She entered, somewhat puzzled. “Yes, sir?”

“Sit down, sit down!” He sighed and sank into his own chair. “I’ve got an interesting and fast-developing situation here that’s causing us some problems and may be opening up some opportunities for you. Uh—pardon me for asking, but I’m given to understand that you’re living alone here now, no particular personal ties or local family?”

She was puzzled and a little irritated at the speed of campus gossip. “That’s true.”

“And you did some of your doctoral research at the big observatories in Chile?”

She nodded. “Yes, under Don Mankowicz and Jorje Paz. It was the most fun I’ve had in science to date.”

“Did you get over the mountains and into the Amazon basin at all?”

It was hard to see where this was going. “Yes, I took a kind of back-country trip into the rain forests with the Salazars—they finance their fight against the destruction of the rain forest and its cultures by taking folks like me on such trips. It was fascinating but a little rugged.”

Hicks leaned forward a little and picked up a packet in a folder on his desk and shoved it toward her. She opened it up and saw it was full of faxes, some showing grainy photographs, others trajectory charts, star charts, and the like. She looked them over and read the covering letter from the MIT team down in Chile who’d sent them. And she was suddenly very interested.

“About nine days ago, during some routine calibration sweeps for the eighty-incher that’s just been overhauled, they picked this up. We’re not sure, but we think it’s a known asteroid—at least, a small one discovered about a dozen years ago should have been in that vicinity at about that time. It should have cleared the orbit of the moon by a good two hundred thousand kilometers, but something, some collision or force unknown, seems to have jarred it just so. It’s big—maybe as big as eight hundred meters— and it’s just brushing by the moon right now.”