Birth of an Age Page 6

  Despite the extensive coverage, many people wanted to see the asteroids firsthand, and stores quickly sold out of amateur telescopes and high-powered binoculars. Some mild hysteria resulted as a few overexcited and inexperienced stargazers spotted various objects, both real and imagined, which they mistook for additional threatening asteroids. But that was not the only hysteria. Despite repeated assurances to the contrary from the United Nations and from scientists around the world, some members of the public insisted that the event marked the end of the world. Others saw the event less as something to worry about and more as an excuse to revel at raucous end-of-the-world parties.

  Local authorities also noted that the increased sales of telescopes and binoculars were accompanied by a sharp rise in reports of Peeping Toms but also reports of exhibitionism by those hoping to be spied upon. Police had little time to spend on such offenses, however, due to a sharp rise in more serious crimes, such as rape and robbery, perpetrated primarily by those who reasoned that, considering the possibility that the world might end, they should enjoy to the fullest what was left of it.

  For some, especially those prone to depression, the fear of impending doom was more than they could bear. Appointments at life completion clinics filled so quickly that service for walk-in clientele was entirely suspended. They simply didn’t have adequate medical and disposal staff to meet the needs. Some of those who found the tension of waiting for completion assistance intolerable even chose unassisted self-termination rather than waiting for the proper medical authorities at the clinics.

  New York

  In the private study at his official residence in New York City, Italian Ambassador Christopher Goodman sat with Robert Milner and Decker Hawthorne watching coverage of the asteroids. The commentators and news directors appeared to be having a hard time filling the final hour before the first asteroid began to traverse the sky of the Western Hemisphere. By now every conceivable person had been interviewed time and again and every imaginable side-bar story had been aired.

  Decker switched programs and caught the last moments of a report on how small groups of people around the world had gathered to chant and visualize in order to create a “positive mental envelope” to protect the Earth from the asteroids. Decker shook his head. “Can you believe these guys?” he asked rhetorically.

  “What they’re doing isn’t that different than what John and Cohen did to cause the calamity that’s about to befall us,” Christopher answered.

  “Can they prevent this?” Decker asked, pointing toward the chanters, suddenly encouraged by this unexpected glimmer of hope.

  Christopher shook his head. “No, John and Cohen are too strong; and our chanting friends are still far too weak. But it’s important that they try. They’re like children now: with the wisdom of youth they see what must be done but don’t have the strength to bring it about, and yet they try. Of such will the New Age be built.”

  Sacramento Peak Observatory, New Mexico

  Another half hour passed, and those watching began to see more clearly the first asteroid’s shape. Now just a little more than 43,000 miles away, it was possible to see that it was pockmarked with small craters. Its odd shape, which resembled a slightly bent and crumpled cigar, and its span of nearly twelve miles, made it quite similar in both size and shape to the asteroid Eros. It rotated on an axis approximately one-third of its length from each end, giving the impression that it was slowly tumbling, rather than rotating. The second asteroid, now about the same distance from the Earth as our moon, was far more spherical and approximately one and a half miles in diameter.

  From time to time the picture on the screen changed, sometimes focusing on only one asteroid or the other, and sometimes showing a split view with the bodies side by side. The asteroids were now so close to the Earth that every such change in orientation revealed a dramatically new portrait of the interplanetary visitors.

  The astronomers of Sacramento Peak Observatory were making final preparations for their experimental work and observations. Of the thirty-five staff scientists and twenty-two assisting graduate students, only eight would be working in the Hilltop Dome where Mary Ludford was observing. The reporters spread out, a few going to each of the other observatories to chronicle every moment of this historic event. Mary would have preferred to be actively involved in the work, but she wasn’t familiar enough with the nuances of Sacramento Peak’s equipment. Besides, the press kept her far too busy to allow her time to do any actual work.

  With nearly every reporter in the world covering one aspect or another of the story, there was never a time when at least one reporter wasn’t asking her questions or noting her reactions to the unfolding drama or just hanging around in case she might say or do something that someone might think was newsworthy. Right now there was only one reporter and a cameraman with her, and since Mary didn’t seem to be saying or doing anything significant at the moment, the reporter’s questions focused on what was going on around them. Even though she had never used equipment exactly like that at Sacramento Peak, she knew enough to answer any layman’s queries.

  When her assigned reporter was finally out of questions, he sat down on a stool to watch the asteroids’ approach on the giant monitor. After about five minutes, he began again. “Why is the picture shifting?” he asked, referring to the side-by-side display of the two asteroids.

  Mary looked at the screen. “What do you mean?” she asked, not noticing any shift.

  “The picture of the first asteroid, there on the left of the screen: It’s shifting slowly toward the right.” Mary watched the screen closely for a moment. She thought perhaps she saw it, too, but it was so slight she couldn’t be sure. “Its probably just the asteroid’s rotation,” she suggested.

  “No, really,” he insisted. “A few minutes ago it was farther to the left on the screen. It’s definitely moving to the right.”

  Mary tried to remember if it had looked any different earlier. It did seem as if it might have been a little better centered on the screen before. “It’s probably that the picture we’re getting now is from a different observatory than the picture we were getting a few minutes ago. The asteroid isn’t as centered in this telescope’s field of vision.”

  “No, that can’t be it,” the reporter insisted. “I’ve been watching. The satellite feeds are still coming from Dominion Astrophysical Observatory in Canada.” He looked at his notes and pointed to indicate where he had made note of it, then added, “It hasn’t changed in the past twenty minutes.”

  Mary looked at the monitor, which indicated the point of origin of the feed. She wasn’t sure, but she thought the reporter might be right. It really didn’t matter though; it was now even more apparent that the first asteroid was moving ever so slowly to the right. “I’ll go find out,” she said.

  Mary walked over to Dr. Alvin Taylor, the senior scientist at the John W. Evans Solar Facility of the Sacramento Peak Observatory. The reporters had been told to stay back from the equipment and out of the way so as not to interrupt the scientists’ work, but Mary felt no obligation to accede to those rules.

  “Excuse me,” Mary said to Dr. Taylor, who was just finishing a conversation with one of the staff scientists.

  “Yes,” he responded, as the other scientist picked up a phone and began to dial.

  “We were just noticing that the picture of 2031 KD seems to be drifting slowly to the right on the screen.”

  “We noticed that, too,” Taylor answered. “Dr. Lane is calling Dominion to find out what’s going on,” he added, nodding toward the woman on the phone. Mary and Dr. Taylor stood quietly for a moment, listening to their end of the conversation, trying to make out what was being said, but the call was far too brief to make any sense of it.

  “Yeah. Okay. Good luck,” they heard Dr. Lane say, and then the call was over.

  “They’re aware of the problem,” Dr. Lane told Dr. Taylor as soon as she hung up the phone. “They think it’s a cumulative error caused by their segment
ed positioning system. They’re attempting to correct it.”

  Dominion Astrophysical Observatory, located on a wooded hill just north of Victoria on the southern end of Vancouver Island in British Columbia, was best known for its study of variable stars, Beta Cephei stars, the orbits of double stars, and the examination of the frequency distribution of chemical elements. Asteroids were hardly its mainstay, but like many other observatories, Dominion had postponed its regular work to participate in this unprecedented opportunity. It had been chosen as the primary observatory for this portion of the coverage because of its northern location and because of its twenty-five-foot segmented mirror telescope (SMT). The Dominion SMT used a mosaic of hexagonal mirror segments that were continuously positioned with respect to the other segments to approximate a monolithic mirror. This was accomplished by means of position sensors and actuators built into the mirrors’ supports. It was these sensors and actuators that appeared to be the cause of the problem.

  “If they can’t get it fixed,” Dr. Lane said, “they’ll switch to the feed from the backup observatory. I believe . . .” Lane looked at a schedule she had on her tablet, “yes, that would be Kitt Peak.”

  Kitt Peak Observatory, Arizona

  High above the Papago Indian reservation, nestled among the granite crags and cliffs of Kitt Peak, the white dome of Steward Observatory stood like a giant white mushroom. Home to the largest concentration of operating telescopes in the Northern Hemisphere and credited with numerous astronomical firsts, Kitt Peak served on this occasion as the backup to Canada’s Dominion Astrophysical Observatory. It wasn’t a role the scientists of Kitt Peak expected to be called upon to fulfill, but it should have been a simple matter of turning on their broadcast equipment and synchronizing the hand-off from Dominion. At the moment the call came, however, Dr. Chapman of Kitt Peak was busy with a problem of his own. He and his colleagues hadn’t even noticed the problem with the picture from Dominion.

  Kitt Peak Observatory, Arizona

  “Dr. Chapman, this is Dr. Watson at Dominion Observatory in Canada,” the call began. “We have a problem here with our 7.7-meter telescope. So far we’ve been able to compensate, but I wanted to give you the heads up just in case.”

  “Thanks,” Chapman said, “but I’m afraid we have some problems of our own with our 11-meter SMT. For some reason — we can’t seem to isolate the cause — it appears we have a cumulative error in our segment positioning system, making it look as though asteroid 2031 KD is changing course.”

  For a long moment there was silence.

  “Hello?” Dr. Chapman said, as he began to wonder if they had been cut off.

  “I’m here,” responded Dr. Watson. “How long ago did this start?”

  “We first noticed it about ten minutes ago,” Chapman answered.

  Again there was silence. “Have you been monitoring our picture?” Watson asked after a moment.

  “Well, not for the last few minutes. Like I said, we’ve been pretty busy with our own equipment. Why? What’s the problem?”

  “You’d better have a look.”

  Dr. Chapman leaned back in his chair and twisted his neck to look around a table at the large split screen monitor of the two asteroids. It took a moment for him to see the shift and when he did, he couldn’t believe what he saw. Jumping up from his chair, he took the phone with him so that he could see the screen more clearly. The unobstructed view and new orientation changed nothing. It took only seconds for Dr. Chapman to realize what was happening. This wasn’t coincidence. It couldn’t be.

  “Tom! Frank!” Chapman called to his associates. “Look at this!” he shouted, pointing toward the monitor.

  Chapman’s two associates looked at the monitor, then back at the image from their own telescope, and then back at Chapman, their eyes asking the same question: Was the image on the monitor coming from their telescope? Chapman shook his head in answer. The taller of the two men looked at a small monitor that confirmed the picture’s source; the other stared back at the view on the large monitor.

  “What is it?” Dr. Watson’s voice asked over the phone in response to the long silence, but Chapman didn’t respond.

  “This can’t happen!” Dr. Watson heard someone on Chapman’s end of the phone yell, offering confirmation of his worst fears.

  “Have you verified this with anyone else?” Chapman asked Watson hurriedly.

  “Stay on the line,” Watson said. “We’ll do that right now.” It really wasn’t necessary: Kitt Peak was well-equipped to verify what was happening, but for about forty-five seconds Chapman held the phone as he listened to the ensuing hysteria that erupted when Watson passed along the content of the call to the others at Dominion Astrophysical Observatory. Then he hung up and sat back down, not waiting for Watson to return to the phone. Behind him reporters, now ignoring the boundaries meant to keep them out of the way, demanded to know what was happening. The other two astronomers quickly called other observatories, hoping to find something that would tell them they were wrong, but there was no mistake. It took only a few moments to be sure.

  Asteroid 2031 KD had inexplicably changed course and was now headed dangerously close to a collision with the Earth. It was impossible to determine where, or even if it would hit; there was no time to run simulations. The asteroid was now only 8,640 miles away and would reach the Earth’s outer atmosphere in less than eight minutes.

  Chapter 5

  Alien Stone

  At 7:33:22 A.M. Greenwich Mean Time (GMT), 317 miles above the Earth’s surface and directly over the northern Siberian village of Tiksi near the Lena Delta, asteroid 2031 KD, traveling at a speed of 18 miles per second, entered the most remote region of the Earth’s ionosphere. Its angle of descent was so slight that it traveled more than seven miles horizontal to the Earth’s surface for every one mile it dropped. At that angle, the density of the atmosphere increased relatively slowly, with the result that the asteroid’s surface temperature rose only about a dozen degrees Celsius with each passing second. The slow but steady increase in resistance of the denser atmosphere against the asteroid’s irregular shape, combined with its unusual axis of rotation, caused it to begin to tumble and spin.

  Eighty-one seconds after entering the ionosphere, at an altitude of 108 miles, friction caused the skin of the tumbling body to superheat and glow. Sixteen seconds later it penetrated the outer regions of the stratosphere, 60 miles above the Earth’s surface. Nearly coincident to this, its surface temperature reached 1,527 degrees Celsius, the melting point of the nickel-iron alloy that made up the majority of its now wildly tumbling mass. As it did, millions of tiny droplets, or ablation flakes, of molten metal began to peel away from the twelve-mile-wide colossus, leaving a visible metallic trail of red-hot nickel iron, which combined with the friction of the asteroid to superheat the atmosphere around it.

  Had it been more spherical, the asteroid would have maintained the same trajectory it had when it entered the atmosphere. That course would have brought it to within twenty-nine miles of the Earth’s surface over northern Canada — never actually coming in contact with the Earth, but continuing on after a six and a half minute sojourn, back into space. Instead, because of its irregular shape, as it encountered denser air, two forces worked increasingly against each other: inertia and drag. Just as the shape of an airplane wing provides lift, so the shape and tumbling of the asteroid combined to force it down toward the Earth. At this point, inertia was winning. But drag had already forced the asteroid several miles lower, and with each mile the air grew thicker and the drag grew greater.

  It would be erroneous to say that the asteroid was falling; the Earth’s gravity played almost no part in the asteroid’s course. Its speed when it entered the atmosphere was more than two and a half times the velocity needed to escape the Earth’s gravity, and thus far that speed had decayed by only a relatively insignificant .6 miles per second. Other factors, however, did come into play to affect the asteroid’s course relative to the Earth’s
surface. These included the continuing orbit of the Earth around the sun, the curvature of the Earth, and even the Earth’s rotation, at the comparatively slow speed of about 1,000 miles per hour. Combined, the effect was that the path of the asteroid arched like a pitcher’s curve ball, carrying it slightly to the east in its predominantly southern course, as it moved ever closer to the Earth’s surface.

  Seconds later, above the Beaufort Sea, north of Mackenzie Bay in Canada’s Northwest Territory, the asteroid reached a critical point in its approach. As the asteroid dropped below thirty-seven miles, a sonic boom as powerful as the strongest earthquake issued forth through the heat-blistered sky.[24]

  Below the asteroid, near Kay Point, south of Herschel Island, the men of a half-dozen Inuit Eskimo families waited patiently in their boats, some with hand-held harpoons, others with high-powered rifles, scanning the bay for the dingy gray-white backs of beluga whales to break the surface. It was 11:35 P.M. local time, but that hardly mattered this far north and at this time of year in the “land of the midnight sun.” The last sunrise had been on June 21, twelve days before, and the next sunset wouldn’t come for another fifteen days, on July 18. On the shore a few hundred yards away, the men’s families slept in tents, waiting for the next kill when they would strip the muktuk and despoil the white whale of every usable part.

  Suddenly, all eyes turned toward the sky and stared in awe at heaven’s display. In mere seconds it was gone, trailing off into the southern sky.

  For a moment, the men stood frozen in silence. And then all at once they shouted to each other in their native Inuktitut with such great excitement that, for the moment, they totally ignored the pair of beluga whales that had surfaced just twenty meters away. Then someone pointed and called out. Quickly the men in the boats nearest the whales put the asteroid out of their minds and went to work, starting their small outboard motors and maneuvering their eighteen-foot crafts as close to the unsuspecting beluga as possible. Near the bow of each boat, two men stood ready, one poised with a hand-held harpoon connected by rope to a pair of empty aluminum beer kegs, the other with a rifle, hoping to finish the job quickly after the harpoon was set.