Impact! Read online

  Tommy Wilson hurriedly put on his golf shoes and grabbed his bag. He hadn’t been able to believe it when Ell Donsaii joined the club where he worked as a pro. Tommy had dreamed of meeting her for many years. When she joined the club it began to seem like a possibility. Then this morning Debbie contacted him through his AI to tell them that Donsaii was about to tee off in a threesome! Tommy grabbed his clubs and headed out for the first tee box.

  Pete wasn’t surprised to see Tommy Wilson heading down to the tee box at the same time as Ell Donsaii’s threesome approached. When she’d joined, everyone at the club had heard just how much Tommy wanted to meet Donsaii. Sure enough, Pete’s AI spoke in his ear, “Call from Tommy Wilson.”

  Chuckling, Pete said, “I’ll take it, Tommy, what’cha need?” As if I don’t know.

  “Going out for a round Pete. Can I join that threesome?”

  Pete snorted to himself. Trying to keep the laughter out of his voice, he said, “Oh, I don’t know. It’s Ell Donsaii. Don’t you think we should let her have her privacy here on the course?”

  Tommy laughed, “Pete, I know you’re just bustin’ my chops! So I’m gonna call on you to enforce the club’s rules.”

  Pete snickered, “Okay, even though I think it goes against all that’s right in the world.” He disconnected and turned to the threesome getting ready to tee off, “Ms. Donsaii? We have a single, do you mind if he joins your threesome?”

  Tommy stepped up to the little group on the tee box, “Hi, Tommy Wilson, one of the pros here at the club, going out for a round to try to keep my game sharp.” He stuck his hand out shaking hands and carefully noting the names of the two men. He turned to Donsaii last. Wow, just as good-looking in person as she is in pictures! “Hello Ms. Donsaii, welcome to our club.” Hopefully she’ll ask me for a few pointers.

  The two guys teed off. Both had decent swings and hit reasonable drives in the 240-250 yard range, though the blonde guy’s shot tailed off into the rough on the right.

  Tommy teed up and nervously addressed the ball. He was surprised to feel this way; after all he’d been playing for years and had a scratch handicap. He realized that he was just worried that he might blow his first shot in front of Donsaii. He took a deep breath to calm his nerves and resisted the temptation to hit it really hard. He wanted a decent first shot, because he knew if he blew this first one, he’d play crappy the rest of the day.

  With great relief he felt his swing run right in “the groove” and watched the ball shoot out down the middle of the fairway with a slight draw. It wasn’t a great drive, but blew past the other two guys and it was still something he could be proud of. He wasn’t a huge hitter for a pro, but it should be 280-290 yards.

  Tommy went back and picked up his clubs to walk down to the ladies tee. When he turned around he saw with some embarrassment that Donsaii was teeing up on the men’s tee as well. From the glances they were giving one another, it appeared that the two other men had also expected her to tee up at the ladies tee. So much for “ladies first.”

  Her swing was beautiful.

  The “craack” sound her club made hitting the ball sounded like someone fired a pistol!

  Her ball sailed over his—still in the air!

  Pete walked up to young Tommy Wilson after they’d finished their round. “Holy shit Tommy! I saw Donsaii’s drive on the first hole! How’d she play the rest of the round?”

  Tommy looked a little glassy eyed. “She’s the best goddamned golfer I’ve ever seen,” he said in a flat tone, as if watching her play had drained all the amazement out of him. He turned to focus on Pete, “Do you know, she doesn’t even have a handicap?” He shook his head, “I spent the entire back nine trying to talk her into establishing a handicap and trying to qualify for the U.S. Open.”

  Pete narrowed his eyes, “What did she shoot?”

  “Sixty-four.”

  Pete’s eyes widened, “That’s three below the course record!”

  “The first goddamned time she’s ever played this course,” Tommy breathed, an expression of awe on his face.

  “If she plays like that it shouldn’t be hard to establish a handicap that would get her into the women’s Open.”

  “I was talking about the men’s! Women can play in it you know, it’s the ‘Open.’ But, she doesn’t think she ‘wants to play enough to establish a handicap.’”

  “What?! Why not?”

  “‘Doesn’t have time for it,’” Tommy said disgustedly. “Which is just so much bullshit! She played one hell of a lot to get this good, she could play a little bit more!”

  ***

  Warren Dawson sat nervously, waiting to meet with Drs. Keller and Jenner. To his astonishment, he heard Stell Simsworth’s voice, “Hi Warren, how’re you doing?”

  “St-Stell?” he asked. Like many blind people he was very good at recognizing voices, but it just seemed too much to believe that Stell Simsworth would be here at the same time as his doctor’s appointment!

  “Yep!” she said. “I was due to have my eyes checked and when Dr. Keller said you had an appointment today, I thought I’d better reschedule mine for the same day. I figured I needed to be here to make sure you weren’t rude to my favorite doctors.”

  Warren could tell from her tone that she was just teasing him. He fired back, “Boy, a poor blind man is a little overly sensitive one time and…”

  “Oh, you’re a ‘man’ already?”

  Warren let out a long suffering sigh, “I’m thinking back on how I used to really like you when I’d only heard you singing…”

  Stell snorted, “You’d better be glad I don’t hit blind people!”

  Warren cleared his throat, then sang a paraphrase of a couple lines from her most famous song,

  But then you’d come to me

  Asking for forgiveness

  Stell laughed and slapped him lightly on the shoulder. “Oh that was a low blow. But now I have hit you on the shoulder, and I’m not planning to ask for forgiveness anytime soon.” She paused, then said, ponderingly “Besides, you have a really nice voice. I can’t be nice to you, you might go into my business and steal all my fans.”

  The nurse called Warren’s name. Suddenly nervous, he said, “Can you go back to see the doctors with me?”

  “Sure, I’ll just tell the nurse where I’ll be. You should know though, that Dr. Keller’s been standing here beside you just waiting for you to shut up long enough for him to get a word in edge wise.”

  A small hand took his and put it on her arm so she could lead him. As they started off Warren said, “Hello Dr. Keller. I hope you’re not thinking too badly of Stell for the way she’s been treating me?”

  Warren heard a man snort. He sounded much younger than Warren had expected. The man said, “I had been thinking you two were here for doctors’ appointments. I hadn’t realized it was actually a date until I heard all the flirting.”

  Warren felt mortified. Flirting? He’d thought he was teasing Stell. Are flirting and teasing the same thing? “Um…” Warren said uncertainly.

  “Dr. Keller!” Stell’s voice said sounding shocked, “We blind people have a great deal of difficulty with social interactions. I can’t believe you would put us on the spot like this!”

  Keller sounded mortified as he said, “Oh, I’m sorry. I, uh…”

  Warren heard a smirk in Stell’s voice as she said, “Gotcha!” After a moment she continued, “But really, I was flirting with Warren because he’s such a hunk. He wasn’t flirting back, he’s just naturally rude.”

  Warren’s train of thought derailed, I’m a hunk??

  ***

  Pete glanced at his HUD to see who was next on the tee time roster. Donsaii! He glanced back towards the clubhouse and saw her walking towards him with a couple of other men. “Hello Ms. Donsaii. Tommy Wilson told me a little bit about your game the other day.”

  She gave him a beatific smile, “Yeah, I played pretty well that day.”

  Pete snorted, “I guess you did a
t that. He said he was trying to talk you into establishing a handicap and trying to qualify for the U.S. Open. Are you considering it?”

  She shrugged, “Who knows? Depends on whether I play enough rounds to have a handicap in time I guess. It’s not high on my agenda, but it might be fun.”

  Pete walked out to the back of the tee box to watch her drive, holding a speed gun down by his hip. Her swing was beautiful, just like the last time he’d seen it. Smooth, accelerating rapidly and hitting the ball with that same whip cracking, pistol shot sound she’d made the last time she’d teed off in front of him. Even standing right behind the ball, Pete’s older eyes lost track of it, but it had certainly started right down the center of the fairway. The men in her foursome stared wide-eyed after it.

  He waited until he got back to the starter’s shack to look at the radar gun.

  Holy crap! Her clubhead speed had been 142 mph and she didn’t even look like she was trying. He knew some of the big hitter pros got that kind of speed on their clubhead when they were participating in the long drive competition, but they were giving up on accuracy and throwing everything they could into it!

  Later that day, he stopped into the Pro shop to see if she’d turned in a scorecard toward a handicap. Somehow he wasn’t surprised to find a bunch of people gathered around the card she’d turned in, gaping at the numbers written on it.

  This time she’d shot a sixty-three!

  ***

  Ell was working in the new underground lab she’d cut into the bedrock beneath and to the side of the house just south of her old Chapel Hill farm. She’d recently become interested in exactly how small the fifth dimension was in comparison to the dimensions we are used to. Unfortunately, measuring something so incredibly small had proven to be extremely difficult.

  Allan spoke in her ear. “We are touch down -20 minutes for the rocket descending on to the fourth planet of Beta Canum Venaticorum.”

  Glad to give up her frustrating attempts to measure the fifth dimension, Ell stood, stretched and said, “Okay put it up on the big screen in the living room. I’ll be right up.” She powered down the micro port she’d been using and headed for the stairs.

  Beta Canum Venaticorum was a Sol analog star about 27 light years away. It was 15% brighter than Sol, so it didn’t seem too surprising that the fourth planet lay in the liquid water zone. The one ended port she’d used to send a rocket there had been pretty far away so it had taken more than a year for the rocket to reach the inner solar system. By spectroscopy she’d known for many months now that there was oxygen in the atmosphere of the fourth planet, so she’d parked the interstellar rocket pretty far away and sent another rocket through its port to do the actual landing.

  BC4, as Ell had taken to calling the planet, was about two thirds covered with water and considerably larger than the other worlds where they had found life. Ell was thinking of it as kind of an “Earth analog” and felt pretty excited to find out what it was going to be like down on the surface.

  As she reached the living room she saw the green expanse of the landmass she had told Allan to direct the rocket towards. The huge island was north of the equator, but relatively small compared to some of the gigantic continents elsewhere on the planet. Ell had been focused on the biggest section of the screen which showed the view from the downward facing camera. For a moment she glanced at one of the screens showing a side view out of the rocket to look at the atmosphere. It looked very thick compared to Earth’s atmosphere. Really thick!

  Ell’s spirits fell. Her hope of an Earth analog looked like it was going to be dashed again. No matter how much like Earth this planet might turn out to be, if it had an extremely dense atmosphere, people wouldn’t be able to breathe there without some special apparatus. People could theoretically live on TC3, but with a density of seven atmospheres, it would require that they breathe a heliox mixture like deepsea divers did to prevent nitrogen narcosis. This atmosphere though, looked much thicker than TC3’s. Even breathing heliox wouldn’t safely get you beyond 10 to 12 atmospheres of pressure.

  Because of the thick air, as the rocket descended, it got harder and harder to see very far towards the horizon. Looking straight down, she could still see pretty well. The world she saw looked lush and green like TC3. She had Allan throw up the atmospheric pressure on the screen to see if she was right about it being high.

  Even at her present high altitude, the readout said 80 atmospheres and it was still rapidly rolling upwards!

  Ell sighed, there would be no way humans could live unencumbered on this planet either.

  The rocket continued to descend and Ell had Allan guide it towards what appeared to be an opening in treelike vegetation. When she got down far enough she developed the impression that the surface it was landing on was swampy mud. She lifted back up and flew to a different opening in the tree analogues. This time there was a large boulder in the clearing so she aimed the rocket to land on it.

  Right before the rocket touched down, the boulder moved. Rather vigorously in fact! It appeared that her “boulder” in fact was some kind of enormous animal. After it had moved off, Ell dropped the rocket down and landed on the area where the immense creature had been standing, and where it had cropped the vegetation short.

  Ell’s eyes went to the corner of the screen where the planet’s vital statistics were displayed. The gravity was 0.78G. Oxygen was 16%, nitrogen 75%, Argon 5% and carbon dioxide 4%.

  Atmospheric pressure was 188 times that on earth! A little more than double the air pressure on Venus!

  Ell snorted, calculating that the air pressure on BC4 was about the same as if you were 6200 feet underwater here on earth!

  She looked at the large herbivore that had moved out from under her rocket. Greenish gray in color with some faint vertical stripes, it looked something like a six legged, headless hippo. Allan put up some dimensions. It appeared that it would be a Triceratops-sized headless hippo!

  The trees had tall straight trunks with enormous leaves that appeared to be tilted towards the sun. A riotous tangle of vegetation immediately surrounded the rocket. Ell could see fern analogues, vine analogues, and an abundance of small bushes and grass analogues.

  Small flyers flitted through the air though “flitted” wasn’t quite right. Their motions seemed a little bit more like swimming, presumably related to the dense medium they were traversing.

  Harald Wheat was going to love this place!

  Ell looked at her watch. It was time to go to bed. “Allan, make sure that behemoth doesn’t step on the rocket. If you’re able to recognize that there’s anything especially unusual about any of the animals, save me video clips. Screen off”

  As Ell went up the stairs, she wondered how long she should study this new planet before she brought the rest of the TC3 team in on it. Allan hadn’t detected any regular structures from space to suggest an advanced civilization and it was hard for her to imagine a truly advanced civilization without some kind of buildings or roads.

  She decided that over the next few days she’d have Allan fly the rocket from place to place in order to get an idea whether there was anything present on BC4 that she didn’t want her own world to know about…

  ***

  Allan said, “It appears that a large comet has just struck TC3.”

  Ell dropped her spoon into her breakfast cereal and stood so violently that her chair skittered across the kitchen floor to bang into the cabinets. “How big? Give me a video feed! How far from Goldie’s cave? What time is it there?”

  As Ell strode into the living room, Allan projected the view from the rocket they called “Goldy’s meteorite” on her left contact. By the time she’d seated herself on the couch the image was also up on the big screen in the living room. The rocket appeared to be sitting where it frequently did on the ledge out in front of the teecee’s cave. The camera Allan had activated was facing west. It had to be early morning there because the mountain the teecee’s lived on was casting an enormous shadow out in
front of her. However, Ell’s attention was riveted by the enormous glowing fireball a few degrees south of directly west.

  Allan said, “I can accurately estimate the distance at 307 km from the teecee’s cave. It is early morning there.”

  “Have the rocket begin emitting a loud siren alternating with shouted instructions to get outside the cave and up into the air off the ledge. How long ‘til seismic impact?”

  “Seismic effects should begin in another twenty-five seconds. The impact should register approximately 8 on the Richter scale. At the cave it should produce effects at about 6 to 7 on the Mercalli scale, which would cause significant damage to housing here on earth. These estimates are necessarily inaccurate as they are based on…”

  “Fly the rocket up about five meters into the air and have it shout for the teecees to do the same. Give me your estimates of the size and nature of the object as well as its immediate effects in the region of the cave.”

  “I estimate the object was approximately 0.7 to 1.5 kilometers in diameter, most likely composed of cometary ice, but with some denser material intermixed. It appears to have released energy in the range of 150,000 to 250,000 megatons of TNT. The thermal radiation from this blast would give humans first to second-degree burns. Ejecta from the impact will arrive in four minutes and should consist of a rain of sand to pebble-sized particles. Huge volumes of dust will follow, but fall more slowly. An air blast of 100 to 150 miles per hour will arrive in approximately fourteen minutes. On earth it would blow down about 30 percent of trees, however TC3’s air is denser and its trees are more gracile.…”

  ***

  Author’s note, for those of you who have not read Tau Ceti (an Ell Donsaii story #6), hie, hies etc. are not misspellings. The teecees are hermaphrodites and therefore are neither “he” nor “her.” These terms are my attempt to convey that status.