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They are going to turn into a white cloud in the sky, and that cloud is going to spread out.”
    Click. The graph continued shooting upward, rocketing up into a new domain and turning red.
    “A day or two after the White Sky event will begin a thing I am calling the Hard Rain. Because not all of those rocks are going to stay up there. Some of them are going to fall into the Earth’s atmosphere.”
    He turned the projector off. This was an unusual move, but it snapped them all out of PowerPoint hypnosis and forced them to look at him. The aides in the back of the room were still thumbing their phones, but they didn’t matter.
    “By ‘some,’” Doob said, “I mean trillions.”
    The room remained silent.
    “It is going to be a meteorite bombardment such as the Earth has not seen since the primordial age, when the solar system was formed,” Doob said. “Those fiery trails we’ve been seeing in the sky lately, asthe meteorites come in and burn up? There will be so many of those that they will merge into a dome of fire that will set aflame anything that can see it. The entire surface of the Earth is going to be sterilized. Glaciers will boil. The only way to survive is to get away from the atmosphere. Go underground, or go into space.”
    “Well, obviously that is very hard news if it is true,” the president said.
    They all sat and thought about it silently for a period of time that might have been one minute or five.
    “We will have to do both,” the president said. “Go into space, and underground. Obviously the latter is easier.”
    “Yes.”
    “We can get to work building underground bunkers for . . .” and she caught herself before saying something impolitic. “For people to take refuge in.”
    Doob didn’t say anything.
    The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff said, “Dr. Harris, I’m an old logistics guy. I deal in stuff. How much stuff do we need to get underground? How many sacks of potatoes and rolls of toilet paper per occupant? I guess what I’m asking is, just how long is the Hard Rain going to last?”
    Doob said, “My best estimate is that it will last somewhere between five thousand and ten thousand years.”
    “NONE OF YOU WILL EVER STAND ON TERRA FIRMA, TOUCH YOUR loved ones, or breathe the atmosphere of your mother planet again,” the president said. “That is a terrible fate. And yet it is a better fate than seven billion people trapped on the Earth’s surface can hope for. The last ship home has sailed. From now on, launch vehicles will rise up into orbit, but they will not go back for ten thousand years.”
    The twelve men and women in the Banana sat in silence. Like the destruction of the moon itself, it was too big a thing for them totake in, too large for human emotion to get around. Dinah focused on trivia. Such as: just how damned good J.B.F.—the president—was at saying stuff like this.
    “Dr. Harris,” said Konrad Barth, the astronomer. “I am sorry, Madam President, but is it possible to get Dr. Harris back into the picture?”
    “Of course,” said Julia Bliss Flaherty, who, with some reluctance, stepped sideways, making room for the larger frame of Dr. Harris. Dinah thought that he looked shrunken and diminished compared to the famous TV scientist. Then she remembered what he had explained to them a few minutes ago, and felt uncharitable for having drawn that comparison. What must it have been like, to be the only man on Earth to know that the Earth was doomed?
    “Yes, Konrad,” he said.
    “Doob, I’m not disagreeing with your calculations. But has this been peer reviewed? Is there a chance that there is some basic error, a misplaced decimal point, something?”
    Harris had begun nodding his head halfway through Konrad’s question. It was not a happy kind of nod. “Konrad,” he said, “it’s not just me.”
    “We have signals intelligence suggesting that the Chinese figured it out a day before we did,” the president said, “and the British, the