Anna looked up and down the hallway one more time before opening the door and pushing Jeremy inside, a wild and mischievous smile on her face.
“Hey, what are you up to?!” Jeremy whispered as loud as he could. Whispering seemed like the right thing to do at the time, even though he was sure no one could hear them.
“Shh,” she said, and kissed Jeremy hard on the mouth.
This made Jeremy shut up, and he managed to smile. Jeremy quickly forgot about everything else besides the small maintenance closet, and kissed Anna back. They walk-kissed backward into the dark closet, knocking against a broom, a mop bucket, and Anna hit her heel on a large vacuum cleaner, at which point she yelped loudly.
Jeremy put his hand over her mouth, and she winced, laugh-crying, holding her foot and bouncing up and down.
“Are you alright?!” Jeremy whispered, giggling.
“I just—”
Suddenly, a flash of light burst into the janitor’s closet, blinding Jeremy and Anna, who put their hands in front of their eyes
“What is going on here?!” a deep voice boomed.
Uh oh, thought Jeremy. Anna half-swore and half-giggled. “Nothing,” Jeremy lied.
“Why are you in here?” the voice commanded again.
“Um, we were going to do a bit of cleaning before the world ends!” Anna burst out laughing. She stood behind Jeremy and held out a mop.
“Ah . . . comedians too.”
Jeremy’s heart sank. It was the über-conservative Vice Principal Jenkins, who apparently had heard Anna’s fit of giggling. Jeremy looked wildly around the closet, as if there were some escape.
Vice Principal Jenkins grabbed Jeremy by the arm, and commanded they come with him to his office. They had no choice.
They followed Mr. Jenkins, heads bent down like prisoners, into the office.
Karina, Anna’s friend, was the office aide that period, and she sat in the front office with her head in her phone. When they walked by, she looked up and exclaimed, “What’s up, girl!?”
Anna shook her head and grimaced, silently telling Karina she was in trouble.
Karina returned a look of utter curiosity mixed with more than a bit of humor, and Jeremy stuck out his hand to high-five Karina.
“You think getting in trouble is cool?!” Mr. Jenkins bellowed behind his desk.
Maybe he saw me high-five Karina, Jeremy thought.
Anna and Jeremy were seated in front of him. Mr. Jenkins was a fat man, very tall, with jet black hair. He had a handlebar mustache and thin glasses which looked squeezed onto his melon-sized head.
“No, sir,” they said together.
Mr. Jenkins lectured them for what seemed like forever, about being present in class and the importance of a decent education. He warned them against doing this again, and how they were basically terrible people. Jeremy and Anna nodded, “yes-sirred,” and “sorry-sirred” anytime Mr. Jenkins stopped to breath. He finished by telling them the normal punishment for this type of “lascivious” behavior is suspension.
“Suspension!” they both exclaimed. This would not look good on their college applications, as many of them said that they would reconsider acceptance in the event of a suspension.
“Mr. Jenkins, please—” Anna began.
“Miss Chenko. This is no time to argue. Now, I know that you both are two bright students. I am going to make an exception. I will call your parents tonight and notify them, and you will have detention for two weeks. Consider this a probation period. If I hear that you two so much as skipped one more class . . . ” Mr. Jenkins threatened, leaving his punishment up to their imagination.
Jeremy looked at Anna and back at Mr. Jenkins, visibly glad he would not be suspended. His father would be furious, but now a bit less. He would probably receive the exact same lecture at home as he did from Mr. Jenkins.
“Now, go straight back to class, both of you.”
They thanked Mr. Jenkins for the minor punishment, and Jeremy walked toward AP Calculus.
“We can still kiss during school, right?” Jeremy asked, mockingly.
Anna answered by planting her lips on Jeremy’s, and walked to drama class.
It was getting warmer in Houston. It had been two months since “Discovery Day”—what Robert considered their start date for work. They had been working diligently and intensely, and the first complete rocket had been fully designed and was now in the middle of construction. A good portion of land had been taken over near Cape Canaveral to facilitate the production of IMPs, or interplanetary missiles. Suri and Robert called them Imps for short, due to their surprisingly small size. They had decided that their best use of resources was to make missiles that could poke holes in the outermost layer of the comet. If they timed these impacts right, they would be able to release the gaseous pockets inside the comet’s interior. These releases would be more powerful than blasting big bombs repeatedly at the surface, so they were designed more for accuracy and maneuverability than size. In fact, almost all of the volume of the Imps themselves were used for fuel to get the Imp from Earth to the comet.
Robert’s office had finally moved to the much larger conference room which could accommodate the tens of people working together. Inside the office were physicists and engineers from every continent except Antarctica.
“Ve hav ze numbers, AE, and ze Imps are progressing nicely. Two of our models from Russia exited ze atmosphere without concern, and are on path now. Ze third, however, malfunctioned,” Dr. Ivanov said.
“Why, Dr. Ivanov?” asked Dr. Petrov.
“Error report should come vithin a few hours.”
“Let’s go over it, you’ll take the lead? You can work with Dr. Campero,” Dr. Miller said.
“Okay.”
At this point Suri spoke up. “Sir, there’s the matter of the public. It’s getting closer to a breaking point with the internet. The NSA, working with CNN and Fox, have done a good job preventing any coverage of our work, but with the internet it’s more difficult to control the public. There are several prominent websites who are accusing NASA of either building nuclear weapons, starting a war, or sending a mission to Mars.”
“I agree. I believe that for now, an ignorant populace will allow us to further our pursuit of building countermeasures while the country is still stable,” Dr. Campero noted.
As the scientists continued working, Suri excused herself and walked to Daniel Atkins’s office, the PR head of Project Mars. He had been doing a terrific job, but the press had now become so intrusive about the new project that they wanted concrete details before going public with it. Robert had refused to assign even one scientist to this decoy project because to him it was a useless waste of time. But it would be much more difficult to work on saving the world when it was destroying itself. Why didn’t he see that? she asked herself.
So, helping him meant adding one more job to her ever-growing “things-to-do-before-the-world-ends” list. She walked into Daniel’s office, which was always open. It had a big rainbow flag on the front of it.
“This is bad, Suri,” Daniel groaned when she walked in. “Chile found out . . . ”
“What do you mean?”
“The entire nation. You know, they had the raw data, and their government tried to stop it, but you know with the internet, there’s only so much I can do. Things were simpler before the internet.”
“You didn’t work before the internet, Daniel.”
“Right,” he sighed, continuing to type on his laptop.
“Well, why hasn’t the news spread outside of Chile yet?” Suri asked.
“I have absolutely no idea. I’m only the PR person for NASA, Suri, not the entire United States. But I expect that someone higher than me has shut off everything.”
“What do you mean, everything?”
“I mean literally everything. All communication. All Chileans’ Facebook accounts are offline.”
“What?!”
“All Snapchat and all Twitter handles. Anything. I c
an’t even call Chile.”
“That’s insane.”
“It really is. I’m surprised the one-hundred-thousand Chileans living in the United States haven’t revolted or something. They can still buy flights, but there are no flights returning to the United States from Chile.”
“That won’t last long,” Suri reasoned.
“Tell me about it. I mean, I tried telling the NSA that, but the White House apparently wants absolutely nothing to get through to the American people.”
“What else is new . . . ” Suri mumbled.
Suri then gave Daniel an extremely brief design of a rocket that might make it to Mars, which Daniel thanked her for.
“In case you’re wondering what the public is hearing about Chile,” he said while handing her a newspaper, as Suri walked out back toward the conference room.
When she got back, everyone had left, except for Robert.
“What’s happening—” Suri began, but she stopped, seeing that Robert was on the phone.
He finished speaking, and looked at her.
“That was a man who identified himself as Mr. S. He said he worked for SpaceX, the private space company from California. They know about Shiva. They know . . . somehow . . . ”
“What? How?” Suri asked.
“It doesn’t matter how,” Robert replied wearily. “They want to help.”
“Okay, but how?” Suri asked skeptically.
“Well, they say they’ve moved most of their labor force to the gigafactory in Nevada, but instead of building batteries they’re going to build rockets. And they want to coordinate with us.”
“Whoa,” Suri crossed her arms, “but we are already building our own rockets.”
“More rockets couldn’t hurt,” Robert said, looking over the most recent models of Shiva’s movement through space.
“More rockets sounds messy,” Suri countered.
“Maybe,” Robert sighed, looking up, “but we could use all the help we could get, and we should be thankful they didn’t tell the entire world what’s happening.”
Suri thought for a moment. “You said they put most of their labor force into rocket production. What about the rest of it?”
“The guy wouldn’t say, but it was something that they said we would definitely be interested in—some kind of rocket ship.” Robert paused. “There’s one problem, though.”
“Uh oh,” Suri answered.
“Since the government has been so tight on security, they won’t give the SpaceX people access to our database or even abilities to transfer documents, so we have to go to their facility in California.”
Suri groaned.
“They were going to call us a long time ago, but didn’t have anything fully operational so they wanted to tell us when they did.”
“They got all that done in two months—two facilities completely retrofitted?”
“I guess,” Robert answered noncommittally.
“Do you think we can trust SpaceX?”
Robert thought for a moment before replying. “I think we should give them a chance, because we are going to need all the help we can get.”
“Do we tell Chief Goldberg?” Suri asked.
“I don’t know. He’s been doing a lot of communication with President Chaplin and Secretary Brighton. I don’t want him to think this is a bad idea and shut it down. I think that it’s best to have as many people working on this project as possible. If we fail, there’s an incredibly small chance the private sector will be able to pick us up. So we should check out what they have to offer before telling Goldberg.”
“I agree,” Suri answered, and before she left she put a newspaper in front of Robert. “There’s another problem. Have you seen this?”
Robert looked down, seeing the front page article, titled, “Chile Dissolves Amidst Social Unrest.”
He hmphed loudly, and thought for a moment before responding. “So someone leaked the information there, right?”
“That’s right,” Suri said, impressed that Robert guessed it so quickly. “When do you think it’ll happen here?”
“I don’t know, but I hope all the defenses around all of our new facilities will hold. Remember, we have guns here, and when anarchy takes over, it won’t be just a few people lighting fires in the streets. It’ll be big, like everything else in America.”
Suri shuddered, and left Robert to continue his work.
Robert looked to his right in the conference room now defiled with papers. He sat at the head of the table. He wore the same shirt for the third consecutive day, and couldn’t remember the last time he’d cooked for himself, which was something he used to enjoy. He looked to the huge whiteboard on the right wall. It was filled with a long list of things to do. It had things like “Find a crew for possible manned mission” and “Design a manned mission” on it.
Right now, only the tasks in the upper left-hand corner of the wall were checked. Up next were small tasks, since Project Mars was still very much in the preliminary stages. There was plenty to do to support the building of rockets and gathering nuclear weapons until Shiva came closer to Earth. Still, Robert was impressed by what they had done so far.
They had identified the orbital path of Shiva very closely. Without any outside influence, its orbit path would hit Earth in approximately thirty months. Using the gaseous explosions and jets of unfrozen hydrogen, methane, and ammonia gas released by the Imps, he hoped to move the comet out of the collision path. The comet’s approach would be utterly terrifying, but it would look incredibly beautiful as it loomed large in the sky. Robert would make a mental note that—when anarchy commenced—he would walk right into Best Buy and steal the best camera and lens combination he could find and use it to take some photographs of the comet. The comet would have a glowing “outgas,” or tail of gas, and a second “dust tail,” which would trail the comet for thousands of miles, making it possibly the most beautiful night sky ever seen by humans. Of course, the dinosaurs had likely seen something just as beautiful before it vaporized them into dust.
When the comet got closer to the Sun, its solar rays would act like a microwave and cook the comet from the outside in. Due to the comet’s elongated elliptical orbit and its spin, the Sun would heat its sides unevenly. Because of this, the comet’s heat wouldn’t distribute evenly across its surface, and some parts of the comet would get hotter than others, much like when you cook an oddly formed potato in the microwave. At some point this would create a chink in the comet’s frozen armor. Then, the gas below this chink would explode out, hopefully acting like a little jet engine, which was actually how comets got those beautiful tails. The Imps would target these engines on one side of the comet in order to maximize this thrust. The problem was that, obviously, something like this had never been tried before. And bombing the comet could have unintended consequences, like it breaking, or the gaseous jets releasing in the wrong direction. The good thing was that the mathematical modeling that could be done with the supercomputers today were very accurate, very efficient, and took into consideration much of the uncertainty that stoked Robert’s unease. Most of the work now just consisted of writing a ton of code, and then sitting back.
All of this work gave Robert—along with Suri and just about everyone else at NASA—very tired fingers and very sore eyes.
As Robert finished up his last piece of code for the night, he went over recent numbers for satellite production. Suddenly, his phone rang. Odd, he thought. He didn’t recognize the number.
“Yes?”
“Dr. Miller?” A nervous voice replied over the phone.
“Who’s this?”
“This is uh . . . Jeremy Genser. Um, my girlfriend and I met you a few weeks ago when we, well, followed—”
“Yes, Jeremy, I remember you, and Anna as well. How can I help you?” Robert didn’t remember giving the kids his phone number. He felt a little ashamed for telling them the world was going to end, and wanted to make sure they were okay.
“Well, we, um
, took something and now we are feeling not so good.”
Great, Robert thought, this is totally not on my to-do list. He could hear Anna screaming in the background, “It’s all going to end!!”
“We probably shouldn’t drive.”
“Yes, Jeremy. Smart of you to acknowledge. Where are you?”
Jeremy texted Robert the address, and he looked one more time at his list. He finally thought that they were getting a handle on things. It seemed, though, that telling Jeremy and Anna about the end of the world may not have been the best idea. Oh well, live and learn, he thought.
Robert drove through the streets of Houston to Spotts Park, a patch of green around the Buffalo Bayou, which meandered slowly through the Houston metropolis. A few days of heavy rain had made the little river overflow, and its banks were thick and muddy. Robert found Anna and Jeremy sitting on a bench, which only barely jutted out of the water. Their bare feet were in the mud, kicking it around.
Robert grimaced, but he remembered what it was like to be young. He couldn’t imagine what they must be going through. At least he had lived almost an entire life. They had only just started theirs.
“Hi, Dr. Miller,” Anna said, dreamily.
Robert walked over, sighing at the fact he would need to buy new shoes, as his were immediately caked with mud.
“Do you really think you can save the world?” Jeremy asked.
Robert thought about it while looking at Houston’s reflection in the muddy water.
“I really don’t know, but what I can tell you is that humanity has been able to overcome some pretty substantial odds to survive in its history. So I think that even though it might be scary to fight against this seemingly impossible task, we have to try.”
“It’s crazy to think that all of this civilization that we’ve built—the huge skyscrapers, the literature, all of it—could just be gone, just because a random piece of rock got in the way of Earth . . . ” Jeremy said.
Robert put his arm around Jeremy. “It won’t all be gone. We’ll find out a way. But soon, our country is going to disintegrate. The government is going to take over everything—the communication, all of it. I don’t know when, but the world will go up in flames. Maybe it would be good to be away from it all, unless you find a way to help.”
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