Indian Hills Montessori School, Indian Hills, Nevada, September 1
Meg Baker loves teaching science more than anything. After teaching sixth-, seventh- and eighth-graders for fifteen years, she is still unmarried at age forty, not by circumstance but by choice. Meg wants to make her mark as a teacher rather than a wife or mother. In purely mathematical terms, she believes she can help more people by teaching. She stands before her classroom of twenty eighth-grade boys and girls and smiles her best Madonna smile.
“Happy Monday everyone! Raise your hand if you saw the asteroid show?”
All the students raise their hands.
“Yeah, that was something else. Did you feel a little scared as you watched it?”
Most of the students nod.
“At first I thought it was an alien invasion,” says one of the boys in the back of the class. The other students snicker and roll their eyes.
“So did hundreds of millions of people in third-world countries. Seeing so many objects could easily lead someone to the same conclusion. But as scientists, we know better.” She walks over to a large map of the Solar System that nearly covers one wall and uses her pointer to explain.
“We know that the main asteroid belt in our Solar System is a vast region located between the orbits of Mars and the gas giant, Jupiter, the fifth and largest planet. Here, millions of asteroids, some as small as dust particles and some as large as dwarf planets, orbit the sun together like a giant merry-go-round. Some are near-Earth orbital asteroids. There are also Trojan asteroids and rogue planets wandering through distant space alone or accompanied by their own moons and asteroids. The asteroids we all saw a couple of days ago may have come from an exploding star or a massive planetary collision light-years away.”
“My brother says we live in a cosmic shooting gallery and we’re very lucky we didn’t get hit,” offers one of the girls.
“Your brother is right.”
“He says the dinosaurs weren’t so lucky.”
“The Cretaceous mass extinction sixty-five million years ago led to the end of the dinosaurs. Almost no large land animals survived. Plant life and tropical marine life were nearly destroyed. Global temperatures were fourteen degrees Celsius hotter than today. Sea levels were a thousand feet higher than current levels, leaving only about half as much land area exposed. Does anyone know the size of the asteroid that caused all that destruction?”
Meg looks around the classroom. None of the students raise their hands.
“It was roughly six or seven miles wide.”
“That’s a big rock,” adds another student.
“Actually, it’s tiny by cosmic standards. Yet it caused an explosion that released the energy of a hundred trillion tons of TNT. That’s more than a billion times more destructive force than the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan at the end of World War Two. It made a crater in the Gulf of Mexico a hundred and ten miles wide. Imagine how much damage an asteroid over one hundred times larger than that would do.”
Meg turns back to the big Solar System map on the wall. She taps the pointer on the largest asteroid in the asteroid belt.
“This is Ceres. It’s the largest known asteroid in our Solar System and it’s six hundred miles wide, roughly one-third the size of our moon. Imagine an object this size traveling fifty thousand miles per hour hitting Earth.”
“Game over,” announces a male student melodramatically.
“Correct. Nothing would survive such an impact.”
Sea of Cortez, Baja, Mexico
Two scuba divers glide carefully along the sea wall searching for large openings among the rocks. The men are Mexican locals from Ensenada, two brothers who spend most of the time they are not running their tourist fishing business diving in the Sea of Cortez. Free diving, cave diving or scuba. Doesn’t matter as long as they are somewhere underwater together.
Matias and Diego Guerrero had been diving together since they learned how to swim. Matias was seven, just eighteen months older than Diego, when their undersea adventures began. They were also best friends and they loved being in the water. They felt blessed to live on the edge of the Pacific Ocean where they could free dive all day and collect hundreds of seashells. They earned money for their family by selling shell jewelry and other trinkets to tourists.
Each member of the family worked at something. In a tourist town like Ensenada, there were many ways to make money. Little girls sold Chiclets chewing gum packs to any American who was careless or naïve enough to make eye contact with them. There were plenty of thieves and pickpockets, too. The prettiest older girls sold their bodies to privileged California beach boys, college students and foreign businessmen.
The Guerrero family would have none of that. Papa Guerrero fixed cars and trucks. Despite the sweaty, dirty, greasy work he did, he carried himself with quiet dignity. People who didn’t know he worked as a grease monkey saw him out with his family and thought he was a rich man. Mama Guerrero and her only daughter made colorful ponchos for tourists and local men who coveted her unique broad-shoulder designs. Diego and Matias made necklaces, bracelets and ankle bracelets from the tiny shells they collected during free dives. Everyone contributed to the family pot. They put considerable pride and craftsmanship into their work, even the boys.
When Matias’ tenth birthday arrived, Papa Guerrero gave him and Diego new snorkel masks and swim fins. Papa knew that Matias would enjoy his birthday present so much more if he could share it with Diego. So it was as the boys thanked Papa profusely and headed straight for the beach to try out their new gear. They loved how the swim fins gave them so much more power and speed in the water, and how the new masks made it possible to clearly see the marine life and shells all around them.
Now, twenty-five years later, Matias and Diego are still as close as two brothers can be. They have traded the Pacific Ocean for the Sea of Cortez and broadened their undersea adventures to include scuba and cave diving in calm waters. They have traveled across Mexico many times to visit the world-famous underwater caves in Tulum, Hoyo Negro and Playa del Carmen on the Yucatan Peninsula. Today, they search for cave openings along the rocky rim on the eastern edge of the Sea of Cortez. Teeming with abundant sea life, it is often called the world’s largest marine aquarium.
The brothers swim among dozens of playful sea lions and schools of hammerhead sharks and manta rays. They see whale sharks, huge dolphin pods, pilot whales, killer whales, sperm whales and humpbacks. There are plenty of smaller creatures as well, including brightly colored sea sponges, sea fans and kelp. They notice sea horses and an amazing variety of damselfish, eels and angelfish. It’s as if most of the world’s marine life vacations here, too.
While the two men dive, their families camp out near their old Ford van under a rocky cliff outcropping up above the shoreline. There is Matias’ wife, Mariana, his son, fourteen-year-old Mateo, and his daughter, Mia, who is eight. There’s Diego’s wife, Isabella, and his daughter, Sofia, now twelve. They are one big happy family as they play games and talk and cook and eat together. They are in the middle of a weeklong family vacation. Away from television, radio or computers, they are oblivious to the eleven asteroids that ripped across the skies only days earlier and created an alarming worldwide phenomenon.
All that Diego and Matias care about at that moment is the placid turquoise water, the almost unimaginable beauty of life all around them and not swimming too close to any large marine mammals or feeding sharks.
Palo Alto, California
Sam Hayden can’t sleep. It’s 2 a.m. and he is jacked up on coffee, wide-awake. Julia has retired for the night hours ago and sleeps peacefully in the quiet storage room where her father occasionally crashes on a pullout bed when he works late and feels too sleepy to drive home.
Sam stares at the screens and monitors and wonders how eleven asteroids escaped early detection by NASA's Near Earth Object Program, which was designed to track asteroids and comets as small as school buses and assess potential
impact risks. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory had successfully identified thousands of objects but somehow missed eleven on the same day. The asteroid storm also went undetected by the United Nations’ International Asteroid Warning Group, a special defense plan initiated in 2014, and by the International Monitoring System, a network of sensors around the world designed to detect nuclear weapons testing based on sound waves and shockwaves above and below the Earth’s surface. The system had identified at least two or three asteroid strikes each year since 2001. Despite all the high-tech tracking systems, not one of those asteroids was identified in advance.
Fourteen months after the meteor exploded over Chelyabinsk, Russia, on a scale equivalent to thirty Hiroshima bombs, Apollo 9 astronaut Rusty Schweickart started the nonprofit B612 Foundation. Schweickart warned that only blind luck had saved Earth from bigger disasters. The Chelyabinsk meteor, just sixty feet in diameter, had ripped through the Earth’s atmosphere at over forty thousand miles per hour back in February of 2013 and exploded eighteen miles above the ground. It damaged over seven thousand homes and office buildings in six Russian cities and injured over fifteen hundred people, including many with severe burns from the explosion. Shockwaves from the airburst had smashed windows, shaken and collapsed buildings and knocked people clean off their feet.
At 2:25 a.m., Sam Hayden’s NEO instrument panel suddenly lights up like a Christmas tree. The instruments alert Sam that they have isolated and locked onto an object much larger than any Sam has ever seen, an object that, according to Sam’s calculations, is about one thousand miles wide. At first, Sam thinks that his instruments are malfunctioning. He restarts his computers and resets the tracking system. It doesn’t change the result. Moments later, the instruments light up again. The alarm sounds again and Sam reaches for the landline phone.
Chapter 2
The White House, Washington, DC, September 2
President Camilla Harrison awakens to the insistent ringing of the wired phone at her bedside. By the third ring, she picks it up.
“I hope you have a damned good reason for waking me at this ungodly hour.”
“I’m sorry, Madame President, this couldn’t wait,” says Sam Hayden. He tells her that his instruments are showing a rogue planetoid traveling fifty thousand miles per hour headed directly into Earth’s orbital path.
“A planetoid?”
“It’s a dwarf planet, almost twice the size of Texas. There’s no good way to say this, Madam President, but we’re looking at a possible extinction-level event, even if it misses Earth.”
“How much time before we know for sure?”
“Two hours, tops,” says Sam.
“How soon can you get to Washington, Dr. Hayden?”
“I’m sorry, Madame President, my place is here in California with my daughter under these circumstances. I’ll keep you updated from here.” He turns his attention back to his computer simulations and orbital analysis, absent-mindedly returns the phone to its cradle and disconnects the President.
President Harrison has far more serious concerns than an astrophysics professor hanging up on her. She dials the White House Chief of Staff, Theo Robinson, a Harvard graduate and Rhodes scholar, just twenty-nine years old. She trusts him implicitly. Theo, the brightest star on the President’s team, answers the second ring.
“Theo, I need an emergency meeting with the Secretary of Defense and the heads of NSA, NASA and FEMA stat. Wake them up and tell them to meet me in the situation room as quickly as they can get their butts down there. I don’t care if they come in their pajamas. Tell them I’m on my way.”
She climbs out of bed and hastily throws on a denim shirt and dark slacks. She brushes her hair and teeth and heads for the door.
The faces in the situation room are somber and deadly serious when she arrives. John Scott Walker from NASA, Cyrus T. Levine from FEMA and Jack Charron from the NSA are there.
“At two twenty-five this morning, our near-Earth tracking systems picked up a rogue dwarf planet approaching our orbital path at over fifty-thousand miles per hour. Its origin: unknown,” says NASA’s chief, Walker.
“What do you mean ‘unknown’?” asks the President. “How did we miss a Trojan that size moving at that speed?”
A guilty silence hangs over the room for a long moment before Walker answers.
“Madam President, we have the technology to detect objects much smaller than this. We do not have the technology see the whole universe in every direction at once. We look at one small sector of space at a time. If an object passes through a different sector, we don’t see it, just like we didn’t see those asteroids. We believe this Trojan may have been blasted from another solar system. A few years ago, we identified a rogue planet six times the size of Jupiter drifting alone through space about eighty light years away.”
President Harrison shakes her head. “What are the chances of this rogue dwarf planet hitting us?”
“Considering what we know right now, maybe one in ten,” says Walker.
“Well, at least that’s something.”
“Except that the moon is a different story, maybe one chance in five. It would take a head-on collision with something roughly the same size to do serious enough damage to alter the moon’s rotation or orbit. This thing is smaller, but it’s also moving twenty-five times faster, kind of like shooting a billiard ball at a grapefruit. We’re modeling possible scenarios right now.”
President Harrison stares hard at Walker. “What do I tell the American people?”
“Just the facts until we know more. No reason to set off a panic.”
“One more question, John. How long before this NEO becomes a YouTube sensation?”
Walker clears his throat. “Couple of hours before the first human sightings.”
Dana Point, California
It’s just after midnight when all the TV and computer screens in Alex Jacks’ home abruptly turn themselves on and tune to the Emergency Broadcast System. The image of the Presidential Press Secretary, a slight Native American woman, Naomi Trueblood, standing at the White House podium, fills the screen. It is just past 3 a.m. in Washington, DC.
Alex Jacks is wide-awake thanks to his third coffee of the day, which he’d finished right after dinner. He stares at the seventy-two-inch curved UHD screen in the living room.
“Ladies and gentlemen, the President of the United States of America,” announces Naomi Trueblood.
President Harrison smiles uncomfortably and begins, “In less than forty-eight hours, an object nearly twice as large as Texas will pass near the Earth and moon traveling at approximately fifty-thousand miles an hour. What we know right now is that there’s a slight chance for a lunar impact. Here to explain it better is NASA’s chief administrator, John Scott Walker.
She steps aside and Walker takes the podium.
Walker, who looks more like a retired pro football player or a Marine drill sergeant than an astronomer, had always been somewhat of a hero to Alex Jacks. The first African-American to be appointed as NASA’s chief, Walker was a retired major general for the United States Marine Corps and a former astronaut. Alex had admired him since the first time he saw him speak on TED Talks. Walker clears his throat.
“First, let’s be thankful we’re about to dodge the biggest bullet in recorded history. This object was likely blasted here by some cataclysmic event in another solar system, possibly the same event that sent eleven much smaller asteroids past us a few days ago. We now believe they could all be part of the same group.”
The screen behind Walker suddenly fills with eleven smaller screens replaying videos of each of the eleven asteroids.
“We all know that the moon’s been hit more often than Rocky Balboa. Yet, it has continued zinging around us unabated for four billion years. We have no reason to believe it will be any different this time.”
As Walker continues, Alex gets up and goes to the kitchen where he begins removing canned foods and non-perishables from the cupboards and piling them o
n the kitchen countertops. He loads the items into large shopping bags and begins moving them down to the basement where the previous owner had constructed a bomb shelter after the terrorist attacks that brought down New York’s World Trade Center on September 11, 2001.
The bomb center’s shelves are already stocked with canned goods and jars, but Alex is determined to fill every space to capacity now. The entire perimeter of the bomb shelter floor is lined with five-gallon jugs of pure distilled water. Alex knows that water can easily become the scarcest and most necessary commodity after a disaster, and he knows they cannot survive more than three or four days without it.
As he continues traipsing up and down the stairs between the kitchen and the shelter, he can only think about one thing: his family’s survival. The bomb shelter had been built large enough to hold eight months worth of food and water for himself, Jessa and Deuce. Alex had reinforced the walls and the ceiling with concrete and steel. He had even installed a separate generator in case the electrical power grid went dark. He and Jessa did most of the work themselves and hired outside help only when they needed it. By the time Deuce came along, the shelter was finished.
Deuce stands in the kitchen doorway watching Alex move supplies down into the shelter. He knows Alex has his own organizational system. Another set of hands will only slow his progress.
Deuce had grown up watching Alex read dozens of books about survival, learning how to reinforce the shelter and talking about different disaster scenarios both natural and man-made that might lead to an untimely end for Homo sapiens. As Deuce got older, they talked about the ‘what if’ possibilities. What if the nuclear plant at San Onofre melted down, or a magnitude 8.5 quake rocked Southern California? What if North Korea rained ICBMs down on the West Coast? What if Yellowstone’s super volcano erupted, or terrorists unleashed biological weapons? What if hordes of zombies suddenly took to the streets of America in search of live human food?
RUNAWAY MOON Page 2
