Текст книги "The End Is Nigh"

Автор книги: Jack McDevitt

Соавторы: Nancy Kress
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Текущая страница: 16 (всего у книги 26 страниц)

he

felt the need to change, though, didn’t mean he thought his friends should. Bernie, Toivo, and Jaco looked a little older every year, but to George they would be forever ten, forever fifteen, forever eighteen, forever the ages they’d been as—together—they had discovered who they were.

But as kids or adults, what they

weren’t

were good card players.

George stared at Arnold, trying to pick off Arnold’s tells. Unlike Jaco, though, Arnold was damn near unreadable. He might have a full house, he might have crap—there was almost no way to tell.

Bernard smacked his cards down on the table again. “Dammit, George, you going to play or what?”

George was. These boys were about to learn a valuable—and extremely costly—lesson.

“Okay, Bernie,” George said. “I’ll see your five—” George took a five dollar bill off his pile and set it on top of the stack of money at the table’s center “—and let’s send the kiddies home so the adults can play. I’ll raise you

ten

.”

Arnold’s bushy eyebrows shot up. “I’m out,” he said. He tossed his cards down.

“Dammit, Dad,” Bernie said. “It’s my bet, you’re supposed to wait for me and Jaco to go before you fold.”

Arnold stood, hitched up his flannel long john bottoms by yanking up on the red suspenders attached to them. “I’m retired,” he said. “I don’t wait for shit, eh?”

He glanced up at the ratty cabin’s peaked wooden ceiling, eyes squinting as if he were looking for something. His hand blindly felt around the table for his glasses. Then, George heard something—the same sound Arnold must’ve heard seconds earlier: the distant, deep roar of a jet engine.

Arnold put on his glasses. “Assholes,” he said. “That’s all we need is some damn plane spooking the deer.”

Jaco giggled. There was no other way to describe the sound: Most men “laughed,” Jaco made a noise that would have been more at home in the body of a twelve-year-old girl showing off a tea party dress than a forty-year-old man wearing the same snowsuit he’d had on for five straight days, taking it off only to handle his business out in the woods.

“Deer should be scared of

something

,” he said. “They sure aren’t scared of us. Are we going to at least

try

to hunt this year?”

Arnold grabbed his can of Pabst. “If we run out of beer before the snow stops falling and the plows pass by, sure. Good thing we got twenty cases, eh? I’m going to take a leak. Jaco, try not to freeze to death, you damn pansy.”

The old man opened the cabin’s rickety door and stepped out into the winter night, letting in a strong gust of crisp wind and a scattering of blowing snow.

Jaco shivered. “See what I mean? Freezing my balls off when we could be somewhere insulated.”

“What balls?” Bernie said.

Jaco had more money than the rest of them combined. Every year for the last three or four deer seasons, he’d begged to get a better cabin. He even offered to pay the difference. But straying from the path was not allowed—since George and Jaco and Bernard had been old enough to drink they had come here with Arnold, and here they would continue to come when their own sons were old enough to join, and

keep

coming until they either died or grew so old they couldn’t handle two weeks of bitter Upper Peninsula cold.

Bernie scratched at his beard. Not even a week in and it was damn near full. The guy had some kind of mutation, of that George was sure.

“Bernie, put up or shut up,” George said. “Ten dollars to you.”

Bernie reached for his money, then paused—he looked up to the cabin’s thin, peaked roof, just like his father had moments earlier. Jaco did the same, as did George. That jet had grown louder.

Much

louder.

The empty cans of Pabst started to rattle like ominous little tin chimes.

“Oh, jeeze,” Toivo said. “My head hurts so bad it’s

roaring

.”

The cabin door opened and Arnold rushed in, stumbling from the long johns pulled halfway up his thighs, the suspenders flapping wildly.

“Get down, eh? It’s right on top of us!”

George was about to ask the man what was going on, but the jet engine grew so loud it had to be right above the cabin. George dove under the table, bumping it hard as he did, sending empties and cards and money flying. He hit the wooden floor hard and lay there for only a split second before it seemed to bounce up below him, the entire cabin rattling like a big box of dry wood.

• • • •

Moments later, George opened the cabin door and rushed out into the freezing night. Jaco, Bernie, Arnold, and Toivo came out behind him, all pulling on jackets or stomping feet into heavy winter boots as they walked. Falling snow ate up the sound, but the woods were even quieter than normal, as if the low-flying jet had intimidated the entire landscape into a terrified silence.

When the sun had gone down six hours earlier, the trees—both lush pines and bare-branched hardwoods—had been blanketed in blazing white. Most of that covering had fallen off, swatted away by the jet’s roar to join the thick snowpack already on the ground.

Clouds blocked out all but a dim, hazy glow of the moon. The only light came from the naked bulb above the cabin’s door.

George glanced at the cabin roof. It, too, was suddenly bare, just a few clumps of snow sticking to the weathered tin. He was a little surprised to see the cabin had remained in one piece. Pots had fallen off hooks and crashed around the wood stove, and all kinds of bat and bird shit had rained down from the old roof, but the one-room building seemed to be fine.

Jaco’s Jeep Grand Cherokee had two feet of snow on it and around it. Other than the Arctic Cat—which was so buried it was little more than a snowbank—the Jeep was the only way to go the crash victims, or to get them help.

Arnold pointed north. A wall of trees lay in that direction, but if you walked that way for about five minutes you would come out on the pristine shore of Lake Superior: untouched, icy rock beaches lining dense, snow covered forest that stretched forever, the black water reaching out so far it vanished into the night.

“The thing was going that way,” Arnold said. “Dark as it is out, the clouds should be lit up where it crashed. We’d see a fire from miles away.”

“Maybe it landed,” Jaco said.

Arnold hawked a loogie and spat it onto the snow. “Where, exactly, might it land? Ain’t no airport around here can even take a prop plane let alone that big-ass thing that flew over, eh?”

Twice in rapid succession, Arnold had said

thing

instead of

plane

or

jet

.

“Mister Ekola,” George said, “what exactly did you see?”

George had known the man since the second grade at Ontonagan Elementary, since the first time Bernie had invited he and Jaco home to play. Even now that George was in his forties—with a son of his own—he couldn’t bring himself to call Arnold by his first name, no matter how many times the man asked.

“Lights,” Arnold said. “Lots of lights. Goddamn

big

, eh? Don’t know what it was… but it wasn’t a jet.”

Bernie threw his hands up in frustration. “Dad, it was a jet. Your eyes are old as hell, remember?”

Arnold pointed to his glasses. “Had these on. Know what I saw.”

“It was a jet,” Bernie said.

Jaco walked to the cabin’s corner, taking big steps to push through the thigh-high snow. “I’ll check around back,” he said. “Maybe something out that way.”

Toivo rubbed at his temples. “Arnold is right, Bernie—there’s no airports around here. A jet makes that much noise could maybe land on da highway, but other than that, it would have had to crash, and if it crashed, we’d see fires or something.”

George pulled his cell phone from his pocket. “If it was a plane, maybe there’s news coverage. Let me see if I can get a signal.”

“Your phone hasn’t got shit all week,” Bernie said. “I left mine inside, I’ll grab it.” He turned and trudged back into the cabin.

George yelled after him: “And grab the flashlights.”

They had rushed out of the cabin expecting to see pillars of flame, had grabbed coats and boots and little else. Whatever was going on, they needed to slow down, think things through. Being outside

at all

in this weather could kill. If they were going to go through the woods looking for Arnold’s mystery non-plane, they had to use their heads.

George couldn’t get a signal. Being in the middle of the woods in one of the most rural and remote places in America, he wasn’t surprised. He put the phone away.

“Hey, guys?”

It was Jaco. He’d gone all the way behind the cabin and come around the other side. He was leaning heavily on the corner, as if he were suddenly exhausted. “You need to come see this. Right now.”

He ducked back out of sight. Arnold started after him, the old-timer more sure-footed through the snow than the men twenty-five years his junior.

George fell in behind. Bernie came out of the cabin, one flashlight in his right hand, another under his right arm. He waved his left hand; the glowing cell phone screen he held seemed to blaze like a comet.

“Told ya,” he said. “AT&T works in da big city, Georgie, but out here Verizon gets full signal. Hey, where you going?”

“Come on,” Arnold snapped. “Jaco saw something.”

George followed in Arnold’s footsteps, which was easier than plunging his feet into the thigh-deep snow. Bernie followed behind, putting his feet in the same spots. He handed George the extra flashlight. George turned it on, pointed the beam out in front of Arnold. The old man moved like he had the place memorized—he did, but the snow was deep and who knew what fallen log or stick might lie below the surface?

George felt a little embarrassed that the snow here was untouched save for Jaco’s fresh prints—he and his friends had barely left the cabin at all. Deer camp wasn’t really about deer; it was about drinking and sleeping and playing cards and telling stories, about making fun of each other, about hanging out with the people who had made grade school, junior high, and high school a great experience.

The four men turned the corner, saw Jaco standing between two towering pines, not even fifteen feet from the cabin. A lone set of footprints showed his path through the snow. George and Bernie’s flashlight beams spotlighted Jaco, and the fluffy white that came up almost to his crotch. He had his back to them. He stood still, yet he was shaking, and somehow George knew it wasn’t from the bitter cold.

Jaco looked down, looked at the lit-up white around him, then turned so fast George took a step back. The flashlight beams lit up his glasses, making him look like a movie android about to unleash a death ray.

“

Turn off da damn lights

,” he said in a snarling hiss.

Out of nowhere, little Jaco, the runt of their litter, had transformed into the scariest person George had ever seen. That wasn’t like Jaco, not at all—he was

terrified

.

Bernie’s flashlight blinked out. George fumbled with his own, then clicked it off. The entire world blackened for a split second, plunging George into a cold, dark, silent void. His eyes quickly adjusted—and the first thing he noticed was a glow coming from deep in the woods.

A

green

glow.

His friends had become reverse shadows, their faces and clothes spots of less-dark that moved and turned, all facing that strange light. They walked to Jaco, feet crunching loudly on undisturbed snow until they stood next to their friend.

George stared. He couldn’t tell how far away the lights were, exactly, but through the trees and the thick underbrush he could almost make out a shape. Not the shape of a big jet, like a 747, or even a prop plane for that matter, but instead a thick rectangle, the upright edges maybe twenty or thirty feet high. The lines parallel to the ground were much longer, maybe a hundred feet, maybe more.

A rectangle… or, the profile of a disc.

“That’s not a plane,” George said.

Arnold nodded. “Told ya.”

“Oh, jeeze,” Toivo said. “What da hell is that thing?”

Bernie shook his head in wide-eyed disbelief. “Sorry, Dad. Sorry. Guess there won’t be any news stories about a crashed plane.”

Arnold nodded. “Yah, that’s fine. Maybe you should look anyway, though. Check one of those news sites.”

Toivo crunched over to Bernie. “CNN? That’s a good one.”

Bernie stared, dumbfounded, at Toivo. “CNN?”

“Your phone,” George said. “You got signal, right?”

His own voice seemed oddly normal, when he knew it probably should have rang with panic. Something was very, very wrong, but Mister Ekola was standing right there and Mister Ekola was calm as could be.

Bernie twitched like someone had stabbed him with a fork. “Oh, shit, right.” He dug in his pocket and pulled out his phone. The screen blazed, lighting up slowly billowing cones of breath.

“Oh, jeeze,” Toivo said. “Turn down da brightness, eh?”

Bernie ripped off a glove and tossed it down, not even bothering to put it in his pocket, then stabbed at the screen with the tip of his finger.

Arnold put his arm around Jaco. “Son, are you all right?”

Jaco shook his head. “No, sir. I don’t think I am.”

“Yah, I suppose that’s to be expected,” Arnold said.

George stared at the man. How could he be so damn

calm

? George knew he should be the one to say something, to get things organized, but all of the sudden he was twelve again, and so was Bernie and Jaco and Toivo; Mister Ekola was the adult.

Jaco’s dad had died when he was just a toddler. George’s dad had left when George was eight, had never come back. Toivo’s dad had beaten the shit out of him more often than not, had sent Toivo to school with long-sleeved sweaters to hide the bruises on his arms. That had happened since at least the fourth grade, when Toivo’s family moved in, until the summer after the fifth grade, when Arnold had paid a visit to Toivo’s house and given Toivo’s dad a lesson on how to dish out a

real

beating. After that, Toivo’s dad walked with a limp; he also never laid another hand on his boy.

Arnold Ekola and his wife hadn’t just raised Bernie, they’d basically raised three more boys as well. For George and Jaco and Toivo, Arnold wasn’t their biological father, but he was their

dad

.

Mister Ekola knew what to do—he always had, he always would.

Bernard looked up from the phone.

“Oh my god,” he said. “Oh, god, Dad… it’s everywhere.”

Arnold squeezed Jaco’s shoulder, pointed out at the green lights.

“Jaco, can you keep an eye on that thing for me?”

Jaco nodded. “Sure, Mister Ekola. I can do that.”

“Good boy,” Arnold said. He turned to Bernie. “Exactly

what

is everywhere?”

Bernie pointed to the lighted rectangle. “That is. I mean,

those

are. Milwaukee, Boston, New York, it even says there’s one in Paris. It’s fucking

aliens

, Dad. That’s what CNN says.”

Toivo nodded. “Was bound to happen someday,” he said. “There’s lots of stars, dontchya know.”

Bernie pulled the phone closer to his face. “They’re landing all over the world. They’re attacking, killing people in the cities. Air Force is fighting them, Army’s been mobilized… Dad, we’re being

invaded

.”

George took two steps toward Bernie, snatched the phone out of his friend’s hand. They weren’t being invaded, that was ridiculous. There was some other explanation for this, shit like this

didn’t happen

.

One glance at the web page confirmed what Bernie had said. George tried to poke the screen, realized he, too, was wearing gloves. He tore them off and threw them down. The cold sent needle-stabs into his hands, the same way it had been stabbing his neck and face—he just hadn’t registered it.

George tried Fox News. Top story:

New York On Fire, London Destroyed

.

He looked at Yahoo:

It’s Not a Movie: Our World is Invaded

.

NBC:

Invaders Overpowering Militaries Worldwide

.

George’s eyes fuzzed; the screen blurred into nothing. He was at the tip of the Keweenaw Peninsula, so deep in the woods there weren’t even paved roads. He was 370 miles away from his family.

My son, my wife… I have to get to Milwaukee

.

George handed back the phone.

“Bernie’s right,” he said. “I don’t know why this one landed in the Yoop, Mister Ekola… but that’s an alien ship.”

Arnold nodded. He hawked a loogie, turned and spat so it wouldn’t hit any of his boys.

“Yah, I figured,” he said. “Let’s get back inside da cabin. Dress warm, get your guns, and make sure you have as much ammo as you can carry.”

The five men turned away from the green lights and walked back to the cabin, their feet crunching in the snow. Bernie slid his phone into his pocket, cutting off even that small light.

They walked into the cabin and silently went about their business, Arnold’s calming influence somehow stopping any of them from freaking out. They all had families to get back to, yet without saying a word they all knew that wasn’t going to happen right away. It felt like at least one of them should go crazy, scream about how he had leave,

right now

, and the others would have to wrestle him to the ground, but that didn’t happen. They all knew they had to wait until morning, at the very least—going out at night was to fear death from the cold just as much as fearing anything the aliens might do.

Still, George wasn’t completely free of crazy. As he put on a second sweater, then a third, he kept one eye on his Remington 700 rifle, and couldn’t help one thought from repeating in his head over and over:

Maybe it’s good we didn’t shoot at any deer—we might need all these bullets

.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

New York Times

bestselling novelist Scott Sigler is the author of the Infected trilogy (

Infected, Contagious,

and

Pandemic

),

Ancestor,

and

Nocturnal

, hardcover thrillers from Crown Publishing; and the co-founder of Empty Set Entertainment, which publishes his Galactic Football League series (

The Rookie, The Starter, The All-Pro

and

The MVP

). Before he was published, Scott built a large online following by giving away his self-recorded audiobooks as free, serialized podcasts. His loyal fans, who named themselves “Junkies,” have downloaded over eight million individual episodes of his stories and interact daily with Scott and each other in the social media space.

Jack McDevitt – ENJOY THE MOMENT

The party on my thirtieth birthday more or less opened the door to the end of the world. It was supposed to be a surprise, but my husband Warren, and a few other family members took to smirking and grinning during the preceding days. I was maybe two steps into the living room when the lights came on. They were all there. Uncle Harry and Aunt May with Liz, our eight-year-old daughter. Jack Camden and his wife, whose name I couldn’t remember, and probably twenty other relatives, colleagues, and friends. They burst into a rendition of “Happy Birthday,” and applauded. My sister Ellen brought me a lime daiquiri, my favorite, and when the singing stopped I was led to the coffee table, which was piled high with presents.

We were essentially party people, always looking for something to celebrate. Tom Akins, the physics department chairman and my mentor, played his accordion, accompanied by Freeman and my brother Bill on guitars. They filled the house with music and everybody danced. We passed out drinks, ate through three and a half cakes, played some games and talked about how good life was.

Tom was a cosmologist who was devoting his life to trying to solve the riddle of cosmic inflation, the incredible, and incomprehensible, rate of expansion that occurred at the very beginning of the Big Bang. He’d won some awards, and had been a good guide for me when I was coming up through the program. Toward the end of the evening, he took me aside to pass on some news. “Maryam,” he said, “I’ve told you about Dan Martin? He’s been doing some groundbreaking work on space-time curvature. He’ll be receiving the Carnegie Award this year.”

Martin had gotten his doctorate only three years earlier. “Beautiful,” I said, trying not to sound jealous. “When did you find out?”

“He called me this morning.” He laughed. “He says some of his friends are making references to Martin’s Theorem.”

“Well, I’m glad to hear it.”

He must have picked up something in my tone. “Don’t worry, Maryam. Your time will come.”

It was a happy night. But I guess some part of Dan Martin lingered. When it was over, and everyone was saying goodbye and retrieving their cars from around the neighborhood, my husband hesitated as we left the house and started down the walkway. “What’s wrong?” he asked.

“What do you mean? Why do you say that?”

“Something’s bothering you. It’s been there for most of the evening.”

I took a deep breath and faced it. “I’m

thirty

.”

His eyebrows rose the way they usually did when politicians were talking. “Maryam, you still look great. I don’t think you’ll have anything to worry about for a long time.”

“That’s not what I mean, love. You know what they say about physicists and thirty?”

“No. What do they say?”

“That if you’re going to leave a mark, you have to get moving early. After you hit thirty your brain begins to freeze.” I tried to turn it into a joke, but he didn’t smile.

“Come on. You don’t believe that.”

I’m not sure whether I did. But it ended there. We got into the car and went home.

• • • •

Despite the alcohol, I didn’t sleep well that night. There’s not a physicist on the planet who doesn’t want to leave his or her name in the history of the field. To do something that grants immortality. Predict the Higgs Boson. Devise the Pauli Exclusion Principle.

Schwarzschild pinned his name to a radius. Heisenberg to uncertainty. Doppler has a shift, and Hawking has radiation. Schrodinger scored with a

cat

. And what, in the end, would Maryam Gibson have?

I’d been working on dark energy since the beginning of my career. My thesis had been an attempt to account for it. Get to the heart of dark energy and you can explain why the universe continues to expand at an increasing rate. If I could succeed, make some sort of progress, it was easy to imagine, that at some future date, people would be talking about the Gibson Hypothesis. Or maybe Gibson Energy. I especially liked that one.

At one time it hadn’t seemed too much to ask. Dark energy constituted 68% of the total mass-energy of the universe. Seventeen times the amount of ordinary matter. I’d been convinced that I could figure it out. It was just waiting there for someone to explain it.

But that night, with the partying done, I lay in the fading moonlight that came through the curtains, and I knew it wouldn’t be me.

• • • •

I needed a different track, but my career demanded I stay with the hunt for dark energy. There was no way I could leave that. But maybe, I thought, I could use my spare time to accomplish something that didn’t require an Einstein. Mark Twain had commented once that he’d come in on Halley’s Comet, and that he expected to go out with it as well. Which he did.

Find one of the things and you got to name it.

Gibson’s

Comet wasn’t exactly what I’d hoped for. But I could live with it. And it might be obtainable.

Warren and I spent a couple of hours most evenings watching TV. I enjoyed being with him, and had always arranged things to ensure we got some time together. But I was going to have to give that up for a while. “I’m going comet-hunting,” I said.

“Whatever you like, babe,” he said. “But you’re not going to give up on the dark energy thing, are you?”

“No. This would just be something I’d be looking at in my spare time.”

“Okay.” He sounded disappointed. “Will we still get to watch

Big Bang Theory

?”

“Sure. And one more thing—”

“All right.”

“Don’t mention this to anyone, okay?”

“Why not?”

“I’d just as soon nobody knows until I actually find one.”

• • • •

We both had offices at home. A couple of nights after the party, when I had some free time, I went into mine, sat down, and started digging through the online sky surveys. Even though I’d devoted my entire career to cosmology, I was probably uniquely qualified to look for comets because I had exactly the right tools. I’d developed software that could analyze for mass, gravitation, dark matter distribution, distance, velocities, and so on. Normally, my research consisted of recording a set of results from the digital archives, moving forward a given number of years, analyzing how the situation had changed, and comparing the results with what I’d anticipated.

The same approach should work in the hunt for comets. Comets originate in the outer solar system, either in the Kuiper Belt—which consists of small bodies of ice, rock, and metal orbiting beyond Neptune and extending for an additional two billion miles—or in the Oort Cloud, which lies at a range of about a light-year. The Kuiper Belt offered a much better chance of success. So I locked in on it.

Warren never quite understood why I was so hung up on gaining visibility in the field. He was a realtor, but he knew there was more to life than making money. He enjoyed being able to see his clients settle happily into homes, or to assist them when they were moving elsewhere. He thought those were the only two things that really counted in one’s profession: making a contribution, and collecting a decent income. “Nobody other than my clients and family, and a few friends,” he’d told me once, “will ever know my name. But what does that matter?”

Why did I want to put myself out front with a theorem that would never matter to anyone? Or probably even be understood by anybody except a few specialists? He’d tried reading

Quantum Theory for Dummies

, and realized that even physicists didn’t really grasp the reality of some of the more arcane mathematics.

I sat quietly through the night, looking at patches of sky, discarding stars, picking up glimmers that were too faint to amount to anything. Eventually my eyes got heavy and I resigned myself to the fact that I would not amount to anything… at least not tonight.

• • • •

Two nights later I repeated the process with the same result. But I stayed with it, whenever I had time. Warren thought it was a waste of effort but he didn’t say so directly. He

did

mention that real estate was booming, and that he could use another agent. He guaranteed I’d earn a lot more than I was making as a college professor. He mentioned an article about how people who keep irregular hours damage their brains. And he left a magazine open on the table with a story about how marriages work better when the partners spend time together.

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.”