Short fiction complete, p.239
Short Fiction Complete, page 239
But I knew better. And I couldn’t stand it. I turned away from the screens, away from the views of dead Jupiter, and pushed through the crowd that was still gaping stupidly at my cameras’ views. I was suffocating, strangling. I had to have fresh air or die.
I bolted out the main doors and into the corridor, empty and silent, deserted by all the people who had crammed mission control. The first outside door I could find I kicked through, heedless of the red EMERGENCY ONLY sign and the wailing alarm that hooted accusingly after me.
The brilliant late afternoon sun surprised me, made my eyes suddenly water after the cool shadows inside the building. I took in a deep raw lungful of hot, dry desert air. It felt like brick dust, alien, as if part of me were still deeply immersed in Jupiter’s mighty ocean.
“It’s all ruined.” Allie’s voice.
Turning, I saw that she had followed me. The tears in her eyes were not from the bright sunshine.
“All dead,” she sobbed. “The city . . . all of them . . . destroyed.”
“The comet,” I said. Shoemaker-Levy 9 had struck Jupiter twenty years ago with the violence of a million hydrogen bombs.
“Twenty years,” Allie moaned. “They were intelligent. We could have communicated with them!”
If we had only been twenty years earlier, I thought. Then the true horror of it struck me. What could we have told them, twenty years ago? That a shattered comet was going to rain destruction on them? That no matter what they had built, what they had learned or hoped for or prayed to, their existence was going to be wiped out forever? That there was absolutely nothing either they or we could do about it?
“It’s cold,” Allie said, almost whimpering.
She wanted me to go to her, to hold her, to comfort her the way one warmblooded primate ape comforts another. But what was the use? What was the use of anything?
What difference did any of it make in a world where you could spend millions of years evolving into intelligence, build a civilization, reach a peak of knowledge where you begin to study and understand the universe around you, only to learn that the universe can destroy you utterly, without remorse, without the slightest shred of hope for salvation?
I looked past Allie, shivering in the last rays of the dying day. Looked past the buildings and antennas, past the gray-brown hills and the distant wrinkled mountains that were turning blood red in the inevitable sunset.
I saw Jupiter. I saw those intelligent creatures wiped away utterly and implacably, as casually as a man flicks a spot of dust off his sleeve.
And I knew that somewhere out in that uncaring sky another comet was heading inexorably for Earth to end all our dreams, all our strivings, all our desires.
Delta Vee
It was going to be the last New Year’s Eve. Forever.
Six months after the last hydrogen bomb was dismantled, a Japanese amateur astronomer discovered the comet. It was named after him, therefore: Comet Kara.
For more than thirty years special satellites and monitoring stations on both the Earth and the Moon had kept a dedicated watch for asteroids that might endanger our world. Sixty-five million years ago, the impact of an asteroid some ten miles wide drove the dinosaurs and three-fourths of all the living species on Earth into permanent oblivion.
Comet Hara was 350 miles long, and slightly more than 100 miles wide, an oblong chunk of ice slowly tumbling through space, roughly the size of the state of Florida minus its panhandle.
It was not detected until too late.
While asteroids and many comets coast through the solar system close to the plane in which the planets themselves orbit, Comet Hara came tumbling into view high in the northern sky. The guardian battery of satellites and monitoring stations did not see it until it was well inside the orbit of Saturn. It came hurtling, now, out of the dark vastness of the unknown gulfs beyond Pluto, streaking toward an impact that would destroy civilization and humanity forever. It was aimed squarely at Earth, like the implacable hand of fate, due to strike somewhere in North America between the Great Lakes and the Front Range of the Rockies.
Comet Hara was mostly ice, instead of rock. But a 350-mile-long chunk of ice, moving at more than seven miles per second, would explode on Earth with the force of millions of H-bombs. Megatons of dirt would be thrown into the air. Continentwide firestorms would rage unchecked, their plumes of smoke darkening the sky for months. No sunlight would reach the ground anywhere. Winter would freeze the world from pole to pole, withering crops, killing by starvation those who did not die quickly in the explosion and flames. The world would die.
Desperate calculations showed that Comet Hara would strike the Earth on New Year’s Eve. No one would live to see the New Year.
Unless the comet could be diverted.
“It’s too much delta vee,” said the head of the national space agency. “If we had spotted it earlier, maybe then we’d have had a chance. But now . . .”
The president of the United States and the secretary-general of the United Nations were the only two people in the conference room that the former astronaut recognized. The others were leaders of other nations, he knew; twenty of them sitting around the polished mahogany table like twenty mourners at a funeral. Their own.
“What’s delta vee?” asked the president. She had been a biochemist before entering politics. None of the men and women around the table knew much about astronautics.
“Change in velocity,” he said, knowing it explained nothing to them. “Look—it’s like this . . .”
Using his hands the way a pilot would, the former astronaut showed the comet approaching Earth. Any rocket vehicle sent out to intercept it would be going in the opposite direction from the comet.
“It takes a helluva lot of rocket thrust to get that high above the plane of the ecliptic,” he said, moving his two hands together like a pair of airplanes rushing into a head-on collision.
“That’s the plane in which the planets orbit?” asked the prime minister of Italy.
“More or less,” the ex-astronaut replied. “Anyway, you need a huge jolt of thrust to get a spacecraft out to the comet, but when it gets there it’s going the wrong way!”
“Then it will have to turn around,” said the American president impatiently.
The space chief nodded unhappily. “Yes, ma’am. But it isn’t all that easy to turn around in space. The craft has to kill its forward velocity and then put on enough speed again to catch up with the comet.”
“I don’t see the difficulty.”
“Those maneuvers require rocket thrust. Lots of it. Rocket thrust requires propellants. Tons and tons of propellants. We just don’t have spacecraft capable of doing the job.”
“But couldn’t you build one?”
“Sure. In a year or two.”
“We only have five months,” said the secretary general, sounding somewhere between miffed and angry.
“That’s the problem,” admitted the space chief.
Hovering weightlessly in the cramped little cubbyhole that passed for the bridge of her spacecraft, Cindy Lundquist stared at the communications screen. The image was grainy and streaked with interference, but she could still see the utterly grim expression on the face of Arlan Prince.
“. . . and after a thorough analysis of all the available options,” the handsome young man was saying, “they’ve come to the conclusion that yours is the only spacecraft capable of reaching the comet in time.”
Arlan was the government’s coordinator of operations for all the mining ships in the Asteroid Belt, a job that would drive a lesser man to madness or at least fits of choler. There were dozens of mining ships plying the Belt, each owned and operated by a cantankerous individualist who resented any interference from some bureaucrat back on Earth.
But Arlan Prince did not descend into madness or even choleric anger. He smiled and patiently tried to help the miners whenever he could. Cindy dreamed about his smile. It was to die for.
“I don’t want to mislead you, Cindy,” he was saying, very seriously. “It’s a tricky, dangerous mission.”
Grease my monkey! she thought. He wants me to go out and catch a comet? They must be in ultimate despair if they expect this creaking old bucket of bolts to catch anything except terminal metal fatigue.
Cindy’s aged spacecraft was coasting along the outer fringe of the Asteroid Belt, well beyond the orbit of Mars, almost four times farther from the Sun than the Earth’s orbit. Since she was on the opposite side of the Sun from Earth’s current position, it took thirty-eight minutes for a communications signal to reach her lonely little mining craft.
That meant that she couldn’t have a conversation with Arlan Prince. She could talk back, of course, but it would be more than half an hour before the man heard what she had to say.
So he didn’t wait for her response. He just went right on talking, laying the whole load on her shoulders.
“I know it’s a lot to ask, but the entire world is depending on you. Yours is the only spacecraft anywhere in the solar system that has even a slight chance of catching up with the comet and diverting it.”
He’s not going to give me a chance to say no, Cindy realized. I either do it or the world gets smashed.
A thousand questions flitted through her mind. Why can’t they just send some missiles out to the comet and blast it into ice cubes? No missiles and no H-bombs, she remembered. They’ve all been dismantled.
Do I have enough propellant to get to the comet? That’s a whole mess of delta vee we’re talking about. While Arlan droned on lugubriously, she flicked her fingers across her computer keypad. The numbers told her she could reach the comet, just barely. If nothing at all went wrong.
Which was asking a lot from this ancient wheeze of a mining ship she had inherited from her father. The old man had died brokenhearted out here among the asteroids that orbited between Mars and Jupiter. Looking for a mountain of gold floating in the dark emptiness of space.
All he ever found were chunks of nickel-iron or carbon-rich rock. Just enough to keep him going. Just enough to get by and raise his only child out in the loneliness of this cold, dark frontier.
Cindy couldn’t remember her mother at all. She had died when Cindy was still an infant, killed by a tiny asteroid no bigger than a bullet that had punctured her spacesuit while she worked outside the ship alongside her husband.
Her father had died of cancer only a few months ago. An occupational hazard, he had joked feebly, for anyone who spends as much time exposed to the radiation of space as an asteroid miner has to.
So now all she had was the old spacecraft, so tiny and tight that you had to go into the airlock to have enough room to sneeze. It was all the home that Cindy had ever known, and all she ever would know, yet it felt more like a prison to her.
Cindy knew she would spend her life alone in this ship, plying the vast empty spaces of the asteroid belt. Miners were few and very far between. Born and raised in the weightlessness of zero gravity, her delicate bones could never hold her up on the surface of Earth, or even the Moon.
Arlan was still talking earnestly about saving the Earth from certain doom. “According to our figures, you won’t have enough propellant to return once you’ve matched velocities with the comet, therefore we will send a drone tanker to your expected position”
Drone tanker, Cindy thought. And if I miss it I’ll go sailing out of the solar system forever. I’ll die all alone, farther from Earth than anyone’s flown before.
So what? a voice sneered at her. You’re all alone now, aren’t you? You’ll always be alone.
Wedged amid consoles and control boards like a key in a slot, Cindy turned to the laser control console and pecked at its faded color-coded keys. Power okay. Focusing optics needed work, but she could bring them in and spruce them up during the couple of months it would take to reach the comet.
She turned off the sound of Arlan’s somber voice and spoke into her comm unit’s microphone. “Okay, I’ll do it. Track me good and have that tanker out there.”
The truth was, she could not have refused anything that Arlan Prince asked of her, even though they had never met face-to-face. In fact, they had never been closer to each other than fifty million miles.
The comet was huge. Cindy had never seen anything so big. It blotted out the sky, a massive overpowering expanse of dirty gray-white. She was so close that she couldn’t see all of it, any more than a butterfly hovering near a flower can see the entire garden.
Cindy floated weightlessly to the ship’s only oh servation port and craned her neck, gaping at the monumental stretch of dust-filmed ice. The port’s crystal surface felt cold to her touch. There was nothing outside except frigid emptiness, her fingers reminded her.
In one corner of her control console, a display screen showed how the comet looked from Earth: a big bright light in the sky, trailing a long blue-white plume that stretched halfway across the sky. It was beautiful, really, but every word she had heard from Earth was trembling with fear. The comet was pointed like the finger of doom, growing larger in Earth’s sky every night, getting so near and so bright that it could be seen even in daylight.
Other screens scattered across her console scrolled graphs and numbers. Cindy had slaved the laser control to the computer calculations beamed up from Earth. When the moment came she wouldn’t even have to press a button. It would all happen automatically.
If her laser worked.
The tanker was nowhere in sight, but Arlan Prince kept assuring her that it was on its way and would be at the rendezvous point on time.
Or else I’m dead, Cindy thought. And that voice inside her head scoffed, You’re dead anyway. You’ve been more dead than alive ever since your father left you.
The thundering howl of the power generator startled her. Looking through the narrow observation port, she saw a sudden jet of glittering white vapor spurt from the comet’s surface, like the spout of a gigantic whale’s breath blowing into the dark vacuum of space.
Cindy clapped her hands over her ears and stared at the readouts on her display screens. The laser had never run this long, and she feared that it would break down long before its job was finished.
When it finally shut off, Cindy glanced at the master clock set into the console above her head. Its digital numbers told her that the laser ran a full two minutes. Exactly 120 seconds, as programmed.
Was it enough?
Hours passed. The comet was drifting away, slowly at first, but as Cindy stared out through the observation port it seemed to gather speed and leave her farther and farther behind.
Not even the bleeding comet wants to be near me, she thought. She waved to it, a great oblong chunk of grayish white, still spurting a glistening plume of icy vapor. Good-bye, she called silently, knowing that she was alone once again.
When the call from Earth came on her comm screen, it was the secretary-general of the United Nations. The woman had tears in her eyes.
“You’ve done it,” she said, solemnly, like a worshiper thanking a god. “You’ve saved the world.”
Cindy’s spacecraft was so close to Earth now that they could talk with only a half minute’s delay.
“You diverted it into a trajectory that’s pulling it toward the Sun,” the secretary-general said, trying to smile. “It will break up into fragments and then fall into the Sun, if it doesn’t melt completely first.”
“You mean I killed it?” Cindy felt a pang of regret, remorse. The comet had been beautiful, in its way.
“You’ve saved the world,” the secretary-general said gratefully.
Cindy fished around for something to say, but nothing came to mind.
The secretary-general had more, though.
“The tanker . . .” The woman’s voice faltered. With an obvious effort, she went on, “The tanker . . . isn’t going to be at the rendezvous point. One of its rocket engines failed . . .”
“It won’t be there?” Cindy asked, surprised that her voice sounded so high, so frightened.
“I’m afraid not,” said the secretary-general.
Cindy felt her entire body slump with defeat. Numbers were scrolling on her data screens. The tanker would pass near the rendezvous point, but too far away for Cindy to reach it. She had no propulsion fuel left, only a bit of maneuvering thrust, nowhere near enough to chase down the errant tanker.
“Then I’ll continue on my current trajectory,” she said to the screens.
“Which is the same as the comet’s original path,” the secretary-general pointed out. She waited a decent interval, then added, “We don’t want you to crash into the Earth, of course.”
“Of course,” said Cindy, as she turned off her communications system. The secretary-general’s oh so-sad face winked out.
Cindy knew that her little ship was no threat to the world. It would burn to cinders once it hit the atmosphere. Maybe I can jink it a little so I’ll blaze through the atmosphere like a falling star, she thought. I’ll be cremated, and my ashes will scatter all across the world.
But then she thought, no, I’ll use the last of my maneuvering thrust to move out of Earth’s way al together. I’ll just sail out of the solar system forever. I’ll be the first human to reach the stars—in a couple three million years.
New Year’s Eve.
All across the world people celebrated not only the beginning of a new year, but the end of the fear that had gripped them. Comet Hara was gone. The world had been saved.
Cindy Lundquist floated alone in her little spacecraft as it streaked safely beyond the Earth and speeded out toward the cold darkness of infinite space. For days her communications screen had been filled with gray-headed persons of importance, congratulating her on her heroic and self-sacrificing deed.
Now the screen was blank. The world was celebrating New Year’s Eve, and she was alone, heading toward oblivion.
Precisely at midnight, on her ship’s clock, the comm screen chimed once and the blond, tanned face of Arlan Prince appeared on it, smiling handsomely.
