Nemesis by Bill Napier Page B

rock face. He willed it to go faster, but the laws of celestial mechanics remained unmoved. A green lizard looked at him from an eye at the side of its head, and then scurried along an abandoned girder where men long dead had once tried to reach down to the nickel-iron meteorite they thought was buried far under the ground. The chopping sound of the helicopter high above faded as the small, bright blue machine disappeared over the rim of mountain.
    The man turned to his companion. “Are there snakes here, Willy? I hate snakes.”
    “Welcome to the Barringer crater, Jim,” said Shafer. “Ever been here?”
    McNally looked around at the bowl surrounding them. “Seen pictures of it. Please say there are no snakes here.”
    “Snakes are not an issue here, Jim. Not like they are in New York, where they smoke crack and carry guns.”
    McNally looked relieved. “I believe you, my feel-good index has just gone up.”
    “Now the scorpions, that’s another matter.”
    “Thanks a million. Why are we here, Willy?”
    “I thought a big hole in the ground might lend a little spiceto our deliberations. Anyway, genius makes its own rules. We’re a small club, the rest of you can only look on and wonder. Let’s do the tour.”
    McNally turned slowly like a lighthouse, gazing at the circular wall of rock which rose six hundred feet above him on all sides. Then he set out after the physicist, making for the base of the wall a few hundred yards away.
    “Some impact,” McNally said.
    “A penny firecracker,” said Shafer. “A few megatons about forty thousand years ago. There may have been people around.”
    “So where are we at, Willy? Do we smash it to rubble with H-bombs?” McNally asked.
    “Where did you get that from, Jim, your Los Alamos Workshop or a bad movie? Say you tried that and you ended up with a thousand fragments. Each one maybe a hundred yards across and coming in at maybe seventy or eighty thousand miles an hour. The bits would drift apart slowly but they’d keep close to the old trajectory. By the time they reach us they’d come in as a spray, countrywide. Instead of a rifle bullet you get buckshot, coming in over a few hours. So you don’t get a million megaton shot, you get a thousand impacts instead, each one with fifty thousand times the energy of the Hiroshima bomb. Ungood.”
    “I’m still trying to get a handle on this,” McNally admitted.
    “Think of America on the receiving end of a nuclear attack. Then multiply by fifty.”
    “So let’s take it a stage further, literally pulverize it. Could it be done?”
    Shafer started to scramble up the steeply sloping inner wall. “Depends who you listen to,” he called down. “One school of thought says the Earth-crossers are just dried-out comets, maybe even just dust balls. In that case, maybe you could. That’s the Webb line. Sacheverell thinks otherwise. He says they’re strays from the main belt asteroids between Marsand Jupiter. In that case they could be rock or iron and no way could we deliver the energy to smash one up into dust.”
    “What’s your view?” McNally asked.
    “There was this Crusader,” said Shafer, sitting down. “He wants to show off his strength to a Saracen. So he gets this iron bar and swipes it with his two-handed sword, and the iron bar breaks in two, and he says beat that if you can. So the Saracen gets a silk handkerchief and he throws it up in the air. He holds the blade of his scimitar upwards, and when the handkerchief floats down over the blade it splits in two.”
    “That is very poetic, Willy. I like poetic stuff, I didn’t know you were a poet as well as a genius. Maybe if I had a Nobel prize too and a head full of parables I would get your drift, but you see just being an ordinary Joe with an ordinary-sized hat who’s frantically trying to save his country, the significance of this poetic story passes me by.”
    Shafer grinned and threw a fist-sized stone playfully down at the NASA administrator.