On to the Asteroid

by Travis S. Taylor

  “Okay, okay, I get it.” Paul stopped them. “We might come up with a fix later for a radio communication, but right now we have to divert this rock. So, let’s get started.”

  “The Tamaroa is six hundred feet long. How in hell are we going to get this monster anchored so that it won’t take off when we fire the engines?” Asked Mikhail, who, in characteristic fashion, seemed to already be working to solve the immediate problem facing them.

  Gesling knew that there was nothing better to get people out of depressed mood than giving them a sense of purpose and a challenge. And this was going to be a challenge.

  * * *

  Gary Childers was in his North Carolina mountaintop cabin enjoying a book while sitting in front of a real wood fireplace warming the otherwise chilly mountain air. He was reading a traditional book, meaning that it was printed on paper and not displayed in front of him on some screen or projection system. He had tried the gamut of book alternatives over the years, from reading primitive unformatted books in text format on a glowing cathode ray tube computer monitor, to the early e-book readers promulgated by online booksellers, into and through the next generation of e-readers that appeared on nearly every possible electronic device developed. He even tried the virtually projected books that came as an option with his recent corneal transplant—“read your favorite authors anywhere, anytime and in complete privacy!” the advertisements had said. None were for him. He still preferred black ink on white paper bound with glue or thread into an honest-to-goodness physical book, though he almost never got to read anymore for leisure. One of the drawbacks to being a multibillionaire mover and shaker was that you had to keep moving and keep shaking if you wanted things done your way. Every now and then he would find a fleeting few moments of down time. Sometimes, and not that often, he could actually sit down, pull a book off the shelf, and disconnect from his world. But then usually his mind would spin up at full throttle on things he needed to get done. It took real effort for him to actually sit still and read and enjoy it. As it was, this night, his reading was making him tired.

  He’d escaped to his mountain retreat to get away from all the frantic activity in Washington and at his Nevada headquarters. With only a miraculous nuclear strike by the Russians standing between Earth and a disaster of truly historic proportions, it seemed that everyone was putting into place disaster survival and preparedness plans—and for good reason. If the nuclear strike failed, then a lot of people were going to die and, in all probability, entire nations might cease to exist. And as hard as he had tried, with all his reach and resources, he had been unable to stop it from happening.

  The models of where the impact would happen were still evolving, but the best guess was somewhere in the Pacific near Hawaii. If that were to occur, then the United States could expect extreme damage all along the West coast, as would every other country bordering the Pacific Ocean. Nations like Japan, Korea and the Philippines would vanish under a tsunami like the world hadn’t seen since the end of the reign of the dinosaurs. Billions would die and the world’s economy and ability to respond to the disaster would be crippled. Even those nations and regions untouched in this scenario, such as Europe, Russia, and much of Africa, would see their economies collapse as the supply of oil, raw materials, and manufactured goods simply vanished. The world’s economy was truly global and interconnected. Like no other time in history, the nations of the world actually depended upon one another, making the likelihood of a major war very small.

  Childers ruminated on that thought as he put his book aside on the mantle above the fire that kept the chill of the night air out of his bones. No matter how hard he tried, he simply couldn’t just sit there and read. He finished off the last of the bourbon in the glass next to him on the end table. The ice clinked in the glass, almost echoing in the quiet. Gary sighed as he closed the book.

  He couldn’t help but continue to reflect on the world’s woes. The only threat to international peace that remained in the world was centered on the Middle East and revolved around people who hadn’t learned how to get along with each other since the dawn of civilization. The irony was that the civilization that had evolved to be interdependent and somewhat resistant to the nationalistic and tribal tendencies that often led to war no longer was centered where it was born. No, that area still harbored hatred going back thousands of years that no one has been able to resolve. And they would remain virtually untouched by the disaster that was about to befall humanity—if the models were correct. Childers wondered if they would take a break from hating and killing each other to notice that a billion or so of their fellow human beings had perished, or, if they’d see it as a sign from their god that they had been right all along. Gary physically shook his head with a sad inward chuckle at the thought.

  The impact, if it were to happen, was still a few months away and so far there didn’t appear to be mass panic. Unlike in the movies, people weren’t rioting. At least they weren’t rioting yet. He knew that the psychologists predicted this sort of panic wouldn’t set in until (or if, he reminded himself) the Russian missile launch failed. Sure, there were doomsday cults popping up all over the place and churches of all types were seeing attendance they hadn’t experienced since the early twentieth century. But, in general, humanity believed in its respective governments overall, and assumed they’d be taken care of. In essence, the planet was in denial as long as there was an inkling of hope. The Russians still offered that inkling.

  The U.S. government was developing a contingency plan to relocate to an undisclosed location somewhere in the middle of North America, well away from vulnerable coastlines facing any ocean. Companies and individuals were hyping the sale and construction of “survival shelters” of dubious quality and effectiveness, of course, and others were making serious plans to themselves relocate to safer regions as doomsday potentially approached.

  Childers had his own contingency plans. His corporate offices, and most of his employees and production facilities, were already in the middle of the country—far enough away to not worry about a tsunami reaching them. Sure, being away from the water wouldn’t do much good if the models were wrong and central North America took a direct hit, but the chances of that were small. He would make sure that all of his employees, and their families, would be safely inside the bunkers he was having made just outside Lexington and in the Nevada desert. With enough food and water to last half a year, he felt like he was doing all he could to take care of his people. As for himself, he would be watching things from the best possible vantage point—in space.

  The Dreamscape was being repaired and readied for flight. The damage done in Feng’s one-man terrorist attack was severe, but Childers had the resources, mostly the money, required to repair the mangled spaceship and get it spaceworthy. He and six others would launch into space a few days before the impact—or the near-miss, trying to be optimistic—and see what happened from there. In either case, it would be spectacular: An impact would be horrific on the ground, but most likely quite awesome and interesting from space where the dead could not be seen. It would also allow him to choose a place to land that was untouched by disaster, maximizing his and his companions’ chances of survival. A near miss would also be interesting if he could phase the orbit so as to be in the correct side of the planet to witness the asteroid skim the outer atmosphere and fly back into deep space. He briefly wondered if, in this case, he would be able to discern the damage done to the surface of the asteroid from the nuclear explosion. It was the first time in his life that he hoped a nuclear bomb would be exploded.

  Childers shook himself out of the state of reflection on upcoming days and strolled outside onto his porch and into the night air. Looking down into beautiful Maggie Valley, just a few miles away from Asheville, it was difficult to believe that something big could soon strike the eternal-seeming planet with force enough to completely wipe mountains such as these off the face of the Earth. He looked skyward and frowned. It was an overcast sky and looked as
if it might begin raining any minute. He’d hoped to catch a glimpse of the stars to calm himself down. When Childers was troubled, he could usually count on either a good bourbon or a starry sky to cheer him up. Tonight, neither was able to do so.

  CHAPTER 28

  “The engines produce more than a hundred thousand pounds of thrust. They’ll burn for about twenty minutes and then that’s it. We’ll have taken all the kick this baby can give,” Gesling explained—he was almost giddy. Solving this problem was right up his alley and it got all their minds off their predicament. He gestured toward the back end of the holographic projection of the Tamaroa as he spoke. Moving forward toward the central truss, he continued, “The truss isn’t designed to take that kind of compressive load. It was built to fly a ship in space, unrestrained, with only the mass of the ship itself to support. If we don’t have some way to transfer the load from the truss to the asteroid, then she’ll snap like a toothpick.”

  “We’re too large to do this,” said Hui.

  “Yeah. NASA sent us out here in their deluxe Mars space yacht instead of a repair truck. Nevertheless, it’s what we’ve got and we’d better figure out how to make it work.”

  “From the thrust angle you showed, it won’t be as simple as just getting the ship to touch the surface. It will have to sit so the main engines point upward at least twenty degrees from the surface.” Mikhail pointed at the holographic display, waving his hands about as he explained.

  “And unless we’re firmly anchored, the ship will skid and then bounce rapidly into space and away from the asteroid. Remember we’re not landing on the asteroid. It’s too small to have much gravity. This will be more like a rendezvous and docking maneuver. Once we dock, we’ll have to securely tie her down to keep her there when the engines light.”

  “What’s our length?” Mikhail asked although Paul was sure he already knew it.

  “Six hundred feet,” Paul answered.

  “About a hundred eighty meters, right.” Mikhail nodded.

  “Sorry about that Mikhail, I use metric in my day job but when I’m working problems I tend to revert to the familiar English units.”

  “Yes, you and the people of Liberia have that in common,” Mikhail said with a smile. “Not to worry comrade, I can convert.”

  “Can we break the truss?” asked Hui. Paul noted how her hair floated about her head almost like a fluid. She typically had kept it in a ponytail or up in some way, but today she was letting it float free.

  “You mean intentionally? Yes, I suppose we can. We might even be able to take it apart. The truss was assembled in Earth orbit in pieces. There isn’t a rocket on the planet that could loft it in one piece. Let me pull up the assembly schematic.”

  The holographic image of the Tamaroa changed, this time showing the elements of the great ship that were individually assembled in space to make her whole. Gesling, Tian and Rykov pushed off to float near the aft end of the ship near the engines, the nuclear reactor and the propellant tanks.

  “The reactor and thrusters were evidently launched in one piece and attached to the truss here so they could be mated easily with the fuel tanks,” Gesling said as he motioned toward the projection.

  “And up here is where we are,” said Hui, pointing toward the front of the ship and toward the habitat.

  “Here are the water tanks coded in blue, the empty clamshell that would have carried the Mars lander, and the logistics module here in yellow,” Paul said, motioning back toward the middle of the Tamaroa and highlighting each component as he pointed them out.

  “I just don’t see how this will work. The ship is simply too big. If we take her apart before we land, then we won’t have control over her. The attitude control thrusters are located all along her length and are integrated into one computer-controlled system. I barely was able to regain control of the ship when we lost the number four thruster. And don’t forget we owe the reactor back there for all our power. If we take her apart we lose that. And without power, we’re dead.”

  “So we cancel that idea and find a way to dock the ship with the asteroid and then break the truss to reorient the thrusters,” Mikhail said confidently. Paul liked the Russian engineer’s “can do” attitude. To Rykov it was just another engineering problem that could and would be solved. And they would be the engineers that did it.

  Gesling tapped a few times on the control panel and the image of the asteroid reappeared. He zoomed in to the area where the ship would need to land. The zoom revealed an area filled with boulders and debris.

  “I don’t think we’ll need to worry about the truss not breaking when we touch down. The ship is simply too large and fragile to land here without ending up on top of a few boulders. I can bring her down, but I won’t hazard a guess as to how well she’ll be performing afterward. Look at those boulders.”

  The crew stared silently at the image in front of them seeking in vain an area free of rocks large enough to safely accommodate the length of the Tamaroa. There were none.

  “So assuming we land in one piece and don’t break containment on the nuclear reactor, the fuel tanks, or the habitat, we still have to go out and disassemble the truss to orient the engines in the correct direction,” Hui said with more than a tinge of sarcasm in her voice. Her Chinese accent only made it sound more solemn.

  “Don’t forget about the water tanks and the engine bells,” Paul tapped at them in the hologram.

  “Why is nothing in this business straightforward?” asked Mikhail.

  “That’s why they call it ‘rocket science.’” Paul didn’t really mean it as a joke but it got a chuckle out of Hui.

  “Indeed, comrade,” Rykov let out a deep belly guffaw and slapped at Paul’s back. The motion spun Paul just enough that he had to stabilize himself with his hands against the touchscreen.

  Mikhail repositioned himself to look at the truss segment that in its assembly sequence terminated just above the water and propellant tanks but below the now-empty Mars lander casement. After a few minutes staring at the drawings, he looked at his companions and frowned.

  “I just don’t see how we’re ever going to get this to work,” he said. “Especially not with the tools we have and the time within which we have left to do it.”

  “Mikhail, I don’t either. The numbers work from a propulsion point of view, but the engineering challenge is unsolvable. Maybe if we had the bright people back home helping us, we’d have a chance. But I just don’t see a way to make it happen.”

  Hui moved away from the projection of the Tamaroa and was staring intently at the image of the asteroid. After a few minutes, she looked up and cocked her head slightly.

  “Paul, take a look at this,” she said as she pointed to the massive fissure that bisected the asteroid.

  “What have you got?”

  “An idea. Look at the width of the fissure and the slope of the walls. Can you fly us into it and touch down with the engines pointed in the correct direction, or close to it?”

  “Let’s look at the dimensions,” he said. Paul’s fingers flew across the control panel tapping at the screen and occasionally at the attached keypad.

  The image of the asteroid and the ship vanished and was replaced with a close-up view of the portion of the asteroid bisected by the fissure. They’d flown across it on their way to the site where the electric thrusters had been positioned and taken very good photographs and radar data in the process. They could see the dimensions of the opening and somewhat into its interior before the image faded into the darkness created by the shadowing of the fissure’s walls.

  “Our imagery only goes down about four hundred feet and it looks fairly smooth—at least up to that point. The radar data looks good beyond that down to about five hundred fifty feet; at that point it gets a little murky. The returns past that showed some scattering that could be due to boulders or a closing of the fissure. I have no way of knowing with what we have.”

  “What if you fly us into the fissure and then fire the thr
usters?”

  “Hui, you know that the habitat is on the front of the ship and that we’ll be at the bottom of the stack down inside the rock when we do that.”

  “Yes, but can you do it?”

  “Hell yes, I can fly us in there, but I can’t say whether or not we’ll be pointing in a direction that will push the rock such that it’ll miss the Earth. I also can’t say what will happen to us. This is an inflatable habitat, not one made of steel. My first thought is that when the nuclear engines fire we’ll be pushed even farther in the hole and this thing will burst like a balloon.”

  “Paul, my friend. You are a fine pilot and a good engineer, but you’re not a materials scientist. Be glad the habitat isn’t made of steel or some other inflexible material or it would burst. Your company made this out of the finest and toughest flexible material they could find that was suitable for space travel. It even has triple redundant skin to allow for resistance to micrometeors or orbital debris impacts, as we have seen firsthand. If we can wedge the ship in the fissure, and if we don’t find the habitat up against a solid rock wall, then the flexure may keep us intact.”

  “Okay, let’s assume I can fly us in there without running into a rock on the way down; we don’t know what’s beyond five hundred fifty feet. Let’s also assume that we can wedge ourselves in there without cracking open the fuel tanks or the habitat. And from what I can tell about the width of the fissure, that may just be possible. It seems to narrow close to where the clamshell is on the truss. The habitat can squeeze through but if we stop with the clamshell just under the rock outcropping, then we might be able to anchor ourselves there. Whether or not it will hold when the engines fire is anybody’s guess. And I still don’t know if it’ll nudge us in a useful direction or not. I need to look at the possibilities and figure that out.”

  “While you are doing that, Hui and I will start looking at ways to anchor the clamshell and the truss to the rock outcropping. Perhaps the 3D printer can be of help.”