Escape from Earth: New Adventures in Space

by Jack Dann

  He glared at me. “Eric, no one dresses like that. . . not even me. And don’t tell me it’s just a coincidence that the Salvation Army store gets broken into, with nothing taken except some clothes.” I started to object, but then he pointed out the window. “Remember what that guy said? About a break-in just like it at Auto Plaza?”

  I remembered, all right. What the locksmith had told us sounded odd even then, but I’d pushed it to the back of my mind. Auto Plaza was the biggest car dealership in town; they sold mostly new Fords and GM trucks, but also had a lot full of used cars that they’d acquired as trade-ins. All makes, all models, best selection in southern Vermont! the radio ads went. We’ve got hot coffee for Mom and Dad, and free balloons for the kiddies! If you were passing through Bellingham and, just for the hell of it, decided to steal a car, this was the place to go. They even advertised.

  “Look ...” I reached for the pitcher, refilled my glass. “Let’s put this together. I run into three guys about our age ...”

  “Whom you or I have never seen before.”

  “Who dress funny ...”

  “The same day a thrift shop has been broken into.”

  “And they ask directions to Narragansett Point ...”

  “Uh-huh.” Crossing his arms, Ted regarded me with the patience of a priest. “Go on. And they’re not quite right, are they?”

  I paused. No, they weren’t quite right. The way Tyler had spoken, as if English was a foreign language. Mickey getting twitchy when Bo cruised by. Both of them trying to prevent Alex from talking to me. Alex stepping in front of the Explorer that was about to run them down.

  “Yeah,” I admitted, “they were acting pretty strange ...”

  “And how do they think they intended to get to the plant?” Ted raised an eyebrow. “Walk? Or maybe use a car ... a stolen car . . . that they’d parked behind a house or in an alley just a few blocks away?”

  “Yeah, but...” I let out my breath. “C’mon, man . . . terrorists?”

  Ted said nothing for a moment. Clasping his hands together, he idly gazed out the window. Night had fallen on downtown Bellingham, all five blocks of it; the stores had closed, and there were only a few cars on the street. Right now, Mom was serving drinks at the local watering hole. At least she behaved like a responsible adult; Ted’s parents were probably whooping it up at the same place. With any luck, they’d get home without one of them having to take a roadside test. Neither of us came from happy, wholesome families.

  “Yeah. Terrorists.” He said this as if it was a matter of fact, not conjecture.

  “Get real. . .”

  “Okay, then let’s get real. Let’s head down to the plant, see if they show up.”

  “Be serious . . .”

  “I am serious. If I’m wrong, then I’m wrong. But if I’m right...”

  “If you’re so sure, then call the cops.” I fished a quarter out of my pocket, slapped it down on the table. “Pay phone’s over there. Go do it. ”

  Neither of us had cell phones. Those are for rich kids. Ted gazed at the quarter, a little less certain than he’d been a moment ago. He knew as well as I did how the rest of this would go down. Hello, Bellingham Police? Yeah, I’m calling to report a terrorist plot to blow up the nuclear power plant. How do I know this? Well, my best friend and I met just some guys who asked directions how to get there. Oh, and they dress funny, too. Who am I? My name’s Ted Markey and my friend’s name is Eric Cosby, and we’re calling from Louie’s Pizzeria, and. . . Five minutes later, Bo shows up to give us a free ride in a police car. Mom would just love that. I’m sure Ted’s folks would be similarly amused.

  “Yeah, well ...” He pushed the quarter back across the table. “So what do you want to do tonight? Catch a movie? Or go down to the nuke and see if these guys appear?” He shrugged. “Up to you, man. Whatever you want, I’m game.”

  Crap. He was throwing this in my lap again. Yet, I had to admit to myself, he had a point. This was a mystery, and a pretty good one at that. And there had to be better things to do on a Friday night than doze through another stupid horror movie . . .

  “Maybe. But how do we get down there?” I wasn’t looking forward to hopping on my ten-speed and peddling all the way out to Narragansett Point. Not at night, and not for ten miles.

  “You’ve got your learner’s permit, right?” Ted asked, and I nodded. “Well, then, all we need are the wheels.”

  It took a second for me to realize what he was implying. “Oh, no,” I said. “Not on your life . .

  But it wasn’t his life that he was willing to put on the line. Just mine.

  Steve was already home by the time Ted and I got back to my house. I wasn’t surprised; my brother called in sick so often, his boss at Speed-E-Mart probably thought he had tuberculosis. Steve’s secondhand ’92 Mustang was in the driveway; a couple of his buddies had come over, but they’d remembered to leave their cars on the street so Mom would have a place to park. Which was fortunate, because it made what I was about to do that much easier.

  Ted and I came in through the kitchen door, careful not to slam it behind us. Not that Steve would have heard the door shut; from the basement, I could hear the sullen backbeat of my brother’s stereo thudding against the linoleum. There was a half-finished TV dinner on the kitchen table and Budweiser cans in the garbage; Steve was still underage, but that didn’t stop him from swiping a six-pack or two from work. He might get rid of them before Mom came home, or maybe not. Ever since he’d moved into the basement, Steve had come to treat the house where we’d grown up more like a hangout than a home.

  Once again, I wondered why Mom hadn’t told him to find his own place. Perhaps she was still hoping that he’d eventually clean up his act; more likely, she loved her older son too much to throw him out. Not for the first time, though, I found myself wishing that she would.

  Ted said nothing. He’d been over to my house enough times to know that my family had gone seriously downhill since Dad died. And with two overage party animals for parents, his own home life wasn’t that much better. So he quietly waited while I looked around. Sure enough, Steve had tossed his black leather jacket on the living room couch. I checked the pockets. Just as I figured, there were his car keys. All I had to do was take them, and . . .

  No. I couldn’t do that. My brother was a deadbeat, but he was still my brother. Leaving the keys where I found them, I told Ted to wait outside, then I went down to the basement.

  The stereo was deafening: Guns N’ Roses, with Axl Rose screaming at the top of his lungs. Steve had a thing for ’90s headbanger stuff: music by the dumb, for the dumb, so that the dumb wouldn’t perish from the face of the earth. The cellar door was shut, but I could smell the pot smoke even before I was halfway down the stairs. Why these idiots couldn’t open a window and put a towel against the bottom of the door was beyond me. I knocked twice, waited a second, then let myself in.

  Steve sat cross-legged on the mattress he’d hauled down from what used to be his bedroom, a plastic tray he’d swiped from a shopping mall food court in his lap. His two cronies were slumped in the busted-out chairs he’d taken from the junk heap Mr. Morton had left behind; they were watching him clean the seeds and stems from the pound of marijuana he’d just acquired from his supplier, perhaps hoping to snag a joint or two before Steve divided the motherlode into half-ounce Baggies that he’d sell on the street. The old Sony TV my brother had “found” somewhere was on, a rerun of Jeopardy! ignored by high school dropouts who couldn’t have supplied the question to American History for $200 (“He wrote the Declaration of Independence”) if a gun was pointed to their heads. The nude girlfriends of millionaire rock stars glowered at me from posters taped to the cement walls, as beautiful as the distant galaxies and just as untouchable.

  Everyone made a nervous jerk when I opened the door, and relaxed when they saw that it was only me. ‘.‘Oh, it’s you,” Steve muttered. “What d’ya want?”

  “Can I borrow your car?” My voice came as a
dry croak; I was trying hard not to inhale. Anything that made Steve the way he was, I didn’t want to have in my system.

  “No. Get outta here, you little twerp.” His friends snickered and passed the bong they’d momentarily hidden from sight.

  “Okay.” I backed out of the room and shut the door behind me. Then I went back upstairs and took the keys from his jacket.

  I felt guilty about doing this . . . but let’s be honest, not too guilty. Besides, judging from the looks of things, I guessed that he’d be in the basement for two or three more hours. Enough time for Ted and me to make a quick run to Narragansett Point and scope out the situation. With luck, I’d be home before Smokin’ Steve and his smokin’ crew pried themselves from their hole.

  Sometimes it helped that my brother was a loser. I consoled myself with that idea as I backed the ’stang out of the driveway, being careful not to switch on the headlights until I hit the street. But I would’ve liked it a lot better if he didn’t call me a twerp whenever he saw me.

  Narragansett Point was located at the east side of town, on a broad spur of land next to the Connecticut River. Built in 1962, it was one of the country’s first commercial nuclear power plants, and was thus smaller than the ones that followed it. All the same, the plant once represented the pinnacle of technology, and at one time had supplied Vermont with most of its electricity.

  But that was when most Vermonters still said “a-yuh” and Phish was something you pulled out of the river with a 20-test line and a handmade lure. The accident at Three Mile Island scared the beeswax out of a good many people, and it wasn’t long before a local anti-nuke group began protesting in front of the main gate. Despite the plant’s good safety record, they believed that Narragansett Point was a meltdown waiting to happen, and it helped their cause when NRC inspectors discovered hairline fractures in the reactor’s secondary cooling lines.

  The plant was shut down for a while and the pipes were replaced, yet that was the first indication that the plant was getting old. Nukes are difficult to run; once billed as being able to supply energy “too cheap to meter,” few people truly appreciated how much effort went into maintaining such a complex machine. Shutdowns became more frequent, and after another decade or so the repair work slipped the cost-benefit ratio over to the red end of the scale.

  By then, New England Energy realized that it stood to make more money by purchasing power from Canadian hydroelectric plants than from keeping Narragansett Point on the grid. Facing pressure from various environmental and public interest groups, and having failed to find a buyer for the aging plant, the company decided to close it down for good.

  Truth be told, I’d never felt one way or another about having a nuclear power plant in my backyard. It was just there, making no more or less difference in my daily life than the occasional nor’easter or the Pats going to the Superbowl again. Dad used to tell me that he’d taken Mom to a protest rally on their first date, but I think it was mostly because Bonnie Raitt was doing a free concert. And like every other guy who got his driver’s license before I did, Steve took girls to the visitors’ parking lot because it was once the best make-out spot in town.

  But that was before 9/11 caused New England Energy to hire more cops to guard the plant, and in the interest of national security they chased away the teenagers and low-riders. I kept that in mind as I got off the state highway and drove down the narrow two-lane blacktop leading to the Point. It wasn’t long before I saw signs advising me that trespassing was strictly prohibited, and that possession of firearms, knives, explosive materials, two-way radios, alcoholic beverages, drugs, pets, and just about everything else was punishable under federal law by major prison time and fines that I wouldn’t be able to pay off even if I mowed lawns until I was seventy.

  Not cool. Not cool at all. I was all too aware of the lingering stench of marijuana in Steve’s car, and we’d already found empty beer cans rattling around on the floor of the, backseat. No telling what surprises might lie in the ashtray or in the glove compartment. I was half-inclined to do a U-turn and head back, but I didn’t want to wuss out in front of my best friend, so I ignored the sign and kept going.

  By now we could see the plant: a collection of low buildings illuminated by floodlights, the containment dome that housed its 640-megawatt pressurized water reactor looming over them like an immense pimple. Narragansett Point didn’t have one of those big hourglass-shaped cooling towers that typified nukes built later, but instead a long structure from which steam used to rise on cold days when the plant was still in operation. Those days were long gone, though, and now the nuke lay still and silent, like some elaborate toy a giant kid had once played with, then abandoned, but had forgotten to turn off.

  It wasn’t until we reached the visitors’ parking lot that we noticed anything peculiar.

  “Look sharp,” Ted murmured. “Cop car ahead.”

  I’d already spotted it: a Jeep Grand Cherokee, painted white and blue, with disco lights mounted on its roof. It was parked near the outer security fence, blue lights flashing against the darkness; beside it was another car, a red Ford Escort, its front left door open. No one in sight; I figured that a security officer had pulled over the driver and was now checking his license and registration.

  With any luck, maybe the cop would be too busy to give us more than a passing glance. The way the parking humps were arranged, though, meant that I’d have to make a swing through the lot before I could turn around. I downshifted to third and tried to drive as casually as possible. No problem here, officer, just a couple of bored teenagers out for a Friday night cruise to the ol’ nuclear power plant. . .

  As we drew closer, though, I saw that the Escort was empty; no one was seated behind the wheel nor in the backseat. I caught a glimpse of the chrome dealer stamp on the trunk above the rear bumper: AUTO PLAZA, BELLINGHAM, VERMONT. The Jeep’s driver’s side door was open, too, but I couldn’t see anyone behind the wheel . . .

  “Hey!” Ted pointed at the front of the Jeep. “Look at that!”

  I hit the brakes. Caught within the Jeep’s headlights was a figure laying facedown on the asphalt, his arms spread out before him. A guy in a dark blue uniform, his ball cap on the ground beside him.

  “Holy . . . !” Without thinking twice, I grabbed the parking brake and yanked it up, then opened the door and jumped out.

  Ted was right behind me as I rushed over to the fallen security guard. At first I thought he was dead; that caused me to skitter to a halt, but when I looked closer, I didn’t see any blood on his uniform or on the pavement. So I kneeled beside him and gently touched the side of his neck. His skin was warm, and I felt a slow pulse beneath my fingertips.

  “He’s alive,” I said. “Just unconscious.”

  “Oh, man ...” Ted stood a few yards away, reluctant to come any closer. “Oh man oh man oh man ...”

  “Shut up. Let me think.”

  The night was cold, with a stiff breeze coming off the Connecticut; I pulled up the hood of my sweatshirt and looked around. Now I saw things I hadn’t noticed before. A Glock .45 automatic, only a few inches from the guard. A hand-mike also lay nearby, attached to his belt radio by a spiral cord. The situation became a little more clear; the guard had pulled over the Escort, asked the driver to get out, then seen or heard something that had given him reason to draw his gun while grabbing his mike to call for backup.

  Then he was knocked out. Exactly how, I hadn’t the foggiest, but nonetheless it happened so fast that he hadn’t a chance to sound an alert. Otherwise, where were the other security cops? Why wasn’t there . . . ?

  “Dude, we gotta get out of here.” Ted was inching toward Steve’s car. “This is too much. We gotta ...”

  “Yeah. Sure.” My own first instinct was to run away. This wasn’t our problem. It was something best left to the authorities . . .

  Then I took another look at the fallen security guard, and noticed that he was a young guy, no older than forty. About my dad’s age when he�
��d bought a piece of Falluja. His buddies hadn’t abandoned him, though; two of his squad-mates had taken bullets hauling his body to the nearest Humvee. The soldier’s code: leave no man behind.

  How couldn’t I do the same? Like it or not, this was my responsibility.

  “Go on,” I said. “Get outta here.”

  “What?” Ted stared at me in disbelief. “What are you ... ?”

  “I’m staying.” I nodded toward Steve’s car. “The keys are in it. Motor’s running. Run back to town, find the cops ...” I stopped myself. Bo knew my brother’s car, from all the times he’d pulled Steve over. No telling what’d he’d do if he saw Ted driving my brother’s Mustang. “No, scratch that. Find the state troopers instead. Tell ’em what we found.”

  “But. . .”

  “Go on! Get out of here!”

  That woke Ted up. He almost tripped over himself as he backpedaled toward the Mustang. He hadn’t yet earned his learner’s permit, but he’d spent enough time in driver’s ed to know how to handle five on the floor. Barely. He slipped the clutch and left some rubber on the asphalt, but in seconds the ’stang’s taillights were disappearing up the road.

  I watched him go, then I started jogging toward the front gate. There wasn’t much I could do for the guard. What I needed to do now was make sure that plant security knew what had just happened here.

  Oh, they knew, all right. They found out, just seconds before the same thing happened to them.

  The front gate was wide open.

  The concrete anti-vehicle barriers were' still in place, the tire slashers raised from their recessed slots beneath the roadway, yet sprawled all around the gatehouse were unconscious security guards, some with handguns lying nearby. My nose caught the lingering stench of something that smelled like skunk musk mixed with red pepper; someone had lobbed a tear gas grenade. Even though the wind was carrying it away, there was still enough in the air to make my eyes water. But someone had walked through this as if it wasn’t there.

  I stepped around the fallen sentries, cautiously made my way down the driveway. About twenty yards from the gate, I found a Humvee. Its engine was still running, its doors were open, and on either side of it lay two more security officers. These guys wore military body armor and gas masks; I spotted an Ingram Mac-10 assault rifle resting nearby. There were even a pair of Doberman pinschers, looking for all the world as if they’d suddenly decided to lie down and take a nap.