Poetry Magazines - The best collection of poetry magazines online - Simon Armitage

       The Millennium SkySearch would never have succeeded if we’d called it something more modest.  Just as SETI both loses and gains by being wrongly bracketed with films like E.T., we got help from hundreds of thousands of eager SF fans who thought a world-ending comet was actually likely.  It allowed us to do our serious work, but also left us open to ridicule. 

       As was happening with our televised debate, seen by the channel’s owners as just a cheap way to fill in the time between profitable advertising slots.  No one had to debate seriously, and our chief opponent was an MP who had  made a career out of feeding public ignorance.

       ‘Look, people have been killed by falling pigs, shot dead by fox cubs that they stupidly stowed along with loaded shotguns, bounced out of windows while practising kung-fu and even beaten to death by peace protesters.  But killed by a meteorite - never.   So why waste the taxpayer’s money on the search for menaces we’ve never yet seen?’  The politician sounded smug and confident.  And having seen small- minded greed triumph over the past thirty years, I though he was probably going to win again.

       ‘Deaths from meteorites are rare but large’, replied the astronomer, not sharing my pessimism.  ‘Small meteorites make a nice light show, that’s all.  But an object big enough to punch through the atmosphere is going to do a lot more damage.

       ‘Every animal larger than a goat died in the great upheaval sixty-five million years ago.  Contrary to popular beliefs, dinosaurs were very successful competitors who defeated the mammals on an evolutionary “level playing field” of more than a hundred million years.  Only a rare accident allowed our potential to get realised.

       ‘It was far from the last.  As recently as 1908, the Tunkuska event flattened half a million acres of pines in Siberia.  If it had hit a city, no more city’.

       ‘OK, it happened long ago.  These are the twenty-hundreds, we have new concerns.  When’s the next one due?’

       The astronomer smiled.  ‘Some time next year. Nothing earth-shattering, but anyone within a hundred miles of the impact point is likely to die.  Oh, and it’s on course to hit Western Europe - most likely Britain’.

       ‘Doomsday!’ shrieked someone in the audience.

       ‘More like Damnsday’, I replied, with sudden inspiration, and getting in before either the politician or the astronomer could say more.  ‘I know the object, 2009-0419-H;  we at Millennium SkySearch found it.  Only we can refine orbits  to the nearest quarter of a million miles, about the moon’s distance from Earth;  the rest is up to the experts.  We find hundreds every year;  there was no reason to think this was a “Damnsday Object”’.

       ‘Why Damnsday?’ asked the chat show host, a serious young black lady who also despised the channel owners and was flushed with the sudden realisation that she wouldn’t be needing them any more.  Unless the astronomer turned out to be mad or incompetent, this routine chat show on a minor local channel would soon be repeated all over the world.

       ‘You’d definitely say “damn” if a few million tons of ice and rock came dropping down from the sky, hundreds of times faster than a fast aircraft.  If you were within a few miles, you wouldn’t even say that.  You’d be dead before you even knew there was a problem’.

       ‘The world will survive;   it’s survived past impacts.  This is rather a small object, only half a million tons’.

       ‘Only half a million tons!?’

       ‘There’s much bigger stuff out there.  The Shoemaker-Levy fragments that hit Jupiter - if one of them had hit Boston, the blast would have knocked over London and Miami and Los Angeles within seconds.  Killed everyone on the planet within a day or two. This one’s much smaller, and travelling a mere fifty thousand miles per hour.  And yes, that is ordinary, as things go in the solar system’.

       ‘They’ll shoot it down, though.  Like they did with Saddam’s missiles’.

       ‘Patriot missiles in the Gulf War were only useful for pretending to the Israelis they were being protected’, chipped in the astronomer.  ‘They mostly missed.   When they did hit, they made the damage worse.  At the heart of the typical impact there is massive overkill;  rocks vaporised, far more violence than anything human could survive.  Let a missile blast it in outer space, it would fragment and still be on course to hit us.  Turned into half a million tons of brick-sized fragments, it’s much worse’.

       ‘It’s what’s so bad about dumdum bullets’, said someone in the audience. ‘A typical bullet goes right through you.  The dumdum breaks up inside of you and rips your flesh apart’.

       ‘Of course, you could be mistaken’, put in the politician.

       They used to say that about global warming, even after the storms of 1987 and 1999 and 2004.

       There was no error.   The astronomer had seen the significance of 2009-0419-H a week before, but wisely waited until other astronomers confirmed it, before going public with the deliberate and successful intent of humiliating an old enemy.  He did lose the chance to name it;  I’d got in first and Damnsday Object was now its name.  Yet it was a triumph for him, and also for us at Millennium SkySearch. 

       I’d been a volunteer consultant from its beginnings.  A few thousand from an inheritance, invested in a friend’s tiny computer company that suddenly ballooned into a multi-million pound success, left me with a decent annual income and no need to work again.  I did still work, of course.  But on stuff I thought was important, not what I was likely to be paid for.

       Following the success of the SETI’s screen-saver, which harnessed the power of tens of thousands of home computers to look for possible alien radio signals, lots of other people wanted to get in on the act.  Millennium SkySearch was the best of these. 

       Astronomers take lots of pictures that show nothing much and which they don’t bother to process in detail.  Some show asteroids and comets, mostly small and uninteresting.  But with time and a lot of computers, you can tie up these observations and get a good orbit.  Sometimes an orbit that comes close to us on Earth.  That’s when we pass the raw data onto the professional astronomers, who sometimes discover an object that could come closer to us than the moon ever does.

       And had now discovered an object that was going to hit.  And not some uninhabited wilderness either;  Britain itself was now a target.

       A lot of people felt that it was best to do nothing and just evacuate the impact zone.  But the Damnsday Object turned out to be on course for Grantchester, just southwest of Cambridge.  Cambridge itself might be flattened, and this was unacceptable.

       A task force was set up, with a special Minister, whom we took to calling the Minister Responsible For Astronomically Expensive Disasters.  He agreed the Damnsday Object was too massive and loose-packed to be safely destroyed by a bomb;  it would be diverted instead.  The newly built SpaceTug was to be landed on the Damnsday Object and change its course to something harmless.

       That the Damnsday Object was just within our capacity to handle it struck me as odd, and perhaps not wholly accidental.  If life is galactic, there could be ancient and alien beings with an interest in educating aggressive young species.  It’s strange that the 1908 object struck one of the few spots on Earth where it would be noticed but would not kill anyone.  Maybe we were being slowly enlightened, by something that didn’t think we were yet up to direct contact.

       My philosophising led me to think we would also be allowed to fail, if we were foolish enough.  The Damnsday Object had been on course for decades;  if something had directed it, this had been done when it was moot if something like Millennium SkySearch would ever get established.

       I also knew that the SpaceTug was new and untested.  So I used my brief fame to get included in something called EarthForce, which was not at all military and was indeed forbidden to carry any weapons more lethal than a wooden staff.  Our green medical-looking uniform was for those with medical or engineering or survival skills, or just a belief that the object would strike as predicted.

       I spent several days as one among hundreds of us who carefully removed the glass from the windows of King’s College Chapel.  This and other big vulnerable buildings were also surrounded and filled with ‘lead balloons’ - large balloons, part water-filled and held with nets, to take the shock wave from the impact and disperse it high  up where it would do least damage.

       Grantchester itself was beyond saving.  ‘Oh God to see the branches bare / At the Impact Zone at Grantchester’,  exclaimed one wit on our team.  ‘Oh God, to see the branches ripped off and the very trees pulverised by 1000 m.p.h. winds’, more like.  Residents were advised to abandon the place for ever, if other lines of defence failed.

       The Damnsday Object would be diverted - but where?  If the impact point were moved east into the North Sea, it would make a massive wave that would hit Holland and Belgium as well as Essex, Kent and London.  Londoners were just as hostile to any suggestion it might be sent south, even to thinly inhabited rural areas.  Birmingham was horrified at the notion of sending it west.  The north was also less than delighted at having the disaster dumped on them, but they turned out to have the least political clout. 

       The idea was first to shift it to the Wash, shallow and unlikely to produce much of a sea-wave.  King’s Lynn and its neighbours were enraged, of course, but their voices got shouted down.  Besides, the idea was eventually to push the impact zone out over arctic and finally to a near miss.  Sending it into the Wash was just a fail-safe fallback.

       Living in Peterborough, northwest of Cambridge, I didn’t find it so fail-safe.  The vehicle known as the Grettir was a rush job.  Europe provided a launch rocket and the Russians and Americans cobbled together a space motor that would loop the SpaceTug round the moon and then slow to let it rendezvous with the Damnsday Object.  After which, it would land and begin the long slow process of shepherding the Damnsday Object away from Earth.

       Surprisingly, all of this was done just fine, with some hitches but no real failures.  And all of us in EarthForce - and hundreds of millions more watching it on live television - cheered as we found that speeds had been matched perfectly.  The Grettir detached itself, robot brain working faultlessly, and cautiously approached the Damnsday Object.  Which was now identified as a comet; if it missed the Earth it would perhaps loop round the sun and put on a fine show for us.

       The landing was perfect, only the comet’s surface did not cooperate.  It unexpectedly turned out to be full of pockets of  methane gas, several of which exploded and blasted the Grettir into space, damaged beyond hope of recovery.  None of which was intended;  I do not believe the conspiracy theorists who say they always meant to blow it up.

       ‘After the Grettir explosion, the impact area has jumped several miles to the northwest, and also spread out a bit.  The “big fellow” - 80% of the mass - is on course for Coppingford, northwest of Huntingdon.  A mass of smaller debris will fall all over Upton, Hamerton, Sawtry, Steeple Gidding, Little Gidding and Great Gidding.  All of those places will need to be evacuated’.  That’s how the Minister Responsible For Astronomically Expensive Disasters put it.

       ‘There will be spectacular daytime meteor showers over Oundle and Peterborough, but I’m not expecting any impact damage.  Shockwave damage, yes.  All of the “lead balloons” that were going to be used to protect Cambridge will be needed at Oundle and Huntingdon and Peterborough, with some at smaller places. That’s assuming that the Beowulf doesn’t do the job’.

       ‘What job?’ was my comment.  ‘Look at that mass of debris, spread out over hundreds of miles now - no one engine will ever move it all.  It should be able to move the “big fellow”.  I do wonder what the people at Upton, Hamerton, Sawtry, Steeple Gidding and the other places are going to say’.

       No need to wonder.  Hundreds of Internet pages sprang up, posted by those who found Cambridge’s disaster being suddenly shifted on to them and reflecting strongly on the character, ancestry and assumed sexual and hygienic habits of the persons responsible.  No need for me to repeat any of that.

       With interest but not much hope, we watched the launch of the giant unmanned rocket containing the second and much improved Space Tug, the Beowulf.  It was promised that it was steerable and would deal with lots of the fragments, not just the one now heading for Coppingford.  But then the launch rocket exploded half way up, being a little too close to the cutting edge of technology.

       ‘I don’t think it was supposed to do that’, said I, as the sky suddenly filled with smoke and flame.  ‘I hope the evacuation plans are well advanced, because the Damnsday Comet is going to turn up right on schedule’.

       Our main concern in EarthForce (Peterborough) was now the Fletton Fragment.  One per cent of the mass, thrown out on a course of its own by some collision, with a lot of volatiles acting like little rocket motors.  It might hit Fletton in the south of Peterborough, but no one was quite sure what it would do.  There were plans to use a surface-based missile to divert it and a couple of others that looked feasible.  But just in case, everyone would be evacuated to special reception centres where they could watch the impact in perfect safety.  It would be a good show, but no more.

       Closer, in the zone that was to be evacuated, it would be much more spectacular.  Once in a lifetime - decidedly so, if something hit too close.  But I figured the odds at no worse than one in a hundred.  It was my life, why shouldn’t I be allowed to risk it?

       A fellow who claimed to have ‘relevant experience arising from his period of army service’ said we could help each other.  The careful way he said it made me think he wasn’t bullshitting.  He needed me to fiddle the records;  Headquarters would think we were in one place and that place would think we’d been sent off on some emergency.  I needed him to avoid being caught, because the authorities were expecting people to try to break the rules.

       What it ended up with was wearing something like a diving suit, packed with ice, which cancelled our body heat as far as any infrared scanners would be able to see.  That it was also numbingly painful to wear was part of the price.  He and I and an unintroduced friend of his hid under a tarpaulin on the night before the impact, at Deadman’s Swamp south of Peterborough.  Distantly we heard helicopters which had special army snatch squads who got most of those who’d had the same idea.  But not us.

       In the morning, exactly ten minutes before impact, we got up and discarded our freezing camouflage suits.  It no longer mattered if we were spotted; helicopters would be death-traps in the multiple shock-waves of impact.  Let them see us - I was planning to turn myself in anyway.

       What bothered me was the sudden discovery that our companion was Sibyl, whom I knew from Earthforce, and knew to be the mother of a small child.  I was single and felt my life was my own to risk; her case was different.

       She saw it otherwise - she’d set the whole thing up, I’m sure.  She had her autobiography drafted, but so had dozens of other people and she had to make it unique.  She also figured that her kid, currently in the care of Sibyl’s own mother, would be better off with money and no mother than a mother but no money.  Sadly, that’s true enough as things are now.

       Anyway, there was nothing I could do, so I got out my video camera and Sibyl and I recorded each other - our ex-army friend managed to stay anonymous.  We saw - live and much closer than anyone else - the successful detonation and diversion of the Fletton Fragment, which scattered very nicely over what should have been open empty countryside. Including Deadman’s Swamp, where a one-ton boulder came down near us, close enough to knock us off our feet, far enough for us to survive.  It managed a very neat impact on some grassy knolls that had fenced off a suspected early Bronze Age site, a thousand years older than nearby Flag Fen.  I do insist that this must have been a coincidence;  it’s Sibyl who insists that the people all that time ago somehow knew what would eventually happen there.  Just because stone circles with their banks and ditches look vaguely like meteor impact craters doesn’t mean there’s any deeper link.

       Regardless, what was revealed looks like another Seahenge or Woodhenge.  It’s lucky we were there;  the squad of soldiers who came to arrest us could be put to good work preserving stuff that might have perished quickly after it was churned up and exposed.

       It was only when higher authorities turned up that Sibyl, who’d been standing about seemingly in shock, revealed that she had her foot on a small gold object.  ‘I didn’t want anyone to be tempted to swipe it’, she explained  (obviously she never meant to keep it, but someone else might have sold it on to a private collector; it happens a lot).  Then the world might never have seen ‘Boadicea’s Necklace’ - it’s vastly older, of course, as far from the real Queen Boudicca as Boudicca is from Queen Victoria

       That’s my part in the story.  Sibyl got what she wanted, including a rich husband - I had considered marrying her myself, but her interest in me seemed to have ended with getting the impact point.  We were of course not prosecuted, given the value of what we’d done for both astronomy and archaeology.

       Much better work was done elsewhere - sterile probes into meteorite fragments that revealed bacteria and an odd complex coral-like thing that died a couple of billion years ago, long before anything that complex got started on Earth in places like the Burgess Shale.  Also its biochemistry is weird - probably related to life on Earth, but not closely.  It's like they figured from the Mars Meteorite - life on Earth descended from somewhere else in the solar system.

       And far beyond this solar system, there may also be beings watching us in their own cryptic way.  It may not be the last Damnsday we’ll need to face.