Which must have gone down just wonderfully. “You said that? How’d he take it?”
“I think the answer to that question is an F.”
Boy, had jack ever misread this boy of his. He’d thought that Laura had gone to his head. “I’m sorry I jumped to conclusions, Sam.”
Sam’s expression did not change. He wasn’t ready to say it was okay because it obviously wasn’t okay. He knew the stakes, and he knew that, unless his dad could work a miracle, that F might really get in his way. Unspoken between them was what they both knew: if Jack had been there to reason with Spengler, maybe things would have been different. But Jack had not been there.
“You have to go to the right!”
“What?”
“Dad, to the right! Departures!”
Jack had almost driven through the airport, his mind had been so far from the reality of the world around him. He had to swerve across lane after outraged, honking lane to reach the departure area. He saw security people watching him carefully and thought, 1 don’t have a carload of dynamite, fellas, not exactly.
“I’m gonna call this teacher and have a word with him. We’ll straighten this out.”
“Forget it, Dad, I’ll handle it myself.”
Sam got out, heaved his suitcase out of the backseat, and headed for the terminal. Not even a good-bye, not even that. Jack’s heart just about broke. “Sam …”
Sam disappeared into the terminal.
FOUR
C
ommander Parker was riding an exercise bike in the
International Space Station. That he was upside down not only didn’t bother him, he kind of liked it that way. He was going home in a few days, and he didn’t want to come out flopping around like a deboned carp, which is what happened to astronauts who didn’t follow a strict physical routine up here. As he rode, he listened to the flight director, who was no doubt uplinking to tell him about the incoming shuttle mission.
Then he heard that it had been scrubbed, weather.
What the hell? Surely it was only a delay. A scrub meant a lot more than that.
Nope, the orbiter had sustained a lightning strike and the safety committee had called for a complete inspection. Every tile, every rivet, every wire. So this was going to be a no-go mission. A whole new mission was going to be declared.
“How long until they reset the launch, then?”
“Doesn’t look like you’ll be coming home this week, Parker. Your wife’s going to be giving me an earful.”
He’d like to have done the same thing. Couldn’t NASA handle a lightning strike, even yet? All he said, though, was “Roger that.” Discipline was tight aboard the station. It had to be. You were living in zero gravity with zero space and zero privacy. The best emotions up here were no emotions.
Hideki, the Japanese astronaut who’d been on station for three weeks, was looking out a window while shaving. He was still enjoying things like letting his razor float beside his head while he checked his beard. Wait until he got a little of that thick lather involved with his sinuses. He’d be shaving with skin oil like everybody else, once he’d discovered just what sneezing did to a weightless body. Hideki a-go-go. It was gonna be fun.
Then Hideki turned around. Lather or no lather concern was on his face. “Come take a look at this cloud pattern.”
Concern over a cloud pattern? This was going to be interesting. At first, as he peered down toward the earth, Parker did not understand what he was seeing. When he realized that it was a thunderstorm, an actual shiver of fear went through him. The damn thing had to be thirty miles high. The top twenty miles of it were—were they made of ice? What the hell was going on down there? What must it be like under that thing?
Then he saw another one farther north, over the Yukon, of all places. What hath God wrought?
Sam ate peanuts because they’d been in the ground and he liked the ground, he liked it so much. No matter what it felt like, the floor of an airplane was not the ground, and he could sense the vast, empty air a few feet from his shoes. He’d made a morbid study of air crashes, and now his complex mind was going through the catalog of engine failures, fires, and disintegrating airframes that filled one particularly dark little corner.
There was a bump, just like hitting a pothole in a good car. But this was not a good car, it was an airplane, no doubt a bad one, maintained by people who knew all kinds of amazing things you could do with duct tape, and that bump was not a pothole, it was a hole in the air and it basically had no bottom.
“Are you all right?”
“He’s afraid of flying,” Brian said, casually staring at his laptop.
That was the last thing Laura needed to hear. “I’m fine!”
Wham!
That was a big one, that was serious. God, had the tail fallen off? Sam waited. No, the plane was still under control. Of course, it took a lot more than a few bumps to make these babies turn to confetti in the sky, so—
Wham!
Dear God, we’re dying. We’re dying, it’s over. A bell rang. The Fasten Seat Belts sign glowed in his face like a branding iron being held by a sadistic maniac. His hands went down, grabbed the belt, ripped at it. Fastened. But did it matter?
As discreetly as he could, Sam checked the airsickness bag in the seat pocket in front of him. That was there, thank God. If he had to use it, he’d be quick, efficient, they would not be offended.
They would be offended and they would laugh and it would become a story. Laura, it was nice knowing you. Laura, I thought—never mind what I thought.
“If you’re going to be sick, turn the other way,” Brian said.
He couldn’t turn the other way! The other way was Laura! And he felt green, definitely. Damned peanuts, damned Coke.
“Shut up,” he muttered. Definitely green. Oh, God.
The plane was now dropping and rising, dropping and rising. A stewardess wobbled past. “Peanuts?”
Oh, please, no. Not even the smell of peanuts.
“Statistically, the chance of a plane going down because of turbulence is less than one in a billion … or was it a million. I can’t remember. …”
Laura leaned across Sam. He inhaled the essence of some wonderful perfume. How did they manage to smell so good, women?
“Shut up, Brian,” she said. Then she touched Sam on the shoulder. “Don’t pay any attention to him. Everything is fine. Look, they’re still serving.”
EEEEeeee, slammml Plastic cups spilled, ice cubes bounced along the floor like a panicked crowd that couldn’t escape, and there were screams. Yes, actual screams. And this was the shuttle. These people flew all the time.
It was bad. It was the end. The stewardesses hurried aft behind their carts. So much for all right. And look at them, they were pale, they were just about ready to run.
The intercom hissed for a moment. Then the pilot spoke. “Folks, we seem to be passing through a bit of turbulence. Please remain in your seats with your seat belts fastened. Put your seats and tray tables in the upright—”
The whole plane shuddered, then it slid to the right, then Sam’s stomach arrived in his mouth. He watched an ice cube, an olive, and Time magazine float gracefully up past the seat back in front of him. He heard voices, a chorus. It was a chorus of screams.
Then, thudddl Stomach to feet, here I come! Clatter, snap, and oxygen masks come down. Laura’s came down. She sat staring at it, her eyes practically popping out of her head. Brian had shut that damn laptop of his at last. He looked over at the oxygen mask, his jaw in his lap.
Finally, the plane leveled off. Finally, the flight became smooth again. Stewardesses appeared, telling everybody not to touch the oxygen masks, helping the folks who’d put them on remove them.
Laura turned to Sam. He turned to Laura. “Sam,” she said.
“Yes?” Was this the moment, so close to death, that she confessed that they shared the same secret, that she declared the love he dreamed of getting.
“Sam, you’re hurting my hand.”
> He looked down. Her fingers looked like trapped, red worms. He snatched his hand away. There were white marks in her skin, he had been gripping her so hard.
“Sorry!”
Brian opened his laptop again. At least one thing could not be disputed, Sam thought, the guy had guts.
At Hedland, the weather was finally becoming normal for the time of year. It was no longer bizarrely hot. On the contrary, a light snow was falling. Simon had seen Rapson’s car in the car park, so he decided to say goodbye to his wife here instead of prolonging it by going inside. They were almost always together, and as far as he was concerned, he was not looking forward to two weeks without her. Jeanette was the luckiest thing that had ever happened to him, the treasure of his life.
“I can’t believe I’m spending two weeks alone with my mum and the baby,” she said, gazing up at him from her car.
He couldn’t either, but he also knew that her mother was incredibly excited about their trip. “Be patient with her,” he said, “she’s been looking forward to this holiday for months.”
Jeanette smiled, more than a little ruefully. Her mother could be a trial at times, especially for the daughter she always found a little wanting. “I know,” she said softly.
Simon leaned into the old Vauxhall and kissed her. “I love you,” he said. He really wanted to kiss her again—many agains—but she pulled away.
Laughing a little, she said, “I love you, too.” Then she reached out and touched his cheek. “Promise not to call every ten minutes, though. All right?”
She knew her husband. He was already thinking about that first call to her cell phone, to make sure she was okay on the snowy roads. “I’ll try not to,” he said.
He watched her drive off, then headed into the center. The control room, as always, was dim and quiet. But Rapson was standing up, staring at the bank of data monitors.
“It’s very odd,” he said as he heard Simon approach, “but this buoy is registering a thirteen-degree drop in ocean temperature.”
Simon thought he’d told Rapson that. He was sure he had. Maybe the old man had forgotten. He covered. “I forgot to tell you. That buoy malfunctioned the other day. I’ll put in a call to see if there are any ships near Georges Bank to get it.”
“This buoy isn’t in Georges Bank,” Rapson snapped. “It’s just off Greenland.”
That was very odd. Simon went closer to the monitoring station. A dot was flashing near the Greenland coast. He zoomed the view out to see just where the buoy was—and picked up another one flashing a steep temperature drop. “What are the odds of two buoys failing?” he said, thinking aloud.
There was a low beeping from another monitor, the one that covered buoys in critical navigation waters, which would require immediate attention if damage or failure occurred.
“Make that three,” Rapson said.
What were they seeing here? Simon looked over at his boss. Rapson was staring at the monitors, deep in silent thought.
As Sam, Laura, and Brian sat in a cab stuck in a traffic jam, Luther threaded his debris-heaped shopping cart among the cars. Or rather, Buddha led the way. Luther was pretty miserable, what with the sudden end of the bum weather that New York had been enjoying since last March.
Hearing a weather report coming out of a radio, he drew near a yellowback. The driver had the window partly open, and it was possible for Luther to listen. “The temperature at La Guardia is a chilly thirty-eight degrees right now,” the announcer said. “That’s a record-breaking fifty-four-degree fall from yesterday’s high of ninety-two.”
The driver rolled up the window and the traffic started moving at the same time. Luther and Buddha had to get out of there fast. He wondered if he had an overcoat somewhere down among his treasures. And what about Buddha? He hated cold weather. Luther began searching for a grate. He needed a grate.
Sam was enjoying sitting hip to hip with Laura so much that he was unaware of the time, certainly unaware of Luther and Buddha.
Laura leaned forward. “Excuse me,” she said in her most polite voice, “but we’re really late.”
“We’re almost there,” the cabbie snapped.
Brian opened his Manhattan Flashmaps. “We’re only two blocks away.”
Laura grabbed it from him. “Lemme see. Okay, guys, let’s walk.”
They got out of the cab into freezing-cold wind. No wonder the flight had been so horrible, with all these wild weather changes. Secretly, Sam thought they were lucky not to have become a statistic. As he paid the driver, he heard a strange sound overhead. Everybody around him was looking up, so he did the same, despite having been told by his dad never to do that in New York. “Looking up in Manhattan marks you as a tourist. Don’t do it unless you’re willing for your wallet to go bye-bye.”
Yeah, Dad, but this is weird. Millions of birds were overhead. Millions of them. He made out the dots of little birds like sparrows, the quick, soaring shapes of swallows and larks, the ominous forms of hawks. Their voices echoed among the skyscrapers, raising a strange, screeching din that was unlike anything Sam had ever heard before.
Above the birds, the long ribbon of sky between the buildings looked real dark. Sam could see the clouds actually rolling. They looked like black, fast-moving smoke. And yet here on the ground the air was still and cold.
What Sam did not know—what nobody knew—was that the intensity of the changes were so great that they were triggering latent instincts in animals of all kinds. Normally docile dogs paced and growled if their owners came near, cats hid and hissed and slapped and bit anybody who tried to pull them from behind the sofas and the closets where they had gone. At the Central Park Zoo and the Bronx Zoo and all the zoos, in fact, from Toronto to Richmond, animals strode their cages, apes beating their chests, lions roaring, captive eagles flapping their hobbled wings.
Visitors at the Central Park Zoo were thrilled when the wolves began to howl. The keepers were mystified. They’d rarely heard it before, even at night. During the day, never. But what a day it was, dark, lowering, with even the park’s pigeons agitated, flocking in endless, twisting loops that moved slowly south across the park. Pigeons are not migratory birds—at least, not normally.
In Gary Turner’s office on Wall Street, the brooding, uneasy weather might as well have been happening in Samarkand, not right outside his window. He sat hunched over his cell phone, his free hand hiding his mouth.
“I know this must be a difficult time for you, Mr. Masako, but this is really important. Your son would have wanted you to help me on this—”
The line went dead. Gary gasped with surprise, then
almost doubled over, fighting to keep his guts from turning inside out. Had Masako hung up on him, or what had happened here? Oh, dear God, he was one inch—one damn inch from jail, here. And all he had was this damn Jap who only understood every tenth word and probably hated him anyway.
“Hey, Gary, bogey incoming three o’clock.” From his adjoining cubicle, Paul spoke in a quick whisper. And then Mr. Foster appeared. He didn’t look too concerned. But then again, he never did.
“Gary, Gary, Gary. You’re a clever boy, Gary, but not as clever as you think.”
Gary sat, frozen. Mr. Foster leaned down, his knuckles on Gary’s desk. Gary could count the pores on Foster’s nose. They were pits. Canyons. He smelled faintly of some kind of horrible hair cream. “I just got a call from the SEC, Gary me boy.”
Gary controlled his throat, trying desperately to work up enough spit to talk. “Really,” a high little boy’s voice chirped, “the Securities and Exchange Commission?”
Foster was sweating now. His eyes looked as if they’d been borrowed from an angry rat. “They know all about the Voridium options you’ve been buying offshore.”
Gary wanted to ask, “What Voridium options?” but that, he feared, would not be the right thing to do.
Mr. Foster turned as red as he would have if Gary had asked it. “You know the ones,” he snarled. “They’ll be worth a f
ortune after the merger.”
He was caught. Dead to rights. They had him at the end of a rope. Stonewall. Only choice. “I didn’t buy any—”
“Don’t be stupid, Gary. Tell your friends in Japan to dump them before the merger goes through and the SEC will have nothing on you. Otherwise, get yourself a good lawyer, ‘cause they will throw your ass in jail for this.”
Foster stood up, ran thick fingers through that bizarre hair of his. What was in it, Brylcreem? Clubman hair oil? “Personally, I don’t give a rat’s ass what happens to you—but if you go down, it puts a stink on all of us. So do the right thing, Gary.”
Foster turned and strolled away, just as calm and cool as he could be. Paul, who had been filing every word in those deep memory banks of his, asked what the hell was going on.
Day After Tomorrow Page 4