***
Frank’s re-electrification of the basement had a side benefit in the resurrection of the snack machines at the end of the hall: a soft-drink machine, a sandwich machine, and a munchy machine. Diedre looked them over knowing the food wouldn’t last forever but at least could see them through what they were doing. After that, she didn’t know what they would eat.
She returned to the control room with an armload of sandwiches and bagged potato chips, two Cokes and a Dr. Pepper. Frank and Lloyd were squared off across the electronic device Frank was constructing. She could tell at a glance they weren’t happy campers.
Frank glared at Lloyd, whose eyes were resolutely downcast.
“So,” Frank muttered. “You’re mad at me for being slow with the press conference slides. You came back to the lab to bug me for them and got separated from Linda.”
“I’m not as mad at you,” Lloyd replied, “as I am at those savages up there in Phaeon Crater.”
“At least you’re alive.” Frank replied.
“I shouldn’t be.” Lloyd’s flat voice gave Diedre a chill.
Frank appealed to her for help. “He says he could have gotten Linda out of there if he’d been with her but jeez, Diedre, you should have heard that beam hit this place. I mean it was like, instant earthquake. The whole building shook and it was all over in a second. We’re both lucky we were down here in the basement, Lloyd.”
Diedre looked into Lloyd’s taut face and tried to console him. “There’s no way you could have gotten her out, Lloyd. You’d just be—”
“With her right now.” The hollow look was in Lloyd’s eyes again.
Diedre put the food down on the bench top and changed the subject. “C’mon boys. It’s noon. Let’s do lunch.” Frank grabbed a bag of potato chips, tore it open and filled his mouth. Apparently his efforts to rig a Rube Goldberg electronic gadget for the van’s TV transmitter had given him an appetite. Of course, almost anything could get Frank’s appetite going.
Just a few minutes ago Diedre had finished her own task of writing the set of commands they would send to Clem. She had burned the command file onto a plug-in memory card they would take with them to the van.
Everything was just about ready—if Clem was.
After Frank finished his sandwich he sealed up his little black electronic box and the three of them trooped off to the TV truck, where Frank crawled under the control desk to hook it into the circuitry. Within seconds he emerged from under the desk, smiling.
“Okay,” he said. “We’re ready to rock’n’roll. Got the memory card, Diedre?”
She handed it to him and he plugged it into the computer that ran the truck’s uplink systems. Several mouse clicks later the commands were loaded into the computer’s memory.
“There we are,” said Frank. “All the necessary connections between the computer and the radio dish are ready to go. Who wants to do the honor of sending the commands?”
“I’ll do it,” said Diedre, sitting down in the computer chair.
“There’s nothing left to do but press the return key,” Frank, explained.
A sense of déjà vu made Diedre’s nerves buzz. Three years ago, she had hovered over a similar keyboard, filled with doubts about what they were doing. This time there was no room for doubt. This transmission had to work or there was no use trying anything else. The commands had to be sent and Clem had to hear them. There were no two ways about it.
She pressed the return key.
The screen flashed a single line. “Transmission sent.”
“Off go the commands into the wild blue yonder,” Frank quipped. “I wish this van’s receiver was strong enough to pick up Clem’s acknowledgment transmission but it’s not. So there’s no way of knowing immediately if she got the message.”
“How will we know if it was sent at all?” asked Diedre.
“Good question,” said Frank. Then an unmistakable reaction came from outer space. The daylight outside brightened into a bluish-white glare and a hellish roar rattled the van.
Frank shouted, “It’s the beam!”
Diedre didn’t need to be told. She shielded her eyes from the blinding light, seemingly brighter than the face of the sun, and tried to prepare herself for death. Then the light vanished as quickly as it came, leaving thunderous echoes booming through the sky. Phaeon had struck at their signal and missed, but just barely.
They went down the steps of the van and stared at a huge patch of campus lawn that was no longer green. A swath of charred ground fifty feet wide smoldered and crackled where the beam had moved across it, having missed the van by only a dozen feet when its nearest edge stopped just on the other side of the wrought-iron campus fence.
After a moment of awed silence Frank said, “Message received, huh?”
“I guess so,” Diedre said. “By Phaeon, at least. But how about Clem?”
“Don’t know.” Frank scratched in his frizzy hair. “At least we know the message got up there.”
“That’s something,” Diedre agreed.
“Come on,” said Frank. “Let’s get inside the lab before Phaeon takes another crack at us.”
Diedre followed Frank and Lloyd up the hill, her nerves settling more with every second the beam didn’t renew its attack. As they ducked back inside the basement door, Frank stopped to glance at the moon. “I guess they figure they got us on the first shot.”
“C’mon, Frank,” Diedre moved past him and jogged down the stairs. “Let’s don’t wait out here to find out. Besides, Clem ought to be warming up her thrusters already if she got the message.”
Fifteen minutes later they gathered around another of Frank’s electronic projects on the roof of the lab building. He had salvaged a TV satellite receiver dish from one wrecked van, brought it up to the roof and run a wire down the side of the building to the basement, and then he had souped up the dish’s wiring to make a mini version of a Deep Space Network receiver. While he made some fine adjustments and Lloyd stood muttering to himself under his breath, Diedre broached another subject.
“You got family to go to, Frank?”
“Not around here,” he replied while screwing a clamp onto a wire. “My mother’s back in Iowa. She’s safe, I hope, but the phones are dead so I don’t know for sure. How ’bout your family?”
“Just my cat. I guess I’ll stick pretty close to home. What’s your plan Lloyd? You going to hang around JPL?”
“I plan to stay close to my wife,” he said with finality.
Once the radio dish was wired up they retreated to the basement to wait for communications from Clementine. The first hint of success came abruptly when an image started appearing on their computer screen, rolling downward line-by-line just like that first image three years before.
As before, Frank and Diedre leaped to their feet and cheered. Even Lloyd managed a hint of a smile. They settled down to watch the image grow. The green-lit radar scene reminded Diedre of her first glimpse inside Phaeon on the night her life began to unravel. Now a hope quickened in her that somehow, despite all that had happened, something good was in store.
But as shocking as the first images had been, this one was even more so. The buildings and towers, once shattered and pockmarked, had been repaired. The craters were gone from the surfaces of the buildings. Broken causeways stood straight again and the central pyramid’s stepped terraces no longer looked ravaged. It stood tall, clean-lined and monolithic. Where a ruined dome had once surmounted the pyramid, now a perfectly symmetrical turret sat with a cannon-like barrel jutting out. She knew at once this was the source of the light beam.
“Whew,” Frank whistled. “So this is what we’re up against. What can anybody on earth do against a weapon like that?”
Dinosaur Wars: Earthfall Page 27
