the next alignment?”
“Three days from now.”
“When will the satellites be in position around Deimos?” asked the president.
“Over the next few weeks,” said Lockwood.
“Why so long?”
“Most require gravitational and orbital assists. They don’t have the fuel to go jetting anywhere at a moment’s notice.”
“Isn’t it possible,” asked the president, “that repositioning our satellites around Deimos might be seen as an aggressive maneuver?”
“The satellites are small, fragile, and clearly unarmed,” said Lockwood. “But, yes, there’s a danger that anything we do—anything—might be misinterpreted. We’re dealing with alien thinking, even if it is alien A.I. It also might be defective. Malfunctioning.”
The DIA asked, “This ‘strange matter’ that you say was fired at the Earth—I don’t understand why it’s so dangerous. Just what does it do?”
Lockwood spoke. “It’s a form of matter that converts regular matter into strange matter on contact, like Midas turning everything he touched to gold.”
“How would that be dangerous?”
“For one thing, the Earth would shrink to the size of a baseball. And then, because strange matter is unstable, it would explode with force so great it would blow apart the solar system, driving strange matter into the sun, which would then explode, affecting our corner of the galaxy.” His deep, pebbly voice seemed to echo ominously in the room.
“So why did the last one go through the Earth without destroying it?”
“It was very small and moving fast. It converted some matter, but that matter accreted onto it and all of it exited the Earth on the way out. That’s why there wasn’t a huge explosion of ejecta, magma, and so forth when it emerged. No shock wave developed. It was like a hot knife through butter, essentially. Our geologists tell us the vacuumed-out hole sealed up behind it. The Moon, on the other hand, was a much bigger chunk. It was too fast to convert the Moon, but it was big enough to generate a huge shock wave that rang the Moon like a bell and ejected a stream of debris.”
“So all this alien artifact has to do,” the DIA said, “is lob another strangelet at the Earth and we’re dead.”
“That’s right. The key is speed. If it’s tossed at us at a slow enough speed to be trapped inside the Earth, we’re finished.”
A long silence settled in the room. “Any other questions?”
No one spoke. Finally the president said, “Why? Why is it attacking us?”
“We don’t know. We don’t even know if this is an attack. Maybe it’s a mistake. Bad programming. It’s been suggested . . .” he paused, “that the Deimos Machine might have been monitoring our planet for some time, picking up radio and television broadcasts and analyzing them. Perhaps it concluded we were a dangerous species that needed to be eliminated. Or it may have been placed there by a hyper-aggressive alien species which wanted to eliminate any intelligent life that might develop in our solar system, nip a challenge in the bud so to speak. It might also have just been woken up. The first shot on April fourteenth occurred only three weeks after Deimos was illuminated with radar from the Mars Mapping Orbiter.”
The president paced in front of the screen showing the Deimos Machine. “Any idea what these globes are, this tube?”
“We can’t begin to analyze it.”
Another round of pacing. “All right, what’s the recommendation of the OSTP? What the hell are we going to do?”
“Mr. President, we have no recommendation.”
A short, shocked silence. “That’s not what I asked you to do,” said the president, exasperation in his voice. “I asked for actionable advice.”
Lockwood cleared his throat. “Some problems are so far beyond our experience, so intractable, that it would be irresponsible to ‘recommend’ anything. This is one of those problems.”
“Surely you could come up with a plan to attack it—nuke it, whatever. General Mickelson?”
“Mr. President, I’m a military man. My instincts are to fight. I started off arguing for a military solution. But I’ve been persuaded by Dr. Lockwood that any aggressive move would be dangerous. Even the discussion of aggression might provoke another attack. The Deimos Machine might somehow be able to monitor our communications.”
“I don’t accept that.”
“That machine could destroy us in a heartbeat. We’re sitting ducks. Powerless. Any military response would take years to plan and launch and would be obvious, even if conducted under the tightest secrecy. Eventually we would have to loft something into space and it would take nine months to get to Mars. We can’t imagine that machine just sitting there waiting to be hit.”
The president