by Edward Lee
Then he opened a small book with a light-yellow paper cover. The book was pretty fat. The cover read:
FIELD OPERATING INSTRUCTIONS FOR
THE M129 (S-)A-D-M AND W-54 WARHEAD ASSEMBLY
TECH LEVEL: MOS-12E50
FM: 233-24-65
Next, Danny turned open the cover, found a heading in the Table Of Contents, and found a heading called Primary Assembly.
It read:
EMERGENCY DETONATION PROCEDURES
1) Connect lead #1 (fig. 1) to DETCORD line (fig. 2) to timer (fig. 3).
2) Connect lead #2 to M34 firing device (fig. 4)
3) Unshunt one military (non-electric) blasting cap (fig. 5) and fix to end of lead #1.
4) Insert blasting cap into ADM capwell as marked.
Danny opened the ADM’s heavy black transport case, and removed the heavy, block-like mechanism. It was covered in an odd dark-green plastic with ridges. As best he could, he followed all of the instructions he’d just read in the manual, then looked back at the page.
5) Open safety cover of M34 firing device, and switch safety toggle to OFF position.
6) Reclose safety cover and depress.
Danny hoped he was doing it all right, and he had a pretty good feeling that he was. He followed the instructions to the letter, using a diagram on the facing page as a guide. Then he checked and rechecked and triple-checked.
It all looked right.
There, he thought. I think it’s ready…
He picked up the little plastic box that was the M34 firing device; he held in neatly in his hand. His thumb slid over the safety cover.
All he needed to do was push down.
He wondered if he’d heard the explosion.
He wondered if he’d live long enough to even hear a click.
But he did know one thing: he wouldn’t feel anything when he died. It would all happen too fast.
“Bye, Mom. Bye’, Dad,” he said, blinking tears out of his eyes.
I hope…I hope there really is a heaven…
Danny shut his eyes, squeezed them tight, then began to press down on the plastic safety cover, until—
“Wait a second, Danny,” a man’s voice called out.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Jesus Christ! I’m a writer, not a fuckin’ gymnast! Garrett had thought as he’d cautiously repelled down age-old elevator cables. His shirt was ruined, his $300 Italian slacks ruined, his hands black with cable grease.
He didn’t know how he’d gotten here…but on the other hand, he did.
He remembered being at the Vander house, Danny’s butchered parents in the upstairs bedroom, and Sanders.
Oh, man…
He remembered killing Sanders.
Garrett didn’t know if it was right to feel good about killing someone, even someone as corrupt, cold-blooded, and simply as evil as Sanders. It probably wasn’t right, but…
Garrett felt good about it anyway.
Then he’d strayed around a bit, feeling absolutely useless—even feeling guilty because Danny would die when he set off the ADM, and there was nothing Garrett could do because he didn’t know where Area November was, nor Depot 12.
And, more particularly, he remembered damning these foreign lifeforms for using an innocent kid to do their dirty work. He remembered hating them for it.
Abducting and brain-washing a little kid for their own devices….
Then—
He remembered more: the basement. He wandered down to the basement, discovered the place where Danny had hidden the bomb, then discovered the boy’s sketches.
But before he’d had time to leave, he’d collapsed to the cold basement floor.
He imagined the worst tequila hangover he’d ever had in his life, then increased that discomfort tenfold. That’s what the headache had felt like.
It had struck him so suddenly that the little rationale he had left suspected that all the booze, junk food, and cigarettes had finally caught up to him, in Danny Vander’s basement, of all places.
Garrett suspected that the Golden Hour had arrived, by way of an aneurism or catastrophic stroke. When he’d passed out from the eruption of pain, he actually expected to die.
He expected to never wake up.
But he did.
He’d regained consciousness in a blurred, glowing dream. A trance-channel, he knew at once, even though he’d never before experienced such a thing. Reports of this same phenomenon accompanied certain types of abduction reports the same way meeting dead relatives accompanied near-death experiences. Garrett’s own research community was well-versed with such reports. A complex mode of telepathic thought- and image-conveyance, a crude joining of minds that transcended language.
Garrett knew that’s what had happened.
The things had touched his spirit. They answered his questions when he’d desperately needed the answers.
And they’d told him, in their own way, how to find Depot 12.
He recalled little else of the experience, almost no detail. Just nebulous colors and metallic scents. Words appeared in his head that weren’t really words. And for a moment—the most irreducible fraction of a moment—he saw them.
Figures tall and thin, skeletons scarcely covered with flesh at all.
Narrow, post-like heads…
Hands with but two fingers each…
And that had been the end of it. Garrett had awakened on the basement floor, knowing exactly what to do and where to go.
And now…he was here.
With difficulty, he twisted his body up and over the top edge of the elevator wall, smeared with gritty grease, and dropped down to the platform’s steel floor. Beyond the elevator’s open entry, he saw—
Holy shit!
—the vast empty depot, the three weirdly narrow crates, and Danny Vander kneeling stoically under the harsh spotlights mounted overhead.
Danny had assembled the ADM, and it looked like he was about to—
“Wait a second, Danny!” Garrett called out.
The boy’s wan face jerked toward Garrett, eyes wide, terrified, but also keenly defensive.
Danny had the small plastic firing device in his hand. Garret knew the consequences. All the kid has to do is press down on that switch until it clicks…and the show’s over…
Garrett held up his hand. “Danny? Listen to me for a second.”
“Who are you!” the boy wailed. “I don’t know you! What are you doing here! No one knows about this except me!”
“I know too, Danny,” Garrett said softly.
Danny’s face strained, tears streaking his cheeks. His thumb rested firmly on the firing switch. “You’re one of the people against the Stickmen! You’re like that man at my house who killed my parents!”
“No I’m NOT!” Garrett yelled back.
“You want to stop me from blowing this up!”
“That’s not true, Danny,” Garrett said, trying to settle down. It was hard to settle down when one was a half-second away from an instantaneous multi-million degree atomic fireball. “I want you to blow it up, Danny. I know that you have to do it. I want you to set that bomb off.”
Danny blinked, frozen. “You-you do?”
“That’s right, Danny. I was sent here to make sure that you did. It’s very important, and you and I both know that.”
Danny gulped, blinked again. “How did you get here? Know one know about this place but me.”
“The aliens told me, Danny,” Garret said. Then he thought: What did he call them? The— “The Stickmen told me. They told me where you were.”
The boy’s paused lengthened. Then: “I don’t believe you! The Stickmen only talk to me! I’m pushing the button now!”
“All right, Danny. Go ahead and push the button, because, like I told you, I want you to do it too. But if you push that button now, you and I will both die. There’s a way that you can still do it…but live. You’ve been having headaches, right?”
The boy’s eyes fixed on Garret. “Y-yeah. How did you know t
hat?”
“But you only have the headaches when the Stickmen talk to you, right?”
“Y-yeah.”
“Well, the same thing happened to me a little while ago. The Stickmen talked to me.” Garrett was sweating, trembling. He’d already beaten death once tonight. Maybe twice was too much to ask. “My name’s Harlan,” he said. “I’m not here to hurt you, and I’m not here to stop you from setting that bomb off. The Stickmen don’t want you to die for them, Danny. But the way that they communicate with you—the way that they talk to you—it isn’t sophisticated enough to tell you all of the details. If you listen to me for just one minute…”
“No!” Danny shouted. “You’re trying to trick me! I’m blowing it up right now!”
The boy’s face reddened, then he—
snap!
—pressed the firing switch. The click, like a tiny bone snapping, was all Garrett needed to hear to know that his life was over. Het really wasn’t sure if he’d pissed in his pants or not—what did it matter? A reflex caused him to close his eyes, grit his teeth, clamp his hands over his ear, but that didn’t matter either.
God…forgive me for my sins, he thought.
At least he could take some comfort in knowing that he would die so quickly, his nerves would not have time to register pain.
Shit, I’ve had a pretty good life, so what the fuck am I complaining about?
A second ticked by, then two, then three.
Garrett knew he would be foolish to hope for a misfire. He knew that the ADM—however “atomic”—relied on conventional explosives and conventional fuse-mechanisms to properly detonate. This might take another second or two.
Garrett stood there, frozen, eyes squeezed shut, waiting for the big boom.
And he stood there like that for twenty more seconds. Nothing happened.
No explosion.
Oh, man, this has been a long day, he thought.
Danny was looking frantic at the ADM assembly, pulling on wires, shoving against the transport case, clicking and clicking and clicking the plastic firing switch.
Either it’s a dud, Garrett reasoned, from being in storage for so long, or—
“Danny?”
The child was futilely smacking his hand against the 1.5 kiloton atomic demolition munition.
“Danny? Listen to me.”
Danny cowered, looking up at Garrett. “Something went wrong,” he sobbed. “And you’re going to kill me now! Like the man at the house wanted!”
“No, Danny. It’s nothing like that,” Garrett assured him. “I understand why you might think that. I understand that you can’t trust anybody but yourself. Believe me, I’ve felt the same way for a long time.”
“Stay away!”
Garrett spread his hands. “If I was going to hurt you, I could do it now, couldn’t I?” he tried to reason. “But I’m not that kind of person. I’m not like the…man at the house. I’m here to help you. Will you let me help you? If you say no, then I’ll walk away right now. But if I do that—”
“The Stickmen,” Danny whispered. “I didn’t do what they needed…”
“Let me help, okay?”
A last long stare. Then Danny nodded.
Garrett walked to the center of the vault. He wanted a cigarette, real bad, but that probably wasn’t a very good idea considering his vicinity to a conventional fuse assembly.
Danny buried his face in his hands. “I fuh-fuh-failed them…”
“No you didn’t,” Garrett assured. “There’s probably just a few kinks to work out of this thing.”
“I failed them… Just like I failed my father.”
“You didn’t fail you father. You didn’t fail anyone. You’re a good kid and you’ve always done your best.”
“My father wanted me to play sports and stuff. But I was never any good at it. I just wanted to draw.”
Garrett knelt down beside the warhead housing of the ADM. “Let me tell you something about fathers, Danny. Sometimes they say things they don’t mean. Sometimes they have their own idea about their kids. But later, after they’ve had time to think about things, they want you to do what you want. I’ve seen your drawings, and they’re real good. You’ll be a great artist one day. And I’m sure your father was very proud of you.”
Danny sniffled through some abating sobs. “You think so?”
“I’m sure of it.”
Garrett looked at the top-face of the bomb chassis. Yeah, I know what I’m doing, he sarcastically thought. But at least the kid seemed to have put it together. “How did you do this?” he asked.
“The book,” Danny said, pointing.
Ah, the good old operational instructions, Garrett thought, and picked up the fat Army field manual lying beside the device. He scanned the table of contents. “How old are you?” he asked. “Eight?”
“Eight going on nine.”
“Well, even for a smart eight-year-old like you, this book’s pretty thick and complicated. You think maybe I should take a crack at it?”
“Yuh-yeah.”
Garrett flipped to crucial pages, noting quickly that Danny had used the emergency detonation guidelines on the inside front cover, which made no mention of the timer protocol, nor the safe-distance perimeters. Getting this thing to go bang shouldn’t be too hard. As he continued to survey the manual, he said, “After the Stickmen told me how to get here, I couldn’t help but notice that it’s a good five-mile walk from your house, and five miles is a long way for an eight-year-old boy to carry a big heavy thing like this.”
“The Stickmen made me strong,” Danny said with little interest. “They gave me the glove…”
Glove? Garrett wondered, looking up from the field manual. Then Danny handed him what looked like a flap of grayish-black fabric, and when Garrett examined it, he discovered that it was indeed quite glove-like: a thin sack of mysterious cloth that felt oddly metallic. But when Garrett held it up—
That’s some glove…
A glove for a narrow, two-fingered hand.
Garrett remember Danny’s sketch that he’d found in the basement. A sketch of something like a glove…
“It doesn’t fit right ’cos the Stickmen only have two fingers,” Danny said. “But when you put it on, it stretches.”
Garrett slipped it over his own hand. The bizarre material widened as if elasticized; Garrett slipped his thumb into one finger, then squeezed the rest of his own digits into the second finger until it appeared that he was wearing a tight black mitten.
Now, Garrett was beginning to get it.
He put his covered fingers into the ADM’s lug-slot—and lifted up the entire device as if it were a Styrofoam box.
“See?” Danny said.
A simple explanation via a highly complex extraterrestrial technology. As astonishing as it was, Garrett, now, wasn’t particularly shocked. A poly-nano textile? A molecular weft? Many remote theories of physics and motion could account for something like this. A gallium-based isolator in a nano-morphic shell, each microscopic in actual size yet replicated a billion-fold could comprise such a material, Garrett surmised. Simple body heat would suffice for a power source whereupon the material would be able to harness one-half of the proximal available gravity and convert it into foot-pounds of force.
Instant human fork-lift…
Garrett, now that he could see it with his own eyes, was actually surprised how unsurprised he felt. It wasn’t much of a stretch to believe that a race of lifeforms capable of inter-galactic flight could develop a lifting tool
“So this is how you tore open the security fences and broke those locks,” Garrett said.
“Uh-huh. I threw a baseball with it once and…it disappeared.”
“I’ll bet,” Garrett chuckled. “And I’ll bet you could knock Mike Tyson out with one punch.” He took off the glove and went back to scanning the manual. “So tell me more about the Stickmen, Danny. They came a couple weeks ago, and they took you on their ship, didn’t they?”
“Yeah, but no one believed me,” the boy dejectedly replied.
“I believe you, Danny. There are all different kinds of Stickmen, and I know lots of people who’ve met them. Just like you. When the Stickmen took you onto their ship, what did they do?”
“They…talked to me—well, sort of. They told me how to help them, then they left real fast.”
“But they continued talking you after that, too, right?”
“Yeah, like in my dreams, or during the day when I’d get the headaches. They talked to me in my head, from far away.”
“What else did they tel you?”
“They told me they’ve only been here a few times. The first time was a long time ago, and that ship crashed. They told me it was because of something called a valence frequency shift displacement, but I don’t know what that means.”
“It means that the propulsion system on their ship—the engine, Danny—can’t work for very long near earth,” Garrett postulated. “There’s a magnetic field around the earth that’s, like, the opposite of the magnetic field that they’re used to. That first ship stayed too long, and its engine lost all its power. That’s why it crashed. So the Stickmen on the other ship asked you to help them. They want you to set off this bomb. The radiation in the bomb will bring the dead Stickmen in those boxes back to life, won’t it?”
Danny nodded glumly, looking at the long, narrow wooden crates. “But I’m not too sure what happens after that.”
Garrett could guess, now that all of the theory was falling into place. “Then the other ship will come back real fast, pick them up, and take them back home.”
“But it has to be tonight—that’s what they told me too,” the boy added. “Because of something called an apogee. I don’t know what that means either, but they said if it doesn’t happen tonight, then it would be a really long time before they could come back again.”
“What that means, Danny, is that they live so far away, they can only come here at special times, when the earth’s orbit is at a certain point in space.”