Learning to Swear in America (22 page)

Fletcher paused. “You want to use your antimatter.”

When he said “antimatter,” a collective groan rose from the assembled scientists.

“There’s no way to contain antimatter,” someone shouted. “You know that. If it comes in contact with its container, they both go poof.”

“Poof?” someone said.

“Math is extremely complex,” Yuri said. “But I’ve already done it. We launch high-flux antimatter accelerator, park it next to asteroid. Shoot pulses to create matter-antimatter reaction, in which particles annihilate each other. Then antimatter is gone—no loss to us—and part of asteroid disappears with it. Not invisible—just gone. And each burst creates push, too, like jet engine. Will push asteroid farther away with each shot.”

Simons rose. “We don’t just need to contain the antimatter. Maybe you have got that figured out—hooray for you if it really works. We don’t have time to find out if you know what you’re talking about.”

“In Russia, is already prototype …” Yuri said.

“But even if you
can
contain it,” Simons said, talking over him, “you’d have to accelerate it in a tight beam over a long
distance. Because we’d have to park the accelerator at a safe distance, and that’s gonna be a few
kilometers
away.”

“Yes …” Yuri said.

“The antimatter will want to spread …”

“I know,” Yuri said. “Was very hard problem. I can show you …”

“You can throw any damn numbers you want up there,” Simons said, gesturing vaguely toward the raised screen. “It doesn’t mean they’re right, and it doesn’t mean they’ll work.”

“This is our best chance to stay alive,” Yuri said, leaning forward. He looked around at all of them. “This is our only chance to stay alive.”

Amy stood.

“We’ve got a bigger problem than keeping it in a tight beam.”

Simons threw his arms up, as though that somehow proved his point.

“What?” Yuri said.

“We have to park the accelerator by the asteroid, right? To match velocity?”

“Yes.”

And then Yuri understood. “Asteroid is traveling at 159,000 miles per hour.” He felt gut-punched. “Humans can’t launch anything approaching that speed.”

“No,” Amy said. “We can’t.”

The room was absolutely silent. Could this be it? Could they be so close and lose their chance to fight because they couldn’t attain the proper velocity? All the desire for speed, the millennia
of races by foot, then horse, then car, every toddler in the world pushing a toy, saying
vroom
, and grinning—was it all for this moment? Was there a biological urge to speed, for this? And they’d failed?

“Okay, people,” Fletcher said. “Dig in. How do we do this thing?”

“We shoot at it as it’s coming toward us,” Amy said. “We launch the accelerator, and shoot as it approaches the BR1019, and as it passes by. Like a cowboy shooting from the hip.”

“This is insane,” Simons said. He pushed his glasses up with his thumb. “We don’t know that an antimatter approach will work at all. It probably won’t. We have to go with what we know has a chance.”

“Which is what?” Fletcher said. “You forget this is an M-type?”

“We throw everything we’ve got at it,” Simons said. “Try to blow it up or push it sideways.”

“Zach, you’re a brilliant man,” Fletcher said. “So stop being stupid.” Simons stared at him. “We’re going to try Yuri’s antimatter.”

“If it doesn’t work, that asteroid is going to hit us head-on.” Simons jutted his index finger at the ceiling, his arm extended. “
No
reduction in mass,
no
reduction in speed.
No
pushing it aside. A head-on with an M-type.”

The room was silent.

“Our problem,” Fletcher said, “is that with conventional weaponry and approaches, we’d still have a head-on with an M-type. Look, I’m not making the call here.” He ran his hand over his scalp. “We’ve got brains, and I’d like to think we have wisdom in
this room. This is too big a decision for any one person. So how many of you want to launch the high-flux antimatter accelerator, and shoot at the asteroid as it comes in and flies by?”

“We got any backup at all?” Simons asked.

“No,” Fletcher said. He hesitated. “We could launch a bunch of nukes at it, to hit after the final antimatter shot. If we’re able to erase some of the asteroid, they’d just explode off in space.”

“Goodnight Moon,” someone said.

“Yeah,” Fletcher said. “We’d have to watch that.”

“The nukes won’t do anything,” Amy said.

“No, they wouldn’t,” Fletcher said. “But they’d be visible from Earth, at least for a little while. They’d give people hope for a few moments. This show is going to be visible from backyard telescopes.”

“The speed, though,” Dan Kilpatrick said.

Fletcher sighed. “Yeah. That’s why we’re not launching any nukes. If the antimatter doesn’t work, that thing will be on us too fast.”

Yuri cleared his throat. “Um, is one other issue.” He gestured toward Amy. “We’ll need to shoot at BR1019 as it comes in, and as it goes by. But that won’t be enough. We’ll need to send one final, enormous pulse backward as it passes. So almost one hundred eighty degrees from first shot to last.”

Fletcher stared at him. “Back toward Earth?”

“Are you insane?” Simons’s face was turning purple. “Are you completely insane? You want to shoot a massive blast of antimatter toward Earth? Toward
us
?”

“Talk about calling in a strike on your own position,” Dan Kilpatrick said.

Amy looked at him, her eyes narrowed but unfocused. She was seeing the shot. She let out a low whistle.

“That beam will miss the asteroid and hit us,” Simons said. “The antimatter will spread out the farther it goes, like a flashlight beam.” He punched an index finger at Yuri. “You’ll bathe the Pacific Rim in antimatter, and it’ll just be gone. Down to the bedrock.”

Fletcher shook his head. “This is too dangerous. I’m all for trying to reduce the size of the asteroid, give it a little shove sideways if we get lucky. But I’m not calling for an antimatter pulse aimed directly at us.”

“Asteroid will be between accelerator and Earth at that point,” Yuri said. “Beam will hit asteroid.”

“What if it does a great job, and goes all the way through the asteroid? Or misses off the side?”

“Then we lose some of California but save Earth,” Yuri said. “But it won’t …”

“Spoken like a guy from Moscow,” Simons said.

There was a stir in the room, and Yuri flushed.
Svoloch
.

“I’m right here,” he said, jabbing both index fingers at the ground. “I’m here, too.” He exhaled sharply. “Look, if we’re going to do this, let’s do it right. We need final, massive backward shot to reduce asteroid mass, and to produce sideways thrust. Maybe asteroid will just hit us glancing blow, or miss entirely.”

“Maybe the accelerator does its job beforehand,” Simons said,
“and we would be fine. But then we take an unnecessary final shot. You know how many things could go wrong with that last pulse?”

Yuri looked to Amy, but she shook her head slowly and stared at a seat back.

“The rest of you may not be aware of this,” Fletcher said, “but as Yuri said, the Russians have a prototype going. They say it’s for energy production.” He shot a glance at Yuri. Yuri nodded. It
was
for energy production. “We know that the kid’s math works, at least in those circumstances.”

“Those circumstances,” Simons said, “are a helluva lot different than space conditions.”

“Yeah,” Fletcher said. “But I’m saying there’s been some testing. His math holds up.”

Simons turned to Yuri. “You ever use a high-flux antimatter accelerator to destroy an asteroid before?”

“No,” Yuri said. “You ever destroy M-type in retrograde using another method?”

Simons snorted and turned away.

“Look,” Fletcher said. “I’m thrilled we have the hardware, and you have the math, to be able to take a shot at this bullet coming at us. But there’s no way I’m authorizing a shot toward Earth.” He looked around. “Anyone here disagree?”

The room was silent. Yuri raked his fingers through his hair.

“You know,” Fletcher said, “the accelerator gets programmed before it’s launched. Once it’s up there, it’s out of our hands. So if we hit it too hard with one of the earlier pulses and break it apart,
a final shot could go right between the pieces.” He smiled thinly. “Zach’s right. Too many things could go wrong.”

Fletcher crouched for a moment, rocking back on his heels, his fingers laced over his head. He sucked in air and blew it out. Finally he stood. “Okay. We’re launching the high-flux antimatter accelerator, programmed to shoot at the BR1019 as it comes in and as it passes, but not after it’s passed. All in favor, let’s see your hands,” Fletcher called, and hands flew up all around the room. “Okay, it’s settled. You,” he said, pointing at Yuri, “get to work. You’re the only guy who can do the math.” He threw an arm out, encompassing the room. “The rest of you get busy working on launch time, the number of pulses, how far away we park the accelerator, all the rest … You know what to do.”

“If you do it this way, it won’t be enough,” Yuri said, his voice higher than he wanted.

“I won’t call a strike down on us,” Fletcher said. “If we die, it won’t be by my hand.”

The assembled scientists began to filter back to their offices, heads down, not talking. Yuri stood for a moment, watching them go.

He was still at odds with every other physicist in the world. Unbelievable.

Back in his office, Yuri worked in a caffeinated blur as night moved to morning. He chewed all the erasers off his pencils, called the front desk to ask for more, and within a minute a middle-aged man showed up at his office with three dozen new pencils. If the circumstances were different, Yuri would have enjoyed that a lot. He was scribbling longhand more than using the computer, with a spare pencil over his ear that he took out to nibble as he thought.

He kicked his shoes off, then his socks, and grabbed at the carpet with his toes while he worked. It had a short weave and he couldn’t quite grasp it. He pulled his fists through his hair until his hair looked like horns.

He made progress but felt he would go mad sitting. Physical inactivity was one of the hardest parts of his lifestyle, and always had been. When he’d complained about it once to Gregor Kryukov, his advisor had told him to use the gym—as though walking on a
treadmill once a day made up for the immobility of adult life. Some days Yuri needed to move so badly that he ran in place at his desk. Some nights he woke, writhing in bed, and couldn’t sleep again until sweat ran down his back from shadowboxing the moon.

Now he used the men’s room, just for the change of pace. It was quiet, even for a bathroom. No one talked, not in the hall, not at the food tables in the conference room. As if in the face of extinction, speech became a lost power. Civilization was collapsing inward on itself, as the universe might someday do. Humans wouldn’t be around to see it.

Yuri worked on, sometimes standing, one leg extended on the desk to stretch his hamstring. He’d switch legs, then run in place, slowing as he needed to jot something down. He lined rows of Styrofoam cups on the left side of his desk. They rounded the corner, but he slowly destroyed the first by digging his thumbnail into it, leaving crescent moons in the foam. Then he pulled a cup apart, shredding it as small as he could. The next cup he ripped apart with his teeth and growled, then moved the line of cups back so it always started at the back left corner of his desk.

He worked through the day, fidgeting, but always moving forward with his calculations. When night fell no one moved to the west wall to watch the sunset. Yuri walked barefoot to the conference room. Someone had brought food up from the cafeteria and set it out on tables. It saved them a minute going downstairs—worth the trouble. Every minute the cold metal edge of the asteroid came 4,260 kilometers closer.

Yuri was still in the gray suit pants he’d worn to Dovie’s high school prom. He realized he’d probably die in that suit, and decided to put the jacket back on when the time came. Irrelevant, of course, but it seemed the right thing to do. It would add a proper solemnity to the occasion. Why had no one written
An Atheist’s Guide to the End of the World
?

He stuffed his hand in his pocket. His fingers brushed something soft and he pulled it out. It was the withered alstroemeria bloom from his lapel. He smiled faintly, like an old man recalling his childhood, pushed it back in his pants, and carried a sandwich to his office.

He noticed something on the way—other people were on the cots, sleeping. A guard with a clipboard roamed the hall, watching when each lay down, scrawling down the time he should wake him. He was gently shaking an older man as Yuri approached, and the man sat up, swung his black socks to the floor, an inch of hairless white skin showing below his pants hem. The man seemed confused for a moment, and his eyes were watering. And then Yuri realized he was crying. Yuri flicked his eyes away, embarrassed, and kept them lowered until his office door clicked shut behind him.

He was the youngest person in the building. He’d seen the Chinese guy a couple of times, and he wasn’t too old—mid-thirties, maybe—one of three or four physicists that age. The rest were at least a decade older, and most were mid-fifties and -sixties. Which meant that while he might be the only person at NEO to be late because he’d gone to prom, he was also the only one who could
stay up for three days. He could keep working while they napped, and he could work while they rubbed their bunions, or whatever it was they did. He might have to squirm around, to stretch out and run in place while he did it, but he could stay awake and make up for the evening he’d lost.