Claire Holroyde - The Effort

Zhen looked through the glass to the mission control room. Anneke stood, but all the other Europeans on the launch team sat in rows in front of touchscreen tablets, telephone docks, microphones, metric screens, and dials. Spanning the far wall above them was a ten-meter mounted screen with split views of live feeds. Larger views captured the launch pad at different angles. A smaller view on the bottom left captured a room with more than thirty seated individuals: the space flight team. A smaller view on the bottom right was all black except for back-to-back universal and countdown times.

The room suddenly vibrated with the sound of a soft tearing from above. Chuck told Zhen that the security team had fighter jets and helicopters patrolling the no-fly zone in case there was a country still capable and dumb enough to launch a missile attack.

“Excusez-moi,” Marcel said. “I need to go vomit.”

As soon as the Frenchman was out of earshot, Chuck moved to reassure Zhen.

“Don’t worry,” he whispered. “The launch will be recorded for Ben. And the history books, of course. Ben won’t have to miss it completely.”

As soon as the HYCIV and Ariane rocket were both on tracks bound for the Final Assembly Building to be mated, Ben Schwartz had collapsed. Breathing and blinking but otherwise nonresponsive, doctors diagnosed him with UD3 catatonia. There wasn’t much they could do but hook up an IV drip and hope for the best.

Chuck told Zhen that Amy had broken the historic rule of conduct: Don’t punch the messenger in the face. Not only had she punched Dr. Clayton after she had delivered the news, but she knocked out a front tooth as a result. Chuck didn’t hide his admiration then or now as they heard her rusty-nail voice in the VIP room. Zhen saw the crowd part down the middle with griping on both sides about jutting elbows and stepping on toes. The Professor emerged in his wheelchair with Amy pushing from behind. They must have come straight from the infirmary.

“You are all interrupting my dying process!” the Professor wanted everyone to know.

But he was chuckling at his own gallows humor. The morphine drip attached to his wheelchair might have had something to do with it.

“It’s good to see you again,” Chuck said with relief.

“Then we must really be in trouble,” the Professor guffawed.

He looked through the glass, over the heads in mission control, and up to the monitor views.

“Look at them,” he said, using his cane to point. “My space flight team! Like Thoroughbreds stomping at the gates waiting for the starter pistol. They can’t believe it’s finally going to be their turn!”

If the launch succeeded, and if the rocket’s nose cone successfully separated to deploy the HYCIV spacecraft, then the space flight team had to steer the craft on a collision course with comet UD3 and detonate its nuclear payload on target.

Amy stepped around the Professor’s wheelchair to touch Chuck on the arm and lean in.

“It’s okay,” she said. “Yuri and Julie are watching Ben for me. They’ll be there if he wakes up.”

Amy looked to Zhen and managed a smile.

“Skin armor,” Zhen told her.

“That’s right,” Amy agreed. “Time to be tough. We’ve got a fucking rocket to launch.”

A voice from the room’s loudspeakers echoed, “T minus five minutes.”

They looked at one another and listened to nervous chatter that vibrated the glass partition.

“I wish Ben was here,” Chuck sighed.

The Professor agreed and said that in all the simulated impact scenarios that Ben had played out in the past, he still couldn’t have predicted the remarkable chain of events leading them through to the uncharted future.

“He’ll come back to us,” Amy insisted.

She took Zhen by the hand and led her away from the partition, toward the rows of chairs in the back of the room. The crowd parted and two people jumped up to offer their seats. It was a nail-biting relief to be a seated bystander now that the work of the HYCIV team was finished. The Effort was in the hands of the launch team, then the space flight team, and then fate itself.

“T minus one minute.”

The VIP room fell silent. Amy, usually fearless, grabbed Zhen’s hand and held it tight. They looked to the countdown on the monitor.

T-minus 41 seconds.

Zhen whispered that Amy’s grip hurt. Amy looked down and forced her clenched fingers to loosen.

T-minus 8 seconds.

In the next few moments, operations would execute automatically, and there was nothing the human species could do. The only choice left was to either shut their eyes or leave them open. Zhen left hers open, even as flare from the rocket boosters left negative imprints on her vision.

“Liftoff!”

The Ariane 5 rocket launched up into the blue sky and over the open sea. Zhen watched, quaking with fear as her mind made a running list of all possible malfunctions. The Ariane shed its rocket boosters and payload fairing and continued to soar with the power of its cryogenic main stage. The upper stage ignited next and burned hydrogen in order to reach speeds of 21,000 miles per hour.

It started as a murmuring as heads turned to look at one another and ended as a deafening blare of screams and cheers. Bystanders lifted their arms in victory. Zhen stood on the seat of her chair to see over all the raised fists. Her eyes caught the Professor, banging his cane against his metal wheelchair and hollering to get Chuck’s attention. The rocket would deploy the HYCIV twenty-seven minutes after liftoff. He had to get to his space flight team.

The Professor probably knew his body wouldn’t last to the time of intercept with the comet, but he would cling to life as long as he could, as all do. As soon as Chuck got behind the wheelchair and pushed it through the crowd like a steamroller, the Professor smiled. He smiled so wide that his ancient face looked ready to shatter into a million pieces.

AFTER THE DISCOVERY of UD3, Enrico and his parents drove every night from their high-rise condo in Mexico City to the basilica to pray. Hail Marys went to the Virgin of Guadalupe, patron saint to the Americas, and now Saint Medard, patron saint of protection against bad weather—which was the closest they could get to a cosmic impact. Priests handed out prayer leaflets with an eagle hovering above the young Saint Medard, sheltering him from rain.

“But the eagles have drowned,” Enrico whispered.

He read science blogs that described beaches blanketed with drowned birds washing up with the tides. Enrico’s mother hissed for him to be quiet. Her pleading eyes never left the fabric shrine of the Virgin hanging behind bulletproof glass. Enrico crumpled his prayer leaflet and tossed it to the floor of their pew; he had no patience for false promises.

When the basilica became overcrowded, Enrico’s family prayed at home. The city already had over 20 million people in a country of a quarter billion. As a first comet trajectory and then a second hit the news, Catholic pilgrims flooded in to reach the shrine. Enrico stopped going to school. His father stopped going to work. The armored car that waited for them in the mornings stopped coming.

For a time, Enrico basked in the beautiful novelty of spending time with his father, who was a virtual stranger to him. Enrico was ten years old and well above his peers in math, sciences, and reading comprehension. Eager to show off, he located UD3 through his telescope from the balcony of their fifty-fifth-level penthouse. It was a faint pinprick of light between Mars and big, banded Jupiter.

“Looks far away,” Enrico said, which seemed to please his father.