“Not a bit of it. We’re all going to be getting a lot sillier before very much longer,” he told her.
29
While it was still morning in California, a train of meteorite impacts stitched its way like a gigantic bombing run over the tip of South America and across the southern Atlantic to beyond the Falkland Islands. Shortly afterward, a similar fall peppered the South Island of New Zealand, and satellites reported another shower in the North Pacific. The areas affected were thinly populated in all cases, but unconfirmed reports spoke of damage and some casualties in a couple of townships on the Chilean coast. An airliner on a scheduled flight from Wellington to Dunedin had disappeared, and a NASA observation satellite was no longer transmitting. On the Moon, seismometers were picking up steady impact activity; outside excursions were being limited to crews using earth-moving machinery to cover exposed parts of the bases with protective layers of regolith. Space transporters and personnel carriers were being readied to be brought back to Earth. It was evidently dawning on people in various places that life at the bottom of a deep gravity well could soon become distinctly hazardous.
* * ** * *
“Have you ever heard of the Carolina Bays?” John asked Keene across a paper-strewn table in the lab after they had watched the latest news update on one of the terminal screens. All of the scientists had returned on time. There had been little talk among them.
“Sounds like a foxhunt somewhere,” Colby Greene murmured without looking up from what he was doing.
“No. What are they?” Keene asked.
“A lot of elliptical depressions in the ground and offshore all the way from New Jersey to Florida but mainly in the Carolinas—thousands of them; over a million by some counts if you include all the smaller ones. They’re all aligned in parallel from northwest to southeast, with a raised rim at the southern end. You get similar things in other places around the world too. They have to be from bombardments by huge meteorite swarms. And they’re recent—a few thousand years.”
Keene tossed down his pen and looked back sourly. “Well, that’s just great to know now. Where were you guys a couple of weeks ago and in the years before that when the Kronians needed some support?”
“That’s not really fair, Lan,” Charlie Hu said, turning from the wall board. “John was one of the people trying to get us into the Washington thing. We were cut out.”
Keene nodded tiredly. “You’re right. I take it back. Sorry, John. I guess we’re all a bit edgier than we think.”
“Forget it,” John told him.
Cavan called around lunchtime to report what he had, using the landline connection from Washington and a personal encryption code for security, since regular communications channels were getting erratic. Keene talked to him in an empty office.
“This character Queal that Voler seems to know is with Air Force Intelligence, so I was able to get a couple of things from nameless friends at my former employer that I remember so fondly,” Cavan said. “He’s involved with high-level security at Space Command, which gives him connections. A look at message traffic over the past forty-eight hours turns up a hive of activity between Queal’s office and a section of the Pentagon that handles FAST operations, headed by a Colonel Winter. And Winter turns out to be the person that Beckerson was visiting at the Pentagon the night before last, when you were at the White House meeting. In fact, it seems that Beckerson was instrumental in getting Winter the position.”
“Interesting,” Keene pronounced. The Facilities Security Teams were the Air Force’s assault and infiltration units, trained for the penetration of air bases, launch sites, and other installations in the event of seizure by terrorists or other such situations. Not only did Keene’s suspicion of something being planned that involved Voler appear to be well founded, but now it was beginning to look as if the Vice President might be part of it too.
“It gets more interesting,” Cavan said. “As of this morning, your man Hixson at Goddard has gone missing too. Now that strikes me as strange, seeing as how he’s supposed to be near the center of a crisis situation. So what do you make of that?”