The Filter Trap (5 page)

She pointed at the fence, then looked at her father. He motioned, “Go on.”

Her hand lifted further and further, but a look of eerie confusion came across her face. “I’m sorry Daddy, I can’t find it. Is Venus gone?”

Allan’s face blanched. An adult would think they’d started from the wrong fencepost and start over, but Katherine didn’t second-guess herself. Venus disappearing occupied a similar magical landscape for Katie that included fat men climbing down chimneys with gifts once a year. To her, planets could disappear as easily as the coins her granddad “hid” in her ears.

“Dad,” Allan’s six year old son spoke up. “Didn’t we see the Moon last time? It’s gone too.”

Allan looked at his wife, terror unfolding in her face. What was he keeping from her?

“Did Santa forget about us?” asked Katherine.

“Allan, what’s happening?” Ariel whispered.

He looked at their children. “I have to get to Wilson.”

“Okay,” she said, only because she didn’t know what else to. Whatever was happening he didn’t want to say in front of them, and she couldn’t challenge that.

“Take the kids inside, get the baseball bat from the garage, and keep the door locked. Don’t open it for anyone, okay?”

“Did Santa leave our presents with Wilson, Daddy?” Ben asked.

Allan didn’t answer, but looked at his wife, imploring her to confirm. “Okay?”

“Okay,” she said, even softer than before.

After making a right turn off of the highway and climbing to higher elevations, ice-patched mud slowed Allan’s journey. The road would be cleared after the holiday, but Allan couldn’t wait. His old Volvo plowed through late December snow, searching for footing. Passing under and behind San Gabriel Peak, the car hit a spate of ice and nearly spun out of control, careening until one wheel came off the road, spinning into space over the sharp cliffside.

Allan’s friends called his black 1996 Volvo 850 the ‘heavenly hearse’ for its owner’s occupational obsession and the car’s peculiar boxy resemblance to a Swedish cubist’s interpretation of a funeral coach. Allan took a perverse enjoyment in raising neighborhood eyebrows when transporting man-size telescopes in the back, hidden under black cloth.

Looking down at the bluffs hundreds of feet below the naked left wheel, he wondered if a used truck would have been a better investment. Posthumous notoriety wouldn’t put his children through college. Allan’s publishing advances were disappearing as better showmen of science, like deGrasse Tyson, took the limelight, and all the money. But Neil wasn’t up here on the mountain, at least not yet. If Allen could plant his metaphorical flag of discovery up there first he’d be the one on the talk shows, hosting TV programs, and getting speaking fees.

Good god, was that why he was up here? For himself? Should he turn around, go back down the mountain, and join the family that he left terrified? Well, he couldn’t go up
or
down without backing off the cliff first. He prayed the transmission wouldn’t slip and take him down a much faster route.

Allan pushed the clutch and moved the shifter all the way to the right and down hard, as it had a tendency to stick and take a stab at fifth gear otherwise. He gently lifted back off the brake, thanking his younger self for putting up the cash for the all-wheel-drive package.

“Tyson probably has a Land Rover and a chauffeur,” he grumbled to match the noise from the wheel wells.

The Volvo lurched backward onto the empty white road. Allan castigated himself for bothering to pray, which birthed a thought almost as jarring as the jolt of the Volvo transferring the work of excavating the car to the rear wheels: what if this is how a God announces itself in modern times? A burning bush on a mountain wouldn’t be good enough for the short attention spans of his wife’s generation or their children, though his wife certainly
was
primed to believe in that nonsense. Still, Americans demanded more spectacle, something impossible.

A missing moon.

Chapter 4

Allan burrowed his tires through the smattering of snow softly melting under the unexpected sunshine in the empty parking lot. He often visited Wilson alone during the short San Gabriel winters when the museum and visitor’s gallery were closed. Ariel probably would have liked it; he knew her father used to drag her to mountaintops, though the view in Montana must have been quite different.

No, this was Allan’s spot. He needed the solitude. Separation from the noise ever-present in their house. Fox and Friends’ climate denial had no place up here at the observatory, Allan’s cathedral of science.

Just a bit warmer and he could have driven straight to the control building, but the heavenly hearse came to rest by the sixty-inch telescope. Allan walked the rest of the way, quickening as he climbed closer to the office, where answers waited.

After turning on the lights he realized he was the first, but surely others would come soon, unless they stayed with their families. His spine twinged with guilt.

Allan checked the 150-foot solar tower monitor, which had famously observed the Sun every clear day for over a century. Until today.

He flicked through the other displays. The magnetogram’s blue and pink dots denoting the strength of the Sun’s magnetic field turned stark white. Dopplergram, ordinarily a bubbling crimson ball, fell nearly black. The intensitygram, normally featuring dark flecks on the orange circle, showed no circle at all. The instruments indicated the Sun spewed one giant, constant flare, unless all the instruments pointed simultaneously at the wrong spot.

He reminded himself to think logically. The Sun was good at making flares. Even NASA erred occasionally, the source always leading to a human mistake. What mistake had the last operator of these instruments made to cause such strange readings?

Certainly it wasn’t the Sun that moved. He’d felt it on his neck and nearly slid on the slush in the parking lot. As a scientist, he didn’t want to hear the whispers from darker recesses of his mind: ‘there’s a Sun out there, but not
your
Sun.’

The readings of the grams were regular for the time still displayed on every mechanical clock. The grams, not able to peer through 8,000 miles of dirt and iron, wouldn’t have displayed anything in the dead of night, the time on all the clocks. Allan shook his head and looked outside. Still daylight. Either the Sun changed positions or the predictions for all the machinery contained unusual errors.

He punched at the controls, looking for the Sun using memories of his shadow on the ground just minutes ago. He could refine from there by decreasing magnification and adjusting. Concurrently he smiled at a sane explanation for the Sun’s unexpected maneuvering.

A massive enough asteroid flyby, along with the movement of the Moon, could have shifted the planet just enough to push the West Coast a few hours forward into daylight. That explained the loss of the satellites as well, taken out by the debris from the impact.

Stretching the truth, Allan knew the distances between the Earth and its Moon meant any fragments from a collision would have struck the Earth by now. The average asteroid traveled at around 28,000 miles per hour. At 300,000 miles away, with nothing to slow the debris in the frictionless vacuum of space, mushroom clouds should have pushed dark skies over his head as he drove up the mountain road. Enough time had passed, but perhaps the larger fragments avoided the Earth, or at least southern California.

Allan wondered if he was a living Stan, from Niven’s short story
Inconstant Moon
, only twelve hours from the effects of an astrological event that hit the
other
side of the planet. Niven’s riveting story had been published at the infancy of the satellite and telecommunications age. The news of a calamity would travel instantly today unless
all
the satellites really were gone, which wouldn’t make sense if the debris only hit the opposite side of the planet. Allan worried the Moon was not inconstant, but invisible, gone forever.

Maybe humans were luckier than dinosaurs. If the angle and velocity of the asteroid were miraculous enough to wash the debris of the Moon’s collision into a higher orbit, only tidal effects would be left to ravage the Earth.

He paused at the thought of a wall of water rushing past the promenade and up Wilshire, glad he’d refused to spend his salary on the upscale condo in Santa Monica his wife had been so in love with. No, his family would be relatively safe from a tsunami in the inland suburbs of Pasadena.

He waited for the scope to plot, leaping back to the monitor when it reached the new coordinates, eager for real data to dispel the disturbing explanations his mind presented.

The Sun looked different. Perhaps the telescope needed cleaning? Imperceptible to the unaided eye, the scope made clear the Earth orbited a smaller and cooler Sun than Allan remembered.

Allan shuddered and pushed back from the monitor, coasting the chair until he softly hit the back wall. A plaster planter in the high window behind him clinked softly and echoed through the building. For the first time, the loneliness of the complex felt unnerving.

His mind said it stronger this time. There’s a Sun out there, but not
our
Sun.

Unacceptable hypothesis. Stop thinking like a stone-age shaman!

Allan eked the chair back to its former position and searched the instruments for a new perspective.

Perspective! A perturbed orbit would put the Earth farther away, maybe making the Sun appear cooler than normal from our perspective.

Allan calibrated for distance. To his dismay, the data never approached normal readings from anywhere near Earth’s orbit. An orbit pushed out farther would have produced effects on the physical makeup of the planet. Catastrophes for the life on board Allan hadn’t felt. Not yet, anyway. The instruments only clarified Allan’s earlier, more frightening theory.

A different star burned overhead.

Few in the world had access to the instruments at the observatory on a normal day. Allan might be one of only a handful on the planet to suspect the truth of the day’s oddities and be in a position to verify it. He had to let them know.

Allan had never bothered to use the shortwave repeater on the mountain before, but he knew by the end of the day—although he wasn’t sure how long that would be—it might be a choice between shortwave or smoke signals to inform the world of his discovery.

After an exhaustive search of the observatory offices he found a radio switch. His brief ham operator stint in undergrad came in handy. He turned the old dials with finesse, fun if not for his new role as prophet of doom.

The ‘4-3-5 repeater’ frequency Allan searched for housed the seedy corner of the ham universe. Operators on the 4-3-5 landed in jail on occasion. However, they were anything but closed-minded. Allan counted on it as he flipped the final switch to listen live.

The troublemakers of Mt. Wilson’s
147.435 megahertz were quiet. No racist allegories. No nerd gang threats. No dirty jokes or lurid tales of bad women and worse men. Nothing.

Silence on this channel said worse things to Allan than any offensive chatter.

He’d have to take the first step. Hopefully someone out there would be listening.

Allan aimed high for a first try, 144.49 MHz. They would have had the best view in the solar system of whatever happened on Earth last night. Allan pressed the Push-To-Talk button too hard, cringing at the audible click on the air.

“Hello, this is Doctor Allan Sands, operating from Mt. Wilson Observatory in California. Please respond if you receive.”

A softer touch on the PTT this time. No click.

No reply, either.

“November-Alpha-One-Sierra-Sierra? Are you receiving?”

Still nothing.

If he knew Russian he’d have tried sending up a request for the Russian call signs, not that he’d be able to communicate, but it would be nice to know the International Space Station was still up there. However, radio silence suggested the largest man-made satellite disappeared with the Moon and all the rest.

Allan’s heart grew heavy. He switched to 40 MHz, normally forbidden to civilians, convinced, given the circumstances, that NORAD wouldn’t mind.

“Hello, is anyone receiving? This is Mt. Wilson. Hello?”

This time his gentle touch on the PTT returned a click, but not from the plastic, the hard click of the words being received.

“Edwards Air Force. Are you receiving, Mt. Wilson?”

“Yes, I’m receiving!”

“Your name, soldier?”

“Civilian, sir. Astronomer from Cal-Tech. Dr. Sands.”

“What are you doing on this frequency? Don’t you know it’s illegal?”

Maybe NORAD already knew what he’d discovered. Maybe Allan endangered lives by taking up bandwidth on this military channel. Better find out, in case not.

“I have something, instrument readings up here, I think you should know about.”

“Wait, what did you say your name was?”

“Sands, Allan Sands.”

The operator paused.

“
Professor
Allan Sands, 2134 Casa Grande Street, Pasadena, California?”

“Yes, the same, sir.”

Allan wondered how long the NSA had kept tabs on him. His guest post on the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s blog might not have been a great idea after all. It certainly didn’t sell any more books.

“Stay where you are, we’re sending a chopper. Forty minutes.”

“Sending a chopper for what? For me?”

A helicopter? Take
that
, Neil deGrasse Tyson!

“Executive order to get you to safety. Stay put, sir.”

“What about my family?”

“Taken care of, sir.”

“How? How will they be taken care of?”

“The same way we’re taking care of you. Now we’ve got to clear the frequency. You’re not the only rescue on the president’s list we need to locate. Go outside and wait. The show’s gonna begin in about ten minutes. You should be safe up there until the extraction team arrives.”

The military operator clicked off with the implication that their conversation had ended.

The
president
? Allan sat back in shock. Wait, what show?

Outside the observatory, Los Angeles looked little different than any other spring day, but as Allan studied the basin between the San Gabriel Mountains and the Pacific Ocean, anomalies crept in. Smoke from distant fires wafted upward in thin gray lines. The lack of jets coming in from the east waiting to land at LAX, normally tracking in a straight line going back almost to Riverside, proved the most damning evidence that something strange had befallen America’s preeminent home of the weird, wise, or wealthy. In the absence of decelerating jet engines, the constant chop of helicopters buzzed. Occasional sonic booms echoed when fighter jets screamed west toward a strange white line behind Santa Barbara Island.

Allan watched as the line rippled, then surrounded the island. Someone with one less neuron might have believed it to be marine layer, a fog created by the heat of the morning sun on the Pacific. Long ago, in the throes of Cupid’s arrow he’d had to pull over on the Golden Gate Bridge when the marine layer swept in too fast and too deep. It was the first and last time he’d copulated in an automobile. The last time he felt alive.

But this was no fog or mist. Allan remembered his earlier thoughts about Moon bits splashing down, and the resultant ripples reaching out for land. No fond memories would result when this moisture hit the coast. If his hunch was correct.

He also realized it might make his expected fame inconsequential. As Niven had better put it in 1971: if the toll of destruction was as high as he expected, then money was about to become worthless. But, nearly five decades later, that tropical storm boiled up by a solar flare remained a concoction only present in literature. What swallowed Santa Barbara Island was something even the 14
th
floor couldn’t save you from.

He ran back inside and trained a small telescope on the coast.

The ripple took not the form of vapor but a tumbling wave crest three times the height of the Statue of Liberty. The little island off the coast, 634 feet tall at its highest peak, ceased to exist for a moment. A wall of water smothered the island with barely a moment’s pause. The waves split and swirled around the flat-top, making temporary whirling spirals before focusing on their next target a mere twenty miles away.

Looking north to Santa Cruz Island, Allan saw the same scenario, but with the water finding a much more formidable foe in Devil’s Peak. This time the water surged up the backside, but could not pummel a summit twice the height of the Empire State Building and more than a thousand feet higher than the breaking waves.

Only the bravest hiking tourists would be spared Poseidon's wrath. The waves, moving faster than an F1 car, usurped and erased any human footholds on the islands. The water regrouped on the eastern side of Santa Cruz and sloshed forward, eager to take on the shorter, flatter valley of Los Angeles directly ahead. The defilade of the Channel Islands slowed the waves down by a few hundred miles per hour, but horrific destruction remained imminent.