The Sky is Falling

by J. D. Martens

  For Jake

  His wonderful ideas and insights into astronomy made sure none of my characters broke the laws of physics.

  The Sky is Falling

  The Meteor: Book #1

  Written by J.D. Martens

  Copyright © 2018 by Abdo Consulting Group, Inc.

  Published by EPIC Press™

  PO Box 398166

  Minneapolis, MN 55439

  All rights reserved.

  Printed in the United States of America.

  International copyrights reserved in all countries.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without

  written permission from the publisher. EPIC Press™ is trademark

  and logo of Abdo Consulting Group, Inc.

  Cover design by Candice Keimig

  Images for cover art obtained from iStock

  Edited by Amy Waeschle

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Names: Martens, J.D., author.

  Title: The sky is falling/ by J.D. Martens

  Description: Minneapolis, MN : EPIC Press, 2018 | Series: The Meteor; #1

  Summary: Dr. Suri Lahdka and Dr. Robert Miller discover an icy body capable of destroying all life on Earth, but the United States Government won’t let them publish their data. Meanwhile, when Jeremy Genser, High School Senior, discovers the truth, he and his friends struggle to come to terms with the world’s possible demise in their own way.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2017946135 | ISBN 9781680768275 (lib. bdg.)

  | ISBN 9781680768558 (ebook)

  Subjects: LCSH: Adventure stories—Fiction. | End of the world—Fiction.

  | Meteor showers—Fiction. | Teenagers—Fiction | Young adult fiction.

  Classification: DDC [FIC]—dc23

  LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2017946135

  This digital document has been produced by Nord Compo.

  “You’d think we would have noticed it sooner.”

  Dr. Robert Miller sat at the end of the bar, staring down his glass. Right now he was not the Director of the Astrophysics Department within the government hamster wheel that was NASA. He wasn’t just another actuarial grunt for the government. No. Now he was Robert Miller at the end of the bar, just ordering another drink.

  “I’ll get this one,” Dr. Suri Lahdka said, motioning her slim hand to the bartender.

  “It’s not like it really matters anymore anyway,” Robert grumbled.

  “Shh!” Suri said, “No one’s supposed to know!”

  Nearby, a man wearing a cowboy hat pricked his ears up.

  Robert laughed at Suri’s comment. “You think anyone will believe us? To them we’re just typical liberal hippie crackpots.”

  The drinks came. To Robert they looked like a hangover, but to Suri they looked delicious. In reality, they looked like surprisingly strong appletinis.

  Robert cupped the effeminate glass in his wiry hands, and in two big gulps the bright green liquid was gone.

  “Okay.” He looked at his glass bashfully before turning around to the dingy bar, raising his hands and his voice. “Okay! Everyone! I have an announcement.”

  “Oh no,” Suri mumbled.

  “The world is going to end!” Robert shouted.

  No one so much as raised an eyebrow at Robert’s yell. The bar, called Soldier’s, used to be a joint Robert frequented often back before he stopped drinking. There he could drink in peace, since his coworkers would never go to the dreary saloon-style joint.

  Robert tried again, standing on his barstool. “Citizens of Houston, we are all going to perish, but much before our time. The world is going to end, and it’ll end in less than a decade!”

  “Dr. Miller, maybe we should . . . ” Suri said anxiously, noticing the bouncer making his move toward them.

  “Nonsense! And Suri, you really can call me Robert. Or Rob, or Robby. What the hell do I care? The world’s going to end.” Robert grinned and raised his eyebrows comically.

  Suri cringed.

  “Alright, buddy, I think it’s time to go,” the disgruntled bouncer mumbled.

  “Where can we go? A comet three times the size of the one that killed the dinosaurs is going to collide somewhere on the Earth, turning us all into stardust.”

  The bouncer rolled his eyes.

  The man with the cowboy hat drinking Budweiser at the bar interrupted the conflict. He spoke up in a pure, calculated voice, and it had a dreadful finality to it: “By the sweat of your brow you will eat your food until you return to the ground, since from it you were taken. For dust you are and to dust you will return.”

  Genesis, Robert’s foggy mind thought. He remembered his father saying those very words to him as a boy, when he was much too young to understand their meaning. Cowboy Hat didn’t flinch a muscle when Robert snorted and laughed boisterously.

  “Ah, yes, Bible freaks beware. It’ll get you too. It’s not just us heathens. We’ll all be torched—”

  And with that, Robert climbed off his stool and the bouncer escorted him outside. Suri hurried to keep up, knowing that Dr. Miller had just hit the nail on the head.

  Eight hours earlier . . .

  Dr. Robert Miller woke up in his Houston home in Midtown. He wiped the sleep from his eyes, and headed to the bathroom. He was fifty-six years old, had blue eyes sunk into their sockets, and was lean, but not skinny. His near-perfectly white hair had been that white for some twenty years; he had gotten used to it long ago. Back in the days of his PhD candidacy, he had resented it, and thought it meant that he was aging too fast. “It must be all the neutrinos,” he used to joke to the lay people in his life.

  Perhaps unsurprisingly, Robert kept few non-physicists in his life. He kept to himself and his work as the Director of Astrophysics at NASA. Like many at NASA, the “what do you do” question is great for bars and picking up girls, but the reality of work is much less exciting than the barroom fantasies.

  Robert’s current project was called Kuiper Search 15439. Robert led the effort to find life or anything interesting orbiting around the Sun in the area called the Kuiper Belt, a region past Neptune’s orbit known for containing a lot of comets. In reality, however, he spent countless hours reading and coding line after line, looking at anomalies in statistics on the makeup of planets’ atmospheres. Since modern modeling software was so advanced it could identify most data anomalies, Robert’s job was to cross-correlate different data sets to determine if these anomalies were interesting enough to study further.

  Robert sat in his car in the usual mind-numbing Houston traffic. He was only around five miles from Johnson Space Center, but it took around thirty-five minutes to get to his parking spot. Despite making top salary as the Director of the Astrophysics Department at JSC, he drove a modest 2015 Hyundai Elantra. He liked the car’s interior, and the air conditioning cooled the car immediately—a lifesaver in the Houston heat.

  After showing a few security guards his badge, Robert walked into his office and plopped down, emitting an audible hmph when his butt hit the leather chair.

  His oak desk had papers strewn all over it. As a student, Robert always imagined he’d end up in a nice office with a crystal decanter filled with scotch. When he got his promotion to the “corner office” five years ago, his dream came true, and a nice assortment of crystal scotch glasses and a decanter sat inside a globe to his right . . . but since he had quit drinking it was purely ornamental.

  To Robert’s left was a tall bookcase filled with astronomy, astrophysics, astrobiology, and many other astro- and -ology books. A thin coat of dust had settled on all of them. The vast majority of his work was done on his computer—coding, looking over codes, answering email, and attending way too many meetings. Aside f
rom all this, Robert coded and accepted or denied permissions to move various satellites and telescopes fractions of a millimeter to look at different areas of the sky. When he had a question that one of the books could not answer, he looked it up on one of the thousands of online databases he had access to.

  Robert pulled up his email on his computer and sighed. Forty-seven emails in just one day! What a disaster; he wouldn’t be able to do any meaningful work for at least another two hours.

  Upon closer inspection, however, around fifteen of the emails were from a Suri Lahdka, whom he vaguely recalled hiring for her computer science potential. He remembered she was a bit frantic and neurotic, and this blast of emails confirmed that.

  Suddenly, there was a frenzied knocking on the door. It wasn’t a knock-knock; someone was rapidly punching his office door.

  “Yes, yes! Come in, please.”

  To his surprise, it was Dr. Lahdka who entered, and she was very out of breath.

  “Dr. Miller . . . Um. My name is Suri, sir. Suri La—”

  “I know who you are, Dr. Lahdka. I hired you, remember?”

  Suri blushed. “Ah yes, well. I’ve been emailing you, and I tried to call your cell phone but no one answered and you weren’t replying to your email and I tried to find you on Facebook but . . . ” Suri slowed to catch her breath, allowing Robert to speak.

  “Suri, I’m going to stop you right there. You need to slow down. What is going on?”

  “I’m not exactly sure. Did you check your email yet?”

  Robert raised his eyebrows.

  “Right, sorry. Well, I think I found an undiscovered comet.”

  Robert became annoyed. There were perhaps millions of masses in the solar system that were undiscovered.

  “So, what? You want to name it after your boyfriend?”

  “I don’t have a—” Suri hesitated before continuing. “No, I don’t. I think its trajectory could be . . . problematic.”

  Dr. Miller narrowed his eyes. “Problematic for whom?”

  “I’ve been researching masses in between Uranus and Neptune, and I ran the N-body simulation to look at its trajectory over the next ten years.”

  With that, Suri opened her backpack and pulled her laptop out of its case. She logged in, and then into the JSC supercomputer. Robert put on his reading glasses, wearily inspecting Suri’s findings.

  “Right,” he began. “Around forty kilometers in diameter, unnamed. Origin: Kuiper Belt. Looks like in around two and a half years it’ll actually come pretty close to Earth . . . ” Robert’s voice lowered, “Jesus!” he said, examining the numbers again. “That’s damn close,” Robert said, watching Suri for a moment. “But it’s not on a collision course. You’re not telling me the plot of Armageddon are you?”

  “It does come pretty close to Earth. It will pass between us and the Moon, actually. But that’s not what worries me. If you look here . . . ” Suri moved some windows around, showing the N-body simulation for planet orbital pathways. “ . . . if we cross-correlate the optical data with the infrared, we can see the size and density of the comet. There’s a gaseous pocket there, see it?”

  “Yes, and?”

  “Sir, combined with an average sublimation rate of the comet’s surface,” Suri continued unperturbed, and clicked another window open, “here is the corrected orbital path if we consider the effects of the gaseous plume.”

  Robert closed his eyes now, rubbing his temples, and looked up from the computer.

  “Suri, you are telling me the plot of Armageddon, aren’t you? You graduated MIT, correct?”

  “Sir—”

  “Computer science, if memory serves, with an emphasis on probability. So you know the extreme unlikeliness of such an event.”

  “I ran it three times, sir. Five sigma.”

  With that, Robert stopped. “What?”

  “Five sigma.”

  The sigma refers to the probability that the calculation is the result of a random error or that the data is simply wrong. If the data is statistically significant to “five sigma,” that means that there is a one-in-three-point-five-million chance that the data is incorrect. In other words, scientists prove things by labeling them “five sigma.”

  “My God.”

  “I’m pretty sure I did everything right, but I still could’ve made a mistake. In college, I messed up on a decimal point and disproved gravity before realizing I messed up.”

  Robert wasn’t listening to Suri anymore.

  “Suri, sit here and run it again. I’ll do the same thing.”

  Together they sat and ran and reran the code, checking the numbers. They tested the accuracy of the initial reading under different astronomical circumstances, and went over their previous numbers to ensure they made no mistakes. Every single time, within two and a half years, the comet would hit Earth. Dr. Miller was senior enough that when he logged in to the JSC supercomputer, he had the ability to log off everyone else. He did.

  At around eleven a.m. there was a knock on the door.

  “Go away,” Robert mumbled.

  The knock became more timid, but continued.

  “Alright! Yes?”

  A gangly, bespectacled, middle-aged man entered.

  “What do you want, Brady?”

  “You logged everyone out of Jarvis.”

  The supercomputer at NASA had been nicknamed Jarvis by Brady. He didn’t have many friends.

  “So what?”

  “I was working on my—”

  “Get out of here, Brady, before I crotch-punch you and give you a wedgie. I don’t have time for your—”

  He didn’t even finish his thought before another person walked in, complaining about the supercomputer-hogging.

  “Suri, please lock the door. Better yet, just stand out there and don’t let anyone knock. Don’t let me be disturbed. If anyone pushes you, push them back.”

  Suri gulped and got up to stand guard.

  Robert felt a cold sweat on his forehead as he continued to check Suri’s work. He had checked and rechecked and the math wasn’t any different. At six forty-five p.m. he printed out the key pieces of Suri’s discovery and burst through the door, almost knocking Suri over.

  “Oh, sorry Suri, follow me. We have work to do.”

  They ran together through JSC to the Chief Scientist at NASA, Dr. Steven Goldberg. He had the corner office of corner offices, and they leapt in, despite the secretary’s shrill admonishment.

  “Goldberg!”

  Dr. Goldberg sighed when he saw Robert.

  “I was about to leave, Rob. What’s going on that can’t wait until Monday?”

  “This,” Robert said, thrusting the paper in front of NASA’s Chief Scientist.

  “Rob . . . I can’t let you use Hubble or ALMA, especially since I’ve had people complaining all day about Jarvis—”

  “You’re using that stupid name for the computer too?” Robert asked, exasperated. “Whatever, it’s not important—this is. Read it, Goldberg. We need to do this now. We need a visual confirmation.”

  “Confirmation of what?” Dr. Goldberg’s furrowed brow turned to the paper on his desk. As he read, the furrow disappeared and a face replaced it that many would adopt in the coming months: the oh-my-God-the-world’s-going-to-end face.

  “Oy vey,” Dr. Goldberg said, turning to his computer. “I’ll grant you access. Where is the comet now?”

  Robert gave him the coordinates, and with that, the years-long waitlist to use the telescopes were bypassed.

  Within a few minutes the photos came on the screen, and they could see a tiny dot on a mostly black screen. When that small white dot showed up, Suri grimaced. Dr. Goldberg took off his glasses and rubbed his temples and breathed heavily. Robert shouted expletives at the top of his voice. They continued to look at the screen, and at that little white dot.

  “Two and a half years,” a hoarse Robert said.

  Suri looked at her watch. It was seven p.m. Robert and Suri excused themselves from Dr. Go
ldberg’s office and went back to work in Robert’s, doing their best to learn as much about the comet as possible.

  Four hours later, Suri looked at her watch again—eleven p.m. She dejectedly began packing her bag and mentioned it was much past her bedtime.

  Robert looked at her. “Nonsense,” he said. “We are getting a drink.”

  Dr. Goldberg poked his head into Robert’s office. Everyone else had gone home, and they were the only ones still in the office. “I’m going home to kiss my wife. And pray. You two, make sure to be here by seven a.m. We have some calls to make.”

  Robert wasn’t paying attention, so Suri acknowledged NASA’s Chief Scientist with a quick nod. Suri watched Dr. Goldberg walk back toward his office with his hand running anxiously through his curly hair.

  “Sir, I . . . um . . . I’m not really a drinker.”

  “I think the fact that the world is about to end calls for at least one appletini, don’t you?”

  “Well, yes. I suppose it does.”

  “Psh! Jer!”

  Jeremy Genser looked to his right in Calculus class at his girlfriend Anna Chenko. She handed him a note. They had decided that instead of texting each other, they would hand notes to each other. Teachers were so obsessed with keeping kids off their phones that they were rarely caught. On the occasion they were, the teacher would look longingly on better days, say something about it being cute, and then the class would meander on as before.

  Jasper’s having a party tonight, want to go?

  Jeremy looked over at Anna, then crumpled up the piece of paper and fake-ate it, making Anna laugh.

  “Jeremy!” A sharp cut went through him. Ms. Konig stared at him.

  “Yes?” he responded, with a mouthful of paper.

  “Are you eating in my class?”

  “No.”

  “Finish whatever is in your mouth, swallow it, then pay attention. You may think this is not important, but if you want to be successful at MIT, you better pay attention, whether you think you know this material already or not.”

  Jeremy winked at Anna. She covered her mouth in disgust and admiration as Jeremy swallowed the disgusting ink-filled piece of paper. It tasted horrendous. He affected a smile while Ms. Konig smirked. She went over derivatives of sine and cosine again.