The view from the observatory tower was even more amazing during the day than it had been at night. Jess had an unobstructed 360-degree view of the surrounding countryside. Giovanni had left a note under her door in the morning, giving her access. She’d just finished rolling back the observatory’s roof covering when she heard footsteps coming up the stairs.
“Jessica?” echoed Giovanni’s voice through the half-open doorway. “Jess?” He appeared and stood on the landing, concern worrying his eyes. “Enzo said you wanted to see me? Are you all right? Is your father good?”
“He’s fine. Everyone’s fine.” At least for now. She let out a long sigh and looked at the plains again, imagining them flooding, the oceans rushing over them.
“Are…we okay?” Giovanni asked. He took a tentative step forward. “I told your mother we could go horseback riding.”
Men. Jess shook her head. They always think that it’s something they did, that it’s something to do with them. And then they try and fix it without even understanding. This wasn’t something someone could fix. Nobody could fix this. She looked toward the horizon.
Giovanni took another step toward her. “What’s wrong? What happened?”
How could she bring this up without sounding ridiculous? “My father, he’s an astronomer.”
“Yes?”
“They found something, in space, that’s heading toward the Earth.”
“What?” Giovanni took a second to process. “An asteroid? Is there danger?”
“Not an asteroid, something else. They don’t know what yet.” Jess looked away, up at the sky. Not a cloud. Perfect. “Nowhere will be safe.”
“Do they think it might hit us?”
“I doubt it. At least, that would be one in a million, whatever it is.”
“Then there’s really little danger?” He cocked his head to one side.
“You don’t understand.” Squinting, she shielded her eyes and looked at the sun. “This thing has fifty, maybe a hundred times the mass of our Sun, and is coming from right behind it. It seems to be heading straight into the solar system.”
“A hundred times the size of…” Giovanni’s jaw dropped open. “Will it destroy the sun?”
“A hundred times the mass, not the size. Nomad is probably very compact, not more than thirty kilometers across if it’s compressed matter, but it’s traveling at more than a thousand kilometers a second. Even if it hits the sun, it’ll be like a bullet going through a ball of foam. It wouldn’t damage it, not much, but its gravity will drag the sun away from us, eject all of the planets into deep space. Including Earth.”
“My God.” Giovanni sat down on a bench beside the telescope. “I didn’t hear anything on the news, the radio…”
“Nobody knows yet. And I wasn’t supposed to tell you.”
Giovanni stared at her. A gust of wind blew through the treetops, washing over the observatory turret. Jess shivered.
“So, this is true?” he asked finally. “This is not some game…?”
“No game.” Jess shook her head. “I’d stay away from the big cities, move everything you can here. Get all your family and loved ones together.”
“Can’t they stop this thing? I don’t know, fire nuclear weapons at it? Push it away?”
“It’d be like a mote of dust in the path of a charging elephant.”
Giovanni rocked back and forth. “I see.”
“My dad says he has evidence of seeing this thing, decades ago.”
“So they can see it?” Giovanni stopped rocking and steepled his hands together, elbows on his knees, and rested his chin on them. “What is it?”
“That’s the thing.” Jess pursed her lips. “They can’t see anything there. So far they haven’t been able to detect anything directly, but something of this mass, coming undetected, there’re only a few options—or its some strange form of dark matter, something we don’t understand. It seems like it appeared from nowhere.”
“Dark matter?”
“Ninety percent of the universe’s matter is invisible, what they call dark matter.”
“How do they know it’s there if they can’t see it?”
“Same way they know this thing is there. Gravitational influence. Like an invisible bowling ball thrown onto the plastic sheet of space-time.” Jess dragged a hand through her hair.
“I see.”
But Jess could see he didn’t, and that he didn’t entirely believe her. Not everyone had a father who was an astrophysicist. “I’m sorry, but I don’t have time to give a physics lesson right now. I need to get to the airport. All I can tell you is—this thing is coming. Trust me.”
Giovanni stared at Jess. She saw something behind his eyes. Distrust? A calculation? Something hidden. Something he wasn’t telling her, but she didn’t have the patience. Or the time.
“And how long do we have?” he asked finally.
“If it’s heading into the solar system, which we don’t know for certain yet”—she wagged one finger back and forth to make the point—“it will be a few months. My dad said they’ll make an announcement in three days when they know. Celeste and I are going to meet him at a hotel next to the airport this afternoon, to take a flight back to the States tomorrow.”