Author: Rick Tobin

Professor Gerard faced his second warning message from HR with a controlled fury. Decades of honors and accolades meant nothing after he refused to bend his knee to the anvil will of a new science department director. Now past fifty, he was ridiculed by younger, hungry astronomers who called him addled and unstable, despite the facts backing his hypothesis.

His cell phone rang—the call was from the Caracas lab.

“Doctor Gerard?”

“Yes.”

“This is Pablo Gutierrez. Your hunch was right. All my colleagues were baffled that Oumuamua had no gaseous signature like a proper comet. Its tail had no water, carbon dioxide, or methane. You know the tests. I pulled up the old spectrograms. There it was: nitrous oxide. What led you to that? What does it mean?”

“Pablo, I’m not sure, and I won’t offer a guess at this point. I found the same trace gases from 31/Atlas, especially after it took that unexpected turn and approached Titan around Saturn, as well as a close contact with Venus and Earth. There it was, again, nitrous oxide.”

“What would cause such a release?”

“NASA specialists told me it is theoretically possible that a perfect rocket engine could expel that as waste, but no such technology exists. Odd, isn’t it? It would have to use free nitrogen gas, which is one of the rarest chemical compounds found naturally in the known universe. Maybe these odd visitors were searching for that resource. It’s a wild idea, I know.”

“Surely. And what do your American colleagues say?”

“I have serious detractors. One of my past competitors for a Nobel calls me a laughing gas comet guru, fixated on fantasy. I thought my years of research merited serious consideration, but influential forces threatened my tenure here—science be dammed.”

“Good luck. I’m sorry I can’t do more. Did you hear about the new huge interstellar object they discovered yesterday? If it’s real, something serious is brewing based on its proposed trajectory.”

“No, Pablo. I missed it. Doesn’t matter to me now. I’m packing up my office and submitting my retirement papers. There’s no place left for me in my field.”

Gerard abandoned his treasured post as a broken man, while a new cosmic interloper approached the solar system, but this time the object was larger than Africa. Alarm bells rang for months from the media, offices of world leaders, and self-elected experts. Fringe elements went unhinged. ARIS 35W approached with what seemed a designed path, putting it both near Earth and then Titan. Myths from ages later, passed among scattered human tribes, described a powerful god that visited Earth, stealing part of the air, leading to environmental disaster and destruction of lost civilizations. All of this collapsed after an alien culture captured three percent of the planet’s free nitrogen gas for its engines without regard for life on Earth or the impacts on Titan. where free nitrogen was plentiful and completely stripped away. For the visitor, it was merely a stop for fuel on its march through the stars.