Free Nemesis by Bill Napier Page A

another few megs in British Guyana in 1935, but the five thousand years of civilisation before that were missile-free? And what about Courty’s Syrian excavations showing Bronze Age city destructions caused by blast? And when Revelation talks about a great red dragon in the sky throwing a burning mountain to earth, and the sun and moon darkened by smoke, and the earth ablaze with falling hail and fire, and a smoking abyss, and the same celestial dragon keeps appearing throughout the Near East, in Hesiod in 800 BC, Babylon in 1400 BC and so on, and Zoroaster predicts a comet crashing to Earth and causing huge destruction, this is all poetic invention, drawn from a vacuum, based on no experience? You are aware, Herb, that comets were described as dragons in the past? That a great comet has a red tail? You have actually heard of Encke’s Comet and the Taurid Complex?”
    Sacheverell’s face was a picture of incredulity. “I can’t believe I’m hearing this. You are seriously telling us that responsible policymaking should be based on a Velikovskianinterpretation of history? You want to throw in the Biblical Flood? Maybe von Däniken and flying saucers?”
    “This is breathtaking,” Webb said. “We’re dealing with a threat to hundreds of millions of lives, and you think you can responsibly ignore evidence of past catastrophe just because you don’t have the balls to handle it?”
    Sacheverell stabbed a thin finger. His voice was strident and the eyes behind the thick spectacles were angry. “You want to identify gods with comets and combat myths with impacts? What sort of a scientist do you call yourself? I say you’re a charlatan.”
    “That’s it, Herb, go with the flow like a good little party hack. I say stuff your cultural hang-ups and your intellectual cowardice.”
    Judy had frozen, mouth wide open to receive a hardboiled egg. Shafer was grinning hugely. Noordhof, his face taut with anger, punched a fist on the table. “Enough! Now get this. I could spend hours listening to you guys at each other’s throats. Unfortunately we don’t have hours to spend. Now simmer down. Ollie, get to the point. Explain to those of us down here on Earth why Big Daddy is good news.”
    Sacheverell sat down heavily, flushed and rattled. Webb said, “Because we could spend two or three thousand years looking for Herb’s Little Bears. Because we have a better chance of detecting Big Daddies further out. And because we can maybe hit a big one harder without breaking it into a swarm.”
    Shafer brushed his grey hair back from his shoulders with both hands. “And because the actuarial odds are that we’ve been hit by a few Tunguskas and maybe even a Baby Bear or two in the historical past, but civilization survived. The damage is relatively local. If you want to utterly destroy America, you have to go for bodies between half a kilometre and two kilometres across. Too little, and you leave the surviving States with lots of muscle and fighting mad.”
    “You guys are wrong,” McNally said. “We’re only fightingmad if we know the impact was an act of war. And like Herb said, we’re not supposed to know that. Look, even with the Baby Bear scenario you have an America with half its population wiped out, its industrial base gone, no political infrastructure, probably just chaos and anarchy. This is a gun society. We’d destroy ourselves, finish the job the Russians started. Zhirinovsky could do what he liked, where he liked and we’d be too busy to care.”
    Shafer said, “Jim, you just want a Baby Bear because it’s easy to shift.”
    Noordhof lowered his head pensively. Then he said, “I go with McNally. The uncertainties are too large for confident statements about the political intentions of the enemy, whether to incapacitate us or utterly destroy us. We conduct the scope of our search to encompass the full range from Baby Bear to Big Daddy.”
    “Forgive me, but that is utterly impractical,” said Kowalski. “If