Nomad (13 page)

“Mom, this is Angela, Ricardo’s sister,” Jess said as Celeste rounded the corner into the apartment.

Celeste took a sharp intake of breath and crinkled her nose. “Ah, I see. Um, pleased to meet you.”

“Don’t worry,” Angela reassured her, “like I said, Ricky’s an ass.” She closed her suitcase and faced Jess. “So you want the keys? I’m going south to my family’s place. Rome is going
pazzo
. Crazy.” She looked at Celeste. “Maybe you should come? Into the countryside?”

Jess threw her backpack onto the couch. “Think Ricardo would like that?”

“Screw him. He’d handle it.” Angela hoisted her suitcase off the table onto the floor. “You sure?”

“Yeah, I’m sure. I need to wait for my dad. He’s in Rome somewhere.”

Angela tossed Jess the keys. “Okay. You can have the place while I’m gone. But you’ll be waiting a long time for your dad.”

Jess caught the keys and narrowed her eyes, frowning. “What? Why?”

Angela strode toward the door and Celeste stood aside. “Because he’s in Germany.”

“Germany? What do you mean? Did he call you?” Jess didn’t know her father even knew Ricardo, never mind his sister, but then her father was resourceful.

Stopping at the door, Angela shook her head and pointed behind Jess. “No, he didn’t call me, but maybe you should call
him
.”

Jess turned to see what Angela pointed at, and found herself staring at her father’s face. On the TV. Below his face, in block red letters:
Dr. Ben Rollins,
European Space Operations, Darmstadt. Germany.

13

D
ARMSTADT,
G
ERMANY

BEN HATED HELICOPTERS. Coming in low and fast, they skimmed the treetops, the town of Darmstadt just visible in the distance. Darmstadt was famous for two things: the heavy element #110, Darmstadium, was named after it, and in 1912 chemists at Merck first synthesized the drug Ecstasy here. Actually, it was famous for three things, Ben thought as the pilot banked sharp right at almost ninety degrees, giving him a view straight down onto the glittering solar-paneled roof of ESOC—Darmstadt was also home to the European Space Operations Command.

The undulating carpet of green forest gave way to a compound of buildings bordered by a train yard on one side, and an intersection of the
autobahn
highways on the other. A huge white radar dish towered above the trees; a giant mushroom nestled above other smaller dishes and antennae. Snow-capped mountains shimmered on the horizon.

His lunch almost came back up as the helicopter executed another swinging turn to bring it to a stop, hovering in mid-air. Ben burped. Herded into a cavalcade of black limos outside the Grand Hotel in Rome, they had sped off to a small airstrip where they’d been whisked to Frankfurt airport on a ten-seater Learjet—the last few hours were a blur. This helicopter was the final leg of their sprint to Darmstadt, and Ben still had no idea why.

“You okay?” Roger asked as the helicopter sank below the tree line. “You don’t look so good.”

The landing skids settled onto the ground, shaking them, as the whine of the engine and rotors came down a notch. “I am now,” Ben groaned.

Out the window he saw Dr. Müller waving at him with one hand while shielding his eyes from the rotor blast of leaves and dust with the other. He ran toward the helicopter, two guards in black fatigues trailing him. The copilot turned around to open Ben’s door, the engine still whining, the rotors still spinning.

“Ben,” Dr. Müller yelled over the noise, “glad you could make it.” He extended his hand to shake.

Unstrapping his harness, Ben shouted back, “You didn’t give me much choice.” Ignoring Müller’s offered hand, he jumped down onto the grass. Roger stepped out behind him, turning to collect their bags.

“Sorry for rushing you in like this, but we need your help,” Dr. Müller explained, leading Ben away from the helicopter, pointing toward a set of blue glass doors in the side of the ESOC building.

The whine of the engines ratcheted back up several decibels. “With what?” Ben asked, leaning into Müller’s ear.

Behind them the helicopter roared, and Ben glanced back to see it leap into the sky, kicking up a new cloud of dust and dirt. Loaded down with their bags, Roger followed. One of the guards in black ballistic vests opened the door ahead of them, and Müller let Ben enter first.

“With media,” Dr. Müller said as they walked inside. “While you’ve been traveling, a lot has happened. This idiot Dr. Menzinger of the Swiss Institute has been on all the news networks ranting about Armageddon. Chaos erupted in some cities.” He held out a hand and stopped Ben. “You’re as close to a celebrity astronomer as we have.”

Five years ago, Ben did a series of hugely popular PBS specials that were syndicated internationally. Off to one side of the entranceway, beside a set of escalators fronted by security guards and x-ray scanners, Ben saw a mob of cameras and microphones. “I’m not going to lie to them,” he replied in a hushed voice.

“Not lie, of course not.” Müller held him in place and leaned close. “But we don’t know what’s happening, do we? Just tell them that.”

Ben grabbed Müller’s arm and pulled him close. “But we might have known. Does this have anything to do with
that
research paper?” He didn’t need to say which one.

Müller stared at Ben, his face blank. “We don’t even know if
that
had anything to do with
this
. But it is one of the reasons I got you in early.”

Ben looked at the reporters and cameramen. By the way they pointed and swiveled their cameras around, some of them already recognized him. “I’d prefer to stay off the record, if that’s all right.”

Müller looked Ben in the eye. “There are riots in LA and Sao Paulo. Don’t lie, just tell a
calmer
version of the truth.”

Roger dropped their bags onto the polished marble floor behind Müller and Ben. “Where to, boss?”

Ben looked at his watch. Jessica and Celeste should be landing at JFK in under two hours. Back in Rome, the security guards chaperoning Ben and Roger had taken away their laptops and cell phones, said that they’d get them back on the other end. “I want my cell phone back, and outside network access for emails. And Roger and I need a flight to JFK, tomorrow night at the latest. I need to get to my family.”

“Done.” Dr. Müller nodded. “Just talk to the media, and I’ll have your cell phones returned and get you set up on the ESOC network. And I’ll book you on flights to the US tomorrow, on the condition that we finish looking at all of your data before you leave.”

Ben looked back at Roger, who shrugged. Ben didn’t want to get involved like this, but then he needed to get to Celeste and Jessica. “Okay, but I’m not lying to anyone. I’m going to tell the truth.”

“Good.” Dr. Müller removed his hand from Ben. “A
calming truth
, yes?” Without waiting for a reply, he turned to the media. “Ladies and gentlemen, I am pleased to introduce Dr. Ben Rollins, a key part of our team and head of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.”

Ben gritted his teeth. He wasn’t head of the Center for Astrophysics, just the exoplanet department, but he let it slide and followed Dr. Müller toward the pack of media.

“Dr. Rollins,” asked a woman at the front row, holding a microphone out. Her cameraman swung around to focus on Ben. “Is it true that a planet-swallowing black hole is heading for Earth?”

“We don’t know what…” Ben started but then caught Dr. Müller frowning at him from the corner of his eye. Ben coughed. “Excuse me. No, we don’t know that; in fact, so far we know very little…”

“That was a good show, Bernie.” Roger smiled and nudged Ben in the ribs with his elbow. “You still got it, old man.”

“Thanks.” Ben rolled his eyes. They still didn’t have their cell phones or laptops back. Security protocols, Müller had apologized, but they’d have them soon. Ben wasn’t so sure.

Ben and Roger crowded onto a platform at the back of a voluminous room with six large screens hanging across the twenty-foot-high wall at the opposite end. Three semi-circular rows of workstations lined the lower level of the room, each piled with flat-screen displays and keyboards and telephones amid a tangle of wiring. The spaceflight operations command center smelled of coffee and sweat and crackled with hushed tension.

“We’re on,” said a woman in the front row of workstations. The wall-screens blinked to life.

A hundred and fifty million kilometers away at LG2, the Gaia space observatory re-aligned itself from staring into the Orion Nebula to focus its instruments on their best guess of Nomad’s position.

“Yes, you did a good job, Ben,” Dr. Müller agreed, standing shoulder-to-shoulder beside them in the packed room.

Ben exhaled slowly as they all waited for the images to come on-line. “Maybe too good.”

How easy it was to slip into technical double-speak.
No, we’re not sure what’s happening. Yes, of course we would say if we knew.
There was truth in Ben’s denials, however. Some of the data coming in gave Nomad’s size a hundred times smaller than other estimates, so either Nomad was a hundred times the mass of the sun, or about the same size, or traveling at thousands of kilometers a second, or just hundreds. The Gaia observatory should resolve the issue.

Jessica and Celeste’s plane was landing in an hour. “Where’s my phone?” Ben demanded for the tenth time.

“Half an hour, maximum,” Müller whispered back.

Ben glanced at the CNN and MSNBC reporters, everyone’s eyes glued to the screens. Ben convinced Müller to let them in. Transparency builds trust, he’d said.

“We have images,” the woman from the front yelled out.

A star field popped onto the first screen. An automated computer software tool highlighted each of the specks of light, one by one, in blue for known objects. A few popped up in red, eliciting excited whispers, but each time a human astronomer checked the item off into blue. Nothing that looked like Nomad was in the first frame. The other screens filled with new star field images.

Again and again, the wall screens filled with images at higher and higher magnifications. Nothing. The same result. There was nothing in the images that shouldn’t be there.

Nothing but empty, black space where Nomad should be.

Nothing at all.

14

R
OME,
I
TALY

“WE DON’T REALLY
know what’s going on,”
Jess’s father, Ben, said on the TV screen.
“We don’t even really know if anything is there yet.”

Jess stuck her bottom lip out. “That’s not what he said to me.”

She arranged pillows around her on Angela’s couch. Her friend’s apartment was one long room with a kitchen area and dining table at one end, and a white L-shaped couch and flat screen television at the other. Four windows, looking down onto the alleyway below, lined the wall behind the television, and over the couch hung a large original artwork—an impressionist’s version of Phoenix rising done in yellow oil over white canvas. A small hallway between the living and dining area led into the bedroom and bathroom.

“Maybe the situation changed,” Celeste said from the kitchen area. She opened the refrigerator door. “Maybe that’s why he went to Germany.”

Jess flipped through channels: BBC, CNN, and MSNBC in English, then through the Italian channels. Sitcoms and soaps on many stations, but half covered the “event,” and more than half of those featured hysterical ranting.