*
The acceleration had been steady for two hours, but now the weightlessness was just as oppressive. The large cargo hauler was fully loaded with extra fuel and a bulk William Porter was reluctant to think about. With the ship turned around for course correction, he could see the Moon glowing with Earthshine, and a bright crescent so thin it was almost a hair.
He had about half an hour to relax before the real work began, and he was using it to read an excerpt from a novel by Anthony Burgess. Hed been a heavy reader all his memorable life, and now he allowed himself a possible last taste of pleasure.
Like most inhabitants of the Moon, Porter was a Geshel, with a physicist father and a geneticist mother. Hed chosen a career as a pilot rather than a researcher out of romantic predilections established long before he was ten years old. There was something immediately effective and satisfying about piloting, and hed turned out to be well suited to the work. Hed never expected to take on a mission like this. But then, hed never paid much attention to politics, either. Even if he had, the disputes between Geshels and Naderites would have been hard to spottheyd been settled, most experts believed, fifty years before, with the Naderites emerging as a ruling class. Outside of grumbling at restrictions, few Geshels complained. Responsibility had been lifted from their shoulders. Most of the population of both Earth and Moon was now involved in technical and scientific work, yet the mistakes they made would be blamed on Naderite policiesand the disasters would likewise be absorbed by the leadership. It wasnt a hard situation to get used to.
William Porter wasnt so sure, now, that it was the ideal. He had two options to save Earth, and one of them meant he would die.
Hed listened to the Psyche-Earth transmissions during acceleration, trying to make sense out of Turcos position, to form an opinion of her character and sanity, but he was more confused than ever. If she was rightand not a raving lunatic, which didnt seem to fit the factsthen the Hexamon Nexus had a lot of explaining to do and probably wouldnt do it under the gun. The size of Turcos gun was far too imposing to be rationalthe destruction of the human race, the wiping of a planets surface.
He played back the computer diagram of what would happen if Psyche hit the Earth. At the angle it would strike, it would speed the rotation of the Earths crust and mantle by an appreciable fraction. The asteroid would cut a gouge from Maine to England, several thousand kilometers long and at least a hundred kilometers deep. The impact would vault hundreds of millions of tons of surface material into space, and that would partially counteract the speedup of rotation. The effect would be a monumental jerk, with the energy finally being released as heat. The continents would fracture in several directions, forming new faults, even new plate orientations, which would generate earthquakes on a scale never before seen. The impact basin would be a hell of molten crust and mantle, with water on the perimeter bursting violently into steam, altering weather patterns around the world. It would take decades to cool and achieve some sort of stability.
Turco may not have been raving, but she was coldly suggesting a cataclysm to swat what amounted to a historical fly. That made her a lunatic in anyones book, Geshel or Naderite. And his life was well worth the effort to thwart her.
That didnt stop him from being angry, though.
* * * *
Kollert impatiently let the physician check him over and administer a few injections. He talked to his wife briefly, which left him more nervous than before, then listened to the team leaders theories on how Turcos behavior would change in the next few hours. He nodded at only one statement: Shes going to see shell be dead, too, and thats a major shock for even the most dedicated terrorist.
Then Turco was back on the air, and he was on stage again.
Ive seen your