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"A big one like this could have the force of a decent-sized atomic bomb, in which case you'd get everything you might expect from a bomb, maybe including radiation—the great mystery explosion at Tunguska in Siberia in 1908 was radioactive, although that might not have been a meteor. The estimates I saw in the papers I read today indicate that this might be the largest one in modern times. The shock wave alone will be enormous, and the crater will be fantastic, like a volcanic caldera, very hot and possibly molten."
    "Sounds like fun," Gus commented. "No chance this thing isn't a meteor, though, is there?"
    "Huh? What do you mean? Little green men?"
    "Well, I saw War of the Worlds on TBS last week. Good timing."
    She laughed. "I seriously doubt it. The only danger, and it's very remote, is that this is going to be something like the Tunguska explosion I just talked about. Massive blast damage for hundreds of miles with no evidence of what caused it. Many people think it might have been antimatter."
    "Auntie what?"
    "Antimatter. Matter just like regular matter only with opposite electrical charge and polarity. When antimatter hits matter, they both blow up. Cancel out. Don't let that worry you, though. I never bought the antimatter Siberian explosion. Nobody ever explained to me why it didn't cancel out when it hit the atmosphere if it was. Others say it was a comet, although there's no sign of the meteorite fall that would accompany one. At least one major Russian physicist thinks it was a crashed alien spaceship, but I don't think we have to take that one seriously. Don't worry—it'll be plenty big enough if it's the size they predict even after losing the bulk of its mass in friction with the atmosphere. I hope it lands either in the jungle or in the sea. The track prediction I saw takes it over some fairly populous parts of Peru if it clears the Andes. There's no way they could evacuate all that region, not in three days."
    "Don't get Gus hoping," Terry cautioned. "If it came down in downtown Lima, he'd be so ecstatic about the photo ops, he wouldn't even think of the misery. And no matter what he says, he'd love it to be an invasion from Mars. As I said, news photographers aren't quite human."
    Gus looked sheepish. "Well, it ain't like this happens every day."
    "In fact, it does happen every day," Lori told him. "Meteor strikes, that is. It's just that the particles hitting the Earth are usually small enough that they burn up before they reach the ground and just give pretty shooting stars for folks to look at. The ones that do reach the ground are often the size of peas or so, and most land in the ocean, in any case. It's just the size of this monster that makes it so unusual."
    "Well, wherever it hits and no matter what damage it does, we'll be the first on the scene," Gus told her. "That's our job."
    "Actually, we're praying for Brazil," Terry added. "The other organizations will be forced to use our pool in that region. If it goes into Peru, well, there's a ton of broadcast teams in there now from dozens of countries and more arriving every day. We want to be first and exclusive. If we're not, we're not doing our job."
    "If it does land up in the upper Amazon, at or near the Peruvian border, it'll be hell to get to on the ground," Lori pointed out. "No roads or airstrips up there, and what natives there are will be primitive and not very friendly. But I'm mostly worried about the idea of covering it from the air."
    "Huh? Why?"
    "While it's huge, it's not going to come down in one piece. As it comes through the atmosphere, it'll fragment. Some decent-sized chunks and a huge number of little ones will come off. Some will be large enough to fall on their own over a wide swath and cause enormous damage. Even so, on the ground you can take advantage of some cover, and the odds of being hit by a fragment in the open are still pretty low. In the atmosphere, though, it will be extremely turbulent, and if even a very tiny