* * *
THE AFTERNOON COFFEE date was Maya’s idea. All the scientists were deeply troubled by yesterday’s news, but Nancy was a mess. Maya heard her bunkmate tossing into the late hours before finally lacing up her boots and leaving before dawn. Nancy met up with the chemistry mapping team for morning duties on deck but kept breaking to pace back and forth, wringing her hands. When their rosette casts were complete, she didn’t follow everyone to lunch. She said she couldn’t eat but, at Maya’s insistence, promised to join up for coffee afterward.
By the time Maya reached Healy’s dry goods store at 1300 hours, Nancy had already finished her weak cappuccino. She stood beside the wall, drawing on her empty Styrofoam cup with a permanent marker.
“You got a head start,” Maya called out, temporarily relieved of worry.
“This is my fourth cup,” Nancy replied without looking up. “Couldn’t sleep.”
Maya nodded to the Coastie behind the counter. He stepped up to the coffee machine along the back wall, oversold as the Java Hut, and made a cappuccino that would add another buck fifty to Maya’s tab.
Nancy had drawn the name Derek on her cup and surrounded it with boxy robots.
“Your son likes robots?”
“He likes dinosaurs,” Nancy replied, “but I’m trying not to think about them right now. So robots it is.”
She couldn’t speak of her seven-year-old son without frowning and tugging down on her freckled lips and brow. Before the latest news of the comet, she had resigned herself to the longing of temporary separation in order to grab the opportunity of Healy’s last Arctic expedition. “Impact Imminent” changed everything for everyone.
“Shall we shrink it at the North Pole?” Maya asked, nodding to the cup.
It was an oceanographer’s tradition to decorate Styrofoam cups and attach them to water-sampling devices. The cups shrunk to a fifth of their original size under immense water pressure, making miniature mementos of the journey.
“No,” Nancy said. “I’ll shrink it now. Before Healy turns back.”
They walked along together, but Nancy turned left at the corridor’s junction as Maya turned right.
“Charlie called a meeting,” Maya said.
“I can’t take his speeches,” Nancy said abruptly. “What good is studying the sixth mass extinction event when the seventh might be headed right for us?”
Maya said nothing.
“I’m going to talk to Captain Weber,” Nancy sighed. “I should be with my son. I just never thought…”
She walked away, shaking her head. Maya watched her friend go and thought, Are we turning back? Is the comet really going to hit Earth? Is there anything I can do—or anything anyone can do? Will we have to just wait it out together like death row inmates with no bars to keep us safe from one another…
Maya knew she couldn’t stop and think. The overload of questions paralyzed her with fear and dread. She had to keep moving and doing.
Most of the scientists had already gathered in the science conference room, although Nancy wasn’t the only one absent. Maya took a seat as she counted thirty-four heads out of the fifty-one who had boarded. She sipped her cappuccino and tried to listen to their nervous whispers.
“Charlie needs to let us leave,” one postdoc said, projecting her voice for all to hear.
All but Charlie. None of these detractors would make a peep if he were in the same room. The man was larger than life in all ways; he dined with Leonardo DiCaprio one weekend and sat at the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change the next. That was not to say that Charlie was unapproachable. Despite his star power, Charlie always insisted that Maya treat him as an equal, even in the years that he served as Maya’s thesis advisor at Berkeley. Charlie continued to arrange opportunities and offer career advice whenever she asked (and even when she didn’t). Maya’s place on Healy’s last Arctic expedition was due in part to his characteristic kindness. She intended to crack open an incredible Bordeaux-style blend from Napa Valley once they entered the Arctic Circle—but only to share with him.
All whispers died when Charlie entered the science conference room. Coasties called him Chief Santa, and he looked the part with his stocky frame, white beard, wire-frame glasses, and full cheeks with red blooms of broken blood vessels. For the last three Arctic expeditions, Charlie had donned a fuzzy red Santa costume when the ship anchored at the North Pole. He read aloud Christmas wish lists from the children of crewmembers and posed for photo ops. Charlie could even be called jolly, but there was an underlying intensity at his core. It was a trait that he and Maya shared.
“Good afternoon,” Charlie said with a smile, and immediately addressed the issue. “The news reports gave us a preliminary trajectory—one that is unofficial and already judged to be inaccurate. It was leaked for one reason. Money.”
Charlie stared down his audience. He always had the fire of the self-righteous. “I know there’s going to be disagreement about this, but I told Captain Weber I want to see this last mission through. You all know its importance. The musician Joan Baez is quoted as saying, ‘Action is the antidote to despair.’”
Maya nodded when their eyes locked. She didn’t have children who needed her back on the mainland, and she didn’t know how to save Earth from a potential cosmic impact. What she did know, and what she could prove, was the grave damage being done to its oceans. In sounding the alarm, she hoped to save humanity from itself, if it still had a future. That was the original plan anyway, and she had yet to make another.
“So let’s do what we can,” Charlie urged the scientists, “while we still can.”
* * *
JACK THOUGHT HEALY’S Arctic expedition would be canceled, but the majority of the world was still in a state of disbelief: this Pakistani scientist had to be wrong; an impact event couldn’t happen; humans were not dinosaurs, they were masters of the solar system (for sheer lack of competition, but still). And there was the habit of duty, after all. US Coast Guard Cutter Healy’s military crewmembers and its latest batch of scientists had a duty to further understanding of the disappearing Arctic. Jack had a duty to document the icebreaker’s last scientific expedition through an ecosystem already slipping from existence.
True to its motto Promise and Deliver, Healy heeded the call of duty and stayed the course. In the meantime, a voice projected from loudspeakers, or what the Coasties called the pipes, announcing a partial evacuation by helicopter to Wales, Alaska. Scientists, guest passengers, and nonessential crewmembers with small children would be given first consideration.
Jack half-listened to the announcements. Of course he was shocked and frightened by the rumor of an imminent impact; his mind spun off on tangents that threatened to pin him immobilized under their weight. Still, Jack wouldn’t evacuate. Those were the very words he used during the interview process with a new employer: I won’t evacuate. Jack felt obliged to warn editors and address the issue up front, as he already had a reputation.
Jack had been called an “adrenaline junkie” by one editor who refused to work with him again. Another claimed he was exhibiting signs of PTSD after refusing to leave a Syrian battlefield. Jack didn’t care what they called him. All he knew was that every evacuation he had made early in his career filled him with some type of regret: survivor’s guilt when other journalists died doing their jobs, or jealousy toward the ones who managed to survive and document harrowing events in order to bring them into the eyes of the public. Journalists who stayed to get the job done had made their lives meaningful and relevant, while Jack chose to be sidelined with fear. Never again.
He passed Ned and Malcolm as they headed toward the helicopter hangar, wearing flight suits. Jack backed against the corridor wall to let them pass and overheard Ned whisper in conversation with his friend.
“I wonder if the government is keeping secrets about the comet.”
“They don’t know shit about shit,” Malcolm grumbled. “Haven’t you been paying attention?”
Jack continued down the corridor and saw Maya standing by the Java Hut.
“Hey!” he called out. “You waiting for your bunkmate?”
“Nancy. You’ve met her—”
“Right, Nancy.”
“I was,” Maya said, “but I think she’s leaving Healy to go be with her son and husband.”
Jack nodded and continued, but Maya blocked his path. He knew walking away made Maya want to chase him.
“I’m staying,” she said.
With those dark and intense eyes, it was half invitation and half challenge. Jack was never one to back away from a challenge.
“Then I’ll see ya around,” he promised.
TWELVE
Space and Time
Low earth orbit
August 16
T-minus 169 days to launch
BOB NOWAK WOULD be forever grateful for receiving the worst news of his life. No one had to tell him, least of all NASA’s administrator on an unscheduled Skype call in the lavatory of the International Space Station.
“You will receive full honors and respect,” the administrator promised.
Bob had to assume he meant posthumously.
“Since our president is thoroughly engaged with the planetary threat…”
The administrator was careful with words because he was not alone. Bob could only see the man’s upper body between a desk and white wall, but his microphone picked up more whispering and breathing.
“I’ve asked our vice president to do the honors of the last word.”
Bob swallowed hard. Of course their president wasn’t one for awkward situations, like talking to the walking dead. He would pass off the job, like all others.
“God bless you, Bob.”
The administrator’s lips contorted as he got up from his desk and stepped out of range. Don’t leave us, a voice in Bob’s head called out. It sounded like a small child too young to understand a hopeless situation. The vice president stepped into the webcam’s range and sat down with a bookmarked Bible. His expression was an exaggeration of resolve, like an actor playing a general ready to address his platoon before sending them on to their glorious deaths.
“Let us pray,” he said, by way of greeting, and opened the good book. “‘Fear thou not; for I am with thee—’”
“Sir?”
“‘Be not dismayed; for I am thy God: I will strengthen—’”
“Sir? I’m an atheist.”
The vice president blinked.
“Then…my prayer won’t be with you, but for you.”
He continued to recite the passage as Bob sighed and waited. The vice president was a politician who had yet to be convinced of human evolution and climate change, whereas Bob was an astronaut who had given his life to science. A disconnect was to be expected.
After concluding his prayer, the vice president looked back up at the image of Bob. His expression finally softened.
“Thank you for your service, Robert Nowak,” he said.
“Thank you, Mr. Vice President.”
Did it make sense to thank someone for thanking you? All Bob knew was that he needed to end this formality before the shock wore off. He pulled out his headphones and closed his laptop, clutching it tight to keep from slamming it against the toilet seat. Be grateful, he insisted. They could have said nothing. That would’ve been easier for everyone with feet firmly planted on living soil through gravitation. The International Space Station could be so forgettable in the face of annihilation, just another satellite moving swiftly through the crowded night sky.
In a stricken daze, Bob opened the waste and hygiene compartment’s curtain and pushed off a handrail. He would have to contact his wife, but what would he say? Everything? Nothing but I love you? Bob tried to focus, but his mind wandered back to the Kursk, lost at sea around the turn of the millennium. An initial explosion sank the Russian submarine to the bottom of the Barents Sea and a second collapsed the hull, killing nearly all the crew. Twenty-three men managed to survive by holing up in the turbine room. Russia refused international aid, so the world had to watch and wonder what was going through the minds of the crew as they died while waiting for rescue.
Now, I’ll know, Bob thought, firsthand.
With the heaviest of hearts, he floated across Tranquility module. On the left, he passed ant farms bolted to the wall. They were an experiment on behavior in microgravity by students at the University of Colorado Boulder.
Little buggers have no idea they’re doomed, Bob thought. Keep those eyes on the tunnels ahead, boys!
The Cupola observatory module was attached at a berthing location in the floor. Astronauts often visited the Cupola during off-hours to gaze back at planet Earth while they orbited at 17,500 miles per hour. Bob peered over the edge of the Earth-facing port, expecting a view like a glass-bottom boat. Instead, he saw white-socked feet belonging to Rémy, a French astronaut from the European Space Agency. Bob didn’t want company, but he didn’t want to be alone, either.
Still holding his laptop and trailing headphones, Bob pulled on the Cupola’s handrails with his right hand and descended headlong. In a pressurized, zero-gravity environment, orientation didn’t matter; upside down didn’t feel any different from right side up. The Cupola was nearly nine feet in diameter but had tubes and consoles poking out of the sides. Two adult males could fit comfortably shoulder to shoulder, but any more had to be nuts to butts, as the saying went.
Rémy turned to see Bob by his side, hugging his laptop like a teddy bear.
“So now you know why the Russians didn’t rotate out our Soyuz capsule,” Rémy said, making it a flat statement rather than a question.
Bob said nothing, but he couldn’t hide his surprise.
“Unless you always take your laptop to the toilet,” Rémy added. “And if you do, I don’t want to know why.”
“Funny.”
Rémy agreed with a bitter smile that seemed to say, To the last. The Frenchman looked back to the dome of windows and said, “I already spoke to the director of the Guiana Space Centre. Marcel told me the situation.”
And it was grave. A Soyuz capsule, the only method of transport for ISS astronauts, remained docked to the station in case of emergency evacuation, but the capsule currently attached had an onboard system failure that had been discovered in late July. The Russians were scheduled to change out the inoperable capsule with a new one, but then canceled the flight and cut all communications with no explanation. The astronauts had no escape. They also had no way to keep living. The European spaceport wasn’t going to launch a transfer vehicle with new supplies. All rockets, spacecraft, and satellites were being repurposed for countermeasures against the comet threat. The ISS crew would be out of luck and, more important, oxygen.
“How many medals did they promise your widow?” Rémy asked.
Bob ignored the question. “Should we tell Sergey?” he asked. “You know the Russians won’t.”
Rémy shrugged. He had one of those dimpled donut chins that was all the more noticeable in harsh, artificial lighting.
“Only if he wants to know,” Rémy said. “Peggy did.”
“You told Peggy?”
By which Bob meant, You told Peggy before you told me? But of course Rémy did. Peggy Whitson was his favorite. She was everyone’s favorite with her wide smile and Iowan decency. Peggy had broken the record for the most time spent in orbit by an American. When she and Bob had once watched a sunset together, the sixteenth and final sunset in their waking hours, Peggy whispered that she wanted to keep exploring right up to the day she died. Poor Peggy would get her wish.
Rémy placed his index finger on the innermost layer of aluminum ceramic composite glass. Bob supposed he was pointing to the spaceport in French Guiana, but when Bob looked 248 miles below, past the minimal cloud cover, French Guiana was too far northeast. Rémy was really pointing to dark plumes of smoke drifting above Brazil’s Amazonia.
“It’s still burning,” Rémy muttered.
�
�What?”
“Clearing fires along the Xingu River.”
Rémy dragged his finger in a squiggly line, tracing the river that glowed like a filament in a light bulb. He told Bob that he first saw the fires at the beginning of his six-month mission on the ISS and watched them spread wider and farther along the headwaters into what was left of virgin forest.
“You know, I almost ventured into the Amazon last time I was stationed at the space center,” Rémy mused. “When I couldn’t fit it into my schedule, I told myself I had time. I was…forty-three.”
He shook his head at his own ignorance. For here he was, using depleting oxygen, and there it was, burning until there was nothing left.
Bob tried his best to comfort the man beside him.
“You are not alone,” he said quietly. “We always think we have more time.”
THIRTEEN
USCGC Healy Keeps Its Promise
Healy in the Chukchi Sea
August 27
T-minus 158 days to launch
ALL TOLD, THIRTY-TWO scientists and twenty-seven crewmembers were evacuated by the time Healy sailed past the Bering Strait and into the Chukchi Sea. It wasn’t long before the ship crossed the Arctic Circle perimeter. The summer sun didn’t fully set at these latitudes; it only dipped low to an eerie twilight.
Healy’s corridors, mess deck, and lounges grew quieter with a third less people. Maya tried to keep herself busy working, walking, and talking. Ruminating was dangerous in the face of a comet and its apocalyptic potential. She tried to focus on crossing into the Arctic, a region she knew only from every possible method of secondhand experience. It was cause for a small celebration.
Maya reached the chief scientist’s stateroom carrying her bottle of Bordeaux by the neck. For the last couple of days, none of the scientists had seen Charlie working on deck or eating in the galley. A few of the Coasties floated a rumor that he wasn’t signing his accountability forms. Charlie’s door was slightly ajar, and there was a three-inch hole where there should have been a knob. Maya knocked on the wall by the open door.
The Effort Page 10