Dust in the Wind

I'm writing this story with the hope of obtaining another clue in the Review Puzzle contest, although judging by the original seven clues another one will just make things more complicated!

1713 words

Dust in the wind.

I thought about it as the small plane came in to land on a dusty red dirt airstrip, designation SLRI, Riberalta, Bolivia, where Jerry was waiting for me.

We met back in 1976 when Kansas senator Bob Dole was campaigning in his home state running for vice president.  He didn't make it but we two hit it off. We were neither of us political, I was a cub reporter and Jerry had talked himself into a job stuffing envelopes to fill in time before college. The rock group Kansas were big around then and had just released 'Dust in the Wind'. I remember we went to one of their concerts and everyone was singing along, or in my case croaking, never could carry a tune.

Over the years we'd run into each other now and again, have a beer and talk. I turned into a real reporter and for a while I thought my stories were going to change the world but then I grew up.
Jerry studied physics and astronomy and got involved with what are now called SSSBs - Small Solar System Bodies - asteroids and stuff like that. He developed computer software that was used to track and predict their paths and was frequently invited to observatories and universities to talk about his work.

On one of these trips to a Japanese university he met Michiko. I went to their wedding. A few short years later I went to Michi's funeral. I can still see Jerry opening his clenched fists at the graveside to release a handful of dust.

Michi's parents were hibakusha - survivors of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Her mother and a brother were still alive. Michi died from a brain tumour. Jerry was convinced it was because of genetic damage suffered by her parents and passed on to her. He became depressed and withdrawn, vehemently opposed to war and weapons of all sorts; he stopped travelling and socialising, apparently spending all his waking moments on his work.
Well, he was working all right but it turned out that nights, weekends and holidays were all devoted to developing a data-driven integrated development environment - a computer games engine. And the games to go with it. You might remember the RPGs Asteroid Empire and Thoremon's Revenge. They were Jerry's. He got in at the start and made a mint then sold the rights to the games and engine and made even more.

Meanwhile scientists and governments were starting to take the threat of an asteroid strike seriously and Jerry was co-opted to work on defence plans.
I sort of lost track of him for a while. News hacks and billionaire scientists don't move in the same circles, but I used to read the occasional space story in Newsweek or the New York Times. That must be where I read that an asteroid had been named after a Chinese physicist. It caught my eye because the asteroid had been discovered by Xinglong Observatory which was one of the places Jerry used to visit, a few hundred kilometres from Beijing, near the Great Wall. He used to say what a beautiful setting it was.
The physicist's name was Peng Huanwu and he helped develop China's first atomic and hydrogen bombs. "Whoo," I thought. "Jerry won't like that!"
That was in September 2006.

On a chilly February evening five months later I was sacked out in front of the TV, channel surfing as you do most of the time these days trying to finds something worth watching. Suddenly I heard the sound of 'Dust in the Wind' and there were the guys from Kansas (plus a few girls wielding violins) performing at a recent concert. The band still includes some of the original members, a bit older and fatter than they used to be, and they have a hectic touring schedule. I sat back to enjoy the show. It was at an outdoor arena and the cameras ranged over the audience as well as the band, pausing every now and again on one or other concertgoer. At the end of the song they focused on a stony-faced guy standing a little apart from everyone else as he unclenched his fists and let fall a cloud of dust. It was Jerry.

That was worrying. I emailed him next day and since we were both in the big smoke we arranged to get together for a meal. I took a cab over to his place, an apartment in a fancy area of town. I buzzed but he wasn't quite ready so I went on up to wait. It was quite something. Wall to wall carpet, central heating to combat the cold night air, leather furniture, and a very long wooden desk along one wall that held three or four computers with a couple of screens apiece. One had CNN showing in a window, several seemed to be running calculations but the one that caught my eye was a 3D picture of none other than Xinglong. The view was swinging repeatedly through 360 degrees centred on the observatory and the sky was clear, the nearby mountains sharp.
"Sorry to keep you waiting," Jerry said buttoning up a sheepskin jacket as he came into the room. "Let's go."

Turns out I was lucky to catch him in town. He was heading back to Bolivia in a couple of days, to a small observatory he had built in a jungle clearing near Riberalta.
"Jungle?" I queried. "I thought you needed clear horizons and lots of sky to look at stars."
"I'm looking a bit closer to home," he said, "at asteroids and other near earth objects. Using a radio telescope."
I asked him about his asteroid defence job.
"I resigned," he answered. "Got fed up with politicians cutting research budgets and increasing military spending so I left. And now I'm free to do my own thing." He grinned. "I can afford it after all."
I enjoyed talking to Jerry again, although he seemed a bit distracted, and we agreed to keep in contact via email. He left a couple of days later and I thought no more about it until mid September 2007.

At noon on the fifteenth, near the settlement of Desaguadero in Peru, a meteorite streaked across the sky from the north-east. It struck the ground and exploded creating a pit 13 metres wide and two deep. Scientists later said the impact should not have happened. It was caused by a rocky meteorite, but that sort always breaks up in the atmosphere and doesn't form craters. It takes a denser, metallic meteorite to form a crater. Until now.
One story mentioned that Desaguadero was on the Peruvian border with Bolivia. I brought up Google Earth and looked. It was about 700 kilometres south-west of Riberalta. I got a prickly feeling at the back of my neck, part fear and part scenting a story. I emailed Jerry.

He was waiting at the airstrip with a battered-looking jeep. We picked up my bag and drove along wide streets laid out in a grid till we reached the waterfront, though that's a rather grand-sounding name for the muddy bank of a wide, sluggish, brown river. We stepped on board a flat-bottomed barge with a blue tin roof, the captain started an outboard and we chugged slowly across the Beni river. Another battered jeep waited on the other side and we piled in and started along a narrow, rutted track. The jungle quickly closed in. All told the journey took about three hours.

The observatory was in a very large clearing. The telescope looked like a huge TV dish but made of wire mesh rather than metal. A white-painted concrete building sat about 50 metres away and housed the control mechanism, amplifiers, and computers.
The living quarters, made of wood and built on stilts, were another 20 metres or so towards the edge of the clearing with a shed that housed a generator and a large number of batteries. Arrays of solar panels were spaced over the northern part of the clearing.

I'd been wracking my brain trying to work out how to introduce the subject but in the end I didn't need to.
"You want to talk about the Desaguadero meteorite," he said with a sigh. "I suppose you want to know how I did it."
"That too," I said, "but mostly I want to know why. And what you're going to do next."
"It didn't go quite according to plan," he continued without really listening to me. "It was supposed to land in the Pacific about 200 kilometres out to sea. Came down a bit early."
"It nearly landed on a village," I yelled. "You could have killed hundreds, men, women and children."
"Yes, I suppose so. I wanted to smash things you know. Hurl thunderbolts like Zeus. But not hurt people."
"Throw large flaming rocks around and people are bound to get hurt," I muttered. "I thought you were supposed to be saving the world from asteroids, not trashing it."
"It's pretty much the same thing, you know. Get a fix on one and nudge it. You can speed it up, slow it down, change the direction. But only a little bit at a time. You have to do it again and again. The hard bit is keeping track of the new path and working out where it'll come down." He sounded quite enthusiastic.
"And that's what you were planning for Xinglong? Jerry, you've been there, you know some of those people. And suppose you missed again and landed on Beijing? Imagine the carnage. All because of a flying rock with a name most people have never heard of and couldn't care less about."
He stopped staring at the radio dish and looked at me.
"The Chinese never bombed Japan," I said. "We did."
He was quiet for a moment or two then nodded slowly.
"Come on. There's cold beer in the fridge."
We climbed the stairs to a wooden veranda that ran round the outside of the house. Jerry picked up a bag, hefted it and then emptied its contents over the side.
Dust tumbled out but there was no wind so it just fell slowly and settled on the ground beneath.