Comet! (an Ell Donsaii story #5 ) (37 page)

They sent
two
impactors on Monday,
and then two more every day for
two
more weeks
.
They could have sent more per day
,
but the currently available natural gas pipeline at D5R couldn’t supply enough gas
to run
more than two rockets
’ engines
at a time.
Once it had become routine
,
they took turns with one person doing everything, especially on the weekends and over Thanksgiving.

At the end of the month
Allan reported that they’d achieved a deflection of an additional 60 kph for a total deflection of
145
,000 kilometers by the time it crossed Earth’s orbit.

Wilson
turned to Ell, “We seem to have gotten more deflection out of the
later
impactors than the first ones. Why would that be?”

Ell
stared into the distance, “Well, the impacts have
blown
some
material
off of the comet by now
,
so it masses a little less and should be
slightly
easier to deflect. But I think it’s probably mostly due to off center impacts. These rockets are flying
nearly fourteen million
kilometers while they’re accelerating
,
and even
though they have
a high level AI in control
,
I think it’s amazing that none of the impactors have
actually
missed
the comet
. But
most
of them probably
do
hit a little off center and don’t maximize the
possible
deflection when they do. I think
that most of the change is because
Allan is getting better
aim
and
hitting
closer
to
the
center
of the comet
as time goes along
,
so we’re getting more deflection per hit
.
”

Ell
looked around at
the
little
“comet group” and said, “Should we keep hitting it?”

Roger said, “All our calculations say
Earth
should be safe now
,
but things might get messed up during perihelion
. I vote we wait until it comes around the sun and recalculate its trajectory then
,
when the orbit
al trajectory
should be more stable. Then we can hit it more if we want.”

“We’ll have to hit it harder to move it the same distance then.”

“I know, and it scares me. But if it needs to be moved more, that would be because we have big errors in our current calculations. If that’s the case
,
we could be moving it closer with what we’re doing now, we really have no idea.”

Ell grinned, “Yeah
and
if we knock off for a while now, we can all
take
a
nice
break for Christmas.” She waggled her eyebrows and grinned at them.
“However, I’m gonna ask Sheila to talk to the LOX supplier and LNG supplier and get them to put in
huge
tanks for us and tell them we may want
very
large quantities in January
. Just
in case
we need to hit it with a
lot
more impactors
in a short period of time…
we’ll want to be abl
e to accelerate them at high Gs and we can’t do that with gaseous propellants.”

The team all nodded, Roger saying,
“If things look bad then, we may need to bring in everyone at D5R for an ‘all hands on deck’ effort to save the planet.”

“Yeah,
and
we might have to
install
some
illegal ports at LOX and LNG distributors if our survival depends on it…”

Chapter
Twelve

Simon Shelton looked askance at his flute of champagne. “You know,” he said to Ephraim Goldwasser, the Nobel Prize winner in Chemistry, “You’d think that after giving literally thousands of lectures that something like this wouldn’t be able to make me nervous anymore.”

Ephraim chuckled, “I know what you mean. Something about being here is making me nervous too.” He reached in his pocket for an antacid.

Shelton
suddenly said, “I can’t drink this.” He turned to the young lady who’d just appeared at his elbow, “Take this away please, honey,” he said holding the flute of champagne to her.

She said, “Certainly sir,” and whisked it away.

Shelton
thought to himself,
These Swedish girls are astonishingly
pretty
aren’t they? And they all seem to speak English. That one really didn’t even seem to have an accent.
Even wearing a tuxed
o, she managed to look feminine.
  And somehow familiar. Probably looks like some movie star.
He noticed Goldwasser staring at him in horror. “What?”

“The young lady you gave your glass to…”

“Yes?” he said turning to look after her again.

That was Donsaii, the Prize winner in Physics.

“Oh my God,” he exclaimed in horror. “Of course!” He recognized her now, how could he not? His wife and friends always accused him of being socially inept.

Shelton
didn’t have an opportunity to apologize until after the girl had given her astonishing lecture
on trans
-
dimensional quantum effects,
making him wonder how he deserved to be on the same stage. He had heard of the paper that won her the Nobel
,
but hadn’t realized that the paper was the basis of the new
PGR
communication chips. He didn’t seem to be the only one
who didn’t
realize that the paper was also the basis for “trans-dimensional” ports that enabled her company to rescue the
International
Space Station a few months ago. Like many others apparently, he’d thought they did it with small rockets. Which, he guessed, was partly true…

“Ms. Donsaii?”

She turned to him, short strawberry blond hair flaring out momentarily. “Yes, Dr.
Shelton
?”

“I’d just like to apologize for handing you my glass earlier, I just… just didn’t recognize…”

“Oh, don’t worry,” she flashed him a stunning smile, “I’m used to it. I’m trying to enjoy looking
‘
too young.
’
I know it won’t last forever
…
”

***

Kitt’s Peak, Arizona
—
The
spokesman for
the observatory says that no one has so far been able to explain the
cause of the
enormous “tail” of Comet Hearth-Daster. “It is breaking all records.
The comet itself is relatively small as comets go
but
the volume of material which has been expulsed by the comet is much greater than
that of
any
other
recorded
comet
.” In addition, observers at
the
many thousands of telescopes which have been trained on it have commented that the outgassing seems to come in huge pulses at semi regular intervals
of about two per day
like a geyser here on earth. Because of the tremendous interest
that has been generated
, many
of those
observers have
re-
calculated its orbit to see how close it will pass by the Earth after it rounds the sun. Although
consensus
projections now show it missing the Earth by about 170,000 kilometers
,
some
observers
have commented that the huge outgassings are very fortunate
for us
. This is
because its orbit actually had a fairly high likelihood of intersecting Earth’s prior to the
alteration of its trajectory by the
huge jets of material
. In any case, those of you
already
enjoying the chance
to observe
this
comet
are in for a real treat when a comet with such an enormous tail passes very close to us in February!

Voight stepped into Epaulding’s office
, “Well
,
we seem to have successfully sold the ‘geyser theory’ to the public
,
but I don’t know what we’re going to do when someone really thinks this through.”

Epaulding said, “Let me make sure I understand our
‘
line
’
in case I’m asked about it. The concept is that the comet has a huge cavity
inside it
that is squirting material through an orifice as the comet heats up. These squirting episodes form the intermittent jets of material that have produced the huge tail and pushed it off of its original trajectory?”

“Yep.”

“And som
e bright boy is gonna ask me how there comes to be so much heat deep in the comet to boil a geyser?”

“Yep.”

Epaulding grimaced, “And I’m going to say we don’t know, then remind him that it doesn’t take much heat to boil frozen gasses, hoping to distract them from the fact that the surface is what’s being heated by the Sun.”

“Yep.”

“Jeez, that’s weak.”

“Just hope none of them ask you if the comet’s rotating, and if so how come the geyser only erupts when it’s turned one direction. Or how a geyser could generate that much energy. Or…”

Epaulding put his hands over his ears in horror, “What the hell
is
happening then?!”

Voight shrugged, “Someone’s bombing it to push its orbit.”

“Who?! The Chinese?”

“We don’t think any of the usual players have the capability.”

“Who the hell does?!”

Voight rolled his eyes and chuckled,
“Who has all kinds of capabilities that we don’t understand?”

Epaulding’s eyes widened, “You think
Donsaii’s
doing this?!”

Voight shrugged again, “Chinese, Japanese,
Europe
,
Russia
, all launch with chemical rockets producing such low impulse that they’d have had to have known about this comet years ago to get something out there to match orbits with it.”

“But, but,
Donsaii’s
rockets can only go 22kps. They couldn’t get there any more than we can.  Besides, about a month ago she called me to ask if it was a danger to us and I
told
her it wasn’t.”

“Bossman…
” Voight raised an eyebrow.
“
That girl’s
smart
. She already
knew
it was gonna hit us, she was just checkin’ to see if
we’d
figured it out yet.”

Epaulding’s eyes widened, “Crap! And I told her a bald faced lie…”

“Yep.”

Epaulding’s eyes narrowed, “But wait a minute, you haven’t explained how she got a mission out there to the comet when she’s limited to 22 kps just like we are.”

“Bossman…” Voight said patiently, then shook his head. “
You
lied to her about the comet’s trajectory. You really think she’s shown you all
her
cards?”

Epaulding buried his head in his hands, “Oh, Jeez.”

***

Roger invited Ell to the Emmerit Christmas dinner
again
. She felt conflicted. Going seemed unfaithful to Emma
,
who had told Ell that Roger seemed to be responding to her somewhat.
Ell
and Roger hadn’t been going out. Maybe that could be attributed to the comet crisis
,
but there had been some opportunity when they were down to
a
routine of shooting two impactors a day. And she’d really had fun at their big crazy Christmas dinner last year. After dithering a bit she’d accepted.

To her amazement
,
Ell again found herself seated next to Grandmother Emmerit. Since the seats at the huge table were drawn by lot it seemed an alarming coincidence.
Once again Roger was seated across the table and down a ways. Grandmother Emmerit turned to her and said, “Ell Donsaii if I remember right?
”