No one was speaking up yet, so he continued.
“The babies are called pups, and a female is capable of producing twelve litters a year with an average of ten or so to a litter. A female is able to begin breeding after just three months, and at the moment we have thirty-five breeding pairs and two extra females.”
“My God, that’s fifty-two of those . . . things!” Lynette said, standing up, half expecting to find one of them running under foot. “You can’t honestly expect us to eat them!”
“I’m afraid that starvation is our only other option at this point,” Forrest said, making brief eye contact with Price, who stood just inside the common room doorway.
The doctor looked embarrassed, and Forrest felt sorry for him, of course. But when a man marries a woman based largely upon her looks, he takes a calculated risk, and Forrest had warned him before he’d taken that final plunge.
“No!” Lynette said. “I’ll fucking starve! I’m sorry.”
“That will of course be your decision,” Forrest replied. “But I have seen starvation up close—in time of war—and you will be very surprised at what you can eat by the time your belly begins to swell from hunger. And I would like to remind everyone that these animals were eaten as part of the regular diet in many Asian cultures and treated with great respect, particularly in India, where they were actually worshipped, rather than eaten.”
“Next you’re going to tell us they taste like chicken!” Lynette lashed out, her flesh continuing to crawl.
Forrest could see her hysteria beginning to spread to some of the other women, so he signaled for Price to come into the cafeteria.
“Oh!” Lynette said, growing angrier. “So now I’m going to be treated like a fucking head case, is that it?”
“Honey, please try to calm down,” Price said. “This isn’t going to help anything, and no one is going to make you eat anything you don’t want to eat.”
“I want out!” she said, continuing her harangue. “Give me my share of the food and let me the fuck out! I’m sick of living on top of each other down here anyway! At least out there I’ll be able to fucking breathe!”
Forrest remained calm, seeing Emory and the other men gathering outside the doorway, Emory clearly ready to physically subdue Lynette if Forrest so much as crooked a finger.
“Lynette, are you sure that’s what you want?” he asked her with a stern military bearing. “Because I will load you up right now with all the food you can carry. You’ll actually be doing the rest of us a favor. Because you won’t be able to carry even a fraction of what you’ll eat should you choose to stay. I’m even willing to supply you with a weapon. But remember one thing: I will not let you back in when that food runs out.”
Lynette’s irate bluff had been called, her punk card drawn, stamped, and given back to her just that fast, and she was suddenly afraid that she might now be expected to make good on her threat. She could already see Ulrich’s cold blue eyes cutting into her, the faintest hint of a sinister smile on his face.
So she did the only thing a woman of her breeding knew how to do in such a situation; she sat back down and began to bawl, and Price went to her, pulled her to her feet and walked her down the hall.
The rest of the women sat staring at Forrest, unsure what to say or even think; the prospect of having to subsist on rat meat was a lot to digest.
“In response to Lynette’s supposition,” Forrest said with a smile, “I did have the pleasure of eating a few of these delectable animals during my time in the military, and yes, they do taste a little bit like chicken, particularly with a dash of Tabasco.”
Andie laughed, and that seemed to break the tension.
“Don’t we have to worry about them making us sick?” Karen asked.
“Like Jack said,” Dr. West joined in at last, “these animals will keep themselves as clean as their environment will permit. But they’ve got bad bladders, so they tend to pee a lot, which will make keeping their environment laboratory-clean something of a challenge. And while a ra—the animal—is capable of carrying diseases that are communicable to people, we’re hoping our animals are at minimal risk. This is because they’re all the progeny of the same original breeding pair—which were local animals living in the fields around the silo, rather than some New York City sewer drain.”
Later that night, Forrest was sitting in Launch Control with his feet up, smoking a cigarette. He and Ulrich were reminiscing about their younger days of whiskey drinking and womanizing and other forms of youthful wickedry. It was taking all of his self-discipline not to check on Melissa, who had yet to emerge from the silo, or envisioning her falling from the top deck to the bottom of the silo in a freak accident. If Laddie hadn’t been with her, he’d have long ago checked on her.
He was about to finally give in to his fears when she at last stepped into Launch Control. Laddie came trotting around the console and jumped up to put both of his feet into Forrest’s lap, whining and licking his face.
“Oh, so she’s not all she’s cracked up to be, huh?” Forrest said with a smile, rubbing and squeezing the dog’s face.
Melissa was smiling more brightly than he had ever seen her smile as he watched her put a single sheet of paper on the console in front of Ulrich.
A
B
C
D
E
F
G
H
I
J
K
L
M
N
O
P
Q
R
S
T
U
V
W
Y
“See that?” she asked.
“That’s the first cipher example I showed you,” Ulrich answered, noting her unmistakable glow. “The first one I checked the code against. The first cipher any cryptographer would check it against.”
“And they know that,” she said. “That’s why they’re using it. They’ve been hiding their cipher right in plain sight.”
“What are you talking about?” he said, noting the proud grin on Forrest’s face now. “Are you saying you’ve cracked the damn thing?”
“I’m saying more than that.” She put another piece of paper down in front of him.
0
9
8
7
M N O
P Q R
S T U
V W Y
E F
G H
I J
K L
A
B
C
D
Any group of three numbers beginning with
a digit lower than 7 is either a space or “gibberish” intended to throw off the cryptographer.
G
R
E
E
T
I
N
G
S
924-
913-
024-
024-
812-
824-
012-
924-
811-
636-
?
F
R
O
M
H
A
W
A
I
I
025-
913-
013-
011-
404-
925-
036-
712-
036-
824-
824
?
Ulrich studied the cipher, matching each letter for himself against the cipher. “Well, I’ll be a son of a bitch!” he said, seeing the other papers in her hand. “And this works throughout? You’ve deciphered every conversation I copied down?”
“Yep! And you were right—you can memorize a cipher pretty fast. By the time I got to the last few pages, I didn’t have to look at the cipher anymore.”
“Well, let’s see the other sheets,” he said enthusiastically.
“Whattaya give me?” she asked, hiding the pages behind her back.
“Jack, tell your wiseass kid to give me those papers.”
“You’re on your own,” Forrest said, rocking back in the chair with his hands behind his head. “She begged you to help her with that damn thing for months and you kept blowing her off. Now you want her to just hand it over? I think she’s entitled to something from your private stash.”
“What private stash?” Melissa asked, instantly scandalized, her eyebrows raised.
Ulrich glowered at his friend. “You got a big mouth, Forrest.”
“I want something from your private stash!” she said, dancing around the console to hide behind Forrest.
Ulrich got slowly up from his chair, eyeing them both. “You two may have the upper hand tonight,” he said, moving toward the spiral staircase, “but the tables will turn.”
He spiraled down and out of sight.
“What’s he got down there?” she asked in a whisper.
Forrest smiled and shrugged.
Down below, Ulrich worked the combination on a big red steel case with TOOLS spray-painted across the lid in black.
A few seconds later they heard the lid slam, and Ulrich slowly reemerged with a vacuum-sealed silver package in his hand. The package was about the size of a slice of French toast, and he offered it to Melissa with a veiled smile.
She reached for it, but he held it tight. “Give me the papers.”
“At the same time,” she said, offering the papers with a tight grip.
Each let go of their trade item at the same time, and Melissa backed away, reading the print on the foil package: ICE CREAM, FREEZE DRIED / U.S. GOVERNMENT / NASA CENTRAL STORES.
“No way!” she said in awe. “Jack, look!”
“See?” Forrest said, knowing exactly what goodies Ulrich had stashed away in the toolbox. “You can’t trust this guy as far as you can throw him.”
He looked up at Ulrich, who stood scanning Melissa’s work.
“What’s it say there, Wayne?”
Ulrich continued to read for a spell, then turned and looked at Melissa, saying, “Come here, kid.”
“No way.”
“Give the ice cream to Jack and come here.”
She gave the ice cream to Forrest and stepped suspiciously forward. “What?”
Ulrich hugged her tight. “Forgive me,” he said quietly, almost reverently. “I’ve failed to support you twice now, but I will not again . . . I promise.”
Forrest sat up and set the ice cream down on the console, having only seen Ulrich comport himself with such respect a few times in all the years he’d known him, and all three times Ulrich had been in the process of placing a folded American flag into the hands of a fallen soldier’s widow.
“What the hell does it say, Stumpy?”
“It says there’s hope,” Ulrich said, letting go of Melissa—who didn’t quite know what to think—and handing him the papers. “Excuse me. I have to go hug my wife.”
Ulrich left the room, and Melissa stood looking at Forrest. “What was that about?” she asked, totally confused.
Forrest sat skimming over the translations. “He’s probably feeling a little bit ashamed.”
“But he didn’t know the code was breakable.”
“Well, honey . . . the night you got sick, he very nearly convinced the others to vote against me going after your medicine. So if it hadn’t been for your uncle Kane . . .”
“I’d be dead?”
“Maybe. And from the looks of this here, kiddo . . . well, you just might have saved every damn one of us, Erin in particular. So Wayne owes you personally now. You’ve given him a reason to finally have some hope, which is something he hasn’t had since the night my buddy Jerry called about the asteroid.”
“Don’t you mean the meteor?”
He laughed, saying, “Well, don’t tell Wayne, but I actually do know it was an asteroid.”
Sixty
The next morning Forrest walked into the shower room and jerked back the curtain on Marty’s shower stall. “You ever hear of an astronomer named Ester Thorn?”
“Jesus Christ!” Marty said, covering himself. “Ever hear of privacy?”
“Well have you?”
“Yeah. Why?”
“Meet me in Launch Control when you’re finished jerkin’ off . . . and that’s too big a weapon for you, by the way.”
Forrest and Ulrich were working to connect a linear amplifier to the wireless transmitter when Marty joined them in the LC. He saw Ester’s textbook on the console and picked it up. “If this is what you want to know about, there’s not much she can do for us now.”
“That’s what you think,” Forrest said, peering over the top of the set. “Read those papers there. Melissa deciphered the code last night.”
“You’re kidding me.”
“Nope.”
Marty read the transcriptions and sat down, staring at them in disbelief.
“What do you think?” Forrest asked.
“It’s unbelievable. She’s a friggin president? This can’t be for real, can it
?”
“What’s she like?”
“I don’t really know her all that well. I only met her once.” He went on to share with them for the first time his story of discovering the asteroid and his visit with Ester Thorn. Forrest and Ulrich stopped their work and looked at him.
“Are you fucking serious?” Ulrich asked him in disbelief. “Or are you jerkin’ us off?”
“No, honest to God.”
“You’re telling us that you’re the son of a bitch who sent her off to Hawaii and got her to go on CNN?”
“That’s me,” Marty said. “I can’t believe she’s their friggin president, though. She didn’t seem the type at all. Are these dates correct?”
“They’re correct,” Ulrich said, going back to work on the transmitter, “but they’re still transmitting three to five nights a week. They should be on the air tonight, and we’ll try to get some up-to-date information.”
“Think she’ll remember you?” Forrest wanted to know.
“That’s kind of a stupid question.”
“Okay, I guess a better question is whether you think she’d be willing to send a rescue party to pick your ginger ass up.”
“No, the question is whether they’ve got the resources,” Marty said, still befuddled. “But if they do, I’d like to think she’d feel at least something of an obligation. Hey, the crater photos! If Ester’s not interested in sending anyone for me, the Islands’ scientific community will definitely be interested in getting their hands on those pictures.”
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