Bova, Ben - Asteroid 1 - The Precipice

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THE

PRECIPICE

BOOK 1 OF THE ASTEROID WARS

BEN BOVA

TOM DOHERTY ASSOCIATES BOOK NEW YORK

This is a work of fiction.

All the characters and events portrayed in this novel are either fictitious or are used fictitiously.

This book is printed on acid-free paper. Edited by Patrick Nielsen Hayden

A Tor Book

Published by Tom Doherty Associates, LLC

175 Fifth Avenue

New York, NY 10010

www.tor.com

Tor® is a registered trademark of Tom Doherty Associates, LLC.

ISBN 0-312-84876-5

First Edition: October 2001

Printed in the United States of America

0 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

To Irving Levitt, a rare jewel among men

To Barbara, who adorns my life with beauty

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

And with special thanks to Jeff Mitchell, a real rocket scientist; to Chris Fountain,

metallurgist and optimist; and to Lee Modesitt, an economist with imagination; true

friends all.

The modern tropics and their fringes support more than half the world's population,

numbered in the billions. Many already live at the fringe of survival, dependent on food

aid transported from the grain belts of more temperate zones. Even a small climatic

shift... would physically compress the geographical limits for cereal cropping.... I leave it

to your imagination what such a pace of climate change would entail for most people.

— Stephen Drury

Stepping Stones: Evolving the Earth and Its Life

... some men have already embarked on a bold new adventure, the conquest of outer

space. This is a healthy sign, a clear indication that some of us are still feral men,

unwilling to domesticate ourselves by any kind of bondage, even that of the spatial

limitations of our planet's surface.

—Carleton S. Coon The Story of Man (Third Edition)

MEMPHIS

“Jesus,” the pilot kept murmuring. “Jesus, Jesus, Jesus.”

The helicopter was racing north, bucking, jolting between the shattered land below

and the thick dark gray clouds scudding just above, trying to follow Interstate 55 from the

Memphis International Airport to what was left of the devastated city. You could not see

the highway; it was carpeted from horizon to horizon with refugees, bumper to bumper

traffic inching along, an un-ending stream of cars, trucks, vans, busses, people on foot

swarming like ants, trudging painfully along the shoulders of the road in the driving,

soaking rain, women pushing baby carriages, men and boys hauling carts piled high with

whatever they could salvage from their homes. Flood water was lapping along the

shoulder embankment, rising, still rising, reaching for the poor miserable people as they

fled their homes, their hopes, their world in a desperate attempt to escape the rising

waters.

Dan Randolph felt the straps of his safety harness cutting into his shoulders as he

stared grimly out the window from his seat behind the two pilots. His head throbbed

painfully and the filter plugs in his nostrils were hurting again. He barely noticed the

copter's buffeting and jouncing in the choppy wind as he watched the swollen tide of

refugees crawling sluggishly along the highway. It's like a war zone, Dan thought. Except

that the enemy is Mother Nature. The flooding was bad enough, but the earthquake broke

their backs.

Dan put the electronically-boosted binoculars to his eyes once again, searching,

scanning the miserable, soaking wet throng below for one face, line individual, the one

woman he had come to save. It was impossible.

There must be half a million people down there, he thought. More.

Finding her will take a miracle.

The chopper bounced and slewed wildly in a sudden gust of wind, banging the

binoculars painfully against Dan's brow. He started to yell something to the pilot, then

realized that they had run into another blustery squall. Fat, pounding raindrops splattered

thickly against the copter's windows, cutting Dan's vision down almost to nothing.

The pilot slid back the transparent sanitary partition that isolated Dan's

compartment. Dan suppressed an angry urge to slam it back. What good are sterile

barriers if you open them to the outside air?

“We've got to turn back, sir,” the pilot yelled over the thrumming thunder of the

engines.

“No!” Dan shouted. “Not till we find her!”

Half turning in his seat to face Dan, the pilot jabbed a finger toward his spattered

windscreen. “Mr. Randolph, you can fire me when we land, but I ain't going to fly

through that.”

Looking past the flapping windscreen wipers, Dan saw four deadly slim dark

funnels writhing across the other side of the swollen Mississippi, dust and debris flying

wherever they touched the ground. They looked like coiling, squirming snakes thrashing

across the ground, smashing everything they touched: buildings exploded, trees uprooted,

autos tossed into the air like dry leaves, homes shattered into splinters, RV parks, housing

developments, shopping malls all destroyed at the flick of the twisters' pitiless, mindless

malevolence, blasted as completely and ruthlessly as if they had been struck by an enemy

missile attack.

The enemy is Mother Nature, Dan repeated silently, numbly, as he stared at the

advancing tornadoes. There was nothing he could do about them and he knew it. They

couldn't be bought, bribed, flattered, seduced, or threatened into obedience. For the first

time since he'd been a child, Daniel Hamilton Randolph felt totally powerless.

As he locked the partition shut again and fumbled in his pockets for his antiseptic

spray, the chopper swung away, heading back toward what was left of the international

airport. The Tennessee National Guard had thrown a cordon around the grounds; the

airport was the Memphis region's last link with the rest of the country. The floods had

knocked out electrical power, smashed bridges, covered roads with thick muddy brown

water. Most of the city had been submerged for days.

Then came the earthquake. A solid nine on the Richter scale, so powerful that it

flattened buildings from Nashville to Little Rock and as far north as St. Louis. New

Orleans had already been under water for years as the rising Gulf of Mexico inexorably

reclaimed its shoreline from Florida to Texas. The Mississippi was in flood all the way up

to Cairo, and still rising.

Now, with communications out, millions homeless in the never-ending rains,

aftershocks strong enough to tumble skyscrapers, Dan Randolph searched for the one

person who meant something to him, the only woman he had ever loved.

He let the binoculars drop from his fingers and rested his head on the scat back. It

was hopeless. Finding Jane out there among all those other people—

The copilot had twisted around in his seat and was tapping on the clear plastic

partition.

“What?” Dan yelled.

Instead of trying to outshout the engines' roar through the partition, the copilot

pointed to the earpiece of his helmet. Dan understood and picked up the headset they had

given him from where he'd dumped it on the floor. He had sprayed it when they'd first

handed it to him, but now he doused it again with the antiseptic.

As he clamped it over his head, he heard the metallic, static-streaked voice of a

news reporter saying,”... definitely identified as Jane Scan-well. The former President

was found, by a strange twist of fate, on President's Island, where she was apparently

attempting to help a family of refugees escape the rising Mississippi waters. Their boat

apparently cap-sized and was swept downstream, but snagged on treetops on the island.

“Jane Scanwell, the fifty-second President of the United States, died living to save

others from the ravages of flood and earthquake here in what remains of Memphis,

Tennessee.”

LA GUAIRA

It was raining in Venezuela, too, when Dan Randolph finally got back to his

headquarters. Another hurricane was tearing through the Caribbean, lashing Barbados

and the Windward Islands, dumping twenty-five centimeters of rain on the island of La

Guaira and Caracas, on the mainland, with more to come.

Dan sat behind his big, bare desk, still wearing the rumpled slacks and pullover that

he had travelled in from the States. His office smelled musty, mildewed from the

incessant rain despite its laboring climate control system. He wasn't wearing the

protective nose plugs; the air in his office was routinely filtered and run past intense

ultraviolet lamps.

Leaning back into the softly yielding caramel brown leather of his swivel chair,

Dan gazed out at the windswept launch complex. The rockets had been towed back into

the assembly buildings. In this storm they could not dare to launch even the sturdy,

reliable Clipperships. The launch towers were visibly shaking in the gale-force wind,

lashed by horizontal sheets of rain; roofs had already peeled off some of the smaller

buildings. Beyond the launch towers, the sea was a wild madhouse of frothing

whitecapped waves. The wind howled like a beast of prey, rattling even the thick double-

paned windows of Randolph's office.

Third storm to hit us and it's not even the Fourth of July yet. Business isn't lousy

enough; we've got these double-damned hurricanes to deal with. At this rate I'll be broke

by Labor Day.

We're losing, Dan thought. We're in a war and we're losing it. Hell, we've already

lost it. What's the sense of pretending otherwise?

The dampness made him ache deep in his bones, an arthritic-like reminder of his

age and the dose of radiation sickness he'd contracted years earlier. I ought to get back to

Selene, he told himself. A man with a broken-down immune system shouldn't stay on

Earth if he doesn't have to.

Yet for hours he simply sat there, staring out at the pounding storm, seeing only the

face of Jane Scanwell, remembering the sound of her voice, the touch of her fingers, the

soft silkiness of her skin, the scent of her, the way she brightened a room, they way she

had filled his life even though they were never really together, not more than a few quick

hours now and then before they fell into bitter argument. There was so much separating

them. After she had left the White House, they had managed to spend a couple of days

together on a tropical atoll. Even that had ended in a quarrel.

But for once they had seen things the same way, had the same goal, fought the

same fight on the same side. The greenhouse cliff meant war, a war pitting humankind's

global civilization against the blind forces of nature. Jane understood that as well as Dan

did. They were going to fight this war together.

And it killed her.

Should I go on? Dan asked himself. What's the use of it? What's the sense of it? He

wanted to cry, but the tears would not come.

Dan Randolph had always seemed larger than his actual physical size. He was a

solidly-built welterweight, still in trim physical shape, although now, in his sixties, it took

grueling hours in the gym to maintain his condition. His once-sandy hair was almost

completely gray now; his staff people called him “the Silver Fox” behind his back. He

had a fighter's face, with a strong stubborn jaw and a nose that had been flattened years

ago by a fist, when he'd been a construction worker in space. Despite all the wealth he'd

amassed since those early days, he'd never had his nose fixed. Some said it was a

perverse sense of machismo. His light gray eyes, which had often glinted in amusement

at the foolishness of men, were bleak and saddened now.

A chime sounded, and the sleek display screen of his computer rose lowly, silently

out of the desktop surface.

Dan swiveled his chair to see the screen. His administrative assistant's young,

somber face looked out at him. Teresa was a native of Caracas, tall, leggy, cocoa-cream

complexion, deep brown almond eyes and thick lustrous midnight dark hair. Years earlier

Dan would have tried to bed her and probably succeeded. Now he was simply annoyed at

her intrusion into his memories.

“It's almost dinnertime,” she said.

“So what?”

“Martin Humphries has been waiting all day to see you. He's the man Zack

Freiberg wants you to meet.”

Dan grimaced. Zack had been the first one to warn Dan of the impending

greenhouse cliff.

“Not today, Teresa,” he said. “I don't want to see anybody today,”

The young woman hesitated a heartbeat, then asked, softly, almost timidly, “Do

you want me to bring you a dinner tray?”

Dan shook his head. “I'm not hungry.”

“You have to eat.”

He looked at her image on his screen, so intent, so young and concerned and

worried that the boss was going off the deep end. And he felt anger rising inside him,

unreasoning blind blazing rage.

“No, goddammit to hell and back,” he snapped. “You have to eat. I can do any

goddamned thing I want to, and if you want to keep drawing your paycheck you'd better

leave me the hell alone.”

Her eyes went wide. Her mouth opened, but she said nothing. Dan snapped his

fingers and the screen went blank. Another snap and it folded back into its niche in the

desk's gleaming rosewood top.

Leaning back in his chair, Dan closed his eyes. He tried to close his mind against

the memories, but that was impossible.

It was all going to be so damned great. Okay, a century or two of global warming

would lead to a greenhouse cliff. Not a gradual warmup but a sudden, abrupt change in

the world's climate. All that latent heat stored in the oceans would pour into the

atmosphere. Ice caps in Greenland and Antarctica melting away. Sea levels shooting up

over a decade or two. Big storms and lots of them. Climate shifts turning croplands into

deserts.

So what? We'll use the resources of space to solve all those problems. Energy?

We'll build solar power satellites, beam energy from space to wherever it's needed. Raw

materials? We'll mine the Moon and the asteroids; there's more natural resources in space

than the whole Earth can provide. Food production?

Well, that would be a tough one. We all knew that. But with enough energy and

enough raw materials we could irrigate the croplands that were being desiccated by the

climate shift.

Yeah, sure. And when half the world's major cities got flooded out, what did we

do? What could we do? When the electrical power grid got shattered, what did we do?

When earthquakes and tsunamis wiped out the heart of Japan's industrial capacity, what

did we do? Diddley-squat. When this quake flattened the midwest, what did we do? We

tried to help the survivors and Jane got herself killed in the attempt.

The office door banged open and a huge, red-bearded man pushed in, carrying an

ornately-carved teak tray laden with steaming dishes. In his massive hands the tray

looked like a little child's toy.

“Teresa says you've got to eat,” he announced in a high, sweet tenor as he set the

tray on Dan's desk.

“I told her I'm not hungry.”

“You can't fookin' starve yourself. Eat something.”

Dan glanced at the tray. A steaming bowl of soup, a salad, a main course hidden

under a stainless steel dome, a carafe of coffee. No wine. Nothing alcoholic.

He pushed the tray toward the red-haired giant. “You eat it, George.”

Pulling one of the upholstered chairs up close to the desk, Big George looked his

boss in the eye and pushed the tray back toward Randolph.

“Eat,” he said. “It's good for ya.”

Dan stared back at George Ambrose. He'd known Big George since he'd been a

fugitive on the Moon, hiding out from the Selene City authorities with a handful of other

free souls who styled themselves the Lunar Underground. Big George was Dan's personal

bodyguard now; he wore custom-tailored suits instead of patched coveralls. But he still

looked like a barely-tamed frontiersman: big, shaggy, the kind of man who could

gleefully pound your head down into your ribcage with no personal malice at all.

“Tell you what,” Dan said, feeling a reluctant smile bend his lips a little 'I'll split it

with you.”

George grinned back at him. “Good thinking, boss.”

They ate in silence for several minutes, George gobbling the entire main course,

which turned out to be a thick slab of prime rib. Dan took a few spoonfuls of soup and

nibbled at the salad.

“Better than the old days, huh?” George said, still chewing prime rib. Fookin'

soyburgers and recycled piss for water.”

Dan ignored the younger man's attempt to jolly him. “Has Teresa gone home?” he

asked.

“Nope.”

Nettled, Dan glanced at his wristwatch. “She's not my nursemaid, double-damn it. I

don't want her hovering over me like—”

“That Humphries bloke is still waitin' to see you,” George said.

“Now? He's out there now? It's almost nine o'clock, for chrissakes. What's wrong

with him? Is he stuck here because of the storm? Doesn't Teresa have the smarts to put

him up in one of the guest suites?”

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摘要：

THEPRECIPICEBOOK1OFTHEASTEROIDWARSBENBOVATOMDOHERTYASSOCIATESBOOKNEWYORKThisisaworkoffiction.Allthecharactersandeventsportrayedinthisnovelareeitherfictitiousorareusedfictitiously.THEPRECIPICE:BOOK1OFTHEASTEROIDWARSCopyright©2001byBenBovaAllrightsreserved,includingtherighttoreproducethisbook,orporti...

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