Professor Rupert Mallox was the head of the Astronomy program at West Coast U. He"d been teaching astronomy for eighteen years, ten of them at the WCU.
The discovery of the comet"s properties by two of his students a few months ago was by far the most significant discovery in his department"s, if not the world"s, history and he"d forced them to rerun their calculations four times before he"d accept their results.
Rupert had since tried several times to get someone to investigate and confirm the comet"s apparent radioactive properties. Over the last few years, there"d been several false alarms regarding asteroids and meteors which could hit the Earth. These concerns had caused significant anxiety to the public before they were determined to be nothing of importance.
After several unsucce
