by Martha Wells
The lads made a whistle-stop in Phoenicia to snag a couple of working girls at Greasy Dick’s soda shop—Betsy & Vera. The girls’ dates were rawboned farmhands in the mood to blow their paychecks. Mac scoffed as he waved a fistful of Grants. The men riled at this most unwelcome intrusion by wet-behind-the-ears fancy-pants brats. Dred showed them the rifle. The farmhands blustered and puffed their chests. He shot out Dick’s neon shingle. The men cooled it.
Mac goosed the Chrysler and drank from a bottle all the way to Woolfolk Bluff. Liquor didn’t have much effect on his capabilities. It only made him more determined. He got them there in one piece and they paired off and shagged. Prior, during, and after, the foursome smoked a hell of a lot of the Old Gold and drank up all the booze.
“Jeezum crow.” Blonde Betsy fastened her skirt. “How old are you, kid?” She squinted at Dred as if apprehending him for the first time. “Say, are you even twelve?”
“And a half.” Dred reposed in the altogether, watching smoke from his mouth bump against the ceiling of stars. He was of average height, sturdy, with thicker, curlier hair than his brother. “Mac is fourteen.”
“And a half,” Mac said. A bit taller than Dred, slightly more kempt, and much denser and stronger than he appeared at first glance. He pointed the rifle at Orion’s Belt and squeezed off a round. Missed, or too early to tell. “Is this buyer’s remorse, ladies?”
“Yep, we’re going to hell for sure,” said Vera, the brunette.
“Oh, you were hellbound way before you met us,” Dred said. “And for lots worse I’d wager. Those farm boys all have the syphilis.”
“Fleas too.” Betsy scratched at herself.
Vera said to Mac, “How come you kids got a funny Limey way a talkin’? Shagging? Who says shagging?”
Betsy said to Dred, “Yeah! And how come your accents keep changin’?”
“Our mother is Egyptian,” Mac said. “She was educated at Oxford. I suppose her accent rubbed off.”
“Your mama is a colored girl?” Vera raised her eyebrows.
“Mother is Mother.” Mac said it cold and sober.
A meteor streaked across the sky. And another. The third object described a fiery red arc through the lower heavens and crashed down across the valley behind a ridge. BOOOM! The granddaddy of all thunderbolts thrummed in the earth. A reddish flash lit up the horizon. Trees shook in the grip of a concussion. To their credit, neither of the working girls screamed, although they clung to one another, perfect little mouths O-d in fear.
Dred tipped a salute at Mac. “Nice shootin’, Tex.”
Mac checked his watch. “Saved by the meteorite.”
The boys dressed in a hurry. Mac tossed Vera the keys and told her to leave the car at Nelson’s Garage in Phoenicia. He scratched their current coordinates on a paper scrap and gave her a number and instructions to buzz his dear pal, Arthur Navarro. Promised her fifty bucks if she came through. As the ladies of the night roared off in the Chrysler, Dred said, “Reckless trusting those girls with that much power, brother. Dad loves that car. I was conceived in the backseat.”
Mac removed his glasses to wipe them. His eyes were red and watery. He shrugged and started walking.
“Hey! How did ya know?” Dred called.
“Arthur told me to hang around the bluff tonight,” Mac said, as he disappeared over the rim. “We better make tracks. Fireworks like these, somebody will be on the way.”
“Who will be on the way? The Army? The heat? Granddad?”
“Pick one and it isn’t anybody we want to see.”
Dred waved his arms in frustration. “I thought we’d driven all the way out here for a nice relaxing Friday night of debauchery. Meanwhile, you were hiding an ulterior motive up your sleeve.” No response was forthcoming. He sighed and went after his big brother.
You’re No Doc Savage!
The descent required a bit of free-climbing, and the boys were still half-crocked. Luckily, in addition to mandatory climbing lessons at Mountain Leopard Temple, they’d vacationed in the Swiss Alps every year since being weaned from their nursemaid’s teat and were, as a consequence, expert mountaineers. The boys made it down with style after some minor scrapes due to poor light, and double-timed across a grassy field and up the far ridge.
“Mac, are we having an adventure? Is someone going to shoot at me? Am I going to be kidnapped again? Locked in a trunk and dropped into the sea? Experimented on with growth hormones? Chased by a lunatic in a mechanical werewolf getup? It sure feels like we’re having an adventure.”
“Yep, we’re having an adventure,” Mac said.
Amid a stand of pine and sycamore, some branches yet smoldering with licks of greenish flame, lay a shallow, smoke-filled depression. A metallic plate shone at the center of the crater—the outer curve of a partially buried space object.
“Well, that’s sure as heck not a weather balloon,” Dred said. “Since NACA is three years south of launching anything besides planes and rockets into low Earth orbit, the only question is, whose satellite? Ours or theirs?”
“It’s not a satellite either.”
“Ya don’t say. Wait a—Holy Toledo! Is it alien? I’m gonna win a Nobel!”
“The Nobel doesn’t award a prize for Acute Idiocy. Little green men don’t exist, sorry to disappoint.”
“The book ain’t closed on extraterrestrial life.”
“Say ain’t again and I’ll smack your mouth. It’s ours, Dred. Sword Enterprises is way past satellites. You’d know this if you ever bothered to read an R&D report.”
“Sorry, I’m busy crafting my body into the ultimate fighting and fornicating machine. NACA would love the scoop about Nancy is what I do know.”
“Trust that a select government subcommittee is well aware. Who do you think coughs up a third of our research capital? When Granddad says foreign investors, he means a farm in Langley.” Mac lighted a cigarette and braced his boot upon a rock. Red-lit smoke boiled in his glasses. “Our X-R program developed a long-range probe in ‘52. NCY-93. You’re looking at Nancy, kid. Experimental phase, last I heard.”
“Apparently, Granddad got her working.” Granddad was better known by the world as Danzig Tooms, patriarch of the Eastern Toomses, and the reclusive industrialist who owned majority shares of multinational conglomerate, Sword Enterprises. He also directed R&D for space technologies.
“Hmm. My compass is dizzy.”
“Mine too.” Dred’s minicompass attached to his Swiss Army knife via a keychain. The needle revolved crazily. “Peculiar, eh? I’d expect it to point at the metal, if anywhere. Chunk this big has to be a false magnetic north.”
“Yes. Peculiar.” Mac laid two fingers against his own wrist and waited. “Elevated pulse. Hairs are standing on end. Possible auditory hallucinations—could be my brother’s yammering. The object is generating a powerful electromagnetic field. Let’s hope it’s nonionizing.”
“Hallucinations? I’m not getting hallucinations. At least, I hope not. Maybe I am. Did ya hear somethin’? Pine needles are exploding. Seems normal, though. I mean, the trees are on fire, right?”
“I doubt you’d be able to tell the difference after that much scotch. C’mon, the breeze is shifting. Don’t fancy a dose of radiation before breakfast.”
They moved upwind of the wreckage and sheltered beneath an overhang of dead pine roots. Dred didn’t pester his brother with questions about the probe or Sword Enterprises’ top secret space program, referred to by insiders as Extraterrestrial Reconnaissance, or X-R. Mac refused to speak when he didn’t want to, and, at the moment, his pinched lips and narrowed eyes indicated he surely didn’t want to. Big brother wore that expression when struggling with angles, calculations, and worry. Nobody worried more intensely than Mac, except for Dad, possibly. Dred smoked and tried to figure the dimensions of the probe based on the length of the crash path and how much of the vehicle was exposed.
Eventually, Arthur “Milo” Navarro came along and rescued them from a fatal case of co
ntemplating their navels. The Navarros weren’t wealthy like the Toomses; Arthur’s father, Luis, chaired the Engineering Corp of Sword Enterprises, and so were imbued with a significant measure of means and privilege, nonetheless. Arthur had graduated Graves College with honors. He intended to take a year away from his studies, travel Europe, and intern with the fellows at the Norwegian Academy of Science before plowing forward with his doctorate. His eighteenth birthday landed in August and the Tooms brothers promised him a shindig prior to the commencement of his overseas adventures.
Mac summoned him whenever he needed a big brain, or godly muscle. Arthur could easily have been the brightest kid in New York State. Few outside his circle of friends and associates were the wiser—he resembled a Sherman tank in his customary uniform of Carhartt dungarees (shirtless), and engineer boots. Low-browed, thick of jaw and neck, and grimly reticent, he played the part of a lug to perfection. Few ever got close enough to realize they’d crossed paths with a boy genius rather than a simple bruiser. Slow to anger, the surest way to kindle his ire was to yell, “You’re no Doc Savage!” He’d collected every magazine and every comic, and recorded every radio show featuring the pulp hero. He’d even attempted to concoct a bronzing solution. Nobody with an iota of common sense mentioned the fiasco.
“Hail the crash site! A goodtime gal reported a pair of ne’er-do-wells in need of assistance.” Arthur lumbered into the clearing. He was attended by two of his five younger brothers, Ronaldo and Gerard, and their manservant Kasper, an allegedly reformed Waffen-SS commando. The party members wore reflective hazmat suits and carried toolboxes. Arthur unpacked a Geiger counter and performed a laborious circuit of the immediate vicinity. He removed his helmet and examined the exposed patch of hull. “We’re clean.” He gave orders to his companions. Kasper and the two boys started in with picks and rapidly peeled away dirt to expose a broader plane of smooth, scorched metal.
Mac and Dred climbed down to join the fun.
“What do you think?” Mac asked. A relatively tall and sturdy young man, he was a peewee juxtaposed against Arthur Navarro.
“I think we need to be gone before trouble arrives,” Arthur said.
Dred sighed in exasperation. “For Pete’s sake, who are we expecting?”
“Maybe the Army,” Mac said.
“I thought ya didn’t know!”
“I don’t. I’m making an educated guess.”
“Not sure it’s the military. Not sure of a blessed thing, honestly.” Arthur popped the lid on a toolbox. He selected an industrial-sized hand drill. “I monitored the channels all night. The probe is designed to evade radar detection. Didn’t hear a peep from the Army or the Air Force, which means the stealth system functioned like a champ. There’s action, though. Twenty minutes ago, Ronaldo caught chatter on the emergency band.”
He nodded at his sibling who smiled gamely through streams of sweat. “I thought Labrador had twigged to the deal, at first. The boys at Zircon have stolen loads of our tech and brain-drained enough of our researchers, seems a fair bet they’ve got the codes to track this pretty baby.” He finished locking down a drill bit the length of his arm and squeezed the trigger. The motor shrieked. “Zircon hadn’t the foggiest. The installation Ron eavesdropped on didn’t spot the probe—Zircon intercepted a backchannel message from someone who did. Complete unknowns. A rival corporation, the CIA, hillbillies with a ham radio, anybody’s guess.”
“Swell,” Mac said. He checked the bolt on the deer rifle. “What about my grandfather? Surely X-R is on top of this?”
“Our side isn’t searching for Nancy. Two reasons. One, she’s supposed to splash down in the Atlantic—that’s the game plan, anyhow. Two, launch isn’t scheduled until the 11th of June.”
“Hey, hold the phone!” Dred said. “That’s next week! Which means the probe launched in secret and earlier. Wait, wait—unless we’re talking about multiple probes. My skull is aching.”
“Nancy hasn’t launched. Sword Enterprises possesses more resources than God, but even we can’t afford multiple experimental space rockets this sophisticated.”
“Fine. Then this is impossible.”
“Absolutely. Step back, friend.” Arthur snugged his welding goggles. He drilled through a series of rivets, paused to change the bit, and removed the bolts. A small plate came free, exposing a circuit board and toggles. He flipped the toggles in varying orders until an alarm chimed deep within the probe and an oval section of the hull a handspan wide rolled back. From a maze of wires, Arthur drew forth a pair of slender trapezoidal tubes, each roughly a yard in length and constructed of crystal shot through with black whorls and lightning bolts.
Kasper swaddled the tubes in fireproof blankets. Dawn glinted among the gaps in the branches, a cool reddish glare that disquieted Mac for reasons he couldn’t put his finger on.
“High time to make tracks,” he said as the last of the equipment was stowed.
“Yeah, let’s am-scray,” Dred said. “I’ve got the heebie-jeebies.”
Big Black
The company hustled a quarter mile to where a two-ton canvas-backed farm truck awaited. Everybody piled in. Kasper drove through underbrush and between copses of paper birch, pine, and mulberry, until he hit a dirt road that wound along the valley floor and eventually merged with the highway. By consensus they decided to transport their prize to Mac and Dred’s house. Nowhere more secure except for corporate headquarters, and HQ was a last resort due to the fact Dr. Bole and chief of security Nail demand an explanation.
Kasper circled past Rosendale and took a secret access road that tunneled through Shawangunk Ridge and emerged at a huge old barn (the boys’ clubhouse) on the edge of the Tooms manor’s back forty. The interior of the barn contained a workshop, lab, a computer, and basement storage. An antenna array poked through the roof. Reinforced with battleship armor plates and powered courtesy of a thirty kilowatt diesel generator sealed inside a soundproof boiler compartment, the barn seemed a likely command post of opportunity.
“Fellows, I don’t understand any of this,” Dred said.
“You’re three sheets to the wind,” Mac said.
“So are you, brother.”
“None of us have a bead on the details,” Arthur said. He glanced at Mac. “Did you notice how slender the crystals are? Those are fabricated in a geovault. Specially engineered and grown. I’ve seen the tubes as they’re inserted into the mainframe. The ones we extracted were mature when the technicians embedded them in Nancy. Which means they should be heavier, fuller. Then there’s the internal composition. The discoloration indicates data saturation.”
“I saw. It’s hard to comprehend. A mistake—”
“My father designed the system. His schematics are unimpeachable. I’ve studied them at length. Get those tubes under a scope and I’ll prove you can trust your lying eyes.”
Mac’s pinched expression only became more severe. “The voyage was—is—scheduled for an eighteen-month loop around Pluto and back. A peek over the edge of our solar system and into the void. Even if Nancy collected data without interruption from every onboard camera and sensor, the crystals possess redundant storage capacity to function for many decades. Saturation should not occur. It defies reason.”
“Correct, Master Macbeth. What do you deduce from these clues?”
“Two impossible conclusions. The first being that Nancy has somehow violated the theory of relativity and traveled faster than light… and through time. Secondly, she has, despite the apparent paradox, been out there for much longer than our scientists calculated.”
“Eureka,” Arthur said dryly. “Judging by the data storage consumption, the probe has traveled for several centuries.”
“Makes sense when you put it plainly. However, I refuse to accept the hypothesis.”
“Oh?”
“I dislike where it leads me.” Mac patted his friend’s massive arm. “This is why you do the thinking and we do the overreacting. Convince me, Art. And make it palatable.�
��
“After I convince myself.”
Dred said to Arthur, “Hang on there, pal. You weren’t tracking Nancy?”
“Not conventionally. My telescope and radio are superior to what you’ll find in most households. Regardless, spotting Nancy would have been statistically more difficult than isolating a grain of sand on a beach. I resorted to an unorthodox strategy. A smidgeon of intuition and a stroke of luck and it came together.”
“Well, if this was supposed to be an ocean splashdown, I’m missing the plot. You told Mac to hang around Woolfolk Valley tonight, and bam, sure enough, Nancy almost drops on our heads. What gives? Heck, for that matter, why don’t we take this back to HQ? Sure, Nail will let us have what-for. Granddad’s eyeballs will pop, though. We’re sure to get a reward for salvaging the probe before Labrador or the mystery goons made off with her.”
“To take your queries in reverse order—it is premature to return our find to HQ. There are… complications. As to how I narrowed the landing site—Little Black predicted five reentry zones. Woolfolk Valley was the most likely.”
“You mean Big Black?” Mac removed his glasses. “Art, please tell me you didn’t swipe your old man’s pass card again.”
Big Black was the supercomputer Sword Enterprises scientists and engineers had developed and refined over the past seventy-five years. Its mainframe occupied a massive subterranean vault beneath corporate HQ in Kingston, New York. Dr. Amanda Bole, director of R&D, and Dr. Navarro had tinkered with BB to the point the machine had evolved into a rudimentary form of artificial intelligence. Big Black, a proprietary technology, like so much of Sword Enterprises’ tech, operated within an insulated network. Granddad and Dr. Bole severely restricted access to the computer. When it came to intruders (industrial spies, foreign provocateurs, and meddling kids), the vault guards maintained a shoot-to-kill, ask-questions-later protocol.
“Oh, boy,” Dred said. “Security has no sense of humor. That’s begging to get dusted.”
“Or worse.” Arthur smiled enigmatically. “Dr. Bole has a eugenics fetish and not enough volunteers. No, I mean Little Black. Give me a few moments and I’ll demonstrate.”