Phytosphere

30

Darkness was her world, and her car was her life.

At last they reached Georgia. Glenda couldn’t believe how long it was taking them to travel the four hundred miles from Raleigh to Marblehill. She was anxious because her charge was getting lower and lower, and Hanna’s coughing was getting worse and worse. They were well up in the mountains and, luckily, there hadn’t been any more road washouts or landslides. The rain had stopped, and the hills were holding. What bothered her were the immense fog banks—fog so thick it was like cheese, with a stench like rotten algae.

She took 441 south through Clayton, Tallulah Falls, and Turnerville, glad to reach Turnerville because the hills and valleys weren’t so big, and the road didn’t wind so much. Also, there was some farmland, not the chilling and grotesque dead forest all the time, which was really starting to frazzle her. But she was also unnerved to reach Turnerville because Turnerville was where they really had to start looking out for Buzz.

Though it was ten o’clock in the morning, the sky was black. The only light came from her headlights.

They pierced the misty gloom like twin swords.

Ten miles later, they came to Clarkesville. She veered onto 17. The charge needle was on empty. Yet Clarkesville was a heady milestone to Glenda, the last town they passed before they reached Marblehill.

She remembered the road now, and didn’t need Gerry’s old map. Seventeen twisted north to 75, at which point she turned left on 75 and headed west again on an old blacktop highway that looked as if it had been abandoned by road crews years ago.

She was no more than a mile along 75 when a cloud of flies enveloped the car. She slowed right down because she couldn’t see through the flies. They landed on her windshield and didn’t blow off. This made seeing difficult. She turned on her windshield wipers and brushed them away. But too late. She bashed into something, and the car lurched to a halt. Her kids jerked forward in their seat belts. The pressure of

Hanna’s seat belt against the girl’s chest made her cough again, and it was a miserable, exhausted cough.

“Jake, give me the handgun,” said Glenda.

“What’d we hit?”

“I don’t know. I can’t see a thing. These damn flies.”

Jake handed the gun to her, and she got out of the car.

She shut the door so the flies wouldn’t get in, and walked around to the front. The flies immediately got in her hair, eyes, and ears. She brushed them away as best she could, but there were so many that she made only a halfhearted effort, and then resigned herself to suffering through them.

She shone the flashlight on the road and saw that she had run into a dead horse. The horse looked as if it had been shot through the head. Who would shoot a horse through the head? The animal was horribly emaciated, and starting to putrefy.

Shining her flashlight further up the road, she saw three other dead horses blocking the way at various distances. At last, far ahead, she saw a truck with a horse trailer, the trailer jackknifed across the road.

She cast her flashlight along the shoulder and wasn’t sure if she would have enough room to get by.

She approached the truck slowly, walking through this bizarre scene of equine mayhem with an overwhelming sense of apprehension. The other three horses looked as if they had also been pulled out of the trailer and shot. The flies got thicker, and the stench was horrendous. This was what she hated about her new world, how every so often a scene from Hell would arise, and there would never be any emergency crews to clear it away, only the terrifying effects of nature on dead flesh. She lifted the handgun and walked closer to the cab.

As she rounded the front of the horse trailer and came to the pickup truck, she peered in through the driver’s door and saw a man slumped forward against the steering wheel, a bloodstain shaped like a spider tattooing the side of his head. The dashboard lights were on, and the computer screen was telling her that while the engine might be off, the electrical was still on, and draining the charge at a rate of two percent per hour. Glenda had a wild hope that they might use this truck to get the rest of the way to Marblehill. Her hopes were further bolstered when she leaned over and looked at the charge gauge—it was a quarter full. Here, at the scene of this odd horse slaughter, they might find salvation.

But then she heard a noise from down the road. Her head swung in the direction of the sound. For a few seconds the noise disappeared, but then it came back stronger. Buzz. Like a hurricane coming in from the Atlantic, bound to get here sooner or later. Why couldn’t she be lucky every now and again, the way Neil and Louise were? Why couldn’t things go her way just once?

She took one more longing glance at the charge gauge in the truck, then ran back to her car. There was no time to make the switch.

Jake was up on his knees on the backseat, peering out the rear window. Hanna coughed and coughed, so miserable that she was in tears. Glenda handed the gun to Jake.

“I can’t see him yet, Mom.”

“He’s back there. The road climbs and dips.”

She got in, put the car in gear, and the dashboard immediately flashed a warning telling her she’d better charge up now or risk getting stranded. She had no choice but to ignore it. She leaned forward so she could get a better view through the windshield, eased her foot off the brake, backed up a bit, and maneuvered first around the dead horses, then the trailer, and finally the truck. Once past the truck she accelerated.

She looked in her rearview mirror and saw Buzz braking at the horse massacre site. He came to a stop, got out of his truck, and went to investigate the animals. He left his headlights on and was silhouetted in their glow.

He must have seen them because he lifted his rifle and shot toward them. The back window smashed.

“Jake, get down!

Jake was already down, but he lifted the gun and fired blindly a few times out the smashed back window. She glanced in the rearview mirror again and saw Buzz running back to his truck for shelter.

Then she just concentrated on getting as far ahead of him as she could.

As the road dipped down into a gully, she saw a track leading through a fence off to her left. With her charge light blinking, she knew she didn’t have more than a mile or two left. She swung left onto the track, where she saw a stand of dead trees up ahead, her headlights illuminating their gray trunks. She felt like she was in an airplane, and that the engine had just given out and she was now gliding. She wanted to turn her headlights off because she was sure Buzz would see them in the dark; at the same time, she was afraid she might crash into a tree if she turned them off. So she kept them on…until they failed all on their own.

She swung off the track and crashed into the dead bushes, hoping to hide the car with this last desperate maneuver before her final charge ran out. Junker that it was, the car behaved abysmally, and she found herself in a small creek once the twenty-second ordeal was at an end.

“Get out of the car!” she cried.

“Where are we going?” asked Hanna.

“As far away from here as we can.”

“She’s spent?” said Jake.

“She’s spent.”

He peered over at the dashboard as if he didn’t believe her, but finally nodded in a way that was far too grown-up.

They got out of the car and she was immediately surprised by how slippery the ground was, how it seemed to seethe underfoot with a rottenness all its own, and how it sent up a smell, not quite like a dead rat festering behind a baseboard but still carrying the sweetness of putrefaction.

They struggled down the creek bank. At last they reached the edge and waded into the water—the creek seemed to be the clearest path anywhere. The sound of Buzz’s pickup got closer and closer.

She started to cry. Who was meant to take this? One of Satan’s agents was following her through Armageddon. That was more than any housewife and part-time nursing-home attendant should be expected to take. She didn’t even have her car anymore.

“Keep going straight up,” she said.

“Mom, the bottom’s slippery,” said Hanna.

“Just stay along the side.”

She glanced back toward the road and saw Buzz’s truck coming along the crumbling blacktop, bumping and rattling as it took the potholes, pink haloes forming around his headlights in the mist rising from the ground. As he reached the track, he slowed down.

She turned around. “I can’t see a thing.”

“Mom, let’s climb up here,” said Jake.

She peered into the blackness and perceived some dead brambles in the stray glow coming from Buzz’s headlights.

“Okay.”

“Mom, I’m going to shoot him.”

“You can’t shoot long-range with a handgun.”

“If he gets anywhere close, I’m going to shoot him.”

“And what will you to do if you miss? He’s got a rifle. A rifle’s more accurate than a handgun. Hanna, are you all right?”

“I can’t breathe.”

“Come up here. There’s some logs we can hide behind.”

They all climbed up onto the bank. She reached the logs. They looked like lengths of cow fence that had never been used and, to her surprise, they were dry. After all the rain, things were drying out again in the intense heat.

“Let’s get behind here.”

She got behind the logs. Jake settled in beside her. Glenda took Hanna’s arm and guided her. Hanna started coughing again.

“Hanna, just try to keep them down for the next little while.”

“Mom, I can’t…” She couldn’t finish her sentence because she started coughing again.

Jake gave his mother a glance.

Glenda shrugged. “Sweetie, just try.”

Jake took off his T-shirt, scrunched it up, and handed it to his sister. “Cough into this, Hanna. See if you can muffle them a bit.”

Hanna nodded woefully, took her brother’s T-shirt, and pressed it to her face. She struggled valiantly, managing to keep the explosions to a minimum, stopping the ragged, barking coughs that had plagued her ever since her medicine had run out, but Glenda wondered if it would be enough, especially in the dead quiet of the countryside. At least they were by a creek, and the current made a bit of noise—maybe enough to cover the sound of Hanna coughing.

Buzz turned off the road and came along the track, driving slowly, no more than two or three miles per hour. As he approached, he shone a flashlight out the driver’s-side window. Its beam was powerful, fully charged, and cut through the misty air with silvery precision, catching like bright flecks the flies that spun and whirled above the dead grass. Glenda wondered how Buzz was keeping his engine charged, but then remembered that his vehicle had a gasoline backup system. At last, his flashlight beam found her tire tracks, then the back of her car. It was funny yet awful to see the family car half in the creek like that.

Buzz turned off the track and drove toward her car through the field. Hanna coughed and coughed into Jake’s T-shirt, muting the noise. Glenda rubbed her back, trying to comfort her.

Jake peered over the logs, then started reloading the handgun.

Glenda tried to get her crying under control, but she was scared and her heart was filled with a great sorrow, not only for herself and her children, but for the man who was trying to hunt them down. How Buzz must have loved his brother. She regretted killing Maynard. Never wanted to. But what choice had he given her?

Buzz drove about halfway to the car and stopped. He got out of his truck and crouched behind the front fender for a long time, his rifle poised over the vehicle. Jake finished reloading the gun.

At last Buzz called out. “Glenda?” He obviously thought they were still in the car.

Jake’s hand tightened around the gun. Glenda reached over and rested her hand on his arm. Hanna continued her muffled coughing.

“Kids?” said Buzz.

Buzz waited another minute before he finally ran crouched over to the creek and took a position on his stomach ten yards upstream from her car. He crawled into a small hollow and disappeared from view for the next minute.

Hanna continued to cough, muffling it well. Still, could Buzz hear that? And just where the hell was he?

She couldn’t see him anywhere.

But then he sprang up on one knee, reminding her of a gopher coming out of its hole, and shot at her car, expertly pulling the bolt back after each round, expelling the spent cartridge, loading another one into the chamber, and squeezing the trigger so that he got off a shot every second or so—seven in all, emptying his magazine into the vehicle. He shot with vengeful intensity, his heated emotion guiding his actions. Each muzzle flash was a tongue of white flame. The reports echoed in the hills, and the sound of bullets clanking into her poor old car dried up Glenda’s tears immediately.

Her fear was now as cold and numbing as an anesthetic. Six simple words drifted through her mind: This guy wants to kill us. They were obvious words, and framed a fact she already knew, but until now they had been something only her mind had acknowledged, not her body. Now they filled her every blood vessel, every sinew, every bone with fear. Her physiological terror made her break into a sweat. She wanted to run, but checked the urge because to run now would only alert Buzz to their location. She swallowed and swallowed, but there seemed to be a hard clot of dryness in her throat that stopped her from swallowing with any degree of success. Hanna ceased coughing, as if the coughs had been scared right out of her. Jake was still on his knees with the gun poised over the pile of old logs.

Buzz meanwhile went back to the ground, and in the peripheral glow of his truck’s headlights, Glenda saw him reloading, thumbing one cartridge after another into his magazine.

At last he got back up.

“Glenda?” he called.

He stared at the car a moment more, then scanned the surrounding countryside. Now even Buzz looked scared.

“Glenda, why don’t you just give up? You know I’m going to get you sooner or later. I know you’re on your way to Marblehill. If you come out now, I’ll spare your children.”

Hanna started coughing again, but she once more muffled it with Jake’s T-shirt, forcing herself to halt the loud, barking explosions and making do with smaller, less percussive ones.

Buzz bolted for the car, dropping to his knees as he reached the driver’s door, then looked all around the countryside again. After another minute, he stood up and looked inside the car. He shone his flashlight in through the windows, first in the front, then in the back. At last he got to his feet and kicked the car as if he were angry at it, then kicked it again, and finally swore.

He opened the back door and started going through their stuff.

“Mom, I think I can get him,” whispered Jake.

“Jake, not from this distance. Not with a handgun. And what’s he wearing? Looks like some kind of…flak jacket.”

It was hard to tell from this distance, in the dark and from behind all these bushes, but the more she looked, the more she grew convinced that he was wearing a bullet-resistant vest. It would make sense, his brother being a cop and all.

Buzz rummaged through the back, dimly illuminated by his truck’s headlights, pulled out Hanna’s clothes bag, and tossed it into the creek. He found the map, folded it, and tucked it into one of his vest pockets.

Then he stood up and looked over the roof. He seemed to stare right at them.

Jake squirmed. “Mom?”

“No, Jake,” she whispered.

Hanna coughed and coughed, and it built and built, and finally she had one of her loud, racking coughs.

Buzz immediately lifted his rifle and fired in the direction of the cough. The three Thorndikes sank right to

the ground. Hanna continued to cough, struggling and struggling, but she simply couldn’t keep them down.

“I hear you,” called Buzz. “Why don’t you just come out and get it over with? You got to pay for what you did, Glenda. So why prolong the agony? Why make your kids suffer like this?”

“Mom, I’m going to kill him.”

And before she could stop him, Jake was standing up and blasting away with the handgun. She grabbed his pant leg and tugged him, but he continued to blast away, and she hoped—God, how she hoped—that he would get Buzz with a good head shot that would take him down once and for all.

She gripped the top log and pulled herself up. Buzz ran wildly back to his vehicle, so spooked by Jake’s fusillade of bullets that he didn’t have the good sense to take cover behind her own car, but bolted toward his junky old truck like a deer in hunting season instead. Jake fired and fired, but he was just wasting bullets. At last the gun was empty, and he ducked back down and fumbled in his pocket for more rounds.

“We’re going this way,” said Glenda, and grabbed them both by their sleeves.

They headed away from the logs and felt their way over the rough, uneven land. She kept glancing behind to see if Buzz would follow them, or fire at them, but all she saw was his truck now, with its headlights piercing the gloom. She had the flashlight, but she didn’t dare turn it on. The land rose through trees that were no more than a few feet taller than she was, Christmas trees, only all the needles had fallen off. A ridge curved upward to the right. She glanced over her shoulder again and saw Buzz emerge from behind his truck. He leveled his rifle across the front of his truck and shot in the direction of the logs.

“Just keep going,” she said. “Climb the ridge. We’ll circle back to the road in a little while.”

“Mom… we’ve got to figure out some way to ambush him,” said Jake.

“Let’s just make for Marblehill. Once we get to Marblehill, we’ll be safe.”

This was her credo now. Get to Marblehill. Only she wasn’t sure she believed it anymore. Was anywhere safe? Could she and her family trust the airmen there? And what about the Tarsalans?

Wouldn’t some of them be landing in Chattahoochee once the TMS was destroyed? Maybe the TMS

was already destroyed. We’ll be safe, we’ll be safe, we’ll be safe. But was that possible? Tears came back to her eyes.

As she finally reached the top of the ridge, she looked down at her car. Buzz now poured gasoline into its interior. In a moment, there was light. Lots of it. Her whole car was engulfed. She stared at the light, even as her feet trudged forward. It was indeed the second Stone Age, she decided. Because, like a cavewoman, she found any fire, even the one that was taking her car away from her, mesmerizing.

31

Gerry called a meeting in Section A of the H. G. Wells Ballroom two days later.

He had Ian and Stephanie at the door checking everybody who came in. Nectarians filed in by ones and twos, and they all had special invitations in their hands—not just anybody could come. Many had donated to Hulke’s campaign for reelection. Some were union leaders. Others had highly placed

managerial positions at the various hotels and casinos. Some owned cannabis bars. A large contingent of showgirls came. In short, invited to the meeting was a broad cross-section of Lunarian society, representative of Hulke’s core constituency; people whose mere presence would put pressure on the mayor.

Hulke arrived somewhere in the middle of it, peering around, trying his best to look at ease. He walked up the aisle with his usual mellow gait, but his face was red, his shoulders riding higher on his body than they usually did. He looked as if he had been outdanced at a dancing competition.

He came to the platform. “Gerry… I hope you don’t mind if I’m skeptical about this.”

“Kafis is lying.”

“Not about turning this place into a self-sustaining paradise. We had a meeting this morning. He showed me the plans.”

“We can save Earth.”

“I don’t think so.”

He decided that Hulke needed forgiveness. “I’m glad you’re here anyway.”

“You’re not going to change our minds, Ger.”

“Look, here comes Luke.”

Luke Langstrom shuffled up the aisle.

When he finally reached them, Luke gave Gerry a bow. “I admire your persistence.”

“Thanks for coming, Luke.”

“Wouldn’t miss it for the world.”

The mayor and Luke drifted off and took seats on the brown, stackable chairs.

Gerry kept his eye on Hulke. Hulke watched the door. The mayor saw more and more of his campaign supporters and contributors come in. It was as if Hulke could sense the noose tightening, just what Gerry needed. At last Hulke got so nervous that he came back up to the front.

“Gerry, you’ve invited some extremely… influential people.”

“What I have to say tonight involves everybody on the Moon.”

“Where did you find these names?”

He shrugged. “Stephanie helped me.”

Hulke frowned. “A lot of these people…” He gestured out at the ballroom. “They’re coming out of respect. Because you’re an Earthman. I don’t want you to get your hopes up.”

“How would you like to go down in history as the man who saved Earth?

“Considering I’m going down in history as the man who save the Moon—”

“It’s not enough, Malcolm.”

“Gerry, I’m not your enemy. I have to be practical.”

“I know who my enemy is. Do you see any Tarsalans around?”

“No.

“Look, there’s Ira. Christ, he looks pissed.”

Hulke turned around and spotted Ira. “I better head him off at the pass.”

Hulke left.

The mayor and Ira met halfway up the aisle and exchanged some words.

Mitch, who was sitting behind the table on the platform, shifted nervously.

At the back, Ian and Stephanie closed the doors. Ian started spraying a spray can of the commercially available debugging aerosol into the air. Some people glanced at him, curious about what he was doing.

Others seemed to know. One thing Gerry knew for sure: The Tarsalans had to have macrogenic airborne surveillance units in the room. And, in fact, a moment later the charged particles from the spray can attached themselves to the various flying listening devices, making them glow as if with a phosphorescent dust. Like ice crusting on the wings of aircraft, the areosol finally brought the devices, one by one, to the floor.

Ira left the mayor, came to the platform, and in the midst of a dozen miniature crash landings had a few hot, quiet words with Mitch.

Gerry walked over to lend Mitch support. The small, unassuming technician was really the hero in all this.

But then Ira swung on Gerry unexpectedly. “Do you have any idea how unstable those early prototypes are?”

Gerry glanced at Mitch. “You told him?”

Mitch looked as if he were hanging by thumbscrews. “He’s my boss.”

Ira had gone red in the face. “You could have gotten everybody killed at Copernicus. And why did you have to initiate the fields in the first place? Those two units were put on ice for a good reason.”

“Ira, sit down. Don’t go blaming Mitch. I’m the one behind it all. If there are any charges to be laid, or bills to be paid, I’m your man. I’m not entirely unfamiliar with sitting in jail. And I’m so far in debt already, a little more’s not going to hurt.”

“Why isn’t Kafis here?”

“Because I didn’t invite him.”

“I think Kafis should be included in any official meetings.”

“In case you haven’t noticed, this isn’t official. This is just Gerry shooting the breeze.”

“Which is what you’ve been doing all along.”

Ira walked away in a huff and took his seat.

Ian continued to spray the aerosol into the air. Stephanie, meanwhile, switched off the lights. As the last remaining bugs crash-landed on the red carpet, they luminesced like daubs of neon paint. Gerry walked to the microphone and pointed to the bugs.

“You see those?” he said. “The Tarsalans are recording everything that’s going on right now. Let’s get rid of their bugs. This meeting is for humans only. If those nearest the surveillance units could please step on them?”

He watched various audience members step on the macrogenic listening devices.

“This whole demonstration serves a twofold purpose,” he said. “Number one: We’re getting rid of their bugs. Number two: No matter what some people might say, we’re still at war with the Tarsalans. And we have to be careful because now we have some of them on the Moon, two hundred, in ships out in the Alleyne Crater. And they’re offering us a deal. They say they’ll make the Moon a self-sustaining home for us. In return we must let them live here as refugees. They say they’ve inventoried every screw, nut, and bolt on the Moon, and that if we’re careful, we can maintain independent life support here indefinitely. They tell us that Earth is lost and that, during the attack on the TMS, the phytosphere control device was destroyed by U.S. troops. They tell us that there is nothing to be done for Earth. And after spending the last forty-eight hours studying the inventory on the Moon for myself, I have to agree with them—we don’t have the materials to fix the situation on Earth. Indeed, the engineering materials needed to destroy the phytosphere are considerable, and they are not on the Moon, yet, paradoxically, not out of our reach either.”

He glanced around to see what effect this statement had on everybody; at least they were all listening.

“But before we get into a discussion of just what the engineering necessities might be, we should take a look at what exactly we have to do to destroy the phytosphere. Because that’s what this meeting is all about.”

The mayor stood up. “Uh… Gerry, my man… with all due respect, the Moon cannot at this time embark on a project to destroy the… uh… phytosphere.”

“And that’s why I’m glad you’re here, Malcolm. Because I think there should be some political discussion. I see several council members here… and even some members of the media…and is that Richard Glamna from the LBC I see? And I guess the political question of the hour—and I’m sure the one that’s on everybody’s mind, and the one people are going to take to their graves with them if they don’t answer it morally—is how do we live with the deaths of twelve billion people on our consciences without even trying to help them? Because it is possible to help them. There is a way we can save the Earth.” He felt mildly buoyed by his own statements, and thought this was what Neil must feel like a lot of the time, making bold proclamations like this. “If we start working now, we can destroy the phytosphere in as little as four weeks.”

And here he outlined in layman’s terms all the research he had done since the middle of June: his work on the flagella, on gravity, on how gravity affected the flagella—and it was like he was in Jarrell Hall again, because every time he gave a lecture, he understood his material better; and it all made perfect sense to him. The flagella acted not only as connecting limbs, but also as a kind of brain stem that looked after the lower functions, those basic muscular and hormonal roles that made the phytosphere behave the way it did. He thought of the simple physics of a force activating the triggering system: the carefully calibrated dance of gravity between the Earth and the Moon. And it was fortuitous that he was an ocean scientist, and that there should be tides involved, and that it was the tides in the phytosphere that had finally tipped him off to the whole system. As he explained more and more background, the room grew silent and an atmosphere of belief seemed to ferment in the air, the genesis of comprehension, and a faith that this thing—this magnificent but terrifying darkness of the Tarsalans—could at last be defeated.

He showed the tape from Copernicus—poor Kev floating the ridiculous Smallmouth 2 up into the laboratory-created phytosphere, the orbiting Platform 2, the stress band, and the whole shroud disintegrating when the gravitational pressure became too great.

Then he went through for them the exact measurements he had taken, particularly how much they had to increase the Moon’s gravity—how forceful they had to make the stress band—just what they had to do to the phytospheric tides in order to break the whole thing apart.

“What many of you don’t know is that at one time the Moon was a lot closer to Earth. Geological evidence suggests much higher tides a million years ago. Why were the tides higher? As a hydrographer, I’ve made an in-depth study of this phenomenon. The tides were higher because the Moon’s gravitational pull was stronger. The Moon’s gravitational pull was stronger because it was that much closer back then.

I believe the Tarsalan phytosphere control device is a gravitational field apparatus. They have a technological culture that is over a million years old. Follow the natural history of the two technological cultures we know, us and the Tarsalans, and you see we learn to control, one by one, the forces that surround us. Fire, wind, electromagnetism, fission, fusion, solar…and in the singularity drive, humankind is now taking its first small steps at controlling gravity. A million years from now, controlling gravity will be child’s play for us, just as it is for the Tarsalans. Have you ever wondered why the TMS doesn’t spin; why it doesn’t employ that particularly primitive technique for establishing artificial gravity? What about the thousands of other, smaller Tarsalan craft? Same thing. They don’t need to spin because the Tarsalans have devised a more advanced way of controlling this fundamental force.”

Ira interrupted him. “In other words, you’re telling us something we already know, that Tarsalan engineering capability is far more advanced than ours. Gerry, they’ve taken our inventory. Say you’re right, and a gravitational device of some sort is what controls the phytosphere. Say in fact that the phytosphere control device U.S. Forces destroyed actually operated on gravitational principles. Don’t you think the Tarsalans would build a new one and save the Earth if they had the materials in inventory? I have an idea of what it takes to create an artificial gravitational field. Each time we burn one of our singularity drives, we get a gravitational field as a side effect. We’re talking cutting-edge physics here.

And to make a gravitational field strong enough to destroy the phytosphere, you would need laboratory resources so vast that I don’t think they could be developed by us or by the Tarsalans in the remaining time Earth has left. You give us a timetable of four weeks. Gerry…that’s just too much to believe.

Especially when so far you’ve given us nothing.”

“I’ve got the timetable right here, Ira. You can take a look for yourself.”

“But how do you expect to develop and implement an artificial gravitational field on such a gargantuan

scale when we have such minimal resources on the Moon? If you combined every singularity drive we have, you wouldn’t even reach one one-thousandth of the power you would need for something like this.

No offense, Gerry, but I think this meeting is adjourned.”

“I never said I was going to develop and implement an artificial gravitational field.”

“Then why are we here, and where is this going?”

“If you’ll let me discuss the physics of the thing…” He motioned at all his measurements.

Ira threw up his hands. “Be my guest. You’re the scientist.” He loaded the word with derision.

“Going back to what I was saying about the Moon—a million years ago it was a lot closer to Earth, and its gravitational pull was that much stronger.” He looked around at his audience—showgirls, movers and shakers, cannabis bar owners, small-time councilors, pimps, and prostitutes—and he knew they all had mothers and fathers, perhaps brothers and sisters, and even children. A great emotion swelled in his chest as he thought of Glenda, Hanna, and Jake. “I don’t need anything like a complex Tarsalan gravitational device. I just need simple physics. And simple physics tells me that we can save the Earth. It tells me that it’s our duty and responsibility to save our suffering fellow human beings on Earth. And as for the engineering miracles involved? They’re not miracles at all. The math is so perfectly juvenile that even a child can understand it.”

He leaned forward over the lectern. “I need a mass of sufficient size to act upon the Moon, a force that will push the Moon, in the short term, two thousand miles closer to the Earth. This repositioning of the Moon will exert the necessary gravitational force to destroy the phytosphere. To get that result, I require a planetoid-sized body roughly twelve miles across striking the Moon at approximately a hundred miles per second. This will degrade the Moon’s orbit the necessary distance, and thereby increase its gravitational pull enough to fracture and destroy the phytosphere.

He lifted his hands because he saw Ira rising with what looked like a million objections.

“Ira, please… stop.”

“What happens to the Moon when this planetoid-sized body strikes it at a hundred miles per second? I mean…Ger…why don’t you just hand out loaded revolvers and we can get it over with?”

“If the Moon had an atmosphere, Ira… if the Moon had oceans… but it doesn’t. It’s just a rock. Fire a bullet at a big rock and see what happens. Not much. Mitch and I have done the calculations. If a body this size were to hit the Earth, you’re right, it would be a planet killer. But not so on the Moon. The Moon is designed to take hits. It’s been taking hits nonstop for the last four billion years. A body this size strikes the Moon, and yes, I admit, it will hit the surface with a force of nineteen million megatons, create a peak-ring crater two hundred and twenty-five miles across and six miles deep, and generally shake up the Moon. But it won’t be a planet killer. Everybody will survive. And there’ll be minimal damage to the Moon’s infrastructure.”

“Why should we believe you?” asked Ira. “And how are you going to pull it off?”

Gerry turned to Mitch. “Mitch?”

Mitch nodded and got up. “Uh…Ira…it’s possible. And it’s feasible with the…the inventory AviOrbit has on hand. We take the FMC Transit Collective drives and we boom them—like a big log boom. We

take them out to the asteroid belt. We already have our…designated body. Gaspra, if you want to know, as it more or less coincides with our dimensional requirements. I’m really sorry, Ira, for going behind your back like this.”

“You’re not going to use the FMC Transit Collective drives.”

Mitch kept going, despite being cowed. “We boom these drives together and we take them out to the… asteroid belt. I know… I know… pretty wild… but, you know, I’ve gone over all the math… and actually I’ve had some of the telemetry guys… and we boom them to one of our freighters… we were thinking the Prometheus, because she’s just been freshly serviced and fueled, and she’s ready to go…”

Mitch continued to outline the whole scheme in a quavering voice: how they would fly the Prometheus to the asteroid Gaspra because Gaspra was ideally located in relation to the Moon at this point in its orbit; how they would then anchor the Prometheus to the “front” of the asteroid, then drill the five FMC

Transit Collective Drives into the body of the asteroid and lay in a collision course for the Moon; explained that the crew would consist of himself as engineering specialist, Gerry as science specialist, and Ian Hamilton as pilot; and how, at the last moment, as Gaspra came within striking distance, the crew would eject in a special survival pod.

“And what’s beautiful about the math is that it allows for a certain margin of error, especially in terms of our angle of descent, and in the way the strike zone doesn’t have to be a hundred percent accurate but just what Gerry is calling a generalized region of effectiveness… so, as Gerry says, the math is, well, juvenile.” He quickly added, “Don’t take that in any insulting way.”

Ian Hamilton got so fed up with Mitch’s apologetic tone that he bounded down the aisle of the H. G. Wells Ballroom and leaped to the platform in the Moon’s weak gravity.

“Goddamn it, Ira, you’re fired. You’re fired, you’re fired, you’re fired. We’re going to take those damn FMC drives, we’re going to bolt them into Gaspra, and we’re going to ram Gaspra down the Moon’s goddamn throat.” He spoke with the fervency of a man who was desperately trying to redeem himself, who was trying to make up for all the bad things he had done in his life. “And the three of us up here are the only ones who have guts enough to do it. I mean…where are your balls? Do you really want to go for this Tarsalan deal? You really want to trust those fatheads after what they did to the Earth? Tell ’em, Ger. Tell ’em that they’re nothing but a bunch of goddamn liars.”

Gerry stared at the crowd of Lunarians. Fathers, brothers, sisters, mothers, wives, daughters, children—every one of them. “We could indeed take the Tarsalan deal,” he began. “The Tarsalans could rig the Moon so that it would indeed become a self-sustaining outpost for the next thousand years. But make no mistake. It would be their outpost, not ours. And in forty years a backup force from their homeworld would arrive, and they would use a new gravitational device to dismantle the shroud, and they would then, at last, immigrate to Earth, just like they’ve always wanted. Only there would be no human survivors left down there anymore, and Earth would be theirs for the taking. Is that what you want? For the Tarsalans to come in and take over? Kafis isn’t dumb. He’s got two brains. He has a million years of technological culture behind him. That’s why I didn’t invite him to this meeting. That’s why I had Ian spray the whole room for bugs. Because Kafis knows it’s possible. He realizes there’s a way we can save ourselves. But is he letting on?”

He stopped, once again thinking of his wife and kids.

“Please, I’m asking you… we’ve got this chance. We can do it. Mitch and I have gone over the mission specs again and again. It will work. Do we tie our destiny forever with the Tarsalans? Do we let them control us? Or do we take control of our own fate? There are those of you out there who I know have people on Earth.” He ventured to his own thoughts of a moment ago. “You have fathers, brothers, sisters, mothers, wives, and daughters. You have husbands. Are you just going to abandon them? Are we going to desert our brothers and sisters on Earth? Do you want that on your conscience? I know I don’t. So let’s do what Ian says. Let’s take this chance, and do what’s right. Not what’s safest for ourselves, but what’s right and decent for all of humankind.”

32

Neil, sitting next to the helicopter door, banged his head as the aircraft shifted suddenly—and from that moment, his left contact lens wouldn’t work, no matter how many times he tapped his left temple.

In the wake of his great failure, nothing seemed to make sense anymore. His life became little more than a series of disconnects, and it became a lot worse when Lenny swerved to avoid incoming fire.

Morgan cried the whole way. Lenny kept glancing at her, as if he wished she’d shut up. And while the two other airmen seemed miffed about the whole rescue operation, Neil couldn’t really tell, because he couldn’t see them that well anymore, not with one eye in focus and the other eye out of focus.

At one point Lenny tried to tell him something, but the helicopter was too loud, there were only enough headsets for the three airmen, and, try as Neil might, he couldn’t make out a word Lenny was saying.

He asked one of the airmen, Douglas, what was happening, and Douglas had to shout to be heard. All he said was that they were being engaged—sporadically—then added that it was amazing what those fatheads could do in the way of weapons, given a minimum of materials.

Neil just smiled; and this was the other thing that bothered him—the smile on his face, the one he couldn’t seem to shake. It was an apologetic grimace, a bewildered one, like the smile of a man in the first stages of Alzheimer’s, fighting to remain polite even though his life was in flames. He couldn’t look at Douglas. As if he had failed Douglas in some way.

And then there came another disconnect. He zoned out. He didn’t know where he went. It was another big blank. Until the third airman, Fernandes, swung the big side door open and started firing his fifty-caliber machine gun at the ground. His children cowered. His wife looked catatonic. And the repeated muzzle flashes from the big gun lit up Fernandes’s face as if with a strobe, so that Neil saw the light-collecting goggles over Fernandes’s eyes, and the way the sweat dripped down his cheeks and off his chin, as if manning the big gun was hard work, like operating a jackhammer. Fernandes didn’t look particularly worried that he was in the middle of combat, though occasionally the corners of his lips twitched downward, as if involuntary spasms of the face were necessary to work the big machine gun.

Louise said something to Neil, but she had such a soft, delicate voice that she couldn’t make herself heard, so he just nodded… and then… and then…

Another disconnect.

They were on Marblehill’s big front lawn, and he had the distinct sense, as Lenny helped him out of the helicopter, that he had crossed over into another era, and that he was now in an age where only bad things happened, so different from the previous age of smiling good fortune. He was sure he heard Lenny say, “Your girls will have to learn how to shoot, of course.” And then he said something about tactical advantage and strategic value, words Neil didn’t understand because he had that smile on his face again, and when he had that smile on his face the whole world became opaque.

He caught sight of Marblehill. Huge bullet holes pocked its stone facade. Were they bullet holes? No.

The Tarsalans didn’t use bullets. How did the translating device put it? Vibration modules? VMs for short? Was that it? A weapon that did its damage by shaking materials beyond the point of their molecular-cohesion tolerances? Yes. It was coming back to him. Those long talks he had had with Kafis by the pool. He glanced toward his pool, the deep end visible behind the west wing of his house, but could barely make out the diving board in the glow coming from the helicopter. Then the helicopter shut down, the lights went out, and another airman, Sinclair, came from behind one of the stone pillars of the drive-through portico with a flashlight and waved them in.

“So?” said Lenny when they reached the portico.

“Nothing,” said Sinclair.

“We need food,” said Louise.

Sinclair gave her a look, and it wasn’t a nice look; it was a look that said, why are you here, what good are you—you’re nothing but extra baggage.

Lenny, on the other hand, was polite, and it was, Mrs. Thorndike, if you could please step inside, and yes, Mrs. Thorndike, that is coffee you’re smelling, and yes, we have coffee, real coffee, and we’d be glad to get you a cup, and I hope you know how to make good coffee, because we buried Nabozniak yesterday, and it’s too bad because Nabozniak was a whiz in the kitchen. Not only that, he knew how to crunch his own rounds—we’ve got a round-making kit, and maybe we can teach Morgan to make rounds, turn her into a real combat asset, because what we’ve got here, Mrs. Thorndike, is a bona fide alien invasion—they started coming down last night, and they sent some bugs in, and gosh we’re glad you brought the spray because we really need it, we should have thought of spray in the initial planning stages, but it’s too late, and they know we have food in here, yes, that’s right, they eat human food, they’re like us in a lot of ways …and it was as if Louise was hypnotized by everything Lenny was telling her. Yet it all sounded familiar to Neil, as if he had dreamed about this alien invasion long ago, and this was nothing but a peculiarly frightening summation of the whole thing.

And… disconnect again… because it was late, it was early, but it was neither late nor early because these two qualifiers didn’t apply anymore. It was dark—the only qualifier. As a result of his two miserable failures, it was dark all the time now. They sat in the second-floor games room—five remaining airmen, his three daughters, himself, and his wife; and they had the gas generator hooked up so that they could have some electrical lights, and he heard the generator humming at the back of the house. Lenny was giving them all a lecture on how to use the airman weapon of choice, the Montclair Repeater, a nasty little submachine gun about the size of an umbrella.

“The rounds are more like darts, but they explode on impact. The thing you have to remember about Tarsalans is that they don’t kill as easy as we do. Rib cage like a rhino. That’s why an exploding round is an advantage.”

He disassembled the weapon, reassembled it, snapped the banana clip in place, then said, “Four hundred rounds a clip. Ingenious.”

He passed it around. Neil could hardly believe his girls were handling one of the most vicious military weapons ever devised, that it had actually come to this; his precocious, bright, pampered, pretty, and innocent daughters being forced to protect themselves from alien invaders with military-style firearms.

When it came his turn to try, he smiled his idiotic smile, and briefly—ever so briefly—broke into tears.

He caught Fernandes and Rostov looking at him. Neil handed the weapon to Morgan. A bloody Montclair Repeater in Morgan’s hands when she couldn’t even read.

“When you’re not engaged, hold the barrel pointed toward the ceiling, hon,” Lenny reminded Morgan.

The gun went to Ashley, then Melissa. Neil remembered this from the Air Force. Standard weapons training. But what he didn’t remember was little girls with guns.

Melissa went first, walking to the window with a strange fire in her eyes, pointing the Montclair out the casement, and shooting out into the grounds. Melissa, the oldest, was like him, ready to try new things, embracing this harsh new world as the status quo, accepting it readily.

Then it was Ashley’s turn, and Ashley was petulant about it, rolling her eyes a time or two as she took the weapon and walked to the window. She fired the Montclair without even looking. An involuntary squeal escaped from her lips as the weapon jumped in her hands.

“You’ve got to grip it, kitten, if you want to stop that recoil,” was all Lenny had to say.

And finally it was Morgan’s turn. Neil was hard-pressed not to intervene, because this was just a ten-year-old girl after all, but what if it came down to just Morgan at the end of it all—just her, and a handful of aliens trying to harvest the countryside without due regard for human life? So he gave her a chance. And she did okay with it, seeming to understand with a profundity that apparently escaped the other two just why Lenny was asking her to shoot the weapon in the first place.

And then… another horrible disconnect. Where he just sat there with Rostov on guard duty, with headsets on, listening through the various microphone plants in the forest beyond the perimeter, hearing crunches and cracks, and the trees settling bit by bit into decrepitude. Hearing the wind blow through the once magnificent Chattahoochee National Forest. Occasionally going to the back to check on Louise and Melissa, who scanned the grounds to the rear through light-gathering goggles. Bits and pieces of the long, perpetual night of the shroud gluing themselves together out of one disconnect after another, until finally Lenny told him how the senior airmen on their little staff, Harmon, Earl, and Scott—Neil’s old friends, Greg’s old friends—had fought brilliantly, but had finally succumbed to the Vibration Modules, the VMs, those insidious Tarsalan weapons they had all grown to fear so much.

“Buried them out by the pool. I hope you don’t mind.”

And in Lenny’s voice he heard a letting go of hope.

Later, near the end of his shift with Rostov, Lenny came to the front and asked, “What went wrong?”

So Neil became Dr. Thorndike again, and tried to explain some of it to Lenny, how with the hydrogen sulfide, the xenophyta had gone into a state of suspended animation; and how, with the virus, the carapace had surprised everyone by jailing the virus during its lytic phase. Lenny stared but said nothing.

And in that stare, Neil saw doubt and, aggravatingly, some Monday-morning quarterbacking, as if Lenny thought Neil should have figured out the pitfalls ahead of time.

After that, he slept for a while—at least as much as he ever slept in this perpetual night—a light doze that never released him into the sweet oblivion he craved so much.

Fernandes came for him three hours later. “We’ve got a full alert, sir.”

Neil took up a position with Louise and Morgan in his study on the second floor. The only light came from the control panel of the communications equipment, but it was enough so that he could see their faces—and their faces were tired and thin and, most of all, fearful.

He lifted the light-gathering goggles and strapped them to his eyes, then raised himself to the windowsill and looked out at the grounds.

He could see them. Yes. Sketched in the ghostly green of the goggles’s light-gathering properties.

Aliens.

Inoculated and biologically adapted to live here, the first Tarsalan immigrants, maybe surprised that they were now soldiers, perhaps baffled by human intransigence, and certainly distressed, the way they all were. The goggles magnified. He saw them clearly, five altogether, their huge, bicephalic heads covered with shaggy black hair that reminded him of a bison’s pelt, visible among the dead yew trees.

He saw a small burst of light from the right, out beyond the six-car garage, like sparks from a welder’s torch. The sparks rose toward the mansion, and as they got closer to Marblehill they drew apart, and pulsated, like the flickering radiance of a pulsar. Chatter drifted up from the radio on the floor. Lenny’s voice, the voice of command, but also the voice of desperation. Through the goggles Neil watched the Tarsalans shift to the left, where they took cover behind the stone wall. Then the tattoo of Montclair Repeater fire erupted from the house, with every fifth round a tracer. Louise and Morgan looked at him.

He gave them a nod, and they tentatively rose to the window and, with shaking hands, pulled their triggers.

He did the same.

The whole thing seemed surreal. Especially watching Louise shoot her Montclair. She was a housewife, for God’s sake, not a combat soldier. And Morgan was a ten-year-old grade-five student with Attention Deficit Disorder who had to take medicine just so she could concentrate. And he was a fifty-two-year-old physicist and biologist, a university professor with a spreading paunch and a taste for fine wines. Yet now he was blasting away, praying that the VMs wouldn’t get anywhere near him. Their light shifted against the ceiling, making green and blue squares, like geometrical ghosts. As they got closer, they began to whine and shriek. They floated with a not particularly urgent velocity toward his study on the second floor, and he shot at them, and they were easy to blast out of the air, but there were just so many of them, as if the Tarsalans believed that the basis for all successful technology was redundancy to the Nth degree.

How it happened he wasn’t sure, because he was too busy shooting out the window, too much in the grip of his own frantic combat mania, shooting but not even looking where he was shooting. Yet…yet the next disconnect was framed in the context of Morgan screaming at him, tugging at his sleeve, pointing at Louise, who was lying on her back on the handwoven Moroccan rug, quivering in the oddest way. At first he thought she was having a seizure, but she was quivering so fast she actually looked blurred around the edges. When he placed his hand against her chest it was like placing his hand on the hood of a car, because his hand vibrated the same way. He saw a tiny, bloodless hole on her neck. Her eyes were half closed, and she didn’t seem to be in any particular pain.

But then she got a nosebleed.

And shortly after her nose bled, she died.

He didn’t immediately feel the overwhelming grief he knew he would later feel. He just felt…disappointed. Disappointed that all the plans they had made for their sunset years were coming to nothing.

“Is she all right?” Morgan kept asking.

“No, sweetie,” he said. “She’s not all right. She’s dead.”

He said the words slowly because he felt he always had to say things slowly for Morgan, just to make sure she understood.

Morgan was not, as Lenny might have said, a combat asset after that, because she simply clung to her mother, crying and crying, occasionally trying to wake her mother up as if she still didn’t understand that Louise was dead.

His initial disappointment faded, and was replaced by a…a knowledge and certainty that he had nothing left to live for, except…except as Louise’s avenger.

He lifted Louise’s Montclair from the floor and checked the little electronic monitor on the side. Two hundred seventy-two rounds left. His own weapon had 234 left. Armed with two weapons, one in each hand, their butts pressed against his biceps, he stood up like a thriller-action hero, heedless of whether any more VMs were coming, and fired away. Through his light-gathering goggles, he saw the alien bastards moving through the dead forest and, in the nanoseconds it took him to squeeze both triggers, he had a memory of Louise out there in the woods picking wildflowers; because that’s what she did when she came here, picked wildflowers, put them in a vase, and tried, with varying degrees of success, to paint them with watercolors.

Every fifth round was a tracer, and the ammo arced over the grounds like hot little hornets in the light-gathering lenses of his goggles. He killed one of the alien bastards, and then another, and finally a third, and saw the remaining two scatter into the woods, their bodies like human bodies, but the proportions different so that the arms were too long and the legs too short; yes, alien bodies, human parodies, and they all deserved to die now that they had taken away his sweet Louise.

He fired until he stopped feeling the kick from his weapons. And shortly after that he realized it was extremely quiet. He looked down at Louise. Morgan wasn’t there anymore. He took a deep breath.

What was he going to do now? We’re going to be all right. People with money are going to weather this thing just fine. His words came back to haunt him. Was it a character flaw, the hubris he had felt all his life? So that he had even believed he was immune to the Apocalypse?

He dropped the Montclairs to the floor. Their barrels smoked. He was hot. Drenched in sweat. He collapsed to his knees. His eyes moistened, yet the guttural howl that tried to escape from his throat simply wouldn’t come, especially not now, not when Morgan came back into the room with the other girls. He knew he had to keep it in, make his girls understand in a calm, reasonable way that things like this happened in the Apocalypse; children lost parents and parents lost children.

Ashley came to him. Melissa came to him. And Melissa was still clutching her Montclair, as if she had forgotten she had it in her hand. They cried, but they didn’t wail—the Thorndike family wasn’t given to excessive displays of emotion—but in their quiet sobs he felt an especially keen agony, something that seemed to grab all his internal organs and drag them downward. Here was the family, what was left of it, the two older girls clinging to him while Morgan fussed around Louise like the strange child she was, trying to wake Louise up.

“Morgan, come here.”

When Morgan came to him, he clung to her tightly, because Louise had always been so worried about Morgan, and Morgan always needed a lot of support, and yet it was now Morgan, a ten-year-old girl, who stroked his hair, even as his own tears came faster, and said to him, “It’s okay, Daddy. It’s okay.”

She showed a strength that surprised him. Portrait of a family in great grief. With only the father left now.

And that was the worst of all possible situations because he wasn’t sure he knew how to be a father. He had always been a professor and a scientist, too focused on his career, and hadn’t even really watched his kids grow up.

He heard combat boots coming along the hall. He looked up. Lenny stared at him in the light coming from the communications apparatus. Lenny had a scratch on his face, not a deep one, but still angry and red. The airman glanced at Louise, then back at Neil.

Neil said, “Sorry. I tried.”

And Lenny responded by saying, “They got Douglas and Sinclair.”

“How long before they try again?”

“Who knows?”

“There’s a cave,” he volunteered. “Did you find the cave? It’s all limestone along this ridge.”

Lenny’s eyes narrowed. “Like for a fallback position?”

“The VMs will have a tough time.”

“What about your sister-in-law? If we go up there…”

And thinking of Glenda, he felt a great comfort. “She’ll figure it out. But maybe we should…maybe I should show you where this cave is…”

He lost sight of that particular objective over the coming days.

They buried Louise. Out by the pool next to the others. They wrapped her in a sheet, and put some photographs of the kids in with her, and also one of her watercolors, and Lenny said something about her even though he didn’t know her, the usual things: good mother, good wife, all-around decent person, and, god-damn it, they would make the Tarsalans pay for this. This last bit came in a sudden outburst that shook Lenny’s body from head to toe.

What was so strange about it was the heat, over a hundred and ten degrees, as if after triggering a short nuclear winter the phytosphere was now rebounding with a long and lethal summer, true to his prediction, even though they were well into October now.

And when Fernandes and Rostov broke the earth, it was like dust, as moistureless as talc, so that it blew away into the tinder-dry forest in little brown puffs, like so many fleeing ghosts.

33

Gerry stood next to the comlink in the mayor’s office. Around him were Ian, Mitch, Ira, Stephanie, and the mayor’s assistant, Damian. Hulke sat in front of the comlink, his face masked in his usual self-immolating grin. On the monitor Gerry saw Kafis’s face and, in the background, he caught a glimpse of another Tarsalan, this one checking something on another screen. It was this other Tarsalan that bothered Gerry. What was he doing? What was he checking? Was it game over for their little conspiracy, even before it had properly begun?

“Council has voted to accept your…uh…solution,” said Hulke, with not even the slightest quaver in his voice, as if his nerve had been hardened by years at the blackjack table. “We would like to invite you and your entire delegation to a celebration dinner in the Nectaris Council Chamber tonight at eight. My advisors and I think our new partnership should be marked in a special way, and so we’re bringing out of stores the finest cuisine still left in our inventory—I should tell you, Kafis, that the cuisine on the Moon is world-renowned. We of course expect you to make a speech, and I myself will make a speech as well.”

“You’ve taken an excellent first positive step, Mayor. My delegation will be eager to meet with your people. The Moon has turned a new page in its history.”

“I couldn’t agree with you more, Kafis.”

The communication ended. The mayor turned to Gerry. “How was that?”

“What was that other one doing in the background?”

“I imagine he was there to stop me from reading Kafis too easily. It’s an old poker trick. Always have people in the background for distraction purposes. That’s why I had Damian right next me.”

“What do we do now?”

“We let the caterers get to work.”

An hour later, Gerry, Stephanie, and Ian stood by the railing above the Council Chamber. Dining tables had been moved in, and caterers in white shirts, black pants, and black bow ties scurried around arranging artificial gardenias as centerpieces. Ian stood apart from Gerry and Stephanie, but kept glancing at Stephanie, lifting his chin from time to time and clenching his jaw, peering at her as if she were the strangest woman he had ever seen.

“I hope this works,” said Gerry.

Stephanie put her hand on his shoulder. “They’ll be arriving in an hour. Why don’t we get dressed?”

Gerry went back to his hotel room, put on a white blazer, a purple T-shirt with the NCSU logo, and his pair of baggy corduroys, the most stylish clothes he had brought to the Moon. He then went back to the Council Chamber. Drinks were served. People and Tarsalans sat. Speeches were made. And one by one, over the next half hour, humans inconspicuously left the hall. Some brave souls, equipped with hidden breathers, stayed, as a complete disappearance of all humans would make the Tarsalans suspicious. But at last, the big pressure doors closed, and oxygen thinned gradually, and at first the Tarsalans were none the wiser. But when they finally figured out what was going on, it was too late; they couldn’t get out. They upbraided the humans who had remained inside the Council Chamber, but by this time those humans had strapped breathers to their faces and barricaded themselves behind some tables.

In any case, there was nothing the Tarsalans could do to harm the brave humans, because they were too oxygen-deprived to do much of anything. Gerry watched everything on a monitor. He felt guilty. He didn’t like to trick people. Or Tarsalans. At one point, Kafis loosened his collar, as if that would help.

Gerry found the gesture pathetic, and wanted to assist Kafis in some way.

When ninety percent of the Tarsalans were subdued, oxygen was slowly pumped back into the Council Chamber—but it was combined with halothane, an inhalational anesthetic brought over from the Aldrin Health Sciences Center. Those not yet knocked out were rendered unconscious in a matter of seconds.

Nectaris Security moved in, faces masked with breathers, and cuffed every member of the Tarsalan delegation, then began moving them to detention. Gerry sighed. As much as he hated lying, he was relieved by how smoothly the whole operation had gone.

Gerry lived in his Computer Assisted Pressure Suit for the next three days, cramming a month’s worth of training into the space of seventy-two hours, thanks to AviOrbit’s ingenious CAPS software.

He was out on the Moon’s surface with Ian and Mitch, and they were anchoring a singularity drive mock-up to the ground. His boots bit into the surface with bear trap–like crampons—what he would have to wear when he walked around in the negligible gravity of Gaspra.

He fired a T-bolt through a brace with his pneumatic drill, the gray dirt puffed beneath him. The T-bolt, easily the size of his arm, penetrated the surface and latched the mock-up to the Moon, even as his monitor told him his crampons had increased their pounds per square inch tenfold—what they would have to do if he wanted to stop his pneumatic drill from shooting him off the surface of Gaspra, where the escape velocity was no more than a few scant miles per hour.

“Anchor seven secure,” he said.

“Say it with more enthusiasm, buddy. We’re going to the asteroid belt.”

“I feel like a Roman senator on the Ides of March.”

“Why does he talk like that, Ian?” said Mitch, who was getting ready with anchor eight.

“Bud, they got what was coming to them,” said Ian.

“I don’t like how we had to lie to them. What are all these other worlds going to think of us once they find out what we did?”

“That Malcolm… he’s a Fast Eddie, isn’t he?” said Ian.

“I’m ready to secure anchor eight,” said Mitch.

“Go ahead, little guy.”

“They’re going to think we’re monsters,” said Gerry.

Another voice cut through their suit radios: Ira, speaking from control. “Could we cut the crap? We’re on a tight schedule.”

“Relax, Ira,” said Ian. “The CAPS will babysit us through the whole thing. You’ve taken the magic and

mystery out of suicide missions.”

“They walked right into it, didn’t they?” said Gerry.

“Hulke’s got a superb poker face,” admitted Ian.

“Yes, but the Tarsalans are supposed to be smart.”

“The Tarsalans were desperate. They wanted to believe what they wanted to believe.”

Gerry shook his head. “In other words, they still haven’t figured out that we’re willing to risk our own survival for the sake of our principles.”

“You think they would have learned that by now. It’s been nine years.”

“We should offer them a concession,” said Gerry.

Ira’s voice came over the radio: “Like you said, Ger, they walked right into it. It serves them right. And let’s remember who’s idea it was to depressurize the Council Chamber in the first place.”

“We don’t have any weapons on the Moon. What else was I supposed to do?”

“And the halothane was a nice touch,” Mitch piped in.

“And the way Kafis loosened his collar,” said Ira. “I haven’t had a good laugh like that in a long time.

You know what? I found it inspiring. To see a couple hundred Tarsalans all unconscious like that. It gave me… I don’t know… a secure feeling.”

“I feel sorry for them,” said Gerry. “They’re so far from home. They’re obviously terrified. And now we’ve locked them all away.”

“No one’s going to run interference on our damn mission,” said Ira.

A burst of dust came from Mitch’s area. “Anchor eight is secure,” he said. “Boy… that drill packs a punch, doesn’t it?”

“What’s the psi on your crampons?” asked Ira.

“Tenfold.”

“Then you have nothing to worry about.”

At the end of the seventy-two-hour training session—and with the CAPS it really wasn’t a training session so much as going along for the ride—they were ferried up to the AviOrbit launch platform fifty miles above the Moon and installed in the Prometheus.

AviOrbit and the Prometheus did a lot of the subsequent work by themselves. In fact, having a human crew was really nothing more than a fail-safe, though determining the exact placement of the five big FMC Transit Collective drives on the surface of Gaspra would require a human eye.

Gerry watched through the window as the Prometheus approached the five Federated Martian Colony drives. A strong titanium alloy frame locked the drives together, two at the front, three at the back, in a triangular boom. The Prometheus docked with the frame in a classic orbital rendezvous. At that point, AviOrbit Control asked the crew to make a complete systems check.

“I’m reading a glitch on the starboard number five thrust conduit,” said Ian. “Control, can you copy that?”

“We copy that, Prometheus. Please refer to Procedure 5-78a-11. It could be a misread.”

Ian referred to the procedure in question, then initiated the steps via the onboard diagnostics computer.

As Gerry watched his old friend, he felt a new admiration. Ian moved quickly and precisely, and looked right at home operating these complicated systems. After fifteen minutes, Ian finally had the system green-lighting him on the starboard number five thrust conduit. The pilot glanced at Gerry and gave him the thumbs-up sign. Ian’s head was now shorn—in fact, he had decided to go for the completely bald look, and his scalp was as pink as the skin of a freshly washed piglet, as if shaving his head was just another way he was reinventing himself. His handlebar mustache, however, was still thick and, for the most part, brown, but with some silver.

“I’m sober three weeks today,” he told Gerry.

“Congratulations.”

“This thing we’re doing… you have no idea what it means to me. I know you two are the ones with people back on Earth, but I finally feel as if I’m doing something…that really matters.”

Gerry gestured at the control panel, then at the CAPS they were wearing. “All this AviOrbit stuff… I had no idea. AviOrbit deserves a lot of the credit.”

“They’ve made it fairly foolproof,” said Mitch. “Though that warning… on the starboard number five thrust conduit.”

“It’s fixed,” said Ian.

“Are you sure?”

“I’m getting a green on it. And the procedure allows for a test fire. The test fire is a go.”

“I’ve just never seen it before. Especially in an M-class freighter. And as that particular thrust conduit is supposed to link FMC Drive Five—”

Ian gave him a wry look. “We got red-lighted all the time back in the old days. The thrust conduit’s just a minor system with a hundred redundancies in it. You don’t have to worry about it.”

34

They transited past Mars, which happened to be in closest opposition, a week later and the Martians sent them fresh oxygen, food, water, and the heartfelt best wishes of its citizens.

Then it was out to the asteroid belt.

The sun was no longer an orb but a gigantic star, a bright presence to their port side, bristling with

jagged rays, like a dangerous and sharp object one could cut oneself on if one got too close.

They settled into their own Kirkwood Gap seven million miles away from Gaspra. The Prometheus performed exactly to spec and braked as it neared the asteroid, spinning round so that the log-boomed singularity drives were now behind it.

Over the next sixteen hours, as they got closer to Gaspra, Gerry kept looking out the window, hoping to get a visual on the asteroid, but it finally had to be sighted through the telescope apparatus, and he got his first view of the misshapen rock on the monitor eighteen hours later.

Twelve miles long and seven across, it reminded him, in shape, of a peanut—a giant stone floating through space, twirling like a gargantuan football, rotating once every six hours and fifty-eight minutes.

The approach procedures were fully computerized. Gerry sat back and watched Prometheus take control.

She approached the asteroid’s “south pole,” though such directions were entirely relative, and for mission convenience only. She brought herself within five hundred yards of the asteroid’s surface, firing a final braking thrust to match Gaspra’s orbit, then initiated two axial bursts so that she began to rotate exactly in tandem. What Gerry saw below him was a bleak, moonlike surface, with horizons that dipped alarmingly and craters that looked disproportionately big on what was a small celestial body.

With its orbit and rotation established in Gaspra’s wake, Prometheus then fired three harpoons at the planetoid, instantly compensating for the force of the shots by five quick and perfectly timed blasts of its axial thrusters.

“She’s red-lighted our axial number three,” said Ian.

“Really?” said Mitch.

Ian quickly keyed in some queries on the diagnostics. “It’s a bug,” he announced a few seconds later.

“Like the one we got in the number five starboard thrust conduit.”

“That’s suspicious,” said Mitch.

The word choice startled Gerry. “Suspicious how?”

“One red-light I can accept,” said Mitch.

“We used to get red-lights all the time,” said Ian.

“And when was your last active mission?” asked Mitch. The question was rhetorical. Everyone knew Ian hadn’t flown in five years. Ian looked away. “You see what I mean?”

Then Ian brightened up. “Look, she’s green-lighting it.”

“What’d you do?”

“I didn’t do anything.”

“Shit.”

“Mitch, it’s working fine. There’s just some small bug in the diagnostics. There’s nothing wrong with the basic equipment.”

“We got every single Tarsalan?” asked Mitch. “There weren’t any hiding out anywhere?”

Gerry got the drift of this with a jolt to his heart. “You think we’re sabotaged?”

“Don’t they want to stop us any way they can?” said Mitch, looking at Gerry through his visor screen.

“They don’t want us to save the planet. They want to keep it bagged until their reinforcements arrive.

They’ll keep us locked away like zoo animals on Mars, Mercury, and the moons, and roll into Earth unopposed.”

“Jesus Christ, Mitch,” said Ian, “we’ve had two red lights, and they’ve both been resolved. AviOrbit whipped this mission together in record time. What do you expect? And yes, we got all the Tarsalans.”

“But did we get all their macrogens? I don’t trust those things. I never have. Especially the way they reproduce themselves.”

“Gerry, I think he’s having some mission stress. You’re the medic proxy. Maybe you should give him something.”

Gerry pointed to the screen. “Look. We have target acquisition.”

The screen showed that the three harpoons had exploded deep into the rocky, sun-blasted dirt of Gaspra, and the panel was green-lighting them for rendezvous.

“There,” said Ian. “You see? A green light. Are you happy? Let’s roll this rig in.”

Over the next fifteen minutes, the Prometheus pulled itself along the harpoon cables, traveling at no more than two miles per hour. The rock got bigger and bigger, and Gerry was somewhat comforted to see that it was green lights all the way. Still, the thought nagged. Macrogens. Devices no bigger than his thumb, capable of all kinds of nasty work, including the deployment of millions of nanogens. Had Kafis outplayed him after all? Were the number five starboard thrust conduit and axial number three just the start? Was the Prometheus slowly going to self-destruct as it got deeper into its mission?

The Prometheus touched down without any fanfare and hardly any dust.

The crew spent the next hour fastening her down with fluorescent green anchoring bolts, walking around on the surface with the special crampons on their boots so they wouldn’t drift away.

The FMC Transit Collective drives towered above them in an upside-down pyramid, an architecturally impossible structure anywhere but in the negligible gravity of a planetoid. The sun came up, the sun went down, all within the space of the first three and a half hours, but it was an odd sequence because the crew was on the south pole, and the sun didn’t so much set as hide behind a ridge, slipping out of sight on the left side, then coming out on the right, as if it were playing hide-and-seek with them.

The surface of the asteroid was different from the Moon in that there were only scattered deposits of loosely clinging regolith, like the pockets of snow that hid in the shade when spring came. For the most part it was bare rock, the best possible anchor for their specially designed crampons.

The work was a lot harder than Gerry had thought it was going to be, construction work, really, and he was glad his suit had artificial muscles, and that the gravity was so weak, because he wouldn’t have been able to take the strain otherwise. They jackhammered the Prometheus into the rock, and once all sixty-eight bolts were done, they stopped calling it the Prometheus and started calling it the PCV—the primary command vehicle.

After the PCV was established, they had a rest period of six hours.

At the end of that six hours they got up and launched a small survey probe—what the technicians at AviOrbit had christened Smallmouth 3, in Gerry’s honor, even though technically speaking Smallmouth 2 had been nothing more than a Styrofoam ball embedded with microinstruments.

Smallmouth 3 performed a complete survey of Gaspra, correlating the new topographical information to the known engineering tolerances of the five FMC Transit Collective drives, and feeding all this into a computer program that was meant to design, out of the misshapen rock that was Gaspra, the best possible spacecraft and, more importantly, the best possible planet killer. The program established five installation areas—these would be the five primary thrust bays, and operationally would be connected via laser through the PCV’s thrust conduits.

The crew sledded the drives one at a time to their installation areas, riding the sled two hundred yards above Gaspra’s surface. It was a bit like maneuvering an old-time zeppelin, as it had to be done with great care. The dual dangers were either that the drive would slam into the surface of the asteroid, or, barring that, would drift away into outer space. It had to be maneuvered through what Ian kept calling, with some nervousness, the “critical plane.”

Despite the finickiness involved, they managed, over the coming days, to anchor the drives into the installation areas with glitchless monotony. Gerry’s confidence climbed each time a new drive was installed. This was vindication. This was proof that he could do something like this. This told him that he was more than just Neil Thorndike’s younger brother.

Their third day, they sledded Drive Four to its installation area, what they were dubbing the Norbert Plains, after Mitch’s partner back on Earth. In fact, all the installation areas were plains of one type or another—the computer program had minimized the landform-thrust interference ratio as much as possible.

They maneuvered Drive Four over the selected area, then allowed the sled’s ion pump to give it a shove groundward. The crew capitalized on this downward momentum and soon had their boot crampons biting into the asteroid’s surface. Except for some minor irregularities, the surface was flat and devoid of loose particulate.

The stars swept by overhead as the short day counted out its two hundred and nine minutes. The three of them, like superheroes, held the drive above their heads, a unit that was fully the size of ten transport trucks but weighed next to nothing in Gaspra’s weak pull.

Ian said, “Let’s shift it a few yards to the left. We’ll miss that swell over there.”

So they moved it a few yards to the left, like three guys moving a big couch.

“Settle her down,” said Ian.

Which they did.

The mission continued with seamless predictability until Mitch started working on anchor seventeen.

Then Gerry heard through his helmet radio the two most dreaded words any crew never wanted to hear during a space mission.

“Oh, shit.”

Mitch drifted upward from Drive Four at a speed greater than escape velocity. His crampons had failed, and the force of his pneumatic drill had propelled him into space like one of the old Atlas rockets, his trajectory on an angle so that he didn’t drift straight up but floated quickly over the short horizon like a stray cloud. Ian fired a line to him, but by that time it was too late. Gerry keyed over to Mitch’s visor readouts and saw that the diminutive engineer had red lights not on one, but on both crampons. One he could accept. Two was…well, suspicious. Then both Ian and Gerry cramponed over to the sled. Ian interfaced the sled’s computer with Mitch’s CAPS computer to see if the two could arrive at a workable procedure. By this time, Mitch was well out of view beyond the short horizon.

“Mitch?” said Gerry.

“Jesus Christ…oh, shit! Where are you guys?”

Gerry and Ian looked at each other. It was Ian who delivered the bad news. “Mitch…the sled is giving us a negative on a rescue mission.”

“What? Are you sure?”

“Affirmative.”

“But that’s impossible. The sled should have more than enough thrust to reach me. I can’t be more than three miles away. Why’s it giving you a negative?”

Ian hesitated. “Because I’m afraid that the particular code needed to effect the proper burns and trajectories…it’s gone. Deleted. Not by me.”

The silence that came to the three of them was like the turning of a page. Gerry felt a tightening in his throat, and the tightness quickly spread to his stomach as the claw of an overwhelming apprehension closed its grip. He heard Ian’s voice through his suit radio, a few tense words, “What happened, Mitch?”

but the words seemed to come to Gerry through thick cotton batting.

“Both my crampons red-lighted at the same time,” said Mitch. “Do you know what the likelihood of that is?”

Mitch’s voice sounded hurt. Ian responded, telling the technician, “Even in my day we never got two red lights at the same time….” His words seemed unsure, as if the idea expressed was one Ian never expected to find in his mouth, especially in the current context. “And with the rescue software kaput… I don’t know. What are the chances?”

All the while Gerry felt Mitch was on a big river, and that he was getting further and further away. His face tensed into a mask of anxiety; he liked Mitch, and couldn’t believe they might lose him.

“Around one in twenty-five million,” said Mitch, because Mitch was always a man for statistics. Gerry heard the AviOrbit technician’s breath coming and going quickly. “It’s them,” he said, his voice going lower, dipping, like hanging onto the edge of a cliff and finally letting go. “They’ve done something.” Then a pause, accompanied by a little rough static from the radio. “You guys need redundancy procedures.”

Mitch might have spoken a foreign language. Redundancy procedures? Gerry was nonplussed. The man was going to die. “Mitch, just hang on. We’re going to save you.”

“That’s it.” Ian had gone into reckless mode, the damn-the-torpedoes Hamilton of old. “I’m getting on the sled. Just hang on, little guy. I’ll be there in a minute.”

“No! Listen to me! The two of you! My suit tells me I’ve broken orbit. There’s nothing you can do. If the rescue software is deleted, that’s…” Then, softer: “That’s it. Let’s face it, the delete is another Tarsalan trick. Ian, if you come after me in the sled, that’s two of us gone. You’re at work, Ian.

Remember? The first job you’ve had in five years. Let’s stay professional. Gerry?”

Gerry felt miserable, but managed to get the words out. “I’m here, Mitch.”

“Have you confirmed the delete? Let’s stick to procedure. Can you confirm?”

“It’s a no go on all fronts.”

“Then that’s it. There’s nothing we can do.”

“I’m sorry, Mitch.”

“I’ve got eighteen hours of life support.”

“Mitch, we could still…” This from Ian, but the words came out in the defeated tone of a man who had reached that cusp where hope and hopelessness merge, and, balancing for an instance on the possibility of last-ditch efforts, the pilot finally teetered into the territory of lost causes. He gave the console a petulant smack with a half-closed fist and turned to Gerry. He shook his head.

“There’s nothing we can do?” asked Gerry.

“There’s zero chance of getting him back, and we risk the whole mission if we try.”

Through his yellow-tinted visor, Gerry discerned his old friend’s face. Here they were again; not the first time they’d been in extreme circumstances—though riding an asteroid bronco-style while a friend drifted to his death was perhaps the most extreme circumstance of all. Ian’s lips had a curious curl, and his eyes had narrowed with resentment. Gerry, on the other hand, felt shocked into a kind of mild catatonia.

Mitch had guts of steel, though, because he was already on to the next thing, miles ahead of either of them. “There’s only two of you now.”

“Mitch, we’re sorry,” said Gerry.

“Think of the phytosphere.”

The dark, ugly thing that was suffocating Earth.

“Right… right. Go ahead, Mitch.”

“With me out of the picture, it means a lot more work for the two of you. Which in turn means new procedures. And if this virus thing keeps evolving, the framework for those procedures will constantly change.” His voice was high, tremulous. “You’ve got to work the procedures up fast, because this thing might balloon exponentially.”

And Gerry had to hand it to Mitch, because he went out like a hero, detailing the kinds of things they would have to do if they were going to get the mission accomplished against this increasingly growing threat, giving them guidelines and new timetables, interfacing with the PCV’s main computer to model fresh mission dynamics, and at last logging the whole thing into the mainframe. Only then did Mitch get weepy. Only then did Gerry and Ian loosen their hold on their own grief.

Gerry asked Mitch if he could still see Gaspra.

“I’m facing away.”

“Buddy, we’re going to miss you.” Ian’s voice was rough.

And it was true. Mitch was one of a kind.

They covered a few more technical possibilities, contingencies, and what-if scenarios, then Mitch’s voice got quiet. It was if the small man could already see the end of his life, was watching hours turn into minutes, minutes into seconds—those finite units of time that everyone had to measure eventually.

“You guys… make it count… that’s all I ask. And if you see Norbert… if he’s still alive… just tell him… you know.”

“We’ll tell him,” said Gerry.

And rather than drift toward Jupiter for the next seventeen hours—the remaining extent and breadth of his current life support—Mitch had his med-pak deliver an untenable dose of barbiturates to him intravenously, even as the Tarsalan infection in the PCV and its external components ballooned—as the small man had feared it would—exponentially.

35

As Glenda and her children ventured onto the final stretch of Marblehill Road, Hanna’s breathing grew more labored. Her coughing exploded into the still, hot air like small pneumatic reports. The trees in the forest loomed over them on either side, dead brown things. No cars, trucks, or people, just the awful silence. Glenda could barely see her kids in the dark. She looked up at the sky. No stars, Moon, or clouds—just the blackness of the phytosphere.

Hanna sank to the ground and coughed more violently. Jake kept looking down the road, gun held loosely in his hand. Glenda knelt next to Hanna. The perpetual darkness felt like something evil inside her body, a tumor she wanted to remove but couldn’t.

“Hanna, we’ve got to keep going.”

“I’m too weak, Mom. It’s never been like this before. I’m going to die. I know I am.”

“You’re not going to die. We just have to get to Uncle Neil’s. He has medicine.”

“Yes, but I can’t make it. I can’t get enough breath.”

“Get between me and Jake. We’ll help you along.”

“I can’t, Mom.”

“You’ve got to, Hanna. Buzz is going to come along.”

Hanna coughed some more, then choked out the words, “Just give me a minute.”

While Hanna rested, Glenda stood up and turned on her flashlight. She shone it up the road toward Marblehill, but its beam was weak and could barely penetrate the gloom. Still, it was strong enough to brighten a big tree that had fallen across the road. As the beam brought the tree’s spidery brown branches into relief, she had the distinct impression of something darting by overhead in the darkness.

She looked up just in time to see a large shadow, maybe twenty-five times the size of her car, disappear above the trees on the left-hand side, rustling above the uppermost branches.

“Did you see that?” she asked Jake.

“Yeah.”

“What was it?”

“I have no idea.”

But Glenda knew what it was, and didn’t want to say because her children were already scared enough as it was. She switched off the flashlight. She looked around at the dark forest with a sudden sense that they weren’t alone. That’s when she heard the bump and rattle of Buzz’s truck far down the road.

“Goddamn him,” moaned Hanna between coughs.

“Come on, sweetie. Let’s get up. Jake, give me a hand.”

“Maybe we should go into the forest,” suggested Jake.

“I’m not sure it’s safe.”

“Why?”

“Just give me a hand.”

They each took one of Hanna’s arms and lifted her to her feet. They struggled along with her as best they could, but she kept stumbling and they made slow progress. Glenda opened her eyes wide, something that was habitual now as a way to see as much as she could in the perpetual dark, and something that made her temples ache with a low throb.

She could barely see the left and right shoulders of the road. Her feet crunched through the gravel.

Hanna started crying, getting her weeping done in between her explosive coughing. The bump and rattle of Buzz’s truck got closer, the signature sound particularly noticeable on this potholed road. Glenda had the sense that she had already lost, and that dragging her daughter up this lonely rural road in the middle

of this perpetual night would be the last thing she would ever do. The futility of her situation made her want to weep, but she found that, despite these self-defeating feelings, her body kept going, as if it had an internal agenda for survival and couldn’t be bothered with the emotional fuss her mind was making.

“I don’t see his headlights,” said Jake.

“He’s behind that hill,” said Glenda. “He’ll be coming over the rise any second. Just keep going.”

They struggled and struggled, and finally came to the fallen tree in the middle of the road. The tree was huge and tinder-dry, and all the leaves had fallen off its branches.

“Let’s go around the left side,” she said.

She and Jake helped Hanna around to the left just as Buzz came over the rise. The dead branches, still thick, scratched her.

“Just push your way through. Hurry up. Hanna, lift your leg over the trunk.”

“I can’t see it, Mom.”

Glenda turned on the flashlight. “There.”

Her daughter climbed over the trunk, but it was as if death had already come to Hanna because, once on the other side, she collapsed.

“Just leave me here. Let him kill me. Maybe that will satisfy him. You two go ahead.”

“Hanna, come on, get to your feet,” said Glenda, her voice now panicked. “He’s nearly here.”

“I can’t, Mom. I really can’t.”

And she simply lay there on her side coughing, too weak to move.

“Jake, let’s drag her.”

But Jake was looking over the tree. “I’m going to take him out.”

“No, no… not with a handgun. Not from this range. You’ll waste bullets like you did last time. Just grab her and let’s go.”

They dragged her—literally—so that her jeans scraped along the gravel and kicked up a small cloud of dust. Buzz’s truck rattled to a stop on the other side of the fallen tree, and she heard Buzz open the door and get out of the vehicle. She didn’t look back, couldn’t look back, because her eyes were glued to the sky above the road, where she saw the dark shape again—huge, hovering silently, with no lights, no visible means of propulsion. Now that she listened more closely, she heard a faint hiss, like water being sucked down a drain.

The headlights on Buzz’s truck shone through the dead branches of the fallen tree, making a wild tracery of shadows all over the road. She glanced at Jake and saw that he was outlined in the branch-broken glow of Buzz’s headlights. But it was as if he didn’t care, because he was looking up at the Tarsalan vehicle as well.

“Goddamn it, Glenda, why don’t you let me kill you easy?” called Buzz.

The sound of a rifle shot rocketed through the air.

That’s when lights exploded everywhere on the Tarsalan Landing Vehicle. Shaped like a clamshell, the TLV now glowed with a mother-of-pearl mix—violet, green, silver—and this light coalesced into a single beam, which quickly pinpointed Buzz’s ramshackle old truck, while a smaller, separate beam outlined Buzz. She saw Buzz clearly in this small beam. He lifted his arm to his forehead to shield his eyes from the light, and squinted at its glare. Then a series of blue and green embers floated away from the alien landing craft and drifted, in no particular hurry, toward Buzz and his truck.

“Get off the road!” she cried.

She and Jake dragged Hanna up a small incline to the other side of a hummock. She got on her stomach and watched things unfold. As the blue and green embers got closer to Buzz they began to whine with a rising pitch until finally the sound was so painful that she had to cover her ears. Buzz figured things out quickly and, after a moment of drop-jawed scrutiny, ran away from his truck, rifle in hand, and disappeared into the forest on the other side of the road. Five embers drifted toward his truck and burrowed into it like hot little drills. A few seconds later, his truck exploded and was left a flaming heap on the asphalt.

Other embers pursued Buzz into the forest. She watched in horrified fascination. With all the underbrush dead, she kept fairly good track of Buzz. He ran from tree to tree as if pursued by a band of malevolent fairies. The embers cruised after him, closing the distance quickly. When they were a yard away, they pulled back, then dove into his body with the ferocity and quickness of bullets. Buzz cried out, an awful throaty scream. His limbs went stiff, his fingers splayed so that he dropped his rifle, and it was as if he was illuminated from within by high-voltage electricity. He shook violently. His shirt burst into flames, and he fell to the ground so that half his body was hidden behind a tree trunk, the other half still visible. Then came a small explosion and she got the distinct impression of a detached leg flying into the air. She turned away. She was saddened that it had come to this, but she was also relieved. And terrified that she now had to elude the Tarsalans herself.

At that point, the alien spacecraft descended to the road. It was wacky, a scene out of a science fiction movie, something she had never expected to see; visitors from another star at last landing on her planet, the spacecraft settling on the road like a giant glowing egg. It made a creepy sound, a sudden buzz with low-frequency harmonics that vibrated through her whole body, then that sucking sound again, like the last bit of water in a bathtub going down the drain. Then all sound faded.

In the ensuing silence, her body took over. She got her kids to their feet and helped them through the forest. Hanna didn’t have to be dragged—fear was a great motivator. Glenda got all kinds of scratches from the thick, dead bushes, but continued to cajole her kids through the dark forest past the spaceship, and finally back out onto the road. Her mind, in its own separate universe, reeled from the terror of it all.

With Hanna in such a debilitated state, it took them a long time to get the rest of the way to Marblehill.

Glenda looked at her watch in the dim glow of her flashlight, and wasn’t sure if it was one o’clock in the afternoon or one o’clock in the morning.

When they finally reached Marblehill, she looked up at the three-story mansion and saw lights burning in

four windows. In the glow of these lights she saw a helicopter sitting on the big front lawn. The building itself looked as if it had been under prolonged attack, with the east turret demolished and the rest of the various walls, dormers, and cornices badly shot up.

The three Thorndikes stood outside a big stone wall. There was a path outside the wall that led into the forest. In happier times, she had walked along this path, hand in hand with Gerry, down into the rugged limestone ravine that abutted the property where the trees used to grow. Hanna lay on the ground outside the wall. Her coughing sounded different: still persistent but not as strong, as if she had long ago ripped all her abdominal muscles to pieces and no longer possessed the muscular mechanics to cough the way she used to

“Jake, stay with your sister. I’m going to the gate.”

But beyond that? She didn’t know. What if this whole thing turned into a bust? What if everybody was dead inside? Shut up, Glenda. Live a minute at a time…minute at a time…minute at a time…

She reached the gate and turned her flashlight on and off three times. She waited, then repeated the signal, terrified that, somewhere out in the dead forest behind her, Tarsalan refugees watched her. She repeated the signal a third time, then saw someone run from the house, across the lawn, and toward the helicopter.

As the figure got closer, she saw that it was recognizably human, with normal human proportions, not short legs and long arms like a Tarsalan. She was so overwhelmed with relief that she felt dizzy and pressed her hand against the gate for support.

The figure resolved itself into a man. “Mrs. Thorndike?”

“Yes…yes, it’s me. Call me Glenda.”

“Where are your kids?”

The man closed the distance between them, and she saw the name FERNANDES stitched above his left breast pocket.

“Just down here.” She peered into the darkness. “Jake? Hanna? Come on.” She saw movement in the shadows along the stone fence. She turned to Fernandes. “My daughter’s really sick. I hope you have medicine.”

Fernandes nodded. “We have all kinds. Let’s get them across the lawn… before the Tarsalans come.”

New anxiety shot through her chest like a lightning bolt. “It’s bad?”

“We have five dead. Six including your sister-in-law.”

“My sister-in-law?”

Fernandes nodded. “It’s just three airmen left, Dr. Thorndike, and his three girls.”

“Louise is dead?”

“One of the VMs got her a few days ago.”

Her children appeared out of the shadows.

“Kids, Aunt Louise is dead. Just so you know.”

“What?” said Jake. “Really? What happened?”

Fernandes was looking at the gun in Jake’s hand. He then turned to Glenda. “He know how to shoot? I mean, really shoot?”

But Glenda was too upset about Louise to respond.

“I’m getting better,” said Jake.

“Ever handle a Montclair?” asked Fernandes.

“A Montclair? What’s that?”

Fernandes’s face sank. “Come on. Let’s get everybody inside.”

Fernandes hustled them across the lawn.

The lawn was brown and had the texture of a piecrust, the sod seeming to have come loose in a single piece from the underlying soil, as if the lawn’s root system had died at the same time, en masse. In a world where things kept getting worse and worse—where the sun could be extinguished by alien plankton, where Glenda could become a cop killer, and where mass famine took the lives of millions every day—Louise was just one more catastrophe, and it was hard for Glenda to immediately feel grief.

She just felt shocked. How was Neil handling it? How were the girls handling it?

Fernandes led them under the great stone portico and up the steps. They went through the front door, and…there they all were, Neil and the girls, waiting for them, just like any other Marblehill visit, only this one was so different.

Neil was smiling in the oddest way. “Welcome to Marblehill.”

His face was lit by a light that was hanging on a hook, a bare bulb in a cage, the kind mechanics used to look under cars. The greeting came out in a stiff, formal way, and the man standing before her didn’t sound like Neil at all.

“Neil, I’m sorry about Louise. This fellow…” She glanced inquisitively at the airman. “Fernandes, is it?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Fernandes told me.”

Neil raised his hands—no need to make any fuss. “We’re all right, Glenda. We’re just glad you made it here okay. We were starting to wonder.”

And that smile. Something wasn’t right about that smile.

The cousins got to know each other again. They had something to eat—military-issue stew, just add water—and her nieces came and clung to her off and on through the next several hours, especially Morgan, who mistakenly called her mommy a number of times.

She got to know the two other airmen: Captain Leonard Aft, who was nominally in charge, and Lieutenant Yuri Rostov, who was always wearing a pair of headphones and seemed to be the technical man; he had a constantly abstracted look in his eyes.

They had a rest. Hanna got her medicine. Her coughing got better and she breathed, for the first time in several days, without a wheeze.

Later on, Glenda stood guard duty with Neil in his study on the second floor. He still had that odd smile on his face, the squeeze of the curve so tight that his lips were white. Light-gathering goggles sat hinged in the up position above his eyes on a strap, and he kept scanning the grounds out front, his face lit by the dim glow of the communications apparatus on the floor next to him. He had lost weight. Not that he was gaunt, but his customary paunch was gone, his clothes were too baggy for his frame, and the usual fullness around his jaw had melted away like wax around a candle.

Now that his face was thin, Glenda couldn’t help seeing the resemblance to Gerry: the way his brow crowned around his eyes in a somewhat falconlike mold, the same generous nose, and a similar rounded protuberance to his chin. Her heart ached for Gerry.

And, as if Neil had read her mind, he said, “I’m sorry about Ger. I’m sorry he’s stuck up there.”

She looked away. Tears came to her eyes. “It’s a bit much.”

He reached out and put his hand on her arm. “Don’t worry, Glenda. I’ve got everything organized.

We’ve got listening posts reaching a mile in every direction. We’ve got infrared cameras the size of your thumb up in trees. We’re tracking each new landing and plotting it on a map. We’ve cataloged their movements and fed the results into a computer, and we’re coming to a real understanding of how they think, at least from a tactical and guerrilla standpoint. We’ve also made a fallback position in the cave.”

She dried her tears. “I forgot about the cave.”

“We’ve fortified the first chamber, and provisioned the second. We’ve got fresh water in there. Enough to last a month. Medicine, too. Not to mention food. We go out on patrol regularly. We search the area.

And we spray the house every day for bugs. Unfortunately, before we started spraying, the Tarsalans sent in bugs and found out we had food. But don’t worry about the Tarsalans. They haven’t mounted a strike in the last three days. We think they’re starting to tire. As for the cave, everything’s buried under rocks so they don’t know it’s there. And we go up there to spray, too.”

And still that smile, the lid on something that was simmering deep inside her brother-in-law.

She glanced out the front window. “I’m sorry about Louise.”

He didn’t say anything. She turned back to him. In the light of the communications apparatus, she saw that his face had turned red. She moved closer and put her arm around him.

“I’m okay…. I’m okay,” he said.

“No… you’re not.”

He took a deep breath. The smile disappeared from his face. “Maybe not.” And then he bowed his head, as if in shame, and closed his eyes. “I failed her, Glenda.”

“You didn’t fail her.”

“And I failed the kids.”

“No, you didn’t.”

“I finally realize what a big fool I’ve been all these years.”

“You’re not a fool. For God’s sake, Neil.”

After that, they lapsed into silence for a long time. She must have dozed. And Neil must have thought she was asleep—even when she opened her eyes around a quarter to eleven.

His shoulders heaved and he wept silently. The pain bristled off him like heat from a furnace. Her throat tightened with anguish and her own eyes filled with tears. God. What were they going to do? Here was the end of time. And Neil, once the world’s hero, was nothing but a broken man who cried alone in the dark when he thought no one was watching.

36

Day now followed day. The sad, dark month of October crept slowly toward its close. Glenda occasionally tried to reach Gerry on her fone, but with the shroud constantly thickening, her signal never got through, and she didn’t even get the message from AT&T Interlunar about service being down anymore.

At the start of their second week there, Neil got a call on his special phone from Assistant Secretary of Defense Fonblanque. When he was done speaking to her, he told Glenda about it.

“The United States Navy recovered a communications drop from the Moon three days ago south of the Solomon Islands. The Moon is telling us they’ve embarked on their own mission to destroy the phytosphere.” And then, unexpectedly, after talking in official mode, Neil got choked up. “Gerry might have had something after all. With his stress band and flagella.” He looked at the airmen, then at his daughters, then at Glenda and her family. “It seems they’ve conducted experiments that prove the phytosphere is… sensitive to gravitational pressure… and that the Moon, all this time, has been creating a tidal flux in the phytosphere—Gerry’s stress band. Gerry says if he increases the gravitational pull of the Moon against the phytosphere by a factor of fifteen percent for a period of five days, the flagella will be overwhelmed and the phytosphere will break apart.” Neil spelled it out in one blunt summation: “He’s going to slam the asteroid Gaspra into the Moon, move the Moon closer to the Earth, and use the resulting stronger gravity to shake the phytosphere apart.” He then sketched in the technicalities.

When he was done, Glenda stared at her brother-in-law with unmitigated alarm. Colliding emotions rushed through her body. Her throat felt ticklish, tears sprang to her eyes, and her head swam. She stumbled backward and would have fallen if Rostov hadn’t caught her.

“And he’s going to be riding on this asteroid?”

“That’s what Fonblanque says. At the last minute they’re going to eject in a survival pod. The mission is already well under way.”

“What’s to stop the Moon from falling into the Earth?” asked Lenny.

“The Moon’s orbit has been widening for millions of years. It’s going to continue in that pattern. This will just be a momentary blip. Centrifugal forces will soon pull it back to its regular orbit.”

“Is he serious?” Glenda couldn’t seem to catch her breath.

“They’ve already gone. They’ve reached Gaspra. They’re rigging it with AviOrbit’s five biggest singularity drives.” Neil looked away. “I’ve always chastised him for taking wild risks… but even I couldn’t have imagined—”

“Is Daddy all right?” asked Hanna, her eyes like tombs after all the asthma, but showing some light for the first time in weeks.

Neil turned to Hanna. “He’s all right.”

The reservation Glenda heard in Neil’s voice jabbed her like the point of a hypodermic needle. “And just what the hell’s that supposed to mean?”

Neil hesitated. “It seems some Tarsalans escaped to the Moon after the TMS became unviable. Before Nectaris mounted its mission, it neutralized those Tarsalans, and they’re now in detainment facilities on the Moon. This was to circumvent the possibility that the Tarsalans might sabotage the Gaspra mission.

But it seems the Tarsalans had automatic sabotage procedures in place, and that all the equipment and software for the Gaspra mission has now been infected with a slow-burning virus. Systems are failing one by one. As a result, one of the crew members has already been killed. But Gerry and… and you’ll never guess… Ian Hamilton—”

“Ian Hamilton?” The sudden appearance of this dark phantom from Gerry’s past alarmed Glenda to the core of her being.

“Apparently he’s been up there working as an AviOrbit test pilot for the last seven years. Now he’s mission pilot.”

“I’ve got to sit down,” she said.

Rostov led her to one of the overstuffed chairs Louise liked to decorate her various homes with, and she sat down heavily, hyperventilating. The components of the disastrous mission paraded darkly through her mind. Gerry, millions of miles away in deep space, riding on a giant rocket that was falling to pieces, one crew member already dead, and the other—the god of good times, as Gerry used to call him—ready to wreak havoc on Gerry’s life all over again.

“Did they take any alcohol with them?”

As ludicrous as the suggestion sounded, it was no joke, and Neil was sensitive enough to see that. For only Neil fully understood the pain Gerry’s alcoholism had caused her, because who could she turn to but Neil when Gerry didn’t come home for three days, or wound up in jail under Fulton’s mocking gaze, or tried to be affectionate to the children when he was so repugnantly drunk he could hardly stand? She would never forget her long telephone calls with Neil, and how Neil had gotten her through the worst of

it. And then what she called the New Sobriety had come along, the sobriety that had finally stuck, after so many times of Gerry trying to quit, but always falling back off the wagon. Was all that in jeopardy now? Surely Nectaris wasn’t such a party capital that they’d allow their astronauts to take booze with them on a critical mission.

“Glenda… it’s okay. For the first time in my life I actually believe in Gerry. He’s going to do this thing. I know he is. I might be smart. But Gerry’s the family genius. And I’ve finally got the guts to admit that.”

She broke down completely after that. Her nerves were shot.

“How long till he makes it light again?” she asked through her tears.

Because, God, did she want daylight again.

“Eight days. Ten at the most.”

So in ten days she would know if she was a widow or not. She wasn’t sure how she was going to make it through the uncertainty.

She didn’t have time to brood or think about it because Rostov, using the tiny state-of-the-art radar dish mounted on the roof, tracked seven TLVs landing within an hour of each other, all within a one-mile radius of Marblehill.

An hour later, Marblehill came under heavy attack. This attack was different in that it employed not only the regular VMs but also standard human weaponry.

“They must have found an armory somewhere,” was Lenny’s only comment.

So, amid the whining squeals of the VMs, there was also a lot of semiautomatic weapons fire. With all the gunfire, she was surprised that the surrounding dead forest, now dry as straw after all the heat, didn’t go up in flames.

She was in a sandbagged position under the drive-through portico with her fellow soldiers, Jake and Melissa.

She watched Melissa in amazement. Here was a girl who should have been more at home in a shopping mall, or out on a prom date, but now she was firing her Montclair like a seasoned grunt, her face darkened by military greasepaint, her jaw clenching each time she pulled the trigger. She stood up over the sandbags and sprayed the yard with gunfire, her long blond hair jerking around her shoulders and her lips pursed against the clenching of her jaw, and when she was done she ducked back down daintily, as if she were practicing a move in a cheerleading squad.

Then Jake got up, and he had the curious habit of holding out both elbows when he was firing his Montclair, as if he were a bird about to take flight. He fired a burst of nearly forty bullets, and as he neared the end of this fusillade, his elbows rose higher and higher until they were nearly parallel with his shoulders. Then he stopped firing, and his head ducked to the left and right, as if he were inspecting the damage; he reminded Glenda of a dentist drilling a tooth—drilling a bit, then looking—but in Jake’s case it was shooting a bit, then looking.

It was Glenda’s turn. This wasn’t like shooting Fulton from the rooftop. This was full-fledged combat shooting, and she was so scared she felt queasy. She flipped down her night goggles, scanned the yard, and saw two Tarsalans, ghostly figures in green, moving toward the helicopter, both carrying automatic weapons, man-made rifles. Hardly any VMs anymore, as if they were running out and had to make do with local resources. She took aim, just as she had taken aim at those partridges so many years ago, and fired, not a whole gusher of bullets the way Melissa had, but with her Montclair on its single-shot setting, believing she was more effective in sniper mode.

The first Tarsalan dropped dead. She aimed at the second. They had a dozen crates of Montclair rounds, including what could be made with the round-making kit, but someday even those were going to run out. Best to conserve. She squeezed the trigger and the weapon spit its bullet with a phhitt!, and the second Tarsalan went down; and now there were two lumps of green in her night goggles.

She saw five more come through the gate.

So began what turned into a long night. Glenda, Jake, and Melissa covered the front yard. Rostov and Morgan guarded the west wing. Neil, Ashley, and Fernandes manned the east wing. And Lenny and Hanna patrolled the rear, though Hanna really wasn’t good for much fighting because she was still too weak from asthma. Glenda was glad the back was fairly well protected by the swimming pool and tennis courts. So far the Tarsalans hadn’t mounted more than harassment strikes from the rear.

She heard a lot of fighting from the west wing and, as they had things fairly under control in front, she sent Jake—yes, her own son, because she wasn’t about to send Melissa, not when Neil had already lost Louise—over to the west wing to help Rostov and Morgan.

“But, Mom, what about the three we keep seeing run by the gate?”

“Melissa and I will handle them. Go help Rostov and Morgan.”

Children as soldiers. Hitler’s Germany. Cheng’s Hong Kong. And more recently, Ngaradoumbé’s Chad. She remembered seeing a picture of a nine-year-old African girl kneeling with a machine gun, a teddy bear poking out of the knapsack on her back. And now it was happening here. At Marblehill.

After two hours, it didn’t seem so strange anymore that children should be fighting. Glenda slowly lost her fear simply because she had to concentrate so hard on what she was doing. It was, in a word, work.

Like a shift at Cedarvale, especially a holiday shift, when Whit would sometimes have her on for twelve hours at a time.

She got tired by the third hour. “Is this what the last one was like?”

Melissa nodded. “We fought… and then we fought some more… and after we were done fighting, we fought some more. It went on for eight hours… and it had these lulls.” Melissa motioned out at the yard.

“I hate these lulls worse than I hate the actual fighting. You don’t know if they’re done or not. You’re always waiting for more.”

“I don’t see why we don’t just give them food. Surely we can spare a bit.”

“Dad says there’s no point. They’d just want more. We’re probably the only food source around for miles. Plus, he’s never going to negotiate with them now. Not since they killed Mom.”

“Yes, but…there’s going to come a time…we’ve only got twelve crates of ammunition left.”

“Dad’s had Yuri wire the whole house with explosives. If we have to fall back to the cave, the house goes up.”

“You’re kidding.”

“If they get the house, there are all kinds of things they can use. We can’t let it fall into their hands.”

Glenda motioned at the sky. “Yes, but they keep coming.”

And, in fact, over the next half hour Rostov radioed and told them he had another five confirmed landings in the general vicinity, that listening posts and tree-mounted cameras had picked up increased activity, and that they should be prepared for a renewed and stronger offensive at any time.

The offensive came fifteen minutes later, with an unexpected burst of VMs floating up from behind the wall like a Fourth of July fireworks display. The modules drifted toward them with their customary whine, flickering like pulsars. All Glenda could think of was that if she got touched by one of those things the intense vibrations would turn her internal organs to mush. She grabbed Melissa and dragged her away from the sandbags.

In the few seconds it took them to take cover behind the portico’s granite pillars, two VMs drifted in under the vaulted ceiling and lit the dark space within—a space where luxury automobiles had once dropped off illustrious guests to Neil’s various hoity-toity gatherings. Her pupils contracted painfully in the sudden sharpness of the light. The two VMs swirled around as if looking for them. But then they targeted the house, driving into double oaken doors that had been shipped all the way from Scotland. In moments, the doors burst into splinters and their stone casing disintegrated into rubble.

Melissa shrieked the way all young girls shrieked—it didn’t matter if it was a VM or a spider, the shriek was the same.

Several other VMs exploded throughout the Marblehill complex. Then the Tarsalans commenced a fusillade of regular gunfire from scrounged Earth-made weapons, and bullets ricocheted off the portico’s granite pillars, creating sparks in the darkness. The few windows that hadn’t yet been shattered burst into fragments. The hail of gunfire was so intense and nonstop that Glenda was too afraid to move. She also feared that under the cover of such heavy gunfire the Tarsalans might make a significant advance across the lawn.

Just as she was thinking that she had to get back to the sandbags and return fire, no matter what, Jake ran from the west side of the house dragging Morgan behind him. Glenda’s first thought was to send him back immediately, because how could Rostov cover the west side all by himself? But a moment later she understood, and a moment after that, Jake confirmed it.

“They got Yuri, Mom! One of those VM things shook him to pieces!”

She told him to get down because he was just standing there looking too shocked to think straight. Then she glanced beyond his shoulder to the west side of the house, where she saw shadows moving among the dead ornamental cypresses. She flipped her night goggles down and counted five Tarsalans, their shaggy bison heads and misshapen bodies now making her think of Quasimodo—five hunchbacks coming toward them. She immediately switched her Montclair to repeater mode and fired in their direction. She got three of them, but the other two found cover behind the balustrade.

“Move!” she shouted, and pointed east.

Glenda, Jake, Melissa, and Morgan ran toward the east wing. As they ran, she glanced out at the front, and saw so many Tarsalans swarming across the broad front lawn that she didn’t have time to count them.

She and the kids ran past the garden shed and around the corner, where they found Neil on his stomach by the lily pond, shooting with focused deliberation into the woods at the side of the house. Fernandes lay next to him, scattering gunfire into the trees as well. Ashley lay motionless, her brown hair matted with blood, her dress twisted around her waist, half on her side, half on her back, her legs scissored as if she were stepping into nothingness. Glenda felt suddenly woozy, and her grief was immediate, because here was just a child, fifteen years old, a year younger than her own Hanna, and she was dead. Her eyes clouded with tears. She glanced at Jake. Jake was staring at his dead cousin, a look of profound solemnity on his face, his eyes wide in the dark. Morgan wept as Glenda, getting a grip on herself, pulled both children to the ground. Melissa ran to Ashley and tried to shake her, but then, as more gunfire came at them from the woods, sank instinctively to the ground, pulled her own Montclair up in a petulant and angry gesture, and fired sporadic short bursts as she swore under her breath.

“Neil!” Glenda cried over the gunfire.

He glanced back. He looked like a phantom through her night-vision goggles, like something that had crawled out of a grave and now glowed radioactive green. And, in fact, with his daughter dead next to him, he looked as if he didn’t belong here at all, and wasn’t really part of this battle anymore, but was in a quiet place where none of it could hurt him. Fernandes, meanwhile, went about combat in his usual businesslike way, as if it were just a chore that he had to get done. Ashley’s awful stillness, lying there half twisted on her side, gave the whole scene a surreal aspect. Morgan wept more persistently, but her weeping sounded different this time: resigned, accepting, just something her body had to do.

Glenda pointed out front. “There’s a bunch of them coming this way!”

Neil nodded and got to his knees, then to his feet. “Help me with Ashley.”

She stared at her brother-in-law through her light-gathering goggles. Didn’t he understand that Ashley was dead, and that to carry a corpse would hamper their efforts; that they might be sacrificing themselves for the sake of a gesture? But in their mutual moment of indecision, Fernandes was already up on his feet, hunching over, taking a few steps toward the dead girl, lifting her, and tossing her over his shoulder, his small frame showing immense strength. And the decision was made; they were taking Ashley with them, whether she was dead or not.

The group ran crouching along the east side of Marblehill, the venerable old manse rising darkly beside them, Fernandes leading, then Neil, then the three kids, and herself at the rear. Tarsalan gunfire continued from the front of the house, but it was wasted because all the humans were back here now. Neil swung round the rear of the house and headed west, toward the metal fire escape that led to the third floor.

“Where are you going?” she cried.

“Up to get Lenny and Hanna. Go to the cave.”

Another burst of VM fire came. It rose from the front of the house until it was high overhead, a total of nine modules altogether. They lit the tennis courts, the swimming pool, and the back of the house with a shifting green and blue light; and in this shifting light, Glenda saw Hanna, running as fast as she could down the metal fire escape, a look of unmitigated panic on her face.

“Where’s Lenny?” Neil called to her.

“They got him, Uncle Neil! They’re in the house! They came through the dining room window!”

“But Lenny has the detonator. Did you get it from him?”

“I couldn’t, Uncle Neil. He’s dead. I saw it.”

Neil turned to Glenda. “I’ve got to get that detonator. Take the kids to the cave.”

“Neil, if they’re in the house—”

“I’ve got to get it. If they get their hands on all our supplies…”

He ran up the stairs, passing Hanna on the way.

Hanna joined Glenda and the other kids behind the tennis courts. She glanced at Ashley. “She’s dead?”

Her voice was without inflection, as if she were too shocked to react.

No one answered.

“Everyone up to the cave,” said Glenda.

Everybody knew the way, having gone to the cave—the single most interesting landform anywhere around Marblehill—many times before. Melissa led the way. Then it was Morgan, Jake, and Hanna.

Then Fernandes with Ashley over his shoulder. Ashley’s head and arms flopped back and forth against his back. Hanna began to wheeze mildly as she climbed the hill, but was otherwise in much better shape than she had been while traveling to Marblehill. Tears came to Glenda’s eyes as she stared at Ashley.

How could things have gone so bad so quickly? She reached out and touched Ashley’s head. Pulling her hand away, she saw blood. Glenda thought of Louise. And she spoke to Louise under her breath, telling Louise that she was sorry, that she should have tried harder, but that there was nothing she could do now. Louise’s baby, her niece, was dead.

Glenda glanced back at the house and saw Neil disappear through the third-floor door at the top of the fire escape. The VMs came down. Five of them splashed into the pool, and their combined vibrations forced every last ounce of water into the sky, so that for several seconds it rained pool water, and the smell of chlorine filled the air. A couple of VMs fell into the middle of the tennis courts, cracks instantly appeared all over the ground, and three of the high fenceposts sagged toward the middle of the court.

The last VM hit the slope behind the tennis courts, and shook loose a lot of the dead bushes, which then slid to the lawn in a mini avalanche.

Just as the path drew even with the roof of the house, Glenda saw Neil emerge from the third-floor fire exit carrying a large knapsack looped around one shoulder. She heard his footsteps resounding tinnily on the risers of the fire escape as he double-timed it to the ground. At the same time, she saw a half dozen Tarsalans coming around the west side of the house, all of them armed with Earth-made weapons, one of them running so fast he slipped on the pool water and fell on his hip. The others took aim at Neil and fired. Neil went down, but got on all fours and crawled toward the path leading to the cave. Coming on the heels of Ashley’s death, Neil’s wounding made her feel as if all that was good and decent in the universe had suddenly disappeared, and in fact had never been there in the first place. But it also filled her with the raw determination not to fail Louise again.

“Hold it… hold it! Take positions. Neil’s been hit. Let’s cover him.”

Melissa, especially, followed this order instantly, as if the inadvertent boot camp at Marblehill had trained her well. She fired a withering hail of stinging Montclair ordnance into the advancing Tarsalans and killed all but one of them. The last one fled west and took cover behind the house. Morgan was already running down the hill, screaming for her daddy. Neil was up on his feet, but staggering badly as he climbed the path.

“Jake, go with Morgan. Help your uncle Neil. We’ll cover you from here.”

Jake went.

No more Tarsalans came, and they helped Neil up the hill without further mishap.

A perch in front of the cave overlooked the house from a little less than a quarter mile away. Fernandes finally put Ashley down. The girls, including Hanna, fussed over her, and they all cried to varying degrees.

But the men, including Jake, were peering through their night-vision goggles at Marblehill, and Neil now had the detonater in his hand, his hand poised on the plunger. They were all waiting, the three of them, silently poised there, caught in one of those odd, still moments that sometimes happen in the middle of the most dire combat. Glenda peered past them through her own night-vision goggles. Dozens of Tarsalans entered the house. Neil’s elbow flexed…flexed…and it all came down to the timing…. Neil, Fernandes, and Jake balanced there, as if they were team members engaged in a sporting event, waiting to place the puck in the net, or the ball through the hoop…waited…waited until at last Neil shoved the plunger down with a viciousness that seemed to be a summation of all the anger he felt over losing his wife and daughter.

The house went up.

Two seconds later, Neil sat down quickly, weakened by his own blood loss.

37

Gerry gripped the fifth and final singularity drive, conscious that if Mitch hadn’t overdosed himself with barbiturates, his life support would have given out seventeen minutes ago. Gerry had a line around his waist, and this line, attached to Drive Five, slowly settled in a deep arc toward the surface of the asteroid, its fall slow in the weak gravity, as if it settled through molasses. Ian maneuvered around behind, gripping him, fearful of falling off the asteroid. Gerry’s fingers felt stiff from holding the drive so tightly. He was sweating inside his suit, and his smell was ripe because the Tarsalan virus had sabotaged his personal hygiene unit and all his intragenic filters were off-line.

He heard Ian’s stertorous breathing through his suit radio. The sun was to his rear, and Gerry’s shadow was like a piece of black felt on top of the drive.

He glanced toward Ian and saw his old friend latch his safety belt to one of the drive’s maneuvering rings. “How do your crampons feel?”

“Still holding.” Ian sighed. “This is taking so long.”

“Last one.”

“I keep thinking of Mitch, drifting away.”

“We stay professional, like he says.”

“We’ve been going for eighteen hours. We’re punch-drunk tired. We’re going to start making mistakes soon.”

“Last one. Go ahead.”

“I wish we could fight this damn virus.”

“It would be like two men trying to dike a flooding Mississippi.”

Ian withdrew the pneumatic drill from his pack, like pulling a huge white arrow from a giant quiver, brought it down, maneuvered carefully, then glanced at Gerry. Gerry reached over and grabbed onto his arm. Once Ian was convinced Gerry was holding him tightly, he muttered under his breath, “Three, two, one,” and fired the T-bolt through the brace. Both of them tensed up. Gerry watched his monitor as his crampon psi increased tenfold, and was glad that his feet felt as if they were stuck in deep mud. The last one. Ian started to laugh, first a few short guffaws, then a long run of ha-ha-has, as if they had just deviously outsmarted the virus. No sooner had he finished laughing than the right guidelight mounted at the side of his helmet blinked out. They both froze. They braced themselves. Little things were going wrong all the time now. As though everything was going through a quick aging process. Gerry’s left guidelight blinked out, and the little red warning signal on his inside visor screen, retinally focused so that he could see it easily, told him that the virus was now checkmating his means of illumination.

“I don’t get how this virus works,” said Ian.

“And look, it’s nearly night.”

The terminator came at them like a quick and relentless black tide, spilling over the uneven surface like ink. He couldn’t help thinking of the rising tide of barbiturates in Mitch’s bloodstream. Funny the way it worked, but the second the terminator touched them, their remaining guidelights went out, as if the leading edge formed an invisible circuit. The darkness was so complete that he felt as though he was in a coffin. The stink of his own fear came to him like the sharp zest of a lemon. The red light blinked again, and in this darkness he was too afraid to move—because first it could be the guidelight, then it could be the crampons, and then they could fall off the edge of Mount Gaspra.

“What do we do?”

Ian’s breathing came over his radio—uneven, stopping at times—and it took him a full fifteen seconds to answer. “Wait for daybreak.” This immediately seemed reasonable, because daybreak wasn’t too far away, only three and a half hours, and they had worked so hard that they were considerably ahead of schedule anyway. Neither of them said anything for several minutes. The whole episode had a dreamlike aspect, especially when Gerry started thinking of the physical particulars: two human beings on an asteroid, desperately isolated from every other human being in the solar system, both of them gripping the last drive, neither moving nor saying anything. Because it was so dark, Gerry began to feel disembodied after a while. But then Ian, a man who always had to talk, gave way to that particular impulse, and the first words out his mouth had to do with Neil, and how Neil was going to have to eat crow when they got back.

“I’m not even thinking of that, Ian,” said Gerry. “I’m just hoping it all works out.”

“Whatever happened to Neil?”

“I guess he started believing in his own propaganda.”

“I just want you to know, I admire the hell out of you, Gerry. I used to admire Neil, but now I admire you. Not only for this mission, but for the…the way you’ve turned your life around. Giving up drinking and all. It’s really helped me.”

“You should thank Glenda. Glenda’s the one who made me see sense.”

“It’s seven weeks for me.”

“Congratulations.”

“I guess I didn’t mention—I started going to A.A. meetings before we left.”

“That’s great, Ian.”

“And I want to meet someone when I get back.”

“I thought you had Stephanie. That night we went for a walk around the lake… I got the impression—”

“Stephanie doesn’t know what she wants.” He said this abruptly, with evident hurt in his voice. Gerry waited for him to elucidate, but he steered clear of Stephanie. “All I’m saying is… I believe in the future.

That might sound funny, considering we’re up here, and we have one system failing after the other.

But… you know what it’s like. The drinking. Especially when you start doing the heavyweight rounds.

And I was doing a lot of heavyweight rounds before you came up. I was a miserable human being, Gerry. I didn’t believe in the future. And now I do. And I just want you to know that… even if things don’t work out… all this has made a big difference to me.”

Sunrise ripped over the opposite horizon of Gaspra like a wild bushfire at the end of the asteroid’s short night.

They found their way back to the sled.

The sled wouldn’t start at first, and when Ian checked the diagnostics monitor, he saw that the number-three relay in the ion pump was misfiring, turning back on itself so that it was in danger of shorting out.

The pilot shut the number-three relay down, keying in the off-line sequence with a quick and practiced hand, and while this resulted in a lessening of drive power, and a concomitant reduction in speed, they still covered the ten miles from the end of the asteroid to the Primary Command Vehicle in under twenty-five minutes. They maneuvered through the critical plane and, looking down at the pitted gray-brown surface with its little freckles of shadow here and there, Gerry got the sense that they were not flying above a planetoid but passing a gigantic transport truck, this illusion created by the way the horizon sloped drastically in all directions.

The PCV came into view a short while later, its clean, angular planes, panoramic freighter windows, and fluorescent green anchoring supports a comforting sight to both of them. They were thankful to at last

land the sled, untether themselves from each other, make the final risky walk to the air lock, and get inside the Prometheus, where the danger of falling off Mount Gaspra didn’t exist.

Telemetry and orbital dynamics called for the ignition sequence three hours and twenty-two minutes later—in other words, Gaspra had reached that precise point in its age-old journey around the sun when it could most effectively be targeted toward the Moon. As Ian went through the sequence Gerry felt, like a presence inside him, the death of Mitch Bennett. The pain was no longer acute, but it was still there, a chronic ache. Through the freighter windows he saw the sun, a bright star, something that could easily be transplanted to a Christmas card as a stand-in for the Star of Bethlehem. Ian had his gloves off and his long fingers danced over the keyboard with virtuoso intensity. With the command patterns now encoded, he went to the engage sequence, something he had to do with a special key made of orange-tinted titanium. But when he turned the key the red warning light went on, and they learned that the spreading Tarsalan virus had hamstrung the ignition cascade.

“The PCV’s main computer was supposed to fire engines one, three, and four but instead asked me to fire two, four, and five,” said Ian. “I’m going to have to bypass the computer and make myself the interface.”

Ian took out tools and fiddled with the key box, and got to the guts of the thing. There were some sparks and smoke, and finally a smooth hum. The position of the sun shifted as they began heading homeward in a steadily collapsing orbit.

But the ignition sequence was just the start of their troubles.

Three days later, communications with AviOrbit Control became intermittent. They sat together by the console, and while Gerry saw that the bits of information were coming in—they could be seen in a representative sawtooth pattern on the Vox interpretive software screen—the virus jumbled those sound packets so that the vocal result was the equivalent of a spilled jigsaw puzzle. They glanced at each other.

It sounded like a bunch of ducks settling down for the night. Ian went into the background language and made adjustments, typing furiously, and they finally got Ira.

“What the hell is happening?” asked the AviOrbit boss.

“We’re having further degradation,” said Ian. “Maintain an open channel at all times.”

Navigation blinked out for up to thirty minutes at a time and then would come back on, and Ian would scramble to recalibrate their fall sunward. Four days in, they sat by the navigational unit and Ian had his wristwatch up close to his eyes. They were both sweating because life support was making the temperature warm. Ian’s face had gone red in the heat, and a small droplet of perspiration hung from the point of his nose.

“I hope my watch is right,” he said, and fired another braking burn, having to use his own wristwatch for the timing because the navigational counter was currently off-line due to the virus.

The solar-activity warning system failed, and they were forced to use one of the backup radiation monitors to alert them to any possible anomalous radiation from the sun. Gerry climbed into the helm area to hold the wand in the air, and the little speaker crackled and the needle jumped into the red. They were forced into the radiation bunker for the next eighteen hours, having to strip down to their thermals, as the magnetized protection of the bunker allowed no metal of any kind. It was like sitting in the scoop of a

backhoe shovel, the ceiling sloped and cramped, and the only light coming from a nonmagnetic phosphorescent strip that put out such a pathetic number of weak green lumens that only the edge of Ian’s face was outlined with an ill-defined edge of olive murk. They were like two men in a dark steam bath, only there wasn’t any steam, just the steady hiss of the monitor telling them that solar activity raged outside. At last the radiation passed and they came back out to take their posts at the command console.

Because the five FMC Transit Collective drives were the most advanced AviOrbit had ever built, and were able to accelerate, in theory, indefinitely, the trip sunward was quick, and after six days Gerry and Ian were halfway back to Earth.

But in that six days, a lot happened.

At one point, their life support began to behave erratically. They both huddled around the monitors and watched the temperature plummet, the little blue bar sinking and sinking. Ian went into the background language and tried to write some corrective code, but even as Gerry watched, new Tarsalan-generated code appeared, as if antiphonally answering whatever Ian might try. So at last they got into their CAPS.

Gerry cranked up the heat and heard the little crackling noises of the conduction coils, and merciful warmth caressed his shivering body. But eight hours later he watched the blue bar on the life-support readout rise, and he got so hot, and his ventilation was by this time so riddled with virus, that he took off his CAPS and pressed himself against the polycarbonate pressure windows to keep cool. Ian came up and joined him.

“Remember the time we went to Mexico? That heat wave they were having?”

But all Gerry could truly remember of the Mexico trip was the tremendous amount of tequila they had downed.

The cabin pressure became too high, and his eardrums ached. The alarm dinged and told them that hull tolerances had climbed into the yellow, so they had to vent atmosphere in order to bring the pressure back down. Out the freighter windows Gerry saw a cold, blue cloud of the stuff drift away over the surface of Gaspra, like a tenuous and ill-defined band of ghosts, the color reminding him of the color of the blue marlins his brother caught at Trunk Bay.

Then, as they were nearing Mars, the virus locked the venting system into the open position and the air became so thin that it reminded him of the time he and Neil had climbed Mount Baker, back in the days when they actually still did things together. Ian sat at the console, his fingers clicking over the keys, and his blue eyes were a picture of concentration, predatory and birdlike as he finally managed to reroute air away from the vent manifold and into auxiliary tanks. By this time pressure was so thin that Gerry felt dizzy, and he was wondering if he might be suffering from altitude sickness. They broke out the emergency breathers—they wanted to conserve their CAPS for whatever emergencies might lie ahead.

Once he had his breather strapped to his face, he didn’t feel so light-headed anymore.

They again stopped at Mars, establishing a braking orbit around Earth’s red neighbor, and approached the FMC’s Phobos-Deimos Terminal, an immense structure fabricated out of the planet’s two moonlets, the planetesimals joined by hundreds of luminous skywalks. PDT Control okayed them for rendezvous, stipulating a ten-kilometer limit, and Ian parked the craft in a tandem orbit behind Deimos. The two men got out and were ferried by taxi to a hotel on Deimos for the night. Meanwhile, the Federated Martian Colonies refurbished their ship with the necessary life support to get them the rest of the way to Earth.

Their room, in a hotel that resembled a stack of bubbles, much like the bubble nests Siamese fighting fish manufactured to breed, was made of a one-way material. Outside, looking in, Gerry saw an opaque blue sheen similar in color to a sapphire. But once he was inside looking out, he got a spectacular view of the Martian surface ten thousand miles below. (Phobos had been moved into a considerably higher orbit while Deimos had been maneuvered into a much lower one for the construction of the PDT.) Gerry beheld the red planet with a mix of awe and reverence. Its red, orange, and ochre shades reminded him of the flowerpots Glenda had in their backyard at home. And even though it was a dead world, it was at least a self-supporting world—if worse came to worst, they would always have Mars. He saw the volcanoes of the Tharsis Bulge. He saw Valles Marineris, and the whitish straining of the polar ice cap as it tried to finger its way south. A world without a phytosphere. As beautiful in its way as Earth. He couldn’t help thinking of Luke Langstrom. Somewhere down there, Dr. Langstrom had his home.

Spacecraft occasionally flew by. It was like a scene out of a futuristic dream, and he was thankful, because ordinarily he never would have gotten to see something like this.

It was while they were in their hotel room that Ian again broached the subject of trying to meet someone when he got back to the Moon—as if the future were a certainty, and the precariousness of their situation meant nothing to him.

“I was kind of hoping for Stephanie,” he said. So. Stephanie, after all. “That is, if you don’t mind me moving in on her.”

“Why would I mind?”

Ian stared at the terra-cotta palette that was the Martian surface below. “Because, you know…you and her—”

“There’s absolutely nothing between us, Ian.”

“I was actually going out with her for a while.”

The strain he heard in his friend’s voice unnerved Gerry. “I kind of figured.”

“But when you came along…well…you know…I stepped aside.” And there was an admission in this, as if Ian understood that he must step aside, that his behavior, abominable for so many years by his own reckoning, disqualified his tenuous hopes for Stephanie’s affections.

“Stepped aside? For what?”

“I didn’t want to get in your way. Or in hers.” He reached up and scratched the back of his head.

Outside, a ground-to-orbit launch vehicle, filled with people looking out windows, eased by. “It was just like the Maggie Madsen thing all over again.”

“Ian, I thought we weren’t going to talk about Maggie.”

“Anybody can see Stephanie’s crazy about you, just like Maggie was. Matter of fact… Steph was the one who broke up with me… once she met you, that is. That’s one thing I admire about her. She wasn’t going to two-time me.”

The sophomoric details of this astounded Gerry. “Ian, I had no idea.” Five miles away, across the delicate network of transparent skywalk tubes, he saw Phobos. “She didn’t mention anything to me.”

Phobos looked like an olive with the pimento missing—the Stickney Crater.

“She didn’t?” He seemed to regard this as another indication of his own spectacularly failed personal life.

“No, I guess she wouldn’t.”

“You should have said something.”

“I kind of mentioned it. In a backhanded way. That night I came to your room and broke the mirror.

How you would never steal a girlfriend out from under me again? The whole Maggie Madsen thing?”

“That’s what that was about?”

“In a way… but… that night. I want you to forget about that night. I was going through a lot that night.”

Gerry frowned. “I had no idea you were talking about Stephanie.”

“I didn’t want you to… you know… get distracted from your work. Or feel uncomfortable.”

“Ian, you know me better than that. And I could never go with Stephanie. I love my wife. She’s the single most important thing in my life. I made that a hundred percent clear to Stephanie. She knows there can never be anything between us.”

“So you don’t mind if I move in on her, then?”

His friend seemed to be missing the point, so he let it go. “No… I don’t mind.” He lifted a citrangequat, a hybrid citrus fruit that for one reason or another had become extremely popular among Martian hydroponics growers, and began peeling the skin from the pear-shaped trifoliate, the peel coming off in blaze orange fragments that seemed to highlight the color of the planet below. “And I wish you’d forget about Maggie.”

“With Maggie, it was a crush. With Steph… it’s more.” Ian looked up from his contemplation of the warrior planet and turned to Gerry, a wistfulness creeping into his blue eyes. “I was hoping that when we get back… you know… you can build me up a bit. Tell her what a hero I’ve been.” He gestured in the general direction of Gaspra. “Because I’m having to drive that asteroid all by myself and it ain’t like drivin’ a bus. This is real test-pilot stuff. You make her understand that I’m worthy of her, and that I’ve been working real hard on being worthy, and that I don’t mean to screw up on her or anybody else ever again.”

Gerry recognized only too well what his friend was going through. This was alcoholic’s remorse again, like on the night he broke the mirror. He gazed at Ian in a new light, and realized that Ian was no longer the god of good times but a man, like so many others, who had been transformed by a woman. Ian didn’t even know if Stephanie loved him. Didn’t even know if she would have him when he got back. Yet there was a new purity to the man.

“I’ll make her understand, Ian.”

38

Glenda wasn’t a doctor, but she’d seen and learned enough working at the nursing home to understand that Neil’s back wound was bad. Fernandes stood next to her holding a flashlight. She took a huge wad of dressing and pressed hard against the injury. She looked up at Fernandes and saw that his face was flecked with tiny spots of blood, maybe Ashley’s. Neil moaned in pain.

“Some morphine?” asked Fernandes.

“Yes.”

Fernandes went over to the kit and brought the unit back. He seemed to know how to use it well, because he jabbed it right into Neil, no hesitation, and a moment later Neil quieted down.

He weakened through the night, and even though they had a stockpile of dressings in the cave, Glenda went through them quickly, trying to stanch the flow of blood. Fernandes tried to comfort the girls as best he could, but he was awkward in this task and finally went to join Jake a little farther down the hill to keep an eye out for possible attacking Tarsalans.

By morning—if in fact it was morning—Neil’s breathing grew labored, and his face was so pale that Glenda was sure they were going to lose him. Yet he hung on, hour after hour, and was even able to eat some military rations. At one point, she sent all four kids out to the ledge along with Fernandes to keep a lookout for Tarsalans, even though for the last several hours—ever since the destruction of Marblehill—the aliens had been eerily inactive.

That’s when Neil started talking.

“In our will… Louise’s sister, Joanne, and her husband, Lorne… are designated as legal guardians for the kids… should Louise and I die before they reach the age of majority, et cetera, et cetera. Grab Lenny’s topographical map for scrap paper. Let’s write a… a codicil to change that.”

“Neil, you shouldn’t even think of that now. You should try to rest.”

“No, no. We’ve got to do this, Glenda. Joanne and Lorne… who knows if they’re okay. I’m sure all of Atlanta has burned to the ground by this time. We’ve got to make it so… you know… you have the necessary resources to… raise Melissa and Morgan, and send them to college… and all the things… that the girls are going to need. And to bury Ashley… properly.”

“Fernandes is talking of burying her up here… close by.”

He turned from her and stared at the cave ceiling. His eyes closed partially and he exhaled, and finally nodded. “I think she’d like that. When I die, bury me next to her. I don’t want her to be alone.”

Glenda wanted to tell him that he wasn’t going to die and that there was no need for him to think about his burial at this time, but she had extreme doubts that he would in fact pull through because he looked awful, white and clammy and ready to give up at any moment.

“Why don’t you have some more water?” she suggested.

“I’ve got pens in that case.”

“And how’s your pain? Do you need more morphine?”

“I’d sooner stay clearheaded for this.”

She saw he wasn’t going to take no for an answer, so she got the topographical map, and a pen from the case. Neil dictated and she wrote the codicil in the light of a flashlight, and she couldn’t help taking heart because he appointed not only herself but also Gerry, as if he firmly believed that Gerry was going to return and that Gerry’s mission to destroy the phytosphere would succeed.

Ten hours later, when it was only Jake and Melissa standing guard on the ledge, and Fernandes, Hanna, and Morgan were trying to make themselves comfortable on coarse military-issue mats, Glenda heard a strange hissing sound up toward the cave ceiling. She shone the flashlight at the ceiling but all she saw was the rough limestone.

She shook Neil by the shoulder. “Neil. Wake up.”

Neil groaned and opened his eyes.

“Listen,” she said.

Neil’s eyes grew more focused, and he finally lifted his head off the mat. “Get the spray. They’ve sent in some macrogens.”

She quickly got an aerosol can and sprayed the air. Fernandes roused himself and helped her with a second can. The spray particles immediately tagged the macrogens, and they glowed with a dull green phosphorescence, fifty of them, flying all over the cave, several of them going into the second cavern, where the foodstuffs and medical supplies were.

The tagged macrogens eventually fell to the floor, like insects overcome by insect killer, but she was sure some must have already transferred their data to Tarsalan survivors in Chattahoochee.

She and Fernandes crushed the felled macrogens underfoot, like they were so many dead locusts. They then picked them up and threw them off the cliff overlooking the dry forest. They did all this, but she knew it wouldn’t matter. From that point on, she understood a fresh Tarsalan attack was imminent. The aliens had to know she had food in the cave. And they were starving. It was the same story all over the world—everybody fighting over food, simply so they could live another day.

Neil settled and she sat up next to him. Fernandes, unable to sleep, joined her. He talked about his wife.

“Her name is Celia. She’s in Denver. I haven’t heard from her since this whole thing began. But I got this strong feeling that I’m going to see her again. She’s smart. Like you. She’ll know how to survive through this. We always meant to start a family.”

After that, they both slept for a while.

When they got up, they decided to bury Ashley. They got some shovels, went up the hill, and dug a pit through the soft forest mulch. They laid the girl inside. Jake stood next to them holding a flashlight, his Montclair slung around his shoulder. Once Ashley was settled in her grave, Fernandes went to get the others. He came back. Neil limped along, supported on one side by Fernandes, and on the other by Melissa. At the graveside, Neil managed to say a few words. Recounted Ashley’s short life. Her interest in riding, tennis, and reading. How, though she didn’t say much, everyone could tell that she thought a lot, that she was extremely aware of the world around her, and that she loved life. “She was too young,” said Neil. “But at least she’s gone to join her mother now.”

The girls gathered some chunks of limestone and made a marker for her.

As they finally pushed the forest soil over the dead girl, Glenda couldn’t help wondering how many similar scenarios were playing themselves out all over the world.

In the meantime, she was worried that the Tarsalans had spied on them with their little flying bugs.

Her suspicions about an imminent attack were confirmed when, over the next several days, she and Fernandes counted a combined total of seventy-three new Tarsalan ships landing in the vicinity. After two days of continuous sightings, the landings tapered off and the dead forest grew still. Glenda knew that it had to be the proverbial calm before the storm.

On the evening of that fifth day, she sat on the ledge overlooking the forest, cross-legged, bony knees slightly up, her Montclair resting on her lap, and her night-vision goggles flipped down over her eyes.

Fernandes was somewhere off down the main road running reconnaissance. The forest was a collage of green trunks and branches. She saw no movement. But somewhere out there she realized there had to be hundreds, possibly thousands, of desperate Tarsalans who knew about her food. She hoped Fernandes would come back with exact numbers.

She flipped her night goggles up and looked at the sky. Why didn’t Gerry hurry up? If the phytosphere were suddenly and miraculously destroyed, and the sun shone again, wouldn’t that give everybody, including the Tarsalans, hope? Wouldn’t there be born in the breasts of humans and aliens alike a new spirit of cooperation? She wasn’t more than moderately religious, but she couldn’t help thinking of the old Biblical phrase in Genesis: “Let there be light.”

She repeated this phrase to herself, off and on, for the next half hour, chanting it like a mantra, but it did absolutely no good as the sky remained locked in darkness. She had to be frank with herself. Louise and Ashley were dead. Neil was going that way. Of the airmen, only Fernandes remained. Marblehill was destroyed. The world was forever enshrouded in darkness. And now she had to defend this cave against hundreds of alien invaders from a star forty light-years away. Worst of all, she had to do it with an army of kids.

A couple of days later, while she was sitting in the exact same spot overlooking the forest, waiting for the Tarsalan attack to come, Morgan came out of the cave and said, with zero inflection, “Dad’s dead.”

In another time, Glenda might have jumped up and raced into the cave. In another time, she might have said, “What? Are you sure? This can’t be.” But all she did was sit, her shoulders sinking, trying to pick out the features of Morgan’s face, struggling to understand how this solemn and strange third child, who always went her own way on everything, must be feeling, now that she was an orphan.

Subdued at first, Morgan cried a short while later. So did Melissa.

Glenda and Fernandes gripped Neil by the shoulders, and Hanna and Jake each grabbed a leg—they couldn’t have the remaining Thorndike sisters doing this—and they carried him outside, up the hill where the trail curved past three yew trees, venerable evergreen giants she remembered and identified from happier times. They took him to the same spot where Ashley had been buried. Jake and Fernandes hollowed out a shallow grave through all the dead leaves, having to cleave through some roots with the ends of their shovels. And as Jake and the airman dug, Glenda wondered about the nature of luck. As she had once told Gerry, Neil, a spectacularly successful academician, an investor of consummate skill, a presidential advisor, the man appointed to save the world, had been born with a golden horseshoe up his butt. But now it was up to Gerry—a reformed alcoholic who never had any luck, and who had faced setback after setback in both his professional and financial lives—to get them out of this mess. She decided Neil had to be overdrawn at the bank of good luck. The gods of misfortune had cashed in big-time.

They buried Neil. Morgan, Melissa, and Hanna gathered some limestone from the surrounding area and made a crude marker similar to Ashley’s: just a pile of stones—hardly worthy of this great Nobel prize winner, with his five homes, eighteen cars, and magazine-perfect family.

Glenda said a few words. She didn’t know much of the Bible, especially as it pertained to death, but she parroted the most obvious phrase that everyone knew: “Ashes to ashes, and dust to dust.” And thought she’d better improvise something more so the girls wouldn’t feel shortchanged. “May the Good Lord take our brother Neil into His arms.” What else, what else? There had to be something solemnly appropriate she could say about Neil. “He was a loving father, and a good husband…and he was kind to me when I needed help…and I could always talk to him…”

She had such mixed feelings about Neil. On the one hand, she couldn’t understand why Neil deserved to be so lucky, and got all the plum appointments, and was able to make such a killing on the stock market.

Envy was a sin, she knew that, but it didn’t seem fair that Gerry, who was really an extremely smart man, should have to suffer through a lackluster academic career, chronic financial embarrassment, and a serious bout of alcoholism that had nearly killed him.

So how to wrap it up? Melissa and Morgan wept. Hanna, emotional in any situation, had tears running down her cheeks. Jake was like a stone. Fernandes kept staring into the forest, on guard as always.

Glenda looked at the grave. In this final hour, in this desperate last chapter, when Neil had been handed his greatest challenge and the stakes had never been higher, the gods of misfortune had indeed cashed in.

And Neil’s luck had finally run out. Her eyes moistened.

“May God bless him,” she intoned, and then said what she really wanted to say. “He was like the rest of us after all.”

A hot west wind rustled through the forest a day later, bringing with it the scent of a dead, dry land. The temperature had to be over a hundred. The sky was darker than ever. And the air seemed thin.

Glenda sat on the ledge overlooking the forest. The wind was so strong it kept blowing her hair in front of her face. Hanna and Morgan slept inside. Melissa and Jake were in position up and down the path.

Fernandes was somewhere out in the forest doing reconnaisance again. Jake came running up the hill, breathless, skinny, and as pale from lack of sunlight as a fresh mushroom. She thought he was coming to tell her that Fernandes was returning. But it wasn’t that at all.

“Three Tarsalans are coming up the path. They’ve got strange lights over their heads. They’re unarmed.”

Thirty seconds later, she saw the glow from down the hill.

Three Tarsalans, one in a jumpsuit made of papery material, another in something that looked as if it were stitched from orange and brown silk, and a third who wore blue jeans with the legs cut short to fit his short limbs, came up toward the cave. An egg-shaped beacon of light shone over each one, hovering in the air above them like halos.

As they got closer, the one in the middle shone an Earth-made flashlight up the path. Glenda immediately lifted her Montclair and pointed it at the Tarsalans. Hard getting used to them, the way they looked. In God’s image, so to speak, as if human anatomical con-figuration was the evolutionary ideal for sentient beings throughout this sector of the galaxy, but with huge, bicephalic heads—big bulbs right and left on top of their craniums, each covered with shaggy black hair, so that, not for the first time, she was reminded of ostrich feathers. And the eyes. So large now, the special genetic part of their makeup actually changing the shape of them so they could see better in the dark—like loris eyes. Hard also getting used to the pale blue skin, a result, Neil had once told her, of a cyanogenic component in their blood.

The middle one had a headset and mike over his ears and mouth, one of those translating things. A small speaker-receiver apparatus hung around his neck, so small that it was like a piece of faucet mesh.

The Tarsalan spoke and the translation thing translated. “Please, my child, put your weapon down. We mean no harm. We’ve come to”—and here the translation device took a few seconds—“palaver, or at least to offer you an ultimatum.”

Her face settled. She kept her Montclair trained on the middle one. So, an ultimatum. Just like the phytosphere.

The middle one was obviously the oldest, with thick crow’s-feet around his eyes, a bushy black brow, and a steadiness about him that the other two didn’t possess. The three kept coming, but they advanced slowly and it was hard to read their expressions. As they got closer, their approach became downright cautious, and she could tell they were frightened, wary of her the same way they might be of a wild animal.

“We don’t accept ultimatums,” she said, feeling as if she were speaking for the whole human race.

“Haven’t you learned that yet?”

She heard the faint sound of the Tarsalan language bubbling through the translation device, and it sounded not unlike a human language because the Tarsalan mouth, glottis, and pharynx, though producing a timbre a lot different than the human voice, were fundamentally based on the same design.

“Then let us palaver,” came the response at last.

“You back off. You withdraw. And I might let you live.”

She couldn’t stop her anger. Louise dead. Ashley and Neil dead. And her children and remaining nieces threatened. The Tarsalans obviously had no idea what a human mother was capable of. Even as she spoke, a plan formulated itself in her mind. If they wanted Armageddon, they would get Armageddon.

“Human, you underestimate the forces ranged against you. We are over a thousand strong. And we are hungry. We demand that you give over your food and fresh water. We’ll leave you with a day’s supply of each. With this food of yours, we can feed our survivors in the command area for a week. Our metabolism utilizes food resources much more efficiently than the human metabolism. The human metabolism is a wasteful thing.”

She was galled by the alien’s hubris. “And this is a reason I should give you all our food?”

“In an absolute moral sense, yes, it is. It’s better that you keep more individuals alive longer than a few individuals alive for a shorter period of time.”

“And you’re the experts on absolute moral sense?”

“When creatures such as yourselves fail to see reason—and we will admit that we ourselves failed to see just how vastly reasonless your psychology is—it is incumbent upon us, as the more advanced society, to try to teach you what is just and right.”

“So murder is just and right. You see these girls here? They’re orphans. And they’re orphans because of you.”

“That was a choice you made for yourself. Human, I give you this opportunity to save yourself. We are by nature negotiators. We have proven this to you over the last nine years. We are not fighters.”

“No. You simply put us all in a big plankton bag and watch us fight each other.”

“It is you who choose to fight. Cooperation would have gotten you much further. Cooperation is the model for all other civilized worlds, and a model we mistakenly assumed for you. Yet you are creatures of choice, just as all creatures are. Don’t blame others for the choices you have made.”

“You’re trespassing on the property of Dr. Neil Thorndike. Does that name mean anything to you?”

A pause as the translator did its thing, and then, “Yes.”

“Dr. Thorndike has died, and all his property has passed to me.”

It took the Tarsalan a moment, but finally, through his translation thing, he said, “Ah, yes…his last will and testament. We don’t have such customs where I come from.”

“Do you understand what trespass means?”

“The human sense of it is slightly different than the Tarsalan one. And there is no concept or word for property in any of our languages.” The word property popped out in English. “Or in our various cultures. But it is a concept that is obviously deeply ingrained on Earth.”

“Then let me give you some advice… Tarsalan.” She hit the word hard. “Get off my property before I kill you.”

She lifted the Montclair and pointed it straight at him. He shifted, took a step backward, and his pupils shrank to such a small size that she could hardly see them.

“My child, shoot me if you wish…but you have already signed your own death writ. We outnumber you more than a hundred to one. What can you possibly do to stop us?”

And Glenda realized that, yes, they weren’t really so smart after all.

She watched them go. She felt sorry for them. The Cameron Chess Study was one thing, and Tarsalans might win against humans again and again in a situation where all the moves were circumscribed by game rules—indeed, all the negotiations with the Tarsalans had possessed a gamelike quality, and she remembered how all of Kafis’s actions seemed to be predicated on a kind of rarefied and arcane games theory—but there were no rules when it came to war, especially human war. There was only brutality.

She waited for Fernandes to get back, then told him her plan. “Let’s get the kerosene. Jake, help us.”

They went into the cave’s second chamber and retrieved five big cans of kerosene, a primitive fuel that Lenny had had the foresight to stash away “For when our batteries fail.” The wind was strong, though it changed direction often, and would act like a bellows. The forest was tinder-dry and would go up like a torch. Eight hundred and seventy thousand acres, all of it dead, providing the necessary combustibles to make her own firestorm.

They poured the fuel in great ribbons of vaporous liquid, venturing into the forest, down the hill, up the hill, until they had dumped every last ounce of kerosene into the brush. Then Glenda got the box of safety matches, scratched one along the side, and, keeping it shielded from the wind with her hand, lit the nearest bush. The flames ignited with a voracious ripple, and spread so fast she hardly had time to leap back.

Ten seconds, twenty seconds, thirty seconds, and the size of the conflagration grew alarmingly. Tongues of flame leaped yards into the air; she took glory in how bright everything was. She could see ! The glow of the fire bathed her eyes with soul-refreshing illumination. All four kids looked on in fascination. She knew that somewhere out there in the dead forest the Tarsalans looked on as well. She thought they were feeling dread in their hearts, and that they were oozing the thick, musty odor they oozed whenever they were terrified.

The heat of the fire became too much for Glenda, Fernandes, and the kids, and they retreated into the cave, where it was cool and damp, and where a faint wind blew up from the bowels of the Earth, forcing smoke away from the cave entrance.

There they stayed as the firestorm raged around them. Glenda wasn’t without guile when it came to the Tarsalans. Maybe they had an ingenious way of putting out the fire. Maybe they would just get in their TLVs and take off. Some ash drifted in through the cave entrance and landed on her foot. Then again, maybe, as with the attack on the mothership, and ultimately on the phytosphere control device itself, they would be caught unawares. They would see this fire, and they would get another lesson in how humans behaved, especially when they had nothing left to lose.

39

The following day Gerry and Ian eased away from the Phobos-Deimos Terminal, and Ian established a transit orbit toward Earth. He engaged thrusters three and one. The singularity drives showed no malfunction and Ian risked full power.

Four days later, the Earth-Moon system hove into view over the craggy nose of Gaspra. The phytosphere was a festering green cancer around Gerry’s home planet, thicker than he had ever seen it, and he momentarily wondered if it would be enough—the shift of the Moon two thousand miles closer to Earth—but then decided it would, knew that he couldn’t have been wrong in his calculations.

For a brief while, as they got closer, an automated Tarsalan probe, egg-shaped like most of the alien craft and wrapped in its own shimmering plasma of blue, violet, and pink light, orbited the asteroid, but the PCV’s scans told them it was unweaponized, unmanned, and posed no threat.

“I’m sure they’ve exhausted all their military capability by this time,” said Ian. “Looks like we’re home free, buddy.”

All that needed to be done now was fire Drive Five. This would initiate the slight change of angle needed for the final impact, and bring Gaspra crashing into the lunar surface.

But when Ian tried the modified key box, it was as if the alien virus had at last worked through to his initial fix and he got no response from thrust conduit number five. In other words, the drive that had given them their initial trouble previous to mission countdown was again flickering into the red. Ian maneuvered from his seat over to the navigation console and his fingers clicked over the keys, but he couldn’t regain command of the conduit, nor secure access through some creative rerouting.

He worked frantically on the problem for the next five minutes. Gerry glanced nervously out the big freighter windows and saw the Earth, like a rotting wedge of lime, and the Moon, craters now fully visible.

“So there’s no way to fix the problem?” asked Gerry, because in these most harrowing moments he had no choice but to defer to Ian.

Ian now had full schematics on screen four. The left side of the screen showed diagrams, while text filled the right side—script so tiny Ian had to tap his contact lenses to their strongest setting.

Ian didn’t so much read as skim. He ignored Gerry as he went through the thick, turgid prose of the drive specs, the sweat beading on his shaved head and a thick vein sticking out like a blue worm over his temple. All the while their speed increased.

“I know these specs like the back of my own hand,” he said. “But you never know. Maybe if I review it, something could jog and I might…”

Gerry felt helpless, frustrated, and so anxious to solve the problem that he kept fidgeting in his seat.

“Couldn’t we go to the drive itself and do something to fix it?”

Ian froze. He stopped flicking through the script and turned to Gerry. He looked like a man on a spirit quest who had just experienced the revelation he had been looking for, his blue eyes wide, his lower lip coming out, his ears shifting a fraction on the sides of his head. Gerry thought he had only pointed out the obvious, but Ian looked at him as if he were Moses coming down from the mount.

“You’re a genius, Gerry.” Then he swung to the timer up on the console. “We’ve got to move. We’ve got only a certain envelope to do this and, after that, it’s a no go for good.”

“What are you going to do?”

“I’m going to blow Drive Five sky-high. I don’t know why I didn’t think of it before. Am I ever glad you’re on this mission. The resulting explosion will give us the necessary thrust to angle us into a collision trajectory. As I say, I know the specs inside out and I think this can work. Especially because all we have to do is collide with your so-called wide region of effectiveness.”

“You’re going to blow up the drive?”

“Yes.”

“How are you going to do that?”

“I’m going to sled to the drive, crawl into its access bay, and manually cross the male and female thrust conduits so they reverse on each other and blow the singularity to pieces.” He motioned at the screen of schematics. “I can’t believe I was looking at a technical solution when all I really needed was the PCV’s fire ax. You’re brilliant, Gerry.”

“But…you’re going to blow up the drive?”

“Right.”

“And then what?”

Ian frowned. “I already told you. The blast should give us the necessary thrust to make it all happen.”

“And then you’re going to come back here to the Prometheus, and we’re going to escape in the survival pod?”

Ian’s brow settled. “Maybe you’re not so smart after all.”

The two stared at each other. It was a pivotal moment for Gerry, because he suddenly understood that Ian was a hero after all.

“Ian… no.”

Ian’s face creased and he now looked irritated. “It’s the only way, buddy. You’ll have the pod all to yourself. There’s no sense in two of us going down for this thing. Now, come on, we’ve got to move. If I leave right now it’s going to take me at least twenty minutes to get there. That’s going to give me only three minutes to reverse the thrust conduits. This is the only chance we have. If this doesn’t work, the Earth dies. Glenda dies. Jake and Hanna die. I got no one. You got your family. This is my moment, Ger, and I mean to go for it. This is the only way I can make up for all the dismal things I’ve done to other people over the years.”

“What about Stephanie?”

“Just tell her what I did. And that I love her, even though she might not love me.”

“It’s not the only way, Ian.”

“God damn it, Gerry. I take back what I said about you being a genius. You’re an idiot.”

“Yes… but you’re going to die.”

“And so’s everybody else if I don’t do something to stop it. Listen to me, buddy. I’m fifty next month.

That’s long enough. I’ve done some interesting things in my life. But this is where I can really contribute.

When this is all done, they’re going to need you back on Earth. ’Cause there’s going to be a lot of problems, and they’re going to need people like you to solve them. There won’t be any need for reformed-alcoholic test pilots. Now, come on. Help me. Before we lose our chance.”

Gerry forced himself to shut down his emotions.

But as they went into the surface access bay and he helped Ian into his CAPS, he couldn’t help thinking that he was aiding and assisting in suicide. Plus he thought of all the good times he had spent with Ian: the time they had gone to Japan together and made a pilgrimage to Hiroshima on the two hundredth anniversary of the atomic bomb; how they had nearly gotten swamped in a hurricane after stealing a boat from the marina near Neil’s place on Trunk Bay; and how, miraculously, they had finally met up at the Buena Vista Hotel and Gambling Casino on the Moon. Now they were here together, old friends, true friends, two men trying to save the world, knowing the stakes couldn’t be higher and that time was running out. What did you say to each other at a moment like that?

“I’ll make sure Steph knows what you did,” he said as Ian finally mounted the sled.

Ian’s lips tightened, and he nodded. “Just tell her how I feel. I want her to know.” Then he checked over the sled’s console, made sure the fire ax was secure in one of the straps, and turned back to Gerry.

“You’re clear on the precise point you have to eject?”

“The angle-of-entry change.”

“When precisely? You have to remember the survival pod’s orbital limitations.”

“When the asteroid’s angle of entry has reached thirty-seven degrees.”

“That should put you ten kilometers outside of Nectaris. The blast event is going to knock out all radios for a while, and control has everybody hunkered down for the strike anyway, so—”

“I know. I have to walk.”

“You’ve got ample life support, so it shouldn’t be a problem.”

They said a rough good-bye, gave each other a hug; then Ian went into the air lock.

The air lock opened ten seconds later, and Ian was on his way—on the last journey he would ever make.

As the air lock finally hissed shut and Gerry was left standing there by himself, he felt the sudden change, the quietness that comes with solitude; but also the shedding of the particular persona he used whenever he was around Ian, as if Ian was someone he not only embraced but also a man he had to guard against, a reminder of his own alter ego. He turned from the sled access bay and yanked himself along by the handholds, essentially in free fall except for the weak pull of Gaspra that settled him groundward with the slowness of a dust speck. He went to his bunkette and packed a few personal items: his A.A. two-year medallion, photographs of his wife and children, and a bag of rocks from Gaspra. He then suited up in his CAPS.

He got a red light on his fresh-water valve, which meant he was going to be awfully thirsty by the time he got to Nectaris, but he knew he would survive.

He took one last glance out the big freighter windows, looked around the operations area, and had the same feeling a castaway might have when leaving his island; that here, in this setting, momentous events had unfolded, and that the place had made an indelible impression. He turned away and stepped into the void of the companionway hatch. He sank—with the slowness of a dust speck—down to the engineering level. He pulled himself to the back, where the corridors bifurcated and continued in a large circle. He took Corridor A until it joined with Corridor B, way at the back of the PCV. From here it was into the survival pod launch unit, an area much like a missile bay on a nuclear sub, housing two projectiles, the primary and the backup, like huge bullets standing next to each other.

He checked over the system of the first and got three red lights. On the backup pod, he got only one red light, life support, but as his CAPS was capable of life support, this wasn’t an endgame obstacle. He pressed the latch buttons and the gull-wing hatch lifted. He moved with an air of unreality, and with a distant sadness clutching at his throat. He slotted himself into the middle launch bed, while those on either side remained empty.

He had a moment of doubt. Would Ian screw up, as he had so often in the past? He touched the necessary spots on the screen in front of him, the gull-wing hatch sank, and the launch bed braces closed over him. He remembered the time Ian had totaled his car, and how he and Glenda had then had to buy a much crappier one, the relic they were driving now. Would Ian, in the final desperate seconds, lose his judgment, as he had lost it so often in the past? Or would he simply chicken out?

He radioed control. “Ira, I’m ready to eject.” Then he let control know what Ian was doing. Ira ranted because Ira was the orchestra conductor, and someone had played a wrong note, but Gerry didn’t want to listen to it, so he switched communications off. The silence was sublime. It memorialized Ian’s approaching death. He brought his gloved hand up to the screen. With a few flicks of his finger he had his telemetry readouts. The timer now told him Ian had only three minutes to make a course correction.

All Gerry could now do was watch the timer roll down, the digital numbers, counting back in bright amber. When the timer reached the two-minute mark, the numbers turned red. Red, the color of the eleventh hour—this whimsical thought passed through his mind, even as his body tightened, went cold, and nausea knocked at the back of his throat. A big loser: these words from Glenda, describing Ian, when she had reached her wits’ end about his drinking. And yes, there was something of the loser in Ian.

A man with a lot of bravado, confidence, and damn-the-torpedoes attitude, but one who had a history of choking at the last second. The time was now down to a minute and twenty-five seconds. A man who ultimately scored the touchdown, but missed the field goal. The numbers rolled relentlessly by and Gerry had the sense that he was in numerical free fall. Also a man who was desperate to make amends. Maybe the pressure of his own remorse would be too much for Ian.

“Think of Stephanie, Ian.”

And in that moment, he knew that’s exactly what Ian was doing. The digits seemed to slow their free fall, as if they had the presentiment of great change and, as the counter timed down to twenty-two seconds, the PCV began to shake as if in an earthquake, sudden g-force pushed him flat into his launch bed, and his stomach got the same feeling it got whenever he was going down in a fast elevator. He checked his screen and saw that the diagrammatic representation of the Moon, the Earth, and the asteroid had shifted, and that Gaspra was now establishing a tight and degrading orbit around the Moon. He watched the angle-of-entry numbers tip toward the region of effectiveness. On the screen, Gaspra looked like a big bee getting ready to sting the Moon, and was approaching its surface at an ever-accelerating rate. He felt a curious moment of elation, because this really looked as if it was going to work. Then again, if the Martians could shift moonlets around to form the PDT, why couldn’t he shift the Moon to save the Earth? What was so difficult about it? It was nothing but operating heavy equipment on a gargantuan scale.

The angle of entry eased toward the target zone. Yet the vindication he felt for finally struggling out of his underdog position and coming up with a procedure that looked as if it was going to do the trick was tempered by a knowledge of just how close they had come. The rock screamed toward the Moon at a phenomenal rate of speed. Angle of entry reached deeper into the region of effectiveness, and within the next few seconds, at thirty-seven degrees, Gerry launched.

The survival pod shot upward through the tube and in seconds he was well above the PCV and watching it recede. Ten seconds after that it was like he was looking down at a mountain, because he saw the sloping curvature of the asteroid, and the curves looked like precipices. Then he got so far up that Gaspra became the big stone that it was, with all its tiny craters—a scarred old warrior that was about to be obliterated in its final battle.

The surface of the Moon was a blur of speed below, its craters shadowy blips. As his vehicle rose, the asteroid sank. His pod’s movement soon carried him beyond the asteroid’s path. He was on his stomach now, his head down as if he was going to dive to the Moon, and from this upside-down position he watched the asteroid get lower and lower, rolling end over end like a badly thrown football, until finally…it struck the Moon’s surface.

By this time, his readouts told him he was nearly three hundred miles away, with the curve of the Moon fully visible, but it was as though the blast happened right next door. The asteroid threw up a small ring of debris, but the debris was moving quickly, and every piece of blasted particulate took on the same shape, an elongated, blurry lozenge. Outside this first small ring, a second ring developed. Then a third ring. Then a fourth. Each ring reached higher and higher into the dark vacuum above the Moon, until finally the rings were so gargantuan, tall, and violent that debris started flying around him and he grew concerned that he might be hit. Take a baseball, stick an upside-down thimble on its side, and that was the proportion of the blast size compared to the Moon. The ground surrounding the crater, covering an area of five hundred square miles, quivered like a bowl of Jell-O. He watched in horror and fascination.

He took a moment to think of his friend—but then had his own concerns to consider. The survival pod carried him up and over the rim of the Moon so that the asteroid strike disappeared behind him. His braking thrusters fired and the pod sank. The surface of the Moon came up fast. In minutes he no longer saw its curvature. Then it was as though he was looking out a jet window from thirty thousand feet. And in many ways it was like coming in for a landing in a jet, with the bleak, gray-brown landforms growing more and more distinct every minute.

When he was a thousand feet up, the pod arced into a vertical position and sank thruster-first toward the surface. As the pod reached the thirty-foot mark, and slowed its descent to two miles an hour, he got a red light on the landing gear—it wouldn’t deploy. When the pod finally reached the surface, it fell over like a big tree.

Luck.

He and Glenda had talked about it often.

Usually, when a piece of bread and peanut butter fell to the floor, it always fell peanut butter side down.

In fact, that was the story of his life.

But it seemed his luck had changed. With no radios working and everbody hunkered down, his death would have been certain if the pod had fallen on its hatch. The weight of the pod on top of it would have stopped it from opening and he would have been trapped until his life support ran out. But the pod had fallen hatch up. He keyed the necessary commands. The gull-wing unit lifted noiselessly.

And Gerry climbed out onto the surface of a Moon that was moving toward the Earth exactly according to his own equations.

40

Driven by strong winds, the fire raged all night. It first consumed the trees around the cave, then spread in all directions according to the wayward will of the fickle winds. Smoke came into the cave, finally forcing Glenda, Fernandes, and the kids into the second cavern. The fire’s roar was like several trains rumbling by the foot of the hill. The oxygen got thin, as if the fire was consuming every last atom.

At times Glenda thought she heard screams outside. Once or twice she grew convinced she heard cries

for help, as if the Tarsalans expected her to rescue them. Fat chance.

At last, the fire burned a safe distance from the cave.

Glenda, Fernandes, and the children went out to have a look.

The world was ashy, and embers flew everywhere. The main body of the fire burned about a mile off, the flames sometimes leaping a hundred yards into the air.

“Cool,” said Jake.

She glanced at her son. He was dirty from head to foot. He had Leigh’s pistol stuffed in his pants and his Montclair slung over his shoulder, and even though he was only twelve, he now possessed a disconcerting maturity and a battle-hardened stare as sturdy as cement. Yet…yet he was still a kid…because this fire was cool.

Light. It flowed into her eyes with a calming influence. All of the dry underbrush and tree branches had gone up, but there were still a number of tall tree trunks, horribly charred by the fire, sticking out of the ground like black fenceposts, all of them now backlighted by the frenzied inferno a mile off. She looked for figures moving through this outpost of Hell, flipping down her night-vision goggles but, because of the heat, all she saw was a blinding wash of green.

So she went back into the cave, got the binoculars, and scanned the destroyed forest for miles around.

She didn’t see a soul—Tarsalan or human.

They all watched the fire burn for the next hour. No human first responders came to put it out, and no fire planes flew by to douse it with payloads of retardant. Chattahoochee, protected under law, just burned and burned.

She wondered how many Tarsalans had died.

After an hour, everyone got bored with watching the fire.

Fernandes went to poke around in the ashes, getting as close as he could to the main body of the fire.

The girls went inside to sleep while Glenda and Jake stayed on the ledge to keep watch.

Four hours later, Morgan and Melissa came outside to stand guard. Glenda and Jake went inside. By this time, Fernandes had come back and was dozing in the corner.

Glenda fell asleep in minutes.

A couple of hours later she was awakened by a strange noise outside. She opened her eyes. She listened more closely. It sounded like hail. It thumped down all over the forest, and hissed in the embers.

“Aunt Glenda?” Melissa called from the cave entrance.

Glenda got up and went outside.

Thumb-sized chunks of hail fell from the sky, only this wasn’t ordinary hail—this was green hail. It took her a moment to realize what was going on. Then she looked up at the sky. Jake and Fernandes came to the cave entrance. Excitement exploded through her body, but she suppressed it. Had Gerry done it?

Had his crazy scheme to push the Moon closer to Earth with a big asteroid actually worked?

She walked out to the ledge and picked up a chunk of hail. By this time Hanna had appeared at the cave entrance as well. The hail melted in her hand, leaving behind a green residue, like cream of spinach soup.

Everybody started picking up their own chunks of hail. The sky was black as oil. But surely to God this had to mean something. How long would it take, she wondered? Would it all fall to Earth, or would some of it drift into space? And if it fell into their oceans, how would it affect things? Was it dead? Or was it still alive?

Over the next several hours the green hail fell with increasing rapidity, so fast that, despite the high temperature, there was some moderate accumulation.

When the sky finally brightened—as at last it did—the forest floor looked glazed in green Jell-O.

Morgan jumped up and down, clapping her hands together. “The stupid thing is gone, the stupid thing is gone,” and she put the words to the tune of “The Farmer in the Dell,” and soon Melissa and Hanna joined in, and even Jake at last got going on it, until they were all singing, “The stupid thing is gone, the stupid thing is gone, hi-ho the derry-o…” On and on, the way kids sang sometimes, just to hear their own voices. Fernandes, meanwhile, simply surveyed the surrounding devastation, as if he expected Tarsalans to emerge from the ashes at any second.

To Glenda, it was more than just the phytosphere falling to pieces. It was Gerry at last succeeding. After so many small and humiliating defeats throughout his life, he had achieved this biggest thing of all.

The hail continued for several hours, but finally tapered off around six o’clock. Clouds moved in under the thin green veil of the disintegrating phytosphere, but they were strange clouds because they were tinged with green.

After a while it started raining green rain. It pounded on the Chattahoochee Forest, and a green flood roared down the path and rushed past the cave. They had to rearrange sandbags to divert the flow from the cave. The sky darkened, and night—just a normal night, not a phytosphere night—came at last.

She tried calling Gerry on her fone, reasoning that if the phytosphere was falling she might get through.

But there was no service, not even a message, as if all the people who operated AT&T Interlunar had indeed gone home to be with their families in this time of crisis.

She pulled out Neil’s special phone, the one he used to communicate with various government officials, and tried to get through to an operator, any operator. This time she got something, but frustratingly, it was just a message telling her that service had been temporarily suspended during the current national emergency, and that only preauthorized numbers would be connected.

She looked for numbers in Neil’s backpack because, yes, Gerry might have saved the world, but she was still stuck out here, amid the burned-down forest and possible Tarsalan hostiles. She had no car, and her ammunition was running low.

As much as she looked for preauthorized numbers in Neil’s pack, she couldn’t find any.

Dawn came, and it was an Earth dawn. The sky was blue, the sun yellow, and only stray wisps of phytosphere remained, like emerald floss way up high. The Chattahoochee was a wasteland of ash coated in green slime. In and amongst the black-sparred tree trunks, she saw nine burned-out Tarsalan

Landing Vehicles, looking like tin cans that had been left in a bonfire all night. She saw no survivors.

She and Fernandes conferred for a while about what they should do and, when they were done, Glenda told the kids, “We’ll stay here for a while and see if anybody rescues us. I’m going to keep trying the Moon. And I’ll try Neil’s phone as well. In the meantime, Fernandes thinks we should dig through the house to see if we can salvage anything.”

After a breakfast of baked beans, Glenda, Fernandes, and the Thorndike kids marched down to the house. They had nothing but their hands to clear the rubble away with. The sun was bright, and it stung Glenda’s eyes after so long in the dark, but she took great joy in it. The uneasiness of having something drastically wrong with the world eased from her soul, and the quality and quantity of the sunshine increased her hope tremendously. Hanna, still not in the best health, sat out much of the time, taking guard duty while the others did the heavy work.

They spent the rest of the day digging into the basement supply room, where they found many crated provisions intact, enough to last six months if they rationed stringently. This was a great relief to Glenda, as it bought her a measure of time she hadn’t been counting on. They lugged the supplies up to the cave and packed them into the second chamber.

Now that all immediate danger had passed, her nieces again grew weepy at the loss of their parents and sister, and Glenda spent much of the afternoon comforting them.

Around five o’clock, the sun began its descent, and though she was made anxious by the approach of night, and was even illogically apprehensive that dawn might never come again, she still thought the sunset was the most beautiful thing she had ever seen. Despite her desolation over the deaths of Neil, Louise, and Ashley, she felt buoyed by it. Light. Was there anything so miraculous? In all its various permutations of color and shadow, was there anything so surprising, mood-altering, or restorative?

Morgan lay with her head on Glenda’s lap, and Glenda stroked the child’s brown hair. Jake ate like a pig in the corner, opening can after can of Irish stew—not rationing, as they had to celebrate their great find in the basement storeroom of Marblehill. Fernandes also ate. The sun would come up tomorrow, she decided. They would get through this. They would survive. Maybe they would survive in a vastly changed world, but they would go on. Gerry would come home. And her two children and two remaining nieces would live long, full lives. And Fernandes would go on as well. He would reconnect with his wife, Celia, in Denver. They would go on to have their family. She could sense this positive outcome in the light that was filtering down from the sky.

A placid and hopeful grin came to her face. She leaned over and kissed Morgan. She glanced at Melissa. She had two new daughters, and she would treat them like daughters, not nieces. She would have to do her best to be a mother to them.

Jake collected up his empty cans of Irish stew. “I’ll throw these in the garbage.” He went over and got Fernandes’s cans as well.

“Come right back and get some sleep,” said Glenda. “You’re on at midnight tonight.”

She watched him go. He now moved with a sureness of step that reminded her of a man’s step. And though his clothes hung on him, she detected a new broadness to his shoulders. He ventured out into the maudlin tints of the sunset and turned left up the hill toward their midden. A breeze entered the cave and she smelled the charred scent of the forest. Her new sense of peace made her sleepy, and she closed her eyes. A comforting doze wrapped its fuzzy hand around her mind, and she nodded off with the rapidity of the truly exhausted. But not for long. Through the fog of her doze, she heard Jake cry out. Her eyes jolted open. His cry was oddly broken, coming in a series of yelps, breaking on the cusp of his changing voice, a cry not only of pain but also of annoyance. She sprang to her feet, at first thinking Buzz had miracuously returned from the dead. But as she hurried from the cave, with Melissa and Fernandes now behind her, she saw that her son had fallen from the cliff to a wide ledge below, and that the point of a broken sapling had skewered the extreme left portion of his abdomen underneath his rib cage.

Fernandes was quick with the orders. “Melissa, get the rope. Mrs. Thorndike, we need some pressure dressings, and some rubbing alcohol.”

Melissa was off instantly to get the rope, but Glenda felt anesthetized. So far, she had dodged all bullets.

But that was her son down there. And he had a sapling coming through his gut. And it wasn’t Buzz or the aliens who had done it; it was just an accident, a stupid, stupid accident, one that could have been treated easily in a hospital. But they were out in the middle of nowhere. And who was coming to get them?

Fernandes was already climbing down the rock face through the ash. Melissa came back, and she had the rope, the pressure dressings, and rubbing alcohol.

“Aunt Glenda?”

Glenda snapped out of it. “Let’s get down there.”

Aunt and niece picked their way down the cliff, coughing in the disturbed ash.

When Glenda got to her son, she saw that the wound was serious, bleeding badly, and that Jake was more or less stuck there because he was so thoroughly skewered. He was crying. He wasn’t a man anymore. He was just a boy who had hurt himself.

Glenda tried to get her panic under control. “What happened?”

“I… I thought I saw a chipmunk.” His voice was high, and his eyes were so wide with hurt amazement that they reminded her of Tarsalan eyes. “And then…” His emotion boiled over. “And then the edge of the cliff gave out and I fell.” He cried again, gazing in horror at his wound, looking as if he wondered how something like this could happen to him. “And it didn’t even turn out to be a chimpmunk. It was just a rock.”

Fernandes got down on one knee, took a wad of dressing from Melissa, and wiped some blood from around the wound. Glenda saw, to her relief, that the sapling, snapped perhaps by a falling tree, its point then tempered by the heat of the fire, had penetrated at the extreme left edge of her son’s abdomen, just below the rib cage, not further in.

“Is it a flesh wound?” she asked Fernandes.

“I think so,” said Fernandes. “We don’t want any internal bleeding. Not out here.” Fernandes looked at Jake and smiled reassuringly. “You’re a lucky man, Jake. You’ve got a flesh wound—a serious one—but I think you’re going to live. Another inch the wrong way, and it could have been much worse.”

Fernandes looked at Melissa. “All right…let’s lift him off. Mrs. Thorndike, get ready with the pressure dressings.”

Jake’s wound, though, was a lot more serious than they first thought. Once they lifted him from the

sapling and got him back to the cave, there seemed to be internal bleeding after all. They gave him morphine to control the pain. He weakened through the night, and no matter how many pressure dressings they put on the entrance and exit wounds, he still managed to soak them fairly quickly. Glenda desperately wanted to stabilize him, and couldn’t believe that after everything they had gone through he would end up like this because of an accident, but he kept on deteriorating.

His condition worsened through the next day. Fernandes characterized the problem as a “slow leak somewhere,” and was worried that if they couldn’t stabilize him soon, they might run into “serious trouble.”

Glenda was frantic to get proper medical attention, and called Gerry on the fone again and again—but the service remained down. She lifted Neil’s special phone and punched in numbers randomly, but the phone kept flashing its message: Preauthorized Numbers Only. She finally gave up on the bulky government device.

Later, a ripe harvest Moon emerged from the east, reminding her of a pumpkin, rising into a spectacularly clear sky. Did the Moon look bigger? Perhaps it did. Were the tides along North Carolina’s Outer Banks larger? Was her husband up there, in Nectaris, staring down at the Earth and admiring his great success? Or was he, too, a casualty?

The night was cool. Morgan came to her a little past midnight and slept beside her. Unexpectedly, so did Melissa, as if accepting Glenda as her new mother.

Around three in the morning, Jake began to cry, and she gave him another morphine shot. He felt clammy, and when Glenda re-dressed the wound, it looked angry and red. She had enough nursing-home experience to know he needed antibiotics. Searching through the scavenged supplies, she found a bottle of Daprox tablets, one of the new broad-spectrum bacteria-fighting drugs, and gave him one.

After that, she slept.

At least until Melissa shook her by the shoulder.

“Aunt Glenda, it’s my dad’s phone… it’s ringing.”

It took her a few moments to rouse herself, but when Glenda heard Neil’s special phone burbling away, she sprang up instantly.

She grabbed the bulky apparatus and pressed the engage button.

“Hello… hello?”

A pause on the other end of the line, then a woman’s voice. “Dr. Neil Thorndike, please.”

She had no choice but to be the bearer of bad news. “I’m afraid Dr. Thorndike has passed away.”

Another pause, then, “And who am I speaking to?”

“I’m Glenda Thorndike. Neil’s sister-in-law.”

A pause. “Will you hold the line, please?”

“Who’s calling?” But she got no answer. “Look, I need help. My son’s been hurt. He needs a doctor.”

But she was on hold.

After thirty seconds a man’s voice came on the line, one she vaguely recognized, but couldn’t immediately place. “Is this Glenda Thorndike?”

“Yes.”

“Dr. Gerald Thorndike’s wife?”

“Yes, yes. Who’s this? My son’s been hurt.”

“This is President Bayard.”

She was, of course, floored. “Oh… I… I thought I recognized your voice.”

“Neil’s dead?”

Her shoulders sank as the woe of Neil’s death visited her afresh. “I’m afraid he is. We’ve been under attack here at Marblehill.”

“You’re at Marblehill?” The president sounded as if he knew all about Marblehill.

“Yes… yes. By the Tarsalans.”

By this time, Fernandes and Hanna had roused themselves.

The president said, “We were calling Neil to… to tell him that his brother… that your husband…” But then it sounded as if someone on the other end of the line was talking to the president, and Bayard muffled the mouthpiece with his palm. Her hand tightened around the receiver. What did the president want to tell her about Gerry? That he was dead? That he was never coming home? That he had ridden the asteroid right into the dark side of the Moon with that maniac, Ian Hamilton, and that he was now pulverized to atoms? Come on, Mr. President, you’re killing me. Then the muffled sound disappeared and the president came back on. “We wanted to tell you that your husband’s a national hero, Mrs.

Thorndike. The country—in fact, the whole world—owes him a great debt of gratitude.”

“Is he alive?”

The president seemed surprised. “Yes, he’s alive. I was talking to him just five minutes ago.”

Her throat closed up, and her blood must have done a wild thing, because suddenly she grew faint and collapsed to the cave floor. For several seconds she couldn’t speak.

Hanna rushed over. “Mom?”

Through the receiver, Glenda heard Bayard’s voice. “Mrs. Thorndike?”

Glenda looked at Hanna as tears sprang to her eyes. “It’s the president.”

Hanna’s eyes widened. “The president?”

“Dad’s okay. The president was talking to him five minutes ago.”

“The president was talking to Dad?” Hanna seemed puzzled by this. Then she got businesslike. “Tell the president he’s got to send a helicopter for Jake right away. He’s getting worse.”

“Mr. President?”

“I’m here, Mrs. Thorndike.”

“My son’s been in an accident. He needs medical attention.”

“I’ll dispatch a medevac helicopter to Marblehill immediately. Anything you and your family need or want, Mrs. Thorndike… We owe you a huge debt.” At this point the president gave her his personal preauthorized number. “And if you want, I can arrange a connection to the Moon through this phone network. The commercial networks are temporarily down. But we’ve got a military one established.

We’ve been talking to the Moon for the last eighteen hours. You stand by, Mrs. Thorndike. We’ll get you talking to your husband in no time.”

And the president was as good as his word.

41

From the time the phytosphere shredded into nothingness, Gerry’s life was never the same.

He came home to a hero’s welcome, which, because of the state of the Earth, and because of all the work that had to be done, was a subdued affair, but gratifying nonetheless. White House staff arranged a small ceremony in the Rose Garden, and the president thanked him personally. Ian Hamilton was honored, and so was Fernandes. Fernandes was there in a dress uniform, and had come with none other than Celia, a pudgy, short dynamo of a woman who looked as if she could survive anything, and who beamed with pride when the president presented her husband with the Air Force Cross.

It was from the president on this occasion that both Gerry and Glenda found out that all those Tarsalan refugees still left on Earth were succumbing to a strange new disease. As they stood in the Rose Garden sipping champagne—the president’s gardeners had been hard at work, coaxing to life dormant samples kept in the vast cold-storage warehouses of 937—the president explained to both Gerry and Glenda that it was the Tarsalanspecific component in Neil’s phytosphere virus that was killing the alien survivors on Earth.

“A micropercentage of the phytosphere consisted of Tarsalan DNA, and Neil’s virus was essentially targeting that DNA. While the phytosphere was able to… uh… circumvent Neil’s virus by utilizing its carapace component… when the phytosphere rained down on Earth the virus escaped, and the Tarsalans didn’t know what hit them. They’re succumbing fairly quickly. We’re trying to save them, but so far we haven’t found a cure. And to tell you the truth, finding a cure isn’t a major priority for us. Not after what they did to us. It’s probably better that they all pass on. We’ve got more pressing concerns right now.”

The president was blunt about his concerns. “Our population has been culled by about forty-five percent, and our best estimate is that it now stands at just under two hundred million. In less developed countries the figures are far more staggering. Of course, the environment has been severely degraded—for several months now we haven’t had any plant life pumping oxygen into the atmosphere, or taking carbon dioxide out. Restoring our atmosphere is going to have to be our top priority. The phytosphere itself was replacing quite a bit of oxygen, but now that the phytosphere is gone, we’ve got to make up the shortfall quickly. Gerry, I want you to think about this. How do we start pumping oxygen back into the atmosphere? The neutralized xenophyta seem to be pumping some oxygen back into the atmosphere, enough to keep us going for a while. And many of the larger, heartier plant varieties—mostly trees of one kind or another—didn’t die out completely. They’re starting to come back, and that’s helping with the oxygen situation. Still, it’s a critical concern. The atmosphere has been badly compromised.”

Over the coming weeks, Gerry became what his brother had once been—a special scientific advisor to the president.

Also, as financial institutions resurrected themselves and lawyers reopened their offices, Neil’s codicil, written on the back of the topographic map, was deemed legal and binding and, overnight, Gerry became a rich man.

But none of this could bring his brother back, and Gerry grieved deeply for Neil.

To stabilize the atmosphere and restore its oxygen to normal levels—respiratory symptoms were now common in about half the population—Gerry surprised everybody by suggesting they dump iron into the ocean.

“Iron?” asked Bayard.

Gerry, still not comfortable in the Oval Office, nodded. “Iron is already a micronutrient in ocean waters, and with even a slight increase in its concentration, phytoplankton growth can be stimulated significantly.

Because of widespread destruction of our forests and grasslands, CO₂ levels in the atmosphere have increased significantly. If we mass-create phytoplankton blooms in the oceans, they’ll devour a lot of this excess CO₂, and replace it with oxygen. As the oxygen levels come back to their norms, the artificially created phytoplankton blooms will then die out because they’ll have used up the available excess CO₂.

Essentially what we’re doing, Mr. President, is terraforming our own planet. I submitted a paper to the NSF about this particular technique during your first year in office, sir. I meant it to address the greenhouse gas problem, but it will work equally well in this situation.”

The president turned to his chief of staff, Holden Gregory. Gregory raised his eyebrows and shook his head. “It never reached my desk.”

In other words, Neil had quashed it.

“The great thing about this technique is that everybody can do it. Anything that has iron content can be thrown into the ocean. If we alert governments worldwide, and fast-track the production of artificial ferrous materials as an ocean fertilizer, we should see significant improvement in as little as six months.”

The plan was put into effect.

Slowly the world came round.

Gerry and Glenda followed developments on TV, now resurrected on a limited basis, from their new three-story home in Nag’s Head, North Carolina.

They followed not only the story about increasing oxygen levels, but all stories related to the aftereffects of the phytosphere.

For instance…

Some animal, bird, and fish species were now extinct, but many had survived, albeit in small numbers.

As for the Tarsalans, SETI apparatus monitored the skies for signals, and because the Tarsalans had actually improved all this equipment during the honeymoon period of First Contact, upgrading it to send and receive instantaneously, Earth intercepted radio communications from many of the civilized worlds, but, oddly, none from Tarsala itself. Which Gerry thought strange, because the Tarsalans were always so full of well-meaning, if misplaced, advice.

Also…

In the months immediately following the destruction of the phytosphere, Neil’s virus found its way to the Moon, no doubt because the Moon had endless visitors from Earth. One of the two hundred Tarsalan refugees on the Moon caught the virus, and that was it—in a matter of days they were all dead, including Kafis.

In the spring following the destruction of the phytosphere, Gerry and his new extended family were at their house at Nag’s Head. They had just been to the beach. They were all in the kitchen, and Glenda was making lunch—not much of a lunch, because the whole country was on a draconian rationing system, even though the food-supply network was starting to come back fairly successfully now. (The Western Secessionists were cooperating.) Glenda was in the middle of mixing egg powder to make scrambled eggs. The four kids were playing Chinese checkers at the kitchen table. The window was open, letting in fresh sea air.

Glenda stopped stirring the egg powder. She looked up. She peered out the window, then exited the house via the back deck that led off the kitchen.

“Glenda?” said Gerry.

She didn’t answer. He got up and followed her. The kids remained distracted by their game of Chinese checkers.

He went out onto the deck, down the steps, and into the yard. As with their house in Old Hill, a woods abutted the back. Glenda was now standing at the end of the yard peering up at the dead trees. Several young saplings, with the return of the light, had begun to sprout in between the dead trees. And even some of the bigger trees, apparently stalwart enough to survive the long stretch of sunlessness, were starting to come back. Grass and weeds were coming back as well.

Gerry reached the back fence and stood next to Glenda. “What’s wrong?”

“Shhh. Do you hear it?”

“Hear what?”

“Listen.”

Over the sound of the wind rustling through the dead branches, he now heard the sweet song of a… a what? He wasn’t much of a bird fancier.

But his wife… Glenda’s eyes lit up as if with the glow of celestial magic. “It’s a cardinal. Look. There it is.”

He looked. The bird’s crimson plumage was like a dash of hope at the beginning of this new world. It was like a revelation. It told him that it was, at last, over. And when Glenda finally looked at him, he knew that all the trouble between them was finally over as well. The world was vastly different, weighted with tragedy and death. But like that cardinal up there, it was also a place of new starts.

For him, as well as for everybody else.

And he decided a new start was all anybody could ask for.