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Crater in northern Arizona?” the astronomer asked.
    “Meteor Crater?” the President nodded. “From above, when I’ve flown to San Francisco. It’s just south of I-40, isn’t it?"
    “Exactly.” Carter said. “That crater’s almost a mile across and was caused by a meteor less than 150 feet in diameter. How many chunks that size do you think you’d get out of twelve cubic miles of asteroid?”
    “Thousands,” Al said. “For every one of those craters, we’d be looking at thousands of square miles of blast damage. The size of the crater is relatively small in comparison to the area of destruction."
    “If one of those came down over a major city–” the President said, the image disturbing her sense of calm.
    “It’s not a matter of if ,” Carter said, “it’s a matter of how few cities would be spared . With as many fragments as we’d create, it would be a certainty that most of the planet would be hit."
    “So if we don’t blow it up, what do we do?” she asked, getting up and walking to the cabinet to get a drink. She returned with a cut-crystal bottle and three glasses. She filled them and settled back to sip hers while she listened.
    “We need to deflect it and make sure that it remains intact while we do it,” Dr. Anthony said.
    “This is where we run into trouble,” Al said, picking up his glass. “Most of the viable ideas to do that are based on having a decade or more from discovery to impact.”
    “But we’ve got less than two years,” she sighed.
    “Fortunately, we only need to change its arrival a little to get it to miss us,” Carter said. “Something like four minutes is all.”
    “Four minutes?” she said, confused.
    “At the speed the Earth travels in orbit around the sun, it takes about eight minutes to get out of its own shadow,” he said. “If we could get the asteroid to arrive four minutes late, it would miss us entirely."
    “So you’re talking about slowing it down?” the President asked.
    “Actually it would be simpler to speed it up a bit and have it cross in front of us,” he said.
    “Why?” she asked.
    “Because of how its orbit works. It passes Earth once before it comes back around to get us. If we could launch while it’s close, we could sneak up behind it so to speak. The difference in velocity at that point is only a few miles per second. But if we can’t get it done until after it’s out to where it turns around and is coming back at us, it’s going to get a lot more complex because of the difference in relative velocity.”
    “So how much time do we have?” she asked.
    “We’ve got eight months until it’s at its closest approach to the Earth” the astronomer said. “Depending on the available warheads, we’ll probably have to launch a mission in about four or five months. I don’t know what we have for hardware so that’s only a guess.”
    “Warheads?” the President asked. “I thought you said, blowing it up was out of the question.
    “By using a series of timed warhead pairs, we could nudge the asteroid off its course incrementally. We’d need to create a sequential string of detonations that would provide adequate cumulative impulse on the asteroid without causing it to shatter."
    “Right,” she said, shaking her head.
    “Actually,” Al explained, “what he’s suggesting is setting off one explosion to vaporize a small portion of the asteroid’s surface, and then while the vaporized material was hanging above it, we’d detonate another one to create a thrust.”
    “I’m still not understanding.” she said.
    “The first explosion creates an atmosphere of boiled asteroid dust, and the second one pushes against that to connect to the asteroid.”
    “Essentially that’s what I’m suggesting,” Carter said. “We’d need several small warheads alternating with much larger ones. The smaller detonations would create the atmosphere , without shattering the target, and then the larger explosions would push against