He laughed out loud, feeling a surge of hope at the arrival of this prospective ally, “With pleasure, Laurie, with absolute pleasure!”

* * *

Three hours later, they had lost none of their enthusiasm and the room had become strewn with even more papers, while the three large whiteboards they had wheeled in were well covered with often conflicting equations, and diagrams depicting angles of entry and orbit. Laurie had brought so much rigor to his thinking that he was almost ashamed that he had presented his thoughts to anyone without putting them to this test first. But neither of them could doubt now that this rigor was only strengthening his conclusions.

Several things had kept Neal up after the meteors had made their scattered impacts on Earth, most of which were merely circumstantial: that they had landed near land, but never on it was curious, as was the fact that they had all landed in patches of deep water or underwater trenches that veered unusually near to land. But despite General Pickler’s opinion of him, Neal was not one to wildly pursue conspiracy theories and these apparent coincidences had no more impact on him than they had had on a man of the general’s unimaginative disposition.

The thing that had peaked his interest was that they had all made it to those oceanic impacts at all.

While an ultrasonic entry to an atmosphere as thick as ours is always destructive, you could never predict exactly how the vagaries of shape, mass, constitution, and density would combine with the prime factors of angle-of-entry and speed to affect an arriving meteor’s ability to survive the onslaught.

You could, however, say that increased size also increased the probability that the mass would survive the introduction to our planet and make it to the surface. So at a given angle of entry, there was a size above which it was very likely that some part of it would make it all the way, and conversely there was a line below which it was inordinately unlikely that it would.

Between these two wannabe-absolutes was a range where factors like shape and density held more sway, though the degree to which they would affect the outcome was harder to predict than the blunter factor of being very big or very small.

“Our eight friends,” Neal had explained to Colonel Milton, then to General Pickler, and had reiterated to Laurie’s nods of understanding at the beginning of their conversation, “fall in the bottom of this range of mixed probability.

“Specifically,” he had continued, “the odds were that they each had on average a roughly 1 in 46 chance of impacting the surface, based on our estimates of weight against the norms of meteor showers in the past.