he could not have any direct communication with any of the Terraforming Center staff whenever it was possible that Dee could overhear. Fredda served as an anonymous intermediary, passing information back and forth, mostly via scribbled notes and whispers.
Donald, meantime, was in constant hyperwave contact with Kresh's office back in Hades. He used preexisting and standing orders to handle most of the queries and requests, and bucked whatever decisions he had to up to Kresh when he needed to do so.
Kresh sat down at the console with something very close to dread. All would be in readiness soon, and the clock was running out. They were getting close, very close, to the moment when he would be forced to make the final, irrevocable decision. He glanced at the wall chronometer. It was set in countdown mode, showing the time left until the comet diversion maneuver. Ninety-four hours left. Before that clock reached zero, he would have to decide whether to send the comet toward Utopia-or to turn his back on all of it, walk away from all the madness and chaos that had led them to this place. He had thought he was sure, that he was ready, that he was ready to step forward. But by now all the pressures were pushing him forward, urging him onward. Suppose, just suppose, that he now concluded the comet diversion would be a dreadful mistake? Would he have the courage to say no, to stop, to let it go past?
"Good morning, Governor Kresh," said Unit Dee the moment Kresh put on the headset.
"Good morning, Dee," he replied, his voice gruff and not at all at ease. "What have you and Dum got for us this morning?"
"Quite a number of things, sir, as you might imagine. However, there is one point in particular that I thought we might discuss at once."
Kresh leaned back in his chair and rubbed the bridge of his nose. It was not going to be an easy day. "And what might that be?" he asked.
"A plan that, if you forgive the expression, I have named 'Last Ditch. ' It provides you with an abort option for the comet impact long after its diversion. Dum performed most of the calculations, and only finished a very few minutes ago."
"How the devil can we abort after the diversion?" Kresh demanded.
"As you know, the whole body of the comet has been rigged with explosive charges, intended to break the comet up into the desired number of fragments just before impact."
"What of it?"
"Virtually all of those explosive charges have been damped down, or directionalized in one way or another, mostly by means of shaped forcefields. The plan is for these controlled charges to be set off one at a time in a very carefully planned sequence, so as to limit undesired fragmentation and lateral spread. By shutting down all the damping and directionalization, and by detonating all of the explosives in a different order, and much more rapidly, it should be possible to disintegrate the entire comet, reducing it to a cloud of rubble."
"But the whole cloud of rubble will still be headed right for the planet," Kresh objected. "It will all hit the planet, in a whole series of uncontrolled impacts."
"That is not quite correct, Governor. If the blasts are done in the right way, and far enough before the impact, the explosion will give the vast majority of the material a large enough lateral velocity that it will miss the planet completely. Our model shows that, even in a worst case scenario, over ninety percent of the comet debris will miss the planet and continue on in its orbit about the sun. Of the ten percent or so of the debris that does strike the planet, ninety percent will strike in areas already slated for evacuation, or in the open waters of the Southern Ocean.
"That still leaves something like one percent of the comet coming down in uncontrolled impacts," Kresh said.
"And some areas will experience a brief period of increased danger," Dee replied. "Small pieces of debris will fall all over the planet, for about 32 hours after detonation-however, the impact danger for most inhabited regions will be on the order of one strike per hundred square kilometers. Persons in most areas would be in more danger of being struck by lightning in a storm than by being hit a piece of comet debris."
"But some areas will be more trouble," Kresh suggested.
"Yes, sir. The closer one gets to the initial target area,