Nemesis Read Online Free PDF Page A

this?”
    “My goodness no,” said Walkinshaw blandly.
    “If there is trouble nevertheless?”
    “Never heard of you. You’re a crackpot.”
    “A popular opinion in some circles anyway,” Webb replied, giving the Astronomer Royal a look. The AR stared unflinchingly back.
    The long backbone of the Cuillins was hidden by low, fast cloud sweeping in from the Atlantic. They stepped out into low, fast sleet sweeping in from the Atlantic. Fifty yards away on the black sand, a dark insect was poised to jump. It was bigger than a house. It had mysterious protrusions, and a row of windows along its dark side, and huge twin rotors throwing spirals of water into the wind. The sand under the Sikorsky was rippling and the Sea King was suddenly a child’s toy.
    Webb stared in alarm at the monstrous thing.
    Walkinshaw shouted, “The Air Force will make sure you catch the plane at Reykjavik. Sign the credit card as Larry Fish. Any expenditures must be accounted for but you shouldn’t need it.”
    “Then why give me it?”
    “A precaution,” was the enigmatic response. “I am informed that you know the Goddard Institute at Broadway. You are expected there around now. Still, they tell me you can beat the Sun at polar latitudes. Something to do with the Earth turning, but we pay you people to know about things like that, don’t we, Bertrand?”
    “What about my tent?”
    “Webb,” the AR replied with a show of infinite patience, “Have you quite grasped the situation? The issue here is not your scientific research, nor your evident fear of flying nor the fate of your blasted tent. The issue is the survival of the West. His Majesty’s Air Force have laid on travel gear in the Chinook, and His Majesty’s Astronomer will personally dismantle your tent and return it to your office.”
    “I’ll be missed at the Institute,” Webb pleaded.
    “The hell you will!” the Astronomer Royal roared. “Nobody knows what you do in that damned basement all day. Anyway, you sent a note saying you’ve extended your leave. My secretary does signatures.”
    “I’m not getting into that contraption!” Webb finally shouted, but he knew he would.
    “Just find the asteroid, Webb,” the Astronomer Royal shouted back. “And quickly! And keep your mouth shut!”
    The freezing rain drove into the Astronomer Royal’s wrinkled face, and he screwed up his eyes as the massive helicopter rose and tilted over the sea. He watched as it dwindled upwards and vanished into the clouds. He puffed reflectively on his pipe, the wind blowing a thin stream of smoke across the beach.
    Walkinshaw looked worried. “Bertrand, are you sure about this? What sort of man spends Christmas alone on a mountain, in a blizzard, calculating?”
    “A hermit, of course. Speaking as his Director, he’s a nightmare.”
    “In what way?”
    “He’s restless, the very devil to control. Needs a woman if you ask me. He keeps diverting from well-established lines of research into cosmological speculation. There’s no funding for stuff like that these days, and anyway nobody quite understands what he’s about. However he pursues his ideas with great exuberance and determination.”
    “Family?”
    “I know little of it except that he comes from a large, poor one with no sort of academic background.”
    “Then I understand him,” Walkinshaw declared. “A large family with little privacy will make him invent his own private space, a world in which he can daydream. Hence the cosmological speculation. And the need to compete with siblings will make him pursue his own ends with determination. Throw in an exceptional intelligence and there you have him.”
    A deeply sceptical expression came over the AR’s face. “Very neat, Walkinshaw, wonderfully glib. I don’t suppose you’re into palmistry as well as amateur psychology?”
    “His evident unworldliness has the same source. There is no great ingenuity without an admixture of dementedness. Seneca said that, not me.