They got us off the station a year and a half later, just over two years after the asteroid had changed the face of the planet forever. Civilization, which I thought would take a hundred years to return was off and running in five. We didn’t have the diversity of products that we’d had, the food we enjoyed, and the automobile, as a fossil fuel machine, was as dead as the dinosaurs that had fueled it for so long. Necessity required us to find alternative ways to get around.
For those interested, something over four billion people died because of the asteroid, but surprisingly, two billion survived. Hardest hit was Africa because the asteroid hit there. India was also devastated. People around the coastlines of all the continents were killed in the millions by the tsunamis that followed.
The Chinese who’d left their station so early in the disaster failed to land and it was presumed they were killed as their shuttle broke up on reentry. We never learned what happened to Jason. He didn’t land in New Mexico and there is no evidence of his landing at Bondurant. His ship probably broke up as well. Had he been patient, he would have survived with the rest of us. We never did learn, for certain, if he killed David. That really might have been a tragic accident.
Life on Earth is calmer than it was. The big issues that had faced us, international commerce, international financing, and global warming, have all faded away. Lots of dust in the atmosphere for years stopped the rise in temperature and now the Earth has had time to cleanse itself.
I’m not sure if we’re better off, but we don’t have the means to make war on each other the way we did at one time and while there have been skirmishes, a general, hell bent for leather, world war has not happened. It’s just too difficult to move masses of soldiers and equipment around the new face of the planet.
I’m working on getting us off Earth, though statistically, we don’t have to worry about another huge rock hitting us for several millions of years . . . but we have other problems like super volcanos and dramatic climate change that could reduce the human population even more drastically. We should be a species that lives on two planets . . . Earth and Mars, and we should be looking for ways out of the Solar System. That way, if another asteroid hits, we’ll have humans surviving in style throughout the Solar System and in our neighborhood in the galaxy.
Those on Mars will be reinforced soon. We have the knowledge, we just need to improve our technology to where it was. Those there have expressed no desire to return to Earth. They could, but everyone thinks they should stay there as the basis of the colony.
Sheila and Sarah have stayed with the new NASA and work to get us all off the planet. Sarah never found Tom, though Tulsa survived most of the destruction from the asteroid. We don’t know if he didn’t make it there, tried to go somewhere else, or just took off to live on his own, sure that Sarah was stuck on the space station.
Debbie lived in Manhattan for a number of years, until I got home. She was in Alamogordo when we finally touched down and three minutes after our reunion it was as if nothing had happened and we had been together the whole time. The world had changed, but we hadn’t.
We moved to Cedar Rapids because that had been the place I had first seen as civilization had returned and it was the first place we talked to as we established radio communication. I know that the town had nothing to do with that, but it seemed appropriate that we make our base there.
So we live in what is again a farming community. We have television through satellites because they still work, we have electricity, and we have education. Those electronic records that I feared would be lost forever have been retrieved and duplicated.
The world, as it is now, is a better place and I hope that no one has to throw an asteroid at us again to make it such. I hope we have learned our lesson.