Collision

by William S. Cohen

  “Just one question, Dr. Taylor. Are you familiar with Robert Wentworth Hamilton?”

  “Familiar? No. But of course I know the name.”

  “In what context?”

  “You said ‘one question.’”

  “Just following up, sir.”

  After a short pause, Taylor felt a surprisingly cautious tone seep into his voice as he said, “I suppose that, for me, the context is SpaceMine. Mr. Hamilton is the CEO of SpaceMine.”

  “Yes. That’s correct. And, regarding SpaceMine, you may recall that, on a televised news show, you suggested that if SpaceMine were to mine a certain asteroid, the mining might put the Earth in jeopardy.”

  “Oh, for Christ’s sake!” Taylor exploded. “What does this have to do with the murders you’re supposed to be investigating?”

  “I am not at liberty to say, Dr. Taylor. But it is a fact, according to the transcript of that show, Street Speak, you did discuss SpaceMine and asteroid mining dangers.”

  “Look, Agent Sarsfield. This happens to be a very busy day for me. If you want to know what I think I know about asteroids, I suggest that you see the show, which will be shown a week from tonight on all PBS stations. And then call me.”

  “I hope to do that, Doctor. Thank you for your call.”

  36

  Taylor stood near the Touchable Moon Rock display in the museum’s grand entry hall on the Mall, greeting guests as they passed through the “Milestones of Flight” gallery and headed toward the reception’s wine and hors d’oeuvres. Many of them touched the lunar sample before shaking his hand. The gesture reminded him of the hand-dip into the holy-water fount at St. Sebastian’s Church in his Bronx boyhood.

  Among the first to arrive were Darlene and Major Sam Bancroft. Taylor leaned down to give Darlene a cheek-kiss and then gave Bancroft the full Dr. Benjamin Taylor handshake—right hand pumping, left hand reaching around to pat Bancroft’s broad back. Darlene and Sam had met a few months ago, and Taylor believed that their romance was on the brink of serious.

  “Looking forward to the show, Doc—… Ben,” Bancroft said, slipping past the honorific to the recently bestowed first name. Bancroft was as tall as Taylor, a blue-eyed, buzz-cut blond Midwesterner in the blue uniform of an Air Force officer. He could be on a recruiting poster, Taylor thought.

  Bancroft had met Darlene at the library of American University, where she worked while juggling graduate school courses on the long road to a doctorate in international affairs. He had been taking an accelerated summer language course in Arabic. He was now stationed at the Pentagon, doing something he did not talk about.

  Darlene walked away to intercept another arrival, Sean Falcone, before he had a chance to reach Taylor. She hugged Falcone and said, “Sean! It’s been too long.”

  “My God, how long it has been! And how beautiful you are!” Falcone said.

  “You are very good for my morale, Sean. Come over and meet my … friend,” Darlene said, pulling Falcone by the arm toward Bancroft and Taylor. When Falcone was introduced, he glanced at the rows of ribbons under Bancroft’s silver wings. He recognized the bits of color that meant service in Afghanistan and Iraq, the distinctive color of the bar signifying a Purple Heart, and the red-white-and-blue for a Silver Star. “Gallantry in action, wounded in action,” Falcone said, looking up from the ribbons. “An honor to shake your hand, Major. Afghanistan?”

  “Yes, sir,” Bancroft said, looking embarrassed at the sudden attention.

  “He won’t tell you about that medal,” Darlene said, touching the Silver Star ribbon. “I had to look up the citation. They’re all online if you know where to look. It was a combat search-and-rescue mission. Landed a helicopter to pick up a couple of our guys who were in the wrong place at the wrong time. He shot some bad guys and took a round himself. But he stayed at the controls and got our guys out of there. Did I say controls? He’s a regular control freak.”

  “A Pave Hawk?” Falcone asked.

  “Yes, sir. A beautiful helicopter. May I ask, sir, are you retired military?”

  “Well, I was military a long while back. Vietnam. But I was a civilian when I first heard about the Pave Hawk.”

  “Sean was a senator,” Taylor said. “And President Oxley’s national security advisor during the President’s first term.”

  “Sorry, sir. I didn’t recognize—”

  “No need. Advisors are low-profile. There were people in the White House who didn’t recognize me. And the Senate, like Vietnam, was a while back. But I remember that the Air Force needed some money to upgrade the Black Hawks, and I was one of the senators who thought that was a good idea. Glad to hear yours did its job.”

  “Still have Black Hawks for jobs like the one on Osama Bin Laden,” Bancroft said, suddenly losing his shyness. “Special Forces still call theirs Black Hawks. We—search-and-rescue—called ’em Pave Hawks for its avionics package. Anyway, I guess I should thank you, sir.”

  “Save your ‘sir’s for the Pentagon,” Darlene said. “He’s Sean.”

  “You’re at the Pentagon?” Falcone asked.

  “Yes, sir.”

  When Bancroft did not elaborate, Falcone knew there would be no point in asking questions about his Pentagon duties. And, realizing that Taylor needed to circulate among his guests, Falcone steered Darlene and Bancroft toward the wine and hors d’oeuvres.

  Taylor spied a man and woman stepping through one of the tall glass doors and strode toward them. Rare to see them together, Taylor thought as he extended his hand to Stephanie Sinclair-Hardy, the secretary of the Smithsonian. He next shook hands with Conrad LaSalle, chairman of the board of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Neither got the full Dr. Ben Taylor handshake.

  “I’m very pleased you both could come,” Taylor said, looking toward Sinclair-Hardy first. She was a stunning woman in a fitted black jacket, black blouse, black pants, and black spike-heeled shoes. Shoulder-length white hair framed her impassive face. She gave Taylor a tight smile and silently moved on. He noticed that she did not touch the moon rock.

  LaSalle looked up at Taylor through the lenses of rimless glasses, his face displaying the perpetual frown of an ulcer-prone worrier. He was in the black tie and black dinner jacket that was the fading dress code for evening social occasions in Washington. Has another event tonight, Taylor thought. Busy man.

  “I’m looking forward to your presentation,” LaSalle said.

  “Good turnout,” Taylor said, looking around. The cost of the reception had come out of his entertainment fund, and he never shortchanged Air and Space, which drew far more visitors than all other Smithsonian museums combined. Taylor shook LaSalle’s limp hand, expecting a short, quick exchange of bland remarks. But LaSalle hurried on to catch up with Sinclair-Hardy. He also did not touch the moon rock.

  As the stream of arriving guests thinned, Taylor made his way toward the reception, walking beneath a Viking lander like the one that touched down on Mars and SpaceShipOne, the first manned private spacecraft—a reminder, if he needed one, that entrepreneurs like Hamilton were moving into space. Nearby were other miletones: the Wright Brothers’ spindly flying machine … the Spirit of St. Louis that had carried Charles Lindbergh across the Atlantic … Columbia, the command module used on the Apollo 11 mission … a Predator drone.

  Taylor stopped frequently to shake a hand, get a hug, and have a short chat, all the time weaving through the growing crowd of tray-bearing waiters and jugglers of food and drink. Among the sixty-odd guests, Taylor spotted two senators, three House members, and the stand-ins for several other lawmakers: clusters of young Hill staffers who were transforming their bosses’ invitations into plates full of free meals.

  Precisely at 7:30, the lights in the vast gallery dimmed, signaling the opening of the doors to the planetarium. Usually the rows of seats were arranged in concentric circles surrounding a dark hub that contained the heart of the planetarium, a projection apparatus that bathed the domed ceiling in images of constellations an
d planets. Tonight a segment of seats was realigned so that the rows faced a small stage and a theater-size screen that rose from the hub. In the front row were the senators and House members, flanked by Darlene, Bancroft, Falcone, Stephanie Sinclair-Hardy, and Conrad LaSalle.

  The lights dimmed and Taylor strode to the center of the stage. After thanking Sinclair-Hardy and LaSalle and their organizations, Taylor turned toward Falcone’s seat.

  “Before taking you into space,” Taylor continued, “I want to thank somebody right here on Earth: former senator Sean Falcone, who, in his recent post as national security advisor to President Oxley, began the process of getting law into the heavens.” Pointing to Falcone, Taylor continued, “I joined him in calling for a Senate hearing on updating the Outer Space Treaty of 1967. And on the day of that hearing is called, I hope I will be given the opportunity to testify about my particular concern: the dangerous exploitation of asteroids.”

  As Taylor stepped off the stage and took the empty seat next to Darlene, he noticed Sinclair-Hardy and LaSalle glancing toward each other. LaSalle was frowning, and Sinclair-Hardy coolly nodded. At the back of the room, Taylor saw a door open and a planetarium staffer escort a latecomer to a back-row seat. Taylor recognized someone he had decided not to invite: Agent Sarsfield. This is an invitation-only event, Taylor thought. He’s using his FBI badge to get in and watch his person of interest.

  The show began.

  37

  A Texas-size asteroid is tumbling toward Earth. Zoom to a NASA installation near Washington. An official says, “We’re going to fly to that asteroid with a nuclear device, implant it, and get off before it blows.” Bruce Willis, leading a crew wearing bright-orange astronaut-style outfits, heads for a spacecraft, which rockets off to land on the asteroid.

  Willis, sweating and puffing through a few more scenes from the movie Armageddon, directs the drilling of a shaft deep into the asteroid. The crewmen drop a nuclear bomb into the shaft. After some bits of drama about Willis’s acceptance of martyrdom, he triggers the bomb. The asteroid explodes and splits in two. Fragments fly off and zip past the rescued Earth, ending the outer-space special effects of the movie.

  “Sorry, Bruce. That might not work,” Taylor says from the screen. He wears his familiar television attire: red sweater over a white shirt, khaki slacks, and big brown boots. Running along the bottom of the screen are the words LOS ALAMOS NATIONAL LABORATORY.

  He begins narrating in a deep voice that sounds like Darth Vader’s: “We’ve done a lot of research on asteroids since that movie came out in 1998. In fact, as we learned not long ago, with the creation of the corporation SpaceMine, asteroids are potential sources of riches rather than objects of terror.

  “Some scientists here at Los Alamos accept the Bruce Willis Solution. Using a supercomputer, they produced a three-dimensional vision of what they think would happen when a one-megaton nuclear weapon explodes on a good-sized asteroid.”

  An enormous splash of red and orange fills the screen as the bomb explodes. The bomb’s shock wave surges through the potato-shaped asteroid, which disintegrates into a stream of rocks.

  The explosion fades and Taylor reappears before a sky full of stars and says, “The Los Alamos scientists believe that a nuclear bomb would, in their tidy words, ‘mitigate the hazard.’ Well, frankly I think they’re prejudiced. After all, they design nuclear weapons at Los Alamos, and since we haven’t used any nuclear bombs since 1945, this scenario was an interesting way to show how a nuclear bomb could be put to peaceful, lifesaving use. And that supercomputer? It belongs to the National Nuclear Security Administration, which also naturally favors the use of a nuclear bomb to rescue Earth. But let’s take another look at those rocks.”

  The stream of rocks reassemble in slow motion and the asteroid takes shape again as Taylor continues: “That is a possible structure of some asteroids: countless rocks of many shapes and sizes, drawn to each other as the core of the asteroid first began traveling through space, its gravity field acting like a magnet. The nuclear-bomb theory is based on the bunch-of-rocks theory, which holds that the asteroid would be blown to smithereens and those smithereens would vaporize and burn away in the atmosphere, never reaching Earth.

  “Another theory, which I endorse, says that this may not be the structure of most asteroids. And even if it were, some of the rocks produced by the explosion would be large and dangerous. And all or most of those big ones would strike the Earth—meaning that we would have to cope with many impacts instead of just one. A dubious kind of rescue.

  “Now let’s move from Bruce Willis and Hollywood and nuclear bombs to the real stewards of an asteroid-endangered Earth, the NASA experts who were directed by Congress in 2005 to find, identify, and track ninety percent of asteroids larger than one hundred and forty meters—four hundred and fifty-nine feet—across. Scientists believe there are about twenty thousand asteroids that are labeled ‘city destroyers.’ NASA has identified and tracked about thirty percent of them.

  “NASA defines ‘near-Earth objects’ as asteroids and comets with orbits that come within twenty-eight million miles of Earth’s orbit around the sun. Asteroids are dark rocks that roughly show their size by reflecting light. We’ve worked out formulas for guessing the size of an object by the amount of light it reflects. Trouble is, a small, light-colored space rock can look the same as a big, dark one. As a result, data collected with optical telescopes using visible light can be deceiving. An asteroid labeled small may really be big. And big may be bigger.

  “Here’s the main outpost of NASA’s Deep Space Network at Goldstone, California.” An image of several huge, bowl-shaped antenna structures appears. “And here is an actual asteroid, Toutatis—it’s named after a Celtic god.” A gray object that looks like a huge, jagged rock slowly tumbles on the screen. “What you are looking at was formed of images generated from radar data collected at Goldstone.

  “Toutatis is an asteroid about three miles wide. It passed four point three million miles from Earth in December 2012, only seventeen times the distance between Earth and the moon. That’s close by astronomical standards, but not a threat. NASA described its movement as that of a wobbly football that was poorly thrown. So imagine trying to tame Toutatis as it erratically spins across the sky.

  “What is also significant about Toutatis is that it was first discovered in 1934 and was then lost. Lost! It was rediscovered in 1989, and NASA has been keeping an eye on it since. This once-lost asteroid reminds us how little we know about these odd neighbors of ours. There are about one thousand seven hundred heavenly bodies classified as potentially hazardous asteroids by NASA’s Near-Earth Object Program. Toutatis is one of them.

  “If Toutatis had struck the Earth, the force of the collision would have produced more energy than all the nuclear weapons on the planet. But even a small asteroid could cause a catastrophe. If it exploded at the right altitude, spewing a ring of debris, it could cause climate shifts that would be sufficient to drastically cut crop yields, perhaps for several years.

  “Our lack of knowledge about asteroids is amazing—and dangerous. Remember that fireball that lit up the skies of Russia a while back? It was called a comet, a meteorite.… Well, now we know that it was a tiny asteroid, only about fifteen feet long! That’s right. Tiny, but able to scare us—and explode with a shock wave that shattered windows, loosened bricks, and injured twelve hundred people.”

  The scene shifts to NASA’s Near-Earth Object Program office at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. Taylor and a NASA scientist are talking about the Impact Hazard Scale. A copy of the multicolored scale, in chart form, hangs on a white wall. The chart rates the potential peril of asteroids that scientists have spotted and are tracking.

  Taylor, pointing to the chart, says, “The hazard scale ranges from zero for an asteroid that has virtually no chance of colliding with the Earth, to ten, which signifies a certain hit—a certain catastrophe. Alongside the numbered scale is a color code that reminds
me of the warning system that Homeland Security once used.”

  Taylor’s hand runs down the chart, showing how the colors range from an unthreatening white through cautionary yellow to threatening orange—and finally to several shades of red. Taylor reads from the gravest of the red warnings: “‘A collision is certain. It can produce a global climatic catastrophe that may threaten the future of civilization as we know it.’”

  Taylor turns toward the camera and says, “Scary, no? Here’s something scarier: Congress has stopped funding research into how best to deflect or destroy asteroids believed to be on a collision course with Earth. That’s right. The same Congress that ignores the climate changes threatening the future of our planet also has chosen to ignore another planetary threat that is just as real.

  “Don’t just listen to me. Here’s what I learned from a visit to the Armagh Observatory in Northern Ireland, founded in 1789.”

  As Taylor walks along a sidewalk that courses through a greensward, from an old brick tower to a modern gleaming sky telescope, he talks to an astronomer, who says, “It’s a question of when, not if, a near-Earth object collides with Earth.” She leads him into the observatory and says, “We’re used to earthquakes, floods, volcanoes, great storms. Believe me, all those disasters are trumped by objects that reach Earth from outer space. The density of threatening objects is incredible. Here’s a map we created, showing the terrestrial planets—Mercury, Venus, Earth, and Mars—with their asteroids. Our solar system is full of asteroids.”

  The dense population of asteroids fades away as Taylor reappears in NASA’s Near-Earth Objects Program office. “We discover new asteroids nearly every day,” he says. “The other day, I received my regular NASA report on near-Earth objects. It showed that in the previous month NASA spotters had found more than two hundred. The total number of known asteroids in Earth’s neighborhood is heading toward one million, a number that grows daily.