by Allen Steele
Typically, the public was the last to know. The highest echelons of the world’s governments were the first to receive the information, and as conference room lights burned late in capitols from Washington, D.C. to Beijing, it was secretly agreed that the news would be withheld until the various defense and science ministries got their acts together and all the options were studied. By then, it had been determined that Na would likely come down somewhere in the Pacific, which was both good news and bad—good because it would miss any major land masses, bad because of the potential long-term effect on the global climate, not to mention the immediate consequences for the coastal areas and islands in the region.
There was one mitigating factor: Na was still far enough away that something could be done about it. Obviously, the coastal population centers and island chains of the Pacific would have to be evacuated in advance of the inevitable tsunamis. Yet there was also the possibility, however slim, that Na might be diverted. In fact, when the first news conference was held, it was announced that the Comstock, an asteroid-mining spacecraft belonging to Translunar Resources that was currently operating just beyond the Moon, was already on its way to deep-space rendezvous with Na. Once it arrived, Comstock’s crew would undertake the mission of planting their mass driver on Na and using it nudge the asteroid into a new trajectory.
We were told not to panic, that the authorities were on top of the situation, and that doomsday was not inevitable. And for the most part, people took it well. Generally speaking, there wasn’t the mass hysteria and anarchy that many predicted would come from an announcement like that. To be sure, there were those who fortified their homes, grabbed every firearm they could lay their hands on, and prepared themselves for the end of the world (for which, I suspect, many of them secretly hoped). By and large, though, the vast majority of individuals determined that they would do what they could to help their friends and family survive. Some found solace in religion, others in a steadfast faith in the human spirit. Some even believed that the whole thing was either a hoax or just a scare that would soon blow over, and everyone would wake up on June 18 to find that the world was just the same and nothing had changed.
In any case, the public was repeatedly assured that there was a strong probability that Comstock’s mission would be a success and that the mandatory evacuations were only a precaution. Relatively few people knew that the mission was a long shot. Until then, asteroid miners had only succeeded in moving NEOs no more than a few hundred feet in diameter. Na was much larger than that, and its greater mass meant a correspondingly higher inertia; Comstock’s mass driver might not be adequate for the task. And blowing up the asteroid was out of the question; even if Comstock were carrying explosive charges sufficient for a job of that magnitude—which it wasn’t—it would have only meant that, instead getting hit by one big rock, Earth would be subjected to a rain of smaller rocks, some of which might come down in populated areas. Not only that, but it would take the mining team almost three weeks to reach Na, during which time the asteroid would have traveled over twelve million miles closer to Earth, shaving the odds of success that much finer.
The authorities deliberately overstated the chances for a successful diversion in order to avoid a mass panic, and for a while, they were successful. Life went on as usual. But as the realization of the magnitude of the disaster and its long-term consequences—namely, a global winter that could last several years—slowly sank in, even communities far from the projected impact zone began making preparations.
The week after the announcement was made, the Amherst board of education voted to suspend school indefinitely so that children could help their families do whatever needed to be done. Suddenly, I no longer had a job. Which was just as well, because a couple of days later, Grandpa called and asked me to come home.
Grandma had passed away a couple of years earlier, leaving him and Mom alone on Juniper Ridge. So he’d been forced to divide his time between monitoring the MC and taking care of her, and although she’d lately become a little more independent, it was still a stretch for a man in his eighties who’d passed the age for retrotherapy. But that wasn’t all.
“Dhani, your mother’s scared,” Grandpa said. “She’d been doing better, but now…”
“Is she pulling back into her shell?”
“I’m afraid so, yeah. There are days when I can barely get her out of the house, and when I talk to her, she keeps saying that she wishes you were still around.” A sigh. “I know it’s a lot to ask, but if you and Robert could bring yourselves to come home, even for a little while…”
His voice trailed off. He didn’t say the rest; he didn’t need to. Mom had accepted Robert only grudgingly, and not without some initial suspicion. She’d never trusted strangers very much; in her mind, Robert was the outsider who’d taken her daughter away from her. Robert had done his best to get along with her, but she’d never completely warmed up to him, and so our visits had been for only a few days at a time. What Grandpa was talking about, though, was a longer stay. Much longer.
I glanced across the living room at Robert. He’d linked his ear jack to the house phone and was quietly listening in. Our eyes met, and he answered my silent question with a nod. “Of course we will,” I replied. “Just give us a few days to board up the place, and we’ll be back there.”
“Thanks. I appreciate it.” He let out his breath in relief. “Tell you what—I’ll even move upstairs and let you two have the downstairs bedroom.”
“That’s all right, Grandpa. I think we can manage without it.” Hearing this, Robert gave me a grim smile. We’d have less privacy upstairs, with Mom’s room next to mine, but I didn’t want Grandpa to have to climb stairs more than he had to. I decided to change the subject. “How’s Galactique doing? What’s the latest?”
Another pause, this time longer. “I don’t know,” he said at last. “I didn’t want to tell you this, but we lost contact about ten days ago. The lunar station hasn’t received any telemetry for over a week.”
“Nothing?”
“Nothing. Not even a status report. Galactique’s gone dark.”
Again, Robert and I traded a look. He knew what that might mean as well as I did.
“We’ll be home as soon as we can,” I said.
11
In hindsight, it’s fortunate that Juniper Ridge had always been self-sufficient. Because my father and grandparents dreaded having the MC knocked out of commission by a local power failure, they’d set up solar panels to provide the observatory with electricity, and the rest of our power came from the town’s wind turbine on a nearby hilltop. The house drew its water from deep artesian wells, and Mom’s obsession with the greenhouse meant that we’d have food even though we would probably have to tighten our belts a bit. And there were other things, like the snowplow Grandpa had attached to the front of his truck and the stockpiles of canned food we customarily kept for the winter months when we couldn’t easily go shopping. So we were better prepared than most.
Still, Robert and I had our hands full as soon as we arrived. The roof of the main house badly needed to be reshingled, the firewood supply was down to half a cord, and the windows would have to be freshly weather-stripped. Grandpa was in no shape to tackle these jobs on his own, so it fell to us to prepare for Na’s aftermath. Luckily, the asteroid had picked a good time to make its appearance; in New England, late spring is the best season to take care of such matters.
But Mom was in bad shape. As Grandpa told me, the news about Na had messed up her mind, sending her back into the depression she’d struggled with for as long as I could remember. She welcomed me with open arms and tears but only gave Robert a tentative handshake and stared in horror as he carried our bags inside. Things might have been a little better if we’d been officially married, but … well, too late for that now. She gradually accepted the fact that he was living in the same house, but it took her a week just to get used to the idea that she’d have to share the upstairs bathroom with a strange man.
Yet we received aid from an unexpected source: Joni Ogilvy.
In the years since I’d grown up and moved away, my teenage best friend had changed, as well. While her twin sister, Sara, had moved to London and become an executive at Lloyd’s, Joni had remained in Crofton after her parents’ death to get married and take over the family’s horse farm.
Tall and well built, with long corn-silk hair and cool green eyes, Joni could have been a runway model if she’d cared to go that way, but she was as direct and no-nonsense as only a country lady could be. It had been quite a few years since I’d last seen her, so I was surprised the day she and Brett walked down the road to our house. Noticing Robert climbing a ladder to the roof, Joni told me that they had a couple of pallets of leftover shingles from their own reroofing job and that we were welcome to them. Considering that every hardware store in western Massachusetts was being cleaned out of stuff like that, it was an offer that was both generous and impossible to refuse.
Teddy Romero was long gone. After his father died, he’d sold the trailer and left Crofton. No one had ever seen him again. Good riddance. At least I wouldn’t have to worry about having him show up at the house. On the other hand, having Joni and Brett as neighbors was a comfort. Once she and I renewed our friendship, I knew that our families would be able to rely on each other during the tough times ahead.
If only all our problems could have been solved as easily. The MC was something else entirely. While it wasn’t critical to our survival, nonetheless it was the reason my family had remained on Juniper Ridge in the first place. Yet the Arkwright Foundation had suffered greatly from Grandma’s death. Member donations had dwindled to a trickle, and while the computers in the MC were old and badly in need of an upgrade, replacing them was out of the question. Grandpa had kept them going as best as he could, but without Mom helping him, his efforts were inadequate at best.
I knew how to run the MC, but I didn’t know how to fix it. The computers were still operational, more or less, but the radio dish no longer had a full range of motion; we could hear the gears of its platform creak from the floor above when it moved. And the screens remained resolutely dark whenever we tried to download new data from the lunar tracking station.
Was Galactique no more? Was its long silence an indication that the ship had somehow been destroyed? Or was it simply a communications blackout, and eventually we’d receive new data? We had no way of knowing. Every day, Grandpa sent a new query, one which approximately asked, “Hello? How are you? Where are you? Please respond at once!” No reply. Just more silence.
“You realize, of course, there’s great irony to this,” Grandpa said one afternoon.
“How’s that?” I took a sip of water from a canteen and passed it to Robert. The three of us were sitting in a clearing on the hillside below the observatory, taking a break from using a chain saw to cut up some dead trees on our property. Mom was in the dome, taking her turn at what had begun to appear to be an exercise in futility, waiting for Galactique to tell us that it was still alive and well.
“Your great-great-great-grandfather started this whole thing because he was concerned about the human race getting wiped out by an asteroid.” I must have had some sort of expression on my face, because he grinned and nodded. “It’s true. Not many people know it, but that’s the reason he willed his estate to the Arkwright Foundation in the first place.”
“I thought it was because he wanted to build a starship. That’s what Mom told me.” I might have added that my father told me the same thing too, but it had been so many years since the last time I’d seen him that I seldom even thought about him anymore.
“Oh, I’m sure that was a reason too. Otherwise, he would’ve had us digging bunkers.” Grandpa shrugged. “But going to the stars says something that digging a hole in the ground doesn’t. It says you’ve got hopes for the future that goes beyond mere survival. Maybe it’s because he was a science fiction writer that he saw things that way, but … well, at any rate, he was ahead of the curve.”
“But the human race isn’t going to get wiped out,” Robert said. Then he added, with just a touch of uncertainty, “Is it?”
Grandpa didn’t say anything for a moment. Instead, he gazed down the hill. It was a lovely afternoon; blue sky, no clouds, warm breeze, fresh leaves on the trees. Hard to believe anything bad could ever happen to a world as perfect as this.
“Probably not,” he said at last. “We survived the global climate change of the last century, what with droughts and superstorms and coastal flooding and all that. The world lost a billion and a half people, but it took decades for the population to drop. Humans are adaptive creatures and pretty resilient when push comes to shove.” He picked up a small log we’d just cut and idly began to strip off the bark. “This is different. Even if they manage to evacuate everyone from the coastal areas before the tsunamis come in, Na’s going to vaporize a lot of seawater when it hits the ocean. That’s going to cloud the upper atmosphere and in turn cause a climatic chain reaction.” He looked up at the sky. “We may not have another day like this for a very long time. And not everyone has a greenhouse out back.”
“But Comstock might still succeed, right?”
Grandpa and I shared a look. We understood the physics of the situation better than most people, my partner included, so we knew what a crapshoot the asteroid-deflection mission really was. “Sure … sure, it’s got a chance,” Grandpa said, and then he dropped the log and bent down to pick up the chain saw. “Well, c’mon, this wood isn’t going to cut itself.”
We spent a couple of more hours on the firewood, and then Grandpa and Robert went back to the house and took the truck to Joni and Brett’s house to start loading the shingles they were giving us. We’d soon be repaying the favor by helping them bale hay for their horses. There was a lot of high grass growing in the mountain meadows abutting her property and ours, so the seven horses she owned would have enough to eat. They would be useful if and when there was no longer enough sunlight to adequately recharge the solar panels of our cars and the truck. And although no one spoke of it, we all knew that, if things got bad enough that we couldn’t feed either them or ourselves, Joni’s beloved horses might have to serve another purpose, as well.
I finished stacking the wood we’d just cut and then went back up to the house. I was about to go inside and start work on dinner when I heard a vehicle coming up the road. It was still out of sight around a bend and behind the trees, so at first I believed it was Grandpa’s truck—which was a little odd; it takes time to load several pallets of shingles. Then it came into view, and I saw that it was a big black sports van.
No one we knew drove anything like that, so I raised my wrist phone and called Mom. “We’ve got company,” I said when she answered. This was something we always did, giving her a chance to hide if she wanted to. My mother never liked unexpected visitors.
“All right,” she replied. “Tell me when they’re gone.”
By then, I could see that it had tinted windows and light-blue all-state plates. I walked down the front path to the end of the driveway and waited until it came to a stop. The driver’s-side door opened, and a young guy in an air force uniform got out.
“Can I help you?” I asked.
He seemed to hesitate, as if uncertain who I was. “Are you Chandraleska Skinner?”
An odd question. It was rare that people mistook me for my mother. We bore a certain similarity, but you could only mix us up if you hadn’t seen her in quite a while, and most people hadn’t. “No, I’m her daughter, Dhani.”
He said nothing but instead went to the back of the van, slid open the rear door, and spoke to whoever was seated in back. I couldn’t hear what he said. A couple of moments passed, and then two people climbed out. One was a heavy-set woman with ginger hair, who wore a pantsuit that, like the van and its driver, looked government issue. The other was a middle-aged man with white hair, thin and slightly stooped. He came out last, and for a long time,
he simply stared at me, as if waiting for me to say something.
“Dhani,” he said at last. “You’ve grown up.”
If he hadn’t spoken, it might have taken me a couple of minutes to recognize him as my father.
12
At the same moment, relativistically speaking, that I was looking at my father for the first time in fourteen years and trying to figure out what to say to him, Galactique was trying to bridge a communications gap of its own.
The spider-bots had taken only a few days to repair the laser array; it was just a matter of taking a little extra cable from the ship’s spare-parts supply and splicing it into the main bus. Once power was restored to the lasers, the array was redeployed to the outer hull, where a quick test confirmed that the system was back on line.
Now came the hard part: locating Earth’s position so that communications could be restored. Galactique’s planet of origin, along with its sun and all its neighboring worlds, had vanished into the cone of darkness that lay behind the ship; the Doppler effect caused by the ship’s .5c velocity had rendered them invisible. To further complicate matters, no navigation updates from Juniper Ridge had been received during the blackout. So the ship had to rely entirely upon itself to determine Earth’s location and send a laser pulse in that precise direction—a feat roughly equivalent to a sharpshooter with a high-powered rifle trying to hit a sparrow sitting on a tree branch ten miles away while wearing a blindfold.
Fortunately, Galactique’s quantum AI had something our hypothetical sharpshooter didn’t have: detailed star maps that included the precise locations of known pulsars in the galaxy. Since each pulsar emitted radio beams on a unique frequency, the ship was able to use them as beacons, sort of like interstellar lighthouses. Together with superb sense of direction based upon the ship’s current position and estimated trajectory and the internal chronometers accurate to the nanosecond, Galactique had the ability to predict where Earth and the Moon would be located, not just then but also in the future. All this involved a very difficult set of parallel calculations in four dimensions. It may have even taken as long as two or three minutes.