Birth of an Age

by James Beauseigneur

  Traveling at 1,100 feet per second, it would be nearly three full minutes before the asteroid’s sonic boom reached the boats below. When it did it would hit like a brick wall, shattering the fiberglass boat hulls as if they were cheap stage glass, and exploding and splintering the bones of the men and their families like balsa wood, reducing their lifeless bodies to formless heaps.

  Behind the asteroid a tremendous vacuum formed, which the surrounding atmosphere rushed to fill, creating a tail of supersaturated air from above the Arctic Ocean and a wake of wind that curled off, forming row upon row of super cyclones like giant eddies behind the paddle of a boat. To the residents of Kaktovik, Alaska, 125 miles to the west, the asteroid appeared as an enormous hurtling sun. It would be eight and a half minutes before the first winds reached them, wiping away all trace of their town and burying it and them beneath the churning Arctic Sea.

  In Ft. McPherson, two hundred miles south of the ill-fated Inuit Eskimos, parents pointed and young children clapped in delight as if viewing fireworks. Nearly everyone, young and old alike, was up despite the late hour to watch the heavenly display. They had been told to expect no more than a bright light, like a huge star, traveling swiftly across the sky. What they saw instead was a flaming, tumbling mountain the size of Manhattan Island hurtling just twenty-six miles overhead at unbelievable speed, followed by a fiery trail as bright as morning itself. It was an awesome sight that no one really had time to take in. Four seconds later, with the asteroid already 66 miles farther south but still clearly in view because of its enormous size, the people of Fort McPherson still stared in wonder as they were engulfed from behind in a nuclear-force wall of heat. There was no chance to escape, but their deaths were quick. Everyone and everything for fifteen miles to the east and west of Fort McPherson was incinerated and turned to ash. What didn’t burn, melted, and all was swept away in the asteroid’s tremendous wake, leaving no trace on the suddenly-barren landscape of the homes, schools, or lives of the 720 stalwart souls who had once lived there.

  Rich with moisture from the Arctic Sea and from the Peel and Channel Rivers, the hurricane-force winds in the asteroid’s wake spread in mere minutes across hundreds of miles to the east and west, uprooting and flattening thousands of square miles of virgin Canadian forest, erasing whole towns, and reducing everything in their path to rubble. Ignited by the superheated atmosphere and molten metal of the asteroid, enormous fireballs followed close behind and were blown by the winds like the flames of hell, consuming everything that remained in an immense blast furnace, reducing hundreds of years of forest growth to smoldering cinders in seconds. Whole lakes and rivers boiled violently and were sucked up by the immense force of the winds. Vapor condensed on cooled microdroplets of melted asteroid, dirt, and other debris, forming rain. Some fell to the earth, and some was swept into the upper atmosphere by the tremendous winds, freezing, falling and repeating the cycle until finally huge hailstones weighing up to twenty-five pounds plunged to the earth, sizzling on scorched landscape where they fell.

  Beneath the asteroid, debris from the ground, including objects weighing up to several tons, was swept along at a thousand miles per hour. Cars, trucks, trailers, boats, mobile homes, aircraft, slabs of rock and concrete, pieces of homes and other structures and all they contained — so twisted and smashed as to bear no resemblance to their former state — were carried aloft and towed along for hundreds of miles.

  A hundred miles south of Ft. McPherson, at 66 degrees north latitude, the asteroid first began to enter darkness. Sixty-three seconds later, twelve hundred miles south of where Ft. McPherson had stood, the asteroid passed 18.84 miles overhead just west of Edmonton, Alberta, the first heavily populated area in its path, and delivered the same devastation to Edmonton’s three quarters of a million people that it had brought on the populations of Ft. McPherson, Ft. Goodhope, Norman Wells, Ft. Norman, and Wrigley, along its path. In seconds every structure in the city and its suburbs were engulfed in flame. Most of the population died in the initial blast of heat and shower of molten iron; the rest died within moments from the fires or were sucked up into the asteroid’s wake. Explosions from natural gas, petroleum, and other chemicals added to the deadly amalgam to incinerate the remains of the towns and homes around Edmonton like the stubble of hay. In the streets, flaming asphalt ran like water, puddling in ruts and wherever the ground was low. In a few places the heat was great enough to melt the shards of glass from the demolished buildings.

  In the next seventeen seconds the asteroid passed over Red Deer, Calgary, and Medicine Hat, wreaking similar destruction. A few buildings were left standing on the western edge of Calgary, only to be blown apart like sand castles by the sonic boom that followed moments behind. In another eight seconds the asteroid thundered across the border with the United States and just fourteen seconds later, now less than fifteen miles above the threatened planet, after obliterating Shelby, Havre, Great Falls, Lewiston, and Roundup, it reached Billings, Montana.

  The asteroid’s tail now stretched more than three hundred miles, flailing objects picked up all along its path like the tail of a child’s kite. Among the smaller debris was an ever-growing number of formerly living, breathing creatures — both human and otherwise — who hadn’t been close enough to the asteroid to be incinerated by its heat, but who instead were picked up, slammed about, and ripped apart. Their soon-lifeless forms, looking remarkably like rag dolls formed of too-often-washed fabric, were subjected alternately to unimaginable pressure and then swept into areas of near total vacuum, crushing them like grapes and pouring out their blood like wine to the vengeance of the alien stone. Deer, elk, moose, caribou, and bear, thousands of herds of cattle and sheep, flocks of assorted fowl, domestic animals, and entire populations of towns and villages surrendered their blood to the mix of fire and hail[25] as they were picked up and carried along for scores or hundreds of miles in mere seconds. Also among the human debris were many who had died in recent weeks, pulled from their newly covered graves by the violent turbulence and added to the asteroid’s cortege.

  Imperceptible except to weather satellites that watched its path from above, and unimportant to anyone within hundreds of miles of its path below, the asteroid’s speed was slowly deteriorating against the resistance of the Earth’s atmosphere. By the time it reached Billings, its speed had dropped to about 15.5 miles per second. Thirty-one seconds and more than a million human lives later, as it passed 11.75 miles above Ft. Collins, Boulder, Denver, and Aurora, Colorado, the speed had dropped another quarter of a mile per second.

  The Rocky Mountains offered no break to the winds and heat that swept across them, repeating the destruction to Grand Junction, Montrose, Cortez, and Durango that had befallen the forests, lakes, and cities farther north.

  Mile after mile, city after city, the asteroid held to its merciless course, destroying everything within 200 miles of its path. Colorado Springs, Pueblo, and Trinidad, Colorado; Raton and Tucumcari, New Mexico; Amarillo, Lubbock, Sweetwater, Odessa, Midland, Abilene, and San Angelo, Texas; and a thousand towns to the east and west disappeared entirely or were reduced to unrecognizable heaps of death. Fort Worth and Dallas – a bit more distant – fared only slightly better. By the time the asteroid reached Austin, Texas, only five minutes and seven seconds had passed since it had entered the Earth’s atmosphere. Its speed had slowed to 14.8 miles per second and its altitude had dropped to only 7.48 miles above sea level. There was no counting the cost of the damage or the number of lives lost.

  Twenty-four seconds later, after devastating San Antonio and Corpus Christi, the asteroid passed over Brownsville, Texas and Matamoros, Mexico and headed southeast across the Gulf of Mexico. Its altitude was now only 5.2 miles above sea level and its speed had dropped to 14.6 miles per second. Once again over water, the tail of the asteroid became rich with moisture, which fed and sustained the enormous storms created by its wake.

  Seconds after leaving land, at an altitude of just under 4 miles, an event o
ccurred, which by itself would have been a point of some interest for scientific inquiry, but under the circumstances would draw little attention. From the moment the asteroid first entered the atmosphere, it began to build up a static charge from friction with the air. As its tumbling brought the asteroid to within 20,000 feet of the Earth’s surface, it released the electromagnetic charge in the form of a massive bolt of lightning so immense and powerful that it literally vaporized the water where it struck, momentarily creating a crater 1,800 feet in diameter and 260 feet deep into the Gulf waters.

  It took the asteroid just forty-two seconds to span the 580 miles across the Gulf of Mexico, coming back over land 18 miles west of Paraiso, Mexico at an altitude of just 6,864 feet (1.3 miles) above sea level. As it traveled inland across southern Mexico toward the lower range of the Sierra Madre Del Sur Mountains, the terrain rose rapidly in its path.

  Drawing down on the surface of the planet, the static charge necessary to span the distance to the Earth decreased dramatically, and the asteroid began to release bolt after bolt of lightning, fulminating the ground below. So quickly was the static charge replaced after each discharge, that to the naked eye (had anyone been alive to witness it), it would have appeared as a solid sheet of lightning spanning the entire twelve-mile breadth of the tumbling titan.

  Thirty miles ahead of the asteroid, the planet reached up to defy or perhaps to receive its oncoming celestial visitor. Row upon row of rock-ribbed hills, each one seemingly higher than the previous, stood only seconds away, waiting in silent challenge.

  Impact was imminent.

  Approaching a nameless series of peaks eight miles northwest of the community of Petalcingo, Chiapas, Mexico, the asteroid brushed the surface of the first mountain, cutting a pass sixty feet deep and 1.75 miles across. The contact slowed the asteroid so imperceptibly that even the weather satellites watching from above couldn’t measure the difference. It wouldn’t make it past the next ridge so cleanly.

  The second summit stood in defiant stillness, rising more than a half mile above the asteroid’s lowest point. It wasn’t nearly large enough to stop the asteroid, but it would slow it noticeably. A fraction of a second later the asteroid met the mountain 3,200 feet below its peak. The explosive collision sheared off the top of the mountain, throwing millions of tons of rocks and chunks of asteroid up to 1,200 miles, and was detected on every seismic monitoring device in the world. A millisecond later the asteroid’s tumbling motion brought the largest lobe slamming down on the crest of the next, slightly lower ridge, pulverizing the peak under the pressure, and bringing down an avalanche of molten rock into the valleys below. A village of three hundred people on the mountainside slid into the valley, where it was buried beneath six hundred feet of rock and dirt. Neighboring mountains shook, causing landslides up to thirty miles away. Later, scientists would estimate the force of the collision at five megatons of TNT, or about 250 times the force of the bomb dropped on Hiroshima.

  Path of Asteroid Asteroid 2031 KD, “Calvin”

  The tumbling impact against the top of the lower mountain vaulted the asteroid skyward, causing it to pass just above the largest of the mountains directly ahead and throwing it in a slightly more easterly direction. Less perceptible but far more important, the impact had changed the asteroid’s rotation. The change was slight, but it was enough to reduce the coefficient of drag sufficiently that inertia became the greater force, thus altering the asteroid’s aerodynamics. The result was that instead of being pushed slowly and relentlessly toward the ground, the asteroid now traveled in a nearly straight line. Because its speed was still more than enough to overcome the Earth’s gravity, the asteroid actually began to “rise” as the curved surface of the planet slowly dropped away. It was very slight — approximately thirty-seven feet of rise per mile — but by the time it reached Guatemala City, 208 miles farther south, it had risen 7,696 feet, well above any mountains in the way.

  The point was academic to those in its path. The destruction was just as severe regardless of the asteroid’s exact position above the Earth. The people of Guatemala City suffered the same fate as the people of every other city in its course.

  The asteroid took just 13.5 seconds to span Guatemala and cross the border into El Salvador, passing halfway between San Vicente and San Salvador, heading for the Salvadoran Pacific coast. Over the Pacific, it continued to rise, reaching an altitude of 11.3 miles as it came back over land above Ipiales, Colombia on the border with Ecuador.

  Below the asteroid, the Colombian Pacific coast rainforest — called the Choco by the inhabitants — and the great Amazonian forests of the eastern lowlands were tinder in the blast furnace winds. Hundreds of species of flora and fauna indigenous only to the South American jungle were destroyed in this single stroke, as literally millions of acres exploded in flame.

  Four minutes and twenty-eight seconds later, at an altitude of 31.6 miles, after destroying the coastal cities of Itabuana and Illheus, Brazil, the asteroid reached the Atlantic Ocean. It had spanned the broadest part of the South American continent in just six minutes and eight seconds. Seventy seconds later, at a speed of 9.6 miles per second, it passed 36.5 miles over the Trindade and Martim Vaz Islands in the Atlantic. As the asteroid rose and the air grew thinner, the resistance decreased rapidly, which allowed its course to become increasingly true, thereby putting it at a sharper angle away from the Earth’s surface and reducing the time required to exit the atmosphere.

  At 7:53:27 A.M. GMT, 309 miles above Bethanie, Namibia, Asteroid 2031 KD returned to space. The entire passage through the Earth’s atmosphere lasted a little more than twenty minutes and covered 14,210 miles. It had passed through fifteen time zones and had caused more destruction than all of the pre-atomic wars combined. When it entered the atmosphere, the asteroid had been traveling eighteen miles per second; by the time it left, it was traveling at only 8.43 miles per second (30,362 miles per hour). While that was still fast enough to escape the Earth’s gravitational pull, as a result of its earthly encounter, the asteroid’s new course sent it hurtling toward the sun. In the void of space and captured by the star’s tremendous gravity, the asteroid would continually accelerate. Twelve days after leaving the Earth, after reaching an incredible speed of 68 miles per second, the asteroid would pass inside the orbit of the planet Mercury. Twenty-two hours later it would begin to melt from the sun’s heat, and in a few hours more, would become a gaseous cloud.

  The sun’s final absorption of the asteroid’s vapor mass would have provided an unprecedented observational opportunity for the scientists at the solar observatory atop Sacramento Peak, New Mexico. That, however, was impossible. There no longer was an observatory at Sacramento Peak. All that remained was a bare mountaintop, stripped of all vegetation and man-made structures. The Dunn Solar Telescope facility had been sheared off at ground level, leaving only a 220-foot hole in the mountain to mark where it had been.

  Long after the asteroid exited the Earth’s atmosphere, its destructive influence would continue. Searches through the ruins would reveal that no one for 260 miles to the east or west of its path had survived. Beyond that distance, up to seven hundred miles away, the very few who did survive the initial blast and the fires and storms had been struck deaf as their eardrums were ruptured by the tremendous sonic boom. The sound violently shook and destroyed buildings as far as four hundred miles away, and some reported hearing the sound for up to twenty-seven hundred miles, making it second in intensity only to the explosion of Krakatoa in 1883, which was heard for up to three thousand miles. And while the initial storms and fires cut a swath up to 1200 miles wide across the North and South American continents, the flames would ultimately rage uncontrolled for months, destroying approximately one-third of the Earth’s total forests.[26]

  For hours after the asteroid passed, as the winds slowly began to subside, hundreds of millions of tons of debris fell to Earth along with the rain and hail and blood: twisted pieces of automobiles, tree roots, branches and t
runks, building materials of all sorts, broken glass, miscellaneous rubbish too mangled to identify, rocks, mud, offal, and other assorted wreckage. Bodies stripped bare of their clothing, many stripped of their limbs, fell from the sky as well.

  In Yuma, Arizona, 680 miles from the asteroid’s path, Guy and Marcie Alexander and their two daughters, lucky enough to have survived the storms, emerged from their basement to find their home destroyed. A second floor bathtub, suspended in air by its plumbing, offered scant evidence of what had stood just two hours earlier on this now-barren plot. Unable to comprehend what had occurred, the family walked in the still-falling rain around what had been their home, too muddled by disbelief to cry. On the pavement that had served as the driveway of their small single-family dwelling, the nude blood-drained head and torso of a woman lay face down where it had fallen after being released from the grip of the storm. Guy Alexander told his wife and daughters to turn away as he quickly found something to cover the body. Gritting his teeth and trying not to vomit, he turned her head in an attempt to determine who the woman was, but the bones of the her face were so crushed that she was unrecognizable. He assumed it was a neighbor. Certainly, he would never have guessed that the body had been carried five hundred miles by the storm, or that for a brief moment, the woman had fallen here had been known around the world for the discovery of three asteroids.