by Bobby Adair
I call Blair again for an update on Tarlow’s progress, and she promises me he’s on the way.
Still, nothing more to say.
We stare and wait, until another of my memories comes up that I haven’t thought about for a long time. “You know, I saw one die once.”
Chapter 28
“You saw a Gray die?” Brice is skeptical. It’s something every human dreams about seeing, however, the layers of elegant sincerity wrapped around most stories of dead Grays fall away under questioning, exposing the wistful rumor beneath.
My story is real, though, not something I heard about, something I saw.
The incident is clear in my mind like it just happened. “I was thirteen then. I lived down near Silverthorne before the spaceport grew up to take over the whole valley. In those days, every mine with a kilo or two of ore still in the ground was being worked to support the grav factories and shipyards. Trailers to house the miners were spread over every flat meadow and muddy riverbank through the mountains.
“My mom and me lived in a row of identical trailers, two-room boxes on wheels packed tightly on three acres of bare dirt a few blocks uphill from the Blue River. She slept in the bedroom. I used the couch in the other room, which doubled as our living room and kitchen. Phil lived two houses down with his parents and brother, four of them in a place identical to ours.
I half chuckle. “It seems shitty now to live in such cramped squalor.” I look at Brice. He knows the privileges bug-heads get, so I don’t feel like I’m bragging. I don’t know what I feel about it. “Now I have a house with an upstairs and a basement with a grassy lawn and trees. Three people on three floors, each twice the size of those trailers we lived in.”
“Your mom made the right choice putting a bug in your head,” says Brice. “The house I grew up in sounds a bit like your trailer, but no wheels. It was rotting right out from underneath us. My dad was always scrounging wood and scrap sheet metal to fix holes in the roof and floor.”
For a moment, it seems Brice is nostalgic for it. Maybe I am, too. Squalor isn’t bad when it’s all you know. At least life had a simplicity to it then, the only worry was constant hunger. Even the MSS seemed like a problem for parents to deal with, not kids.
“I didn’t realize it until I was in fourth or fifth grade—everybody who lived on the three-acre dirt plot had bug-headed kids—the MSS had long since relocated the miners who lived there before us. The Grays wanted us kids to play together, to form pods or whatever. We were an experiment, members of the first generation of implanted humans with a bug since birth. There were a dozen colonies of us around the valley, yet all of us kids attended the same school. We didn’t have any normal friends. They kept those kids separate from us, at least until they moved them all out of the Gray Zone.”
“A Gray Zone?” Brice asks. “I haven’t heard that phrase since I was a kid. What is a Gray Zone?”
“That’s what they called it in those days, Breckenridge and places like it,” I answer. “It was supposed to be an area safe for the Grays.” I laugh at the bleak reality of earth’s situation. “Now the whole planet is a Gray Zone. It didn’t take long for that to happen—a single generation.”
“Safe for Grays.” Brice is just as disgusted by the state of the world. “Not so much for people.”
“It was summer,” I continue, getting back on track with my story. “Me and Phil were riding our bikes up to Frisco. We were headed toward town to meet up with a couple kids we knew from school, and the three of us wanted to hike up the mountain and follow the ridges south down Tenmile Range, hitting all the peaks along the way until we reached Hoosier Pass. We were stupid enough to think we could do the whole hike by midday and make it back home in time for dinner.” I laugh, genuinely. “Probably a good thing we never got up the mountain that day.”
“How’s that?” asks Brice.
“No way we could made it back. We’d have ended up missing days of school. The MSS would have punished our parents.”
Brice grimaces. Everybody knows about the MSS’s brutal discipline.
“It was still early.” I remember the way the sun felt hot on my face even though the air was still cool. It had been a dry summer. There wasn’t any moisture in the air to take the edge off the sun’s harsh glare. “Me and Phil had just rolled down the dirt road, not pedaling more than a few times on the downhill zigzag to the bridge across the river.
“The spaceport wasn’t as busy then as it is today. Earth’s industry was only a dozen years past the siege and was still ramping up to meet the Grays’ needs. Still, big semis hauled shipments along Highway 9 in what seemed like an unending slow line on the rough road. All that cargo was destined for the grav lifts to be shot into orbit for construction of the space station.
“We stopped at the corner of the two-lane highway, in the parking lot of the ration distribution center. The trucks were loud and slow, with one rolling by every thirty or forty seconds. Dust was in the air so thick it got in your eyes, and you could taste the grit in your mouth. Half the asphalt on the road had crumbled away because the Grays had no interest in fixing it. We were waiting for a gap between the trucks so we could cross. Mostly, we were just watching the semis, because the truth was, there was enough space between them we could have crossed any time. Phil saw it first, and pointed it out to me. He always had a good sense for when Grays were around.”
“He saw the dead Gray?” Brice asks.
“No,” I answer. “Not dead yet.”
Chapter 29
“To me,” I tell Brice, “Grays seem fragile when they walk, like really old women, feeble and slow, like they might fall over and die at any moment. Except Grays don’t fall over, they just keep on moving, like ants that don’t give up. Have you ever seen one run?”
Brice nods.
I go on to describe it. “Grays don’t run like anything on earth, not any animal or even any bug that I’ve seen. They stiffen like boards and they kind of bounce from foot to foot with their legs spread wide. They remind me of a kid I saw in an old movie with braces on his legs. So, when Phil pointed out the pod of Grays and said one of them was acting strange, I turned to look, but I figured I’d see a Gray acting like they always do.”
“But that’s not what you saw,” guesses Brice.
Shaking my head, I tell him, “One of them was walking in circles and swatting at the air. Its head rolled around on its thin neck. I thought at first its neck was broken. Then it would stiffen for no reason at all and run. Directionless. Phil was starting to freak out about it, which I thought was weird, like he felt sorry for it.” I shake my head again. “I didn’t know at the time how strongly he could connect to them, or to any of us for that matter.”
That’s when I realize why I keep entertaining the notion that Phil isn’t dead. He doesn’t feel absent like his brother did the day he died.
I wonder again if I’m telling myself lies.
“It was disturbing,” I tell Brice. “In that moment, I felt sorry for it. The other Grays were pogoing on their spindly legs and trying to corral the crazy one to catch it—I’m not sure—to help it, I guess?
“I learned later, they evolved from plants. They don’t eat the way we do. They absorb various wavelengths of electromagnetic energy from their surroundings. They suck nutrients through their skin when they touch things. They never had an evolutionary imperative to catch their dinner. Seeing them trying to catch the sick one was like watching blind people trying to capture fireflies.”
“Doomed to fail,” adds Brice.
“After watching for a few minutes, Phil told me the sick one had Crazy Stick.”
“I’ve seen some contraband vids,” says Brice. “That’s what it sounds like to me.”
I silently confirm and go on to say, “Some bacteria infects their system. Nobody knows if the bacteria is terrestrial in origin or if the Grays brought it with them. It might not be bacteria at all, just that really ancient Grays act like
that right before they die.”
“I’ve never heard of anybody doing an autopsy on one.” Brice is disappointed over what seems like a wish he’d enjoy fulfilling. “I’ve only heard rumors about what’s inside those little bastards.”
I figure Brice is going to like this next part. “Phil and I were still right there in the parking lot when the crazy one made for the road. He ran most of the way across. He wasn’t fifteen feet in front of us when one of those big semis locked its rear wheels. The trailer skidded toward where we were standing, not very far, but close enough to scare us. The truck’s front bumper knocked the Gray down, and it fell badly, right in front of the front tire.
“It seemed like slow motion, and in a way it was, with the truck finally stopping. The tire caught the Gray’s feet and rolled up its legs. The thing’s arms went crazy, beating the road and flapping. Phil cried out like he felt every bit of it. I didn’t, but I felt something.”
“Empathy?” asks Brice.
I shake my head. “Something more elemental than that. Almost like the truck was crushing my legs.” I shiver as I recall the sensation. “The tire just kept rolling. I guess the truck had too much momentum to come to a stop. The Gray’s head was bouncing up and down on the road like it was trying to beat its own brains out to stop the agony. The tire rolled over the Gray’s torso, getting close to the neck, then the top of the Gray’s head burst open, exploding orangish-yellow jelly onto the road. It was disgusting. It smelled like an outhouse.
“While the Gray’s arms were still twitching, Phil elbowed me and pointed at the other five. They’d all fallen over as if they were dying, too.”
Brice is incredulous. “They all died?”
Shaking my head, I answer, “When the squashed Gray stopped convulsing, they started to recover.”
“So flattening it with the truck tire,” says Brice, “and popping its head like a zit didn’t kill it?”
“That orange jelly inside its head is a separate organism living in a symbiotic relationship with the Gray’s body. The body died, but the jelly thing lying there on the road in the sun didn’t, at least not for a while.
“That made me think about the symbiont in my head. It made me wonder what’s going to happen to me when it dies.”
“How long will the bug in your head live?” asks Brice.
“Nobody has an answer for that question. At least not one they’re willing to share with any of us bug-heads.” I sigh. “I suppose Phil and me should have run out of there after what we saw, yet we didn’t. After a while, the Grays gathered themselves and walked over to stare at their dead buddy. They stayed at a distance. As if they were all afraid of catching Crazy Stick. I don’t know.
“Before I realized what was happening, more Grays were there, and the MSS was with them, strutting around in their uniforms with guns on their hips. One was shouting in my face, demanding to know what had happened.
“Phil started answering his questions.
“I kept staring at the dead Gray and its orange marmalade brains on the road, knowing although the Gray was dead, the jelly symbiont wasn’t. I felt it there, suffering, rolling in the dust.
“Another Gray, an important one, was suddenly on the scene. It was clear he was important because he had a human interpreter with him, a kid not much older than me and Phil. The kid had been raised with the important Gray since both were babies. The interpreter was able to speak the Gray’s thoughts in words we humans were capable of hearing. It was the only way we were truly able to communicate with them.
“The interpreter, ‘the mouthpiece’, we called him, ordered the MSS officers to take the driver out of the truck.
“The driver hadn’t moved from the driver’s seat. He was too afraid to come out and see what he’d done even though it wasn’t his fault. It was clear to anybody who’d witnessed what had happened, but that didn’t matter. A Gray was dead. A human was involved. Case closed.
“The man begged and pointed to Phil and me, saying he could have swerved off the road—to the left, he’d have run over more Grays, to the right, he’d have run over us, waiting on our bikes for our chance to cross.
“The MSS officer glared at us, but ordered his men to drag the driver in front of the truck and hold him down on the ground. Another MSS man climbed into the truck and started it up. They rolled the front tire over the driver. They did it slow. He screamed while the tire flattened his legs. Blood gushed out his mouth when the tire rolled up over his stomach and smashed his chest.”
Brice shakes his head. It’s an appalling end to the story, but not unexpected.
“We didn’t hike that day,” I tell him. “Phil and me rode our bikes home, not saying anything along the way.
“Up until then, the occupation had been an abstract thing for us. We lived in the Gray Zone, neither of us had ever seen the destruction out in the rest of the world. We never personally knew anyone who’d died, besides Phil’s brother. Our parents worked at low-level jobs at the spaceport or the mines. We usually had food to eat.
“We didn’t know injustice and brutality.
“Phil remembered the brutality the most, and he changed after that. It was like something inside him chose to hide itself away and never come out again. We seldom rode much after that, and we never hiked the high mountains. He was afraid of what might be lurking in the woods. He was afraid of the steep drops. He was afraid when the storms came, and he looked at the mountains like the snow might avalanche down at any minute and kill everyone he’d ever met.
“The brutality gave me nightmares that haunted me for years, but where Phil grew scared, I turned reckless, ready to take any dare, because I knew as long as Grays ruled my life, it was worth nothing. And I hated that idea.”
The door opens and in walks three orange-clad rebels with Tarlow in tow.
“‘Bout time,” says Brice.
Chapter 30
Standing by a pallet of stacked buckets, laying his hands on them like they’re his special pets, Tarlow says, “This is TX. It’s a ternary compound of inert liquids that doesn’t turn volatile until mixed.”
“Ternary?” Graham asks. “What does that mean?”
“It’s got three parts,” I answer. “Tarlow’s trying to sound smart.”
“How volatile?” asks Brice.
“Not like nitroglycerine,” answers Tarlow, “but you want to be careful with it.”
“That doesn’t tell me anything,” Brice persists. “Can you drop it? Bump it?”
“Drop it?” Tarlow laughs as he shoves a bucket off the top of the pile. It moves slug-slow toward the floor.
“If you kick it?” I urge. “You know what he’s asking. How much abuse can it take?”
“Once mixed,” says Tarlow, “any good-sized electrical charge and it will detonate. A static charge might do the trick. So be careful about that, especially with all this dust in the air. You can collect a charge just walking through it, like crossing a carpet in an arid environment back on earth.”
“What about concussions?” I ask. “More specific, please.”
“You can kick a bucket of it, and nothing happens.” Tarlow looks down his nose at each of us. “But put a hot railgun round through it, or land a grav lift on it and you better hope you’re nowhere near.”
“Okay,” says Brice. “That’s all sweet and special. How quickly can you mix some of this stuff up and code the detonators to our d-pads?”
Tarlow points to three pallets of buckets that appear to be disorganized. “Those are already mixed.” He smiles guiltily. “I’m not supposed to blend this stuff except on demand—it takes a while. In this gravity, you can’t pour the buckets out, you have to pump them and,” he points at a washing machine-sized piece of equipment that looks like it belongs in a bakery back on earth, “mix them in that before pumping the final product back into the containers.”
“Does it separate?” asks Brice.
“Good question.” Tarlow grins. �
��In earth gravity, yes. Four to five days on the shelf is all it takes to make it nearly ineffective. Two weeks after mixing and it won’t even burn. Up here, I could let it sit for months before enough separation occurs for the difference to be measurable.”
“And you said you blended this when?” I ask.
“Right before the Trogs arrived.”
“We’re good, then?” confirms Brice.
“Should be,” answers Tarlow.
“What do you use all this for?” asks Graham.
Tarlow points up through the roof. “You saw those big asteroids out there? They’re all too massive for our tug to push to light speed. We have to make them smaller. We’ve drilled most of them. What we do is set the explosives in the holes and detonate them simultaneously to split them into transportable chunks.”
Which leads to my next question. “How much of this stuff do you think it would take to split that Trog cruiser down the seams?”
Chapter 31
The buckets are satisfactory for my purpose, maybe perfect, a metaphor for the measure of my intent and malice.
Either way, the buckets of TX are what Brice and I have to work with—twenty in all, strapped together in two bundles of ten, three hundred and fifty pounds each, a load that would be impossible for us to manually transport back on earth. However, on the Potato, weight is no problem. The momentum is, and needs to be managed.
Three hundred and fifty pounds represents enough mass to crush a human body if it’s moving at a decent clip. A little faster, and it might spontaneously detonate on impact. The asteroid is covered with plenty of stone outcroppings, opportunities for such a collision to occur.
After forty-five minutes of carefully handling our loads through the irritating slurry of dust and rock, Brice and I are resting beside a chubby stone mesa near the wide end of the Potato.
“The haze isn’t too thick down here,” pants Brice.
I’m looking at the sky, able to make out the nearby asteroids, able to see the stern of the Trog vessel still laying claim to its spot of empty space above us.