Fore!

“Every object in a state of uniform motion tends to remain in that state of motion unless an external force is applied to it.”

“Anything that can go wrong will go wrong.”

 

The planet Earth is about to be destroyed.

In a seemingly unrelated series of tragedies, every year, about a dozen people around the world are struck dead, right where they stand, for no readily apparent reason.

To make sense of this phenomenon, another statistic is necessary. Every year thousands of people fire their guns into the air all over the world – whether in celebration, or mourning, or just for the hell of it.

The bullets which fire out of those guns do not just disappear, though it might seem that way to their owners. Instead, those pellets of metal are loosed upon the unsuspecting world, flung like super sonic hail through the air in sweeping parabolic arcs. 99.9% of them fall harmlessly to the ground, embedding in the dirt, or the sidewalk, or frightening an old woman when her ceramic planter shatters unexpectedly.

But about a dozen of those tens of thousands of bullets find their way into the unsuspecting bodies of distant innocents, striking them dead as if by magic.

Neither Newton nor Murphy can be blamed for their deaths, no more than the written chemical formula for TNT can be blamed for everyone who’s ever been blown to bits by what that formula represents.

However, the laws which bear those two men’s names can provide a damn good explanation – both of what happened to about a dozen unlucky people last year, as well as to why a Trilaxian Doom Fleet currently orbits the Earth.

On February 6th, 1971, by the reckoning of his race, Alan Shepard was on the moon. His stay would be brief, but he still managed to get in some rest and relaxation. He famously chipped two golf balls off the lunar surface, sending them flying off into space. This was reported back to Earth, chuckled at and swiftly forgotten. Man did not return to the moon for two hundred years.

However those two golf balls did not, contrary to how it may have felt to Alan Shepard, disappear. Like the stray bullets of thousands of irresponsible gun owners, they continued onward in their not quite ballistic trajectory, traveling through the near vacuum of space unmolested and therefore without slowing.

It may be hilarious to some – although probably not to anyone currently on the Earth’s surface watching the Trilaxian’s charge their atomizing cannons – but perhaps it would be hilarious to others that the fate of an entire species should ride on the quality of one man’s golf stroke.

Had Mr. Shepard been a poorer golfer, then his golf balls would have missed the Trilaxian Royal entourage by over 60,000 miles. Had he been a much better golfer, then the golf balls would have arrived ahead of the Trilaxian’s and drifted off harmlessly into space.

Alternatively, if the poor Trilaxian King and Queen had decided to tour a different outlier solar system, or to linger only a few hours longer orbiting fiery Ganymede, then humanity would also have been spared Trilaxian wrath.

Or if, to cite a final of the infinite ways things could have turned out differently, the Trilaxian pilot had not increased their ships velocity to 9/10ths light-speed in order to arrive in time to photograph Venus’s most pristine moon rise, then the royal ship’s shielding might have held and the planet Earth would also have survived.

Unfortunately for the human race, both Newton and Murphy’s laws are immutable, chance is capricious, and none of these alternative possibilities came to pass.

A regulation golf ball impacting an object traveling at very nearly the speed of light has a kinetic force equivalent to a bullet train. Two such golf balls intersected with the Trilaxian Royal Family’s ships. The first ball vaporized the forward escort. This sudden explosion caused the Royal Transport to veer off their planned path just a fraction of a degree – precisely into the path of the second ball.

The Trilaxian Royal family was obliterated, turned to atomic dust. For a generation the best Trilaxian detectives worked the case, replaying every picosecond from every angle, until at last they saw a single frame of the deadly object, captured by surveillance video recovered from one of the black boxes.

A small, white dimpled sphere with one word written on the side in black.

Titleist

It was not long before the Trilaxian’s tracked down that word and found their perpetrators, and when they did they sent their Doom Fleet to unsuspecting Earth.

Which is how the human race finds themselves here, now, watching, dumbfounded and ignorant, as the Trilaxian atomizing cannons unleash their blazing light onto the planet Earth. The colossal energy beams pass through the atmosphere, an image displayed on every device across the planet. Where the beam touches the ground an irreversible fission reaction begins, and does not stop until the Earth is reduced to a diffuse cloud of nuclear heat, its bullets and its golf balls alike turned to vapor in the solar wind.

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