reach Jupiter.”
“And that provokes the U Agency?” she asked wonderingly.
Kingsley studied the leafy garden with a skewed slant tohis mouth. “I felt bound to let those above know, as did Victoria. We spoke of it the second day I was here. I did not include you two in my thoughts because, frankly, I felt it was a side issue, just a reporting up the chain of command sort of thing. But quite quickly it caught the attention of certain people at the NSF, then DARPA—my sources tell me.”
Benjamin disliked both what he was learning and getting it from Kingsley. The man had mastered astronomy, international diplomacy, and—no doubt, they would soon learn—figure skating. Now he knew how laymen felt when confronting the complex weave of astronomy with only newspaper-level knowledge. He hated playing straight man here, but stifled that and asked, “Why in the world would the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency have connections to NSF’s astronomy office?”
“There is a standing procedure, ever since the Air Force began detecting what turned out to be gamma-ray bursters, remember?” Kingsley smiled. “Their satellites designed to detect nuclear explosions found signals coming from the sky. Bursters bequeathed us this alliance of interests.”
“And from there on, let me guess,” Benjamin said, “it went to the National Security Council, then the President’s Science Adviser.”
Kingsley raised an eyebrow in appreciation. “You know more of this labyrinth than I expected. Pretty nearly so, yes.”
“So we’re stuck having to work with those Chicken Littles, huh?” Channing said.
Kingsley gave her a puzzled glance. “Uh, Chicken…”
“The U Agency’s purpose is to stop disasters before they grow, mostly by taking action across national and even continental boundaries. They’re a quietly accepted part of global integration,” she rattled off knowledgeably.
Benjamin was surprised at how much she knew. When she had a mind to, she showed as much acuity as Kingsley. And he, in turn, had small blind spots, like not remembering who Chicken Little was. The man’s concentration upon his career had swept all else from his mind. Most astronomerswere distracted sorts, unable to recognize many of the faces on the magazines next to the checkout line in markets. Kingsley took this to an extreme, but his footing among the corridors of power was deft and firm.
With lacerating sarcasm, Channing made fun of the U types, reminding them that she had some dealings with the Agency in her “spacesuit days.” Her eyes danced with memories. “The two most common elements in the universe are hydrogen and stupidity, and they’ve got plenty of both.”
Benjamin felt their home around them like a warm cocoon and hoped that it could be a quiet refuge from the growing tumult outside as word inevitably spread. Something big was coming, and he was not ready. Above he saw the spray of glimmering that was the plane of the galaxy, the Milky Way, and wondered from which, of all those stars, this thing had come. It had been gobbling up iceteroids for some time, no doubt, so its initial incoming direction was no clue. It could be from anywhere. Given the vast spaces between the suns, it could have been traveling for centuries, millennia. And what unimaginable technology lay behind the downright weird signatures of the intruder?
Starship? The word seemed inadequate for the energies the thing poured forth. They needed a better term, a name that carried the mystery of it.
4
Channing gave it a name that stuck, within a week. One much better than “X-1” or “intruder.”
To concentrate and save her energy, she worked in the
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