The Orion Plan (5 page)

He turned away from the bum and looked at the ball. It was so smooth and polished it glittered in the moonlight, even with all the mud on it.
Maybe it's some kind of fancy sculpture
, he thought. Maybe the bum had stolen it from an antiques store or some rich guy's living room. It might be worth a few bucks at a pawnshop, maybe.

Emilio stepped into the hole once more to take a closer look at the thing. The bum followed a couple of steps behind. “I found it,” he repeated in a louder voice. “You can't take it away. It belongs to me.”

His craziness was making him stupid. He'd moved within a yard of Emilio and it looked like he might take a swing at him. Emilio gave the bum a hard look, but before he could say anything Paco came forward and stepped between them. The boy raised his sharpened screwdriver and pointed it at the bum's face.

“You want to make trouble,
pendejo?
” Paco cocked his head and grinned. “You want to play rough?”

Amazingly, the bum didn't back down. He looked Paco in the eye. “Listen to me for a second. I'll make a deal with you.”

“A deal?”

“I'll give you half the money. I can get a lot of money from the people who own this thing.”

Paco snorted. He glanced at the other Trinitarios, who'd moved in closer to follow the conversation. “You believe this shit? The asshole says he'll give us half.”

Frowning, the bum turned away from Paco and appealed to the others. “Just listen, all right? If you try to sell it on your own, you won't get nearly as much. And you can't pick up the thing anyway. It's still too hot. It'll burn your hands.”

The homeboys laughed at him. Carlos mimicked the bum's raspy voice, saying, “Just listen, just listen.” Meanwhile, Emilio bent over the black ball again and stretched his fingers toward its surface. The bum was right: the thing was hotter than a radiator. He must've heated it somehow, maybe by lighting a fire under it. Emilio couldn't understand why he'd do such a thing. Everything about the guy was crazy.

When Emilio looked up he noticed that Paco had edged closer to the bum. The tip of his screwdriver gleamed in the moonlight. The boy tightened his grip on the screwdriver's handle and tensed his biceps. He was going to start cutting the guy unless Emilio did something soon.

“Hey, Paco!” Emilio called. “Stop playing with that
pendejo
and give me your bandanna.”

Paco stared at him, uncomprehending. “What?”

Emilio removed his own bandanna from his head. “I need to cover my hands to pick up the thing.” He slipped his screwdriver into his pocket and started wrapping the green fabric around his left hand, covering the palm and fingers. “Come on,
muchacho
, I need your bandanna too.”

After a moment Paco figured it out. He stepped away from the bum and scowled at Emilio, but he couldn't disobey a direct order. He took off his bandanna and tossed it over.

Emilio wrapped the fabric around his other hand, creating a green mitten. Then he crouched beside the ball. It was partly embedded in the ground, which was wet and cool, so he guessed its lower half might be a little less scorching. He wriggled his gloved hands into the mud under the thing and tried to get a grip on it. He could feel its heat even through the mud and fabric. It was like a ball of fucking lava.

He tried to lift it anyway, clamping his hands around the thing and pulling upward. He put his whole body into it, straining his biceps and thighs. Then he felt a jab in the center of his right palm. It was sudden and very painful, like being stuck with a
destornillador
. But the jab had come from the ball's smooth, polished surface.

He shouted, “
Coño!
” and let go of the thing, pulling his hands out of the mud. When he raised his right hand he saw a small hole in the bandanna wrapped around it. He quickly unwrapped the fabric from his hand and looked at his palm. In the moonlight he saw blood welling up from a puncture wound.

His homeboys crowded around him, craning their necks to look at his hand. The cut didn't look that bad, and Emilio wanted to tell his boys to stop gawking, but the pain was so intense he couldn't say a word. It spread outward from his palm, as if his hand had caught fire. His fingers burned and throbbed. They felt like they were going to burst.

Emilio turned away from his boys so they wouldn't see his face. He shook his hand as hard as he could, trying to put out the fire. But the pain just got worse.

In the middle of all this commotion, the homeless guy stepped in front of him. The bum looked at him carefully and then, unexpectedly, grasped his shoulder. “Calm down,” he said. “Let me see your hand.”

The bum didn't look so crazy anymore. His gaze was steady and he wasn't trembling. He reached for Emilio's burning hand and held it in front of his eyes.

As he inspected the puncture wound Paco rushed toward them, his face dark with fury. He aimed his screwdriver at the bum's throat. “Hey, asshole! What the fuck are you doing?”

The homeless guy stood his ground. “I just want to see how deep—”

Paco gave him a vicious shove. The bum lost his balance and toppled backward, hitting the ground hard. He lay on his back in the mud while Paco leaned over him, brandishing the screwdriver. “Stupid
cabrón
! We don't need a fucking nurse!”

The guy's head tilted to the side. He looked woozy, semiconscious. “I'm not … a nurse,” he rasped. “I used to be … a doctor.”

“Who the fuck cares? You're dead now, bitch!”

Paco drew back his right foot and kicked him in the ribs. The bum let out a howl that echoed against the hillside. The noise triggered something in the other Trinitarios, some cruel impulse they'd kept in reserve all night, just waiting for the chance to cut it loose. Roaring curses at the homeless guy, they leapt forward to join the beating. They surrounded him and started kicking his legs, arms, and torso. At the same time, Paco crouched low and raised his screwdriver, looking for a place to stab him.

The howl also triggered something in Emilio. All at once the pain in his hand disappeared. He opened and closed it, wiggling the fingers with relief. Then, without any hesitation, he clenched the hand into a fist and charged at Paco.

The boy never saw it coming. Emilio punched the side of his head, just above the ear. Paco dropped his screwdriver and fell sideways to the ground.

The other boys froze. For at least ten seconds Paco lay in the mud, limp and still. Then he coughed and took a ragged breath. He opened his eyes and tried to lift his head, but after a moment he slumped back to the mud. None of the other boys tried to help him. They were too stunned.

But no one was more surprised than Emilio. He held up his right hand and gazed in astonishment at his bruised knuckles. He hadn't planned to knock out Paco. He'd done it without thinking. And now, as he faced the other Trinitarios, he saw what he had to do next. It was so obvious.

He pointed at Paco but kept his eyes on the other homeboys. “Carlos, Miguel, you take his arms. Luis, Diego, grab his legs. Carry him down the hill and back to the soccer field. I'll meet you there in five minutes.”

The boys didn't move at first. Emilio had to shout, “
Vayan!
” to get them going.

As they lifted Paco and carried him away, Emilio knelt beside the homeless guy. He was squirming in the mud, clutching his side. Paco must've cracked the guy's ribs. He needed to go to the hospital. Emilio reached into his pocket and pulled out his cell phone.

“Hey, hombre, I'm gonna call for an ambulance. What's your—”

“No!” The bum shook his head fiercely. “Don't call. I'm fine.”

“You sure? You don't look so fine.”

“Please. Just leave me alone.”

Emilio shrugged. He wasn't going to force the guy. He stood up and took one last look at the black ball.
Madre de Dios,
what a weird fucking thing. The bum was welcome to keep it.

Before he left the clearing, Emilio held his hand up to the moonlight so he could check the wound in his palm. It had stopped bleeding and didn't hurt at all now. At first he thought he saw something next to the wound, just under the skin, a dark speck about the size of a poppy seed. But when he looked a little closer, it was gone.

 

FOUR

At 4:00
P.M.
Sarah was in New York City, standing in a deserted baseball field in Upper Manhattan. She checked the map on her iPhone to confirm her position. The field lay between the Hudson River and the West Side Highway, on the western edge of Inwood Hill Park. More to the point, it lay within the impact zone for the debris from last night's fireball. This was the most likely area to find any charred fragments of the asteroid that had exploded twelve hours ago.

She took a deep breath and smelled the brackish Hudson. The people of New York had been freakishly lucky—the debris from the fireball had scattered across one of the few unoccupied parts of the city. According to Sarah's calculations, the impact zone stretched across the river, with one end in Manhattan's Inwood Hill Park and the other in the Palisades Interstate Park in New Jersey. There were no apartment buildings or houses or office complexes within the zone, so there were no reports of any damage. No one saw any fragments hit the ground or splash into the river. Like the vast majority of meteorite showers, this one had gone unnoticed. But Sarah had come here anyway, catching a 5:00
A.M.
flight from Los Angeles to New York. She'd traveled three thousand miles on the spur of the moment to see if she could find some evidence.

She focused her attention on the baseball field. It was in terrible shape, all hard-packed dirt from home plate to the chain-link fence, but its condition was perfect for meteorite hunting. If any unusual rocks had landed in the field, they would stand out like paint drops against the blank canvas of beige dirt. Sarah started to walk across the field, keeping her head down and scanning the ground.

She'd scratched lines in the dirt to make a grid for her search, and now she was scrutinizing the grid squares, one by one. Sarah had learned this technique long ago, back in the early eighties, when she used to go rock hunting with her father in West Texas. Her dad had been an accountant in El Paso, but on the weekends he'd turn into an amateur geologist. Every Saturday he'd drive to some godforsaken desert where he'd heard there might be some good finds. Hunting for rocks was ridiculously tedious, and West Texas was usually hotter than Hades, but Sarah went along with him whenever she could. It was worth it just to see the look on his face when he found something interesting.

The basic rule for their meteorite hunts was to look for the color black. As a rock plunges through the atmosphere, its surface gets fried to a black crust that looks like burnt toast. But there were exceptions to the rule: if the meteorite is a fragment of a larger rock that exploded, then only one side of it would be black and the other would be lighter, and the lighter-colored side might be the one showing on the ground. It was tricky.

Over the course of all those weekend hunts Sarah's father found only a dozen meteorites. He kept them on a shelf in their living room, each rock carefully labeled. He spotted the last one—a two-inch-wide fragment of a stony-iron asteroid—when Sarah was fifteen, just three months before he died of Huntington's disease. At that late stage he could hardly walk, and his hands shook as he picked up the meteorite. But his haggard face lit up with joy as he showed it to her.

Years later, when Sarah recalled that afternoon, she realized that was the moment she decided to become a scientist. She was thinking of her father when she applied to Cornell University and earned her Ph.D. in Astronomy and went to work for NASA. She wanted to feel the same joy.

Now, as she stared at the hard-packed dirt of the baseball field, she noticed that its color was close to that of the West Texas desert. The weather was familiar too. It was a scorching June day in New York City, with temperatures in the upper nineties. Sweat dripped from her chin and landed in the dirt she was inspecting.

After half an hour she concluded there were no meteorites in the field. Disappointed, she took a break in the shade of the dugout and stared at the Hudson River. She looked south toward the George Washington Bridge and north toward the Bronx. Then she turned around and gazed at the woods of Inwood Hill Park, which rose steeply above the West Side Highway. The park was big, almost two hundred acres, and about half of it lay within the impact zone. Combing those hillsides for meteorites would be a hell of a lot harder than searching the baseball field. But the real problem was the river. The Hudson occupied more than two-thirds of the impact zone. In all likelihood the asteroid fragments had plummeted into the water and now lay on the muddy riverbed.

Sarah shook her head.
Be positive,
she told herself.
There's always a chance.
Another baseball field was nearby, only a hundred yards away. It also lay within the impact zone and was as dusty and grassless as the field she'd just searched. That's where she'd go next. She'd flown across the country on her own dime—NASA didn't even know she was in New York—and she was going to stay here until she got some answers. She couldn't prove anything yet, but she felt certain that last night's asteroid was something very special.

The thing that distinguished it was its speed. The rock had entered the atmosphere at thirty-seven kilometers per second, much faster than a typical meteor. When an asteroid approaches the Earth at such a high velocity, it's usually in a retrograde orbit, traveling clockwise around the sun. Because the Earth orbits the sun counterclockwise, a retrograde asteroid hits the planet at higher speeds. But according to the observations made by the Sky Survey telescope, last night's object had been moving in the same direction as the Earth. It had caught up to our planet because the rock was streaking across our solar system at the blistering speed of sixty-five kilometers per second. It was moving too fast to be bound by the sun's gravity. The object wasn't orbiting the sun like all the other asteroids in the solar system; it was speeding past the planets like a fastball, its path only slightly bent by gravity's pull. If it hadn't hit the Earth, it would've shot right past the sun and disappeared into interstellar space, the vast emptiness between the stars.