Learning to Swear in America (29 page)

A collective gasp rose, and Yuri snapped back to the screen. The BR1019 asteroid was visible behind the accelerator. Of course it was. It was kilometers long.

Yuri had expected the speed, understood it intellectually, but not what it would really be like. It was like watching a bullet the size of Manhattan, except that it was moving many times the speed of a bullet. The ideal would have been to park the equipment alongside the asteroid, keeping common velocity. That wasn’t possible here.

The accelerator would fire as soon as the BR1019 was within range. It wouldn’t take long. With each pulse there was a danger of the asteroid breaking apart. And the accelerator had to discharge the antimatter without ever coming in contact with it. One touch between the accelerator and its load and both disappeared—which meant the asteroid didn’t.

Yuri had calculated the strength of each pulse, and everyone in the room knew it. If he was wrong and shot too much antimatter at one time, the asteroid would break apart and hit Earth with multiple catastrophic impacts. If it cracked, everyone would see it, and they would know whose fault it was. Were they showing this to everyone in the world? Would his mother know, standing in
her hospital, watching the television? Would Kryukov? Would his advisor die disappointed in his favorite student?

Or the plan might work, the asteroid hold together as it was reduced bit by bit from the side. It would be reduced in mass, but it might not be pushed far enough away, so it would still hit Los Angeles—smaller, but still a planet-killer.

It was the final scenario of failure that made Yuri’s palms slick, and his eyes throb—what if it worked, and the final shot back at Earth missed the asteroid and annihilated the Pacific Rim? What if Fletcher and Simons had been right, and the earlier pulses were enough? If the final shot came and there was no asteroid to stop it, the antimatter would spread out as it traveled back toward Earth. By the time it reached the surface it would be diffuse, weak and spread out, and everything within its limits would simply disappear—people, buildings, trees, mountains, the surface of the Pacific Ocean.

Or, if they missed the asteroid entirely, or the equipment somehow jammed, more than four jillion pounds of iron would hit the Earth at astonishing speed.

Damn shit hell.

“It’s different seeing it, isn’t it?” The man next to him smiled.

Yuri looked up at the warm brown eyes. “Yes. It is.”

Yuri heard a liquid rattle to his left, looked over, and saw a man peeing into his drink cup. Must have needed to go, and couldn’t bring himself to leave. Yuri turned away. One of his last sights was going to be some old American’s
chlen
sending up a pungent urine-Pepsi mist. Terrific.

The black numbers counted down, below a minute now, hundredths of seconds shearing off. Yuri couldn’t breathe. Probably no one could. He wondered what Dovie was doing. The last minute shredded. He tried not to blink.

Five.

Four.

Three.

Two.

One.

The accelerator shot instantly, lobbing a burst of antimatter at an obtuse angle at the approaching asteroid. Yuri hadn’t known if they’d be able to tell or not if the antimatter had hit, but the asteroid’s shape helped. It looked as though something with an oval mouth—a crocodile, maybe—had taken a bite out of the body.

The physicists gasped, but the accelerator was already shooting another burst, and another. With each pulse there was a danger of the body breaking apart. If it did so, the high-flux accelerator might shoot through gaps without hitting the asteroid. Divots appeared in its surface. The antimatter was hitting, annihilating itself and the material it touched. That much was clear. It was impossible to tell, though, if it was pushing the asteroid farther out.

The accelerator was turning as it fired, shooting at the asteroid first as it approached, then as it passed by. It swiveled, like a gunfighter turning, and shot again as the asteroid moved past its position, hurtling on toward Earth. Another piece of the asteroid simply disappeared.

Yuri leaned forward, his hands clasped in front of his mouth. Had it moved? Had the asteroid been pushed sideways?

Fletcher stood, still staring at the screen. The accelerator shot again, at a long, acute angle down the side of the asteroid. The scientists could see into the barrel.

It was pointed at them.

Another burst of antimatter came, scraping down the iron side as the asteroid rocketed toward Earth. There was a collective roar as the scientists suddenly understood. Fletcher turned, eyes searching for Yuri. Then he looked back toward the screen in time to see the final, massive burst of antimatter as the accelerator released an enormous amount of energy. And blew up.

It looked like a firework, exploding up and then trailing down in graceful arcs of debris.

The asteroid’s side disappeared, all the way to the end of the body. Which meant that there was no end limit for the antimatter—the angle was so tight that it had shaved the side and continued on, down toward Earth.

Yuri tried to focus, tried to think if they would be hit first by the asteroid or by the antimatter. Because he’d switched the data in order to get the final shots back toward Earth, especially the final, huge pulse. Which had overshot.

He’d been wrong.

He had killed the world. He had killed life. He was the asteroid.

His eyes burned as he stared at the screen, the visible evidence of his atrocity. He had committed the single most arrogant act in
the history of the world. Hands down. No second place. He was the most arrogant person ever. A mass murderer. Stalin had nothing on him.

Damn. Hell. Shit.

Fuck.

He began to collapse inward, to rock. His eyes filled, blurring the black shape that expanded outward across the screen, blocking the light as it spread out toward the corners.

The edge of the planet became visible in the picture, and a groan rose in the room. The asteroid was too close. It was going to punch through the atmosphere and slam Earth. It was a matter of seconds.

How many breaths did he have left? Four? Three? Yuri wanted that last breath, but he couldn’t make his rib cage expand. He would die with a high concentration of carbon dioxide, and then realized that would be his last thought, and it seemed unfathomably sad. His mind scrambled for something to hold on to, anything, and he saw Dovie lying among crushed cabbage leaves, her eyes on him, smiling softly.
That
.

The BR1019’s scarred iron side, flattened from the antimatter bursts, shuddered as it hit the atmosphere and sliced through the stratosphere. The room vibrated, then was absolutely still.

The screen was empty.

The people in the media room gasped again and stood as one, staring at the ceiling. Had it worked?

Fletcher jumped on his seat, his cell phone to his ear, and just before he spoke Yuri understood.

“The telescope is telling us,” Fletcher said, pausing. “They can’t give us results …”

A loud groan escaped from the room at large.

“… because it can’t swing fast enough to follow what’s left of the BR1019 asteroid as it moves away from us.”

He shouted, “It just kissed us as it went by,” but no one was listening anymore. People were crying, grabbing shoulders, and thumping each other’s backs. A planetary motion specialist in front of Yuri turned and kissed him on the mouth, and he laughed out loud.

The soft-eyed man beside him seized fistfuls of his shirt, and Yuri hugged him. They sank together to the floor, crying, Yuri’s hair in his eyes. The old man mumbled some words in Hebrew, and Yuri repeated them, two atheists trying to pray in a language that one couldn’t remember, and the other had never known.

Yuri didn’t know how long they were like that, crying and hugging, beating on each other’s backs, but at some point someone wheeled in champagne and they sprayed it around the room like hockey players who’d just won the Stanley Cup. The room stank of unwashed bodies and grapes, and someone poured a bottle down Yuri’s back, the chilled glass neck touching his neck, the champagne gushing cold down his spine.

He didn’t see who grabbed him, but he felt himself hoisted unevenly in the air, and for a moment the astrophysicists passed him around overhead, champagne dripping off his shirt. It was an exhilarating moment—better than matching shirts would have
been—and scary when he thought about the age and bone density of the people holding him up. And then he was down, lowered awkwardly with one leg on a chair, and he wondered if Dovie knew yet. They were safe. He had saved her.

He left the media room, pausing a moment at the door to look back. They’d trashed the place. He grinned.

In his office, Yuri packed his book bag. He stuck in the papers scrawled with his angular handwriting, the ones he’d waved in frustration in Mike Ellenberg’s face. The Americans might take the notes, or the Russians might. They could wind up in a museum somewhere, but he wanted to frame and hang them in his office—let Fyodor Laskov see them as often as possible. Besides, Yuri had the feeling he’d be reading them by moonlight on many sleepless nights.

There wasn’t really much to pack. He looked around this small, spare office in which he’d spent the most intense moments of his life. It was someone else’s space. Someone else’s books were on the bookshelves. Time to give the place back. He sat on the cot for a moment, then lay down, staring at the ceiling. It was strange to know that he didn’t really belong here.

He’d never wondered until now who usually used this space. Did the normal occupant keep framed family photos on the desk? Or did he carry an unframed photo of his advisor around in his book bag? Yuri sighed. Not much chance of that.

He imagined beyond the roof the asteroid, one side flattened, hurtling on through space. They would have changed its orbit when they swatted it away from Earth. Maybe now it would bury
itself in some far planet, or plunge into the sun. Figuring that out was going to be somebody else’s problem.

Then he was asleep.

A hand on his shoulder woke him. It was a guard. He was relieved that it wasn’t the one who had brought Lennon back.

“Director Fletcher wants to see you. Now.”

Yuri nodded and rose, taking his book bag with him. He glanced quickly around the office, wishing he were alone for his last look. Probably Fletcher was going to tell him now that he was stuck in the United States. Yuri flirted with the idea of telling Fletcher what he’d done—that it was his hand that shielded Earth. Fletcher would gape, then check the computer to see if it was true. Then he’d shake Yuri’s hand and have their picture taken together. Send him home in a luxury airplane full of caviar and … Dovie.

The guard rapped lightly on Fletcher’s office door.

“Come in.”

The man opened the door and nodded toward Yuri, then shut it after him. Fletcher was standing with his back to the door. He turned slowly and aimed eyes like flamethrowers at Yuri, who felt himself desiccating under the gaze. They could have used Fletcher’s eyes to melt the asteroid. Why hadn’t he thought of that?

“The antimatter beam made it the distance it had to travel. It stayed tightly focused. Also, the high-flux accelerator fired rapidly while it rotated, and continued to fire after it pointed at Earth.”

“Oh.”

In his fatigue he’d forgotten that Fletcher had seen the final shot. That he knew.

“And that was consistent with its behavior if I had entered your models. But I didn’t, did I? So the accelerator should have stopped firing when the asteroid flew past it. It should never have shot at us. It should never have
tried such a huge shot that it blew up the goddamn high-flux accelerator of the United States of America
.”

Yuri licked his lips.

“‘How could that have happened?’ I asked myself. ‘It shouldn’t behave like that,’ I said to myself. So while you were napping, I looked at the models I sent on to the people who programmed the accelerator. And do you know what I found?”

He took a step toward Yuri. Yuri took a step back.

“I found line after line of data,” he whispered, “that I never entered.”

Yuri glanced behind him at the door.

“You switched the math. On your own, without my permission and against my will.”

“Sorry.” His voice sounded high, the apology incredibly inadequate.

“There shouldn’t even have
been
a second set of code.”

“Um …”

“You gambled with my children’s lives. With
everything
.” Yuri stared at the carpet, fingering the rubber piping behind his belt. “Anything you want to say?”

“Sorry.”

The asteroid had blown his clothes off after all. He stood naked before the world, exposed for exactly what he was—unfathomably
arrogant. Would Gregor Kryukov, his advisor, be ashamed of him? He wanted to cry. He wanted Fletcher to throw an arm over his shoulders and tell him it would be okay, that he’d done right. That it would still be possible to get up every day, knowing what he’d done. But he couldn’t say any of it, so he said what he could.

“Did you call me in to apologize for doubting me, or to thank me for saving your life?”

They locked eyes for a long moment, and then Fletcher said, “My God, you’ve got a pair.” He smiled faintly. “Don’t do it again.”

Yuri turned to go, saw the shadow of the guard in the hall and remembered what he had to do. “About my return home,” he said, and saw Fletcher’s face change, tighten. Until that moment, he wasn’t sure they would detain him. Nothing he’d been through, nothing he’d done, made any difference at all. He took a moment to catch his breath. “I was wondering if I could delay my return.”

Fletcher’s eyebrows rose.

“There’s conference in Detroit that I’d like to attend. They have panel on antimatter.”

“Oh. Sure. That makes sense.”

“But if you want just to put me on next plane to Moscow, I understand.”

“No,” Fletcher said, a little too quickly. “We can get you to Detroit. That would work out fine.”

The guard hustled him into a NASA car, nosed past a phalanx of reporters gathered around the Jet Propulsion Lab, and drove him to his hotel. Yuri stopped in the little shop off the hotel lobby
and bought a prepaid cell phone, which he slipped inside a newspaper. Back in his room, he called Dovie and told her that he was going to the conference in Detroit.