Movies like Meteor, or Deep Impact, or the appallingly bad Space Cowboys always fucking piss me off, for some reason. I don’t plan on seeing 2012, anytime soon.
I’m not much of a scientist, although I taught grades six and seven for about thirty years at a couple of different schools in Des Plaines, and I was happy enough doing that. It seemed like such a privilege to help mould young minds; that is until I saw what happened to those minds when they became adults. For some reason some of, ‘the most brilliant young minds of our times,’ don’t even know the simplest, most basic facts of math, physics, or chemistry, or even that most uncommon of all things, common sense. As a teacher, I hate feeling like a total, abject failure, but that sort of thing happens from time to time. For some reason the human rejects seem to do awfully well later in life. It doesn’t seem fair for some reason. Some of the worst students go on to become doctors, lawyers, or newspaper editors, but our society is pretty sick to begin with. And science isn’t about the quest for truth or knowledge, it’s about patent applications and making money out of poorly-tested products that ultimately cause more harm than good. I suppose I saw them young, before they realized their true potential. And the old are entitled to be grumpy once in a while. I had always believed I would develop more patience as I aged. I was wrong! Oh, so wrong. But as our allotted time gets shorter, the value of time seems to go up proportionately. I guess you could say that the old appreciate life, while the young just seem to take it for granted.
So when a young guy that I taught years before showed up in the bar on a Friday night, and latched onto me like a long-lost friend, I had to be tolerant. I had to accept the fact that the boy I always thought of as, ‘poor Billy,’ had been hired by a prominent firm, a member of our military-industrial complex; and that he was in the business of making tools and devices for killing people. Sure enough, he caught sight of me and his eyes lit up.
“Mister Prentice,” he bellowed the length of the bar.
There wasn’t much point in slouching down in my seat at that point, was there?
Sometimes you just know. We spent some time reminiscing about old school chums, good times and bad times. Predictably enough, it wasn’t long before he started in on the complaints about his career, his wife, his job. It seems his wife didn’t understand him. He told me that three times before quaffing off his fourth martini and ordering another.
My unspoken comment, “I think she understands you very, very well,” remained unsaid.
It didn’t take too long before William, as he liked to call himself now, was drunk. And I mean stupidly drunk, where he was telling me stuff that he shouldn’t. Although I’m glad he did, as it gave me the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to save the world.
“I shouldn’t be telling you this,” he slurred, then burped; then looked around with a guilty look: obviously married, in the worst possible way.
“Then don’t,” I replied shortly.
Some guys just can’t take a hint. He sure couldn’t, but that’s perhaps for the best, as was quickly demonstrated.
“There’s a comet,” he confessed, with a look of raw desperation. “It’s headed this way. It’s top-secret, of course, but you’re all right. I know you won’t tell.”
His eyes burned into mine.
Ah, yes; the masturbation incident. He was actually a little young for it at the time, but he had been reading some book—I think it was Desmond Morris’ ‘The Naked Ape,’ or something.
And he had tried it. Apparently his first climax was achieved while clutching that book, and following along like some kind of instruction manual. Morris’ rather clinical description of the higher primates engaging in sexual intercourse, was the chapter that did it. A lot of the kids passed that book around, and I eventually confiscated it. Otherwise I probably wouldn’t know what’s in it. It seems he got scared when nothing came out! His first climax was a dry one. And he couldn’t talk to anyone at home. His parents were right lunatics. They’d beaten an older brother half to death once when he was about fourteen years old and had come down with a cold.
His mom had found a few facial tissues in his waste-paper basket, and predictably enough, drawn the obvious-but-mistaken conclusion. As a teacher, I despise a certain kind of parent, but we have to treat them all like gold, or we get sued for a half a billion dollars or something ludicrous like that. The school board frowns on that sort of thing. It’s okay for the parents to foul up the kids, try to teach them anything useful, or accurate; or arcane notions, like evolution, or freedom of inquiry, and they get uptight. Recently the government of Canada has decreed that the subject of homosexuality, in conjunction with other sex education, has to be dealt with in the schools, beginning in grade four. Yet it is the parents, some of whose children are homosexuals, or will be later in life, that are objecting to the subject being dealt with in any terms other than outright condemnation. It is only after their kids have been beaten to death by the side of the road, that they realize that a parent can forgive a child for anything, even things the child could not control. We’re supposed to teach the kids tolerance, and the kids would be fine at that age.
It’s the parents who can’t hack it; it’s the parents who are truly ignorant.
I taught his brother history in grade seven, and quite frankly the bruises, the half-healed gashes and cuts were something to make one’s blood boil. Greg is doing eleven life sentences in some maximum-security prison out west somewhere. His record is a long litany of violent, sexual crimes against women, oddly enough. No, Greg is not a homosexual, he’s merely a violent psychopath.
Somehow that’s more socially acceptable, at least in his own mind.
Half the people in the Bible were violent psychopaths, unless I’m reading it wrong.
With a wrench I pulled myself back to the present day, and tried to show a little compassion, although I had this particular former student pegged as the classic, ‘A-type personality,’ which is a scholarly euphemism for the nethermost regions of the alimentary canal. I suppose he can’t help it. The upbringing has a huge influence, which even the best teachers can seldom correct. William was telling me that the meteor was going to hit the Earth, and we were all going to die, and there was no way that they could build a big enough nuclear weapon to, ‘vaporize it,’ in his words, and that’s when I put on my little thinking cap.
“See, I think you’re going at it all wrong,” I suggested in a gentle tone.
“No, no, we just can’t build a big enough friggin’ device,” he insisted. “That’s the only way we’re going to stop it.”
It seems the usual missiles and rockets just weren’t big enough to carry a zillion-megaton bomb. After all, they had been designed to drop much smaller bombs on our neighbor’s heads.
By destroying the world we prevent our enemies from winning, or something deucedly logical like that. They can design it, they can build it; they can test thousands of them to make sure they’re going to work. They can even use them from time to time. For some reason they can’t call it what it is: a bomb. I guess that’s considered rude.
I suppose I’d had a couple or three drinks myself; by this time, otherwise my patience would have held out against any assault.
“Dispersed gases,” I told him, and I don’t know where that came from.
Somewhere in the subconscious mind, I suppose.
“What?” he asked. “Dispersed what?”
William had his doctorate, for Christ’s sakes, and yet every one of them buggers all think the same way; the benefit of higher education. They all think like they’re supposed to. So I said it again.
“Dispersed gases,” I told him. “The meteor goes through a cloud of dispersed gases, and then it heats up from friction. It begins to outgas. That’s a verb, William. It radiates them in all directions, in a semi-spheroid pattern. Most of its mass won’t even approach Earth. You must have twenty or thirty thousand smaller missiles lying round, gathering dust, no good to anyone that way…perhaps you should use some of them up, before mice gnaw the insulation off all the wires and they self-ignite…”
William had talked about the comet’s transit past Saturn and Jupiter, and a couple of smaller planets. Let their gravity catch a-hold of some of that mass, while it was a liquid or a gas, and in the midst of decomposing from simple, abrasive heat. The key was to start a little earlier, and use just enough of it, or approximately one zillion megatons.
He sat up a bit then.
“What are you getting at?” he gasped in new-found hope.
“Think of it as driving a nail into a pencil lengthwise,” I offered. “If that comet had to go through something like a jet contrail, lengthwise, the heat of friction, from all the dispersed gases, say helium, or hydrogen, any kind of gas will do, although the denser the better…hell! You could use black powder from a bunch of firecrackers, if you wanted to do it on the cheap.”
Sure the world would go through a few years of climate upheaval. It would cost the taxpayers, who would have to subsidize the big corporations in order to guarantee massive profits, but at least the common man would still have a planetary biosphere to inhabit. And the bombs had all been paid off at the bank decades ago.
“That’s…that’s…” he said, wild-eyed, and no wonder.
The man was piss-drunk, and he was confronting the issue of calling the boss while under the influence and not in a very organized state of mind. “Brilliant!”
“It’s not brilliant at all,” I told him with just a hint of heat in my voice.
It suddenly occurred to me that William must have cheated on Section Five of our science class.
“You should have read the book, William,” I told him. “You get all your science off of the movie screen, or out of some crappy science-fiction book from some rank amateur who thinks kids floating through the air on a bike is cute.”
I couldn’t help it. It just came out that way. His pale, insipid, wishy-washy blue eyes stared into mine. Then he slapped his thigh, pulled a little phone out of some inner recess, and hit the ‘speed-dial’ button.
“Can you explain that, over the phone?” he asked in an agony of suspense.
Perhaps there was some hope for William after all. Sometimes massive forces, applied crudely, and all at once, just won’t work. Maybe he’ll get it someday.
“Of course, you ninny,” and he grinned a little at that.
Teachers have to say something, after all. That one was socially acceptable, although the parents and school board wouldn’t have liked it much. So William muttered away for a couple of minutes, while I checked my watch as unobtrusively as possible, wishing I were somewhere else. Then he handed me the phone.
I had to explain it again a couple of times, about little puff-balls of smoke or gases all lined up in a row ahead of the meteor, and how the thing would arrive in Earth’s vicinity as just a big clump of steam; without enough kinetic energy to cause any harm or penetrate the atmosphere, et cetera. Usually a couple of beers are enough for me. William’s company made my skin crawl, and I pounded back another. I’ve never thought of myself as an ugly drunk, but maybe the medications, the pain-pills and the alcohol were an unlucky combination.
I had to explain that if you took a half of a tenth of one percent of velocity off of that comet, there’s no way it could hit the Earth. I tried to explain how a simple bomb-blast behind the comet, up nice and close, in the cone of shadow where the sun’s light pressure was shielded by the body of the comet itself, would inevitably guarantee that the comet would pass behind and outside the orbit of the Earth harmlessly, but I don’t think he was actually capable of understanding that part. Perhaps it simply wasn’t an expensive enough option for his line of thinking.
After a long conversation with some four-star cluster-fuck in Washington, I handed William back the phone. Making my excuses, I headed for the washroom to relieve myself. Just coincidentally, the rear exit is right there, out of sight of the main lounge. I bought a huge cup of coffee at a well-known retailer, and went home. I haven’t been sleeping much lately, to tell the truth.
Sometimes I sit out back on a starry night and just enjoy the sky. And I’m glad I got the chance to talk to William. The universe is just too beautiful to let shit-heads, and ass-holes, and guys like William fuck it up for the rest of us. Incidentally, I heard later that ‘poor Billy’ got a big promotion. He lives in Cupertino, California, and makes about four hundred thousand dollars a year, and in a recent news story, it seems he got a fifty-million dollar bonus at Christmas.
The little creep never even called me or anything. But who knows? Maybe he blacked out and doesn’t even remember talking to me! It’s scary when you think of people like that involved in our national security.
About a year and a half later, a few of us schoolteachers were invited to the White House. our new president is big on beer, pretzels and, if it seems justified, a quiet conversation in the back room. She gave me some new medal that no one has ever heard of, and apparently, ‘If I’m ever out of work…’
I told her, “No fucking thanks, Madame President.”
I hope she accepts my decision in this matter. You see, I’m a Democrat, and I can’t stand them lying Republicans. About half of them should be put up against a wall and shot. The other half are just fine where they are, beating their kids half to death, promoting ignorance and bigotry, and preventing poor people from enjoying the common benefits of civil society. They make regular people look much better than they really are. Don’t take my word for it. Just sit back and watch for a while. Sit back and observe objectively.
Lately the stars seem a little dimmer at night, or perhaps my eyes are going. We all have to get old sometime. I’m tired, and I suppose that’s a good thing. It makes death look so much more attractive. You want the truth? I have cancer. I’m not in pain or anything, what with all the medications they’ve been giving me lately. I’ve had all the treatments. There is nothing further anyone can do for me. On the plus side, my wife is dead, my kids are all grown up, and I don’t owe anyone any money. I’m an only child, and my parents are long gone, although I do have an elderly aunt in Detroit. And I’m very grateful for all the kindnesses, of course.
There are times when I kind of resent saving the world.
I just know damned well they’re going to bury me with that fucking medal on my chest, and if I’m lucky, my granddaughter Sarah will put a little package of chocolate-chip cookies in there too, and maybe a little note saying how much she loves me.
END
'The Comet' appears in 'The Paranoid Cat and other tales,' available from fine online retailers everywhere.
http://www.amazon.com/The-Paranoid-Cat-other-tales/dp/0987972391
