Chapter Thirty Four
As the residents of the tent city in Custer Park near Mount Rushmore awoke and began to greet the day among their beautiful surroundings, that same Saturday morning began quite benignly elsewhere as well in North America. Springtime was becoming apparent in the pleasant temperature and new growth of grass and leaves. Despite the excesses of the government and the repression and slaughter for which it was responsible, the land itself appeared to be enjoying a rebirth of sorts. The hue of the sky above was a deep blue almost to the horizon where it paled almost imperceptibly, just enough to confirm the new warmth of the surrounding air. In those areas that had been the least troubled by the brutal events of the recent past, the world outdoors was a fresh tapestry of soft, brightly blooming trees and flowers and lush green fields. Birds called joyfully and their songs blended harmoniously with the lively warm air.
At precisely 8:15 that morning, Alan Carlson shut off his phone and returned to his breakfast nook, where he sat disconsolately sipping coffee. He was a lucky man to have coffee to enjoy. But then he had reason to be so favored. As an astronomer he was, like all prominent scientists, a quasi-governmental official who, although not permitted the amenities of the FEMA underground facilities, was blessed with housing and food in relative abundance. He was given guard protection as well. These niceties came at a substantial price: Alan had finally succumbed to the prodding of government officials and accepted the mark of the beast.
Dr. Carlson was not a happy man, the phone call having changed his day from joy to a bleak horror. Thirteen nights ago he had discovered through his telescope a previously-undiscovered comet, a finding that had given him an ecstatic boost and his name a household term, at least among those fortunate enough to remain in the possession of households. The comet was even labeled the Carlson Comet in honor of his discovery of it. Since that discovery, up until the phone call, he had felt a possessive bond with the object, as if it belonged to him personally. Very quickly, however, other experts had inserted themselves in on his find to evaluate its characteristics, including its size and particularly its path. The first surprise that confronted these experts on minutiae was its size: it was massive, almost the size of the moon. Comets of such size were of such rarity that some experts would have denied the possibility of this newcomer’s existence without visual proof, just as past peers of equal authority had denied the existence of meteors until they were forced to view the meteorites that had landed virtually at their feet. But it was the trajectory that stumped them, causing them to wait for several days’ confirmation before they officially announced the comet’s apparent destination.
After they had reviewed the numbers several times over, quiet panic set in among the astronomers who had so callously muscled in on Carlson’s new pet. Their preoccupation with this new object grew rapidly as communications networks carried urgent requests for support to colleagues around the globe. Ultimately, the government got directly involved by commissioning the world’s finest computer-knowledgeable mathematicians to perform more sophisticated trajectory computations as if man, by mathematical precision, could alter the path of a several thousand-mile wide rock. With the unwelcome confirmation they provided, GLOW tried briefly to suppress its disclosure to the rest of his government for regional security reasons. Finally the hitherto-omnipotent GLOW himself came to the disturbing realization that the issue was bigger than regional security. His unhappy mind churned out random thoughts that equated, in the aggregate, to his displeasure at being usurped by a mere object. Darkly appreciating that a problem of this magnitude took all the fun out of elitism, he removed all obstacles he had inserted in the information path between the scientists and his government functionaries. If there was anything good to come out of this flap at all, he thought with resignation, it was that if crises were useful tools for the manipulation of peoples, this was the mother of all crises.
Dr. Alan Carlson, who himself had been kept in the dark regarding the object’s path, had just been informed of it by the latest phone call. The problem was specifically that the trajectory of the Carlson Comet, as confirmed by at least a thousand independent calculations, was found to terminate a very short time in the future at a point in space that would be concurrently occupied by the planet Earth. From this time forward, the unfortunate Dr. Carlson would be identified not for his expertise as an astronomer, but as the first harbinger of Earth’s inevitable doom. The corresponding intra-governmental communiques were brutally truthful: man, with all his ingenuity and scientific prowess, would be helpless before this monster, unable to deflect it from its path by any meaningful amount. The beast was simply too massive, and time was too short. The advent of the Carlson Comet was a complete surprise.
Over the next couple of weeks the earth and the planetoid went on about their respective businesses with benign indifference to each other. People continued to suffer under the repression of the regime, which had become even harsher in the wake of the discovery. Those individuals who had accepted the mark and had been relatively well-off now were making general asses of themselves as they went through the grieving sequence of denial, anger and grudging acceptance.
The period of denial varied with the level of understanding. The average person took it on faith that the “science guys” would send up a nuclear-tipped rocket that would blast the cosmic intruder to smithereens. Having thus solved the problem to their collective satisfaction, this group quickly reverted to their usual activities. The “science guys” knew better: their period of denial was virtually nonexistent. They knew that the Carlson Comet was far too massive to be blown to smithereens by anything that they could cook up. Besides, even if they could have found a method to counter the beast, recent cutbacks of applied technology had made launch vehicles way too scarce to deploy all but the most puny firepower.
It would be theoretically possible, over a span of fifty years, to alter the comet’s trajectory with existing knowledge and materials found on earth. Fifty years, however, was significantly longer than the allotted time to collision. These intellectuals, who were a dollar short and a day late and knew it, knew also that the world was expectantly waiting for them to solve the problem. They made the first transition from denial to anger. Discarding their assumed images of disinterested professionalism, they shamelessly and with quite shocking vehemence blamed each other (and especially the hapless Dr. Carlson) for discovering the offensive object in the first place. Then they blasted their own shortsightedness and fixated next on the shortsightedness of government and the apathy of the common person with respect to scientific matters for their current inability to solve the problem. These carryings-on eventually filtered down to the common person, who finally perceived that indeed the “science guys” were not coming to the rescue. Once this perception was attained, they, too, immediately entered the anger phase. Of course the primary focus of their anger was the “science wimps”, chief among them the poor Dr. Carlson who, although just an innocent astronomer, was bombed out of his car one morning. Demonstrations were held; these pathetically inept demonstrations of the public temper quickly progressed into ugly riots with demands for governmental intervention by those who wore the mark and relied on the government to solve all their problems.
The transition to the acceptance phase was universally shared. Riots began anew and quickly descended into self-serving orgies of looting and destruction. Society throughout the world once again became disordered and chaotic, and with this breakdown of order the means of production and distribution halted. Just as the pinnacle of power finally had come into his grasp, GLOW realized that he might well become virtually ineffective, an understanding that made him very, very angry.
Chapter Thirty Five
The belligerent nature of the angry hot body extracted from Jupiter and set in motion by the Holy Spirit mirrored the troubled arrogance of the insignificant little specks on the surface of a distant companion in space, Earth. Angry with the descending quality of their lives under the brutal new North American regime and its sibling governments throughout the world but curiously stubborn in their insistence in ignoring their God, men of ill-will continued to clash one against another in their headlong pursuit of Self as they attempted to eke out acceptable standards of life in a land where such standards no longer existed. The government, even more devoted to Self than its subjects, continued its quest for absolute control over its miserable and impoverished subjects, committing a wholesale slaughter of both the land and the people within it.
But the new planetoid had a destructive potential that exceeded by a huge margin the capacity for evil of Earth’s occupants. This body now held all the cards, subject only to the will of the Father and the response of His Divine Companion.
In this cosmic game the unwelcome intruder slapped its first card on the table by interfering with Earth’s gravitational field and causing a movement of the mantle.
This new development reached North America with a deep rumbling sound like that of an enormous trumpet that pierced the air and white-hot rock belonging to the Yellowstone supervolcano erupted from the tortured ground in a massive outpouring. A vast wind came up and blew the enormous black cloud of ash eastward, enclosing the entire southeastern portion of the old United States in a suffocating, poisonous cloud that slaughtered millions of people, relieving them rapidly of their miserable lives.
In faraway Israel the land below Dafna began to be pelted with fast-moving rocks that rained upon the masses of intruding soldiers. Astonished people looked upward toward the source of this vast commotion to see a more amazing spectacle yet, that of a sky lit up like a Christmas tree and beyond that another moon that wasn’t their own familiar Luna. Awed people around the globe first assumed that this enormous object was an asteroid, but after a while they began to notice things about this new cosmic intruder that didn’t square with what they knew about the behavior of asteroids.
In the first place, it wasn’t barreling toward them with the speed of a bullet. It was just standing still, or if it indeed was moving, it wasn’t moving fast. Not only that, but it was much too large to be an asteroid. It looked more like a planet, or at least like the moon, which it appeared to match in size and brightness. It was barren and void of any atmosphere of its own, but it appeared to be shedding pieces of itself, some of which were igniting into flames and making the sky sparkle as they entered the earth’s atmosphere. The boulders that survived this fiery entry turned ugly as they hurtled into the militant crowds and left roadkill behind. In North America, the onlookers watched amazed as a particularly large chunk of extraterrestrial matter splashed into the Atlantic Ocean off Long Island Sound, creating an enormous circular wave that inundated the surrounding area. The sight led the observers to switch their focus to the larger ocean beyond, which had become so turbulent that it was sinking many ships, both small and great.
As a catastrophe of planetary scope, the destruction and terror was almost universal. With a few exceptions in isolated localities, life for humanity became very basic and very, very ugly. At about that time also, the first real effects of the cometary encounter appeared with the eruption of the Yellowstone supervolcano. With less than a few days to go before I-day (I for impact), the intruder’s gravitational influence became sufficiently large that the magnitude and frequency of earthquakes accelerated beyond the already-disturbing upward trend. Japan was almost obliterated by the explosion of Mount Fuji and the tidal-wave aftermath. In the Western Hemisphere Mount Rainier and Mount Baker both resumed activity. After burying several large communities under carpets of mud, Mount Rainier continued to grow, reaching a lofty altitude of over twenty three thousand feet before exploding in a gigantic eruption that sent two thirds of the mountain skyward in a cloud of dust. Mexico City buckled and heaved once more, this time taking seven million lives.
Each hour, as seismic activity increased, the source of this horror became larger and more apparent to the naked eye. There was no remaining doubt about the seriousness and inevitability of this event. One day before I-day the animal kingdom became generally aware of impending disaster. Animals of all kinds began to congregate together oblivious to the usual natural relationships. Most pathetic was the inbred reliance of the domesticated animals on their human masters. They looked to them for safety, but the masters turned away, focusing on their own plights and indifferent to the problems with the animals.
As I-day approached, the comet began to dominate the sky, mocking the helplessness of mankind to control it. By this time all the sequestered liquor, pills and drugs had essentially run out, forcing the elite to face their doom sober. Suicides increased to epidemic proportions; roadways of all sizes were impassable, littered to uselessness with shapeless hulks of vehicles whose drivers had raced headlong into welcome oblivion. Within the military, the sound of self-directed gunfire was commonplace until the bullets were all gone. Then the knives and razors took over, finding their ways to veins and arteries. The major cities began to smell of death.
The earth had by now reached an equilibrium of gravity-induced stress. Earthquake activities diminished dramatically. An ominous silence blanketed the earth, presided over by the giant and yet more rapidly growing apparition that dominated the sky.
The dawn of I-day arrived in New York on time. But at that point time had lost its usual meaning, for the sun took until noon to reach only halfway overhead, and there it remained. During that time the tide continued to ebb, outward, slowly at first and then with increasing speed. Land was newly exposed in inches, feet, yards and then miles. Ugly, barren, terrifying plains finally extended over the horizon. The wind came up, from gale to hurricane and quite unbelievably beyond, a smashing fist that broke every window in the city and then, one by one toppled every skyscraper. By early afternoon a shadow appeared on the distant horizon, shimmering and indistinct. With unexpected speed the shadow materialized into a wall of moving water that, had they remained upright, would have dwarfed the largest skyscrapers. This wall overshadowed the city like a tornado of infinite extent and, rushing through, killed every living being in its path. The wall would continue on across the great plains and beyond, finally dissipating itself on the western slopes of the continent. Although nobody remained to appreciate it, the sun itself was larger and hotter in the new, more southern latitude of the late New York City.
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