“But that is just a theory, is it not?” Tony put in.
The captain was silent for a moment, staring off into space. “Yes, just a theory,” he responded. “But the right one.”
Anne Marie stared at the strange little man in the darkness and frowned. “Indeed? And how can you know that?”
Because it was a pain in the ass, even with the greatest computers in creation, to figure out just the exact spot to aim it where it would do exactly that, he thought to himself. Aloud, in a lighter tone, he said, “Well, I told you I was older than I looked.”
They weren’t sure whether to laugh or edge away from him at that, but since he had the car and the keys, a nervous laugh seemed the most prudent choice.
The captain got a blanket out of the car and spread it on the ground, then went back and got out a small hamper and a cooler. He then helped Tony get Anne Marie’s wheelchair set up and her into it.
“Some light snacks, sinful sweets,” the captain told them. “And some good wine, although in case you couldn’t or wouldn’t drink, some fruit punch as well.”
The stars were out, not as many as would be visible farther out from the city but far more than could be seen in Rio itself. There was a quarter moon at this season, but it was a late moonrise and had not yet shown itself, nor would it until almost an hour after the meteor arrived. That much luck was with them.
The captain amazed them with his knowledge of the stars and constellations. There didn’t seem to be a single one he couldn’t name, or tell its distance from Earth and details about its composition.
“You know more than most astronomers could keep in their heads, I think,” Tony noted, unable to see the stars but nonetheless fascinated by the tour. “This is from navigating a ship?”
“From navigating a lot of ships, and of different types,” the captain responded.
“Do you think there is other life out there?” Anne Marie asked him. “Strange creatures, alien civilizations, all that sort of thing?”
“Oh, yes,” he answered confidently. “A vast number. The hugeness of the cosmos is beyond anyone’s comprehension. Some of them may already have spaceships and be in contact or even commerce with one another.”
“You mean in this solar system?” Tony responded. “I would doubt it.”
“No, no, there’s nothing else in our solar system worth mentioning. I mean beyond. Far beyond. Thousands and millions of light-years, in this galaxy and many others.”
“You are a romantic, Captain,” Tony said skeptically. “What you say about other creatures and civilizations might well be true, but those same distances would prohibit contact. The speed of light alone says no.”
“Well, that is something of a stopper,” Solomon admitted, “but not as much as you’d think. Gravity bends space, light, even time itself, and it’s but one of a great many forces at work. If a ship could be built to withstand those forces and make use of them, both space and time might be bent, reducing a journey of many centuries to a matter of days or weeks. They once said that heavier-than-air craft could never fly under their own power, and for many years it was believed that the sound barrier was so absolute, its vibrations would tear an airplane apart. Nothing is impossible—absolutely nothing. It just takes a lot of time, work, ingenuity, and guts to eventually figure a way to cheat.”
Tony shook his head. “My education was as an engineer, and I know about solving such things, but I believe that practical interstellar flight is just outside the rules of God.”
“Well said, sir! You sound like a medieval pope!”
“Oh, stop arguing, you two!” Anne Marie scolded. “I don’t care if it’s possible or not, since even if it is, none of us will live to see it, but it is fun to imagine. I wonder what sort of creatures there are out there.”
Captain Solomon looked at the stars. “Oz, and Olympus, and Fairyland, and a hundred other lands not quite imagined here on Earth. If you like, play a game. Suppose you could wish yourself up there, become one of those other creatures—what sort of creature might you like to be?”
She laughed. “I’m not much good at imagining creatures, and most of the ones on the telly are pretty slimy.”
“Well, there’ll be slimy ones, of course. But, if you can’t think of some creature out of whole cloth, pick one out of mythology or classical fantasy.”
“Umph!It’s so difficult to do! I suppose I should fall back on the obvious, as my therapists would say in the old days. Lying there, unable to move for so long, I used to dream of being a racehorse. Isn’t that a silly thought, even if an obvious fantasy for me? Anne Marie, interplanetary racehorse!”
“Well, be a centaur, then, or is that ‘centauress’?” the captain responded in a light mood. I knew another centauress once, but I can’t even remember her name…
“What about you, Tony?” Anne Marie prompted. “What sort of creature would you be? How about an eagle? Flying about, and with remarkable eyesight as well.”
“Possibly,” Tony responded, sounding a bit irritated with the game but nonetheless going along for Anne Marie’s sake since she was getting such a kick out of it. “But, and I am being fully honest here, if such a thing were possible, then I should like to be whatever you were.” And he meant it, too. The captain could feel the love that was there and was almost consumed with envy for this unfortunate blind and crippled pair of mortals.
“How sweet, my darling,” she said with a smile. “But what of you, Captain? We haven’t heard your own choice.”
“I’m afraid I have grave limits on that part of my imagination,” he answered seriously. “I can think of myself only as Gilgamesh, or the Wandering Jew. Always the same, never changing, walking through the world but unable to fully become a part of it.”
“I believe I’d like that,” Tony said. “Never changing, never aging, and never beyond repair, as it were. Watching the ages come and go, empires rise and fall, and great events as they occur. Yes, I might find that quite enticing.”
“No, you wouldn’t,” the captain came back a bit sharply. “Suppose you had to do it without Anne Marie? Without anybody to share it with? Watching everyone you knew or liked grow old and sick and then die, watching as many horrors as great things and being unable to do more than bear witness to them? Always alone, without even anyone to talk about it with or share experiences with on an equal basis? Is that a blessing or the worst of curses? You tell me.”
“Without Anne Marie? Hmmm… I think I see what you mean. But I would insist on Anne Marie as well!”
“I’m not so certain of that myself,” she put in. “I mean, after centuries together I’d expect even the most loving of people to get rather sick of one another.”
Both men were startled by her comment, Tony because he could not conceive of such a thing and the captain for far different reasons.
Was that ultimately what it was? Did I need her so much that I failed to realize that I could be a pretty boring and predictable stick-in-the-mud that might eventually drive anybody nuts? Could it be as simple as that?
“You might grow sick of me?”Tony asked her, genuinely a little upset.
“Don’t worry, darling, I’ll give you a few thousand years or so,” she answered playfully. She paused for a moment, sensing that her response had really bothered him. “Oh, come off it, Latin lover! It’s just a silly game to pass the time!”
The captain turned and looked back toward the northeast. “Sorry I caused any problems. As Anne Marie said, it’s just a ga—Holy smoke!”
Anne Marie suddenly looked up in the same direction and gasped. “Tony! The whole sky is lighting up! It’s like the sun’s about to rise!”
But it was thirteen minutes after two in the morning.
Rockfall: Rio
In spite of many predictions to the contrary, it was quite clear to astronomers that as the meteor dug into the atmosphere, it was coming apart. Not enough to keep a large mass from striking fairly close to where they had predicted but enough so that pieces
, some fairly large, would shower down along the route inland. This had been feared but was not completely unexpected.
It began while still well over the Atlantic, a brilliant, shining fireball that turned darkness into eerie twilight while providing a surprisingly multicolored display in its wake for those watching openmouthed on ships at sea and from monitoring aircraft. This caused a lot of attention but little concern; the ocean was vast and swallowed whole the splinters that managed to make it all the way to the surface.
As the meteor approached the continent, however, it was lower in the sky and slowing slightly, although its speed was still so great that observers on the ground saw the fireball flash past in the space of but a few seconds.
To the captain and Anne Marie, sitting atop the hill not many kilometers from Rio, it was an eerie, awesome sight nonetheless. The meteor approached from over the horizon, illuminating the eastern sky like the coming of dawn, slowly obliterating the stars, and overwhelming even the glow of the city lights. When it suddenly appeared, much lower on the horizon than they had expected, it was a miniature sun, a massive fireball that seemed several times the size of a full moon. Even the captain had to admit that he’d never in his incredibly long life seen anything quite like it before.
It came with blinding speed almost directly over them, and at just about that moment the captain, who’d gotten to his feet without even realizing it as he gaped at the sight, suddenly reeled, cried out, and dropped to his knees.
The sensation was momentary but powerful: a sudden loss of orientation and a pervasive, cold, desolate emptiness that struck to the core of his soul, as if someone had just walked across his grave…
At the same moment there was a series of thunderous explosions that echoed all around them and a brief but violent wind that came out of nowhere and struck with surprising force.
“Wha—what’s happening?” Tony cried. “What’s happening! Anne Marie!”
“I’m all right!” she shouted to him, although already the wind and explosions seemed to be dying down, vanishing into pale echoes as if they had never been there. “Oh, good lord! There are streamers—sparkling things, hundreds—no, thousands of them, falling all over. Reds, yellows, greens, golds, pure white—incredible! Captain, can you—” For the first time she looked over and saw Solomon bent over double, looking agonized. “Captain! Are you all right?”
The captain gulped down several deep breaths. “Yes, yes! I’m all right. It was—strange. I’ve never felt anything like that before. Never. It’s fading now. Did you feel it?”
“Only the wind.”
He was getting some self-control back but was clearly still shaken. “That was just the fireball sucking up some of the air in its wake. It must have come almost directly over us. The explosions were sonic booms. It’s still going very fast, unless it’s already crashed by now.” He looked out at the spectacular fireworks display still raining down all around them. “Some of those are big! I think I can see smoke in the direction of the city!”
There was a sudden, jarring explosion very close by, an explosion so near that the ground trembled and Anne Marie’s wheelchair began to vibrate, almost tipping over. The captain again fell, this time from the tremors.
“What now? Earthquake?” Tony asked, frustrated that he could see nothing.
“I don’t think so,” the captain responded. “I think a big chunk came down pretty damned close to us.” He picked himself up off the ground and wiped off some dirt. “Everybody okay?”
“Yes—I think so,” Anne Marie responded. “Oh, my! This was quite the adventure, after all. I doubt if I will ever forget this. I’m so glad we came!”
The captain began looking around and immediately saw a reddish-orange glow from the direction of the road below—the road they’d used to get there.
“You two stay here and try to relax,” he told them. “I’m going to walk over and see just what hit and where.” He had visions of landslides that might possibly trap them atop the mountain, but he didn’t want to alarm his companions until he knew just what the situation was.
He was also still somewhat shaken by that terrible paralyzing sensation he’d had as the meteor had passed overhead. Nothing, but nothing, had ever felt like that before.
It had felt like death.
Not the warm, dark cessation of life he’d imagined but cold, terribly lonely, empty, corrupt—the cold of decomposition and the grave.
He reached the point where the road started down, but he didn’t have to walk far along it to discover what had hit and where. No wonder the earth had shaken! He couldn’t imagine why it hadn’t knocked them off the hilltop and toppled the car, for all the good the car was going to do now.
Below, near the point at which the dirt road met the main paved highway, was a large glowing object. There was a lot of steam and a hot, acrid smell as if the area had suddenly gone volcanic and melted rock and road. It was impossible to see much detail without going down quite a ways and it wasn’t terribly clear how much of the dirt road remained intact, but he didn’t dare leave his two companions to go down to check.
He started back toward them, reaching into his pocket and taking out a large cigar, which he stopped to light. He had refrained from smoking near Anne Marie, but this was the kind of situation that called for a good cigar. The hilltop was dark again, and all the debris made it a tricky walk, but he made it back to them without falling or twisting an ankle.
“We’ve got a real problem,” he told them straight out. “Our friend that just passed over left us a present right at the base of the hill, and it’s none too clear if we’re going to be able to get down very easily.”
“Oh, dear!” Anne Marie exclaimed. “What will we do, Captain?”
“There’s a good-sized meteor chunk that came in and hit right down there. That was the earthquake we felt. It’s still glowing hot—probably will be for days—and I’m not sure how much of that road is still there or whether there are any rock slides or other obstacles. The only thing we can do is try very carefully to make it down in the car. If it’s impossible, then we’ll have to go as far as we can, get out, and manage on our own. I’m pretty sure that if we can get down to the main road one way or another, people will be along fairly soon who might help. But the plain fact is, we have to get down there, since nobody knows we’re up here and neither of you is exactly in condition to climb down the side of this hill even if we had ropes and such to do it with.”
“I don’t like it,” Tony told him. “The whole road might be undermined, and there might well be rather narrow passages. Not only would that cause me obvious problems, but Anne Marie’s chair would never make it.”
“Couldn’t we build a signal fire or something from all this junk?” Anne Marie asked. “I mean, there are sure to be all sorts of folks out here sooner or later, right? If it’s big enough, possibly helicopters. You did say that this was once a helicopter landing pad, didn’t you?”
Solomon nodded. “The trouble is, I think this is only one of a lot of fragment strikes, and it’s pretty far out. I would expect people along the main road any time now, particularly others who came out here like us to get a better look, but in terms of the authorities and helicopters and the like—possibly sometime. The glow toward Rio has increased, I think, and I suspect that there are a number of fires and possibly worse.”
“Check the radio,” Tony suggested. “At least we’ll know where we stand.”
The captain nodded, went over to the minivan, and, after discovering he had to start the engine to power the radio, flicked it on.
There was mostly static.
“I think Jesus may have lost his power,” the captain said a bit sarcastically. The great statue that sat on the mountain that directly overlooked Rio was the symbol of the city, but that same mountain and two others nearby were where the transmitting towers for radio, television, and other telecommunications were located. If power was out up there, it wouldn’t matter what was going on below.
/> He slowly turned the dial, finally getting a low-powered broadcast heavy with static.
“… out in two-thirds of the city, and there are numerous fires from sparks and cinders all over. Because we have managed to keep our power and remain on the air, we will keep broadcasting information as we know it. Civil authorities have asked that no one attempt to use telephones and that they remain in their homes and remain calm. Fire brigades are out all over the city, and police are trying to free people trapped in buildings and cope with dozens of accidents as most of the traffic signals are out. A declaration of martial law is expected and may be in force now; we have no way of knowing from here…”
Solomon got out but left the radio on. “Sounds pretty bad. Martial law, fires, power outages, you name it. They didn’t expect this. Not knowing anybody in particular is up here, I seriously doubt if anyone’s going to be out this way for some time—maybe a day or two. Even if they knew we were here, I think we’d be a pretty damned low priority. We’ve got the remains of the little picnic I packed, but that’s it, and there doesn’t appear to be any water or other facilities up here. If you’re too nervous to make the attempt down, my next inclination would be to go myself and see if I could find help—but, again, that might take a very long time, and I really wouldn’t like leaving you two up here for an extended period.”
“Ordinarily I would agree on getting down, but I am afraid that Anne Marie might get stuck halfway and then what do we do?” Tony asked.
“This is one of those ‘there’s no good solution’ problems,” the captain replied. “Anne Marie, you said you had medicine you had to take religiously, and you’ve been fairly weak as it is. How much of an extra supply of that medication did you bring?”
“Oh, my! Yes, I see what you mean,” she said thoughtfully. “I’m afraid, dear, that he’s right—we have no real choice in this.”
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