Soon, the news about how close Nomad was would be announced. Ben had left the LIGO data on Dr. Müller’s desk in the middle of the night, detailing their suspicions about the gravity waves confirming Nomad was a binary black hole. By now, Müller had to know, and soon, the whole world would, too.
But Ben had an edge of a few hours, a head start to get south as quick as possible to find Jess and Celeste. He hadn’t heard from them, not since news of the bombing in Rome. A hundred thousand feared dead, but the detonation was only a massive conventional bomb, not a nuclear weapon. It was the only good news Ben had heard in the past week. He hadn’t heard from them, but somehow, Ben knew Jess and Celeste were alive.
And he had to find them.
Twelve hours to Rome, that was the driving time from Darmstadt.
There was still time.
Time—a funny thing for a physicist. It didn’t even exist, not in the deep recesses of quantum physics where Ben’s mind often wandered. Time had no strict direction in physics, but in the real world, in the here and now, every second ticking by felt wasted. A moment that could never be regained. Every moment was precious.
Hundreds of thousands dead in Rome, but this was just the first raindrop of the coming storm. The world was already in convulsions, and when the update about Nomad hit the news, Ben was sure chaos would follow. He made his decision to leave the moment they deciphered the LIGO data, and discovered that Nomad would be here in three days.
Not even three days now.
He was obsessed with the digital clock on the car’s dashboard. He looked again and did a mental calculation: seventy hours and thirty minutes till their best guess at Nomad’s closest approach. Armageddon now had a date and time: six a.m. on October 24th.
Plus or minus an hour.
And plus or minus tens of millions of kilometers.
Neither NASA nor ESOC had managed to get a visual fix on the damn thing yet. An invisible ghost. If they hadn’t had deep space probes out there, they might not have even noticed it coming yet. Even surrounded by all our technology, Nomad might have dropped from the sky on an unaware world.
And maybe it would have been better that way. Maybe it was better just to die in an instant, to not to know what’s coming. The whole thing still felt unreal, but there was a sense of finality to it. Like entering a doctor’s office and being told you have days to live, with some terminal disease named. In the back of your mind, your whole life, you always knew it would end, and now—as terrible as it was—at least you knew how.
Realizing there was no running away, no escaping, Ben’s thoughts turned to his loved ones, to Jess and Celeste. Why had he kept them away? Why hadn’t he spent more time with them? Ben had gone through the stages of shock and depression as he sat alone in a bathroom stall the night before, numb and crying. Thinking of Jess, of Celeste, guilt overcame him. Guilt of not being a better husband. Of not being a better father. Of abandoning Jess.
If there was no escaping Nomad, he at least had to escape Darmstadt.
At 3 a.m., with only a skeleton staff on hand in the ESOC building, Ben had snuck into the press lounge and stole an ID from a CNN reporter. He stole the reporter’s car keys as well. Ben had never stolen a thing in his life, not even a pack of gum, and he’d never imagined that he would one day steal a car. What might he be forced into doing tomorrow?
Ben revved the engine of the reporter's rental car and stared at the back of the tractor-trailer in front of them. Both of their cell phones were still turned off. They had the car’s satellite radio tuned to BBC World, but the announcer was only rehashing stories from the previous day.
Roger’s laptop was plugged into ESOC’s satellite data network and downloading regular updates from Gaia and LIGO. His connection was anonymized into the Internet, but even so, Ben had only allowed him to turn it on once they passed into Switzerland.
Inching the car forward, Ben glanced at Roger. “Anything yet?”
Roger shook his head and nodded at the same time, his head circling. “Some amateur astronomers in Australia just posted a report about Neptune and Uranus shifting more than predicted…”
Ben nodded grimly. It wouldn’t be long until the world figured it out, one way or the other. Moving forward another few feet before stopping, he cursed and jammed the ball of his hand into the car’s horn. “Come on, damn it!” Seventy hours till Armageddon, and they were stuck in traffic.
“Did you find out what Ufuk Erdogmus wanted?” Roger asked.
“No, I didn’t talk to him again.”
“Pushy guy.” Roger buried his face in the laptop screen. “Guess that’s how you get to be a billionaire.”
“Yeah,” Ben said. “I guess.” He replayed the short conversation with Ufuk Erdogmus in his head. Had the billionaire been offering some kind of safe house? He said something about sanctuary. He should have talked to him.