Project Space Guard - 16 November 2001

The following is a quotation from, you'll be mightily relieved to hear, a work of fiction written 28 years ago.

It came in a letter from a faraway friend. Fasten your seat belts.

At 9.46 on the morning of September 11th in the exceptionally beautiful summer of 2007, most of the inhabitants of Europe saw a dazzling fireball appear in the eastern sky. Within seconds it was brighter than the Sun.

As it moved across the heavens, somewhere above Austria, it began to disintegrate, producing a series of concussions so violent that more than a million people had their hearing permanently damaged. They were the lucky ones.

Moving at 50 kilometres a second, a thousand tons of rock and metal impacted on the plains of northern Italy destroying in a few flaming moments the labour of centuries. The cities of Padua and Verona were wiped from the face of the Earth and the last glories of Venice sank forever beneath the sea as the waters of the Adriatic came thundering landward after the hammer blow from space.

Six hundred thousand people died. After the initial shock mankind reacted with a determination that no earlier age could have shown. So began Project Space Guard.

Well, both the dreadful event and the determination to prevent its ever happening again are recounted in a fantasy written by Arthur C Clarke in 1973 - a novel called Rendezvous With Rama.

Sooner or later - in this case it was rather surprisingly later - somebody in Congress came to realise that whereas the meteorites of 1908 and 1947 had fallen in uninhabited wilderness by the end of the present century there won't be such spaces safe for celestial target practice.

Anyway 20 years later Congress took Dr, now Sir, Arthur C Clarke seriously and urged Nasa to set up a workshop - humble word to describe the awesome project of inventing telescopes that could detect asteroids at 200 million kilometres away, become aware of them a decade in advance and acquire the technology to deflect their trajectories.

The Nasa workshop exists and with due credit takes its name from Clarke's fantasy: The Space Guard Project.

I thought it would be refreshing, for a change, to relieve the horrors of what we now consider a manmade catastrophe to consider what some other bodies in the Universe have in store for us, or for our grandchildren, and to know that something positive is being done about it.

This fascinating dollop of consolation came to me the other morning in a letter from my old friend in Sri Lanka who, for his part, says he's wondering still how he got the Space Guard idea but is even more "still getting over the extraordinary coincidence that in my novel the meteorite that destroyed Northern Italy fell on 11 September".

Well I am the least mystical of men but a complementary even odder coincidence is the fact that just when old Arthur Clarke was pondering his choice, 28 years ago, of September 11 as doomsday, I was here, a global leap away, wondering why my immediate reaction to the collapsing of the Twin Towers was the last day of the battle of the Marne, September 11, 1914.

There must be something to coincidences beyond coincidence. And I leave it to be figured out by more clairvoyant or spiritual types.

A note from another part of the world, from a news commentator, touches us and my trade anyway, where I live.

"Now," the man said, speaking from Tel Aviv to American radio and television commentators in general, "what we've lived with for 20 years.

"Since," he says, "we have a couple of suicide bombers a week we start the news by telling where and when and counting the dead and then get on with the rest of life."

The rest of life! That, through September and October, is what New Yorkers have been urged by every public official - from the president down - to pay attention to and what they find most difficult to do.

"Go shopping," says Mayor Giuliani.

"Go to the movies," says the president.

"Fly, fly, take a flight," beg the airlines. "Go take a holiday in the islands, the Caribbean, the Bahamas."

Television these nights is crammed with delicious scenes on tropical beaches, carefree couples raising highly-coloured drinks, sifting white sand between their toes.

All to - I won't say no avail - but nothing like enough avail. Most people have less money this year than they did before what is now officially declared to be the recession set in.

Air travel was beginning to pick up quite briskly till - BAM - suddenly that commercial airplane intended for the Dominican Republic crashed only three minutes into its flight in the densely-inhabited borough of New York city.

At which point two of the three main airlines had their chiefs down in Washington begging for some more billions of assistance - five billion is not enough.

One day these suppliants sat alongside other beggars - the insurance companies, hoping to be helped with covering the enormous liability of the crashing towers.

One or two visitors from the outland, I've noticed, first express sympathy with anyone who has the misfortune to be a New Yorker and then they don't exactly smirk but they give thanks to whatever gods there be that they happen to live in some splendid, remote part of the country.

One friend settled high in the Rockies for many years had, before Doomsday, thought of moving into New England but figures quietly that the Rockies may be "safer".

Another good old friend, not too old to have found his permanent haven, had the bright idea of moving for keeps to his favourite holiday country - to Switzerland. Why Switzerland? he was asked.

He's an old-fashioned type, probably the last generation to read Tennyson and Wordsworth.

I mean he loves landscape - trees, lakes, mountain shadows, skyscapes - and he's something of a gourmet.

He said: "Why Switzerland? Because it's so beautiful and it's the only country, apart from France and Denmark, where the standard daily food is delicious."

I believe he was starting to think about arrangements until a week ago he unfolded his New York Times and of course it fell open at a page-long piece datelined Nyon, Switzerland.

The lead sentence was just what my friend had been talking about. Switzerland's image is that of an orderly country, smooth as its fabled chocolate, whose trains run as precisely as its watches, where crime does not exist, companies are profitable and the president takes public transport to work.

That was the last lyrical sentence in the piece. There followed a recital of disasters.

In mid-September a man walked into the parliament building near Zurich, pulled out a gun and murdered 14 officials.

Days later the famous, the reliable, the national airline Swiss Air collapsed.

In October two trucks collided in Switzerland's technological marvel the St Gotthard tunnel and produced a mile-long blaze.

The government has been so shaken by all this, coming in the wake of September 11, that it will no longer take the risk of turning its annual world economists' conference into a riot.

So instead of holding it in the beautiful but apparently vulnerable ski resort of Davos, it is moving the conference to a safer place. Guess where: New York city.

That news brought my old friend's plans full circle. He decided to play it safe and stay in New York.

One man who has no intention of leaving but thinks anybody would be crazy who'd think of leaving, even after further attacks, is our newly elected mayor, Mr Michael "call me Mike" Bloomberg.

He takes over from his friend and very useful backer, Mayor Giuliani, in January.

Until a month or two ago he was a rigid Democrat but looking over the primary squabble between the Democrats fighting to be the Democratic candidate, he coolly decided he'd turn Republican.

The primary winner he was up against was a Democrat who is very closely tied to the going or running-down Democratic machine that Mayor Giuliani came to trash and to conquer.

Mr Bloomberg was described as full of money, energy and ambition and a deadly critic of the really appalling New York city educational system.

Anyway with five registered Democrats to every one registered Republican in this city Mr Bloomberg's good looks, his easy employment of 8,000 financial gurus and his saying that he doesn't give a damn for ideology but would like to fix the particular problem of each particular borough gave him his surprising win.

We shall hear more, much more obviously of Mr Bloomberg. For the moment he was asked to describe himself.

He said at once: "I am 60-ish, rich, straight, a bachelor and my hobbies are the theatre, running things and chasing women."

That's a nice touch, suggesting we have, after a long dry interval, a politician in charge with a sense of humour.

It's been years since the retirement of Senator Bob Dole, the best legislator of his day, who once sat on a senate committee which was reviewing the qualifications of his wife to become secretary of transportation.

A Democratic opponent said: "Surely, senator, you recognise a conflict of interest?"

Senator Dole shot back: "Lots of interest. No conflict."

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