Loeb got up and checked their progress. They were nearly to the Cathedral. “Michael, trust me, God doesn’t have to punish us. We do that quite well on our own.”
The train pulled into the station under the National Cathedral. The five men got off and made their way up a metal staircase to a locked door that Loeb opened with an access card he had made at Camp David. From there, it led into a vaulted stone hallway and then to a side chapel off the nave.
Michael knelt in front of the altar and began to pray.
Bowen dragged him to his feet. “Save it, padre, I don’t think anyone’s listening.”
They left the church and walked south past darkened buildings to the observatory. Loeb and Bowen located the observatory’s backup generator while the others waited. The lights came on, and when the two returned, Loeb was carrying an armful of computer printouts.
“What’s that?” Michael asked.
“This forty-foot telescope has a twenty-six inch lens and was once the largest refracting telescope in the world. It’s not anymore, of course. Now, the Navy uses it primarily to measure the parameters of double stars — position, angle, separation, and so forth. Every clear night, they take photos of as many of them as they can. There are several they are actively tracking, so those they photograph every night. The photos go directly into the main computer to be analyzed. These are the printouts from the evening of the twentieth. By comparing this data with the photos we’ll take in a few moments, I hope to be able to tell you all what exactly is happening.”
“I hate to break it do you, Doc,” Ferret said, looking up at the telescope eyepiece. It was ten feet off the floor. “But we didn’t bring no ladder.”
Loeb flipped a switch on the base of the telescope and the entire floor rose up toward the eyepiece. “Gentlemen, I give you the largest elevator in the city of Washington, D.C.”
Loeb set the telescope to view the first double star, took the high-speed photos, and left them to get the printouts from the computer room. When he returned with the new data, he was preoccupied and refused to speak with anyone. He checked and rechecked the settings and took another set of photos. He even moved on to the next double star on the list and took several sets of that. When he returned from the computer room the second time, he slumped in a chair with the papers in his lap.
“Well?” Bowen asked.
“I was wrong.”
Bowen drew his gun and ran his finger down the barrel. “So I can shoot you now?”
“You may as well. It doesn’t make any difference.”
“Dr. Loeb, what did you see through the telescope?”
“The end of mankind, Cameron. A gloriously ignominious sight to behold.”
Bowen holstered his weapon. “What the hell are you talking about?”
“Back at Camp David, I knew something was wrong. The stars weren’t right; more specifically, Mars wasn’t right. In the night sky, it should be visible in Aquarius until February at least, but it wasn’t in Aquarius.”
“Where was it? In Uranus?” Ferret laughed. “Get it? Uranus.”
“Somehow, that seems a fitting last joke for the human race.”
“Mars has moved?” Cameron asked.
“It appeared so, but it was impossible to tell without this data. I thought it more likely a distortion of the reflected light striking the Earth.”
“A distortion? Caused by what?”
“By the one thing possessing a strong enough gravitational field to bend light — a black hole — and this data proves that out. At exactly 12:21:12 p.m. on 12|21|12 our futures were forever altered by a black hole.”
“Wouldn’t we see something that big coming?
“Not necessarily. All black holes resolve to a point without dimensions, the singularity, and the event horizon, the area of space within its gravitational pull, could be millions of miles across or as small as our planet or much, much smaller. And if it were traveling through the galaxy at a sufficient rate of speed, we might never see it, even when it was upon us.”
“But we would have had some warning. The government would know, right?”
“This isn’t the movies, Cameron. We aren’t constantly watching the skies for objects on a collision course with Earth.“
“So where is it?” Bowen asked.
“It’s gone.”
“Gone? What do you mean gone?”
“The Milky Way is traveling through space at about two million miles per hour, Bowen. Light, about three hundred times that fast. Even assuming the black hole was only going the same speed as our galaxy but in the opposite direction, it would be beyond the sun in a single day. This data indicates it was traveling much, much faster than that, but it came so close that we were within its event horizon for a brief time. Fortunately or unfortunately as the case may be, it could not entirely overcome Earth’s inertia before leaving the solar system. Otherwise we would have been sucked in immediately and obliterated, and we wouldn’t be having this discussion.”
“So you’re saying this black hole sucked six billion people off the planet?” Bowen laughed.
Ferret whistled. “That’s a powerful lot of sucking, Doc.”
“Idiots. Obviously I’m not saying that.”
Bowen took a flask from his jacket and took a long pull. “So what are you saying?”
“I said that Mars looked like it was in the wrong place in the sky. That was incorrect. Mars is where it should be. It’s Earth that is a million miles out of position. Apparently, while we were within the black hole’s event horizon, the tremendous pull of its gravity altered our orbit. We’re now moving away from the sun at approximately sixty-seven thousand miles per hour and accelerating. Unless our orbit stabilizes soon, at the rate we’re accelerating, we have less than a month before the planet’s surface becomes uninhabitable. The average surface temperature will drop to minus one hundred degrees Fahrenheit and continue to decline until every living thing left on the planet freezes to death. That is assuming, of course, that we don’t run into something like an asteroid or another planet on our way out of the solar system.”
The heaters in the observation room couldn’t keep up with the falling temperatures outside. Beyond the opening in the roof, dawn was breaking on a world that should have been waking up for the start of another day.
“That’s why they took everyone,” Cameron whispered. “They knew this was coming.”
“See, Doc, I told ya it was them Mayans all along,” Ferret said.
“You never said anything of the sort.”
“Well, I was thinking it. Don’t you see? They figured it out. They saw it coming and got out of Dodge when the getting was good. Then they sent in the cavalry for the rest of us. That’s what them UFOs sightings was all about. They weren’t Martians. They was Mayans. That’s their ship the government’s holding at Area 51, the one with all that funny writing on it. It’s Mayan, I tell ya.”
“Is it possible there was a civilization on this planet that lived so primitively by our standards yet was so advanced that it could predict an extinction-level event two thousand years into the future? And if we allow for that, must we not also allow for the possibility that they were capable of leaving Earth, finding a new home, and coming back to relocate us?”
“That’d make a great bedtime story, Loeb, but what good does it do us? We’re dead in a month.”
“Oh, we can survive for years underground once we get to shelter, Bowen. Even with the extreme surface temperatures, Earth’s core is still molten metal and will continue to generate sufficient heat for our lifetime and beyond if we are far enough underground. We’ll be the last of our species, living in a hole in the ground like our ancestors of thousands of years ago. We will end as we began. Fitting.”