"That's harbinger,'” he said. “It has a soft G."
"What?"
"And who says the asteroid is going to come anywhere close to Earth in six months?"
"You did,” Andrea said. “On your nerd site. You said it will cross Earth's orbit again on its way out, and everybody knows that Earth will be on the other side of the Sun by then, too, right in the asteroid's path."
Craig opened his mouth to refute her, but he couldn't decide where to start. The asteroid wouldn't have anything like the same period to its orbit that the Earth did. The odds of its orbital plane crossing the Earth's at precisely the right point were vanishingly small. The odds of it being big enough to do any serious damage even if it did hit were smaller yet. And so on. But every time he'd tried to explain it before, the idiots of the world had twisted his words to suit their own ends.
He ran a hand through his hair, leaving it standing straight up in front. He widened his eyes and twitched them back and forth between Andrea and the camera, because he'd heard that you were never supposed to look directly into the camera. And he said, “All right, you've obviously figured it out. We've been hiding it because we didn't want to start a panic, but you're absolutely right. The Earth is doomed. Doomed! And it's worse than we thought. The asteroid is as big as Mars! There's no chance that life will survive at all unless we build a huge ark and launch it into space."
Andrea's eyes grew wide. “Are . . . are you sure?"
"Absolutely,” Craig said. “You said it yourself; the Earth is going to be on the other side of the Sun in six months. And when the asteroid gets there, smack!" He slapped his right fist into his cupped left palm. “What's left of Earth will be a ring of debris orbiting the Moon."
Andrea swallowed. She looked up into the night sky for a second, then pulled herself together and asked, “What do you plan to do between now and then?"
"What am I going to do? I'm an astronomer. I'm going to buy the biggest telescope money can buy. What are you going to do?"
She thought about it for maybe five seconds. “I've always wanted to go to France. That's where my ancestors are from. Maybe I'll go. Live it up a little before we all . . . all die.” She dabbed at a tear.
Craig gallantly helped her with the sleeve of his robe, which pulled open enough to expose his chest. She looked frankly at his pecs, and for just a second he saw a look in her eye that told him what else she might be interested in doing between now and impact, then she sniffed and dabbed at her eyes and looked away until she'd regained her composure. Craig felt like a heel for leading her on, but before he could say anything more she said, “Thank you for your time, Mr. Hendrickson,” and she and her cameraman headed for their van.
* * * *
Exasperation is not a good defense for causing a global panic, Craig learned. He quickly recanted when the Homeland Security goons showed up barely an hour later, and he went on news program after news program in the days to follow, debunking his own story and the dozens of other stories that floated around the internet, but as historians have learned since the first clay tablets were inscribed, once you get bad data into the system it's impossible to get it out. And bad news spreads far faster than good, so the truth never stood a chance among the kind of people who like to forward email.
It didn't help that the President went on TV to reassure everyone. After the economy had collapsed completely despite government assurances that prosperity was just around the corner, nobody trusted the government to get the time of day right. If the feds said the asteroid was going to miss, then of course it was headed straight for us.
Bad news sells, and times were indeed hard, so otherwise respectable magazines wound up running articles on the coming devastator, complete with diagrams showing the solar system—nowhere near to scale—with the path of the asteroid drawn as a bold line cutting right past the Sun and intersecting the Earth on the other side of its orbit in a big explosion. In tiny little print below the diagram they put the disclaimer: “Orbital path of asteroid is speculative.” In light gray halftone. And this after the orbit was finally calculated and discovered to come nowhere near Earth.
Craig only avoided prison because the prisons were full of people who decided to spend their last few months enjoying other people's money and possessions. That slowed down considerably when people started fighting back and self-defense against robbery stopped being prosecuted as a crime. Another email that circulated around the internet claimed that the average intelligence of the world had risen about three I.Q. points by the time the wave of thief killings and grudge murders had died down. Craig didn't believe that one, either, although it made him wonder.
Even though he knew the asteroid was going to miss, he bought a twenty-inch Starmaster telescope with the remains of his savings. Despite all the hoopla, it was his asteroid. He'd discovered it, and by God he was going to watch it cruise past with the biggest scope he could afford.
So were a lot of other amateur astronomers, it turned out. Telescope sales picked up dramatically worldwide, to the point where the manufacturers had to hire back their laid-off staff and then some to keep up with the demand.
A lot of companies found themselves in the same situation. Car manufacturers felt a sudden surge in demand for touring cars as people decided to take that last big road trip before the apocalypse. Boat builders found themselves selling out their entire stock within days. Computers and iPods and cell phones flew off the shelves as everyone upgraded to the latest, coolest gadgets while they still had a chance.
Even people who knew there was no doomsday coming still found themselves rethinking their priorities, and more often than not they decided to live it up a little, too. And not long after that, they began finding jobs again: providing the goods and services that a world full of sudden spenders demanded.
When Asteroid 2011 JD Hendrickson made its closest passage to Earth—a comfortable three-quarter million miles away—Craig held a star party at his favorite dark-sky site to celebrate. He invited all his astronomy friends from town, his co-workers at the mirror-coating lab he'd started with seed money from Celestron, and just for the heck of it, Andrea LeTour.
"You made fun of me,” she said when he reached her at the TV station.
"I was making fun of everybody,” he said. “But I apologize. Let me make it up to you. Have you ever looked through a telescope?"
She admitted that she hadn't, and she asked if it would be okay to bring a camera crew to film the asteroid's discoverer observing his discovery.
"Only if you can shoot under starlight,” he told her. “Astronomers don't like bright lights. It blows our night vision and we can't see anything for half an hour afterward."
She laughed. “That's why you were so upset when you came to the door. I've always wondered."
"You didn't think maybe it was because you woke me up at four in the morning?"
"You said Turn off the fucking light,’ not Do you have any idea what time it is?’ That was a first."
"Ah. Okay. So are you coming?"
"Sure,” she said.
He gave her directions to his dark-sky site, feeling a little like a fisherman who reveals his favorite stretch of stream. If she talked it up on the news, he would never find any peace up there again. But she showed up alone just before dark, driving a hybrid Chevolt, and she wasn't made up for the camera. Without makeup, she looked every bit as hot in person as she did with it on TV.
He introduced her around like an old friend, enjoying the looks his buddies gave her, and him. She helped him set up his scope, holding the truss tubes while he settled the secondary cage into place.
Craig's observing site was on a high ridge about fifteen miles south of town. The Sun was already down in the west, but the sky still held a touch of red near the horizon. In the east it was growing dark enough for the first few stars to pop out.
"It's pretty up here,” Andrea said.
"One of my favorite spots in the world,” Craig admitted.
"Is t
his where you were when you discovered the asteroid?"
He laughed softly. “Nope. I was in my driveway."
She laughed with him. “The truth is never quite as prosaic as you'd like, is it?"
"People don't want the truth, that's for sure,” he said.
"No, I suppose they don't.” She looked at the other astronomers, fast becoming silhouettes in the deepening twilight, then turned back to Craig. “It's funny how it all worked out. We started a panic—” She held up her hands to forestall his protest. “You and I and about a million other people started a panic, but it wound up resurrecting the global economy. Who knew that would happen?"
"I sure didn't.” Craig took a medium-power eyepiece out of the box and fitted it into the focuser, then swung the telescope down toward the southwestern horizon. A little hunting with the finder scope brought Saturn into view. He centered it up in the eyepiece and focused, getting the rings and four of its major moons as crisp as possible, then said, “Come have a look at this."
She stepped around to his side of the telescope and looked into the eyepiece. “Oh my God!” she said. “It's beautiful."
"Now that response I knew would happen.” He let her look for a bit, then said, “See that black line in the ring? That's the Cassini Division. It's about as wide as the Atlantic Ocean. And see those little dots on either side? Those are its moons."
"Are any of them as big as your asteroid?"
"Much bigger,” he said. “My asteroid's about ten miles across. Those moons are maybe a thousand."
"Ah. Not as big as Mars, then?"
"Hmm?"
"You told me your asteroid was as big as Mars."
He felt the heat in his face, was glad it was too dark for her to see him blush. “I did, didn't I? One more thing to live down. But it's considerably closer at the moment. It looks bigger than Mars."
"I've heard guys say that before.” She looked away from the eyepiece and gave him a mischievous grin.
He laughed. “I'm trying to imagine the circumstances under which that could actually have happened."
"Okay, so I made that up.” She stepped away from the telescope. “So show me your great big asteroid, why don't you?"
"I thought you'd never ask."
He swung the telescope high, looking for the familiar dot that had made him both famous and infamous at once. A meteor slashed overhead, and Andrea gasped. Several of the other astronomers oohed and aahed.
"Make a wish,” Craig said.
"I think I've already got mine, thanks,” said Andrea.
The tone of her voice left very little to the imagination. Craig looked over at her, then up at the deepening sky. This could turn out to be a far more interesting night than he'd bargained for.
That was one of the things he loved about astronomy. You never knew what you'd find out there in the dark.
Copyright © 2010 Jerry Oltion
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Novelette: THE GREAT GALACTIC GHOUL by Allen M. Steele
The explanations people want to believe are not always the ones they should believe....
In the late twentieth century, the first unmanned probes were sent to Mars. Most of them failed; of the thirty-nine missions launched by America and Russia between 1960 and 1999, nine exploded during lift-off, seven lost contact with home, seven more either went into useless orbits or missed the planet entirely, and four crashed while attempting to land. No other program had the same failure rate, nor as many mishaps that couldn't be easily explained.
This led someone at NASA to playfully suggest that a creature lurked between Earth and Mars, a gremlin ready to sabotage or destroy any spacecraft that dared to enter its realm. The Great Galactic Ghoul became a standing joke among engineers and ground controllers, but as the missions continued to fail, the laughter stopped. It soon became considered bad luck to mention the Ghoul. Even if these otherwise rational men didn't necessarily believe in space monsters, neither were they willing to say anything that might jinx the mission.
Despite the setbacks, Mars was explored and people eventually went there, and not long after that they began to travel farther out into the solar system. By then, they'd learned how to build spacecraft that were reasonably safe and reliable; they had to, because the consequences of catastrophic failure were unthinkably high. There were accidents, of course, and occasionally a life was lost, but those instances were rare; when they occurred, more often than not human error was the primary cause. In any case, investigations would be announced, studies would be conducted, data collected, reports written, findings made public. Changes would then be instituted, and if the process worked the way it was supposed to, that particular accident would never happen again. Or at least not quite the same way.
In time, the Great Galactic Ghoul was forgotten. But he didn't disappear. He simply went into hiding for a while, waiting for the day to come when he could return from the shadows and wreak havoc upon any vessel he happened to encounter in the darkness between worlds.
* * * *
Until August 16, 2062, there had never been a deep-space rescue mission. There were countless instances, of course, between Earth and the Moon in which one spacecraft made an emergency rendezvous with another. The distance involved there was less than a quarter of a million miles, though, and since there were over a dozen stations in cislunar space, help was seldom more than a few hours away. Beyond the Moon, the situation was different: spacecraft crews were expected to deal with onboard accidents themselves, without relying on outside assistance. And for good reason: Earth and Mars were separated by an average of forty-nine million miles, and even in the most densely populated zone of the asteroid belt, tens of thousands of miles could lay between one inhabited rock and another.
Nonetheless, it wasn't long before spacers realized that they needed to plan for coming to one another's aid. No one could anticipate every sort of emergency, but there were times when it would have been helpful to know, no matter how bad things might be, that help was on the way. Indeed, one of the first things the Pax Astra did after it was formed in 2049 was to ratify the space rescue clause of the old 1967 U.N. Space Treaty, even though the Pax rejected most of the treaty's other provisions. As much as the newly independent space colonies wanted to break away from Earth, this part of the treaty, which mandated that all space vessels had to respond to distress signals, was worth keeping.
It's a good thing that the Pax settled this particular issue, for only six years later the belt colonies broke away to form their own alliance, the Transient Body Shipping Association. Since the TBSA was willing to do business directly with Earth-based companies and governments, economic rivalry with the Pax Astra was assured. So it was just as well that Pax and TBSA ships formally agreed to come to each other's aid in times of emergency; by 2065, each side would be committing piracy against the other, with worse yet to come.
But hostilities hadn't yet broken out when the Ritchie Explorer disaster occurred. Considering that the Ritchie was a Pax Astra vessel, perhaps it was only appropriate that the nearest ship to receive its mayday signal was a TBSA freighter.
The TBSA Gold Dust Woman was seven weeks out of Ceres, passing Mars orbit on its way to the Moon, when the signal was received by its Ku-band wireless. Because the ship was no longer in the belt, Captain Henry Zimmerman had relaxed the twenty-four-hour watch mandated by flight regulations. Chief Engineer Quon Ko remembers being in his berth, nursing a squeezebulb of Irish coffee while reading a fantasy potboiler on the data screen, when Zimmerman's voice came over the intercom, asking him to report to the bridge.
"I didn't ask what it was about,” Quon says. “I just said okay, be there in a minute, then I climbed out of my bunk, zipped up my jumpsuit and tossed the rest of my drink into the recycler, then headed upstairs."
Gold Dust Woman was an Ares-class freight-er, 272 feet in length and 110 abeam at its outrigger telemetry and reactor booms, the sort of workhorse known by spacers as a “rock hauler” even though it neve
r carried asteroids themselves. It had a nuclear fusion main engine and an open payload bay capable of carrying up to eight cargo containers—on this mission it had six, mainly oxygen, water, copper, and titanium mined from inner-belt asteroids—and it had a crew of three: Captain Zimmerman; Lesley Zimmerman, his first officer, navigator, and wife; and Quon Ko, who doubled as engineering chief and cargomaster. The Zimmermans were the Woman's permanent crew, while Quon was aboard only until the union rotated him out and gave his job to someone else.
As it turned out, Henry and Lesley weren't on the bridge either when the signal was received. Captain Zimmerman was in the observation blister, using the optical telescope to make a manual navigational fix as required by regulations, while Lesley was napping in their cabin. So the transmission was first heard by the ship's AI, which in turn alerted the captain. It took Henry Zimmerman less than a minute to ride his chair down from the blister to the bridge, and only a minute after that to confirm that the signal was an emergency transmission sent by another spacecraft. A stickler for following TBSA regs to the letter, the captain immediately summoned the other senior officers to the bridge; as it so happened, his wife and Ko were also the only other two people aboard.
By the time Lesley and Ko left the living quarters in the ship's carousel and climbed up the access shaft to the bridge, Henry had learned other pertinent facts. The signal was coming from the PASS Ritchie Explorer, a mobile mining rig registered to the Pax Astra. The Explorer was presently anchored to Eros, an S-type asteroid whose annual period presently put it just within Mars orbit. According to the TBSA database, it had a crew of six.
Beyond that, little else was known. The signal, apparently sent by an automatic transponder, consisted of a brief print message that repeated again and again:
MESS. 1397 1503 GMT 8/16/62 CODE A1/0679
TRANSMISSION FROM PASS RITCHIE EXPLORER/433 EROS TO ALL SPACECRAFT PRIORITY REPEATER
Analog SFF, October 2010 Page 16
