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The Oak of Odona
by Steven Craig
The Oak of Dodona
Chandler was standing at the great oak doors of the Hall of History, turning the key in the old block lock that for some centuries had been the only seal on these doors. He was doing it very slowly, watching each turn of the old brass flash in the early afternoon sun. With a click that for him decades go he first heard, the lock bolt took hold of the jam. Chandler pulled gently on the smoothly worn handles to check the door was secure. It held, just as it has always done. His hand slid from the simple bronze handle to the old yellowed oak. Here, for just a moment, he caressed the wood like an adoring child caresses a dear, dying pet. Even the look of sadness was there I his eyes, had there been someone there to see it.
Chandler glanced down at his watch, with a look that had grown so compelling. It read off two times. One was early, only 1953z in the afternoon. The other time reading out was rapidly changing, and always drew his attention, for the clock ran backwards. It had run out of years, out of days, even run out of hours. Only minutes were left running down by the second …
0000/000/00:04:23/.0 it read… the 0000/000/00:04:22.0 … 0000/000/00:04:21…
Chandler turned ad walked to the edge of the great stone landing and sat on the top step there he looked across the university campus. For a Tuesday, in early May, it was so very quiet. Only a few figures, mostly professors, had agreed to be there when the clock counted down to its terminal number. For all the rest, they were where ever they felt they needed to be.
Chandler grinned, thinking about the history of that watch he wore. The design had become a popular culture fixture at the beginning of the great computer revolution at the end of the 20th century. Something to do with a new millennium and the hysteria that the world would end since computers could not deal with dates of the 21st century.
His students had learned of similar hysteria, all fostered by mass insecurity, a need to believe in something. God seemed to have fallen out of favor for a long while by then, so the masses hooked onto every doomsayer that could reach the ancient mass media.
Space aliens were a hit in his class. The mere concept that the world’s population ever entertained a notion for some moments of hilarity that he always welcomed. In the 815 years since that far away millennium, the forces of science had sought for them, had spent vast sums of money to build devices to ferret them from the cosmos, and in this end, found nothing. Nothing at all. No life. No far away mysterious communications. No ancient lost alien civilization. No space aliens lurking behind comets or veiled in cloud nebulae. Just no space aliens. It had taken centuries to discover why. And even without that discovery, there was no physical way or method to exceed the bounds of the speed of light. All the lore, the writing, the need to believe went to nothing. The earth with all its grandeur and beauty and live, was all that was ever known to history.
Chandler also remembered the next great wave of hysteria, the one involving the total destruction of the world from rocks falling from space. Asteroids and meteorites that would come unheralded and wreck devastation upon the planet. A cult built up after a while, almost wishing for some hurtling mass to smash upon the earth to justify their fears. Governments and military forces marshaled a call for planetary defenses to defend against these things. The problems were enormous, the events much too infrequent.
Public hysteria waned when none appeared, even after endless predictions and documentary special on the media. Focus moved on to … was it global warming and the call for refrigeration plants to lock up excess sea water with its CO2… no… it was the explosive volcanic events that started appearing all throughout Iceland that quelled that one. The mightily volcanoes of the Southwestern Pacific rim had long been suspected of activity in large groups. Following Iceland in the early 21st century, at times a dozen or more massive explosions and continuous lava surge events changed everyone’s mind about global warming. The atmosphere had cooled some 18C in less than 5 years with the fine dust high in the atmosphere… the catastrophe was unheralded and bewildering. It was not supposed to happen that way.
Chandler reflected more on the current moment. The clock was running out of time.
It read now 0000/000/00:02:47/.0.
They had been right about rocks falling out of the sky. But for all the wrong reasons. And now they could never build a defense against the real life cause.
And there was no method of leaving the earth to sail away from its advance. There was nothing to be done, but wait.
The earth had been waiting for 812 years.
It was just about that long ago now, that the star had appeared from behind its great shroud of stellar dust, and revealed itself to the great scientists of the age. The start taught them new concepts from their hidebound ways. Even those ancient devices that they had available determined that this was something different.
The start was over 100 times more massive than the sun (106.87342 times more massive to be exact). It was too large to exist, too massive to be real, but it was. It was too powerful to continue to exist, and it shortly did not. It contained too much potential to be even a super nova. And it brought new theories and concepts to science that changed the entire attitude of the planet when it finally did explode. The debate would go o for some centuries after the event.
And today was the day, that the theory was to be put to the test. The one that Chandler was most keen about was the subject of the distance to the explosion, the “mega-nova” as the term was coined. It was simple. The earth was not to survive the encounter.
The time was growing acute … 0000/000/00:00:47/.0.
Chandler remembered the text accounts ….
On that day in August, 2003, the light of the explosion punched though both the night and the day skies, brighter than the sun. The bow wave of neutrinos was so intense that spacecraft were damaged by the massless particles. Features of the earth were pitted at the microscopic level, many electronics simply ceased to function forever. Even a few people were killed due to severe cell damage. It was a cosmic wakeup call to the earth of how totally insignificant life was. More so, this was just a ripple precursor in advance of the great shock wave predicted to more slowly follow.
The computer predicted it. They had crunched on the numbers endlessly. For centuries, scholars and students had reworked the numbers, refining results, pin pointing the exact time that a massive interstellar shock was would reach the planet. And what would be the energy level, the effect, the final result of its passing on the living in a post Mega-nova universe.
The new hysteria was that the bow wave would be pushing all the detritus of the universe in front of it all , gathered in all directions into a tsunami on the galactic level. The residue of smaller stars, their planets, all those comets … all would join a massive wave of former star stuff. And like a great stellar tsunami, it would collide globally with the earth, with the earth like a rain drop encountering the ocean.
Some had predicted that the earth would be obliterated, turned to just more cosmic dust pushed along with the great wave of space detritus.
Others thought that only the earths atmosphere would be torn from the planet.
Others know that whatever happened, in ay likelihood, anything that could so impact the earth with neutrinos was almost certain to alter the orbits of massive numbers of asteroids and comets. And some of them would certainly find the earth.
Over the centuries, the hysteria waned on this as well.
For it took too long to occur, and human interest has always been what it is, so short termed and limited.
Until now.
Suddenly, it was no longer in the future… it became next year, then next month, then tomorrow.
Finally, it was now.
0000/000/00:00:03/.0.
Chandler was gently scratching his right hand with the fingers of his left as he watched the final seconds tick off his watch. Chandler noticed that he as saying the word “good-bye” quietly as the looked off across the campus.
There was a black ant darting and crawling on his sleeve. There were a few soaring birds just as on any other day. The southwestern sky was awash with a line of tall white clouds.
Chandler watched that sky of Missoula as suddenly turn to a vivid pink, and there was an all consuming flash…
02/06/2016 Posted on 02/06/2016
Copyright © 2026 Steven Craig
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