by Greg Bear
“Two long, bright flares at first. Then small, much less bright.”
Post’s hand worked restlessly with his shirt collar. “Hell, it could be a plain old meteor, too,” Arthur said. “Meteors spark. Would an amateur know the difference?”
“But what about the radiation? Every guess we make, we go out on a limb,” Sand said.
“No kidding,” Post chuckled.
Samshow leaned forward. “But let’s assume the second one was a more spectacular fall. Bigger object?”
“The traces could indicate a slightly bigger object. Or…explosive disturbances along its path?” Sand suggested.
Arthur listened, amused by the creative confusion. “What would release radiation?”
“Small black holes might,” Post said. “But they’d be considerably smaller in cross section than a few centimeters, if they massed in at only a hundred million tons. I don’t think they’d make much of a show at all. And if they’re putting out gamma rays at a high enough level to irradiate sailors dozens of kilometers away…” His face fell. “They’re not going to last very long. Besides, they can’t be black holes, remember?”
“What do you mean, about them not lasting very long?” Samshow asked.
Post made a frustrated face. “They’re not black holes. We can be pretty sure of that. But, all right, black holes put out radiation all the time. When they’re big, they’re colder than the universe around them, but they’re not at absolute zero…Still, the effect is a net intake of energy. But after tens of billions of years, or if they were created small to begin with, they become much hotter, and lose their mass much more rapidly, percentage-wise. When they drop down to about ten thousand tons of mass, they explode all at once — ten thousand tons of pure energy.” He worked quickly on his calculator. “Not enough to cause much damage if they’re deep inside the Earth, actually.”
“But what we have is a hundred million tons,” Sand said. “Or maybe twice that, if we count the second object.”
“I was getting to that,” Post said, holding up a hand. “The worst case is that the black hole, or holes, could suck up mass inside the Earth, grow, and eventually suck up all of the Earth.”
The group looked at each other, wondering how much they were willing to believe, how far out they might be willing to go.
“That wouldn’t make sense if the aliens had any intention of using the Earth’s raw material to make more spaceships,” Post said.
“What about something else, something we know nothing about?” Arthur persisted.
Samshow laughed. “You’re saying we know anything about black holes?”
More silence.
“Maybe it’s trivial,” Samshow finally said. “But I’d like to discuss this oxygen increase and decrease in mean sea level…what are the figures?”
“Oxygen level up one percent, mean sea level decreased by one centimeter. What if they’re related?”
“I’m sure we’ve all been thinking about that,” Arthur said. “Something might be dissociating seawater into hydrogen and oxygen, on a huge scale.”
“So?” Sand prompted. “Where’s the hydrogen?”
“I haven’t the slightest idea,” Samshow said. “Just thought I’d mention it.”
Post’s frown intensified. “Very interesting,” he said.
“Has anybody got any good news?” Arthur asked. “Something to cheer us up before we go to dinner?”
Nobody did.
37
November 24
On a rare, dangerous but necessary outing to the town, Edward sat in the cafe, a plate with the remnants of a large hamburger and fries pushed to one side, and looked over the papers sent by his department head in Austin. Chits for release of back pay, amended W-2 forms, suggested teaching schedules for the next semester. A liability waiver from the school’s attorneys, asking that the school be released from whatever slight responsibilityit might have had for their being in Death Valley. The implication was, of course, that signing all these papers — especially the last — would mean his reinstatement and the resumption of his career.
Minelli entered the caf6 and sat down quietly beside him. “You going to sign?”
“I don’t see why not,” Edward said. “You?”
“Sure. Back to normal.” He grinned wanly and lifted a thumb, then looked at the thumb intently. “Hitchhiking back into life. The old school’s acting as if they’re afraid of us.”
The waitress, young and plump and bright-faced, came out of the kitchen with a keypad. “You want to order something?” she asked.
“How’s the meat loaf?” Minelli asked.
The waitress lifted her eyes heavenward. “Not recommended,” she said. “We don’t have any, actually.”
“Nah, nothing for me.”
“Anything else?” she asked Shaw. He declined. She issued a printed bill from the front of the keypad and he handed her his charge card.
“We should cut our book deals soon,” Minelli said.
“There haven’t been any offers,” Edward reminded him.
“They’re…” Minelli seemed to lose his train of thought. “Reslaw thinks we’re just lying too low to get any offers. We should talk to that Air Force attorney, or maybe to Mrs. Morgan’s lawyer.”
“You really want to write a book now?” Edward asked softly. “Go back over all we’ve been through, when nobody really knows what’s going on yet?”
“You mean, why try anything until it’s all over…”
Edward nodded. “We can stay here for another couple of days, spend some time out in the desert—”
“Away from Death Valley.”
“Right. And then get back to Austin and hope the reporters have forgotten about us.”
“Fat chance,” Minelli said.
Reslaw came into the cafe and slid into the seat beside Minelli. He withdrew a folded New York Times from under his arm and spread it in a clear space on the table. The headline read:
MYSTERY OBJECT MOVING WITHIN EARTH
“That’s where we should be,” Reslaw said, pointing to the picture of a meeting room in the St. Francis Hotel. “Talking to these people.” There were pictures of Kemp, Sand, and Samshow on the next page.
“What could we tell them?” Edward asked. “What do we know that they don’t?”
Reslaw shrugged. “At least we’d be doing something useful.”
“If they wanted to talk to us, they’d let us know.”
“The President came to talk to us,” Minelli said. “Look what he’s done. We’re a jinx. Did you ever think perhaps the alien put something in all of our minds…?” He made a vague gesture toward his temple, eyes wide. “Something that makes us stupid and weak? Maybe it’s making the President say things he doesn’t mean.”
Edward looked at Reslaw. “Anything in your head?”
“Not that I can feel.”
“It’s not impossible,” Minelli said.
“No,” Edward admitted, “but it’s paranoid as hell, and that’s the last thing we need, more fear.”
Minelli turned the paper around to face him and read the article quietly.
“Stella says there have been more people on the highway, stopping at the motel, the trailer park,” Reslaw said. “Most are going out to the cinder cone.” He bit off an ironic laugh and shook his head. “I remember an old ‘Peanuts’ cartoon with Snoopy. The end of the world is coming, so let’s hide under a sheet. With eyeholes cut out.” He made circles around his eyes with his fingers and peered at Edward.
“Stop it,” Minelli said pleasantly. “You’re acting like me. Only one crazy fellow allowed in this group.”
“What gives you privileges?” Reslaw asked, equally pleasant.
“Weak character. It’s on my resume.” Minelli handed the paper to Edward. “This is really going to send them into a tailspin. They call it the smoking gun, whatever the hell it is. We’ve already been shot in the head, maybe, and we just haven’t died yet.”
“You do have a w
ay with words,” Reslaw said, staring at the palm of one hand. The waitress approached and he ordered a milkshake and a hamburger.
Edward finished the article and stood, dropping his tip on the table. “If everybody’s going to be camping on the desert, there’s no sense our looking for solitude. We should clear out of here and get back to Austin and leave these good people alone.”
“Makes sense to me,” Minelli said.
“What about your book deals?” Reslaw asked.
“Fuck fame and fortune. Who’d have time to spend the money?”
Stella had invited Edward to join her on a horseback ride that afternoon. They loaded four bales of alfalfa into the Morgan Company jeep and drove to a run-down corral a mile outside town. Three horses — a roan, a chestnut quarter horse, and a small, energetic pinto-stood with ears attentive in the middle of a broad pasture.
“I haven’t had time to ride for months,” Stella said, lifting a bale from the back of the Jeep and hefting it to a half-demolished feed pen within the fence. All three horses approached warily, tails swishing. “They’re half wild by now.” She smiled at him, flicking straw from the sleeves of her Pendleton. “Up to a challenge?”
“I’m an amateur. I haven’t ridden in years.”
The horses gathered to snuffle at the alfalfa, then settled in to feed. Stella hugged the pinto’s neck and it regarded her with a wild pale eye, though not resisting her caress. “This is Star. Used to be my horse all the time. When I came back from school, I’d ride her all over the desert, out to the opal beds and down to the Indian digs, across the dry creek beds. We had a good old time, didn’t we?”
Star munched.
“You should ride the chestnut gelding, that’s Midge,” she suggested. “Midge is even-tempered. Get acquainted.”
Edward approached the chestnut and stroked its neck and mane, murmuring “Good horse, nice friendly horse.”
After a few minutes of reacquainting the horses with human company, Stella brought two blankets and saddles from the Jeep, Star accepted the blanket skittishly, Midge with resignation.
“I’ll get on them both first,” Stella said. “Try them out and get them used to riders.” She adjusted the cinch on Star and mounted easily. The pinto backed away from the alfalfa and paced around the feed pen nervously, then stood still and hoofed the soft dirt and old straw in a corner. Stella dismounted and approached Midge. Edward backed away.
She mounted Midge just as gracefully. Midge bucked from the feed and reared, throwing Stella on her back in the dirt. Edward yelled and grabbed the reins and kept his feet clear of the prancing hooves. When he had guided the horse away, he sidled it into a corner and went to help Stella to her feet.
“I’m fine. Just embarrassed.” She brushed her jeans with quick, disgusted strokes.
“Gentle, hm?” Edward asked.
“He’s your horse, obviously.”
“I’ll try to convince him of that.”
A few minutes later, Midge accepted Edward’s weight without protest, and Stella rode the pinto beside them. They rode to the far end of the corral and she dismounted to lift the wire loop on a sun-bleached gate.
Shoshone, like most of the desert resorts in the area, sat on a thermal hot spring that poured hundreds of gallons of water a minute out across the desert, and had done so, without letup, for decades. The runoff formed a creek that meandered under California 127, borax pans covered with grass and scrub, throwing up thick fringes of cattails along its banks.
They rode across the creek and into the dry desert beyond, coming finally to a borax-topped decline. With some prodding, the horses slid down the decline. They rode in shadow through the Death Valley sage of a quiet gully, glancing at each other and smiling but saying nothing.
The gully spread out onto a broad plain and the sage gave way to hummocky yellow salt grass. Part of an old narrow-gauge mining railway ran to their left, rails rusting on a long embankment of cinders and gray dirt. Birds called out in the stillness and a thick rat snake slid its meter length through the scrub.
“All right,” Stella said, reining her horse up short and facing him. “I’m just about cured. How about you?”
Edward nodded. “This sure helps.”
She sidled the pinto closer to him and patted its shoulder. “I’ve lived here all my life, with a few years at school and traveling. Europe. Africa. Peace Corps. My mother and sister and I have done everything we could to keep the town together after my father died. It’s become my life. Sometimes it’s an awful responsibility — you wouldn’t think that, would you, since it’s so small? But it weighs on me. Mother takes it in her stride.”
“She’s a wonder,” Edward said.
Stella leaned her head to one side, looking sadly at the gravel. “You know, I said I was a radical. It was my sister who was the real radical. She went to Cuba. She has a complete set of Lenin and Marx on her bookshelves. She loves Shoshone as much as I do, but she had to leave. We think shers in Angola. Lord, what a place to be now. Me, I’m just a capitalist like all the rest.”
“Hard on your mother, I guess.”
“Who, me or my sister?” Stella smiled.
“I meant your sister. I suppose both of you.”
“What about your family?”
“None to speak of. My father vanished more than twenty years ago, and my mother lives in Austin. We don’t see much of each other.”
“And your connections at the university?”
“I’m not sure I’ll stay there, now.”
“No long-term plans?”
Edward brushed at a buzzing horsefly and watched it veer across the hummocks until it vanished. “I don’t see why.”
“Mother and I have been making plans for selling mineral rights. We’ll redo the town’s sewage line with a government loan, but this extra money — that could keep the town going for years, even if the tourists keep flocking over to Tecopa.”
“The big resort.”
She nodded. “What a disaster for us all. Tecopa used to be a bunch of shacks built over hot springs. Rowdy. Now it’s plush. The desert is like that.”
“It’s beautiful here. Something big could happen to Shoshone.”
“Yes, but would we want it to?” She shook her head dubiously. “I’d like to keep it the way it was when I was a girl, but I know that’s not practical. The way it was when Father was alive. It seemed so permanent then. I could always come back.” She shook her head slowly, looking out across the grass to a lava-covered hill beyond. “What I’m getting around to saying is, we could use a geologist here. In Shoshone. To help us work out the mineral rights and figure out what we have, exactly.”
“That would be nice,” Edward agreed.
“You’ll think it over?”
“Your tourist business should be real good for the next few months,” he said.
Stella made a face. “We’re just getting the freaks now. Religious nuts. All going out to the cinder cone. Who needs them? Everybody else is going to stay at home and wait it out. Do you think it’s all going to go away?”
“I don’t know.” But he did know, in his gut. “That’s not true, actually. I think it’s all over.”
“The things inside the Earth?”
“Maybe. Maybe something we don’t even know about.”
“It makes me so goddamned mad,” Stella said, her voice breaking. “Helpless.”
“Yeah.”
“But I’m going to keep on planning. Maybe the whole deal will fall through. The commodities markets are going crazy. Maybe nobody will want to buy mineral rights now. But we have to keep working.”
“I don’t think I can stay,” he said. “It sounds wonderful, but…”
Her eyes narrowed. “Restless?”
“I don’t think I can really have a home now. Not even here, nice as this is.”
“Where will you go?”
“I’ll travel. Probably break away from Reslaw and Minelli. Go out on my own.”
‘Sometimes
I wish I could do that,” she said wistfully. But my roots are too deep here. I’m not enough like my sister. And I have to stay with Mother.”
“There was a place,” Edward said, “where my father took my mother and me before he ran away. My last summer with him, and the best summer I’ve ever had. I haven’t been back since. I didn’t want to be disappointed. I wondered if it would have changed…For the worse.”
“Where was that?”
“Yosemite,” he said.
“It’s beautiful there.”
“You’ve been there recently?”
“Last summer, driving through on the way to the wine country. It was really lovely, even with all the people. Without crowds, it would be wonderful.”
“Maybe I’ll go there. Live on my back salary. I’ve dreamed about it, you know. Those peculiar dreams where I go back and it’s completely different, but still something special. I think to myself, after all those years of just dreaming about being there, I’m finally back. And then I wake up…and it’s a dream.”
Stella reached out to touch his arm. “If…it works out, you can come back here after.”
“Thank you,” Edward said. “That would be nice. My teaching position will certainly be closed by that time. I can’t expect them to wait forever.”
“Let’s strike a deal,” Stella said. “Next summer, you come back here and help Mother and me. After you go to Yosemite, and after the world gets its act together.”
“All right,” Edward said, smiling. He reached out and touched her arm, and then leaned forward to kiss her on the cheek. “It’s a deal.”
PERSPECTIVE
Compunews Network, November 29, 1996, Frederick Hart reporting:
Here in the winter desert, only a few miles from Death Valley proper, it gets bitterly cold at night, and thousands of campfires light up the grass and sand around the government-declared National Security Site. In the middle of the site, rising against the clouds of stars like a great black hump, is the so-called Bogey, the imitation extinct volcano that has burrowed into the national imagination as the Kemp objects have burrowed into the Earth’ s core, and into our nightmares. People have come here from around the world, kept back a mile from the site by barbed wire and razor-wire barricades. They seem to have come to worship, or to just sit quietly under the warm desert sun and stare. What does it mean to them, to us? Should they wish to storm the site, will the Army be able to keep them back?
