For those who would like to get a peek at the first installment of the trilogy, I am posting the first four chapters to whet your appetite, beginning with Chapter 1.

Would you like to swing on a star,
Or carry moonbeams home in a jar?
Swinging on a Star
Written by Jimmy Van Heusen, performed by Bing Crosby

CHAPTER 1


As with many discoveries, finding Asteroid 2005 XF13 was more the result of serendipity than hard work. After what seemed like a long, uneventful winter, Norma’s discovery of the  asteroid brought enough excitement to her life to propel her out of winter doldrums into spring. Norma Lancaster was just finishing up her last year of study in astrophysics at the University of Chicago. She’d attended U of C for the last six years after graduating from a small suburban high school with straight As and a perfect SAT.

She was extremely bright, but she had an easy way with people. Everyone she met saw her as warm and approachable, not your run-of—the-mill computer geek. On this particular Monday she arrived at her small cubicle in one of the geological science department’s laboratories, dropped her books on her desk and checked her weekend’s e-mail. While her workstation was booting up she looked around and once again vowed to clean up her cubicle. She could find anything she needed, but it made her look rather unorganized.

Norma had no new e-mail messages waiting for her. She turned her attention to the weekend run of digital images uploaded from the observatory on the edge of the Mauna Loa volcano in Hawaii. These pictures, negatives of the night sky, black dots on a white background, were the stuff of which her dreams were made.

She lacked the patience to spend hours gazing into the night sky on her own, learning quadrant by quadrant, but she secretly hoped she would discover a new world or asteroid that would bear her name in perpetuity.

Instead of spending her nights in solitary contemplation of the sky, Norma had written a suite of programs that compared digital images of the sky and flagged items that appeared, moved or disappeared over time. The hardest part of her project was writing the programs to map the thousands of stars into her computerized sky so that images could be perfectly compared against each other.

These search and comparison programs had earned her a grant from NASA in digital image processing, and were the precursor for an automated system for discovering and plotting new bodies in the sky.

“Hey, Norma, baby . . . what’s shakin’?” came over the top of her cube. She looked up at the familiar face of research fellow Alan Richards, with his brown wavy hair wildly askew atop his head and warm, brown eyes twinkling in easy-going humor.

“Nothing yet, but as you know, ‘on any given Monday, anything can happen!’” they both finished together. Alan was a University of Chicago Fellow working on his own project and a very low-maintenance lab mate. He had no really annoying habits like humming to himself, or tapping his pen on the desk, or questionable hygiene. Most of the time, Norma felt lucky to share her space with him instead of some dense mouth-breather with overactive hormones and bad skin.

“What’s up with you?” Norma asked. “And how is it that you beat me in the door on a Monday of all days?”

“Actually, I was in all weekend working on something I think is really hot,” he replied. “I  haven’t been home since Thursday night.” Oh well, she thought, so much for the good hygiene.

“What’s got you so pumped up, if I may ask? Some new shoot-em-up computer game?” she asked sarcastically.

“Not this time, although I seem to recall you like playing those games almost as much as I do. No, this is a 3D mapping routine that just may make me some serious cash with the public planetariums out there.” He paused, trying to decide whether or not he should spill the beans to Norma. It’s not that he didn’t trust her, after all they had been through their own cycles as colleagues, friends and very infrequent lovers. He wasn’t sure he wanted to talk about it until he was closer to being finished, but plunged ahead anyway.

“Well,” he began, “it’s really a kind of a three-dimensional extension of the star mapping program you’re working on. But before you get pissed off, it’s not really the same idea at all. Instead, it’s for displaying star maps, planetary systems and other astronomical objects in three dimensions instead of fl at on a screen,” he finished, watching her face for reaction.

“And just how are you planning on cashing in on this idea?” she asked.

“Instead of just seeing the sky pasted to the ceiling in a planetarium theater, the whole sky could be displayed in three dimensions using holographic technology!” he replied. “One could paint using lasers in three dimensions. And, if I can paste digital images of planets, moons and other celestial objects into the program, I can project three-dimensional renderings of the entire solar system and the nearby galactic neighborhood with built-in calculations to show movement over time.”

Norma was silent for a few seconds rolling the idea around in her head, looking at it from all angles. Was she pissed that he stole part of her idea? Was it that he had taken what she had worked on for the last two years and added something so remarkable that became greater in magnitude than her whole life’s work? Or, was it that he had seen a facet of her idea that she had never considered and ran with it without so much as a by-your-leave?

“Did I ‘boldly go where no man has gone before’ or are you thinking of some way of making me disappear in some South Side alley without a trace?” he finally asked.

“No,” she answered. “I’m not exactly pissed. It’s more that I didn’t consider before how my project could be extended into the third dimension.”

“Although, now that I think about it, you can’t use this mapping program for detection of dark bodies because you would need simultaneous, offset observations to locate a body in the third dimension,” Alan added.

“True,” Norma said. “If you could plot anything in the sky immediately in three dimensions, you could calculate speed and direction in a much shorter time instead of waiting several days, or weeks, to perform serial observations. By the way,” she asked, “Did you notice whether my latest uploads came in?”

“Oh, yeah. They started Saturday afternoon, hosing up my network bandwidth until around eleven o’clock last night. It looks like the whole set was about thirteen gigabytes of data based on the decrease in available server disk space this morning.”

“Awwww, did little Alan miss out on his music downloads over the weekend?” she tossed over the partition as she started checking the coordinates of this latest batch of images. The demise of some of the shared music sites on the Internet a few years earlier had in no way kept Alan from stacking up a bunch of searches on Friday so that he could download and burn music off to blank CDs during the week. “What’d you get this weekend? Some thrashing, techno, grunge Gregorian chants?”

“Nope,” he answered distractedly, “actually I was downloading a couple of classic movies.”

“Porno?” she asked with a grin.

“Nope. One was Some Like It Hot with Tony Curtis and Marilyn Monroe, you know, the old black and white movie directed by Billy Wilder, and the other was The Fifth Element with Die Hard guy Bruce Willis.” But even as he was answering, Alan was back into the depths of his dual-screen display, fingers fl ashing over the keyboard, mouse clicking away.

His project was the refinement of the underlying math behind the famous “unrestricted three-body problem” in physics. It had applications from astrophysics to molecular engineering, and finding its definitive solution had been on the table since Newton published his Laws of Motion. Since most of the equations dealt with motion in three dimensions, his project and Norma’s slightly overlapped, enough so that they had had some pretty far-ranging, and heated, discussions on both.

Norma settled into her chair, pulled her keyboard into her lap, put her feet up on her desk and began supervising the computer’s aligning and resizing of the uploaded images for comparison to her reference sky map. She noticed that this image set included Saturn in the lower right quadrant of the sky and she marked it to be ignored by the computer. Some of the edges of the images showed a slight distortion in the same spot; she was going to have to crop the pictures and send a note to the observatory to check for dirt or spots on the lens of their telescope.

When she was about halfway through the pictures, Norma looked up and saw that it was after two o’clock. She stood, stretched and peeked over the partition. Alan had fallen asleep in his chair with his head thrown back, mouth open and slumped down in that boneless slouch guys seemed able to achieve at the drop of a hat. She looked at his face thinking how much younger he looked when he was asleep. Her stomach broke the mood by growling in indignation over its long neglect.

Norma considered waking Alan to see if he wanted her to bring him something back, but nixed the idea, positive he needed the sleep more than anything. She grabbed her bag, slung it over her shoulder and headed out to one of the local restaurants, wondering what today’s soup and sandwich were.

Late spring and early summer in Chicago’s Hyde Park neighborhood often yielded exhilarating weather. One could see a hard, subzero freeze morph into tropical heat and humidity in the course of a day. Norma liked the panorama of the changing seasons, even the gray, oily slush of the Chicago winter, because the spring brought a renewal of hope and excitement each year.

The day was glorious, the temperature was in the high seventies, and the sun beat warmly on her cocoa brown skin. The wind blew her skirt around her long, slim legs and warmly caressed the toes peeking out of her sandals.  

Today Norma could look all the way down the street, past the Museum of Science and Industry, to Lake Michigan and the deep blue water scattering the sun’s rays. Walking through the door of her favorite hangout, she stopped for a moment to let her eyes adjust to the dimly lit interior of the restaurant.

Catching the eye of the greeter, Norma waved him off, letting him know she was just ordering something to go. She paid for her selections and, walking back to the lab, started to think about what plotting objects three-dimensionally in the sky would entail.

The first problem was determining location accurately. The second problem was fi nding the direction and speed of any nonluminous body at any distance from the sun. The amount of reflected light normally wasn’t sufficient to directly view an asteroid without practically knowing where it was in the first place. The third was the complicated problem of plotting an asteroid’s path through the solar system with any degree of accuracy given the effect of the gravitational pull of all the planets, moons and other large asteroids that would influence an object’s motion.

Walking back into the lab, Norma saw that Alan was awake and prowling around in the middle of a low-voiced, heated discussion on his cell phone. She ignored his terse muttering and sat down at her desk to eat, occasionally glancing at her screen as the various images were resized and mapped. The speed and accuracy of her program had taken a long time and a lot of effort to accomplish.

 
The sweat she had put into programming her computer to scan the sky reminded her of the process she had gone through to get to where she was now.

With the constant cutbacks at NASA beginning shortly after the last American left the moon in 1972, her proposed automated computer programs promised to keep watch on the heavens for inbound asteroids and do it much cheaper than human observers could. Once her computer images of the sky were resized and mapped, the differences could be marked for additional attention by human eyes. Since the entire NASA sky search budget was only sufficient to watch about two percent of the sky surrounding the earth, Norma’s project was the only way those scant funds could be stretched far enough to seriously keep watch for that extinction-event asteroid everyone worried about. Any asteroid of sufficient size striking the earth would render the entire biosphere of the planet unlivable for years, just like the asteroid blamed for the extinction of the dinosaurs sixty million years ago. Proving that low-cost computers could watch the sky was the basis for the grant, and had been the focus of her last two years. Thinking over the progress she had made during those two years, and seeing the evidence of her efforts on her computer screen, had her feeling pretty damn good.

Finishing her lunch, she brought up the results from the batch of images from the observatory in Hawaii and ran the stats. Hmmm, she thought, only about eighteen anomalies from the entire run. Not bad, assuming that they’re from errors in mapping or positioning.

She brought up the first tagged image and checked the circled region the computer marked for her attention. False alarm, she saw; it was the result of a little portion of the distortion she had noticed before. After cropping and resubmitting the image to the analysis queue she called up the next image. This one was from a different part of the sky just below the plane of Saturn’s rings. The question here, upon closer observation, was whether this small blur in the picture could be an imaging artifact or a real object. Norma brought up the next image in the series. Again the computer had highlighted an object in almost the same location. She saw that the times the images were taken were about twenty-eight hours apart and the only difference between the two pictures was just this one blur. Although not normally very excitable, Norma felt a tiny fl utter in her stomach as she let herself imagine the possibility of catching an actual space-borne rock in motion with her program.

Typing quickly, Norma went through table after table of tasking coordinates trying to find a telescope or satellite that was scheduled to observe this quadrant of the sky in the upcoming weeks. Only two were, but she was in luck. One was a space-based x-ray telescope that had a powerful optical sighting system for precise aiming of the x-ray sensor array.

Norma sent off an e-mail message to the head of NASA’s X-Ray Observation and Analysis committee who supervised the tasking schedule for the space-based x-ray observatory. She requested access to any visible light images downloaded from the quadrant of the anomaly. She then sent a message with the coordinates, time and estimated size of the object to the Planetary Registry Society, staking her claim to the registration and naming of the body.

Although cautious by nature, Norma entertained a singular thrill that she might finally discover a new, loose asteroid she could name whatever she wanted. She stood up, stretched and looked over the divider to give Alan the news. Unfortunately, he had gone away while Norma was off into her own world. Instead of waiting for his return, she isolated the blurred spot from the best of the two images, added an electronic circle to the picture and sent it to him through in-house e-mail with a note saying “Check this out!”

Checking the computer’s calculations on the amount of sky that seemed to be occluded by the asteroid, Norma whistled in amazement. The computer’s best guess showed a width of just over one mile and a length of four point three miles, although at that distance it was a shot in the dark. Preliminary mass calculations couldn’t be completed so soon. However, if the asteroid was about twenty-five percent rock with the rest made up of frozen water and carbon dioxide, it could almost qualify as a small moon. Well, maybe not quite, but if it continued to get closer to the sun it could probably be seen by the naked eye in a matter of weeks.

Norma was so excited by the implication of her discovery that she needed to share it with someone, anyone, before she burst. She wondered where Alan was, vaguely remembering his agitated telephone conversation, curious with whom he had been talking.

Her overall ambivalence toward Alan was a defense against being hurt by men in general. Not that she was emotionally frail, she just never wanted a relationship to get in the way of her goals. The mysterious disappearance of her parents just after she started college as an undergraduate, and the self-imposed emotional isolation that followed, had stiffened her resolve to get everything she wanted from life. She still felt a great deal of bitterness toward the Georgia authorities for what she considered a shallow, nonchalant investigation into her parents’ disappearance. No trace of a crime or any clue concerning their fate was ever uncovered.

Norma wanted to believe that not knowing what happened to them was better than finding out they were, indeed, dead. Her not knowing kept them alive to someday return. She was much too smart to really fool herself in her heart of hearts, but her little mind game kept the pain and loss compartmentalized enough for her to finish her degrees and sustain her through her doctoral project at the university. She had enough of her emotional self left to go around for several fulfilling relationships with men, and a singular lack of bitterness at the throw of the dice life gave her. One positive thing her parents’ disappearance brought her was a small estate that paid for her education, but not much else. At least she wouldn’t finish her doctoral studies with a huge pile of debt. Some of her fellow students, once they got their Ph.D.s, would have a debt load of well over a hundred thousand dollars, a daunting pile of cash to have to begin to pay back right out of school. One perk of graduating from the University of Chicago was that the starting salaries of its top graduates were usually half again as much as those graduating from lower-ranked schools.

Her on-again, off-again thing with Alan was more a matter of convenience for the both of them than a deep abiding love. They were both too driven by their respective studies and ongoing projects to be able to sustain a committed relationship. And they were both enlightened enough to not let each others' lovers be anything more than a source of entertainment. They knew each other so well that their on-again times were easy and very comfortable for Norma. She knew she wouldn’t have to go through lengthy, painful explanations about her family or her lack of roots. Her practice of “out of sight, out of mind,” remained a workable accommodation to the pain in her soul where the memories of her parents resided.

Norma loaded her best image processing software to see how much she could enhance the outline of the asteroid. She reveled in the fact that the software she was using was as good as anything the various spy agencies used to enhance their satellite photos, just a bit slower. After all, the government security services did get the very best in hardware, most of it never getting into the hands of ordinary consumers.

Norma set the program to apply normal adaptive sharpening to both images and left it to process overnight. The countdown clock in the program estimated the time of completion nineteen hours away. With the rest of her images flagged, cataloged and stored in her master database, she started a full system backup. Since Alan wasn’t there he wouldn’t bitch about slowing the system down backing up her data to tape and offsite storage. Norma was, if nothing else, a belt and suspenders kind of woman.

She looked around to see if she had forgotten anything that needed her attention. Finding nothing of import, Norma left the lab, locked the door and walked out into a perfect spring afternoon.

Getting into her car she headed for the lakefront, hopped onto Lake Shore Drive and began the drive downtown. On the way she called her best friend Angela to see if she wanted to go get a bite to eat. What she really wanted was to share her discovery and for Angela to help her celebrate. If this piece of rock was what it appeared to be, it was proof positive that her project performed just as she predicted it would. Not that she had met any detractors on the decision train when she conceived the system, but getting any funding for research was becoming increasingly harder.

When Angela answered the phone Norma shouted, “Hey girlfriend, what’s up?” above the wind blowing in through the car windows.

Angela answered, “Nothing! Get me out of here, it’s so dead.” Angela worked as a job costing accountant for a large construction company. She spent most of her time figuring the cost of the company’s construction projects down to the last nail and screw before they went to bid. During the summer, when most of the jobs were in full swing, she could sit around doing nothing, often for days at a time. Fortunately, unlimited Internet access provided her at least some entertainment during the day.

“Did you drive?” Norma asked.

“No, I took the train in. Come get me. RIGHT NOW!” she ended with a yell.

“Okay, I’ll be there in about twenty minutes, and then it’s margarita time!”

Norma took her time driving downtown because the view of Chicago’s skyline was most spectacular coming in from the South Side, something that Norma was sure well-heeled North Siders resented. The ride was great, and seeing the sailboats on the water reinforced her decision to play hooky for the rest of the day. The only thing missing was a convertible.

Pulling up to Angela’s office building, Norma saw that her friend was already waiting outside. Angela jumped into the car and gave Norma a big hug. “Thanks for rescuing me, there’s only so much movie-watching I can do on the computer before I go nuts sitting inside the same four walls. All of the guys are on site, and everyone else was acting like they were some weird Stepford office workers. It seemed like they all were in some sort of trance all damned day.”

“Just judging from the couple of visits I’ve made, the whole offi ce could do with a personality transplant. So guess what?” Norma asked her friend.

“What, Alan got that sex change operation he so desperately deserves?”

“No.”

“You bought me those electric undies with the built-in vibrator we saw in that leather shop up north?”

“Nooo,” Norma answered with a laugh. “One more guess.”

“Well, you can’t get a raise, the Nobel Committee doesn’t meet until October and I know you don’t play the lottery. So give, what’s up?”

“Okay, it’s not for certain yet, but it looks like I’ve found one.”

“One what, for Christ’s sake?”

“I may have found an asteroid!!” shouted Norma.

“Using your programs and stuff? That’s great, sweetie, are you going to be famous now?” Angela asked.

“Well, not exactly, maybe if it comes close to the earth it might get some news coverage.”

“Hey, I’m sure it will, look how much press those two guys got when their rocks plowed into . . . what was it, Jupiter? They were interviewed for a couple of weeks on all the news shows,” Angela gushed. “I can’t wait to see you on television, maybe if they interview you at home I could be visiting as your best friend.”

“If I get that kind of attention I’ll be sure to have you over. Hey, where do you want to go for a margarita?” Norma asked.

“Are you hungry at all?”

“Not really, I ate around three, but we can get you something to eat. What do you have a taste for, Mexican, Greek, Chinese? How about we hit Halsted Street and get something from Greek Town?” Norma suggested.

“You know that no one over there knows how to make a good margarita. How ‘bout heading over to Jesse’s place, they’ve got sandwiches AND margarita. What do you say?”

“Fine, just don’t expect me to get totally polluted with you, I still have to drive home tonight.”

Angela leaned over and tuned the radio to the smooth jazz station and sat back watching downtown Chicago go by. The tavern Jesse worked at was just outside downtown in Chicago’s trendy Lincoln Park neighborhood. The three of them were pretty good friends, having met at a walk for breast cancer two years ago. They had all been in the same line to register and get their t-shirts when they struck up a conversation about whom they were walking for. Both Angela’s and Jesse’s mothers were cancer survivors and Norma was there for one of her peers at the U of C who had unfortunately lost her battle with cancer the year before.

The three of them made a striking trio. Norma was slim, with skin the color of milk chocolate, cool blue eyes and features suggestive of former Miss America Vanessa Williams. Angela had naturally curly, almost red hair, grey-blue eyes and a bigger build than Norma, but without any excess baggage (as she called it) to ruin an almost perfectly proportioned physique. Jesse was pale and willowy, with long, straight dark brown hair. Her calm, unflappable demeanor hid a smoky intensity that many men found startling, and most found intimidating. The three of them never failed to turn heads when they were out together, but more times than not their gang had little time for the nonsense most men visited on women to win their attention.

Pulling up to the bar, Norma’s parking mojo was with her; there was a space only a few doors down from the tavern.

Once inside, they found a booth and sat down. Moments later Jesse appeared on the bench next to Norma.

“Hey, you two, I was wondering when the three of us were going to get together again. What’s up with you guys?” asked Jesse.

“We’re celebrating,” replied Angela. “Norma found a new planet and were trying to fi nd a name for it better than Uranus.”

“No shit? You found a planet? Where is it? Is it out past Pluto, or is it in some other solar system?”

“Hey, you know better than to listen to Angela. No, what I think I’ve found is an asteroid that may have originated around Saturn. My programs found it, but it’s going to take a couple of days to confi rm it,” said Norma.

Jesse leaned over and gave Norma a big hug. “That’s great, hon, no one deserves it more than you. Have you told anyone else? How about the rest of the gang in the department?”

“Not yet. I sent one of the pictures to Alan with a big circle drawn around it, but no one else knows yet. I did send an e-mail message to the Planetary Society to register it and if I’m the first to find it, I get to name it!”

“Or they’ll name it after her,” Angela added.

“That’s great, this really does call for a celebration. How ‘bout a couple of margaritas on me to start you off?” asked Jesse.

“You know that’s why we come here. You go ahead and throw together whatever you think this party needs,” Norma said.

As Jesse got up and headed for the bar Angela asked, “No bullshit, why’s this
kind of thing so important anyway?”

Norma thought about it for a moment, and began, “Well, it’s really three things. The fi rst and most important reason is the extinction event. That’s where an asteroid large enough to change the weather for hundreds of years actually hits the earth. What happens is that a large enough piece of anything hitting the earth will throw so much debris into the air that sunlight and heat are blocked from reaching the surface. That causes a mini ice age for a couple of hundred years, or at least until most of the crap settles out of the air. The combined might of all the missiles on the earth couldn’t do anything to deflect a rock even half a mile wide, and some of the asteroids out there are the size of Texas. So, seeing them as early as possible, especially if they are incoming, is important in terms of preparing for disaster. Remember back in the spring of 2002, when scientists didn’t see a football-field-sized asteroid until a few days after it passed within seventy-five thousand miles of earth? That one, if it had hit, would have had the same power as several of our larger nuclear warheads. If it had hit land somewhere the results would have been spectacularly bad, no matter if it was away from a major population center or not. Seventy-five thousand miles isn’t far at all in terms of the entire solar system, and even one that small couldn’t have been deflected with our current level of technology. Essentially we’re just sitting ducks.”

Angela broke in, “Well, don’t just beat around the bush or sugar-coat it Norma, tell me what all this really means.”

“Okay, maybe I’m being a little dramatic, but this is serious stuff. It’s why I got the grant in the first place. Anyway, the second reason for finding and identifying asteroids like this one, especially if a large portion of the thing is ice, is that the majority of the cost of any off-earth mission is lifting consumables like food and water into orbit. Getting even a gallon of water into orbit costs over thirty-five thousand dollars using current space shuttle technology. Imagine what it’s going to cost to get that same gallon of water to the moon or Mars. If we could somehow grab a few of these chunks of ice and bring them into earth orbit and process them there, the cost of manned missions in orbit, or to nearby bodies like the
moon, Mars or Venus, drops dramatically.”

“But wouldn’t grabbing these things and keeping them in orbit above our heads be just as dangerous as having them fly around loose?” Angela asked.

“Not at all. For the most part objects in orbit, at least high enough orbit so that the earth’s atmosphere doesn’t cause them to slow down, will stay in orbit practically forever, just like the moon. Besides, they would be getting progressively smaller and smaller as their mass was processed for water and air for space stations and shuttles between high earth orbit and the moon. And with some of the new propulsion technologies coming online, that same frozen water could be separated into hydrogen and oxygen and used for rocket fuel.

“The last part of this equation is this. Imagine how much manufacturing could be done in space if you could use a huge iron asteroid to produce steel for space stations or habitats on the moon. No lifting cost at all, just the cost of pushing it into earth’s orbit so it could be made into whatever parts you need for building a space habitat. Some science fiction writer even wrote about making enormous space stations by heating huge iron asteroids until they’re completely molten and then blowing them up with air like large balloons and letting them cool. The idea was to start out with a huge, empty sphere and build the habitat inside.”

“Yeah, but it doesn’t seem like we’re anywhere near that kind of capability now.” said Angela.

“That’s mostly true, but it’s not that far off in the future. The biggest hurdle to beginning something like harvesting any kind of asteroid is the cost of transportation, getting consumables off earth, and for propellant to push an asteroid into orbit.”

Just as Norma finished her explanation, Jesse arrived with the two huge glasses on a tray. As she set down napkins and the glasses she asked, “Has Angela figured out a better name for it than Uranus? How about ‘Her-anus?’”

The three of them cracked up. The two girls raised their glasses in Jesse’s direction toasting their friend and host. Jesse blew them kisses and headed back to the bar.

“So what would we be able to do if one of these large rocks were going to hit earth, Norma?”

“Probably nothing. It’s not like we could pull off something like in the movie Armageddon. There would be no mission to the asteroid to blow it up, we can barely lift a crew of six and a satellite with the current space shuttle. Nuclear missiles would have practically no effect on a solid iron rock, maybe melt some of the surface, but blowing it up is out of the question. I think the only practical thing we could do would to be to make sure as many people as possible could survive the impact and resulting change in climate. The best bet is to get them underground to escape the deep freeze to follow. But really, how many is that going to be? A few thousand, maybe. And, if it all goes to hell, you’ll have chaos, vigilantes and masses of humanity trying to get underground, way underground, subways and basements won’t do. You’d need to get far enough down so that you could get some heat from the earth’s core, maybe build near active volcanos, but not near the fault lines, too unstable. I’m sure a hit like that would trigger quakes and aftershocks for quite a while after the initial impact. No, I think the lucky ones would be the ones who happened to be right under the thing when it hit.”

“Jeez, Norma, not only is the glass half empty with you, it’s cracked at the rim with fungus fuzz growing on it! I thought this was supposed to be a celebration.”

“You’re the one who asked what would happen. But you know what, you’re right.” Norma lifted her glass and said, “Here’s to Lancaster’s Folly, or whatever they name it!”

“Hear, hear! But no speech, no speech!” shouted Angela.

After the toast their conversation drifted off into more mundane subjects like Angela’s work; when, if ever, Norma and Alan would be on again; Angela’s imaginary lover (the one she maintained she really had, but whom Norma had never met); the weather; the news and anything else that came to mind. Things really deteriorated after ten o’clock when Jesse punched out and joined them. The three of them drank together until closing time.

Despite her best intentions Norma managed to get quite polluted after all, and wound up having to call a cab to take her home.