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nothing more than to lean back and nod off, Arno chose this moment to demand a
summary of the "scientific situation."
"What do you think the Eater will do next?"
Kingsley was tempted to retreat to his now-
standard aliens-are-alien argument, but this newly revived Arno did not seem
in the mood to accept that and let him sleep. He leaned forward, summoning up
energies he did not until a moment before know that he had. An aide handed him
a gin and tonic with crackling cold ice, fresh from the limo bar. This
incongruity disarmed him momentarily and he took a sip. What the hell, it was
calories. At least Amy was beside him. He needed her much more than the drink,
but it, too, was comforting. He dimly noted that his drink hand was trembling
and wondered abstractly why.
"It's concerned. Not perhaps desperate; we can't flatter ourselves with
entertaining that notion. But
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concerned, since it is wasting its most vital resource
the hot, fluid, ionized mass that is compressed by gravitational gradients
into the disk that orbits it."
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Arno was a difficult audience because he knew just enough to ask questions.
"It didn't use that to burn Washington. Or to shotgun that ship."
"In a way it did," Kingsley said. "The jets it creates, the gravel it used to
poke holes in that ship
they come ultimately from the infalling energy and mass in its disk."
Arno frowned. "It's got a lot in that disk. Hell, I
could see it glowing in the sky. Back when I could see the sky, I mean."
"Indeed. Yet mass is a scarce resource for it now, as it has expended a great
deal decelerating on its approach to us. To be sure, it retrieved some in our
upper atmosphere. Amy has estimated that it could catch in the range of
several tens of tons per minute with the expanded field region it has flowered
forth.
Integrating that over its cruise around the Earth in several shallow orbits,
one gets a substantial mass.
But still a good deal less than it needs. And therefore desires
, for I suspect it experiences its most basic needs as a hunger. Desire is a
more rarefied way to put it. This thing is best regarded as an extremely
sophisticated, moving appetite with more experience than any civilization
could possibly have. And of a different kind, as well, one we can explore only
by working out the most basic constraints upon it."
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This extended blurt Arno greeted with his patented skeptical gaze. He took so
long to say anything that Kingsley wondered whether the man was slipping back
into his earlier semicatatonia.
Then he looked at one of his lieutenants, wedged into the far end of the limo
with a security type, and said, "We got any new intelligence on this?"
"Nosir. Nothing works
."
"No lines to DoD?"
"Nosir."
"The airborne White House?"
"Nosir, it hit us pretty bad."
"Well then." Arno seemed to have decided something, for he now gazed stolidly
at Kingsley across the short separation of the limousine's center well. "What
you got?"
"Our strategy, if it deserves such a name, is simple. The one thing it must
have to move on with is matter. Our first maneuver is to explode canisters of
barium near it. Barium ionizes easily in the solar ultraviolet. The plasma is
disagreeable to the Eater, so it will move away."
"Herding it, I remember that."
"But it needs mass, so we suspect "
"Hope," Amy put in. "A more honest word."
"Quite. We hope that it will move toward the most readily available,
substantial mass in its vicinity."
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"Right, the moon."
"Yet by the logic we settled upon long ago, when we first understood its
nature, the Eater cannot simply plunge into the moon. That would strip it of
its magnetic fields and thus its mind. Suicide."
"So it grazes the moon. Orbits in, real close."
Arno nodded. Kingsley could see he was reconstructing this, as if his memory
were disarranged.
"And that is where we use matter again the key to destroying it, as well."
"Antimatter," Arno said. He clung to the word.
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"The antimatter Channing carries is lodged in cylindrical, highly magnetic
traps. If she can eject the contents at the innermost edge of the Eater's own
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