“I only need a few more minutes. I’ll clean up, and by the time I’m done, my images will be captured.” Ying moved towards the telescope controls, “Don’t touch those!” Yelled Imus, surprising himself and both men who stopped to stare at him. Yang shook his head. “We’re going to call the Dean, you’re finished! You’ll never graduate and earn your PhD. You’re not PhD material anyway. Now get out!”
Imus managed to download his images on a memory stick and left thinking to himself, if I captured what I think I did the university will beg me to take my PhD from them. I’ll be famous while you two old farts who have been working on something for thirty years will still be here fighting over some stupid formula.
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The 2-mile-long rock knew nothing of the excitement in Imus or anything else. It was a mineral rich, extremely heavy rock flying through space. It had no choice on where to go. It was all geometry, like pool. It had been hit and was knocked out of its orbit. It had begun a journey that was going to change the life of billions. The rock had enough gravity to attack some much smaller rocks and space dust which bombarded the rock’s surface.
Imus drove back to his small apartment. He’d decided to miss his classes so he could investigate the reason a star was missing. Stars do not just disappear. He’d been lucky in catching a dim reflection from the rock. He plotted the missing star and decided this evening to set up his own telescope and see if he could record any additional images. His next time slot at the Lick Observatory wasn’t until the following week. He didn’t want to wait that long, plus if the object was moving very quickly, he might have to search a large area before he picked it up again, time he didn’t have. His allotted time at the observatory was extremely limited. People waited years to get a time slot to use the large telescope.
Imus started scanning the area on his personal telescope at midnight. He’d driven to the observatory and set up close by. Since the observatory was located on a small mountain and it was in a dark area Imus thought it would give his small scope a possible shot at finding his unknown object.
Three long, cold numbing hours later Imus grinned from ear to ear. Yup, there was something out there and it was moving at one hell of a speed. He’d been able to plot a simple course based on the two nights of viewing. He knew he’d need a few more nights before he could begin to determine the object’s orbit. He knew it wasn’t a comet because it didn’t have a tail. Unless, could it be, could he have found a so-called dark comet? Imus’s excitement grew as he expanded each of the images he’d captured. He zoomed them in and rotated the images so he could get a better idea what he was seeing.
So far all he knew was there was something out there that was moving very quickly, and it was heading in system. He didn’t yet know where it had come from or where it was going. Both calculations required computing power far in advance of what he had. Imus sat on his living room couch, his coffee table filled with empty delivery food containers and empty coffee cups. He didn’t know how long he’d been sitting in front of his three computers trying to work on the formulas when someone pounded on his door.
“Robert are you in there? Robert, if you’re in there, open the door!”
Imus heard the noise; however, he was so deep in his thoughts it took a moment to register. “Professor, what are you doing here, did I miss a meeting?”
“Robert you’ve been missing for over a week. You not only missed my class, you missed two of our appointments to review your progress on your Ph.D paper.” Professor Jackson Wright looked around the small apartment. “Robert, when was the last time you opened a window, took a bath or cleaned up? What’s gotten into you? You begged me to teach one of my classes then all of a sudden you up and disappear. You pitched me a brilliant idea for your paper. I bent arms for you to get time on the big scope at Lick and I get a complaint you went over your time and then you disappeared? Please tell me what’s going on. None of this sounds like you.”
“Professor, please let me show you something. I discovered a new object, it’s large, it’s fast and it’s coming in system and that’s as far as I’ve gotten to. I’m stuck. I’ve been trying to rig these three laptops together to give me more computing power. I tried logging in to the school’s network…”
“That was you who took the network down three days ago?”
“I guess it might have been. I’m sorry.”
“We’ll discuss that incident later. First tell me what you think you’ve discovered. I want to see what you believe you’ve discovered and why you believe it’s important.”
“Professor, come, sit, let me move some of this mess away.”
Professor Wright shook his head, “Why don’t you clean up and have dinner with me tonight? Then you come here and get a good night’s sleep, then
