by Terri Kouba
We had hit another dead end and this one demoralized us more than the others. It’s not that we hadn’t been making progress; in the last three months we had developed all sorts of amazing devices. The first thing Marla wanted to do was convert the personal armor she had tested into something the animals could wear. While the devices were successful, we couldn’t get the animals to contain their fear of the Slicers long enough to realize that the Slicers couldn’t harm them anymore. The cows sent outside were skittish and produced sour milk. The horses bucked their riders and one even ran wild-eyed off the edge of the cliff and drowned in the Aegean Sea. The chickens fared a mite better after we placed blinders over their eyes, but topside chickens produced smaller and fewer eggs. Eventually Marla conceded that the animals were happier in the underground caverns and we could keep them there until we had rid the world of Slicers completely.
Derrick insisted my father work on perfecting the personal armor for the soldiers and within a month he had produced enough Eigengrau light belts that everyone in Plato’s Cave had one to call their own. After they had showed us their greatest secret, the underground caverns, the Platonists had no problems answering the questions that had so concerned us before the marauders attacked. Gretchen would have been pleased to learn that Plato’s Cave had over eight hundred members, with over two hundred children, but she never made it off the train alive. Charlie would have been happy to learn that the Platonists did indeed have fish farms but instead of using above-water boats, they collected their catches using submarines, but he, too, had perished on the train.
Marla gave me the most important job of all though. She said it was my idea so I should just continue working on it. That was just like her. She, the brightest scientist, worked on Eigengrau light bells for the cows and I, the weakest scientist, was to design the Eigengrau lights in a mesh dome that protected Plato’s Cave. Just about the time she had conceded to the animals and my father was finishing his last personal armor belt, I was turning on the mesh dome to protect the colony.
Indulge me for a moment, my children, while I immerse myself in the memories of my greatest achievement. It wasn’t my greatest idea, that would come months later, but designing and building the dome to protect the colony was the greatest thing I have done in my life.
The month was filled with frustration and elation as one idea that I was sure would work, failed miserably, and the weakest ideas turned out to be the correct solution. I don’t remember being hungry or tired during that month, though I know I barely ate or slept. None of us in the lab did. We were in our element. We were in the zone. We were focused on killing the Slicers and it was a very, very happy month.
We turned the protective dome on the night of the full moon. They had a ceremony in my honor after we acted out the Allegory of Plato’s Cave. I know it can’t be true but my memories tell me that I danced with every one of the eight hundred that night.
I left with Jeremiah, the same man with whom I left when I saw their ritual for the first time. We watched the sun rise and I cried as I leaned against the window. I could still see the flashes of the Slicers in the sunlight but they were far away. Very far away. It was like a shroud was removed from over the colony and finally, after all these years, we had breathing room. Jeremiah and I took very deep breaths that morning.
The following month we spent training others to mass-produce the personal armor belts. The nomads were ecstatic when we asked them to distribute the belts to the other colonies. They turned suspicious when we said they didn’t need to trade for them. There was something in Marla’s face, though, that convinced them that we weren’t tricking them. It was a good thing she didn’t speak much that day, for I think her voice would have changed their minds. I didn’t think it was possible, but after Robert used Marla’s poisonous gas to kill the marauders, her voice carried even more sorrow. It sounded like boulders scraping against glacial ice.
The third month, though, is when we started to hit high stone walls. We knew we had to develop a method to kill the Slicers rather than just protect ourselves from them. We made guns that shot the Eigengrau light. While shooting the Slicers was like shooting fish in a barrel, a barrel the size of the planet was just too large for a single gun to be effective. We tried to enhance Marla’s Eigengrau light laser. When the laser beam was tight, it killed the Slicers but only a few with every sweep. If we diffused the beam it covered more Slicers, but it lost its effectiveness and brushed over them harmlessly. We created Eigengrau light bombs but when we launched them in the air, they killed at most forty Slicers at a time.
We tossed around hundreds if not thousands of ideas and discarded them all. We struggled with the transition from defense to offense but mostly we struggled with the transition of scale; from killing dozens to killing billions.
“What we need is an airplane that will beam the light downward, blanketing them, killing them.”
My father nodded at Sarah when she brought our lunch.
Marla shook her head. “You’ve seen how easily they move away from the personal light shields. Anything covered in the light becomes a dead zone to their senses and they just move away, avoiding it. If we had an airplane, the Slicers would just move out of the way of the beam and then return when the airplane passed. We need something that will hit everything, all at once.” She nodded at me. “We need your mesh dome, but large enough to cover the entire planet.”
“Impossible,” I said. “You know the light beam limit is three hundred yards. We’d have to have hundreds of thousands of beam sources, spread all over the world. We’d have to have them in the middle of the ocean there’s nothing to anchor them to, so we’d need boats every three hundred yards. Mountains would block the dome, so we’d need to cover the tip of every mountain and every crevice in every valley. Impossible.” I shook my head violently.
“That’s why beaming the light downward, from above, is better,” my father persisted.
“If we can’t get enough stationary beam points, we certainly can’t get a hundred thousand airplanes into the sky to all turn on their Eigengrau light at the same moment,” Marla snapped.
“We don’t even know if there’s anyone who knows how to build an airplane anymore, much less fly it,” I conceded.
“We have a few books downstairs on flight, but I don’t know if they’re enough.” Marla took a bite of the sandwich Sarah brought.
“Did I ever tell you that my brother Jonas is still alive,” Sarah spoke.
We all turned to look at her. She rarely spoke in the lab, and then it was to ask whether we were finished with the plates or what we wanted for dinner. She had never spoken to me of anything personal before.
“What?” Marla asked. She turned to look at Sarah. “No, I didn’t know you had a brother.” Marla was like that. She could switch her mind from one topic to another without losing her train of thought. I couldn’t do that. Introduce a new topic and I quickly forgot what I was thinking about before. “Would you like him to come here?” she surmised.
Sarah shook her head. “He is happy with his comrades in Moscow. He is a man of great responsibility there. He remotely adjusts the satellites, so they remain in stable orbit. Even though they aren’t transmitting now, he still keeps them ready. Ready for the day when they will be needed.” She was very proud of her brother.
Marla had a funny, far-away look on her face before she broke into a broad smile. “Satellites. We used to have hundreds of satellites in stationary orbit around the planet. I had forgotten all about those.” She grabbed Sarah and hugged her. “That just might work.”
“But how are we going to get the Eigengrau light devices up to the satellites?” my father asked.
Marla darted toward the door. “We might not have to. I think we have some books downstairs on satellites,” and she was gone.
