BEN SETTLED INTO his chair, putting his espresso down on the café table. Behind him a buzzing growl erupted, and he turned to see a scooter loaded with two riders, one of them clutching a brown bag of groceries, roaring toward him. He flinched backward, the mirror of the scooter flying just inches from his face.
A close call. A near miss. But he was none the worse for it, except for a jolt of adrenaline to go with his caffeine.
Shifting his seat closer to the wall, Ben watched the scooter disappear down the cobbled street in a haze of blue exhaust. In the stifling air, a fetid aroma wafted from garbage piled near the corner. The collectors were on strike. Unseasonably hot weather for Italy in early October. Looking up, he admired the French-shuttered windows lining each story of the tiny alley up to three stories above him, cables and wires stretched like jungle vines from one side to the other with a thin blue strip of sky beyond that. A flock of birds fluttered across the rooftops.
If there were ever a day for alcohol at breakfast, today was that day, but Ben kept to coffee. The meeting the night before had been short, with Dr. Müller giving precious little information except that he needed Ben to help assemble a trusted group.
Ben hadn’t seen Müller in years before last night, not since Müller was his thesis advisor at Harvard. Ben heard the old man had gone into the private sector; either that or retired. Apparently not.
Dr. Müller wanted Ben’s data; that’s why he needed him. Ben both loved and hated being in charge of the exoplanet group at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. Sometimes there was excitement, like when he co-discovered one of the first planets orbiting another star in 1992. But ten more planetary discoveries took ten more years of drudgery after that.
In the last decade, though, the floodgates had opened with the development of new telescopes and sensing systems. Now the list of exoplanets—planets that orbited stars other than our Sun—stretched into the many thousands, with dozens of them similar in size and orbit to Earth. What they were looking for now wasn’t a planet, but a lot of the data they’d collected could be used for what Dr. Müller needed.
Ben still had a headache.
The night before had been a celebration of sorts. This year was a big event for the International Astronomical Union, one hundred years since its inception. Five thousand astronomers and physicists from all over the world assembled here in Rome, back at the place it all started—in Italy four hundred years ago when Galileo turned his telescope skyward and championed the idea that the Sun, not the Earth, was the center of the solar system.
“So this is where you’re hiding,” said someone behind Ben.
Turning, he discovered the smiling face of Roger—the graduate student attending the IAU meeting with him—looking down at him with a quirky grin. Dr. Müller had made it clear that only a small group of senior people was to be included at this point, so Ben couldn’t say anything to Roger yet. He did his best to smile.
“What, the Grand Hotel isn’t grand enough for you to enjoy your coffee there?” Roger said, laughing. “You look terrible. Too much vino last night?”
“Maybe.” Ben shrugged limply. “You know what it’s like when us old boys get together.”
“Sure.” Roger sat opposite Ben, his hands wide apart on the table. A white-aproned waiter wheeled out of the café entrance and Roger mouthed, “Espresso,” while pointing at Ben’s empty cup and saucer.
Ben held up a finger, requesting his third. The waiter nodded and turned back.
“Are you going to the seminars this morning?” Roger asked, pointing at the IAU meeting schedule open on the table between them.
Ben stared at the thin strip of blue sky between the rooftops overhead. Was destruction really coming? With dozens of countries with active space programs, hundreds of spacecraft and telescopes peering into space, how could it be possible to miss something like this? Did this thing suddenly appear from nowhere? It seemed impossible, but Dr. Müller promised more answers at the meeting later this morning.
Even after thirty years as a professional astrophysicist, Ben was amazed at the detail of the universe that humans had managed to construct, all by staring up into the sky and by peering through tiny devices. A collection of fantastical objects—dwarfs, red giants, black holes, dark nebulae—sounded more like fantasy than reality. But it seemed the fantasy was about to deliver a cold dose of reality.
“Earth to Ben. Are you going to the seminars this morning or not?”
Ben caught himself staring up, lost in thought. Rubbing the back of his neck with one hand, he turned and met Roger’s quizzical smile with an awkward grin.
“Sorry, coming back to Rome brings up a lot of memories. I honeymooned here.” He folded his arms. “And to answer your question, no, an emergency meeting was called last night.”
“An emergency meeting? At the Union?” Roger snorted. “What, they want to turn Pluto back into a planet?”
The waiter appeared as if by magic and hovered over the table. He delivered their two espressos before vanishing again.