The New Testament                                       107

And on the eighteenth day of the fifth month of the year one-thousand-and-nine-hundred-eighty, Mount Saint Helens, in the state of Washington, blew up.⁷⁷ And three cubic kilometers of rock and ice were blasted from the north side of the summit. For hours did eruptions detonate – it was like setting off Hiroshima-sized atomic bombs at one per second for eight hours. And the explosions devastated trees – some snapped like match-sticks, others burned to crisp, still others were uprooted, and some were stripped completely bare.⁷⁸ In the end, five-hundred square kilometers of forests were obliterated, and ten-million trees were killed.
     And although a billion dollars worth of damage had been done, the blast was mild when compared with the great ones of the past: the eruption of Krakatau had been thirty times more powerful; the eruption of Tambora had been one-hundred times more powerful.

Chapter XVII: A Close Encounter

And on the fifth month in the year one-thousand-and-nine-hundred-ninety-six, asteroid 1991JA1 from the black of outer space headed at the Earth. And again, Earth was threatened by an extraterrestrial invader. But the asteroid did not strike its mark. Instead, at four-hundred-and-fifty-thousand kilometers from Earth – just beyond the distance to the Moon, it sped past Earth, continuing on its journey in the wilderness of outer space. Now this was a close encounter of the disastrous kind, for had the orbit of the asteroid been slightly different, a cosmic catastrophe might have taken place.

____________________

⁷⁷ The importance of this eruption is that it would be the most highly studied by geologists in modern times – sensors in the mountain would relay a wealth of geo-information. Field trips and overhead flights would also provide much valuable data.
⁷⁸ These trees looked like telephone poles.