Moonfall

Everyone watched Boswell's Comet for a month as it spun towards the sun. For a few weeks, its spectacular long tail was visible to the naked eye in the night sky. Close to the sun, it was difficult to see and, once completely lost to view, the public lost interest.

Only the academics watched it low in the sky around dawn when it reappeared again. It was headed back this way and would pass close by in astronomical terms but would miss the Earth by a million or more miles as it scampered on its way out of the solar system, not due to return for another 720 years.

The European Space Agency were the first organisation to announce its deviation. Analysing the recordings, they believed the core appeared to hit something before it changed direction and headed for the Moon. It crashed into the dark side about three hours after it deviated from its anticipated path. Two NASA moon satellites recorded up to the point of impact but both failed to continue transmissions almost immediately.

The effect was apparent wherever in the northern hemisphere the Moon could be observed. Like a tidal wave, a cloud of dust, ice and rock circled the circumference of the moon over a period of several hours. Whether it was day or night, even though the Moon was in darkness, the cloudy atmosphere flared in the sunlight and made the Moon look like she was covered in a beautiful diaphanous silk gown.

This phenomenon proved entertaining for a day or two, especially as it made the Moon look twice as big as it used to. Over several days the billowing cosmic cloud thickened and the Moon looked three or four times bigger but even this unique phenomenon soon evaporated from front page news. Oh how fickle the public be!

The news was soon dominated by reports of record tides, with low-lying areas flooding all over the world, while the ebb tides went much further out than previously, causing ocean-going ships and ferries to run aground and long-lost wrecks break through the surface of the seven seas.

The Moon itself was invisible in the sky, only its thick dust skirts, which obscured the surface seemed to get bigger and bigger, like a ferocious storm in the cosmos.

China had a satellite ready to launch and sent it up to look at the dark side of the moon and check out the source of the billowing cloud. The quiet launch was largely ignored in the West, although NASA requested information from the Chinese Space Agency, blind as they were with their own pair of satellites unresponsive.

The images were embargoed, even though the news broadcasters were desperate for information updates. Soon though, they didn't need the Chinese camera images. No, the storms on the surface on the moon started to clear, showing that the moon was split into two uneven halves and both heading straight for Earth.

***

The President was safe in his bunker deep underground, his cabinet convened in the Oblong Office. The prognosis was grave, the smaller half of the moon landed in Siberia, which triggered off earthquakes across the continents of Asia and Europe. The second and much larger half landed in the Pacific, sending the largest tidal waves ever seen across the planet. The shock of the impact had thrown the orbit about two million miles closer to the Sun and altered the axis so that Indonesia became the north pole and the mid-Atlantic the south pole. Most of the existing atmosphere was displaced by the shock so it was no longer possible to breath air on the surface. Also violent dust storms raged which scoured the surface of all traces of human endeavour.

It would be a thousand years before the surface and atmosphere calmed down enough for the surface to be habitable again. The bunker had food, power and air for only two centuries, eight hundred years short. Mankind was, to all intents and purposes, waiting for extinction.

At the end of the inaugural meeting of the New United State of America Underground, the President asked whether Professor Webster, the US Chief Science Advisor who suggested that a nuclear explosion next to the comet would divert it to land on the moon to mine for precious heavy metals, made it to the bunker.

A consultation of the muster records confirmed, "Mr President, he made it to sector 7, shall I summon him?"

"No, just tell the fucker he's fired."