Claire Holroyde - The Effort

“You’re not leaving without me.”

Amy was a military brat raised on several bases until she got her GED and became a legal adult at eighteen. She worked several different jobs and lived with several boyfriends while taking night courses at several community colleges. Every time Ben mentioned that he wanted to move to a larger living space, Amy leveled her eyes at him and said, I’m done with moving. She wanted her idea of a settled home where Ben was a permanent fixture.

“Cap it.”

“What?”

“Cap your razor,” Ben said, pointing to the pink disposable in her hand. “Or you could cut yourself.”

Amy towered above his crumpled form, wearing a ratty Mystery Science Theater 3000 T-shirt and a stolen pair of his boxers, which he hated for the sole reason that they fit better on her flat navel.

“C’mon,” Amy said, not ungently. “You need to get over your shock and get dressed.”

She left the bag of toiletries on the sink and grabbed Ben under the arms. Leveraging her weight, Amy leaned back and stood Ben up.

“Now, go find our passports,” she prodded.

Ben usually knew where things were because he was the one who put them away in the first place. Using walls for support, he followed Amy back into their bedroom. Two empty suitcases were already on the bed with unzipped mouths gaping open. Amy grabbed armfuls of clothes from their closet and dumped them into the suitcases with their plastic hangers. Ben pulled on a pair of jeans and tucked his wallet and their passports in his back pockets. A car horn sounded briefly from the street.

“Cool your fuckin’ jets!” Amy hollered.

Ben flinched at the loud noises. His hands were shaking, but hers were steady and determined. All those hours she spent alone in her tiny bedroom reading science fiction novels and comics had prepared her.

“Amy, you know this is for real, right?”

She nodded. Amy had been waiting to save Earth since the fifth grade.

“Everything we know and understand is at stake.”

“Yeah, I got it,” she said, and grabbed their suitcases by the handles.

Ben watched her struggle. A braver, simpler man would have rushed to help, but Ben was neither brave nor simple. His mind was still reeling.

“My God,” Ben whispered. “What’s gonna happen when the world knows what’s coming?”

JACK CAMPBELL WAS on layover in Seattle on his way to Alaska when his eyes caught “dark comet” on an overhead monitor. The news ticker looped as Jack blew steam off the surface of his franchise coffee. His pursed mouth froze when the full headline came into view: SPACEWATCH DISCOVERS DARK COMET UD3. He didn’t know why it sounded ominous, so he googled it.

Online articles described dark comets as those that are out of sight from Earth’s perspective. UD3, according to a NASA report, was a long-period comet that approached from the other side of the sun and slingshotted around the massive star, hurtling into the view of telescopes. NASA stated that there wasn’t enough information to estimate the comet’s trajectory or provide comment on probability of impact. Jack looked up from his phone and studied the other travelers waiting at gate 36. Danger felt more real when shared with others, but everything appeared normal. Men, women, and children were either bent down toward phones, laptops, books, or magazines or cat-napping until a flight attendant flipped on her microphone and welcomed all passengers—especially American Airlines AAdvantage program members.

Jack boarded the plane and secured his camera bag in the overhead compartment. He was a photojournalist headed to an assignment aboard an Arctic expedition. It was an opportunity of a lifetime, and he should have been over the moon with excitement.

“What do you think about this comet?” Jack asked the silver-haired passenger in the window seat. “The one that was just on the news?”

He tried to show her the screen of his phone, but she waved it away.

“Oh, I don’t follow news, honey. Too depressing. Are they giving us food on this thing, or do we have to pay for snacks?”

THE PLANE LANDED in Anchorage just after three p.m. Alaska daylight time. The faces of other passengers were set with a sense of urgency as they hurried on to jobs, family, or more travel. One boy studying his phone and likely hunting for Pokémon bumped into a wall, rebounded, and continued on his way. He was another reminder that life was mostly keeping your head down, only catching fleeting glimpses of the great wide open and all its implications.

Jack’s editors at National Geographic had arranged for a driver to take him the remaining leg of the journey to Seward. Travel schedules for his profession were grueling, but at thirty-two and with no strings attached, it was a price Jack was willing to pay for a job he loved. He kicked off his sneakers and stretched his lanky six-foot-two body across the back seat of the town car, and he was on his way.

During the flight from Seattle, Jack had web surfed and discovered that cosmic impacts were nothing new. It was the larger bodies that were rarer. For the last 70 million years, Earth had had a lucky streak… but luck could run out. Probability said it would.

Jack pulled out his phone and ignored all the new emails and texts from friends, colleagues, and ex-lovers from all over the world. He didn’t answer his mother’s latest emails, so it was no surprise when she called at the end of his three-hour drive. She asked about the flight and other niceties, but Jack was only interested in discussing the comet.

“You shouldn’t believe everything you read,” his mother advised.

“Mom, it was on CNN.”

“Exactly!”

He knew where this was headed.

“Why would this be fake news?” Jack asked. “There’s no political gain in scaring people…” But he knew there was, so he switched tack. “There was an asteroid the size of a school bus that came closer than the moon back in March,” he countered. “It was discovered five days before it zipped past. And back in 2014, there was another of these dark comets called Siding Spring. It came out of our blind spot from behind the sun and almost hit Mars.”

“I never heard that.”

“Me neither, until I read about it today. Just because we’re not paying attention, it doesn’t mean these things don’t happen, Mom.”

“I can hear you sighing. How would you like it if I sighed every time you gave an opinion?”

“These are facts . Facts are not opinions .”

“I didn’t call to argue.”

Jack heard his own sigh too late to stop it.

“Are you still leaving?” she asked.

It was the question his mother always asked.

“Because if you change your mind, your father and I could come visit…”

Jack tapped the speakerphone button so he could listen while checking what was trending online:

1. Red Sox vs. Yankees

2. Taylor Swift concert

3. Autism and antidepressants in utero

4. FIFA World Cup

5. Hair loss from shampoo

6. …

Comet UD3 came in at number 16, bumping Manchester City Football Club. It appeared that Jack’s mother wasn’t the only one who missed its headlines.

“We wouldn’t take up all your time,” she assured him. “We can do a matinee and then meet up for dinner. It’s been so long since we took a trip up to the city…”

“I gotta go, Mom. With all the flights, I’m beat.”

It was true. On some things, his mother didn’t argue. Jack said he loved her, which was also true, and ended the call.

As his town car reached Seward, Jack made one more Google search. Some of the articles he read on the flight referenced an official document released several years ago by the outgoing executive administration. Jack typed a few of the words he could remember and clicked on the first auto-fill option: National Near-Earth Objects Preparedness Strategy . The top link sent him to an unavailable webpage on the current whitehouse.gov site, one of several removed indefinitely.