“Have you already tried switching transponder channels?”
“Oh, puleeeeze!” Marty howled. He was up on tiptoes looking over their shoulders. “Of course we tried that. What do we look like—idiots? Don’t answer that.”
David pulled a chair up to the control board and sat down. Almost immediately, his long limbs began to coil around one another. “Bring up the Weather Channel.” The technician plinked a command into the keyboard. A text display popped up on the television monitor. “Experiencing Technical Difficulties. Please Stand By.”
“May I?” David asked, moving the technician out of the way, “I wanna try something real quick here.” His fingers whizzed across the keyboard, switching the monitor over to broadcast reception—regular antenna-on-the-roof reception. Suddenly, the Today Show looked fine, then fuzzy, then fine again. “Oh my God, you’re a genius,” Marty gushed, “how did you do that?”
“Not so fast, Marty.” With his legs woven into a lotus position, David hunched over the board working in trance-like concentration. The Today Show was replaced by a computer bar graph. After entering a last few commands, David came up for air. “You’re right, it’s definitely the satellite. That good picture was a local broadcast. I pointed our rooftop dish over toward Rockefeller Plaza. They’re putting out good signal.”
“And what’s this computer caca on the screen? We’re not sending this out to the customers, are we?”
“Will you relax already? No, it’s not going out. I’m running a signal diagnostic.” David studied the test results on the screen, then sat back, perplexed.
“According to this, the satellite signal is fine. It’s coming through at full power. Maybe the satellite itself is fritzing out.”
Turning to Marty, he came up with a plan of action. “I’ll get up to the roof and retrofit the dish to another satellite. You get on the phone and rent some channel space. SatCom Five has plenty of space available.”
A self-satisfied grin spread across the heavy man’s face. He didn’t understand all the technical stuff, but for the time being, he had the jump on David. “Already thought of that,” he announced proudly. “I called SatCom, I called Galaxy, and I called TeleStar. Everybody in town is having the same problem.”
“Everybody in town?” David asked, incredulous. “If those guys are having this same problem, it means the whole country—no, the whole hemisphere—is getting bad pictures.” David thought it over for a moment then added, “That’s impossible!”
“Exactly,” Marty shot back. “Now fix it.”
*
CRASH! Miguel sat bolt upright out of a deep sleep and tried to focus his eyes. He had been dreaming a flying dream. A beautiful girl with pale skin and luminous dark eyes had taken him by the hand and showed him how to lift himself into the air. At first he was afraid of falling out of the sky, but once he got the hang of it and the two of them began looping and diving like a pair of dolphins, his only fear was that the girl would disappear.
CRASH!
He pulled back the plastic windowshade. A squad of fearless soldiers, the seven-and nine-year-olds from next door, were shooting it out with squirt guns. They looked like the Ninja Turtles at the OK Corral. Once they were shot, they died in ostentatious flailing body slams against the back of the Casse’s Winnebago.
“Vayanse! Quit hitting our damn trailer!” he yelled. The warriors looked up at him then squealed away as a group, fanning out across the Segal Estates, which is what the owner had the nerve to call this place. An RV campground that had gone downhill, it was now a sort of flophouse on gravel and asphalt. Half of the tenants were Mexican migrant laborers, campesinos, who pooled their money to buy a mobile home so they could bring their families north. The other half were white folks who had “retired” out to the desert. It was half a mile from the highway, and cyclone fencing on three sides separated it from the surrounding alfalfa fields. Miguel, along with his sister, his half-brother, and his stepfather had been renting space at the Estates for about three months. They’d been living in the Winnebago for almost a year.
Two weeks before, Miguel had graduated from Taft-Morton Consolidated High School, but refused to go through the ceremony. He hardly knew any of the other kids and was afraid Russell, his stepfather, would show up and embarrass him. That evening, Alicia organized a cake and soda party for just the four of them. Halfway through it, Russell, who was drinking something stronger than soda, went off on a drunken, teary-eyed speech about how proud he was and how he wished Miguel’s mama was still alive so she could see this. It ended the way so many of their conversations did, in an ugly shouting match with Miguel slamming the door on his way out.
At the front of the trailer, eleven-year-old Troy sat in the “kitchen” slapping the side of the television set. They were about forty miles north of Los Angeles, and the broadcast was being relayed through satellites to improve its signal strength, but it obviously wasn’t doing much good.
“What are you doing?” Miguel hollered from beneath his pillow.
“The TV’s all blurry and messed up.”
“Hitting it isn’t going to help. It’s probably a problem at the station. Just leave it alone.” But Troy didn’t have much patience. When the picture failed to improve after ten seconds, he smacked the set again. Miguel threw back the sheets and came to see what was going on. It was already eight A.M. and he should have been gone out looking for a job by now.
“See?” Troy gestured toward the rolling picture. “Should I whack it again?”
“No, Mr. Kung Fu television repairman, I told you. It’s not the set, it’s the… whatevers, the airwaves.” His younger brother was unconvinced, so Miguel changed the subject. “Have you taken your medicine?”
“I’ll take it later.” Troy was born with adrenal cortex problems, the same condition that killed their mother. He was supposed to take a small dose of hydrocortisone every morning, but because of the expense of the medicine, his family allowed him to skip a couple days a week. As long as he ate right and wasn’t under a lot of stress, missing the medicine wasn’t any big deal.
“Have you eaten anything yet?”
“Nope.”
“Alicia, what are these dishes doing?” Obviously, they were sitting in the sink waiting for someone to wash them. She’d made herself breakfast, leaving the boys to fend for themselves. She was up front, stretched out in the Winnebago’s passenger seat clipping photos out of a fashion magazine. When she heard Miguel yelling at her, she raised the volume on her Walkman. She was fourteen, bored, and developing a gigantic attitude problem. Since her hormones had started to kick in that spring, she’d taken to wearing makeup, skimpy cutoffs and tight white Tshirts, which had become the unofficial uniform among the ninth-graders at her new school.
Miguel came over and was about to give her hell for being so selfish when a red Chevy truck skidded to a halt in the gravel at the end of their driveway. The driver sat inside for a moment angrily talking into a cellular phone. His name was Lucas Foster, a local farmer who had hired Russell Casse to do some emergency crop dusting this morning. Plant-munching moths had invaded the desert croplands north of LA, just in time for the Casses, who were dangerously low on cash.
The farmer stomped up the driveway with a head of lettuce in one hand. Miguel knew his morning was about to get off to an ugly start. He went to the side door and opened the screen. “Good morning, Lucas. What’s going on?”
“Your dad in there?” Lucas Foster, a muscular young man, was steaming mad.
Alicia slipped past her brother out into the sunlight. “He went to spray your fields,” she said. “He left a long time ago.”
“Well, where the hell is he, then?”
Miguel created a story about how Russell’s plane had a mechanical problem the day before, but the other man didn’t let him finish. “It’s one damn thing after another with that jackass. He’s sitting around somewhere with eight hundred dollars of insecticide while these damn moths are eating my crops!” Lucas heard h
imself shouting and quickly regained control. He was only a couple years older than Miguel and felt sorry for him. Now he was cursing himself for making a business decision based on sympathy for these kids and their crackpot dad.
“Maybe he had to refuel and he’s there now,” Miguel said hopefully.
“Naw, I just called my dad and he’s not in the air,” Lucas replied. “He’ll probably get there about the same time the wind kicks up. Then we’ll have to wait until tomorrow, while these moths eat our entire crop.”
Humiliated, Miguel wanted to crawl into a hole and die. His stepfather, a notorious drunk around town, had put him through some embarrassing moments, but nothing like this. Miguel didn’t blame Lucas for being mad. Behind him, Troy was still slapping the side of the TV. “Troy, stop it!” Miguel warned.
“If he’s not in the air by the time I get back there, I’m going to call Antelope Valley Airport and get somebody else. I can’t wait another day.”
“Yeah, okay, that’s fair. I’ll go out and look for him right now.” He grabbed the keys to his motorcycle and headed out the door. As he walked with Lucas down to the end of the driveway, Alicia called after them, asking Lucas for a ride down to the Circle K Market. “No!” Miguel exploded, wheeling around to face her. “You get in there and make Troy some breakfast before you go anywhere.”
Miguel kick-started his bike, an old Kawasaki, and sat in the driveway wondering where to look first.
*
Colonel Castillo and his crew at the Pentagon had determined that the giant object had taken up a fixed position and parked itself less than 500 kilometers behind the moon. As the moon moved through space, the object moved with it, hiding behind the white orb like a shield. After repositioning three of their satellites, U.S. Space Command was able to get a pretty decent look at the object. They had three live cameras beaming infrared pictures of the object back down to earth, where they were keeping it under constant surveillance.
“Colonel!” one of the soldiers called loudly. “You better take a look at this!” Castillo sprinted across the floor and looked over the man’s shoulder at the composite infrared picture. The area under the massive object was undergoing some kind of disturbance.
“Looks like it’s exploding,” Castillo observed.
“More like a mushroom dropping its spores,” the man at the monitor said.
Large segments of the thing were detaching themselves and twirling away into nearby space. After watching the process for a few more minutes, and seeing the way the pieces arranged themselves in a circle, Castillo and the others realized what they were watching. It was time to call General Grey, who’d gone across the Potomac to the White House.
*
Connie tried sneaking out the side door of her office, but it didn’t work. Members of her own staff, along with a dozen White House pages, were milling around in the hallway, and they pounced on her the moment she came through the door. Each one of them had a notepad full of urgent questions. All morning the phones had been as hot as teakettles, ringing off their hooks with one heavy hitter after another: senators, foreign ambassadors, queens and kings, Whitmore’s family, network anchors, prominent businessmen that would normally be put straight through to the president. Nobody knew what to tell these people, each one calling with some crisis on their hands.
Connie knew her people needed answers, but didn’t have the time to talk to them. She was already five minutes late for the presidential briefing, something that had never happened before. She’d been on the job long enough to know the best way to handle a stressful situation: wear a charming smile, ignore everyone, and bull your way through the crowd. Fran Jeffries, her chief lieutenant, saw what she was going to do. She stepped right in front of her boss and spoke fast.
“CNN says they’re going to run a piece that the United States may have conducted an open-atmosphere nuclear test at the top of the hour unless you call to deny.”
Connie shrugged, “Tell them to run with it if they want to embarrass themselves.”
Everyone started shouting their questions at her. “NASA’s been up my butt all morning,” a harried aide complained. “Can you read their position statement? It’s short and they need approval.”
“Our official position,” she told him, “is that we don’t have an official position.”
Constance, still smiling, pushed through, focusing on the portrait of Thomas Jefferson at the end of the hallway. When she got there, she surprised them by turning left, away from the stairs, where more people with more questions were waiting. She pushed the button for the old elevator, the clunky antique installed for Franklin Roosevelt.
When Gil Roeder, a top operative, saw she was about to escape, he yelled over the others. “Connie, what the hell is going on?”
Perfect timing. Just as the doors were sliding closed, she tried to look as if her feelings were hurt by the question. “Come on, people. If I knew anything, would I keep you out of the loop?”
Outside the doors, she could hear them answering in unison, “Definitely!”
*
In the Oval Office, the president had already called the meeting to order. He sat with his chief of staff, Glen Parness, the head of the Joint Chiefs, General Grey, and Secretary of Defense Albert Nimziki. For very different reasons, Whitmore trusted each of them.
“But I want to remind everyone,” Grey was in the middle of saying, “that our satellites are unreliable at the moment. It’s not clear whether this thing wants to or will be able to enter the earth’s atmosphere. It’s still possible it won’t come any closer. It might not want to deal with the force of our gravity, for example.”
“That’s true, Mr. President,” Nimziki allowed, “this object might, as the commander suggests, pass us by. But our responsibility is to prepare for the worst-case scenario. Having no information, we must assume the object is hostile. My strong recommendation is that you retarget several of our ICBMs and launch a preemptive strike.”
Nimziki was a tall, gaunt man of sixty who had earned the nickname, “the Iron Sphincter.” He was a rarity in Washington, a cabinet-level appointee who kept his job through changes of administration. Whitmore was his fourth president, his second Democrat. He was not a likable man, but when he spoke, everyone felt obliged to listen. Some years back The Post had written about him: “Not since J. Edgar Hoover has a government official amassed so much power without ever having stood for election.” An intensely political animal, Nimziki always managed the appearance of staying above politics. He never let them see him pull the strings. He was, in a word, Machiavellian. His suggestion was precisely the kind of shoot-first-ask-questions-later style of thinking everyone else in the room was trying to avoid.
“Forgive me,” Grey broke in, “but with the little information we do have, firing on them might be a grave error. If we’re unsuccessful, we could provoke them, or it. If we are successful, we turn one dangerous falling object into many. I agree with Secretary Nimziki about retargeting the missiles, getting them set, but—”
Constance came in the door, but stopped short when she saw all the brass.
“What’s the damage?” Whitmore asked her, beckoning her to join the discussion. “How are people reacting?”
“Hello, gentlemen.” She nodded around the table as she took the seat next to Nimziki. “The press is making up their own stories at this point. CNN’s threatening to plug in a segment suggesting we’re covering up a nuclear test. I’ve scheduled myself a question-and-answer session for six o’clock, which should keep them on ice until then. The good news is nobody’s panicking, not seriously.”
Nimziki, impatient with the interruption, spoke across the table to Grey. “Will, I think it’s time for you to contact the Atlantic Command and upgrade the situation to DEFCON Three.”
The others jumped on him at once, telling him that was premature. The majority opinion was that sounding an alarm and causing panic before they even knew what they were up against would be a mistake. Nimziki defended hi
s position, but was eventually talked down. At the end of the flare up, the chief of staff, Parness, was still talking.
“Furthermore, we’re two days out from the Fourth of July and fifty percent of our forces are on weekend leave. Not to mention all the commanders in Washington for the parade on Sunday. The only quick way to call our personnel back to their bases would be to use television and radio.”
“Exactly,” Constance seconded. “We’d be sending up a major red flag to the world.”
The door opened again. One of General Grey’s men, his liaison to the Pentagon, came in carrying a bombshell. “Our latest intelligence tells us that the object has settled into a stationary orbit which keeps it out of direct sight behind the moon.”
“Sounds like it’s trying to hide,” Grey remarked.
“That sounds like good news for the time being,” Parness said, hopefully. “Maybe it just wants to observe us.”
Grey’s liaison wasn’t finished. “Excuse me, but there’s more. The object established its orbit at 10:53 A.M. local time. At 11:01 A.M. local time, pieces of the object began to separate off from the main body.”
“Pieces?” Whitmore asked, not liking the sound of it.
“Yes, sir, pieces,” the man continued. “We estimate there are thirty-six of them, roughly saucer-shaped, and small compared to the primary object. Still, each craft is approximately fifteen miles in diameter.”
“Are they headed toward earth?” Whitmore asked, already knowing what the answer would be.
“Looks like it, sir. If they continue along their current trajectories, Space Command estimates they’ll begin entering our atmosphere within the next twenty-five minutes.”
The president stared back at the young man in the Air Force uniform, dumbfounded and more than a little frightened. For a moment, he thought this must be some kind of joke everyone else was in on, an elaborate piece of theater staged to get a reaction from him this very moment. Then the grim reality of the situation began to sink in. What had seemed so laughable, so far-fetched a few hours before, was coming horribly true. One of the primal fears of mankind, a fear buried under mountains of denial, was coming to pass. The earth was being visited, and perhaps invaded, by something from another world.
Complete Independence Day Omnibus, The Page 4