Rolling Thunder (30 page)

Ships were hot-bunked, with three people sharing each bed in eight-hour shifts. The finest luxury liners became overcrowded cattle cars, gourmet meals vanishing in favor of macaroni and rice and oatmeal.

At home, all tourism activity was suspended. Nobody was spending money on luxuries, anyway, though a lot of people wanted the casinos kept open in an eat-drink-and-be-merry spirit. No dice … so to speak. Soon families were sleeping on the craps tables.
Under
the craps tables, too. This came to be known as a “Martian bunk bed.”

All the hotels were rapidly converted to barracks. We jammed them in there like sardines, as many as each room could take. And there were always more, as each and every passenger ship that could be pressed into service shuttled back and forth between Earth and Mars and some of the asteroid colonies at a steady one gee of boost. Many Navy ships that had even corridor space for sleeping bags were shuttling, too. We moved almost a million people in two months.

And of course it was a drop in the bucket. Billions were left behind.

There was a very strong chance that
all
those billions would die. High ground or low ground, nothing was going to save them if the impact was as hard as it was expected to be. It would be an extinction event, as bad as the one that killed the dinosaurs. The sky would blacken and stay that way for many years. The ground would open and swallow entire cities, whether coastal or mountainous.

It was going to be Hell on Earth for everybody but the Rapturists.

WHILE GOVERNMENTS AND
other bodies were concerning themselves primarily with rescue operations, the military branches of these entities were not entirely inactive.

As soon as Grumpy’s course became clear, two possible means of salvation presented themselves, and both of them had to be put into action as soon as possible if they were to have any effect.

Plan A: Divert it. Tall order.

Plan B: Blow it up. The idea was that smaller chunks might cause less damage, some would miss the Earth entirely, and the rest might be easier to divert.

There were voices raised, pointing out that attacking these things, in view of their incredible power, might not be a wise idea. What if we merely managed to piss them off? But most people with the capacity to do something about it decided that you could hardly be more pissed off than to aim a trillion-ton object at an inhabited planet.

I’m not a big advocate of shooting if there’s
anything
else you can do, but I had to agree, retrospectively. Why not try it?

So they went with Plan B first, simply because they could do it at once and Plan A took some preparation.

One of the largest weapons in somebody’s nuclear arsenal was put aboard a rocket and accelerated at a constant five hundred gees right at the heart of Grumpy, and everybody crossed their fingers.

Result: nothing. It didn’t go off. The Curse of Taliesen strikes again. Probably. I mean no nuke had
ever
failed before, when used in anger.

Two days later there was no farting around. A salvo of one hundred nuclear-tipped missiles was fired. All Earth and all Mars and all the outer planets watched hopefully as they approached and began to go off.

Half of them failed, but half did detonate, and it was horribly beautiful. Tiny little pinpricks of dazzling light sparkled all around Grumpy, then expanded into perfect white spheres, and slowly faded away. Where they had been, the surface of the giant crystal glowed a lovely red.

Billions cheered.

Then the data came in. Grumpy had not deviated one foot. We could have hit it with thousands more, but what would be the point?

By then Plan A was just about ready. A dozen very large bubble engines had been constructed and loaded onto our largest cargo ships. The Martian Navy hurried them into position—if you’re going to try to divert an object heading for you, the sooner you start pushing it the more course change you’ll get for every erg of energy expended. They were equipped to attach themselves to one side of Grumpy and begin firing. If they could fire long enough and hard enough, it just might work.

The drone engines approached within a mile, half a mile, one hundred feet … and touched the surface.

And vanished. One moment they were there, the next moment they were gone. Slow-motion cameras revealed they simply sank into the surface as if it were Jell-O.

The next six went out with volunteer human pilots. By then it was iffy as to whether they’d do any good even if they worked, as Grumpy was a lot nearer the Earth now and closing fast.

But they tried. They tried … and now there is a statue of those four men and two women in the Plaza just outside my window.

Because they reached Grumpy, and vanished. If there were living beings inside those goddam crystals, they really
were
boojums.

So it was time for Plan C.

THE MARTIAN NAVY’S
ultimate weapon is the Broussard Bubble, in both its varieties. The Republic of Mars owns all the bubble-making facilities, which is what prevented our takeover when my parents were kids and the Martian War was fought. We’d have gotten our butts kicked—we
did
get our butts kicked, with hardly a shot fired from our side; the fireworks were all from competing factions squabbling over who got to conquer us—but for Mom and Dad and Uncle Travis and Uncle Jubal going to Earth and threatening to squeeze the whole nasty planet down to the size of a pea if they didn’t
cut it out
!

They did, and most Martians agree that the only reason we aren’t paying taxes to some Earth country and the Earthies haven’t taken the bubble technology from us is that they’re still afraid of being squeezed.

There aren’t many of the bubble factories because, incredible as it seems, only Uncle Jubal knows how to make them. Only Jubal
can
make them, I guess I should say. He tried to teach others how it’s done because being the only human who can do it made his life intolerable, but it doesn’t seem to be a knack that can be taught. So every installation that can make the machines that make the bubbles was built by Uncle Jubal.

How many of them there are is classified far above my petty rating. It’s a state secret, jealously guarded, and the only non-Martian citizen who knows is Travis, who isn’t a citizen of
anything
, now that the United States is fragmented.

Most of the bubble machines are on Mars. A few are closely guarded and supervised—by the Martian Navy—on Earth. But an unknown number are aboard our Black Fleet, which hovers tens of billions of miles to the north or south of the sun—no one knows which, or if it’s both—like the deep-sea nuclear subs of Earth nations, perpetually combat-ready, able to deliver an object lesson or vengeance if we are attacked again.

The Republic doesn’t like using these ships for anything other than a threatening presence. We don’t even like them to be seen; they are based on Eris, which never gets as close to the sun as Pluto’s maximum distance, and around which the Navy maintains a billion-mile spherical exclusion zone.

But this was clearly a special case. One of the black ships was called in, with the intention of surrounding Grumpy with a stopper bubble and taking it far, far away, before it could hit the Earth.

Long story short: It didn’t work.

Why didn’t it work? I get tired of saying this, but … no one knows. It’s especially frustrating because no one knows why the bubble generators work
at all
. I’m not even sure if Uncle Jubal knows, since he’s not able to explain it. Maybe it’s just something he does with his mind, like a … a psychic, or something, though I don’t believe in psychics or poltergeists or levitation or any of that woo-woo crap. But the fact remains, Uncle Jubal can build a bubble machine and it works. Anyone can be shown how to operate it. Someone else can build a bubble machine
exactly the same way
… and it just sits there. As far as I know they are the only machines ever built that can’t be duplicated, that only work for one man.

Poor man. Jubal Broussard, doomed to be the goose that laid the silver egg.

This time, the bubble generator itself just sat there. They can operate from a great distance—classified, but it’s many millions of miles, and may even be infinity—but no matter how far away they tried it, nothing happened. No squeezer bubbles, no stopper bubbles. Of course they tested the machines, and found they had no trouble forming either sort of bubble, even at several million miles away. But not if it was surrounding Grumpy, or any part of him. They tried it on Doc, too, with the same result.

Again, No One Knew Why. Something about the crystals made it impossible to use our weapon of last resort against them. Maybe it was their gravity drive, or electromagnetic drive, or whatever they used. Ask a physicist, if you can find one who’ll talk to you about it at all. Physicists are a very pissed-off group since the invention of bubble technology. They take it personally that they can’t figure it out.

So the mass evacuations continued, and everyone watched and waited.

THEN GRUMPY (OR
Gabriel) began to slow down.

No one had expected it, though the crystals had demonstrated that they had a vast source of power, even if we didn’t know what it was. So far, none of the crystals had done
anything
anyone expected.

It was around the moon’s orbit that the deceleration began. Over the next several days the velocity dropped. Computers chewed over the data continually, figuring time of arrival—people were beginning to say that instead of the discouraging word “impact”—and total energy released if conditions remained the same. They didn’t; the big rock kept slowing down, so that by the time it entered the atmosphere over the Pacific Ocean it was just moseying along … for an astronomical object being pulled by Earth’s gravity, that is. Maybe it was going to be a gentle touchdown. Maybe aliens were going to emerge and tell us how to stop global warming, end war, stop hunger and racism and poverty and give us a really, really good recipe for chicken soup.

Maybe they were going to welcome us to the Galactic Federation.
Klaatu barada nikto,
Earthlings!

No such luck. It didn’t levitate any Rapturists out of their clothes, either.

It was moving at about Mach 3 when it hit the water. Say two thousand five hundred miles per hour. Not what you’d call a soft landing, but infinitely better than the thirty-five-thousand-plus miles per hour of the first, predeceleration estimate. Impact was several hundred miles southeast of the big island of Hawaii.

The atmospheric shock wave was enough to blow down trees and break windows in Maui.

Mauna Loa is the world’s largest mountain, by volume, and Mauna Kea is the tallest, though the bottom four miles or so are underwater. Mauna Kea had been inactive for millions of years, but now she and her cousin Mauna Loa and daughter Kilauea popped like red-hot pimples from the inertial mass of Grumpy settling into the seabed. What geologists call “slumps,” massive landslides, came down the sides of all the volcanoes, creating tsunamis that were pretty much lost in the much bigger one created by Grumpy himself displacing about fifteen cubic miles of seawater very quickly.

All the seacoast cities of the Pacific Rim were pretty much wiped out. All the islands of Polynesia and Micronesia were scoured clean. (Almost no one was there by that time.) Australia, Indonesia, Japan, the Philippines, China. Mexico, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, Chile. The Western America coast. The list was long.

Earthquakes shook the Mississippi Valley, India, China, Russia.

It took three days for the planet to reach a state of—more or less— equilibrium. Then the cleanup began. And the burials. No one was using the word
recovery
. The world had still not recovered from the Big Wave, twenty-five years before. No one would ever recover from Grumpy.

The operative phrase was
start over
.

Hard to call anything a silver lining in the face of such devastation, but of course there was one. It could have been
much
worse.

So the people of Earth started digging out, settling in on the high ground … and keeping an eye out over their shoulders to see what Doc and Sneezy were going to do.

MARS WAS FULL.

Earth governments didn’t like it, but had to accept it. The door was closed for the moment. If we took one more person from Earth, she’d have to learn to breathe mighty thin air with zero oxygen in it. We were having enough trouble feeding the refugees we had. Mars had never been known as an agricultural planet.

But we were trying. Lord knows we were trying.

The months after Grumpy saw the most intensive construction human beings have ever undertaken.

On Mars, all Navy enlistments were extended indefinitely.

The economy took a terrible hit with the closure of the tourist industry, but we had power and we had food, and we simply stopped all trading with Earth and switched to a credit, moneyless economy: You work at what needs doing, or you don’t get food. Computers kept track of what needed doing, and of who was doing what, and all working citizens and refugees got enough to get by on.

But tensions were high, and for the first time an armed militia was formed to quell violence, especially from the displaced, if and when it happened. Pretty soon we were calling it the Martian Army.

With squeezer technology we hollowed out vast underground bunkers in the bedrock. When they were finished they would become home—temporarily, we hoped—to the poorest of Earth’s teeming, displaced millions. But not until we finished the equally extensive underground farms so we’d have something to feed them. Three hots and a cot, that was the promise, with rooms for families and all the work you can handle, then back to Earth as soon your home country got back on its feet.

Which might be never, but no one wanted to think about that yet.

On Earth, entire cities were planned, ground was broken, and the millions of homeless were put to work building them. They were all located above the high-water marks Grumpy had left, and safely away from fault zones.