The Princess' deluxe cruiser popped out the wormhole, and I found myself inches above the surface of your moon. The biggest danger in ultra-long distance travel is that wormholes only come from massive collisions, which means when you emerge you'll find yourself just inches above a large mass of some kind, in the middle of an explosion, or both. You have no way to know if you're inches from the side of a mountain, in the path of a fast-moving object, or what have you; you have to act quickly (and get a little lucky) or crash and burn. That's one of the reasons why no one back home thought much of my prolonged absence; they figured that I had just had an "unlucky pop." It was nearly true; when I first arrived on Earth, my ship came out in the midst of the Tunguska impact. My ship was mashed in the shockwave, but fortunately because this sort of thing happens with frequency ships are made with an inner shell much like the roll cage in a race car. The inner shell held and I survived. My ship was completely inoperable, however, which is one of the reasons why I was never able to leave Earth. There were no major collisions on Earth itself, and without my ship I couldn't simply go to the moon or someplace nearby where large-mass collisions were more common. Fortunately the blast left such a mess, I simply tossed some of the thousands of felled trees over the top of the wreckage of my craft and it was never discovered. Somewhere, under the forests of Siberia, what's left of it remains.
This, on the other hand, was as clean an arrival as you could ask for; I was above a nearly perfectly flat range of the Sea of Tranquility. Pointing the ship upwards, I set my radio to scan the frequencies Earthlings tend to use. Almost immediately I picked up excited squawking; "Dad, is that you? Over." It sounded like Genny.
"It most certainly is, honey," I said confidently, "what's your 20?"
"In orbit just beyond you," she answered, "and we're running low on air."
"Coming," I said breezily as I turned towards the direction my ship located as the source of the transmission. "Now you'll see how to travel space in style."
"That sounds great dad," Billy now spoke, "but I hope we're not too late. Impact is in less than 48 hours."
48 hours! I gulped. That would be asking a lot, even for a Gravitron. "Holy shit... why'd you wait 'til the last minute?"
"We almost couldn't pull it off at all," Billy said soberly, "we ended up dragging an old space station to the asteroid belt and using it to divert a space rock into the moon. Good thing we had the angles figured out right, because we only had one shot at it."
"NASA couldn't have come up with something sooner?" I asked incredulous.
"NASA didn't help at all," Ginny answered, "a lot has happened since you've been away. No one thought you were coming back."
"No one trusted me? How long have I been gone?" Wormholes through space-time are just that; in order to arrive
where
you want to go, you kind of have to take your changes on
when
you arrive.
"Three months," she replied. Fuck. I've never been able to figure out exactly how long your days are relative to ours, but I know I wasn't gone three months on my personal timeline.
I now had a visual on them—a tiny ship, clearly a private company model. Six figures had already abandoned the ship and were spacewalking, looking for a pickup. I pulled round and opened the airlock as one by one they clambered inside. I closed the airlock once Billy, Genny, Eddie, plus three other of my progeny (Kurt, Jason, and Amanda for the record) were safely aboard. "Wow," was their unanimous reply. Earth spacecraft are primitive: with barely enough power to get into orbit, they are still mega-cramped and not gravity-neutralized, so its passengers must be uncomfortably strapped to the sides. The inside of most regular spaceships in other parts of the universe are something more like the inside of a bus or train car. This was a Princess' private model, though, so it was furnished much more luxuriously, maybe like a private jet or camper, complete with master bedroom and quarters for her personal staff. Either way, with climate and gravity controls you can freely roam them without your suit unless you're planning on heading out. I was wearing mine, though, because I had just jumped through spacetime, and as I say you never know where that'll put you.
From here, there was no mistaking where the comet was. It was nearly up to us, having cut a visible path through the asteroid belt. Even if you couldn't see the blacker-than-blackness of it, all you needed to do was follow its wake, much like the path an icebreaker cuts through the surface ice of a frozen lake. And of course each asteroid it had encountered it had vaporized, releasing energy, which was then recaptured in the event horizon and reconverted into antimatter. Thus the comet was even bigger than it was when I'd left it, giving it that much more inertia we would need to overcome. "Let's get the bugger," I declared, and steered the ship towards the looming menace.
I pulled up just "below" (from Earth's point of view) the comet, adjusting our flight path so that it was the same speed and trajectory as the comet and just a few hundred yards from the event horizon. Dangerous, but a speeding comet changes direction even slower than an aircraft carrier, so there wasn't much danger of it jumping up to swallow us. I switched on the Gravitron and began to pull. Now I did have to be alert, because while it may not change direction quickly, it was now moving our way. Every few minutes I adjusted our flight path slightly to stay out of harm's way.
"I couldn't bring the computer with me," Genny moaned, "so I can't tell whether the trajectory is clear or not."
"Don't worry, this will do it." I pulled up the modeling program and gave her a crash course on how to monitor it and what key symbols meant. We could see that we'd already adjusted its path, but so far it was still tracking towards impact.
"Now what do we do?" Billy asked.
"We sit here and suck this puppy into a new orbit," I declared.
"How long is it going to take?" he asked.
"Well..." I said, checking on Genny and the model, "I'm worried. So far, the models are still showing us impacting Earth. I think we're going to be pulling against this thing right up until the moment we get there."
"That's 48 hours," he noted, "and we've been up 36 hours already..."
"Oh man... you guys need to get some sleep. All right, here's the plan; Billy, I'm going to show you how steer this thing. Eddie, have Genny show you how to run the simulations. Then the rest of you get some sleep. In 12 hours we'll wake you, and you guys take a shift while we rest. We'll do this in shifts until we move this bastard out of harm's way. OK?"
There was unanimous agreement. I showed Billy how to run the ship, then they went to bed. Genny and I sat alone in the cockpit.
"So... how's you're mother?" I asked, breaking a prolonged silence.
"She's... been under a lot of stress," she said carefully.
"Oh?"
Genny started to fill me in on just how much the world had changed. When the plan to save Earth appeared to fail, all hell had broken loose. Everyone lived like there was no tomorrow, because, well, there wasn't. People wanted to get a hold of any kind of luxury item they could, wanting to enjoy the good life for their last few weeks, but since at the same time no one saw much purpose to working anymore, commerce ground to a halt. Riots broke out as people tried to take what no one would sell them, and virtually the entire world had to be put under martial law. Around the globe the poor rose up, attacking and looting the possessions of the rich, with many casualties on both sides. Mexicans poured across the border, risking being shot on sight for a chance to get their hands on some of the good life; the situation only stabilized when the US government took protectorship over all of Mexico. Wars broke out all over, and less effective governments crumbled; tens of thousands of people were killed before the comet even got here.
With no one to work the infrastructure of the planet, food supplies could not reach their destinations. Some parts of the world devolved into anarchy, but in the US the government stabilized the situation by forcing everyone to go to work. The National Guard ensured that everyone reported to their jobs as before, even if in some cases there was no work to do, or risk being executed as a traitor. Trucks started rolling again and the shops had employees again, so at least people didn't starve. Most people spent their free time getting drunk, screwing, or both; drunken orgies broke out in public places and office spaces alike. Civilization had been brought to its knees.
"Wow," I said with amazement, although in retrospect it kind of made sense, "Earth is crumbling and the comet hasn't even hit yet."
"Yeah," she said wearily, "that's one of the reasons we had to pay for the second launch ourselves."
"I noticed that was a private ship you were in," I replied, "no government would give you one?"
"No one was in a position to get organized enough to launch, they were all too busy trying to maintain order. But Billy kept insisting that you said to be sure to create a collision before the comet got there."
"Indeed I did," I replied.
"Unfortunately, no one else heard you," she sighed. "In the end Mom had to have you declared legally dead. Then she had us testify that you had lived with mom and raised us, so she was able to be recognized as your common-law spouse. Once she did that, she was able to get access to your Swiss bank accounts."
"Oh," I said. Before she even told me I could guess those accounts were now history, and I was broke. Yet I still marveled at Amy's resourcefulness.
"She took all that money, and with a some help from some rich optimists we privately funded the return to space. There was only room for the six of us, so there weren't enough of us to create any big interplanetary collision. Finally Billy hit on the idea of taking the old International Space Station and crashing it into an asteroid, diverting it to hit the moon. We weren't sure it would be a big enough bang, but I guess it was."
"Barely," I agreed, "the ship almost didn't fit through the wormhole."
"That wasn't the only thing. The Foundation was the only direct link to you, right? So naturally, everyone directed their questions towards the Foundation. Mom was bombarded by governments and everyday people alike: where did you go? Were you coming back? Did you abandon all of humanity to face certain annihilation? And she just didn't have any answers for them. It wasn't long before the questions turned to anger. Eventually we had no choice but to go into hiding."
"You've been living in hiding?"
"Almost three months," she sighed.
I was silent. I wondered what kind of Earth I would be going back to. That is, if I would be going back to Earth at all. The models kept showing steady progress, but they still all projected an impact with Earth.
--------------
I woke up, my turn to rest over as far as I was concerned after just a few hours sleep. I jumped out of bed to see where we were at. I could see the big red circle on the monitor before I even came up to Eddie running the simulations.
"So we're still not clear of it?" I said solemnly.
