Read Online The Medusa Chronicles by Stephen Baxter - Free Book Online

it?”
    Seth said, “We don’t have ten launch pads—”
    â€œWe could build more. Money won’t be an object, believe me.”
    â€œWe haven’t got ten Saturns either. I think we’ll only have—what, five, six?—built by June of ’68 when that thing hits.”
    â€œWe can build more Saturns—”
    â€œIt won’t work,” Mo insisted. “A high-speed flyby in formation, a simultaneous detonation—it’s just too damn complicated. Even if we build the Saturns and the pads. The best we can do is to fire them off in sequence, every few days, have them sail past the rock, and set off their nukes one by one.”
    Sheridan snapped, “And what use is that? You just said a hundred-­megaton warhead is too small to destroy the thing.”
    â€œSo we don’t destroy it.” Mo looked at Seth. “We deflect it.”
    â€œDeflect?”
    â€œThink about it. Set the bomb off at the moment of closest approach, just above the surface.”
    Seth stared at him. “My God. Yes. But how much delta-V would that buy you?”
    â€œDepends on how far out we can go to meet the thing . . .”
    *  *  *  *
    It took them ten minutes of scrawled figuring at the board. Seth was vaguely aware of Sheridan wisely sitting back and keeping his mouth shut.
    Finally they turned to face him. “Okay,” Mo said heavily. “Probably some MIT Brainiac will second-guess all this, but we think we can do it. How much push you’d get from a nuke would depend on how close you could get to the rock, and the nature of the surface and so forth.”
    â€œAlso,” Seth said, “the further out from Earth you meet the rock the better, because the less deflection you need to achieve to shove this thing aside. The systems in Apollo-Saturn have a sixty-day limit, which means we can’t reach Icarus at all before it comes within twenty million miles—”
    Sheridan cut through that. “How many detonations do you need?” he snapped.
    Mo and Seth shared a look. Then Mo said, “Maybe just one could do it. One hundred-meg. Just possibly. But maybe not, and besides a single nuke could fail. We should send up a whole string of the things—”
    â€œAnd we’d need some kind of monitoring probes to measure the deflection—”
    Sheridan slammed his briefcase shut. “I’ve heard enough. God damn it, gentlemen, you may or may not have saved the world, but you sure as hell have saved my ass. I’m calling the President.”
    He bustled out, taking the briefcase.
    Mo stared at Seth. “Well, Tonto, now we’ve done it.”
    â€œWhat if we’re wrong?” Seth glanced at the blackboard. “If we screwed the pooch . . .”
    â€œ That would be worse than the world coming to an end. But hey, it would all be over soon enough.” He grinned. “Eat, drink and be merry, Tonto.”
    But Seth didn’t feel like joking. Mo was a bachelor. Seth, suddenly, could only see the faces of his little boys.
    *  *  *  *
    â€œBut despite all the efforts I and others have spent in building up NASA and all its facilities, America is not the world’s only spacefaring power.Perhaps we can do this alone, but every man is stronger with a partner at his side. That’s why I am calling on our Soviet counterparts to come to the table in trust and friendship, so that, in a combined project under the leadership of Senator Kennedy, your experts and ours can work out how best to pool our resources to achieve this monumental goal . . .”
    Twenty-four hours on from a Sunday Seth Springer had expected to spend on a sailing boat, here he was not yards from Lyndon Baines Johnson himself at his presidential podium, with New York Senator Robert Kennedy at his side, and Administrator Webb, George Lee Sheridan and two goofing-off astronauts