“Smart man to admit he’s an idiot,” Minelli said. “Asteroids. Jesus.”

Edward flipped past other channels, but found nothing more.

“What do you think, Ed?” Minelli asked, slouching back in the corner of the broad L-shaped couch. “What the hell did I see? More end-of-the-world shit?”

“I don’t know any more than they do,” Edward said. He entered the kitchen. “Do you have a doctor in town? A psychiatrist?” he asked Bernice.

“Nobody worth the name,” she answered, her voice as low as his. “Your friend’s still not doing too well, is he?”

“The government got rid of us in a real hurry. He should be in a hospital somewhere, resting, cooling down.”

“That can be arranged,” she said. “Did he actually see something?”

“I guess so,” Edward said. “I wish I’d seen it.”

“Day of the Triffids, that’s what it was,” Minelli said enthusiastically. “Remember? We’ll all go blind any minute now. Break out the pruning shears!”

Stella stood by the stove, methodically cracking eggs into a pan one by one. “Momma,” she said, “where’s the pepper mill?” She brushed past Edward, tears in her eyes.

34

Walt Samshow stepped from the cab on Powell Street under the shadow of the St. Francis Hotel awning and turned around briefly to look across at long, silent lines of hundreds of marchers parading around Union Square, a cable car grumbling by covered with swaying tourists, spastic traffic of cars and more cabs, civilized mayhem: San Francisco, other than the marchers, not terribly different from his memories of it in 1984, the last time he had been downtown.

In the spacious, elegant lobby of the St. Francis, with its polished black stone and dark lustrous woods, Sam-show began hearing the rumors practically the moment he set his luggage down by the front desk.

The convention of the American Geophysical Society was in full swing. Kemp and Sand had gone ahead, and apparently big things had happened since their arrival Thursday. Now it was Saturday and he had a lot to catch up on.

As he checked in, two professorial young men passed by, engaged in earnest conversation. He caught only three words: “The Kemp object—”

The bellhop carted his luggage over thick carpet to the elevator. Samshow followed, unwinding his arms and stretching his fingers. Two other conventioneers — an older man and a young woman — stood near the elevators, discussing supersonic shock waves and how they might be transmitted through mantle and crust.

Reporters and camera crews from three local television stations and as many national news networks were in the lobby when Samshow returned from his room to check in at the convention desk. He avoided them deftly by walking around several pillars.

With his badge and bag of pamphlets and program guides came a note from Sand:

Oz, Samshow learned from a desk clerk, was the bar and disco at the top of the “new” tower of the St. Francis. He looked at his frayed sports coat and his worn-out running shoes, decided he was easily ten years behind the times and thousands of dollars short in refurbishing his wardrobe, and sighed as he entered the elevator.

The trip from Honolulu to La Jolla had been arranged by the Scripps Institution of Oceanography. He had paid for that by lecturing the night before at UCSD. It never ceased to dismay him, after twenty-five years, how popular he was. His huge, expensive book on oceanography had become a standard text, and hundreds of students were only too pleased to listen to, and shake hands with, the modern Sverdrup.

On his own tab, he had taken a flight out of Lindbergh Field to San Francisco. Not yet did he have a clear idea what they were all doing here; there was still much work to be done on the Glomar Discoverer, beginning with the collation of billions of bits of data from their passages over the Ramapo Deep.

He suspected much of that data would be pushed aside indefinitely now. Sand’s gravimeter anomaly would be the key element. Somehow, that saddened him.

Braced against the ascent of the high-speed elevator, he realized he had been feeling his age for the past week. Psychologically, he had been caught up in the national malaise that had followed Crockerman’s announcement. He felt no different from the young people carrying their blank signs just across the street. What was there to protest? Apocalypse could not be repealed by the democratic process. Even now, the instrument of that destruction — or an instrument — might be lancing through the Earth’s core.

The Kemp object. That attribution, he assured himself, would change shortly. Sand-Samshow object…Not a catchy name, but it would have to do. Yet…why? Why lay claim to the discovery of the bullet that might have everyone’s name on it?

The elevator door opened and Samshow stepped out into a blare of noise. Oz glittered, silver and gray, glass-walled and high-ceilinged. Young people in elegant dress danced across the central floor, while drinkers and talkers sat and stood on the surrounding raised carpeted areas. The sweet smells of wine and Bourbon wafted from a passing waitress’s tray.

Samshow winced at the noise and glanced around, looking for Sand or Kemp. Sand stood in a corner waving to catch his eye.

Their round table was barely a foot across, and five people were crowded around it: Kemp, Sand, two others he did not recognize, smiling as if they were old friends, and now himself. He shook hands as Sand introduced Jonathan V. Post, an acquaintance of Kemp’s, dark and Levantine with a gray-shot curly beard, and Oscar Eglinton from the Nevada School of Mines. Post declaimed a brief and embarrassing poem on meeting the legendary Old Man of the Sea. When he was finished, he smiled broadly.

“Thank you,” Samshow said, not very impressed. The waitress came and Post sacrificed his own Corona that Samshow might have a drink sooner.

He had once downed a case of Corona in two days while whale-watching at Scammon’s Lagoon. That had been in 1952. Now more than one beer gave him heartburn.

“We have to fill you in, Walt,” Sand said. “Kemp talked with seismologists in Brazil and Morocco. One of them is here — Jesus Ochoa. We have the nodal traces. October thirty-first. The disruptions and shock waves. There’s been high surf in some very suspicious places, and seismic events like nobody’s ever seen…”

“Thirty-five south, forty-two west,” Kemp said, with the same smug grin he had worn a week ago in Hawaii.

“He convinced me that was good enough evidence to talk to Washington. They referred me to Arthur Gordon—”

“The President isn’t interested, apparently,” Kemp said, his grin vanishing. “We couldn’t even talk to the new national security advisor, what’s his name…”

“Patterson,” said the muscular, dark-tanned Eglinton.

“But Gordon says he’ll be here tonight to talk with us. There’s going to be a lot to discuss. Post here has spoken to some physicists and space scientists. Chris Riley, Fred Hardin. Others. Asteroids are on their mind.”

“You’re all convinced we’ve got something appropriate, a true extraterrestrial bullet?”

“We have more than that,” Kemp said, leaning forward. Sand put a hand on his arm, and Kemp nodded, falling back into his seat. Sand leaned over to Samshow as if to explain something delicate.

“There was a central Atlantic fireball sighted by a cargo ship four days ago. Like the previous object, as far as we can discover, nobody picked it up on radar coming in. Similar phenomenon — deep-ocean splash, small storm, and peculiar seismic traces. This fireball was much brighter, though — blinding, huge, leaving a glowing tail behind it. Captain and crew were treated for retinal burns. The doctors treating them noticed hair loss and strange bruises and questioned them, and they admitted to having bloody stools. Everyone on deck is suffering from severe radiation exposure.”