Chapter 9:

With Space and Time to Think

Reminded of his time at the bottom of the pool, Nathan couldn’t help wondering about his boyhood friend once more. James disappeared right out of high school, into the armed forces, and never returned. Marvelous told everyone that James went into the Marines, hoping they’d respect James for taking such a rough charge, although Marvelous knew no more than anyone else. Secretly, Nathan figured James joined the Coast Guard, the Air Force, or more likely, the Peace Corps. Whatever he did, James never returned, and Nathan wondered if perhaps he was killed in some stupid training accident.

Ah, but that was so long ago, and so very far away.

Nathan looked up from his position at the bottom of the crevice. He stood a couple hundred feet deep in the chasm that at points was maybe thirty feet across, and at others, less than ten. He could see everything fine now, as the sun was shining through the canyon.

The sun made him itchy wherever it touched. It was not the sun filtered through a couple miles of atmosphere, but unadulterated and irritating. Nathan turned away and scratched at his hands.

Unafraid of the vacuum, he’d long ago stripped off his encumbering spacesuit. He stuffed as much of it as he could into the helmet. The arms and legs dangled out, the weighted boots dragging along the ground as Nathan walked.

Without his suit, Nathan wasn’t cold, but quite the opposite. The sun was amazingly hot, as if Nathan had fallen asleep in a sauna, except the air wasn’t thick and hot. Dressed in long underwear, Nathan began to sweat. Within minutes, the sun would once again pass over the canyon, until the rock spun around again to face the sun.

Nathan approached the TIM he’d lowered to the floor of the crevice. He wasn’t supposed to put one here, but what was command going to do about it? They wouldn’t even know once all the bombs went off. Taking a look at the device, he made sure it was secure and had started its process. The drill on the TIM had already activated, and was drilling to a depth of about fifty feet. Not that he could hear it. He could feel it in his feet: a light vibration. When the drilling finished, a thick and highly explosive substance would drip into the hole bored by the drill. The explosion would race down the solution, forcing more and more energy into the center of the asteroid, thereby shattering Lucifer 6, and once more securing humanity’s frail future.

The TIMs were originally designed to complement strip-mining efforts, but were considered overly destructive and thereby, surprisingly, unethical. The device was field tested only once on a slight mountain in south central Colorado where a single TIM destroyed the entire north face of Sunspot Peak (initially 13,189 feet Above Sea Level, now only 12,543). The TIM set off a landslide that nearly buried the observers, even though they stood over a mile away. The explosion registered on seismographs across the planet, and was criticized for triggering a 7.7 earthquake in Alaska two days later. Several buildings in Anchorage were so damaged they had to be demolished. Valdez, mere miles from the epicenter, was wrecked. No oil flowed for months while the small city was rebuilt. Of course, allegations that the TIM was to blame were never substantiated, but the device was shelved—until NEAR officials took a shining to it.

Nathan dropped the stuffed helmet next to the TIM. Hunching down, he sprang upwards, hoping to grab a ledge maybe fifteen or twenty feet up. He was surprised by the height and velocity he achieved, feeling like Superman as he flew upward.

Nathan missed the ledge he meant to grab. He shot up, not quickly, but quick enough, and when he saw he would overshoot the ledge, he simply let it pass as he figured he’d grab further up the wall. He continued upward, the gravity of the asteroid not strong enough to rein him in. He glided higher and higher, up between the two rock walls, reaching seventy-five feet, and still flying. Soon, he approached the top of the crevice.

As he rose through the crevice, Marvelous watched the line he’d used to lower the TIM. It went on and on as Marvelous traced its course. A plague of ethical questions arose as Nathan contemplated the asteroid, the mixed red and grey coloring, the cold touch and its imminent destruction. Precisely, he wondered if it was right to destroy something in order to preserve something else. How could it be justified? Was he justified in destroying this rock and thereby altering the course Nature, God, or Whatever, had set for the universe? What if man was meant to suffer this calamity? What if Nathan and NASA were in the way of evolution, or the Will of God, or whatever?

But the question was answered with the asking. As part of Nature’s grand scheme, could Nathan affect the world in any way other than Nature intended? Didn’t his very existence justify any action he could conceive? Wouldn’t he thereby be justified in anything he could do?

He decided in order to answer these in the negative, one would have to believe in abominations and forces counter to nature; or termed differently; forces of good and evil, of God and Devil.

But Nathan long ago gave up on questions of such religious idiom. If there was a God, he was a clock-maker, an absentee landowner, a Kansas City slumlord. He was no longer present. He sat off in another land, demanding an inflated rent, yet refusing to upkeep the property. God was living off the interest, and didn’t care that the tenants were putting holes in the walls and ruining the plumbing.

Nathan slid upward, watching the wires, thinking small thoughts about large topics. The thick wiring snaked over the edge of the crevice, caught by its anchor. Nathan looked up, realizing he was about to soar off and away from the asteroid altogether, into cold dead space. Realizing the danger, Nathan grabbed at the wiring, just catching it as he soared by. Immediately, his body twisted and pivoted as he held the wire. His feet rocked back and his torso pushed forward. He swung around, crashing into the wall with a thud and whacked his head against the outcropping. Bouncing off the wall, Nathan swung back, but slowly, this time, and managed to cushion himself against another rough rebound. With one hand, he held the wire; with the other, he rubbed pain out of his skull and blood out of his hair.

Settled on the edge of the canyon once more, Nathan stared off at the starry sky above him. The gravity of the asteroid never would have reined him in before he shot out of the asteroid’s gravity well and into the dark reaches of nothing. He wondered what it would be like to soar through space, flying for all eternity between the stars. He contemplated jumping into the starry void. It wouldn’t be particularly dangerous—but talk about a new sort of monotony, pure and unchanging. Although he wouldn’t have to worry about angry ex-lovers writing cruel books, or strangers shoving his inadequacies in his face, it’d be a thoroughly inconvenient existence.

And that’s when he knew what he had lost. He had lost his fear. He’d lost the fear of decompression, of insta-freezing, the fear of a shockingly quick and dramatic death. Now this mission was looking like everything else Marvelous could remember. There was such a sharp taste of anticipation as the experts told him of all the magnificent dangers. The touch of space should freeze him instantly and the vacuum should explode him into icy chunks of guts and gross, chinking off the rock in a burst of misguided glory. He would not be able to breathe, not even to shout in his exotic pain. He would simply die a grisly, lonely, beautifully tragic death, that would end in the blink of an eye.

This was the kind of fear he felt as a small boy, sitting patiently at the bottom of the apartment’s pool, jumping off the top of the swing set, and other occasions of adolescent recklessness. These events should have left him cold and senseless, bloodied at best—but none of them bothered him for more than a few seconds. That sharp taste of danger was gone, robbed by experience. Nothing could touch him. He was indestructible, and not even God or the Universe cared to put him in his place. They simply watched as he stumbled through life, a perfectly imperfect machine.

Now, killing this asteroid was little more than a chore, another task as hopeless, pointless, and riskless as everything else he’d ever done. If he didn’t go through with it, if he decided to renege on this assignment—well, so what? Others would shoulder the price. There would be screaming and shrieking and the boom of impact, and after all the dust had settled, Nathan would go home to his mansion with no Michelle waiting for him. He’d sleep in front of the boob tube—if he managed to sleep at all. To everyone else it meant something. To him, this rock was an inconvenience: a flat tire he had to change so he wouldn’t ruin the rim, a load of laundry he had to wash so he wouldn’t smell funny wearing the same shirt for the sixth day in a row, an oven he had to preheat so several million people could go about their small lives.

In a sudden rage, Nathan wondered if perhaps he shouldn’t retrace his course and rip every TIM right out of the rock. Let the world die. Let the Mediterranean evaporate in the heat and impact of Lucifer 6. Rome would burn once more. It’s not as if it was the first time. Then he could watch the ants scurry to and fro, caught up in the whirl of uncertainty and fear caused by their physical fragility. The survivors would chant words of infinity, never and always, begging higher powers for safety. If there was a God, such words must be sacrilege as the world is forever dynamic, taking everything, and promising nothing.

Marvelous hung his feet over the edge of the crevice and looked up at the Earth, looming large over the asteroid. Nathan realized this was a fight to the death between the Earth and Lucifer 6, and the asteroid stood no chance at all. He wondered what it was like to be at such disadvantage and not even realize it.

Nathan sighed another soundless sigh as he thought about returning home, about swimming in the blue-green sea off the coast of Greece while it was still blue-green. If he rode the asteroid in, he would swim in that sea in a day’s time, red with blood and heat.

At once, Nathan decided to fail. He wanted this failure chalked up to human frailty so he could be like everybody else and fail when he’d truly tried. He wanted to return, forlorn and defeated. Then, all the people who spent so much time and effort to get him up here, to do this inconceivable job, could pat him on the back and tell him to keep his head up. He wanted someone to say that they’d demanded too much, even of someone so powerful and marvelous. He wanted frailty.

Marvelous wasn’t just human, he was more than that—and it was lonely—because he didn’t know anybody else that was more than that. There was only him. He wished people understood that perfection is inhibiting, because nobody wants to be intimate with the Perfect. The Perfect is to be revered and worshipped, or feared and fought if it is seen as a Perfect Evil. Nobody ever laughs with the Perfect. Nobody ever plays ball with the Perfect, or pulls pranks on the Perfect, or tells crude jokes in front of the Perfect. People pray to the Perfect, offering up worship, praise, and sacrifice—but they do not smile, they do not love, despite all their words to the contrary. No wonder Jesus always wandered alone in the desert. Who could deal with all the groveling and kowtowing? Who could put up with people’s incessant pleas for mercy, justice, or a bit of bread? Jesus offered the huddled masses knowledge and true power, yet all they took was a bit of fish and a few misunderstood platitudes. Marvelous imagined nobody ever invited Jesus to play softball.

It didn’t matter that Nathan was far from Perfect, that he was perfect in a small way, in a physical way, that only magnified the imperfections of his mind and soul. He had his human flaws. Only his constitution, his immunity to physical injury made him different. He wanted to be liked. He wanted to have friends, to get intoxicated and say the wrong things, and be forgiven for saying the wrong things. He wanted to be anybody else in the crowd. He needed people to laugh at his follies and like him nonetheless.

So why not? Why not let the whole thing end in a rain of rock and terror? Why not give Lucifer 6 the chance to change everything?

But he knew nothing would change. A lot of people would die and the very face of the Earth would be scarred; but nothing of importance would change. Nobody would look at Nathan any differently.

Marvelous gave a soundless sigh and stared up at the world. What was he to do? The answer came through the vacuum, as Nathan listened for the whisper of God, Nature or Whatever. He would do what he saw, which was nothing.

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