A hundred and fifty million kilometers away at LG2, the Gaia space observatory re-aligned itself from staring into the Orion Nebula to focus its instruments on their best guess of Nomad’s position.
“Yes, you did a good job, Ben,” Dr. Müller agreed, standing shoulder-to-shoulder beside them in the packed room.
Ben exhaled slowly as they all waited for the images to come on-line. “Maybe too good.”
How easy it was to slip into technical double-speak. No, we’re not sure what’s happening. Yes, of course we would say if we knew. There was truth in Ben’s denials, however. Some of the data coming in gave Nomad’s size a hundred times smaller than other estimates, so either Nomad was a hundred times the mass of the sun, or about the same size, or traveling at thousands of kilometers a second, or just hundreds. The Gaia observatory should resolve the issue.
Jessica and Celeste’s plane was landing in an hour. “Where’s my phone?” Ben demanded for the tenth time.
“Half an hour, maximum,” Müller whispered back.
Ben glanced at the CNN and MSNBC reporters, everyone’s eyes glued to the screens. Ben convinced Müller to let them in. Transparency builds trust, he’d said.
“We have images,” the woman from the front yelled out.
A star field popped onto the first screen. An automated computer software tool highlighted each of the specks of light, one by one, in blue for known objects. A few popped up in red, eliciting excited whispers, but each time a human astronomer checked the item off into blue. Nothing that looked like Nomad was in the first frame. The other screens filled with new star field images.
Again and again, the wall screens filled with images at higher and higher magnifications. Nothing. The same result. There was nothing in the images that shouldn’t be there.
Nothing but empty, black space where Nomad should be.
Nothing at all.
14
ROME, ITALY
“WE DON’T REALLY know what’s going on,” Jess’s father, Ben, said on the TV screen. “We don’t even really know if anything is there yet.”
Jess stuck her bottom lip out. “That’s not what he said to me.”
She arranged pillows around her on Angela’s couch. Her friend’s apartment was one long room with a kitchen area and dining table at one end, and a white L-shaped couch and flat screen television at the other. Four windows, looking down onto the alleyway below, lined the wall behind the television, and over the couch hung a large original artwork—an impressionist’s version of Phoenix rising done in yellow oil over white canvas. A small hallway between the living and dining area led into the bedroom and bathroom.
“Maybe the situation changed,” Celeste said from the kitchen area. She opened the refrigerator door. “Maybe that’s why he went to Germany.”
Jess flipped through channels: BBC, CNN, and MSNBC in English, then through the Italian channels. Sitcoms and soaps on many stations, but half covered the “event,” and more than half of those featured hysterical ranting.
“Doesn’t explain why he hasn’t called us yet.” Jess flipped back to BBC to catch the end of her father talking.
Celeste closed the refrigerator then opened the cupboards beside it. “Your friend doesn’t cook much.”
“She mostly uses this as a vacation rental,” Jess explained. “We’ll go downstairs to the market in a second.” A Breaking News headline appeared on the TV. “Something’s happening, come here!”
“We go live to the European Space Operations Center, where images from the Gaia orbiting observatory are now coming in,” the BBC anchor said. Images filled the screen behind him, of star fields. A box opened on-screen with a reporter’s face. “So far, researchers at ESOC have reported finding nothing at all in the vicinity of the supposed Nomad object…”
“You see?” Celeste walked over to Jess and put a hand on her shoulder. “Maybe it’s a false alarm.”
The commentators on-screen began arguing the same thing, one of them describing other ways to explain the reported discrepancy in Neptune’s orbit.
“Just because they can’t see it doesn’t mean anything.” Jess logged her laptop into Angela’s wireless, and checked her email again. Still nothing. She looked out the window. Getting dark. “Come on, if we’re going to hole up here, we need some food.”
Closing her laptop, Jess grabbed the keys and her phone, and they left the apartment. Outside, the alleyway was eerily calm, the warm night air pungent from garbage piled at the corner. The small market across the street—where Jess remembered going to buy wine on more than one ocassion at Angela’s—was closed. A bigger supermarket was a few blocks away, so they walked toward it, the street opening up onto the Piazza Navona, one of Rome’s most famous squares.