“What?” Roger’s face contorted in a scowl.
“Lighter. Do you feel lighter?”
“How do mean, lighter?”
The edges of Ben’s mouth quivered into the barest of smiles. “Judging by the way the oceans flooded, from what Celeste heard on the short wave radio, and the last data I saw from NASA on my laptop on the drive here—I’d put Nomad at seventy million kilometers away. Should be exerting…" Ben paused, closed his eyes and tapped the table top. “…about a tenth of Earth's gravity, straight up. If we had a scale, you’d be ten percent lighter right now. Incredible, isn’t it?”
Roger exhaled and rolled his eyes. “Trust you to be fascinated by this.” He picked up his cup of tea and tested it.
“A piece of creation is flying over our heads right now, a left over fragment of the primordial universe.” Ben looked up, his jaw flexing. “It’s hard not to be awed.”
Celeste took a sip of her tea. “I wish it would go away.”
Ben took her hand and squeezed. “And it will. That’s the amazing part. As fast as Nomad arrived, is just as quick as it will leave. In a few hours, it’ll stop bending the Earth’s crust and will release our oceans.” He stared into Celeste’s eyes. “We’re going to survive.”
Roger snorted and slammed the plastic tea cup down. “For what? A few days until we freeze to death? I think the lucky ones are the ones already dead.” He hung his head, winced and held his bloody left shoulder. “Nomad is going to toss the Earth into deep space like a child’s toy. Two days from now it will be as cold as the arctic here, and a few days after that, colder than Mars.”
Roger took a sip from the tea cup. “Global warming? All that carbon dioxide we’ve been worrying about?” He lifted his head and laughed. “It’ll be the first to liquefy at minus fifty-seven Celsius, and at minus eighty you’ll see carbon dioxide frost cover the ground. A few weeks from now the atmosphere itself will start to solidify, first oxygen at minus one-eighty, then nitrogen at minus two hundred. We’ll be a frozen chunk of ice, wandering through interstellar space. How long do you think burning those barrels will keep you alive?”
Ben stared at Roger in stony silence. The ceiling shuddered, sending down a shower of dust. “You’re probably right. Nomad is dragging us along behind it like a dog on a leash, but it’s also dragging the sun. Did you see the last of the simulations?”
He meant gravity simulations of the solar system. Ben and Roger ran them continuously on their laptops on the long journey in the car over the Alps.
“Of course I saw. I was the one running them.” Roger put his tea down, mashing his lips together as if he tasted something disgusting. “By now, Mercury and Venus have been ejected away from the sun by gravitational slingshot, and Saturn pulled into a retrograde orbit, and the Earth, well…”
“Exactly, it was right on the cusp. We don’t know the exact trajectory of Nomad. It all depends on the geometry.”
Roger shook his head. “And right now, we could be headed straight into the Sun.”
“At least we wouldn’t freeze.” Ben grimaced. A bad time for jokes. “But that’s not possible. We know the trajectory of Nomad down to one degree of resolution, and none of the solutions near that throw the Earth into the sun.”
This didn’t have the effect of cheering anyone up.
Ben took another sip of his tea and put the cup down. He squeezed Celeste’s hand, stared into her eyes, then looked back at Roger. “We need to go outside. Right now.”
Roger looked Ben in the eye. “I was thinking the same thing.”
“What?” Celeste pulled her hand out of Ben’s. “Why?”
“To get my backpack. I left it in that half-basement, outside the walls, when Nico kidnapped us.”
Celeste pulled Ben to face her. “What on Earth could be so important?”
“The long axis coordinates of Nomad appearing thirty years ago. That bag has my old data, maybe the only data that still exists that could pinpoint the exact trajectory.”
“What about all the satellites? The government agencies?”
“When Nomad finally appeared from behind the sun, we were bombarded by a massive solar flares. Hopefully my laptop was deep enough in that basement not to get fried by the radiation, but there’s no way any satellites survived that. They had an hour or two at most to get a direct view of Nomad when it came from behind the sun, and even then, it’d still be invisible. And who the hell would be sitting at a desk to monitor all this during Armageddon?”
“He’s right.” Roger balled both of his hands into fists. “Even if they did pinpoint it in space, that would be only one point. They’d need a long axis to determine the trajectory.”