“Tell me about Mark Shackleton, the government employee who stole the database and was shot and seriously wounded.”
“I knew him from college. I was there when he was shot. He seemed like a sad fellow, I’d say pathetic.”
“What motivated him to perpetrate the hoax of the Doomsday case?”
“I think it was greed. He said he wanted a better life.”
“Greed.”
“Yes. He was a very smart man. He was in a position to pull it off.”
“If you hadn’t broken the case.”
“I had help-my partner, Special Agent Nancy Lipinski.” He sought her out with his eyes from behind one of the cameras and smiled at her. “She’s my wife now.”
“Fortunate woman,” Cassie said coquettishly. “The US government doesn’t want us to know about the Library.”
“I think that’s pretty obvious, yes.”
“And people within the government were willing to kill to keep the secret.”
“People have died.”
“You were a target.”
“I was.”
“Is that why you went public, why you gave the story to the press?”
He leaned forward as much as he could. “Look, I’m a patriot. I was in the FBI. I believe in law and order and our system of justice. The government can’t be judge, jury, and executioner even if they’re protecting classified data. I have every reason to believe that they were going to silence me, my family, and my friends if I didn’t act. They killed people trying to get at me. I’d rather my fate be in the hands of my fellow citizens.”
“I’m told that you’re not going to answer questions about Mr. and Mrs. Lipinski or about how you got wounded. You’re recovering well, I trust?”
“Yeah. All of that will come out eventually, I guess. And thanks, I’m going to be fine.”
“When you were briefing the press on the supposed Doomsday case, they called you the Pied Piper. Are you?”
“I can’t play the flute, and I don’t particularly like rats.”
“You know what I mean.”
“I’m sure as heck not a follower, but I’ve never thought of myself as a leader either.”
“That may change tonight. Tell me, why did you choose to give this to a very young reporter at The Washington Post who broke the story yesterday in that remarkable front-page article?”
“He’s my daughter’s husband. I figured this might give his career a kick.”
She laughed, “What honesty!” Then she got serious again. “So, Will, last words: what should be done? Is the Library going to be released to the public? Should it be released to the public?”
“Will it be? Maybe somebody ought to ask the President that tonight. Should it be? I’d say, put a lot of smart and good people from all over the world in a big room and sort it out. It’s not for me to decide. It’s for the people to decide.”
When the tungsten lights were off, and Will’s lapel mike was shed, Nancy came out of the shadows, embraced him, and held on for dear life. “We got them,” she whispered. “We got the bastards. There’s nothing they can do to us now. We’re safe.”
The President of the United States gave a brief speech, heavy on national-security themes about the dangers the country faced from foreign enemies and the vital importance of intelligence operations. He obliquely acknowledged the role of Area 51 in the grand scheme of intelligence assets and promised to consult with congressional and world leaders in the coming days and weeks.
At his flat in Islington, Toby Parfitt, read his home-delivered copy of The Guardian while a croissant warmed in the toaster oven. A journalist had found the old Internet auction listing from the Pierce & Whyte catalogue. On the front page was a picture of the 1527 book with a “no comment” comment from Toby, who had been rung by the reporter the evening before for his views.
In fact he had strong views, though none for public consumption. He had held the book in his hands! He had felt an emotional connection to it. It was undoubtedly one of the most valuable books on the planet! And now there were claims that a Shakespearean sonnet had been secreted in its endpapers!
Two hundred thousand pounds! He’d sold it for only two hundred thousand pounds!
His hand shook as he lifted his cup of breakfast tea to his lips.
In a few days, the Post announced that no one was getting access to its copy of the database until a federal lawsuit seeking its return wended its way through the system, presumably all the way to the Supreme Court. In the meantime, the paper’s newest star reporter, Greg Davis, began doing interviews and proved to be good at them.
And the media circus and the public outcry did not abate, nor would they for a very long time. Life and death were very hot topics.
On Garden Street, north of Harvard Square, most of the staff at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics were having lunch at the campus cafeteria or at their desks.
Neil Gershon, an associate professor of astrophysics at Harvard and the Assistant Director of the Minor Planet Center, was cleaning a gob of mayo off his keyboard which had squirted out the end of his roast beef wrap. One of his grad students came into his office cubicle and watched with amusement.
“I’m happy to entertain you, Govi. Can I help you with something?”
The young Indian researcher smiled and accommodated his boss’s forgetfulness. “You told me I could see you lunchtime, remember?”
“Oh yeah. February ninth, 2027.”
Astrophysicists were suddenly popular.
The Post article and the Piper interview had unleashed a torrent of academic and amateur speculation on humanity-eliminating events. To dampen down the hysteria, governments turned to scientists, and scientists turned to their computer models. While they worked on the problem the popular press blithely dived in.
That very morning, USA Today published a survey of three thousand Americans asking about their favorite hypotheses concerning that suddenly famous date. There were a lot of theories ranging from the plausible to the ridiculous; a quarter of Americans believed that an alien invasion was in the cards, War of the Worlds — style. Divine retribution and the Last Judgment scored fairly high too. Asteroids were also in the double digits.
A task force was immediately established at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena comprehensively to explore some of the plausible extraplanetary scenarios. The Minor Planet Center at Harvard-Smithsonian was assigned to sift through their Near-Earth Asteroid Tracking database to eliminate collision threats.
That was quickly accomplished. Of the 962 Potentially Hazardous Asteroids, PHAs, in the database, only one was relevant to the 2027 time frame: 137108 (1999 AN 10), an Apollo-class near-earth asteroid discovered in 1999 at MIT’s Lincoln Lab. It was a very large body, almost thirty kilometers in diameter, but only of casual interest. Its nearest pass to earth in the next one thousand years was going to take place on August 7, 2027 at a distance of 390,000 kilometers. On the ten-point Torino Impact Hazard Scale, the asteroid rated only an anemic score of one, hardly noticeable.
To be ultraconservative and thorough, Gershon had assigned his best student, Govind Naidu, to relook at the asteroid and update its orbital parameters. The NASA project had a priority designation, and Naidu was able to cut into the queue to task the forty-eight-inch telescopes at the Maui Space Surveillance Site and at the Palomar Observatory to reimage 137108. He was also given eight precious hours of time on the government’s supercomputer at the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.
“You’ve got the new MSSS and Palomar data?” Gershon asked.
“Yeah. You want to go over to my workstation?”
“Just log on from here.”
“You’ve got mayo on your keypad.”
“And this is against your religion?” Gershon got up and relinquished his chair. “I’ve got a telecon with JPL this afternoon, and I want this nailed.”
Naidu sat down and logged on to the observatory databases. “Okay, here’s the orbital plot for 137108 as of the last observation point in July 2008. Right now, it’s past Jupiter heading inbound with an orbital period of 1.76 years. Here’s the last simulation-let me fast-forward to August 2027. You see, there, it gets within 400,000 kilometers of us.”