Sidney's Comet Read Online Free PDF

didn’t see anything wrong with that, and a couple of days later they came back with a list of tasks they felt could be better performed by handicapped personnel. One of those tasks was the assembly of circuit boards.”
    Jim McConnel, the portly Indian minister of Bu-Med, rose angrily and snapped: I’m not going to let this mess land in my lap! No one told us we were manufacturing critical components! And don’t forget that Bu-Construct pressured us to build more orbiters!”
    Immediately, all the other ministers leaped to their feet, clamoring for attention. They argued heatedly for several minutes, with the ones who had not yet been blamed choosing sides. Ogg let the melee continue awhile to see if he could make sense out of the alignments among those ministers of doubtful loyalty. But no clear patterns emerged, and as the alliances shifted back and forth, Ogg finally demanded: “STOP THIS FOOLISHNESS! TAKE YOUR SEATS IMMEDIATELY!”
    The ministers fell silent and resumed their seats.
    “Now I will show you what the President’s office can do,” Ogg said.
    Munoz knew what was coming.
    The office door swung open, admitting a procession of coffee secretaries. They rolled in single file, dressed in dark brown mini-dresses bearing the gold encircled lapel crest of a steaming cup of coffee. The first in line was a consumptively rotund redhead carrying a trivet. With a curt smile, she placed the trivet on the President’s desk, did a one hundred eighty degree spin on her moto-shoes and rolled out the door. The second girl carried a large coffee pot, which she placed on the trivet with equal fanfare. Next came eleven pudgy saucer bearers, and a saucer was placed in front of the President and on the little tables next to the ministers’ chairs. They were followed by eleven cup bearers and then by a pneumatic brunette who poured the coffee and returned the pot to the trivet.
    “Very impressive, Mr. President,” several ministers said as they watched buxom blond twins remove the coffee pot and trivet. “Very impressive, indeed.”
    I call that showing off, Munoz thought as he watched the women leave. Twenty-seven girls to serve coffee to eleven of us!
    “Thank you,” the President said as he mentoed the door closure. “Now let’s get back to the matter at hand.” Addressing Dr. Hudson, he said, “Just forty-eight hours ago you assured me that no comet was heading toward Earth.”
    “That’s true, sir. I replied so at the time because I did not believe it to be a comet.”
    “Why not?”
    “Many bodies of matter move through the heavens, sir, not all of which are comets. This particular object is of unique origin . . . and unlike any comet I have observed, it has an extremely dense mass. Most comets are a ‘bag of nothing,’ in that they consist of gas particles surrounding an ice nucleus. While their tails may stretch for millions of kilometers across space, they typically don’t have much mass.”
    “Tell him about the spectral analysis, Dick,” Munoz said.
    “It’s burning common garbage, meteorite chunks, nuclear matter and the like,” Hudson said. “I suppose it’s a comet, Mr. President. It’s closer to that than to any other phenomenon. But this baby’s unlike any other comet in the universe!” It’s also burning human bodies from our burial shots, Hudson thought. Such a nasty detail.
    Ogg took a sip of coffee, asked angrily, “Why didn’t you level with me in the first place? You knew something was heading toward us.”
    “You don’t like to be bothered with technical details, Mr. President. Besides, until now, we didn’t have enough photographs to plot the course.”
    “It’ll hit us? For sure?”
    “It is on a definite collision course with Earth. We were trying to save you a lot of trouble. . . . ” Hudson’s voice trailed off.
    President Ogg spun his chair around to stare out the window. He focused on an imposing grey General Oxygen factory in the distance, with seven tall