The brilliant late-afternoon sun surprised me, made my eyes suddenly water after the cool shadows inside the building. I took in a deep raw lungful of hot, dry desert air. It felt like brick dust, alien, as if part of me were still deeply immersed in Jupiter’s mighty ocean.
“It’s all ruined.” Allie’s voice.
Turning, I saw that she had followed me. The tears in her eyes were not from the bright sunshine.
“All dead,” she sobbed. “The city . . . all of them . destroyed.”
“The comet,” I said. Shoemaker-Levy 9 had struck Jupiter twenty years ago with the violence of a million hydrogen bombs.
“Twenty years,” Allie moaned. “They were intelligent. We could have communicated with them!”
If we had only been twenty years earlier, I thought. Then the true horror of it struck me. What could we have told them, twenty years ago? That a shattered comet was going to rain destruction on them? That no matter what they had built, what they had learned or hoped for or prayed to, their existence was going to be wiped out forever? That there’s absolutely nothing either they or we could do about it?
“It’s cold,” Allie said, almost whimpering.
She wanted me to go to her, to hold her, to comfort her the way one warm-blooded primate ape comforts another. But what was the use? What was the use of anything?
What difference did any of it make in a world where you could spend millions of years evolving into intelligence, build a civilization, reach a peak of knowledge where you begin to study and understand the universe around you, only to learn that the universe can destroy you utterly, without remorse, without the slightest shred of hope for salvation?
I looked past Allie, shivering in the last rays of the dying day. Looked past the buildings and antennas, past the gray-brown hills and the distant wrinkled mountains that were turning blood red in the inevitable sunset.
I saw Jupiter. I saw those intelligent creatures wiped away utterly and implacably, as casually as a man flicks a spot of dust off his sleeve.
And I knew that somewhere out in that uncaring sky another comet was heading inexorably for Earth to end all our dreams, all our strivings, all our desires.
DELTA VEE
You meet a lot of people over the years, and as a writer’s career advances, some of those people become close friends, no matter how geographically distant they may be.
One of my closest friends—even though he lives a three hours’ drive from me—is Rick Wilber. Rick is a fellow writer (as you will soon see), a teacher of journalism at Florida Southern University, and editor of the Tampa Tribune Fiction Quarterly.
The fourth edition of 1995’s Fiction Quarterly was scheduled to be published on Sunday, the thirty-first of December. Rick asked me to contribute a story with a New Year’s Eve theme.
“Delta Vee” is the result. By the way, if you detect a faint hint of Cinderella in this tale, it was an unconscious influence that I myself didn’t see until the first draft of the story was finished. Something about that old clock striking a midnight deadline must have, well, struck a chime in my subconscious mind.
It was going to be the last New Year’s Eve. Forever.
Six months after the last hydrogen bomb was dismantled, a Japanese amateur astronomer discovered the comet. It was named after him, therefore: Comet Kara.
For more than thirty years special satellites and monitoring stations on both the Earth and the Moon had kept a dedicated watch for asteroids that might endanger our world. Sixty-five million years ago, the impact of an asteroid some ten miles wide drove the dinosaurs and three-fourths of all the living species on Earth into permanent oblivion.
Comet Hara was 350 miles long, and slightly more than 100 miles wide, an oblong chunk of ice slowly tumbling through space, roughly the size of the state of Florida minus its panhandle.
It was not detected until too late.
While asteroids and many comets coast through the solar system close to the plane in which the planets themselves orbit, Comet Hara came tumbling into view high in the northern sky. The guardian battery of satellites and monitoring stations did not see it until it was well inside the orbit of Saturn. It came hurtling, now, out of the dark vastness of the unknown gulfs beyond Pluto, streaking toward an impact that would destroy civilization and humanity forever. It was aimed squarely at Earth, like the implacable hand of fate, due to strike somewhere in North America between the Great Lakes and the Front Range of the Rockies.
Comet Hara was mostly ice, instead of rock. But a 350-mile-long chunk of ice, moving at more than seven miles per second, would explode on Earth with the force of millions of H-bombs. Megatons of dirt would be thrown into the air. Continentwide firestorms would rage unchecked, their plumes of smoke darkening the sky for months. No sunlight would reach the ground anywhere. Winter would freeze the world from pole to pole, withering crops, killing by starvation those who did not die quickly in the explosion and flames. The world would die.
Desperate calculations showed that Comet Hara would strike the Earth on New Year’s Eve. No one would live to see the New Year.
Unless the comet could be diverted.
“It’s too much delta vee,” said the head of the national space agency. “If we had spotted it earlier, maybe then we’d have had a chance. But now . . .”
The president of the United States and the secretary-general of the United Nations were the only two people in the conference room that the former astronaut recognized. The others were leaders of other nations, he knew; twenty of them sitting around the polished mahogany table like twenty mourners at a funeral. Their own.
“What’s delta vee?” asked the president. She had been a biochemist before entering politics. None of the men and women around the table knew much about astronautics.
“Change in velocity,” he said, knowing it explained nothing to them. “Look—it’s like this . . .”
Using his hands the way a pilot would, the former astronaut showed the comet approaching Earth. Any rocket vehicle sent out to intercept it would be going in the opposite direction from the comet.
“It takes a helluva lot of rocket thrust to get that high above the plane of the ecliptic,” he said, moving his two hands together like a pair of airplanes rushing into a head-on collision.
“That’s the plane in which the planets orbit?” asked the prime minister of Italy.
“More or less,” the ex-astronaut replied. “Anyway, you need a huge jolt of thrust to get a spacecraft out to the comet, but when it gets there it’s going the wrong way!”
“Then it will have to turn around,” said the American president impatiently.
The space chief nodded unhappily. “Yes, ma’am. But it isn’t all that easy to turn around in space. The craft has to kill its forward velocity and then put on enough speed again to catch up with the comet.”
“I don’t see the difficulty.”
“Those maneuvers require rocket thrust. Lots of it. Rocket thrust requires propellants. Tons and tons of propellants. We just don’t have spacecraft capable of doing the job.”
“But couldn’t you build one?”
“Sure. In a year or two.”
“We only have five months,” said the secretary general, sounding somewhere between miffed and angry.
“That’s the problem,” admitted the space chief.
Hovering weightlessly in the cramped little cubbyhole that passed for the bridge of her spacecraft, Cindy Lundquist stared at the communications screen. The image was grainy and streaked with interference, but she could still see the utterly grim expression on the face of Arlan Prince.
