Comet!

by Laurence Dahners

  Epaulding took a deep breath, “Comet Hearth Daster is quite likely to hit the Earth.”

  Bayless tilted his head and narrowed his eyes. “And… so?”

  Now Epaulding’s eyes narrowed. Could it be that he didn’t understand what that meant? “As I’m sure you’re aware, such an impact would be a disaster.”

  The left side of Bayless’ mouth quirked up sardonically, “Come on. I may not be a science whiz, but even I know that meteors hit the earth every day.”

  Epaulding thought, Jesus, he’s completely clueless. “Jim, this thing masses about 300 million metric tons. If it hits the Earth it will be the end of civilization and will likely result in the extinction of the human race. Though it’s smaller, this is the same kind of event that wiped out the dinosaurs.”

  Bayless stared at Epaulding uncomprehendingly for a moment, then his hair began to stand up and his ears began to ring. He noted distantly that his lips felt funny. He leaned back in his chair until his head stabilized against the headrest. The lighting was weird and the room was dark around the edges. Distantly he heard Epaulding saying, “Jim, you OK?”

  Epaulding watched Bayless’ head loll to the side, is he having a heart attack? Epaulding stepped closer, “You OK?” he repeated. He recognized Bayless’ chair as the same type he had in his own office and leaned down to depress the lever that laid the chair back nearly horizontal. He took Bayless’ wrist and felt for a pulse, it was there and regular but very slow. Should I be calling 911?

  Bayless pulled his head back up, widened his eyes and said, “What just happened?”

  “I think you passed out. You want me to call 911?”

  “No, no, I’ll be fine.” He sat back up and frowned, “What were we talking about?”

  “The comet.”

  Bayless eyes widened and he blanched again. Jeez, Epaulding wondered, is he going to go down again?

  Bayless sat up and shook his head a little. “Holy crap! It’s going to hit us?”

  Epaulding nodded. “Pretty good chance.”

  Bayless threw his head back, “Oh Jeez. And what did you want from me?”

  “I need you to back off of D5R so they can give us the ports we need.”

  Bayless frowned, “Why do you need ports?” he asked querulously.

  “We need ports to fly a bomb out there to the comet.”

  “Oh! You’re going to blow it up?”

  “Knock it aside.”

  “Yeah, yeah. OK. I’ll find a way to approve your ports. Holy crap! I’ve got to call some people!”

  Epaulding rolled his eyes, “It sounds like you don’t remember signing the ‘Secrets’ document?” He tapped the paper where it still lay on Bayless’ desk.

  Bayless’ eyes widened again as he glanced at the paper and it came back to him. “But, I’ve got to…”

  “Jim, you breathe a word of this, even to your cat and you’ll be going to prison. Understand? If word gets out, the panic it’ll create will be a disaster all of its own.”

  “You can’t…”

  “We can, and we will. You authorize the ports for ILX and you keep your mouth shut. Understand?”

  Bayless sat up a little straighter, shook himself again, cleared his throat, then said sullenly, “Yeah, I got it.”

  ***

  By the time Wilson Daster arrived at RDU airport in Raleigh and got his rental car it was 8PM. He put through a call to Donsaii, unsure whether he was just supposed to take a room at any hotel or whether they might have booked one already. “Ms. Donsaii?”

  “I thought you were going to call me Ell?”

  “Uh, yes, sorry, Ell, I’ve just now got my car and I’m not sure where I should stay.”

  “Great! If you’re up to it come on by D5R. We’re still working on your comet and should have something to show you about the time you get here. It’s only 6PM Arizona time right? I’ll have my AI make you a hotel reservation while you’re driving over.”

  Daster’s eyebrows climbed, hard working group! “Uh, sure, I’m on my way.”

  “The guard will know to let you in.”

  The guard at the shack out front directed Daster to the entrance. The door opened when he approached. Ell met him at the door and said, “Quick, or you’ll miss it.”

  She hurried off down a hall in front of him. She was wearing new jeans and an XKCD.com t-shirt. He frowned, You’d think that she’d look plain in those clothes, but she looks stunning. He thought, she must be wearing heels, but then he heard the soft pad of athletic shoes and caught glimpses of them beneath her gently belled jeans. The jeans weren’t tight but were snug enough to be sexy, even though he suspected she didn’t think they were. She didn’t roll her hips in a sexy manner as she walked but still, the way she walked drew his eyes like moths to a flame. The place seemed like a big, empty, and dark barn, but she led him to a well lit area where two other people were facing a big screen. Daster’s eyes widened as he realized that the lumpy object on the screen must be his eponymous comet.

  Expecting to be introduced he tore his eyes off the comet and looked at the two people. One was a tall slender man with a wild shock of dark hair. The other was a small cute woman with curly brown hair. “Hello…” he began.

  But then the three let out a shout. The man stood so suddenly that his chair flipped over behind him. Ell and the curly haired girl were pumping their fists. Then the three threw their arms around each other. Daster stared at the screen where on the right side of the comet an area had blossomed outward into a huge puff ball. “What the hell just happened?” he asked querulously. Was that actually my comet?

  “Yesss!” Ell said, turning to him. “Let me introduce…” her eyes darted back to the screen, then came back to him, “Let me introduce Emma Kenner, and Roger Emmerit.” She turned to them, “Guys, this is Wilson Daster, one of the fellows the comet is named after.”

  Emma and Roger turned to shake Daster’s hand but kept darting glances back to watch the screen as the “puffball” continued expanding. Daster said, “That’s an amazing image. What kind of telescope are you using?”

  Ell grinned over at him. “That’s not a telescope, just a standard SHD video camera Wilson. It’s just that the camera is on a rocket that’s only 5 kilometers from the comet.”

  “Wait, so you mean to tell me you’ve known about the comet and its risks for months?! And you just pretended that I was telling you something new?!”

  “Oh, no. I’d never even considered the possibility that it might actually hit us until you called me.”

  Daster tilted his head querulously, then narrowed his eyes, “Why did you have a rocket out there observing it then?”

  “Ah.” Ell grinned, “We didn’t. We sent it out after you called.”

  “That was yesterday!!” he burst out incredulously.

  Ell smiled, “So it was. And I’ll explain some crazy stuff to you as soon as you sign the non disclosure agreement I’ve forwarded to your AI. You’re going to find us doing even more weird stuff unless you decide to bail.”

  Daster reached out, found a chair and sat down a little unsteadily, his mind racing. There’s no way this is possible, is there? He looked up at his HUD and started to read. He found himself reading lines over and over again because he couldn’t concentrate. Finally, having gotten the gist of the agreement well enough he said, “OK, I agree. What next?”

  Roger leapt up again, knocking over his chair a second time. He shouted “Yes!”

  Wilson looked at the screen where the puffball continued getting bigger but less dense. Some parts of it at the periphery seemed to be spreading over the surface of the comet as if they were falling back onto its surface a little. He couldn’t see what they were excited about but then noticed a line of text across the bottom of the screen saying, “Deflection, 2.0 kph.”

  “Uh, what are you so happy about?” Daster asked uncertainly, “Is it the ‘deflection’?”

  “Yes!” Emma said over her shoulder, but keeping her eyes on the screen. �
��We’d calculated 2.2 kph but that would be with perfect energy transfer. This is great!”

  “Kph?”

  Ell said, “We’ve deflected the comet from its orbit at a rate of 2 kilometers per hour. Obviously that’s not much, but still, in the three and a half months until impact it would deflect it about 5100 kilometers, close to half the diameter of the earth. And we can just keep hitting it since it doesn’t seem like it’s going to break up… Allan, any sign of instability of the nucleus?”

  Donsaii’s AI responded through everyone’s AIs. Daster heard it simply say, “No.”

  “Alright!” Ell exclaimed, washing her hands together. “Tomorrow we start building an entire series of impactors and we’ll hammer that bad boy.”

  Feeling bewildered, Daster found himself checking into a Red Roof Inn, head still swimming. He felt hugely relieved that these people thought something could be done. Unable to sleep, he lay awake wondering if these twenty somethings could be playing a trick on him. If so, why?

  After he’d approved the Non Disclosure Agreement, Donsaii had spent some time explaining how they’d gotten the rocket out to the comet to observe it. Her initial description of the ‘ports’ had seemed like wishful thinking or impossible fabrications. Then her description reminded him that these people had been involved in rescuing the Space Station when she had said in an offhand way, “using the same kind of ports that we provided oxygen to the Station with.”

  Their plan to deal with the comet still had his head spinning. Could it really be possible to hit a three hundred million ton comet with small rockets weighing about 11 lbs and actually deflect it enough that it wouldn’t hit the earth? In his mind he’d pictured a mission to fly out to the comet in their spacecraft and do something dramatic, though he’d never been quite sure what.

  ***

  Kitt’s Peak, Arizona—The observatory reports that the albedo of comet Hearth-Daster has increased. This appears to be due to a surprisingly large degree of outgassing. Though comets normally “outgas” volatile materials, usually they do this when they are quite a bit closer to the Sun than Hearth-Daster is at present. These volatile materials are what become the comet’s “tail” and leads to their extraordinary appearance…

  In the morning, Daster was introduced to the redoubtable Sheila and then to Nancy from HR. Once they’d made him comfortable about his move they took him down to meet the rest of the Quantum Research team. To his astonishment they provided him with an AI headband that was hooked up through some of the new PGR chips to a near supercomputer. Then he was given the plan that had been drafted for moving the comet and told to spend as much time as he needed to determine whether he believed it would succeed or fail and whether he could suggest modifications to their plan. He had to admit that using such an advanced AI certainly made it easier to confirm their calculations.

  He saw Donsaii walk by on her way to the machine shop area and found his eyes following her. He kept wondering why she wasn’t working as a model. What if Emily decided he’d taken this job because of his new boss’s looks?

  Donsaii came back out and sat down across from him, “What do you think? Found any holes in the plan so far?”

  Daster shook his head. “No. There are things I’m worried about though.”

  “Such as?”

  “I’m afraid that if you scale up the impactors the comet will come apart. If it breaks up into just the five visible main fragments it might not be too bad but if it really comes apart, dealing with a lot of fragments could be pretty difficult.”

  “Agreed. It would be cheaper to use a few very large impactors, but I’m thinking we’ll just keep going with the five kilogram ones so we don’t have to worry so much about it coming apart.”

  “Another potential problem is the gravitational stress that it will be subject to during perihelion. You do realize that our impactors are moving its perihelion a bit closer to the sun don’t you?”

  “Yes,” Ell shrugged, “if anything that should also help buy boiling off even more of the volatiles shouldn’t it?”

  “Well boiling them off will make the nucleus smaller all right but perhaps more susceptible to disintegration?”

  “Hmmm, we could try to perform all of our displacement after the comet rounds the sun I suppose, but then we’d have to hit it a lot harder to move it the same distance at the point it crosses Earth orbit. Our choices are to hit it gently now and move it closer to the sun, or hit it so hard later that it may break up from the impacts. I’m not sure… I think we should keep with the plan to hit it gently now. But, can you try to do what you can to model both scenarios and see if you come up with an obvious benefit to one versus the other?”

  “Sure. I’ll work on that a while.”

  “Once we’re confident that we’re doing everything we can to stop the comet we can talk about having you check over our finances, but, even though that’s your profession, it is definitely of secondary importance at present, right?”

  Daster nodded and she moved off to talk to someone else.

  He looked around the big room where many people seemed to be working on projects of one type or another. Nearby, Roger and Emma had their heads down over a screen, working on something. From where Daster sat he thought it was schematics for their rocket impactors. He noticed Emma looking intensely at Roger. He wondered if they were a couple and if that was against the rules of employment here.

  Ell came to talk to Emma, but just when she’d begun, someone came over from the ‘Portal Technologies’ end of the room and said, “Ell, I just got a call from Mullins at PHMSA.”

  Ell looked up, a furrow between her eyes, “Yes?”

  “He said that we could sell the ports to ILX now. That we didn’t have to wait for the applications for them to be made or to get approval or anything?!”

  Ell narrowed her eyes, “Really?”

  “Yeah, these are the ports NASA has been having conniptions over. Demanding that we get them to them yesterday! I’m pretty sure NASA greased the skids on this somehow, and it pisses me off.’ He grinned and raised an eyebrow, “I told Mullins that PHMSA either needed to approve everyone or no one. We don’t believe in special favors.”

  Ell stared intently at him a moment, then said, “No… I’m pretty sure I know what this is about and the skids really did need to be greased for it. They need ports in the worst way.”

  “So! We tell them that they need get all the rest of the ports approved if they want us to ship these!”

  Ell sighed, “I hear you Fred, but I’m pretty sure lives hang in the balance on this. If it were my life I wouldn’t want anyone playing petty politics.”

  Fred gave her an exasperated look, “Whose life could depend on these ports? The Space Station is safe, we already fixed that. There isn’t anyone else up there in orbit!”

  Enigmatically, Ell said, “I can’t tell you right now Fred. But, believe me, when you find out, you’ll be glad you didn’t hassle those folks. Just go ahead and release the ports to ILX.”

  “OK, you’re the boss.” He said, letting his irritation show, “I still think we should get something out of it though.”

  “We will Fred, we will.”

  Fred turned and strode stiffly back across the room while Ell looked pensively after him. She then resumed her conversation with Roger and Emma. After a bit she got up and came back over to Wilson. “How are you coming? Did you find any serious problems with hitting the comet as soon as we can?”

  “No… but I’d like to keep thinking about it and running more calculations.”

  “Any other issues?”

  “Are you thinking that NASA is working on the comet problem? And that’s what they need ports for?”

  Ell shrugged, “Pretty sure, yeah.”

  “Doesn’t it piss you off that they haven’t even confided in you after all you’ve done for them?”

  She rubbed her chin, “Kinda, but I think that they don’t want to start a panic and they’re afraid the more people that know,
the harder it’ll be to keep the secret. I’m worried about it, so I can hardly blame them.”

  “Seems like you’ve got a good plan to deal with the comet yourself. Why not hold up the ports so they’ll push on PHMSA for you?”

  “Your comet is a problem that humanity needs more than one arrow in its quiver for. I’m not sure how NASA’s planning to deal with it but I don’t want us to fail and then to have set them up to fail too.”

  “Huh.” Daster said pensively, thinking that Donsaii was more of a saint than he’d ever be. His eyes wandered into the distance a moment, then stopped on Emma staring at Roger. “Are Emma and Roger an item?” he asked curiously.

  Ell’s head snapped around to stare at Emma and Roger. They were sitting very close and at the moment Ell looked, Emma had her eyes turned dreamily up at Roger. Roger didn’t seem to have noticed. His eyes were still fixed on the screen they had laid out in front of them.

  Suddenly it seemed obvious that Emma, at least, had a thing for Roger. Ell felt something clamp on her heart.

  To Daster she stammered, “I, I don’t know. Maybe? Sorry, I’ve got a meeting.” Ell stood and bolted from the room.

  Once in her office she gasped, then slouched in her chair and threw her head back to stare unseeingly at the ceiling. Emma and Roger? Or just Emma, with a crush on Roger? Was Emma trying to move in on Roger? Was this what Emma had been about to bring up back at top of the Hill before Sam and Bridget’s little drama had interrupted her? Has it been going on a long time and I’ve just been oblivious?! Roger hadn’t asked Ell to go out for a while, but she hadn’t noticed with all that had been going on with the comet. Mentally she brought herself up short, Wait; I’m the one who’s been putting Roger off. I as much as told him to go out with other girls and ‘get some practice’ a few months ago! And, at Top of the Hill, I told Emma I didn’t feel “that way” about him.