The Sky is Falling by J. D. Martens

Author:J. D. Martens [Martens, J. D.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: ABDO
Published: 2018-05-15T04:00:00+00:00

It was getting warmer in Houston. It had been two months since “Discovery Day”—what Robert considered their start date for work. They had been working diligently and intensely, and the first complete rocket had been fully designed and was now in the middle of construction. A good portion of land had been taken over near Cape Canaveral to facilitate the production of IMPs, or interplanetary missiles. Suri and Robert called them Imps for short, due to their surprisingly small size. They had decided that their best use of resources was to make missiles that could poke holes in the outermost layer of the comet. If they timed these impacts right, they would be able to release the gaseous pockets inside the comet’s interior. These releases would be more powerful than blasting big bombs repeatedly at the surface, so they were designed more for accuracy and maneuverability than size. In fact, almost all of the volume of the Imps themselves were used for fuel to get the Imp from Earth to the comet.

Robert’s office had finally moved to the much larger conference room which could accommodate the tens of people working together. Inside the office were physicists and engineers from every continent except Antarctica.

“Ve hav ze numbers, AE, and ze Imps are progressing nicely. Two of our models from Russia exited ze atmosphere without concern, and are on path now. Ze third, however, malfunctioned,” Dr. Ivanov said.

“Why, Dr. Ivanov?” asked Dr. Petrov.

“Error report should come vithin a few hours.”

“Let’s go over it, you’ll take the lead? You can work with Dr. Campero,” Dr. Miller said.

“Okay.”

At this point Suri spoke up. “Sir, there’s the matter of the public. It’s getting closer to a breaking point with the internet. The NSA, working with CNN and Fox, have done a good job preventing any coverage of our work, but with the internet it’s more difficult to control the public. There are several prominent websites who are accusing NASA of either building nuclear weapons, starting a war, or sending a mission to Mars.”

“I agree. I believe that for now, an ignorant populace will allow us to further our pursuit of building countermeasures while the country is still stable,” Dr. Campero noted.

As the scientists continued working, Suri excused herself and walked to Daniel Atkins’s office, the PR head of Project Mars. He had been doing a terrific job, but the press had now become so intrusive about the new project that they wanted concrete details before going public with it. Robert had refused to assign even one scientist to this decoy project because to him it was a useless waste of time. But it would be much more difficult to work on saving the world when it was destroying itself. Why didn’t he see that? she asked herself.

So, helping him meant adding one more job to her ever-growing “things-to-do-before-the-world-ends” list. She walked into Daniel’s office, which was always open. It had a big rainbow flag on the front of it.

“This is bad, Suri,” Daniel groaned when she walked in.

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