Phytosphere

8

Neil met with the president, the national security advisor, and the secretary of defense at Camp David.

As Neil entered the meeting room, he saw that Tony Bayard was giving him a good looking-over, as if the president expected nothing but the best news from him. National Security Advisor Julia Petrov’s lack of sleep was painfully apparent in her haggard appearance. Secretary of Defense Joe Sidower sat at the end of the table, his bald head bowed as he went over some waferscreen notes. The White House photographer took stills.

Neil’s previous mood of unshakable optimism had now turned to one of cautious pragmatisim. He couldn’t help thinking of the Cameron Chess Study, and how even the smartest human beings hadn’t yet beaten a Tarsalan at chess.

The president sat, and Neil followed suit. Julia Petrov took her seat as well. One of the kitchen staff came around and poured coffee. A plate of Danishes sat in the middle of the table. The food-distribution network was breaking down day by day, its decline driven relentlessly by the growing certainty that there would be no crops next year, which in turn engendered mass hoarding, and people were already going hungry. Yet this morning he was having coffee and Danishes with the president.

“Neil,” said the president, breaking into his thoughts. “Can you give us an update? Your original two-week deadline has come and gone, so I hope the news is good. Your preoccupation… is making me…” The president trailed off.

Neil prided himself on always giving it straight to the president. Yet he began tentatively, and without his usual bravado. “My team and I… we’ve had some time to study the retrieved shroud samples, more than my original two weeks, yes, and the initial results show that the shroud is made primarily of plant material.

On a chromosomal level—and I don’t want to get too technical here—it resembles some of the more common forms of phytoplankton we have in our oceans. The shroud is a living, breathing, growing entity, Mr. President, and it knows how to heal itself.”

The president paused to consider.

“If it’s a living thing,” said Sidower, “it can be killed.”

Neil grinned at this characteristically hawkish response from Sidower. “One would think so. In fact, I had some of the top herbicide specialists in the country come to the lab in Miami to take a look at the specimen. We sat around and had a real bull session about the whole problem.”

“And what did you come up with?” asked the president.

“Well, we hypothesized that we could use some commercially formulated herbicides because, structurally, the shroud is similar to many of the plant and weed varieties that these products are active against. But as we mapped out the specimen’s chromosome, we began to see that some of its DNA sequencing differs from the more common forms of phytoplankton. It was a tough genome, but we finally got it all mapped out.”

“And how, exactly, does it differ?” asked Julia.

Neil glanced at the national security advisor. “Some of the sequencing in the specimen comes directly from Tarsalan genetic makeup itself.”

This, he knew, was the showstopper.

The president’s eyes went wide. “You mean they’ve stirred some of their own genome into the mix?”

Neil raised his palms, as if he were as surprised as the president. “Their splicing techniques are far more… advanced than ours.” He sat back and consulted his waferscreen. “You might remember I wrote a paper on a subset of Tarsalan genes, ones with transmutational properties. These are the ones we’re finding in our samples.”

Sidower made a face as he glanced at the president, not looking too pleased about the growing complexity of the threat.

“If you could give us the essentials,” said the president.

Right. Bayard liked the simplified version. But he wasn’t sure he could simplify something that was so complicated. “Let me go into lecture mode here. The Tarsalans have a subset of genes in their makeup, and this subset of genes can mutate certain of their physical characteristics, depending on environmental circumstances. This is what’s made the Tarsalans so… so adaptable, and it’s why they’ve been able to live on so many different planets throughout the galaxy.” He squinted as he tried to demystify the whole concept. “The simplest analogy would be the jackrabbit. It turns white in winter. Not that the mechanism in the Tarsalan is in any way the same, but it gives you an idea of what I’m getting at. Chameleon lizards turn from brown to green and back again. There’s a transmutational component.”

“So they’ve put some of themselves into the shroud,” said Sidower. “Big deal. How does it affect our odds of defeating the goddamn thing?”

He glanced at the secretary of defense, who was cantankerous for obvious good reason.

“Eventually we will defeat it.” He meant it to be a bold Neil Thorndike proclamation, but it came out sounding weak. “It’s just that I think it will take a little more time than I originally thought. And that’s because the shroud—and, by the way, I prefer to call it the phytosphere now, because that’s what it is, a sphere made out of plant material.” He felt his forehead moistening. “Anyway, the phytosphere seems to adapt to whatever we throw at it, most probably because of this subset of transmutational genes. Also,

we’re finding it hard to penetrate the individual planktons themselves because the Tarsalans have spliced resistant traits of the Martian paleo-organism, Aresphyta, into the mix, and this has created a kind of impenetrable shell around each individual organism. To give you a bit of history—”

“We get the picture, Neil,” said Sidower. “This shell more or less acts as armor.”

“Yes.”

“And there’s no way we can penetrate this armor with conventional herbicides?” asked the president.

“No. I’ve got one team working on finding a herbicide that will effectively destroy the phytoplankton component, another working on destroying the shell, or carapace if you will, and a third studying the Tarsalan genetic component. The main thrust right now is the carapace. We’ve got to find a way to break the carapace. Once we’ve done that, we can concentrate on the organism itself.”

“Do you have any ideas about the carapace?” asked the president.

Neil squared his shoulders, forcing his confidence. “We’ve tried acids and other corrosive agents, but so far nothing has worked. We have to devise something that can compete against the carapace, in the Darwinian sense, and come up the winner every time. We need something that’s adaptable and can shift strategies, depending on the situation. I believe the best answer is to develop some kind of omniphage, an organism that can eat through the carapace, and won’t stop eating. If we develop an omniphage capable of penetrating the carapace, we can then use the same macrogen as a delivery module to carry a lethal dose of whatever toxic agent we finally develop to kill the xenophyta—that’s what I’m calling the individual organisms.”

“And is it possible to develop such a… hell, what do you call it? An omniphage?” asked the secretary.

“I have a team of geneticists working on the problem right now.”

“So when you say it should be designed to carry a lethal dose…” The president trailed off, trying to figure it all out.

“It would essentially be a workhorse macrogen engineered to penetrate the carapace and administer the necessary fatal agent. As for the fatal agent itself, my team is working on a hydrogen sulfide compound that’s going to fool the xenophyta into thinking it’s getting its usual supply of carbon dioxide when in actual fact—”

“But first we have to get this…this omniphage going, right?” said Sidower.

“Yes.”

“And do we have all the best experts on board to help us build this omniphage?”

“In the case of the Aresphyta, all the best experts would be Martian.”

“Wonderful. Let’s send a drop to Mars right away.”

Neil nodded, even as his confidence once again ebbed. “I’ve been having some of my people track these experts down. And they tell me that the top expert of all, Dr. Luke Langstrom, is currently on the Moon. As a matter of fact, he’s part of my brother’s team.”

Neil couldn’t help being galled by this. After advising strongly against his brother’s involvement, and getting Gerry’s flat refusal in a recent drop, his brother now held a trump. He glanced around at the other three, and knew they understood the implications. He had alienated all those working on the Moon effort, and now it was going to play against them. Neil couldn’t help feeling like an idiot. And he didn’t like feeling like an idiot. Especially in front of the president.

The president turned to the national security advisor. “Send a priority drop to the Moon. Do whatever it takes, but get this Luke Langstrom on board.”

9

Gerry left the Nectaris Buena Vista after supper and strolled down Sagittarius Way, still trying to come to grips with all the wild and conflicting information the Smallmouth had brought back from the shroud.

He looked at the vaulting underground dome of Nectaris, ten miles across and two miles high, most of it laminated rock, but with huge polycarbonate windows here and there. He headed downtown.

At this time of the day, the lighting technicians, probably zonked out on premium-grade bud, were having fun with their spots, floods, and lasers, choosing, for the most part, a mood indigo. The sky was a preternatural violet, intense in its dark luminosity, the epitome of dusk, peppered here and there with red stars. Food vendors were conspicuously absent, and as he reached Pisces Road, he realized that even the prostitutes weren’t around, that all the curtains to the brothels were closed, and that despite the carnival indigo of the evening sky, there weren’t many people about at all, as if the somber situation on Earth had cast its pall over the gay old Moon.

Yet a few cafés were open, and he saw couples sitting at tables drinking espresso and eating pastries.

He remembered the old days, when he and Glenda had lived in the center of Raleigh, before the kids had been born; how they would go to cafés, just like these young people, and believe for a while that life had all the magic of an indigo sky with red stars.

He strolled down Pisces Road toward Möbius Lake. Would he ever make sense of all the bizarre information from the Smallmouth?

Have a tough problem to solve? Go to the ocean and look at it for an hour. But all he had now was this artificial lake, which was really the town’s main water recycler and Ossimax dispenser. He hoped Neil was making progress on Earth. He hoped that tomorrow he would wake up and look at Earth, and that the shroud would be gone. In the meantime, he had a lot to think about. He took a deep breath and focused his concentration.

He was just reaching Möbius Lake when Ian Hamilton came out of the nearby Nickel and Dime Cannabis Bar and Roti Shop; he could never go far in this city without running into Ian, it seemed.

“We were just talking about you,” said his old friend.

“Who?”

“Me and the girls. And Malcolm. And Luke.”

“I’m just out for a walk.”

“Why don’t you come inside?”

“As long as you know I don’t smoke anymore. I never really did.”

“Then have a coffee. It’s on me.”

He followed Ian into the Nickel and Dime.

Looking around, he saw that it was a cozy little place, all the furniture made of artificial wood, the Velcro trails decorated with designs of colorful thread, a lot of thick macramé tapestries on the walls, and aquariums filled with genetically enhanced Siamese fighting fish with fins and tails so long and so colorful he could easily understand why they were the chief objets d’art in this stoner bar. The fish bioluminesced, turning on and off like Christmas lights.

He and Ian went to a table at the back, really more a low platform surrounded by cushions, and there he found the mayor and Dr. Luke Langstrom, their eyes glazed, their mood placid, their bent philosophical.

The air was sweet with the smell of hashish, and he had a hard time getting used to it because it was still illegal in North Carolina. The girls. He had forgotten their names. Only that Ian had been dragging them around for a while. Twins? He wasn’t sure. They looked much alike. Pretty. Small. Fine-boned.

Showgirls, but showgirls of the Moon variety, born here, raised here, like elfin queens in their delicacy, as tranquil and as still as a day in the Mare Serenitatis.

“You remember Gwen and Stephanie?” asked Ian.

He waved. “Hi.”

“Here’s the man of the hour,” said the mayor. “Have a seat.”

He maneuvered awkwardly—still wasn’t used to Moon gravity—and sat on one of the large, embroidered pillows. He glanced at Luke Langstrom, who was grinning with ruby red eyes over a bowl of Moroccan. Ian took a seat beside him. The mayor had half his mind on some kind of 3-D game involving holographic leopards and parrots. So. Here it was. The perfect cross-section of the lunar effort to destroy the shroud. His committee on all things serious. Yes, why not? Neil had the president and the president’s closest advisors. It made perfect sense that he should have potheads and showgirls.

“So you’re him?” asked Stephanie.

And they would all speak cryptically, and answer cryptically, and no one would understand anybody else, but somehow, through a series of non sequiturs and red herrings, they would get the job done.

“Who?”

“The man who’s going to save the world.”

“I’m going to try, sweetie,” he said, the sweetie coming reflexively because he always called Hanna sweetie.

“We don’t talk to many Earthmen,” said Gwen. “You move funny.”

“I know.”

“I could teach you to walk right,” said Stephanie.

He looked at Stephanie closely. She had pink hair, and a makeup atomizer had misted her face blue.

She had plucked eyebrows, now lined with twinkling blue sequins. She had painted her lips a shade of plum.

Before he could accept Stephanie’s offer, Dr. Langstrom said, “I got the attachment you sent. The microscopic photographs were spectacular.” Langstrom glanced at Stephanie with marked disapproval, then turned back to Gerry. “They brought to mind some of the Martian fossils I’ve researched. I would like to look at the samples firsthand, if you don’t mind.”

Gerry studied Langstrom. “Be my guest. What do you make of the photographs?”

“Rather a stark comparison between the ones taken in the lab and the ones taken in the shroud itself, isn’t there? Microscopic section photographs right inside the foul thing. How did you arrive at such a technique?”

Gerry shrugged. “You’ve got to study things in their natural habitat, Luke. Studying it in the lab is only going to lead to a lot of miscues.”

Langstrom’s amused intolerance softened. He looked as if he had been given a fascinating new toy.

“Interesting organism.”

“You got my e-mail about the carapace?”

Langstrom’s eyes narrowed. “Reminds me of the carapace of Aresphyta C-4721. If only Nectaris had a DNA sequencer.” The Martian turned to the mayor, as if he were to blame.

“Anything like that is always done on Earth,” said the mayor.

“Because it would be interesting to see if the Tarsalans used Aresphyta genetic strands to construct this organism. C-4721 is of course a prehistoric organism, and I’ve only ever seen fossil specimens. But it’s not beyond the realm of possibility that the Tarsalans could have recovered a live specimen. They’ve been coring the Martian ice cap for the last several years, and C-4721 mimics certain present-day Martian organisms, especially in the growth of its carapace. Grows like a tooth, you know. Impervious to ultraviolet radiation. It wouldn’t surprise me at all if the Tarsalans spliced C-4721 into their phytoplankton base.”

The mayor spoke up. “Gerry, no pressure, my man, but any ideas on how we might… like… do a pest-control number on the phytosphere?”

“Phytosphere? Where’d you come up with a name like that?”

“Just what the Earth guys are calling it.”

Gerry’s confusion, ambivalence, and puzzlement over the shroud—phytosphere—came back. “I don’t know what we’re going to do.” Phytosphere. That would be a Neil name. “Every time I think I have an answer, I run into a roadblock.” Everything was Greek to Neil. “I’m thinking herbicide—get AviOrbit to design and build some applicator satellites—but I’m not sure it would work because many kinds of phytoplankton can absorb huge amounts of herbicide with little, if any, detrimental effect.” He wondered if Neil was thinking herbicides. “Going the herbicide route might be counterproductive.”

“It would be more than counterproductive,” said Hulke. “It would be impossible.”

“Why?” said Gerry.

“Because we have no herbicide or large-scale chemical production facilities here on the Moon. We don’t even use herbicides here. We’re a… a hermetically sealed community. Everything that comes to our customs depot is meticulously screened. We don’t have any weeds in any of our gardens…or hydroponic acreages, because the seeds for such plants have never gotten past our teams in the first place.”

So even if they wanted to go the herbicide route, it was out of the question anyway? “What’s the latest drop from Earth say? Phytosphere. Who thought that name up?”

The mayor glanced away, as if he were embarrassed. “That would be your brother. He’s in the news, Gerry.” Hulke focused on him and folded his hands. “He’s made a number of announcements to the media.”

Gerry nodded stoically. “And what’s he got to say for himself? I mean, over and above calling the shroud the phytosphere.”

Langstrom piped in with an odd kind of glee. “He’s calling the individual organisms xenophyta.”

Gerry regarded the Martian evenly, then turned back to the mayor. “Anything else?”

Hulke’s eyes narrowed. “Nothing specific about their plans to destroy the… the phytosphere.” As if the mayor were reluctantly giving in to Neil’s nomenclaturural template. “Only that they’ve definitively confirmed that it is in fact derived from ocean plankton, just as we have, and a few other components that they wouldn’t disclose.” An expression of patient aggravation came to the mayor’s face. “They’ve devised a… how did they phrase it… a three-pronged approach to dismantling the phytosphere. These drops from Earth… God, they’re funny.” Yet the mayor looked peeved. Was he wondering why Gerry hadn’t devised his own three-pronged approach? “I asked them for a full scientific report but they… they more or less flipped me the finger. If that’s the way they’re going to play it—by the way, what about… like, a report from you, Ger?”

Gerry shook his head, momentarily distressed by how baffling he found all the Smallmouth’s information. “I haven’t got any reports, Malcolm. All I’ve got are a lot of questions. I guess in their drop they didn’t say anything about the way the xenophyta behaved in the lab as opposed to the way they behaved in the actual phytosphere.”

The mayor paused, and he could see it in the mayor’s eyes: Hulke thought that maybe—just maybe—Dr. Gerald Thorndike, formerly of the NCSU, might have something. “Why? Is there a big difference?”

“A huge difference. The xenophyta… they embrace each other when they’re in the phytosphere. They have these two little flagella on each organism—tiny whiplike appendages, like the flagella on certain phytoplankton. When they’re in the phytosphere, these flagella twine around each other to form long chains, and these long chains then go on to form huge mats, which then go on to the bloom phase. Then the blooms join to form the entire phytosphere. These flagella are extremely active in the phytosphere.

But you take the xenophyta out of the phytosphere and put them in the lab and the flagella grow limp.

The xenophyta still congregate in colonies, but they don’t bind with their flagella. So far I’ve yet to discover any electrical or chemical stimuli inside the xenophyta that can account for the flagella becoming paralyzed like that. They seem to need the entire phytosphere to bind, and I can’t figure it out.”

Outside, the sky turned purple and now had orange stars. A waiter came by with a tray of smokables but everybody had had enough.

Gerry looked around at the group. In Stephanie’s eyes he saw a burgeoning idolatry. In Malcolm Hulke he saw apprehension, as if the mayor were blaming him for coming up with yet more obstacles. Ian Hamilton wasn’t even paying attention anymore, and was instead focusing on Stephanie, gazing at her as if she were the most beautiful creature on the Moon.

Luke Langstrom was the only one who looked fascinated by the problem. “So do you have any theories about it?”

Gerry’s brow rose. “Only that there’s got to be some trigger that’s turning these flagella on and off, depending on where they are.”

Later, as they strolled around Lake Möbius, Stephanie took his arm.

“Maybe I can sit in at some of your sessions,” she said.

“If you’d like.”

“Because I’ve been thinking about the shroud. The phytosphere. Whatever you want to call it.”

“You have?”

“An outside opinion might help. Are there any showgirls on your committee?”

“No.”

“Then don’t you think you should have one?”

He gave her a smile. “I think maybe we should.” To make things perfectly clear, he added, “I’ve got my wife down there. And the more people working on the problem, the better.”

She paused. “I don’t know many scientists.”

“Perhaps you should count yourself lucky.”

“You don’t seem like a scientist.”

He looked away. “No. And sometimes I don’t feel like one, either.”

“Except I can tell you’re the most brilliant man on the Moon right now.”

“And how can you tell that?”

She tightened her grip on his arm. “It’s just something I can tell. This way I have. Ask Ian. He knows. I can tell you have a different way of looking at things than other people.”

“And is that a curse or a blessing?”

She stopped and peered at him more closely. “In your case, I think it’s a blessing.”

He couldn’t say why, but Ian seemed to be made extremely uncomfortable by Stephanie’s friendliness toward him.

A short while later, as Gerry got into a more protracted conversation with Dr. Langstrom about the xenophyta and the flagella, he watched Ian pull Stephanie aside and separate her from the rest of the group. The two lagged behind. He glanced back. Stephanie looked so small next to Ian, her Ossimaxed bones slender; an impossible creature, growing up in this weak gravity as an entirely different species of human, moving with the grace of Peter Pan in Neverland. Tonight, she wore magenta contact lenses, and she reminded him of a cute blue lab mouse. He sensed a mild distress in her, and understood that Ian was a problem for her.

Neil and Dr. Langstrom strolled to a bench, where they sat. Dr. Langstrom suggested that he rather liked “being in the thick of it” again, and Gerry at first couldn’t decide whether this was an appropriate remark or not, considering Earth’s peril, and formed a new notion of the Martian professor—that within his grandfatherly exterior there lurked an immense ego, and that his interest in the xenophyta and flagella wasn’t necessarily about the phytosphere, but more about Dr. Luke Langstrom showing Dr. Gerald Thorndike how smart he could be.

In any case, his true concern was for Ian and Stephanie, as they seemed to be having a real row back by the lake. He couldn’t help wondering if they might be lovers, and if he had inadvertantly been the cause of their quarrel. As the recipient of Stephanie’s overt friendliness, he had to consider the possibility that he might have precipitated a jealous tantrum in Ian. Ian gripped her by the arm, and she tried to pull away.

But he had a tight hold on her. When she looked up at him, he thought she might have been angry, but instead she looked perplexed, as if Ian’s words were now puzzling her greatly. At last he let her go. The others had drifted on ahead. Dr. Langstrom was still talking about the phytosphere and possible ways to destroy it, none of them sounding the least bit plausible to Gerry. Stephanie became subdued, said a few quiet words to Ian, then turned around and walked back up Pisces Road. Ian watched her go, then came toward Gerry.

As his old friend closed the distance, Gerry excused himself—rather abruptly, if Dr. Langstrom’s surprise was any indication—and joined the god of good times.

“Everything all right?” he asked.

Ian looked at him for several moments, apparently fighting to contain a strong emotion. “She’s tired, that’s all. She gets moody if she has too much excitement.”

10

In the third week of July, Glenda stepped out her back door into the darkness and turned on her flashlight. The beam cut through the gloom and fell in an amorphous circle on the trees at the end of the yard. Nearly half the leaves had fallen; the other half hung limply from their branches.

Her watch said five p.m., and it should have been light, but it was dark, and the darkness was doing something to her. She didn’t feel like Glenda Thorndike anymore. Glenda Thorndike was always bold as brass. But now she felt…perpetually unsettled.

Where the hell was Leigh? She swung her flashlight toward her neighbor’s house. She shook her head.

Was he hiding? Dead? Or had he just gone somewhere, maybe to his folks’ place?

She proceeded across the patio onto the grass. The grass smelled funky and was slippery underfoot. It had rotted, like lettuce in a fridge. She walked to the toolshed and got the spade. With the spade in one hand and the flashlight in the other, she proceeded to the rear of the lot.

The woods looked like something out of a horror movie. Her heart pulsed with fear. She was afraid of bears. They got a few down from Jordan Lake every so often. With the forest dead, would the bears be hungry and come down into Old Hill looking for something to eat? Would a hungry bear consider her fair game?

“Live a day at a time,” she murmured into the dark.

She shone her flashlight at a maple tree. After three weeks without light, the wilted leaves hung like sleeping bats, their green cellulose as pliant as limp balloons, the tree giving up the ghost as it eased into sapless purgatory. One maple might not look so strange—but they were all like that.

She stopped halfway to the woods. Did she want to go in there to get the toy box? She never went into the woods at night. But of course it wasn’t night. It was five o’clock in the afternoon.

She glanced at Leigh’s house once more. God, this darkness. It penetrated her with horrible imaginings.

She gave up on going into the woods and, leaning the spade against the fence, walked over to Leigh’s house. If she knew her neighbor was there, maybe she wouldn’t be so afraid.

His car sat in the drive, hooked to its recharge cell. The blinds on his living room window were drawn and the light was on, but the light had been on like that for the past five days. She was really beginning to think something had happened to him.

She went to the front door. The console scanned her and asked if she were the owner, a guest, or a delivery person.

“It’s Glenda Thorndike.”

She read the screen. Glenda Thorndike: acknowledged. Please wait.

So Leigh was inside? “Leigh?”

She caught movement at the side of house.

Leigh emerged from the bushes. She swung her flashlight in his direction. He carried a rifle. His face was slack, as if the last several days had taken their toll on him.

“It’s you,” he said with obvious relief.

She lowered the flashlight. “I thought you were inside.”

“You’re alone?” He peered past her shoulder. “Where are the kids?”

“In the house.” She motioned at his weapon. “What are you doing with a rifle?”

“Turn off the flashlight.” He cast a nervous glance toward the road. The corners of his lips turned downward and he raised his chin. His eyes narrowed in suspicious perusal of the thoroughfare.

“What’s wrong? Why were you at the side of the house?” She glanced out at the highway. “What are you doing?”

He continued looking at the road. “Just being cautious.”

She turned off her flashlight. “Have you been going to work? Your car’s always in the drive.”

“I’ve been off for a while now. I’m going to weather this thing at home.”

She gave him a hint of her own apprehension. “I just wanted to make sure you were here. I thought something might have happened to you.”

He turned to her. He tried to smile but his expression crumbled, and he looked as if he were going to be physically sick.

“Leigh, what’s wrong?”

“I did something stupid.”

“What?”

He looked away. “I told a couple of guys at work I had a stash.”

“A stash? What kind of stash?”

“Food. Water. Basic supplies.” He rubbed the back of his neck. “We were just sitting around talking about the shroud…and how people were preparing for it. And I let it slip.” He shook his head. “I’m a total idiot.”

She gave him a sympathetic grin. “I’m sure they all have their own stashes.”

“Glenda… I saw this thing coming a long time ago. I never trusted the Tarsalans. I’ve been stocking up for the last three months, since the minute the negotiations got rocky. I knew they were going to try something. And these guys at work—they’re always so full of themselves. We were talking about the shroud… and I had something to brag about for a change, so I bragged.” He shook his head and glanced out to the highway again. “Now I realize it was a big mistake. I keep thinking they’re going to come to my house and take everything I have. I haven’t slept. My whole cycle is screwed up.”

He lapsed into silence.

She tried to be helpful. “Where do these guys live? Do they live far?”

“In Raleigh.”

“And you think they’re going to come all the way out here and raid your house?” She shook her head.

“Doesn’t that sound a little… crazy?”

“It’s just this one guy, Jamie… the last day I worked, the way he looked at me. He knew I was taking time off. Just the way he was looking at me. Like he had plans for me. Like he was going to hook up with these other guys, Lars and Perry, and they were going to come out… I wouldn’t put it past them, Glenda.

These guys are real assholes.”

“Yes, but how much of a stash do you have? All the stores are closed. Would it be worth their while?”

“I’ve got two fifty-gallon barrels of fresh water. I’ve got candles, and boxes of ammunition for my rifle. I bought a lot of dried-food dinners from a specialty place in Raleigh, those little vacu-packed ones. I’ve got a hundred rolls of toilet paper. I know that might sound stupid… but toilet paper is something you don’t want to do without.”

“Jeez, Leigh. I really don’t have more than enough supplies to last me a week now.”

Leigh’s eyes narrowed in speculation. “If you guys get hungry, I’ve got tons.”

She nodded, trying to swallow her pride. “The government relief truck didn’t come to the school yesterday.”

“I’ve got an extra rifle, too. You know how to use a rifle?”

“My dad used to take me partridge hunting. Back when I was a kid in Kansas.”

“Because you should really have a rifle in the house.”

“I hate to ask you for a handout.”

“The food reserves in this country have been horribly managed.”

“Bayard’s doing everything he can.”

“Not really.”

“He’s downed a total of thirty killer satellites. We’re chipping away at them.”

Leigh shook his head. “That doesn’t help the food situation, does it?”

His complexion was pale, and he had great dark patches under his eyes. Despite his boasts of more than enough food, he looked as if he had lost weight. He smelled like he hadn’t bathed in days, and his face was unshaven.

“Leigh, why don’t you come over and sit with us for a while?”

Leigh drifted for a few seconds, staring at the dead grass; then his eyes narrowed and the corners of his lips tightened. He looked like an entirely different man. “I would like to see Jamie try,” he said darkly. He turned to her. “Let me get that rifle.”

As he went inside, the lights turned on automatically. Their glow spilled onto the front stoop. The begonias in the terra-cotta planters had died. The ivy covering the side of the house was nothing more than a dry, spidery track.

Leigh came back a few moments later with the rifle and a plastic bag. “Here. I hope you won’t have to use it, but you never know.” He held up the plastic bag. “And here’s three freeze-dried dinners and a few

boxes of ammo. Put the freeze-dried dinners in boiling water and they cook up nicely. If you need more, let me know. I’ve got a stash in the basement, plus some stuff buried out behind the shed.”

She took the rifle and bag. “Thanks.” She inspected the rifle, a Remington. “It’s pump action?”

“You ever fire one before?”

“No. Just bolt action.”

He took the rifle and demonstrated how to use it, then handed it back. “It’s got a four-round magazine.

It’s not the best rifle, but it’s not the worst, either.”

When she finally went back home with her rifle, food, and ammo, she had a lot of jittery new thoughts, ones she knew she wouldn’t have if it were broad daylight. Thoughts of Jamie, Lars, and Perry. Thoughts of Leigh going beserko on her. Of everybody going crazy because of the damn dark. But most of all she thought of how Leigh had a stash buried behind the shed. Because if worse came to worst… She nodded to herself. Yes, if worse came to worst.

She heard about people getting into confrontations. Fighting over food. Even killing each other for it. But she never got in a confrontation herself. She talked to Tammy St. Martin, who lived over the west hill, and learned that every single store in Old Hill had been looted clean and there wasn’t even one can of beans left anywhere.

And then the mailman stopped coming and she phoned the post office, and the computerized voice on the other end told her that, because of labor difficulties, the post office would now implement a system of rotational mail deliveries, and that any given addressee couldn’t reasonably expect to get their mail more than once a week.

She learned from Whit that fully half the Old Hill Fire Department had quit.

“Everybody’s looking out for their own. Especially because this… this darkness is starting to go on for a while.”

Other strange things happened, and these things told her that the whole country was being affected.

Small, ridiculous things, details one wouldn’t normally think of, but details that seemed to be more frightening to her than the larger calamities that might eventually come. For one thing, she stopped getting bulk or spam e-mails, as if the people or corporations who generated this crap now had much more serious things to worry about.

On the television, people were indignant about the nearly total lack of food relief and ranted against the Western Secessionists for being so tightfisted with the assistance. Why wasn’t the government doing something to intervene?

Then there would be sound bites of farmers plowing under crops, or killing their livestock because they had nothing to feed them with.

Shortly after that, she couldn’t get any network television at all, just the Emergency Broadcast System, and that was too bad, because there was nothing but a test pattern on the EBS most of the time.

The radio still worked, though, and that’s how she got her news.

There was news of how the electrical utility workers were deserting their jobs and management was struggling to hang on, but it was hard because people had to spend a lot of time looking for food and the other essentials of survival, and couldn’t spend a lot of time at work. She got news from the Internet, and learned that there had been a cascading blackout in the West affecting forty million people. Then she got the scare of her life because the power went out in Wake County, and the blackout lasted five hours.

Also, a few buildings burned to the ground downtown, set alight by looters, and no firemen came to put them out.

So, little by little things got worse, but out here on the highway she and her kids remained okay, because Leigh kept giving them food. She started filling empty pails and jars with tap water and storing them downstairs in the basement in case the water stopped working. She tried to get through to Gerry every day, but never could. The power went out again, and this time the utility told the customers it wasn’t their fault; that they were caught in the middle of a cascade, and they were having these cascades because there simply wasn’t the maintenance staff to keep the electrical equipment properly serviced.

And then the Internet went down, right around the time the radio went down, so she had no idea what was going on. The servers across the country weren’t adequately connecting to each other. On certain evenings she couldn’t get the news site, and finally she couldn’t get anything at all, not even her home page.

This particular brand of Armageddon, at least at first, was of a slow and creeping kind, but it was pernicious. It was formally announced, on one of the few evenings the radio came back on, that fully ninety percent of next year’s crops had been lost, and that many livestock had already starved to death.

Things couldn’t survive without light.

When Leigh told her that there had been several home invasions over in Willington—people just trying to find some food—she tried to buy stronger locks for her doors, and even traveled all the way to Raleigh to find a locksmith who was open. But it seemed as if locksmithing, as a profession, had entirely disappeared, and she was forced to make do with the crappy old locks she already had on her doors.

11

Are you afraid of the dark? This question kept parading through Glenda’s mind once the rolling blackouts became a more permanent feature of their day-to-day living. And she was sure it was the same all over the country. Twelve hours of night was one thing. But at the end of that twelve hours, daylight was supposed to come back. Now it didn’t. Not with the power off most of the time. It was dark twenty-four hours a day. The days had stretched into weeks, and the weeks had stretched into the first month, and they had received only occasional blips of power every now and again. They were officially at war with the Tarsalans, but most of it was happening up there, beyond the black skin of the shroud, while down here it just got darker and darker, and colder and colder, so that on a few occasions it had actually snowed, right here in North Carolina, in the middle of summer.

Her kids sat on the floor around the living room coffee table playing chess because it was the only “board” game they owned. All their other games were electronic, and with no electricity they couldn’t play them. They played by candlelight and she watched them with low-level apprehension because everything was running out—food, medicine, electricity—and she didn’t know how much longer she could hang on.

She could be grateful for one thing only: Leigh next door was providing them with food every now and again. But Leigh was getting that look in his eyes, like a boy who had a high school crush, and she was afraid that he was going to do something stupid, like make a pass at her, and then she wouldn’t be able to accept his food anymore.

She hated it all. But mainly it was the dark. It was like a chronic disease, something that made her feel not only anxious but also under the weather, as if she were suffering from the weakness of persistent anemia.

Even worse was her loneliness. God, how she wanted Gerry. She sipped her cold chamomile tea. She wanted to be pressed against his tallness. She wanted to feel his arms around her. She wanted to tell him she was sorry for exploding like that.

She was just thinking she might try the fone again, which had become like a talisman of futility to her, when she noticed light coming through the front window.

She looked out the window and saw firelight far to the west. Something was burning? She walked to the door, opened it, and went out onto the porch. She gazed to the west and saw the glow of what must have been a considerable conflagration just over the hill. Was that Tammy St. Martin’s place burning?

Tammy with her two little girls, and her husband, Denny, who was with the National Guard and trying to keep the peace in Raleigh? Jake came out onto the porch and, after a moment, so did Hanna.

“Is it a house fire?” said Jake.

“I think it must be the St. Martin place. I hope Tammy and her girls are okay.”

“Where’s the fire department?”

It was a good question, but one she already knew the answer to. Who’s afraid of the dark? They all were, including the men in the local fire department. People were afraid, and fear was driving them—driving them as much as the darkness. People weren’t showing up for their jobs. She was going to the nursing home only when she felt like it. All the stores were closed. The banks were closed.

Commerce, for the moment, had been suspended. And people were starting to fight each other. She glanced at Leigh’s place. Leigh had the right idea. Stock up, hunker down, and hope for the best.

“Maybe we should go up and help,” suggested Hanna.

Glenda looked around the yard, then along the highway, then out into the farms and fields beyond the highway.

“I think we should stay put.”

“Are they going to let it burn to the ground?” asked Jake.

“Kids, we’ve got to be real careful with those candles.”

She then saw another source of light, blue flashing police lights coming over the hill to the east, and a second later Sheriff Maynard Fulton’s police cruiser appeared. It came racing down the highway at seventy or eighty miles per hour, and in addition to her fear of the darkness, she now felt her long-standing fear of the sheriff. An old truck, one that bumped and rattled along the road, followed the sheriff’s cruiser, and she recognized the truck as that of the sheriff’s younger brother, Buzz Fulton. She felt an additional old fear, the fear of Gerry’s alcoholism. Because wasn’t Buzz Gerry’s favorite drinking

buddy in Old Hill? And hadn’t they gotten so magnificently plastered on more than one occasion that Sheriff Fulton had had to intervene? And hadn’t Sheriff Fulton then eyed her in an uncomfortable fashion when she had come to pick Gerry up in the drunk tank?

“Kids, get inside. Don’t let them see us.”

“Mom, it’s just the sheriff.”

“Don’t you think I know that?”

She herded her kids inside and shut the door, just as the Fulton brothers sped by.

She hurried to the kitchen window where, in a moment, she got a view of the cruiser and truck hurtling west on the highway toward Tammy’s place. She gripped the edge of the counter for support.

She watched the fire burn for the next fifteen minutes, and her shoulders eased. At last she went back to the living room and sat in Gerry’s easy chair. She liked sitting in the chair because it had his smell. She thought the emergency was over, and that they could go back to the apprehension and ennui of total darkness twenty-four–seven. But then, glancing out the living room window, she saw headlights swinging back down the highway, coming from Tammy St. Martin’s place, and the two feared vehicles finally came up her drive; first the cruiser, then the truck.

Her body stiffened because she knew Fulton possessed all those characteristics you didn’t want in a cop. He was a man who was liable to abuse his power at the first opportunity.

She sprang from Gerry’s chair and rushed to the kitchen. She pulled their few cans of food from the shelves, shoved them into a canvas bag, quickly took it down to the basement, and hid it among all the boxes, then hurried upstairs just in time to hear Fulton knock at the front door.

“Kids, let me do the talking,” she said.

She smoothed her hair, walked to the front door, and opened it.

Fulton looked thin. He was a square-jawed man with a mustache, and squarish aquamarine eyes atop squarish red cheeks. His flashlight printed a cream circle on the porch step, and in its glow she saw an expression of mistrust on his face. Buzz came up behind the sheriff.

“We thought we’d check up on you, Glenda,” said Maynard.

“Howdy, Glenda,” said Buzz.

“Buzz here was telling me you usually go down to Marblehill around this time of the year, so we really didn’t expect to find you here.”

“No, we’re here.”

“I guess you would be,” said Buzz, “with Gerry stuck up on the Moon and all.”

“Matter of fact,” said the sheriff, “I’m glad you’re here. Gives us a chance to tell you about the changes we’ve been making.”

“Changes? What changes?”

“I wish they’d at least get radio up and running again,” said Maynard. “Me and Buzz have been doing a lot of door-to-door. And I’m getting a bit tired of it. Mind if we step inside?”

“I’d prefer if you didn’t.”

“Now, Glenda, you got to learn to trust the sheriff. It wasn’t your fault that I had to throw your husband in the drunk tank so often. I was only trying to help him.”

“You insulted him repeatedly. You made passes at me. And now you think I’m supposed to trust you, Maynard?”

“Oh, come on, Glenda,” said the sheriff. “Gerry can take a little kidding. That’s all it ever was. And you should be thanking us for coming round. We thought you’d be in Marblehill. Why ain’t you down there?

That’s where I’d be if I had half a chance. Buzz here tells me it’s quite a place. Huge. With a pool and tennis courts.”

“My husband’s decision to take Buzz down there three years ago was a mistake. Buzz, you were a bad influence on him.”

Buzz frowned. “He was a bad influence on his own self. He was the one doing all the drinking.”

“He embarrassed himself in front of his brother, his sister-in-law, and their kids. All because you were there to egg him on.”

“Let’s not dig up old dirt,” said the sheriff, breaking in. “We’re just here to check up on you, Glenda, that’s all. Because… truth be told, it’s getting harder to keep the peace in Wake County. I’ve had to deputize some of the boys, Buzz here included. Lot of people don’t know what’s going on, what with radio and TV being down. So I might as well tell you; we’re more or less on our own in Old Hill. Court’s been closed down. All the stores have been closed down. And because of this Western Secessionist thing, the delivery of emergency food supplies has been reduced to a trickle. Mayor’s gone away, we’re not sure where. Fire department’s gone AWOL. And I don’t mean to alarm you, but there have been a lot of home invasions in this area lately. The murder rate has climbed a bit. And it’s not because of the criminal element. People are trying to find enough food.” He glanced over at Leigh’s house. “How’s your neighbor? He bothering you at all?”

“Why would he bother me?”

“Pretty woman like yourself… Everyone knows about you and Leigh.”

“I resent that. There’s nothing between us. I’m a happily married woman.”

“Only your drunk of a husband has run off to the Moon.”

“Maynard, this is why I don’t respect you.”

Maynard’s face settled. “Well, Glenda, I think you better start respecting me soon. Because I’m the only one around here who can protect you. You’re a target, you realize that, don’t you? With law and order breaking down—and believe me, I’m doing my best to keep the peace—but with law and order breaking down, a lot of desperate young men, they find a pretty woman like you, and they realize they have nothing to lose, and they may want to have their way with you. So you’ve got to realize that you need a sheriff more than you ever have before. I don’t have to keep sheriffing. I’m doing it because I feel a responsibility to the people of Wake County. Lot of people want a sheriff around. Only we’re not getting any support out of Raleigh anymore. The chief is telling us we can walk if we want to, especially with the food situation getting so bad, and us having to look after our own families, but I feel it’s my civic responsibility to stay on.”

“Aren’t you noble?”

He shook his head. “Why do I even try with you, Glenda? In any case, the nature of my job has changed. The Wake County Sheriff’s Department has undergone a… a…” He scratched his head. “What would you call it, Buzz? A restructuring, I guess? Folks understand they need a sheriff, and I do what I can for the Old Hill area, only, like I say, we’ve got no support from Raleigh—no food, no nothing—so if people want a sheriff’s department, they got to contribute. My officers need food. If you’ve got any extra food around—or maybe old Gerry has a couple stray bottles of bourbon.”

“There’s no alcohol in the house.”

“Okay, okay. Don’t get so defensive.”

“And we don’t have any food. We’re starving like everybody else.”

“Then you know… there are other ways a pretty young woman like yourself can contribute.”

And here it was, what she knew he was going to get around to sooner or later—and Buzz, oddly, looking away, as if he were embarrassed by it but nonetheless willing to tolerate it.

“Get off my property, Maynard.”

“It just comes down to a question of whether you want my protection or not. We got Tammy and her kids in the cruiser. Her house burned down and she has nowhere else to go. Denny is God knows where.

A few days ago we asked her for food, but she didn’t want to give us any, and now her house burned down, because, you know, we can’t protect everyone; just the people who are willing to cooperate with us. Wouldn’t it be a shame if your house burned down too?”

Her insides shriveled in fear as she understood the game he was playing. “Maynard…please…I’ve got no food. And for God’s sake, I’m a married woman.”

“That ain’t stopping Tammy. She knows what she has to do to survive.”

“Please… just go.”

“You think about it, Mrs. Thorndike. Your situation’s similar to Tammy’s. You don’t have your husband around to protect you. You have only the sheriff.”

At work a few days later, Glenda pushed a food cart down the hall. The cart had stale tea biscuits on it, and an urn full of weak tea. The place stunk. The cleaning staff didn’t come anymore. It was only her and Whit trying to keep the place running. She lifted a biscuit and shoved it into her mouth. The place was dark and she had to wheel the cart down the hall using a flashlight. She saw another flashlight up ahead.

Her own beam sketched out Whit’s tall figure.

As Whit reached her, he said, “Mrs. Waters is dead.”

“Do you need help moving her?”

“It’s already done. Help yourself to another biscuit. And take a few for your kids.” Whit shook his head.

“I don’t know how much longer we can stay on, Glenda. There’s not much we can do.”

“So only twenty-seven residents left now?”

“Twenty-six.”

“And you’ve tried contacting their loved ones?”

He didn’t answer. In fact, he switched to another topic entirely, one he had grown obsessed with over the last couple of days. “I’m afraid those kids might come back. One of them has a gun.”

“If you have to defend yourself… I mean, if they give you no choice…”

“Why are they coming here anyway?”

Glenda shrugged. “I guess they think we have food.”

He motioned at the tea biscuits. “You call that food?”

“I wonder where their parents are?”

Whit reached in his pocket. “Take the keys to the dispensary. We’ve got asthma drugs in there.”

She was elated by the offer because she had thought often about the Cedarvale dispensary. She took the keys, shoved them in her nursing uniform pocket, stood on her toes, and kissed him on the cheek.

“Thanks, Whit.”

“Haven’t been in touch with my family for years,” he said. “I have a brother in Detroit. Maybe I’ll head up there.”

So. There it was. The inevitable. “That’s it? I don’t have to come anymore?”

He looked away. “I appreciate you hanging on as long as you have.”

“It’s just that… my kids.”

“You don’t have to apologize, Glenda.”

“Then maybe after today—”

“I’m thinking of moving everybody up to 3C. To the single rooms. Everybody’s too spread out now.

I’m going to shut down the elevators and barricade the stairwells. We’ll put all the food in the sterile room. If those kids come…” He trailed off, not finishing his thought.

“How long do you think the food’s going to last?”

He shrugged and raised his eyebrows. “Maybe another ten days.”

“Do you need help moving people? I could stay if you want.”

“Go to your children. Leave this cart to me.”

“Can I charge my car one last time?”

“You don’t have to ask. And you can come back and recharge it any time.”

She gave the cart to Whit, and hugged him.

She then negotiated the dark corridors with her flashlight.

She went to the dispensary and took all the asthma medicine she could find.

Next she went to the garage and charged her car. She checked the gauge on the generator and saw that it was good for another fifteen charges.

She drove the car herself—no satellite connections to drive the car for her anymore—and wondered if she would ever have to worry about getting another job again.

12

Having told everybody in the mayor’s office of his defection, Dr. Luke Langstrom now sat on the edge of his seat, elbows resting on the table, his upper lip hoisted in a tight smile, his blue eyes sitting like insensible marbles behind his narrowed eyelids. Gerry had that old familiar sensation that, while he had been fogging his brain with the ether of his own confused musings, someone else had comprehended the situation with the crispness of a high-powered microscope and had then pulled the rug out from under his feet.

He glanced at Malcolm Hulke, gauging the mayor’s reaction. The mayor gazed at the Martian with wide, perplexed eyes. Then it was over to Mitch Bennett, the AviOrbit representative. Mitch’s lips had twisted into a tremulous pout, and he looked like a sensitive schoolboy who had just been teased beyond endurance.

Ian Hamilton, smelling of last night’s drunk and sporting his rawhide cowboy hat, had his unshaven chin thrust forward and his brow set in an angry frown. “That’s the biggest bullshit story I’ve ever heard, Luke. Did Neil Thorndike put you up to this?”

The Martian shifted. “I won’t deny that Dr. Thorndike’s signature was on the drop. I’m honored that such a distinguished scientist thinks he can put my modest talents to good use.”

“So have they confirmed through genetic analysis that the chromosomal makeup of the xenophyta carapace might in fact be derived from the Martian specimens you’ve studied?” asked Gerry, wanting only to find out what he could.

“I’m not at liberty to say.”

“Luke, we’re a team,” said Ian. “Just the other day you were telling me how you were personally behind Gerry a hundred percent.”

“I am. And I wish Gerry the best of luck.”

“Why can’t you discuss the carapace with us?” asked the mayor, his tone sounding as if he had bitten a lemon.

“The National Science Foundation Task Force on the Phytosphere thinks it’s better if we keep our research confidential. They prefer I use the American Legation’s drop system now.”

The mayor fought hard to disguise his disappointment. “I guess we can’t stop you.”

“The smug sons of bitches,” said Ian. “Gerry, you should send Neil a drop and tell him to butt out. He realized you had a good thing, so he came in and took over, like he always does.”

“I don’t look at it that way, Ian. We’re all in this together.”

But Ian wasn’t satisfied. “What did he give you, Luke? I know how Neil works. What’s on offer here?”

The Martian scientist shifted again. “Can’t we be civilized about this? Gerry’s right. Ultimately, we’re all trying to do the same thing. Defeat the phytosphere.”

“What Neil can’t steal, he always tries to buy,” said Ian. “What was your price? Everybody’s got a price.”

Langstrom frowned again. “The point is, this whole lunar effort is ridiculous. You have no money. You have no resources. And your chief scientist”—he nodded at Gerry—“is stalled in his primary research.

I’m not even convinced his primary research should be the main focus. I think the flagella will ultimately prove to be a side issue. Who cares if they behave one way in the lab, and differently when they’re in the phytosphere? I don’t think it matters.” The Martian’s tone grew defensive. “You’ve forgotten the most basic scientific principle, Gerry, that of Occam’s razor. The simplest theory is the best theory. All I can see of your research so far is that you’re trying to complicate—unnecessarily—what is really a simple problem. Take a page from your brother. The thing’s an organism. Therefore, it can be killed. And yes, it’s an interesting phenomenon to see the flagella behave differently in different environments. But solving that problem has no ultimate value, at least not in terms of destroying the phytosphere.”

In spite of himself, Gerry couldn’t help feeling hurt. “And my brother’s approach is so much better?”

“I can only speak in the broadest general terms because of the confidentiality issue, but in the wide spectrum of things, yes, it is.”

“And in the wide spectrum of things, what is he generally planning to do?”

Langstrom frowned. “For one thing, he has a plan. You don’t. I would even go so far as to call his plan a procedure; one with clear directions and logical steps that technicians and military personnel can follow.

Step one is to identify the chemical and biological makeup of the phytosphere, which he’s done, right down to mapping its entire genome, something we on the Moon don’t have the equipment or expertise to do. Step two is to break down its defenses; in other words, find a way through its carapace. That’s where I come in with my omniphage. Step three is the introduction of a comprehensive toxic agent that will ultimately prove fatal to the phytosphere.”

Gerry shook his head. “You see, Luke, that’s where I disagree with my brother’s approach. I’ve studied all kinds of phytoplankton. They develop quick resistance to any kind of toxin and, in many cases, certain toxins will promote their growth. And let’s not forget, a toxin will be the first thing the Tarsalans look for.

I mean, my God, here’s a race whose individual members have two brains apiece. It’s been proven by scientific study that they outthink humans again and again. And you honestly believe they haven’t thought of a toxic approach yet? You can’t fool the Tarsalans.”

“From what I understand, your brother doesn’t plan on fooling the Tarsalans. He plans on fooling the organism itself. And I believe he’s going to be successful. Your brother’s a brilliant scientist. He has the greatest minds behind him. He has the full resources of the United States at his disposal. He’s had wide experience at managing large projects. Unlike you, he’s a goal-oriented problem-solver. I’m sorry, Gerry, but you sit inside a problem, look around, admire the view, meditate…and nothing concrete gets done. I’ll admit that perhaps at some time in the future, when this crisis is over, the flagella might bear a closer, if extraneous, investigation. But right now we have to focus on destroying the phytosphere, not just staring at it as if it were an intriguing plaything.”

“This toxin is going to turn out to be the dead end, Luke, mark my words. And I don’t see how you can’t recognize the importance of the flagella. The flagella are where we should begin, because they’re the only part of the xenophyta’s body that function outside the carapace. And if I were going to use a toxin, I wouldn’t waste my time trying to bite through the carapace with an omniphage. I would go directly for the flagella apertures, because the apertures offer an already existing means of ingress. Neil thinks he can bash his way in anywhere. He’s always favored the frontal assault.”

“That’s because it works.”

“I believe his methods often lead to blind spots. Sometimes it’s better to step back. Sometimes it’s better to take the wide view. The kind of science Neil practices may be too goal-oriented. You have to let the science speak to you, not the other way around. You can’t dictate to the science, the way Neil does.” He shook his head and sighed. “I’m sorry, Luke, but you’re backing the wrong horse.”

“At least your brother has a horse.”

Gerry glanced at the others, then turned to the elderly Martian. “Then fine. Go, Luke. We don’t need you. Getting through the carapace isn’t going to make any difference in the long haul.”

“It’s Dr. Thorndike’s belief that it might make all the difference in the world.”

Gerry was in the Alleyne-Parma Observatory later that night. This… this tourist attraction was his primary research platform. Heaven’s Eye rose beside him, done up like a sea captain’s telescope, with gold curlicues and florets along the side. Maybe Luke was right. Maybe the Moon effort was ridiculous.

The observatory staff had gone home. He glanced at his watch. Just past midnight. The best time of day to think.

He sat in front of the monitors—the special ones the techies at AviOrbit had hooked up to Heaven’s Eye for him—and he had the distinct feeling, impossible yet magical, that Glenda would emerge from the shadows and tell him to come to bed. He was worried. If only he could get through. He thought of his den at home. She would come into his den, and she would say, “Come to bed, Ger, it’s getting late.”

And…and…He looked into the shadows of the observatory and realized he would give anything to see her one more time.

He turned back to the monitors and concentrated. He had to go back to asking basic questions. And he guessed the most basic question was this: Why were some spots on the phytosphere dark while others were light?

Gerry’s shoulders stiffened. He leaned forward and looked at the phytosphere more closely. “Good question, Gerry.”

Yes, here it was, the quiet nighttime inspiration. He remembered Luke Langstrom’s words. You sit inside a problem, look around, admire the view, and meditate. Maybe that was the only way. Maybe true insight came only to those who allowed their brains to function on several levels, in the wee hours of the morn.

The color variations proved elusive. He chose a couple of simple function keys and heightened the contrast. The difference between light and dark became more pronounced. Possible answers? Varying thickness. What would cause varying thickness in the phytosphere? Barometric pressure? Did the phytosphere have its own weather system? Sitting on top of the troposphere, with tentacles dropping down into the troposphere’s cold trap for moisture supply, did the phytosphere possibly echo, in a faint way, the disturbances that were happening in that real weathermaker?

He shook his head. He didn’t have the data to answer this question, and until he could measure the real-time weather in the troposphere against the mottling effect in the phytosphere, this particular hypothesis would have to remain in the realm of speculation.

Funny, the way the brain thought if you just let it go. Is this what the Tarsalans did? Let their brains go?

Both their brains? When he let go, questions linked themselves in long chains. The next link in the chain of this particular problem came to him unbidden: Was there a pattern to the color variation?

He focused on the real-time footage that was coming in directly from Heaven’s Eye.

He had to watch it for a half hour before he could say with any certainty that the shades were actually shifting—so slowly that the change was nearly imperceptible to the human eye.

He turned his attention to the archival footage of the shroud, over a month’s worth of nonstop round-the-clock digitized images, the kind of long-term observations he liked to watch so much. He keyed in a command that brought it right to the start, two days after the initial meeting in the H. G. Wells Ballroom.

He played the footage, sped it up—sometimes patterns became more apparent when they were accelerated.

He watched for the next hour, compressing a full day into sixty minutes. And he definitely saw dark patches change into light patches, and vice versa, but the attenuations were too random for him to definitively conclude that there was any pattern.

So he compressed a week into sixty minutes, and by the time three o’clock rolled around he had seen it seven times, an amorphous band of lighter coloration passing from east to west in a definite pattern.

Toward the equator, the band of lighter patches broke apart, and some even whirlpooled, as if caught in a weather system. He was somewhat disappointed. He felt fairly certain that what he had here was a kind of weather system inside the phytosphere. That it seemed to be on a daily cycle with a twenty-four-hour periodicity made him suspect it might be artificial, and that the Tarsalans had created it—maybe as a housecleaning tool for the phytosphere, or perhaps as one of its operational aspects.

He shook his head. He wasn’t sure how he could turn this to his advantage. He sighed as his shoulders sank. Was this another flagella-type dead end? Was the proper approach just to kill the phytosphere any way they could, rather than try to understand it first?

What could be another possible reason for the change in coloration, other than an artificially created weather system? A chemical change? What was an indicator of chemical change? Heat. Bingo. How could he measure heat? He would need to hook up some infrared equipment to this appalling tourist attraction.

He left the telescope and went to the circular hall ringing the observatory. He passed the washrooms, the gift shop, and finally came to the observatory office.

In the office, he phoned Mitch Bennett—he didn’t care what time it was; he had to talk to Mitch and find out whether this was doable.

“Hello?” The tone of Mitch’s greeting was worried, as one might expect from a phone call at three o’clock in the morning.

Gerry told him what he wanted.

“Infrared?” said Mitch, as if the request were impossible. “Have you met Ira Levinson? He’s the one everybody’s always mistaking for a brick wall.”

“I just want to get a better idea of what we’re looking at in terms of temperature fluctuations in the phytosphere. I could be on to something here, Mitch.” Or he could be grasping at straws.

“Yes, but we don’t have any infrared units out of mothballs right now. Years ago we used infrared for tracking, but since we upgraded to singularity drives, we haven’t used the infrared stuff in… in decades.

And I’m sure most of it’s been sold off.”

“Most?”

Mitch paused. “Ira and I have never gotten along.”

“Yes, but is there any left?”

“Hang on, let me check my waferscreen… it’s been acting funny lately. I’ll see if I can…” Mitch disappeared from the vidscreen and all Gerry got for a few seconds was a view of rumpled sheets. Then Mitch came back, sat on the bed, adjusted the vidcam upward, and Gerry saw his sleep-swollen face.

“I’m just looking at the record right now…. That stuff’s expensive.” Mitchseemed to be going through a long list. “Ira’s not going to want us dicking with it. If there’s any left, I’m sure he’s planning to sell it.

And anything earmarked for liquidation…He’s obsessed with the bottom line, Gerry. We’re in a competitive, high-stakes, frontier industry.”

“Yes, but can you—”

“Hold on, hold on… I’ve got it, and it’s…” He watched Mitch’s brow fold with misgiving. “Ah, shit.”

As the diminutive AviOrbit representative hardly ever swore, the expletive indicated something truly awry.

“What?”

“We’ve got a unit crated in one of the orbiting warehouses. The retrieval expense…he’s not going to like it.”

“Can we take the sky elevator up and check it out?”

Mitch paused. “Gerry… let me be blunt.” A look of intense skepticism came to Mitch’s eyes. “Ira isn’t so convinced by you.”

Alarm pinched Gerry’s chest. “Why? He doesn’t even know me.”

“It’s just that there’s this impression… and it’s been going around… and he’s gotten wind of it. Ira’s a technocrat, an engineer. What do you expect? He thinks pure science is a waste of time.”

“If it’s just old junk, I don’t see why we can’t take a look at it.”

“Yes, but this particular unit in the catalog here is a light-gathering optical refractor. We’d have to hook it up to an IR array and conduit, and that’s going to take an engineering staff, which in turn means a proposal, which in turn means Ira. Remember Ira? He’s the guy people mistake for a brick wall.”

“Mitch, this is important. I’m not sure where it’s going, but I know it’s going somewhere.”

“Now, there’s a proposal Ira’s going to like.”

“Let me talk to him.”

Mitch’s face reddened. “No… no. I better do the talking. We might not get along, but I know how to handle him.” He looked away with sudden despondency, as if he had abandoned all hope. “I’ll get into my shark cage, and I’ll make sure I have my stun gun, and that my will’s in order, and I’ll tell Ira that I’m not sure where we’re going, but that I think we’re going somewhere. And then I’ll pray.”

13

Glenda reached for Gerry’s side of the bed. She peered toward the alarm clock, hoping to see its dim blue digits, praying that the utility company might have restored power by this time, because wasn’t this going on a bit too long? Didn’t they understand that the dark freaked people out, and that to make people live in the dark all the time was simply too much?

All she saw, as she stared in the general direction of the alarm clock, was more darkness.

She pulled her hands close to her collarbones, curling into a fetal position.

She lay there for close to an hour, and that’s when the power came back on. She heard the electric baseboards crackling, heard her own voice on the answering machine, “Hi, this is the home of Glenda, Gerry, Jake, and Hanna Thorndike,” et cetera, et cetera, and at last heard the television go on, the president’s voice coming over the Emergency Broadcast System—yes, Bayard’s measured game-show cadences.

She sprang out of bed and hurried to the living room. She blinked in the light. She wasn’t used to seeing light. The lamp beside Gerry’s chair was on. So was the porch light. The fluorescent light above the kitchen sink was on and spilled its bluish glow over the dining room floor.

“Units of the First, Second, and Eighth Infantry Units have been moved into place, and there have been fierce clashes along the state borders, but so far the Army has yet to break the stranglehold. These three states house some of our largest emergency food supply depots. You can rest assured that I’m doing everything in my power to keep the supply lines open, and I consider the unilateral actions of Governors Fitton, Peters, and Marles, as well as their Western Secessionist supporters, to be criminal. I can pledge to the American people that all three governors will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law, once the situation is brought under control. Until such time, our relief efforts will be severely hampered, and at this point we can’t guarantee any of our previously scheduled relief drops, and ask you to bear with us while our military units attempt to regain control of these critical food stockpiles. Until such time, the First Lady and I offer our sincerest prayers, and urge you—”

And that was it, because with a percussive click and the trace flash of a sudden power surge, the electricity failed once again and the house was plunged into darkness.

“Mom?” Jake’s voice.

“It’s okay, sweetie.”

“Was the power back on?”

“For a bit. Go back to sleep.”

“I’m hungry.”

“I’m going to ask Leigh if he can give us some more food tomorrow.”

Because from the look of things, the government wasn’t going to come through anymore. From the look of things, the Western Secessionists were at last ruining the country. Which meant the food situation had just gone from bad to impossible. And come to think of it, why hadn’t the television woken Hanna up?

Hanna was sleeping way too much.

Glenda waited for her eyes to get used to the dark, then felt her way through the living room and went down the hall into Hanna’s room. Couldn’t see a thing—it was truly an absence of all light, especially when the power was off, that made things so difficult.

She stumbled into Hanna’s bed, her shin hitting its steel frame—a lot of bumps and bruises for everyone, wandering around in the dark all the time—and she heard Hanna’s deep and heavy breathing, her lungs crackling, always half inflamed. She sat on the edge of Hanna’s bed and put her hand on Hanna’s leg.

That’s when Glenda heard a truck coming down the highway. She thought it might be an Army truck bringing food relief. But then she recognized the steady putt-putt of a civilian truck, and wondered who would be driving down the highway in the middle of the night. The middle of the day? Which was it?

Headlight beams made squares of light on the wall, and as the truck drew closer, the squares moved, passed over Hanna’s shelf of stuffed animals, rested momentarily on her grade-five district-wide spelling bee plaque, and finally shifted obliquely as the truck pulled up Leigh Phelps’s driveway.

She got off the end of Hanna’s bed and walked to the windows. A pickup truck crunched up the gravel, two men riding in the back and one driving. They pulled up to Leigh’s house and got out. They had rifles—hunting weapons that she could see in the glow of the headlights—and she knew that Leigh’s fears had been justified after all, that the look he had seen in Jamie’s eyes had been enough.

It was a crossroads for her, because she had the extra rifle now, and knew how to shoot—all those summers partridge hunting with her father in Kansas—and it was the moral thing to do, get her rifle and stand shoulder to shoulder with her neighbor against these men, especially because she was planning to ask Leigh for food again tomorrow. But the risk was too great. She had to survive. Not for herself but for her children. She would not put herself in harm’s way, not unless it was for Hanna and Jake.

So she retreated from the window, fearful that they might have seen her face in the glare of the headlights. She sat on Hanna’s bed, gripped her daughter by the leg, and shook her. Hanna moaned, then said her usual, “One more minute,” but must have at last sensed something strange going on because she pushed herself up, cleared the hair from her face, and squinted at the glow of the headlights coming in through the windows.

“Sweetie, we have to go to the basement.”

“Why?”

“Remember what we talked about.”

Hanna’s sleepiness immediately lifted and her blank look of slumber was transformed into one of alarm.

They left Hanna’s room and walked down the hall to get Jake.

Jake was already up and looking out his own window, down on one knee, a yard back from the casement and well into the shadows so that any chance glare from the headlights wouldn’t catch his face.

He glanced over his shoulder as his mother and sister entered. He didn’t say a word, but his expression, at once solemn and concerned, with a knit to his tawny brow, revealed a boy who simply accepted, who had made the transition, who understood and was now resigned to the ways of this dark world.

He got up and lifted his Handheld Sport from his desk, a game-playing device that no longer worked because it got its recharge from sunlight.

He followed them down the hall to the basement stairs.

They descended the narrow, steep stairs into the shallow basement—more a storm cellar—and, as was so often the case these days, especially since the power had become intermittent, Glenda found herself in a world of touch. The banister was smooth and cool against her palm. The dank smell of the cellar permeated her nostrils. Her children creaked down the stairs behind her. Her foot hit the basement’s concrete floor with a light scuffing sound. She reached for her rifle, which she had leaned against the wall at the foot of the stairs.

And then it happened. What she had been dreading, but also what she had been expecting. The obvious outcome to all this buildup. Because hadn’t it been a long time now, and wasn’t the food situation just a bit much to take, especially when no one knew when it was going to end? Yes, the inevitable happened.

Gunfire—like the barking of dogs—erupted from next door. It was a sound she at first didn’t want to admit to herself, because it escalated the situation to an entirely new plane. The rifle shots made her skin crawl and her throat tighten, but at last she shook all feeling away because she knew she had to look after her children.

“Jake, will you hurry up?” she said in a small, panicked voice.

“I can’t see where I’m going.”

“Shhh.”

“Mom,” said Jake, “they’re not going to hear us over all that gunfire.”

How easily Jake accepted it all.

“Just move quickly and quietly to the back. Jake, grab onto my sleeve, and Hanna, you grab onto Jake’s.”

Forming a human chain, they walked in the darkness until they came to the back. More gunfire came from next door, and then a lot of shouting. Then there was one final shot, and all the shouting stopped.

They listened for a while. Nothing.

The phone rang upstairs. Her body stiffened. Who could that be? Maybe somehow Gerry had managed to get back, and he was phoning from somewhere on the “ph” phone. She was terrified because she thought the men next door might hear the ringing. She was eager to go answer so she could see if it was Gerry, but hesitant to move from her safe basement refuge.

At last, Glenda bolted from her crouched position on the floor and, feeling her way through the aisle of junk, came to the foot of the stairs. She crawled up the steep steps on all fours.

She came to the kitchen, rose to her feet, and got no farther than the table when someone shone a flashlight in through the front window. She froze and quickly backed up against the wall.

The flashlight beam penetrated through the living room to the dining room, and into the kitchen, where she saw it brightening first the cupboards, then the sink, then the floor. And all the while the handset part of the vidphone continued to ring on the dining room table, set to sing like a cardinal because she loved the sound of the cardinal so much.

The flashlight beam swung away, and its peripheral glow grew dimmer and dimmer, until finally the kitchen was dark again. She sprang from her hiding spot against the wall, and headed for the dining room table, where the phone continued to tweet like a cardinal. She got halfway there when the phone stopped ringing. Even though her good sense told her she had lost her chance, she lifted the phone anyway.

“Gerry?”

All she heard was silence.

She selected the call list to see who had phoned but the little screen remained blank. Who could it have been? Neil? Louise?

She rested the handset on the receiver and went downstairs, disappointed and close to tears. She felt her way through the dark to the back. Her kids sat crouched next to the downstairs refrigerator.

“Was it Dad?” asked Jake.

“I didn’t get it in time.”

Her kids said nothing.

She sat down.

“Are they still out there?” asked Jake.

“One came to the window and looked inside.”

All three lapsed into silence. She thought of all the other people hiding in the dark, in similar situations.

And then thought of the Western Secessionists, now making everything a lot harder.

14

At what point does a man lose faith in himself?

This question gnawed at Neil as he sat in his Coral Gables dining room with the rest of his family, listening to the gunfire outside. They sat in the dark. Candles flickered on the table. Ashley read a magazine on her waferscreen, the glow of the thing lighting her face. Melissa sat on the chaise longue painting her toenails pink. Morgan, his precious Morgan, had her chair pressed right against his. He had his arm around her, and she was scared—constantly frightened now, morbidly terrified, as if the dark were a monster that was just waiting for the chance to kill her.

At what point did a man lose faith, and realize that the problem he had decided to solve was simply too big to solve?

Louise gazed at him stoically, enduring the gunfire outside, but with a look in her eyes that told him it was unendurable. The dark outside was like a thing alive. It pressed in on them with the unstoppable force of a bad weather front. A day, a week, even two weeks, okay, they all knew it was going to be dark for a while. But a month? And now even more than a month? He was second-guessing himself constantly, and he knew it was because of the dark. He didn’t know what to tell his family about his progress, and he felt like he was letting Louise and the kids, the president, even the whole world down.

Outside, it was the haves against the have-nots. And damn those Western Secessionists. It wasn’t that there was no food; it’s just that there was no distribution. And everybody knew—yes, right down in their stomachs—that the existing food, the hoarded food, was indeed finite, and that next year’s crop was gone. People fighting over an ever-shrinking pile of food. The equation was simple. Why hadn’t the government prepared for it?

He got up and walked into the sunroom. He looked out across his swimming pool and saw flames reflecting on the water—a neighbor’s house burned up the street. Where were the firemen? He walked out the big French doors onto the patio. All his exotic shrubbery was dead. The ground stunk like rotten hay. He rounded the fountain and found the maid, Eva, boiling MREs on the barbecue because there was no electricity, at least not right now. He hoped that the neighbors wouldn’t smell them and come over for a handout.

He approached her. “Eva, I want you to know—you can go home to your people any time you like.”

Eva looked up. Her face was a mask of fear. She was neither young nor old, and yet her fear made her look ancient. “You want me to go?”

“Only if you want to.”

Even his manner of speaking had grown halting and unsure, and it was because he was always creeping around in the dark; he wasn’t a man who liked creeping around in the dark.

“What does ma’am say?”

“I just thought… a lot of people want to be with their families…”

“My family is in Colombia. And things aren’t so good there right now.”

The barbecue flickered and he saw the reflection of the flame dance on her face. The black pall of the phytosphere hovered in the sky. “You’re welcome to stay.”

Tears clouded her eyes. “Thank you, sir.”

As if he had offered her an ironclad guarantee that she would survive the phytosphere.

He turned and walked back to the house. He pushed his way in through the French doors only to find his wife coming out into the sunroom with that special phone they had given him, the one that sent its signal through a squadron of communications aircraft that were constantly aloft.

“It’s Bob Cruz,” she said, and hope danced in her eyes like a sad childhood remembrance.

He took the phone and pressed it to his ear. It was bulky and big, like a combat radio, and had a nubby black antenna. He had his usual reaction—a tightening of his esophagus, a spray of acid over the lining of his stomach, and a premonition of yet more bad news.

“Bob,” he said, the name dropping from his mouth like a dead bird from the sky.

“We’ve got Luke Langstrom on board. He’s working on the omniphage.”

Here was a border—one between good luck and bad, and for a split second he was balanced on the infinitesimal edge of either. The cards had again been dealt in his favor, and he felt within himself the distinct quality of good luck, elation mixed with relief, like a chill mixed with a fever.

“How soon does he think he can do an initial workup?”

“He says a few days.”

“And Gerry’s reaction?”

Bob paused. “No word.”

Neil hesitated, but then got down to business. “Does Langstrom have any preliminary ideas?”

“He’s already selected a designer organism from his old files. Apparently he’s designed dozens of omniphages like this. He uses them as surgical tools to study the guts of modern-day Aresphyta.”

A little more talk about the chemical teeth of potential omniphages, just so when he briefed the president and the secretary of defense he could give them a cohesive overall picture, and then he thumbed his special phone off. He looked at the phone, contemplating it the way he might a strange artifact. He put it on the table.

“Good news?” said Louise.

“Langstrom is working for us.” Neil shook his head. “I hope Gerry’s not too mad.”

Melissa looked up from her toenail painting. “Does that mean it’s going to get light again, Dad?”

How to answer his eldest daughter? He gazed at her in the candlelight coming from the table, and he momentarily wondered about her inner life, how she was dealing with the phytosphere, second by second, minute by minute—how she was coping with that sporadic and unnerving gunfire outside. Just who the hell was shooting? And did Miami really have so many guns? Melissa was losing her tan. Even that was something she would have to deal with.

“It’s a step in the right direction, hon.”

He heard a strange sucking sound from the kitchen. His wife and daughters glanced that way, their heads flicking in unison. He lifted the flashlight, walked past the dining room table, and entered the kitchen. The sucking sound came from the sink. He walked over, and further pinpointed the sound to the faucet. He recognized the sound. It was the sound of water pressure fading away.

Louise and the girls came into the kitchen. He turned on the cold-water tap and the sucking intensified.

He tried the hot-water tap, and the pipes below gurgled and burped, and the sound grew more and more distant as the pressure reversed itself and drained away into the main pipe outside.

He turned to Louise. It was a strange scene, Louise’s blond hair backlighted by the glow coming from the candles in the dining room, her face barely illuminated by the flashlight, and the three girls gathered around her, watching him expectantly, looking to him as the authority on all things technical.

He could only state the obvious. “The water’s…gone off.”

He took a few seconds to connect in his mind the series of events that might have led to this circumstance. How did water get to his house? He wasn’t even sure. Only that during either the filtration or actual pumping process, power was needed, and power, at best, was an intermittent resource these days.

“We have the pool,” said Louise.

Yes. And so they would drink pool water, and it would taste too much of chlorine, and it might make them sick, but what choice did they have? Pool water and army rations. This was the way it would happen. A slow and steady reduction, until the reduction was complete and life couldn’t continue. Had to dig in. The thought came to him suddenly. Find a defendable position, stock it, and dig in. Flashback to medieval times, when might made right, and those who survived were the meanest motherfuckers in the valley. Go up to his home in northern Georgia, Marblehill—even its name was tough—and protect his wife and girls for as long as he could until the reductions reduced them to the final repose of death.

He shook his head. He had to stop thinking that way. Negative thinking never got anybody anywhere.

In the next moment he stopped thinking anything at all, was only an organism reacting, not even necessarily interpreting what he was reacting to, just jerking to the floor at the sound of all the windows breaking, ducking instinctively even as he saw his family do the same, and only in that moment, as he felt the cool surface of the ceramic tile against his hands, did he understand that the house had been peppered with a hundred or so rounds of machine-gun fire despite the Morrison fighting vehicles protecting them out front. Who the hell were they up against? A question of the haves against the have-nots. A question of either starving to death or not starving to death. Especially now that the Western Secessionists had fouled things up.

“Louise?”

“Neil?”

“Girls?”

“We’re here, Daddy.”

“Ashley? Morgan?”

Responses from daughters number two and three—“I’m here, we’re here, I’m okay, we’re okay”—that he couldn’t really hear, because at that moment there came the chat-a-chat-a-chat of return machine-gun fire from their front drive, the gunner phrasing his counteroffensive with a nearly calypso rhythm, little bursts of fifty-caliber rounds for the next twenty seconds until it finally stopped, and the only sound was some people yelling far in the distance.

“Everybody stay here,” he said. “I’m going to see what’s going on.”

He crawled through the glass of the broken kitchen window, cutting himself, acknowledging the wetness of the blood on his hand, but too pumped up to feel the pain.

In the dining room, he got to his feet and ran hunched over to the den.

He got his gun, and he thought that this was the last thing he would ever have seen himself doing, skulking around his own house with a gun in his hand. He heard another burst of machine-gun fire, only this time it was several streets over—maybe gangs, maybe cops, rumors from the Morrison fighting vehicles out front, cops forming gangs, anarchy thriving in the growing lawlessness of the thickening phytosphere. How long before the Marines out in the Morrison fighting vehicles turned against them?

How long before things broke down completely?

He left the den, walked back into the dining room, then turned right and went into the sunroom. Shards of glass littered the floor. He scanned the backyard down to the canal and saw the Coast Guard vessel at his dock, the Escapade puny next to it, but couldn’t see any Coast Guard sailors aboard. Where had they all gone? AWOL? The flames from the house fire the next street over were bright now and, glancing to the right, he saw that the conflagration was flaming out of control. And the dark. An aging Martian scientist. That’s all he had to offer against this darkness.

He opened the French doors and stepped onto the patio. The patio was like a jigsaw puzzle of broken glass. Goddamn it, his family was a priority family. They shouldn’t have to live like this. Marblehill. Stock it. Block it. And dig in. Maybe phone some of his old Air Force buddies. He glanced at the pool and saw something floating in it. An alligator. Animals were acting bizarrely, boldly, because of the phytosphere.

He saw the flick of a reptilian tail, the glow of alligator eyes; funny, the way the eyes glowed like that, even in the blackness of the phytosphere. And maybe, just maybe, the alligator smelled blood, because wasn’t that blood over by the barbecue, and wasn’t that Eva lying amid a constellation of glowing coals?

He rushed over. Called her name.

But she didn’t answer, couldn’t answer, was too badly torn up to answer—frightening, the damage machine-gun rounds could do. She was hit somewhere in the chest but he couldn’t tell where. Her blood looked black on her black uniform, and the only blood he really saw was a spray of the stuff on her white collar. But he knew it had to be bad because a sucking sound came from her chest. Just like the sucking sound from the faucet. Alarm threatened to overwhelm him.

He had to grab onto her clothes because she was so limp, slippery with blood, and unable to brace herself. He carried her into the house, and as he entered the sunroom he heard splashing in the pool, the alligator now agitated. His family came out of the kitchen. Morgan cried. From the other two it was, “Oh my God,” the all-purpose refrain of their teenaged lingua franca. Louise immediately dug through the drawers of the buffet and pulled out linen napkins to use as pressure dressings, her petite ballerina’s body quivering like a leaf in the wind.

Neil felt as if he were in a dream, and that in this dream the things people said and did made no difference, that all the knee-jerk survival responses of the human race to this sinking ship of a calamity were going to add up to nothing. Nonetheless, he kept going. Even as Eva’s chest sputtered weakly, and even as blood got all over the expensive Persian carpet out in the front hall. The maid’s feet knocked over a vase. He opened the door.

What he saw before him was a scene of devastation. The soldiers had dug pits and were burning all the dead vegetation, so that, at the four corners of his once carefully manicured lot, smoldering craters sent ash and smoke into the air. Bullet holes riddled his sports car and the cherubs of the Italianate fountain now presided over basins that had been damaged by gunfire. In the light of the various neighborhood fires, his grass looked pale—not pale like the pale grass of August, but exsanguinated, as if the chlorophyll-carrying phloem within had been bled dry of their life-sustaining processes. The carefully stuccoed walls surrounding his property, painted an evocative shade of Tuscan gold, were now cracked and pocked, and great sheets had broken away to show the concrete underneath. Out beyond the gate he saw the Morrison fighting vehicles. Marines hid behind the vehicles, some on their stomachs, their rifles ready, another on one knee, all of them peering in the same direction, as if an intensely interesting spectacle unfolded down the street.

He walked with Eva in his arms, and he realized that he was tired. Physically exhausted, yes, but also spiritually drained, as if, like the phloem in his grass, he, too, had been bled dry. He glanced over his shoulder and saw his wife following, daintily picking her way down the steps, past the cars. He wanted to tell her to go back, but he found he didn’t have the energy. He put one foot after the other and kept heading for the front.

“Sergeant?”

The streetlights were out. A barricade of burning cars flamed three blocks away, where the neighborhood of the have-nots began. The sergeant turned, a black man he had gotten to know fairly well named Baskerville, grim-faced and scared, and not much older than Melissa. He turned so quickly that the red pinpoint of laser light from his scope skidded across the outside wall of the compound like a maniacal scarlet fairy.

“Get down, sir. They’ve made a flanking move.”

“Who?”

“We’re not sure. Some renegade officers from Miami-Dade, we think. They’ve got military-grade weapons. This whole neighborhood is sitting on a shitload of food, and I guess they want some.”

“Eva’s been shot. She needs a doctor.”

Baskerville crouched and loped over to the gate, his buddies letting go with a sudden and heart-stopping fusillade of gunfire to cover him.

Baskerville forcefully dragged Neil by the shirt back inside the compound. “Sir, I’m going to have to ask you to stay in the house. At least until we get this situation under control.”

“She’s bleeding to death. And the sailors from out back are gone.”

Baskerville looked at Eva. The soldier unclipped a flashlight from his belt.

“I knew they were going to bolt. Put her there.”

Neil put the maid on the ground. As he did so she quivered in pain. Baskerville shone the flashlight down the front of her uniform. He put the flashlight next to his knee and unbuttoned her blouse.

Louise approached from the house, and as she finally reached them she put her hand on Neil’s shoulder.

The sound from Eva’s chest wound grew fainter. At what point did a man lose faith in himself? The sound from her wound stopped. At what point did he realize that the forces ranged against him were far too large to handle? Marblehill. Stock it and lock it. The immense stillness that could only mean the cessation of life crept over Eva the way the shroud had crept over the Earth. At what point did a man come to realize that the concerns of the world at large were of secondary focus, and that his main objective should be his family?

Baskerville looked at him just as his troops fired a field flare into the sky. The flare lit Neil’s front yard with a flickering white glow and, as it sank in the direction of the poor neighborhood, gunfire erupted from beside the Morrison fighting vehicles, the age-old music of war, the beat and rhythm of things breaking down.

“We’ll look after her, Dr. Thorndike.”

“Look after her?” he asked. “How?”

In the light of the flare, Baskerville’s face changed, hardened, his eyes narrowing, his lower lip curling a fraction of an inch, a hint of disrespect in his eyes as if he were wondering how Neil could ask such a stupid question. Neil sensed a schism between himself and Baskerville now.

“You know. Deal with her remains.”

Louise gave him a tug. “Neil, let’s go back in the house.”

“You listen to your wife, Dr. Thorndike,” said Baskerville. “Ain’t nothing to see out here.”

15

Glenda got up from her basement floor once the truck drove away.

“Stay here,” she told her children.

She had to argue with them, because kids wouldn’t be kids if they didn’t argue, but at last she left them on the floor next to the refrigerator and moved through the darkness, touching her way along the piles of junk to the foot of the stairs, clutching her rifle in one hand and feeling her way up the steps with the other.

In the kitchen, she listened.

Usually there was the hum of electricity coming from the refrigerator, or the sound of cars out on the highway. But except for the ticking of the battery-powered clock in the dining room and the hush of fresh snow falling against the windows (yes, more snow, just in the last few minutes), all was silent.

She crossed the kitchen floor, now used to navigating in darkness. She veered left around the kitchen table, maneuvered to the right, went through the dining and living rooms, then stopped short, exactly at the front door, and clutched the doorknob.

She went outside.

She saw a light burning in Leigh’s dining room window.

Using it to see her way, she crossed the yard to the hedge separating her lot from Leigh’s. She squeezed her way through, the stiff, dead branches snagging her sweater. She walked down Leigh’s driveway toward his house, pausing often to listen, the snowflakes crash-landing on her face.

Up in the hills she heard gunfire.

She continued down the drive through Leigh’s carport and into his side yard. She heard the snow melting from the roof into the eaves, a steady trickle. Then more gunfire up in the hills.

As she neared the dining room window, she crouched. She double-checked to make sure her safety was off, felt her heart beating more quickly, was afraid that someone was still inside, and that she might have to kill them. She peered in through the dining room window and saw, in the light of a battery-powered lamp sitting on the table, three chairs toppled on their sides. The glass in the china cabinet doors was broken, and three bullet holes punctured the walls. She stared at the destruction and couldn’t help thinking that it was an odd mix—this suburban dining room with its department-store furniture, such an everyday scene, now destroyed like this.

Finally she moved to the rear of the house. She looked through the back door into the kitchen.

The door had been broken open, and the security console smashed. The kitchen table lay on its side—she dimly perceived its outline in the light coming from the dining room. She stepped into the vestibule leading into the kitchen. She saw Leigh’s hiking boots, garden clogs, and sandals sitting neatly side by side on an imitation Navajo mat.

“Leigh?” she called.

She got no reply.

She proceeded into the kitchen.

Her toe hit a can of something. She lifted the can and saw that it was instant milk. She couldn’t help thinking how her kids could use this instant milk. Use anything. She put the can of milk on the table and walked into the dining room. She lifted the lantern, a neat little rechargeable unit that had a rustic look to it, like it came from a sailing ship of yore. She smelled cordite, and saw brass rifle shells on the floor. She lifted a shell, a.303; a good hunting round, deadly enough to down a man in one go.

Taking the little lamp, she checked the whole first floor: Leigh’s bedroom, where everything was tidy and the bed made; the second bedroom, which he had turned into his weight-lifting room; then into the third bedroom, where he had his computer and all his other electronic junk; then the bathroom, where, in the bathtub, behind the shower curtain, she found two fifty-gallon Duratex coolers of fresh spring water.

Jamie, Lars, and Perry must have missed them.

She backtracked into the living room, then the dining room, then the kitchen, and stood at the top of the basement stairs. She held the rechargeable lantern high, but the light wasn’t focused, and permeated only halfway down the steps. Nonetheless, it was strong enough to see footprints in blood on the risers.

She now looked at the kitchen floor. Blood was tracked everywhere. Her sneakers had left their own prints.

“Leigh?” she called again, hoping she would hear a groan, sigh, or cry for help.

She heard nothing. She stood at the top of the stairs for close to a minute as the anxious possibilities tumbled through her mind. She fought with her own conflicting impulses. Run? Investigate? She finally held the lantern up and went downstairs, trying as best she could to miss the blood on the steps.

In the basement, she found an extensive hydroponics installation. Leigh had never brought her down here before, and she was surprised to see all this stuff. She saw tomatoes, zucchini, and carrots growing in long, narrow planters, and an array of grow-lights overhead, all of them now off. She saw a hydrogen-powered generator in the corner. The final third of the basement had been bricked up and turned into a large cold cellar. She walked over and had a look. Thick Styrofoam insulated the inside of it. As she entered, she held the lantern high. Shelves lined every available square inch of wall. The shelves were bare. Jamie, Lars, and Perry had made a considerable haul.

She turned around, and that’s when she saw Leigh. He lay behind the door on his back, head tilted to one side, feet splayed, wearing a camouflage hunting vest that was dark with blood. He looked like he was sleeping. For such a violent death, his final resting position was one of peaceful repose. Blood trickled down the drain in the corner. The blood had been stepped in, and the chaotic footprint pattern reminded Glenda of the finger paintings kindergartners did.

She stood there for several seconds.

Then she heard the sound of a car in the distance—far up the highway, at the top of the east hill.

She immediately bolted.

She switched off her lantern and exited by the back door. Was it Jamie, Lars, and Perry coming back?

She ran all the way to the bottom of Leigh’s backyard, and now felt Leigh’s death coming to her in a blur of tears. The falling snow was cold against her face. She turned around and looked toward the highway. She saw through her tears the blue flash of police lights a quarter mile up the road. A new fear exploded through her chest. It was Maynard Fulton, coming to investigate. He would see her footprints in the blood.

She opened Leigh’s back gate and hurried over to her yard. The flashing police lights now lit up the whole neighborhood, even though the two cars were still a couple of blocks away.

She went through her own back gate, ran up the yard and in through her back door. She closed it, locked it, then hurried into Hanna’s bedroom. From the window she saw Leigh’s house, with the angle wide enough for a partial view of the front drive. The two police cars pulled up and came to a stop.

She saw Brennan Little, one of the sheriff’s deputies, get out of one car and walk up the side of the house, shining his flashlight into the dead bushes and along the window casings, his gun drawn. She saw Sheriff Maynard Fulton get out of the second car and walk to the front of the house, quickly disappearing from view behind the carport.

“Mom?” Hanna called from the top of the stairs.

Glenda left Hanna’s bedroom and went into the kitchen. Flashing police lights now partially illuminated the inside of the house.

“Go back downstairs.”

“Is Leigh dead?”

“Yes.”

“Really?”

“Go downstairs. The police are here.”

The new logic: The police are here. Hide.

Glenda followed her downstairs, and the police lights strobed throughout the basement. Jake had taken advantage of the unexpected light to find an old toy, an alien action figure, only this alien was nothing like the aliens up in the TMS. It wore medieval armor and had a big laser gun, and everybody knew real aliens didn’t wear medieval armor and shoot laser guns.

She sat there with her children for a few minutes, Jake playing alien, Hanna starting to wheeze despite the nursing home medication. Too much of the damp basement for her. Glenda heard the muffled chatter of the police radio through the cheap Duratex windows.

A few minutes turned into ten. She thought Fulton might go away. Maybe she wouldn’t have to look into those eyes of his—those mocking blue eyes that constantly undressed her. She hoped that he would simply take what he wanted from Leigh’s house, add it to whatever hoard he was building—because it was all about the building of hoards these days—and never come back.

But…

The knock came at last…

A loud knock.

The knock seemed to squeeze her heart so that the passage of blood through her chest felt painful. The knock came again. She thought she might will Fulton to go away, but knew her own footprints were in the blood, and knew that Fulton wouldn’t go away no matter how hard she willed him to.

“You two stay here.”

She went upstairs, answered the door, and saw Fulton standing there in the dark. He wore his uniform jacket and hat, and he looked cold. The snow behind him was stopping.

“You heard the noise next door?” he said.

He always tried to trap her with his questions, she knew that, but as she didn’t see a trap in this particular question, she answered truthfully.

“I heard it.”

His mistrust deepened. “And you didn’t call? Some local calls are still going through.”

“I’ve been hiding in the basement all this time.”

He shone his flashlight at her shoes. “Is that so?”

She looked down and saw Leigh’s blood. Damn. Trapped. Even though it was snowing outside, her face felt hot. “I went over there to check things out after his killers left.” Because there was no denying it now.

Fulton’s face settled and he contemplated Glenda for close to five seconds. “You see his basement?”

Another trap, because her footprints were on the stairs as well. “I saw it.” She wasn’t going to fall for this one.

He lifted his chin. “What do you suppose he had on all those shelves?”

“Is that a serious question, Maynard?”

He shook his head. “Always the tone, Glenda. In case you didn’t know, I’m here to serve and protect.”

“That’s what your mouth says. But your eyes tell a different story. Please stop looking at me like that.”

He shook his head a second time, but he was grinning, as if he were enjoying this. “And after all the help I gave you with your husband.”

“Leigh didn’t tell me anything, if that’s what you want to know.”

“So you have no idea who his killers are?”

She brushed the hair from her forehead and felt her expression sink, not in fear but in anger, and had the damnedest impulse to order Fulton off her property and tell him never to come back. “Jamie, Lars, and

Perry. Work buddies. That’s all I know.”

“No last names?”

“No.”

“Found your footprints in that basement room, Glenda. Were you looking for food?”

She went all innocent. “Was that what he had in there?”

“Old Leigh wasn’t going to let you starve. Everybody knows about you and Leigh.”

She frowned. “Why don’t you act like a sheriff for a change, Maynard?”

“Leigh didn’t give you any food? Because it looks like he had a lot down there. Then all those vegetables he was growing. He was planning for the long haul, wasn’t he?”

“He never gave us any food.”

His eyes widened. “Is that so?” He shone his flashlight past her shoulder. “Do you mind if I come in and look around?”

He tried to get around her, but she blocked his way.

“I’d prefer it if you didn’t.”

“I think I better,” he said.

“Maynard, I’d appreciate it if you didn’t.”

“Seems to me you should be glad to have me around, Glenda, now that Gerry’s gone and run off on you.”

“Gerry hasn’t run off on me.”

“What do you suppose he’s doing up there on the Moon right now?”

“I told you, he doesn’t drink anymore.”

“Glenda, I’ve got to take a look around. Police business.”

“Then show me a warrant.”

“Ever since the…restructuring, we don’t need warrants. We’re streamlining our jurisprudence as we go along, on account of the courts being closed.”

He used his great physical size to push past her.

“Maynard, stay out of my house!”

“Sorry, ma’am, but I’m investigating a murder.”

He walked into the living room, got down on one knee, and looked under the couch. He then went into the dining room and opened the cupboards under the china cabinet.

“You’re looking for food, Maynard. Leigh’s murder has nothing to do with it.”

“Ma’am, if you don’t calm down, I’m going to have to cuff you.”

She followed him around the house, knowing she was powerless to stop him.

He went into the kitchen and opened the cupboards. He walked to the fridge, even though it wasn’t working, and shone his flashlight in there. He shut the door and shone his flashlight directly in her face.

“Where are you hiding it all, Glenda?”

“Will you stop shining that thing in my face?”

“You got it all in the basement, like Leigh did?”

“Got what?”

“Your food cache.”

“Maynard, I don’t have a food cache.”

“You’ve already lied to me once.”

“And you said you were investigating a murder, not looking for food.”

He shook his head. “You’re too smart for your own good, you know that?”

He walked across the kitchen to the cellar door.

“My kids are down there. Please don’t scare them.”

“I’m the sheriff. Why would they be scared of me?”

She followed Fulton down the stairs. “Kids,” she cried. “It’s just the sheriff. He’s coming down. No need to be afraid.”

Fulton got to the bottom and shone his flashlight at all the boxes of junk in the middle, then at the tool bench, then at the washer and dryer, and finally at Jake and Hanna.

Glenda’s rifle leaned against the wall next to Jake.

“You’ve got a rifle?” said Fulton.

She scrambled for the quickest dodge. “It’s just an old thing my Dad gave me.”

“You got a license for that thing? You need a license in Wake County.”

“Somewhere. In all these boxes.”

He walked over and lifted the rifle. “Hate to tell you this, but the Wake County’s Sheriff’s Department is confiscating all firearms at the present time. I’m going to have to relieve you of this firearm for the duration of the emergency. Got any ammunition?”

She couldn’t hide her desperation any longer. “Maynard, please don’t take my rifle. It’s the only thing I’ve got to protect me and my children with.”

“Ma’am, I repeat, got any ammunition?”

“Just what’s in the rifle.”

“That’s twice you’ve lied, Glenda.”

“Please leave the rifle. I hear shooting in the hills. I need my rifle in case any of that comes down here.”

Fulton lifted his chin and contemplated Glenda. “You come over and see me sometime, Glenda.” His implication was clear.

“Maynard, please.”

“You want your rifle back or don’t you?”

“Okay, okay, I’ll come over and see you sometime.”

Just then, Little called from upstairs. “Maynard?”

“I’m down here.”

“We found crates and crates of stuff up in his attic. Canned goods and everything.”

“I’ll be right up.” He turned his attention back to Glenda. “Now you listen to me, Glenda. I’m in charge now. I’m running the town independent. You just remember that. Me and the boys, we’re more or less operating the whole show out of Old Hill right now. Ain’t going to be no more government help. So it’s about time you start being nice to me.” He gave the rifle back to her. “You come round and see me, you hear? Gerry won’t mind. Gerry’s all the way up on the Moon getting drunk. I’m the only one you got to look after you now.”

16

At the daily meeting the next morning, Gerry insisted that Stephanie, the showgirl, fill Luke Langstrom’s chair—and it was agreed by the others that a tourist worker should have representation on the committee.

Gerry outlined his latest finding to the group, and was glad to see that at least Hulke showed some interest, his small gray eyes focusing with curiosity.

“So, this… this band—a band is what you’re calling it?”

“It’s more amorphous than a band,” said Gerry, “but I guess we could call it a band if you like.”

“So, you can…like, see it? It’s there all the time?”

“Yes. I’m hoping to get a second Smallmouth off the ground so we can fly in and take a closer look.

This second Smallmouth will be specifically designed to follow the band, and I think the readings we’ll get from it will be markedly different from the ones we’ve obtained from the first Smallmouth. Plus I’ve got Mitch working on the infrared angle for me. It will be interesting to see if there’s any heat fluctuation.”

Gerry glanced at Mitch. Mitch’s face was pinched, and the AviOrbit representative wouldn’t take his eyes off his waferscreen. The small, intense man spoke without looking up. “I was just thinking that maybe we can analyze the visual-light data more thoroughly… just so we can confirm for Ira that any resources he puts into an infrared array might in fact yield some usable results. Because, to tell you the truth, he really doesn’t see what you’ve done with the results from the first Smallmouth yet… so he asked me why we even bothered with the Smallmouth in the first place if you weren’t going to use… you know… the data in any constructive way.”

Gerry’s frustration simmered. “I’m still analyzing it, Mitch. Believe me, I’m going as fast as I can. If anybody’s got anything at stake here, I do. My wife and kids are down there. But there’s a wealth of information the Smallmouth brought back with it, and I’m only one scientist, and I have hardly any lab staff, and no proper equipment. I’ve had to borrow equipment from the high school. I’m using high school stuff, for God’s sake.”

“It’s just that Ira, he gets in these rhetorical moods. And he was in a really bad one this morning.”

Gerry turned to the mayor. “Malcolm, I’m asking you to put pressure on Ira.”

“Me?” The mayor seemed flustered by the notion. “Gerry…let me explain something to you. As mayor of Nectaris, I don’t have any say over what AviOrbit does.”

“But surely you must have some clout. Talk to Ira. Tell him we need to find out what’s going on with this band. Tell him we have to get this infrared array up and running. Tell him we even need a second Smallmouth.”

“Gerry, he’s not going to go for another Smallmouth,” said Mitch.

Gerry felt himself losing heart. “But we might need it.”

“You haven’t analyzed the data from the first one.”

Gerry glanced at Ian, then at Stephanie, and while both looked at him in obvious alarm, neither of them seemed to know what to do.

At last he turned back to the mayor. “I thought I was in charge here.”

“You are. But can’t you see Ira’s point? Sending the first Smallmouth cost a fair nickel, and—not to sound like the city’s totally down on its luck…but Ira, he’s a bit of a bean counter, and he wants the council to fork over at least a sizable chunk for that particular mission, especially now that it’s starting to look like a bust.”

“A bust?” said Gerry, wondering how the mission could be characterized that way. “It’s not a bust at all.

And a second Smallmouth would follow the band, so it’s going to be different.”

“He’s also a bit reluctant—and I also was on the phone to His Majesty this morning—but he’s also a bit, uh, hesitant, to open the coffers at this particular moment because there’s now the feeling…” He turned to Mitch. “I guess it’s more than a feeling, right, Mitch, because we’ve got some reasonable intelligence to back it up. So… there’s now the feeling that the Earth is on the verge of doing something in a… a grandissimo way about the shroud, and if Earth is going to go ahead and get rid of it for us, why waste money when we can save the funds for, like, a festival or something?”

“And what are they going to do?” asked Gerry.

“Something along the toxin line.” The mayor raised his palms, widened his eyes, and shook his head. “At this point, it’s probably more cost-effective to hold off a bit.”

Stephanie leaned forward beside him. “That’s exactly the opposite of what we should be doing.”

The mayor turned to the showgirl. “And why’s that?”

“Because once Earth blows it—and I’m convinced Earth is going to blow it—we should move fast with whatever we have so we can still catch the Tarsalans off guard.”

A paternal grin came to Hulke’s face. “Ah, yes… but hon, I don’t think Earth’s going to blow it. You’re just showing your Moon bias. They’ve got the fantabulous Dr. Thorndike as their ringmaster. He’s got the… the top eggheads in the country backing him up. He’s got the…” And here he mimicked the overblown diction of the official drops. “The entire resources of the United States of America at his disposal.” The mayor glanced at Gerry and, with a glibness that was slightly drawn, added, “Gerry, you’ve got only high school stuff.”

The rawhide hat twitched menacingly beside Gerry. “Before you can kill something,” Ian said darkly,

“you’ve got to understand it.”

“Now, Ian, my man, I’m sorry, but you must have lifted that from a movie somewhere, and I don’t know how seriously I can really take you when you start talking like that. We can’t be thinking Hollywood. We’ve got to look at the fiscal side of things. That’s all I’m trying to do here. I’m trying to do what’s right for the city. If we knew the toxin wasn’t going to work, it would be a different story.

We’d be throwing every last penny into our own effort. But because the toxin is in fact going to work…”

“But it’s not,” said Stephanie. “Gerry already said so.”

The mayor turned to Mitch. “Should I go into specifics, Mitch? Just so we can convince them?”

“If you think it will help.”

“So you got a drop?” said Gerry.

“Correcto-mundo, my friend. As a matter of fact, we received it at 0500 hours this morning.” The famous self-immolating grin came to the mayor’s face. “Listen to me. I’m starting to talk like them.”

“And what’s my brother got to say for himself this time?”

“Ah…now Gerry, I’m not a technical guy.”

“I thought you said you worked for AviOrbit.”

“I did. In public relations.”

“Then just give me…” The mayor’s phrase came back to haunt him. “The gist of things.”

The mayor raised his eyebrows. “All I know is that they’re going to fool the phytosphere in some way.

It’s the old ace up the sleeve. The old switcheroo. Something like that.” The mayor squinted as he concentrated harder. “Was it…hydrogen sulfide?” He shook his head. “Jeez, all that chemical stuff. I don’t know how you guys keep it straight. Anyway, they’re going to flimflam the phytosphere somehow.”

He turned to his assistant. “Damian, didn’t we make a note of the specifics somewhere?”

The mayor’s young assistant looked up from his waferscreen. “They’re going to starve the phytosphere of its carbon dioxide supply by fooling it with hydrogen sulfide.”

Gerry thought it through and was able to put the rough idea together. Neil was going to use hydrogen sulfide as a carbon dioxide substitute—fool the phytosphere into thinking it was getting the right nutrient, and thereby starve it of the same. It was an ingenious idea. Of course it was ingenious—his brother was no slouch.

Yet he still had doubts. “I hope it works. But I don’t think we should sit around and wait to see if it does. Mitch, if Ira won’t go for another Smallmouth, at least get him to go for the infrared array.

Because as much as my brother’s idea sounds like a good one, the Tarsalans might find a way to neutralize it. We’d be fools to stop our own research and put our eggs into Neil’s basket.”

He looked at the mayor, then at Mitch, and he saw that he had made at least some small impact.

The mayor turned to Mitch. “Tell Ira that we’ll partially underwrite the infrared array if we can later incorporate it as part of the tourist attraction at the Alleyne-Parma Observatory.”

Mitch nodded, the expression in his eyes like the flat line on a heart monitor. “I just hope he doesn’t go rhetorical on me again.”

17

Neil and his family sat huddled in the back of an armored limousine heading through the dark streets of Miami. They were leaving town. Many buildings were now gutted. Others continued to blaze. The fire department was nowhere in sight. He heard the rumble of their escorting Morrison fighting vehicles outside the car. A priority family. At least they were getting the hell out of here. At least the powers that be finally understood they couldn’t stay in Coral Gables anymore.

Would it work? His mind circled back to the question of the hour. Would the omniphage munch through the carapace, and would the compound then mimic carbon dioxide appropriately? In the lab, yes. But in the phytosphere itself? The whole thing left him unsettled.

They soon reached the highway and traveled south.

Halfway to Homestead, he got a call. On his phone. The phone.

Secretary of Defense Sidower sounded tired but satisfied, his voice rough, as if he were recovering from a cold. “We’ve launched, Neil. South Dakota went first. Then Texas. Then Guam. Florida should be

next. You might see a few missiles from where you are. I can’t tell you how goddamned relieved we are.

I’ve read your reports. So has the president. I know we’re going to beat this thing.” Then, after a pause, he added, “You’ve done it again, Neil.”

Here it was, the basic integer of his life—people in power telling him he had done good. Yet he couldn’t help thinking of Kafis, the Tarsalans’ chief scientific envoy, his Tarsalan counterpart, and how Kafis, on his many visits to Marblehill, had always surprised him with peculiar ways of looking at things, and of thinking about things—as if the alien could rotate a problem in his mind, view it from all sides, and see every possible permutation and variation. The chess game. Was he going to win? Or was he going to lose?

“I think the hydrogen sulfide thing is sly enough to beat them.”

“I think so too.”

“It’s just a question of understanding the way they think. I’m lucky in that I’ve had many one-on-one sessions with Kafis. I know how sly he can be. He’s always seven steps ahead of the obvious. But I think the hydrogen sulfide is eight steps ahead.”

“If you’re going to beat a Roman, you have to think like a Roman.”

“Yes. And I think I’ve come to a real understanding of the… the Tarsalan mind-set.”

“I wish I could say the same, Neil. He’s a formidable adversary.”

“As formidable as Kafis can sometimes be, I don’t think he necessarily views the phytosphere in an adversarial context.”

“If the phytosphere isn’t adversarial, I don’t know what is.”

“As I said to the president, it’s a teaching tool. Or at least that’s the way I think Kafis views it.”

“Right,” said the secretary. “The cinerthax, or whatever you call it. The only thing it’s taught me is how to hate them more than I already did.”

“Hating an enemy and understanding one are two different things.” Neil felt he had to expand. “Children on the Tarsalan homeworld don’t live with their parents. They live with their teachers.”

The secretary of defense considered this. “I always hated school.”

“Kafis tells me the quest for knowledge is like a religion on Tarsala. Whenever he came to Marblehill, he was always trying to teach me things. Particularly with a variety of Tarsalan games. He says that in harmless games, especially where strategy is involved, we can learn a great deal about ourselves. From a military standpoint, that’s something you should keep uppermost in your mind.”

“And does Kafis think the phytosphere is a harmless game?”

“All I’m saying is that he understands things best through teaching protocols. They all do.”

“Then I guess we’re teaching them a lesson.” The secretary paused. “How soon can we expect to see some light?”

“Our best estimate is forty-eight hours. Maybe sooner.”

“And you’re sure it will start in alpha bloom first?”

“Yes.”

“Because it… it can’t come soon enough, Neil.” Sidower hesitated. Neil braced himself for yet more bad news. “Never mind the civilian side of things, I’m talking about the military.” It was like a personal admission of failure.

“Is the president safe?”

“He’s in lockdown.”

“And the vice president?”

“In a secure location in Key West.”

“And the president pro tem?”

“We’ve lost the president pro tem,” said Sidower. “He was assassinated in his home state. We think by Western Secessionists. It’s a tough thing, being a federal democrat in the West right now.”

Neil took this as a personal blow because he had been good friends with the president pro tem. “And the speaker?”

“Still safe.”

“And what about military bases?”

“We’ve had some problems.”

“But Homestead is safe.”

“Would I send you and your family there if it wasn’t?”

“So no problems at Homestead at all.”

“The rationing’s tight, Neil. There’s been some minor insubordination. But that’s it.”

“When was the last time you spoke to Greg?”

“Leanna spoke to him a couple of hours ago. He knows you’re on the way. He remembers you well.”

“I should hope so.”

“There’s nothing like the bond of the military. He’s got a nice place set up for you and your family in the Officers’ Compound. We’ve had laboratory units airlifted in, and bunks made ready for whatever personnel you think you might need for a second line.” The secretary put out a feeler. “The president wants to know if you’ve had any more thoughts about a second line yet.”

Neil glanced at the dark sky outside the limousine window, and again thought of Kafis. “I’ve drawn up the main, broad principles. If the omniphage and toxin don’t work, we develop a virus. We’ve already tested a few, and we’ve had some initial success against what’s turning out to be a fairly strong immune response on the part of the Tarsalan component in the xenophyta. We hope to have something workable, at least on paper, by the middle of the month. Is it possible to get help with a second string of biological launches from our allies?”

“You’re kidding, right?”

The seriousness of the situation seemed to color everything the secretary said.

“So they have no launch infrastructure intact?”

“If you think the U.S. is bad, you should see other countries.”

In the secretary’s terse utterances, he saw Armageddon’s remorseless agenda. “Are we talking horrific?”

The secretary cast around for the proper words. “It’s been going on for a while now, Neil. The surgeon general has advised us that the population has reached a nutritional threshold.” The implication was clear.

“As well, he’s reported outbreaks of cholera, diphtheria, and typhoid. Horrific would be understating the case.”

Neil regarded the faces of his wife and daughters sitting in the seat opposite him. They stared at him, wondering what he was talking about. Their eyes prospected for hope, the strain apparent in the way they had all lost weight.

“And what about the Tarsalans?”

Sidower paused again. “We’re having great luck with their satellites. We’ve downed fully seventy-five percent of them. We’re planning a major offensive in the coming days. We’re going directly for the mothership.”

“Anything on the diplomatic front?”

“Neil… the diplomatic front’s been abandoned for the time being. We’re going to board the TMS and take control of the phytosphere’s control mechanism.” The secretary paused again. “Your toxin and virus… we’ll try those. But I wouldn’t be fulfilling my obligations and responsibilities as secretary of defense if I didn’t militarily try to get my hands on the damn thing’s control system. I guess you’d call it my own… cinerthax. If I’ve got to put them on the ropes to teach them a lesson, then that’s what I’ll do.

It’s my little contribution to this whole hellish mess.”

A short while later, after he had ended his call with the secretary, Neil saw several flashes to the west.

These flashes resolved themselves into pinpoints of flame, and they rose steadily into the sky. He had thought he would feel a sense of accomplishment. But instead he thought of Kafis once more, and of the way he and Kafis would sometimes play chess together at Marblehill. He could see the pieces on the board, remembered the many occasions when he had been on the verge of winning only to have Kafis surprise him with an unforeseen counter-move. The faces of his wife and daughters flickered in the glow of the distant launch flames. Was it a question of his own mind-set? Of actually being able to put himself in a place where he could be the teacher, and Kafis the student? He knew that Kafis was infinitely more

intelligent than he was. And compared to the human race’s scant few hundred years of technological culture, the Tarsalans had had a million years of it. The Tarsalans were superior to humans in every way.

“He doesn’t get it,” he said, out of the blue, with no context.

“Who?” said Louise.

“Kafis. He doesn’t get that we’d sooner make our own history, and not become a part of Tarsala’s.”

Louise looked away. “Let’s just hope he doesn’t end history.”