About 3:40 p.m., three men got out of a newly arrived pickup, assault rifles in their hands, and pushed their way roughly through the crowd. After sizing up the situation through the chain-link fence, they turned and left, apparently not liking the look of the shotguns and M-16s.
Lavender got back on the radio to Little Rock. “Captain,” he said, “three militia types just sized us up. They carried assault rifles. When they saw my folks carrying M-16s and shotguns, they left, but they could just as well come back with friends. And all the bystanders along the fence would be like shields . . . which means we can’t defend the people we’re holding. Or ourselves. ‘Cause there’s no way in hell I’ll have my people shoot into a crowd.
“What I need here is a National Guard infantry platoon. If there’s not one available, then martial law isn’t worth a hill of shit. Anyway I need a lot more backup, either that or authority to take these Millennium people somewheres else.”
The captain said he’d see what he could come up with. Lavender posted one of his troopers on the radio, then reexamined the situation. More of the crowd was leaving, apparently because of the militia visit, but two new vans had just arrived, bringing people to be healed. That made Lavender uneasy too. No telling what someone in a wheelchair might be carrying under their blanket. But he wasn’t willing to refuse people healing, not yet anyway. So he gritted his teeth, and hoped for quick action from Little Rock.
* * *
The President of the United States sat at her computer, looking at an array of rectangles on her wall screen, each showing the face of one of the persons she was on a conference call with: the attorney general; her newly confirmed director of the FBI; the secretary of Homeland Security; and General Alvarez of the army’s Continental Command. Her White House chief of staff stood beside her.
“Those of you who haven’t seen or heard what happened in Little Rock this afternoon,” she said, “will tune to CNN as soon as this call is over. Telling can’t do it justice. The governor of Arkansas not only arrested Ngunda Aran today, he had him brought to his office, and at about three p.m., murdered him with an automatic weapon, on televison. Then he committed suicide. The whole damn country—the whole damn world!—has either seen it or soon will.
“We can expect all kinds of weird crap to follow this, and we need a plan, with specifics. That’s what I’ve called you for. We’re going to hammer one out right now, within the hour. We can adjust it as necessary, as we go, but we need a basic plan to start with.
“Anderson, we’ll start with you. Give us your considerations.”
They hadn’t gotten very far when something came up that changed the situation drastically.
* * *
Lee’s scream had been followed by tears and shock. Now she sat watching TV again. She hadn’t seen the militia types, but Art Knowles had, and warned them to be ready to hit the floor.
Then CNN’s announcement of a special report snatched their attention.
“Minutes ago, at 4:43 p.m. Eastern Time, an astronomical monitoring satellite reported a rogue asteroid on a course intersect with Earth. The predicted time of impact is 5:52 p.m. Eastern Time—that’s 22:52 Greenwich Mean Time and 2:52 p.m. Pacific Time—almost exactly one hour from now.” Michael Sandow’s black face was as calm as usual. “It is not the doomsday collision that’s been speculated on for some unknown date in the future—the sort of cosmic collision that wrote finish to the dinosaurs, sixty-seven million years ago. But it will be a major astrogeological event, far greater than anything in the previous history of humankind. It is almost certain to cause great losses of life—how great will depend on where it strikes—and will severely disrupt worldwide weather.
“The mass of the roughly potato-shaped asteroid, which is about a thousand feet long, is estimated at forty million tons. It was presumably knocked out of its orbit in the asteroid belt by a collision with another asteroid, and may have been further diverted and accelerated by a close flyby of Mars. It is now approaching at some 21,000 miles per hour, roughly 100 times the speed of a deer rifle bullet.