Complete Independence Day Omnibus, The

by Molstad, Stephen

  “Little Pitcher,” a voice came over the radio, “we’re tracking you down here at Ford Ord and you’re looking all clear. Are you out of those clouds yet? Over.”

  “Negative,” replied the pilot, squinting out the front window, “we still have zero visibility.” A tropical storm had blown unusually far north from Mexico, leaving a thick mass of clouds hanging over the California Coast. “Fort Ord, what’s your best estimate on our ETA? Over.”

  “Sorry, Little Pitcher, we just lost our angle. We can’t see you any longer. You’re into the blackout zone on our screens. Maybe San Diego can still see you.”

  After a tense moment of silence, a new voice came onto the line. “This is San Diego. Negative on that. We’ve got the same problem. Little Pitcher is inside the disturbance field. Sorry, Pitcher. We’ll stand by.”

  Blasts of sunlight came through gaps in the clouds and into the cockpit, only to vanish a split second later. “Ground Control, this is Pitcher. We’re starting to experience general instrument malfunction. Our altimeter and environment controls are gone. We’re still moving through zero visibility and can’t get any kind of reading on what’s in front of us. I’m going to climb a little higher and see if we can’t get clear over the top of this cloud cover.”

  “Roger, Pitcher,” came the reply from Moffet Field. “It’s your call at this point. You are totally manual.”

  “Don’t climb,” the president whispered. A former fighter pilot himself, he was imagining himself at the helm of the plane, “just keep it level.” But the phone hookup was a one-way transmission.

  “That’s looking a little better,” the AWACS reported with relief. “I think we’ve found a clearing.”

  Growing louder, a sonic disturbance, the cracking hiss of static interference, growled over the speakerphone. Then, just as the AWACS broke free of the clouds, the pilot’s voice screamed over the noise, “Jesus God! The sky’s on fire!”

  In front of him was a solid wall of flame five miles high and twenty miles long, a majestic and fearsome sight. Roughly disk-shaped, it was shedding altitude, dropping down right on top of him. The pilot jerked back on the controls, forcing the plane into a steep climb. But when they came too close to the fireball, the plane suddenly shattered like a lightbulb crashing against an anvil.

  There was a sharp crack on the speakerphone before the line in the Oval Office went dead. “Get them back,” General Grey snarled to one of his men, even though he, like everyone in the room, suspected the plane was lost.

  The commander in chief of the Atlantic Air Command stepped closer to a stunned President Whitmore. “Two more have been spotted over the Atlantic. One is moving toward New York; the other is headed in this direction.”

  “How much time do we have?”

  “Less than ten minutes, sir.”

  With this news, Whitmore’s civilian advisers began pushing their way through the ring of military men that circled his desk. The first one through was Nimziki. He spoke very precisely in a voice loud enough for the entire room to hear.

  “Generals, we must move the president to a safe location at once. Organize a military escort to Crystal Mountain.” General Grey agreed completely. He leaned close to the president’s chair and urged him to move immediately to a secure location.

  As orders began to fly around the room, the president reached across his desk and put a hand on Nimziki’s shoulder. The gesture took the secretary quite by surprise. He froze in place, staring at the hand as if at a tarantula. President Whitmore used the moment to confer with his most trusted adviser.

  “Connie, what’s your take? Can we expect the same kind of panic here as in Russia?”

  “Probably worse than what we just saw,” she said.

  “I agree,” Whitmore said. “They’ll start to run before they know which way to go. We’ll lose a lot of lives.”

  Nimziki could see where the president was heading. He stepped backward, out of the president’s grip. “Mr. President, you can discuss these secondary matters on the way. But the situation demands that you, as the commander in chief—”

  “I’m not leaving,” the president announced.

  Nimziki was stunned, as were most of the people in the room. Several top-ranking officers stepped closer to the president, urging him to come to his senses and evacuate to a protected location.

  “We must maintain a working government in a time of crisis,” one of them reminded him loudly, making no attempt to disguise his frustration. A dozen men were all shouting at once, concerned for the president’s safety. A pair of Secret Service agents pushed their way close and stood at his side.

  With a long, glaring look, the president silenced the room. Slowly, he issued a set of commands. “I want the vice president, the cabinet, and the joint chiefs taken to a secured location. Let’s get you men to NORAD. For the time being, I’m going to remain here in the White House.”

  Nimziki bristled, “Mr. President, we all—”

  “I understand your position,” Whitmore cut him off, “but I’m not going to add to a public hysteria that could cost us thousands of lives. Before we take off running, let’s find out whether these things are hostile and exactly where they’re headed.”

  Nimziki stared icily back at the president. He had hoped Whitmore would be different from the other presidents he had served, that his military training would keep him cool in an emergency. Even though this was a totally new situation, there was still a protocol to be followed. But Whitmore was trying to write his own script. Nimziki still had a few aces up his sleeve, but knew it was too early to play them.

  “Connie,” Whitmore continued, “initiate the emergency broadcasting system. I’ll do an announcement as soon as you can set it up. Write a brief speech advising people not to panic, to stay home if possible. Can you do that in twenty minutes?”

  “Give me ten,” she said, already on her way out the door.

  The joint chiefs were still standing in the office, confused, not quite willing to leave their posts here in what had become the command center.

  “All right, people, let’s move,” Whitmore commanded, “I want you to get to NORAD as quickly as possible.” The six generals exchanged glances with their staffers, then began moving reluctantly toward the exits. General Grey broke away from the pack and stood in front of Whitmore.

  “With your permission, Mr. President, I’d like to remain by your side.” As chairman of the joint chiefs, it was an unusual request, but given the long friendship between the two men, it came as no surprise.

  “I had a feeling you would.” Whitmore smiled. “And you, Mr. Nimziki?” The tall, brooding man replied without hesitation, “NSC directives require that the secretary of defense make himself available to the president at all times.” Then, after a beat, he tried changing tones. “It’s my job to stay.” He tried to make it sound friendly, but it came out like most of the things he said: vaguely menacing.

  General Grey turned to Whitmore and asked the grave question that had been gnawing away at all of them for the past hour. “Mr. President, what happens if these things do become hostile?”

  Whitmore thought for a second. “Then God help us.”

  *

  Like the cob-webbed entrance to a forgotten tomb, the feed room door creaked open very slowly. David, his mind wandering through some parallel universe, his nose buried in a computer printout, shuffled absentmindedly into the central office of Compact Cable. The single-spaced print out was sixteen pages in length and contained only one thing: a single, incredibly long number, a continuous mind-numbing strand of ones and zeroes, a binary mathematical representation of twenty minutes worth of the mysterious, disruptive signal. His custom-built phase-reversed spectrometer had done its job. The device had compiled a precise numerical “portrait” of the oscillating frequency and specified the mirror-image signal that could be broadcast to cancel out the interference. Marty was going to be very happy. He could start pumping a clear picture out to their subscribers then get on t
he phone and taunt the competition. But David wasn’t finished: as soon as he’d figured out a way to block the signal, he started asking himself where it was coming from and what it meant.

  He was halfway across the office before he noticed it was empty. David glanced at the wall clock. Way past lunch time, he told himself. Jack Feldin, an old-timer who worked in sales, was at his desk sobbing like a baby into a telephone. In a vague way, David realized something was wrong, but he was so focused on solving the puzzle he ignored everything else. He was an obsessive puzzle-solver, had been since he got hooked on the New York Times Sunday crossword at age twelve. When the “Genius Puzzles” came out in the Mensa magazine each month, he’d plow through them one by one until, an hour or a few days later, he’d cracked them all. This business about the repeating signal in the satellite feed was a real-life riddle David was uniquely qualified to decipher. After all, how many engineers were there with his practical and theoretical skills who could also put their hands on fifty million dollars worth of high-tech communications equipment any time they liked?

  He took the pages to his cubicle, slipped a disk into his desktop computer, and brought a sequence analyzing program up on the screen. With a few flicks of his fingers, he created a representation of the transmission. On a hunch, he asked the program if the repetitions of the signal were precisely equal. Negative. It was getting shorter, slowly reducing itself down to nothing. But it wasn’t losing any strength and television reception was in the same sad shape it had been in all day. Curious. Assuming the signal was being sent for some intelligent purpose, why would it fade to zero? Very weird.

  It took David about sixty seconds to do the algebra. According to his calculations, the signal would cycle down to extinction and disappear at 2:32 A.M. EST. Okay, he said to himself, so what? Because he’d been locked away in the crypt of the feed room all day, he had no idea where the signal might be coming from. After deciding he probably wouldn’t learn anything else until that night, he stood up and left the cubicle. It was time to deliver the good news.

  Marty’s office was, as usual, a disaster area. Yellowing newspapers, take-out lunch containers, extra copies of the latest shareholder’s report, and great heaps of unopened mail were piled on top of overflowing file cabinets. In addition to all the mess, there were five bodies crowded into the room, their attention glued to the television.

  David barely noticed them. He did, however, spot the only unoccupied seat and slid into it like someone might beat him to the spot at the last minute. He casually draped a leg over the arm of the chair. It took him a moment to pick up on the mood of frightened anxiety in the room.

  “I’ve got a lock on the signal pattern,” he announced, “and we should be able to filter it out.”

  “Huh?” Marty realized he was being spoken to. Then, absently, “Oh, good, good.”

  “But here’s the strange thing. If my calculations are right, and they usually are, the whole thing’s gonna disappear in about seven hours anyway.” When he didn’t get any reaction, he looked up and said with emphasis, “The signal reduces itself every time it recycles. Eventually, it will disappear. Hey, are you listening?”

  “David, my God,” Marty realized, “haven’t you been watching this? This is horrible, David.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Look, it’s right there.”

  David wheeled around in his chair and saw a live picture from Australia. A giant plate of fire, fifteen miles wide, was hanging in the sky over Melbourne. David’s first thought was that there had been some sort of ecological disaster, the ozone reaching a critical state of frailty and erupting into spontaneous combustion. But a moment later, he asked the same question everyone had when they’d first seen the thing, “Is there a war going on?”

  “They don’t know what the hell these things are,” somebody said. “Atmospheric phenomena is the term they keep repeating.”

  “It’s probably some kind of debris from an asteroid,” a coworker suggested. “These things are falling all over the earth.”

  “Oh, will you please wake up and smell the coffee,” Marty snapped at the man. “They’ve said it about a hundred times: they’re not falling objects! They’re moving too slowly. And some of them have started moving sideways. They’re flying. They’re fucking flying saucers and this is the fucking invasion of the earth, okay?”

  David hesitated for a moment, not knowing whether to laugh or shit his pants. The distressed faces of the others in the room confirmed that Marty was serious.

  “Whoa! Wait a second.” David stood up unconsciously waving the idea away. A sharp chill ran up his back, lodged itself in his brain, then erupted into a creepy variety of terror. Marty came around the desk and put a concerned hand on David’s shoulder, then began filling him in on what little was known about the thirty-six “phenomena.”

  Suddenly, he pointed at the TV screen. “David, look. Isn’t that Connie?” Following the strictures of the Emergency Broadcast protocol, every channel switched over to a live picture of the White House press room. An attractive woman in a white silk blouse stepped up to the microphone and began taking questions from the press. The sight of her immediately wrenched David out of one drama and hurled him into another, more personal one. The woman was none other than Constance Marianne Spano, his estranged wife.

  “…emphasize that so far this phenomenon, while it has disrupted our televisions and radios, hasn’t caused any lasting damage and we have no reason to assume that it will.”

  David watched her lips moving, but hardly heard the words. They had spoken only a few weeks before, but watching her now made him realize they hadn’t actually seen one another for a year. Even through all the signal disturbance, he knew she looked different: a little older, a little more polished, and much further away.

  “The president is in an emergency planning meeting at the moment, but he wanted me to assure each and every American, as well as all of our allies, that we will be prepared for any possible outcome. The important thing now is for people not to panic.”

  A reporter shouted up at her, “Why did you initiate the EBS?”

  Connie, composed, congenial, responded. “We have instituted the Emergency Broadcast System. As anyone who has called long distance or anyone who is watching us now understands, we’re getting a lot of interference. The system helps ensure reliable communication links between government and military installations, that’s all.” David was the only person in the world who knew exactly when Connie was and was not bullshitting. She was telling the truth on this one.

  “We have a fix on four different occurrences,” she continued, “that will soon appear over American cities. Two are headed toward San Francisco and Los Angeles. The other two are on our Eastern seaboard moving toward New York and Washington, D.C.”

  Marty smiled at Pat Nolan, an enthusiastic new employee who poked his head into the office. “You guys, we found an old bomb shelter in the basement of this building. If any of you care to join us down there, we’ve got room for a few more. But I wouldn’t wait too long.” With that, he turned and walked out. Jeanie, one of Compact’s copywriters, bolted out the door after him, trying to beat the others in the room downstairs for a spot.

  When she was gone, Marty shook his head. “This is going to get very, very ugly.”

  *

  Burlie’s was a depressing, dilapidated beer joint just across the highway from the tiny local airport. The felt on the pool table was frayed, and the thumbtacked posters of busty chicks caressing power tools hung on nicotine-encrusted walls. Russell Casse was perched on a bar stool, staring at his second scotch and water, waiting for a man to walk through the door and hand him ten thousand dollars.

  As soon as he’d landed the de Haviland, he’d gone to the office to find Rocky, the owner-manager of the two-bit landing strip. Rocky was a terrible name for this obese, oily man, so obscenely overweight he looked like a prize hog.

  “How much’ll you gimme for that old plane?”
Russell asked.

  “Ten thousand bucks,” Rocky replied, half joking. Both of them knew an available 1927 de Haviland could probably fetch seventy-five grand.

  “All right, I’ll take it,” Russell said softly, “but I need the whole thing in cash. I’ll wait for you at Burlie’s.” With that, he had turned and walked away, knowing Rocky would pour himself in his Lincoln and race to the bank.

  But it had been well over an hour since their conversation, and Russell was ready to order another drink, even though he couldn’t pay for the first two if Rocky didn’t show up with the cash. The television set at Burlie’s was switched off and Russell was the first customer of the day. Neither he nor the bartender knew about the catastrophe taking place in the skies around the planet. Nevertheless, the topic of conversation turned to UFOs when a trio of greasy mechanics from the airport walked into the bar.

  “Well, well, well, speak of the devil,” said the largest and dirtiest of them. “We heard you had a little trouble this morning, Russ. Went up and dusted the wrong field?” The other two guys cracked up. Russell faked a smile and kept his eyes on his whiskey. “Don’t laugh, you guys,” the big man continued, “it ain’t Russ’s fault. He’s still a little confused from his hostage experience.” Once again, his two pals began to cackle like a pair of hyenas in coveralls.

  One of them stopped abruptly and asked, “Hostage experience? What happened to him?”

  “Let the man drink in peace, fellas,” said the bartender without much conviction as he slid their beers across the bar. But the leader of the grease monkeys was just getting started.

  “You mean he ain’t never told you? Well, a couple years back, our boy here got himself kidnapped by aliens and taken up to their ship. And the little fellers did all kinds of nasty experiments on him. Tell him, Casse.”

  “Not today, guys. Okay?”

  “He’s not talkin’ now,” the guy brayed, “but you just wait till he has a couple more drinks in him. We won’t be able to shut him up. Hey, Russ, could you do us a favor?” he asked, glancing at his watch. “Would you get stinkin’ drunk before we head back to work?” That brought on another round of laughs from his buddies.