"I didn't mean you, Little Father."
"It is too late to call back the canard," said the Master of Sinanju, breezing out the door one step ahead of his pupil.
Chapter 21
In Cancun's Diamond Resort Playacar Hotel, the occupant of room 33-D sat nervously on the edge of the rumpled king-size bed, his laptop balanced on his hairy-legged lap, his eyes staring at the room TV, which was tuned to CNN. Moonlight streamed in through the half-closed curtains.
On the screen, a steely-eyed anchor sat with a graphic floating beside his silvery pompadour. The graphic showed a starry sky against which floated three letters: "MNp."
The newscaster was saying, ". . . obviously a hoax inasmuch as the purported alien letters are of earthly origin."
"I don't believe it," the man on the bed said.
"A hoax so shoddily constructed that the middle consonant was flopped," the newscaster added.
"Thank God thank God thank God for flopping."
The graphic was replaced by a shot of the shapeless blob of space-age metals and ceramics that was once a U.S. space shuttle.
"At the Kennedy Space Center, NASA officials remain tight-lipped about the loss of the Reliant, which jeopardizes the International Space Station, whose first components were scheduled to fly on the Reliant next year and will not be completed until the year 2001."
"Tough. Build another shuttle."
"With us now, by satellite from his private observatory, is renowned astronomer and exobiologist, Dr. Cosmo Pagan of the University of Arizona's Center for Exobiological Studies. Dr. Pagan, what motive would anyone have for destroying a U.S. space shuttle?"
Dr. Pagan appeared on one side of the split screen, his face sober, his voice sonorous, his speaking cadence strange, the accents falling on improbable syllables and words.
"Brad, we cannot rule out an asteroid strike. A small impactor, not a Tunguska-size bludgeon. Otherwise, we would have lost Florida, and not an unimportant shuttle. You see, striking asteroids pack the punch of a nuclear device. Recently we sky watchers have begun to classify them, threat-wise. They include the aforementioned ten-megaton Tunguskas, hundred-megaton regional bludgeons capable of obliterating a continent, hundred-gigaton, hemisphere-demolishing small extinctors, and the Tyrannosaurus rex of asteroids, the great extinctors."
"How serious is this threat?"
"Quite small. We can expect a ten-megaton impact once every century. So this event, coming ninety years after Tunguska, is about on schedule."
"Earlier in the day, you were quoted by AP as pointing to the ozone layer."
"An ozone-layer rupture is also a possibility," said Dr. Pagan.
"You say this, but the phenomenon appeared in two highly localized spots thousands of miles apart. How would an ozone hole account for both events?"
"Perhaps we are looking at a floating hole in Earth's ozone shield," Dr. Pagan said without skipping a beat.
"In other words, you really don't know?"
"I know the possibilities. The universe is ruled by mathematical possibilities. Billions upon trillions upon zillions of possibilities. I am merely enumerating them. I am a scientist, not a seer."
"Pick a damn theory and stick with it!" the occupant of room 33-D railed at the unheeding screen.
"I see," said the CNN anchor. "Dr. Pagan, let's address the question of sabotage. Who would profit from the shuttle's destruction?"
"Besides my career, you mean?"
The laptop beeped, and the occupant of room 33-D looked down at his liquid-crystal screen.
"You have mail!" the system was flashing.
Calling it up, the man read quickly as the singsong voice of Dr. Cosmo Pagan evaded the question artfully.
To: RM@qnm.com From: R Subject: New problem Last-quarter report is out, and firm lost big. Heads are rolling. Upper management is on our backs for a progress update on ParaSol. And they're looking for you for stockholder-impact report.
"Damn," said the man in 33-D.
He pecked out a reply.
To: R From: RM@qnm.com Subject: Re: New problem Do they know where I am?
He hit Send and went back to watching Dr. Pagan, who had somehow gotten on the subject of comets.
"A comet is nothing more than a dirty snowball locked in a perpetual orbit around our mundane sun. Comets rarely strike Earth. But asteroid strikes are very common. A great extinctor created the Chicxulub crater in Yucatan, which threw up so much obscuring dust it blocked out the sun and set off the eco-chain reaction that killed the late, lamented dinosaurs. I would be more concerned with a nameless asteroid landing on Washington than Hale-Bopp or some future comet that's merely booming by our planet."
"Shut the eff up," the occupant of room 33-D snarled. "Do you want the board to hear you?"
The reply from research and development was succinct: "Unknown."
Then the system flashed the new-mail signal, and it popped up automatically.
To: RM@qnm.com From: Evelyn@qnmxom Subject: Mr. Gaunt Mr. Gaunt asked me to request that you make yourself available for early-morning meeting at your hotel. He is en route.
"Shit! That pencil-necked bean-counter is coming here. What do I do? What do I do?"
On CNN, Dr. Cosmo Pagan was into his biography.
"I owe it all to Edgar Rice Burroughs, H. G. Wells and Ray Bradbury. They all wrote about Mars. Not the Mars that's up there now but the Mars of imagination. The Mars of the human spirit. Someday soon, lowly man will walk on the Red Planet, and that day will be a glorious one. Let me urge NASA to launch a crash Mars-colonization program before mankind succumbs to the next great extinctor."
The occupant of room 33-D grasped the remote control and hit Mute. Dr. Pagan kept talking anyway. He just didn't make any sound.
"I didn't get this e-mail. That's it! I was out. My system is down. I can't be held accountable for mail I don't receive."
Hastily he reaccessed the last R and hit the Reply key.
"Cease all communications until further notice," he typed. "Erase all e-mail from me. We have not been in contact. Don't even answer this. I never sent this message."
Then he folded up his laptop and called down to the main desk.
"I'm checking out. Immediately. Urgent business. Gotta get back to the States."
Packing furiously, he muttered, "Let Gaunt come here. I'll go back to Seattle. It's the last place he'll think of looking. If he complains, that'll teach him to get on an international flight without waiting for confirmation of my whereabouts."