“I agree, but you must see that there is something there?”
“Yes, I think something is there,” Ben agreed. “But how far, how fast, I don’t know. What else are we doing?” Something of this magnitude needed proof beyond a doubt.
“The European Space Agency, NASA and the Russians, Japanese and Chinese have begun re-aligning their orbiting and ground-based observatories to look in the direction of Nomad. But if it’s there, it’s coming from almost exactly behind the sun. Our best hope is the Gaia observatory. It’s the only space-based observatory not immediately near Earth.”
Ben nodded. Gaia’s Lagrange 2 location was a point about 1.5 million kilometers away from Earth, in a direction away from the sun. The Gaia observatory was the most sophisticated exoplanet-hunting tool they had. If anything could spot this thing, Gaia was their best hope.
“What was Ufuk Erdogmus doing at the meeting? I thought you only wanted astronomers.”
Dr. Müller slipped his hands into his pockets and lifted his chin. “Why? Did he talk to you?”
“No. Why would he?”
“I don’t know.” Dr. Müller rocked back on his heels. “Erdogmus wasn’t expected, but it’s hard to stop a man such as this, yes?” He licked his lips. “And the man has eight frozen human popsicles halfway from here to Mars. He offered to wake some of them up, to try and use the Mars First ship-board instrumentation to look at Nomad’s location.”
“Wouldn’t that be a death sentence? That ship isn’t designed for years of life support en-route, is it?”
“It’s already a suicide mission, no?” Müller stroked his chin with his right hand, and Ben noticed a signet ring.
The ring looked like it had a yin-yang symbol on it. In the twenty-odd years since Ben had seen him last, Müller hadn’t changed much—a few extra pounds, a little less hair, a little more wrinkled and gray—but the signet ring was new. Ben didn’t remember him being Taoist, or even religious in any way. Müller pulled his hand away and slid it back into his pocket.
“In any case, we declined his help as ridiculous,” Dr. Müller said. “It’s a foregone conclusion that something is there. We’re already seeing a shift in Neptune’s orbit.”
And Neptune was the closest planet right now.
Any hope Ben had of this being an elaborate hoax or miscalculation was evaporating. It would be hard to argue with something as straightforward as measuring a planet against the background star field. The cigarette smoke in the air burned his throat, his eyes teared, and the temperature in the room seemed to rise.
“Are you going to make an announcement?” Ben asked. But where would people go? There was no way to escape the planet.
“Of course,” Dr. Müller agreed. “Not yet, though. It will take days, weeks, for us to decipher the data properly and figure out the path of Nomad, what its mass is, and how it might affect us.”
Weeks? By then it might be too late. But too late for what? What were the options? “I think we should bring in a larger community of scientists, at least.”
Dr. Müller held up his hands. “We don’t want to be alarmist. We don’t even know if it will come close to the inner solar system yet. This thing is, what, twenty billion kilometers away?”
Ben looked Dr. Müller in the eye. “I need to get back to my data.”
Ben was still lost in his thoughts when he slipped his keycard into the hotel room door. Before he could open it, it swung back by itself. Not really by itself—Roger stood in front of him, his face ashen.
“Gliese 445?” Roger said slowly. “Variability? Microlensing, is that what you’re looking for?”
Ben pushed his way inside and closed the door. “What did you find?”
Roger pushed the papers on the bed aside and sat down. “Something big is heading this way, isn’t it?”
There was no point in trying to lie. “Yes,” Ben replied simply.
“What do you know?”
“Not too much yet,” Ben answered honestly. “But I have a feeling it’s not going to be good when we do find out.”
“Do you want me to keep looking through the data?”
Ben nodded. “And I need to make another phone call.”
9
CHIANTI, ITALY
CELESTE AND JESS walked along a gravel path through the gardens outside the west walls of the castle, underneath huge oak trees, with a view down the mountain to the twinkling lights of the village far below.
“You look nice,” Jess said, admiring her mother’s calf-length black dress and heels with envy. Rarely, if ever, would Jess wear anything but jeans in casual company, and she always wore flats or sneakers. High heels didn’t work well with a prosthetic foot. In sports, she’d wear shorts or Spandex pants, but only when she was mostly alone. She wouldn’t admit it, but it was probably the reason she enjoyed hiding on cliff faces and mountaintops.