The Universe Versus Alex Woods (5 page)

‘You see, Alex,’ she said excitedly, ‘your meteorite is largely composed of metal. It’s actually a member of the iron–nickel subgroup. They’re much rarer than the common chondrites and achondrites – the rocky meteorites. They’re much denser too. That’s one of the reasons it was able to pass through your roof so easily, without fragmenting. Your meteorite weighs just over two point three kilograms and would have been travelling at a terminal velocity of almost two hundred miles per hour when it struck the top of your house. You know, Alex, it’s an absolute miracle that you’re still here.’

‘Yes,’ I agreed, rolling my body weight across my knuckles. I was sitting on my hands because I felt very fidgety, and I had my eyes fixed on that scruffy sports bag. I know that it’s rude not to look at someone when they’re talking to you, but I couldn’t help it. I was mesmerized. I was staring at that bag so hard it was in serious danger of bursting into flames.

‘Dr Weird—’ I began.

‘Actually, Alex, it’s Dr
Weir
.’

‘Oh.’

‘Call me Monica if you like.’

‘Dr
Weir
,’ I said, ‘have you got my iron–nickel meteor in that bag?’

Dr Weir smiled patiently. ‘What I have in this bag, Alex, is your iron–nickel meteor
ite
. That’s what we call it once it has dropped to Earth. It’s only called a meteor while it’s burning in the Earth’s atmosphere. And before that, while it’s still in space, it’s called a meteoroid. Would you like to hold your meteorite?’

‘More than anything.’

It was the size of an orange but a very funny shape – kind of pointy on one side, where it had split from the original impactor, and curved on the other, where it had been superheated by friction with the Earth’s atmosphere. And on the jagged side, it was covered in small fissures and at least a dozen little craters, like tiny alien thumbprints. Dr Weir held it very gently, in both hands and close to her chest, as if it were some kind of fragile woodland creature. ‘Be careful, Alex,’ she said. ‘Remember that it’s much heavier than it looks.’

I held my hands out like a shallow bowl. I was prepared for its weight, but I wasn’t prepared for how cold it was. My hands were still warm from being under my bottom and the iron–nickel meteorite felt like it had been pulled straight from the fridge.

‘It’s freezing!’ I gasped. ‘Is that because it’s from outer space?’

Dr Weir smiled again. ‘Actually, Alex, it’s at room temperature. It just
feels
cold because it’s extremely conductive. It’s drawing a lot of heat from your hands. As to where it’s from, well, that’s one of the things we can be fairly certain about. It probably originated in the molten core of a large asteroid that was destroyed through collision billions of years ago. Do you know what an asteroid is?’

‘Asteroids are great big boulders in space,’ I said. ‘The
Millennium Falcon
had to fly through a whole field of them to get away from Darth Vader’s
Star Destroyer
.’

Dr Weir nodded enthusiastically. ‘Yes, that’s right. But that was in a galaxy far, far away. In our solar system, most of the asteroids – and there are millions and millions of them – orbit the Sun in a wide belt between Mars and Jupiter.’

At this point, Dr Weir drew me a detailed diagram showing the Sun, the planets and the Asteroid Belt. It wasn’t to scale, she said, but it was accurate enough for our purposes.

‘Now, Alex. Usually these asteroids don’t get anywhere near the Earth, as you can see. But occasionally, they get thrown out of their regular, stable orbits. Sometimes they collide like snooker balls, and sometimes they get captured by Jupiter’s enormous gravity and then launched on a whole new path round the Sun. As you probably know, Jupiter is extremely massive and has a very powerful gravitational field. Some of these captured asteroids will eventually impact with Jupiter, and some are thrown so far that they leave the solar system entirely. And some – a tiny, tiny percentage – become meteoroids. That is, they’re hurled onto an orbit that puts them on a direct collision course with the Earth.’

Dr Weir drew on her diagram a little dotted line representing the hypothetical path of a disrupted asteroid crossing the Earth’s orbit. I thought that this was something my mother would have enjoyed looking at. She often talked about how the movements of the planets could affect events on Earth, but she’d never really explained how that worked. Dr Weir explained it much better.

‘Anyway,’ Dr Weir continued, ‘most of the asteroids that collide with the Earth are very tiny and are vaporized high in the upper atmosphere. But a few – like yours – are big enough and dense enough to make it all the way to the ground without vaporizing. And an even smaller number are so big and heavy that they’re hardly even slowed down by the atmosphere. They leave craters and create huge, incredibly destructive explosions. Most scientists agree that it was probably a meteor originating in the Asteroid Belt that killed all the dinosaurs.’

I looked at the orange-sized meteorite in my hands. ‘I’m not sure that one meteor could have killed
all
the dinosaurs,’ I said sceptically.

Then Dr Weir talked for a very long time about how the meteor that probably killed all the dinosaurs was much, much bigger than mine – probably at least ten miles wide – and how a meteor that big would have caused waves as high as mountains and then acid rain and forest fires and a cloud of dust that would have circled the entire planet and blocked out most of the sunlight for the next several years. There wasn’t any meteorite left from that meteor because it had exploded with the force of one hundred billion megatons of TNT, but there
was
a huge sixty-five-million-year-old impact crater under the sea near Mexico. There was also a suspiciously high amount of iridium-193 in the sixty-five-million-year-old rock samples. Iridium-193 was one of the two stable isotopes of iridium, and it was extremely rare on Earth but much more abundant in meteoroids. An isotope was something to do with atomic mass and extremely tiny particles called neutrons, but that was somewhat harder to grasp, and Dr Weir told me that it wasn’t necessary for me to understand all the subtleties right there and then. The main point, she said, was that finding all that iridium-193 in the sixty-five-million-year-old rocks was like finding a smoking gun.

I thought about all this information for a long, long time.

‘Dr Weir?’ I asked. ‘Did they find any iridium-193 in my head? You know, after they took the swabs? Because that would be a smoking gun too, wouldn’t it?’

Dr Weir was delighted with this question. She told me it was exactly the sort of question a scientist would ask. And the answer was yes: the swabs had been analysed using all sorts of special chemical tests, and this had confirmed the presence of a number of meteorite metals, including iron, nickel, cobalt and
lots
of iridium-193. Not enough to build a spark plug, she said, but still lots by normal, earthly standards. And this meant that it was 99.999 per cent certain that my skull had been struck directly by the meteorite fragment, and not merely by falling masonry, as the ambulance man had suggested. That made me only the second person in recorded history to have been significantly injured by a direct meteorite hit.

I felt very triumphant at this point, but also slightly nervous. Because there was one question I still needed to ask.

‘Dr Weir,’ I said, ‘what’s going to happen to my iron–nickel meteorite now? Do you have to take it away again?’

Dr Weir smiled and stayed quiet for a few moments. ‘Well, Alex, I think really that should be up to you. I don’t need it any more. I’ve got enough data and samples from that meteorite to keep me busy for the next six months at least. Usually I’d say that a specimen that beautiful should be put on display in a museum, because I’m sure that there are a lot of people who’d love to see it. But, really, it’s your call. If you want to keep it, you should keep it. Don’t let anyone tell you that you can’t.’

I hugged the meteorite close to my chest. ‘I think I’d really like to keep it,’ I said. ‘At least for now.’

And I did. I kept my meteorite on a special shelf in my bedroom for the next five years. Then, on 20 June 2009, I decided to let other people enjoy it too. It felt like the right time, but I’ll get to that later on. I think, for now, I’ve said enough about my meteorite. If you want to go and see it, you can. It’s in a glass cabinet on the first floor of the Natural History Museum in London, in a section called the Vault – about a hundred metres from the dinosaurs.

Once all the doctors had agreed that my brain was okay and my skull was healing itself beneath its degradable bone plates, I was discharged from hospital and into a series of media scrums. The first occurred six feet outside the main entrance, the second at my mother’s car, the third at our front gate, the fourth in the same place the following morning, the fifth just outside my mother’s shop, the sixth as we were closing up that evening and so on and so forth for the next two days. Rather surprisingly, my thirteen-day coma had helped to sell a lot of newspapers. It didn’t matter that twelve of those days had been completely uneventful. A whole universe of speculation had been created from just a few unpromising particles. According to reliable and never-named sources in the hospital, my situation was critical, then desperate, then critical but stable, then just stable, then uncertain, then (for twelve hours) improving, then uncertain again and then steadily bleaker with each passing day until everyone agreed that there was very little chance of my ever waking up. At that point, I woke up, escaping the cul-de-sac into which I’d been written.

Of course, journalists were not tolerated within the hospital walls – not unless they had broken bones or terrible diseases – but that didn’t stop several dozen well-wishers (‘friends of the family’ and ‘distant relations’) turning up on the ward during visiting hours (and I should tell you that our ‘family’ had about three friends and precisely zero known relatives). My mother left instructions at reception that no one should be allowed through without her explicit agreement and all incursions were quickly repelled. The articles written about my recovery were, therefore, just as speculative and non-eventful as those that had documented the various phases of my unconsciousness. But during the week that I was awake, the media did at least have plenty of time to work out all the best ambush points for when I was finally set free.

Progress across the hospital car park was glacial, and by the time we’d made it out and were waiting at the roundabout, my mother had resolved that I was not going to answer any more questions or stand still for any more photographs. She couldn’t stop the reporters from lurking around her car or inspecting the inside of our wheelie bin, but she was not going to put me on parade; and the only time she came close to breaking this resolve was during the final stage of the ongoing bathroom-roof saga, which is another thing I should probably tell you about.

Upon arriving home, I discovered to my horror that the bathroom roof had been repaired and was now completely back to normal. It was only in the newspaper cuttings that I would ever get to see the devastation wrought upon our house by 2.3 kilograms of metal travelling at two hundred miles per hour. It transpired that the roof had actually been fixed weeks ago, by a local builder who had offered his services for free. He had tried to contact my mother shortly after the accident, but she was away at the hospital, and in no state to think about roof repairs. Luckily, the Stapletons, who were collecting our mail and looking after Lucy, had been able to accept this kind offer on our behalf. But then I woke up and my mother could think again and she was overwhelmed with gratitude and immediately told the builder that she wouldn’t dream of letting his generosity go unrewarded. After all, his was a small, family-run operation, and our bathroom had been a bomb site. It wasn’t just the metre-square hole that had been punched in the roof – there was also the floor, which needed retiling, and the shattered sink, which needed replacing. The cost in terms of labour and materials must have been substantial. And because we had comprehensive insurance, it seemed silly that the builder should be left out of pocket.

It was this last piece of information, of course, that had finally swayed him. He sent my mother the invoice, she sent the invoice to the insurance company, and, two days later, the insurance company sent her a very long, very wordy letter saying that regrettably they were unable and unwilling to foot the bill. In a strange oversight, our house was covered against fire, flood, subsidence, earthquakes, vandalism, terrorism
and every extreme of weather – including blizzards, tornadoes and hurricanes – but
not
against meteors, which fell into the category ‘Acts of God’. As a large corporation of international repute, with shareholders and premiums to consider, they didn’t feel it would be ethically responsible if they agreed to pay my mother’s claim – not when our builder had previously been so willing to work for nothing (a detail that had made the local papers and which had not escaped their notice).