Ulrich took a bite from his pretzel. “Suppose somebody shows up with a ’dozer? Digs down deep to the ceiling. Employs a jackhammer.”
“That’s six feet of reinforced concrete to go through,” Kane said.
“Well, like Jack said, they’ll be desperate.”
Forrest said, “We all know there’s no such thing as an impregnable castle. We can only prepare for what we can prepare for. But just in case, we’d better have some kind of Broken Arrow in mind.”
All three men pondered the unthinkable. A measure of last resort was not something to be overlooked.
“We could plant topside charges,” Ulrich suggested.
“Maybe,” Forrest said. “Where’s the Dynamic Duo?”
“Still working on the wiring,” Kane said. “The generators are in place but they’re not hooked into Launch Control yet. The ventilation system probably needs a lot of work too. Those motors haven’t been run up in years.”
“Well, that goddamn realtor assured me they still run,” Forrest said. “Once we’re powered up, give them a try.”
“You’re the man.”
“And what about that realtor?” Ulrich said. “Say she survives? She knows you went asshole-deep in debt to get this place. She might start asking questions. Might think we knew this was gonna happen all along.”
“I hadn’t thought of that,” Forrest said, taking a moment to consider the point. “Well, we can’t take any chances. Marcus, you’d better kill the real-estate lady. Make it look like an accident. Toss a toaster into the tub with her.”
Ulrich couldn’t help cracking a smile.
Kane stood chewing. “Know what else we ain’t figured out? Vasquez. How much insulin can we store and how long will it keep if we lose power?”
Forrest looked at Ulrich. “I guess we’ll have to kill Vasquez too. There’s no sense in having him down here eating our food if he’s only going to die.”
Ulrich snorted. “You’re a fucking jerk.”
“This is true,” Forrest said, dropping back into the chair with a sharp squeak. “We need some new chairs too.” He held up the textbook he’d been reading, a work on heavenly bodies by an astronomer named Ester Thorn. “Look guys, prehistoric man already pulled off this exact same mission with nothing more than a double digit IQ and some animal hide. Don’t tell me that five battle-tested Green Berets won’t be able to think their way through this challenge. That’s all this is, another mission, so we knuckle down and we drive on.”
Two
Marty Chittenden stood in the hall outside a classroom at the California Institute of Technology Jet Propulsion Laboratory, anxiously waving a red file to get the attention of Professor Susan Denton, who was in the middle of giving a lecture on astrophysics. When she finally noticed what at first glance looked like a lunatic outside her classroom, she paused in mid-sentence, surprised to see a fellow doctoral candidate from her days at Berkeley.
Susan remembered him well, Marty having spent the better part of a school year trying to win her heart. Though they had gone to movies a couple of times and shared some laughs, she hadn’t felt much chemistry between them, but they remained friends until they finished graduate school and then went their separate ways.
Now here he was out of the blue, five years later, fervently beckoning her into the hallway. She couldn’t imagine what could possibly be so important.
“Excuse me for a second,” Susan said to her class, and stepped out into the hall. She was five-six with red hair, freckles, her intensely expressive hazel eyes focused on this visitor from the past. “I’m in the middle of a class, Marty. So please make this quick.”
“I need you to check some calculations for me,” he said earnestly, offering the file.
“I’d be happy to,” she said patiently. “But I need to finish class. Give me half an hour.”
Susan turned back toward the room, but Marty impulsively grabbed for her elbow. She jerked away, suddenly wild-eyed. “Don’t touch me!” she hissed acidly.
He stepped back, stunned by her uncharacteristic viciousness. “I’m sorry,” he said, sensing that she had experienced something terrible since their last meeting. “I didn’t mean to… it’s just that… it’s just that this will be the most significant… most frightening discovery in all of human history.”
Susan went from angry to alarmed and intensely curious. In all the time she knew Marty, she had never seen him as melodramatic. If anything, he verged on being a classic academic bore.
“Well, God… what is it?”
“It’s an NEO, Sue, and it’s got our name on it.” He gestured with the red file folder. “I’ve got all my calculations. I’d like you to review them before I take them over to JPL.” Susan felt a sudden chill run through her. She knew Marty was an excellent astronomer and not someone prone to exaggeration. If he said the world was going to be struck by a near Earth object, chances were good to excellent it was going to happen.
“Well… how long do we have?”
“Counting today? Eighty-eight days.”
She felt her knees weaken. “Jesus,” she muttered. “Let me dismiss the class.”
She returned to the classroom then. “Okay, everybody,” she announced, I’m letting you go early today. We’ll pick up right here on Wednesday.”
The entire class sprang from their seats in a flurry of laptops and backpacks, and in less than thirty seconds the room was empty. Marty stepped in and closed the door, handing the folder to Susan.
She sat down at a student desk and skimmed through it, her almost savantlike mind checking Marty’s computations on the fly. “This can’t be right,” she muttered, searching desperately for a miscalculation. “Marty, are you sure this isn’t a comet? It’s moving at over a hundred thousand miles an hour, for God’s sake.” She sat chewing the end of her hair as Marty had seen her do so many times in the past in the library at Berkeley. The idiosyncrasy was all the more endearing now.
“Why hasn’t anyone else spotted this thing?” she wondered aloud.
Marty had gone to the window to gaze out over the Caltech campus two stories below.
“Because it’s not coming from the asteroid belt,” he said, referring to the asteroid field orbiting the sun between Mars and Jupiter, where the majority of NEOs were thought to begin their journey. “It’s an ancient rogue, Sue. It came out of deep space, and it’s probably been traveling half a billion years to get here, maybe longer.”
“But at two miles across… it’s huge. Somebody should’ve seen it sooner.”
“Yeah,” he said, turning around. “But remember, Jupiter was hit back in ’09 by a comet so big that it left an impact scar in the Jovian atmosphere the size of the Pacific Ocean… and no one knew a thing about it until after it had happened. What’s more… it was only an amateur astronomer who spotted the scar.”
“How big was the comet that wiped out the dinosaurs?” she asked. “The one that hit the Yucatan.”
“The Chicxulub bolide was nearly six miles across. It hit with an equivalent force of ten teratons of TNT and left a crater a hundred miles wide. This sucker’s only a third the same mass but it’s likely moving much faster.”
“Jesus,” she whispered. “Have you done the math on damage probabilities? Are we going out completely?”
He shrugged. “It’s hard to quantify, but the sun will be obscured for at least of couple years, so you’re talking about twenty-four months of freezing temperatures even at the equator… and with the ensuing famine? Mankind will likely survive it, but only barely. So at the very best, we’re starting over.”
“At least it’s hitting land and not water, less acid in the atmosphere. There’s no time left for anything, is there? Christ, Marty, I never even got married.”