IT’S SHOWTIME: THE END OF BETELGEUS

IT’S SHOWTIME: THE END OF BETELGEUSE

By Andrew Paul Grell

“Even if it does happen, it can’t possibly be dangerous to us. It’s too far away. We’ll get a great light show and Michael Keaton will get a career boost.” Tamar Hoffman the physicist was verbally chest-bumping her father, Caleb Hoffman the mathematician. It was an ordinary suburban star-gazing cocktail party. But the number of such parties world-wide jumped by orders of magnitude on the news that stars started hiccupping. And then another order of magnitude when the most famous named star, Betelgeuse, got a bad case of the DT’s. Caleb ignored his daughter in favor of his Granddaughter Cassie—short for Cassiopeia—and took her by her eight-year-old hand to the 14-inch scope.

“You see the three stars in a row? That’s Orion’s belt. Got it?” The little girl nodded. “Great, now look up a little higher. You see the big, bright, red star? Redder than all the stars around it? That’s Betelgeuse. The star that started all the fuss.” The originator of the new field of Bottomology finally turned his attention to his only child, Tamar.

“You’re going to be needed to help figure this out, Tammy. Suppose your wrong? Do you have a working hypothesis for what’s happening? Something you can test, something you could sink your teeth into?” The younger woman shook her head.

“We’re waiting for more data. Pegasus A is acting up also.”

“Pegasus is always acting up. You named your daughter after a constellation. Are you going to trust what the stars are telling you this night?”

“Doc!” Pat and Kyle came running with the cordless phone. “It’s Christ Church.”

“What, Oxford?”

“No, Christ Church New Zealand. Eta Carinae is doing it too.” Caleb’s graduate assistants made an easy switch from math to astronomy; having gone through a true liberal arts program, they both had groundings in the subject. They had silly grins from being on the cutting edge of a major discovery which were not diminished by the potentially catastrophic results of said discovery. Caleb went back to the child.

“Move the scope a bit to the right.” Caleb peeked in the spotting scope to make sure Cassie was seeing what he wanted to show her. “We can’t see the constellation that’s your name, sweetie. But we can see the constellation you were born under, Virgo. You see the five stars that make a big “V” in the sky? V for Virgo.” The little girl looked up at Grandpa and nodded. Even through the spotting scope Caleb could see Spica blinking like a pothead trying to get the red out with Visine.

“Ursala, could you take a look and see if the star you see is vibrating, blinking, bouncing, or doing anything weird?”

“It did one blink for me, Honeybunch.”

“Great, sign here as witness, please. Thanks. Kyle, can you get this out over the wire? Wire. Heh. Over the net. Thanks. Chop chop.”

“Well, Tammy? Three stars having tantrums. Plus one moving from Swan Lake to Jazz Tap. It’s a regular Hollywood tonight. You know, when you were a kid, you were so bright your mother wore sunglasses around you. What happened to you? Why those four stars, genius?”

“If those four went supernova at once, it would dose most of the world population roughly equally. But they’re still too far away. And Dad, I really don’t want anything to do with your prepper friends.”

Caleb led his daughter through the party, steering her around the decorative bollards, grills, tables, and lawn games, showcasing the utter normality of the prospective crew.

“We’re not preppers. We’re cagers. This started under Reagan when there was serious talk about X-ray lasers. We would very much like to keep as much as possible safe from an electromagnetic pulse. Or a cosmic ray bombardment. So we build Faraday cages. Just in case. And now seems to be the case. You don’t think it’s strange that the four stars closest to us that are supernova candidates all started acting up at once? You know, your grandfather made sure the property couldn’t be turned into a subdivision. A hundred and forty-two acres. About a third of it is on top of the cage. C’mon down and take a look, why doncha? See all these people at the party? Most of them are going to be down there, the rest are considering it. Cassie and Max will have plenty of little friends. We’ve got two doctors, four nurses, three army medics, teachers, supplies for ten years plus seeds and frozen embryos in case things have to be started back up. And we’ve got a job for you.” That last was a bit of a dig at the younger Hoffman, who was between professorships.

“If I knew math was such a lucrative profession…”

“Teaching it isn’t. Using it is. Remember the Corvette we bought you for high school graduation?”

“Sure, we still have it. I take it out when there’s a Corvette rally anywhere near.”

“Belmont Park, 7^th race, Irrational in a photo finish in a stakes race. The horse was a shipper. Her owner paid for Jenny Crow to fly up and ride her, even though she wouldn’t be able to use her apprentice allowance. That’s a horse with a trainer that knew something. A horse to bet on.”

“Crunch time, kid. Coming down for the tour with the rest of us? There’s a reason we invited you for the long weekend. We’ll all be down there for the next 72 hours. Full disclosure: There’s something down there you’re not going to want to leave.”

“Alright, Dad. It’s not like we’ve got somewhere else to be right now.”

Caleb herded everyone with their luggage and kids into the house, down to the basement, and through the double-gate separation between the world outside and the shielded cage below. Two people turned around and went right back up; unfortunately, one of them was a nurse. Family by family, they found their assigned “bungalows” and lay down their burdens. Everyone except Tamar was encouraged to wander around and explore. As for the exception, Caleb brought his daughter to a very heavy-looking bronze door.

“This can’t be what I’m thinking it is, Dad, can it?”

“It sure is.”

“Dad, I don’t think you’re allowed to own your own nuclear reactor.”

“It’s a Thorium reactor. Almost perfectly safe. Non-weaponizable. The market for Thorium went nuts a few years ago with the whole China thing, the medical Thorium shortage, and that TV show Occupied where the Russians invaded Norway because they built a really big Thorium reactor. I bought some on a dip and built the device. We couldn’t run the cage without it. And it’ll be your job to keep it going. That, and making sure the tap into the water table I drilled doesn’t start leaking. And oh, do you recall those big, glass ‘I Dream of Genie’ looking bottles on the lawn?”

“The bollards?Sure, what about them?”

“They’re cloud chambers. You’ll be supervising getting the data from them. When the storm starts, the cloud chambers will light up like, well, like stars. We’ve got mechanical-only periscopes monitoring the cloud chambers. You’ll have to eyeball them to see what’s going on. If they start dancing the watusi, we hit the big red button and seal ourselves off. That’s basically it.”

“And I’ve got a job for you, Mr. Numbers Guy. Nobody knows how many stars Eta Carinae has; probably at least three. It’s the longest shot for a supernova, and on a normal day it’s 50 million times as powerful as our little dwarf star. In between wrangling your friends, maybe you should work on the three-body problem.” Caleb looked at his daughter in a new light. The kid was right.

The next morning, the potential cagers woke to Caleb demonstrating the hi-tech prepared meals. The debut menu featured cheesy eggs, hash browns, milk, a doughnut, and V-8 juice.

“You just pull the tab on the side. The cooked stuff heats up in two minutes and the cool stuff stays cool. When you rip off the cool side lid, the juice and milk cups telescope out. Ready to have you drink out of them. When you’ve had your fill, they collapse back down. If we wind up being down here for an extended stay, the kits can be refurbished and reused. Bon Appetite, everyone!”

Folks started exploring. There was a three-on-three at the regulation basketball court, a couple of families lining up for miniature golf, and a fair attendance at a “How to Mend Clothes” course. Little kids occupied the bounce house and ball room while the cognizant sat down to wait for President Spade’s press briefing. The barley-colored high pompadour came on screen first, followed closely by the Chief Executive and then what the press referred to as the Amen Chorus.

“Good afternoon America! I am addressing you today to tell you the real story of what’s going on. I’m sure you’ve heard rumors and read things on the internet about our planet being under attack. This whole thing started with a whistle-blower from NASA leaking false information, dangerously false information, criminally false, in my opinion. You may have heard about the Iron Dossier, which is totally fake information. It is true that there are four huge, very huge stars, stars that form a sphere around us, that have become unstable, even more unstable than the lefty press thinks I am. I must tell you that if any of these stars go supernoava, that would be a bad thing for us, very, very bad. It isn’t going to happen. Not gonna happen. But just in case it might, these brilliant scientists on the podium with me have come up with a plan. First, everyone is going to have to live underground for the next six months. Basement, fallout shelter, cave, subway station. If you don’t have a basement or a shelter, every American will still be able to have a place underground. I have authorized provisions of the Emergency Production Act so that every piece of construction equipment in the United States is going to be used to build underground shelters. These will be terrific, fabulous, wonderful shelters, all the comforts of home. People will want to live in them even after this is over. And we’re going to close our borders so that nobody comes across to take spots in our shelters. Finally, as you know, last year I inaugurated the new United States Space Corps. General Turgidson, as we speak, has the Space Force Command working on a counterattack in the event that aliens are actually targeting us. And don’t worry about November, folks. There should be almost no reason for the election to be postponed. So get into your shelters and be safe. God bless you and God bless the United States of America.”

Caleb and Tamar took a good look at each other. Caleb could see in Tamar’s eyes what happens when a slightly paranoid, over-the-top defense against a not-really-too-likely threat emanates from the mouth of a true sociopath like President Spade.

“How can they possibly do it?” Cassie was arguing with Max about the top story of the day.

“Why can’t they? They’re aliens!”

“Aliens still have to follow science. It’s superheroes that don’t have to stick to science. Grandpa showed me in the telescope, those stars are really far apart, in different parts of the sky. How could the aliens tell all those stars what to do?”

Caleb and Tamar were listening from outside the bounce house, faces both beaming at the precociousness of the children. Caleb handed the reins over to his dear wife Ursula to be hostess to a now 48-hour cocktail hour rather than being a den mother to frightened children. Caleb took his daughter’s advice and gave the three-body problem—how to predict the paths of three bodies in orbits around each other—a fresh look.

The final day of the test run turned into a subterranean picnic when everyone began realizing that the Earth wasn’t going to be destroyed, or not yet, anyway. Tamar secured the reactor, checked on the water table tap, both jobs done meticulously since the cage should be maintained in case of some other emergency. She then switched from engineering back to Physics and checked the cosmic ray count. It was 0.5% higher than normal for monitors facing Orion. She read the reports of the dust storms obscuring the big red star last year, and then the subsequent reports of what happened to the dust. Tamar thought she knew and surreptitiously called her broker.

It was one more round of underground libations and the cage-nauts emerged into the suburban evening.

“Will you look at that?” was the number one observation. Something a little smaller but a lot brighter than a full moon, blood red, was seen in the north sky. It would later be revealed that Betelgeuse had swallowed its dust cloud, which triggered the supernova event.

Tamar and her father circled around to meet each other at the open air bar, each with something to say.

“Here’s what I have on three-body. A method I prove to be the closest possible approximation to the orbits. Plus, I might be able to prove that it’s one of those Godel problems, true things you can’t prove to be true. How bout you?”

“When I realized it was going to be a fizzle, I called my broker and shorted the whole construction industry. Saturday afternoon, there were 923 pieces of heavy equipment on the move, ready to dig shelters. When people realize they aren’t going to get paid for digging holes, the stocks are going to tank. Page from your book, Dad.”

As people got home and turned on their TVs, sure enough, there was Michael Keaton the movie star being interviewed about Betelgeuse, the super star.