The Effort

by Claire Holroyde

  I loved to watch you comfort our children when they were sick. I’ve always meant to tell you that. You are my hero for always trying to take away their pain. I know you will make the right decisions.

  He heard footfalls behind him as Healy’s second-in-command approached the windows of the bridge and cleared his throat.

  “We’re ready with the new coordinates, sir,” he said. “Want me to call everyone back on the ship?”

  Weber saw one of the Coasties throw a wet snowball smack into the chest of another.

  “In a bit,” he said, trying to hide a smile in spite of it all.

  SIXTEEN

  Things Are Being Done

  Kourou, French Guiana

  September 10

  T-minus 144 days to launch

  BEN AND AMY sat in the back of a Humvee, fighting sleep. Four hours was not enough rest for a sleep-deprived body, but it would have to do. Amy took Ben’s hand and squeezed. Back in California, in what seemed like an alternate reality, she used to say, It’s us against the world, babe. But here they were, doing their very best to save that world. In terms of chess, they were the queen and king, sitting with a core team of bishops, knights, and rooks in a swarm of pawns. The queen was the power player, the mover and shaker; the king was admittedly the less glamorous piece, but he kept his army alive.

  And what an army it was! Their defense effort was in full force at more than fifty thousand bodies encircled by two layers of protection: the original security gates of the space center and the outer Effort perimeter. The center’s gates wrapped around security headquarters and its kennel, the administration complex, the Ariane rocket launcher integration facilities, payload prep and fueling stations, the railway tracks connecting them, and a new infirmary set up in the gutted Vega rocket facilities.

  The Effort’s security perimeter cast a much wider net that included the center’s public facilities, the Effort’s vast military barracks, the Pariacabo wharf by the Kourou River and the desalination plant they were installing beside it, the Kourou Station with its fifteen-meter dish antennae and no-break power supply, and the Kourou airfield. Ben was told about additional security that extended beyond the perimeter’s southeast border for forty miles along the highway leading to Cayenne, the capital of French Guiana. Access to the international airport, main seaport, and French naval base had to be protected.

  The Effort’s security team had instituted a no-fly zone over the entire perimeter, but luckily for Ben, there was still a persistent swell of human activity. Noise helped ease his crippling anxiety with an assurance that things were being done. Things are being done things are being done things are being done things are being done looped in the background din of Ben’s thoughts.

  “You had to tell them the truth,” Amy said, watching him carefully.

  He did. Ben needed the brain trust of the world to solve the impossible. For one of a few times in his life, his own brain was not enough. On September 1, Ben had used the UN’s back channels to world leaders in order to confirm a high probability of impact and call upon their resources.

  “We needed the US to pledge support,” Amy insisted.

  Again, she was right. The president had sole authority over the country’s nuclear arsenal, which they needed for the HYCIV’s nuclear charge. In order to get cooperation, Ben had to divulge the full truth: that NASA’s own trajectory calculations predicted 89 percent probability of impact. With that, the president finally committed the country’s nuclear arsenal and military might.

  “NASA’s trajectory will leak to the public. Maybe it already has,” Ben said, miserable. “The world’s gonna go to shit, Amy.”

  “You don’t know that.”

  But he did. At the annual Planetary Defense Conference, Ben had played out many impact scenarios where mass hysteria set off a chain reaction of events. First came the hoarding, looting, and runs on banks. Then came the breakdown of supply distribution networks and municipal services. With no access to clean water, food, medicine, waste disposal, electric power, currency, and all things that made habitation for dense populations possible, people grew desperate and violent. All impact scenarios drew upon the outcomes of real-life, localized disasters that were then multiplied up to a human population of 7.5 billion.

  But even knowing the consequences, what else could Ben have done? The Effort needed a miracle, but short of that, it needed a nuclear arsenal and the best engineers alive.

  Things are being done things are being done things are being done things are being done…

  Amy sighed and rested her cheek on Ben’s bony shoulder. He smelled her freshly bleached hair, a familiar aroma that wasn’t unlike Chinese food. Amy had long stopped caring about her appearance, but she hadn’t stopped caring about Ben’s manic fear of time running out. She promised to keep her roots bleached a matching pale yellow to keep him from calculating how many days had passed since he last measured them (human hair grows 1.25 centimeters a month, he said). Ben already stared at the digital seconds of his watch for too long as they blurred with the speed of change.

  Once their jeep cleared the center’s security gates, Amy called out to the driver by his first name and asked to stop. (She always seemed to know the things he never bothered with: names, birthdays, who had kids, who had pets that were treated like kids, etc. She had read that Dale Carnegie book How to Win Friends and Influence People, like, a million times.)

  “I’ll help process the new arrivals at security,” Amy said. “Then I’ll review the rest of the engineer CVs.”

  She looked so exhausted and serious, so unlike his Amy.

  “You could stay with me. I feel taller with you,” he half-joked.

  She kissed him goodbye and said, “Let’s get to work.”

  Ben continued toward the administrative building complex. The Effort’s scientific core team had split into factions, and the Janus building was now the residence of the nuclear team. In the next twenty-four hours—or however long he could stay awake—Ben would make two additional stops farther north within the space center grounds: to Jin-soo and the HYCIV team in the largest cleanroom at the payload prep facilities, and then to Marcel and the staff working to complete the Ariane rocket in the launcher integration building.

  As Ben exited the elevator on the top floor of the Janus building, he immediately heard a loud swell of voices and languages spilling from the meeting room. The quiet UN minions and overlords were gone, transferred to another building in the administrative complex with the rest of UN leadership as they battled incoming government officials to remain a neutral arbiter of the defense effort. Comparatively, members of the nuclear team were loud as schoolchildren.

  More than seventy physicists stood or sat in large clusters facing walls lined with electronic whiteboards. Lopsided diagrams and long equations were scrawled across one to the other as onlookers discussed and called out in their own native tongues. The nuclear team was responsible for a nuclear payload capable of a one-gigaton explosion. This was an unprecedented amount of power; twenty times larger than the biggest man-made nuclear bomb: the Russian Tsar Bomba, or King of Bombs, that detonated a yield of fifty megatons of TNT in 1961.

  At the back corner table, where the science core once gathered, Chuck sat watching with his meaty arms crossed. The Professor sat a few feet from the entrance in his lobby armchair against the wall. The octogenarian was much more functional these days, admittedly with the help of strong pain medication. His expression was relaxed and loopy with opiates—or maybe he was just giddy to be surrounded by so much math. For inside this tropical Tower of Babel, math was the universal language. All the other languages were a barrier that required either several interpreters or one of the best.

  “Love!” Ben shouted.

  She was the only interpreter Ben used. Whenever he called her name—Love! Love!—all the English speakers in any given room would look at him like he was crazy. Ben took a seat next to Chuck as Love emerged from the babble dressed in rumpled culottes and
a sleeveless shirt that showed off her shiny arms and collarbones. She had started growing out her hair, but Ben began to hallucinate that he could see it growing and humbly asked that she cut such an obvious indicator of passing time. As for the men, they had to be freshly shaven or bearded. Ben couldn’t stand the in-between grizzle sprouting right before his own eyes.

  “You look…better,” Love said carefully to Ben. “You needed the rest.”

  But Ben ignored her, just as he ignored the needs of his body.

  “What’d I miss?”

  “Just lots of math.”

  “Just?”

  She took a seat on Ben’s right side. Both Ben and Chuck were left-handers who liked to write their own notes. In fact, there was a surprising number of lefties among the nuclear physicists. Ben spotted two members of his core team: Julie Schmidt from Lawrence Livermore and Ziggy Divjak from Stanford and Los Alamos. Julie used her left hand to point out a piece of an equation that Ziggy was writing, also with his left. Only the Professor used his right hand to hold up his cane like a pointer stick in a lecture.

  Ziggy handed his marker to Julie when he saw Ben. He flashed an unmistakable grin that made his old, elfin face look a few decades younger as he excused himself from the fray.

  “I have a surprise,” Ziggy told Ben.

  “I hate surprises.”

  Ziggy quickly got to the point.

  “Oleg and Yuri have finally arrived in Kourou.”

  “When?”

  But Ben knew before he finished asking the question; it had to have been while he was sleeping. Only four hours of rest after days of no sleep, and he was already out of the loop. The arrival of the two Russian physicists was a long-awaited event. Luckily for the Effort, Oleg and Yuri were retired from the Russian Ministry of Defense, which meant they could travel freely outside of the country. Both men took the same flight from Moscow just before the Kremlin closed the borders and banned international travel. Russian diplomats had tried to block their connecting departure from Heathrow Airport, but the British government didn’t want to force two individuals back on a plane against their will. Oleg and Yuri had to remain in London until the UN could successfully intervene on their behalf.

  “They’re on their way from security,” Ziggy said, more than thrilled at the chance to reunite with more ex–Cold Warriors like himself.

  In the winter of 1992, one month after the fall of the Soviet Union, Ziggy had contacted two directors of its secret nuclear weapons labs to invite them to the United States. The security of Russia’s nuclear arsenal—which had kept the United States in its crosshairs for the last forty years—was now especially threatened in the political vacuum.

  The ex-Soviet directors, Oleg and Yuri, agreed to a tour of Los Alamos and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories. What’s more, they returned the invitation. That February, Ziggy, Julie, and four other senior US scientists arrived in Sarov, a city that had long been removed from all government maps. Ziggy once described to Ben the surreal experience of stepping out of a Russian plane and into the strong hug of Oleg and the gentle embrace of Yuri. “Unknown enemies,” Ziggy explained to Ben, “but here they were waiting for me in the bitter cold like old friends.”

  Both the Russian and US scientists were eager to collaborate. Most were active in the field in September 1983 when a nuclear world war was avoided by the split-second reaction of one Soviet official named Stanislav Petrov. Petrov saw an early warning system alert of a missile attack from the United States but reported it to his superiors as a false alarm. Not only was this gut decision correct, it also saved the United States and its NATO allies from a mistaken counterattack by the Soviets and the large-scale nuclear war that would have followed. Millions of lives were saved by one man holding a phone and acting on a hunch. This was the Cold War legacy. How could its retired warriors not jump at the chance of redemption?

  Doors to the Janus meeting room opened with Acosta from the Brazilian United Nations in the lead. She stood to the side as Oleg and Yuri walked in. Oleg was large and thick with dark hair sprouting up from the collar of his shirt. Added to a full beard, and wide upturned nose, he resembled a silver-backed gorilla. Yuri, on the other hand, was reed thin and soft-spoken with sparse white hair. Ziggy rushed to them with open arms. Julie was close behind with her own crinkled, beaming smile. Even the burly and gruff Oleg kissed her age-spotted hand most sweetly.

  Ben let the Cold Warriors have their moment. He had met the two Russians only virtually through email. Oleg and Yuri used to be more involved in their earlier days, especially after 1994, when comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 impacted Jupiter. Physicist Edward Teller, known as “the father of the hydrogen bomb,” even made a public proposal for nuclear weapons designers of the Cold War to collaborate on future planetary defense. Who better, he argued, to leverage old arsenals of nuclear fusion warheads than the very men and women who built and tested them?

  But Ben was only seventeen at the time of the comet’s collision. Since then, national politics and acts of aggression interfered, as they often do. Teller’s dream of collaboration was never realized. At least, not until now.

  Ben wasn’t a hugger, but he grabbed Oleg as soon as the man was within reach.

  “You two are a sight for sore eyes,” he sighed.

  “Had to make sure you didn’t fuck this up by yourself.”

  Oleg meant it as a joke—he was a ball-buster for sure—but it still made all of Ben’s muscles quake. Oleg clapped him loudly on the back with a friendly smile, but whispered, “Breathe, man!” through his dentures. Ben had to be helped back to his chair.

  I am not alone in this, Ben told himself. Together, we are getting things done. Together…

  Oleg and Yuri took the two chairs on Chuck’s left. Discussion among the physicists continued briefly until Ben caught his breath and yelled for everyone to shut up for a minute so he could summarize their main challenge to Love: nuclear weapons weren’t built to vaporize a comet or asteroid flying through space at tens of thousands of miles per hour; they were built to hit static, terrestrial targets.

  “Them, in other words,” Ben said, pointing to the two former Soviets on his left.

  Oleg chuckled and looked to Ziggy and Julie, his old counterparts in the Cold War.

  “Or them,” he said, pointing.

  “Or them!” chirped a Pakistani physicist, pointing to an Indian physicist, who laughed and ruefully pointed back, happily surprised as anyone to be in a room full of enemies turned allies using weapons of mass destruction to save all of creation.

  “It’s a strange universe for sure,” Ziggy remarked, speaking for all of them.

  SEVENTEEN

  Maya and Jack

  Healy in the Bering Sea

  October 21

  T-minus 103 days to launch

  REGAINING ACCESS TO the internet at lower latitudes came as a shock to Healy’s passengers. In the weeks where bandwidth was too limited, media outlets had reported multiple leaks of classified information from NASA claiming an 89 percent probability of impact with comet UD3. With that, all hell had broken loose, and the president had to call a national state of emergency to combat food scarcity and rampant crime.

  When Maya visited the UC Santa Barbara website, she saw one of those yellow emergency announcement bars pinned to the top. The university had canceled classes and shut down administration indefinitely. Only one of Maya’s colleagues at the Marine Science Institute had replied to her emails. Jennifer was a second-year postdoc who had gone to stay with her parents at their vineyard after the university shut down. She wrote:

  Needless to say I’ve been pretty drunk during the worst of this. And pooping. Grapes are the only fresh produce we have left, so we’re eating them by the pound. So much pooping.

  (Maya was envious. She missed fresh produce—and wine—and a good poop in her own private bathroom.)

  Jennifer’s parents were also hosting two migrant workers and their three children, who had nowhere else to go. The mig
rants’ employer from the recent harvest was a wine hobbyist who owned the neighboring property and ran operations remotely. Jennifer said his land was taken over by “very unfriendly” squatters who turned the family away. Jennifer wrote:

  Of course we wanted to save this hungry family. And we did. But we can’t save the next one that shows up at our doorstep. Would you let your own family starve to feed five strangers? I mean, those are the choices we’ll have to make in the short term. In the long term, I think we’re all fucked anyway. That could be my hangover talking. Or not.

  There wasn’t much pause before she added:

  I’m sorry about your family. And no, I haven’t heard anything about your hometown except that it’s one of the cities that’ve gone dark.

  Jennifer wrote that the army was keeping order in major cities like Los Angeles, San Francisco, and San Diego. The rest had to make due with local law enforcement. Cities such as Oakland, Stockton, San Bernardino, Compton, Merced, and Modesto had “gone dark” with power blackouts and rampant violence. There was no reportage or contact because no one could safely get out and no one wanted to go in.

  Maya hadn’t received an email from her mother, father, three sisters, or neighbors on all sides of the small house where she grew up since news headlines announced the first leaked trajectory. She told herself to stop hitting Refresh only to stare at an empty inbox. The memory of her father’s last visit to campus replayed in her head.

  He came alone. Maya’s sisters all had young children and husbands to care for. Maya’s mother came less often because she was usually saddled with grandchildren and neighborhood children who needed watching by a good abuela who didn’t say no. Mr. Gutiérrez made the four-and-a-half-hour drive to UC Santa Barbara every couple of months, not out of obligation but because his “heart sang with joy” to see his own daughter working as part of such an impressive institution of higher learning.