The angle of entry eased toward the target zone. Yet the vindication he felt for finally struggling out of his underdog position and coming up with a procedure that looked as if it was going to do the trick was tempered by a knowledge of just how close they had come. The rock screamed toward the Moon at a phenomenal rate of speed. Angle of entry reached deeper into the region of effectiveness, and within the next few seconds, at thirty-seven degrees, Gerry launched.
The survival pod shot upward through the tube and in seconds he was well above the PCV and watching it recede. Ten seconds after that it was like he was looking down at a mountain, because he saw the sloping curvature of the asteroid, and the curves looked like precipices. Then he got so far up that Gaspra became the big stone that it was, with all its tiny craters—a scarred old warrior that was about to be obliterated in its final battle.
The surface of the Moon was a blur of speed below, its craters shadowy blips. As his vehicle rose, the asteroid sank. His pod’s movement soon carried him beyond the asteroid’s path. He was on his stomach now, his head down as if he was going to dive to the Moon, and from this upside-down position he watched the asteroid get lower and lower, rolling end over end like a badly thrown football, until finally…it struck the Moon’s surface.
By this time, his readouts told him he was nearly three hundred miles away, with the curve of the Moon fully visible, but it was as though the blast happened right next door. The asteroid threw up a small ring of debris, but the debris was moving quickly, and every piece of blasted particulate took on the same shape, an elongated, blurry lozenge. Outside this first small ring, a second ring developed. Then a third ring. Then a fourth. Each ring reached higher and higher into the dark vacuum above the Moon, until finally the rings were so gargantuan, tall, and violent that debris started flying around him and he grew concerned that he might be hit. Take a baseball, stick an upside- down thimble on its side, and that was the proportion of the blast size compared to the Moon. The ground surrounding the crater, covering an area of five hundred square miles, quivered like a bowl of Jell-O. He watched in horror and fascination.
He took a moment to think of his friend—but then had his own concerns to consider. The survival pod carried him up and over the rim of the Moon so that the asteroid strike disappeared behind him. His braking thrusters fired and the pod sank. The surface of the Moon came up fast. In minutes he no longer saw its curvature. Then it was as though he was looking out a jet window from thirty thousand feet. And in many ways it was like coming in for a landing in a jet, with the bleak, gray-brown landforms growing more and more distinct every minute.
When he was a thousand feet up, the pod arced into a vertical position and sank thruster-first toward the surface. As the pod reached the thirty-foot mark, and slowed its descent to two miles an hour, he got a red light on the landing gear—it wouldn’t deploy. When the pod finally reached the surface, it fell over like a big tree.
Luck.
He and Glenda had talked about it often.
Usually, when a piece of bread and peanut butter fell to the floor, it always fell peanut butter side down.
In fact, that was the story of his life.
But it seemed his luck had changed. With no radios working and everbody hunkered down, his death would have been certain if the pod had fallen on its hatch. The weight of the pod on top of it would have stopped it from opening and he would have been trapped until his life support ran out. But the pod had fallen hatch up. He keyed the necessary commands. The gull-wing unit lifted noiselessly.
And Gerry climbed out onto the surface of a Moon that was moving toward the Earth exactly according to his own equations.
40
Driven by strong winds, the fire raged all night. It first consumed the trees around the cave, then spread in all directions according to the wayward will of the fickle winds. Smoke came into the cave, finally forcing Glenda, Fernandes, and the kids into the second cavern. The fire’s roar was like several trains rumbling by the foot of the hill. The oxygen got thin, as if the fire was consuming every last atom.
At times Glenda thought she heard screams outside. Once or twice she grew convinced she heard cries
for help, as if the Tarsalans expected her to rescue them. Fat chance.
At last, the fire burned a safe distance from the cave.
Glenda, Fernandes, and the children went out to have a look.
The world was ashy, and embers flew everywhere. The main body of the fire burned about a mile off, the flames sometimes leaping a hundred yards into the air.
“Cool,” said Jake.
She glanced at her son. He was dirty from head to foot. He had Leigh’s pistol stuffed in his pants and his Montclair slung over his shoulder, and even though he was only twelve, he now possessed a disconcerting maturity and a battle-hardened stare as sturdy as cement. Yet…yet he was still a kid…because this fire was
Light. It flowed into her eyes with a calming influence. All of the dry underbrush and tree branches had gone up, but there were still a number of tall tree trunks, horribly charred by the fire, sticking out of the ground like black fenceposts, all of them now backlighted by the frenzied inferno a mile off. She looked for figures moving through this outpost of Hell, flipping down her night-vision goggles but, because of the heat, all she saw was a blinding wash of green.
So she went back into the cave, got the binoculars, and scanned the destroyed forest for miles around.
She didn’t see a soul—Tarsalan or human.
They all watched the fire burn for the next hour. No human first responders came to put it out, and no fire planes flew by to douse it with payloads of retardant. Chattahoochee, protected under law, just burned and burned.
She wondered how many Tarsalans had died.
After an hour, everyone got bored with watching the fire.
Fernandes went to poke around in the ashes, getting as close as he could to the main body of the fire.
The girls went inside to sleep while Glenda and Jake stayed on the ledge to keep watch.
Four hours later, Morgan and Melissa came outside to stand guard. Glenda and Jake went inside. By this time, Fernandes had come back and was dozing in the corner.
Glenda fell asleep in minutes.
A couple of hours later she was awakened by a strange noise outside. She opened her eyes. She listened more closely. It sounded like hail. It thumped down all over the forest, and hissed in the embers.
“Aunt Glenda?” Melissa called from the cave entrance.
Glenda got up and went outside.
Thumb-sized chunks of hail fell from the sky, only this wasn’t ordinary hail—this was green hail. It took her a moment to realize what was going on. Then she looked up at the sky. Jake and Fernandes came to the cave entrance. Excitement exploded through her body, but she suppressed it. Had Gerry done it?
Had his crazy scheme to push the Moon closer to Earth with a big asteroid actually worked?
She walked out to the ledge and picked up a chunk of hail. By this time Hanna had appeared at the cave entrance as well. The hail melted in her hand, leaving behind a green residue, like cream of spinach soup.
Everybody started picking up their own chunks of hail. The sky was black as oil. But surely to God this had to mean something. How long would it take, she wondered? Would it all fall to Earth, or would some of it drift into space? And if it fell into their oceans, how would it affect things? Was it dead? Or was it still alive?
Over the next several hours the green hail fell with increasing rapidity, so fast that, despite the high temperature, there was some moderate accumulation.
When the sky finally brightened—as at last it did—the forest floor looked glazed in green Jell-O.
Morgan jumped up and down, clapping her hands together. “The stupid thing is gone, the stupid thing is gone,” and she put the words to the tune of “The Farmer in the Dell,” and soon Melissa and Hanna joined in, and even Jake at last got going on it, until they were all singing, “The stupid thing is gone, the stupid thing is gone, hi- ho the derry-o…” On and on, the way kids sang sometimes, just to hear their own voices. Fernandes, meanwhile,
