He sold this vision, incredible as it may sound. My father, an aging civil engineer, senior partner in a firm that designs dams, tunnels, and bridges—something of a hardhat, despite his doctorate degree—sold this vision to the slickest, sleekest techies in the world. He sold them on the idea that all professional engineers, from muddy boots builders to geniuses of software application, are linked in a fellowship, and that this fellowship has the genius, the opportunity—and the obligation—to ease human suffering.
And among the invitees, who could resist? A fully paid luxury cruise aboard a brand-new ship on an exotic, seldom-traveled route, partway around the coast of Africa! Bring your family, including children (up to the age of thirty, as long as they are still enrolled students), and pocket $5,000 spending money for everyone in your party. More important than the money and the travel, how about the excitement of being with talented peers who are seeking the Holy Grail of human salvation? The inevitable attention of the world’s media to this remarkable enterprise was also a plus for career builders.
Most of the people who were invited accepted enthusiastically. With fifteen hundred passengers aboard, we were a veritable village. It is hard to believe that we embarked, in such high spirits and with such high hopes, just a little more than a year ago.
Today, we are indeed a village, although not at all like a village that any of us has ever seen before. But we have survived, and the mood of crisis that prevailed for so many months has recently begun to lift. It seems as if we can now look ahead to more than a few days at a time.
Yes, we have survived. But our magnificent ship is sunk, and the few precious objects that we were able to salvage from it don’t really amount to very much. Complex appliances—a radio, a few flashlights, a laptop computer—only mock us now. Most of our batteries were quickly used up, and we have few sources of new energy—no fuel, other than wood and a little coal, no electricity, yet. We have the use of animal power, most notably herds of powerful oxen. And we have ample running water in nearby rivers, which we have already put to use with a number of rudimentary waterwheels. Also, we have embarked on an ambitious program of technological recovery. But we have had to start from such primitive circumstances—from so far back—that one has to wonder about our long-term prospects.
I recall in one of my history courses reading about Curtis E.
LeMay, longtime commanding general of the Strategic Air Command, who eventually became chief of staff of the U.S. Air Force. A darling of right-wing extremists, and known as a zealous proponent of carpet-bombing, he retired from the military and in 1968 ran for vice president with George Wallace on the American Independent Party line. During the Vietnam War, LeMay proposed telling the North Vietnamese that unless they put an end to their aggression, we would “bomb them into the Stone Age.”
Well, yes indeed, General LeMay. Not exactly the circumstances you had in mind, but it happened very much like you suggested. We’re living proof. Bombed into the Stone Age!
In the course of just a few hours we were transported back to Neolithic times, before 4000 B.C.E., when the first copper was smelted in Sumeria. Like our Neolithic ancestors, we could cultivate crops and domesticate animals. Those two talents—momentous in the history of
Then it took six thousand years of Neolithic living to bring us to where weare—or rather, where we were twelve months ago. Thinking of this passage of multiple millennia, what hope has our small group to make its way back to the modern age? Assuming—as seems so farto be the case—that a return to the modern age is the course we wish to pursue.
1
ABOARD THE
DECEMBER 25, 2009, 5:00 P.M. LOCAL TIME
Jane Demming Warner, a professor of planetary sciences at the University of Arizona Lunar and Planetary Laboratory, had come on the cruise along with her husband, Jacob Warner, one of the leading computer engineers in the United States. It was to be their first vacation together in several years. Jane’s life had long been devoted to the study of comets, meteors, and asteroids; but she had planned to take a break from all that for three weeks, just kick back and enjoy the trip.
Sitting on the still-unmade bed in their stateroom, wearing an old tanktop and running shorts for a planned two-miler on the track, Jane gripped the telephone impatiently, waiting for the connection to be established, grimacing at the clicking and buzzing that she heard on this her third attempt to get through to her colleagues in Tucson. She had a sick sensation in her stomach about this whole thing, compounded by a guilty feeling that she had “deserted” her post at home.
The cruise had been fantastic, everything she and Jake had wanted it to be. During the days, he was cheerfully busy with his seminar activities; and their evenings were filled with splendid dinners, dancing, and strolls on the wide decks of the luxury ship. The stars—she had never seen them so brilliant and close other than through the business end of a telescope. She gazed up at them like a cockeyed “civilian,” as if she had never noticed them before. The winter constellations of the southern hemisphere, so familiar in theory, seemed startlingly fresh in their present reality—a revelation… Finally a voice on the other end of the line.
“Geoff, is that you? It’s Jane. What’s going on there?”
Despite the tenuous wireless connection, Geoffrey Baird’s voice was clear and crisp, his New Zealander accent unmistakable. “Not good news, Jane luv. Not good at all.”
“What the hell is it? Be specific.”
“The missiles”—he pronounced the second “i” very long; she could hear his labored breathing—“They went awry—or at least one of them did. We don’t know whether it was sabotage or what. Who could possibly be that suicidally crazy? What could their objective be?”
“Stop hemming and hawing, for God’s sake,” Jane said, wanting to reach through the phone and shake her friend and colleague.
Just a few hours earlier, she and Jake had sat in the lounge with a group of other passengers watching news of the intercept on a satellite feed from ITN in Great Britain. Jane understood exactly what was at stake and how the nuclear explosives were supposed to thwart the comet that was hurtling toward the earth. Jake had been sipping a Jack Daniel’s with a blissful grin on his face. He was having one hell of a good time away from his lucrative but stressful consulting business. She had been drinking an iced tea and looking at her watch, thinking about the best time to call her friends at the university, knowing they’d be at the lab monitoring the diversion effort closely.
“Jane, we’re not going to make it. Based upon our rough calculations—”
“What do you mean? Who’s not going to make it?”
“All of us, the entire bloody planet. I’m saying we’re doomed. About six hours from now. The impact—”
She could not hear Geoffrey’s words for the roaring in her ears. What was he saying? It couldn’t be… it just could not be what she thought he had said. The mission a failure? The end of the world? Too fantastic, too horrific to contemplate.
“Slow down, Geoff. Have you been drinking or something?”
“No, but I wish I had a good shot of vodka right about now, Jane. We’re looking at the Big Barbecue. I don’t mean to be flip, but I don’t know what else to say or do. We’re all going under one way or the other. Some of the
