Comet! (an Ell Donsaii story #5 ) (42 page)

As she spoke, Gordon glanced into the western sky and saw a star pop into view
. It began
to move slowly, then turn
ed
into a streak that shot across the sky toward the east. He had raised his arm to point at the fireball
. A
s his arm tracked it past the stage
,
he swung his arm
on
down to strike a power chord
and start the concert
.

Years later Gordon would remember
Velos’
show at D5R as the most amazing night of his life. The crowd, giddy with relief over the demise of the comet
,
enthusiastically danced
,
cheered and applauded. Halfway through the first set
,
other
people, having heard the President’s announcement
,
started showing up
at D5R. They quickly overwhelmed the gate guard and packed the gr
ounds of D5R
. E
ventually
Velos had
an audience
of thousands of enthusiastically cheering
people
.
On one song
Ell came back out on the stage to wild applause and led the entire crowd in a simple line dance.
Seeing thousands of people dancing in synch to their music choked Gordon up.
Throughout, the sky streaked with thousands of meteors
,
some exploding overhead like fireworks
. After Gordon begged her from the stage
Donsaii
reprised her jaw dropping “
Greensboro
dance,” to the same song she’d
danced to
that night a few months ago
. A man named Marsden came on stage and took the microphone while Gordon was playing the gentle arpeggiated intro to one of Velos’ songs. Gordon just kept the arpeggio going as the man spoke
—
tears streaming down his face
—
of Donsaii’s accomplishments, from the Olympics, to stopping terrorists, to winning the Nobel
Prize
to, now, saving the world from Hearth
-
Daster. Marsden invited her up to say a few words but
she
blush
ed and
shook her head.
However,
the people around her lifted her onto their shoulders and carried her up to place her on the stage
.
Once there on the stage she did take the mike and
spoke touchingly of
the “amazing
ly
hard work of
all
the people at D5R who gave unstintingly of themselves to
stop that comet.” This brought thunderous cheers, not just from the D5R people but from the thousands of other people who’d shown up.

In the pause that followed Gordon leaned to the mike and sang
the
words
of the song
, not written for the occasion but somehow seeming to fit
—

The night was stormin, like an angry beast

Now a mis
ty mornin’, sun
comes
o
’
er the sea

The s
ea
gulls soarin’, floatin’
in the east

The
waves
they are
rollin’, ragin’ to be free

We
keep
slowly walkin’, barefoot in the sand

We keep
gently talkin’, ‘bout our
newfound
plans
…

In her ear Ell heard Allan say, “Heinlein has
assumed a
n
orbit
around
the third planet of Tau Ceti.”

Excitedly Ell said, “Show me images!” She looked up at her HUD and saw a globe
that resembled Earth
in that it was blue and white
. Much more of it appeared to be
white
than on
the usual
images of Earth
,
but
some
areas of
brilliant
blue
could be seen
here and there.
“Wow! That’s pretty! Send images to Roger and Emma!

“Zoom in on one of the blue areas
.” Ell’s eyes narrowed as she stared, “More zoom.” The
break in the clouds
filled her field of view
,
but to her disappointment Ell didn’t see any brown or green. “Try another area of blue.”

Allan zoomed the video in on blue area after blue area. None of the breaks in the clouds had anything but blue visible.

“Dang!” Ell said, disappointedly. “OK,
keep
it orbiting and check every break in the clouds for land, or any other color than blue
. Tell me if you see anything
.
”

Allan said, “Both Roger and Emma are calling.”

“Put them on… Hey Roger, Emma, did you get the pictures?”

“Yes!” They chorused. Roger
asked
, “Are those from Heinlein
at
Tau Ceti
three
?”

“Yep. Pretty cloudy, but some spots of blue
. Must not be completely frozen like we’d thought
.”

“Have you sent him down yet?”

“No, I’ve got him orbiting for now, looking for something other than blue to show through the clouds. So far
,
no luck and it seems like it would be silly to send him down to an area that had nothing but water to look at.”

Emma said, “Bummer. Do you think it’s completely covered with water?”

“Looks like it so far. Unless something else is blue down there. Why are you thinking it’s a bummer?”

“I don’t know. I guess it just doesn’t seem very earthlike.”

“Huh, I’ve been expecting other worlds to be a lot more different. The other planets in our Solar System are
extremely
different
from Earth
. This
one
seems like it has liquid water, clouds and free oxygen in the atmosphere.
Even if it doesn’t have any land
,
that’s
way
more like Earth than
I
thought we’d be finding.”

“How much longer are you going to orbit? I’m dying for you to get down under those clouds and see what’s going on!”

“Just a couple of weeks.”

“Weeks!?” Roger and Emma said together.

“Not really, I was just jerking your chains. But we’ve got to start thinking about bringing in some experts before we do too much.
”

“Experts?”

“Well yeah. I don’t think we should open any ports, even in orbit until we have some system in place to isolate any possible disease organisms that might float through.”

“Oh my God!
” Emma almost moaned, “
How are we going to put instruments through to measure things like, like, air pressure and take samples to analyze atmospheric composition and determine what’s in the water and obtain specimens? ‘
C
ause there must be life there to liberate that oxygen, right?”

“Hmmm,” Ell said, “We should have dropped off a port a little farther from the planet that we could send instrumented rockets though. Then we could mount whatever instruments we wanted on various rockets and send them down. Results
c
ould come back by
PGR
, that’d be disease free.”

“Oh my God! Emma exclaimed, “We’re going to have to wait months before we can get another rocket there that we can send stuff through?”

“Well we would if Roger hadn’t suggested dropping off a port about a hundred thousand kilometers out.”

“Arggh!” You two set me up?!”

“Yeah, I’m excited to get started too, but
after the comet scare
we
don’t want to
take a chance of wiping out humanity by importing some disease
organism
that happens to think we’re particularly tasty. Roger, can you feel out Dr. Bynewicz to see if she knows someone in the medical field that might have the expertise we need? I’m goin
g to talk to my Astronomy prof. I’m taking a class
in the search for
extra
-
solar
planets
,
though
I’m not sure it’s a research area for him
. If he isn’t
really
an expert in what to do, maybe he can point us to someone who is?”

“Really? Are you ready to announce this to the world already?”

“I don’t think so. I’m thinking to address it as a hypothetical. If that doesn’t work, I’m thinking that I’ll have him sign a non disclosure agreement before talking about what’s really going on.”

Roger said, “Do you want me to approach Bynewicz the same way?

“Yeah, I think that’d be good.”

The End

Hope you liked the book!

If so, please give it a positive review on Amazon.

Try the next in the series, to be published soon.

Author’s Afterword

This is a comment on the “science” in this science fiction novel. I have always been partial to science fiction that posed a “what if” question. Not everything in the story has to be scientifically possible, but you suspend your disbelief regarding one or two things that aren’t thought to be possible. Then you ask,
what if
something (such as faster than light travel) were possible, how might that change our world? Each of the Ell Donsaii stories asks at least one such question.

“
Comet!
”
continues an exploration of the question,
“
what if
wormholes were possible, connecting one location in our space-time continuum to another?
”
This
exploration continues to focus on small wormholes, connecting vast distances
,
and
in this case
allowing small rockets to be fueled and driven to enormous speeds. Because the formula for kinetic energy
(K=1/2mv
2
)
squares the velocity component, high speeds translate into huge energies. In this case
,
energies capable of dealing with a comet threatening the survival of the human race. It is hard to imagine an object weighing five kilograms (11 lbs) moving an object weighing 300 million metric tons, but with a high enough velocity, it can be done.

Acknowledgements

I would like to acknowledge the editing and advice of Gail Gilman, Elene Trull and Nora
Dahners
, each of whom significantly improved this story.