Read In the Ocean of Night for Free Online

something?
    “Nigel?”
    “I think it’s been vacant for a long time. There are big open vaults inside, hundreds of meters on a side. Something must have been in them—maybe water or food—”
    “Or engines? Fuel?” Len said.
    “Could be. Whatever it was, it’s gone. If it was liquid it probably evaporated when this vent opened.”
    “Yes,” Dave said, “that could be what made the cometary plume, the Flare Tail.”
    “I think it was. That, and the atmosphere that blew out through the crack. There’s a lot of disorder inside— things ripped off the walls, strewn around, some gouges in the corridors that could have been made by things flying by. I picked up some of the smaller stuff lying around and brought it out.”
    No one said anything for a while. Nigel put a hand to the cabin wall near him, feeling the wholeness of it. He looked out at a burnished rock shelf and sensed the problem before him. It was something he could hold in one palm and turn to watch its facets catch the light, much as he had once seen in his mind Icarus slipping silently toward the Earth at thirty kilometers a second, himself and Len arcing out to meet the tumbling mountain, administer the kick, race home. That had been a clean problem with easy solutions, but now it crumpled and fell away from him, replaced by another, darker vision that slowly formed, coming to clarity in his mind—
    Just before he had entered the dust plume, while Len was still in view, Nigel had taken a sighting on prominent stars to fix his inertial gyros. It was a simple process, easily done in the allotted time. Before swinging the telescope away from the port, a point of light caught Nigel’s eye and he focused on it. It swelled into a disk, blue and white and flat, and he realized that he was looking at Earth. A featureless circle, complete and serene. Alone. A target, unnoticing. Its smooth, certain curve seemed more than a blotch on a star background; no, it was the center. A hole through which light was pouring from the other side of the universe. Complete. He had looked at it for a long moment.
    Through scratchy static, Dave said, “Well, we can give you the time for another trip inside, Nigel. Haul out everything you can, take some more photos. Then you and Len can rendezvous and get clear of the Egg and—”
    “No.”
    “What?”
    “No. We’re not going to set off the Egg, are we, Len?” “Nigel—” Dave started, then paused.
    “I don’t know,” Len said. “What have you got in mind?”
    “Don’t you see that this changes everything?”
    “I wonder,” Len said distantly. “We’re trying to save millions of lives, Nigel. When Icarus hits it’s going to wipe out a big chunk of territory, throw dirt into the air and probably change the climate. I kind of—”
    “But it won’t! Not now, anyway. Don’t you see, Icarus is
hollow.
It has only a fraction of the mass we thought it did. Sure, it’ll make a pretty big blast when it gets to India, but nothing like the disaster we thought.”
    Len said, “Maybe you’ve got something there.”
    “I can estimate the volume of rock left—”
    “Nigel, I’ve been talking to some people here at Houston. We started reevaluating the collision dynamics and trajectory when you found the core was hollow. We’ll have the results pretty soon, but until we do I just want to talk to you about this.” Dave paused.
    “Go ahead.”
    “Even if the mass of Icarus is a tenth of what we thought, its energy of impact will still be thousands of times larger than Krakatoa. Think of the people in Bengal.”
    “What’s left of them, you mean,” Len said. “The famine cycles have killed millions already, and they’ve been migrating out of the impact area for over a year now. Since the Indian government broke down nobody knows how many souls we’re talking about, Dave.”
    “That’s right. But if you don’t care about them, Len, think about the dust that will be thrown into the upper atmosphere. That