“We never saw it coming?”
“Somebody in McCusker’s looked out and saw it as it passed.” McCusker’s was one of the dining areas. Peter took a deep breath. “I heard you were here.” Then he noticed Maureen and Amy and managed a smile. “Yours?”
“The little one.”
He said hello, and Amy asked whether they had any pictures of the asteroid.
“Let me play it for you.” He spoke to the AI and one of the monitors came on. The asteroid was a flattened, potato-shaped object, tumbling slowly, end over end. The long blue arc of the Earth merged into the picture.
“How big?” Hutch asked.
“Four kilometers. Over four. They’re telling us it would have been lights out for everybody. If it had gone down.” The object was growing smaller. The Earth dropped gradually away. “That’s taken from one of the imagers here, on the station.”
“I can’t believe we never saw it coming,” said Amy. She looked at Hutch for an explanation.
Had it hit, Hutch knew, it would have thrown substantial amounts of debris into the atmosphere. Winter would have set in. Frigid, desperate, permanent. Unending. An infant born that day, and enduring for a normal span of years, would not have lived long enough to see the freeze end.
She opened a channel to station operations. “This is Priscilla Hutchins. May I speak with François, please?” That was François Deshaies, the director.
“Wait one, Ms. Hutchins.”
She turned back to Peter. “Let the commissioner know.”
“Okay.”
She heard François’s voice. “Hutch. I assume you’re calling about the rock.”
“Yes. Any more out there? Sometimes these things travel in packs.”
“We’ve been looking. Don’t see anything.”
“Okay. François, how much warning did we have?”
“We didn’t see it until the last minute.” He sounded uncomfortable. “We didn’t know whether it was going to hit or not until it had passed. C’est embarrassant.”
“Could have been worse.”
“Priscilla, I must go. We are getting traffic.”
Peter was whispering into his link, watching her, and saying yes to somebody. Finally, he signaled her. “He wants to talk to you.”
She switched over. “Hello, Michael.”
“It’s getting a lot of play,” he said.
“I’m not surprised.”
“How come we didn’t know about it before time?”
She wanted to say he should ask his buddy Senator Taylor. “The old Skywatch program was shut down years ago.”
“Skywatch? What the hell’s that?”
“It was a few dozen independent astronomers who tracked Earth-crossers. But the Congress cut off their funds, so now they’re down to a handful of volunteers.”
“Hell, I don’t care about that. What about our operations people?”
“It’s not the Academy’s responsibility, Michael. It’s not what we do. Technically, it’s up to the station.”
“That’s not going to sound like a very good answer when the questions start coming. Which I’m waiting for now.”
“Michael, we don’t even have sensing equipment. We ride along on the gear that Union uses. And now that I think of it, it’s not their job either. They track flights. In and out. And that’s all they do.”
“Well,” he said, “there’s going to be hell to pay. Asquith out.”
She smiled at that last one. Asquith out. As if he’d ever been in.
AS ARRANGED, SENATOR Taylor, with two security types, was waiting for them at Reagan, in the reception area. He collected his daughter and asked whether she’d enjoyed herself.
“Yes, Dad,” she said. “We were on board the Peifer.”
“Good.” He looked at Hutch with an expression that suggested weariness. “You had an exciting day up there.”
“You mean with the asteroid?”
“Yes.”
“It was a near thing,” she said.
“It’s ridiculous, Hutch. All the money we spend and look what happens.”
“We need to spend it a little more intelligently, Senator. Fund the Earth-crosser program. It’s nickels and dimes.”
“We have telescopes all over the world. And satellites. You name it. And nobody sees this thing coming?”
“You need something specifically dedicated to the task. A lot of — ”
He put up a hand. “It’s okay. I hear you.” He told Maureen how pretty she looked. Looked at the child while he spoke to Hutch. “Thanks,” he said. “I appreciate your doing this.”
“You’re welcome. It was a pleasure to have Amy along.”
Amy looked from Hutch to her father. She seemed hesitant. “If you and Maureen go up again sometime,” she said, “I’d love to go with you.”
“You’re on,” said Hutch.
One of Taylor’s security people took Amy in tow, and they headed for the exit.
The world narrowly averted a cataclysm today when a giant asteroid passed within less than a thousand kilometers. It is the closest known approach in historic times. Those who are expert in such things tell us the result, had it crashed, would have been global catastrophe.
The aspect of this event that is most troubling is that, given a reasonable advance warning, turning it aside would have been quite simple. But for reasons that are as yet unclear, the people manning the sensors and telescopes at Union never even saw it coming. The word is that they noticed the killer rock only moments before it would have impacted.
How close did it come?
It skimmed across the atmosphere. It could not have been closer. It was rather like having a bullet part our hair.
So who’s responsible? You can bet there’ll be an investigation. And somebody needs very much to be hung out to dry. The only real question at the moment: Who?
— Moises Kawoila,
Los Angeles Keep, Saturday, February 21
The unprovoked attack on a local clergyman should be dealt with severely. Violent crime has been on the rise during recent years. It is time to get serious with these thugs. The Henry Beemer incident is particularly outrageous. Beemer doesn’t even have the justification that the assault occurred during a robbery. In this case, it was simply a mindless act, intended to inflict harm on an innocent man of the cloth. Nothing less than the maximum sentence is called for.
— Derby (North Carolina) Star
chapter 11
The term congressional hearing is an oxymoron. No congressional hearing is ever called to gather information. Rather, it is an exercise designed strictly for posturing, by people who have already made up their minds, looking for ammunition to support their positions.
— Gregory MacAllister, “I’ve Got Mine”
It was never possible to determine who first saw the asteroid. The guy in the restaurant had been first to report it to the operations center. But he said a young boy pointed it out to him. Two technicians working on a solar observatory in high Earth orbit at about the same time called their supervisor when they noticed a star moving through the sky. A group participating in an outdoor prayer service in Lisbon claimed to have seen the object and watched it for two minutes before it disappeared over the horizon.
Several calls were made to the Central Observation Group, and within seconds tracking devices in orbit and telescopes in northern Spain and the Caucasus broke off their current schedules and swung toward the object.
Word flashed around the world. The ultimate near miss. Close enough, in the words of the director of the Anglo-Australian Observatory at Epping, “to leave a few singed tail feathers.”
By the end of the day, scientists were being interviewed on all the talk shows. While they disagreed on the level of risk posed by Earth-crossers, they were unanimous in predicting that eventually one of the rocks would hit. There was a lot of talk about dinosaurs. The headline on The Guardian summed it up: