“Yah, I suppose that’s to be expected,” Arnold said.
George stared at the man. How could he be so damn calm? George knew he should be the one to say something, to get things organized, but all of the sudden he was twelve again, and so was Bernie and Jaco and Toivo; Mister Ekola was the adult.
Jaco’s dad had died when he was just a toddler. George’s dad had left when George was eight, had never come back. Toivo’s dad had beaten the shit out of him more often than not, had sent Toivo to school with long-sleeved sweaters to hide the bruises on his arms. That had happened since at least the fourth grade, when Toivo’s family moved in, until the summer after the fifth grade, when Arnold had paid a visit to Toivo’s house and given Toivo’s dad a lesson on how to dish out a real beating. After that, Toivo’s dad walked with a limp; he also never laid another hand on his boy.
Arnold Ekola and his wife hadn’t just raised Bernie, they’d basically raised three more boys as well. For George and Jaco and Toivo, Arnold wasn’t their biological father, but he was their dad.
Mister Ekola knew what to do—he always had, he always would.
Bernard looked up from the phone.
“Oh my god,” he said. “Oh, god, Dad . . . it’s everywhere.”
Arnold squeezed Jaco’s shoulder, pointed out at the green lights.
“Jaco, can you keep an eye on that thing for me?”
Jaco nodded. “Sure, Mister Ekola. I can do that.”
“Good boy,” Arnold said. He turned to Bernie. “Exactly what is everywhere?”
Bernie pointed to the lighted rectangle. “That is. I mean, those are. Milwaukee, Boston, New York, it even says there’s one in Paris. It’s fucking aliens, Dad. That’s what CNN says.”
Toivo nodded. “Was bound to happen someday,” he said. “There’s lots of stars, dontchya know.”
Bernie pulled the phone closer to his face. “They’re landing all over the world. They’re attacking, killing people in the cities. Air Force is fighting them, Army’s been mobilized . . . Dad, we’re being invaded.”
George took two steps toward Bernie, snatched the phone out of his friend’s hand. They weren’t being invaded, that was ridiculous. There was some other explanation for this, shit like this didn’t happen.
One glance at the web page confirmed what Bernie had said. George tried to poke the screen, realized he, too, was wearing gloves. He tore them off and threw them down. The cold sent needle-stabs into his hands, the same way it had been stabbing his neck and face—he just hadn’t registered it.
George tried Fox News. Top story: New York On Fire, London Destroyed.
He looked at Yahoo: It’s Not a Movie: Our World is Invaded.
NBC: Invaders Overpowering Militaries Worldwide.
George’s eyes fuzzed; the screen blurred into nothing. He was at the tip of the Keweenaw Peninsula, so deep in the woods there weren’t even paved roads. He was 370 miles away from his family.
My son, my wife . . . I have to get to Milwaukee.
George handed back the phone.
“Bernie’s right,” he said. “I don’t know why this one landed in the Yoop, Mister Ekola . . . but that’s an alien ship.”
Arnold nodded. He hawked a loogie, turned and spat so it wouldn’t hit any of his boys.
“Yah, I figured,” he said. “Let’s get back inside da cabin. Dress warm, get your guns, and make sure you have as much ammo as you can carry.”
The five men turned away from the green lights and walked back to the cabin, their feet crunching in the snow. Bernie slid his phone into his pocket, cutting off even that small light.
They walked into the cabin and silently went about their business, Arnold’s calming influence somehow stopping any of them from freaking out. They all had families to get back to, yet without saying a word they all knew that wasn’t going to happen right away. It felt like at least one of them should go crazy, scream about how he had leave, right now, and the others would have to wrestle him to the ground, but that didn’t happen. They all knew they had to wait until morning, at the very least—going out at night was to fear death from the cold just as much as fearing anything the aliens might do.
Still, George wasn’t completely free of crazy. As he put on a second sweater, then a third, he kept one eye on his Remington 700 rifle, and couldn’t help one thought from repeating in his head over and over:
Maybe it’s good we didn’t shoot at any deer—we might need all these bullets.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
New York Times bestselling novelist Scott Sigler is the author of the Infected trilogy (Infected, Contagious, and Pandemic), Ancestor, and Nocturnal, hardcover thrillers from Crown Publishing; and the co-founder of Empty Set Entertainment, which publishes his Galactic Football League series (The Rookie, The Starter, The All-Pro and The MVP). Before he was published, Scott built a large online following by giving away his self-recorded audiobooks as free, serialized podcasts. His loyal fans, who named themselves “Junkies,” have downloaded over eight million individual episodes of his stories and interact daily with Scott and each other in the social media space.
ENJOY THE MOMENT
Jack McDevitt
The party on my thirtieth birthday more or less opened the door to the end of the world. It was supposed to be a surprise, but my husband Warren, and a few other family members took to smirking and grinning during the preceding days. I was maybe two steps into the living room when the lights came on. They were all there. Uncle Harry and Aunt May with Liz, our eight-year-old daughter. Jack Camden and his wife, whose name I couldn’t remember, and probably twenty other relatives, colleagues, and friends. They burst into a rendition of “Happy Birthday,” and applauded. My sister Ellen brought me a lime daiquiri, my favorite, and when the singing stopped I was led to the coffee table, which was piled high with presents.
We were essentially party people, always looking for something to celebrate. Tom Akins, the physics department chairman and my mentor, played his accordion, accompanied by Freeman and my brother Bill on guitars. They filled the house with music and everybody danced. We passed out drinks, ate through three and a half cakes, played some games and talked about how good life was.
Tom was a cosmologist who was devoting his life to trying to solve the riddle of cosmic inflation, the incredible, and incomprehensible, rate of expansion that occurred at the very beginning of the Big Bang. He’d won some awards, and had been a good guide for me when I was coming up through the program. Toward the end of the evening, he took me aside to pass on some news. “Maryam,” he said, “I’ve told you about Dan Martin? He’s been doing some groundbreaking work on space-time curvature. He’ll be receiving the Carnegie Award this year.”
Martin had gotten his doctorate only three years earlier. “Beautiful,” I said, trying not to sound jealous. “When did you find out?”
“He called me this morning.” He laughed. “He says some of his friends are making references to Martin’s Theorem.”
“Well, I’m glad to hear it.”
He must have picked up something in my tone. “Don’t worry, Maryam. Your time will come.”
It was a happy night. But I guess some part of Dan Martin lingered. When it was over, and everyone was saying goodbye and retrieving their cars from around the neighborhood, my husband hesitated as we left the house and started down the walkway. “What’s wrong?” he asked.
“What do you mean? Why do you say that?”
“Something’s bothering you. It’s been there for most of the evening.”
I took a deep breath and faced it. “I’m thirty.”
His eyebrows rose the way they usually did when politicians were talking. “Maryam, you still look great. I don’t think you’ll have anything to worry about for a long time.”
“That’s not what I mean, love. You know what they say about physicists and thirty?”
“No. What do they say?”
“That if you’re going to leave a mark, you have to get moving early
. After you hit thirty your brain begins to freeze.” I tried to turn it into a joke, but he didn’t smile.
“Come on. You don’t believe that.”
I’m not sure whether I did. But it ended there. We got into the car and went home.
• • • •
Despite the alcohol, I didn’t sleep well that night. There’s not a physicist on the planet who doesn’t want to leave his or her name in the history of the field. To do something that grants immortality. Predict the Higgs Boson. Devise the Pauli Exclusion Principle.
Schwarzschild pinned his name to a radius. Heisenberg to uncertainty. Doppler has a shift, and Hawking has radiation. Schrodinger scored with a cat. And what, in the end, would Maryam Gibson have?
I’d been working on dark energy since the beginning of my career. My thesis had been an attempt to account for it. Get to the heart of dark energy and you can explain why the universe continues to expand at an increasing rate. If I could succeed, make some sort of progress, it was easy to imagine, that at some future date, people would be talking about the Gibson Hypothesis. Or maybe Gibson Energy. I especially liked that one.
At one time it hadn’t seemed too much to ask. Dark energy constituted 68% of the total mass-energy of the universe. Seventeen times the amount of ordinary matter. I’d been convinced that I could figure it out. It was just waiting there for someone to explain it.
But that night, with the partying done, I lay in the fading moonlight that came through the curtains, and I knew it wouldn’t be me.
• • • •
I needed a different track, but my career demanded I stay with the hunt for dark energy. There was no way I could leave that. But maybe, I thought, I could use my spare time to accomplish something that didn’t require an Einstein. Mark Twain had commented once that he’d come in on Halley’s Comet, and that he expected to go out with it as well. Which he did.
Find one of the things and you got to name it. Gibson’s Comet wasn’t exactly what I’d hoped for. But I could live with it. And it might be obtainable.
Warren and I spent a couple of hours most evenings watching TV. I enjoyed being with him, and had always arranged things to ensure we got some time together. But I was going to have to give that up for a while. “I’m going comet-hunting,” I said.
“Whatever you like, babe,” he said. “But you’re not going to give up on the dark energy thing, are you?”
“No. This would just be something I’d be looking at in my spare time.”
“Okay.” He sounded disappointed. “Will we still get to watch Big Bang Theory?”
“Sure. And one more thing—”
“All right.”
“Don’t mention this to anyone, okay?”
“Why not?”
“I’d just as soon nobody knows until I actually find one.”
• • • •
We both had offices at home. A couple of nights after the party, when I had some free time, I went into mine, sat down, and started digging through the online sky surveys. Even though I’d devoted my entire career to cosmology, I was probably uniquely qualified to look for comets because I had exactly the right tools. I’d developed software that could analyze for mass, gravitation, dark matter distribution, distance, velocities, and so on. Normally, my research consisted of recording a set of results from the digital archives, moving forward a given number of years, analyzing how the situation had changed, and comparing the results with what I’d anticipated.
The same approach should work in the hunt for comets. Comets originate in the outer solar system, either in the Kuiper Belt—which consists of small bodies of ice, rock, and metal orbiting beyond Neptune and extending for an additional two billion miles—or in the Oort Cloud, which lies at a range of about a light-year. The Kuiper Belt offered a much better chance of success. So I locked in on it.
Warren never quite understood why I was so hung up on gaining visibility in the field. He was a realtor, but he knew there was more to life than making money. He enjoyed being able to see his clients settle happily into homes, or to assist them when they were moving elsewhere. He thought those were the only two things that really counted in one’s profession: making a contribution, and collecting a decent income. “Nobody other than my clients and family, and a few friends,” he’d told me once, “will ever know my name. But what does that matter?”
Why did I want to put myself out front with a theorem that would never matter to anyone? Or probably even be understood by anybody except a few specialists? He’d tried reading Quantum Theory for Dummies, and realized that even physicists didn’t really grasp the reality of some of the more arcane mathematics.
I sat quietly through the night, looking at patches of sky, discarding stars, picking up glimmers that were too faint to amount to anything. Eventually my eyes got heavy and I resigned myself to the fact that I would not amount to anything . . . at least not tonight.
• • • •
Two nights later I repeated the process with the same result. But I stayed with it, whenever I had time. Warren thought it was a waste of effort but he didn’t say so directly. He did mention that real estate was booming, and that he could use another agent. He guaranteed I’d earn a lot more than I was making as a college professor. He mentioned an article about how people who keep irregular hours damage their brains. And he left a magazine open on the table with a story about how marriages work better when the partners spend time together.
Then, one night about six months after I’d started, the numbers coalesced and I realized I’d found what I was looking for. An object on the inner edge of the Kuiper Belt had dropped out of its orbit, probably influenced by the passage of Neptune, and was moving toward the sun. The spectroscopic analysis indicated it was 3.1 billion miles away.
Beautiful.
Warren was watching a hockey game and Liz was in the kitchen when I came out of my office. “Are you quitting for the night?” he asked. “It’s early.”
I looked casually at my watch. “I guess it is a bit early.”
He froze the picture. “Why the smug smile? Did you find something?” I didn’t have to say a word. “Congratulations. How big is it?”
“The diameter’s about twenty-five kilometers.”
“That sounds good. When will we see it?”
“Warren, I don’t know how much visibility it will have. And I haven’t really run the numbers yet, but I’d guess it’ll be in the vicinity of Earth in about twenty years.”
“So we’ll be in our fifties.”
“Hard to believe, isn’t it?”
He broke into a grin. “I certainly married a woman with vision.”
• • • •
When the news broke about the comet, I became a local celebrity and the university got a nice PR boost as a result. Reporters descended, and I appeared on several TV shows and on The Science Channel. It was a gloriously happy time.
The data were made available to the world, and confirmed by everyone. Tom called me into his office. “I was surprised that you’ve gotten involved with comets.”
“It became something of a hobby.”
“I hope it hasn’t been affecting your research?”
“No, Tom. I wouldn’t let that happen. I was just taking an occasional break.”
“Okay. Nothing wrong with that.” He glanced up at the dictum that, he claimed, ruled his life: Enjoy the moment. We don’t have forever. It was framed and hung on the wall beside a picture of him and the governor. The reality was that I’d never known anyone more committed to the task at hand, and less likely to take time off. “You know you have naming rights?”
“I had no idea.” I tried not to smile.
“Well, you might want to give it some thought.”
I knew what I wanted to call it, of course. But I had no wish to sound like an egomaniac. I’d gotten to know him pretty well over the years, so I decided to give him a chance to open a door for me. “Tom,” I said, “if you’d discovered one of these things
, what would you call it?”
“The tradition is that it should become Gibson’s Comet.”
“I could live with that.”
• • • •
I don’t know that anyone became prouder of Gibson’s Comet than Liz. But she was disappointed that the image on her computer screen was barely visible. “I thought comets were bright,” she said. “Where’s its tail?”
“It won’t have one until it gets closer to the sun.”
“When will that happen?” she asked.
“It’ll be a while,” I said.
Warren was happy for me, and gradually over the next few weeks, everything went back to normal. One evening while we were watching a Seinfeld rerun, I got a call from a woman who identified herself as an astronomer working at the Mauna Kea observatory in Hawaii. “Maryam,” she said, “something odd’s happening.”
I couldn’t imagine why she would be calling me. “What’s that?” I asked.
“We have two more comets coming in. From the same general location as yours. I’ll forward the data if you like.”
That was not good news. I wasn’t excited at getting competition. But when I saw Tom at the university next morning and mentioned it, he’d already heard.
“Something’s happening out there,” he said.
• • • •
Our local TV station, WKLS, hit a slow news period and asked me to answer some on-camera questions. The show’s moderator was Judy Black, who specialized in doing inspirational, uplifting pieces. “Dr. Gibson,” she said, “have we ever had three comets in the sky at the same time before?”
“Well,” I said, “they’re all a long way off, so I wouldn’t exactly characterize them as ‘in the sky.’ But, yes, that’s certainly unusual.”
“Can you explain why it’s happening?”
“Judy, we think there’s been a gravitational change of some sort. We’re still looking for a reason.”
Her eyebrows rose. “What could cause such a change?”
“A lot of things, really. It can happen, for example, if one of the big planets gets a bit close to an object in the Kuiper Belt. That’s what pulls the comets out of the Belt and sends them in our direction.”
The End is Nigh (The Apocalypse Triptych) Page 27