Shiva Descending

It had traveled through the silent void for countless millennia, since the formation of the solar system. A gray and black lump, it was well in advance and to the side of the rest of the hurtling swarm, a forerunner of what was to come. The irregular mass of iron and rock entered the outer atmosphere somewhere over eastern Iran, quickly heating up to become a flaming streak across the tranquil summer evening. It had companionsspecks and chunks that briefly lit up in long fiery trails before they burned out, or were deflected by the thickening blanket of air, spinning back out into space to begin a new path. But the big one flamed on, deeper and deeper, angling downward. The air slowed it, but it was still traveling at a tremendous velocity when it struck the earth at Biskra, near the Tunisian border. In an instant the meteor obliterated the rambling Arabian town. Where forty-six thousand people had lived moments before there was only smoke, a steaming crater whose bottom was a bubbling pool of sand and rock turned into lava, and death. In the suburbs, along the roads and trails, lay blackened bodies, children and animals and twisted burned things. Every building was leveled. Sand dunes were fused to molten glass or blown away to the bedrock. Brick, flesh, machines, dolls, the mosque, animals, everything: molten, vaporized, burned. The immense ball of orange flame that was the death knell of Biskra was seen by a crop analyzer on Space Station Three. She stared, blinked, then reached for the emergency microphone. Earth had been struck by the largest meteor in modern times. * * * Zakir Shastri was normally calm, even placid, as befitted an astronomer, whose chief was patience. But now he bit nervously on his full lower lip, his dark eyes intent upon the words and numbers building in glowing lines upon the screen before him. He took a deep breath and exhaled it in a sigh. He glanced away from the phosphor dots, out the side port. Earth swung into view. Across the nightside, dotted with smudges of light, something suddenly scratched a long streak of orange light. Then it vanished. Soon, another. Then two dimmer ones. He sighed, closed his eyes to blank out the sight, and chewed nervously on his lip. The Indian astronomer sat strapped into a chair bolted to the platform. He was at the sighting focus of the main telescope, where he could "eyeball" the precise fix he wanted. This was the place where he felt most at peace in the entire Orbital Astronomical Observatory. It was not vastly different from the famous cage at Palomar, where generations of astronomers had labored through the years in the biting cold of the California mountains. Now, pollution of the seeing conditions by the billion lights of the megalopolis below made Palomar a risky site for some kinds of observations, particularly for taking spectra of dim objects. And, of course, Palomar was the prime example of the basic limitation of all Earth-based telescopes: precision of resolution. Visitors to Palomar and other great observatories always thought the point of building such a giant telescope was to see more detail. In fact, Palomar couldn't "see" any better than a twenty-centimeter backyard telescope. The rippling air above any telescope scrambled light waves coming in, erasing any detail smaller than about a half-second of arc. Telescopes bigger than twenty centimeters were just buckets for catching more light; they couldn't make out any more detail than their smaller brethren. Only by putting telescopes in orbit could astronomers see any better. So the eighty-centimeter tube directly in front of Shastri represented a new dimension in peering at the universe. Without the obscuring blanket of air, this telescope could see fine features in the optical, ultraviolet, and infrared ranges. It would, in time, open a universe in a way the great Hubble could never have dreamed.[read more]