Learning to Swear in America by Katie Kennedy Read Free Book Online Page A

see that list, and we promised we’d limit his access. They knew we wouldn’t send him back if hesaw it.” Fletcher hissed in frustration. “They said they told him to behave. We did, too. It’s his own damn fault.”
    “That’s the problem with having a teenager in a place like this,” Simons said. “What about the Chinese guy? Liu?”
    “Lin. He’s wanted to come here for a long time. We’ve had covert contact before. He knows he’s defecting.”
    Distant footsteps came from below. The men rustled, breaking off their talk.
    “Keep your mouth shut,” Fletcher said. “Nobody else knows about this. We don’t need the distraction while we’re still working.”
    Yuri stood in the darkening stairwell. He would have stayed there for hours, staring west, away from home, but he heard a man’s shoe slap against the bottom stair below him. He slipped out of the stairwell and hurried down the hall to his office. He shut the door silently and sat on the floor, leaning against his desk, until it was well and fully night.
    The asteroid filled his mind, pulsing in his brain, making his head hurt. Because whatever results his team came up with, whether the asteroid slammed into Earth or not, life as he knew it was over. His life was in two pieces. He was being spaghettified.

    That night he lay sleepless in his strange bed in his featureless hotel room. He’d brought half a dozen different foods home for the mouse to try. The mouse ate all of them, then urinated in Yuri’s hand. That was the day’s highlight.
    Yuri thought he could probably get another cell phone. He could even borrow one from an unsuspecting colleague, or from one of the janitors. He wasn’t sure how to call Russia from the United States—there’d be an international code, and he didn’t know what it was—but he could find a way to call someone. His mother. Kryukov, his advisor. Someone in Russia—anyone.
    But what would he say? Because if he left, the math would be wrong. The asteroid would hit North America. People would die. The asteroid should blow up when it entered the atmosphere, like the one over Siberia in 1908. No huge dust cloud to cover the planet, block the sun, wipe out the crops. But some impact on Russia, surely. Trade would be disrupted, the balance of power thrown off. It could hurt his country, too. It could endanger his wobbly table and bowl of dark borscht, and across from him the craggy, understanding face of Gregor Kryukov.
    He had to stay to save these people who were willing to sacrifice him. He had to get home to Moscow, too.
    So he had two problems. He had to save the world, and he had to save himself.

CHAPTER 7
SEATS
    When the car service deposited him at the NEO building the next morning, Yuri had circles under his eyes.
    In his office, he pulled out a fresh pad of paper and began to calculate the problem. He chewed slowly on a pencil eraser, and as he came to the point of divergence from Simon and Pirkola’s work, his hand hesitated a moment, hovering. Then he brought it down decisively, scrawling longhand the same symbols he had used previously, following the same line of thought. The most logical approach was to reduce the asteroid with antimatter before they blew it up. And he knew how to do it.
    He leaned forward, occasionally punching a calculator with his left hand, keeping his right hand moving over the paper. He was going to do the math his way. The right way. When he was done, he would explain it to Simons and Pirkola, make them understand.
    An hour later he took a break to check his e-mail. He thought there might be a message from his mother, but there wasn’t. There were several from people he knew at Moscow State. He had just gotten his doctorate and been made an assistant professor in the physics department, a colleague to his professors. He saved the message from his advisor until last. It said, “ Возвращайся к работе . Get back to work.” He laughed.
    Then he exited his e-mail