Learning to Swear in America (28 page)

“Exactly.”

“Gimme some of that, too, would you?”

“You’re sitting down.”

“Still,” Lennon said.

Yuri fished through the boxes and found more rubber piping. Lennon threaded it under the belt loops on his jeans and grinned.

“Prepared for all emergencies.”

“Yeah,” Yuri said.

He walked back to the NEO building beside Lennon.

“You guys probably have a pretty good telescope to watch this thing come in?” Lennon said.

Yuri glanced sideways at him. “We won’t need telescope,” he said quietly. “It’s heading straight for us. We’ll see it in sky. Soon.”

“Yeah,” Lennon said, “but the antimatter just makes it
dissolve, right? So maybe we’ll see a speck up there, and then it’s just gone.”

Yuri smiled ruefully. “Antimatter isn’t going to dissolve all of it. There’s just way too much iron.”

Lennon’s eyes bugged out. “Something’s still going to hit? It’s still going to hit?” He fingered the buckle of his new harness.

“Idea is to annihilate much of it. Antimatter bursts will also push it to side some. Final strong burst will dissolve big piece and push it enough that rest will scrape by—not hit. Maybe.”

“I like the it-disappears-entirely-a-long-way-from-here scenario better,” Lennon said.

“Sorry,” Yuri said. “Wasn’t option for us.”

“So how close exactly is this thing going to get?”

Yuri took a breath. “It’ll be good thing you’re sitting down.”

“A wheelchair joke?” Lennon said. “Really?”

Yuri held his eye. “No joke.”

“Aw, crap.”

“They’re grounding airplanes. You heard that, right? Is because asteroid will come close enough it could smash them. Also if leading edge does touch atmosphere, wind may get very turbulent.”

Yuri held his eye.

“It’s going to be huge in sky. And it’s going to be very, very fast.” They stopped in front of the NEO building. “You know Hubble telescope, yes? It crosses United States in ten minutes, traveling at eight kilometers per second.” He looked out into the sky. “Asteroid is coming at seventy-one kilometers per second.”

“Aw, crap,” Lennon said.

“Yeah. Anyway, I have to get back now.”

“No kidding,” Lennon said. “I want to go sit in the basement.”

His taxi was waiting in a parking lot down the street. The guard who had brought him to Yuri’s office was stationed outside the building, not looking at either of them.

“You want me to go get driver for you?” Yuri asked.

“No, I got it,” Lennon said. “The driver’s been waiting a while, though. I should probably give him more money.”

Yuri pulled his wallet out and fanned it sarcastically in front of Lennon, who ran his fingers through the bills, then plucked out two twenties.

“That was expensive book,” Yuri grumbled.

“You’ll love it,” Lennon said. “You’ll use it for years.”

Yuri shot him a suspicious glance as Lennon wheeled himself to the taxi, and then the driver was out and helping him with the chair. Yuri waved but didn’t stay to see him off. He walked back to his office and picked the book off the floor. He flipped it over to look at the cover.
Techniques for Self-Gratification in the Male: An Illustrated Guide.
He was going to kill Lennon.

Yuri got permission to go back to his hotel to shower and took the car service. The driver glanced at him repeatedly in the rearview mirror. Yuri knew he wanted a word of reassurance, to have someone who really knew tell him it would be fine. Yuri was exhausted and didn’t know what to say.
I found the math, dammit. Let somebody else find the words.
He got out without looking at the man.

He showered slowly, like a ceremony, and once he was clean he stood under the water and let it rain down on his skin. He couldn’t shake the driver’s eyes, haunted with their question: have you saved me, or have you killed me?

He finally turned the water off, ran the towel over his head, and realized the phone was ringing in the bedroom. He dived for it.

“It’s me,” Dovie said, and he smiled. “I wanted to apologize for
telling you about Michelangelo. You know I want you to win the Nobel, right? Since that’s what you want?”

“Yeah,” Yuri said, piling the pillows up and sinking deeply into them. He hesitated. “My father died when I was very young. Little later, my mother read in newspaper about that year’s Nobel winners, and she said, ‘They’re immortal.’ And I thought if I could win one, my father might not be dead—because we share name, see? Like I could trick Death. Eventually I figured out that wouldn’t work. But I can still make his
name
immortal.”

“Oh,” Dovie said. “Wow.” He could hear her breathing in the phone. “Do you believe in an afterlife?”

“No.”

“But you’ve spent your childhood trying to create one for him. To
be
his afterlife.”

“I suppose that’s what children are,” Yuri said.

“It might be easier to believe in heaven than to win a Nobel.”

“Not for me. Next year, when little kids recite list of Nobel physics winners, Strelnikov will be on that list.”

“You get that normal kids don’t do that, right?” She was silent for a moment, and Yuri was teetering on the brink of sleep when she spoke again. “Is that still why you want it? For your father?”

“No. I’ll think of him when I see our name on program. But I can’t even remember him. I want it for me.”

“Yeah,” Dovie said. “That’s growing up, I guess. Leaving some things behind.”

They got off the phone and he burrowed into the pillows and shut his eyes. He’d lost count of how many hours of sleep he’d
lost—how many nights—and now he slept instantly and deeply, a pillow clutched to his chest.

Hours later he dreamed that Hitler strode into his room, boots shining. His face was an alarm clock with that ridiculous little mustache, and he used his arm salute to try to make Yuri get out of bed.

“Go away, Hitler,” Yuri mumbled, but the führer’s face kept ringing. Yuri finally lifted his head, and it wasn’t the alarm clock but the phone that was clamoring. He glanced around quickly to make sure Hitler was gone, shook his head sharply to clear it, and picked up the receiver.

“Hello?”

“Dr. Strelnikov, we have a car waiting for you downstairs. It’s showtime.”

It was the Dial 1 woman. Time to go back already? How long had he slept? Yuri dressed quickly and trotted downstairs. He hoped he would have the same driver he’d had that morning. Then he could speak to him, say something of comfort. And it was the same man, in the same clothes, his face more drawn, his eyes large and luminous. Yuri had only seen eyes like that before in pictures of Holocaust victims. It was good of the man to leave his family and stay on the job in what could be his last day alive. Yuri should say something about that, too, some word of thanks as well as comfort.

The driver pulled through the checkpoint and stopped in front of the NEO building. Yuri got out and hesitated, his hand on the frame of the open window. “Thanks for ride.”

“Yeah,” the man said, and pulled away.

Yuri stood watching him go.
I may not be a people person.

His heels rang across the empty lobby. No one was in the conference room, either, although the coffeepots and tepid water for tea were still there. Yuri walked toward his office, realized it was the one place there would certainly not be anyone, and headed down to the media room. There were others filing down the steps, too. Karl Fletcher was standing in the stairwell, staring up through the glass wall at the softening light. He turned.

“Hey. You’re back.”

“It’s clear today,” Yuri said. “Don’t know if that’s good or bad.”

Fletcher snorted softly. “It passed the moon twenty minutes ago.” They stood in silence for a moment, looking up at the sky.

“Dr. Fletcher?” Yuri hesitated, then plunged on. “Do you believe in parallel universes?”

“Yeah,” the director said. “I do.”

“In another universe, would you have made same decision? Not to take that final shot?”

“No,” Fletcher said, looking him in the eye. “In another universe I would have chosen to use your version. That’s what makes it another universe.”

“So if we save ourselves here, do we kill ourselves there? Did we turn Earth into Schrödinger’s cat?”

“It’s complicated enough the way it is,” Fletcher said. “Don’t make it harder.”

“I just don’t like idea of getting smashed in any universe.” Yuri nodded to Fletcher and moved on, but he was thinking,
In
some universe, I didn’t switch the models. In some universe, I was wrong.

Someone had set up coolers of bottled water outside the media room doors. Yuri grabbed a water as he walked in. He held the bottle under his chin as he struggled into his suit jacket. It was time to put it on.

Time was racing the asteroid. He’d intended to nap briefly, not for hours, and then review his work. Reassure himself that he was right, that the switch he’d made was necessary. Be confident as he went to the media room to watch the intercept. Panic rose in his throat like a red line of mercury. He felt weak, trembling as he walked into the media room. Must be hypoglycemia, he told himself. Couldn’t be fear.

He filed into the room with his eyes on the carpet and sat near the back, away from Simons. A cameraman was set up with a camera on a swiveling tripod. There was no TV station logo on the equipment. Must be for posterity’s sake, if there was to be a posterity.

The screen was already lit. It was split into two pictures. On the left was a view of the high-flux antimatter accelerator, its fuel contrail nearly lost in the glare of the sun. On the right was the control room that had launched it. Yuri had expected a long room with dozens of people. He had seen video of rejoicing scientists slapping each other on their matching blue polo shirts after the Mars probe landed. This was a smaller room, fewer people.

Yuri glanced around at the scientists seated near him. There were two kinds of people in the room—those who hadn’t
risked the lives of every living thing on the planet on their own untested theory, and him. Wherever he went, that would always be the case.

He blinked. The asteroid hurtled forward twenty-four kilometers.

Fletcher walked to the front of the room, dropping a cell phone in his pocket, and then the picture from the launch site disappeared, and the president of the United States, seated at his Oval Office desk, filled the right side of the screen.

“Good evening,” the president said. “I wanted to thank Director Karl Fletcher for his oversight of this project, and to thank all of you for your work. You know, when Winston Churchill said that never have so many owed so much to so few, he was talking about the fighter pilots fending off Nazi planes over Britain. But you have those boys beat. At no time in the history of the planet have the stakes been this high. At no time have individual decisions and mature judgment mattered this much. Never has the fate of history itself been held in so few hands.”

Yuri ran to the garbage can at the back of the room and threw up. His gut spasmed and clenched, and acid burned his throat. He hadn’t eaten anything in hours, so his bile was a green slick at the bottom of the wastebasket. Seeing it made his stomach heave again.

“So again, thank you,” the president continued. Yuri hoped like hell it was a one-way feed. “And may God bless your work.”

The picture cut from the Oval Office back to the accelerator control room. Yuri rinsed his mouth out and spat in the
wastebasket, then took his seat again. He didn’t look at anyone around him, but the man seated to his right gripped his shoulder and Yuri glanced up. The man was at least seventy, and Yuri recognized him. He was an expert in the fine-structure constant, a brilliant physicist, and Yuri had just thrown up in front of him. Actually, he’d just thrown up in front of a hundred of the greatest minds in the world. And a television camera.

“How do they get that video of flux accelerator?” Yuri said, in order to say something. His throat was raw. The man’s keen brown eyes continued to bore into him for a moment, then the old fingers let his shoulder go.

“They swung a space-based telescope around to watch. Not an easy thing to do, but it was worth it. That’s why we’re meeting down here. Some of us wanted to watch from the parking lot, but it’ll happen so fast we wouldn’t really know. Here we’ll get a replay.”

“I still think I’d rather just watch it. See it with my own eyes.”

The man smiled.

“Me, too. But this is the most important footage of all time. Not film it? It’ll get more hits on YouTube than a moose on water skis.” He waved his hand vaguely in the air. “Also, it will be nice to know if we’re going to die or not.”

“Oh. Yeah.”

Black numbers appeared, superimposed over the top of the right picture. A silent countdown, starting at five minutes. What it would take to get a red countdown? Yuri felt dizzy. He looked
around the room absently, and pushed his jacket sleeves up. His forearms were so familiar to him. How many hours had he spent with his shirtsleeves rolled up, his forearms propped against the edge of a desk? He loved his arms. Was that weird? He loved
arms
. If there was life somewhere else in the universe, did it have arms? Could it love itself, and hate itself?