![]() Three hundred thousand years is a long time in anybody’s book. On average, objects greater than a hundred yards in diameter strike the planet once every five thousand years, and asteroids half a mile across thunder down at intervals of three hundred thousand years. But, of course, that midnight glow and the fate of those unhappy Siberian reindeer were nothing at all compared to what would have happened if a larger object had invaded the Earth’s atmosphere. There were no stars visible, no moon-just a pale, quivering light, as if all the color had been bleached out of the sky. The night of the Tunguska explosion the skies were unnaturally bright across Europe-as far away as London people strolled in the parks past midnight and read novels out of doors while the sheep kept right on grazing and the birds stirred uneasily in the trees. “Forget it!” I shout, and her voice drifts back to me-“What if it’s Maddy?”-then I watch her put her lips to the receiver and whisper, “Hello?” We stare blankly at each other through the first two rings and then Maureen says, “I’d better get it,” and I say, “No, no, forget it-it’s nothing. “Hey,” I call, pitching my voice low, “are you coming or not? You don’t expect me to wait all night, do you?” I listen to the little sounds from the bathroom, seductive sounds, maddening. We had cocktails earlier, and a bottle of wine with dinner, and we sat close on the couch and shared a joint in front of the fire, because our daughter was out and we could do that with no one the wiser. I’ve lit a candle and am waiting for Maureen to step into the room so that I can flick off the light. I am in bed with a book, naked, and hardly able to focus on the clustered words and rigid descending paragraphs, because Maureen is in the bathroom slipping into the sheer black negligee I bought her at Victoria’s Secret for her birthday, and her every sound-the creak of the medicine cabinet on its hinges, the tap running, the susurrus of the brush at her teeth-electrifies me. Petermann, of 16 Briar Lane, white, divorced, a Realtor with Hyperion, who has picked at a salad and left her glasses on the bar, loses control of her vehicle. Maddy has a cell phone and theoretically she could have called us, but she didn’t-or that’s how it appears. Maureen and I bought her a car, a Honda Civic, the safest thing on four wheels, but the car was used-pre-owned, in dealerspeak-and as it happens it’s in the shop with transmission problems and, because she just had to see her friends and gossip and giggle and balance slick multicolored clumps of raw fish and pickled ginger on conjoined chopsticks at the mall, Kimberly picked her up and Kimberly will bring her home. She’s out there in the dark and the rain, walking home. My point? You’d better get down on your knees and pray to your gods, because each year this big spinning globe we ride intersects the orbits of some twenty million asteroids, at least a thousand of which are more than half a mile in diameter.īut my daughter. Petersburg and annihilated every living thing in that glorious, baroque city. If the meteor had struck just five hours later, it would have exploded over St. Seven hundred square miles of Siberian forest were levelled in an instant. ![]() Thirty miles away, reindeer in their loping herds were struck dead by the blast wave, and the clothes of a hunter another thirty miles beyond that burst into flame even as he was poleaxed to the ground. There was a detonation-a flash, a thunderclap-with the combustive power of eight hundred Hiroshima bombs. The force of its entry-the compression and superheating of the air beneath it-caused it to explode some twenty-five thousand feet above the ground, but then the term “explode” hardly does justice to the event. ![]() Or that’s not strictly accurate-the meteor, which was an estimated sixty yards across, never actually touched down. This was the site of the last known large-body impact on the Earth’s surface, nearly a hundred years ago. But that’s not really what I want to talk about, or not yet, anyway. My daughter is walking along the roadside late at night-too late, really, for a seventeen-year-old to be out alone, even in a town as safe as this-and it is raining, the first rain of the season, the streets slick with a fine immiscible glaze of water and petrochemicals, so that even a driver in full possession of her faculties, a driver who hadn’t consumed two apple Martinis and three glasses of Hitching Post pinot noir before she got behind the wheel of her car, would have trouble keeping the thing out of the gutters and the shrubbery, off the sidewalk and the highway median, for Christ’s sake. ![]()
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