‘Time for another Moon to light up my night,’ he thought to himself, then shook his head, hoping he’d never let an embarrassing pun like that ever make it down to his lips. Must be the eggnog talking. He grabbed his telescope for one last close-up look at his first love.
His night literally lit up, turning stark white too quickly for his pupils to tighten against. He slammed his eyelids shut, the searing pain crumpling him to the floor. He banged his head on a shelf and his ears buzzed a nauseatingly low and loud hum for a moment. Or had the sound started before he fell? He opened his eyes a crack to see the study bathed in hot, yellow mid-day sunlight. He let his eyes adjust, then slowly scanned up to the skylight.
Daylight. The Sun barely past apex, replacing the Moon.
“Ariel!” he shouted for his wife.
She walked toward the study. “Allan, you old coot, you left me alone again. Boy, I sure didn’t sleep well, feels like I just closed my eyes and now the Sun’s up. I tried to wait for you, but that eggnog was strong!”
He walked to her and held her hand. “I think I passed out.”
“My God, Allan! Did you forget to take your heart pills again?”
“I don’t think so,” he said without certainty. He ran to their bedroom, his worried wife one step behind.
“Did you remember to put the presents under the tree before you passed out?” she yelled after him.
Allan grabbed the old fashioned alarm clock on the nightstand. “Look! It says 1:37am!”
She rolled her eyes, grabbed the clock and flipped it over. “It must have run out of batteries. I’m assuming that means you did not put our children's presents under the tree. Good thing they’re sleeping in, which I admit is odd for Christmas morning.”
The clock ticked to 1:38.
“Dead batteries, huh?”
“Or the power went out and it restarted.” She tossed the clock onto the bed and went into the walk-in closet. “We better hurry before they wake up.” She started uncovering large wrapped gift boxes.
Allan flipped from channel to channel on their bedroom television.
“C’mon, Lego sets are heavy, help me with these,” Ariel said from the closet over the fuzzy static from the TV. Realizing he wasn’t coming she came out to drag him in.
“Well, it’s a white Christmas even in California,” Ariel joked, looking at the TV and tugging Allan toward the closet. “Gonna be a sad Christmas if we don’t get these downstairs before the kiddos. C’mon . . .”
Allan moved like a zombie to the closet as a terrifying hypothesis formed in his mind. What if he hadn’t passed out and she hadn’t slept? It portended an eventuality beyond belief for a scientist of his stature, one of the few in the world qualified to verify such a theory.
“Maybe the box burned out,” Ariel offered to explain the TV, seeing the worry in his face.
Allan looked out the window at the still brilliant Sun, then bounded back to his study. He turned the monitor back on and brought up the links to several of the satellites that were commissioned for his exoplanet search. He started breathing faster.
“They’re not responding,” he whispered to himself. “They’re not responding!” he shouted to his wife, entering the room, a stack of presents cradled in her arms.
“Who?” she asked, increasingly alarmed, not knowing if her delusional husband had suffered a stroke in the night or if something larger happened.
“Nobody,” he said, back at the monitor, clicking furiously through to different live satellite links. “GOES-WEST, GOES-EAST, Meteosat Ten, Meteosat Seven, MT Sat, all . . . gone.”
“What’s ‘G-O-E-S west?’”
“It isn’t just the TV, Ariel, they’re all gone.”
“All what!”
“All the satellites.”
She crumpled to the ground and began to hug herself softly, the suddenly forgotten presents tumbling across the carpet. “Terrorists then,” she surmised, looking past the gift boxes in the direction of their still sleeping children. “I told you we couldn’t let another liberal get in the White House, but you and your damn professor friends, you threw away our freedom. After gutting our military and hobbling the CIA, now we’re under attack on Christmas morning!”
“There’s no need for hysterics. We have the largest military in the world several times over and the CIA still listens in on everybody everywhere. With the planning and equipment needed to carry out something this big they would have seen this coming a mile away.”
“How? We treat jihadists like honored guests when we grab them. No interrogation, just tea time and clean turbans.”
“You think torture would have stopped an attack on our national communications infrastructure?”
“They’re terrorists! They only understand one thing: either we die or they do!” She stood, balling her fists and letting tears patter her cheeks.
If Allan hadn’t had a stroke before, he was approaching a burst vessel now. He knew marrying Ariel for her youth would have consequences, but, in a role reversal, he’d tried to whittle away the decades of staunch conservative values instilled by her father. Apparently none of it took. She had merely learned how to be a good actress.
“It’s not terrorists. It’s probably just a collision with space debris. If we spent even a fraction on space that we spend on the military this could have been avoided. Your right-wing buddies are the ones that keep shooting down NASA funding! Dammit, Ariel, maybe a day without Fox News will do you some good!”
They stared at each other in silence, letting the rage dissipate. If nothing else, the astrological event enabled them to discuss what they’d avoided their entire marriage.
“I’m sorry, Ariel.” He squeezed her arm, but she flinched at his touch, retreating into her personal island.
“Look at you, you’re terrified,” he said. “That’s fear programming from . . . well, from the programming you watch.”
She glared at him with red eyes. She didn’t have to say ‘hypocrite,’ it was written in his voice. He was scared too. After all, he’d called her in here after she’d suggested benign explanations for ten minutes.
Ariel rolled her eyes and looked down, hands patting her thighs, searching for something. Like everyone in her generation, her mobile phone had become a bodily extension. It moved from her nightgown pocket to her hand, then up to her head.
“Call Daddy,” she whimpered.
“Calling Daddy,” the phone’s soothing voice replied.
“Calm down, Ariel. The TV’s down but there have to be online reports.”
Allan opened an Internet browser, furiously typing out one URL after another, opening ten tabs, fifteen tabs, twenty tabs. “This is slower than dial-up.”
“Sorry, I can’t connect with . . . Daddy right now,” the phone asserted, with none of the terrible implications of that fact reflected in its calm, motherly intonation.
“Why won’t my phone connect?” Ariel sobbed and sat back down.
“The entire network is churning to a halt. The Internet, the phone networks, everything. Of course, they would be overloaded if the satellites are down. Los Angeles started a cellular infrastructure project last year because studies showed in an earthquake the existing networks would never handle the bandwidth. Not soon enough, apparently.”
His wife spoke softly, but directly. “There wasn’t an earthquake. Even the tiny ones freak me out, and I didn’t feel anything.”
“You sure seemed freaked out a minute ago.”
She grumbled, “Besides, why are all the clocks wrong? None of the lights turned off, none of the clocks are blinking zero, and the power never went out. Even my phone has the wrong time.”
In his obsession with finding the satellite feeds and jumping on a more satisfying theory, Allan had forgotten about the clocks. Satellite collisions and overloaded cell towers couldn’t explain the sudden loss of eight hours of night.
“Come on,” he gestured to her, getting up out of the chair. “The kids will be up soon.”
She reacted to the trepidation in his eyes with cold shivers before rising resolutely again, absolving his faults and restoring her faith in him. Space, computers, satellites, and stars were all Allan’s realm; best to give her husband a long leash so he could take his mind where it needed to go in order to allay her fears and protect herself and the children.
Ariel’s father and his guns were a thousand miles away in the Bitterroot Mountains of Montana. She hoped Allan’s brain provided commensurate protection for their children during whatever crisis this turned out to be. She’d rather be at Trapper Peak, on solid ground and removed from civilization.
Her father had warned her about living in a city of ten million people. “Pedicures and Persian food are great, sweetheart, but when the big one comes you’re gonna have millions of desperate people fighting over the same bottles of water.” He tugged at his graying beard like it might go with his daughter if he didn’t hold onto it. “It’s only a matter of time, but we can’t stop you from following your heart.”
She wondered if it was not her heart she followed so much as a healthy checkbook. That was the security she needed at the end of her teenage years, and Allan’s book deals provided plenty. But royalty checks wouldn’t save her children from terrorists.
“Come on kids!” Allan shouted, running down the hallway. Their mother echoed, and the children came out of their rooms excited, innocently assuming they were being summoned to open presents. The family took the stairs to the living room, the children tripping over themselves with glee. At the bottom, their smiles drooped, presents absent from under the tree.
“Dad?”
“Outside!” he motioned for them to follow him out the door.
After the four of them stood in the front yard, the children drooped again.
“Dad, there’s nothing here. Are the presents in the garage?”
Their suburban Pasadena neighbors emerged from behind the picket fences and vine-covered siding, the adults showing as much confusion as their children.
“Nothing working over there either, Allan?” shouted a neighbor across the street.
“Electricity is on, but no network. No Internet.”
“So weird, huh?” their next door neighbor said. “All my clocks say it’s yesterday, and I feel like I didn’t sleep a wink. It’s like that old movie . . . uh . . .”
“The Day the Earth Stood Still,” Allan finished.
“Kids are really upset,” another neighbor chimed in. “This is worse than when the PlayStation network went down last Christmas.”
“Worse than Klaatu leaving Earth a burnt-out cinder?” Allan said under his breath.
“What?” Ariel gulped in horror at the vaguely Middle-Eastern sounding name. She wondered if he’d lied about it not being terrorists, but she knew if he had, it was probably to keep her calm in front of the kids. She could live with that. For now.
“Nothing,” he said, grasping his daughter’s hand. Allan hadn’t come outside to chat with neighbors; he wanted the innocence of a child to back up his new hypothesis. He pointed her hand at the fence at the end of the short driveway.
“Katie, do you remember when we came out last month and looked at a planet in the morning?”
“Venus, Daddy?”
“Yes, Katherine, do you remember how to find Venus?”
“Mmhmm.”
“Show me, sweetie. Show daddy where Venus is.”
She pointed at the fence, then looked at her father. He motioned, “Go on.”
Her hand lifted further and further, but a look of eerie confusion came across her face. “I’m sorry Daddy, I can’t find it. Is Venus gone?”
Allan’s face blanched. An adult would think they’d started from the wrong fencepost and start over, but Katherine didn’t second-guess herself. Venus disappearing occupied a similar magical landscape for Katie that included fat men climbing down chimneys with gifts once a year. To her, planets could disappear as easily as the coins her granddad “hid” in her ears.
“Dad,” Allan’s six year old son spoke up. “Didn’t we see the Moon last time? It’s gone too.”
Allan looked at his wife, terror unfolding in her face. What was he keeping from her?
“Did Santa forget about us?” asked Katherine.
“Allan, what’s happening?” Ariel whispered.
He looked at their children. “I have to get to Wilson.”
“Okay,” she said, only because she didn’t know what else to. Whatever was happening he didn’t want to say in front of them, and she couldn’t challenge that.
“Take the kids inside, get the baseball bat from the garage, and keep the door locked. Don’t open it for anyone, okay?”
“Did Santa leave our presents with Wilson, Daddy?” Ben asked.
Allan didn’t answer, but looked at his wife, imploring her to confirm. “Okay?”
“Okay,” she said, even softer than before.
After making a right turn off of the highway and climbing to higher elevations, ice-patched mud slowed Allan’s journey. The road would be cleared after the holiday, but Allan couldn’t wait. His old Volvo plowed through late December snow, searching for footing. Passing under and behind San Gabriel Peak, the car hit a spate of ice and nearly spun out of control, careening until one wheel came off the road, spinning into space over the sharp cliffside.
Allan’s friends called his black 1996 Volvo 850 the ‘heavenly hearse’ for its owner’s occupational obsession and the car’s peculiar boxy resemblance to a Swedish cubist’s interpretation of a funeral coach. Allan took a perverse enjoyment in raising neighborhood eyebrows when transporting man-size telescopes in the back, hidden under black cloth.
Looking down at the bluffs hundreds of feet below the naked left wheel, he wondered if a used truck would have been a better investment. Posthumous notoriety wouldn’t put his children through college. Allan’s publishing advances were disappearing as better showmen of science, like deGrasse Tyson, took the limelight, and all the money. But Neil wasn’t up here on the mountain, at least not yet. If Allen could plant his metaphorical flag of discovery up there first he’d be the one on the talk shows, hosting TV programs, and getting speaking fees.
Good god, was that why he was up here? For himself? Should he turn around, go back down the mountain, and join the family that he left terrified? Well, he couldn’t go up or down without backing off the cliff first. He prayed the transmission wouldn’t slip and take him down a much faster route.
Allan pushed the clutch and moved the shifter all the way to the right and down hard, as it had a tendency to stick and take a stab at fifth gear otherwise. He gently lifted back off the brake, thanking his younger self for putting up the cash for the all-wheel-drive package.
“Tyson probably has a Land Rover and a chauffeur,” he grumbled to match the noise from the wheel wells.
The Volvo lurched backward onto the empty white road. Allan castigated himself for bothering to pray, which birthed a thought almost as jarring as the jolt of the Volvo transferring the work of excavating the car to the rear wheels: what if this is how a God announces itself in modern times? A burning bush on a mountain wouldn’t be good enough for the short attention spans of his wife’s generation or their children, though his wife certainly was primed to believe in that nonsense. Still, Americans demanded more spectacle, something impossible.
A missing moon.
Chapter 4
Allan burrowed his tires through the smattering of snow softly melting under the unexpected sunshine in the empty parking lot. He often visited Wilson alone during the short San Gabriel winters when the museum and visitor’s gallery were closed. Ariel probably would have liked it; he knew her father used to drag her to mountaintops, though the view in Montana must have been quite different.
No, this was Allan’s spot. He needed the solitude. Separation from the noise ever-present in their house. Fox and Friends’ climate denial had no place up here at the observatory, Allan’s cathedral of science.
Just a bit warmer and he could have driven straight to the control building, but the heavenly hearse came to rest by the sixty-inch telescope. Allan walked the rest of the way, quickening as he climbed closer to the office, where answers waited.
After turning on the lights he realized he was the first, but surely others would come soon, unless they stayed with their families. His spine twinged with guilt.
Allan checked the 150-foot solar tower monitor, which had famously observed the Sun every clear day for over a century. Until today.
He flicked through the other displays. The magnetogram’s blue and pink dots denoting the strength of the Sun’s magnetic field turned stark white. Dopplergram, ordinarily a bubbling crimson ball, fell nearly black. The intensitygram, normally featuring dark flecks on the orange circle, showed no circle at all. The instruments indicated the Sun spewed one giant, constant flare, unless all the instruments pointed simultaneously at the wrong spot.
He reminded himself to think logically. The Sun was good at making flares. Even NASA erred occasionally, the source always leading to a human mistake. What mistake had the last operator of these instruments made to cause such strange readings?
Certainly it wasn’t the Sun that moved. He’d felt it on his neck and nearly slid on the slush in the parking lot. As a scientist, he didn’t want to hear the whispers from darker recesses of his mind: ‘there’s a Sun out there, but not your Sun.’
The readings of the grams were regular for the time still displayed on every mechanical clock. The grams, not able to peer through 8,000 miles of dirt and iron, wouldn’t have displayed anything in the dead of night, the time on all the clocks. Allan shook his head and looked outside. Still daylight. Either the Sun changed positions or the predictions for all the machinery contained unusual errors.
He punched at the controls, looking for the Sun using memories of his shadow on the ground just minutes ago. He could refine from there by decreasing magnification and adjusting. Concurrently he smiled at a sane explanation for the Sun’s unexpected maneuvering.
The Filter Trap Page 4
