Book of Souls

Naidu puffed out his chest and proudly described a sophisticated statistical model he’d constructed which exploited the massive computing power at the NERSCC to examine hundreds of thousands of hypothetical asteroid-to-asteroid strikes involving 137108.

“ Lot of second-body variables,” Gershon whistled. “Mass, speed, angle of contact, orbital dynamics at point of collision.”

Naidu nodded. “Each potential hit can change every parameter of 137108. Sometimes not by a lot, but you can get meaningful differences to the aphelion, the perihelion, the orbital period, the ascending node longitude, the inclination, the argument of perihelion, you name it.”

“So show me. What do you have?”

“Okay, since I had only eight hours of computing time, I limited the model to about five hundred higher-probability asteroids based on their orbital characteristics with respect to 137108. Only one simulation out of six hundred thousand produced something interesting.”

Naidu launched a graphical-simulation program and provided running commentary. “This one assumes an asteroid-to-asteroid collision between 137108 and 4581 Asclepius, an Apollo-class object that’s just a little guy, about three hundred meters diameter. It passed within 700,000 kilometers of earth in 1989. If it had hit, it would have been no big deal,” he snorted, “just the equivalent to one Hiroshima-sized explosion every second for fifty days! This simulation assumes 4581 gets tweaked by another rock, gets its own orbit perturbed, and hits 137108 near Jupiter in March 2016. Here’s what goes down if that happens.”

Naidu set the orbital simulator to run from the present. On the screen they watched a green dot representing 137108 move through the solar system in an eccentric elliptical orbit, approaching the earth approximately every two years, then sling-shotting past Jupiter before turning back again toward the sun.

When the simulation got within five years of 2027, he slowed it down so they could watch it more carefully. They stared at two independent orbits, the earth’s and the asteroid’s, a green dot and a red dot moving through the solar system. At a January 2026 time-point, Naidu slowed the simulation again to a snail’s pace.

Gershon leaned in over his student’s shoulder. “It’s really hard to say visually whether its new orbital is going to make things better or worse.”

Naidu said nothing.

The clock turned slowly and at mid-2026, asteroid 137108 turned toward the sun. The earth’s orbit was slowly positioning the planet to get close to an intersection with the asteroid’s track.

October 2026.

November 2026.

December 2026.

January 2027.

The red and green dots were getting close.

Then February 2027.

The simulation halted on February 9.

A pop-up box appeared on the screen:

Impact Probability-100% ****Torino 10**** Torino 10**** Torino 10****

Gershon gasped. “The asteroid’s size. Does it change postimpact with 4581?”

Naidu scrolled down to a table, double-clicked on a cell, and pointed. “It’s still huge, a game-ender.” He logged off the terminal and stood up. “It’s all hypothetical, but I thought you needed to see it. We’re not talking about large probabilities.”

Gershon looked out the window. It was a blustery fall day, and sharp gusts were separating the last leaves from their branches. He had an urge to feel the wind on his face and to crunch through the dry leaf piles on the lawn.

He gently touched his student’s shoulder, and said, “I’m sure you’re right, Govi. Listen, I’m going to go out for a little walk.”

TWO WEEKS LATER ARACAS, VENEZUELA

THE EARTHQUAKE STRUCK AT 11:05 A.M. The epicenter of the 7.8 mag event was twenty kilometers east of Caracas along the El Pilar Fault. At the moment the first tremor hit, the day was sunny and windy, the sky, hazy blue with wisps of fast-moving clouds. Forty seconds later, the sun was blotted out by plumes of concrete dust rising above pancaked apartment blocks, high-rise offices, municipal buildings, and schools. Then ruptured gas lines started fires, which were wind-whipped into conflagrations that roared through the historic Altamira district and the Parque Central Complex.

Eighty percent of the 220,000 casualties occurred within seconds of the first shock-men, women, and children mercilessly crushed to death by steel, glass, and masonry. Most of those trapped under the rubble would fall victim to slow dehydration. Others would be killed by the serious aftershocks and fires which plagued the city for the next seventy-two hours.

Incoming telemetry lit up the Global Seismographic Network like a Christmas tree. At the USGS monitoring site at the Albuquerque Seismological Lab, the Caracas quake was immediately classified as a Major Seismic Event, and, per protocol, hot-line calls went out to Homeland Security, the Pentagon, the State Department, and the White House.