“Okay, let’s do it,” Jeremy agreed, and Anna’s eyes sparkled with mischief.
Across the street of the JSC, they sat waiting for Dr. Miller to depart. Most of the other workers had left, but Dr. Miller’s car still had not. They sat, both of them thinking that a “stakeout” was much more romantic in the movies than in real life. They switched the radio on and off repeatedly, and Anna braided her hair while Jeremy tried to flip coins into the cup holder.
Finally, by ten o’clock, the white puff of Dr. Miller’s hair bounced along as he walked to his unassuming Hyundai. Jeremy and Anna looked on apprehensively, their hearts racing. Dr. Miller left the JSC and accelerated onto the Gulf Freeway north toward the city center. Jeremy and Anna made sure to follow far behind Dr. Miller.
Dr. Miller weaved in and out of traffic, and Jeremy kept up. Dr. Miller’s Hyundai took the University of Houston exit, going under the freeway and then taking a right on Cullen Street.
“Should we stop him or something?” Anna asked. Neither of them had thought about how to confront Dr. Miller about his work.
“Maybe we should wait. I don’t think this is where he lives, judging by the neighborhood.
The Greater Third Ward, where they were driving through, was the part of town Anna’s dad would not allow her to go to—especially not at night.
They continued to follow Dr. Miller as he turned left and right, going deeper into the Third Ward. Suddenly, he put on his blinker and parked on the side of the road, in front of a particularly dreary bar called Soldier’s. They drove past Dr. Miller so he wouldn’t think he was being followed, and parked ahead of him so they could watch.
“What’s he doing?” Anna asked, but Jeremy just shook his head.
Dr. Miller had parked next to a group of lasciviously dressed women. One of them walked to the passenger window and began speaking to Dr. Miller, but Jeremy couldn’t make out what she was saying. This is so awkward . . . Jeremy thought. Suddenly, Dr. Miller got out of the car and began speaking to the prostitute directly. He looked like he had a big smile on his face, and she was laughing at what was probably some kind of joke he was telling.
Anna held her hand over her mouth in disgust.
Dr. Miller was walking around the prostitute now, pointing at something in the sky and waving his hands around. The woman looked embarrassed. Then he put his arms around her and walked into Soldier’s.
“What should we do?” Anna asked Jeremy.
“Let’s try to get in!” he replied excitedly.
Jeremy pushed through the saloon doors to enter the Old West bar. Luckily there was not a bouncer standing out front. There were the stuffed heads of deer, bison, buffalo, and bear on the walls with swords mounted below them. Lone Star State flags were everywhere, and people in cowboy hats sat in booths along the walls, drinking Budweiser or whiskey. At a booth in the far end of the bar, Jeremy saw Dr. Miller’s puff of white hair.
“What can I get you?” the bartender asked, seeing them enter.
“Uh,” Jeremy replied. He hadn’t planned on ordering anything. But standing there with his mouth open might draw attention.
“Two soda waters with lime,” Anna replied easily.
Jeremy looked over at his girlfriend, surprised both by Anna’s quick order and her strange drink choice.
The barman looked both of them up and down, and Jeremy thought, Thank God, I didn’t shave for the past week. Hopefully I look old enough to be in the bar.
“Y’all are twenty-one?” the barman asked as if on cue.
“I’m twenty-two, he’s twenty-one,” Anna lied confidently.
The barman looked them over once more and then shrugged, saying, “Right.”
“Why soda waters?” Jeremy whispered as the bartender poured their drinks.
“So it looks like we’re drinking,” she explained, “so we fit in here and don’t look out of place.
Smart, Jeremy thought.
They got their drinks and took a seat in the booth adjacent to Dr. Miller. After a minute or two, the woman with him left to go to the bathroom and Dr. Miller went to the bar. Jeremy watched as Dr. Miller drank three shots of colored liquor, grimacing with each, before purchasing another beer and sitting back down.
“Jesus,” Anna whispered to Jeremy. “He’s thirsty.”
Jeremy and Anna whispered to each other, wondering how they should approach Dr. Miller, who had returned to speaking with the woman across from him. Dr. Miller and the woman were also whispering to each other, so Jeremy couldn’t hear what was being said without obviously eavesdropping on them.
“Come on, let’s just ask him,” Anna whispered to Jeremy, but he sat still and waited, listening.
When the woman went to use the restroom again, Anna could no longer handle it, and slid into the booth across from Dr. Miller.
“What is happening at NASA? What are you using an atomic bomb for? What is going to be destroyed? Is NASA helping the U.S. go to war with someone?” she asked.
Dr. Miller furrowed his brow and shook himself, as if to shed the “drunk” from his being, and his eyes went from Anna to Jeremy, who reluctantly sidled into the booth next to Anna. Dr. Miller narrowed his eyes at Anna.
Dr. Miller didn’t answer, just took another sip of his beer while looking at the couple.
“How old are you?” Dr. Miller asked Anna.
“Twenty-two,” She replied fiercely. “Are you going to answer me?”
“Why would I tell you the truth after you just lied to me?” Dr. Miller answered, giggling and hiccupping at the same time.
Jeremy looked over at Dr. Miller and then at Anna, and asked, “What are the Russian scientists doing at the JSC? I looked up some of their names, and Dr. Ivanov, he’s a nuclear physicist, right?”
Anna looked surprised at Jeremy, who hadn’t told her this piece of information.
After what seemed like minutes, Dr. Miller spoke, tripping over his words. “You’re one of the lighting workers at JSC. You work for Genser Contractors. I can have you fired, you know.”
Dr. Miller said the last sentence so drunkenly it seemed like one long slurred word.
“This is bigger than me keeping my job,” Jeremy retorted.
Dr. Miller looked through the neck of the beer bottle as though inspecting it for some science experiment. Then he looked up and said, “We are trying to figure out how to blast a comet to smithereens.” The old scientist giggled.
“A comet?” Jeremy asked, “Why would we need to blast a comet?”
Dr. Miller looked cross-eyed at Jeremy and Anna, and fumbled for his beer again.
“See this?” Dr. Miller said, showing them the half-filled bottle of beer with his right hand. “This is the beautiful Earth. And this,” Dr. Miller picked up the salt shaker with his other hand, “is a relatively small icy body undiscovered until recently.”
Then, Dr. Miller swung the salt shaker’s butt toward the neck of the beer bottle, connecting cleanly with the dark glass of the bottle. Jeremy and Anna threw up their hands to protect their faces, and Dr. Miller began to laugh as the glass shards landed on the ground.
“Hey!” the barman yelled, hearing the violent sound of shattering glass.
“Sorry!” Dr. Miller said innocently. “The bottle must have fallen out of my hand.”
Suddenly, the woman with whom Dr. Miller had been sitting appeared from the bathroom, and looked confused as she found two teenagers sitting in her spot across from the scientist.
“Young tastes, Dr. Miller?” the woman asked contemptuously.
“What?” Anna asked.
At that moment a second figure appeared, and this one was a bouncer. He gave the prostitute a once-over and asked, “Weren’t you not supposed to come in here anymore?”
The woman glared malevolently at the bouncer, swung her purse over her back, and stormed out of the bar. Then the bouncer glanced suspiciously at Jeremy and Anna, shrugged, and walked back to his original post.
“That doesn’t seem fair,” An
na remarked. “You were the one who broke the glass.”
“Yeah, well,” Dr. Miller said, his tone growing morose, “life isn’t fair.”
Jeremy contemplated what he’d heard, and didn’t want to believe the scientist.
“How could this happen?” Anna asked, a little angrily.
“It’s just a bit of bad luck really, but Shiva is orbiting the Sun and so are we. In fact, a lot of Kuiper Belt comets are undiscovered, and many are hurtling through space. This one just happens to be very large. And on a collision path with Earth.”
Suddenly, it seemed as though the scientist had had enough of the bar, and grabbed his car keys from the table. In his drunken state, however, he misjudged where the keys were and grasped at nothing on the table. Jeremy and Anna looked at each other.
“Do you want a ride home, Dr. Miller?” Jeremy asked.
Dr. Miller furrowed his brow suspiciously at the keys, as if they had magically moved at the last second to prevent his hand from grasping them.
“I think that’s probably a good idea,” Dr. Miller mumbled, still looking at his keys.
Jeremy and Anna left their untouched drinks on the table and walked out of the bar, Dr. Miller in tow. Anna got in the backseat of the car, allowing Dr. Miller to sit in the front.
“Dr. Miller, can I ask you something?” Anna asked.
“Yes. What is it?”
“You really think the comet is on its way to hit Earth?”
“Shiva, Destroyer of Worlds, is coming,” Dr. Miller answered sardonically.
“What if it’s an elaborate joke? What if you’re mistaken . . . ” Anna’s voice trailed away.
As Robert drifted off to sleep he thought about the two teenagers and wondered if he’d made a mistake by telling them about the end of the world. These thoughts were soon whisked away as he sunk into a pleasant dream.
Dr. Miller woke up the next morning with the pounding headache he had known was coming. He was still in his clothes from the night before, and wearily he got up, showered, and went downstairs to make some coffee. As he listened to the coffee drip, he listened to NPR and learned that Chile was going through a populist revolution. The journalist said the revolution came as a surprise because the president had always been a popular candidate. It was a mystery why the people had revolted against the government.
But Dr. Miller knew it to be because they had found out about Shiva. After all, they were the only country aside from Russia and the United States that had access to the data at one point, and they had some pretty good telescopes, too. The telescope they’d used to get a physical image of Shiva, ALMA, was in the Chilean Andes. Perhaps the anarchy had already begun, though he thought they must be able to share this data with other nations using the internet. He wouldn’t have put it past the U.S. government to shut off all communication with Chile to buy its own people a little more time without anarchy.
Who knows? All that mattered to Dr. Miller now was working on Suri’s proposal to start one of the gaseous jets that could divert the course of the comet so it did not hit Earth in thirty months’ time. And this required a lot of patience.
Sleeping through his alarm, Jeremy arrived at school fifteen minutes late while his Calculus teacher was in the middle of a lesson. As he sat down, he noticed that Anna was not in her seat. This was strange, as she was nearly always on time.
Ms. Konig rolled her eyes at Jeremy when he walked in but continued her lesson undisturbed. They were going over advanced trigonometry, something they had learned last year, but all the students had forgotten. Dustin raised his hand.
“Dustin?” Ms. Konig said, narrowing her eyes. Dustin normally understood the work, meaning his question was probably a joke, or pointless.
“Okay, I get why we need to know geometry. I could see that becoming useful to us at some point. But why in the world would anyone—ever—need to use Trig?”
Even though it wasn’t that funny, the class laughed. Jeremy would usually have answered Dustin, telling him that Trigonometry was useful for all forms of engineering and physics. It won’t be useful after the comet destroys Earth, thought Jeremy. He looked around at all the kids in his class. The Nerds in the front row, eagerly writing down every one of Ms. Konig’s marker strokes. The kids in the back goofing around—even in Calculus class there were the “Kids in the Back.” All of it is pointless now, Jeremy thought.
English class, by contrast, seemed much more important. They were reading a book called The Trial, by a depressed German named Franz Kafka. Every single page seemed hard to read, and the main character, a guy named Mr. K, was on trial for committing a crime, but he didn’t know what he did. The judges and police wouldn’t tell him, and he ran around his idyllic German community trying to find out how to become a free man again. Everything he did, though, seemed to create more problems for himself, and he looked hopelessly at life.
It had been one of Jeremy’s least favorite books in one of his least favorite classes, but now, as he sat in class listening to his classmate with the hipster glasses read to them, he found it oddly relaxing. And relatable. Mr. K seemed to think the world was against him and that life was pointless when faced with his trial. Jeremy found himself thinking, Mr. K is probably around forty or something, but I’m only seventeen . . . By the time Shiva hits Earth I’ll be twenty . . .
Suddenly, thoughts started coming into Jeremy’s mind incredibly fast. The end of the world, and Anna, and his parents, and the girl he dated before Anna, Sarah. He couldn’t think, and his head started to hurt. He felt incredibly anxious and shook his head, as if he could shake these racing thoughts away. It was getting hard to breathe.
When that didn’t work, he raised his hand, interrupting the girl reading in the front, and asked, “May I use the restroom?”
But he didn’t wait for a reply, and instead, half-conscious, stumbled through the maze of desks, banging his knee on someone’s desk and knocking over the coffee on it. He barely noticed his classmate’s yelp of surprised anger.
He got out into the hallway and put his hands on his knees, breathing heavily. Slowly, the anxious feeling that surrounded his entire being melted away. In and out, in and out, he thought, breathing slowly.
Within minutes he began to feel better.
“Jeremy . . . are you alright?” the teacher, Mrs. Presley, asked, putting a hand on his shoulder.
Jeremy looked at Mrs. Presley. She was a small woman, with big glasses that made her resemble the Divination teacher from Harry Potter. However, she was not nearly as weird.
“Thanks, Mrs. Presley, I’m fine. I don’t know what happened.”
“I think you just had a mild panic attack, hon. You’ll be okay. Kafka does that to people, but don’t worry, your life won’t be like Mr. K’s.” She rubbed Jeremy’s back reassuringly and smiled.
“Thanks . . . I think I’ll just go wash my face in the bathroom.”
“Hurry back, dear,” Mrs. Presley winked.
Jeremy walked to the bathroom slowly, his head feeling clearer by the minute. He had never had a panic attack before; he always felt like that was something that happened to weak people. Now, though, he had a newfound respect for people who dealt with this. He hadn’t been able to function and it was hard to breathe. A few more seconds of those racing thoughts and he would have passed out!
When he got in the bathroom he put some water on his face. It felt good to clean himself up, and as he stepped out of the bathroom, his phone buzzed.
Anna: Hey . . . meet me outside Mr. C.’s?
Mr. C. was Anna’s History teacher. Jeremy walked toward the History classroom.
He turned the corner past the trophy case and walked toward Anna, who was pacing up and down the hallway outside her class, looking like she had just finished crying. When she saw Jeremy she ran over and hugged him tightly.
He hugged her in return, and they could feel each other’s heartbeats. Then they stepped out of the main building of the high school and walked down the steps to the foot
ball field. A new track had just been put in, and they strolled on the rubber material, bouncing lightly up and down.
“You know what I was thinking?” she asked.
“What?”
“School doesn’t really matter anymore. And it’s not just high school—this isn’t senioritis. It’s all of it. Why go to college? I won’t even be able to graduate.”
“Yeah.”
“Yeah?! All you say is yeah?”
“What else is there to say, Anna?” Jeremy asked, but Anna didn’t answer.
They walked silently for a bit until Jeremy spoke up. “Did you tell your parents?”
At this, Anna actually laughed out loud. “My parents? My parents wouldn’t believe a word I said. They’d think I was crazy.”
Jeremy agreed. He hadn’t told his father. He could picture his response. “Son, there must be some mistake.” His mother would say, “Sure, honey, but maybe you’re wrong? Who knows?” In her mind, though, she would be certain that Jeremy was incorrect.
“And kids . . . I’ll never have kids,” Anna muttered to herself.
Jeremy looked down, again unsure of what to say.
“Dr. Miller said there were a lot of people trying to work on saving us. Even the Russians and the Americans are working together,” Jeremy offered.
“Jeremy, he was completely drunk and had picked up a prostitute! To me, that means he thinks it’s hopeless. He’s still trying, yeah, but the happy endings only happen in movies like Deep Impact. You really think they can stop a forty kilometer wide boulder from hitting Earth? And don’t say, ‘Well, we landed a man on the Moon.’”
Jeremy laughed. It was exactly what he was going to say.
“Well, at least we have a few years, right?” Jeremy responded, trying to cheer Anna up.
“Yeah, two whole years . . . Come on,” Anna said, suddenly getting up.
Plus five months, Jeremy thought. With that, she took Jeremy’s hand and guided him back into the main building. She looked around with a sort of nervous excitement before walking quickly down the hall, stopping in front of a door that read, “Maintenance.”
The Sky is Falling Page 5
