Elijah's Chariot (The Forgotten Children Book 1) (2 page)

Sean
watched the tiny, white jet inch slowly across the screen, its nose just
reaching the Atlantic Ocean. He’d never been on an international flight before,
nor on any plane that had maps showing their progress as they flew. They were
definitely a nice feature, he decided.

Sean’s
father sat to his left, the overhead light shining brightly on the chart in front
of him. He yawned and set the stapled sheets down on the tray table, took off
his glasses and rubbed his eyes. They’d watched the sun set an hour or so ago
and many people had started to pull the window shades down and search for the
small pillows and thin blankets.

Sean
was about to turn back to the article from
Science
that he’d been
puzzling over for the past hour when a round man, with dark wavy hair gathered
in a fuzzy ball around his head, stepped into the row of seats in front of them
and reached out to shake Kevin’s hand.

“Hello,
Bob. Whose conspiracy theory are you chasing this time – Drudge Report’s,
UFO
Magazine’s
?” Kevin chuckled.

“Ha,
ha. Tim Bailey over at
Astronomy
has me on this one – wants me to do
more of a science angle, compared to most of my regular stuff, of course. Most
of the other rags already had their own guys headed out this way – people are
practically coming out of retirement for this one. Kind of hard to get an
assignment, believe it or not.”

Bob
slowly rotated his head as he spoke, surveying his surroundings, only
occasionally focusing on Kevin and Sean. His words came out in brief sprints,
then would slow way down about mid-sentence, making him almost sound like a
drawling southern gentleman. His choice of which words to rush and which ones
to let drag seemed completely random. 

“Even
after your piece in the
L.A. Times
? I saw it – it was good. Glad you
didn’t misquote me this time.”

A
weak smile crept onto Bob’s face and he held his hands up in mock helplessness.
“Come on! You’re still the only one that’s called me on that one, by the way.
Very few people are as intimately acquainted with the supporting mathematics of
string theory as you,
Doctor
Prochazek. I mean, it
was
the
L.A.
Times
, after all.” 

Kevin
laughed again and shook his head. Gesturing to Sean, he said, “This is my son
Sean. Sean, this is Bob Quidley – part-time world adventurer, part-time wine
connoisseur and all-the-time freelance reporter: breaking down science into
digestible chunks for the masses.”

“Digestible
chunks – I like that. I’ll have to put it on my business card.” He smiled
broadly and leaned forward, shaking hands with Sean. “Glad to meet you, Sean.
So, you’re tagging along to Mother Russia to see the end of the world up close,
huh?”

Sean
smiled and glanced at his dad, unsure of how to answer. He didn’t completely
buy Bob’s act. His speed-up-slow-down words were telling one story, but his
languidly shifting eyes another. He’d pitched the question to Sean casually
enough, but his eyes had stopped suddenly on his face at the end of the
sentence, narrowing as if he was carefully scrutinizing his reaction, gauging
the emotions that were playing across his face. Sean wondered if Bob was using
a trick that his dad had taught him about asking questions that you already
knew the answers to, just to see how much the other person knew or to find out
their opinion of the facts. His dad had also said that it was a great way to
throw a person off guard, forcing them to underestimate your understanding of
the subject so that they wouldn’t notice in time to change their story as your
questions became more focused. 
       “Don’t tell me you’ve fallen for all that alarmist talk, have you Bob?”
Kevin said quietly. 

Bob
spread his hands again, eyes back on the rove. “I don’t know, a lot of people
are saying a lot of different things. It’s sometimes kind of hard for us
‘masses’ to know what’s happening in this big, scary world.”

A
flight attendant glided by taking drink orders and passing out packets of
peanuts. She looked overly eager to serve the few passengers on board, her
voice surprisingly energetic for the late hour.   

“No,
seriously, what’s your take on this? I mean, I’ve read all the reports and
NASA’s official assessment of impact hazards and some of the speculative
literature, but what’s it look like from the inside?”

“You
want me to tell you that it’s all a government cover-up and that Jerry’s really
going to knock us into some kind of ice age?”

“That
would be nice – if it’s true,” Bob said, a mischievous grin pulling at the
corner of his mouth. 

“Sorry.
Everything’s out there, there’s no time bomb. We’re all still going to be able
to grow our grapes and summer squash after it’s all through. But, this is still
one of the greatest events of modern science – it’s the biggest thing since man
walked on the moon. We missed our chance at Tunguska, but now – we’ve got
another shot,” Kevin waved his hands emphatically as his voice grew louder.   

Bob
held up his index finger to pause Kevin, nodded, then swung out into the aisle
and shuffled toward the back of the plane. 

“Tunguska’s
where that meteorite exploded about a hundred years ago, right?” Sean asked. 

“Yes.
Well, a meteorite or a comet or something. They never found any sizable
fragments, so it’s tough to say.”

“But,
it still blasted everything for miles around, didn’t it?”

“Luckily,
it was in a sparsely populated area. If the thing had exploded near a city it
could have killed tens of thousands of people.” 

“Wouldn’t
they have evacuated the city?”

“They
didn’t know it was coming – it just happened. This time we can be there and
study it up close. Plus, technology’s gotten a little better since 1908.”

“Why
do meteorites always crash in Russia?” Sean asked curiously.

Kevin
paused. “Large land mass, it’s kind of hard to miss with twelve time zones.
But, they don’t always land there – there’ve been lots of others in South
America and elsewhere. Plus, with about seventy percent of the planet covered
in water, most of them have probably hit somewhere in the ocean. Since it’s
often very hard to find any fragments or craters, we don’t have a very good
idea of actually how many have collided with the planet over its life.”

Bob
hurried back up the aisle with a notepad and pen in hand. Along the way, he
stopped the flight attendant, who had just taken drink orders from Kevin and
Sean, and placed one of his own. He resumed his kneeling position in the seat
in front of Kevin and quickly scribbled on the page, prepping the ink. Kevin
sat back calmly, lips pressed together, head resting against the seat and hands
languidly curled around the armrests. 

“Okay,”
Bob said, jotting something down. “The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter picks up an
abnormal magnetic field, way out there, on March twelfth.” He paused, most of
the words dripping out like sweet honey on a summer’s day. Then, he quickly
shot out, “How’d you know it wasn’t something else, maybe from the planet
itself, maybe some star exploding way out there.” 

“We
didn’t. Dr. Rohrstadt’s team noticed an abnormal fluctuation and decided to
check it out. He could have just as easily attributed it to any one of those
things, or a temporary equipment glitch. But, he decided to find out what, if
anything, was going on and called the guys down on Palomar Mountain in San
Diego and asked them what they could see.”

“And…
they saw it out there?”

“They
thought they saw something, they weren’t sure. It’s tough with such a small
asteroid. So, they had to check it out with other observatories, get approvals,
check, double-check, triple-check. That’s why the announcement didn’t come out
for a couple of days. We had to verify it.”

“Why
hadn’t you seen it sooner?”

Kevin
paused. His hands hadn’t left the armrests. He inhaled and looked back up at
Bob.

“Like
I said, it’s extremely difficult to see such small asteroids. The Near Earth
Object Program is really only equipped to find near-earth-asteroids larger than
a kilometer in size, since those pose the greatest threat to life on the
planet. Even once we knew something was there, we had to contact observatories
all over the world to measure its parallax to see if it was moving at all.”

“Parallax?”
Bob asked.

Sean,
leaning on the edge of his seat, watching his father intently, said, “It’s how
an object looks like it’s changing positions, or moving, when comparing other
objects in its distant background from different locations around the world.”

Bob
nodded and quickly scribbled on the page.

Kevin
glanced at Sean and continued his explanation.

“Since
it’s easiest to detect sideways motion from a stationary object, assuming for
the sake of illustration that Earth is stationary… the fact that the planet is
actually moving relatively slowly both complicates and eases the calculation…”
his voice stopped suddenly, his eyes focusing on some faraway point. 

As
suddenly as he’d stopped, he began again. “So, it’s a great deal more difficult
to catch objects that are coming straight at you, making these little guys even
easier to miss. There have been several near impacts that we only found out
about
after
they passed by us.”

“Like
1989 FC? What was it – missed us by only six hours? About as far away as the
moon, wasn’t it?” Bob threw the words out quickly as he studied the overhead
storage bins.

Kevin
nodded. “It was about 300 meters across, a bit bigger than Jerry should be. It
could have been bad, depending on where it hit.”

The
flight attendant pushed a thin, gray cart to a stop next to Bob and handed him
a Bloody Mary. She passed ginger ales over to Kevin and Sean and continued
toward the rear of the plane.

“Alrighty,”
Bob said after taking a careful sip from his glass and placing it on a tray
table beside him. “Jerry’s supposed to be coming down around 6 a.m. local time,
Sunday, April sixth, at like thirty thousand miles an hour, slamming into the
middle of Russia…”

“That’s
assuming that it doesn’t break up in the atmosphere or somewhere on its path
down to the surface. Even though it’s largely composed of iron – you just never
can tell. The Tunguska object exploded about a mile
before
it hit the
ground.”

“Okay,
okay, but assuming it does make it relatively intact – what’s going to happen?”

Kevin
leaned forward a little, licking his lips. “As it streaks through the
atmosphere, its surface is going to begin to melt and the air around it will
become electrically charged, turning it into a giant fireball. This is going to
be very bright. When it hits, it’ll be traveling at about forty times the speed
of sound and will therefore explode, sending fragments everywhere, and creating
a blast of roughly one hundred megatons, about one hundred million tons of
TNT.”

“How
big was Hiroshima?” Bob interjected.

“About
twenty thousand tons of TNT.”

Bob
whistled and quickly jotted the figures down on his notepad. 

Sean
leaned forward in his seat. This was usually the most exciting part for
everyone and he’d heard the scenario enough times to know his father enjoyed
telling it. Sean never grew tired of hearing it again and again.      

Kevin
cleared his throat and continued, making a bowl shape with his hands above the
tray table in front of him. “The impact will create an enormous crater, over a
mile wide and hundreds of yards deep. Everything for miles around will be
vaporized. This all, of course, depends on Jerry’s impact angle, its density,
its mass, how much iron really is in the thing. The more heavy iron and less
porous rock material, the bigger the blast.”

“So,
if Jerry’s supposed to touch down somewhere in the middle of Siberia, who’s in
danger? Maybe a couple small villages?” Bob asked.

“Right,
as long as it lands in a relatively unpopulated area, most everyone’s fine.
People for miles around are going to hear the impact, it’ll blow out windows,
leave some fires, but not much besides that. There’ll be a slight tremor in
most of the region. And it’ll light up the sky for thousands of miles. Most of
that stuff you hear about tidal waves and craters dozens of miles across are
based on impact scenarios of much larger objects – at least a kilometer in
size. Jerry just won’t cause that kind of damage.” 

Kevin
took a sip from his glass. “It would be much worse if it hit a more densely
populated area. In Moscow, for example, the entire city would be destroyed,
plus most of the suburbs around it.”

“How
sure are you of the impact site?”

“Pretty
sure. As long as it continues on its course and at a steadily increasing speed
from gravitational force, it should strike within a few hundred miles of where
we’re predicting.”

Kevin
unbuckled his seat belt and stood up, stretching out his legs. Bob’s pen
scratched furiously at the pad of paper. Looking up at the tiny, white airplane
on the trip monitor, Sean noted that they were out over the Atlantic. An image
of the dark, rolling sea thousands of feet below the plane flashed through his
mind. He shivered slightly and reached for the dark blue blanket in the seat
next to him.