Carl angrily snapped off the radio and maneuvered the Mercedes off the freeway, onto Sepulveda Boulevard, and then onto Highway 1, which would take them straight north to LAX without the freeway delays.
“Those dirty, lying idiots!” he blurted. “How could they do that?”
Lori flinched at his sudden outburst. “What, Carl? What are you yelling about?”
“Those jerks! I can’t believe this! They didn’t say anything until it was too late! They’ve been tracking that blasted thing for days, weeks even. And no warning whatsoever, until now . . . when it’s too late to do anything. It’s criminal!”
“Maybe they didn’t want to start a panic, Carl.”
“Panic!” he shouted. “Lori, all hell’s going to break loose in less than ten hours. There will be plenty of panic then!”
“Maybe they didn’t know it was coming so close,” Lori persisted.
“If they knew about that other one—the one you said came so close ten years ago—then maybe they thought this one would pass by the same way.”
“Lori, listen to me,” Carl said impatiently. “If that thing is as big as they say it is and if it hits anywhere near here, thousands of people— maybe hundreds of thousands—are going to die. It’s criminal not to warn the people of California what’s going on.”
Lori shifted nervously. “What are you saying, Carl? What does this mean, really?”
Suddenly Carl wished he didn’t know anything at all about astronomy—that he couldn’t see what was coming. But over the years he had continued to educate himself about astronomy, keeping up with the latest books and articles. Reading about the movements of stars and the planets had always been a kind of intellectual consolation amid the mindless commercialism he lived with. But now he realized that if that huge chunk of rock came hurtling from the sky and landed off the California coast, it was going to wipe out everybody and everything for hundreds of miles. After that, a series of inevitable floods, fires, and earthquakes would leave a toll of devastation beyond human calculation. Nothing and no one could be saved, and it was already too late to help anybody else.
“Honey,” he said, “what it means is we’ve got to hurry and get on that plane. Do you understand?”
Lori nodded, not trusting herself to speak.
As they approached the terminal, they could see hundreds of cars jamming every lane, in every direction. There was nowhere to park, so Carl pulled up onto the median and drove as far as he could before he stopped and turned off the engine. “Let’s go,” he said. “Grab your carry-on and just keep going straight ahead. Don’t slow down and don’t look back. Just keep moving, no matter what happens.”
Carl reached over and touched his wife gently on the cheek. “Are you ready?”
She nodded again.
“Then, let’s go.”
They got out of their car and jogged the last hundred yards to the terminal, criss-crossing between cars and groups of people milling around on the sidewalk. When they entered the lobby, Carl took Lori’s hand and pulled her through the crowds. At the checkpoint, they slipped into line, passed through the metal detectors, and made their way to the Continental gates with nothing but the bags in their hands. They were more than an hour early, but the flight was already in the final boarding stages.