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.
«… and after a thorough analysis of all the available options,» the handsome young man was saying, «they’ve come to the conclusion that yours is the only spacecraft capable of reaching the comet in time.»
Arlan was the government’s coordinator of operations for all the mining ships in the Asteroid Belt, a job that would drive a lesser man to madness or at least fits of choler. There were dozens of mining ships plying the Belt, each owned and operated by a cantankerous individualist who resented any interference from some bureaucrat back on Earth.
But Arlan Prince did not descend into madness or even choleric anger. He smiled and patiently tried to help the miners whenever he could. Cindy dreamed about his smile. It was to die for.
«I don’t want to mislead you, Cindy,» he was saying, very seriously. «It’s a tricky, dangerous mission.»
Grease my monkey! she thought. He wants me to go out and catch a comet? They must be in ultimate despair if they expect this creaking old bucket of bolts to catch anything except terminal metal fatigue.
Cindy’s aged spacecraft was coasting along the outer fringe of the Asteroid Belt, well beyond the orbit of Mars, almost four times farther from the Sun than the Earth’s orbit. Since she was on the opposite side of the Sun from Earth’s current position, it took thirty-eight minutes for a communications signal to reach her lonely little mining craft.
That meant that she couldn’t have a conversation with Arlan Prince. She could talk back, of course, but it would be more than half an hour before the man heard what she had to say.
So he didn’t wait for her response. He just went right on talking, laying the whole load on her shoulders.
«I know it’s a lot to ask, but the entire world is depending on you. Yours is the only spacecraft anywhere in the solar system that has even a slight chance of catching up with the comet and diverting it.»
He’s not going to give me a chance to say no, Cindy realized. I either do it or the world gets smashed.
A thousand questions flitted through her mind. Why can’t they just send some missiles out to the comet and blast it into ice cubes? No missiles and no H-bombs, she remembered. They’ve all been dismantled.
Do I have enough propellant to get to the comet? That’s a whole mess of delta vee we’re talking about. While Arlan droned on lugubriously, she flicked her fingers across her computer keypad. The numbers told her she could reach the comet, just barely. If nothing at all went wrong.
Which was asking a lot from this ancient wheeze of a mining ship she had inherited from her father. The old man had died brokenhearted out here among the asteroids that orbited between Mars and Jupiter. Looking for a mountain of gold floating in the dark emptiness of space.
All he ever found were chunks of nickel-iron or carbon-rich rock. Just enough to keep him going. Just enough to get by and raise his only child out in the loneliness of this cold, dark frontier.
Cindy couldn’t remember her mother at all. She had died when Cindy was still an infant, killed by a tiny asteroid no bigger than a bullet that had punctured her spacesuit while she worked outside the ship alongside her husband.
Her father had died of cancer only a few months ago. An occupational hazard, he had joked feebly, for anyone who spends as much time exposed to the radiation of space as an asteroid miner has to.