Tad was watching Jack carefully.

Steve leaned forward. "So what's your answer, Jack?"

"No." Jack's voice shook because he never said no to Steve. "I don't want any part of it."

"Okay." The colonel nodded. "I understand your feeling on this. And I respect it."

Thank God. "Then we'll look for another way?"

"We've looked for another way. We've been looking years for another way. Jack: Tad and I are going to complete the mission." He looked over at Tad, and Tad's eyes were amused. "But I understand you have a moral reservation that will not allow you to participate."

"Colonel-"

"It's okay."

Tad's jacket had been thrown carelessly across a coffee table. Now he picked it up and his right hand went into a pocket. The colonel signaled no and the hand came out. "I'm disappointed, Jack," he said. "I thought you'd want to be with us on this."

"No. I don't know how you could say that. I've never wanted to kill anybody."

"Then I have to ask what you've been doing all these years in a military unit. What was this? Some kind of joke to you?"

"This isn't a military action, Steve. It'll be mass murder. Is that what you want?"

Steve's eyes slid shut. "Okay. I'm sorry you see it that way, Jack." He looked at Tad. "You were right. We should have left him out of it."

Tad nodded almost imperceptibly.

"I can't turn you loose," he said to Jack with a mixture of regret and irritation. "You're going to have to come with us."

"With your permission, Colonel," said Tad, "he'll be in the way. We'll have to watch him constantly."

"I understand the problem," Steve said. "But I don't have a lot of choices here. And I won't have my brother's blood on my hands." He stared at Jack, who was having trouble comprehending what was happening to him. "But fortunately, I'm not entirely unprepared." He produced a pair of handcuffs.

BBC WORLDNET 11:55 P.M.

Dr. Alice Finizio at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Interviewed by Connie Hasting Finizio: (Finizio and Hasting stand in front of a map of the United States.) We're projecting ground zero right about here, Connie, near Interstate 35 in Chase County, roughly midway between Wichita and Topeka. (A circle appears in the center of the map, in Kansas. It expands until it touches Canada and Mexico, extending roughly from eastern Utah in the west to Columbus, Ohio.) This is the primary blast zone. We would expect very few survivors in this area. Hasting: (Breathless) It includes Chicago, St. Louis, Dallas… Finizio:… Minneapolis, Lansing, Fort Wayne. The entire heartland, I'm afraid. I wish we could be more optimistic. (A second, shaded circle rolls out from the first through large sections of Canada and Mexico, absorbing the entire United States, with the exceptions of Oregon, Washington and northern California in the west, and Florida and northern New England in the east.) This represents a heavy-to-mod-erate destruction zone. People living in this section, if they take precautions, should survive the immediate impact. Hasting: Immediate? Finizio: The long range prognosis is not good. The blast will throw up a cloud of dust that will spread around the globe. The skies will be dark for decades. It's going to get cold, and it's going to stay cold, Connie-(Picture flutters and vanishes. A BBC anchorwoman appears.) Anchor: We are having technical difficulties at the source. We'll return to the Jet Propulsion Laboratory as soon as we are able. Meantime, we have a report from the Federal Emergency Management Agency on how to prepare for the impact…

CHAPTER NINE

Monday, April 15

1.

Hartsfield SSTO Maintenance Facility, Atlanta. 2:55 A.M.

A pair of SSTOs were berthed in the hangar; another waited outside. Work crews swarmed over all three vehicles. Sparks flew from welding torches. Exterior panels were removed while technicians poked at the planes' circuits.

The crew chief was satisfied that they were getting all the preliminary work done. There was still a question about the type of piton that would be installed. And that couldn't be resolved until whoever was doing the analyses of the Possum's surface made up his, or her, mind about specs. But once they knew, it would just be a matter of slapping in junction boxes, bolting on the mounts, and inserting the units.

"Four hours," the crew chief told his department head. "Minimum."

"Four hours?" The department head wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. "Look, Arvy, we've got the goddam president of the United States personally taking soil samples-"

"Well, that sure as hell makes me confident."

"Just have everything ready to go, okay?" AstroLab. 4:11 A.M.

Feinberg was sleeping on a couch in his office when the call came in. It was Al Kerr: the president would be grateful if the professor could see his way clear to accompanying the Possum mission.

He hesitated. Feinberg didn't like planes all that much, much less rockets. He argued that he was better placed to help at the AstroLab, but Kerr insisted. The president thought his presence might make the difference if problems developed. "Besides," Kerr said conspiratorially, "the country's in a panic right now. If you're there, people are going to feel better."

"They need me to hold their hand," he told Cynthia a few minutes later. "But I want you available. Stay here. Sleep in your office if you have to, but stay near the action."

A military escort had a helicopter waiting to take him to Atlanta. Cynthia Murray was therefore directing operations at the AstroLab when POSIM-38 reached its apogee, a little more than an hour later, and began to fall back toward Earth. Percival Lowell Flight Deck. 5:42 A.M.

Rachel Quinn moved into a parallel trajectory with POSIM-38. They circled the object and began mapping its surface. They made extensive and detailed images, concentrating on areas suggested by Feinberg, who was in communication from a military transport flying over Pennsylvania.

The chaplain had asked what he could do to help, and Rachel showed him how to operate the imaging equipment. It was really quite simple. When Feinberg, watching on his notebook, asked that the image be shifted, or rotated, or that they simply move on, the chaplain pushed the appropriate button.

When they were satisfied they had enough, Rachel laid in alongside the Possum and matched its tumbling motion, so that its rocky walls stabilized in Lowell's viewports while the stars and the Earth began to tumble. Feinberg had suggested a number of touchdown sites, and she began now to ease toward the first of these. The ship rotated and corrected.

In the right-hand seat, Charlie watched the cliff wall approach, tilt, move up past the window, become a plain. His stomach began to feel queasy. The chaplain smiled and told him it'd be over in a minute. "Try to think about something else," he said.

Charlie was looking out over a stretch of unearthly terrain. Not a moonscape; this was rather a profusion of rolling hills and flowing valleys, a spectral panorama possessing a dormant liquidity. This section of the Possum reminded him of the Dakota Black Hills, which he'd visited as a boy on one of his family's sight-seeing vacations. It had, like that bleak place, erupted and quickly cooled. This was the Back Country, the spheric area that made up three-quarters of the Possum's surface. It was dark, probably seared in the fireball. In the distance he saw Solitary Ridge, a long, ramrod-vertical cliff, distinctive by its angularity in this relatively uniform area.