reason he worked in this joke station.
“Ginger!”
“It’s gone!”
“Tell him, he’s dyin’ out there!”
When she imparted the wonderful news, Mary saw his face fall, then set with determination. He tried again. “You’ve been quoted as saying that the world would end tonight at twelve oh one.”
“I said that the Mayan prophecy would come true.”
Crap! Crap! Crap!
“But the world didn’t end! We’re all still here.”
“The end of the world was media hype. You people. All the Mayan prophecy said was that we’d cross the centerline of the galaxy, and we did.” He pulled up his sleeve and glanced at his Rolex. “Exactly four minutes and twenty seconds ago.”
“This is so poor, Ginger, he is eating us for frigging lunch!”
Ginger, her voice tight, said, “Go to the scientist clip, then we’re back in with the forecast.”
They ran the talking head from the university, who explained that astronomers had no idea whether we were crossing the centerline of the galaxy or not, because it was hidden behind dust clouds.
“And we’re out,” Ginger said. “Two minutes on the break, Marty.”
His lights went down. His camera turned off. He tried to control the red-hot rage that was building in him. “That was shitty as hell,” he said, forcing himself not to scream. “I mean, we had that guy nailed down, that’s why we bought el Timothy a ticket all the way to New Joisey, Ginger, hey!”
Ginger was silent.
He knew that there was no point in commenting further, but he could not shut up. “I mean, have you got your professional screwup certificate, Gin, or are you still an advanced amateur?”
“I found the clip!”
He wanted to tell her to stuff it up her ass, but that would be harassment of some damn kind. “How nice,” he said. “Wrap it up for me and I can smoke it after the show.”
“To you in five, four, three, two, one.”
“And the big story tonight is that lake-effect snow, folks, you got that right, we’re gonna get a heavy dose tonight.” And so it went, down to the bottom of the hour, and they were out. When he walked off the darkened set, Gin was already gone. Far, no doubt. But where else were they gonna get somebody who could run a board for her money?
Later that night, he was hanging on a bar sucking beer and wishing some kind of dealer, any kind, would show up. Then a citizen came in, saw him, and said, “Hey, Marty. No snow!”
That was Marty Breslin. Batting a thousand.
6:36 PM, DECEMBER 22, 2012
JET PROPULSION LABORATORY
Dr. Deborah Wilson pointed to a faintly blinking readout from the Advanced Composition Explorer. “What’s that spike, Sam?”
Her graduate assistant thought perhaps this was some sort of quiz. He tapped the screen, and the ACE II detailed readout appeared. What he saw confused him. It was ordinary for the ion flux from the sun to vary, sometimes by a lot, but not by this much, never. “Let me run the circuits.” What this would do was to determine whether or not there were overloads anywhere on the satellite, or tripped circuit breakers. From there, they could pinpoint the source of the anomaly.
“I’ve done that,” Dr. Wilson said. She was clipped, careful, and very uncompromising. But she had also just told him that this tremendous spike in ions was some sort of real phenomenon, not an artifact.
He pulled up the Solar and Heliospheric readouts. The solar wind speed was 431.5 km per second, the proton density was thirteen. There was a coronal hole at midlatitude, and two small sunspots on the near side. “So this isn’t coming from the sun,” he said.
“Apparently not.”
Energy from deep space, then. It had first been detected in the late nineties of the last century by Russian astrophysicists, but it wasn’t considered a significant factor by their American counterparts.
As he spoke, his voice rose an octave, which he just hated. “But this can’t be.” He cleared his throat.
“Except that it is.”
And there it was, entering the solar system right now, the sudden increase in intensity unmistakable. And his instructor was waiting. “I think it’s a wave of energy from some sort of extrasolar event, perhaps an archaic supernova.”
“Why archaic?”
“Well, obviously, there’s a lot here compared to the normal range of solar output, but I’d think that a close supernova—that would be, um, even more energetic.”
“Unless we’ve been in the distant corona since 1997, and this is the leading edge of the real stuff.”
There was something in her voice that he didn’t like. He looked up, met her eyes. “You’re scared.”
“Supernovas happen.”
“But—my God.” If this was the leading edge of a supernova wave, it could end life on earth. “This isn’t possible!”
She reached across his cluttered desk and did something that she had never done before, and, in fact, was probably not appropriate conduct. She touched his hand. She started to speak, then stopped, and her silence said everything.
It was possible. It was quite possible.
However, when their findings eventually became a press release, it didn’t exactly cause people to go rushing into churches begging God for deliverance. In fact, the story appeared in
Still, though, the energy level in the solar system quietly began to increase, and it kept increasing. Nobody noticed that the ion flux had begun to rise at exactly one nanosecond after midnight on December 21.
Nobody would ever notice that, but the story of what was happening to our solar system would grow and grow, until it became the most important of all stories, the greatest story, and, in a sense, the last story.
1. LUCKY BOY
David Ford had never flown in a private jet before, but it seemed almost inevitable that the superexclusive Acton Clinic would transport its new chief psychiatrist this way. The thing was small and louder than an airliner, but it was also swift and plush, if a bit worn. The sweep of leather was cracked here and there, and the carpet was tight from many steps.
Mrs. Aubrey Denman sat opposite him. She was the board’s representative, all angles and desperation, narrow arms, a neck like knotted rope, her face an archaeology of lifts, so many that she appeared to have been transformed into a waxwork of herself. Her laughter was all sound and no expression. She must be seventy-five, maybe more.
The jet was claustrophobic. There was absolutely no wasted space. In the galley, a cadaverous servant in a blue blazer stood at the ready, his eyes emptied by a lifetime of waiting.
She was so rich that she had not only a plane, two pilots, and a servant, but also the plane was
