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Chapter One
— NEO (Near Earth Object)
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"This asteroid
is fifty miles in diameter and on a collision course with Earth.” In the
darkened classroom, the British professor, Callus Grymm pointed to the hologram
behind him. The students saw a five-foot diameter image of a nearly round space
rock.
"What does
that mean, professor?" asked one of the female students.
"It means
nothing less than the end of all life on this planet.” He paused. “Even
microbial—one moment. What have we here?” In the midst of describing the death
of everyone in the room, the professor noticed one student had fallen asleep in
his class. He brought the lights up slightly.
Professor Grymm
withdrew his wand from its robe pocket and aimed it toward the offending
student, Oxford Peccant. “How do I wake thee? Let me count the ways.” He paused
only a moment. “I shall take thee to the depth and breadth and height thy chair
can reach…” As he said this, he raised both student and chair up to the high ceiling.
“I could drop him from there, but the school would regrettably frown upon my
intentionally maiming or murdering a student while class is in session. Pity.”
The chair lowered back to a point only three feet off the floor instead. “Does
anyone know what work of poetry I was paraphrasing just now?”
With no other
hands in the air, he called on dark-haired Amy Levine; certain she would know
the answer. She did. “Sonnet forty-three by Elizabeth Barrett Browning,
written while she was—”
“Correct, Miss
Levine.” Giving his wand a slight flip, the floating chair and the overweight
‘Ox’ Peccant, dropped suddenly to the floor. The chair broke under him, waking
the sleeping Ox. “Mister Peccant, it appears you have broken yet another of the
school’s chairs with your excessive mass. Please take another. ... Bring it right
up here beside my desk. ... Now, sit.”
The professor
walked around him, and continued speaking, “Where was I? Ah yes, I remember
now.” His voice lowered more and more as he leaned closer to the student. In a
quiet pleasant tone, he said, “While you were sleeping, I was just telling the
class that an asteroid is going to hit the Earth, killing everyone.” He leaned
closer to Peccant's ear and suddenly screamed, “We are all going to die!”
Straightening back up, his voice returned to its normal pitch, “You will have
plenty of time for sleeping after you are dead, which could come sooner than
the asteroid, if you sleep in my class again.”
Gratified by the
sudden look of terror on Ox’s face, the professor continued his class lecture.
"May I presume you have all heard of the Chicxulub impact crater, known today as the Caribbean?” He glanced around. "That is the remains of an
asteroid impact which many believe to be the event which brought the
demise of the great dinosaurs."
Getting no response
from most of his students, he sighed and continued. "Only three students? Why am I
not surprised? The estimate of that asteroid's diameter put it at only
six miles, while the one coming is fifty. It hit the Earth with an impact equal
to approximately two hundred quadrillion pounds of high explosive. It is hard
to imagine such a force, isn't it?” He paused a moment, “I shall attempt to
enlighten you. The explosion was so great that not only did it melt hundreds of
square miles of bedrock and turn thousands of cubic miles of ocean to
superheated steam, but also an enormous quantity of the molten impact debris
blasted into space, far beyond the atmosphere. This eventually rained back down
dispersed around the globe. The energy released both from the impact itself and
from reentry of the space debris had the effect of heating the air over the entire
planet, touching every creature that did not hide underground in a cave or
burrow. The heated atmosphere caused mass wildfires on a global scale, and was
hot enough to cook the Dinosaurs."
He placed a blueberry
on his desk. “If this were the asteroid that dug out the crater we call the
Caribbean, let us compare that to the one coming now.” His hand appeared from behind
him swinging in an arc over his head. With a resounding bang, he squashed the
blueberry on the desk using a regulation-sized softball. “So much for the Caribbean,
North, Central, and South America, Europe, and the Atlantic Ocean.”
As he spoke, a new
image appeared behind him. This time it portrayed a fiery holocaust, with
dinosaurs attempting to flee, but overtaken by a flash of fire, leaving a wake of
death where once majestic creatures roamed. "That will be humanity’s fate."
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