“I really don’t know, Dr. Alexander.” He tapped the radio on his belt. “They just told me from the visitors’ check-in desk.”
David wondered who was meeting him, then decided it had to be either his lawyer or, just possibly, Teri. He’d asked Dutton not to tell his wife that he was being released. He still had some thinking to do about that. If he could just convince Liana that it would be better for them both to end this mismatched marriage once and for all….
The clerk was right. It would be good to sleep in his own bed tonight. On the other hand, he wasn’t sure he wanted to see Liana just yet. He’d been doing a lot of thinking about things during the past couple of months. It was time, he thought, to have it out with Liana once and for all…to sit down with her, make her see that it just wasn’t working out, make her realize that there was no good reason for the two of them to keep on destroying each other’s lives. There had to be a way to make her listen to reason.
He knew he had to do it, and soon, but the thought of going home tonight, before he’d had a chance to work out exactly what he wanted to say, was more daunting than Joliet’s walls. Funny. All those months alone, here, and he hadn’t figured out yet how to say what he needed to say….
Maybe he would take a hotel room in Chicago for a day or two, while he thought things out. Somehow, he had to find a way to resolve things with Liana before he could let himself even think about a new life with Teri.
The guard led him into a lounge area near the main building’s front door. There were a number of people there, and he scanned the crowd, looking for a familiar face.
Then a group of people in uniform stood and walked toward him, and David’s eyes widened. “Good heavens!” he said. “I certainly didn’t expect to see you here, sir!…”
“Dr. Alexander?” General Montgomery Warhurst said. “You and I have to talk.”
TWENTY-ONE
MONDAY, 15 SEPTEMBER 2042
Asteroid 2034L
Approaching Earth
1905 hours CDT
The main body of 2034L was considerably smaller than it had been originally. The nuclear detonation had vaporized some hundreds of tons of rock and surface dust, and a number of house-sized pieces had split off in zero-G avalanches as rock expanded under the thermal shock and deeply buried pockets of ice turned to steam. The largest piece, still over one hundred meters across and massing over two and a half million tons, moved now on a slightly altered course, one that would carry it past the Earth, missing by well over a hundred miles. Tracked by hundreds of radar-and laser-ranging facilities in orbit and on Earth, it tumbled past the planet, crossing the terminator from night into day. Accelerated sharply by Earth’s gravity, it hurtled above a suddenly flattening horizon of blue and swirling whites in a breath-holding cosmic near miss that slung it sunward along a new orbit that was now the concern only of future generations of humankind.
Of the myriad fragments and splinters that had accompanied 2034L on its near-miss swing-by, most either missed entirely or were small enough to burn up in Earth’s atmosphere. A few boulders, some the size of a house, were large enough to cause significant damage. Over the next few minutes, thousands of fragments entered Earth’s atmosphere, flaring brilliantly for a few seconds. Observers all along the Atlantic coast, in a vast footprint from Puerto Rico to Newfoundland and extending west as far as the Rocky Mountains, reported a dazzling display of shooting stars, including numerous bolides leaving long, persistent, slightly greenish trails. Several large fragments exploded in the sky as they rammed into increasingly thicker air, loosing their payloads of kinetic energy in violent blasts of heat, light, and sound. One fragment, massing twenty-five thousand tons, exploded eleven kilometers above the North Atlantic with a blast equivalent to twenty-five megatons of high explosive. Dozens of ships—most of them warships of either the US Second Fleet or the European union Joint Military Command—burst into flame as the fireball expanded overhead, flames extinguished half a minute later as the shock wave arrived from the sky as a gust of hurricane wind. Over eight thousand men and women died, and thousands more were injured in an event initially thought by both sides to be an enemy nuclear strike. A second chunk passed over the Canadian Maritimes and Quebec with a light rivaling that of the sun before exploding thirty kilometers above Ogoki, Ontario. The three-megaton explosion ignited forests and blew down trees for tens of miles in all directions. Hundreds died and hundreds more were blinded, mostly people in Ogoki and in Fort Albany, on St. James Bay, who’d come out to watch the light show in the sky.