The End - Visions of Apocalypse

“Emergency exit,” Weist said. “It opens to the air duct. If you need to, you could climb out through there and follow the zip line into the airlock. Without a suit it would hurt, but it’s a short haul and you might come out alive.”

“You think I need it?”

“You know how people are,” Weist said.

“Yeah,” Timo had to agree. “I’ll tell you what; if I get lucky this time out and find something worth anything, I’ll have you put that in. I can’t spend what I don’t have.”

“Okay,” Weist said. “I have the parts. I’ll set them aside and see if you want them when you get back.”

“Fair enough,” Timo said.

He gave Weist most of his money, and was on his way.

* * *

Timo checked his heading again. It was off. Even if the instruments didn’t show it, Jupiter was a small sphere up ahead, and he kept watching it as it slowly slid to the right.

He pulled out an old tennis ball, something he had salvaged a year or two ago, and placed it carefully between his face and the control panel. It drifted forward, down and to the left.

There was definitely something out there, something large— or heavy.

It had taken him a month to skate through the asteroid belt. There was lots of gravity pulling from every which direction, and hardly any salvage at all. It made him uneasy to compensate for small sources of gravity. The math made his head hurt, and he could never get the numbers to turn out right.

Computers were in high demand, but they were hard to find intact. Jeenie had found a computer once, actually five, along with a dozen or so cell phones still in their boxes. She’d stumbled on the remaining corner of a computer store. The eggheads wanted to make her a national hero.

Even being her friend hadn’t bought him a chance to buy one. It was business. He understood.

This gravity felt like it was coming from a single direction. He wasn’t close enough to be running across one of Jupiter’s moons, and he’d made sure he wasn’t going to cross the Trojans.

Timo should have adjusted his course and kept going, but he had tried so hard to avoid everything. Something deep in the back of his mind wondered what this was.

Besides, he decided, he could use whatever it was for a free gravity assist. If he could get the math to come out right — or close to right — he could get some extra momentum before he got to Jupiter. It might even take a couple of hours off the trip.

Timo turned into the gravity. Half with an old calculator he’d bought, and half with guesswork, he put himself in a curve to get close enough to the gravity center to swing him around.

At first there wasn’t anything to see. For a brief moment, Timo worried that he might have found the final resting place of the heavy object that had destroyed the Earth. It could have been slowed by the impact with the planet. It would be just his luck, to die in heavy gravity or be swung out of the whole system.

That’s when he saw it.

“Holy…” Timo said. He wanted to say more, but he couldn’t think of anything to say.

It was the Moon.

* * *

The Earth didn’t really explode. The eggheads thought it might have been a piece of a neutron star, or something like it. It had fallen right though the Earth and left in its wake an ever expanding donut of debris.

Maybe half a million people on the planet survived the initial impact. There were a few dozen more in space ships or on the Mars expedition — most of them survived. The people who happened to be in some kind of sealed environment and who had found some form of sustainability were the lucky ones. If one could call it luck.

Recently, someone had salvaged a nuclear submarine with sixty live sailors. It had been lodged in a thick piece of ocean — rare enough in itself. The sailors had been using electrolysis to make air out of the water, and there had been fish in their frozen ocean.

The best guess had the human race down to about sixty thou, maybe less.

The Moon was the holy grail of the parts of what used to be Earth. Some prospectors had been looking for it since 3 A.D.(After Disaster). The geeks said it could help them terraform Mars. It would be worth its weight in… Well, just about anything of value.

Timo looked at the pictures he had taken of it on his fly by. The Moon looked none the worse for wear. There were new craters, but even in the dim sunlight, it was quite distinctive.

Timo sent a help signal, one indicating he needed help with salvage. On the one hand, it would take some serious muscle to get the Moon to go where he wanted it. On the other, the more people involved, the smaller his cut would be.

“Timo?” a voice cracked though the short range. Timo fought the urge to slam his head on the wall. It was Den. Of all the people in all the sky, Den was the last man he’d want to share anything with. Den had greed issues. “Is that you?”

“Who else would I be?” Timo said.

Den thought he was clever. He thought no one noticed how he cheated everyone he did business with. The fact was, Den was stupid and mean, with the emphasis on mean.