When a pair of cops pulled a road block aside to allow a line of news vehicles on to the street, Julius cut into the line and drove past the road block like he was Walter Cronkite. Even after years of studying him, David couldn’t tell when his father was being sneaky and when he was simply blundering along. When the Valiant lurched to a stop, Julius turned and dryly addressed his son.
“Okay, we’re here. You want to ring the doorbell or should I?”
David shot his father a Clint Eastwood stare as he flipped open his cellular phone and dialed Connie’s number from his computer screen. He got a busy signal. “Perfect, she’s on the phone right now.”
Sometimes David made no sense. “How,” his father wanted to know, “can it be perfect if you need to talk to a person and her line is busy?”
“Because,” David explained, his fingers issuing commands across the keypad, “I have a service that allows me to triangulate her signal and establish her exact position. Even inside the White House.”
Julius started to say something else, then stopped short, realizing what David had said. “You can do that?” he asked, honestly curious.
David answered with a diabolical grin, “All cable repairmen can.”
*
Inside the White House, Connie was in one of the hallways taking care of some personal business. She had called her friend and neighbor, Pilar, who was just about to leave for her parents’ place in New Jersey. The woman promised to take Connie’s cat, Thumper, with her. As soon as the two of them said goodbye, the phone rang again.
“Yes?”
“Connie, don’t hang up.”
Her eyes rolled toward the ceiling when she heard David’s voice. She leaned against the wall. “How did you get this number?”
“Walk to the window. There should be a window right in front of you.” Reluctantly, she looked around. Sure enough, there was a window only a few feet away. She walked over to the tall windows and pulled back the white lace curtains to peer outside.
“All right, I’m at the window. Now, what am I looking for?”
There was no need for more explanation. As soon as Connie looked up at the street, she saw a tall, awkward figure climb up onto the hood of an old blue car and start waving wildly in the air.
Secret Service men quickly surrounded the car and “helped” David down. Filtered through the phone, Connie could hear him telling the men he was talking to someone inside the White House.
A moment later, an all-business voice came on the line. “Who is this?” Connie identified herself and, despite her own doubts, assured the agent that the man on the hood of the car wasn’t a lunatic. She checked her watch and decided she could come down and talk to him for a minute or two.
*
A shower of sparks from a welder’s torch bounced off the helicopter and onto the tarmac at Andrews Air Force Base, then fizzled away. The hooded man was putting the final touches on something called “Operation Welcome Wagon,” a hastily organized attempt to communicate with the visitors. Portable work lights, designed for nighttime road construction, had been trucked onto the runway along with a fleet of loudly chugging generators needed to power them. Scores of news crews from around the world moved as close to the scene as the soldiers would let them.
The center of all this attention was a sixty foot long, thirty foot high, eighteen-ton piece of machinery, the most advanced instrument of its kind: an Apache attack helicopter. A special steel frame was fitted into the copter, designed to hold a giant light board.
Searching for some way to communicate with the mute Goliaths hovering over the world’s capitals, the army engineers had finally seized on a plan. They’d descended on RFK Memorial Stadium, home of the Washington Redskins, and dismantled a large section of the ballpark’s message board. The aluminum box, forty feet tall, had 360 lights that could be programmed by computer to display just about any kind of pattern or message. Once the box was delivered to Andrews AFB, it was mounted to the floor of the Apache, extending like a pair of bulky wings from the doors on either side.
A thousand cameras began to flash when the long rotor blades started to turn. Reporters shouted questions at the soldiers and press officers assigned to keep them at a distance, rushing to their positions to do stand-up remotes. Within seconds, they were patched in to live network broadcasts and millions of people around the world were watching the beginning of Operation Welcome Wagon.
“What you see behind me,” a CNN reporter shouted over the din, “is an Apache attack helicopter refitted with synchronized light boards. Pentagon officials hope these lights will be our first step in communicating with the alien craft. But what message will we be sending? And in what language? We spoke with one of the men responsible for designing earth’s first message to these inscrutable visitors just a few moments ago. He told us that it would be a message of peace sent in the language of mathematics…”
As soon as the blades were at full speed, the ground crew moved away and the pilot lifted off, careful to keep his craft level so that the light board wouldn’t slip out. It rose straight up, then began moving toward the dark metallic menace slowly turning in the night sky. A swarm of smaller helicopters, equipped with cameras, followed it away from the base.
People everywhere followed the scene on their television screens. Even in the White House, a large contingent of military personnel and civilian advisers watched as the tense drama unfolded.
“Where are we?”
Suddenly half the room jumped up and saluted as the president strode into the room.
“We’re in the air,” General Grey reported, “ETA approximately six minutes.” As he said these words, the pounding thwack of the Apache was audible over the city. Several officers went to the windows and watched it lifting higher and higher as it flew to the rendezvous point at the tall tower which seemed to mark the front of the ship. President Whitmore stood shoulder to shoulder with the rest of the room, watching in grim silence.
Just down the hall, the doors of the old executive elevator rolled open and out stepped an unshaven Julius Levinson, his trousers wrinkled from the long drive. He made no secret about being impressed with his surroundings. As Connie and David headed down the hallway speaking in urgent whispers, Julius stopped to inspect his appearance in a mirror.
“Oy! If I had known I was going to meet the president,” he said loudly, “I’d a worn a tie. Will ya look at me, I look like a schlemiel.”
Without a word, Connie hurried back, hooked her father-in-law’s arm in hers, and tugged him along until the three of them were standing in the Oval Office. The room was empty, but to Julius it felt as if all the great names of American history were in there with him. He couldn’t believe where this strange day had taken him. As a reflex, he combed his fingers through his hair, trying to make himself look presentable.
“You two wait right here. I’ll be right back,” Connie told them. Before she left the room, she warned David, “I don’t know how happy he’s going to be to see you.”
“Connie, we’re wasting time,” David urged. “I’m about the last person he’s going to listen to.”
“Of course he’ll listen,” Julius erupted, suddenly ready to defend his son, “why shouldn’t he listen?”
“Because the last time I saw him I punched him in the face.”
Julius gasped and clutched his heart with his hands. He looked at Connie, then at David. “You actually punched the president? My son punched the president?”
Connie paused at the door. “He wasn’t the president then,” she explained. “David was convinced I was having an affair with him, which I wasn’t.”
With that, she closed the door and walked down the hall to the briefing room. A smile crossed her lips as she heard Julius raising his voice, incredulous, in the room behind her.
Connie stopped outside the door to the briefing room. She was taking an enormous personal and professional risk, pulling the president out of a high-level meeting for a conference with her erratic ex-h
usband. But David had managed to convince her that he was on to something real, something she thought the president ought to know about. She took a deep breath and plunged in, walking straight up to Whitmore and whispering something into his ear.
“Right now?” he asked, incredulous.
His communications director nodded. Everyone in the room had turned to watch this conversation. The timing couldn’t have been worse. The welcome wagon would reach its destination in just over three minutes. But Whitmore was accustomed to relying on Connie’s good judgment. Without another word, he turned away from the window and walked to the door.
“You aren’t going to leave now, are you?” Nimziki made sure everyone in the room was aware of the president’s curious decision as Whitmore ignored him and left the room.
“Ugh! How in the world do you put up with that cretin?” Connie asked once they were out in the hall.
“He ran the CIA for years. He knows where all the bones are buried. It comes in handy,” Whitmore told her. “Now, exactly who is this I’m going to talk to?”
Rather than answering him, Connie ushered him into the Oval Office. The moment Whitmore saw David, he froze in place. “Damn it, Connie, I don’t have time for this!”
Anticipating exactly that reaction, she had shut the double doors and stood in front of them. There was an icy silence.
Julius, understanding the situation better than he let on, broke the tension by marching up to Whitmore, hand extended. “Julius Levinson, Mr. President. An honor to meet you.”
“I told you he wouldn’t listen,” David said, pouting at Connie.
“This will just take a moment of your time,” Julius assured him.
President Whitmore shot a dumbfounded look at Connie, amazed that she had dragged these two weirdos into the White House at a moment like this. As he moved to leave the room, David finally spoke up.
“I know why we have satellite disruption,” he said calmly.
Whitmore turned and looked back at him. “Go on.”
“These ships are positioned all around the globe,” he began, coming around to the front of the president’s desk and drawing a circle on a notepad. “If you wanted to coordinate the actions of ships all over the world, you couldn’t send one signal to every place at the same time.” He drew lines between the ships showing how the curve of the earth would block their signals.
“You’re talking about line of sight?”
“Exactly. The curve of the earth prevents it, so you’d need to relay your signal using satellites—” David added a pair of orbiting communications satellites to his sketch “—in order to reach the various ships. I have found a signal embedded in our own satellite network, and this signal is actually—”
Before he could finish, the door was forced open behind Connie. An aide poked his head in the door with an urgent message. “Excuse me, Mr. President. They’re starting right now.”
So far, David hadn’t told Whitmore anything he didn’t already know from intelligence reports coming out of Space Command earlier that day. The president picked up a remote control and switched on the television. The Apache had just reached the front of the huge spaceship and turned on its light boards. The powerful lights began to flash on and off, creating a repeating sequential pattern. The staff at SETI, after several hours of furious on-line discussion and a blizzard of faxes, had come up with a simple mathematical progression, a message written in what they hoped would be a universally comprehensible language. The entire sequence would repeat every three minutes, followed by a display of the word “peace,” written in ten different earthly languages. It wasn’t much, but it was a beginning. The message spelled out by these flashing lights was utterly incomprehensible to most humans, including the president.
He turned back to David. “So, they’re broadcasting to one another using our satellites?”
David had turned on his computer. He showed Whitmore the graphic he had created to express the signal. “This wave is a measurement of the signal. When I first found it, it was recycling itself every twenty minutes. Now it’s down to three. It seems to be fading out, losing power, but the broadcast power remains stable. It’s like they’re slowly turning down the volume, shortening it down to zero. It has to be some sort of a countdown.”
The president stared back at the television, lost in thought.
“Tom, these things are—” David caught himself and started over with greater composure. “Mr. President, these things are using our own satellites against us, sending out a countdown. And the clock is ticking.”
“When will the signal disappear?”
David opened a window on his computer screen. ‘Thirty-one minutes.”
Whitmore stared at the television. The giant helicopter looked like a mosquito beside the endless gray bulk of the intruder ship. What David had told him made sense, confirmed his worst suspicions. Until then, he’d taken a wait-and-see attitude, but if David was right about the countdown, it was time to spring into action. He nodded his head and walked out of the room, down the hall, and came into the briefing room with a whole new battle plan.
“General Grey, I want you to coordinate with Atlantic and Southwest Commands. Tell them they have twenty-five minutes to get as many people out of the cities as possible.”
“But Mr. President—”
“And get that chopper away from that damned ship. Call them back immediately.”
Grey picked up the direct line to Andrews AFB and relayed the commander in chief’s orders. Nimziki, on the other hand, used the moment as an opportunity to advance his career and accumulate personal power. With a series of glances around the room, he tried to cement the impression that Whitmore was cracking under the pressure, reversing himself for no apparent reason.
“Mr. President,” his tone was full of false civility, “why are we pulling back now? What changed your mind?”
Whitmore ignored him. “We’re evacuating the White House, effective immediately. Let me have the two choppers on the lawn in five minutes. Somebody go downstairs and get my daughter.” Advisers and staff broke into thirty separate conversations, scrambling to execute their new marching orders.
“Sir,” Grey held a hand over the phone, “I’ve got General Harding of Atlantic Command on the line. Just how orderly should this evacuation be?” Grey was as confused as anyone by Whitmore’s sudden change of direction. But there was no time to answer the question.
“They’re responding!”
All the movement and chatter stopped abruptly as everyone turned toward the bank of television screens. A thin shaft of green light, two inches around, sprouted from the base of the tall tower on the alien ship. Almost like a long finger extending through the darkness, it grew in length until it reached out and poked against the helicopter, a mile away. The Apache, moving sideways through the air to keep itself in front of the tower as the giant ship spun slowly through the air, reacted visibly, jolting backward several feet when the light nudged against it. The beam, bright enough to be visible from the ground, was the pale color of milky jade. The millions watching on television could see that the helicopter was struggling to maintain its position relative to the vast, menacing ship.
The pilot’s cool voice came over the radio. ‘This ray of light seems to have some type of mass or energy to it. We’re experiencing some turbulence, getting knocked around pretty good up here.”
As he spoke, a huge screeching noise drowned out his words. A pair of huge armored plates concealing the source of the mysterious pole of green light had begun to grind open with an earsplitting squeal.
“Sounds like God’s fingernails on a big chalkboard,” the pilot purred in a southern accent.
As the panels pulled open, the light from inside the big ship overpowered the 1500-watt bulbs of the light board. The men inside the helicopter shielded their eyes, still struggling to maintain position. Then the president’s order reached them. The lead pilot flipped the switch on his radio, his voice broadcast to millions worldwide
.
“We have received orders to return Operation Welcome—”
He never finished. A spike of green light suddenly streaked across the night sky and smashed against the helicopter, shredding it in a single burst. It looked like a dragonfly being taken out by a .22-caliber shell. After the brief explosion lit up the sky, everything was suddenly dark once more. The bright light coming from the spaceship was gone. All that remained were a few pieces of smoking debris drifting earthward like fiery snowflakes. The doors at the base of the tower rolled closed and the huge saucer covering the sky went back to sleep.
*
A phone rang in the Los Angeles hotel room. Then rang again. Marilyn Whitmore was too stunned by what she had just seen to answer it. She had been packing a few last things into her briefcase when the helicopter exploded. The television was showing it again in slow motion. Grainy enlargements of the pilot showed him covering his head in the last frame of videotape before the blast hit him. Marilyn sat down on the bed feeling sick for the man and his family, but even worse for what the extraterrestrials’ response meant to the human race as a whole. When the phone rang again, one of her Secret Service escort picked the cellular up and identified himself. He listened carefully, saying, “Yes sir, I understand,” and “Yes sir, immediately. She’s right here, do you wish to speak with her, sir?… Yes, sir, I understand.”
He clicked the phone off and turned to Mrs. Whitmore. “That was the president, ma’am. He said he loves you very much and gave me orders to evacuate you from Los Angeles at once. We have the southern stairwell secured. We’ll take it up to the roof.”
“Okay, let’s rumble,” she said, pulling herself together and heading out the door.
As they came out on the roof, an army transport helicopter was fifty feet above them, coming in for a landing on the rooftop helipad. Mrs. Whitmore wondered aloud whether getting into a helicopter was such a good idea. The city-sized spaceship overhead might have developed an appetite for them. As the whirring blades stirred up the warm night air, Marilyn scanned the city’s skyscrapers and noted something curious happening on one rooftop after another: helicopters buzzing around, shining search beams down on the tops of the brightly lit buildings.
Complete Independence Day Omnibus, The Page 12
