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by Al Macy

  The president cleared his throat. “Maddix, what about international coordination?”

  Young nodded. “Well, the UN is handling that, but they’ve been pretty slow off the blocks. Some countries are already annoyed that Cronkite chose to visit us only, and hasn’t stopped at other places around the world. Hopefully, the UN will have its act together by the time we need to respond to this event.”

  When the meeting broke up, Hallstrom asked Charli about the Jake situation.

  “I’m going to call him tomorrow,” she replied.

  * * *

  June 5, 2018

  “Senor Corby, there is a call for you on line two, a Ms. Charlena Keller.”

  It took Jake a second to place the name. Keller? Keller? Oh, right. Shoot! Hallstrom found me. “Charlotta Keller?”

  “Si, Senor. Charlotta.”

  Jake, in the offices of Corby Solutions, sighed and picked up the phone. He looked out the picture window at Mexico City and the mountains beyond it. “Well, you found me, didn’t you?”

  “Mr. Corby, I’m sorry for your …”

  “Don’t say ‘loss.’”

  “No, I wasn’t going to. I’m sorry for what’s happened. Do you remember me?”

  “I do. ‘Charli,’ right?”

  “Mr. Corby—”

  “Jake.”

  “Jake, I’m sure you’ve figured out we want your help, but we understand that your situation …”

  “You know that it’s my goddaughter who’s been kidnapped?” Jake stood up and paced.

  “Yes, we do. Jake we’d like to—”

  “No.”

  “Jake, you don’t even know—”

  “You were going to offer to help.” Jake looked up at the ceiling. “You want to free me up and figure that by offering to help, you can get me back to DC faster.”

  “You are misreading our motives. We—”

  “No, Charli. I know the kidnapping business, and I know that the last thing we need is to have some huge government bureau involved. That would also involve the Mexican government, possible corruption, and would be a surefire way to get Sophia killed.” He whispered the last word and closed the door to his office.

  “Okay. Jake, we will stay out of it. Can you agree to help us when you’re done?”

  “Do you hear yourself?” Jake gritted his teeth. “You’re saying ‘We’ll promise to not do anything that might kill your friend’s daughter if you will come to work for us.”

  “No, Jake, that’s not it at all. I understand the pressure you feel, but please stop twisting—”

  “Okay, maybe I’m being a little unfair. Just back off. You have no idea what could happen.”

  “Right. You’re right, Jake. I’m sorry. When this is over—”

  “When this is done, you and I can talk.”

  “Please don’t disappear again.”

  “Just stay away. No wiretaps, nothing. Sophia’s life depends on it.” Jake hung up but then picked the phone up again. “Charli, are you still there?”

  “Yes.”

  “About those device plans that Cronkite said he’d upload …”

  “Yes?”

  “Have you heard of the Carter twins?”

  “Ah, no.” Charli said.

  “These twins are teenagers but are super-geniuses when it comes to devices and language. You’ll want them on the team. Google ‘Carter twins.’ I think one is named ‘Alexander.’’

  “Thank you, Jake.”

  “But remember, interfere down here, and you’ll never see me again.”

  “Got it.”

  Jake hung up.

  * * *

  June 8, 2018

  In Ruby Mountain’s high-tech videoconference center, Charli rolled her chair closer to the conference table and looked once more at her watch. This should be an interesting meeting if we ever get started. She checked her notes while she put a hair-tie around her wrist and arranged her hair into a ponytail. Hallstrom sat to her right.

  Once the technicians finished setting up the video links, Charli replayed the video of Cronkite’s monologue. “The question we’re asking today is this. Is he crazy?” Two psychologists, seated in the White House’s media room, appeared on separate video screens.

  Dr. David Avraham could have been cast in the title role of a movie about Sigmund Freud, except that he was black. He sat without moving and spoke with a refined accent.

  Dr. Julie Zaluski, in contrast, looked like a female truck driver and rarely stopped fidgeting. “Not crazy,” she said. “For a person, that is. If whatever that creature is, if he, well, or she, were a human, I wouldn’t conclude based on that, that he was psychotic. Not much to go on, of course. Do you agree, David?”

  Avraham answered slowly, or perhaps it just seemed that way compared with Zaluski’s manic delivery. “I can only agree that we have insufficient material on which to base a diagnosis. However, if I had a gun to my head, I would have to admit that his behavior was not frankly psychotic. That is not to say that he isn’t dangerous. His general affect most reminds me of—”

  “A teenager.” Zaluski interrupted.

  “Well, no, Julie. The word I was about to say is ‘curmudgeon.’ I use that word in the sense of an old man who has his definite opinions about the world and is terribly annoyed that there are those who do not share his views.”

  “That sounds like a teenager to me,” Zaluski replied. “A know-it-all teenager who has all the answers. One who ridicules anyone who doesn’t agree with his, or her, point of view.”

  Hallstrom asked, “Doctor Avraham, are you saying he acts like someone who has Alzheimer’s?”

  “That was not my intent. There is some similarity, perhaps, but only in the sense that some Alzheimer’s patients can become angry all of a sudden, with no apparent cause. Cronkite’s mood shifts were rather rapid.”

  “Like those of a teenager,” Zaluski said.

  “Well, yes, I will admit that both the teenager and old codger analogies work.”

  “Let’s say he really has the soul of a teenager, or an old curmudgeon. Does that make him more dangerous?” Charli asked.

  “Yes!” Both psychologists said it together.

  Zaluski went first. “When you think of a teenager, consider one that doesn’t fit in. Perhaps he doesn’t have any friends, and others make fun of him. Now think of Columbine or one of the other mass school shootings. In this case, Cronkite doesn’t just have automatic weapons, he, and I’m assuming here, has access to much more powerful weapons.”

  “And a curmudgeon? Dr. Avraham?” Hallstrom asked.

  “Let me tell you a story about one of my patients, Mr. President. This woman, aged seventy-eight, was obsessed with crime. Her next-door neighbor didn’t keep any outside lights on at night and didn’t trim the bushes around his house. Robbers could break in without being seen. She complained to all the other neighbors that he was just asking to be robbed. Couldn’t he see how stupid he was being? Why wouldn’t he listen to her?”

  Avraham continued. “One day she cut all of his bushes to the ground. The man initiated legal action, so one night she went to his door and rang the doorbell. When he answered the door, she shot him in the face with a shotgun. And do you know what she did next, as he lay bleeding and dying in his front hall?”

  “What?” asked Zaluski and Charli together.

  “She reached in and turned on his outside lights.”

  “Okay, got it.” The president shook his head, “Would you both agree that the bottom line is that, whether he’s a teenager or a curmudgeon at heart, we need to be concerned that his anger could have some serious consequences for this planet?”

  Zaluski spoke first. “Do you know who Justin Briegler is?”

  “The teenage pop star who’s always getting arrested and causing car crashes?”

  She nodded. “Picture him with his thumb on the nuclear button.”

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  June 8, 2018

  Cronkite’s nanobot spor
es arrived at the surface of the earth. Like cottonwood seeds, only lighter and invisible, they had drifted until evenly distributed among the unwitting humans going about their daily routines: shopping, talking on phones, working out at the gym, planting crops, driving cars.

  Before long, most of the humans on the planet had either breathed in, ingested, or simply contacted at least one spore.

  Fanta Okoro, a seamstress in Southern Nigeria had thirteen nanobot spores waiting in her body. Heather Goff, a two-week-old infant in Baltimore, gazed up at her loving parents. Two spores waited in her left lung and two more sat on her back. Amak Koko, an Inuit fisherman in the Alaskan arctic, was spore-free.

  Each patient nanobot scanned its environment and counted down.

  Forty-eight hours to go.

  * * *

  Charli sipped her coffee and daydreamed three thousand feet below the surface of Ruby Mountain. She spread exactly 1.5 tablespoons of cream cheese onto her low-carb, chocolate chip cookie dough Quest bar. A perfect combination. She’d had the bar in her pocket when they were evacuated.

  She’d again pulled her hair back into a ponytail, enhancing her high cheek bones. Today she chose a minimal-make-up look to go with her camo outfit. Because her own clothes had apparently been routed to the wrong presidential bunker, she was sporting ensembles from Nevada’s Ruby Mountain collection. Luckily for her, they had some child sizes to choose from.

  She enjoyed the experience of living in a bunker—so far, anyway. It was a bit like camping. Or glamping.

  She’d gone on plenty of camping trips as a child. Her favorite had been a two-week through-hiking trip with her dad on the Appalachian Trail. Her mother had died in childbirth, and Sam Keller had raised his daughter single-handedly with assistance from grandmother Marie. In addition to her one-on-one time with him, Charli had enjoyed the rigor of carefully organizing the gear and equipment, running through checklists, and putting everything in its proper place.

  “Excuse me, Ms. Keller.” Her secretary stood at the door, one hand on the jamb and the other on the knob. “Dr. McGraw has something to show you in the communications room.”

  Charli popped the last bit of snack into her mouth and took her coffee with her.

  In the comm center the main screen displayed a schematic of the solar system with the orbits of the planets clearly indicated. Charli squinted at it as she sat down. “What are we seeing, Seth?”

  McGraw used the mouse to indicate several markers. “Here’s the earth and here’s DJ1.” The marker for DJ1 was near the line indicating the orbit of Jupiter but not near the planet itself. “And here’s Cronkite’s sphere.” He zoomed in so that only the two alien spacecraft fit on the display. At that zoom level, Charli could see Cronkite’s inching toward DJ1.

  “Well, this should be interesting,” she said. “How is it that we can track him?”

  “His craft gives off radiation. It has a signature we can recognize. DJ1 does also, but its is different.”

  “He took off in that direction with no special gravity-assist maneuvers. That is, he didn’t use Earth’s gravitational field as a slingshot. He just went.”

  “How fast is he going?”

  McGraw pointed to a readout on the corner of the screen. “About a quarter of the speed of light.”

  “Whoa. Impressive.”

  “It took him a little while to accelerate to that, of course, and he’s starting his deceleration now.”

  “When’s he going to get there?” Charli asked.

  “In ten minutes.”

  Charli sipped her coffee and the two sat in comfortable silence as the markers on the screen moved closer. President Hallstrom entered the room, and McGraw brought him up to speed.

  Hallstrom said, “So Cronkite and DJ1 are from the same civilization after all.”

  Charli shook her head. “We can’t infer that, Dane.”

  “You’re saying it’s what, just coincidence that we were visited by two aliens at the same time?” Hallstrom sat down.

  “Sorry, I mean that we can’t infer that they are together. Yes, they could be buddies, or it could be that the arrival of one prompted the appearance of the other.” As she spoke, the two icons on the solar system map merged.

  “Now what? Did they crash?” Hallstrom looked at McGraw.

  McGraw’s communication screen showed an incoming video call from Dr. Nils Rorman at JPL, the head technician for NASA’s Deep Space Network. Rorman said, “Hey, Seth. We’re seeing a lot of radiation from the DJ1 area. It’s really lighting up.”

  McGraw asked, “Discrete events? Explosions?”

  “No.” Rorman looked over to one side, apparently checking another screen. “No, it’s like a sustained expenditure of energy. Wait a second. Stand by. Okay, it stopped. Now we’re seeing only the DJ1 radiation.”

  “Is Cronkite gone?” Hallstrom asked.

  “Just a second, sir.” McGraw looked at the screen showing Rorman. “Still there, Nils?”

  “I’m still getting energy from DJ1 but nothing from Cronkite … no, hold on. Yeah, we’re seeing that energy again.”

  As they watched, the two markers started diverging. It looked like Cronkite was heading back to Earth.

  “Okay, thanks Nils. Let’s keep in touch.” McGraw exited the chat and rotated around to face the president.

  “What just happened?” Hallstrom asked. “Were they communicating?”

  “No, that wouldn’t make sense,” McGraw said. “It doesn’t take much energy to talk back and forth, and besides, they wouldn’t have to be close to one another to do that. Especially since we think that DJ1, at least, has the capability for FTL communication. So that suggests—”

  “They are fighting.” Charli stared into the distance.

  McGraw nodded. “Something like that, yes. I think that’s it. Seems logical. If so, I’d guess …”

  “What?” Charli said.

  “Well, if you held a gun to my head, I’d say that DJ1 came out on top. It kept transmitting, but Cronkite seemed to go dead for while. But it’s hard to guess about these things because there’s such a mismatch between our technologies. Take someone from the 1850s to a modern street, and he or she would probably guess that we’d been attacked by millions of small creatures that forced us to frequently take them out of our pockets and massage them with our thumbs.”

  * * *

  June 8, 2018

  Alex Carter slid the trigger peg into the rail assembly of the fish-catching machine and glanced over at Rebecca Reed, sitting against a pine tree. She wore cutoff jeans and a bathing suit top and had obviously developed faster than other girls her age. When Martin glanced at her, too, Alex clenched his teeth and hit his brother in the shoulder. “Watch what you’re doing.” Whoa! This is different. Usually, nothing distracted him when building a device.

  The Carter twins were on a technology-free canoe trip in the Boundary Waters Wilderness area between Minnesota and Canada. No cell phones or tablet computers allowed.

  Rebecca put on a puzzled face, tapping her chin with her finger. “Gee, I wonder whether it would be more fun to catch fish the old-fashioned way, with, like, a rod and reel? Hmm, could be a lot less work, too.” Another conscript in the week-long “get the prodigies out of their shells” trip, her talent was music. She had twice recorded with the Cleveland Orchestra, playing the French horn.

  Alex set the ratchet tension and looked at his brother. Done. The boys walked up the bank to sit cross-legged on the ground in front of Rebecca.

  “You guys have a word for “geek” in that secret language of yours?” she asked.

  “Sure do,” said Martin, “And it’s got a variant—”

  “—that you might find useful.” Alex finished his twin’s sentence. Talking with them was like watching a tennis match.

  “A variant?” Rebecca squinted.

  “Band geek,” the boys said together.

  She smiled and nodded once and then shook her head. “Sorry, fellas, no comprende. By the w
ay, I heard the government keeps an eye on you guys.”

  “Yeah, apparently machine design is something they are interested in—” said Alex.

  “French horns, not so much.” She leaned forward. “That’s what you were going to say next, right, Martin?”

  Martin shrugged.

  Alex looked directly at Rebecca. “Also, the government wants us to reproduce. ASAP.”

  “In your dreams, guys.”

  Martin snapped his fingers. “Hey, maybe that’s why they sent us out into the wilderness …”

  “Don’t even go there.” Rebecca rolled her eyes. “Changing the subject, and quickly, what about these plans for devices that Cronkite uploaded? That should be right up your alley.”

  “The government clamped down on WikiLeaks even before Cronkite’s speech was done, but it was too late. The plans are out in the wild. We’ve seen some of them,” said Martin.

  “We figure there are some weapons plans in there.” said Alex.

  Martin made a mock-serious face. “Of course there could be plans for a high-tech music stand.”

  “Or not,” the twins said together.

  Their conversation was interrupted by a snap from the fish-catching device. They all turned to watch as a descending log attached to the pulley system reeled in a ten-inch lake trout and slid it up a ramp into a holding tank.

  The twins high-fived and turned toward Rebecca.

  She looked back at them. “Dumb fish.”

  * * *

  June 8, 2018

  In Portland’s Longfellow Medical Center, Marie Keller stopped in to visit her former colleague, radiologist Moulik Sachar. She’d never liked him much, since he always seemed annoyed about something or other. He was dictating x-ray findings, and his office was lit only by his two wide-screen monitors. She was glad she wasn’t working with him any longer.

  “Marie, look at this.” He pointed to the x-ray on his screen. “More of these damn artifacts.” He threw his microphone onto the desk and charged down the hall. She took a quick glance at the monitor then scrambled after Sachar and caught up with him in X-Ray Room Two.