The Orion Plan

by Mark Alpert

  After a moment Paco figured it out. He stepped away from the bum and scowled at Emilio, but he couldn’t disobey a direct order. He took off his bandanna and tossed it over.

  Emilio wrapped the fabric around his other hand, creating a green mitten. Then he crouched beside the ball. It was partly embedded in the ground, which was wet and cool, so he guessed its lower half might be a little less scorching. He wriggled his gloved hands into the mud under the thing and tried to get a grip on it. He could feel its heat even through the mud and fabric. It was like a ball of fucking lava.

  He tried to lift it anyway, clamping his hands around the thing and pulling upward. He put his whole body into it, straining his biceps and thighs. Then he felt a jab in the center of his right palm. It was sudden and very painful, like being stuck with a destornillador. But the jab had come from the ball’s smooth, polished surface.

  He shouted, “Coño!” and let go of the thing, pulling his hands out of the mud. When he raised his right hand he saw a small hole in the bandanna wrapped around it. He quickly unwrapped the fabric from his hand and looked at his palm. In the moonlight he saw blood welling up from a puncture wound.

  His homeboys crowded around him, craning their necks to look at his hand. The cut didn’t look that bad, and Emilio wanted to tell his boys to stop gawking, but the pain was so intense he couldn’t say a word. It spread outward from his palm, as if his hand had caught fire. His fingers burned and throbbed. They felt like they were going to burst.

  Emilio turned away from his boys so they wouldn’t see his face. He shook his hand as hard as he could, trying to put out the fire. But the pain just got worse.

  In the middle of all this commotion, the homeless guy stepped in front of him. The bum looked at him carefully and then, unexpectedly, grasped his shoulder. “Calm down,” he said. “Let me see your hand.”

  The bum didn’t look so crazy anymore. His gaze was steady and he wasn’t trembling. He reached for Emilio’s burning hand and held it in front of his eyes.

  As he inspected the puncture wound Paco rushed toward them, his face dark with fury. He aimed his screwdriver at the bum’s throat. “Hey, asshole! What the fuck are you doing?”

  The homeless guy stood his ground. “I just want to see how deep—”

  Paco gave him a vicious shove. The bum lost his balance and toppled backward, hitting the ground hard. He lay on his back in the mud while Paco leaned over him, brandishing the screwdriver. “Stupid cabrón! We don’t need a fucking nurse!”

  The guy’s head tilted to the side. He looked woozy, semiconscious. “I’m not … a nurse,” he rasped. “I used to be … a doctor.”

  “Who the fuck cares? You’re dead now, bitch!”

  Paco drew back his right foot and kicked him in the ribs. The bum let out a howl that echoed against the hillside. The noise triggered something in the other Trinitarios, some cruel impulse they’d kept in reserve all night, just waiting for the chance to cut it loose. Roaring curses at the homeless guy, they leapt forward to join the beating. They surrounded him and started kicking his legs, arms, and torso. At the same time, Paco crouched low and raised his screwdriver, looking for a place to stab him.

  The howl also triggered something in Emilio. All at once the pain in his hand disappeared. He opened and closed it, wiggling the fingers with relief. Then, without any hesitation, he clenched the hand into a fist and charged at Paco.

  The boy never saw it coming. Emilio punched the side of his head, just above the ear. Paco dropped his screwdriver and fell sideways to the ground.

  The other boys froze. For at least ten seconds Paco lay in the mud, limp and still. Then he coughed and took a ragged breath. He opened his eyes and tried to lift his head, but after a moment he slumped back to the mud. None of the other boys tried to help him. They were too stunned.

  But no one was more surprised than Emilio. He held up his right hand and gazed in astonishment at his bruised knuckles. He hadn’t planned to knock out Paco. He’d done it without thinking. And now, as he faced the other Trinitarios, he saw what he had to do next. It was so obvious.

  He pointed at Paco but kept his eyes on the other homeboys. “Carlos, Miguel, you take his arms. Luis, Diego, grab his legs. Carry him down the hill and back to the soccer field. I’ll meet you there in five minutes.”

  The boys didn’t move at first. Emilio had to shout, “Vayan!” to get them going.

  As they lifted Paco and carried him away, Emilio knelt beside the homeless guy. He was squirming in the mud, clutching his side. Paco must’ve cracked the guy’s ribs. He needed to go to the hospital. Emilio reached into his pocket and pulled out his cell phone.

  “Hey, hombre, I’m gonna call for an ambulance. What’s your—”

  “No!” The bum shook his head fiercely. “Don’t call. I’m fine.”

  “You sure? You don’t look so fine.”

  “Please. Just leave me alone.”

  Emilio shrugged. He wasn’t going to force the guy. He stood up and took one last look at the black ball. Madre de Dios, what a weird fucking thing. The bum was welcome to keep it.

  Before he left the clearing, Emilio held his hand up to the moonlight so he could check the wound in his palm. It had stopped bleeding and didn’t hurt at all now. At first he thought he saw something next to the wound, just under the skin, a dark speck about the size of a poppy seed. But when he looked a little closer, it was gone.

  FOUR

  At 4:00 P.M. Sarah was in New York City, standing in a deserted baseball field in Upper Manhattan. She checked the map on her iPhone to confirm her position. The field lay between the Hudson River and the West Side Highway, on the western edge of Inwood Hill Park. More to the point, it lay within the impact zone for the debris from last night’s fireball. This was the most likely area to find any charred fragments of the asteroid that had exploded twelve hours ago.

  She took a deep breath and smelled the brackish Hudson. The people of New York had been freakishly lucky—the debris from the fireball had scattered across one of the few unoccupied parts of the city. According to Sarah’s calculations, the impact zone stretched across the river, with one end in Manhattan’s Inwood Hill Park and the other in the Palisades Interstate Park in New Jersey. There were no apartment buildings or houses or office complexes within the zone, so there were no reports of any damage. No one saw any fragments hit the ground or splash into the river. Like the vast majority of meteorite showers, this one had gone unnoticed. But Sarah had come here anyway, catching a 5:00 A.M. flight from Los Angeles to New York. She’d traveled three thousand miles on the spur of the moment to see if she could find some evidence.

  She focused her attention on the baseball field. It was in terrible shape, all hard-packed dirt from home plate to the chain-link fence, but its condition was perfect for meteorite hunting. If any unusual rocks had landed in the field, they would stand out like paint drops against the blank canvas of beige dirt. Sarah started to walk across the field, keeping her head down and scanning the ground.

  She’d scratched lines in the dirt to make a grid for her search, and now she was scrutinizing the grid squares, one by one. Sarah had learned this technique long ago, back in the early eighties, when she used to go rock hunting with her father in West Texas. Her dad had been an accountant in El Paso, but on the weekends he’d turn into an amateur geologist. Every Saturday he’d drive to some godforsaken desert where he’d heard there might be some good finds. Hunting for rocks was ridiculously tedious, and West Texas was usually hotter than Hades, but Sarah went along with him whenever she could. It was worth it just to see the look on his face when he found something interesting.

  The basic rule for their meteorite hunts was to look for the color black. As a rock plunges through the atmosphere, its surface gets fried to a black crust that looks like burnt toast. But there were exceptions to the rule: if the meteorite is a fragment of a larger rock that exploded, then only one side of it would be black and the other would be lighter, and the li
ghter-colored side might be the one showing on the ground. It was tricky.

  Over the course of all those weekend hunts Sarah’s father found only a dozen meteorites. He kept them on a shelf in their living room, each rock carefully labeled. He spotted the last one—a two-inch-wide fragment of a stony-iron asteroid—when Sarah was fifteen, just three months before he died of Huntington’s disease. At that late stage he could hardly walk, and his hands shook as he picked up the meteorite. But his haggard face lit up with joy as he showed it to her.

  Years later, when Sarah recalled that afternoon, she realized that was the moment she decided to become a scientist. She was thinking of her father when she applied to Cornell University and earned her Ph.D. in Astronomy and went to work for NASA. She wanted to feel the same joy.

  Now, as she stared at the hard-packed dirt of the baseball field, she noticed that its color was close to that of the West Texas desert. The weather was familiar too. It was a scorching June day in New York City, with temperatures in the upper nineties. Sweat dripped from her chin and landed in the dirt she was inspecting.

  After half an hour she concluded there were no meteorites in the field. Disappointed, she took a break in the shade of the dugout and stared at the Hudson River. She looked south toward the George Washington Bridge and north toward the Bronx. Then she turned around and gazed at the woods of Inwood Hill Park, which rose steeply above the West Side Highway. The park was big, almost two hundred acres, and about half of it lay within the impact zone. Combing those hillsides for meteorites would be a hell of a lot harder than searching the baseball field. But the real problem was the river. The Hudson occupied more than two-thirds of the impact zone. In all likelihood the asteroid fragments had plummeted into the water and now lay on the muddy riverbed.

  Sarah shook her head. Be positive, she told herself. There’s always a chance. Another baseball field was nearby, only a hundred yards away. It also lay within the impact zone and was as dusty and grassless as the field she’d just searched. That’s where she’d go next. She’d flown across the country on her own dime—NASA didn’t even know she was in New York—and she was going to stay here until she got some answers. She couldn’t prove anything yet, but she felt certain that last night’s asteroid was something very special.

  The thing that distinguished it was its speed. The rock had entered the atmosphere at thirty-seven kilometers per second, much faster than a typical meteor. When an asteroid approaches the Earth at such a high velocity, it’s usually in a retrograde orbit, traveling clockwise around the sun. Because the Earth orbits the sun counterclockwise, a retrograde asteroid hits the planet at higher speeds. But according to the observations made by the Sky Survey telescope, last night’s object had been moving in the same direction as the Earth. It had caught up to our planet because the rock was streaking across our solar system at the blistering speed of sixty-five kilometers per second. It was moving too fast to be bound by the sun’s gravity. The object wasn’t orbiting the sun like all the other asteroids in the solar system; it was speeding past the planets like a fastball, its path only slightly bent by gravity’s pull. If it hadn’t hit the Earth, it would’ve shot right past the sun and disappeared into interstellar space, the vast emptiness between the stars.

  The only logical explanation was that the rock was a visitor to our solar system. It must’ve come from somewhere else in the galaxy.

  It would be an extraordinary discovery if Sarah could prove it. Several years ago a team of astronomers had claimed they’d detected a high-speed meteor that must’ve come from another star system, but their findings hadn’t stood up to scrutiny. Skeptical researchers found fault with the observations and argued that the meteor wasn’t as speedy as claimed. Although Sarah trusted the Sky Survey observations, she knew her results would be vulnerable to the same criticism. That’s why she’d spent nine hundred dollars on a last-minute plane ticket to New York. She needed to find a piece of the object so she could analyze its chemical composition. If it turned out to be very different from the asteroids that are native to our solar system, she’d have some solid evidence. Then she could publish her results and announce the discovery of the first interstellar meteorite.

  But she had to be careful. An astronomer could ruin her reputation by announcing a discovery too soon. Sarah had made that mistake twenty years ago when she first started working for NASA, and it had nearly ended her career. She was forced to retract her claims and abandon her research. It was the first great disappointment of her adult life, and she didn’t handle it very well. She nose-dived into bitterness and depression. She alienated her friends and fought with her fiancé and broke off their engagement. Her life crashed so violently she lost almost everything. She finally took a leave of absence from NASA and checked into a mental-health treatment center in New Mexico.

  The next six weeks were grim, but with the help of therapy and some powerful antidepressants, Sarah recovered. After another three months she rejoined NASA and started the Sky Survey project. Over time she became the space agency’s leading expert on near-Earth asteroids and eventually regained the respect of her colleagues. And now the last thing she wanted to do was risk losing her reputation again. So she wasn’t going to make any half-cocked claims. She was going to keep her mouth shut until she had her proof.

  Sarah stood up and headed for the neighboring baseball field. She gazed at the Hudson again, the brown water sloshing against the riverbank, the Palisades looming over the New Jersey side. Then she glanced downstream and saw half a dozen Coast Guard boats under the George Washington Bridge. They were flashing their lights and speeding upriver.

  She stopped in her tracks and stared. They were patrol boats, each at least eighty feet long, with bright orange Coast Guard stripes on their hulls. They cruised in a V-formation, carving furious wakes in the brown water. After a minute or so the formation split in two; three of the boats angled toward the New Jersey side of the river and the other three headed for Inwood Hill Park’s marina, which was a few hundred feet south of the baseball fields. As the boats got closer Sarah noticed that their decks were crowded. Dozens of men stood behind the bow rails, all dressed in combat uniforms. They were also carrying assault rifles.

  What the hell?

  She watched them, curious and worried. This can’t be a coincidence, she thought. They must be here for the same reason I am. But why was the Coast Guard suddenly interested in meteorites?

  After another minute the patrol boats reached the marina and the soldiers jumped onto the long wooden pier. They fanned out along the riverbank and set up a checkpoint at the marina’s entrance. The same thing was happening on the New Jersey side of the river. As the soldiers marched toward the baseball fields they stopped the joggers and dog walkers and cyclists they encountered on the pathways and escorted them out of the park. Sarah could hear snippets of their conversations.

  “Sir, please come with us.”

  “Why? What’s going—”

  “We’re clearing the area, sir. Please step this way.”

  The soldiers were polite but insistent. They were also big and burly and intimidating as hell. One of them headed straight for Sarah, taking long strides and cradling his rifle. Although she doubted she could convince him to let her stay in the park, she began rehearsing her arguments. She pulled her NASA identification badge out of her pocket, hoping that proof of her government employment would help her case. But before she could say a word, the soldier pointed at her. The letters SGT NUNN were stenciled on his uniform.

  “Ma’am, are you Dr. Sarah Pooley?”

  In his left hand Sergeant Nunn held a photograph of her, the same photo that appeared on her NASA badge. This surprised her so much she almost forgot to answer him. “Uh, yeah, that’s me. Listen, I need—”

  “Ma’am, would you please come with me? Our commander would like to speak with you.”

  “Your commander?”

  The sergeant stepped forward and grasped her arm, just above the elbow. His grip
was firm and unfriendly. “This way, ma’am. General Hanson is waiting.”

  * * *

  The soldiers had already commandeered a site for their headquarters, inside a waterfront restaurant next to the pier. As Sergeant Nunn escorted Sarah into the dining room, she saw a dozen uniformed men rearranging the tables and shooing the customers out the door. A pair of soldiers spread a map across a square table, and several higher-ranking officers bent over to examine it. Sarah recognized one of the officers by his coal black crew cut and the stars on the shoulders of his Air Force uniform. General Hanson was marking the map with a pencil and giving orders to the other men.

  The sergeant stopped a couple of yards from the table and let go of Sarah’s arm. For a second she considered bolting out of the restaurant, but she knew she wouldn’t get far. Instead, she peered at Hanson’s map, which showed Upper Manhattan and the Hudson River and a skinny ellipse marked in red pencil. The elliptical shape meant it was an impact zone. Hanson was organizing the hunt for the asteroid fragments, assigning a search area to each of his officers.

  After Hanson finished giving orders, the other officers saluted him and left the dining room. The general studied the map for several more seconds. Then he lifted his head and grinned at Sarah. “Thanks for joining us, Dr. Pooley. Did you have a nice flight?”

  She frowned. The guy’s arrogance was unbelievable. “How did you know I was here?”

  “My contacts at NASA said you’d called in sick. Then I made a guess and checked the passenger lists on the flights out of Los Angeles.”

  “You can do that? Poke around in civilian records?”

  “Under ordinary circumstances, no. But as you can see from our deployment here, the present circumstances are far from ordinary.” No longer grinning, he turned to Sergeant Nunn. “Could you give us a moment, Sergeant? Please wait by the door.”