In The Falling Light

by John L. Campbell

  Cortez used his index finger to draw a circle in the fogged glass, then tapped a pair of moons off to one side. He stared at the image.

  Something had happened back in his ancestors’ times. They stopped running the processors, and people started leaving for Earth in great numbers. The city emptied rapidly, leaving no one to maintain the sprawling plantations or the sophisticated technology of Cape Verde. Cortez didn’t know what became of them, and couldn’t imagine they fared well outside the carbon dioxide and methane environment of Mars, upon which their biology relied.

  Those who stayed were croppers, folks who had a kinship with the land, who had buried their people in the red soil, raising their children, living and dying amid that black corn. They couldn’t leave, wouldn’t leave, even as year after year the atmosphere bled off unchecked, the UV rising and the temperatures falling as Mars hurried back to its former state. Each generation saw less rain, smaller corn, higher winds and the unstoppable decay of technology, the knowledge with which to replace or repair it lost over the long years. Still the croppers stayed, tightening their belts in order to feed their children, clawing their lives out of the red soil.

  They eventually sent the Glory into a Mars orbit, an unmanned supply vessel packed with everything the croppers could need; food, medical supplies, clothing, spare parts and fuel cells, even educational and training materials. As the corn continued to fail, the croppers became increasingly dependent upon the Supplement, dropped once every twenty-four months in the middle of Martian summer. They had once appointed administrators to measure out the supplies amongst the remaining population, but that practice had moved on as well, and now the people divided the supplement as a community, according to need. It was fair, and there were few disputes.

  Cortez looked at the receiving field, a large, wind-scoured stone pad ringed with lights which hadn’t worked since he was a boy. On each of the four edges stood over a hundred of the empty supply landers, big cubes which had once been white but were now pink from embedded dust. They had been stripped of anything useful, even wiring, and pushed off to the side. A person could just look at the many landers and tell them apart, old from more recent, by their condition.

  He felt a pair of bodies press close against him on either side. Isaiah stood on his right, sucking his thumb, and on the other side Dinah’s small hand crept into his own. They all looked out the window.

  “Will it come, Papa?”

  “Can’t say, honey. I hope so.”

  Isaiah’s thumb popped out and he breathed on the glass, fogging it. Cortez waited to see what the boy would draw, but he just went back to sucking his thumb.

  “It has to come, doesn’t it, Papa?” Dinah squeezed his hand. Cortez knew his daughter wasn’t talking about launch programming, but about their mortality. He didn’t reply.

  Outside a bitter wind kicked up a dust devil a hundred feet high, and it marched across the receiving field before twisting into the night. The bright spot which was Glory hung silently in the heavens, and Dinah coughed, a few raspy barks ending in a rattle. He squeezed her hand back. An hour passed, and one by one the folks of Cape Verde gathered quietly at the window around them, eyes turned upwards. A few of the youngest children fidgeted, but everyone else was still, all wondering the same thing.

  “Let us offer up a prayer,” Amos John said at last.

  Some of the men frowned at him and shook their heads, but Cortez turned to the preacher. “I think that would be a good idea.”

  Fifty people linked hands and lowered their heads as Amos John spoke, his voice soft, lacking its usual jump and holler. “Dear Lord, we thank you for letting us come together as a community. We ask you to watch over our sick, and welcome home the loved ones we’ve lost. We know you have a purpose for our hardships, and we accept your mysterious ways and trust in your divine wisdom. Lord, we pray that you deliver the Supplement unto us, so that we can continue your work a bit longer. Help us to be strong. Help the corn. Amen.”

  “Amen,” they repeated. Amos John nodded at Cortez, smiling at Dinah and her little brother as they all went back to watching the sky.

  Another hour later a pinprick of light separated from the Glory and moved away, then slowly began to grow brighter. The group sighed and many began to weep, men and women alike, embracing one another as the Supplement descended towards Mars. Soon the men were shrugging into their parkas, pulling on gloves and goggles and masks, hugging their wives and children again before pushing out into the cold.

  The wind hit them hard, icy and full of blowing grit, and they bent against it as they piled into the crawlers and drove in a line towards the receiving field. Headlights cut thin beams through the dust while above them, the Supplement lander flared blue as it burned through the atmosphere. The cube fell quickly, and then rockets fired a dazzling white, slowing its descent. The lander, the size of a small building, thumped onto the field amid a burst of smoke and white fire, the roar of its rockets reverberating through the cabs of the crawlers as they arrived. The rockets shut down and the wind tore the smoke away. Floodlights at each corner of the lander snapped on, creating pools of light.

  The crawlers approached and spread out, stopping in a line as the men climbed down to the pavement, heads tucked. The powered lifts and loaders were now petrified relics in a forgotten garage, so the men would have to unload by hand and pack the goods into their vehicles. They huddled together for a moment, then approached as a group. The square outline of a big cargo door was set in one side, and it was Cortez who opened a small panel beside it, exposing a keypad. He removed a glove and tapped in a numerical sequence, the same code used since the drops began, and memorized by every person on the planet once they were old enough to speak or understand.

  “Praise God,” Amos John yelled over the wind, his voice muffled behind a dust mask. The men nodded. A moment later there was a hiss, and the men stepped back as the door lowered itself into a ramp, revealing darkness within. Boots thudded on the ramp as the group walked up and in, relieved to be out of the wind. They stopped and waited.

  Lights flickered for a moment, slow to ignite, but then they started snapping on in rows along the ceiling of the high cargo bay, where the full, strapped down pallets waited for them in orderly rows.

  It was empty.

  Wall to wall, the smooth floor was bare. Not a box, not a bin, not a barrel.

  The croppers started cursing, and Elson wailed. Amos John fell to his knees, clasping his hands and crying, demanding to know why the Lord had forsaken them. Cortez could only stare. After long minutes, he turned and walked back down the ramp, starting his crawler. The lone bar of the fuel gauge glowed at him from the dashboard. He drove back to Levi’s and collected his children without speaking, ignoring the panicked questions from the women, helping Dinah into the crawler and then handing Isaiah to her.

  Cortez drove into the night, back to his farm, back to his dead corn. His daughter coughed, and he wondered which of them would be the first to go into the ground. He told himself to remember to leave a shovel by the door for Dinah, in case it was him. Above, the speaker softly played What a Friend we have in Jesus.

  TEN RULES OF WALTER

  Walter followed the rules.

  He’d been doing it his entire life, careful to stay within the lines, keeping a low profile and staying out of trouble. It didn’t make him particularly happy – that wasn’t a state he experienced often – but it avoided a lot of hell, and he supposed that was a sort of happiness all by itself. Rules. The pillars of structure and civilized life which kept the world stable. And it was his unshakeable belief in that rigidity which attracted him to his current field.

  Recently, Walter had come to a startling realization. He’d decided that of the millions of rules which existed, in the end, only ten really mattered at all. Several he had known and accepted all along, and others he had discovered only within the past few weeks. A few came up just today.

  So Walter followed the rules. His rules, and though he
kept them numbered in his head, it was only to satisfy his need for structure, not to place them in any particular order. They were all equally important, and equally true.

  1) The U.S. Mail Is Still Reliable. The internet was amazing indeed, and there was no denying its ability to instantaneously reach millions. But for a physical delivery, the U.S. Mail was the ticket. A dependable organization, they could still get your letters or packages anywhere in the world within days. And really, Walter thought, there was nothing like personal correspondence you could touch and feel to get your message across.

  2) Four Day Weekends Breed Carelessness. The protocol said no one was ever to be alone in the work space. With a four day Christmas weekend about to start, however, people were anxious to leave and had in fact been slipping out early all day. By three o’clock, only Tom Jenkins and Amanda Carroll remained with him, and they were in a hurry.

  “Walter,” Tom said, “wrap it up and let’s get out of here.”

  “Yes, come on Walter, we’ll all walk out together.” Amanda had her coat on, her purse over her shoulder.

  Walter waved at them from behind his computer screen. “You two go on ahead. I’m running a program, and it’s going to take at least a couple more hours.”

  Tom and Amanda exchanged looks. They knew the protocol, but they also knew they had people waiting for them. “Please?” said Amanda. “We’ve all been working so hard. You’ve been working so hard. Can’t it wait until we’re back on Tuesday?”

  “Yeah, c’mon sport,” said Tom. Walter despised being called ‘Sport.’ “We can’t go without you, and our families are waiting. You don’t want to be the reason they’re disappointed, do you?”

  Walter peered from behind his screen. “I don’t want to hold either one of you up, but it’s only three, and like I said, I have this program.” He gestured at his screen, which they couldn’t see from across the room, and which currently displayed a screen saver of cartoon chickens laying eggs which hatched into dinosaurs, which promptly ate the chickens.

  Tom shot Amanda an annoyed look, and she sighed and rolled her eyes.

  “Listen, as soon as it’s done running, I’ll shut down the lights and make sure the place is secured on my way out. I won’t tell anyone, it’ll be my Christmas gift to you.”

  They exchanged another look, then smiles, and in that moment all the detailed training on security procedures went out the window. They thanked Walter – Amanda blew him a kiss – and wished him a Merry Christmas as they hustled out the door. When it banged shut, Walter smiled towards it. “Fuck you very much.”

  That was over two hours ago.

  3) Psychological Screening Is An Imperfect Science. It was all about belief, he’d decided. Not believing in your own answers – only an idiot would believe the bold-faced lies necessarily told during psychological screening. No, where belief came in was in the tester’s belief in the accuracy of the tests, and the effectiveness of their Q&A model. They believed it couldn’t be beaten, so they weren’t prepared for someone to do just that.

  Not only could Walter defeat their tests, he was an ace at out-foxing polygraph as well. Belief. His was stronger. What it really came down to was their desire to believe, not in the actual screening, but in the idea that it would protect them from having that one highly motivated individual slip inside and…do the unthinkable.

  Walter wasn’t sure if his next rule stood by itself, or was an extension of number three. He decided it was certainly in the same theme, but deserved its own number.

  4) Top Secret Security Clearances Are Given Too Easily. A solid work ethic with no disciplinary actions, no criminal record, a perception of being stable and a moderate level of patriotism; all easy enough to achieve or fake. Presto, access granted to all manner of dark knowledge and dangerous toys. It was foolishness, and another example of people putting their heads in the sand out of a desire to not believe. To be sure, there were some who did believe in monsters. They were the ones who created the screening and testing procedures, and designed the multi-layered security precautions. Sadly, these guardians were delusional as well, not about the idea that it could happen, but in their faith in their clever protective systems. The security they dreamed up was Walter’s friend, because once a person was past the impressive defenses, no one really worried about him anymore.

  5) One Man Can Make A Difference. Despite all evidence to the contrary – a pervasive attitude that teamwork could overcome any obstacle, that no man is an island, and the belief that individuality, while admirable, was not to be taken seriously – Walter knew different. Was the loner rejected and often reviled? No argument. And when that same loner was bright but lacking in social skills, people tended to avoid contact, and their behavior isolated the individual. A perfect combination, and for Walter it created both time and space to think, to dream, and to engage in his pursuit, a project which would change the world. What greater achievement for a man?

  6) Picking On Co-Workers Is Bad. Walter was awkward. He wasn’t attractive, and simply couldn’t see the point in all the effort it took to master social niceties and develop relationships. All that energy was better spent on work, and so he lived an isolated existence with his computers. He was a nerd and a geek, had been told so most of his life, and he was okay with that. The fact was this facility was filled with them. So why then should Robert Rawley (“Uh, it’s Bobby, bro.”) single him out for torment? Robert was good-looking and friendly, and said things like, “Let’s do some softball and get our drink on,” or, “You look great, Karen, but you’d look even better on my boat. What are you doing this weekend?” But for Walter, Robert was school all over again; the mocking, being the butt of jokes, the juvenile pranks.

  His intellectual brain – and dear God was that a big part of him – told him that Robert Rawley was just acting out his insecurities, and that he felt threatened by the depth of Walter’s mind, by his frighteningly brilliant grasp of complex theories about which he spoke so casually. The inner-intellectual said Robert was forever fighting against the idea that at his core, he would never be anything more than a well-educated jock, and once his college days had ended, his best days were then behind him.

  Walter’s more primitive, emotional brain, however, was still the clumsy little boy who got tripped on the bus and shoved to the floor in school hallways, a wedgie target for the Robert Rawleys of the world, sentenced to eat lunch every day with only his hurt feelings for company. It was this part of Walter which made sure Robert Rawley was on the mailing list.

  7) People Are Easily Distracted. Walter’s position gave him access to The Vault, but not unlimited access. Although he was entrusted with the codes, he was still required to have written authorization to go inside, and had to be accompanied at all times. This was true for each of the carefully chosen few who were granted such access. The Army corporal on duty near the big, pressurized door and armed with an intimidating black automatic was the human back-up to The Vault’s complex, computerized security system, and he knew the rules. Not Walter’s rules, but his own set of orders by which he lived.

  But he was young, and he was bored.

  Walter had approached him carrying his iPad. “Scott, I found a You Tube video of two women having sex in a JC Penney fitting room.” The kid grinned and came out from behind his desk. While he was engrossed in the video, Walter slit his throat with a carpet knife he bought at Home Depot, then accessed The Vault and removed what he wanted.

  8) Calligraphy Is A Lost Art. Children who spend a lot of time alone – especially bright ones – master obscure skills which most of the world has forgotten. Walter had many of these skills, including chess, trivia, bird identification and juggling. The one he was using for this project was calligraphy, something he had started teaching himself in junior high with a book from the library, and still did to this day as a means to amuse himself. He knew how to use the old-fashioned fountain pen, but he had discovered that the craft stores carried a selection of fine, chisel-edged markers in a var
iety of sizes, which looked just as nice but were less messy than the jars of ink.

  He had done the original letter in Old English script, and when he was done it looked like something a medieval sheriff might have nailed to a castle door. The text was simple, and not personalized for the recipient, just a few paragraphs covering Walter’s views on justice and equality. From the original he had made five hundred copies, the few remaining sitting in a Staples box on the desk beside him, next to a scattering of pre-addressed business envelopes. He had let the printer make the peel-and-stick address labels, and putting them on along with the stamps had been the most time consuming and boring part of the process.

  Walter lifted a letter from the box and gave it a single spritz with the cut glass atomizer on the desk, the fancy kind with the tube and the little squeeze ball. Beside it was an empty glass vial with a red label on it, a tiny bit of clear liquid still pooled around the open mouth. The atomizer had been his mother’s, used for her many perfumes over the years, and was one of her few remaining possessions he still had. It worked nicely, puffing out a tiny mist which settled invisibly on the paper. As he folded it neatly into thirds and stuffed another envelope, he was struck by how similar this was to some lonely girl in the forties sending a love letter to her G.I. fiancé in Europe, adding a touch of fragrance to give him a hint of home.

  But this wasn’t perfume, and it wasn’t a love letter.

  Across the top of each photocopied page in tall, Old English script stood the words, DEATH WARRANT.

  9) Intelligent People Don’t Necessarily Do Intelligent Things. And here was a perfect example of that. Biochemistry was a field filled with bright young talent, highly educated and creative. And those minds dreamed up – then cooked up – Poveglia V, naming it after an island in the Venetian lagoon which had been used over the centuries as a place to dispose of plague victims. How clever. Poveglia V was highly contagious, spread by both physical contact and airborne transmission, with flu-like symptoms followed by sudden paralysis appearing at seventy-two hours, and death occurring twenty-four hours later. It was a hardy little bastard, too, and didn’t break down when it hit the air or sunlight as many other organisms did. PV was capable of living outdoors in a virulent state for up to two weeks and had a 97.6% mortality rate. There was no vaccination for it, and no way to halt its brief but fatal journey once it entered the body.