Jack Chalker: Echoes of the Well of Souls

The flight was surprisingly smooth and comfortable once they were airborne; more so, she thought, than a bigger plane, although it had been much bumpier taxiing. She had been surprised to see the “Fasten Seat Belt” and “No Smoking” signs just like on a commercial jet. In a few minutes, the panorama of Atlanta at night was obscured by clouds and there was nothing to do but wait until those magic lights vanished, signaling freedom. Not that she wanted to get up right at the moment; the angle of climb was pretty steep and seemed to go on forever.

Finally they leveled off, and the seat belt lights went out. Almost immediately the copilot came back to the cabin. “Anybody hungry?” he asked.

“Starved,” Lori responded.

“We get our meals from the same caterer as the big boys on flights like this. The executives have their own food specially prepared, but this is cuisine a la Dobbs House, I’m afraid. No better or worse than the usual airline fare. I’ll stick them in the microwave, and we’ll at least be full up until breakfast.” The small kitchen was cleverly concealed and easy to manage. He put the dinners in, set the controls, then came back and pressed a large square button on one of the bulkheads. A section opened outward, cleverly revealing an impressive-looking bar.

“It’s more or less serve yourself,” the copilot told them. “Anything you might want is here. Hard stuff, soft stuff, beer, wine—good wine—as well as coffee, which I’ll start when we reach altitude. Ice is in the hopper there, glasses in the bin. Trash goes in here, and dirty glasses go in this other bin over here.”

A bell went off, and he went back to the small kitchen. “Let’s see … we’ve got Delta fish, United Salisbury steak, and USAir lasagna. I’ll just put them on the cold trays and set them on the table, and you can fight over which one you want.”

“What about you and the pilot?” Lori asked him.

“Oh, we have to eat yet different meals, but that’s later. Both of us ate before we came.”

He showed them how to unlock the seats so they would swivel once more and also demonstrated that they were nearly full recliners with a nice footrest emerging when the backrest was lowered. Pillows and blankets were above.

Lori didn’t care which meal she got and wound up with the Salisbury steak. She couldn’t help noticing that Terry had the fish and a diet Pepsi. Only the congenitally thin acted like they were obese all the time.

“So—is this it?” she asked the two newspeople. “I mean—no reporter?”

Terry chuckled. “Oh, there’ll be a reporter, all right. Himself.” She lowered her voice as deep as she could. “John Maklovitch, CNN news,” she intoned solemnly. “He’ll meet up with us in Manaus. Flying in from God Only Knows, as usual. In fact, he should beat us there if his connections work out right. We’ll use local free-lancers. I’ve already set up with my counterpart from TV Brasil. Right now they think it’s fifty-fifty that the meteor will come down before dawn, so we’re going to try and catch its act as it comes in, from the air. It would be neat if we could catch it hitting the earth, but they still can’t predict exactly where within a couple of hundred miles last I heard, and it’ll be traveling a lot faster than we can.”

“Might be for the best we’re not that close when it hits, if it hits land,” Lori noted. “A big one like this could have the force of a decent-sized atomic bomb, in which case you’d get everything you might expect from a bomb, maybe including radiation—the great mystery explosion at Tunguska in Siberia in 1908 was radioactive, although that might not have been a meteor. The estimates I saw in the papers I read today indicate that this might be the largest one in modern times. The shock wave alone will be enormous, and the crater will be fantastic, like a volcanic caldera, very hot and possibly molten.”

“Sounds like fun,” Gus commented. “No chance this thing isn’t a meteor, though, is there?”

“Huh? What do you mean? Little green men?”

“Well, I saw War of the Worlds on TBS last week. Good timing.”

She laughed. “I seriously doubt it. The only danger, and it’s very remote, is that this is going to be something like the Tunguska explosion I just talked about. Massive blast damage for hundreds of miles with no evidence of what caused it. Many people think it might have been antimatter.”

“Auntie what?”

“Antimatter. Matter just like regular matter only with opposite electrical charge and polarity. When antimatter hits matter, they both blow up. Cancel out. Don’t let that worry you, though. I never bought the antimatter Siberian explosion. Nobody ever explained to me why it didn’t cancel out when it hit the atmosphere if it was. Others say it was a comet, although there’s no sign of the meteorite fall that would accompany one. At least one major Russian physicist thinks it was a crashed alien spaceship, but I don’t think we have to take that one seriously. Don’t worry—it’ll be plenty big enough if it’s the size they predict even after losing the bulk of its mass in friction with the atmosphere. I hope it lands either in the jungle or in the sea. The track prediction I saw takes it over some fairly populous parts of Peru if it clears the Andes. There’s no way they could evacuate all that region, not in three days.”

“Don’t get Gus hoping,” Terry cautioned. “If it came down in downtown Lima, he’d be so ecstatic about the photo ops, he wouldn’t even think of the misery. And no matter what he says, he’d love it to be an invasion from Mars. As I said, news photographers aren’t quite human.”

Gus looked sheepish. “Well, it ain’t like this happens every day.”

“In fact, it does happen every day,” Lori told him. “Meteor strikes, that is. It’s just that the particles hitting the Earth are usually small enough that they burn up before they reach the ground and just give pretty shooting stars for folks to look at. The ones that do reach the ground are often the size of peas or so, and most land in the ocean, in any case. It’s just the size of this monster that makes it so unusual.”

“Well, wherever it hits and no matter what damage it does, we’ll be the first on the scene,” Gus told her. “That’s our job.”

“Actually, we’re praying for Brazil,” Terry added. “The other organizations will be forced to use our pool in that region. If it goes into Peru, well, there’s a ton of broadcast teams in there now from dozens of countries and more arriving every day. We want to be first and exclusive. If we’re not, we’re not doing our job.”

“If it does land up in the upper Amazon, at or near the Peruvian border, it’ll be hell to get to on the ground,” Lori pointed out. “No roads or airstrips up there, and what natives there are will be primitive and not very friendly. But I’m mostly worried about the idea of covering it from the air.”

“Huh? Why?”

“While it’s huge, it’s not going to come down in one piece. As it comes through the atmosphere, it’ll fragment. Some decent-sized chunks and a huge number of little ones will come off. Some will be large enough to fall on their own over a wide swath and cause enormous damage. Even so, on the ground you can take advantage of some cover, and the odds of being hit by a fragment in the open are still pretty low. In the atmosphere, though, it will be extremely turbulent, and if even a very tiny fragment hits the plane, it could be disaster. And when it hits, like I said, it’ll be like an atomic bomb.”

“It’s what we get paid for, Doc,” Gus commented, sounding singularly unconcerned. “Can’t cover a war without gettin’ in the line of fire once in a while.”