Regolith

by Brent Reilly

  By a weird coincidence, he also happened to make the world’s toughest metal. So in early October he modified his factories to make millions of plain sheets of amorphous metal.

  Jackson looked for the world’s largest civilian cargo plane and found the Russian Antonov An-124, with a cargo space 36 meters long, 6.4 meters high, and 4.4 meters wide. Even Airbus’ new A400M, designed to replace Lockheed’s C-130, only has a height of 3.85 meters and a width of 4 meters. He would have preferred to buy American, but only the government was allowed to use Lockheed’s C-5 Galaxy, C-17 Globemaster, and the C-130 Hercules. Fortunately, the Russians leased him two dozen An-124’s until the end of January. Not appreciating the danger, they even fully insured him against natural disasters and “acts of God”.

  The cargo hold of the An-124 determined the size he could make his amorphous sheet metal. The sheet metal would roll off his factory line directly onto a flatbed trailer, which would drive into the Antonov. That meant he could make them 30 meters long and 4 meters wide, or the size of a house.

  As he modified his factories to make millions of them, he now needed to sell them. So he first sold Wal-Mart on the idea of covering their roofs, who then scored a public relations coup by inviting their customers to wait out the meteorite storm from the relative safety of their stores. Other retail chains like Target, Kmart, Home Depot, and Loews then wanted them. Jackson sold them on the condition that they let the public pass the shit storm inside. Next he tried to sell them to owners of enclosed stadiums, malls, and multi-story office, apartment, and condo buildings, also on the condition that they shelter people at capacity. Local and state governments bought millions of them to shelter people in their largest buildings, such as high school and university buildings, as well as public clinics and hospitals.

  That left only 110 million homes and 5 million commercial buildings in the United States likely to be damaged or destroyed.

  By coincidence, he made 20,000 amorphous metal homes in China that he placed in clean energy communities in the Inland Empire in Southern California over the last several years. Like his sheds and ship hulls, these homes were poured and cooled at the same time, so they had great structural integrity. If he could get permission, he could fill them with Democratic voters. Fifty people per home, including the garage, sheltered a million people. And all he had to do was get his local field teams on the case.

  It surprised him how many lives he could save with one fucking email. And several thousand field workers. And tens of thousands of their family and friends working around the clock. And a willingness to spend billions from his own wallet.

  By another coincidence, he spent the last several years making apartment buildings out of a few hundred thousand used shipping containers. Instant asteroid shelters! By not requiring a lease, he kicked his tenants out and send them via rail to Canada.

  With 17 million containers worldwide, he contracted out shipping agents around the world to buy them all. As the world’s biggest destination for containers, the United States had several million of them, so he instructed his field teams to buy them all.

  He contacted railroads to rent railway land far from coastlines, protected from blasts by mountains, ridges, or canyons. Cranes laid them two stories tall along both sides of the train tracks, which left just two defendable entrances. As more came in, the line of containers just got longer. He had the containers placed less than thirty meters across from each other so that they could secure his amorphous sheet metal between the two lines. This covered the tracks and provide space for more people. The rail companies now had miles of shelter for their trains, which held up the long sheet metal right in the middle to support the weight of tons of regolith.

  By December, people and corporations were paying several thousand dollars a head for the privilege of waiting out Judgment Day in these railway container cities. All that money went to a non-profit Jackson called the Survivor’s fund. Demand was so great that Jackson denied entry to anyone who voted for McCain, while making it free for anyone who voted for Obama.

  This was simply the fastest way to shelter the most people. The containers found in America went to either these inland survival shelters or by train to Canada. His agents in Latin America sent all the containers they could find to Patagonia, either in Chile or Argentina, while his agents in Europe and the former Soviet Union sent them by rail to Scandinavia.

  Unfortunately, the Canadian rail network doesn’t connect with Alaskan rail so Jackson convinced the four major American railroads, Union Pacific, Norfolk Southern, CSX, and BNSF to send their best trains by barge to Alaska. There he built more container cities. Alaska Railroad’s northern track ends at Delta Junction, where the Delta River intersects with the Richardson Highway and the end of the Alaska Highway. Another area he favored was the railway between Talkeetna and Hurricane because it had no roads for the uninvited to get in. Most of the rest of the containers lined the railway to Fairbanks, near the Artic Circle. Because it traversed so many mountains, it took twelve hours for the train to go the 356 miles from Anchorage to Fairbanks.

  It wasn’t, however, enough because most containers were owned by shipping companies. Fortunately, insurers dropped coverage as quickly as they could send out amendments, leaving shipping companies completely exposed. Since few people expected ships to survive tsunamis taller than football fields, much less the world’s ports, their share prices dropped dead.

  So Jackson bought every single container ship and every shipping company as possible. Buying a few thousand ships enabled him to move millions of containers much faster to his asteroid survival camps. Whenever possible, he filled them with food, clothes, construction materials, medicine, and supplies like car batteries, blankets, thermal underwear, and electric heaters.

  His amorphous metal sheds, although the size of a 20 foot standard shipping container, were in greater demand. He kept them separate by sending them from the Alaskan port of Skagway by rail to Whitehouse, the capital city of Canada’s Yukon Territory. This isolated track has no links to other railways. Then he held a press conference and offered his indestructible sheds to any American who joined the Millionaire’s Club, or to non-Americans who donate a million to either his Survivor Fund or the Jackson Space Foundation. Hysteria-fueled demand was so great that he later set up similar “survival camps” throughout Asia, the Middle East, South America and Europe.

  Just a year before, when he bragged that one thousand donors would join his Millionaire’s Club, he was laughed at. So when the millionth member joined, he boasted at another press conference that several thousand Democrats received a fucking trillion dollars in early, hard money campaign contributions.

  Once he decided to lend his sheds to those who joined the Club, he knew he needed to expand the list as much as possible. So he added virtually every non-incumbent Democratic candidate for mayor or statewide office. When two or more Democrats waited to fight it out in a primary, Jackson let his local field office choose the candidate to put on the list.

  But Jackson went farther. The DC Establishment didn’t like him anyways, so he let his district field offices add the names of a primary opponent if they didn’t like their own congressman or senator. Not since 1980 has more than one sitting senator lost a primary fight, but now Democratic senators were looking at the largest primary season in memory. And those primary challengers were very well funded.

  Tsunamis would doom any ship on the high seas, so he leased an icebreaker and sent his fleet up the Yukon in Alaska. Fortunately, the Yukon is over 3000 kilometers because in just two months he bought a few thousand large ships that he anchored over several hundred miles in Yukon tributaries. Then he covered them with shipping containers to protect their decks, covered the glass windows, and maximized the number of people they could shelter.

  Then there were the nearly 150 cruise ships. When insurers dropped coverage of Carnival Cruises and Royal Caribbean Cruises, the two largest cruise lines, their shares essentially died since investors assume
d that all of their ships would be destroyed, along with the ports they used and the islands they visited. Given their heavy debt loads, investors had every right to assume that these companies would go belly up. Like his cargo ships, he covered their decks with containers for people to stay in, then auctioned off the cabins to the richest Democrats, with the money going to the Survival Fund charity so they could write it off of their taxes. The media, naturally, loved it. A few thousand ships, their decks covered with container-homes, as thousands of Democrats cheered from riverbanks or on board, was quite a sight.

  So Jackson expected space scientists like Kowalski, who appreciated the dangers better than most, to accept his free fucking asteroid shelter. Like Voltaire, Jackson prayed that God save him from his friends. His enemies he could take care of himself.

  31

  “When is Dennis leaving Kitt Peak?”

  “No time soon,” his father replied. “He’s repositioning every possible scope on Kitt Peak to gather as much data as possible before they are destroyed.”

  “Well, he better leave soon.”

  “It’s a monster of a job to do with just his pregnant wife. I would have gone and helped him if these uninvited dip shits with the cameras didn’t show up. Besides, every freeway is packed, even though Governor Naples has the police directing both sides of the freeway away from here. The police are even telling motorcyclists and those driving 4X4s to drive off-road, parallel to the freeways. Thank God Naples listened to you and set up offices in Montana.”

  “Then we have to send a helicopter after him.”

  “Ain’t any. Palin gave the military authority to borrow all aircraft, which forced me to order your fleets home. Palin is putting soldiers in the cockpits of private and commercial planes. You would have lost the heloplane if they found anyone who could fly it. David flew Monique, Lina, the general, and the twins to our base in Wyoming while they had the chance. I tried to get Lisa to go, but the little bitch out-ran me. We could have all left together if you weren’t so busy with Cooper. I sure hope he was worth it. It’ll take David several hours to come back to pick us up.”

  Well that complicated things, since he owned several thousand aircraft.

  In October, Jackson and his father sought out experts to game out the most likely disaster scenarios, and it dawned on Jackson that airlines would have nowhere to put their fleets. American, Delta, Southwest, United, and Continental each have several hundred large planes, and the ability to shelter few of them. Which meant that each of them were looking at $200-$300 billion in replacement costs, plus lost revenue. A scene in their movie showed regolith punching holes in passenger jets, many exploding, so they rightly concluded that share prices of airliners would basically drop dead once the movie came out.

  So he started building what looked like very long tunnels, 15 meters tall and 60 meters wide, on well-paved private roads in Alaska, northern Canada, Patagonia, Scandinavia, and Australia with poured concrete and rebar for walls and his 30 X 4 amorphous sheet metal for roofs. No windows, plumbing, or electricity. Most of these aircraft shelters were miles long in order to protect over 3000 large planes. After hundreds of planes parked inside them nose to tail, many thousands of people could wait out Judgment Day inside insulated tents under and around the planes. Because his field teams sent so many Democratic voters north by rail, which was easiest, cheapest, and fastest, Jackson was forced to build hundreds of miles of aircraft tunnels as close as possible to Canadian railways to shelter both planes and people.

  Jackson knew from the beginning that Canada and Alaska couldn’t possibly provide heated shelter for 100 million people so, if they had passports, they were pushed to take Jackson’s free charter planes to Patagonia, Scandinavia, or Australia.

  Stock markets plunged after the Regolith 3D movie came out, but airlines suffered much more because Jackson pointed out that domestic airlines have 19,000 commercial airliners, with 170,000 private planes competing with them for shelter. So Jackson gradually accumulated a majority position in American, Delta, United, Southwest, and Continental, replaced top management, then sold the planes dirt cheap to a newly formed company, Jackson Airlines, which started airlifting Democratic voters to Australia, Scandinavia, and Patagonia. He would also have bought British Airways, but their fifty 747-400s are both too high at nearly 20 meters, and too wide at 65 meters, to fit into his very long hanger-tunnels. After regolith destroyed most of the world’s large cargo and passenger planes, Jackson would own a big chunk of what survived. Which would multiply their value.

  He needed to send a lot of people to Australia because he bought several million shipping containers from Asia and his Alaskan and Canadian ports were so busy they couldn’t accommodate any more. Australia was also closer, so he set up a few dozen large container cities to shelter Democratic voters and anyone who wanted to pay his Survivor’s Fund to stay in them.

  “Then Dennis can fly out with us in the heloplane.”

  “I told him.” The tone of his father’s grunt said he was not optimistic. “So what the hell was so important with Cooper?”

  “He asked me to be his VP.”

  The room went silent. The overalls guy stopped swigging Jackson’s wine from the bottle like a beer. Even Lisa looked up.

  The professor looked at his son impatiently.

  “And what did you say?”

  “That I had to ask Lorena.”

  His father leaned forward, peering into his face, as if trying to decide if his son cracked a joke he didn’t get. Then his face turned into an expression of disgust.

  “You dumb ass! Cooper asked you to be the vice-president of the United States and you told him you had to ask the wife?”

  “What?”

  “You think Lorena would say no? You got the best damn wife in the world, and you let Cooper leave here without a firm ‘hell yeah’? Who else can do half as good a job at cleaning up the mess this damn asteroid is going to make?”

  Actually, until Cooper did so well in Iowa and New Hampshire, everyone assumed he was just auditioning for VP himself. So for him to offer that slot to Jackson instead of Obama or Hillary, if he won the nomination, was actually huge news. And showed a lot of balls. Reporters would kill to film the facial expressions of Obama or Hillary when they first hear of this.

  Jackson noticed the camera crews angling for better views of his face. A boomer almost dropped a mike on his head. For the first time he regretted his high ceilings.

  “So why are all you idiots still here?” he asked the camera crews. “You’re filming without reporters? Have the major networks been reduced to reality TV? I’ll bet Cooper is leaving in his press plane right now. You can catch him if you hurry.”

  “I told them to leave as soon as they got here,” the professor said, clicking away on the computer.

  A stocky black cameraman spoke up. “There wasn’t enough room on the jet, so they sent us here. The highways look like parking lots, so they promised to send a helicopter after us.”

  “And you believed them?” Jackson said contemptuously. “Helicopters can only fly a few hundred miles. That won’t even get you out of the state unless you go to Mexico. What you need to do is get to Davis-Monthan Air Force Base. The attached AMARG facility is a long term storage and reclamation facility for excess U.S. government aircraft. They have hundreds of planes.”

  “The Air Force already took them to move troops and equipment, and the line at the airport is miles long. The National Guard are authorized to use lethal force, and have. Even though they cram as many people in each plane as possible, there’s no way all those people are getting flown out.”

  Hands on his hips, Jackson stared at them like dead men. He looked at each of them now, man to man, and saw that they knew their fate long before he entered the room.

  “So you’re the band on the Titanic,” he quipped.

  “Look, if it’s not too much trouble, we’d like to stay here. It’s better than that damn hotel.”

  The black came
raman seemed to be taking this rather well. The rest of them looked scared shitless. As part of the press pool, they were here to cover Governor Cooper, not come here to die. Ironically, Tombstone, of Wyatt Earp fame, was not far from here.

  “Governor Jackson?” the guy by the fridge asked. “I don’t suppose you got any beer…”

  “Sheeee-it. I can do better than that. No hard liquor, but you’ll find some expensive wine that we’re not gonna have time to drink. Help yourself to food, too. A bathroom is down the hall. Mi casa es tu casa.”

  A fat white guy went down the hall, probably looking for a bathroom, while three others took off for the garage to get them some fucking liquor.

  “So, dad, what else can we do?”

  “Well, I emailed again every news organization in your database, the emergency management offices of all fifty states, the National Emergency Management Association, the International Association of Emergency Managers, all fifty governors, every state’s National Guard, FEMA, Homeland Security, NASA, the military branches, etc. I blogged it earlier, but when these guys got here, I hit all the basics again: all power plants, refineries, chemical plants, factories, oil and gas pipelines need to be shut down. Offshore oil platforms must be bottled up. Those on small islands, along coastlines, and beneath dams need to find higher ground far inland. Satellites need to be closed up. A lot of people are waiting it out in mountain tunnels or under America’s 600,000 bridges, but some of those may collapse.