Tiny little things change a lot.
Why, look at this asteroid. Eight miles from bow to stern – not even a cosmic atom. But there it was, about to make the lives of ten billion fatty apes so very much more difficult than they needed it to be.
But they had their own little ways of making their own little changes.
“Wow.”
“Focus, please.”
“I’m focused. Hey if I hold up my palm just right I can cover up the whole planet. Woah.”
Intentionally or not.
“Look, can you just turn around and come back to the ship? Your tank’s gas mix is off. You’re not thinking rationally.”
“I’m absolutely rational. I spent seventeen years being trained to monkey with impossibly dangerous substances day in and day out and never kissed anybody even though I really wanted to. I’m very rational. I’m very rational. Hey, what do you think is going on here? Is this rock more of a phallic thing or a yonic thing? I mean, it’s going to PENETRATE atmosphere, but it’s shaped a lot more like a-”
“Please. Major. Come back. You’ve got the detonator on you.”
“I do?”
“Yes.”
“Huh. Where’d I put it?”
“In your left pocket.”
“I can’t find it.”
“Your other left pocket.”
“Oh! Well how about that. Heck, might as well get it done while we’re out here, right? No sense in wasting time. Every delay brings us a nanoinch closer to obliviation, right?”
“Major, please. The explosion has to be precise. You are holding the lives of ten billion people in your pocket. ”
“Nah, it’s in my hands now. And it’s safe! Hey, did I ever tell you what I did when I was a kid?”
“No, Major. Maybe you should come back and show me?”
“I skipped rocks!”
“That’s n-”
“I was good at it. Really good.” The Major brushed the detonator carefully, feeling the plastic switches tremble and judder in their little safety cages. “All those days down at the lake, it was a good lake you know. For skipping. Seven skips. Without a good stone, mind you. Like, a lumpy one. A big clunky one. Hey, you know what? I bet I can top this.”
“Major plea-”
“It’s fine,” said the Major, holding the detonator sideways and upside down and then settling on backwards. “I’m an expert at this. They called me Skippy, you know that? I miss being Skippy.”
They only got four skips out of it before it landed in the North Atlantic, but boy they were fat ones.
Still, it was just a little planet. It’d get over it.