A few semi-articulated rigs were laboring up the approach to the pass in the slow lane. Some of these were just conventional boxy trucks and so there was no guessing what might be in them, but Doob thought he was picking out an unusual amount of weird industrial traffic: tankers carrying cryogenic liquids, flatbeds with bundles of tubing and structural steel.
The clouds flashed, bright enough to make some of the sleeping students flinch and stir in the backseat. Out of habit, Doob began counting zero Mississippi one Mississippi two … and when he reached something like nine or ten he felt, as much as heard, the sonic boom. As a child he’d have assumed it was a lightning bolt. Now he interpreted all such events as incoming chunks of moon shrapnel. This one had passed within about three kilometers. A secondary boom, several seconds later, suggested that it had hit the ground, as opposed to just breaking up in the atmosphere as most of them did. So it had been a relatively large piece.
It had been a day or two since Doob had checked the site where his grad students had been tallying observed bolides vs. the predictions of their model. He didn’t check it very often because, after some jitter in the first few weeks, the model had been refined to the point where it tracked observations to within a reasonable statistical range. This, of course, was good news for the model and bad news for the human race, since it meant that they were still on track for the White Sky to happen, and the Hard Rain to begin, in another twenty-one or twenty-two months. If memory served, strikes like the one he had just observed were probably happening about twenty times a day worldwide. So it was mildly remarkable that he’d been close to one, but nothing to write home about.
A few minutes later the taillights ahead of him flared as people applied their brakes. After inching along for a short distance traffic came to a complete stop. This woke up some of the students, who remarked on it sleepily. After ten minutes had passed without movement, Henry climbed out, stood up on the SUV’s running board, and began loosening ropes holding a bicycle in place on the roof.
Doob sat warm and safe in the driver’s seat and watched his son pedal off between the lanes of stopped traffic with precisely the same heartsick feeling as when the boy had gone off on his first solo bicycle ride in the streets of Pasadena.
He was back all of three minutes later. “A rig jackknifed just before the top of the pass,” he said. “An oversized load, a piece of a gantry, I think.”
Gantry. There was a word that activated deep memories in Doob’s brain. Only used in connection with launch pads, only spoken by the likes of Walter Cronkite and Frank Reynolds in the deep nicotine-cured anchorman tonalities of the Apollo days.
Nothing was happening, so they pulled their winter coats out of the back, bundled up, and hiked up the road to see. A lot of people were doing this. This struck Doob as unusual. The normal behavior was to wait in the car, thumb the iPhone, listen to a book on tape, and wait for the authorities to come and deal with it.
The stranded truck was only about half a mile ahead of them. It looked to have gone into a spectacular skid. The colossal weight of the gantry—a welded steel truss looking like a section of a railway trestle—had swung the rear end of the truck forward and sideways, sweeping across all lanes of traffic and finally grinding to a stop by flopping over onto its side and then destroying about a hundred yards of guardrail. Behind it a few cars had spun out as their drivers had stomped the brakes, and a few people were dealing with the aftermath of minor rear-end fender benders, but no one seemed to have gotten seriously injured.
The pedestrian traffic toward the crash had been considerable, and yet Doob saw few of the sorts of people he would classify as gawkers or rubberneckers. Where were they all going? As he and Henry and the other students drew closer he saw cars moving around, headlights sweeping across the wreck to better illuminate it, and then he saw a stream of people squeezing through the gap to the other side, or clambering through the space between the tractor and the trailer. Self-appointed safety wardens had stationed themselves at critical locations to focus the white beams of their LED flashlights on trip hazards and useful handholds. Doob and the others crowded through those gaps and then broke free to the far side of the wreck. The view here was worth a look. The wet interstate, completely empty of traffic, stretched away from them. A ski area, lit up for night use, spread up the mountainside to their right. In the distance maybe ten, twenty miles away, a streaky patch of mountainside was flickering a lambent orange through intervening veils of snow and mist: the impact site of the bolide. Doob saw now how it had all happened. The meteor had passed overhead. To him it had just been a flash above the clouds, but to the people cresting the pass at the same moment it must have been visible as it streaked into the ground and plowed up a mile-long stretch of forest. Cars must have faltered and strayed out of their lanes. The driver of the truck had been forced to apply his brakes and the tires of the trailer had broken loose from the slushy pavement.
The number of people on this side of the wreck must have been well over a hundred.
Twenty minutes later, there were enough of them to flip the rig back up onto its wheels. Like a work crew of Egyptian slaves moving a great block of stone, all of these people in their parkas and their microfiber gloves and snow pants just got under the thing and started lifting it. Towing straps had been fetched from toolboxes and anchored to the other side of it, and run to the trailer hitches and the bumpers of several pickup trucks that had four-wheeled their way to the scene, and they pulled while the humans pushed, and with surprising ease the whole thing came up, balanced for a moment on half of its wheels—the only sound now being the skidding of pickup tires as the drivers burned rubber—and then dropped into place. A huge uproar of people shouted Whoo! as much in relief as in exultation. Doob exchanged thumping, mittened high fives with twenty people he’d never met before and would never see again.
Getting the truck pointed in the right direction again, and back on its way down the interstate, was a more tedious operation that would likely span another couple of hours. But within a short time they were at least able to open one lane. By then, people with four-wheel-drive vehicles had already begun to cut across the median strip and claim lanes on the wrong side of the interstate, which was sparsely trafficked by veering cars holding their horn buttons down in long Dopplered howls of protest.
Another slowdown caught them an hour later when they entered a low plume of thick smoke drifting across the highway and bringing visibility down to almost nothing. Galaxies of red and blue flashing lights emerged from the murk and then receded: places where emergency vehicles had clustered to stage firefighting efforts, or to aid locals affected by the strike. At one place, sitting in the middle of the road, festive with road flares, was a rock the size of a car, which had struck the pavement hard enough to pierce it and lever up thick shards bristling with snapped rebar. Not the meteorite itself, but ejecta: shrapnel hurled out from the impact site.
There was another delay, this one purely for gawking, at the place where the interstate crossed the Columbia River, almost a mile wide, at Vantage. Something was going on down below the bridge, on the eastern bank of the river where the low span angled up away from the water to let big barges pass beneath it. Blinding lights had been elevated on poles, creating a mottled spill of daylight where something huge and cylindrical was being winched up off a barge.
With all of those complications it was well after midnight when they reached the town of Moses Lake and turned off the interstate to follow almost all of its traffic in the direction of the Grant County International Airport.
That was its official name. When Doob woke up the next morning, crawled out of the tent he had shared with Henry, and stood up and looked about, he immediately dubbed the place New Baikonur. It was at the same latitude as Baikonur and it was in the same sort of steppe country.
And like the steppe of old it was populated by nomads. Space Okies. At least ten thousand, he guessed.
They seemed orderly enough. Long straight lines had been chalked out on the dry lakebed, apparently with the same equipment used to stripe football fields. These delineated streets and avenues that, for the most part, were being respected by newly arrived tent pitchers. Portable toilets huddled at strict intervals, though Doob’s nose told him that some