The Dark Freeze

by Peter Gregory

  Sat in his wheelchair, her father was so proud as his daughter walked on to the stage. So proud as she received her degree. Even though he was terminally ill, tears rolled down his wizened, grey face, a face bursting with pride. As Liz descended the steps and hurried back to her father, tears welled up in her eyes. She kissed him tenderly on his wrinkled forehead and whispered, ‘I did it for you, dad. I did it for you.’ Then she burst into tears.

  A few days later, her father died. He’d fought bravely for nine long years but to no avail. The disease won. It always did. As she stood beside his open coffin and studied his face, a face that was now at peace, Liz thought back to the time about a year earlier, a time when he still had some control of his mental faculties, when he begged her to end his life. Implored her to administer an overdose of tablets, or even the garden weedkiller, Weedol, to end his suffering and let him slip away with a modicum of dignity. Liz was torn between conflicting emotions; on the one hand she hated seeing her father suffer, but there was no way she could have a hand in hastening his death. No way at all.

  Her father’s death proved to be the last straw for her mother. It crushed her. Devastated her. She lost the will to live, to carry on, even though she had two beautiful daughters. Two beautiful daughters she adored. She became withdrawn and introverted again, like a zombie, and shut herself off from the world. A recluse.

  It was a difficult time for the whole family, particularly Baby Blu – she was only 15 – but, despite the difficulties, Liz still managed to obtain a PhD (Doctor of Philosophy) in astrobiology from Bangor University and a job at Jodrell Bank. Her little sister followed in her mother’s footsteps and became a teacher at a local primary school, fell in love with a fellow teacher and got pregnant. Blu’s pregnancy seemed to instil a new lease of life in their mother. Invigorate her. Give her something to look forward to, something joyous and happy instead of the sadness and despair she’d had to endure. She was really looking forward to the birth of her first grandchild when tragedy once again reared its ugly head. Blu tripped and fell down the stairs, causing the baby to miscarry at six months.

  It was one tragedy too many for their mother. One evening, Blu came home from school to find her mother on the floor: a packet of sleeping pills and an empty gin bottle lay beside her. She wasn’t dead, although death might have been a better outcome. She’d suffered a massive stroke that left her severely brain damaged. A vegetable who’d spend the rest of her life in hospital. Two years later, she died.

  Liz and Baby Blu sold the family home. Liz bought a modest semi-detached house in Southport, a place where houses are surprisingly inexpensive, whilst Blu and her teacher boyfriend bought an apartment near Chester. Both of them wanted a new beginning.

  Dong, dong, dong… chimed the clock on the wall. The noise startled Liz, snapped her out of her reverie. She sat up abruptly and glanced at the time. Midnight. Good God! Had she reminisced for so long? Despite the coffee, she felt drowsy. It was time for bed. After making sure that everything was switched off, she climbed the stairs to her bedroom, took off her robe and snuggled under the duvet.

  As she was dozing off, her thoughts returned to the recent glut of meteor showers. There was nothing unusual about meteor showers. They were a natural occurrence. But there was something different about these. Something that wasn’t quite right. She couldn’t put her finger on what it was, not yet, but maybe she’d have a better understanding after the meeting tomorrow. Suddenly, a bright light startled her. Made her sit up. It was coming from the bedroom window and getting brighter by the second. She jumped out of bed, dashed to the window and flung back the curtains. It was a shooting star. A meteorite. And it was heading straight for her!

  4

  Meteor Showers

  Liz had never moved so fast in her entire life. She flung herself away from the window, away from the white hot piece of rock hurtling towards her, landing in a heap on the bedroom floor. Almost simultaneously – everything happened so fast – she heard a bang, like a dull explosion, as the meteorite thudded into the wall. The bedroom shuddered and, just for an instant, Liz feared it would collapse on top of her, crushing her to death just like her grandfather. It didn’t, but it left her shaking all over. Shaking with fear at her close encounter with a meteorite. She was scared, very scared, but also excited at the same time. She realised what a great opportunity it was. Would there be any fragments from the meteorite? Even the intact meteorite itself? Any clues as to its origin? Recovering her composure, she put on her robe and dashed downstairs.

  The ‘explosion’ had woken her neighbours. People were milling about in pyjamas and nightgowns wondering what the hell had happened. Confused, bewildered, frightened people. Explosions simply didn’t happen in their street.

  Liz ignored them and made a beeline to the side of the house where her bedroom was located. What she saw surprised her. She’d expected to see a gaping hole but what met her eyes was… just a circle of damaged bricks no more than a foot in diameter. A circle of badly damaged bricks and dust. Dust that spread out from the damaged bricks and dust on the floor. Lots of it.

  Liz examined the damaged bricks more closely. In the centre, where the meteorite had struck, the damage was more extensive but even here, the meteorite hadn’t penetrated the wall. She was puzzled. It had seemed so large as it hurtled towards her, a white hot missile as big as a football. But it couldn’t have been. A meteorite that size would have demolished not just the wall but the entire house. It must have been smaller, much smaller, probably the size of a pea or, at most, a golf ball. And yet… and then it dawned on her. Even a meteorite the size of a pea left a trail of white hot gas larger than a football. That was it! It had appeared large but in reality it wasn’t.

  A wave of excitement swept over her. A meteorite that small explained everything. Atmospheric friction has little effect on the velocity of large objects such as asteroids, but it quickly slows the speed of small objects like meteorites from tens of thousands of miles per hour to just a few hundred. Not only did that explain the minimal amount of damage to her house, it also meant that the meteorite should still be intact. At that speed, it shouldn’t have disintegrated on impact. It should be around somewhere. She looked at the drive under the impact point but couldn’t see anything other than fragments of bricks and dust. The drive sloped down towards the road so it could have rolled on to the road. But it wasn’t there either.

  By now, a crowd of curious onlookers had gathered, wondering what all the commotion was about. The man from next door approached her. ‘What’s happened, Liz?’ he asked.

  ‘I think a meteorite hit the house,’ replied Liz. ‘It’s a good job it was only a small one.’ Secretly, she wished they’d all leave so she could continue searching for the meteorite. Realising there was nothing much to see, the crowd dispersed, slowly at first then more quickly, leaving Liz free to resume her search. Perhaps they’d read her thoughts.

  If it wasn’t on the drive, it could only mean one thing. Unless it had defied the laws of physics, it must have rolled into the front garden. The garden was wet and muddy from the storm and all she had on her feet were bedroom slippers. Clean, white, fluffy bedroom slippers. ‘What the hell,’ she thought, stepping into a muddy puddle – she didn’t want to waste time changing her footwear. In her haste, she slipped and would have fallen had she not grabbed the branch of a silver birch tree. She stopped and looked around. A sodium vapour street light cast a pale yellow glow over the small garden, imparting a strange hue to the grass and the shrubs. There was no meteorite on the lawn. As she turned towards the shrubs at the side of the drive, a faint hissing noise caught her attention. It seemed to be coming from under the hydrangea bush. As she moved closer, she noticed wisps of steam curling up into the cold night air. They too emanated from the hydrangea bush. Liz thought it looked, and sounded, eerie. Like an invisible snake hissing its steamy breath into the night sky. Carefully, she parted the branches with her han
d. There, under the bush, was a red hot piece of extraterrestrial rock the size of a golf ball, a meteorite, lying in a puddle of water.

  ‘Don’t be bloody stupid,’ snapped the young man sat across the table from Liz. ‘It’s just a natural event. Yes, there are some irregularities, some differences, between these meteor bursts and previous ones, and yes, there are a lot more meteorites than usual, but that’s because the Earth is passing through the debris from the collision of the comet with the asteroid.’

  ‘Have you finished? Have you quite finished, you…?’ She was about to say jumped-up, toffee-nosed, supercilious prat, but corrected herself and said, instead, ‘blinkered idiot’. Both were very apt but the latter was more relevant to the current discussion. ‘Your closed mind ‘‘I’m always right’’ attitude just pisses me off,’ she spat.

  ‘It isn’t that, is it Beth?’ he replied in his calm, superior manner, deliberately drawing out the word ‘Beth’. Drawing it out because he knew how much she hated being called by that name. ‘You just can’t stand being proved wrong.’

  ‘No one’s proved me wrong,’ she hissed. ‘Certainly not you.’

  Professor Cecil Vivian Shawcross, the leader of the small Near Earth Object (NEO) team, glanced at his counterpart, Professor Frank Rogers, the leader of the equally small ‘Astrophysics’ team, and sighed. The two young protagonists were at it again, arguing like cat and dog trying to get the better of each other. Liz Conway, his star protégé and Rupert Templeton-Smythe, Frank Rogers’ bright young man. He’d yet to attend a meeting without the two of them going at it hammer and tongs. ‘Look,’ he said, defusing the situation, ‘let’s all calm down. At this stage no one’s right and no one’s wrong. We just don’t have sufficient data to make an informed judgement. Let’s move on. And,’ he continued, glancing at Rupert and Liz, ‘let’s behave like adults, not unruly, spoilt children.’

  ‘I think it’s a good idea if we review the facts,’ said Frank Rogers, doing his bit to calm the situation. ‘As we all know, a meteor shower happens when streams of debris, usually from the tail of a passing comet, enter the Earth’s atmosphere at extremely high velocities. Most are smaller than a grain of sand and burn up before reaching the Earth’s surface. However, a few do make it to the surface, but not many. Intense meteor showers, meteor storms, like the kind we are experiencing now, can produce over a thousand meteors per hour.

  ‘What has been unusual,’ he continued, ‘is the number of meteorites in the meteor showers. Normally, there are none, or very few. But, as someone mentioned earlier,’ he didn’t mention Rupert’s name, ‘that’s because of the debris from the collision of the comet and the asteroid.’

  ‘With respect, sir, …’

  ‘Oh please, call me Frank.’

  ‘With respect, Frank,’ continued Liz, ‘what you’ve said is true as far as it goes, but it doesn’t explain everything.’

  ‘What doesn’t it explain, Liz?’ said Frank in a fatherly way to the young woman he admired. The young woman who wasn’t afraid to challenge existing dogma.

  ‘Well, it doesn’t explain the fact that these meteor showers don’t originate from a single point in the sky, like normal meteor showers do. And…’

  ‘That’s perfectly true, Liz,’ interjected Frank, knowing full well that he hadn’t explained everything. ‘But again, it’s probably because of the debris from the comet and the asteroid. Such a collision is a very rare event so we don’t really know what to expect.’

  ‘I suppose that could be the explanation,’ replied Liz slowly, although it was obvious she wasn’t fully convinced. She had her own ideas.

  ‘But the really interesting thing,’ continued Liz, ‘is the distribution of the meteorites.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ queried Frank. This was new information to him.

  Liz glanced at Zak Rhodes, a newly qualified PhD and the third and final member of the NEO team. An expert in probability theory, it was Zak who’d plotted, predicted might be a better word, the likely distribution of the meteorites. He nodded for her to carry on.

  ‘Well,’ continued Liz thoughtfully, ‘the majority of the meteorites landed in the sea, which isn’t surprising given that 70 per cent of our planet is covered with water. However, what is surprising,’ she paused for effect, scanning the faces of the people in the room, ‘is the distribution of the meteorites that didn’t end up in the sea.’

  ‘And what distribution is that, Liz?’ asked Frank, becoming more and more interested.

  ‘What’s surprising about their distribution,’ said Liz, ‘is that an unusually large proportion of the meteorites landed in the coldest regions of the planet. The Arctic, the Antarctic, Siberia, Alaska and the Himalayas.’

  ‘Beth,’ said Rupert somewhat resignedly, ‘that’s because of the tilt of the Earth. The Northern Hemisphere is pointing towards the debris, so it’s perfectly natural that more of them will fall in the Northern Hemisphere.’

  Rupert’s confident, superior manner irritated Liz. She was about to respond when someone beat her to it.

  ‘That explains the higher incidence of impacts in the Arctic, Alaska, the Himalayas and Siberia,’ chimed a nervous voice from the back of the room, ‘but it doesn’t explain the high level of impacts in the Antarctic. That’s in the Southern Hemisphere.’ It was precisely the same point that Liz was about to make but one of the young PhD students stood at the back of the room had said it first.

  ‘Good for you,’ thought Liz, turning around to look at the young man who’d plucked up enough courage to speak. ‘Even young students can spot flaws in your pronouncements.’

  Rupert shrugged his shoulders. ‘Just another quirk of nature,’ he said nonchalantly.

  ‘You self-opinionated, smug, know-it-all bastard,’ seethed Liz to herself. ‘When you don’t know the answer, you just shrug it off as ‘‘just another quirk of nature.’’ ’ She could have hit him. But she’d get him. Expose him for what he was. Starting right now.

  ‘Then why is it?’ said Liz, looking him straight in the eye, ‘that the meteor showers are spread randomly around the globe whilst the meteorites aren’t?’ She had him now. That’s what Zak’s data had shown.

  ‘It’s puzzling,’ chimed in Frank.

  Liz continued looking straight at Rupert. ‘Rupert?’

  ‘I agree with Frank,’ he said. ‘It’s puzzling, but I’m sure I’ll come up with an explanation.’

  ‘You smug bastard,’ she thought. ‘You have a bloody answer for everything.’

  ‘What do you think, Liz?’ asked Professor Cecil Vivian Shawcross, her team leader and boss.

  ‘What do I think!’ said Liz, still seething with rage at Rupert’s comments. ‘I think that intelligent extraterrestrial beings are using the meteor showers as cover to either contact us or as a prelude to invading and conquering us.’

  Rupert burst out laughing. ‘Not the ‘‘Little Green Men’’ scenario again,’ he smirked. ‘You know there’s no intelligent life on Mars.’

  Liz was furious at his facetiousness. ‘You know very well that I don’t mean Mars,’ she snapped. ‘There are 200 billion stars in our galaxy and 100 billion galaxies in the Universe. Billions of these stars will have planets and millions of them will be suitable for life to have evolved. Intelligent life. And, given the age of the Universe, many civilisations will be far more advanced than ours.’

  ‘Then why is it they haven’t contacted us?’ sneered Rupert.

  ‘You know as well as I do that the main reason there hasn’t been any contact is because of the vast distances involved,’ retorted Liz. ‘The vast interstellar distances which even light, the fastest thing in the Universe, travelling at 186,000 miles per second, takes billions of years to reach us. That, and the fact that civilisations may have existed at different times. Come and gone. After all, we’ve only had the technology to search for extraterrestrial life for less than a hun
dred years, which is nothing compared to the 13.7 billion year history of the Universe. Just the blink of an eye.’

  ‘Surely they’d have made contact using radio waves or some other form of electromagnetic radiation?’ said Frank. ‘Not a physical object which only travels at a fraction of the speed of light.’

  ‘But using radio waves would betray their presence,’ replied Liz. ‘Maybe they want to keep themselves hidden.’

  ‘So what’s your theory, Liz?’ asked Frank.

  ‘My theory is that some of the meteorites are probes from an advanced alien civilisation. Probes to obtain information about Earth.’

  ‘For what purpose, Liz?’ asked her boss.

  Rupert Templeton-Smythe could contain his anger no longer. ‘For Christ’s sake!’ he shouted, thumping the table with his fist, ‘stop pandering to this woman’s deluded fantasies. We’re here to discuss science, not science fiction.’ His outburst over, Rupert Templeton-Smythe got up from his chair and stormed out of the meeting.

  ‘They’re going to make contact some time. WHY NOT NOW!’ shouted Liz to the man striding out of the room.

  ‘I’m sorry about that,’ said Frank apologetically. ‘He can be difficult at times.’

  ‘Too bloody right he can,’ thought Liz. ‘Just another example of his closed mind mentality.’

  ‘Well everyone, I think that’s enough for today,’ said Professor Cecil Vivian Shawcross. ‘We’ll know more about the meteorites when the search teams bring some back to the lab for analysis.’

  As the people began filing out of the room her boss walked over to where she was standing, placed his hand on her shoulder and said, in a fatherly sort of way, ‘Are you sure you’re alright? Last night must have been frightening.’