Keene nodded mutely. Laughter from one of Salio’s children sounded somewhere in the background and was answered by a female voice calling something about it being way past time for bed. It was eleven-thirty in Washington, an hour earlier in Houston.
“How bad is it going to be?” Salio asked.
“Nobody’s sure yet. That’s why I need to talk to these people. I’ve been asked to report independently of the official channels . . . as a check.” There wasn’t much else Keene could say.
Salio nodded that he understood, then hesitated. “Look . . . this may sound pathetic after what happened before, but if there’s any way I can help . . . Well . . .”
“It’s okay,” Keene said. “It wasn’t just you. That was part of something much bigger. . . .” He bit his lip and hesitated. “But if they start talking about evacuation, don’t wait for the panic and congestion. Get inland, away from the coast. In the meantime, if I need more help, sure, I’ll give you a call. Okay?”
* * *
The Goddard Space Flight Center was located twelve miles northeast of Washington center in Greenbelt, on a sprawling site of office and experimental facilities interspersed with grassy open spaces and woodlands occupying approximately two square miles. The shapes of the buildings outlined in pools of light and patterns of orange lamps marking the roadways and parking lots expanded out of the night as the helicopter bringing Keene descended beneath an overcast of cloud. Goddard had been the planning and management center for NASA’s Earth-orbiting missions and space-based observatories since its inception, and later assumed the coordinating role for all the agency’s astronomical work.
A security guard was waiting to drive Keene and the pilot from the grassy landing area to Number Two Building, a long, three-story, edifice of brick walls and a white frontage with black tinted windows, where much of the work on extraterrestrial science was concentrated. They left the pilot with the supervisor in the night office and went up to a part of the top floor which, unlike the rest of the building, was brightly lit and full of people working at screens or poring over printouts and images strewn across desktops. Waiting in his office to receive Keene was Dr. Jeffrey Hixson, who headed the Interplanetary Physics branch.
Hixson was a big, fleshily built man with a flabby neck and second chin, red-eyed and unshaven. He spoke while eating a mixed plate from a batch of hamburger meals and breakfasts that someone brought in from McDonalds just as Keene arrived. There was a hollowness in his voice, and he seemed to have a haunted look. “It’s going to come close—maybe even inside the Earth-Moon system. Never mind what they talked about yesterday night at the White House. Those were just guesses based on what they know about comets. This animal is in a different league from comets—I mean, totally. What we’re in for is going to be big.”
“You mean more than just meteorite storms and big dust infusions?” Keene said.
“That’s a piece of Jupiter coming at us. We’ve never known what’s really down under the gaseous envelope, but the core material that was ejected took part of what appears to be a rocky crust with it that has broken up and elongated into a stream of debris moving ahead of and trailing the main body. When that gets funneled down into Earth’s gravity well, it’ll be enough to obliterate whole regions.”
For the first time, a measure of the panic that Hixson was struggling to control communicated itself. Perhaps the clamminess on his brow wasn’t due just to his being overweight. “What kind of regions?” Keene asked.
“Let’s put it this way. A month from now, countries the size of England and Japan might not be here.” Hixson snatched another bite of hamburger and went on, “And it’s not just the impacts that you have to worry about. Athena carried away parts of Jupiter’s atmosphere, which make up a large part of the tail—heavy in hydrocarbon gases. Vaporized crude oil, Dr. Keene. If that penetrates and mixes with our oxidizing atmosphere, you’ve got fuel-air munitions on a continent-wide scale. They can burn at a temperature that will melt stone. With hot incoming and exploding meteorites to ignite it, a cloud like that could incinerate everything from here to the Rockies.”