Chapter 1: The Morning After

Christopher Wallace looked around the school library and saw what he expected to see. He was tired, but still jazzed; even so he knew this was the wildest, craziest thing he’d ever dreamt of. So, he took several slow, deep breaths, willing his racing heart to slow, before finally stepping forward.

He stopped at the table where the four girls sat apart from any others. He stood between Amy Stephens and Lisa Marlowe contemplating his distaff peers. Amy was tall, with black hair and black eyes. Her hair was long and shiny; it had always amazed him how beautiful it was. Lisa was shorter than Amy, with thick brown hair that hung straight down to a few inches above her shoulders. She had brown eyes that weren’t nearly as dark as Amy’s.

The girl facing him from across the table was Sydney Marlowe, Lisa’s cousin. Sydney and Lisa were often mistaken for sisters, but Sydney was shorter and a little heavier-boned. Next to her, Brenda Johnson was the sole blonde of the group, although some would have called her hair very light brown. Her hair was cut short, and seemed to clutch her head like some sort of cartoon octopus. Her hazel eyes were fixed on Christopher. The other three had glanced at him and had gone back to their books.

The common wisdom at school was that the four girls were too nerdy and shy to be lesbians, and Brenda Johnson was easily the shyest girl in school. Christopher had had his first class with two of the four of them back in third grade, and had classes with one or more of the others ever since. There had been a friendly, but unspoken, rivalry between Christopher and the four for the best grades in their classes. Even so, while he’d known them for years, he doubted if he’d exchanged more than a couple of hundred words, total, with each in all that time. They were all really shy — Christopher included.

Brenda spoke up. “Christopher.”

He nodded, feeling like an idiot. This was no time to lose his nerve! This was the first step in a long, complex plan that he’d spent the last ten hours working on the outlines. This, though, was the make or break action for the whole thing. Without success here and now the rest was problematic at best — and maybe not worth the risk.

He spoke quietly, not wanting to attract much attention. There weren’t as many people in the library as usual, but then there weren’t nearly as many people in school today as usual. Of course it wasn’t exactly the usual school day, either.

“I have a proposition for you. All of you. I was wondering if I could have a few moments of your time. Outside, where we can talk privately.”

Brenda regarded him silently for a moment before she spoke. “About the topic d’jour?”

“Yes.”

“A tempest in a teapot, so we’re told.”

“I’d like to talk to you away from anyone else,” Christopher repeated.

He wasn’t ugly; he was neither tall nor short. He was a smidge less than five ten, a little on the thin side. He had light red hair that he kept cut short, and his blue eyes looked curiously out at the world. He had always been curious.

He had watched these four young woman for seven years now. A couple of times he’d tried to strike up a conversation with one or the other of them, only to fail. They were the four musketeers and if you dealt with one you had to deal with them all. And Christopher Wallace was as shy as they were and infinitely more solitary. He’d always suspected that Brenda was the leader; even though this was the first time he could remember that she had spoken first. Usually it was Amy who spoke for them.

“All right, we’ll listen,” Brenda said, nodding. They all got up and the five of them made their way out to the quadrangle that the school was centered on.

It was the second day of November, a Tuesday. The days in Pine Valley were still warm although they could expect that to change at any time now. The grass of the quadrangle was already starting to turn sere brown and in another week or two would be totally dead. They walked out to one of the picnic tables that were under a veranda and currently untenanted.

Again, the four sat at the table and he stood at its head. He didn’t wait much longer than for all of them to get seated.

“The topic d’jour. On December 5th an asteroid plops down in the South Pacific, due south of Easter Island about noon our time. We are told that it’s not going to be a big deal.”

“Yes,” Amy said, speaking for the first time.

“You four are math geniuses. So, that being considered, I’m pretty sure you understand statistics and data clustering.”

Again it was Amy. “You are surely right.”

“Statistically, it’s no big deal to find someone with a 165 plus IQ. It’s not unusual for a person that bright to be interested in mathematics. Two such people in a town of fifty-five hundred are unusual. Three is remarkable and four — well, random chance we’re told. Five? Well, we’re already tripping the light fantastic.”

“This has what to do with the topic d’jour?” Amy asked.

“Patience. This isn’t as easy as it seems, in several senses.

“What they are telling us about the topic is a flat-out lie. You four are geniuses in math. I’m not quite as good in math as you are, but where you four are interested in math, my true love is astronomy and celestial dynamics.

“I’m not going to try to pretend that my family is no different than most people’s. My father is a concert pianist who travels the world headlining concerts. My mother is a professional drunk and party-animal, and she travels the world with my father; she being blotto most of the time.

“At one time my great grandfather employed virtually everyone in Pine Valley. He had a couple of friends that he convinced to move small manufacturing enterprises to Pine Valley, so that when the mine played out, there was a contraction in the local economy but not a crash like most mining towns of the 19th Century.”

Chris waved towards Gutterman Mountain, where the mine had been and where he had lived all his life. “I live in a house high on the mountain. There are still a few ranch hands there; there is a number of other staff. These days, I’m pretty much left to myself. Last week my father called and told me that they weren’t sure if they were going to be home for Thanksgiving or Christmas; I expect it’ll be Thanksgiving.

“So, I’m an astronomy nerd. I get copied with the bulletins from the International Astronomical Union with notices of new findings — all the hot info about new discoveries. I knew about that rock hours before most of the rest of the world did ... even before the president.

“I watched the initial data come in and believe me, I could see the total consternation among astronomers about what the numbers were.

“Then, last night, a few minutes before the President spoke, the IAU wire went dead. Zip ... nothing. You can’t even ping their website. In the next fifteen minutes just about every observatory and astronomy research lab in the US, and the western world for that matter, went offline. Someone stepped on them, I’m sure.

“They are lying. Take the simplest thing — they say the rock is a mile in diameter.” He reached into his fanny pack and pulled out a russet potato. “It’s a mile in diameter in this dimension,” he said, circling the short line around the middle of the potato. “It’s about three and a half miles long. They said that they were still working to determine it’s composition ... and that’s probably true. But before things went dark they had the asteroid’s mass down to a couple of grams. They needed that to work out the orbit.

“The asteroid is a worst case scenario. It’s certainly a consolidated piece of nickel-iron. It has a density of nearly 7.0. It is one very heavy rock. They also didn’t tell us anything about the rock’s position or velocity vector. They didn’t dare, because anyone with an ounce of curiosity would have had instant concerns. As it is, they limited themselves to saying it’s about eight million miles away.”

“And why is that of such a concern?” Lisa asked.

“Because, they left out the velocity vector. Lisa, the rock is moving with considerable eccentricity with respect to the plane of the ecliptic. It will be fifteen degrees above the ecliptic when it passes Earth’s distance from the sun and roughly 15 degrees ahead of the Earth. It is headed down towards the sun and will pass close to it.”

“Towards the sun?” that was Sydney, frowning. “That doesn’t make any sense.”

“It makes perfect sense,” Christopher told her. “Its current velocity is about forty-two miles per second. When it passes close to the sun — and it will pass within a million miles — its velocity will be on the far side of sixty miles a second. The good news is that when it gets back out here it’ll be doing that same forty-two miles per second as it approaches the Earth. When it hits, though, it’ll be going forty-nine miles a second. That’s roughly two and a half times the usual velocity of such a rock.