about this weather, huh?”
“Yep.”
We’re in his office, and he’s drinking gin from a short square tumbler, absently rubbing his palm along his chin, staring out a big window at the snow tumbling down onto Eagle Square. “A lot of people are blaming it on the asteroid, all the snow. You’ve heard that, right?” Gompers talks quietly, ruminatively, his eyes fixed on the street outside. “It’s not true, though. The thing is still 280 million miles from here at this point. Not close enough to affect our weather patterns, and it won’t be.”
“Yep.”
“Not until afterward, obviously.” He sighs, turns his head to me slowly, like a cow. “People don’t really understand, you know?”
“I’m sure that’s true,” I say, waiting patiently with my blue book and a pen. “Can you tell me about Peter Zell?”
Gompers takes a sip of his gin. “Not that much to tell, really. Guy was a born actuary, that’s for sure.”
“A born actuary?”
“Yeah. Me, I started out on the actuarial side, degree in statistics and everything. But I switched to sales, and at some point I sort of drifted up to management, and here I have remained.” He opens his hands to take in the office and smiles wanly. “But Peter wasn’t going anywhere. I don’t mean that in a bad way necessarily, but he wasn’t going anywhere.”
I nod, scratching notes in my book, while Gompers continues in his glassy murmur. Zell, it seems, was a kind of wizard at actuarial math, had a nearly supernatural ability to sort through long columns of demographic data and draw precise conclusions about risk and reward. He was also almost pathologically shy, is what it sounds like: walked around with his eyes on the floor, muttered “hello” and “I’m fine” when pressed, sat in the back of the room at staff meetings, looking at his hands.
“And, boy, when those meetings ended he would always be the first guy out the door,” Gompers says. “You got the feeling he was a lot happier at his desk, doing his thing with his calculator and his statistics binders, than he was with the rest of us humans.”
I’m scratching away, nodding encouragingly and empathetically to keep Gompers talking, and I’m thinking how much I’m starting to like this guy, this Peter Anthony Zell. I like a guy who likes to get his work done.
“The thing about him, though, about Zell, is that this craziness never seemed to affect him too much. Even at the beginning, even when it all first started up.”
Gompers inclines his head backward, toward the window, toward the sky, and I’m guessing that when he says “when it all first started up,” he means early summer of last year, when the asteroid entered the public consciousness in a serious way. It had been spotted by scientists as early as April, but for those first couple months, it only appeared in News-of-the-Weird kinds of reports, funny headlines on the Yahoo! homepage. “Death from Above?!” and “The Sky is Falling!”—that sort of stuff. But for most people, early June was when the threat became real; when the odds of impact rose to five percent; when Maia’s circumference was estimated at between 4.5 and 7 kilometers.
“So, you remember: people are going nuts, people are weeping at their desks. But Zell, like I said, he just keeps his head down, does his thing. Like he thought the asteroid was coming for everyone except him.”
“And what about more recently? Any change in that pattern? Depression?”
“Well,” he says. “You know, wait.” He stops abruptly, puts one hand over his mouth, narrows his eyes, as if trying to see something murky and far away.
“Mr. Gompers?”
“Yeah, I just … Sorry, I’m trying to remember something.” His eyes drift shut for a second, then snap open, and I have a moment of concern for the reliability of my witness here, wondering how many glasses of gin he’s already enjoyed this morning. “The thing is, there was this one incident.”
“Incident?”
“Yeah. We had this girl Theresa, an accountant, and she came to work on Halloween dressed as the asteroid.”
“Oh?”
“I know. Sick, right?” But Gompers grins at the memory. “It was just a big black garbage bag with the number, you know, two-zero-one-one-G-V-one, on a name tag. Most of us laughed, some people more than others. But Zell, out of nowhere, he just flipped. He starts yelling and screaming at this girl, his whole body is shaking. It was really scary, especially because, like I said, he’s normally such a quiet guy. Anyway, he