“So — tell us, in your own words, about the day forty years ago when you knocked that rock off its course before it could hit the city.”
The young reporter pressed the recorder’s button, its little light blinking red. Misaki, I think her name was. She had twice my energy.
They call me the hero who deflected the rock. Every time I hear it, something goes cold down my back.
That was forty years ago. A slab of stone the size of a pyramid was falling straight toward our city’s sky. I sent up a single probe, slammed it into the rock, and nudged its path a little sideways. That was all it took to make me the city’s hero. Or rather — I didn’t become one. I got turned into one.
“The goal was to delay the rock’s arrival by seventy seconds. What you actually achieved was thirty-two minutes. Twenty-five times the success line. People still call it a miracle strike—”
“It wasn’t a miracle.”
The words slipped out before I could stop them. Misaki looked up sharply. Too late to take it back now.
Something about it had bothered me for years. A hit that weak should never have moved a rock that far. The night I first saw the numbers, before the joy came, what I actually muttered was closer to dread — this worked too well. It wasn’t my aim. Something else had to have pushed that rock along with me, somewhere I couldn’t see. For forty years, I’d wanted nothing more than to find out what.
“So I sent a second probe out to the rock. To measure the scar.”
“Right — that data arrives today. That’s why we’re holding the ceremony.”
The ceremony could wait. What mattered was that the answer — years there, years back — was finally coming home today.
A grainy photo of the rock came up on the screen. I held my breath and read the report scrolling past.
The target hadn’t been solid stone at all. It was a loose pile of rubble, barely holding itself together. The weak impact had shattered its surface, and the debris had blasted out the far side. The recoil from that spray had pushed the whole body far beyond anyone’s prediction.
There it was. Not skill. The rock had simply been junk. I’d kicked a sandpile that was already on the verge of collapsing, and it had collapsed. Forty years of dread, answered in the most embarrassing way imaginable.
I stood up.
“Misaki, listen. I’m no expert marksman. My aim was clumsy. That rock happened to be falling apart already, so it crumbled and moved on its own. It was luck. All of it, luck.”
I said it. And I finally felt forty years of weight lift off my shoulders.
Misaki blinked at me for a moment, then scribbled something in her notebook and turned it toward me.
“Here’s the headline: ‘The Sharp Eye That Spotted a Fragile Asteroid — A Hero’s Forty Years.’”
“No, that’s not it—”
“I get it. Modesty’s part of being a hero too!”
The mayor came bounding up onto the stage, beaming, and pressed a gold-plated model of the launch button into my hands. “Congratulations, Kuroda!” The real button weighed twenty-five times less.
The report on the screen wasn’t finished. In print too small for anyone to bother reading, it said this: the scattered fragments were now drifting together into a loose swarm, slowly spreading toward somewhere else entirely.
Someone would go check on that too, someday. Decades from now, probably. I stood there holding the heavy button, looking up at the sky where the debris had scattered. The applause just kept going, and never seemed to stop.