Second Contact, page 41
part #2 of Not Alone Series
Emma was nodding. “That’s not even an option. But there are certain ways for bad news to come out. And seriously, when the news is this bad, the way it comes out can be the difference between sporadic riots and the total collapse of society.”
“Right. But there is a distinction to be made,” Timo said. “There is a difference between passing this information on to people who can use it and announcing it to the public without any thought for what happens next. If Godfrey had found this before we did, or if NASA had found something like it a few years ago, they would have begun preparations long before the public found out. Of course there is a chance of amateur observation, and of course that becomes inevitable as time passes. But for as long as possible, preparations must be carried out under the radar. This is a case where early public knowledge could be absolutely fatal for public safety. If this is on the news in a few hours, I fear that we are done for. Chaos in the streets, looting and rioting, shelves empty, banks closed, utter lawlessness when the police and security forces stop turning up for work since money means nothing if there’s not even going to be a world in nine months… just absolute anarchy. So Dan, do you see why not everyone can know about this, at least for now?”
“Obviously,” Dan said. “But you literally just said that we have nine months and need three years. What are you going to prepare, a seating plan for who gets to sit in the front row when this thing crashes into us?”
“I estimated that we’d need three years to prevent an impact,” Timo clarified. “You already know that I have paid attention to this kind of thing over the past year — the field of planetary defence — but there are distinctions to be made between avoidance, mitigation, and all manner of other measures. Unfortunately, unless the GSC has a lot more than I think, physical interception is completely off the table.”
Dan, who had always been interested in this kind of thing, already firmly suspected that the timescale was too short for a Hollywood-style mission to take out the comet before it got too close.
Emma, who had seen all of those movies, was immediately reminded of a conversation between Timo and Billy Kendrick on Focus 20/20, in which Billy had specifically mentioned a long-period comet as being among the likeliest extinction-level threats that could emerge when it was too late to act. Being reluctant to spread fear, Emma hadn’t liked the fact that they had talked about such things; and now that those fears had been proven well founded, she liked it even less.
And although she was no defeatist, if the chance of doing anything effective in nine months was as slim as Dan seemed to think then Emma couldn’t see how a nine-month societal descent into apocalyptic chaos was any better than having no warning at all; in her professional opinion, it seemed only too likely that the mere revelation of the comet’s approach could destroy humanity long before the impact had a chance.
Nine years would have been doable; nine seconds would have been merciful; nine months would be hell.
“But…” Timo went on, “even with only nine months, there are certain things we can do. Dig, for one. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if significant emergency bunkers already exist in this country and elsewhere, but I can certainly try to either expand those or construct our own. The alternative to going down is going up. I’m not going to pretend that I’ve looked into this particular option very much, but it seems reasonable to explore whether we could survive within Earth’s atmosphere if we were in a high-altitude vessel on the other side of the world when the impact hit, to see out the worst of it.”
Dan shook his head, almost imperceptibly. Timo’s heart was always in the right place, but Dan couldn’t so easily turn his mind towards solutions that could, at best, save a tiny portion of the world’s population.
“How long until we can see it with just our eyes?” Emma asked.
“I didn’t ask,” Timo said. “Perhaps something like four months. But I would be stunned if it’s not independently observed long before naked-eye observation becomes possible. You’re the expert and something tells me this isn’t going to be up to either of us, anyway, but my take would be that the public has to find out through official channels so the message can be managed. It then becomes a trade-off of how long to wait; the ideal time is as long as possible before an amateur astronomer spots it. Even a month would give us some time to get around a table — ‘us’ being my staff and all the old NASA, ESA, CNSA and Roscosmos teams at the GSC — and that would at least give us a chance to talk about how to keep things stable while we pursue whatever we can pursue. Alessandro is waiting for me to give him the green light to bring some GSC personnel in on this, because they and only they have access to any space-based observational equipment. The major telescopes can be pointed towards it, and distant probes can be redirected towards it to give us more information about its composition, which is going to be crucial if we have any chance at all. We’re way past politics now and we really do need to bring them in on this ASAP. So… green light?”
Emma nodded. “Dan?”
“Go for it,” he said. “But even I know there’s no such thing as being ‘past politics’. The comet could be five minutes away and those idiots would be arguing about who gets to give the last speech.”
Timo heeded their agreement, sending a brief text message to Alessandro to authorise the sharing of his observational data with high-ranking GSC officials who reported directly to Chairman Godfrey.
“What about the plaque?” Dan asked when Timo was finished. He aimed the question at no one in particular. “Are we going to tell anyone else how Alessandro knew where to look?”
“Not yet,” Emma answered, simply and decisively. “One thing at a time.”
Dan was glad to hear this answer; both parts. As the initial gut-wrenching shock of the comet news had begun to sink in, his mind had started wondering about the nature of the plaque’s message.
The previous year, those optimists who didn’t see the first two plaques as warnings of a potentially disastrous rendezvous with an asteroid or comet argued that it made little sense to think that the Messengers would care enough to warn the citizens of Earth but not enough to protect them. The technology required to traverse the stars and deliver a series of plaques implied an ability to shunt off-course or otherwise disturb a would-be impactor, they argued, and as such the warning hypothesis made little sense.
Those plaques were fake, as Dan McCarthy knew only too well. But the fourth plaque, only too real, brought up the same question in his mind: Why would they warn us when they could save us?
Even more perplexing was how the Messengers’ stated doctrine of minimal necessary intervention fitted in to this. It struck Dan as fairly obvious that the most minimal intervention in this case would have been no intervention at all, and that the fact one had been deemed necessary clearly implied that the Messengers had deemed humanity worthy of protection. The problem, thus, was logically circular.
It also struck Dan that even assuming humanity had been deemed worth protecting and that intervention was thus necessary, preventing a potentially catastrophic impact without alerting humanity would have been considerably less invasive and destabilising — i.e. more minimal — than alerting humanity of a problem it had insufficient time to deal with.
In turn, this consideration of the timescale raised yet another question: Why the hell did they leave the warning so late?
“I’m with Emma on that,” Timo said. “The plaque has to wait. It’s done its part. And for now, we’ve done ours. I’m sure we’ll hear from Alessandro in the next few hours as updates come in.”
Emma sat down again as a ponderous silence circled. “I’m glad we know,” she said, breaking it very suddenly. “It’s better to know.”
“And we’re definitely telling Clark and Tara,” Dan said, looking at Timo as he spoke.
“Definitely,” Emma concurred.
Timo gave a half-nod-half-shrug; he didn’t look too concerned either way, and knew he would have been outvoted by Emma and Dan and powerless to stop them, anyway.
“So what’s it called?” Dan asked. “Comet Bonucci, after Alessandro?”
For the first time since arriving, Timo broke into a slight smile. “No, he wanted nothing to do with it! Do you remember Louisa and Francesco from your time at the Cavalieri Observatory? Louisa Conte, the observatory’s director, and Francesco Abate, its senior researcher? They were the first to corroborate Alessandro’s findings, so it’s going into the books as Comet Conte-Abate. Unofficially, Alessandro has christened it Il Diavolo.”
“I’m guessing that means ‘the Devil’ in Italian,” Dan said, half-asking.
“You guess correctly,” Timo confirmed. “Il Diavolo is the most potent foe of all.”
The silence that followed this statement lasted far longer than any before it.
Dan sat down next to Emma before long; her head rested on his shoulder as soon as he did.
“Do you think we should wake Tara and Clark to tell them now?” he asked.
“No,” Emma said, speaking very quietly as she listened to his heartbeat. “I know I said it’s better to know but there’s literally nothing either of those two can do about this, so we might as well let them have a few more hours. Ignorance is bliss and all that.”
Timo stood awkwardly next to the couch. “Uh, Dan, do you mind if I go back to the basement?”
“Knock yourself out,” Dan said. “But if you see Clark, don’t let on. I’m telling him.”
“Understood. And Emma, I’m sorry to have woken you at this hour. Needs must, as they say.”
Emma almost let out a slight laugh at Timo’s unexpected apology. “Don’t worry about it.”
And with that, Timo was gone.
After a few minutes of thinking Emma had fallen asleep on his shoulder, Dan felt his own eyes closing.
“They’re not really going to leave us all to die,” she suddenly said, jolting them open again. “Are they?”
“No,” Dan replied, gently kissing the top of her head. “We know what they told us at Lolo and we know they’re on our side. If something like this doesn’t merit a decisive intervention, I don’t know what ever could.”
Dan was desperate to believe his own words, but they sounded a lot more convincing to Emma’s ears than his own.
C plus 1
GSC Headquarters
Buenos Aires, Argentina
William Godfrey stood in his office, face-to-face with a worried-looking advisor. This man, Manuel, was the closest thing to a confidante Godfrey had left within his ever-shrinking inner circle.
None of the fake tidbits of relatively trifling information Godfrey had shared with Manuel throughout the previous year had ever come back to him in the form of second-hand gossip, which was more than could be said of similar information he’d shared with others to test their loyalty. Manuel was a straight-shooting family man who firmly believed in the GSC’s mission and possessed keen instincts which Godfrey had come to trust almost as much as his word.
Today, Manuel wore an expression of concern like none Godfrey had seen on him in the past. He arrived clutching a single sheet of paper which he handed to Godfrey when asked, then stood quietly as the GSC Chairman read the short message.
“This is verified?” Godfrey eventually asked, after reading the impossible words for the fourth time.
“Fully, sir,” Manuel confirmed. “By staff at several facilities.”
“And the original tip came from Fiore’s people? They sent their data to us… no strings? I haven’t missed some public announcement, have I?” Godfrey asked, scrambling to turn on the wall-mounted TV.
Manuel gestured towards the memo. “This is all I know, sir.”
There was nothing on Blitz News about an extinction-level comet hurtling towards Earth, so Godfrey breathed a sigh of relief that the situation was under wraps; for now, at least.
“Manuel, right now I need you to make sure that everyone who knows about this also knows how important it is to keep it under wraps until we can get on top of things. I’ll make sure everyone understands that very soon, but can you get the ball rolling in the meantime while I take care of something else?”
“Absolutely, sir. Only those with high clearance in relevant departments have seen this, but I will ensure that the consequences of loose lips are fully understood. And sir, can I offer any assistance with the ‘something else’?”
Godfrey opened the door for Manuel, an upstanding individual of the kind he would have loved to have a building full of, and politely ushered him outside. “Thank you, Manuel,” he said, gently patting him on the back. “But that’s all for now.”
With Manuel gone, Godfrey sat at his desk and picked up his phone to call reception. His single spoken order was a simple one:
“Put me through to Timo Fiore.”
C plus 2
Ford Residence
Birchwood, Colorado
When Tara woke early to find Emma and Dan curled up on the couch, quiet but awake, Emma stuck to her earlier decision to afford Tara a few more hours of blissful ignorance.
“Watching the news” was a sufficiently convincing explanation as to why they were there — Emma’s bedroom contained no TV, and Dan had recently switched on the living room’s projector — and Tara didn’t pay enough attention to their expressions to know that anything was wrong.
It wasn’t until Timo arrived with Clark, not long before noon, that blissful ignorance’s time finally ran out.
“So what’s the big secret?” Clark asked immediately upon entering Emma’s house, evidently on the basis of what Timo had told him so far. Dan wasn’t annoyed by this; the main thing was that Timo hadn’t told Clark what the secret was.
Emma called Tara into the room, as keen as Dan to get this over with and to make sure they only had to do it once. This time, Tara did notice their tellingly grim expressions.
“Alessandro found an extinction-level comet when he was looking towards the area the plaque told us to look in,” Dan said, spitting it out in layman’s terms. “If nothing stops it, it’s going to hit Earth in nine months.”
“What?! Why don’t they stop it?” Clark asked, diving straight into the heart of the dilemma and verbalising a thought Dan had been wrestling with all morning. “If they’re on our side, why warn us when they could save us?”
“I don’t know yet,” Dan said, throwing in the ‘yet’ for his own benefit as much as anyone else’s. He then turned to Tara to see how she was taking it; the colour had drained from her face and she had already sat down, so the answer seemed to be ‘not well’.
“What if it’s maybe not actually a comet?” she said, trying to clutch on to some faint hope. “What if it’s the Messengers? Maybe it’s their ship?”
“Doesn’t their craft travel at the speed of light?” Clark asked.
“No,” Dan said. “Well, I guess there’s a chance, but we don’t know that it does. What I know for sure — what they told me — is that their craft is powered by light. That doesn’t mean they move at the speed of light. Think of a remote-controlled car with a solar panel on top for recharging the battery… powered by light, but that’s all. Their craft could be the same.”
“So it could be them?” Tara asked, her tone now bordering on desperation.
Dan deferred to Timo, who shook his head.
“The observed size and the early composition analysis are quite conclusive on that,” Timo said. “But Tara, none of this is to say that we are helpless. There has to be a way to deal with this, and my team is going to work with the GSC to find it. You don’t have to like Godfrey to recognise that the existence of the GSC framework is going to be a big plus here in terms of facilitating and hastening the kind of scientific and political discussions we need to have, so it really could be worse.”
“Here’s the other thing I don’t get,” Clark blurted out, his tone tinged with an angry kind of confusion more than helpless fear. “How does this fit in with everything else? Dan, you think they gave us a plaque so it was undeniable that the message on it came from them, right? But how does this fit in? It’s just a star-map that showed us the way to one system, and even I know that comets move fast as hell… so surely this plaque is only a relevant warning at this specific time. How does that make any kind of sense in the context of Kloster’s story about the craft being found in Toplitz eighty years ago? And without exposing the hoax, which they don’t want us to do, how the hell can we ever explain that this came from a plaque? Are we even going to try?”
Clark’s was a question Dan had already thought about, but that didn’t mean that he had come to any real conclusions. He had concluded that they would likely share the plaque, particularly if complacent thoughts that the Messengers might stop the comet became prevalent, but the issue of how its content made sense was a difficult one to deal with. If the plaque’s star-map had led to the discovery of New Kerguelen as initially hoped and expected, everything would have been a lot more straightforward. As it was, straightforwardness was in short supply.
“It is possible to fit this new plaque into the existing narrative,” Dan said. “It’s kind of like if I told you to look towards a certain tree in the distance so you could see a bird that was about to fly in front of it. There are limits to how far away a given object can be observed from, so I don’t think it would be too much of a stretch for people to think that the Messengers knew this comet’s long-term path and knew that we would first see it by looking in this one specific direction.”
“Hopefully that ends up being the kind of thing we have to worry about,” Emma chimed in. “Message management is something I can handle. If we hear some feasible solutions from the GSC in the next few days, I’ll be happy to worry about fitting the fourth plaque in with the rest of the story.”
“So we’re telling the GSC about this soon,” Clark said. This wasn’t a question, but rather an approving statement.
