“It is godless creatures like yourself who have brought this crisis upon us!” Pastor Ryan accused Bruce.
“Get away with you!”
“Smith, have this man arrested at once – and his friend for good measure. I will not be made a fool of by these foreigners!”
“I’m afraid I can’t do that, Mr Chump,” General Smith replied.
“Why not? Well, you then, Wisneski. Or do I need to call my security team in here to do it myself?”
Wisneski shook his head. “I can’t do that either.”
“Why not?” demanded a now apoplectic Chump whose face seemed to swell in front of them and get all hot and red. “Why not!”
Bruce thought the man’s head would explode like a ripe fruit, or he might blow a valve, if he wasn’t careful.
“Mr Chump, you don’t seem to understand, we are not in control of the situation unfolding here.”
“What do you mean?” Chump demanded angrily. “How could we not be in control? We are the most powerful nation on the planet!”
“We don’t possess the capability to divert or destroy the asteroid heading for us. If it impacts Earth, as it most certainly will, according to our best estimates, it will cause an extinction event if it strikes a landmass, similar to the one that killed off all the dinosaurs at the end of the Cretaceous period. Huge devastating tsunamis that will circle the world if it impacts in an ocean.”
“That is simply preposterous,” Pastor Ryan interjected. “Extinction is not part of God’s plan for us.”
The room went silent for a moment and even Chump seemed a little taken aback by the statement from his pastor, who took the silence as a signal to continue his little sermon.
“The scriptures tell us the world was created by God less than ten thousand years ago and there were no dinosaurs or asteroid extinction events. It is all lies dreamt up by godless scientists looking for tax dollars to indulge their fantasies. Science is the root of all evil!” the pastor screamed fervently.
Bruce couldn’t believe his ears. Was this guy for real?
“Well, that will be all for the moment, Pastor Ryan. Thank you for your blessing. I’ll call for you when I need some more guidance from the Lord. And you too, Reid,” Chump told the two men as Pastor Ryan came up for air.
The pastor looked around for support and then realised belatedly that he was not among friends and believers, and even Chump, a man he had served for many years, had momentarily forsaken him. He shrugged his shoulders. “God help you all, especially you, Mr Chump. Wait until the rest of the party hears about your lack of faith.” He rose to his feet from the kneeling position he had adopted to deliver the blessing and left the room with Reid in tow.
“Do you mean to tell me that with all the money we have invested over the years in the military and with NASA that we can’t deal with this asteroid?” Chump sounded far more reasonable now his entourage had left the room.
“Mr Chump, you and your fellow fiscal conservatives in government have steadily degraded our capability in space and trimmed programmes that could have provided the required capability.” He paused to let the information filter through before continuing. “Each time your party and its leaders have been advised of the risks, the response has been from the ‘experts’ you have consulted that the risk of life on Earth being destroyed by an asteroid impact scenario is minimal in your lifetime.” Despite looking harassed and haggard, the old general seemed to be enjoying himself now. Bruce got the impression he was taking advantage of the situation to get a few hits in.
“I think that’s probably enough,” Dr Roach interjected.
But Chump was having none of that. “Do you people realise,” he said to the room in general, “just who I am and the powerful interests I represent? We make or break people like you just for fun.”
“You’re just a big fat bully who isn’t used to being told no,” Bruce said, injecting himself into the conversation. “I’m not here to listen to this shit, and I don’t care if you’re the Queen of bloody Sheba.”
“And just who do you think you are?” Chump blustered, clearly not used to being contradicted and starting to wonder why this man thought he could talk to him that way, to treat him with such disrespect. Then an insidious feeling of doubt, a sudden realisation he might not be in control of the situation, started to assail Chump. Had he stumbled into a situation where his status meant nothing to the other people involved? He firmly thrust that horrible thought aside. “Do you know who I am?” he repeated for Bruce’s benefit. “I am one of the most powerful men in the country and I am likely to be the next President of the United States of America. I am going to make America great again.”
“You’re not the most powerful person in this room. In this room you are the least important person, and in fact you have broken a number of laws and confidentiality agreements to be here, so I would be keeping quiet if I were you or that will be the end of your campaign, and your party will need to find another contender,” the general told Chump in no uncertain terms. He seemed to have come to some kind of decision.
“Chump, I don’t know who leaked the intelligence about the asteroid to you, but they shouldn’t have – it puts at risk all our planning to mitigate the impact of any strike. This is more important than your grandstanding and your petty partisan politics. What we do here and the decisions we make in this room are crucial to the survival of mankind and you, sir …” the general paused again for effect, “… are not equipped to be a part of that process. Wisneski, please arrest Mr Chump and his team and remove them to a place of safety until further notice.” The general did not add that whatever the outcome there would be a new normal and perhaps this was the opportunity where the likes of Chump could be banished to the lunatic fringe where he belonged, along with all his supporters.
“You can’t do that!” Chump shouted desperately. Chump could feel the foundations he so carefully based his position on being undermined by a force he could not even begin to describe, let alone understand. If he could not insinuate himself into this process and influence the outcome to the benefit of his supporters, then he would face an immediate diminution of his power and influence as well as the support he needed to keep his campaign rolling towards the White House. “You don’t have the political mandate I have!”
“I have a mandate direct from the President and a Presidential Order to the effect that I have the authority to resolve the crisis as I see fit and to keep news of the disaster from the media and general public. I see you as a threat to that process so I am empowered to hold you incommunicado until the crisis has been resolved.”
Chump seemed to deflate like a popped balloon as all of his earlier bluster and assertiveness dissipated. He seemed to recognise too late that he had crossed over an invisible line.
“You haven’t heard the last of this, by any means,” he muttered feebly as he went for the door.
“Hold him and his team with Mrs Harwood and the other women, for the moment,” Wisneski instructed the guard at the door. “And make sure his guard detail is sequestered as well.”
“Who was that guy? Was it who I think it was?” Bruce asked as the tension dial in the room quickly wound back.
“Ronald Chump is the current darling of the conservative movement in this country. He thinks because he is ideologically pure and has the ear of a few wealthy, influential men and women, he runs the whole country,” the general informed Bruce. “He seems to believe he is going to be the next President but he hasn’t even won his party’s primary yet.”
“OK, so now that unpleasant business is out of the way, let’s get down to it, shall we?” Dr Roach suggested. “The sooner we get Bruce here equipped, the sooner we can put a lid on this whole situation.”
“What do you mean ‘equipped’? I don’t think I need much that you can offer.” Bruce did not want to sound too cocky and he cringed inwardly as he realised how arrogant he sounded.
“We just need to make sure you actually do the right thi
ng with the asteroid and that you fully understand the implications of the plan we want you to follow. OK?” The old doctor seemed to instinctively understand the best way to get ensure Bruce’s cooperation was to explain the issues to him clearly and treat him with at least some respect.
“OK. But what about the Chump and his friends?”
“There’s nothing much we will be able to do to keep him quiet after the event. We can’t just make him disappear,” Dr Roach said, casting a wary eye at the general. “We can keep him under wraps, using one pretext or another, for as long as it takes to resolve this situation, but in the longer term it is very difficult to scare the likes of Chump into silence for any length of time. He’ll seek to make some kind of political capital, whatever we do with him.”
“But the man’s an idiot,” Bruce remarked. “How is it someone like him has so much influence?”
“Look, son, we’re not here for some kind of philosophical political discussion, we’re here to talk about what you can or can’t do with that asteroid. And may I point out politicians of Chump’s ilk exist everywhere, so don’t go and get all high and mighty about the purity of your own political leaders. The only difference between them and Chump is the scale of mischief and damage they can cause.”
“OK,” replied a suitably chastened Bruce.
“I’m not sure what you know about orbital mechanics, the orbits of celestial bodies and astronomy in general,” Dr Roach began. “However, it is important that you understand something about the orbits of these asteroids so you can appreciate what we want to do and why we want you to do it.”
“OK.” Bruce could see this was going to take a while, so he got up for a cup of coffee from the pot boiling on the sideboard.
Shelly Shaw pushed a button on the remote lying beside a keyboard on the table and a screen dropped along the far wall. She tapped away at the keyboard and opened up some kind of presentation.
“When you’re ready,” she said to Bruce impatiently. “This is the short version of the situation we are facing and how we think we should approach it. This presentation is based on a paper I did recently for a conference so some of the detail regarding the current situation is a little different. However, you will get the general gist of the position we are in.”
Do you want me to analyse the long version? the MPU asked.
“Might as well.”
“There seems to have been a plethora of movies and books recently involving asteroids, actually or potentially, devastating earth type storylines. Perhaps it is not surprising, because with each new improvement in our ability to detect these objects, we discover more of them and this information is available instantly, and the probable outcome if a big one hits Earth makes a fantastic story. We know, of course, despite anything Pastor Ryan would have us believe, the history of the planet has been shaped by impact events – comets delivering water in massive impact swarms over huge lengths of time and the enormous impactors that have almost killed life off completely each time they have hit through the four billion-odd years of the planet’s existence.
“The known history underlines the fact the possibility of an impactor hitting the Earth poses a threat to all human existence. The planetary space that our home planet moves through is not empty. In fact, it appears to be a rather violent, constantly changing menace that we must keep a watchful eye upon if we are to anticipate any threats to our way of life.”
Holy fuck, Bruce thought. He had never really thought in these terms before. He had been exposed to how fragile civilisation really was in the face of Skidian stupidity, but he had never really appreciated before just how delicate their own hold on life was in this part of the universe. He reckoned the Skidians must have some way of dealing with asteroids, comets and other bodies that could slam into their planet, so maybe they, or what was left of them, could lend Earth a hand to deal with this one.
“To cut a long story short,” Shelly Shaw continued, after stopping for a moment to sip on a glass of water, “despite the very obvious risks, we only spend about $200 million a year on searching for, tracking and documenting these objects, and almost nothing on strategies to deal with them if we found one heading this way. By the end of 2015 some 10,000 asteroids have been discovered and around 10 per cent of them are at least a kilometre in diameter.
“To put this in perspective for you, Bruce, the Tunguska event, the largest known asteroid event in human recorded history, flattened approximately 800 square miles of forest and exploded with the power of an estimated 1,000 Hiroshima atomic bombs. It is estimated to have spanned about 200 yards or so. This compares with the six-mile-long asteroid we think wiped out the dinosaurs.
“The asteroid heading this way, Automedon, is about 20 kilometres miles long, so if it impacts, the damage will be catastrophic. It is far too big to attempt to shatter into pieces small enough to burn up in the Earth’s atmosphere. If we attempt this approach we would likely just result in fracturing one large chunk of rock into a multitude of smaller pieces whose cumulative potential for destruction would probably almost equal that of the original asteroid.”
Shelly Shaw paused to let this fact sink into Bruce’s consciousness.
“Other proposed theories of asteroid deflection involve harnessing nuclear bombs along the length of the asteroid to nudge it clear of Earth’s orbit, attaching a solar sail and harnessing the sun’s energy to modify its trajectory, and using propulsion technology to push the asteroid clear of Earth’s path – but we haven’t got time to mount these kind of …”
“OK, OK, I get it,” Bruce said, interrupting. “So what do you want me to do?” He hoped the MPU was taking an interest in proceedings. He wasn’t sure who, or what to believe. However, he thought despite the fact it was a machine intelligence – or, actually, when he stopped to think about, because it was a machine intelligence– the MPU might have a better handle on things.
Their science is sound, the MPU agreed. I have a plan I would like your help with, which probably means a few modifications to the offworld proposal.
“What do you mean?”
The offworlders are going to want you to nudge the asteroid out of its event trajectory so it never has a chance of impacting your planet. However, I want to nudge it into orbit instead so I can develop it as a Skidian outpost in your solar system.
Bruce chuckled to himself and tried to keep a straight face.
“We want you to get out towards Jupiter, intercept the asteroid and place some large solar sails on the surface which we can then program to direct the asteroid off its current course and into a much wider orbit so it has no chance of hitting us.”
“And how do I manage that?” Bruce looked at Myfair who, he suddenly realised, had not uttered a single word all the time they had been in the room.
“We were hoping you would be able to facilitate this process and perhaps provide much more durable materials than we can manufacture.”
“I’m sure I can. Are you OK, Myfair? Are you OK to help me with this?”
Myfair turned to him. Bruce had never seen anyone look so downcast – well, not since the Chump had left the room.
Myfair nodded. “I will assist you,” he responded. “My … your ship,” he corrected himself. “Your ship has the industrial capability to make solar sails and other tools. We can manufacture the structures on site using raw materials from the asteroid itself.”
“Well OK then, when do we start?”
“When do we start, you mean?” It seemed the old general and the doctors wanted to be in on this history-making trip. “We wouldn’t miss it for the world.”
Bruce glanced across at Wisneski. “You too?”
“What do you think?” Bruce asked the MPU.
It can’t hurt, as long as they don’t get in the way. I will send you the coordinates of where I will come and pick you up.
Eight
“Just what is going on here?” Chump demanded. “Just what is going on here?” he growled, to an audience much smaller and
far more hostile than he was used to. But he didn’t really seem to expect an answer from the two women in the room with him.
He had tried the door, only to be met by the expressionless stare of one of the guards Wisneski had put in place. His own security team had been hustled away by some really dangerous looking ruffians, who did not appear to speak English, and were being held separately. Chump was going to have it out with whoever after this. How dare they use foreign mercenaries to incarcerate him like this. They must be foreign no sane military person in the country would dare detain him, given he was the darling of the segment of the electorate who wanted to ramp up defence spending at the expense of every other budget area. The only landline in the room had been disconnected, and his mobile and those of his team been confiscated so there was no way he could call for help.
His biggest worry at moment was not his personal safety – he was sure someone would soon come to their senses and let him out after apologising profusely and let him take his rightful place at the centre of events. His biggest worry right was that someone would look through his personal mobile’s call and text logs, and potentially discover his penchant for high-priced hookers, certain recreational drugs and excessive drinking in establishments his electorate and his long-suffering wife were best left in ignorance of.
His colleagues and peers would understand the stresses public life placed on a man and the need for release. However, the general public were oblivious to the pressures in his personal world that demanded satisfaction through certain recreational activities he sought to deny mere mortals. He had always felt justified in his belief there was one rule for him and one for most everyone else. But his electorate would not condone, let alone understand, his justification for breaking just about every moral standard they held dear to their hearts. If his wife found out what he had been up to she would probably skin him alive – though he had long suspected she knew exactly what was going on, and accepted his behaviour as long as she wasn’t publicly humiliated. If word ever got out about his behaviour then all bets would be off and he would be cut adrift in more ways than one. It was a situation that didn’t bear contemplating.
The Lifeboat Page 10