The Last Christmas On Earth

"I'm sorry to contradict you, but it changed a little since then," Hope objected. "The comparative analysis we did, using the spectrometer, showed something completely unexpected and not very reassuring."

"That is?" Kowalsky urged, paling slightly; when too many big words began to buzz in his head he lost the focus on his speech and got nervous.

"During our research, we identified deep fractures at many Mohorovicic discontinuity locations, which are nothing but wounds in Earth's crust, at very great depths, and so we finally realized what is causing these intense localized temperature increases. The nature of solar radiation is changing. Until recently, the frequency spectrum of emissions that reached the ground has always involved a range from three to ten Gigahertz, but lately, it started to fall and touched more than once values very close to 2.45 Gigahertz.

This fact has contributed significantly to triggering the phenomena that recently occurred in the area of the Ring of Fire. Moreover, it seems that emissions are about to become more or less stable around those values."

"I still don't understand what is your point," the President confessed.

"Practically, in this phase, the Sun is gradually turning into a huge magnetron, the tube for operating microwaves."

The President questioned Ross and Kowalsky with a quick glance, who responded by sticking their chin forward to indicate they too had not understood.

"I'll explain it easier. Let's take a silicone balloon, fill it with water and put it in a microwave oven. If we..."

"I get it now," the President interrupted again. "The silicone will not change, but the liquid inside will boil, and increasing its pressure due to overheating, it will explode, shattering the casing."

"Unless fractures are created on the surface of the balloon to allow some liquid to escape and to rebalance the internal pressure," Dr. Hope pointed out.

"So according to his theory the Sun is slowly overheating all the magma contained within the Planet sending it to boil, and if the right conditions are met we run the risk that the Earth will explode" hypothesized the President; then he stopped waiting for a confirmation.

"Your theory is very fascinating, but in my opinion, it seems too much extreme, the chances such event occurs are minimal," replied Dr. Hope after thinking it over.

"Then what is the real problem? Why are we here tonight to discuss instead of saying goodnight to our children?" Asked the President angrily, he almost had the impression the scientist was having fun behind him.

"The real problem apart from the various active volcanoes scattered all over the planet lies in the chain of super submarine volcanoes located in Antarctica," explained the scientist.

"What volcanoes?"

"The British Antarctic Survey discovered them a few years ago, they are twelve volcanoes located not far from the South Sandwich Islands, a stone's throw from the South Pole. Some of them are three thousand meters high and still seem to be active."

"I don't see what problem they can cause, they are so far from civilization," the President objected.

"We know the cracks that affect the Mesosphere are so large as to favor the flow of real huge underground magma rivers, you have no idea of what could happen if all the thermal energy absorbed by the Ring of Fire would channel in that direction without getting lost along the way."

"So you tell me," the President replied impatiently, the researcher was treating him as ignorant and he didn't like it at all.

"The ashes produced by the possible eruption of many huge volcanoes would poison the sea and obscure the sky for years, depriving us in a short time of all the resources we need daily and generating a sort of nuclear winter that would affect the whole planet. The biggest explosion would then be located just where Earth's axis of rotation ideally meets the surface, and this would have irreparable consequences. In the worst scenario possible, such an explosion could give the planet a tremendous boost, that our engineers have established to be comparable to the rockets on a spaceship ..."

"That's enough!" The President surrendered, he didn't want to imagine other catastrophic scenarios. "Are you suggesting that we must wish for a further increase in seismic and volcanic activity so that Earth can, let's say," discharge "? Should we hope that many great calamities rather than one huge catastrophe occur? "

Dr. Hope raised his eyebrows as to say "there you go".

"If I'm not mistaken, you also said that the culmination of the solar crisis will come soon," the President then asked to take control of the situation.

"A fortnight, maximum twenty days. Perhaps less," the scientist confirmed.

"How many chances do we have that the sun really works like a microwave and triggers the grand finale?"

"I suppose we have good chances to survive, but I am not able to state this with certainty because we do not have similar precedents to study. Making predictions would be unscientific, but if I were forced to venture a number I would say fifty and fifty."

"And does one chance out of two seems good to you?" Ross remarked, annoyed. The scientist answered spreading his arms.

"Will there be any warning before it happens?" Asked the President.

"A maximum of four or five days' notice, I assume. The internal pressure of the magma chambers will increase exponentially by transferring part of its energy to the Astenosfera, which will be significantly affected by the effects of this phenomenon. Earthquakes and chain eruptions will occur, but it will still be a fairly slow process. The first consistent signal will be the large masses of water that will start to evaporate from lakes and rivers and then from the sea with rapidly increasing speed and intensity. When water vapor comes into contact with the colder air in the upper parts of the atmosphere tremendous storms will break loose. Once fallen, the water will immediately start evaporating again to start the cycle again increasingly devastating. Meanwhile, even living beings..."

"Did you say living beings?" Ross interrupted him, he wasn't sure he understood.

"Exactly. We, for example, we are made of water at seventy percent, what do you think would happen to our bodies in such a situation?"

"Does that mean we're destined to burst like that balloon in the microwave?"

"It's a possibility. It is not certain that all this will happen, but if it really happens then there will be no single safe place on Earth, if this is what you wanted to know."

"What can we do?" The President asked Benjamin Hope, and he did it in a way that for the first time since he had stepped into the White House had seemed humble. The scientist looked at him strangely, because he could hardly believe that the President himself had really asked him a similar question. Then the President immediately regretted asking it to him. Dr. Hope had asked him a meeting for a long time, telling him that he had to expose vital questions to him, but he had always done everything he could to avoid that meeting.

"What can we do?" Dr. Hope echoed, the President nodded and let him rub salt in his wound. To rub it in for how much superficial he had been in postponing that meeting was the least he could have done.

"As far as I am concerned tonight I will go back home and dedicate all the time I have to my family, I will try to prepare as best as I can for what could be our last Christmas on Earth," he replied quietly, without arguing. The President looked strangely at his collaborators who shrugged their shoulders, then returned to seriously look Dr. Hope because that was certainly not the answer he expected. Dr. Hope noticed it and nodded, he knew that the President was asking what humanity could work out about that specific problem and so he took a few moments to think about it.

"We have to cross our fingers, it seems obvious to me ... at this point, I can't see what else we could do!" He declared at the end of his reflections; everyone present remained speechless.

"Goodbye," he added, getting up, then put his hat on his head in an elegant manner and moved toward the door.

It was almost three o'clock and James had not yet managed to sleep. He was just about to doze off when an unexpected distant rumble of a low-speed diesel engine got his attention. He opened his eyes cursing that noise, it awakened him just when he was about to fall asleep, then he got up yawning and looked out of the window wondering who could wander at that time of night. He looked carefully through the closed shutters, but the open space in front of the house was deserted, there were no lights of any kind, and he thought he had only imagined it. Once awake, he decided to look at Harry, slowly opened the door and found him blissfully asleep. He smiled smugly and went back to bed, ready to sleep, but as soon as he closed his eyes a screeching squeak made him alert all his senses again. He listened for a few moments without being able to catch other noises, then he thought that probably a gust had stirred the unstable walls of his tin shed.

"Sooner or later I'll have to make up my mind and settle it," he thought, once again ready to fall asleep, but just a moment later he heard a new crunch. Eve grumbled something and changed position by pulling the sheet towards her.

"Did you hear that too?" James asked her as he turned on the lamp, but she was sleeping soundly with her earplugs insert. He heard yet another unusual sound and at that point, he was quite certain that someone was rummaging in his tool shed, then got out of bed, took the torch and the semiautomatic from the drawer of the dresser and ran down the stairs. Once downstairs he put on a pair of boots at his feet, put on a sweatshirt over his pajamas and lurked behind the kitchen door, the best point from which he could observe the garden without being seen. He noticed a faint glow inside the shed and decided that he would exit the back door to walk around the house passing over the hedge that bounded the property, in that way he would arrive behind the shed without being seen. He would have lurked and would have surprised the intruder at the exit; whoever it was would have dealt with, he would have let him pass the desire to go and rummage into other people's houses. He walked those thirty meters behind the hedge with his heart in his throat, thinking back to all the strange things that had happened in those last days, and he repeated several times that he had to be very careful. Arriving at the shed he flattened himself against a side wall and patiently waited. Shortly after the door opened slowly and a shadow came out, James jumped on her, seizing her from behind and pinned her to the ground, with her arms crossed behind her back, like when he makes an arrest, and before the other could try to move he sat astride on her back.

"Don't move," he growled in her ear, then he raised his arm to hit her shoulder with the butt of his pistol just to show immediately who was in charge. At that point, the intruder, frightened and put in inferior conditions, would have told what was she doing in there without resisting and without inventing stories. As soon as he began to lower his arm, however, he stopped because a light bulb had suddenly lit up in his head: when he had approached the intruder's ear he had the feeling of knowing her. The vague hint of a familiar scent, though almost completely covered by the smell of her sweat, had awakened a sensation in him. Also, thinking back, he realized that when he had belted her from behind he had touched something soft, something very similar to a breast.

"James, stop for the love of God!" Shouted Helen, terrified.

"Helen? What are you doing here?" He said puzzled lowering his arm.

"Do you want to leave me now? You are hurting me!"

James loosened his grip and moved to her side, she stood up rubbing her aching wrists and looked at him badly.

"How could I know it was you?" He justified himself. "Luckily I recognized you at the last moment, otherwise I don't know what I would have done ... lately, too many strange things happened."

"Don't tell me!"

"Why, what happened to you?"

"It would be faster to tell you what hasn't happened yet."