Learning to Swear in America (21 page)

“What’s going on?” Yuri asked.

The driver was silent for a moment, then said, “I don’t know.” He looked at Yuri in the rearview mirror, as though maybe he’d explain it.

Yuri fidgeted all the way down Oak Grove Drive, past the guard gate, the California hills getting taller, the JPL buildings rising, bright, ahead of him—fully lit this late in the evening. He could see people move past office windows. The place was humming.

Yuri mumbled Nobel winners under his breath to calm himself. He was up to Arthur Holly Compton when the driver pulled up to the entrance. Yuri jerked the car door open and bounded out without looking back at the man or thanking him for the ride. He trotted up the steps and ran into the lobby, walking quickly to the conference room.

Someone had taped up a piece of computer paper beside the marker boards holding the equation. The scrawled header read, “Who I wish was here right now.” Underneath, the same hand had written, “Isaac Newton,” and someone else had added “x2.” Below, in black ink, a different hand had written, “Einstein,” and below that it read, “Niels Bohr,” “Aristotle,” “Stephen Hawking,” and “Galileo,” and below that, in the director’s precise script, “Yuri Strelnikov.”

Yuri’s face burned. It wasn’t a compliment to his abilities, ranking him with Newton and Einstein. It was a sarcastic remark about him going AWOL. Yuri turned, headed across the conference room toward Fletcher’s office, and caught a hostile stare from a couple of orbital dynamicists. There must have been a meeting, everyone gathered back from their offices, something announced—and his absence noted.

Yuri tucked his head down and caught sight of the drooping alstroemeria bloom in his buttonhole. He gently dislodged it and put it in his jacket pocket. He stepped into the hallway that held Fletcher’s office. The janitors walked down the corridor, setting up cots. The oldest one caught sight of him and tucked his head down as he unfolded another cot, taking care not to let the metal tubing clank against the wall.

Something was very wrong.

Yuri knocked quietly on Fletcher’s office door.

“If you’re not Yuri Strelnikov, you can go screw yourself,” Fletcher yelled.

“I’m Yuri Strelnikov.”

There was a pause, and then the door flew wide.

“You can still go screw yourself. Where were you?”

Yuri flushed.

“I took walk …”

“Save it.” Then Fletcher laughed, a tense noise, vocal cords vibrating tightly. “Save it. That’s good.”

Yuri looked at him curiously.

“We’ll walk to your office so you can get right to work, after your own special briefing.”

“I’m sorry.”

Fletcher waved him off.

“We got more data back.”

“Yeah?”

“It’s an unusual asteroid,” Fletcher said.

“Because of speed,” Yuri said. “Which is partly because of retrograde orbit. Instead of coming up from behind Earth, like asteroids normally do, it’s coming from front, so Earth’s orbital speed adds to total. Like head-on car collision.”

“Yeah,” Fletcher said as they rounded the corner. “That’s why this is so much faster than most asteroids—because we’re heading into it.”

“We already knew this,” Yuri said.

“But that’s not what makes it so unusual.”

Yuri looked at the side of his face, at the high forehead. There was something brittle about him, as though he’d been dipped in liquid nitrogen and if you touched him he might shatter. The director went on. “We had to figure its orbit first—would it hit—and how fast it’s moving. How long we have to work.”

They were at Yuri’s office. He stopped outside the door, still not sure where this was headed.

“We just got the spectral analysis back.”

Yuri looked at him, not getting it.

“It’s red-sloped.”

Yuri felt the hairs on the back of his neck prick up.

“No. It’s S-type. Silicaceous. They can look reddish.”

“We got the analysis. It’s red-sloped but featureless spectra,” Fletcher said.

“Is mixed composition, maybe?” His voice pitched high, and he hated himself for it. “Silica can have nickel-iron mixed in.”

Fletcher gave him a sober look. “It’s an M-type. Metal. There isn’t any question about it. And it’s almost uniform. Looks like a little palladium and iridium, but it’s almost all iron.”

They were silent for a moment. Yuri felt a sense of great quiet, of stillness, as though the barometric pressure had just plunged.

“We can’t do it,” he whispered. “Our plan to pulverize it. This thing’s mass must be—it’s not going to work.”

“No,” Fletcher said. “It’s not.”

Yuri stared at him.

“We have to come up with a new plan, and we have almost no time. And the weapons team will need some of that little time to deploy whatever we decide to use.”

“What are we going to do?”

“Die,” Fletcher said. “Unless one of you can come up with a better idea.”

Yuri ran his hand over his mouth. “M-type.”

“M-type in retrograde orbit,” Fletcher said. “The mother of all nightmares.” He scratched the back of his neck. “Meeting in the conference room in twenty minutes. We have to agree on a new strategy then, because we’ll need the rest of the time to implement it.”

Yuri stared at him. Twenty minutes?

Fletcher started to walk away, then turned.

“Another thing. Everybody stays here. Eat while you work. No showers. If you start to fall asleep, move to one of the cots.
Someone will wake you in twenty minutes.” Yuri nodded. “No walks.”

Yuri stared after the director for a full minute after he’d rounded the corner. Then he entered his office and caught the pale smudge of his face in the black window glass, and shame tasted like vomit in his mouth.

The world was ending, and he’d gone to prom.

He looked on his desk for a briefing and found nothing. They were starting over, here, shortly before midnight, six days before impact. There was nothing to report. All their work had meant nothing. His arguments with Simons and Pirkola—pointless. Nothing they had been calculating had ever had a chance, because something unfathomably fast and cold was rushing in, and they hadn’t recognized it. It was a failure of understanding.

Could this hurt his chances for the Nobel?

It was a full second before he realized that if life on Earth was wiped out, it would include the Nobel committee. It was another second before he realized that it didn’t matter anymore.

In those two seconds, the BR1019 came 142 kilometers closer.

Yuri ran back through a printout of his previous work, looking for bits that could be salvaged, then brushed it off his desktop with the back of his hand. He pulled out a clean piece of paper and wrote in Russian:
Make it stop. Shove it sideways. Move Earth out of the way. Blow it up. Make it disappear.
He wrote a dash, and
Impossible
, after each of the first four possibilities. Then he stared at the last one, and chewed on the pencil eraser.

He hadn’t been tired, but he now ground the heels of his palms
into his eyes. There had been time before. He had finished the calculations, come up with the answers his team needed, and done it easily. He might have had time to persuade Simons and Pirkola, too. Now their difference of opinion didn’t matter, because while they would have been able—just barely—to blow up a rock of BR1019’s magnitude, all the nuclear weapons in the world put together wouldn’t blow up a hunk of iron that size.

It wasn’t a matter of switching out a few numbers, calculating for a new mass. It would require a whole different approach. There might not be an answer. Nothing might work.

Yuri was on his second pencil eraser when a woman he didn’t know shouted down the hall that it was time for the meeting, and everyone should go down to the media room. Yuri stared at his desk. He had a piece of paper scrawled with five potential approaches, four of which were impossible and one of which was crazy. He flipped the paper facedown and bent forward, resting his forehead on it, his eyes squeezed shut.

Then he stood and followed others to the media room. It was large, filled with dark blue seats like a movie theater, but with no cup holders. Most of the seats were already taken, and Yuri got swept in by the shuffling scientists, seated by default next to a young woman who was an expert in dense stellar systems. The anxiety in the room was palpable.

Fletcher walked to the front and stood where the screen would be if they’d lowered it.

“I’m not introducing myself or anyone else,” he said. “You all know who I am, and I don’t give a goddamn if you know your
neighbor. A few hours ago, after we got the spectral analysis back, I asked you to go to your offices and brainstorm. I don’t know how we’re going to beat this thing, and if we do come up with a strategy, we may not have time to implement it. So keep it short, and talk fast. What have you got?”

No one spoke for a moment, but it wasn’t silent. Papers rustled in reluctant hands, necks rubbed against collars as people looked at each other, waiting for someone else to speak.

“Seventy-one kilometers a second, people!” Fletcher bellowed.

A tall man with a scholar’s stoop stood to the left of the room.

“I’m Dan Kilpatrick, usually at Goddard.” He caught Fletcher’s expression and ended his intro. “This thing’s kilometers across. We had a chance at blowing up a rock that big, but iron isn’t going to react the same way. We all know it won’t work, and if we do manage to blow it into a few pieces, they’ll still be too big to burn up on entering the atmosphere. We’d just be creating multiple impacts of a catastrophic nature.”

“There’s no viable alternative,” an older man called from the right, without bothering to stand. “We may as well try it—nothing else has a chance.”

“We may as well do nothing,” Kilpatrick snapped. “The only reasonable strategy is to try to deflect the asteroid, just punch it to the side as it goes by.”

“It’d be like punching a skyscraper with your fist,” the woman beside Yuri whispered to him. “You can punch, but it ain’t moving.”

He nodded. She was right.

“Dan, what’s your thought on the deflection process?” Fletcher said.

Kilpatrick fanned his fingers out.

“We use everything we’ve got. Throw it up, detonate simultaneously along one side.”

A general murmur rose in the room.

“It won’t be enough,” a small woman called from the front. “Anyway, they’d have to touch. No air in space, no concussion. Every single nuke would have to touch the asteroid, and with simultaneous detonation, they’re as likely to destroy each other as they are the 1019.”

“So what do you want to do, Amy?” Kilpatrick asked.

“What if we send them up in sequence, one at a time, and try to chip away at as much of it as we can? Place the detonations so that we break off what we can, and make the remainder as small as possible.”

“That would reduce the blow, but it would still be catastrophic,” Fletcher said, frowning.

Amy rose to look at them. She was a spark plug kind of woman. Yuri wondered if she might once have been a gymnast. “We’re not going to push it aside, not this late, not with what’s available now. We’re not going to break it into small-enough pieces to avoid multiple regional devastations.” Someone started to say something, and she talked over him. “Come on, this is a ten on the Torino Scale. What we can do is make it a smaller catastrophe, so that a million years from now life might rise again from the permafrost.”

A hush fell over the room, heavy and impenetrable. The silence filled Yuri’s nose and mouth and stuffed his trachea. His chest contracted in shallow heaves that drew in no air.

“Maybe we don’t get to save it for ourselves,” Amy said, her tone softer. “Maybe all we can do is save it for someone else.”

Her words floated over the room and settled like ash. Finally Fletcher spoke.

“Are we redefining our mission, then? Instead of trying to save life, are we trying to save the possibility of life at some point in the future?”

Yuri felt sick. The future was supposed to be his, not someone else’s. He hadn’t lived long enough to turn life in, like a piece of lab equipment checked out and then returned so others could use it.

There was silence for a moment. Then the tall guy, Kilpatrick, said, “I’m not ready to give up. We may as well try to punch it away.”

Fletcher sighed, and his whole body seemed to deflate.

“Does anybody have an idea that has a chance—a real chance, Dan—to save us in the here and now?”

“It’s metallic,” a man shouted out. “What if we launched an enormous magnet and drew it …”

“You got a magnet that size?” Fletcher snapped.

Yuri thought the director might have a better chance of getting people to speak if he didn’t yell at them when they did.

“Okay, give me a quick show of hands on which is better, trying Dan’s deflection or Amy’s breaking it up as much as we
can. Understand, the bomb placement will be different. We can’t do both.” He gave them a moment. “Okay, raise your hand if …”

Yuri stood.

“Um, is another possibility,” he said. “Doctor …” What was her last name? “Amy’s idea to blow it up would work if asteroid were smaller.”