Comet! (an Ell Donsaii story #5 ) (29 page)

“I’m doing fine, thanks to you and Emma
. Hope you like omelets
. Wow, you work
long
hours!
” she said concernedly,
“
I stayed up until
midnight
last night waiting to see you and say thanks.”
She frowned, “
Or did you go out?”

“No, something big has come up at work. Is there anything I can do for you?”

“Oh, no! You’ve done so much already. I just wanted to tell you I’ve found a sublet and will be able to move out today.”
She served Ell an omelet.

Ell’s eyes narrowed, “What about Sam?”
She shoveled up some omelet.

“He’s still in the hospital
. They did a long
surgery on his hand.
Your barbecue bottle really busted it up.
When he’s discharged he’ll go to jail until he can make bail.”

Ell
eyed her
omelet,
“
These are
good
…
Aren’t you worried that Sam
’ll come after you once he’s made bail?”

Bridget shrugged, “His hand’s messed up enough that
he’d have a lot of trouble trying to
physically hurt me. The police assure me he won’t be able to legally buy another gun.”

“What about illegally?”

Bridget frowned, “Well, yeah.
That’s a problem
.
”

“You know
him;
do you think he’s the kind that might?”

She sighed, “He holds grudges for
ever
.”

“Are you in school or working?”

“I worked as an admin assistant at the University but Sam made me quit.”

Ell frowned, “Why?”

“He
said
because
he could support us
and he didn’t want me to work
.
But
I think he was jealous of my boss.
”

“
Can I have another omelet?
Your boss was a man?”

Bridget’s eyes widened at how fast the first omelet had disappeared.
“Well I worked for six professors, but one of them was young and handsome and Sam almost went crazy after he met him at the office Christmas party.”

“Do you have another job yet?”

“No, but I’ll get one.”

“We probably need a good admin out at Quantum Research, where I work. It’s guarded so that Sam couldn’t come into the building. You could stay with me a while longer too. Rent free and there are good intruder alarms
i
n this old farmhouse.”

Bridget stared at Ell wide eyed. “I could pay some rent.”

Ell grinned at her,
“You
could
make me omelets every morning.”

Bridget grinned back, “
Now
y
ou’re asking a
lot
. I don’t usually get up this early. She wrinkled her nose, I guess I could make an exception for
the woman that saved my life
though.”

“Well
,
eat your omelet
and let’s go talk to Sheila at Quantum Research, see if they’ve got a job for you.”

***

Ell walked Bridget down to Sheila’s office. “Hi Sheila. This is Bridget
.
I called you about
her
earlier. Hoping we have an admin opening?” She winked at Sheila with the eye that Bridget couldn’t see.
She hoped she wasn’t overdoing her efforts to make it seem she wasn’t actually in charge.

Sheila said, “Um
, yes I checked and we are authorized for another admin po
sition. Let me just talk to her and I’ll get her to
Nancy
from HR.
”

Ell turned to Bridget, “If it doesn’t work out, my car can take you home and come back for me later. Good luck.”

As Ell walked down the hall to the machine shop she said, “Allan, what’s your projection for Hearth-Daster?”

“The likelihood that we’ll be struck by the entire comet is low, on the order of
5
-
1
5
%…”

Ell
felt some
relief
.

“…because it is likely that the major fragments visible in the core will
separate
during the comet’s perihelion with the sun. The likelihood that one or more of the fragments will hit is high, on the order of
50-75%.”

Ell’s shoulders sagged, “And the energy delivered by a fragment
massing
one fifth of the total comet?”

“23,770 m
egatons of
TNT
.”

Ell
reflected
that one or two impacts that size might not
cause the
extinction of the human race, but that that would likely be of little consolation to the billions of dead.
After
standing stock still, staring into space and
considering
for
a moment or two longer she turned toward the area of the D5R building where the ET Resources group had set up.

Braun was by himself at a work station, “Bob, can you let me look at those five kilogram impactor rockets you’ve been using to turn your asteroid into rubble?”

Getting up from his workstation, Braun said, “Sure, we’ve got a couple over here. They’
re about as simple as it gets.
A big chunk of cheap steel at the front to give it mass. There’s
a
camera
at the front
and a
PGR
chip
that
send
s the
video home.
The steel impactor is just screwed on to the pusher assembly at the back. It has t
hree attit
ude jets, three more cameras
and a main rocket. All the calculations and controller adjustments are done using computing resources and valves back here
at
ETR
.
When you suggested we reuse them we realized all we had to do was put a little motor on the screw that holds the steel impactor to the pusher assembly.
”

“The Quantum Research group needs a few of these ASAP. Can we bum
a couple
of yours?”

He frowned, “They don’t take long to make.”

“Great,
” Ell grinned at him,
“
then you won’t suffer much
,
not having them until you can make more. This is important.”
Ell paused a moment, “We’ve got something for you in return.”

Eyes narrowed,
Braun
lifted
his chin for her to continue.

Ell told him about the one ended ports and her offer to place transfer ports near locations of interest around the Solar System. His eyes widened further and further during her description.

“My God! That’s fantastic! Can we shoot a transfer port out to the asteroid tonight?”

Ell frowned, “You don’t already have one there? You’ve already sent missions there
, haven’t you
?”

“We uh…” Braun looked sheepish, “we didn’t think of
sending
a port out there
just
so we could
put
later missions
through it
.”

Ell grinned at him, “My daddy used to say, ‘Gotta be smarter than the tools you’re using.’”

Braun drew himself up and placed his hand on his chest, “Hey, I
am
a rocket scientist you know.
” His shoulders slumped,
“
Apparently
,
just not a very smart one.”

Ell said, twinkle in her eye, “Perhaps
then
you haven’t
considered that
you could
put a port into Earth orbit so you don’t have to launch
little rockets
from
the
parking lot
anymore
either?”

Braun actually blushed,
then grinned,
“Sure, you can have some of our five kilogram impactor rockets. Not a problem. Take as many as you need.
Us dummys
’ll make more.
”

Back in the Quantum Research area Ell found Emma and
Roger. Ell had asked Emma to
swear Roger to secrecy, then
fill
him
in on the comet problem. Roger looked pale
.
Ell
set the 5 kilo impactor rocket
down
in front of
them
. “Time to start looking into whether we can move that comet or not.”

Roger looked up at Ell, “
Holy crap, Ell
!”

Ell put her hand on his and quietly said, “Yeah, I know. This is about as
‘
holy crap
’
as it gets.”

Emma was staring off into space as if considering something.

Roger said, “When Emma swore me to secrecy, I had no idea what
I was swearing to
. I’m not sure this is something that
should
be kept a secret!”

Ell
sat with him a while
, explaining her concern that public panic might cause immeasurable harm
whether or not the comet hit
. Just as Ell seemed to have convinced Roger,
Emma pulled her focus back from wherever it had been and looked at the rocket. “What’s this?”

“It’s a five kilogram rocket that essentially consists only of
a
guidance
package
, a thruster and a chunk of steel to provide kinetic energy. The ET Resource guys have been using them to bust up their asteroid in prep for mining it.”

Emma’s eyes narrowed. “
This
couldn’t possibly bust up that comet!”

“Well no. But they’re flying these into their asteroid at 22 kilometers per second. Five kilos at that speed delivers the kinetic energy equivalent
of
290 kilograms of
TNT
.”

“Ell, I thought you said the comet masses 300 million metric tons?”

Ell shrugged, “Probably. It has a diameter of just under a kilometer and
,
if its density is
somewhere around the
0.6 gm/cm
3
estimated for comets, then it will come in at
close to
300 megatons.”

Emma shook her head, “Like I said, this isn’t g
oing to bust up that comet. I
t’d be like using a flyswatter on a blue whale
!”

“Oh, no. It couldn’t
bust it up
. But it should transfer that kinetic energy to the comet and move it a little.”

Emma’s eyes widened. In the tone you use speaking to a child she said,
“The energy from 290 kilos of
TNT
isn’t going to move 300 megatons very much either Ell.”

“Well, no. It would move it at a rate of…
” Ell’s eyes defocused a moment, “
two tenths of a mile per hour.
” Her eyes refocused on Emma,
“
Which isn’t enough admittedly, but remember we can build ones that will hit at 150 kilometers per
second instead of the 22
kps
this one will go. That
will
deliver the energy of thirteen and a half
tons
of
TNT
.
With one of those we can move the comet
…” she defocused again,
“
2.2 kilometers per hour.”

Wide eyed Roger said,
“The earth is a target 12,000 kilometers wide!”

“Yeah,
at 2.2 kph
it would take eight plus months to move it
the
12,000 kilometers
of Earth’s diameter
and we’ve got
less than 4
months. But, we
can
hit it more than once you know?”

Emma’s eyes defocused again.

Ell said, “I was thinking along the lines of a 25 kilo rocket at 150 kps for 67 tons
TNT
equivalent. That would move our comet
at
almost 5 kilometers per hour.
At that rate it would take a hundred days to move the comet an Earth diameter. Admittedly, we’d want to move it a lot farther than one Earth diameter but we could just
keep shooting
at it
until we were happy.”