Judgement Day Read online

  Judgement Day

  JAMES JEFFERIES

  Copyright © 2019 by James Jefferies

  The right of James Jefferies to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other non-commercial uses permitted by copyright law. For permission requests, write to the publisher.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  Chapter One

  Those people who thought about such things were always in awe at the vastness and majesty of the heavens which were timeless in their solid and unchanging appearance and this was no truer than in the miniscule area known as the solar system. In these knowledgeable days at least the idea that the Sun revolved around the Earth had been discarded after centuries of religious objection to such an apparent gross infringement on the primacy of the human race and now the daily movement of the stars across the night sky was well known. God’s creation was not seen as being diminished as a result and in fact the endless universe gave mankind a new sense of awe.

  Distant galaxies added to man’s understanding of the enormous universe and if the Earth was a grain of sand out of countless millions poured onto the ground from a child’s bucket at the beach, humanity had contrived to know much about these other particles, where they are and, in many cases, from what they were made.

  The Milky Way, Earth’s home galaxy, spun as ever in its own relentless way like a Catherine-Wheel of immense dimensions and the only planet known to possess intelligent life took its place in one of the outer arms of stars, itself within a solar system of proportions so far beyond man’s ability to visit save by unmanned craft. It was true that far away the universe expanded rapidly, and at vast distances at speeds greater than that of light, and it wrenched its way through time with the formation of new stars and the occasional appearance of super-nova and all the rest of the events astronomers loved, with the co-mingling of galaxies on an epic scale. To the casual observer, the local space in the Sun’s domain looked as it always had done and the pathway of its massive bodies through the sky proceeded relentlessly and could be tracked according to mathematical calculations.

  And yet, events unknown to human beings had contrived for the inner planets of the solar system to be visited by a guest that would prove to be unwelcome and destructive in equal measure unless the hosts would be able to slam shut the door on it with a degree of resolution and ability hitherto not available. Would such a thing have been possible and memory long enough, dinosaurs could have given their bitter testimony when last such an unexpected visitor arrived so violently seventy-five million years before.

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  The summer day was ignorant of what was taking place in the heavens as it dawned in the Gulf of Mexico and it did not take long for its usual colossal humidity to wrap itself as always around everything whether inert or alive, the cloying warmth like a wet flannel of oppression seeping into the pores of the buildings and soaking the clothes of people unfortunate enough to be out in its grasp.

  Inside her modest apartment the air conditioning was very powerful but as the equipment was very old the background hum was loud, although to her its familiarity made it a comfort and far from being an irritable annoyance, it was akin to an old friend. Nevertheless, when she woke early in the morning she was bathed in sweat and anxious, greatly worried if truth be told, and she knew why. Her sleep had been very disjointed over the previous several nights and the cumulative effect made her very tired from that alone, even ignoring the long hours she put in at her work to accompany the stress of what she believed she had found.

  What started off as idle curiosity had turned into a nightmare and this was made worse because she was yet to tell anybody about what she suspected. The night before was terrible and her mind had raced ahead and she found herself passing in and out of sleep all through the night, her active brain going over calculations that she had made the day before, hoping and praying that she was mistaken. But she rarely made mistakes and for once she did not fee; that this was to her advantage. When she was a child she had learned to study subjects containing numbers late at night on the basis that her mind would continue to work on them in her sleep, but now she was regretting such an approach of stimulating her senses so powerfully and it gave her no peace at all.

  The previous recent months proved in many ways to be exciting but at the same time highly traumatic. As time went on and the hours became days and the days turned into weeks, she became more and more agitated, but still she had held her peace on the matter in hand. Now she anticipated that the upcoming night would be hard because she was due to work a red-eye shift, finishing at six o'clock the next morning, so before that could start, she had the long daylight hours to reflect on what she might do, and to stew even more. She had come to the point when her investigating needed to be shared.

  Unless an astronomer in some remote and obscure university was looking in the same direction in the vast heavens, she was the only person on the planet possessing knowledge that clearly would change the way the world functioned, if indeed it survived at all. She had not much family to speak of, no husband or children and she had only one remaining parent so it was not as if she had much in the way of fearfulness as to what might happen to loved ones. She had a few friends but not many who were close when she thought about it and this made her feel depressed.

  The daylight hours passed slowly, and she pottered around her apartment doing nothing in particular until at length she made her way to the large complex where she worked as a research astronomer, entering the building slowly and without much enthusiasm, which was very strange given the monumental discovery that she was sure she had made. She felt as if she lived in a parallel universe, which was ironic under the circumstances, and as her work shift continued its usual way she chuckled to herself with a kind of gallows humour until she found herself once again tired in the dead hours early in the morning and could bear her self-imposed solitude no longer.

  Deep in the bowels of the control centre, where light was shunned twenty-four hours a day and those who worked there prided themselves on their pallid complexions which had become a badge of honour for dedication to the mantle of important work, data from telescopic arrays at various places around the world was fed back into to an extremely fast and powerful computer. At first, the differences in photographs taken were imperceptible but, taken over time and with diligent analysis which she alone had undertaken so far, there was evidence of some unexpected foreign body, detected from such exceedingly small movements across the photographic plates. Whatever it was, it must be near enough not to be a distant heavenly body, given the speed implied by the pictures taken in rapid succession, for anything far away would not have registered.

  Judith Judgement, her name for once in line with that which she would give as an opinion when pushed by colleagues, had been working all through her night shift at her computer and had become close to despair due to the build-up of anxiety but equally from sheer tiredness such that every bone and muscle in her body seemed to ache. The large room of mission control contained banks of computers on desks arranged in serried ranks facing towards a large screen on which would be projected from time to time messages or liv
e pictures from orbit or some other information that any of the scientists decided to show such as still photographs.

  The room was plush and had recently been refurbished with pale green thick carpeting chosen by ergonomic consultants to be restful and this gave the feel of being not unlike the trading floor of a wealthy investment bank, something the predominantly young staff much appreciated. The efforts made by the administrators to improve the comfort of their highly intelligent staff had been successful and as a result the astronomers and other scientists there tended to speak in hushed tones as they went out about their business and in any case certainly the thickness of the carpets and upholstery served to dampen down extraneous noise. This had the added benefit of enabling the occupants to concentrate further in the exercise of their cerebellums, but it also meant that, unfortunately, they became more isolated because it became very difficult to speak to anyone other than their immediate neighbours.

  The room still contained six staff even though the time was past five o’clock in the morning, not that she or anyone else could tell what time it was save by looking at the hands of a large clock next to the huge visual display unit on the wall. She looked across at her co-worker Brian Donnelly and then for the twentieth time that night back at her screen and once more she shook her head with disbelief. Judith was like a dog with a bone and when she grasped hold of something, she would not leave it alone.

  The anomalous readings she had seen had come through over the last few weeks and she had noted them in some of the spare time she had after the completion of her previous mapping project. Now and again she had the opportunity to look at this new data with real purpose for a change, given that her idle tinkering at leisure had ended and now she was transfixed and very serious about what she saw.

  Judith’s character and upbringing made her a cautious lady not giving to mindless speculation, a trait she had learned in childhood from being, in her opinion, the ugliest girl in the class, something that was grossly not true although she did not believe otherwise, but in any case she did not like to be the centre of attention unless there was a good reason for it. Despite not voicing speculative thoughts this did not stop her thinking about them and in her inner self her secret thoughts were in fact very profound, but she did not voice them very often because she had such a low level of self-esteem. It had taken but one negative comment as to how she looked from a young and insensitive classmate at school for her to clam up tight and inevitably the result of this was that she withdrew into her own world. This had a benefit in that she became very good at passing examinations through diligent study as not for her were the distractions of a mis-spent youth. She had sailed into a top university and in due course had obtained a doctorate in astrophysics and since then the whole academic world appealed to her greatly because for the first time in her life her opinion was valued without guile.

  Now several years later, she was well established as an astronomer and researcher of heavenly anomalies, on secondment from her university. The information that she had recently analysed was not like anything she had seen before and showed to her mind a large object with a trajectory which would, in due course, move it extremely close to Earth although this would not take place for about three years, detailed calculations for which would follow, for she would be precise in her estimates before alerting her supervisors.

  Brian, sitting next to her and therefore as close as anyone could be, was a man whom she privately liked a great deal but, more from old ingrained practice than anything else, she made sure that he did not have any awareness of this. Old habits die hard and the thought of him finding out her true feelings mortified her for he would surely reject her and that would be more than she could stand.

  She had come to know him a little over the last two years but they hadn't said much to each other for the majority of that time until recently, although in the last three months they had gained an understanding of each other, unspoken as is the way of such things but nevertheless there all the same.

  He had a deep voice and spoke slowly with a dry wit and in recent weeks the sound coming from him thrilled her, as if its deep timbre resonated through her whole body to stir her in most pleasant ways. If nothing else, it became a comfort to her. His accent was east coast and educated and his humour corresponded with this educational background, sophisticated and erudite, at least it was in her opinion. She had taken the view that he could do no wrong at all. They had come to take coffee together at various times during the workday although he insisted on drinking lemon tea in the afternoons, and she now longed for these breaks and had a suspicion that so did he, although she wondered whether this was the triumph of hope over reality. Consequently, Brian had become something of a rare person in whom she could confide without much danger of him laughing at her if she was wrong, which for her was everything in the world.

  In her clouded opinion she was rather plain looking of face, a harsh and erroneous assessment, mousy hair colour and medium build, nondescript really, without the long legs and slender figure beloved of magazines. All of this, of which she was painfully aware since childhood, caused her to take on a rather dowdy outward appearance as if perversely living up to the expectation of others.

  Her mother knew that Judith suffered agonies of a lack of self-confidence which hid a lively character with a sharp wit and was the main reason that her daughter dressed in a rather drab way. Judith was fully aware of this fact but petrified of venturing out to shop for clothes that would be more in keeping with her true character which she made sure was covered from view. Also hidden and deeply buried was an interest in painting, writing and other creative arts but, unfortunately, she had little time to follow these pastimes in recent years due to being so wrapped up in her career as an astrophysicist. She had been singularly unsuccessful with men, whom she had come to fear and whom were usually intimidated in turn by her and put off by her job and academic achievements. As a result, she rarely dated and in life’s vicious circle this caused her to suffer from chronic shyness.

  In Brian she had found a kindred spirit. He was a little overweight, something he confessed to be the result of eating too many fast food dinners late at night and donuts during the day, along with little exercise, all which he readily confessed with modest self-deprecation. In the short time she had known him she recognised that he was incredibly kind and gentle, and she thought of him often, even on one occasion in her dreams, the rather disturbing nocturnal memory exciting and shocking her in equal measure. All-in-all, Brian was very attractive to her, and she longed for him to reciprocate the feelings.

  Neither was confident with interacting with the opposite sex, despite primeval urges coursing through their bodies over years of pent-up frustration and each would be horrified if they let down their respective guards and professed interest for fear of rebuttal. For his part Brian secretly loved her and had for the last four weeks been building up enough courage to ask her out on a date, but when she had smiled at him his nerve had failed. He had convinced himself that his interest in her had flourished gradually as he came to know her character, as much as any man can know a woman, but the truth was that, like the majority of red-blooded males, it had been initial lust that had prompted his attention, although that raw feeling had been tempered with a deeper desire which had grown through their intellectual intercourse.

  “See, there,” she said, as Brian leaned over her desk and squinted at the faint shape on her computer screen.

  Before he took in the sight before him on her computer screen his senses were swamped with her scent which overpowered him, and it was all he could do not to show her a rather masculine reaction due to such close proximity. It had been his secret that he took great pleasure from her smell which was a mixture of some expensive perfume and the raw female aroma of her body. He did not know which was the greater in the heavenly and heady concoction, but in quiet moments he felt sullied and mean and even disgusting in his baseness. He prayed that she had no notion of his rather crude inte
rest in her.

  He looked closely at the screen and at length saw what he was supposed to see, which was a large blurry object seen progressing in the heavens. He did not speak but studied the data which was present on the screen underneath the image, showing distance and trajectory as calculated by the computer.

  “Dear God,” replied Brian, seeing the sizable slightly fuzzy dark object, for which the estimates were that it was roughly four miles across, two high and one in depth.

  “Is that coming at us?” he whispered, his voice barely carrying in the plush silence of the room.

  “Yes,” she replied quietly.

  He sat back in his comfortable swivel chair, the shock of what he had seen enabling him to break the binds of intimacy and pull away from being close to her, whereupon he let out a long sigh, before looking across at the lady he lusted after and fixing his eyes upon hers with unusual penetration. He was in awe of her work and now in what he was seeing on her screen. He knew that he was the first person with whom she had confided and was glad of that and it created a greater bond between them.

  “Come on, let's go,” he said decisively and they both stood up, Judith following his lead.

  “Where to?” she said, not caring but just glad to be with him, her tiredness forgotten for a moment.

  “Outside for some fresh air, and then breakfast, whilst we discuss all this.”

  His vigour in this matter appealed to her greatly and she was delighted to go with him and more so as it would represent the first time that they had been out of the building together save for one or two social occasions run by the department, but in these they had hardly been alone.

  They walked slowly outside, Brian following behind her as a gentleman does and each taking the opportunity to stretch tired limbs as they proceeded away from the vast complex of buildings. Overnight the weather had turned a little cooler given that time of the day and unusually the immense humidity had not yet arrived, and they decided to drive to a diner which Brian knew would be open early. He signalled for her to follow him to his car, which in her view was a new model surprisingly, because for some reason she had assumed that he would be as poor as a church mouse. She rebuked herself for attributing the car he drove to be congruent to his rather untidy appearance and reminded herself that he must have received an expensive education.