The Pouakai

by Sperry, David;

  “Anything we could use to wipe them out?” the Captain asked, as we ducked under a set of black pipes.

  “I don’t know. You’d have to ask them. They did say they thought the Rocs get their energy from sunlight.”

  “I see. If we could put up some sort of sunshade in orbit, that might do it.”

  “I don’t know. It would have to be huge. Bigger than anything we’ve done before by several orders of magnitude. If we did that, how would it affect the rest of the Earth? Plants and animals that depend on sunlight. The Rocs are killing us, but some of the cures may be worse than the problem.”

  “It’s us versus them, Captain Boone. We have to do something. Nobody can live with those damn things around.”

  With a look back at what had happened over that past couple of weeks, I wasn’t so sure that wiping them out was the only right move. “Some people have learned to live with them,” I suggested, echoing the Chief. “There are other alternatives we should consider first.”

  “Really? Have you seen the condition of the world today?”

  “Of course I have,” I said, as we walked into the mess. My crew and passengers were crowded into the small room, sitting on the tables, benches, and the floor. “My career is dependent on getting rid of them. So is the world’s economy. My whole life would be better if they were gone. I’m just asking if there are alternatives we haven’t thought of yet.”

  “That’s for people at a higher pay grade than us to figure out,” the Captain said, with a thin smile.

  I was happy to be on the sub, and on my way to Hawaii, but after being on the island and in a position to learn about the Rocs, it felt like control of the situation was slipping away again. The last thing I wanted to do, though, was get into an argument with the man who had rescued us.

  The Captain glanced at our group crowded into the mess, and then back at me. “Enjoy your stay here on the Ohio, Captain Boone. If there’s anything you need, let me know.”

  “Thank you, Captain. I’ll do that.”

  He left, and a feeling of calm settled on me. I sat at one of the tables and nibbled on a tuna sandwich. Next to me were Colin and Alan, who furiously scribbled their observations into a pair of notebooks borrowed from the sub’s crew. They wrote feverishly as they tried to organize their thoughts. That information could lead to our salvation from the Rocs, or the destruction of the Earth, or both. There were too many variables, and I was too exhausted to think about it all. I’d been through a lot in the past eleven days, and all I wanted was to go home, to live my life in peace and quiet.

  Perhaps, I thought, the Rocs felt the same way.

  I closed my eyes, and listened to the strange sounds of this technological marvel that was taking me home.

  Part 2

  Oahu

  1

  Trade winds swirled around the lanai as Jennifer set a platter of steaks on the table. The palm trees in our back yard slapped and clicked in the breeze.

  "Real steaks?" Colin asked.

  Jennifer smiled and nodded. "They were the last ones at Foodland, but they still looked okay."

  We passed the meat, along with bowls of rice, green beans, and teriyaki sauce, around the table. I picked up my knife and fork just as Anna spoke up.

  "To the man who saved my husband's life," she said, raising her glass of wine. The wind played with her long blonde hair.

  "Hear hear," Colin added, lifting his glass high.

  "Aw, shucks guys," I said with mock modesty. "’Twasn’t nuthin’."

  "No, of course not," said Colin. "Just another day at the office; ditching your plane on an island, dodging Pouakai, saving the lives of so many people." He tipped his glass toward me, and then grinned. "Nothing at all."

  I smiled back, and raised my wine glass to meet the rest.

  "Cheers," chorused my wife and friends. I took a sip, and then reached for the bottle of expensive French wine Colin and Anna had brought with them. Bringing a makana—a gift—to dinner was a Hawaiian custom, but this bottle must have cost a small fortune.

  “You guys didn’t really have to do this,” I said, tilting the bottle toward them.

  “Yes we did,” Anna replied. “For keeping Colin alive.”

  “Besides,” Colin said, “I had to bring something. That makes the score, what, about two hundred to zero?” He flashed a sly grin.

  “Yeah, I know, I forget to bring a makana now and then.”

  “Now and then?” Jennifer scoffed. “Unless I’m with you, you forget every time.”

  She had a smile on her face, but steely anger lingered behind those beautiful brown eyes. My return home three weeks earlier had been a mixture of tears, hugs, and rage for putting her and the kids through so much panic. It had softened over time, but uncertainty about my job and the future of Hawaii kept her on edge.

  Anna leaned toward Jennifer. "Was this really the last of the meat in the store?"

  Jennifer nodded. "The store manager said he hoped to have another shipment in from San Francisco next week, but the refrigerated deliveries were coming in slower these days. He didn't know when the next one after that would arrive."

  "What's next?" Anna asked sullenly. "Food rationing? Gas stamp books?"

  "Not likely," said Colin.

  "Why not?"

  "People are leaving faster than we're losing shipments. Fewer supplies are coming across the Pacific, but there are fewer people here to buy them too."

  I looked down the hill from our backyard, along the Niu valley and out to the waters of the Pacific. The sun had just set and a golden glow enveloped the misty air. The waters of the ocean shimmered like hammered gold. Another glow emerged over the ridges to the west—the lights of Honolulu coming on in the twilight.

  "When will it end?" Anna asked quietly.

  "I don’t know if it does," Jennifer replied.

  "It has to! We can't live like this forever."

  I leaned back in my chair and stared at the wine glass still in my hand as the discussion continued, the same argument heard around the world for the last three years. We can't live this way, and yet there's nothing we can do about it.

  “Then what do we do?” Jennifer said. “What options do we have?”

  Anna sank back in her chair, clearly exhausted and frustrated. “It’s not fair,” she whispered.

  “No, it’s not,” I said. “It’s a no-win situation. We don’t have a clue how to get rid of them, so until we do, we’ll have to change the way, and places, we live.” I looked at Colin, who shrugged.

  “We have a conference in Tokyo next week,” he said. “The paper Alan and I wrote for Nature was fast-tracked, and will be published while we are at the conference. We’re hoping it will generate some new ideas.”

  “Any other scientists with new ideas like yours?” Jennifer asked.

  Colin shook his head. “There’s none that I know of. We’re still hampered by our inability to take our time dissecting a dead Pouakai.”

  “Why?”

  “They degrade too fast. Something in them is triggered when they die, and the body decomposes within an hour. It’s weird, since it doesn’t make any sense biologically, but when they die, there’s an immediate reaction that begins to dissolve the tissues. Within an hour the carcass becomes too difficult to handle, and within two hours, it’s just a pile of gloop.”

  “You can’t learn anything from the gloop?” Jennifer asked.

  “Not much. We’ve learned the basic elemental makeup, but it’s pretty much like any other life here; carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, hydrogen, a little sulfur, and some trace elements. Whatever complex molecules they have are broken down before we can test them. We can’t get a handle on what they’re made of, or what makes them tick.”

  “Maybe that’s the point,” I said. Everyone at the table looked at me.

  “What do you mean,” Anna asked.

  “Colin said it himself, back on Nanumea. Maybe they’re an engineered organism. Maybe somebody designed it so we couldn’t fig
ure out what makes them tick, so we couldn’t invent a defense against them.”

  Colin shook his head. “I know I said that, but it was one of the more extreme theories. We haven’t found anything that would favor that theory over another.”

  “I read about that last week,” Anna said.

  “Really? Where?”

  “Cosmo.”

  Colin almost choked on his wine.

  “Don’t laugh,” Anna said. “It was a good article. They talked about all the theories of where the Rocs—sorry sweetie—Pouakai, came from. Several of them were versions of that theory: that someone or something created them for whatever job they do, and that maybe they came from space.”

  “Did the article include ten ways to come on to a lonely Pouakai?” Colin asked with a grin.

  Anna glared at Colin, threw her napkin at him, and stuck her tongue out. Then she smiled and laughed.

  “Where in the world did you find her?” I mockingly asked.

  “Oh, you know the old story,” Colin said. “Geeky exobiologist goes for a haircut, falls in love with the girl cutting his hair, they marry, end of story.”

  “It’s more like he came in for a haircut every month for two years before he even got up the nerve to ask me out,” Anna replied. “At least Cosmo was giving out some real information. Better than all that crap being sent out by the doomsday churches.”

  We all went quiet, the playfulness of the moment gone again.

  “There was a big gathering at Ala Moana Park this morning,” Jennifer said. “Did you see the posters advertising it? Some sort of prayer vigil to rid the Earth of the devil. I assume they meant the Pouakai.”

  “Couldn’t hurt,” Anna said.

  “Couldn’t help,” I corrected. “I don’t think prayer is going to do it this time.”

  I looked at Colin, but he sat deep in thought. A growing frustration filled my mind, and wondered if we would ever have a conversation that went for more than two minutes without touching on the Pouakai.

  I cut into my steak and chewed without tasting it, lost in thought.

  2

  I stood at the sink and dried the dishes after Jennifer washed them. She hadn’t said anything since Colin and Anna left, and I knew better than to try to force the issue. The only sounds were the clink of dishes on the counter and the wind in the palm trees.

  The phone rang, and I almost dropped the dish in my hand. Jennifer looked at the phone.

  “Kelly,” she said, and pushed the talk button. “Hi sweetie. How was class today?”

  I looked at the time; just past midnight in Colorado. She had been the strict clock-watcher at home, but I remembered how college had changed me too.

  “Yes, your dad’s here. No more trips until next week. No, he’s not going to Australia again. I think it’s San Francisco.”

  Their conversation continued for a while as I put the dishes away. Along the way I gathered that the classes Kelly had quit after my accident wouldn’t count against her GPA, and she could re-take them next semester. Finally Jennifer handed me the phone.

  “Hi, angel,” I said. “How’s life in the frozen wasteland?”

  “Fine, dad. How’s life at home? Mom talking to you yet? Or is she still in pissed-off mode?”

  “It’s chilly, but the spring thaw is on the way.”

  “Good. You two had better work it out, or I’m coming back for summer break to knock some sense into both of you.”

  “I’m sure you could do it, too,” I said. Then I tried to change the subject. “I gather you can make up the classes you dropped?”

  “Yeah, my guidance counselor has been a life saver. When he heard you had disappeared, he talked to someone in the registrar’s office, and it was all taken care of.”

  “Great.”

  “Yeah. Then after you were rescued and I came back here, they sent someone from the school paper to interview me. They had a pretty nice write-up about your crash, along with my interview. You’re a hero to my friends now.”

  “I’ve been getting a lot of that lately,” I said, looking at last week’s Time magazine, sitting on the counter. ‘Rocs gaining ground’ read the cover article, along with a photo taken by one of my passengers of our plane on the beach at Nanumea.

  “So you’re not going to do any more Australia trips, right?” she said, more in the form of a statement than a question.

  “No angel, not any more. The airline suspended all flights through the Roc’s zone for now, and may not restart them again, depending on a review from the Air Force on the safety of continuing their escort flights.”

  “Good. I lost you once, and can’t imagine losing you again.”

  “That’s sweet of you,” I said quietly. “No, the farthest afield I’m going is the mainland, or maybe Japan, but that’s about it. No more Rocs for me.”

  I watched Jennifer’s back as she sat at the table and mindlessly stirred a cup of coffee. It almost seemed like I could see the tension in her shoulders relax a tiny bit. Maybe.

  A long moment of silence came across the phone, and I began to wonder if the line had gone dead. Then Kelly spoke.

  “Dad, what’s going to happen, really?” she asked quietly.

  “I don’t know, angel, I just don’t know.”

  I looked out the kitchen window at the lights on the hillside leading down to the ocean. It appeared so normal. Inside, I felt nothing but hopelessness, but I didn’t want to pass that on to Kelly.

  “We had dinner with Colin and Anna tonight,” I continued. “He was talking about some of the ideas they came up with while we were on the island. He is going to a conference in Japan next week to go over all their data, plus that of other scientists. Hopefully they’ll come up with something.”

  “Yeah, I hope so,” she said, in a tone that showed she didn’t believe it either.

  “Angel, we didn’t become humans without learning how to adapt to changes in our environment. Somehow, someway, we’ll find a way to keep going, no matter how bad it gets.” I said the words, just like I’d said them to her so many times before. Yet now they felt hollow. For the first time, I couldn’t convince myself that what I said was true, and it frightened me.

  “Thanks Dad. I needed to hear that.”

  Her reply only made me feel worse.

  “Sleep tight, Kelly. Don’t pull an all-nighter for finals again like you did last year.”

  “No way. I learned my lesson.”

  We said our goodnights, and then hung up.

  Jennifer had left the kitchen lights off. I only saw her outline, sitting at the table, a cup of coffee gripped tight in her hands. I wanted to say something, but was afraid of opening the wound again. Her long straight black hair, inherited from her Japanese mother, reflected the light coming in from the living room. A Hapa, as we said in Hawaii; she’d inherited her father’s Swedish reserve, and her mother’s steel will. I’d fallen in love with her the day I met her at the University in Honolulu. I’d been working on a Masters in Engineering while flying for the Hawaii Air National Guard. She was finishing up her PhD in Economics and wanted to single-handedly put Wall Street on the right track. Fate intervened though, in the form of my roommate Colin Benoit, who, for reasons unknown, thought we would make a good couple and set us up on a blind date. By some strange magic Colin, who couldn’t find himself a date to save his life, matched us up and we clicked immediately. Twenty-something years later I still haven’t actually said thank you, but I think he gets the idea.

  Since my return from Nanumea however, that fiery anger Jennifer usually kept on a tight rein had fallen on me several times. It would eventually fade away, but I had no idea when. Any attempt to defuse it would just make it worse. I walked toward the living room, but as I passed her, Jennifer raised her hand in front of me, and I rocked to a stop. She didn’t look at me, but kept a tight grip on the coffee cup.

  “Did you mean it?” she asked quietly.

  “Mean what?” I replied.

  “What you told Kell
y. That you wouldn’t take any more flights through the Rocs.”

  “Yes, I did. Just like I said to you yesterday, and last week too.” I grimaced, afraid I’d gone too far and the arguments would ignite again. She didn’t raise her voice though, or even glare at me. Instead she took a deep breath, and in the dim light I saw her shoulders relax. She let go of the cup, and stood up.

  “Okay,” she whispered. “Okay.”

  She stepped forward and put her arms around my waist. I wrapped her up in my arms, as she put her cheek against my shoulder.

  “Don’t leave me again,” she whispered. “Ever.”

  “No sweetie, I won’t. That’s a promise.”

  We stood like that for several minutes, rocking slowly to our own internal beat. Eventually, I looked down and kissed the top of her head. I slowly ran a couple of fingers from behind her ear, down the back of her neck, and along her spine. She responded by dropping her hands to my rear and pulling me harder into her. As she looked up at me, I kissed her softly, and she kissed back more forcefully. I could see where this was going, and let her take the lead as we slowly dropped to the floor.

  3

  “This can’t be good,” Jim Reynolds said.

  We were both looking at a hastily written notice posted on the crewroom wall. Jim and I had just returned from San Francisco to find the message posted all over the place. ‘Mandatory pilot meeting, today, 2pm.’ It was signed by our V.P. of Flight Operations.

  “It’s another furlough,” Jim added.

  “Don’t go borrowing trouble,” I said. “Maybe we’re getting more work from the government.”

  “Fat chance. They’re cutting back again.” Jim sighed and tossed his hat onto the worn leather sofa in the corner of the lounge. He had been a junior Captain before the Rocs started to play havoc with our careers. As the airline shrank and pilots were laid-off, he moved further down the seniority list. Now near the bottom of the co-pilot list, he would be the next to get laid off if we shrank any more.