‘Well, it’s a bit of a problem,’ Adah began, abruptly coughing her words in an attempt to dislodge the knot of toast that still dwelt at the back of her throat from breakfast.
It was hot, the struggling air conditioner had suddenly become a drone of irritating voicelessness and as forty eyes from a collective twenty heads all looked expectantly up at her, the scientist sighed a tired yawn and looked to her notes, dejected that she was unable to find a swear-word polite enough to begin a public address with.
A deep breath then.
The quiet buzz of stenographic-translators and the ineffectual shuffling of paper filled the meeting annex with a murmur of guffawed discord, the assembled panel contained a leading scientific mind from fifteen different fields, along with a few government types who would have complained if they were left out, and as the chief scientist of all astrophysical research had just opened her speech with a rather blue expletive, her fellow peers felt they should listen.
This murmur of silence had appeared to Adah as sine wave of pure source decay, it was as though a vacuum of energy had momentarily sucked the air from the room and left behind an irradiated bar of awkwardness and a statistically improbable half eaten sandwich.
‘At exactly 0700 hours, yesterday morning, on the 31st of December 1983, Hall-institute radio-waves detected what was to be described as an unfortunately large object, unaffected by conventional orbit and similarly on a direct trajectory with earth, for what we have estimated to be roughly thirty-two million years, give or take.’
Another polite chough,
‘After confirming with the AAT, we have observed this object to be roughly the size of the moon,’ letting the enormity of the problem sink in, a whir of translators filled the room with sound and with fury as they primarily repeated the words ‘wait, what!?’ in thirty different languages.
‘That’s quite a time Doctor,’ a politician, cool of demeanour slippery with grease, stood to speak above the din, ‘how long do we have, one hundred years? A thousand?’
‘Tu- Tuesday,’ the scientist stammered, half-restrained in correcting the man’s assumption that all scientists had to be doctors, ‘just after lunch.’
‘WHAT!’ the American representative had jumped to his feet and exploded into a shout of anger, ‘how are you telling me that you’ve missed an additional moon barrelling towards us for thirty-two million years!? Do you not have telescopes! Did Plato just forget to note it down? Speak damn you!’
‘It sunk up on us,’ Adah offered, not seeing why she should be blamed for the mistake. Everyone could see the second moon, it’s not her fault that no one had bothered to look up at the sky and think to themselves that it was getting bigger.
‘Through several calculations we have measured the trajectory of the object to be increasing exponentially as it nears, and we have assembled some of the worst available mathematicians to double check these numbers in hopes of manufacturing some good news. But…’ she deftly paused to add a garnish of tension like the public speaking course had recommended, ‘we may well be snookered.’
‘I believe I know a thing or two about this snooker game that you mention,’ a gentle voice projected out over the annex from a location unknown. Confused the gathered forty eyes looked around attempting to find who had just spoken so calmly and with the plainly obvious smile of a meta-memory knowing something that no one else had cottoned onto yet.
A bespectacled man, wrinkled and hunched over his paperwork, had recently lifted his head to regard the room and then quietly stood. Pausing slightly, the man stooped downward to speak into the desk microphone.
‘Firstly, I would like to commend Principal Scientist, Adah Orji, for her excellent work in these past few hours and secondly I would like to thank her profusely for letting me her solution and claim it as my own.’
‘Wait, what?’ Adah baulked, looking at the man and trying to place his name.
Suddenly realising who this stranger was, the ever-nimble scientist immediately dove behind the podium and attempted to wrench the cover off a cable duct.
‘You have the floor Alexi,’ she yelled, closing the hatch behind her and scrabbling off to take her chances with the impending heat death of two colliding atmospheres outside
‘Hmm. Anyway, I am Alexi Gregoris, my fellow comrades, and I am somewhat of a scientific super-villain,’ He laughed while removing his glasses and placing them into his coat pocket. ‘You would remember me from Deretovia-affair had not erased your memories of the event and you may well remember my death at the hands of your security guards, had I not vaporised them with a laser on the way in.’
The room was stunned, no one could remember this stranger or what he had claimed to have done, but were each held to silence by the confidence of his voice and the sharpness of his eyebrows.
‘Before Mrs Adah left she had mentioned snooker, now I am more of a billiards man myself but it gives me an idea. Our opponent, the hand of death for argument’s sake, has cued an asteroid so that it may strike our little planet, potting in the uncertainty of total oblivion, but we have an opportunity, my friends, there is another ball on the table and with a well-timed nudge we will still be in the game.’
‘You mean the moon sir?’ rasped the voice of the British consulate, having missed the stranger’s name but not letting it deter his questioning. ‘Are you telling me that you wish to play billiards with a celestial satellite.
‘I’m more suggesting that we cheat at billiards so as to keep our planet on the table, as it were,’ Gregoris smiled, mentally making note to throw the consulate into something acidic should they all survive this. ‘I have a simple deal with you, I fire a laser of terrifying power through the Hubble telescope and push the moon into the impact path of an asteroid, you all go back to your countries, or committees, or whatever you call them, and draft me up the title deeds to all the world’s gold, sound good?’
Across the eons of time that our earth has turned upon its own orbit, a clever mind was often needed to solve a complex problem.
But when madness occurred, misshapen things that shambled and lilted down the corridor of irregularity, a particular mind was required to find a use for it.
Like petrol can technically mow a lawn Alexi Gregoris had technically used a death laser to explode two moons and indebt mankind to his brilliance. We have learned to fear our new overlord with his whims and his ways, for they are not ones we may ever understand.
Cheers to Gregoris, we hold our thumbs up for you!
J.McCray
2021
Sunday Short Stories 