I Will Love You Forever

Chapter 1, part 3: Observers

He certainly is taking his time, Lu thought, arching her back in a combination of joy, frustration, and eagerness. She knew Ken was as eager as she was, and was taking his time because he loved her so, but she wanted to get their baby started with an intensity she had never felt in her life.

“Please,” she whispered.

* * *

“Jill! Come look at this.” Zack adjusted the instruments and his glasses, and frowned at the numbers on his primary screen. He watched the secondary screen come into sharper focus. A spot of light was on it, centered between three alignment pips.

“What is it?” Jill leaned over his shoulder, brushing back her dark hair. She was wearing a sweatshirt that said Go Big Red, and she had a mug of chocolate with the Cornell logo on it. “Want some cocoa?”

“Maybe in a bit,” Zack said absently. “Before I answer that one, though, why don’t I tell you what I’ve just seen that blip do?”

“Okay,” Jill said, impatiently. “What did it do?” They had been sharing the Ithaca astronomical watch center for two weeks now, and Jill was getting very tired of Zack’s tendency to make everything out to be more than it was. She had caught him staring at her several times, and while he didn’t quite creep her out, she would be glad when their internship was over in a few more weeks. She liked Professor Hoover, but she was beginning to wish she had never gotten the internship. Zack was so annoying.

“It moved,” he said. “Three times.”

Jill snorted. “No kidding, genius! Given its trajectory, it’s either on a cometary orbit or coming from outside the system. Of course it’s moving. Is it going to hit us?”

“Uhhh, hang on. I have to recalibrate.”

“Zack, that was the first thing you were supposed to do!”

“Yeah, but … there. Let me do it again.”

“What do you mean again? You only have to do that once.”

“I told you. It moved. Okay, there it is. It’s not only going to hit, Jill, but it’s going to hit somewhere in the U.S. Unless it moves again.”

Jill was silent for a few seconds. “Okay, I give up. What are you talking about?”

Zack frowned at her. “How many times do I have to tell you? It moved.”

Jill took a deep breath and counted to ten, mentally. “Yes, you keep saying that. Suppose you tell me what you mean by it.”

“I mean it changed course, three times.”

Jill managed not to spill her chocolate as her mouth came open, suddenly dry. She swallowed a gulp of too-hot cocoa, and set the mug down with shaking hands. Her heart was racing. “Was it near anything else?” She put her hand on his shoulder, looking in close at the screen. Could it be?

“Nope.” He grinned at her. “Open space, all three times. And Jill, it isn’t on a cometary orbit, and wasn’t when we spotted it.”

Oh, my god. “Are we recording?”

“No, dammit!” Zack’s grin went away. He was used to computers doing what he wanted them to do. “They aren’t operational. Nothing down here is running yet.”

“How can that be?”

“Something about the security protocols. They started hooking them up yesterday, and now nothing works, and I can’t get anything to record.”

“We’re still locked in?”

“Oh, yeah. Got to keep the world safe from us. God forbid that we should text a friend while we’re in here.”

They looked at each other, and both realized how crazy it was. Everything was working fine on the satellite, and everything was working in Ithaca on the instrumental end. Normally, they would be able to reconstruct any event from telemetry readings, but not even the readings were being saved. They were calibrating and practicing, and that was all. The system wasn’t supposed to be operational until next month.

Once it passed trials, the entire lab would be moved somewhere else, so the defense department could use it for whatever it was they planned to use it for. No doubt everything would be recorded then. In the meantime, Jill and Zack were just two undergrad interns watching the instruments on an unfinished project, to find out if everything kept on running the way it was supposed to.

Part of the security protocols meant that no communication was allowed into or out of the watch center, except through secure channels. The secure channels were nearly ready, but in the meantime, once Professor Hoover locked them in, not even cell phones would work, and they didn’t have access anyway. They could open the doors, but that would set off all kinds of alarms, and more than likely get them both fired.

It all added up to the fact that if Zack was right about what he had seen, it was the most important astronomical observation in human history, and they could neither report it to anyone, nor record it. It was going to obliterate itself on the planet in just a few minutes if it didn’t slow down.

“Can we call Hoover?”

“No!” he said. “I already thought of that. She’s as cut off as the rest of the world.” Zack shook his head. “It’s going to make a heck of a splash when it hits.”

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