Learning to Swear in America (23 page)

He spent the second night at his desk, sitting on occasion, but mostly leaning over, fidgeting, grinding the heels of his hands into eyes bruised by numbers, and thinking about the speed of light, and the speed of death. Thoughts came unbidden. He wouldn’t have a casket. None of them would, and though there would be no one left to notice, it still didn’t seem right. He would have liked a blue lining cloth. He looked good in blue.

He blinked the thought from his mind and couldn’t stop the mental calculation—the asteroid had hurtled 24 kilometers closer to the bridge of his nose during his blink. He blinked again, and again. Twenty-four. Twenty-four. He refocused, punching numbers into his calculator, and realized he hadn’t double-checked himself in hours. What if he messed up because he forgot to carry the one? That would actually be funny. He started to laugh and couldn’t stop, laughed while tears streamed down his cheeks and his stomach muscles began to burn. Then the tears were real and he was crying, and he kept his pen moving, kept tapping on his calculator while wiping his cheeks with the side of his palm.

He would never win a Nobel. Never feel the heft of the medal in his hand, never run his finger over the engraving of Science pulling the veil from Isis’s face. The stars would not align for him.

He put two Styrofoam cups upside down on the floor and jumped on them, landing with his heels. He looked at the broken shards and thought of Dovie and her fear that Earth would splinter.

“It won’t break apart, Dovie,” he whispered. “But we’ll still die.”

When he had been awake for sixty hours, he had scribbled down the math to contain the antimatter, to focus the beam, to make each pulse small enough that it didn’t break the asteroid apart, causing the next shot to miss. He had done everything he was supposed to.

He allowed himself a celebratory fruit cup and then bent again over his desk, because he had one more thing to calculate: the final, long backward shot toward the BR1019 after it passed the high-flux accelerator. The shot aimed at Earth. Because the first streams of antimatter would reduce the asteroid’s size, but not enough. There would still be a huge body hurtling toward them—flattened on one side, and pushed a little farther away. But not enough. Without the last, huge pulse, the BR1019 was still a planet killer. The job had to be done his way if it was going to work, and there would be no second chance.

When he was done, he took two sheaves of paper, a thick one with his work on the first shots, and a thinner one with scribbled notes for the long last shot, and walked to Fletcher’s office. The director was awake, but his eyes were red and crusty at the corners. He smiled at Yuri and pointed at the papers.

“You got it?”

“Yeah.”

“I’d have somebody double-check it, but there isn’t anybody who can do it. Damn bad break that it hasn’t been published yet.”

Yuri shrugged and scratched his forearm, deeply grooved from angling against the desk edge for dozens of hours. He handed Fletcher the top sheets of paper.

“It’s right. This is, too.”

He handed over the last bit of work he’d done.

Fletcher frowned. “What’s this?”

“You know.”

Fletcher rolled his head back and looked at the ceiling. “I wish to hell everybody agreed on an approach.”

“I ran the numbers. The first pulses won’t be enough.”

“We already decided …”

“You know it’s true. I’ll bet you had somebody else run it, too. They can calculate that much.” He saw in Fletcher’s face that he was right.

“He wasn’t sure,” Fletcher said flatly. The director pushed the second sheaf of papers back at Yuri. “We’re only using antimatter at all because we’ve got no choice. But I will not call for a strike directly on Earth—on our position.” Fletcher leaned forward, and stared at Yuri from under his crusty red lids. “I will not be the man who condemns the planet.”

“Then you just did.”

Yuri didn’t take the papers, so Fletcher laid them on the edge of his desk. Yuri cocked his head back and squeezed his eyes shut. He wanted to hit something. For a moment, he considered punching Fletcher. What difference would it make? He’d just die with a
broken hand, and Fletcher with a sore jaw. Yuri let the urge pass and opened his eyes. Fletcher’s wall clock faced him. The second hand was ticking, parsing time into seconds, each the same as the last, like a man who doesn’t break his stride as he walks over a cliff.

“Come on,” Fletcher said. “Everybody’s finished. I’ve been writing the work up on some marker boards.”

“I saw them when I got sandwich …” Yuri hesitated. “Yesterday, I think.” Or was it the day before? He picked up his papers off Fletcher’s desk.

“I’m gonna write your data in, let everybody look at the whole thing. I want to see if anything jumps out at anybody. Any simple mistake. We’re all exhausted—it could happen.”

Fletcher sent someone to roust the napping scientists, then walked with Yuri to the marker boards in the conference room. Yuri held up the paper with his antimatter work, and Fletcher glanced at it as he scribbled the math in with a foul-smelling black marker. Yuri held up his second paper, the one on the final shot.

Fletcher shook his head. “Nice try.” His gaze held Yuri’s for a moment. “If you were me, would you use it?”

Yuri leaned forward. “Yes.”

Fletcher snorted softly. “You think you’re the smartest guy in this building?”

“No. I know I’m not. I’m just right about this.”

Fletcher sighed. “Too many things could go wrong. And every one of them would be catastrophic.”

“We have to try.”

Fletcher capped his pen, but the stink still lingered. “We
may have just found a creative solution to the Mideast peace problem.”

Yuri nodded numbly. “I’m going to men’s room. I think I’m going to be sick.”

Fletcher gripped his bicep. “You did good work.” He shook Yuri’s arm, then let it go. “You know the telescope guys are going to give us a live feed.”

“We’ll actually see it?” Yuri felt a new wave of nausea.

“If we see the accelerator take too small a bite out of that big iron apple,” Fletcher said, “you’ll have several minutes to tell us that you told us so.”

Yuri clenched his fists behind his head, hair spraying through his knuckles.

“Is okay if I call couple of people? To say good-bye?”

“Sure.”

Yuri went back to his office and laid his forehead on the desk for a moment. He sighed and sat up and got the woman at the front desk to put a call through to his mother. The hospital receptionist told him that she was in surgery. He smiled as he hung up. She was doing what she did best. He’d never thought of it that way before.

He tried Gregor Kryukov, his advisor, but the office phone just rang. Yuri could see it, sitting on Kryukov’s desk beside his stainless steel pen cup, ringing in the old man’s office in the physics building on Lebedev Street. He felt a moment of panic, wondering if they’d already pushed Kryukov out, if his advisor had defended Yuri’s authorship of his work and been penalized for it. Then he
realized what time it was in Moscow—Kryukov would be in bed. That meant his mother was doing an emergency surgery. He squeezed his eyes shut for a moment and thought of her, electronic scalpel in hand, saving someone’s world. He didn’t know her very well, and didn’t always like her, but he was proud of her.

Then he called Dovie.

“Hello?”

“It’s Yuri.”

“Hey. Is everything okay?”

“Um, no.” He hesitated. What was he going to say? And why hadn’t he thought about this before he picked up the phone? “I’m sorry I didn’t call after dance. We got busy here.”

“Yeah, I heard. They said the asteroid’s worse than they thought because it’s metal, but I don’t really understand why.”

“Who told that?”

“The TV news. It’s all they’re talking about.”

“They released that? They told people it’s iron?”

“Yeah.”

He wondered if people in Russia knew, too. Did his mother know that while she was scrubbing in, standing in a cold hospital corridor in the night, next to a rack holding boxes of suture line?

They were silent for a moment.

“My Dad’s upset because they’re selling these T-shirts,” Dovie said. “They say ‘I survived the BR1019 asteroid.’ Dad’s mad because there’d be no way to get a refund. You know, if we don’t survive.”

Yuri laughed. “That sounds like your dad.”

Dovie turned serious. “Why is this so much worse? Than before?”

“Iron is very heavy. It has huge mass. If your refrigerator were solid iron, it would weigh almost 30,000 pounds.”

“Get out!”

“Um, pardon?”

“You know, it probably does. Some of Mom’s banana bran muffins are in there.”

Yuri laughed.

“So there’s a big iron thing coming for us. Yuri, it’s a cannonball!”

He blinked. That hadn’t occurred to him.

“It’s like we’re being attacked by giant space pirates!”

Yuri could hear Lennon’s voice in the background say, “Space pirates? You have my attention.”

“I’m going to have to go in minute. There’s more to do here.”

“Okay,” Dovie said, and her voice sounded suddenly small.

“Dovie? Are your bangs sticking up?”

“Yeah. Up and at a rakish angle to the side.”

He visualized it and smiled, but his mouth twisted, and he ran a hand over his eyes.

“Are we going to be okay?” Dovie whispered.

“I’m not sure. I’ll try to call again later, okay?” he said.

“Yeah.”

They didn’t say good-bye.

A few minutes later, Karl Fletcher knocked on Yuri’s door, and stuck his head in. “Grab your work,” Fletcher said. “Time to go down to the lion’s den.”

“Um …”

“The computer programmers.” Fletcher handed Yuri the sheaf of papers he had copied to the marker board. “I photocopied this,” he said, “just in case someone drops pizza on it and we can’t read it. Wouldn’t that be something.”

“I won’t get it anywhere near pizza,” Yuri said, unable to keep the offense out of his voice.

“Oh yes, you will. You’re going to be on their turf now, and trust me, there will be pizza.” Fletcher led him into the hall. “Communication is going to be the key here—they don’t know our job, and we don’t know theirs. They know how to turn the math into an algorithm that can control our flux accelerator. We don’t. But they don’t understand what they’re working with. They won’t get why your numbers are what they are.” Fletcher gave Yuri a lopsided grin. “Hell, I don’t, either.”

“They won’t really understand what they’re seeing?” Yuri asked.

“Not a chance. You’ll think they’re a bunch of idiots. Honestly, their first attempts will make you want to tear out your hair. Resist the impulse.” Fletcher ran a hand over his smooth scalp.

He took Yuri down to the second floor, and paused outside a closed door. “By the way, don’t call their computers ‘computers.’ They’re workstations.”

“Okay. How is it different?”

“If you asked them that, they’d turn purple and start telling you about all their gadgets and generally bore the hell out of you, all in an incredibly condescending tone. It’d make you miss Zach Simons.”

“Workstations,” Yuri said. “I’ll remember that.”

Fletcher opened the door to a large room filled with computers in what had been cubicles in facing rows. The cubicle walls were gone, stacked against the right wall near the servers. Fletcher saw him looking. “The barbarians dismantled them.”

A fleshy man with glasses walked toward them and stuck out his hand. “Mike Ellenberg,” he said. “I’m lead here.” He nodded toward the cubicle walls and grinned. “We live by our own rules.”

Fletcher sighed.

Yuri glanced around. Wires exploded from the front of the metal server racks, and cables stretched across the floor and ceiling. Laptops were scattered around on tables and open metal shelving, along with printers and unidentifiable bits of outdated equipment. A flat screen was mounted on the wall with the door, and a white marker board stretched across the facing wall. In the upper-right-hand corner someone had written the wireless password and the phone number for Antonio’s.

“We’ve got the best computer programmers and program managers in the country right here in this room,” Fletcher said, gesturing sideways with his hand. “It’s still gonna be tough to reduce the math to a programming language. It usually takes a butt load of meetings to get it worked out, and we don’t have time for that.”

Mike Ellenberg moved away and Fletcher whispered to Yuri, “They never really understand the math. Humor the hell out of them anyway.”

Yuri nodded. Humor them. Tell them a joke? Seriously?

Fletcher nodded to the papers in Yuri’s hand and spoke loudly, addressing the room. “This is what we’ve got. You need to turn it into something the computer’s gonna like, and you have to do it fast, and if it’s not perfect, you die. So, I’m parking The Brain right here. You’re not sure what he means by something, you ask.”

Fletcher pushed a padded swivel chair against the wall, and swept his hand toward it. “Your throne.”

Yuri looked at him. “I just sit here?”

“Oh, they’ll have questions. You’ll be up and down constantly.”

Ellenberg walked over and Yuri handed him the sheaf of papers. Fletcher clapped the program manager on the back, nodded to Yuri, and left. Ellenberg flipped through the papers. The programmers threw curious glances at Yuri. He felt exposed, sitting in a chair by the wall. He wished he had a desk.