by Scott Mackay
“Get off the road!” she cried.
She and Jake dragged Hanna up a small incline to the other side of a hummock. She got on her stomach and watched things unfold. As the blue and green embers got closer to Buzz they began to whine with a rising pitch until finally the sound was so painful that she had to cover her ears. Buzz figured things out quickly and, after a moment of drop-jawed scrutiny, ran away from his truck, rifle in hand, and disappeared into the forest on the other side of the road. Five embers drifted toward his truck and burrowed into it like hot little drills. A few seconds later, his truck exploded and was left a flaming heap on the asphalt.
Other embers pursued Buzz into the forest. She watched in horrified fascination. With all the underbrush dead, she kept fairly good track of Buzz. He ran from tree to tree as if pursued by a band of malevolent fairies. The embers cruised after him, closing the distance quickly. When they were a yard away, they pulled back, then dove into his body with the ferocity and quickness of bullets. Buzz cried out, an awful throaty scream. His limbs went stiff, his fingers splayed so that he dropped his rifle, and it was as if he was illuminated from within by high-voltage electricity. He shook violently. His shirt burst into flames, and he fell to the ground so that half his body was hidden behind a tree trunk, the other half still visible. Then came a small explosion and she got the distinct impression of a detached leg flying into the air. She turned away. She was saddened that it had come to this, but she was also relieved. And terrified that she now had to elude the Tarsalans herself.
At that point, the alien spacecraft descended to the road. It was wacky, a scene out of a science fiction movie, something she had never expected to see; visitors from another star at last landing on her planet, the spacecraft settling on the road like a giant glowing egg. It made a creepy sound, a sudden buzz with low-frequency harmonics that vibrated through her whole body, then that sucking sound again, like the last bit of water in a bathtub going down the drain. Then all sound faded.
In the ensuing silence, her body took over. She got her kids to their feet and helped them through the forest. Hanna didn’t have to be dragged—fear was a great motivator. Glenda got all kinds of scratches from the thick, dead bushes, but continued to cajole her kids through the dark forest past the spaceship, and finally back out onto the road. Her mind, in its own separate universe, reeled from the terror of it all.
With Hanna in such a debilitated state, it took them a long time to get the rest of the way to Marblehill.
Glenda looked at her watch in the dim glow of her flashlight, and wasn’t sure if it was one o’clock in the afternoon or one o’clock in the morning.
When they finally reached Marblehill, she looked up at the three-story mansion and saw lights burning in
four windows. In the glow of these lights she saw a helicopter sitting on the big front lawn. The building itself looked as if it had been under prolonged attack, with the east turret demolished and the rest of the various walls, dormers, and cornices badly shot up.
The three Thorndikes stood outside a big stone wall. There was a path outside the wall that led into the forest. In happier times, she had walked along this path, hand in hand with Gerry, down into the rugged limestone ravine that abutted the property where the trees used to grow. Hanna lay on the ground outside the wall. Her coughing sounded different: still persistent but not as strong, as if she had long ago ripped all her abdominal muscles to pieces and no longer possessed the muscular mechanics to cough the way she used to
“Jake, stay with your sister. I’m going to the gate.”
But beyond that? She didn’t know. What if this whole thing turned into a bust? What if everybody was dead inside? Shut up, Glenda. Live a minute at a time…minute at a time…minute at a time…
She reached the gate and turned her flashlight on and off three times. She waited, then repeated the signal, terrified that, somewhere out in the dead forest behind her, Tarsalan refugees watched her. She repeated the signal a third time, then saw someone run from the house, across the lawn, and toward the helicopter.
As the figure got closer, she saw that it was recognizably human, with normal human proportions, not short legs and long arms like a Tarsalan. She was so overwhelmed with relief that she felt dizzy and pressed her hand against the gate for support.
The figure resolved itself into a man. “Mrs. Thorndike?”
“Yes…yes, it’s me. Call me Glenda.”
“Where are your kids?”
The man closed the distance between them, and she saw the name FERNANDES stitched above his left breast pocket.
“Just down here.” She peered into the darkness. “Jake? Hanna? Come on.” She saw movement in the shadows along the stone fence. She turned to Fernandes. “My daughter’s really sick. I hope you have medicine.”
Fernandes nodded. “We have all kinds. Let’s get them across the lawn… before the Tarsalans come.”
New anxiety shot through her chest like a lightning bolt. “It’s bad?”
“We have five dead. Six including your sister-in-law.”
“My sister-in-law?”
Fernandes nodded. “It’s just three airmen left, Dr. Thorndike, and his three girls.”
“Louise is dead?”
“One of the VMs got her a few days ago.”
Her children appeared out of the shadows.
“Kids, Aunt Louise is dead. Just so you know.”
“What?” said Jake. “Really? What happened?”
Fernandes was looking at the gun in Jake’s hand. He then turned to Glenda. “He know how to shoot? I mean, really shoot?”
But Glenda was too upset about Louise to respond.
“I’m getting better,” said Jake.
“Ever handle a Montclair?” asked Fernandes.
“A Montclair? What’s that?”
Fernandes’s face sank. “Come on. Let’s get everybody inside.”
Fernandes hustled them across the lawn.
The lawn was brown and had the texture of a piecrust, the sod seeming to have come loose in a single piece from the underlying soil, as if the lawn’s root system had died at the same time, en masse. In a world where things kept getting worse and worse—where the sun could be extinguished by alien plankton, where Glenda could become a cop killer, and where mass famine took the lives of millions every day—Louise was just one more catastrophe, and it was hard for Glenda to immediately feel grief.
She just felt shocked. How was Neil handling it? How were the girls handling it?
Fernandes led them under the great stone portico and up the steps. They went through the front door, and…there they all were, Neil and the girls, waiting for them, just like any other Marblehill visit, only this one was so different.
Neil was smiling in the oddest way. “Welcome to Marblehill.”
His face was lit by a light that was hanging on a hook, a bare bulb in a cage, the kind mechanics used to look under cars. The greeting came out in a stiff, formal way, and the man standing before her didn’t sound like Neil at all.
“Neil, I’m sorry about Louise. This fellow…” She glanced inquisitively at the airman. “Fernandes, is it?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Fernandes told me.”
Neil raised his hands—no need to make any fuss. “We’re all right, Glenda. We’re just glad you made it here okay. We were starting to wonder.”
And that smile. Something wasn’t right about that smile.
The cousins got to know each other again. They had something to eat—military-issue stew, just add water—and her nieces came and clung to her off and on through the next several hours, especially Morgan, who mistakenly called her mommy a number of times.
She got to know the two other airmen: Captain Leonard Aft, who was nominally in charge, and Lieutenant Yuri Rostov, who was always wearing a pair of headphones and seemed to be the technical man; he had a constantly abstracted look in his eyes.
They had a rest. Hanna got her medicine. Her coughing g
ot better and she breathed, for the first time in several days, without a wheeze.
Later on, Glenda stood guard duty with Neil in his study on the second floor. He still had that odd smile on his face, the squeeze of the curve so tight that his lips were white. Light-gathering goggles sat hinged in the up position above his eyes on a strap, and he kept scanning the grounds out front, his face lit by the dim glow of the communications apparatus on the floor next to him. He had lost weight. Not that he was gaunt, but his customary paunch was gone, his clothes were too baggy for his frame, and the usual fullness around his jaw had melted away like wax around a candle.
Now that his face was thin, Glenda couldn’t help seeing the resemblance to Gerry: the way his brow crowned around his eyes in a somewhat falconlike mold, the same generous nose, and a similar rounded protuberance to his chin. Her heart ached for Gerry.
And, as if Neil had read her mind, he said, “I’m sorry about Ger. I’m sorry he’s stuck up there.”
She looked away. Tears came to her eyes. “It’s a bit much.”
He reached out and put his hand on her arm. “Don’t worry, Glenda. I’ve got everything organized.
We’ve got listening posts reaching a mile in every direction. We’ve got infrared cameras the size of your thumb up in trees. We’re tracking each new landing and plotting it on a map. We’ve cataloged their movements and fed the results into a computer, and we’re coming to a real understanding of how they think, at least from a tactical and guerrilla standpoint. We’ve also made a fallback position in the cave.”
She dried her tears. “I forgot about the cave.”
“We’ve fortified the first chamber, and provisioned the second. We’ve got fresh water in there. Enough to last a month. Medicine, too. Not to mention food. We go out on patrol regularly. We search the area.
And we spray the house every day for bugs. Unfortunately, before we started spraying, the Tarsalans sent in bugs and found out we had food. But don’t worry about the Tarsalans. They haven’t mounted a strike in the last three days. We think they’re starting to tire. As for the cave, everything’s buried under rocks so they don’t know it’s there. And we go up there to spray, too.”
And still that smile, the lid on something that was simmering deep inside her brother-in-law.
She glanced out the front window. “I’m sorry about Louise.”
He didn’t say anything. She turned back to him. In the light of the communications apparatus, she saw that his face had turned red. She moved closer and put her arm around him.
“I’m okay…. I’m okay,” he said.
“No… you’re not.”
He took a deep breath. The smile disappeared from his face. “Maybe not.” And then he bowed his head, as if in shame, and closed his eyes. “I failed her, Glenda.”
“You didn’t fail her.”
“And I failed the kids.”
“No, you didn’t.”
“I finally realize what a big fool I’ve been all these years.”
“You’re not a fool. For God’s sake, Neil.”
After that, they lapsed into silence for a long time. She must have dozed. And Neil must have thought she was asleep—even when she opened her eyes around a quarter to eleven.
His shoulders heaved and he wept silently. The pain bristled off him like heat from a furnace. Her throat tightened with anguish and her own eyes filled with tears. God. What were they going to do? Here was the end of time. And Neil, once the world’s hero, was nothing but a broken man who cried alone in the dark when he thought no one was watching.
36
Day now followed day. The sad, dark month of October crept slowly toward its close. Glenda occasionally tried to reach Gerry on her fone, but with the shroud constantly thickening, her signal never got through, and she didn’t even get the message from AT&T Interlunar about service being down anymore.
At the start of their second week there, Neil got a call on his special phone from Assistant Secretary of Defense Fonblanque. When he was done speaking to her, he told Glenda about it.
“The United States Navy recovered a communications drop from the Moon three days ago south of the Solomon Islands. The Moon is telling us they’ve embarked on their own mission to destroy the phytosphere.” And then, unexpectedly, after talking in official mode, Neil got choked up. “Gerry might have had something after all. With his stress band and flagella.” He looked at the airmen, then at his daughters, then at Glenda and her family. “It seems they’ve conducted experiments that prove the phytosphere is… sensitive to gravitational pressure… and that the Moon, all this time, has been creating a tidal flux in the phytosphere—Gerry’s stress band. Gerry says if he increases the gravitational pull of the Moon against the phytosphere by a factor of fifteen percent for a period of five days, the flagella will be overwhelmed and the phytosphere will break apart.” Neil spelled it out in one blunt summation: “He’s going to slam the asteroid Gaspra into the Moon, move the Moon closer to the Earth, and use the resulting stronger gravity to shake the phytosphere apart.” He then sketched in the technicalities.
When he was done, Glenda stared at her brother-in-law with unmitigated alarm. Colliding emotions rushed through her body. Her throat felt ticklish, tears sprang to her eyes, and her head swam. She stumbled backward and would have fallen if Rostov hadn’t caught her.
“And he’s going to be riding on this asteroid?”
“That’s what Fonblanque says. At the last minute they’re going to eject in a survival pod. The mission is already well under way.”
“What’s to stop the Moon from falling into the Earth?” asked Lenny.
“The Moon’s orbit has been widening for millions of years. It’s going to continue in that pattern. This will just be a momentary blip. Centrifugal forces will soon pull it back to its regular orbit.”
“Is he serious?” Glenda couldn’t seem to catch her breath.
“They’ve already gone. They’ve reached Gaspra. They’re rigging it with AviOrbit’s five biggest singularity drives.” Neil looked away. “I’ve always chastised him for taking wild risks… but even I couldn’t have imagined—”
“Is Daddy all right?” asked Hanna, her eyes like tombs after all the asthma, but showing some light for the first time in weeks.
Neil turned to Hanna. “He’s all right.”
The reservation Glenda heard in Neil’s voice jabbed her like the point of a hypodermic needle. “And just what the hell’s that supposed to mean?”
Neil hesitated. “It seems some Tarsalans escaped to the Moon after the TMS became unviable. Before Nectaris mounted its mission, it neutralized those Tarsalans, and they’re now in detainment facilities on the Moon. This was to circumvent the possibility that the Tarsalans might sabotage the Gaspra mission.
But it seems the Tarsalans had automatic sabotage procedures in place, and that all the equipment and software for the Gaspra mission has now been infected with a slow-burning virus. Systems are failing one by one. As a result, one of the crew members has already been killed. But Gerry and… and you’ll never guess… Ian Hamilton—”
“Ian Hamilton?” The sudden appearance of this dark phantom from Gerry’s past alarmed Glenda to the core of her being.
“Apparently he’s been up there working as an AviOrbit test pilot for the last seven years. Now he’s mission pilot.”
“I’ve got to sit down,” she said.
Rostov led her to one of the overstuffed chairs Louise liked to decorate her various homes with, and she sat down heavily, hyperventilating. The components of the disastrous mission paraded darkly through her mind. Gerry, millions of miles away in deep space, riding on a giant rocket that was falling to pieces, one crew member already dead, and the other—the god of good times, as Gerry used to call him—ready to wreak havoc on Gerry’s life all over again.
“Did they take any alcohol with them?”
As ludicrous as the suggestion sounded, it was no joke, and Neil was sensitive enough to see t
hat. For only Neil fully understood the pain Gerry’s alcoholism had caused her, because who could she turn to but Neil when Gerry didn’t come home for three days, or wound up in jail under Fulton’s mocking gaze, or tried to be affectionate to the children when he was so repugnantly drunk he could hardly stand? She would never forget her long telephone calls with Neil, and how Neil had gotten her through the worst of
it. And then what she called the New Sobriety had come along, the sobriety that had finally stuck, after so many times of Gerry trying to quit, but always falling back off the wagon. Was all that in jeopardy now? Surely Nectaris wasn’t such a party capital that they’d allow their astronauts to take booze with them on a critical mission.
“Glenda… it’s okay. For the first time in my life I actually believe in Gerry. He’s going to do this thing. I know he is. I might be smart. But Gerry’s the family genius. And I’ve finally got the guts to admit that.”
She broke down completely after that. Her nerves were shot.
“How long till he makes it light again?” she asked through her tears.
Because, God, did she want daylight again.
“Eight days. Ten at the most.”
So in ten days she would know if she was a widow or not. She wasn’t sure how she was going to make it through the uncertainty.
She didn’t have time to brood or think about it because Rostov, using the tiny state-of-the-art radar dish mounted on the roof, tracked seven TLVs landing within an hour of each other, all within a one-mile radius of Marblehill.
An hour later, Marblehill came under heavy attack. This attack was different in that it employed not only the regular VMs but also standard human weaponry.
“They must have found an armory somewhere,” was Lenny’s only comment.
So, amid the whining squeals of the VMs, there was also a lot of semiautomatic weapons fire. With all the gunfire, she was surprised that the surrounding dead forest, now dry as straw after all the heat, didn’t go up in flames.