“So it might be nothing,” said the chairman.
“It could be that a hundred years will pass before we go from eight chunks to nine chunks,” Doob said, nodding at him, “but four days ago I got worried that it might be one of those things that looks more like an explosion. So my grad students and I have been crunching some numbers. Building a mathematical model of the process that we can use to get a handle on the time scale.”
“And what are your results, Dr. Harris? I assume you have some, or else you wouldn’t be here.”
“The good news is that the Earth is one day going to have a beautiful system of rings, just like Saturn. The bad news is that it’s going to be messy.”
“In other words,” said Pete Starling, “the chunks of the moon are going to keep banging into each other indefinitely and breaking up into smaller and smaller pieces, spreading out into a system of rings. But some rocks are going to fall on the ground and break things.”
“And can you tell me, Dr. Harris, when this is going to happen? Over what period of time?” the president asked.
“We’re still gathering data, tuning the model’s parameters,” Doob said. “So my estimates could all be off by a factor of two, maybe three. Exponentials are tricky that way. But what it looks like to me is this.”
He clicked through to a new graph: a blue curve showing a slow, steady climb over time. “The time scale at the bottom is something like one to three years. During that time, the number of collisions and the number of new fragments are going to grow steadily.”
“What is BFR?” asked Pete Starling. For the graph’s vertical scale was labeled thus.
“Bolide Fragmentation Rate,” Doob said. “The rate at which new rocks are being produced.”
“Is that a standard term?” Pete wanted to know. His tone was not so much hostile as unnerved.
“No,” Doob said, “I made it up. Yesterday. On the plane.” He was tempted to add something like I am allowed to coin terms but didn’t want things to get snarky this early in the meeting.
Seeing that Pete had been silenced, at least for a moment, Doob tried to get back into his rhythm. “We’ll see an increasing number of meteorite impacts. Some will cause great damage. But overall, life is not going to change that much. But then”—he clicked again, and the plot bent sharply upward, turning white—“we are going to witness an event that I am calling the White Sky. It’ll happen over hours, or days. The system of discrete planetoids that we can see up there now is going to grind itself up into a vast number of much smaller fragments. They are going to turn into a white cloud in the sky, and that cloud is going to spread out.”
Click. The graph continued shooting upward, rocketing up into a new domain and turning red.
“A day or two after the White Sky event will begin a thing I am calling the Hard Rain. Because not all of those rocks are going to stay up there. Some of them are going to fall into the Earth’s atmosphere.”
He turned the projector off. This was an unusual move, but it snapped them all out of PowerPoint hypnosis and forced them to look at him. The aides in the back of the room were still thumbing their phones, but they didn’t matter.
“By ‘some,’” Doob said, “I mean trillions.”
The room remained silent.
“It is going to be a meteorite bombardment such as the Earth has not seen since the primordial age, when the solar system was formed,” Doob said. “Those fiery trails we’ve been seeing in the sky lately, as the meteorites come in and burn up? There will be so many of those that they will merge into a dome of fire that will set aflame anything that can see it. The entire surface of the Earth is going to be sterilized. Glaciers will boil. The only way to survive is to get away from the atmosphere. Go underground, or go into space.”
“Well, obviously that is very hard news if it is true,” the president said.
They all sat and thought about it silently for a period of time that might have been one minute or five.
“We will have to do both,” the president said. “Go into space, and underground. Obviously the latter is easier.”
“Yes.”
“We can get to work building underground bunkers for . . .” and she caught herself before saying something impolitic. “For people to take refuge in.”
Doob didn’t say anything.
The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff said, “Dr. Harris, I’m an old logistics guy. I deal in stuff. How much stuff do we need to get underground? How many sacks of potatoes and rolls of toilet paper per occupant? I guess what I’m asking is, just how long is the Hard Rain going to last?”
Doob said, “My best estimate is that it will last somewhere between five thousand and ten thousand years.”
“NONE OF YOU WILL EVER STAND ON TERRA FIRMA, TOUCH YOUR loved ones, or breathe the atmosphere of your mother planet again,” the president said. “That is a terrible fate. And yet it is a better fate than seven billion people trapped on the Earth’s surface can hope for. The last ship home has sailed. From now on, launch vehicles will rise up into orbit, but they will not go back for ten thousand years.”
The twelve men and women in the Banana sat in silence. Like the destruction of the moon itself, it was too big a thing for them to take in, too large for human emotion to get around. Dinah focused on trivia. Such as: just how damned good J.B.F.—the president—was at saying stuff like this.
“Dr. Harris,” said Konrad Barth, the astronomer. “I am sorry, Madam President, but is it possible to get Dr. Harris back into the picture?”
“Of course,” said Julia Bliss Flaherty, who, with some reluctance, stepped sideways, making room for the larger frame of Dr. Harris. Dinah thought that he looked shrunken and diminished compared to the famous TV scientist. Then she remembered what he had explained to them a few minutes ago, and felt uncharitable for having drawn that comparison. What must it have been like, to be the only man on Earth to know that the Earth was doomed?
“Yes, Konrad,” he said.
“Doob, I’m not disagreeing with your calculations. But has this been peer reviewed? Is there a chance that there is some basic error, a misplaced decimal point, something?”
Harris had begun nodding his head halfway through Konrad’s question. It was not a happy kind of nod. “Konrad,” he said, “it’s not just me.”
“We have signals intelligence suggesting that the Chinese figured it out a day before we did,” the president said, “and the British, the Indians, the French, Germans, Russians, Japanese—all of their scientists are coming to more or less the same conclusions.”
“Two years?” Dinah piped up. Her voice was hoarse, broken. Everyone looked at her. “Until the White Sky?”
“People seem to be converging on that figure, yeah,” Dr. Harris said. “Twenty-five months, plus or minus two.”
“I know that this is a terrible shock for all of you,” said the president. “But I wanted the crew of the ISS to be among the first to know about it. Because I need you. We, the people of the United States and of Earth, need you.”
“For what?” Dinah asked. In no sense was she the official spokesman for Izzy’s crew of twelve. That was Ivy’s job. But Dinah could tell, just from looking at her, that Ivy was in no condition to speak.
“We are beginning to talk to our counterparts in other spacefaring nations about creating an ark,” the president said. “A repository of the entire genetic heritage of the Earth. We have two years to build it. Two years to get as many people and as much equipment as we can into orbit. The nucleus of that ark is going to be Izzy.”
Absurdly, Dinah felt a mild flicker of annoyance that J.B.F. had appropriated their informal term for the ISS. But she knew how it was. She had spent enough time with the NASA PR people to understand. Things had to be humanized, to be given cute names. All the terrified kids down there who knew they were going to die would have to watch upbeat videos about how Izzy was going to carry the legacy of the dead planet through the Hard Rain. They would take out their crayons and draw cartoon pictures of Izzy with a torus halo and a big rock on her ass and a little anthropomorphic smiley face on the side of the Zvezda Service Module.