The Rogue — (Volume 1 of Planets Shaken)

By Lee W Brainard

2019 Audie Award finalist in the Faith-Based category
2019 Readers' Favorite Gold Medal winner in Christian Fiction

"Enormously satisfying and exciting ... bolstered by excellent scientific background" — Amazon review

"A pulse-pounding page-turner ... well-plotted, well researched, and well-written" — Amazon review

When rookie astronomer Irina Kirilenko discovers a planet-size comet in the Kuiper Belt on a collision course for Mars, she first faces stonewalling from the Minor Planet Center, then coercion and stricture from NASA. They press her to embrace an ingenious reinterpretation of her discovery and ban her from talking about it.

It slowly dawns on her that the government is fostering a massive conspiracy to keep the public oblivious to the truth—Earth is facing an existential threat. Unwilling to be silenced, she recruits fellow astronomer Ariele Serrafe to evaluate her discovery, placing both in the crosshairs of government agents.

The Rogue is the first volume of the Planets Shaken series, a thought-provoking thriller based on the mysterious line in Luke 21:26, "the powers of the heavens shall be shaken."

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lee W Brainard
• Release date: May 20, 2017
• ISBN: 9780998759425

Lee W Brainard

Lee has been a Bible teacher for over 35 years. His areas of study include the Bible languages, Bible prophecy, apologetics, ancient history, catastrophism, and electric universe cosmology. He and his wife live in Harvey, ND where he preaches twice a month at Harvey Gospel Chapel. They have four children — all of whom are married — and twelve grandchildren.His passion is the presentation of Bible truth with a special interest in prophecy. To communicate these truths he writes books (fiction and non-fiction) and blog articles on his website, soothkeep.info.Lee's first foray into fiction, The Rogue, volume one of the Planets Shaken series, is a 2019 Audie Awards finalist in the Faith-Based category.His hobbies, which he rarely finds time for, are backpacking and mountain climbing. He finds enjoyment in the simple pleasures of life — conversation with friends, coffee, dark chocolate, mountains, the bugle of a bull elk, the call of the loon, the smell of lilacs in the spring, sunrises and sunsets, and northern lights.

Book preview

Chapter 1

Los Angeles

Friday afternoon, November 23, 2018

Ariele stared at the package, perplexed. The return address was Shadowchaser, 107 Walnut Lane, Mentor, KS. The cancellation stamp said Salina, KS. Nothing rang a bell. She had no family or friends in that part of Kansas. None that she knew of anyways. And none of her friends went by the moniker Shadowchaser. She double-checked the address. Ariele Serrafe, 420 Hancock St., Bancroft Apts., Unit F8, Los Angeles, CA 90031. That’s definitely me. Her mouth tweaked and her eyebrows raised. Weird.

She tucked the crumpled package under her arm, tossed the key into the empty parcel box, and shut the door. Then she turned back to her mailbox, which was still sitting open, retrieved her mail, closed the box, and began to walk briskly toward her apartment. Her eyes nervously scanned the area for the packs of youths that milled around aimlessly most evenings. Her father disliked her living situation, a run-down complex in an edgy neighborhood east of Chinatown. He constantly reminded her that she could afford better. True, she could afford better. But she had her life mapped out. And the first thing on her list was buying a homestead in the San Gabriels. She longed for an orchard with fruit trees, a garden, a few chickens, a hand pump, and a woodstove. Living here was part of her plan to get there. Alas, things weren’t going quite like she had planned. Property values were climbing almost as fast as her savings account. She sighed.

To her relief, she saw none of the gang-looking types that made her nervous, not even at the basketball court or the soda machine by the laundry room. She relaxed her pace and turned her attention from scanning for potential threats to surveying the monotony of her surroundings. The dreary exterior of her building near the southeast corner of the complex was indistinguishable from the other buildings. The three dozen time-worn brick buildings, one apartment deep and three stories high, were clustered around courtyards of trampled grass and aging concrete like gaunt elephants at withered waterholes. Though the scene was as familiar as the back of her hand, it was awkwardly foreign. She didn’t feel at home here and likely never would.

She reached her building, bounded up the stairs to her landing on the second floor, and leaned against her door, pinning the package with her belly. While holding the doorknob with one hand, she inserted the key with the other and tried to turn it. Rats! Six calls to the manager, and I still have to fight this door knob! If I ever have a guy in my life, he’s gonna be a fix-it kind of guy. After several jiggles, the key finally turned.

Once inside, she set the package on the kitchen table. Who is this Shadowchaser? She opened her laptop and searched the White Pages for the return address. Nothing. She brought up a map of Mentor, Kansas and looked for Walnut Lane. There was no such street. In fact, Mentor was barely a town. The address appeared to be bogus.

Ariele examined the package, looking for tell-tale clues that she might have missed. Aha! There was no handwriting on the package. Both the address and the return address were printed on computer-generated mailing labels. Whoever sent the package didn’t want to be traced or identified. Perhaps Shadowchaser didn’t even live in Kansas.

She removed the brown wrapping paper and discovered a battered shoebox—Christian Louboutin pumps, size 7. Probably not a guy. She lifted the cover and peered inside. It was stuffed with wadded pages from the Salina Journal. Under the wadding lay a manila envelope with the word ROGUE glued on, a single R and OGUE. They appeared to have been cut from the covers of magazines. Probably Redbook and Vogue. That’s another one for a woman.

Her curiosity piqued, she opened the envelope with a scissor tip and dumped the contents. A single DVD and a several-page letter, typed and neatly folded, spilled onto the table. Intrigued, she unfolded the letter and read the top page. It was a cryptic note.

The social was boring.

We sat on swings under the stars,

Laughing at conspiracy theories,

Talking about end-of-the-world scenarios.

We shared directions:

You were headed for sky time in the Golden State,

I for computer time in a cubicle out East.

We shared ambitions:

My pursuit was trans-Neptunian objects,

Your focus was near-Earth objects.

Here’s an NEO you’ll wish you never heard about.

A smile creased her face. The who part of the mystery was solved, kind of. Shadowchaser had been a classmate at California Institute of Technology, Caltech for short. They had shared various classes starting with Astronomy 101 their freshman year, but they had never been close friends. Both had a passion for astronomy and were exceptionally bright—straight As from junior high through their graduate work. Both had obtained a PhD in astrophysics.

She could see her face clearly, but she was drawing a blank. What was her name? It was trying to claw its way out of her subconsciousness. Irina … Irina Kirilenko. The memories came flooding back. Their differences went far beyond the fact that Irina had focused on TNOs while she had focused on NEOs. They were different, like princess and hippie chick.

Irina was religious, some kind of Bible-thumping Christian. Ariele wasn’t religious though she was culturally Jewish and attracted to Eastern mysticism and nature.

Irina didn’t drink. Ariele did. Though she had grown out of the party scene before the end of her sophomore year, she had continued her little indulgence every Friday night with the Rat Pack as they styled themselves. The five of them studied, laughed, and sipped bitter liquors like retsina and vermouth in emulation of their favorite intellectuals and authors.

Irina was a small-town girl. She had been born and raised in Ostroh, Ukraine, where her father taught physics and mathematics at the National University Ostroh Academy. When she was fourteen, he moved their family to Yreka in Northern California, fleeing the growing specter of Russian hegemony before it was too late. He was now head of the mathematics department at the College of the Siskiyous. Ariele was a bona fide city girl having grown up in Los Angeles, where her father was a fairly well-known sound technician in the film industry.

Irina loved classical music, ballet, and ballroom dancing. Ariele’s tastes were more trendy: indie, reggae, and new age. Irina was cultured and classy. Ariele was fascinated with the hippie culture, old Mother Earth News magazines, and tiny homes.

Earth to hippie chick. Ariele rolled her eyes at herself, reigned in her nostalgic reverie over her Caltech days, and returned her focus to the matter at hand. She flipped the page, walked to her favorite chair in the corner of the living room, settled in with one leg crossed under, and began reading the body of the letter.

Ariele,

You may recall my doctoral dissertation, The Underestimated Danger Posed by Comets in which I pointed out that there are more than one million long-period stony comets in the Kuiper Belt. Thousands of these asteroid cousins will eventually threaten Earth: some directly, others indirectly by bumping smaller bodies (like asteroids, Trojans, Centaurs) into orbits that will intersect Earth. The very-low-albedo variety are the most dangerous. Like stealthy ninjas, they can move deep inside our solar system without detection. Last year, I discovered one of these ninjas while searching for trans-Neptunian objects. But let me give you the backstory and the context.

My dissertation led to an invitation to join Dr. Goldblum in his TNO program at Cornell. I arrived in June 2016 and set up my program to search for TNOs in image sets from over two dozen sources. In April 2017, I turned my attention to Taurus. Several weeks later, I discovered an occulted star above the Pleiades on a plate from April 2016. Further investigation revealed seven more occultations between July 2013 and January 2017. Initial analysis suggested that it was an exceptionally large comet, larger than Hale-Bopp, so we put it at the top of our priority list.

For reasons that didn’t become apparent until later, Dr. Goldblum stretched out the verification process far beyond the usual days or weeks—a full five and a half months.

The observatories helping with the project—the Keck at Mauna Kea, the Hooker at Mt. Wilson, and the MMT at Whipple—observed an occultation in October just below the Pleiades which allowed them to make an accurate time-of-transit measurement for the comet. We were shocked. Its diameter was far larger than we anticipated, between 900 and 1,000 kilometers. That is about fifteen times the diameter of the largest known comet. Because its size and orbit reminded me of a rogue elephant on a rampage, I nicknamed it the Rogue.

The fact that it is invisible to optical telescopes despite its massive size suggests that it has an extremely low albedo, far below 0.02. If you recall the albedo chart, 0.04 is the albedo of coal, so this comet is more than twice as dark as coal.

Using the available data, our predictions indicate that the comet will pass through the asteroid belt and shave Mars—within 25,000 miles.

On Monday, November 6, we sent my report on the new comet to the Minor Planet Center.

That afternoon, we received the standard response from the MPC acknowledging receipt of the report. Tuesday, we anxiously waited for the confirmation email. It never came.

Wednesday, Dr. Goldblum didn’t show up for work. His assistant said he was attending a special NASA function and would return in a few days.

That afternoon I received an email from the MPC requiring me to hold off on all communication and publication about the discovery until NASA had concluded its investigation—a very unusual request.

When Dr. Goldblum returned, it was obvious that something had changed. He seemed touchy about the comet and didn’t want to talk about it. At the time, I wondered if the government had initiated a cover-up, but shelved the idea as preposterous.

The following week, on Wednesday, November 15, we received another standby letter from the MPC reiterating the request to refrain from communication on the matter.

The awaited confirmation email finally arrived on Monday, November 27. But it was a disappointment. The MPC insisted that my discovery was not a string of stellar occultations caused by a comet, but a string of refractions caused by the shock wave on the nose of a jet from a recently formed black hole. Further, it banned me from communicating on the phenomenon, which they regarded as a sensitive issue, until the government (NASA, JPL, the Pentagon, etc.) had finished their investigation.

While I felt uneasy questioning the experts, I was deeply skeptical of their interpretation that the stellar occultations were caused by the shock wave from a black-hole jet. Perhaps it was a viable theory. But why wait until now to introduce it? Why wasn’t it brought up earlier with any of the dozens of comets that had been discovered in recent decades? Why trot this theory out for the first time in the face of a potential comet whose orbit appears likely to create havoc in the solar system, with repercussions that could threaten Earth? And why did the MPC involve the Jet Propulsion Lab if there was no potential threat to Earth?

I asked Dr. Goldblum if he had any doubts at all about the black-hole interpretation. He replied that the experts had spoken. That should be the end of the matter. It was our business to find things. It was their business to decide what those things are.

This response rattled me. This wasn’t the fiercely independent scientist I had signed on to work with. And his position couldn’t be chalked up to humility showing deference. He isn’t that humble. It had to be kowtowing. Men only did that for fear or gain. So, what was he afraid of? Or what was his gain? Or were both motives at play?

Then he dropped a bomb. All research in Taurus was being turned over to elite teams of researchers. All unauthorized research in Taurus was banned. I was removed from my Taurus project and required to turn in my research by the end of the day.

Thankfully, after the second letter from the MPC had left me with a gut feeling that something was wrong, I made copies of every document and image in my research and stored them in Buster.

Ariele winced. Buster? She knows about Buster? Buster was a Linux-based off-shore, deep-web security company that offered data storage and a suite of services with insane levels of protection. The arcane business was loved by hackers, the underworld, and the rich and powerful. Über-cool. There is way more to this straitlaced, churchy girl than meets the eye.

While I felt a little uncomfortable with keeping copies of my research, I consoled myself with the thought that my actions were more in keeping with the Old Testament story of Jehosheba hiding the heir to the throne from the murderous designs of Athaliah than a traitor perpetrating crimes against his country.

I sat on this for about a year, hoping against hope that the situation might change. But I can’t sit on it any longer. The government is covering up the truth. They don’t really believe the black-hole-jet refraction theory that has been making headlines. If the only danger was another relativity problem to give astrophysicists headaches, they wouldn’t have banned research on the phenomenon, much less all research in Taurus. They know full well that the Rogue will pass dangerously close to Mars. They don’t want this disruptive information in the hands of the public.

Moreover, I fear that my time here at Cornell is soon coming to an end. I am on Homeland Security’s list of potential threats. If I don’t get this information out into the hands of others now, I may never get the chance. The truth will be buried.

The enclosed DVD includes my eight original occultations and two observed by Dr. Goldblum’s team, one in July and another in October 2017. I had no access to any further research after the latter date.

The data sheet that is attached to this letter gives the dates, locations, and stellar names of all ten occultations. I have also included the date ranges, locations, and stellar names for three potential occultations in the months ahead. If you are interested, one of them is likely to occur between November 30 and December 2.

Sometimes, I fear that I have blown this matter out of proportion and that I am being paranoid. I don’t know for sure that it will deflect another body into an orbit that will threaten Earth. But I do know that it has made people in high places very nervous. Perhaps the Rogue will be the disruptor implied in Luke 21:26, the planets of the heavens shall be shaken. Something has to shake the planets. They are not going to shake themselves. You may recall that I shared this verse with you the evening we sat on the swings and talked.

Your friend,

Shadowchaser

P.S. If nobody can reach me, it’s likely that I’m languishing in a FEMA camp somewhere—one of the shadowy Homeland Security gulags—detained under the pretense of being a soft terrorist, who poses a non-violent threat to U.S. security.

Ariele was torn. Part of her was inclined to side with NASA and the astronomical community. Maybe Irina was mistaken in her judgment, and in her zeal to defend herself, she had fallen down the rabbit hole of conspiracy, suspecting the government of a cover-up. Granted, the black-hole-jet theory did border on science fiction. But so did relativity theory. The universe was filled with bizarre phenomena that defied explanation, and the explanations for them often defied comprehension.

Yet she couldn’t shake the possibility that Irina might actually have stumbled upon a threat to this planet that the government was trying to cover up. She was one of the most sober-minded thinkers Ariele had ever met. She had a nose for facts, wasn’t tripped up by logical fallacies, and wasn’t influenced by the herd mentality.

On top of that, Ariele herself distrusted the government. Her research on the assassination of John F. Kennedy and the shadow government secreted in various secret societies had led to chilling discoveries. Their tentacles reached deep into Washington, D.C.—every branch of the government—along with Wall Street, the tech giants, and the mega-corporations. This dark reality gave her pause. She had long ago lost all trust for government agencies in general. They served their own agendas, not the American people. Maybe she should regard NASA with the same suspicious eyes.

She shifted uncomfortably in her seat as recent changes in the Astronomy Department at Caltech came to mind. Under the auspices of the NASA Bill, the Hooker at Mt. Wilson, like every telescope at every other observatory in the nation, had been brought under the jurisdiction of NASA. So had all plate research. Every project had to be vetted by NASA. Theoretically, they were trying to minimize research overlap so they could maximize NEO cataloging time. The concept had seemed plausible, so she had chalked up the heavy-handed implementation to overweight bureaucracy. Now, Irina’s letter raised an intriguing question. What if the changes had been implemented as part of a cover-up to keep the public ignorant of the comet?

She turned her head and stared out the window, hoping to momentarily escape the horns of her dilemma by visualizing the rural property she hoped to own someday. But anxiety over the letter made it impossible to concentrate on her dream. She grappled with the quandary. I need to get to the bottom of this. Is there really a cover-up? Or is Irina guilty of misinterpreting the data? I need more information. But how and where am I going to get it?

Chapter 2

Cornell University

Monday, May 22, 2017

On a sunny spring morning a year and a half earlier, a titanium BMW sped into the parking lot near the Cornell Center for Astrophysics and Planetary Science and slipped into an open spot. A tall, stunning brunette, stepped out. She slipped her shades high up on her brow and began strolling toward the building with long, graceful strides.

Irina Kirilenko was still amazed at the way things had worked out for her. Her family had migrated from Ukraine when she was fourteen. Since that unbearable first year, she had graduated from Yreka High School at the top of her class, earned a bachelor’s degree in astronomy in 2012 at Caltech, added a master’s degree in 2014, and completed her doctorate in astrophysics in 2016. At her graduation party, her father had surprised her with her classy ride—a 2006 7 Series with low mileage. Now she had been at Cornell for ten wonderful months, and she was living the dream.

But it was her dissertation on comet composition and threat—and her spirited defense of it—that had landed her the position. Dr. Goldblum, who had been a visiting lecturer at Caltech and had sat on her committee, had been impressed by her dissertation and had extended an invitation to join his TNO-research program at Cornell. Without hesitation, she had jumped on the opportunity.

It seemed like a good fit. Not only did he lead one of the most prestigious TNO programs in the world at Cornell University, but he had a reputation for being a maverick who wasn’t intimidated by the high priests of cosmology. He shared her belief that the asteroid belt was caused by the shattering of a planet that had formerly orbited between Mars and Jupiter, though he put this event hundreds of millions of years in the past rather than in recent history.

More importantly, he partially agreed with her theory that comets were rocky bodies. While holding that the majority were dirty snowballs from the Oort Cloud, he did believe that some of them had been spawned by the same ancient collision that formed the asteroids. He had even gone on record in a prestigious journal defending the existence of rocky comets and pointing out that they posed a much greater threat to the world than was generally ascribed to comets.

The week after she defended her dissertation, she loaded her possessions into her car and headed for New York, taking a scenic route that passed along the southern rim of the Grand Canyon, wound through the Sangre de Christo Range and the Colorado Rockies, and then traversed the Appalachians from Tennessee to New York. She loved the mountains and never tired of soaking in their majesty.

She had arrived in Ithaca the third week of June, found an apartment within two days, and started hunting for a church. After visiting several, she chose New Life Church. It had an awesome worship team and exuded an aura of vision and purpose, the same attractions that had drawn her to Resurrection Fellowship, her old church in California. She also appreciated the fact that Pastor Colin Jellineck was not only a dynamic speaker but highly educated, with an earned doctorate in Theology.

Her new position had begun the second week of July. The first week, she focused on learning the layout of the buildings and meeting her program directors and colleagues. The following week, she began setting up her detection system, an algorithmic program she had designed herself which looked for occultations of fixed stars on optical and infra-red plates. It ran several scans simultaneously, one of which searched for very low arcsecond changes, enabling the detection of comets approaching Earth at or near the ecliptic.

Once the software was ready, she assembled an array of images from the Orion sector with sets from the CFHT Legacy Survey, OSSOS, WISE, 2MASS, NOAO Science Archive, Hubble, Spitzer, Pan-STARRS, New Horizons, IRAS, and twenty other sources. On the first of November, she had fired up her program.

The Orion investigation had succeeded far beyond her or Dr. Goldblum’s expectations. Between November and April, she had discovered six TNOs, an unparalleled stretch of serendipity. Two were large enough to classify as dwarf planets: one the size of Makemake, the other slightly smaller. No earthly joy had ever been half as satisfying as the joy of sending her dwarf-planet discoveries to the MPC.

But she had faced one small bump in the road: what to name the dwarf planets. Her dilemma was that TNOs were traditionally named after mythological creation deities. She had wanted to name them Methuselah and Melchizedek, names associated with pivotal moments in man’s history. But the nod to the Bible had been unacceptable to the Committee on Small Body Nomenclature.

She laughed at the memory. Mythical deities are okay, but major figures from the Bible are banned? What an upside-down world. Typical bureaucratic short-sightedness. What are they going to do for names when they run out of creation deities?

Finding herself at the doors of the Cornell Center for Astrophysics and Planetary Science, she left memory lane behind, bounded into the building with a song in her heart, then waltzed into her office. She began the day with her usual Monday ritual: pouring a cup of coffee, putting on Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, sitting back in her chair, clutching her cup with both hands, and mentally preparing for the week.

She was now three weeks into her Taurus project, and things were going amazingly well—two TNO candidates were in the verification process. Relishing the sense of accomplishment after years of hard work and preparation, she reached for a piece of her favorite dark chocolate, Sage and Juniper from Evocative Nuances, and popped it into her mouth. It evoked magical hints of the rugged West. She leaned back in her chair and drifted into romantic reveries of being swept off her feet by a cowboy.

Chirp! Chirp! Chirp! The alarm for a potential TNO interrupted an evening ride down a pine-covered ridge on a palomino behind a blonde cowboy, her arms wrapped around his waist. This had better be the apocalypse on the way.

Irina swiveled to her computer, brought up the hits that had registered since she logged out on Friday, and sent them to the printer. She could have pulled up the readout on her monitor but, like her father, she preferred the feel of real paper in her hands. The printer quickly spit the page out. She retrieved it and scanned the results. There were twenty-eight that had registered less than five percent occultation, almost certainly false positives. Four others had registered five to ten percent occultation, most likely false positives too. But one of the hits leaped off the page. Some unknown body had entirely occulted a star next to the Pleiades in late April 2016.

She identified the star, a string of numbers and letters which would baffle an outsider, then entered its name and location into her verification program and set up a perimeter search centered on the star. A half-hour later, she had her answer. Four occultations of dim stars lined up in a row with the original occultation: one in January 2017, one in November 2015, one in March 2015, and another in August 2014, all slightly above the Pleiades and close together. She entered the coordinates for a search on the general trajectory that might take it back another couple years. Three more hits on dim stars were returned: February 2014, November 2013, and July 2013.

Hands shaking, she punched the coordinates for the eight occulted stars into NASA’s trajectory-calculation program. After several minutes, a map of the solar system popped up on her monitor with a green line indicating the known historical path of the unknown body and a broken green line forecasting its future path. It had the trajectory of a long-period comet and would pass within 25,000 miles of Mars. She didn’t bother to check it against the database of known TNOs. Instead, she checked it against the database of long-period comets. There were no matches. A new comet?

Irina started to tremble. Chills ran down her spine. She reached for her coffee. It was cold. She walked numbly to the breakroom, emptied her cup into the sink, and poured a fresh cup. Why am I so nervous? I discovered a comet with a long-period orbit. Astronomers discover them every year. But something was out of place. The corona! There was no corona, not even the faintest hint, around the occluded star. The truth dawned on her. It wasn’t a run-of-the-mill comet that had occulted the star. It was a large comet—a very large comet. Her mind began to run wild. Extraordinary comet! Nice to have on the resume! Collect yourself girl. Stay objective.

Irina hastened back to her desk, printed out her charts and data, typed up a summary, and tucked the pages into a manila folder. Then she strode briskly down the hall to Dr. Goldblum’s office. His door was open. That was unusual for Monday mornings when he tended to hole up in his office and catch up on his reading so he could stay abreast of his field. He jealously guarded these precious hours. Not really thinking about her actions, she knocked and entered almost in one motion.

He looked up from the astronomy journal his nose was buried in and fixed her with a cold stare that suggested she was intruding.

The excited female blurted out, I found something highly unusual!

He cocked his head with mild interest. You weren’t that excited when you discovered your dwarves. What did you find? Planet X?

No. Not Planet X. But definitely in the same category.

So, what have you found that belongs in the same category as a rumored ninth planet?

I’m pretty sure that I have discovered a large comet in the Kuiper Belt beyond Pluto on a trajectory that will take it close to Mars. As the words tumbled out of her mouth, she felt a little sheepish. That was lame. A new comet was an exciting discovery, but it didn’t belong in the same category as Planet X. Most long-period comets journey inside Jupiter, with many of them passing close to Mars. She recovered her courage and got more to the point. I’m pretty sure that it is unusually large for a comet, much bigger even than Hale-Bopp.

Pretty sure isn’t science, he replied with a little edge in his voice.

She winced. Now that Dr. Goldblum had hooked her and reeled her in, he wasn’t quite as sweet as he had been when he was wooing her. It wasn’t that he was mean. But when he was focused on a project, and you had the nerve to interrupt him, he tended to be curt and callous.

Drop the folder on my desk. I’ll get to it when I can.

She nodded, placed it on the top of his In box, and started to walk out.

By the way …

She turned back around.

Don’t report this discovery. Don’t do anything with it until I get a chance to look into it myself.

Her eyebrows furrowed.

You didn’t say you discovered a comet. You said you discovered a comet bigger than Hale-Bopp. You don’t just report something like that. You capitalize on it. But before we can do that, we need to make absolutely certain that you have discovered what you think you have discovered. And right now I have a pain-in-the-backside project with a looming deadline—a paper on how to increase and improve institutional cooperation with NASA in the search for near-Earth objects. So you are just going to have to wait.

So how long is this wait going to be?

Two or three weeks maybe.

That can be an eternity in our world. What if someone else discovers it and reports it first?

Not likely. You are the only one doing occultation searches in Taurus. The other major research projects are using either optical or infrared. If the body you discovered is visible in either spectrum, it would have been spotted and reported already. Since it hasn’t been reported, we can assume that this body, whatever it is, must have an insanely low albedo, and isn’t reflecting light. And if major observatories haven’t picked it up, it sure isn’t going to be accidentally discovered by amateur skywatchers.

She exhaled slowly and nodded. Sure would love to believe that.

Are we on the same page? he asked, staring at her intently like someone watching their dog to see if it was going to obey.

Irina bit her lip, nodded, and turned.

Close the door behind you.

She trudged back to the breakroom, sullen, and dropped into the chair next to her coffee cup. She didn’t pick it up. Instead, she folded her arms and stewed over the delay. Wait? Two or three weeks? Can’t believe that he’s that busy! I made an amazing discovery, and he can’t even give me the time of day.

Advice from her father arose from somewhere deep inside and challenged her sulking. Just because a carpenter doesn’t stop pounding nails and give you his undivided attention doesn’t mean that he doesn’t appreciate you or your ideas. It means he’s busy. She smiled at her mini-meltdown, picked up her cup of coffee, and headed for her cubicle. Time for the rest of that dark chocolate. Few things worked better for discouragement.

Chapter 3

Cornell University

Wednesday, June 14, 2017

Three weeks later, Dr. Goldblum stepped into Irina’s cubicle and leaned against the wall. She glanced over her shoulder at him, then continued typing.

I’m sorry for ignoring your discovery, he began. She changed pages in her note stand as he continued. But you know how busy I’ve been preparing that report for NASA. I didn’t have time to think about anything else. Not even a record-breaking comet.

She didn’t respond.

Are you mad at me?

She looked over her shoulder at him without a hint of a smile or warmth.

That wasn’t my choice, he apologized. The project was assigned to me. I didn’t volunteer for it. I hate assignments. A junior player does the research, and a bigshot puts his name on it and gets the glory. I hate it when someone else gets credit for my work.

Her glare tapered into an empty stare. She did feel a little pity for him.

I hate to admit it, but I haven’t even opened the folder you gave me. But now that the monkey is off my back, I’m going to give it my undivided attention.

She shrugged and said, Okay. Apology accepted. But she continued eying him as if waiting for something more.

He took the hint. Yesterday afternoon, with the deadline looming, I shipped the paper to Richard Fairchild at NASA via overnight air. I hope I never get shanghaied by bigshot bureaucrats again. When I returned to my office, I thought about taking a peek at your discovery. But after eight weeks of mind-numbing effort, I was too exhausted. I went home early, collapsed in my recliner with a glass of scotch, and watched Humphrey Bogart reruns until I fell asleep. But here I am today, ready and raring to give your discovery the attention it deserves. He waved her folder as he finished the thought.

She relented and smiled. Better late than never.

His mouth curled into an odd, dry grin, then he turned and walked away.

Jonathan Goldblum spent the next few hours in a flurry of activity at his desk: entering data into his computer, scribbling notes on a legal pad, and crunching numbers on his ancient Texas Instruments calculator. He checked and rechecked Irina’s calculations. There was no doubt about it. Irina had discovered a comet—a big comet.

When he ran simulations of the star being occulted with a Hale-Bopp-size comet, the star barely dimmed. Ditto when he simulated a comet twice its diameter. When he simulated a comet that was five times its diameter, the star still manifested a distinct corona. Irina’s comet had entirely occluded the star. Not even the glimmer of a corona. He shook his head. The math couldn’t