Arkwright (30 page)

From my childhood on Juniper Ridge, I'd learned to recognize a space telescope image when I saw it. My first thought was that it was a star or perhaps a newly discovered exoplanet somewhere many light-years from Earth. But it wasn't either, and it was much closer than that. It was the monster we'd all come to know as Na.

When it was first discovered four months earlier by Spaceguard's orbital telescope, 2099 NA-2 appeared to be just another near-Earth object whose elliptical orbit would carry it past to our world. There are nearly countless NEOs like it, but the vast majority of them come no closer than the Moon. This particular asteroid was a little more than half of an astronomical unit from Earth when it was first spotted, and it was first believed that it would come no closer than the Moon; as a matter of routine, it was classified as a potentially hazardous object, worth watching but probably no more hazardous than any of the many PHOs discovered every year. Shortly after this particular asteroid crossed Mars orbit, though, planetary astronomers reexamined the data and came to the realization that it was much more dangerous than that. A Spaceguard alert team at the Lowell Observatory in Arizona was assigned to study 2099 NA-2, and what they found caused them to immediately contact their counterparts in Hawaii and ask them to confirm their findings. A few days later, the Maui observatory delivered its verdict, and it was grim indeed.

First, 2099 NA-2 was on collision course with Earth. Traveling at 27,000 MPH, in two and a half months, it would sail straight into our planet.

Second, and worse, this was a
big
asteroid. A class-C carbonaceous-chondrite rock shaped like a potato, it was about half a mile wide and a little more than a mile long—as newscasters would become fond of calling it, “a flying mountain” (the name
Na
came a little later; the phonetic pronunciation as “nah” was irresistible). It wasn't going to be another dinosaur killer like the one that turned
Tyrannosaurus rex
into an interesting fossil, but nonetheless, June 17, 2099, was going to be a very bad day for every living creature on Earth.

Typically, the public was the last to know. The highest echelons of the world's governments were the first to receive the information, and as conference room lights burned late in capitols from Washington, D.C. to Beijing, it was secretly agreed that the news would be withheld until the various defense and science ministries got their acts together and all the options were studied. By then, it had been determined that Na would likely come down somewhere in the Pacific, which was both good news and bad—good because it would miss any major land masses, bad because of the potential long-term effect on the global climate, not to mention the immediate consequences for the coastal areas and islands in the region.

There was one mitigating factor: Na was still far enough away that something could be done about it. Obviously, the coastal population centers and island chains of the Pacific would have to be evacuated in advance of the inevitable tsunamis. Yet there was also the possibility, however slim, that Na might be diverted. In fact, when the first news conference was held, it was announced that the
Comstock
, an asteroid-mining spacecraft belonging to Translunar Resources that was currently operating just beyond the Moon, was already on its way to deep-space rendezvous with Na. Once it arrived,
Comstock
's crew would undertake the mission of planting their mass driver on Na and using it nudge the asteroid into a new trajectory.

We were told not to panic, that the authorities were on top of the situation, and that doomsday was not inevitable. And for the most part, people took it well. Generally speaking, there wasn't the mass hysteria and anarchy that many predicted would come from an announcement like that. To be sure, there were those who fortified their homes, grabbed every firearm they could lay their hands on, and prepared themselves for the end of the world (for which, I suspect, many of them secretly hoped). By and large, though, the vast majority of individuals determined that they would do what they could to help their friends and family survive. Some found solace in religion, others in a steadfast faith in the human spirit. Some even believed that the whole thing was either a hoax or just a scare that would soon blow over, and everyone would wake up on June 18 to find that the world was just the same and nothing had changed.

In any case, the public was repeatedly assured that there was a strong probability that
Comstock
's mission would be a success and that the mandatory evacuations were only a precaution. Relatively few people knew that the mission was a long shot. Until then, asteroid miners had only succeeded in moving NEOs no more than a few hundred feet in diameter. Na was much larger than that, and its greater mass meant a correspondingly higher inertia;
Comstock
's mass driver might not be adequate for the task. And blowing up the asteroid was out of the question; even if
Comstock
were carrying explosive charges sufficient for a job of that magnitude—which it wasn't—it would have only meant that, instead getting hit by one big rock, Earth would be subjected to a rain of smaller rocks, some of which might come down in populated areas. Not only that, but it would take the mining team almost three weeks to reach Na, during which time the asteroid would have traveled over twelve million miles closer to Earth, shaving the odds of success that much finer.

The authorities deliberately overstated the chances for a successful diversion in order to avoid a mass panic, and for a while, they were successful. Life went on as usual. But as the realization of the magnitude of the disaster and its long-term consequences—namely, a global winter that could last several years—slowly sank in, even communities far from the projected impact zone began making preparations.

The week after the announcement was made, the Amherst board of education voted to suspend school indefinitely so that children could help their families do whatever needed to be done. Suddenly, I no longer had a job. Which was just as well, because a couple of days later, Grandpa called and asked me to come home.

Grandma had passed away a couple of years earlier, leaving him and Mom alone on Juniper Ridge. So he'd been forced to divide his time between monitoring the MC and taking care of her, and although she'd lately become a little more independent, it was still a stretch for a man in his eighties who'd passed the age for retrotherapy. But that wasn't all.

“Dhani, your mother's scared,” Grandpa said. “She'd been doing better, but now…”

“Is she pulling back into her shell?”

“I'm afraid so, yeah. There are days when I can barely get her out of the house, and when I talk to her, she keeps saying that she wishes you were still around.” A sigh. “I know it's a lot to ask, but if you and Robert could bring yourselves to come home, even for a little while…”

His voice trailed off. He didn't say the rest; he didn't need to. Mom had accepted Robert only grudgingly, and not without some initial suspicion. She'd never trusted strangers very much; in her mind, Robert was the outsider who'd taken her daughter away from her. Robert had done his best to get along with her, but she'd never completely warmed up to him, and so our visits had been for only a few days at a time. What Grandpa was talking about, though, was a longer stay. Much longer.

I glanced across the living room at Robert. He'd linked his ear jack to the house phone and was quietly listening in. Our eyes met, and he answered my silent question with a nod. “Of course we will,” I replied. “Just give us a few days to board up the place, and we'll be back there.”

“Thanks. I appreciate it.” He let out his breath in relief. “Tell you what—I'll even move upstairs and let you two have the downstairs bedroom.”

“That's all right, Grandpa. I think we can manage without it.” Hearing this, Robert gave me a grim smile. We'd have less privacy upstairs, with Mom's room next to mine, but I didn't want Grandpa to have to climb stairs more than he had to. I decided to change the subject. “How's
Galactique
doing? What's the latest?”

Another pause, this time longer. “I don't know,” he said at last. “I didn't want to tell you this, but we lost contact about ten days ago. The lunar station hasn't received any telemetry for over a week.”

“Nothing?”

“Nothing. Not even a status report.
Galactique
's gone dark.”

Again, Robert and I traded a look. He knew what that might mean as well as I did.

“We'll be home as soon as we can,” I said.

 

11

In hindsight, it's fortunate that Juniper Ridge had always been self-sufficient. Because my father and grandparents dreaded having the MC knocked out of commission by a local power failure, they'd set up solar panels to provide the observatory with electricity, and the rest of our power came from the town's wind turbine on a nearby hilltop. The house drew its water from deep artesian wells, and Mom's obsession with the greenhouse meant that we'd have food even though we would probably have to tighten our belts a bit. And there were other things, like the snowplow Grandpa had attached to the front of his truck and the stockpiles of canned food we customarily kept for the winter months when we couldn't easily go shopping. So we were better prepared than most.

Still, Robert and I had our hands full as soon as we arrived. The roof of the main house badly needed to be reshingled, the firewood supply was down to half a cord, and the windows would have to be freshly weather-stripped. Grandpa was in no shape to tackle these jobs on his own, so it fell to us to prepare for Na's aftermath. Luckily, the asteroid had picked a good time to make its appearance; in New England, late spring is the best season to take care of such matters.

But Mom was in bad shape. As Grandpa told me, the news about Na had messed up her mind, sending her back into the depression she'd struggled with for as long as I could remember. She welcomed me with open arms and tears but only gave Robert a tentative handshake and stared in horror as he carried our bags inside. Things might have been a little better if we'd been officially married, but … well, too late for that now. She gradually accepted the fact that he was living in the same house, but it took her a week just to get used to the idea that she'd have to share the upstairs bathroom with a strange man.

Yet we received aid from an unexpected source: Joni Ogilvy.

In the years since I'd grown up and moved away, my teenage best friend had changed, as well. While her twin sister, Sara, had moved to London and become an executive at Lloyd's, Joni had remained in Crofton after her parents' death to get married and take over the family's horse farm.

Tall and well built, with long corn-silk hair and cool green eyes, Joni could have been a runway model if she'd cared to go that way, but she was as direct and no-nonsense as only a country lady could be. It had been quite a few years since I'd last seen her, so I was surprised the day she and Brett walked down the road to our house. Noticing Robert climbing a ladder to the roof, Joni told me that they had a couple of pallets of leftover shingles from their own reroofing job and that we were welcome to them. Considering that every hardware store in western Massachusetts was being cleaned out of stuff like that, it was an offer that was both generous and impossible to refuse.

Teddy Romero was long gone. After his father died, he'd sold the trailer and left Crofton. No one had ever seen him again. Good riddance. At least I wouldn't have to worry about having him show up at the house. On the other hand, having Joni and Brett as neighbors was a comfort. Once she and I renewed our friendship, I knew that our families would be able to rely on each other during the tough times ahead.

If only all our problems could have been solved as easily. The MC was something else entirely. While it wasn't critical to our survival, nonetheless it was the reason my family had remained on Juniper Ridge in the first place. Yet the Arkwright Foundation had suffered greatly from Grandma's death. Member donations had dwindled to a trickle, and while the computers in the MC were old and badly in need of an upgrade, replacing them was out of the question. Grandpa had kept them going as best as he could, but without Mom helping him, his efforts were inadequate at best.

I knew how to run the MC, but I didn't know how to fix it. The computers were still operational, more or less, but the radio dish no longer had a full range of motion; we could hear the gears of its platform creak from the floor above when it moved. And the screens remained resolutely dark whenever we tried to download new data from the lunar tracking station.

Was
Galactique
no more? Was its long silence an indication that the ship had somehow been destroyed? Or was it simply a communications blackout, and eventually we'd receive new data? We had no way of knowing. Every day, Grandpa sent a new query, one which approximately asked, “Hello? How are you? Where are you? Please respond at once!” No reply. Just more silence.

“You realize, of course, there's great irony to this,” Grandpa said one afternoon.

“How's that?” I took a sip of water from a canteen and passed it to Robert. The three of us were sitting in a clearing on the hillside below the observatory, taking a break from using a chain saw to cut up some dead trees on our property. Mom was in the dome, taking her turn at what had begun to appear to be an exercise in futility, waiting for
Galactique
to tell us that it was still alive and well.

“Your great-great-great-grandfather started this whole thing because he was concerned about the human race getting wiped out by an asteroid.” I must have had some sort of expression on my face, because he grinned and nodded. “It's true. Not many people know it, but that's the reason he willed his estate to the Arkwright Foundation in the first place.”