“More like a dozen.”
“That’s what I mean. Look, let me send someone out to talk to you. If you are comfortable with what they have to say then we can go from there. The thing is, we can’t wait too long or this may blow over,” she warned Abby.
“Alright. Send someone to talk to us. I’ll transfer you to my secretary and she can work out the time.”
“Excellent. Thank you and have a good day,” Kathleen said.
“Same to you,” Abby replied.
Why had she even agreed to such a thing? She hardly had time to go to the bathroom let alone spend time with some reporter. She looked at her watch. Speaking of talking to reporters, it was time to meet with the crew from CNN. She was hesitant because she did not have a very high opinion of them. She knew their reputation for beating a story to death. They would scour the country for what the term ‘experts’ and before long the entire importance of the discovery would begin to be nothing more than a circus event.
She was setting while they put make-up on her when the co-host came over and introduced themselves.
“A pleasure to meet you,” she told them.
“Have you been on television before?” Sally Raze asked.
“Local television.”
“I meant on a national level,” she replied.
“Why? Does the camera know if it is local or national?” she asked.
“No, I suppose not. We will see you on the set.”
“Don’t worry about her. She is just a tad big headed,” the co-host, James Barrymore said and winked.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
President Thomas Strong was a charismatic fifty-seven year old who had been swept into the White House by a landslide victory. He was the first middle of the road president who had been able to win praises from both sides of the Senate and House of Representatives.
While his briefings were more laid back than his predecessor, it certainly didn’t mean you could show up unprepared. One of the things that would anger him the quickest was shoddy work. He felt a deep obligation to answer to the people who had put him in office and having a dysfunctional government was not acceptable.
“We need to decide if we want to hold the exercise off the coast of the Ryukyu Islands with Taiwan or scrap them,” the Chairman of the Joint Chief of Staff said.
“And what is your recommendation?”
“Well sir, North Korea is acting up again. It’s pretty much the same old saber rattling we hear all the time. They aren’t going to do anything except expound rhetoric.”
“So you are saying we should go ahead?” the President said.
“Yes sir. I see no reason to cancel this exercise,” he said.
“Does anyone disagree?” he asked, looking around the table.
No one spoke up.
“Alright. I will give you my answer by 5 o’clock. Now Dan, why don’t you fill us in on the JPL meeting you attended yesterday.
Dan spent the next forty minutes briefing them on what he had learned. He could see every reaction from those seated around him. It ranged from horror to indifference and everything in between. The President was listening intently and he would jot down something every once in a while. When he had finished he sat back down.
“You are talking about an asteroid as large as a small planet correct?”
“Yes sir. It’s called a planetoid.”
“Yes, I got that. And no one ever discovered it before until this Doctor Montgomery stumbled upon it?”
“Correct sir.”
“How is that possible? I mean we are talking about a pretty big object heading toward the Earth,” the President said.
“I asked Doctor Montgomery the same thing. She said it was; one, not being looked for. Two, the location of it made it very difficult to see. And three, they found it because they were doing work on the tenth planet theory.”
“We have a tenth planet? I didn’t realize that.”
“Well it’s just a theory they were trying to prove or disprove.”
“Okay, just looking at what you said, at the speed it’s traveling, which I get at a little over a million miles a day, and from where they are reporting it currently, it should be pretty darn near us in 238 days. Around eight months from now.”
“Yes sir. That was the latest projection I received.”
“How do we know it is going to miss earth?” the President wanted to know.
“Well sir, we don’t for a certainty but initial calculations indicate that it will miss Earth by a few thousand miles.”
“What would be the effect of it coming so close?”
“Sir, I don’t think anyone knows the answer to that right now.”
“Then we had better get some answers and quickly. This isn’t something we can just put on the back burner. We need current data. I want the JPL to jump on this as their top priority. Understand?”
“Yes sir, I most certainly do.”
“This isn’t some publicity stunt is it?
“Absolutely not.”
“It just seems so… science fiction. Wasn’t there a movie like this?”
“Deep Impact, sir,” Dan replied.
“Right. Morgan Freeman isn’t going to come in and take over is he?”
“Not this time Mr. President.”
CNN –
“This is Sally Razo.”
“And I am James Barrymore and this is a special report on the latest object found in the skies above Earth.”
“The Jet Propulsion Laboratory in conjunction with the University of Arizona finally announced some of the details about the recent discovery of a large object that has entered into our solar system,” Sally reported.
“That’s right Sally and Director Lance Weldon from the JPL said that they have investigated the sighting by Doctor Abigail Montgomery’s team from the U of A. Director Weldon said that the JPL was in agreement with the data that they were supplied,” James said, “This is an incredible find and shows how much more of the universe that we need to discover. While funding has been cut over the years, Universities such as the one in Arizona have pushed forward.”
“When asked the specifics of the object he said that it was a planetoid, meaning larger than a normal asteroid, but smaller than a planet. The diameter was given as in excess of 30,000 miles across and with a velocity approaching 80,000 miles per hour. While it is still over 520 million miles from earth, at its current speed it will approach the Earth in around 270 days,” Jane added, “Director Weldon said that they are using everything at their disposal to track it and keep the public informed of the position and any important data that is discovered. The planetoid is officially called 2015 KA 5. Tonight we have with us Dr. Abagail Montgomery from the University of Arizona. Welcome to the show,” she said and smiled.
“Thank you for having me.”
“Tell us a little more about this meteor,” she asked.
“Actually it is an Planetoid. Larger than an asteroid but not the size of a planet.”
“I thought a meteor and an asteroid were the same thing.”
“An asteroid, while they can be quite large, do not become meteors until they enter the earth’s atmosphere. Once they break through our protective layer, they are then meteors,” Abby told her.
“I can’t really see that much difference,” she shot back.
“Okay. Think of it like this. If I dropped a bowling ball on your head, it would be a heck of a lot of damage. But if that same bowling ball had to make its way throw the layers of protection, reducing it in size and it became a pea, then you would hardly notice it. That is the difference.”