| Fiction | Dana Place |
The Last to Leave - Part One
Prologue
At 26 miles a second a small magnesium rock clung to a large
orbit around a large yellow sun in a distant corner of the
Milky Way galaxy with millions of other rocks of different
size, shape and composition following a path it has taken
thousands of times before for millions of years. The
slightest nudge by a neighboring rock, and it begins to
drift, unnoticeably at first, and then, revolution after
revolution, the orbit becomes a more skewed, uncontrollable
orbit, away from the pack. Like a top, spinning perfectly
until it hits the slightest imperfection, spinning wildly
out of control, and each new imperfection skews that orbit
more and more, until finally crashing onto the floor. This
particular top has been spinning in a chaotic orbit and one
nudge by a tiny imperfection adjusts the orbit, pushing it
off the table and directly into the path of a larger blue
ball millions of miles away.
This nudge is acknowledged by a tiny red light on a large
server in New Delhi, India. Three thousand miles away, in
Dallas, TX, in a pale white room full of computers, a man
paid to stare at a blue screen 12 hours a day, reads a quick
one line message across his screen:
“3214.1225m orbit shift 147.5/52.1/119.3”
The man pulls a taco out of his mouth and cut and pastes the
line onto an email that arrives two thousand miles away to a
computer in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The man leans back in
his chair and stuffs the taco back into his mouth.
The next morning, a young female graduate student opens her
email and reads the one line post. She slides her chair
across the room and plugs the new coordinates into an
identical computer and leaves the room for a cup of coffee.
A computer across the campus of MIT picks up the new
information and immediately begins to plot the new orbit of
3214.1225m.
At almost the exact same time, an astronomy student at UCCS
in Colorado Springs noticed the exact thing that the
computers would notice in a few minutes. The projected path
of meteorite 3214.1225m would pass approximately five
hundred thousand miles from Earth. The student picked up the
phone and dialed the administration office, then transferred
to her professor sitting in his office grading tests. Five
minutes later two professors from opposite ends of the
country were holding for the Director of Astronomical
Anomalies at NASA in Houston, TX.
By 8pm, the New York Post posted a story on it’s website
about the meteoroid, and by 9:15 a headline was plastered on
the top of the Drudge Report:
Meteor projected to “just miss” Earth
At 9am the next morning, an update to the original article was posted. A written statement from NASA:
At 9:30 pm (EST) Thursday, June 9th 2005, meteoroid
3214.1225m’s orbit was altered by a near space collision
that will bring it within five hundred thousand miles of
Earth on approximately Wednesday, June 15th. This is known
as a “cosmic close shave” and although is not common, it is
not a rare occurrence cosmically speaking. Astronomers all
over the world along with the appropriate federal agencies
are monitoring the meteoroid and are confident that this
will just be another in a series of cosmic debris to pass
through our orbit.
Xxxxxx Xxxxxxx
National Aeronautics Space Administration
. . . . . . . .
The city of Galveston, Texas sits on the Gulf of Mexico approximately 40 miles south of Houston. It sits at the bottom of a row of chemical and oil refineries that run up the Gulf Coast to the Eastern edge of Louisiana. Galveston County is home to over 350,000 people. They move back and forth to work, buy groceries for the following week, fill up at the local pump, and plan for that weekend getaway. Many of them are going to be the recipients of a distinction that has never happened since such things have been recorded. They will be killed from a falling extra terrestrial object.
. . . . . . . .
The most intelligent scientists at the NASA Space Center developed the Voyager III project to follow in the footsteps of it’s predecessors by passing through the inner then outer solar system and past, reading data and transferring it back to Mission Control Houston until it reached the outer limits of our tracking capabilities, drifting farther and farther away from our solar system. The smartest men in the world planned the mission to the smallest detail for 12 years, at a cost of 410 billion dollars. While passing the smallest of Mars’ moons, the calculated journey came to an abrupt halt when the Voyager III collided with a meteorite labeled 3214.1225m, destroying the craft and slightly altering the course of the meteorite. A supercomputer in Houston, Texas downloading the continuous information being transmitted by the explorer picked up an unknown substance just before the transmission disappeared entirely. The data was immediately rationalized by the computer and the first actual readings of the meteorite were mistaken as a phosphorous iron allow common on Mars and it’s surrounding moons. The meteorite was mistaken for planetary orbital debris and an investigation into the collision was initiated. The rock continued on it’s path toward the small island in the Gulf of Mexico.
. . . . . . . . . .
Four men in identical gray business suits sat around a black marble table and looked at the chart in front of them. Two of the four men had no background in science, but didn’t need one to know what they were looking at. 314.1225m was not going to miss the Earth, it was going to hit the atmosphere in approximately 14 hours. A digital imaging satellite borrowed from the Fox News Channel had been able to deliver an analysis of the object they were looking at: 225m x 18m, composed of mostly iron ore, rock, and an unknown substance. Although larger in scale than most debris that entered and burned in the atmosphere, the general consensus of the group was that the rock would break apart and that any pieces large enough to pass through would simply fall into the Atlantic Ocean. The findings of the group were typed and couriered to the White House press office, where the news would be sandwiched between the President’s daily schedule and the Boston Red Sox visit to the rose garden to meet the president.
. . . . . . . . . . .
Ken Raymond, a science teacher from the town
of Norman, Oklahoma pulled a cooler full of soda from the
back of a blue Ford Aerostar and his wife trudged behind him
carrying a wicker basket she had packed that morning full of
various sandwiches for her husband and five of his students.
Her husband hadn’t slept the night before. After lobbying
the school district for months, they were allowing him to
take a group of accelerated honor students on an overnight
field trip to witness the first meteor shower that would be
directly over the Southern United States in the last few
years. It was a perfect night for it. Clear skies, and they
would be in a campground far enough out of the city to be in
complete darkness. He knew this meteor shower would be a
once in a lifetime event for most of these boys, and was
anxious to take advantage of the opportunity to excite their
young minds. His students filed onto the little yellow bus
marked Norman ISD, the doors sealed shut, and the bus pulled
out of the parking lot.
The campground was about 40 miles south the city limits,
surrounding a lake and surrounded by a large grove of trees.
The bus pulled into a parking lot filled with other yellow
school buses and high school students unloading tents and
moving into a grove next to the lake. The five students and
their teacher set up their tents and built a small campfire,
waiting for twilight.
. . . . . . . . . . .
At 8:24pm CST, 3214.1225m slammed into the Earth’s atmosphere and officially became a meteorite, along with 400 other pieces of rock and pieces of Russian satellite that broke apart and rolled out of orbit. It immediately slowed to 315 mph and turned a bright red, pieces breaking off it’s outer edges and burning past the other rocks. Everyone looking at the skies saw a large red fireball surrounded by white flares of light that would disappear after a few moments. The fireball, dimmed as it slowed, until it became a small red light invisible to the naked eye. The children and teachers in southern Oklahoma would continue to watch the light display and would not find out what happened to the large red fireball until they arrived back at the school the next day.
. . . . . . . . .
A meteorite the size of a large walk in
freezer hit Galveston Island at 8:51 pm CST, immediately
killing forty thousand people and sinking the Northern tip
of the island. The collision completely leveled every
building within a quarter mile, sinking the only major
access off the island, and created a seismic shock wave that
registered 6.3 on the Richter register at NASA and was felt
over three hundred and fifty miles away. Which in turn
caused a tidal wave 40 feet high, flooding the entire island
and the surrounding cities, killing another fifty people
within the first few minutes. The water and the seismic
blast completely cut power to the entire island and the
outlying areas.
The chemical plants along the water next to the island were
unprepared for the initial blast, flood waters, the power
outage, and the seismic shock. The first explosion occurred
about five minutes after 9pm, five more in the next few
moments before the units were able to be completely shut
down. Within 20 minutes of the meteoroid’s collision with
Galveston Island, the entire oil and chemical production
capabilities from Beaumont to Corpus Christi was shut down
completely, a large portion of Galveston County was without
power and completely flooded, a lane of fire had surrounded
Galveston Island, 52,000 people were dead, many more
wounded, and the FEMA National Urban Search and Rescue team
was in the air to Galveston Island.