Meteor Strike

“As big as the comet that wiped out the dinosaurs,” that’s how the meteor was first described to me.
 
As Head of Meteor Repulsion, this is exactly the type of situation I’ve spent twenty years of my life preparing for. I asked for all the data to be brought to me and checked it a dozen times. There was no denying it, this giant meteor was heading straight towards us and would hit the Earth in just over a month.

The meteor was over a mile across at its widest point – big enough to cause an impact equivalent to over a million megatons. That’s tens of thousands of times greater than the largest nuclear explosion. Detailed analysis of the meteor’s structure showed that it was mainly made of iron, meaning that it wouldn’t break up as it entered our atmosphere, it would land intact, doing maximum damage. What you effectively had was a giant, interstellar wrecking ball heading our way.

The effect would be catastrophic, akin to an earthquake that covered the whole Earth. The initial impact would flatten anything 250 miles from ground zero and cause extensive damage within 1,500 miles. Those that weren’t killed immediately by the impact would be doomed by the ice-age that would follow, as a cloud of dust shrouds the Earth and blocks off the sun.

I calculated what we could do to prevent the meteor from hitting us. In the long term our unit had been planning a number of strategies for meteor defence, but none of these systems had been developed, in most cases we hadn’t got beyond sending off the funding applications, and while the current meteor threat might help us with the funding problem, waving our grant-cheques at the enormous metal ball would hardly be likely to stop it.

The sole defence we had at our dispose were six rockets, old military stock we had been gifted by the government to make up for any actual funding. These could be fitted with nuclear weapons and used to blow the comet apart. The odds of this working, even with six attempts, was, I calculated, less than 6%. The iron-based structure of the meteor meant that it would resist the force of a nuclear explosion, and whilst it would kill off any aliens who’d happened to have hitched a ride, it would do no relevant damage to the meteor itself.

If we could launch the ‘attack’ from an angle, we could knock the meteor out of its current orbit, causing it to miss the Earth, but there was simply no time to position the rockets far enough away from Earth to make a significant difference to the meteor’s trajectory.

So this was it, I was going to die. We were all going to die. Mankind’s existence was about to end.

The full implications of this took a while to filter through to my brain, but eventually it hit me.

It meant I would never get to write my novel.

Twenty years or more I’ve been planning to write a novel. I only had a vague idea of the plot and characters, but that it would be a work of sheer brilliance I had never doubted. The Booker Prize was guaranteed, as soon as I got round to writing it. It would be my life’s greatest achievement.

The trouble is I always put off starting it, with work, relationships, friends, family getting in the way. The few times I had taken a week off work to write, I found that I didn’t have any ideas and returned to work a week later having advanced world literature by nothing more than a notebook full of doodles.

I did some calculations. A month. That’s enough time for me to write a novel in, I realised. It wouldn’t be long enough to create an all-time master work and the 500,000 word epic was out of the question, but if I could average 2,500 words a day it would be a novel. It would be my novel, the book I’d always promised myself.

2,500 words a day. Very easy if you’re not working. I bash out reports and articles of this length at a single sitting at work. The trouble is I would be busy, busy as the Head of Meteor Strike Prevention during the greatest meteor strike crisis in the world’s history. I thought of the hours I would be expected to put in, calculating weak spots in the meteor’s structure, working with military experts to target these areas, calculating where on the Earth the meteor would strike and trying to evacuate the nearest continents. It would be a full-time job for a million men, let alone just me. Sneaking off early to write my novel would, I realised, be out of the question.

On the other hand, if I left work I wouldn’t have to face the usual worries of where the money would come from to see me into my old age. I would have no old age, I would have a month to live and I could fritter away my savings any way I pleased. Actually I’m paid a month in arrears, so I’d get a full pay packet without having to do a stroke of work. My colleagues, so very busy saving the Earth, wouldn’t get a penny more than I did.

I was about to hand in my notice, then I thought some more. Suppose I write this novel. There wouldn’t be time to publish it, not in the middle of a new ice-age. Not with no human survivors. It would be the last novel ever written, and the least-read novel in the history of mankind. It seemed such a sad fate for my great work of art to face.

Wouldn’t it be better, I thought to myself, if I could finish my novel, load it onto a rocket and launch it into space, to be discovered by any alien lifeforms that might be out there. That way my novel would not only be read, it would be the only piece of human literature they would ever encounter. It would, by definition, be the greatest novel in the world’s history.

If only I had a rocket.

Hmm, a rocket.

How stupid I’d been. I tore up my resignation letter. I DID have a rocket. Six of them in fact. Five rockets would have almost as much chance of stopping the meteor as six. I could borrow one of them to send my novel into space, turning the rocket’s trajectory away from the meteor towards an area of the galaxy where life was most likely to exist. It would mean that my novel was ‘out there’, in the universe. It was bound to be spotted by a publisher eventually.

Eventually I had a change of heart. After all, one rocket had little chance of ever being found. It was foolish to think my novel could ever be discovered that way. I would need all six to have any chance.

It took all of my effort and over a month of continuous arguing to get the rockets aimed away from the meteor, ready to launch my literary career. I was on the phone constantly to allies, including senior politicians, babbling made-up laws of physics in justification. Eventually, using my authority and citing the backing of ignorant Presidents and Prime Ministers, I was given permission to use the rockets as I saw fit.

The trouble is it’s taken all of my spare time. I’ve not had a chance to write the novel. I’ve got six nuclear missiles primed and ready to fire, the biggest literary launch in history, and I’ve got nothing. A lifetime of blank pages and just 24 hours left to write the novel in.

I’ve switched off the internet, turned off my phones. This is it. I must write the novel now or never. Even a novella would suffice.

It’s the first line I’m struggling with. If I can just write the first line the rest will flow, I know it.

At this rate I’m going to die staring at a blank page. How tragic would that be?