He woke to pounding on the front door. Bright moonlight washed in through his bedroom window. From the angle, it was about 4:30 in the morning. Craig staggered out of bed and pulled on his robe and trudged to the door.
When he opened it, a spotlight far brighter than the Moon glared straight into his eyes. His astronomer’s reflexes kicked in and he threw his left arm over his eyes to protect his night vision, simultaneously shouting, “Turn off the fucking light!”
It didn’t go off. Instead, a resonant female made-for-TV voice said, “We’re here at the home of Craig Hendrickson, discoverer of the asteroid that is poised to destroy the Earth in a scant six months’ time. Mr. Hendrickson, can you tell us how it feels to be the harbinger of doom for our entire planet?” She pronounced it “Harbin-grr,” like a dog might.
He lowered his arm and squinted into the spotlight. There was a TV van parked in front of his house. A shadowy bulk below the spotlight must have been the camera and its operator. To the right of it stood Andrea LeTour, the local news station’s morning newscaster. Her bleach-blonde hair looked salon-perfect, as did her makeup. Craig had always thought she looked pretty hot on TV, but in person she looked like a plastic mannequin.
“That’s ‘harbinger,’ ” he said. “It has a soft G.”
“What?”
“And who says the asteroid is going to come anywhere close to Earth in six months?”
“You did,” Andrea said. “On your nerd site. You said it will cross Earth’s orbit again on its way out, and everybody knows that Earth will be on the other side of the Sun by then, too, right in the asteroid’s path.”
Craig opened his mouth to refute her, but he couldn’t decide where to start. The asteroid wouldn’t have anything like the same period to its orbit that the Earth did. The odds of its orbital plane crossing the Earth’s at precisely the right point were vanishingly small. The odds of it being big enough to do any serious damage even if it did hit were smaller yet. And so on. But every time he’d tried to explain it before, the idiots of the world had twisted his words to suit their own ends.
He ran a hand through his hair, leaving it standing straight up in front. He widened his eyes and twitched them back and forth between Andrea and the camera, because he’d heard that you were never supposed to look directly into the camera. And he said, “All right, you’ve obviously figured it out. We’ve been hiding it because we didn’t want to start a panic, but you’re absolutely right. The Earth is doomed. Doomed! And it’s worse than we thought. The asteroid is as big as Mars! There’s no chance that life will survive at all unless we build a huge ark and launch it into space.”
Andrea’s eyes grew wide. “Are… are you sure?”
“Absolutely,” Craig said. “You said it yourself; the Earth is going to be on the other side of the Sun in six months. And when the asteroid gets there, smack!” He slapped his right fist into his cupped left palm. “What’s left of Earth will be a ring of debris orbiting the Moon.”
Andrea swallowed. She looked up into the night sky for a second, then pulled herself together and asked, “What do you plan to do between now and then?”
“What am I going to do? I’m an astronomer. I’m going to buy the biggest telescope money can buy. What are you going to do?”
She thought about it for maybe five seconds. “I’ve always wanted to go to France. That’s where my ancestors are from. Maybe I’ll go. Live it up a little before we all… all die.” She dabbed at a tear.
Craig gallantly helped her with the sleeve of his robe, which pulled open enough to expose his chest. She looked frankly at his pecs, and for just a second he saw a look in her eye that told him what else she might be interested in doing between now and impact, then she sniffed and dabbed at her eyes and looked away until she’d regained her composure. Craig felt like a heel for leading her on, but before he could say anything more she said, “Thank you for your time, Mr. Hendrickson,” and she and her cameraman headed for their van.
Exasperation is not a good defense for causing a global panic, Craig learned. He quickly recanted when the Homeland Security goons showed up barely an hour later, and he went on news program after news program in the days to follow, debunking his own story and the dozens of other stories that floated around the internet, but as historians have learned since the first clay tablets were inscribed, once you get bad data into the system it’s impossible to get it out. And bad news spreads far faster than good, so the truth never stood a chance among the kind of people who like to forward email.
It didn’t help that the President went on TV to reassure everyone. After the economy had collapsed completely despite government assurances that prosperity was just around the corner, nobody trusted the government to get the time of day right. If the feds said the asteroid was going to miss, then of course it was headed straight for us.
Bad news sells, and times were indeed hard, so otherwise respectable magazines wound up running articles on the coming devastator, complete with diagrams showing the solar system—nowhere near to scale—with the path of the asteroid drawn as a bold line cutting right past the Sun and intersecting the Earth on the other side of its orbit in a big explosion. In tiny little print below the diagram they put the disclaimer: “Orbital path of asteroid is speculative.” In light gray halftone. And this after the orbit was finally calculated and discovered to come nowhere near Earth.
Craig only avoided prison because the prisons were full of people who decided to spend their last few months enjoying other people’s money and possessions. That slowed down considerably when people started fighting back and self-defense against robbery stopped being prosecuted as a crime. Another email that circulated around the internet claimed that the average intelligence of the world had risen about three I.Q. points by the time the wave of thief killings and grudge murders had died down. Craig didn’t believe that one, either, although it made him wonder.
Even though he knew the asteroid was going to miss, he bought a twenty-inch Starmaster telescope with the remains of his savings. Despite all the hoopla, it was his asteroid. He’d discovered it, and by God he was going to watch it cruise past with the biggest scope he could afford.
So were a lot of other amateur astronomers, it turned out. Telescope sales picked up dramatically worldwide, to the point where the manufacturers had to hire back their laid-off staff and then some to keep up with the demand.
A lot of companies found themselves in the same situation. Car manufacturers felt a sudden surge in demand for touring cars as people decided to take that last big road trip before the apocalypse. Boat builders found themselves selling out their entire stock within days. Computers and iPods and cell phones flew off the shelves as everyone upgraded to the latest, coolest gadgets while they still had a chance.
Even people who knew there was no doomsday coming still found themselves rethinking their priorities, and more often than not they decided to live it up a little, too. And not long after that, they began finding jobs again: providing the goods and services that a world full of sudden spenders demanded.
When Asteroid 2011 JD Hendrickson made its closest passage to Earth—a comfortable three-quarter million miles away—Craig held a star party at his favorite dark-sky site to celebrate. He invited all his astronomy friends from town, his co-workers at the mirror-coating lab he’d started with seed money from Celestron, and just for the heck of it, Andrea LeTour.
“You made fun of me,” she said when he reached her at the TV station.