I eat a Clif Bar and a peanut butter sandwich, pour out a cup of kibble for the dog, reviewing my obligation in my head, my contract with my client: I will do what I can to find your husband…. The problem now is that I know where he is. The problem now is that I could be there on the ten-speed in an hour. The problem is that I want to go. I’ve come this far and I want to deliver my message. I’ve come this far, and I need to see the man with my own eyes.
The door rings brightly. “Hey, can I get a palak paneer, please?” says Nico pulling up a chair. “And a thing of naan bread?”
She’s smiling her crooked clever smile, a cigarette hanging in the tough-girl style from the corner of her mouth, but somehow I’m not in the mood. I stand up and hug her for a long time, pressing her face against my chest and resting my chin on her head.
“What the hell, Henry?” she says when I let her go. “Did something happen?”
“No. I mean, yes. Not really.” I sit down again. “You smell like beer.”
“Yup,” she says. “I drank a bunch of beer.” She runs a hand through her spiky black hair, then flicks her cigarette butt into the corner. Houdini glances up disapprovingly from his food, sniffing at the smoke.
“So?” says Nico. “Did you find her?”
“My witness?” I say. “I did.”
“What about Martha’s husband?”
“Not yet. But I know where he is.”
“Oh, yeah? Where?”
“Maine, south of Kittery. At a place called Fort Riley. It’s an old state park.”
Nico nods blankly, helping herself to a bite of my Clif Bar. This is as far as her interest goes in my ongoing investigation.
“All right,” says, when she’s done chewing. “You ready?”
I rub my forehead with one hand. I know what she means, of course. I promised that if she guided me to and through the Free Republic of New Hampshire, then I would listen to all the sordid details of Nico’s Magic Plan to Save the World. I just wanted a couple more minutes. Just a moment or two of small normal happiness, a brother and a sister and a dog. I’m not ready, I want to say. Not yet.
But I promised. I did promise. “Okay,” I say. “Fire away.”
I cross one leg over the other and lean slightly forward and focus my energy on Nico, admonishing myself as she begins talking to listen with patience and good grace to whatever Hail Mary last-ditch song and dance I’m about to hear.
“The United States government,” Nico begins, and I clap one hand over my mouth, “if it wanted to, could detonate one or more near-surface nuclear explosions in the space surrounding the approaching asteroid.”
I tighten my grip over my mouth, clamp it closed, forcing myself not to speak.
“The effect would be to superheat the surface of the object, initiating what’s called a back reaction and altering its velocity sufficiently to keep it from impacting the planet.”
I shut my eyes now, too, and tilt my head forward in a position that hopefully looks like deep concentration, but is in fact a desperate attempt to keep myself from leaping to my feet and away from this monologue. Nico goes on.
“But certain officials, high in the government, have decided to suppress this information. Make it sound like it’s too late, or impossible.”
I can’t take it any longer, I remove my hand from my mouth. “Nico.” Just that, quietly. She doesn’t hear, or chooses not too. Houdini smacks his lips in the corner.
“Those with the knowledge to perform the operation have been jailed or made to disappear.”
This is talking points. I can smell it. I try again. “Nic?”
“Or, in one case, murdered.”
“Murdered?” I’m done. I stand up, lean forward across the table. “Nico, this is crazy.”
She leans back from me and says, “What?”
“This is the big secret? A nuclear explosion? Blast it from the sky? You can’t do that. It turns the one big asteroid into a million smaller ones. You haven’t heard that? There was a National Geographic special about it, for God’s sake. It was on the cover of the last issue of Time magazine.”
I’m speaking loudly. Houdini looks up for a moment, startled, then returns to his kibble.
“That’s not what I said.” Nico speaks softly, crossing her arms patiently like a kindergarden teacher, like I’m the child, I’m the fool. “You’re not listening.
“We went to war to prevent Pakistan from shooting a nuke at the thing. Thousands of people died.” I can still see the pictures; it was all in the Monitor before the paper went out of business: drones, air strikes, firebombs, the rapid annihilation of nuclear capability and concomitant destruction of civilian areas. There was quite a spread on Pakistan, too, in that same issue of Time, their farewell double issue. Cover headline: “And Now We Wait.”
“I didn’t say blast it from the sky.” Nico rises from the table and leans against the buffet line, digs another cigarette from her pocket. “What I said was a nuclear explosion or explosions, near but not on the asteroid. This is called a standoff burst, as distinct from a kinetic impactor, which would be a ship or other object smashing into the surface. A standoff burst has the advantage of creating the desired velocity change while minimizing surface disruption and the resulting ejecta.”
More talking points. I feel like she’s going to hand me a pamphlet. I get up. I pace.
“A standoff burst. And you guys think no one has thought of that?”
“I knew you wouldn’t listen,” she says with sadness, shaking her head, tapping ash onto the floor. “I knew I couldn’t count on you.”
I stop pacing. Of course she knows exactly what to say; she has had a lifetime of making me feel bad for castigating her in the face of her outrages. I take a breath. I lower my voice. “I’m sorry,” I say. “Please. Tell me more.”
“As I said, it’s not that the government—I should say the military, it’s really the military, not the civilian government. They have thought of it. They even commissioned people to figure out how to do it, years ago, when this kind of danger was purely hypothetical. There has to be a nuclear package in a new shape, with a new kind of fuse, to deliver the payload in space.”
“Right. But they never built those.”
“Well.” She smiles, winks. “That’s what they want us to think.”
“Jesus, Nico. This is crazy.”
“You said that already.” Her expression suddenly transforms from wry and knowing into kind of serene intensity—this is the part she’s been waiting for. This is the kernel of the lunacy. “Certain conservative elements in the international military-industrial complex welcome the asteroid, Henry. They’re psyched. The opportunity to rule over a decimated, miserable population? To consolidate the remains of the world’s resources? They can’t fucking wait.”
I start laughing. I lean my head back and bark laughter at the ceiling, and now Houdini really jumps, skitters away from his dish. The absurdity of this, the whole thing, sitting here talking as if we two tiny people in this bombed-out Indian restaurant in New Hampshire happen to have privileged information about the fate of the universe.
Nico talks for a while, and I listen as best I can, but a lot of it just washes over me, a lot of it is just words. There’s a rogue scientist, of course: Hans-Michael Parry, an astrophysicist formerly associated with the United States Space Command, who knows exactly how to do it, knows where these specially constructed fuses are housed and how they are operated. Nico’s organization has found Parry in a military prison, and they’re going to get him over to England, where sympathetic elements are ready to try this deflection maneuver with British bombs.