Book of Souls

ON GARDEN STREET, north of Harvard Square, most of the staff at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics were having lunch at the campus cafeteria or at their desks.

Neil Gershon, an associate professor of astrophysics at Harvard and the Assistant Director of the Minor Planet Center, was cleaning a gob of mayo off his keyboard which had squirted out the end of his roast beef wrap. One of his grad students came into his office cubicle and watched with amusement.

“I’m happy to entertain you, Govi. Can I help you with something?”

The young Indian researcher smiled and accommodated his boss’s forgetfulness. “You told me I could see you lunchtime, remember?”

“Oh yeah. February ninth, 2027.”

Astrophysicists were suddenly popular.

The Post article and the Piper interview had unleashed a torrent of academic and amateur speculation on humanity-eliminating events. To dampen down the hysteria, governments turned to scientists, and scientists turned to their computer models. While they worked on the problem the popular press blithely dived in.

That very morning, USA Today published a survey of three thousand Americans asking about their favorite hypotheses concerning that suddenly famous date. There were a lot of theories ranging from the plausible to the ridiculous; a quarter of Americans believed that an alien invasion was in the cards, War of the Worlds-style. Divine retribution and the Last Judgment scored fairly high too. Asteroids were also in the double digits.

A task force was immediately established at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena comprehensively to explore some of the plausible extraplanetary scenarios. The Minor Planet Center at Harvard-Smithsonian was assigned to sift through their Near-Earth Asteroid Tracking database to eliminate collision threats.

That was quickly accomplished. Of the 962 Potentially Hazardous Asteroids, PHAs, in the database, only one was relevant to the 2027 time frame: 137108 (1999 AN₁₀

), an Apollo-class near-earth asteroid discovered in 1999 at MIT’s Lincoln Lab. It was a very large body, almost thirty kilometers in diameter, but only of casual interest. Its nearest pass to earth in the next one thousand years was going to take place on August 7, 2027 at a distance of 390,000 kilometers. On the ten-point Torino Impact Hazard Scale, the asteroid rated only an anemic score of one, hardly noticeable.

To be ultraconservative and thorough, Gershon had assigned his best student, Govind Naidu, to relook at the asteroid and update its orbital parameters. The NASA project had a priority designation, and Naidu was able to cut into the queue to task the forty-eight-inch telescopes at the Maui Space Surveillance Site and at the Palomar Observatory to reimage 137108. He was also given eight precious hours of time on the government’s supercomputer at the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

“You’ve got the new MSSS and Palomar data?” Gershon asked.

“Yeah. You want to go over to my workstation?”

“Just log on from here.”

“You’ve got mayo on your keypad.”

“And this is against your religion?” Gershon got up and relinquished his chair. “I’ve got a telecon with JPL this afternoon, and I want this nailed.”

Naidu sat down and logged on to the observatory databases. “Okay, here’s the orbital plot for 137108 as of the last observation point in July 2008. Right now, it’s past Jupiter heading inbound with an orbital period of 1.76 years. Here’s the last simulation-let me fast-forward to August 2027. You see, there, it gets within 400,000 kilometers of us.”

“I need the new data, Govi.”

“I’m getting there.” He clicked through and opened spreadsheets that were time-stamped to the previous night. “Okay, both telescopes got clean images. Let me merge the databases from Hawaii and Palomar. It’ll just take a minute.”

His fingers flew over the keyboard as he conformed the two sets of observations, and when he was done, Gershon said, “Let’s see it.”

Naidu clicked on the orbital plotting tool and fast-forwarded the simulation to 2027. “See? It’s unchanged. The closest point is still in August at a distance of almost half a million kilometers. On February 9, it’s not even close.”

Gershon looked satisfied. “So that’s it. We can scratch 137108 off the oy vey list.”

Naidu didn’t get up. He was accessing the Lawrence Berkeley database. “I thought you might get more questions, so I ran a series of scenarios on the NERSCC supercomputer.”

“What kind of scenarios?”

“Asteroid-asteroid hits.”

Gershon grunted his approval. The young man was right, he’d probably get the question. There were about five thousand asteroids in the main belt between Mars and Jupiter, and it wasn’t unprecedented for them to slam into each other from time to time, changing their orbital characteristics. “How’d you model it?”