Then, one night about six months after I’d started, the numbers coalesced and I realized I’d found what I was looking for. An object on the inner edge of the Kuiper Belt had dropped out of its orbit, probably influenced by the passage of Neptune, and was moving toward the sun. The spectroscopic analysis indicated it was 3.1 billion miles away.
Beautiful.
Warren was watching a hockey game and Liz was in the kitchen when I came out of my office. “Are you quitting for the night?” he asked. “It’s early.”
I looked casually at my watch. “I guess it is a bit early.”
He froze the picture. “Why the smug smile? Did you find something?” I didn’t have to say a word. “Congratulations. How big is it?”
“The diameter’s about twenty-five kilometers.”
“That sounds good. When will we see it?”
“Warren, I don’t know how much visibility it will have. And I haven’t really run the numbers yet, but I’d guess it’ll be in the vicinity of Earth in about twenty years.”
“So we’ll be in our fifties.”
“Hard to believe, isn’t it?”
He broke into a grin. “I certainly married a woman with vision.”
When the news broke about the comet, I became a local celebrity and the university got a nice PR boost as a result. Reporters descended, and I appeared on several TV shows and on The Science Channel. It was a gloriously happy time.
The data were made available to the world, and confirmed by everyone. Tom called me into his office. “I was surprised that you’ve gotten involved with comets.”
“It became something of a hobby.”
“I hope it hasn’t been affecting your research?”
“No, Tom. I wouldn’t let that happen. I was just taking an occasional break.”
“Okay. Nothing wrong with that.” He glanced up at the dictum that, he claimed, ruled his life: Enjoy the moment. We don’t have forever. It was framed and hung on the wall beside a picture of him and the governor. The reality was that I’d never known anyone more committed to the task at hand, and less likely to take time off. “You know you have naming rights?”
“I had no idea.” I tried not to smile.
“Well, you might want to give it some thought.”
I knew what I wanted to call it, of course. But I had no wish to sound like an egomaniac. I’d gotten to know him pretty well over the years, so I decided to give him a chance to open a door for me. “Tom,” I said, “if you’d discovered one of these things, what would you call it?”
“The tradition is that it should become Gibson’s Comet.”
“I could live with that.”
I don’t know that anyone became prouder of Gibson’s Comet than Liz. But she was disappointed that the image on her computer screen was barely visible. “I thought comets were bright,” she said. “Where’s its tail?”
“It won’t have one until it gets closer to the sun.”
“When will that happen?” she asked.
“It’ll be a while,” I said.
Warren was happy for me, and gradually over the next few weeks, everything went back to normal. One evening while we were watching a Seinfeld rerun, I got a call from a woman who identified herself as an astronomer working at the Mauna Kea observatory in Hawaii. “Maryam,” she said, “something odd’s happening.”
I couldn’t imagine why she would be calling me. “What’s that?” I asked.
“We have two more comets coming in. From the same general location as yours. I’ll forward the data if you like.”
That was not good news. I wasn’t excited at getting competition. But when I saw Tom at the university next morning and mentioned it, he’d already heard.
“Something’s happening out there,” he said.
Our local TV station, WKLS, hit a slow news period and asked me to answer some on-camera questions. The show’s moderator was Judy Black, who specialized in doing inspirational, uplifting pieces. “Dr. Gibson,” she said, “have we ever had three comets in the sky at the same time before?”
“Well,” I said, “they’re all a long way off, so I wouldn’t exactly characterize them as ‘in the sky.’ But, yes, that’s certainly unusual.”
“Can you explain why it’s happening?”
“Judy, we think there’s been a gravitational change of some sort. We’re still looking for a reason.”
Her eyebrows rose. “What could cause such a change?”
“A lot of things, really. It can happen, for example, if one of the big planets gets a bit close to an object in the Kuiper Belt. That’s what pulls the comets out of the Belt and sends them in our direction.”
“Is that what’s happening now?”
“No. Nothing’s really close to the area.”
“Then what is it?”
“We’re still working on it, Judy.”
I was on my way to the university after the show when Tom called. “Can you come by my office?”
“Sure,” I said. “When?”
“When can you get here?”
“I have a class in forty minutes. I can come in after that.”
“Artie Thompson will cover for you. Come here now. As soon as you get back to the campus.”
When I arrived, he was at his desk talking with a thin white-haired man who was seated in one of the two armchairs. Tom said hello and gave me a pained smile. “Maryam,” he said, “this is Paul Crenshaw. He’s the director—”
“—of the Kitt Peak Observatory. Yes, of course! Hello, Professor Crenshaw. It’s an honor to meet you.”
“Call me ‘Paul,’” he said. His eyes were tired behind thick bifocals, and he nodded without any show of welcome. “You’re the young lady who discovered the first comet, I take it?”
I nodded. And managed maybe a flicker of a smile. “Yes, that’s correct, Profes—Paul. But what was so urgent?”
Tom pointed to the other chair, waited for me to sit, and took a deep breath. “First off, Maryam, if you get into any more conversations with reporters, we’d like you not to mention that there’s a problem.”
“I didn’t say anything about a problem.”
“Just don’t go into details about why we have three comets, okay?”
Crenshaw was nodding.
“All right,” I said. “Sure.”
Tom and Crenshaw exchanged glances without speaking. I was getting scared. Had I done something seriously stupid?
Tom pushed back in his chair. “Paul flew in this morning,” he said. “Kitt Peak has been looking into this.”
“Kitt Peak has? Why?”
“Along with a lot of other people.” His eyes locked on mine. “This conversation does not leave this room.”
“Okay.”
Crenshaw took over: “We know why there were three comets.”
“What do you mean were?”
“The trajectories are changing. If that continues, and we’re pretty sure it will, they won’t make it into the inner solar system.”
“Why? What’s going on?”
“There’s a brown dwarf nearby.” Brown dwarfs are failed stars. They lack the mass to power a fusion reaction in their cores. They’re big, they’re heavy, and you don’t want to get too close to one of them.