He made his way past the jungle gym and found his teacher. “Miss Cohan,” he said, tugging at her skirt. “What’s that?”
She used a hand to shield her eyes as she looked up in the direction he was pointing. “That’s just an airplane, Ricky.”
Ricky Jericho wasn’t one to contradict his teachers lightly. But he shook his head. “No, it’s not,” he said. “It can’t be. It’s not moving.”
My mind was swirling, and my intestines were knotting. A new day was dawning, not just in Toronto, but for the entire Milky Way. In fact, even observers in far-distant galaxies would surely see the growing brightness once sufficient time had elapsed for the light to reach them. It beggared the imagination. Betelgeuse was indeed going supernova.
I put Don on the speaker phone, and he and Hollus conversed back and forth, with me interjecting the occasional worried question. What was happening, I gathered, was this: in every active star, hydrogen and helium undergo fusion, producing successively heavier elements. But, if the star is sufficiently massive, when the fusion chain reaches iron, energy starts being absorbed rather than released, causing a ferrous core to build up. The star grows too dense to support itself: the outward explosive thrust of its internal fusion no longer counteracts the huge pull of its own gravity. The core collapses into degenerate matter — atomic nuclei crushed together, forming a volume only twenty kilometers across but with a mass many times that of Sol. And when infalling hydrogen and helium from the outer layers of the star suddenly hit this new, hard surface, they fuse instantly. The fusion blast and the shockwave of the collision propagate back out, blowing off the star’s gaseous atmosphere and releasing a torrent of radio noise, light, heat, x rays, cosmic rays, and neutrinos — a deadly sleet pouring out in all directions, an expanding spherical shell of death and destruction shining brighter than all the other stars in the galaxy combined: a supernova.
And that, apparently, was happening right now to Betelgeuse. Its diameter was expanding rapidly; within days, it would be bigger than Earth’s entire solar system.
Earth would be protected for a time: our atmosphere would keep the initial onslaught from reaching the ground. But there was more coming. Much more.
I’d tuned the radio in my office to CFTR, an all-news station. As reports started appearing on Earth’s TV and radio stations, some people rushed to caves and mine shafts. It wouldn’t make any difference. The end of the world was coming — and with a bang, not a whimper.
Those Forhilnors and Wreeds currently visiting Earth, perhaps along with a few human passengers, might escape, at least for a time; they could maneuver their starship to keep the bulk of the planet between themselves and Betelgeuse, acting as a shield of stone and iron almost thirteen thousand kilometers thick. But there was no way they could outrun the expanding shell of death; it would take the Merelcas a full year to accelerate to close to the speed of light.
But even if that ship could escape, the Forhilnor and Wreed homeworlds could not; they would soon be facing the same onslaught, the same scourge. The asteroids that hit Sol III and Beta Hydri III and Delta Pavonis II sixty-five million years ago were minor blows in comparison, mere flesh wounds from which the ecosystems rebounded within a matter of decades.
But there would be no rebounding this time. This would be the sixth great extinction, felt equally on all three worlds. And whether biology had started in this solar system on Mars rather than Earth, whether it really had arisen multiple times on the Forhilnor world, whether the Wreeds even knew that it was the sixth extinction, didn’t matter.
For this would also be the last great extinction, the concluding chapter, a wiping clean of the slate, the final turn in the game of Life.
30
What do you do in the last moments of your life? Unlike most of the six billion humans who had just received a death sentence, I actually had been preparing for my own demise. But I’d expected it to come at a more dilatory pace, with me in a hospital bed, accompanied by Susan, maybe my brother Bill, a few friends, and perhaps even brave little Ricky.
But the explosion of Betelgeuse was utterly unheralded; we didn’t see it coming. Oh, as Hollus had said earlier, we knew Betelgeuse would doubtless eventually go supernova, but there was no reason to expect it to happen right now.
Toronto’s subway system was jammed already, according to the radio reports. People were going down into the stations, into the subway cars, hoping that they would be protected by being underground. They were refusing to vacate the trains, even at the ends of the lines.
And the roads outside the ROM had already turned into parking lots, total gridlock. I wanted to be with family just as much as everyone else did, but there didn’t seem to be any way to manage it. I tried repeatedly calling Susan’s office, but all I got were busy signals.
Of course, death wouldn’t be instantaneous. There would be weeks, or even months, before the ecosystem collapsed. Right now, Earth’s ozone layer was protecting us from the high-energy photons, and, of course, the sleet of bulky charged particles, traveling slower than the speed of light, hadn’t arrived yet. But soon enough the onslaught from Betelgeuse would strip off the ozone layer, and hard radiation both from that exploding star and from our own sun would reach the ground, breaking down living tissue. Surely I would be able to reunite with my wife and son before the end. But for now, it seemed, my company would be the simulacrum of an alien being.
The first blast from Betelgeuse had already disrupted the satellite-based long-distance telephone network, and so I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised to see the avatar wink in and out of existence periodically, as the electromagnetic cacophony from Orion interfered with the communication between the real Hollus over Ecuador and her holographic stand-in here in Toronto.
“I wish I could be with Susan,” I said, looking at the Forhilnor across my desk, cluttered with unfinished business.
To my astonishment, Hollus actually raised her voices — something I’d never heard her do before. “At least you will likely get to see your family before the end. You think you are far from home? I cannot even contact my children. If Betelgeuse is hitting Earth with this sort of force, it will slam Beta Hydri III, as well. I cannot even radio a goodbye to Kassold and Pealdon; not only is there too much interference, but the radio signal would not reach them for twenty-four years.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I wasn’t thinking.”
“No, you were not,” she snapped again, holographic spittle actually flying from her left mouth. But after a moment, she calmed down a little. “Apologies,” she said. “It is just that I love my children so much. To know that they — that my entire race — is dying . . .”
I looked at my friend. She’d been away from her world for so long already — out of touch with what was going on back home for years now. Her son and daughter were grown when she left on her grand tour of eight star systems, but now — now, they were likely middle aged, perhaps even biologically older than Hollus herself was, for she had traveled at relativistic speeds during much of her journey.
It was worse than that, actually, come to think of it. Betelgeuse was in Earth’s northern sky; Beta Hydri in its southern one — which meant that Earth was between the two stars. It would be several years before the brightening of Betelgeuse would be visible from Beta Hydri III — but there was no way to get a warning to that world; nothing could reach it faster than the angry photons from Betelgeuse that were already on their way.