by Scott Mackay
When he was a thousand feet up, the pod arced into a vertical position and sank thruster-first toward the surface. As the pod reached the thirty-foot mark, and slowed its descent to two miles an hour, he got a red light on the landing gear—it wouldn’t deploy. When the pod finally reached the surface, it fell over like a big tree.
Luck.
He and Glenda had talked about it often.
Usually, when a piece of bread and peanut butter fell to the floor, it always fell peanut butter side down.
In fact, that was the story of his life.
But it seemed his luck had changed. With no radios working and everbody hunkered down, his death would have been certain if the pod had fallen on its hatch. The weight of the pod on top of it would have stopped it from opening and he would have been trapped until his life support ran out. But the pod had fallen hatch up. He keyed the necessary commands. The gull-wing unit lifted noiselessly.
And Gerry climbed out onto the surface of a Moon that was moving toward the Earth exactly according to his own equations.
40
Driven by strong winds, the fire raged all night. It first consumed the trees around the cave, then spread in all directions according to the wayward will of the fickle winds. Smoke came into the cave, finally forcing Glenda, Fernandes, and the kids into the second cavern. The fire’s roar was like several trains rumbling by the foot of the hill. The oxygen got thin, as if the fire was consuming every last atom.
At times Glenda thought she heard screams outside. Once or twice she grew convinced she heard cries
for help, as if the Tarsalans expected her to rescue them. Fat chance.
At last, the fire burned a safe distance from the cave.
Glenda, Fernandes, and the children went out to have a look.
The world was ashy, and embers flew everywhere. The main body of the fire burned about a mile off, the flames sometimes leaping a hundred yards into the air.
“Cool,” said Jake.
She glanced at her son. He was dirty from head to foot. He had Leigh’s pistol stuffed in his pants and his Montclair slung over his shoulder, and even though he was only twelve, he now possessed a disconcerting maturity and a battle-hardened stare as sturdy as cement. Yet…yet he was still a kid…because this fire was cool.
Light. It flowed into her eyes with a calming influence. All of the dry underbrush and tree branches had gone up, but there were still a number of tall tree trunks, horribly charred by the fire, sticking out of the ground like black fenceposts, all of them now backlighted by the frenzied inferno a mile off. She looked for figures moving through this outpost of Hell, flipping down her night-vision goggles but, because of the heat, all she saw was a blinding wash of green.
So she went back into the cave, got the binoculars, and scanned the destroyed forest for miles around.
She didn’t see a soul—Tarsalan or human.
They all watched the fire burn for the next hour. No human first responders came to put it out, and no fire planes flew by to douse it with payloads of retardant. Chattahoochee, protected under law, just burned and burned.
She wondered how many Tarsalans had died.
After an hour, everyone got bored with watching the fire.
Fernandes went to poke around in the ashes, getting as close as he could to the main body of the fire.
The girls went inside to sleep while Glenda and Jake stayed on the ledge to keep watch.
Four hours later, Morgan and Melissa came outside to stand guard. Glenda and Jake went inside. By this time, Fernandes had come back and was dozing in the corner.
Glenda fell asleep in minutes.
A couple of hours later she was awakened by a strange noise outside. She opened her eyes. She listened more closely. It sounded like hail. It thumped down all over the forest, and hissed in the embers.
“Aunt Glenda?” Melissa called from the cave entrance.
Glenda got up and went outside.
Thumb-sized chunks of hail fell from the sky, only this wasn’t ordinary hail—this was green hail. It took her a moment to realize what was going on. Then she looked up at the sky. Jake and Fernandes came to the cave entrance. Excitement exploded through her body, but she suppressed it. Had Gerry done it?
Had his crazy scheme to push the Moon closer to Earth with a big asteroid actually worked?
She walked out to the ledge and picked up a chunk of hail. By this time Hanna had appeared at the cave entrance as well. The hail melted in her hand, leaving behind a green residue, like cream of spinach soup.
Everybody started picking up their own chunks of hail. The sky was black as oil. But surely to God this had to mean something. How long would it take, she wondered? Would it all fall to Earth, or would some of it drift into space? And if it fell into their oceans, how would it affect things? Was it dead? Or was it still alive?
Over the next several hours the green hail fell with increasing rapidity, so fast that, despite the high temperature, there was some moderate accumulation.
When the sky finally brightened—as at last it did—the forest floor looked glazed in green Jell-O.
Morgan jumped up and down, clapping her hands together. “The stupid thing is gone, the stupid thing is gone,” and she put the words to the tune of “The Farmer in the Dell,” and soon Melissa and Hanna joined in, and even Jake at last got going on it, until they were all singing, “The stupid thing is gone, the stupid thing is gone, hi-ho the derry-o…” On and on, the way kids sang sometimes, just to hear their own voices. Fernandes, meanwhile, simply surveyed the surrounding devastation, as if he expected Tarsalans to emerge from the ashes at any second.
To Glenda, it was more than just the phytosphere falling to pieces. It was Gerry at last succeeding. After so many small and humiliating defeats throughout his life, he had achieved this biggest thing of all.
The hail continued for several hours, but finally tapered off around six o’clock. Clouds moved in under the thin green veil of the disintegrating phytosphere, but they were strange clouds because they were tinged with green.
After a while it started raining green rain. It pounded on the Chattahoochee Forest, and a green flood roared down the path and rushed past the cave. They had to rearrange sandbags to divert the flow from the cave. The sky darkened, and night—just a normal night, not a phytosphere night—came at last.
She tried calling Gerry on her fone, reasoning that if the phytosphere was falling she might get through.
But there was no service, not even a message, as if all the people who operated AT&T Interlunar had indeed gone home to be with their families in this time of crisis.
She pulled out Neil’s special phone, the one he used to communicate with various government officials, and tried to get through to an operator, any operator. This time she got something, but frustratingly, it was just a message telling her that service had been temporarily suspended during the current national emergency, and that only preauthorized numbers would be connected.
She looked for numbers in Neil’s backpack because, yes, Gerry might have saved the world, but she was still stuck out here, amid the burned-down forest and possible Tarsalan hostiles. She had no car, and her ammunition was running low.
As much as she looked for preauthorized numbers in Neil’s pack, she couldn’t find any.
Dawn came, and it was an Earth dawn. The sky was blue, the sun yellow, and only stray wisps of phytosphere remained, like emerald floss way up high. The Chattahoochee was a wasteland of ash coated in green slime. In and amongst the black-sparred tree trunks, she saw nine burned-out Tarsalan
Landing Vehicles, looking like tin cans that had been left in a bonfire all night. She saw no survivors.
She and Fernandes conferred for a while about what they should do and, when they were done, Glenda told the kids, “We’ll stay here for a while and see if anybody rescues us. I’m going to keep trying the Moon. And I’ll try Neil’s phone as well. In the meantime, Fernandes thinks we should dig through the house to
see if we can salvage anything.”
After a breakfast of baked beans, Glenda, Fernandes, and the Thorndike kids marched down to the house. They had nothing but their hands to clear the rubble away with. The sun was bright, and it stung Glenda’s eyes after so long in the dark, but she took great joy in it. The uneasiness of having something drastically wrong with the world eased from her soul, and the quality and quantity of the sunshine increased her hope tremendously. Hanna, still not in the best health, sat out much of the time, taking guard duty while the others did the heavy work.
They spent the rest of the day digging into the basement supply room, where they found many crated provisions intact, enough to last six months if they rationed stringently. This was a great relief to Glenda, as it bought her a measure of time she hadn’t been counting on. They lugged the supplies up to the cave and packed them into the second chamber.
Now that all immediate danger had passed, her nieces again grew weepy at the loss of their parents and sister, and Glenda spent much of the afternoon comforting them.
Around five o’clock, the sun began its descent, and though she was made anxious by the approach of night, and was even illogically apprehensive that dawn might never come again, she still thought the sunset was the most beautiful thing she had ever seen. Despite her desolation over the deaths of Neil, Louise, and Ashley, she felt buoyed by it. Light. Was there anything so miraculous? In all its various permutations of color and shadow, was there anything so surprising, mood-altering, or restorative?
Morgan lay with her head on Glenda’s lap, and Glenda stroked the child’s brown hair. Jake ate like a pig in the corner, opening can after can of Irish stew—not rationing, as they had to celebrate their great find in the basement storeroom of Marblehill. Fernandes also ate. The sun would come up tomorrow, she decided. They would get through this. They would survive. Maybe they would survive in a vastly changed world, but they would go on. Gerry would come home. And her two children and two remaining nieces would live long, full lives. And Fernandes would go on as well. He would reconnect with his wife, Celia, in Denver. They would go on to have their family. She could sense this positive outcome in the light that was filtering down from the sky.
A placid and hopeful grin came to her face. She leaned over and kissed Morgan. She glanced at Melissa. She had two new daughters, and she would treat them like daughters, not nieces. She would have to do her best to be a mother to them.
Jake collected up his empty cans of Irish stew. “I’ll throw these in the garbage.” He went over and got Fernandes’s cans as well.
“Come right back and get some sleep,” said Glenda. “You’re on at midnight tonight.”
She watched him go. He now moved with a sureness of step that reminded her of a man’s step. And though his clothes hung on him, she detected a new broadness to his shoulders. He ventured out into the maudlin tints of the sunset and turned left up the hill toward their midden. A breeze entered the cave and she smelled the charred scent of the forest. Her new sense of peace made her sleepy, and she closed her eyes. A comforting doze wrapped its fuzzy hand around her mind, and she nodded off with the rapidity of the truly exhausted. But not for long. Through the fog of her doze, she heard Jake cry out. Her eyes jolted open. His cry was oddly broken, coming in a series of yelps, breaking on the cusp of his changing voice, a cry not only of pain but also of annoyance. She sprang to her feet, at first thinking Buzz had miracuously returned from the dead. But as she hurried from the cave, with Melissa and Fernandes now behind her, she saw that her son had fallen from the cliff to a wide ledge below, and that the point of a broken sapling had skewered the extreme left portion of his abdomen underneath his rib cage.
Fernandes was quick with the orders. “Melissa, get the rope. Mrs. Thorndike, we need some pressure dressings, and some rubbing alcohol.”
Melissa was off instantly to get the rope, but Glenda felt anesthetized. So far, she had dodged all bullets.
But that was her son down there. And he had a sapling coming through his gut. And it wasn’t Buzz or the aliens who had done it; it was just an accident, a stupid, stupid accident, one that could have been treated easily in a hospital. But they were out in the middle of nowhere. And who was coming to get them?
Fernandes was already climbing down the rock face through the ash. Melissa came back, and she had the rope, the pressure dressings, and rubbing alcohol.
“Aunt Glenda?”
Glenda snapped out of it. “Let’s get down there.”
Aunt and niece picked their way down the cliff, coughing in the disturbed ash.
When Glenda got to her son, she saw that the wound was serious, bleeding badly, and that Jake was more or less stuck there because he was so thoroughly skewered. He was crying. He wasn’t a man anymore. He was just a boy who had hurt himself.
Glenda tried to get her panic under control. “What happened?”
“I… I thought I saw a chipmunk.” His voice was high, and his eyes were so wide with hurt amazement that they reminded her of Tarsalan eyes. “And then…” His emotion boiled over. “And then the edge of the cliff gave out and I fell.” He cried again, gazing in horror at his wound, looking as if he wondered how something like this could happen to him. “And it didn’t even turn out to be a chimpmunk. It was just a rock.”
Fernandes got down on one knee, took a wad of dressing from Melissa, and wiped some blood from around the wound. Glenda saw, to her relief, that the sapling, snapped perhaps by a falling tree, its point then tempered by the heat of the fire, had penetrated at the extreme left edge of her son’s abdomen, just below the rib cage, not further in.
“Is it a flesh wound?” she asked Fernandes.
“I think so,” said Fernandes. “We don’t want any internal bleeding. Not out here.” Fernandes looked at Jake and smiled reassuringly. “You’re a lucky man, Jake. You’ve got a flesh wound—a serious one—but I think you’re going to live. Another inch the wrong way, and it could have been much worse.”
Fernandes looked at Melissa. “All right…let’s lift him off. Mrs. Thorndike, get ready with the pressure dressings.”
Jake’s wound, though, was a lot more serious than they first thought. Once they lifted him from the
sapling and got him back to the cave, there seemed to be internal bleeding after all. They gave him morphine to control the pain. He weakened through the night, and no matter how many pressure dressings they put on the entrance and exit wounds, he still managed to soak them fairly quickly. Glenda desperately wanted to stabilize him, and couldn’t believe that after everything they had gone through he would end up like this because of an accident, but he kept on deteriorating.
His condition worsened through the next day. Fernandes characterized the problem as a “slow leak somewhere,” and was worried that if they couldn’t stabilize him soon, they might run into “serious trouble.”
Glenda was frantic to get proper medical attention, and called Gerry on the fone again and again—but the service remained down. She lifted Neil’s special phone and punched in numbers randomly, but the phone kept flashing its message: Preauthorized Numbers Only. She finally gave up on the bulky government device.
Later, a ripe harvest Moon emerged from the east, reminding her of a pumpkin, rising into a spectacularly clear sky. Did the Moon look bigger? Perhaps it did. Were the tides along North Carolina’s Outer Banks larger? Was her husband up there, in Nectaris, staring down at the Earth and admiring his great success? Or was he, too, a casualty?
The night was cool. Morgan came to her a little past midnight and slept beside her. Unexpectedly, so did Melissa, as if accepting Glenda as her new mother.
Around three in the morning, Jake began to cry, and she gave him another morphine shot. He felt clammy, and when Glenda re-dressed the wound, it looked angry and red. She had enough nursing-home experience to know he needed antibiotics. Searching through the scavenged supplies, she found a bottle of Daprox tablets, one of the new broad-spectrum bacteria-fighting drugs,
and gave him one.
After that, she slept.
At least until Melissa shook her by the shoulder.
“Aunt Glenda, it’s my dad’s phone… it’s ringing.”
It took her a few moments to rouse herself, but when Glenda heard Neil’s special phone burbling away, she sprang up instantly.
She grabbed the bulky apparatus and pressed the engage button.
“Hello… hello?”
A pause on the other end of the line, then a woman’s voice. “Dr. Neil Thorndike, please.”
She had no choice but to be the bearer of bad news. “I’m afraid Dr. Thorndike has passed away.”
Another pause, then, “And who am I speaking to?”
“I’m Glenda Thorndike. Neil’s sister-in-law.”
A pause. “Will you hold the line, please?”
“Who’s calling?” But she got no answer. “Look, I need help. My son’s been hurt. He needs a doctor.”
But she was on hold.
After thirty seconds a man’s voice came on the line, one she vaguely recognized, but couldn’t immediately place. “Is this Glenda Thorndike?”
“Yes.”
“Dr. Gerald Thorndike’s wife?”
“Yes, yes. Who’s this? My son’s been hurt.”
“This is President Bayard.”
She was, of course, floored. “Oh… I… I thought I recognized your voice.”
“Neil’s dead?”
Her shoulders sank as the woe of Neil’s death visited her afresh. “I’m afraid he is. We’ve been under attack here at Marblehill.”
“You’re at Marblehill?” The president sounded as if he knew all about Marblehill.
“Yes… yes. By the Tarsalans.”
By this time, Fernandes and Hanna had roused themselves.
The president said, “We were calling Neil to… to tell him that his brother… that your husband…” But then it sounded as if someone on the other end of the line was talking to the president, and Bayard muffled the mouthpiece with his palm. Her hand tightened around the receiver. What did the president want to tell her about Gerry? That he was dead? That he was never coming home? That he had ridden the asteroid right into the dark side of the Moon with that maniac, Ian Hamilton, and that he was now pulverized to atoms? Come on, Mr. President, you’re killing me. Then the muffled sound disappeared and the president came back on. “We wanted to tell you that your husband’s a national hero, Mrs.