The Extinction Event

by David Black

  “The guy you sent to kill me is dead,” Jack said.

  “You keep making assumptions,” Keating said.

  “You’re saying he wasn’t working for you?” Caroline said.

  “It’s complicated,” Keating said. “And it doesn’t matter anymore.”

  “Because—” Jack started.

  “Because,” Keating said, “as far as you’re concerned, he never existed.”

  “I was attacked by a ghost?” Jack said.

  “If you want,” Keating said.

  “Frank’s dead,” Jack said. “Jean’s dead.”

  “You can’t change anything,” Keating said.

  “Jean was your daughter,” Caroline said.

  “We can’t change anything,” Keating said.

  “Robert’s dead,” Jack said.

  “Civilization,” Keating said, “happens when we give up revenge.”

  “And let the state handle it,” Jack said. “Whatever it is.”

  Keating nodded.

  “Who hired the Cowboy? Caroline asked.

  Keating was silent.

  Caroline got very still.

  “The state was handling it,” Caroline said.

  3

  “I’d rather you left,” Keating said. “But—”

  Keating sighed.

  “Okay,” Keating said, “Frank realized Jean was suffering from something more than drugs. He thought a class-action suit against Mohawk Electric might make him rich and famous. But he ran into problems.”

  “You scared off witnesses,” Jack said. “Like Shapiro.”

  “What he really wanted,” Keating said, “was to make it all-inclusive. National. Global. All electric companies.”

  “That’s why you got rid of him?” Caroline asked.

  “He was a diligent researcher,” Keating said. “Too good. He was looking for anything that would help him in his suit. Including anything in my life he might use to prevail upon me to cooperate.”

  “Frank wasn’t a blackmailer,” Jack said.

  “Not only a blackmailer. “Keating said. “A magnificent blackmailer. The Napoleon of blackmailers. Or so he believed. He began to think a shakedown might be more profitable than a lawsuit. Of course, that way he’d get rich but forgo fame.”

  “How many people have you killed?” Jack asked. “Had killed?”

  “Frank stumbled on something much bigger, much more sensitive than electrical pollution,” Keating said.

  Keating held the door open.

  Jack and Caroline glanced at each other—in for a penny, in for a pound—and went through the door into the hall, waited for Keating to take the lead, and followed him down the hall, down the stairs, down a second set of stairs, below ground.

  Keating led Jack and Caroline into a tunnel.

  The walls, ceiling, and floors were white. Shoulder height were kids’ crayoned pictures from some school visit to the observatory. Amber-Lynn. Amanda-Lynn. Carol-Lynn. Tashi. Cyndi. Porn star names. Raphael. Toshi. Henree.

  Above them, the white neon tubes buzzed. Red, blue, and green stripes ran along the floor, as in a hospital.

  First the red stripe branched off. Then, the blue.

  Keating kept them on the green stripe.

  A corner of the molding was water stained.

  “It’s amazing what science can do,” Keating said. “At the University of Pittsburgh and Carnegie-Mellon, macaque monkeys with electrodes in their brains have learned to control a robotic arm with their thoughts.”

  At an elevator door, Keating pressed a button, which lit up.

  “When I was a young man and the world was new,” Keating said. “Or when it seemed new to me, we read Idylls of the King in school. King Arthur and his Round Table.”

  The door opened. They entered the elevator, which was white top, bottom, and sides.

  The enclosure smelled like old sweat socks.

  “That Christmas,” Keating said, “Becky Foster gave me a toy knight on a charger. I still have it.”

  The elevator rose.

  Caroline felt her stomach drop.

  “The seminar I’m missing,” Keating said, “the seminar you’re causing me to miss, is on an interesting topic. FOPEN. A foliage penetration devise developed by Lockheed Martin, which allows unmanned planes to see targets. Or, rather, the child of that project—TRACER.”

  “Why are you telling us that?” Jack asked.

  “To show I trust you?” Keating said. “No. It’s not that big a secret. Neither is this: On Norway’s Spitsbergen Island in the Arctic Circle, the Svalbard Global Seed Vault is storing seeds from all over the planet. Eventually, two billion two hundred and twenty-five million seeds. At minus-eighteen degrees Celsius. The seeds can last two hundred years even if the power were lost. Some seeds could last longer. Sorghum seeds could last twenty thousand years.”

  “Why?” Caroline asked.

  Keating didn’t answer.

  The elevator door opened.

  They entered a circular room, filled with banks of electronics. A dozen people, some in white coats, others in street clothes moved purposely to and fro.

  The floor of the laboratory was reddish brown, like a desert. The lighting was bright, but not glaring. Above them was a catwalk. Above the catwalk was the dome, criss-crossed with girders. Vast. Like a cathedral.

  Cradled in a giant horseshoe was the telescope as large around and as tall as a silo.

  “This two hundred inch is one of four telescopes we have on site,” Keating said. “It has a single borosilicate mirror. We also have a sixty inch. A forty-eight inch. And an eighteen inch. I wish I could take requests and show you something in the heavens you’ve always wanted to see. But we have our nightly schedules. Our rituals.”

  Jack felt something. Not exactly a vibration. Not exactly a sound.

  “A forty-kilometer-wide object looped past Neptune and is headed back to the Oort Cloud, a source of long-period comets,” Keating said. “A twenty-two thousand five hundred year elongated orbit will take it back to a region two-hundred-forty billion kilometers from sun. It was first spotted in two-thousand six.”

  The telescope started moving. Raising its eye higher—as the shutter of the dome began to open, revealing the night sky, spangled with stars.

  “One of the largest members of the asteroid family is Baptistina,” Keating said. “Twenty-five miles across. Among two thousand smaller objects from the same family.”

  The whole dome began moving, swinging around in a circle as the telescope came to a rest at about a forty-five degree angle.

  Like a carnival ride, Caroline thought.

  “One hundred and sixty million years ago, give or take twenty million years,” Keating said—like a senator talking about the economy, comfortable with inconceivably large numbers—“an asteroid, maybe a hundred ten miles across, collided with another large planetary body, producing a very large chunk of space rock—Baptistina—and some smaller bodies, one of which may have landed in the Yucatán Peninsula in southern Mexico. Another may have hit the moon and caused a crater we can see named after Tycho Brahe, the sixteenth century Danish astronomer. The object that hit the Yucatán—there’s discussion on what exactly it was and where it came from—may have caused the Cretaceous-Tertiary extinction event sixty-five million years ago. Which resulted in the death of the dinosaurs and many other species.”

  “What’s this got to do with Frank?” Jack asked.

  “Then, there’s Apophis,” Keating said. “We were a little concerned about it. At first, it looked as if there were a two point seven probability it would hit Earth in two thousand twenty-nine. Now, we’re not quite so worried. We like to keep track of things like that. We—and some other people. The Southwest Research Institute in Boulder. And other places around the globe.”

  Caroline, who had been staring at the night sky, looked at Keating.

  “It’s beautiful,” she said.

  “We think of the orbits of the heavenly objects as if they wer
e God’s clockwork,” Keating said. “But it’s pretty chaotic up there. As chaotic as weather.”

  Keating went to a computer and typed. A video screen came up.

  “The last time someone showed me a video on a computer,” Jack said, thinking of Shapiro, “it showed a holocaust.”

  “Oh, yes?” Keating said.

  Keating hit enter.

  On the monitor, Jack and Caroline saw an animation of a giant asteroid approaching the Earth. Casting a shadow across continents. Across seas. Hitting—its impact blasting outward in concentric circles. The firestorm pulsing out in concentric circles. Until the whole planet was on fire. Burning until the Earth was nothing but a cinder. Dead rock.

  “There are three kinds of near-Earth asteroids,” Keating said. “Amors, which approach Earth from outside its orbit. Apollos, which cross Earth’s orbit, and Atens, which approach Earth from within its orbit.”

  Keating gestured to Jack and Caroline to get inside a cage on a mechanical arm, which lifted them thirty feet in the air, halfway up the telescope.

  “There’s no privacy,” Keating said. “Not in the offices. Not in the hallways. Up here, we can talk.”

  They could see bolts the size of a baby’s fist.

  “If an asteroid did hit the Earth,” Keating said, “if we did end, I wonder, will everything end with us? Was Bishop Berkeley right? Without the observer there is nothing to observe?”

  “If we aren’t around to perceive?” Caroline said. “It’s the end of the world?”

  “It’s,” Keating said, “the end of reality.”

  “What if God is the observer?” Jack asked.

  “If there is a God,” Keating said, “or a God who perceives. Or a God who cares.”

  “You think God’s just a blind watchmaker?” Caroline asked.

  “If we’re lucky,” Keating said.

  “No,” Caroline said emphatically. “If we are lucky, there’s a God who holds us in his hand and—”

  “No hymns, please,” Keating said.

  “God is not a crutch,” Caroline said.

  “You think God, if there is a God, needs an audience to exist?” Keating asked

  “God’s not that crippled,” Jack said, “and neither are we.”

  “No,” Keating said, “we’re not! That’s the point. What if the Anthropic principle is right? That the universe was made just so we could exist. We were the whole reason the universe came into being.”

  “And if we’re gone?” Caroline said.

  “It all goes,” Keating said. “The pyramids and Mozart and Yankee Stadium—”

  “Stalin and Mao and Hitler and what’s left of a three-year-old who stepped on a cluster bomb,” Jack said, thinking of Shapiro.

  “Everything that makes us human,” Caroline said. “The good and the bad.”

  Below them, the scientists and tech support looked miniature. As they moved, they made patterns that they were unaware of but that Jack could see.

  That Jack could impose on them.

  “But, even without the asteroid, it will all end eventually,” Keating said. “The sun will go out. The solar system will fall apart. The galaxy. The universe.”

  “And then what?” Jack asked.

  “The Mad Hatter’s tea party,” Keating said.

  Keating turned to face Jack.

  “Something’s coming,” Keating said.

  Jack was watching a man in a beige sweater and jeans who was entering the dome, drop a file folder.

  “Coming?” Jack asked absently.

  Far below, papers fluttered to the floor.

  “What do you mean?” Jack asked.

  The man who had dropped the folder bent over to pick up the papers.

  When Keating didn’t answer, Jack turned to look at Keating—and at Caroline who blinked rapidly.

  “Something’s coming?” Caroline said.

  Jack saw the image from the video of a vast shadow moving across the face of the Earth.

  “How big?” Jack asked.

  “Big,” Keating said.

  “When?” Caroline asked.

  “Soon,” Keating said.

  “How soon?” Caroline asked. “How much time do we have? Is the government going to send up missiles? Blow it up?” To Jack she said, “I’ve got to tell Dixie. Nicole.”

  Caroline interrupted herself. She stood, her mouth open.

  “Now,” Keating said, “you understand?”

  Looking at Caroline’s face, Jack got it, too.

  “Frank found out,” he said.

  “While checking you out,” Caroline said, “about the electrical pollution.”

  “And he tried to blackmail you about this,” Jack said. “Not about electrical pollution. About—what’s coming. He tried to blackmail the government.”

  “What would happen if news of this leaked out?” Keating asked. “Panic. Death and destruction. The end of civilization.”

  “Which will come from the asteroid anyway,” Jack said.

  “But in the meantime,” Keating said. “All the suffering.”

  “Your contempt for The People,” Jack said, “is not as great as you claimed.”

  “I have no contempt for individuals,” Keating said. To Caroline, Keating said, “You know you can’t tell anyone. Ever. That’s what Frank couldn’t understand.”

  Caroline studied Keating’s face.

  “You’re suffering,” she said.

  “Now that you know,” Keating said, “you will, too. Every time you hear a happy father talk about seeing his son grow up to play baseball. Every time you hear a couple plan on having kids.”

  For the first time since they had entered the dome, Keating looked up. At the heavens.

  “Unless you can understand that the asteroid isn’t tragic,” Keating said. “When the end is coming and everybody is still worrying about getting and spending, status and territory, it’s comic. Or unless you can accept consciousness is just a machine fueled by glucose. Or that realities are like matrushka dolls, one within the other forever—from microcosm to macrocosm. I want to feel that. But I can’t. I only see the loss…”

  “What if you’re wrong,” Caroline said. “What if the meteor, asteroid, or whatever deviates by a hair up there and, hundreds of thousands of miles later, misses us?”

  “That’s a possibility,” Keating said.

  They were silent.

  “Old men have apocalyptic dreams,” Keating said. “They think the world’s going to end with them. Usually, they’re wrong.”

  Another silence.

  “And in the meantime?” Keating said.

  “You killed your own daughter?” Jack said.

  When Keating answered, he was hoarse: “One or two people die so hundreds of millions won’t suffer. So for some uncertain time they will have Bach, Yankee Stadium, and each other.”

  “What do you do about us?” Jack asked.

  “What we chose to do before,” Keating said, “wasn’t my decision.”

  “And now?” Caroline asked.

  “Oh,” Keating said, “as far as I’m concerned you have free will to choose what you will do. If you tell, it leads to chaos; if you cover it up, cover up Frank’s death, Jean’s death … even Robert’s death—”

  “All the other deaths,” Caroline said.

  “—there’s no justice,” Keating said.

  “How many deaths will it take?” Jack asked.

  “To protect the world from itself?” Keating asked.

  “Don’t people have a right to know?” Jack asked. “A right to choose how to react to the news? Just like you do?”

  “And, now,” Keating said, “just like you do.”

  He looked from Jack to Caroline.

  “No one should have to suffer,” he said. “And they’ll suffer if they know.”

  “Eventually, whatever we choose,” Jack said, “things are going to end.”

  “Then,” Keating said, “what do you care?”

  “Because,” Jac
k said, “Frank was my friend.”

  “Robert and Jean were my children,” Keating said.

  “You’re going to let us go?” Caroline said.

  “On August 25, AD 79, Mount Vesuvius exploded,” Keating said. “There was a rain of burning lava, which buried people and made them immortal. Our sacrifice—the asteroid—will leave no trace of us behind. Not immortality, just extinction.”

  A second time, Caroline asked, “You’re going to let us go?”

  “I always thought King Lear doesn’t go mad at the end of the play, but is crazy at the beginning,” Keating said. “All that hoopla about his daughters performing. And, during the play, he gets sane. In the storm on the heath, he is quiet, not shouting, not raging. He finally understands, Man is just a poor forked creature, negotiating with God like Abraham over how many to save in Sodom. Increasingly sane. Until, by the end of the play, he has no illusions left. Just never, never, never, never, never. If this thing comes, there will be no saving remnant.”

  A third time: “You’re going to let us go?”

  This time, Keating nodded.

  “Frank was damage control because he found out about what’s coming,” Keating said. “You were damage control because you found out about Frank. I can’t have you killed here. Now. Too many witnesses. Most of the people who work here don’t know what’s going to happen. They’re all working on their projects. And, once you leave…”

  Keating shrugged.

  “After you, what damage control will be necessary?” Keating asked. “Your brother, Mr. Slidell? How much does your uncle know, Caroline? Your sister? What would they do to find out what happened to you. And the whore? Her boyfriend? How many others?”

  For the first time, Keating seemed old. Defeated.

  “Do you think I loved my daughter less than my son?” Keating asked. “I didn’t want Jean to get hurt. That was a mistake. There have been too many mistakes. Only your friend Frank was supposed to be dealt with. Only because he refused to cooperate.”

  “And Stickman?” Jack asked.

  Keating gave Jack a blank look.

  “Jean’s Pakistani friend,” Jack said.

  “Oh, yes,” Keating said.

  He was silent.

  “Did he also refuse to cooperate?” Jack asked.

  “Things take on a life of their own,” Keating said. “I’m not a monster. I didn’t want anything to happen to you.”