Progress was slow but steady. The surroundings became emptier of people, the vehicles fewer, all going the other way. A couple of hours after leaving San Antonio, Mitch voiced the question that perhaps had been forming in many of their minds. He had come back to allow Cavan a spell of riding up front in the cab.
“Look, I know she’s important to you, Lan, and it has to be a big thing in your book, but in a situation like this we have to be realistic. . . . I mean, how likely is it, really, that anyone is still going to be at this place? If this shuttle that we’re betting on is down over the border, wouldn’t we be doing everyone here a favor by being honest and heading straight on there direct? I hate having to say this, but . . .” He gestured at the desolation around the roadway unrolling behind them, and left it at that.
“It isn’t just Vicki and Robin,” Keene replied. “We need a pilot too. I told Halloran to try and find one.”
Mitch looked puzzled. “But I thought you could fly it,” he said.
Keene shook his head. “What gave you that idea?”
“You were on that ship that all the news was about, the one that outflew the spaceplane, right?”
“Sure, as an observer-engineer. I helped design the propulsion unit, that’s all.”
Mitch stared at him for a few moments of revelation while the universe took on a new perspective suddenly. “Well, shit,” he pronounced resignedly. The others exchanged ominous looks but said nothing. Colby took out a handkerchief to wipe his indestructible spectacles. “Isn’t it funny how life always has one more thing in store that you hadn’t thought of,” he remarked to nobody in particular.
Interstate 37 continued all the way into Corpus Christi. The plan, however, was to exit at Highway 281, seventy miles before, which followed a direct route south to San Saucillo, where Keene had told Vicki to wait. Since they were now entering his home territory, he changed places with Cavan to ride up front in the cab.
If anything, the bleakness of the depopulated surroundings was even more unnerving than the scenes they had witnessed from California to San Antonio. The smoke and clouds had mingled into a heaving canopy of orange and brown from which hissing streamers of flame and bursting fireballs continued to lash down over the hapless landscape of deserted townships and abandoned farms. Buff and Luke were silent, staring out in awed, uncomprehending dread. Closer to the coast now, with two circulation systems in collision, the winds alternated between violent spasms and sudden calms. With the windows closed, the cab quickly became unbearable in the heavy, humid heat that had descended. Opening them brought in fumes that produced burning nostrils and smarting eyes. The air had a greasy stickiness that matted the hair, permeated clothing, and lodged in the throat, giving everything an oily taste.
As the miles rolled by from Orange Grove to Alice, recognition of familiar places and old landmarks triggered images of the world that Keene had known. The contrast between his recollections and the things he was seeing at last brought on the dispiritedness that he had been fighting. How far, and for how long, had he been fooling himself? Whatever chance there might once have been of finding anyone had faded long ago. He’d had the chance to escape to the stars. Instead, all he was coming back to was a graveyard. He pushed the thought from his mind, wiped the sticky film from his lips, and waved away the flies.
Things went well until twenty miles or so past Alice, when Buff slowed suddenly, craning forward in his seat to peer through the windshield. “What the hell have we got here?” he growled.
“Damn!” Luke groaned on Keene’s other side.
Outlined ahead was what looked like a shadowy hump extending across the highway. Closer, it proved to be part of a ridge of impact ejecta and boulders thrown from a crater somewhere to the side, with tangled branches of trees protruded in places. Buff brought the truck to a halt, and they climbed out, pulling hoods over their heads and batting away flies. The others from the rear joined them.
Reynolds climbed to the top of the ridge to reconnoiter, reporting when he came back down that the blockage extended as far ahead as he could make out. Surveys to the right and left revealed no ready way around. A number of other vehicles that had tried finding one had been left bogged down in the sandy soil. A brief conference inside the shelter yielded no alternative to turning around and finding a way through to Highway 77, which ran parallel to 281 twenty-five miles farther east, about halfway to the coast. They would follow 77 southward to below Kingsville, and then cut west to get back onto 281.
They retraced their route accordingly, and turned off Highway 281 at the first opportunity. But the patchwork of minor roads and tracks was constantly blocked or obliterated, forcing them ever farther northward until well into the afternoon, when they finally made Highway 77 just short of Robstown-almost back where they would have been had they stayed on the Interstate from San Antonio. But at last, they could resume heading south again.
For the past few miles, Keene had noticed the landscape taking on a peculiarly flattened appearance, the vegetation lying in one direction as if it had been combed, houses leaning and coming apart. And there was wreckage that seemed not to belong-house contents and belongings; parts of structures; all kinds of trash and debris-not scattered in the patterns that had become familiar but lying in endless carpets. Some of the piles included human and animal bodies, grotesquely bleached and bloated. What it meant didn’t hit Keene until he saw the mounds and ribs of sand on the highway, in places holding pools of trapped water, and realized that the dark masses and clumps draped across them were seaweed. “Stop the truck!” he told Buff sharply.
From the map, they were thirty miles inland. Yet already, they had ventured below what was now the level of high tide. From the condition of the sand it appeared to have receded only recently. It would return, Charlie said, in six hours at the most. The roadway they were standing on would then be under the Gulf.
They had two choices: either turn around yet again and go back to Alice, which would mean finding a way to San Saucillo via a long detour inland; or they could make a dash south now, while the highway was above water, and hope for a way inland before it was submerged again. Buff and Luke wanted to turn back. Even Mitch seemed subdued, and for once Alicia couldn’t raise the spirit to dispute him. It was Cavan, amazingly still unflagging and indefatigable, who provided the spur.
“Six hours? We could make the Mexican border in half that time,” he told them. “There have to be a dozen ways back across to 281 in that distance. You’ve seen what kind of a mess it is once you get into those back roads. We’d still be blundering around there when it gets dark, and then lose another night.” Keene watched him, cutting an almost jaunty figure in Army fatigues and a combat smock, for some unknown reason still carrying his submachine gun slung across a shoulder. Cavan waved an arm to indicate the direction ahead. “Did we come this far from California to be stopped now? The people who are depending on us are that way, and so is our only way out. We don’t have time for any more excursions around Texas. In any case, speaking personally, I’ve seen enough of this bloody state. The more we stand here talking, the more time we’re giving the tide to turn. So let’s shut up and get on with it.”
“Leo is right,” Alicia told the others. “I’ve seen enough of Texas too. We have to give it a try, yes?”
Buff and Luke shook their heads at each other but said nothing. Mitch nodded his assent to the troops. Charlie, Colby, and Cynthia turned away without commenting and went back around to the rear of the truck. They all climbed wearily back aboard. Soon, Keene found himself looking out once again at the stretch of road from Corpus Christi to Kingsville that he had driven so many times. But he had never seen it like this. The road was thick with flotsam and trash as well as fallen rubble, making progress slow. There were upturned cars, downed trees-even wrecked boats carried from the coast. Through the outskirts of Kingsville, the remnants of houses demolished by impacts had been broken up by the water and dispersed. The whole area looked like a shantytown in the wake of a hurricane, extending for miles.
They were ten miles or so past Kingsville, anxiously watching east for the first signs of the wave front, when Keene saw the figures ahead, standing across the roadway. They were holding automatic weapons trained on the cab of the truck. Two standing ahead were waving it down. Farther back in the haze was what looked like a barricade on the road. Keene took the radio from the shelf below the dash panel and buzzed Mitch in the trailer three times. At the same time, he felt for the automatic in the holster at his belt. “Forget all the stuff you’ve seen in movies,” he muttered to Buff. “They could cut this tin box to ribbons in seconds with those things. You’d better pull over.”
Keene counted eight of them, muffled in a variety of coats with hoods or hats, a couple wearing poncholike capes. Their faces were all dark, although whether this was their complexion or due to the effects of smoke, dust, and dirt was impossible to tell. They looked exhausted and desperate.
“Okay, stop it right there,” one of the two who had come forward ordered. He had a thick beard and was wearing a torn gray jacket with a hood that revealed tangled hair protruding around the edge. With six rifles trained from fifty feet farther back, there was no question of accelerating through the line. Buff halted the truck and looked down from the window. The leader had a lean, high-cheeked face with narrow, yellow eyes. He motioned with his rifle for them to get out of the cab. “Let’s see what we got here. You’re going the wrong way, doncha know? Now we’ve got us a ride going the right way. Come on, everybody out!”
“Not so fast!” Mitch’s voice barked from the trailer behind. The leader’s head jerked sharply to look back past the cab. Keene moved his head to view the nearside mirror and saw three barrels protruding from gaps in the forward end of the shelter. “This is an Army Special Forces fire team. We are in here, behind cover. You are out there, in our sights. Your call.”
The leader glanced uncertainly at the other, wearing a purple scarf across his face, who was standing just behind. The others farther back shuffled awkwardly or stood in bewilderment. One of them started to back away cautiously. “Hold it right there!” Mitch’s voice ordered. The man froze.
Then the leader waved at them to lower their guns, and his face split into a grin of broken teeth with gaps. “Well, sa-ay. It’s okay, we don’t want no trouble, man. We were, like, just bein’ careful, you know. Doesn’t do to take chances, the way things are. You never know who you might run into. But you’re still goin’ the wrong way, man. We’ve been where you’re headin’, and there ain’t nothin’ to go there for. It’d make more sense to just turn around and get us all out o’ here.”
“That’s fine. So you can lay the guns down,” Mitch answered. The leader hesitated. In the cab, Keene raised his automatic above the window level where it was visible, leaving no doubt who would be the first to go. The leader nodded to his men and put his own gun on the ground. One by one they hesitantly followed suit. He turned back toward the truck and spread his arms wide, again switching on a broad grin to show he was the most reasonable fellow in the world.
Mitch appeared from the back, accompanied by Cavan, cradling his submachine gun in the crook of an arm. Legermount and Birden got out too, but remained in covering positions by the rear corners of the trailer. Keene climbed down to join them, still holding the automatic. Other rifles were still being aimed from inside the shelter. “Okay, now we’ve established a talking relationship, what’s it all about?” Mitch asked. “Did you people just decide to go out for a walk or something? Look around. Don’t you know this is going to be seabed in a matter of hours?”
“Yeah, we know all about that, all right.” The leader looked back along the highway. “But whatever your plans are, you people ain’t gonna get no farther in any case. There’s a bridge down just back there. Nothin’ the other way for us to turn around for-’cept wait for the tide to come in like you said.” He waved toward the side of the highway. “Then we saw that boat there and figured we’d come across to check it out-think maybe it’d see us through till we found somethin’ better, like maybe another truck. Then you showed up.”
Keene looked the way the leader was pointing and noticed for the first time the hulk lying on its side against a gravel bank about a hundred feet off the highway. He turned with Mitch and Cavan to peer past the men still cordoning the road. The wind was gusting, but not to the levels that it had reached earlier. Flies attacked in vicious, swirling flurries. Ahead, he could make out, now, the canted surface and bared pilings of what he had taken to be a barricade across the roadway. More figures were standing on the near side of the break.
“Where are you making for?” Mitch asked.
“Corpus Christi, then thirty-two to San Antonio. What other way is there?” The leader shrugged as if it were a pointless question. “Where the hell did you think you are going?”
“It’s a long story.” Mitch squinted into the distance. “So how bad is this bridge?”
“Not even good for walkin’, man. Washed out. We just about got ourselves over, an’ that’s it. Like I said, you ain’t takin’ that truck nowhere that way.”
“Let’s have a look.” Mitch waved to Buff, who slipped the truck into gear and eased it forward. The leader directed a torrent of Spanish at the others back on the road. They parted sullenly. The leader and his second led Mitch and Cavan through them, the truck following ten yards behind.
There were four more in front of the bridge, three women and a boy, maybe in his mid teens. The leader said something in Spanish as he approached, sounding as if it was meant to be jocular but evoking only a suspicious look from the youth as he saw the strangers carrying guns and his own people without any. Moving to the edge of the break, Keene saw that the bridge spanned a shallow ravine containing a creek. The structure had collapsed on one side, shedding most of the pavement except for the right-hand shoulder, which hung as a succession of tilted slabs and flakes to afford a precarious crossing from the far side. The ravine was littered with trash and debris washed up by the tide and carried down by the creek from farther inland. The wreck of a small coastal freighter lay half buried in mud a short distance below the bridge on the seaward side. Keene guessed that the boat being slammed against the bridge had caused the initial damage, and the flood waters had taken things from there. On the far side of the bridge was an ancient green truck of the kind used for local deliveries, with a miscellany of boxes, bicycles, plastic-wrapped bundles, and suitcases tied to the top. Mitch and Cavan came up to stand alongside him and silently took in the scene. It told its own story.
“You see what happened,” the leader said, waving. “We get that far, and that’s it. We don’t wanna go back anywhere we’ve seen, man, I’m tellin’ you. Then Augusto sees the boat over this side here, and we come over to check it out. Figure maybe we’re gonna need it when the water comes in again, you know? So now, what you say? That big truck can easy take all of us. You ain’t goin’ anywhere this way, in any case. We don’t give you guys no trouble. I mean, what else you gonna do, just leave us here? Come on, man. We all gotta stick together in this, you know?”
Mitch swatted flies away from his face and looked at Cavan for guidance. “Looks like there might not be any other way,” Keene heard him say above the wind.
“What about my guys back there?” the leader asked. “Is it okay for them to come back now? We’re all friends together, right?”
“Over there, where we can see them,” Mitch said, waving at the shoulder on one side of the roadway. “Have one of them pick up the guns and leave them by the truck.” The leader yelled back to relay the directions in Spanish. Buff and Luke had come down from the cab and were staring at the bridge and the strip of highway disappearing into the swirling vapors beyond. Luke turned and said something; Buff shook his head stolidly. The others were appearing from the back and coming around to inspect the situation. “You guys bring some women too,” the leader commented, tugging his beard and grinning approvingly.
“What else are we going to do?” Mitch said. “Shoot them? We don’t have any choice but go back toward Corpus Christi. We can’t just drive away and leave them here to drown?”
“I suppose we have to take them that far,” Cavan agreed. “Then it would depend on what we decided. Are we still talking about finding a long way around, or do we give it up and head back for San Antonio?”
Mitch pulled a face and looked toward the sky. The booms and rolling of distant thunder had intensified in the last few hours. “I don’t like the way this is going. It feels like it’s building up toward the Big One that Charlie talked about. I don’t want to be anywhere near any ocean when it hits.” Cavan looked at Keene to invite comment, but in a way that said Mitch was speaking for both of them.
“What’s happening?” Charlie asked as he joined them.
Cavan gestured. “See for yourself. The only way now is back. What we do when we get to I-37 is the question.”
Alicia was turning her head from side to side, as if searching for a way around. “But . . . San Saucillo?” she said. “What about the shuttle?”
“What do you want us to do, fly the truck over?” Mitch asked her.
“What’s the deal? Are we trying for the long way, then?” Colby asked, moving into the circle.
“That’s what we’re debating,” Cavan told him.
“Athena’s closing in,” Charlie said dubiously. “Every tide is going to be higher than the last.”
“How far inland could the next one go?” Cavan asked, looking alarmed.
Charlie showed his hands in what could be the only honest answer. “How can I tell you? Maybe to Saucillo.” In which case, he didn’t have to add, there would be no point in spending maybe all day tomorrow looking for a long way around. It would achieve only the guarantee of their getting trapped also. Cynthia moved closer to Keene and squeezed his arm as if in a gesture of sympathy for how he must be feeling.
“You people talk much longer, and we’re gonna need that boat up there anyway,” the leader called over at them.
Mitch looked away, indicating that as far as he was concerned there was nothing more to be said. Cavan stood waiting for Keene to acknowledge the inevitable. Alicia shook her head protestingly but could add no words that would change anything. Even Colby was reduced to an awkward silence. Keene stared across past the bridge; unrealistic, romanticized images poured into his mind of Vicki, Robin, others, waiting somewhere. Everything in him rebelled at the obscenity that was being forced upon him. His gaze came back to the battered green truck, weighed down by its almost comical burden of accoutrements. And finally, the obvious dawned on him.
He stabbed a finger, pointing. “There’s your answer!” he threw at the rest of them. Their eyes followed, then came back to him disbelievingly.
“What are you talking about?” Mitch asked uncertainly. Keene was past debating; in any case, there was nothing in the way of reason or logic left for him to debate with. He turned and began shouldering his way back between the others.
“What are you asking us to do?” Alicia pleaded as he passed her.
“I’m not asking anyone to do anything. I just know what I’m doing.” Keene walked to the end of the truck, climbed up into the shelter, and began collecting a share of rations, water, and other oddments to fill his pack. They had brought spare rifles and magazines. He selected a standard Army pattern and a pouch filled with clips. Alicia and Colby arrived as he clambered back down off the tailboard, Cavan not far behind. Alicia gaped at him for a moment, then grabbed his jacket with both hands, pulled him close, and kissed his cheek.
“Have you gone completely mad, Landen?” Cavan called ahead.
“Why me? Wasn’t it you who was mad a short while ago?” Keene gestured the way ahead. “You said it yourself. There’s people depending on us. You change your mind if you want, Leo. I’m going on.”
“But . . . you heard Charlie.”
“All the more reason to get moving, then.”
Alicia started saying something to Cavan. Keene came back to the leader, who was watching, confused. “How far did you come in that?” Keene asked him.
The leader waved vaguely. “Was a long way from south, a place you never heard of.”
“It runs? It’s got gas?”
The leader made a face, shrugging. “Well, is like you expect, you know. We take some from a car we find here, a truck there. But is good for a few miles yet, sure.”
“Okay. Then I need the keys.” The leader seemed to hesitate reflexively. “Hell, come on! It’s not going to be any more use to you.” Keene said.
The leader stared at Keene for a moment longer as if confirming that he was dealing with someone crazy, then shrugged and looked away. “Augusto. Come here,” he called, and followed it with something in Spanish. One of the men came forward and produced a set of keys. He removed a couple carefully and presented them to Keene. God alone knew what he thought he’d need the rest for.
Keene looked quickly around the rest of his party, the troops, Buff and Luke still standing together. More than anything, he was conscious of time relentlessly passing. “I would have wanted a better way to do this, but it’s what we’ve got,” he told them. “You’re all great people. It’s been a privilege. Let’s consider the rest all said, eh?” Some of them managed a response; others just stood mutely, as if unable to believe it was happening. Keene glanced back at the leader and indicated the green truck with a wave. “And if you want any of that stuff off there you’d better get your people moving, because I’m dumping it.” Slinging the rifle around behind him to leave both hands free, he moved onto the bridge. Behind him, the leader’s voice launched into a tirade at the others.
Picking his way over the chunks of broken concrete was trickier than it had looked. The sloping surfaces were slippery, making it necessary to find footholds in the breaks and where possible hold onto the jagged edges higher up. In places he had to move on exposed steel reinforcement, greasy and treacherous, causing his body to tense involuntarily as when sensing insecurity walking on ice. All the time, the wind gusted and raged around him in its attempts to pluck him off. He was perhaps a quarter of the way across when Alicia’s voice floated through from behind. “Lan!” Holding tightly to the stance he was on, Keene raised his head to look back. She was coming around the truck, lugging a pack in one hand and what looked like a medical kit in the other. Cavan was behind her with another pack and his submachine gun. “We’re coming with you.” Such was Keene’s concentration at that moment, that the message only partly sank in. He kept his head turned for a few seconds, letting the gesture say what his position prevented him from articulating, and then looked back to his task.
Near the midpoint, he came to a section where the group crossing the other way had tied ropes as improvised handrails-the worst part, with all the pavement gone and the creek visible below, from where the smell of decay reached his nostrils. Clutching the ropes and the girders, he had no defense against the flies. The sky to the west lit up with an incoming fireball landing closer than most. Keene braced himself for the boom and the shock wave, waited until they had passed, and carried on.
Then he was once again among flakes of shattered concrete, and by comparison the going seemed easy now. The last few yards, and he was standing on unbroken roadway again, in front of the green truck. At close range it looked even more antique than before. He walked up to it. All the glass was gone from the passenger side of the cab, and what looked like the rear window from a different vehicle had been lashed in place of the truck’s absent windshield. The sides were dented everywhere and missing a few panels. Keene picked out a scattering of what looked suspiciously like bullet holes. Grunting to himself, he turned back to look for Alicia and Cavan. They were close together on the bridge, Cavan helping Alicia at the awkward center section.
But that wasn’t all. There was another figure some yards behind them . . . and another two farther back still, just moving onto the first stretch. Keene peered, and after a few seconds made them out to be Colby, followed by Charlie and Cynthia. A tall figure that had to be Mitch was walking from the truck, at the same time slinging a large pack over a shoulder; as Keene watched, two more jumped down from the rear of the trailer and followed. They were all coming! Keene wiped the grime and perspiration from his face. It felt sticky and stubbly, but all of a sudden none of the discomfort mattered. Something warm and uplifting, brushing a depth of the spirit that in his life had seldom stirred, flooded through him. He rubbed an eye with a knuckle. More than just the fumes, he realized, was causing his vision to blur. He turned away and climbed up into the cab.
He first tried the engine. After a couple of backfires and two unsuccessful attempts at starting with different setting of the choke, which was manual, it finally coughed into life with a celebration of blue smoke from the tailpipe, indicating burning oil. Looking out through the improvised windshield, Keene saw the figure of the leader on the far side, beaming and giving him an enthusiastic thumb’s-up as if to say, See, I wouldn’t fool you. For what it was worth, the gas gauge claimed almost half a tank. Check with a dipstick before setting off, Keene told himself.
By the time the others began arriving off the bridge, he was already tossing out filthy blankets, piles of clothes, and pots of partly eaten food from the back. The inside stank of tobacco and pot, too many unwashed bodies crowded together for too long, and fear. While he was still clearing space, he heard the sounds of the rest of the baggage being cut free from the roof. Legermount and Dash appeared at the doors and began heaving in packs and equipment. Keene climbed out and found Cavan and Mitch poring over a map that they’d brought from the other truck. “Come on, we need you, Lan,” Cavan said. “This is your country we’re in now.”
“Buff and Luke aren’t coming?”
“It appears not,” Cavan said. “Perhaps they decided that trucks, not spacecraft, were more their line.” Keene realized that for some reason he had half expected it.
“Here,” Mitch said, handing Keene his radio. “You want to wish them luck?” There was still a set programmed to the same frequency in the cab. Keene took the unit and pressed the call button. Across the bridge, one of the figures near the truck turned around and walked back to the driver’s door.
“Yeah?” a voice answered in the radio that Keene was holding. It sounded like Buff.
“Lan Keene here. So you guys aren’t coming along after all?”
“Well, you know how it is. . . . I could never really see me up in one o’ them spaceships, anyway. And these people aren’t so bad. Someone’s going to have to get them to San An or wherever they want to go. And then Luke and me figured that if it works out that it’s possible, we might try heading back east when the worst is over, and try to find our folks-just the way you’re doin’. I reckon like maybe you gave us some inspiration. Anyways, we’re set on giving it a try.”
Keene swallowed. There wasn’t a lot left that he could say-or the time to say it in. “Well, you’ve been a big help to us. Good luck.”
“We’ll take whatever comes. Hope it all works out for you.”
Keene clicked off the radio. The others were already aboard, Legermount waiting on the driver’s side of the bench seat. Keene and Mitch squeezed in with him, while Cavan went around to the rear. Nobody else from across the bridge was coming back to collect any belongings. Evidently, the things they had found in the larger truck would suffice. Legermount fought the shift into reverse with a frightful grinding of gears, backed around onto the shoulder, then engaged forward and turned onto the highway. A series of blasts from the other truck’s horn sounded behind.
As they lurched their way among the washed-up debris, broken paving, and fallen rock rubble, Mitch nudged Keene’s arm and pointed ominously in the seaward direction to their left. Through the patches of brown haze twisting in convolutions with clearer air drawn in off the sea, a line of fuzzy whiteness had become visible, extending as far as they could see to the south ahead of them and northward behind, paralleling the coast.
They had to get back across to Highway 281 running parallel with them farther inland, and then south along it to the San Saucillo site. The road they were on ran a little above the flat expanse of land to their left, stretching away twenty-five miles to the coast. Watching the approaching line of foam as it appeared and disappeared in the murk, Keene put it at two miles away at most. If Charlie was right about progressive tides getting higher, and they took 281 as a likely guess for the next high-water mark, the water’s average rate of advancement from the former coast would be between six and seven miles per hour. That meant it would reach Highway 77, the one they were on, in around twenty minutes. Timing the truck’s odometer with his watch told Keene that they were averaging close to twenty-five miles per hour, and with the state of the road and the obstacles, Legermount wasn’t going to push any more. The turnoff that Keene normally took when driving to San Saucillo was fifteen miles farther south, which at this rate would take them thirty-six minutes. They weren’t going to make it. It was as simple as that.
He looked up at Mitch after timing another mile and shook his head. “Scratch the plan for taking the exit that I said. It isn’t going to work.”
“Great. So what do we do?”
“A few miles ahead, the road goes down into a dip where it crosses a valley with a creek-kind of wide and shallow. You come up the other side onto a ridge that extends west. Our only chance is to try and pick up a farm track or something going that way. We’d be running ahead of the tide and should gain on it. Saucillo’s on high ground too, so if we can make 281 with time to spare we should be okay.”
Mitch turned to Legermount, relaying the proposition unvoiced. Legermount nodded and said nothing as he wound the wheel around and then back, keeping his eyes on the road.
They passed a succession of overturned vehicles, carried off the roadway and containing disheveled, water-sodden corpses, that looked as if they had been caught in a previous tide. As the truck began descending into the dip that Keene had mentioned, a bus filled with people, its roof loaded up the way the truck’s had been, appeared going the other way. “We can’t stop,” Mitch said sharply. Legermount didn’t have to be told. He slowed down enough to gesture back with a thumb and wave his hand negatively. After the bus had passed, he took his eyes off the road intermittently to glance at the mirror, finally shaking his head. “They’re not turning.” Keene sighed, but there was nothing to be done. God knew what those people were doing here in the first place.
Looking to the left as the ground began to slope, Keene could see the approaching front plainly now, still maybe a half mile off but with a tongue surging ahead into the valley that the road descended into. It was not a placid, beachlike rising of the tide accompanied by rolling breakers, but an angry, boiling wall of foam, flailing the land ahead with wreckage, debris, and pieces of uprooted trees as it advanced, while behind, the ocean rose and heaved in impatiently jostling hills of water and wind. Keene felt a coldness at the base of his spine and a sweaty slipperiness in his palms. The tension of the other two in the cab communicated itself palpably. A wheel hit a rock, and the truck bounced sickeningly. Legermount swore under his breath.
As the road leveled, the first fingers of water were streaming across the lowermost point ahead. They were below the level of the oncoming crest, now a churning cliff of water bearing down on them. A building of some kind on the creek bank came apart as they watched and was swept away in pieces. Parts of the roof reappeared again, bobbing and cartwheeling in a surge of whiteness that engulfed the roadway just yards ahead. Then, momentarily, the surge retreated, but the truck slowed as it hit the resistance of water, throwing the occupants forward.
“Don’t slack off now! Go for it!” Mitch shouted.
Legermount straightened his leg as if he were trying to push the gas pedal through the floor. Keene felt them sway as a swell caught them on the side, and for a moment he thought they were afloat without traction. Just at that moment, he could have done without being an engineer with the picture in his mind of the probable state of what was under the hood, and what water would do to it. But it was time they were due a small miracle, and somehow the motor shuddered and roared defiantly through to claim a tiny victory of abused technology. The road began rising, and while the land to the left and ahead of them was still being swallowed up, they had gained some margin, however temporary. Keene leaned out and looked back. The water was already far into the valley, cutting off the opposite side like a strait separating an island. He knew that the road dropped again not much farther on. Very possibly, the water would have covered it already. They had to get off the highway before then.
Beyond the ditch, the road was now bounded by a wire fence strung between wooden posts with a plantation of young firs on the far side, mostly flattened or uprooted and thrown together in tangles. The fence was down in places and sagging in others under debris that had been thrown against it, but there could be no crossing the silt-laden ditch between it and the road. Keene scanned the margin ahead anxiously. Just as it seemed that they were going to have to start descending again, he spotted a shoulder ahead where the ditch disappeared into a pipe under a gravel ramp crossing to what looked like a gate. “Slow down,” he yelled across the cab. Legermount eased off the gas. Below, to their left, a sheet of ocean extended away where there had been nothing but land an hour before.
There was a gate, but it was intact between concrete posts and appeared locked. Behind it, a fire break led away between the trees, offering just a watery, sandy surface littered with branches and downed trunks. “That’s gotta be a way into a trap if I ever saw one,” Mitch said.
“That’s something we’ll have to risk,” Keene replied. “It’ll be worse farther on.”
“How do we get past the gate?” Legermount asked.
Keene took in the situation rapidly. “Forget the gate. We can take out the section of fence next to it.”
Legermount steered the truck onto the ramp and brought it nose-up to the section of adjacent fence. Before it had stopped, Keene was out of the door and on his way back, hammering on the side with a fist as he ran. Birden opened the rear door from the inside. “Tool bag!” Keene shouted. “We need cutters . . . maybe claw hammer, pry bar.” Colby threw the bag out, then tumbled out himself, along with Birden and Cavan. Keene tore the bag open, took out a large set of cutters, and ran back to begin attacking the fence, snipping the mesh squares vertically down a line by one of the posts. Mitch found a pair of heavy pliers with cutter edges and went to work at the bottom, while the others held the strands back as they parted. Keene looked back across the highway behind the truck. Fountains of white spray were already exploding upward from below the end of the ridge. “That’ll do it!” he yelled at the others. “Let’s get moving.” While Birden and Cavan held the cut section of fence aside, Legermount eased the truck through the gap.
“We might need help if anything needs clearing,” Mitch told Birden. “You ride shotgun outside Legermount’s door.”
Keene stepped up into the cab as it passed. Mitch followed him but remained standing, holding the door open. Birden did the same on the other side. The others threw themselves in the rear while Alicia held the door from the inside. Legermount eased the clutch up. For a moment the rear wheels spun and skidded sideways, and then they gripped. They began snaking a way through the fallen trees and heaps of washed-up brush. But the way turned out to be not so bad as they had feared, the fallen branches giving traction in the sandy soil. The soldiers riding the cab only had to get down twice to haul obstructions aside before they came to a dirt service track, following the remnants of a power line, that led in the right direction and it looked as if it might keep to the ridge. They stopped long enough for Birden to return to the back of the truck. Mitch hauled himself in beside Keene, closed the door, and leaned his head back, letting his helmet rest against the cab wall to release in a long, slow gasp the tension he had been accumulating. Legermount reached forward and slapped the dash panel of the truck affectionately.
“Well, I’ll be darned,” he breathed. “The old gal done did it.”
“We still have Mexico to make,” Keene reminded him.
Legermount settled down more comfortably behind the wheel. “The way she feels right now, I reckon we could make Argentina,” he replied.
The service track brought them to a wider farm road, which they followed south for a mile or so before curving around to follow the contours in a more-or-less westerly direction once again. They emerged onto Highway 281 at a point Keene recognized as being only a couple of miles north of the turnoff to Amspace’s San Saucillo launch site. As they turned left onto 281, they could see water northward, away to the right. That would be the valley of the river that bounded the north side of the landing field, Keene informed the others. Past the landing field, the river curved south, marking the perimeter of the two-mile safety zone around the launch pads. Depending on how far upriver the tide had penetrated, and if the water had reached 281 farther south, the San Saucillo facility could have become an island on three sides by now.
It was like coming back to a place of fond remembrances and finding everything bulldozed away for a new highway intersection or a shopping mall-except the recollections weren’t from some idealization of distant growing-up years but a matter of mere weeks ago. The last time Keene saw the grounds bordering the approach road had been from the helicopter taking him and Vicki back to Kingsville after flying from Montemorelos, when cleanup crews had been collecting the trash left after the launch demonstration. There had been stone falls and cratering, and the area to the south was charred and blackened. Disabled vehicles stood along the roadside, all of them dented and holed, several burnt out, most with wheels missing and hoods and trunk lids open, stripped of movable essentials.
Loud concussions sounded from the north. The sky was the eeriest they had seen, causing even Mitch to gaze up wordlessly with an awed expression that probably came as close as he was capable of to dread. With the clearer masses of air coming in from the ocean, the canopy that had remained solid for days with dust and smoke from the conflagrations inland was now a turmoil of fiery clouds rolling down to blot out the landscape at one moment, then a minute later opening into vast vaults of emptiness extending upward like inverted canyons between walls of incandescent colors. All the time, the rumbling of distant thunder and the booms of bodies passing above or exploding in surrounding regions merged in a background of noise punctuated by occasional nearer detonations that were becoming practically continuous.
There was something ironic about the way the familiar sign by the main gate had survived unscathed, still proclaiming it the entrance to amspace inc. orbital launch & flight test facility. The gatehouse was demolished, and there were gaps torn in the outer security fence. The parking areas beyond had been pulverized, and Legermount had difficulty finding a path through the wrecked vehicles. A mound of recently bulldozed earth near the ruin of what had been the Sports and Social Club perhaps explained the absence of bodies.
Immediately ahead, one end of the main administration building had collapsed, while the remainder presented the familiar scene of a windowless facade with shattered upper levels open to the winds. The second floor was now a reinforced roof, and below, the ground floor had been turned into shelters behind earth banks and walls of sandbags. A number of wrecked military trucks suggested that the site had been used as a relief or evacuation center, probably on account of its large landing field. Behind the front offices, the flight preparation and assembly complex was for the most part a burned ruin, above which the larger vehicle assembly building had split down the middle into two parts that now hung outward in a deformed V against the sky. Legermount brought the truck to a halt. They sat surveying the scene.
“So this is what it all came to, eh?” Mitch said after a silence. “The end of the dream.”
Keene was too overcome by images of how he remembered it all to respond. Legermount murmured, “Maybe Reynolds is right. It all needed a new start over again-but with different people.”
“Don’t tell me he’s got you as a convert,” Mitch said.
Legermount shrugged. “I dunno. But looking at the way it all happened . . . It makes you think.”
They felt the jolt of the rear door being opened. Moments later, Cavan, still toting his submachine gun, appeared by the passenger-side door. Mitch picked up his rifle and got out to join him. They stood, letting their eyes roam over the desolation. “Well, is there any hope here, Landen?” Cavan asked finally.
“There’s always hope,” Keene replied, sliding across the seat to get out.
“So where should we begin? Isn’t there a pad area too, somewhere?”
“It’s two miles away at the other end of the airfield.” Keene shook his head. “Anybody who was waiting wouldn’t hide back there. The only way out of it is up.”
“Look, I hate to sound pessimistic, but shouldn’t we agree on a time limit on this before we start?” Mitch said.
Just as Keene eased himself down off the end of the seat and straightened up, an amplified male voice rang from the administration building ahead of them.
“DO NOT MAKE ANY SUDDEN MOVES. YOU ARE BEING COVERED. EITHER LEAVE NOW, OR ONE PERSON ONLY COME FORWARD UNARMED AND STATE YOUR BUSINESS.”
Keene looked along the bottom level of barricaded windows and sandbagged openings but could see nobody. Cavan moved a few yards from the truck, presumably to show no hostile intent.
“What’s happening?” someone said from behind. Keene glanced back and saw Colby peering around the rear corner of the truck from inside.
“Near the center, just right of the main doors,” Mitch said, keeping his gaze ahead.
“Interesting, but at the moment, academic,” Cavan observed. “I’d say we have little initiative in this particular matter, Mitch.”
“I guess you’re right.”
Keene moved out from the truck, keeping his hands high to show he wasn’t carrying a weapon. “I’ll go,” he muttered to the other two. “This was supposed to be my party, anyway.”
He began moving forward, picking his way through the rubble and glass fallen from the building. As he approached, he caught a movement from the place Mitch had indicated: a sandbagged opening into one of the ground-floor rooms where there had formerly been a door and adjacent window. Closer, and he saw that it was a figure in a woollen cap and combat jacket, covering him with an automatic rifle. “That’s far enough,” the figure called in his own voice when Keene was about five yards away. Keene halted. The figure straightened up from behind the sandbags to see him more clearly. Keene caught a glimpse of another farther back, also holding a leveled gun. “Okay, who are you, and what do you want here?” the one in front asked. Keene drew a breath to launch into the simplified explanation that he had been composing in his head. . . . And then, instead, his posture relaxed, and his face creased into a grin. “What’s so funny?” the figure demanded.
Keene waited a second or two. “Have I really aged that much? Although, I suppose it wouldn’t surprise me. Or is it the fancy dress like yours?”
“Look, I’m not in a mood for games.”
Keene gave it a moment longer. Then, “Oh, stop it, Joe, you stupid shit. It’s Lan Keene, for Christ’s sake. I’m sorry we took our time getting here, but the traffic was a bitch. . . .” He broke off and could do no more than shake his head as the flippancy drained from him. It was Joe Elms, who had piloted the NIFTV the day they took on the Air Force spaceplane. He had the same reddened, blistered face as everyone else, with the beginnings of a beard, and looked more like a guerrilla fighter than a spaceship pilot. But it was Joe.
Even now, Elms came out warily, the other behind him still covering. He moved closer and peered disbelievingly. “It is you. . . . You look like you’ve been in a volcano. Jesus, have we all changed that much?” Elms turned to the other and waved for him to lower the gun. “It’s okay, Sid. It’s them. They made it!” Elms looked back at Keene, his expression dazed. The message seemed only now to be sinking in. “We . . .” He gave up and shook his head.
Keene looked past him at the younger man stepping out over the parapet of sandbags. “Sid? I know you. . . . Sid Vance, right? You came with us to the Osiris.” It was the Sid who had won the place on the shuttle, the kid from Navigation Systems Group, just out of college, who had been with Amspace a month.
“I never gave up on you,” he told Keene. “I kept telling them. You just never seemed the type.”
It hadn’t fully sunk in yet with Keene either. Only now was he beginning to realize how much, inside, he had been steeling himself for the worst. There was only one more question. He interrogated Joe with a look for a second as if hoping to divine the answer before he dared ask it. “And Vicki?” he managed finally.
Joe nodded. “She’s here. Robin’s hurt his arm, but he should be okay. Too bad we didn’t have a doctor. We had some trouble here a couple of days ago, and he took a bullet. I did what I could . . .”
Keene didn’t hear the rest, partly because the relief that swept over him, and the strange, sudden weakness that came with it, almost causing him to collapse. The other reason was that he could see into the room behind the sandbagged opening; another person had appeared framed in the doorway at the far end. Keene was unable to make out the face or expression in the shadows; but without really trying, in some unconscious reading from years of learning her postures and her body language, he knew it was her.
Keene moved away from Joe and Sid and stepped over the low wall of sandbags into the room. It had once been an office but had been turned into a watch post, with an improvised bed, a collection of coats, capes, hats, and weapons hanging along the opposite wall, and the desk serving as a general table. Vicki didn’t make any immediate move but stood staring from the doorway as if paralyzed. Keene was distantly aware of Joe’s voice outside saying something over the bullhorn. He crossed the room slowly and looked at her. She was wearing jeans with a stained shirt and sweatband around her forehead; her hair was matted, and her face, he could see even in the dim light, was cracked, swollen, and streaked where perspiration had carried away the grime. He didn’t think he had ever seen anyone look more wonderful. Her eyes looked him up and down silently. Keene waited for the offbeat remark, the dry understatement. He could see her mind running over the combinations, rejecting one after another as not fitting the moment. And then, instead, she just came a step nearer, hugged him with both her arms, and buried her face against his shoulder. Keene pulled her tight, rubbing his face onto her hair. He felt her gripping tighter, then starting to shake as everything she had been storing up found release. In that strange way things had always been with them, it was the things they didn’t say that said the most. Finally, he drew back enough to speak.
“About Robin. Joe said . . .”
“His arm’s broken, but it seems clean. We tried to set it.”
“I’ve got a couple of medics with me. He’ll be okay.” A hundred questions were tumbling over one another to get out. Keene shook his head, not knowing where to begin. “What about the others?” he asked. “Karen, Judith?”
“Karen left for Dallas with her boyfriend before the evacuation started. Celia came here with me but left with the military. I never heard from Judith. . . .”
Keene could see the tears starting, her fighting to hold them back. “I guess we won’t be going back to the Bandana this time,” she whispered.
“I never liked the music there, anyway.”
Now the stupid talk. It had to come. They were never going to change. And then Vicki abandoned the attempt and hugged him close again, and he kept holding on because he felt his face wet too and didn’t want her to see. And all the time he wondered to himself why this was the first time they had ever let each other know their feelings like this.
The noise of the truck pulling up outside and the voices of the others finally parted them. Another figure appeared from the corridor behind the door that Vicki had come through, thirtyish maybe, with sandy hair and stubble, dressed in baggy pants and a red T-shirt. Vicki said his name was Jason, an Amspace prelaunch technician that Joe had brought with him after Vicki relayed Keene’s message. Jason had actually worked on some of the equipment installation at Montemorelos and knew the layout there. And that was it: just the four of them, and Robin.
Keene was perplexed. “No others? Harry Halloran? Wally? Ricardo?”
Vicki shook her head tiredly. “Sorry. Harry got here but he didn’t make it through. I don’t know about any others. It’s a long story.”
Cavan came in with Joe, who from the shouts and laughs Keene could hear outside had already passed out the news that Vicki was here. “We’ve been on the move since first thing this morning,” Cavan was saying. “Everyone could use a meal. How are you stocked here?”
“Not too badly. Our dining room is across the corridor. The menu’s a bit restricted, but there’s plenty of room. We’ve got the whole place to ourselves.”
“We’ll need to be ready to move out as soon as the water recedes.”
“And travel overnight?” Joe sounded skeptical.
“There’s no choice,” Cavan said. “The next tide will cover this whole place.” Joe whistled. It seemed he hadn’t realized things were that close.
Alicia and Dash came in with a medical pack. “Where’s Robin?” Alicia asked.
“This way,” Jason said, turning to lead back the way he had come. Keene followed them to a room across the corridor that was evidently being used for living quarters. Robin had been napping on a couch, from an office suite or reception area somewhere, that had been made into a bed. He had his share of blotches and facial sores like everyone else, but he was clean and looked rested. From his expression as he rubbed his eyes and looked the arrivals up and down, he evidently couldn’t say the same about them.
“I never knew you dressed like that,” he told Keene. “It’s like out of some movie. You look like you should be in a war somewhere.”
“Me?” Keene objected. “You’re the one who got shot in the arm.” Robin conceded the point with a rueful nod. “How does it feel?” Keene asked.
“Oh . . . it could have been worse, I guess.”
“We’ve got a couple of people here who are going to take care of it. Professionals. You’ll be okay.”
“Mom told me about Earth being a satellite of Saturn, and the gravity being less then, and that’s how the dinosaurs existed. Is that the way you think it really was?”
Keene shook his head incredulously. At a time like this, that could still bubble to the surface of his mind? “That’s only part of it,” he answered. “Half of science is going to have to be reconstructed. You’re going to be a busy guy when you get older.”
Alicia, who had been waiting near the door with Vicki and Dash, moved forward. “We’d better take a look at that arm,” she said.
“I get squeamish about these things. I’ll leave you to it,” Keene said, moving toward the doorway.
“Do you really think I could get to be involved in work like that, Lan?” Robin called after him.
Keene winked back at him. “You’d better believe it.”
Robin’s upper arm had been hit by a ricochet, but the break was a simple one. Alicia and Dash reset it and announced that it should heal without complications. Over bowls of a spicy beef and vegetable stew that Joe had concocted, accompanied by hunks of crusty buttered bread and, incongruously, a selection of not-bad wines purloined from a cabinet in the Executive Suite, the arrivals told their story and listened to a condensed account of events at San Saucillo.
The trouble at Kingsville, which Harry Halloran had described when Keene called him from Vandenberg, had resulted in different groups deciding to go their own way instead of the concerted early evacuation that Keene and Marvin Curtiss had hoped for. When Vicki began recruiting for a group to go with her to San Saucillo and wait for Keene, others had conceived the idea of organizing a launch from San Saucillo themselves and trying to join the Osiris. By that time the military was using the San Saucillo airfield as an adjunct to the vulnerable coastal bases around Corpus Christi to fly essential cargos inland. One shuttle was launched but exploded in the boost phase-it was thought from a meteorite hit. After that, the pad area rapidly became unserviceable and further attempts were abandoned. Most of the others gave up then, and left with the military when they pulled out three days previously. “We might have done too,” Vicki concluded. “But some kind of local gang came in-because of the stuff the military had left behind. But that wasn’t enough; they wanted what we had too. There was fighting. That was when we lost Harry, along with a couple of others who’d stayed. They got away with the truck that we’d kept, so we were stuck here. So you can see why Joe was jumpy when you showed up in that circus truck. I mean . . . what kind of breaker’s yard did you find it in?”
“Don’t jest. It’s still your only ticket out,” Keene reminded her.
There was little more to be done when they had finished eating. Joe had made sure to have everything they needed to take sorted and packed in case a quick getaway was called for. They had also collected a supply of gasoline, which the troops transferred to the truck’s tank, with a reserve in the rear in cans. They took an extra half hour to sandbag the truck’s roof and fix spotlamps on the cab door pillars for the night drive. Mitch used an ax to cut a hole through the wall at the back of the cab to allow communication with the rear compartment.
As distasteful as it was for Keene to have to admit it to himself, having the numbers reduced did simplify things. The normal load for a minishuttle of the type at Montemorelos was twelve persons-which had been the size of the party that visited the Osiris. As things were, they had fifteen adults plus Robin. By throwing out inessential equipment and eliminating fuel for reentry, Joe felt they could accommodate the extra. But he wouldn’t have wanted to push things any further than that.
While the others were loading the last items, Keene went out the back of the admin building to stare one last time over the landing field and toward the pad area, where so much of the latter years of his life had been invested. Although night was coming on, the flaming sky was creating enough of a lurid light to see. The scene looked like the aftermath of a battle with the litter of abandoned military equipment, vehicles, and a number of wrecked aircraft, including a cargo plane that had been picked up by the wind and cartwheeled into one of the heavy transporters on the tracks bordering the landing field. As he watched, something burst like a falling bomb somewhere near the far end of the main runway, toward the ruins of the pads. Boots crunched on the concrete behind him. It was Mitch.
“We’re ready to go, Lan.” He stopped beside Keene and followed his gaze. “End of the dream, eh?”
“Maybe the beginning of another,” Keene said.
“You mean out at Kronia?”
“That’s where the ball will be for a while now.”
Mitch looked at him. “Is the Osiris still going to be up there, really?”
Keene sighed. That was something he hadn’t wanted to think about. It wasn’t on the list of things he could change. “Let’s just play things the way that’s got us this far, Mitch,” he answered. “One crisis at a time.”
They walked back through the building to the waiting truck. Keene decided to let Vicki spend some time introducing herself to the others and rode up front again with Legermount and Mitch.
For once, fortune seemed to have worked in their favor, and on regaining Highway 281 they found that the tide had cleared it rather than introducing new obstacles. Although the meteorite bombardment continued to increase, they made the sixty-odd miles to the border in close to two hours and, setting the last of their immediate worries to rest, the bridge across the Rio Grande at Reynosa was still passable. And more, the coastline now to the east of them bulged seaward, taking it farther away, which would give them an additional margin of distance when the tide returned to its next high point.
They were a few miles into Mexico, when the entire western sky lit up for ten or twenty seconds in a sheet of yellow that illuminated the surroundings like an eerie, off-color dawn coming from the wrong direction. It could only be what the scientists had feared early on: A huge area of hydrocarbon-vapor-saturated atmosphere had ignited. Legermount halted to stare incredulously. Mitch was equally stupefied. Keene felt as if his insides were turning cold. “Get out of here!” he shouted at them. “We can’t stay exposed out here. Get under a bridge or something.”
Mitch shook himself back to reality. “How long have we got?”
“If that thing is a hundred miles away . . . maybe ten, twelve minutes.”
They pressed on, but nothing like a bridge or flyover materialized. When they had left it as long as they dared, Keene directed Legermount to steer off the highway at the bottom of a cutting they were in, and to park as close as he could get against the rock face forming its side. Keene ran around to the back and threw open the door. “Everybody get out and get down! Cover your heads and your ears! There’s a shock coming in, and it’s going to be a big one!”
Bodies tumbled out and scattered to find niches among the rocks and sand gulleys along the verge. Keene waited to help Vicki and Robin down, and then guided them to a muddy fissure near the base of the cutting face, which Colby and Reynolds were hastily scraping deeper with entrenching tools. They threw themselves in, hands and whatever padding they could find clamped over their ears, Keene using his body to shield Vicki protectively. Even so, the pressure wave when it arrived was excruciating, and he heard Cynthia scream with the pain. In its wake came a howling wind that tore dust off the ground in sheets, blowing branches and whole trees past the end of the cutting and pinning the truck on two wheels against the rock. Out in the open, they wouldn’t have stood a chance. As things were, it was two hours before the tempest fell sufficiently for them to risk moving again.
When they emerged from the cutting, the sky to the west had dulled to a red maelstrom boiling along the horizon, shimmering with lightning that was all but continuous. With the wind, they would not be able to maintain the rate they had managed from San Saucillo to the border. It was ninety to a hundred miles to Montemorelos, the last stretch being uphill into the highland beyond Cruillas. They had something like eight hours in which to get away, racing against not only the water on one side now, but a wall of fire advancing from the other.
They did well for the next sixty miles. While the din of bolides passing through the atmosphere, and of airborne and impact detonations, grew to terrifying dimensions, the rising tidal incursions had emptied the coastal region of population, and the road remained free of traffic. And grotesque though the images were that they fashioned from the landscape, the fire to the west and the incendiary skies illuminated the way ahead and gave early warning of obstructions.
But past the San Fernando River, things changed. Emergency evacuation plans had evidently been less advanced south of the border, or less vigorously implemented, and the truck began running into the stragglers still heading for the high ground. Although relatively few in number, they were the slowest and most heavily laden, creating agonizing moving bottlenecks, seemingly at every narrowing of the road or uphill stretch. And crossing over the road to try and pass was invariably frustrated by another driver swinging out ahead and moving only slightly faster than the obstruction, and who once in possession of the passing space, stayed there.
“This isn’t looking good,” Keene announced over the noise as he checked his watch. “We made pretty good time for a while. Now we’re losing it all again.”
“What do you want us to do, shoot ’em?” Mitch yelled back.
Stalled vehicles were also an impediment. At one point, a car right in front of the truck lurched to a halt suddenly, hit by a falling rock, and Legermount was only just able to avoid hitting it as figures tumbled from the doors. A mile farther on, a group of people by a stranded van were waving frantically, several of them running out into the traffic lane and trying to grab the doors of anything that slowed close to walking speed.
“How is it back there?” Keene shouted back over his shoulder through the hole Mitch had cut in the cab wall.
“Bumpy, but we’re surviving,” Cavan’s voice answered. “We’ve felt a couple of hits on the roof. Let’s just hope we don’t collect a big one. What’s it looking like outside?”
“Grim.”
A big explosion occurred a mile or more to the left. The shock came, followed by a volley of debris. There was sharp crack from somewhere near Legermount’s head, and the side window shattered. A truck a hundred yards or so ahead slewed off into the ditch. Legermount gripped the wheel tighter and kept going.
The new site at Montemorelos was up on the plateau away from any major route, and Keene had hoped that they would lose the other traffic when they left the highway. But it didn’t work out that way. Word of the likely size of the impending tide must have gotten around, for everyone was turning off to follow any road leading in an upland direction. Congestion built up, and it seemed that everything would come to a standstill. But though it brought greater immediate hazard, the increasing intensity of the bombardment proved to be the saving factor. Few of the other vehicles had protected roofs, and as the hail of stones from above grew heavier, more of them pulled off the road for the occupants to scramble out and seek shelter underneath, enabling the truck to pass through.
The makeshift windshield exploded inward, covering Keene and the others with rivers of shards; Mitch knocked out what was left with the butt of his rifle and yelled at Legermount to keep going. A tracer of flaming naphtha hissed down and draped across the road ahead of them, but they carried on over it, bucking and bouncing to the smell of burning rubber from the scorched tires. To the right a hillside was on fire, showing the forms of trees as blazing silhouettes.
The village of Montemorelos lay among scrubby hills at the top of a long rise from the coastal plain, a few miles before the launch site itself. There was no route farther inland, and by the time the truck arrived, lines of vehicles were jammed around the outlying area. Maybe their intention had been to sit out the high tide here, and then descend again to the highway and get to the main Sierra Madre range during the next period of low tide. Very likely, many of the refugees hadn’t thought beyond simply getting to the nearest high ground. But now, with nothing but a wall of flame to the west, they were choked along the lanes and pulled off into the surrounding fields under the increasing downfall, with nowhere to go. Some were trying to improvise shelters out of the vehicles or farm buildings, while others seemed to have lost their heads and were running around aimlessly or just sat immobile as if seized by a stupor. The spotlight that Keene was directing from the cab window picked out people struggling to get others out of a crumpled car, more falling out in the open. Ahead, one side of the village was in flames; even as Keene watched, something landed among the houses, throwing up a shower of debris in the glow.
The main thoroughfare through the center was jammed with vehicles, wreckage, and milling people, and several times Legermount had to stop and back up to find a way around the alleys between the houses. People pressed around constantly, either trying to stop the truck to get help or to gain access to it after losing their own transport. It would have been suicidal to stop. There was no way of telling if any of the cries, angry shouts, and thuds of fists and other objects beating the sides were due to the truck’s hitting any of them; there was nothing to be gained from thinking about it.
Keene had worried that some might have taken it into their heads to look for shelter among the launch site constructions, even though there was nothing else beyond the village in that direction and no route inland. However, past the village center the way became clearer, and as they came to the outskirts it began to look as if they might have a clear run for the last few miles. Then, as it rounded a bend in the road, the truck came upon several cars and a van pulled over to the side with a cluster of figures apparently trying to repair something.
At the truck’s approach, several of them stepped out in front of it, waving it down with flashlamps, giving Legermount little choice but to brake or run right over them. There was just time for Keene’s spotlamp to pick out the stove-in side of the van and the mixture of capes, parkas, and uniforms-whether police or some kind of military, it was impossible to tell-when a harsh voice barked something on the driver’s side. A figure outside grabbed for the door, but Legermount had already locked it. An arm came in through the broken window to seek the inside handle; Mitch lunged at it with his rifle butt. At the same time, another figure twisted the lamp from Keene’s grasp and opened the passenger door. Whoever they were, they were desperate and panicking. Their van was out of commission, and they wanted the truck. There was more shouting, and Keene felt himself gripped by the jacket and pulled from his seat. He managed to produce his automatic, but a gloved hand swiped it aside. For an instant he was looking at a swarthy, mustached face framed by a parka hood pulled up over a peaked cap, eyes wide, teeth bared; he saw a pistol coming up toward him and knew that moment of slow-motion awareness, like the split-second before a car crash when what’s about to happen is clear but a dreamlike paralysis makes it impossible to intervene. . . . And then Legermount fired three times in quick succession across the cab with a handgun, and the figure cried out and recoiled backward.
Shouts were coming from inside the rear of the truck. Looking back through the cutout in the cab wall, Keene saw light flooding in as the doors were torn open and more figures appeared, waving rifles. Somebody fired a shot from inside but without effect. The ones outside began raising their weapons to aim into the truck.
Mitch yelled “Down!” and fired a burst back through the length of the truck from the cutout. Keene slammed the passenger door. A form loomed toward him; he aimed the automatic, and the shape ducked away as Legermount hit the gas pedal.
But as the truck pulled away, a bright lamp from outside illuminated the interior to show Cavan trying to untangle his gun from a pack, Dash reeling off-balance and tumbling from the sudden jolt, with the others frozen in confusion. It would be a slaughter in there. The truck would never pull away fast enough, and Mitch, blinded by the light shining in from outside, couldn’t see to protect them.
Legermount hit the brakes, and even while Keene and Mitch were slamming into the dash panel, crashed the shift into reverse and gunned the truck backward. A series of sickening thuds accompanied by screams came from the rear end. The light disappeared abruptly, and Keene felt a wheel lurch over something. Legermount braked and reengaged forward gear. Again, the gruesome lurch, and they picked up speed. Shots followed, a few hitting the bodywork, but the truck was away by now. Keene put his face close to the cutout. “Anybody hurt back there?” he called through.
Cavan appeared outlined against the frame of the still-open door a few seconds later. “No . . . I think we’re all okay. Would you believe it, Landen? The first chance I get to actually use this bloody thing, and it gets caught up in the straps. Maybe the desks were more my line after all.”
* * *
The last stretch of road up to the launch site was clear and deserted. From the final bend at the top of the slope, the view to the side looked down over the direction they had come, visibility being better now as a result of the conflagration to the west, drawing in clearer air from the Gulf. Several new craters glowed below on the plain, while beyond, shining pink in the ghastly light, the line of the inrushing tide was already visible as an immense wall dwarfing the scale of the previous one.
Finally, they came within sight of the launch facility. Apart from the ubiquitous rock debris and some superficial damage in places, the structures stood intact. The gates were still locked. Jason and Joe ran forward and severed the padlock hasps with bolt cutters. Legermount took the truck through, waited for them to reboard, and Keene pointed the way to the access building serving the silo that had been made operational. Again, Jason and Joe came around with tools to force open the doors. As the last lock gave, they waved the others out from the cover of the truck. Legermount gave it a friendly parting slap before grabbing his kit and hastening away.
While Jason and Joe disappeared inside with Legermount, Keene and Mitch stood by the doorway ushering the others through while Cavan saw them down from the truck: Cynthia and Charlie; Colby with Vicki, helping Robin; Alicia, followed by Dash; Birden and Reynolds. . . .
“There’s one more,” Keene called. Cavan looked momentarily uncertain. “Where’s Sid?” Cavan turned back toward the truck. Keene went over as Cavan shone his flashlamp inside. Sid Vance was still sitting at the far end, his back to the wall, his face blank. Keene threw Cavan an ominous look and climbed in. “Sid?” He nudged Vance’s shoulder cautiously. Vance keeled sideways silently, then doubled over. Keene lifted him back up while Cavan played the flashlamp from the door. Sid’s head lolled limply to one side. There was a single bullet hole in the front of his jacket, hardly any blood. Keene checked his face and raised an eyelid with a thumb, then turned away, shaking his head.
“I never really found out who he was,” Cavan said as Keene got back down.
“Just a kid who always hit lucky-until this time,” Keene said. He looked past Cavan and stiffened suddenly. Cavan turned and looked back. Three sets of headlights were coming up the road from the village.
“It seems that our friends back there don’t intend letting the score go unsettled, Leo,” Keene said. “You might get a chance to use that gun yet.”
They went in, found Mitch, and set him about organizing some defense while Keene, Jason, and Joe went on down to the service bays adjoining the silo to check the situation. Only dim emergency lights were on, running off a battery system in the generator room that had also been left driving the refrigeration plant for the liquid oxidizer portion of the hybrid fuel mix. That was the most crucial part. It meant that the oxidizer storage tank was ready to deliver to the shuttle now-the operation had to be done at the immediate prelaunch phase. Had the refrigeration been turned off, liquefying the oxidizer would have taken hours. With a supply ready to flow, transfer could be accomplished in about fifteen minutes. Keene breathed a silent prayer of thanks to whoever the engineer had been who allowed for this kind of situation.
Jason threw switches along a panel and started the standby diesel generator. They had power. Keene heard him go into the control booth, and moments later lights started coming on in the concrete-walled rooms and equipment bays, through the stairwells and corridors, and among the ramps and service platforms around the silo above. Keene went through to the pump room and ran quickly over the valve settings. As he started up the oxidizer transfer process, Jason’s voice came from the general address system serving the area. “Okay, Joe, you should have power. The access hatch should be at green, bridge extended.”
“Right. That’s what we’ve got,” Joe’s voice shouted down from the access bridge to the shuttle, higher overhead.
“The onboard system’s showing live. I’m disconnecting power umbilicals and switching everything to internal. Okay, start getting everyone inside.”
The lower gantry through to the silo was down. While Jason went through the blast door into the silo to release locking pins and safety latches, Keene went up to the monitor panel at the access level to begin retracting the service gantries and power up the silo’s covering doors. Charlie Hu was at the bridge crossing the gap to the white body of the shuttle. Joe had already gone through to commence flight-deck procedures.
“We’re still missing some,” Charlie said. “Where are Cavan and the troops?”
“Securing the outside. It looks like trouble followed us up from the village.”
“What about Sid?”
“Sid didn’t make it.” Keene saw Charlie’s hesitation, wanting to contribute something more. “Go on inside and make sure the others get strapped down, Charlie. There’s nothing you or they can do. We can’t have everyone out there.” Charlie nodded, turned, and disappeared into the hatch.
Jason appeared, having finished his chores below. “Just the oxidizer to complete,” he announced.
“I can take care of that,” Keene said. “Where can we get a connection to the flight deck?”
“This way.” Jason led him back to a control room outside the blast wall of the silo and activated a screen on one of the panels. It showed the face of Joe, working systematically inside the shuttle.
“Roger,” he acknowledged.
“Can we get some remotes from the security cameras outside?” Keene threw as an aside to Jason. “And see if you can pick up Mitch or Cavan on the band they were using.” He turned to the screen showing Joe. “All in order here. How are you doing inside?”
“Well, if you never heard of seat-of-the-pants spaceship flying before, this is gonna be it,” Joe replied. “I’ve got a reading on the outside wind. We could never launch in this with a regular sequence. I’m programming the side thrusters to fire as we come up out of the hole and create a horizontal counter thrust. Just hope I’ve got these numbers right.”
Keene had never heard the like of it. “I don’t have a lot of confidence in first-time guesses,” he answered dryly.
“That’s why you need a pilot, not an engineer.”
A shudder ran through the structure as something large impacted not far away.
“Lan, look at this,” Jason called from another console.
“Keep the line open, Joe,” Keene said to the screen, and moved across. Jason had operated one of the external cameras to view the main gate into the compound. The three cars had arrived outside, but somebody had driven the truck back and parked it there, blocking the entrance. As Keene watched, a helmeted figure jumped from the tailboard, ran a few paces, then turned and threw something back inside. Seconds later, the truck flamed into a torch. Keene remembered the spare cans of gasoline they had loaded at San Saucillo. “Who is that crazy bastard?” he yelled.
“I think I’ve got Mitch here,” Jason said, passing Keene a mike.
“Mitch, can you hear me?”
“Just,” a voice acknowledged distantly through a blur of static.
“This is Lan Keene. That’s not you at the gate?”
“I’m on my way up to the roof with Legermount and Dash. Birden and Reynolds are covering the entrances.”
That accounted for five. Then it could only be Cavan. “Oh Jesus,” Keene groaned. “Head for the front, Mitch,” he shouted into the mike. “Leo’s gone out there to delay them. He’s going to need cover.”
“Got it.”
On the screen, two cars were bumping their way along the outside of the fence toward a place where something had torn a gap. The third car was still outside the gate and had disgorged a figure who began firing at Cavan through the fence. Cavan turned and dropped to one knee, and for a heart-stopping instant Keene thought he had been hit. But it was just to aim, and Cavan dropped his target with a quick but accurate burst. However, more were appearing from the car. With one gun against several, and being out in the open, Cavan would have no chance. He rose and began zigzagging back across the compound. But with the distance still to go, there was no way he was going to make it.
“Perimeter lights!” Keene snapped at Jason. Jason reached for a panel beside the console and began flipping switches. White light enveloped the gate area, throwing the burning truck into relief and highlighting the figures clustered against the fence. One of the soldiers from the building-either Birden or Reynolds from what Mitch had said-ran forward into view and began firing at them. They retreated in confusion into the darkness farther back, and Cavan sprinted for the building, followed by whoever had covered him. Meanwhile, Jason had managed to direct a second camera at the two cars making for the gap, which was now also clearly visible in the fence lights. One of the cars stopped suddenly, figures tumbling out and throwing themselves for cover, evidently from fire coming from somewhere, probably the roof. The other veered off into the shadows and doused its lights.
“Is it you doing that, Mitch?” Keene asked into the mike.
“Right. We’re on the roof at the front. Good move with the lights. How’s Leo?”
“Looking good.”
One of the lights over the gate was shot out. Seconds later, the two nearest the gap through the fence went the same way.
“I’m just about done here,” Joe’s voice called from the screen showing the flight deck in the shuttle. “We need everyone on board.”
The third car was coming out of the darkness, heading for the building. Behind it, several dark forms came through the gap and began spreading out. One of them fell. Muzzle flashes were coming from the others and from the car.
Then Keene realized that there was something odd about the background in the scene. Unless his sense of direction was confused, the view from the roof in that direction should have shown the plain below, lighted up by the fires and the glowing meteorite craters. Instead, it was black and featureless except for flecks and patches of white. He stared, puzzled for several seconds; and then, suddenly, a chilling feeling ran through him as he realized it had turned into ocean. And then, even as he watched, the fires of the village they had just passed through, maybe one or two hundred feet below them in his estimation, dissolved under what he could now make out to be an oncoming front of churning foam.
“Mitch! It’s time to pull out!” he shouted into the mike. “Look down the hill!”
“Christ!” Mitch’s voice exclaimed.
Keene turned to Jason, “I’m going down to wrap up the lox. We need to open the silo doors.”
“I can do it locally from the ramp.” Jason crossed the room at a run and disappeared out the doorway.
Keene flew down the stairs to the lower level, checked the gauges, and shut off the pumps. As he retracted the umbilical, the sound of firing came from inside the building. He climbed a steel stairway to a platform above the pump area and entered a passage as Birden appeared at the far end, stopping to send a burst of fire back from the cover of the corner, then ducking back around as it was returned. In the other direction was a steel door that led through to the access stairs. “Birden!” Keene yelled out. “This way.”
Birden looked back and saw him. “Dash is coming through. Hold that door.”
Keene ran to the door and pulled it open. Behind was a work area with a tool bench. Birden stepped out and fired again as Dash appeared around the corner and ran past him. Keene held the door while Dash went through. At the far end of the passage Birden fired again and turned to follow. Keene waited, holding the door. But before Dash could cover effectively one of the pursuers appeared and cut the running figure of Birden down with a stream of bullets. Keene found that he was still staring, horrified, when Dash slammed the door.
“He’s gone! Move!”
They dragged the bench behind the door and tipped it over to form a block, then started away again; but Keene, on a second thought, turned back and took down a heavy sledge from a wall rack while the bench rocked from the pounding against the far side of the door. Turning again, he found that Dash had waited to cover him in case the door gave. They raced for the stairs that would take them up to the access bridge.
They arrived to find Mitch bundling Cavan across the bridge into the shuttle, and Legermount and Reynolds holding off more pursuers at the far end of the boarding antechamber, where one body was already lying on the floor among splashes of blood. Dash followed Cavan and Mitch across the bridge and disappeared inside. Keene stopped just past the blast door to wait for Legermount and Reynolds. Looking up, he saw the silo doors open, revealing a circle of orange-streaked sky. Jason must have already gone through. Legermount detached and ran through with Reynolds covering and took the door. “Where’s Birden?” he asked Keene.
“Out of it.”
Reynolds backed through, firing from the hip, and went through to the shuttle. Legermount waved for Keene to go after him. Keene shook his head, motioning with the sledge in both hands. Reading his intention, Legermount swung the door shut and stood back while Keene delivered a series of heavy blows to jam the hinge and latch mechanisms. By the time Keene tossed the sledge down and turned away, Legermount was across the bridge and in the shuttle, waiting at the hatch.
Inside, Dash and Reynolds were fastening themselves into harnesses; the others were all secured. While Legermount closed the hatch and settled down, Keene paused to find a grin for Robin, who was hunched between Vicki and Alicia, looking pale. “Bearing up okay?” Keene said to him. “That’s the worst over. We’re on our way.” Robin nodded, managing to keep a brave face. Keene squeezed Vicki’s shoulder in a way that said everything would work out okay-it wasn’t as if he would ever have to answer for himself if it didn’t.
“Okay, I’ve seen Mexico,” Colby said from his seat. “Can we move on?”
Keene went forward to join Joe in the crew section and buckled himself into the flight engineer’s seat. He would have to handle the electronics too, since they had no Ccoms operator this time, but that didn’t make a lot of difference to anything, since there was nowhere to communicate with. The first thing he made sure of, however, was that the computers still contained the navigation beacon and homing codes that had been used for the rendezvous with the Osiris. A quick run through the checks showed engines, fuel, power, hydraulics, environment, and cooling all looking good. He keyed in the command to retract the access bridge, and an auxiliary screen with a vertical view down between the silo wall and the body of the shuttle showed it sliding back cleanly into its recess.
“Tank and pump pressures good, temperatures good, auxiliaries functioning,” he told Joe. “Do we want the whole list?”
“With guys out there wanting to shoot this thing full of holes? Hell, no. Let’s get outta here!”
“Then you’re all set. We have delivery. . . . What’s this? Oh, my God!” Keene stared at the screen, horrified, as it showed the blast door at the bottom of the silo being opened from the other side. A group of figures in helmets and combat gear ran out, brandishing guns, onto a concrete ledge flanking the duct that directed the exhaust out to a water-cooled pit on the far side of the structure-Keene and Jason hadn’t bothered to flood it; what would have been the point?
Joe’s finger was already straightening against the button.
The figures came to a confused halt and stood gaping up at the tail and booster nozzles of the spacecraft towering above them. Then, realizing their mistake, they began a frantic scramble to get back through the door.
“Ignition.”
Keene counted seventeen gut-wrenching hits or lightning strikes on the structure as the ship climbed through the winds, the flaming clouds, and the meteorite storm. But it stayed together, and as it emerged from the atmosphere the occupants got their first view of Athena since the last transmissions before the satellites were knocked out, and the shots that had been relayed from the Osiris. The nucleus was clearly visible now, appearing six times the size of the Moon, which meant that it was well inside the lunar orbit. It hung as a malevolent, white-hot presence, its tail of dust and incandescent gas engulfing and extending far beyond the Earth, with twisted and braided secondary streamers discharging immense sparks through the plasma envelope to the main body and between each other.
The regular flight-planning programs were unable to compute a stable orbit through the changing gravity now permeating the region. Charlie Hu, Joe, and Keene calculated a burn that would send them coasting out on a long ellipse away from the two bodies as they closed. Although it meant expending an alarming portion of the remaining fuel, their estimates indicated that it would be better in the long run than constantly having to fire to correct a closer-in orbit. And with the ship’s vantage point lengthening, its occupants watched the devastation of an entire planet as the encounter between Earth and Athena entered its final, cataclysmic phase.
The seas of fire that they could see engulfing parts of the southwestern and central U.S. were repeated across huge tracts of every other continent also. From the size and sharpness of the spiral chasms carved in the smoke-laden atmosphere, they were generating winds more ferocious than anything seen previously. Watching in horrified yet compulsive fascination, they were able to glimpse through the slowly shifting patterns fragments of what was happening on the surface.
The tides filled the valleys of the Amazon, Mississippi, Congo, Ganges, and Yellow Rivers, rising over the southeastern states all the way to the Appalachians in the U.S., covering the plains of southern India and Argentina, and creating temporary seas that immersed London and Paris, Baghdad, Beijing, and Montreal. When the water receded, a mud bank running from Florida to Venezuela turned the Caribbean into a six-hour lake; Britain reemerged amid a plain of lakes extending from Norway to Spain; Asia became reconnected to Australia except for a narrow channel twisting its way between Borneo and Celebes.
As the magnetospheres of Earth and Athena intersected, colossal electrical bolts began flashing incessantly not just between parts of Athena but directly down upon Earth itself. After two days, Charlie, who had been trying to make measurements from the ship’s imaging displays, announced that the tidal extremes were getting less even though Athena was still closing. It confirmed the fears that Keene had heard voiced back at JPL: The motion through Athena’s field was making Earth an immense Faraday generator, heating the beds of the oceans and actually inducing boiling in places, causing sea levels to fall by hundreds of feet. The recondensing vapor turned into a pall of cloud miles thick, which the winds stirred with the browns of the hydrocarbon gases and the smoke from the continent-wide fires to draw a curtain over the death throes as Earth and Athena commenced the slow mutual gyration that would mark their closest pass. But the broad story told by the shuttle’s infrared scans left no need for every ghastly detail.
Under the close gravitational influence, the crust seemed to slip in its rotation. Softened and melted toward the surface by the induced heating, it buckled and tore into huge north-south running paroxysms of earthquake and upheaval. The great African Rift opened up into a two-thousand-mile-long lake of lava that could be seen widening hour by hour, soon to become a new ocean, while to the east the tip of India extended into a ridge of upthrusting, colliding slabs of seabed snaking its way southward across the equator. The trench system running from Japan via the Phillippines to Indonesia was opening too, and starting to cleave Australia-very possibly, Charlie guessed, presaging a continental uplift somewhere in the western Pacific. They were literally watching the next world being born, even as the old one died.
The shifting of the spin axis caused oceans to slop across continents. Swathes of blue and green cold advancing hour by hour across the previously yellow and orange hot areas on the false-color infrared images told of miles-high cliffs of water bursting over the Appalachian barrier to descend upon Cincinnati and Pittsburgh, surging up into the funnel formed by Siberia and Alaska to spill over into the Arctic basin, and turning the southern Himalayas into an archipelago. With the surface charted simply by its temperature variations, the images quickly lost all resemblance to maps that were recognizable. In any case, it was already clear that those maps would hence be of interest only to future historians, geologists, and archaeologists. “Could anything survive that?” Vicki whispered amid the horrified silence that had enveloped the cabin for hours.
“Nothing could survive that,” Joe murmured. His voice was numbed.
“It happened before, not all that long ago,” Keene reminded them. “And some survived then. It may have been just a handful, scattered across a mountaintop here and there or a few places that the floods didn’t reach. But it was enough.”
“Go forth and multiply, and repopulate the Earth,” Reynolds recited softly.
“But could it really have been this bad?” Vicki persisted.
“They didn’t have the technology either,” Charlie said. “Some of those down there might pull through, even with all that.” Keene didn’t know. All he could do was look with the rest of them at the dark ball that Earth had become and know that in the cities disappearing under towering walls of foam in the darkness beneath, the forests and grasslands that had become carpets of ash, the exposed seabeds being consumed under spreading lava plains, the splitting mountains and sinking islands, humans and life of every kind were dying in billions. The things he had seen in the past week had hardened and wearied him to the degree of showing little external sign, even to this. Vivid though the pictures were that he created in his mind, nothing in his experience enabled him to relate to the the calamity he was witnessing. But inside, in his soul, he wept for the tragedies taking place everywhere, a million every minute, on the scale he was capable of grasping. He wept for all the Marvin Curtisses with stepdaughters who would never play their cellos to a public audience now; for the David Salios with pretty wives and young children who would never see Europe; the Wally Lomacks and their grandchildren; the Washington cab drivers and their wives who weren’t going to retire to Colorado; the Lieutenant Penalskis, Colonel Laceys, and General Ullmans who had stayed to carry through their duty; the Buffs and Lukes who had gone back to find their kinfolk.
And he mourned the passing of the culture that had emerged from squabbling European tribes to produce the cathedrals of Cologne and Rheims, the paintings of Michelangelo and the music of Bach, the calculus, the steam engine, the Boeing 747, the IBM PC, and yes, even Wall Street. Would visitors from another age return one day to take pictures of New York’s steel skeletons standing stark against a sandy desert, or to excavate the ruins of Tokyo and its seaport among some range of inland hills as others had the pyramids or the ziggurats of Nineveh?
The momentum of the two bodies’ turning embrace parted them, and Athena at last began withdrawing to find whatever future was destined for it among the other objects of the Solar System. As a macabre finale to its act, it recrossed the lunar orbit close enough to draw the Moon toward itself until the Moon started to break up. It receded with what had been Luna slowly transforming into a trail of debris, curling around to circle Athena like a triumphal garland. The bulk of the material could be seen plunging down in a torrent to be consumed into Athena’s incandescent surface. The residue would accompany Athena as a ring system, a trophy from its victory, which it would carry across the heavens as a taunting reminder for thousands of years to come.
The ellipse carried them out past what had been the Moon’s orbit, into regions of space that were cleaner. However, being intended for short missions, the shuttle was not equipped with solar panels or a long-life power source, and use of the sampling instruments and external imagers had to be limited. The craft had evidently sustained some damage during the lift up from the surface, for nothing could be picked up on radar. Neither could a signal be received from any surviving ship or other source that might be out there. This naturally raised the question of how they could be sure that any of the communications equipment was functioning properly-in particular, the beacon that was supposed to provide a signal for the Osiris. As time continued to drag by, the more sinister but obvious question raised itself of whether the Osiris’s failure to materialize might be due not to any malfunction of the shuttle’s equipment, but the fact that the Osiris was no longer out there at all.
As nerves grew frayed, and fears worked on by the mind acquired the substance of virtual certainties, Keene was the one who had to bear the brunt. It wasn’t simply that something that the others, now relieved from the pressures of just staying alive, were beginning to see as a Mad Hatter scheme from the beginning, had been his conception. With the change in circumstances and environment, roles had altered, and he had become the leader that all of them recognized now. Keene had acknowledged Charlie’s seniority within JPL. Mitch had accepted Cavan in Washington as the natural commander of the force mobilized to go to Vandenberg, and then assumed the dominant part himself when the situation changed from political intervention to virtual combat. Now they had returned to the world of technology and space engineering; and the natural person to take charge in it was Keene.
He did his best to reassure them, telling them to put themselves in the position of the Kronians aboard the Osiris: the only representatives of their culture to be within hundreds of millions of miles of what had happened. “Imagine you’re all scientists, like Charlie,” he appealed to the others. “You’re in a unique position to record close-up and take back records of events that nobody alive will ever see again. Priceless data and information. What are you going to do-just head off home and ignore it? Of course you’re not. But you wouldn’t exactly want a ringside seat, either. You’d pull back to a safer distance. They’re out there somewhere. We’re on a long, eccentric orbit. It’ll take some time, sure. But they’re there.”
“But even supposing they are, what’s to make them think that we’re still here?” Legermount persisted. Legermount had been restless and brooding now that the action was over. Cool, competent, and given to few words when there were demanding things to be done-the ideal second to someone like Mitch-he was affected the most by the passivity of being shut up, waiting for something that was beyond their control to happen.
Which brought them back to the original point: How did they know the beacon was working?
“It’s still a good point,” Cavan agreed.
Keene wasn’t sure if any of them had the expertise to do very much if it wasn’t, and he doubted if the ship carried the full range of parts that might be needed anyway; but it quickly became clear that not even knowing if they had a chance would drive everyone slowly crazy. He and Jason talked about rigging up a simple transmitter-receiver that they could launch on a tether and communicate with by wire to test the ship’s receivers and see if a beacon signal was being emitted. But Robin, looking livelier now, his arm strapped comfortably and doing well, reverted to his habit of spotting the obvious that had been missed. “Couldn’t somebody be let out and just do it in a suit?”
Of course, that was the way to do it. And with Joe resigning himself to the position of driver and galley steward in this operation, the natural choice of who should go fell upon Keene.
Joe helped Keene put on one of the three EVA suits that the shuttle carried as a normal complement, and Keene squeezed into the narrow entry space inside the main hatch, which was fitted with an inner door to serve the double function of acting as a lock. Joe pressured the chamber down and opened the hatch from the flight deck. Keene rechecked the tether attached to his harness, its mounting, and the straps holding the test set that he would use in addition to the suit radio. Then he shoved himself through, orienting to align the gas thruster on his backpack. Moments later he was coasting away, turning to watch the distance steadily increasing between him and the vessel, apparently motionless in space. It looked a lot more scarred and battle-weary than he had imagined.
“Hello, Joe? This is Lan, testing. Anybody there? . . . Lan Keene to ship. Hello, Joe, are you reading? . . .” Nothing. He flipped on the portable unit that he had brought and tried the first frequency they had set. “Jason, are you reading? . . . Come in, ship. This is Lan, out on the line.” Silence. He tried the other frequencies, ship standby, and emergency bands. Still the same. Worried now, Keene raised the forearm carrying the suit controls and switched to the wire circuit. “Joe, can you hear me?”
“Nice and loud, Lan. How are we doing?”
“Not good. I’ve been trying you and Jason on all the channels. You didn’t get anything?”
“Negative. . . .” There was a pause. “Jason says he was tuned all the while. Not a thing.”
“I don’t like this, Joe.”
“Me neither. Have you tried the beacon yet?”
“I’m just about to now.” Keene looked down and switched the portable unit to receive mode. He realized then that his chest was pounding. His breathing was shaky in his helmet, the clothes next to his body clammy with perspiration; his mouth and throat had gone dry. In the next few seconds he might find out that they were all destined to die out here. He selected one of the Kronians’ homing settings and plugged an audio decode connection into one of the suit circuit’s external jacks. . . . And a moment later, he was shouting out aloud in a relief that was almost crushing.
“YEAH! . . . OH, YOU BEAUTIFUL, BEAUTIFUL SHIP! I COULD MARRY YOU, YOU BATTERED PIECE OF BEAT-UP JUNK!”
The tone was coming through clear and strong in his helmet. It was the sweetest music he had ever listened to.
“Lan? . . . We’re okay?” Joe’s voice inquired, sounding a little unsure.
Keene nodded to himself, feeling drops of perspiration run off his head. “We’re okay, Joe. The receivers might be out, but the beacon’s singing. We’re getting out of here, Joe. They’re going to be coming for us.”
“Yeah, well, that’s great.” Joe didn’t seem fully to have absorbed it yet. “Lan, don’t do that to me again.”
They reeled him back in, still ecstatic and intoxicated by the sight of the stars, and for a few minutes with the weight of what had befallen Earth actually gone from his mind. It was only when he was almost at the hatch and about to guide himself in that his thoughts went back to the radar display he had watched at Vandenberg of the blip closing in toward the Osiris. The connection had been lost before they’d had a chance to be sure that the unharmed craft really was the Boxcar as Keene had assumed. If he was wrong, then none of the Kronians would ever have arrived at the Osiris to tell their story of Keene’s last-moment change of plan; and whether the shuttle was transmitting a signal or not wouldn’t make very much difference, since with Idorf and his ship long ago seized, nobody would be looking for it.
The grim set that the thought imparted to Keene’s face must still have been in evidence when he emerged through the inner door into the cabin, and Jason helped him off with his helmet.
“What’s the matter, Lan?” Vicki asked. “Joe said everything was all right. You look as if there’s bad news.”
Keene looked around at their apprehensive faces, the silent pleas to be reassured. He couldn’t dump this latest doubt on them now, he decided. But neither could he lie to them. There had to be some bad news.
“I didn’t realize how much you all stank,” he told them instead.
They turned off all the unessential electronics, wound the environmental control and air recirculation down to minimum, and made do with just the dim emergency light in the cabin. Keene surreptitiously increased a little the carbon dioxide level that the monitors would set to. It would relieve the load on the system and make people drowsy, passing the time more easily, lowering their oxygen consumption, and making them less likely to vent their anxiety in querulousness. All the same, Legermount tossed and fidgeted until it seemed he would start dismantling the ship with his hands, just to find something to occupy himself. Reynolds was just the opposite, calm and accepting in his belief that all was in the hands of a higher, wiser power.
Mitch and Cavan talked idly about military affairs and the old days, not realizing how much it sometimes affected the others, and wondered what the future might be for their line of business on Kronia. Dash revealed a literary bent and began composing a detailed account of all he could recall, at first using any scrap of paper that came to hand, later getting Keene’s okay to transfer to an on-board laptop whose drain wouldn’t make a lot of difference to anything. When Dash wasn’t writing, Jason and Joe would take the laptop forward to the flight-deck seats and play chess. Colby went off into long excursions of thought that resulted in few revelations, returning periodically to use the laptop for notes of his own that he was compiling, or to quiz Keene about workings of the ship that aroused his curiosity. He also attempted to entertain Robin with a variety of coin, card, and pocket-item tricks, none of which would work. Colby’s explanation was that he’d never realized how much they depended on gravity.
Vicki and Alicia talked about science, history, life in America and in Poland, and personal reminiscences involving Keene and Cavan. Charlie and Cynthia continued getting to know one another, making an effort to forget the lives that were gone and swapping stories about Kronia as if deliberately rejecting any possibility that they might not be on the threshold of new lives about to begin. Charlie was also intrigued by Robin’s novel thoughts on such things as planetary evolution and biological origins, and they talked about the Venus encounter, the Joktanian discoveries of humans who had lived beneath a sky dominated by Saturn, and the science that would have to be rewritten.
“I was just starting to get to know a planetary scientist in Houston when . . . you know, it happened,” Robin said. “His name was Salio. He said the whole time scale that all the books teach was much too long-that it had been invented that way to justify theories that don’t hold up anyway. Everything happens much more quickly. It’s all going to have to be rethought. Is that what you think?”
“Well, I never thought about it much at all until the last few days,” Charlie answered. “But you saw how it happened: new oceans starting to open up, mountain chains lifting while we watched! And it must have gotten even worse after Athena closed in and we lost track. But the information that we’ve got will be keeping scientists busy for years. You saw how those lava sheets were pouring up out of the rifts in those last images?”
“Yes.” Robin shuddered at having to remember.
“I’ve been thinking about them ever since. There were huge electrical discharges going on between Athena and Earth all the time the sheets were spreading. I figure that’s what could have caused the magnetic stripe patterns on the old sea beds. The conventional line is that they were written over millions of years by unexplained reversals in the Earth’s field. Well, maybe it didn’t take millions of years at all. Maybe it was just days!”
Vicki was listening, looking skeptical. “Could it have cooled quickly enough in that short a time?” she asked dubiously.
“We don’t know what was going on down there under all that cloud,” Charlie pointed out. “Hundreds of feet of ocean had been boiled into the atmosphere. Suppose that under the smoke cover it precipitated out again as ice. Maybe that could cool a surface skin sufficiently to retain magnetism. I don’t know. I haven’t analyzed the numbers yet.”
Keene clipped to an anchor line on the wall and stretched out to rest, tired of following it all. Or was it the carbon dioxide level? He looked around the cabin and yawned. Most of the others were settling down except Dash, who was busy with his narrative, and Cavan and Alicia up front, talking in low voices. . . . And an irritating clanging that he’d just noticed.
It stopped for a few seconds, then started again.
“Is that you, Legermount?” Keene grumbled irritably. “Stop rattling the cage. We’re trying to settle down.”
“It’s not him this time. He’s out of it,” Reynolds’s voice mumbled.
“Then what?” Keene straightened away from the wall, alert suddenly.
Colby turned and showed his empty palms. “It’s not me.” Joe looked up from something he had been fiddling with close to one of the lights and shook his head.
It came again: Clang, clang, clang. . . . Clang, clang, clang. . . .
Keene’s head jerked around sharply. There was nobody in the direction that it was coming from. . . . Just the entry hatch. His and Joe’s eyes met for a second.
“Oh my God!” Joe whispered. He tore free from his anchor line and hurled himself forward to the flight deck section with Keene following.
“Hallelujah!” Reynolds murmured.
Cavan and Alicia were already moving out of the crew positions to make room. Joe’s trembling fingers raced over the touchpad to activate the imagers; Keene powered up the controls for the external cameras. A screen came to life showing a drifting starfield as the shuttle turned. Keene rotated the camera outward to get the view abeam of the ship. And, slowly, the most beautiful sight he had ever seen moved into the frame: one of the Osiris’s surface landers riding parallel perhaps half a mile off.
“It’s them! They’re here! That’s them banging on the door!” he heard himself shouting. Joe brought up the lights. Within seconds, everyone in the cabin was shouting and hugging, laughing and crying. Keene grabbed one of the rifles, which for some reason they had brought aboard, and hauled himself into the entry space behind the hatch. Thunk, thunk, thunk.
Joe had a camera trained along the outside of the shuttle’s hull. Two figures in bulky, Kronian-style suits were outside the hatch, one poised to beat the surface again with a metal hand tool, the other holding the end of some kind of tube pressed to the hull. Keene beat against the ribbed inner surface of the door again. Thunk, thunk, thunk. On the screen, the figure with the tube started making excited gestures and pointing at the ship. The other leaned forward.
Clang, clang, clang sounded from outside the hatch.
Keene responded deliriously. Thunk, thunk, thunk . . . thunk, thunk, thunk . . . thunk, thunk, thunk . . .
The lander moved in to make a docking connection, and the fourteen exhausted survivors from the shuttle were transferred over. The two Kronians who had come across were Sariena and Thorel, the engineer from the Osiris’s crew. Sariena had wanted to be one of the first to greet them if they were found.
Kronia was sending all the help that could be mobilized. In the meantime, the Osiris had been searching the vicinity for days. A number of other ships from Earth had also managed to get away, and the Osiris had collected a full complement to take back. The shuttle that Keene had been hoping to organize when last heard of was the last it could afford to wait for. Idorf had been ready to give up, but Gallian wouldn’t hear of it.
Events after the launch of the Boxcar from Vandenberg had been as Keene deduced. A second, mysterious ship had inserted itself ahead of the Boxcar as it closed, transmitting fake signals claiming to be the Boxcar pursued by a would-be attacker attempting to use it as a shield. Keene’s on-the-spot guess of which one to fire on had been correct. On a sadder note, after all the heroic effort that had been put in, the second Boxcar sent up from Vandenberg later had never been seen. Just one more tragedy among the billions.
Thirty minutes later, the Kronian vessel detached and drew away under a mild nudge from an auxiliary thruster. On a screen inside, Keene looked at the empty, silent hulk turning slowly in the sunlight, presenting on its side the last, scarred rendering he would probably ever see of the Amspace Corporation logo.
The lander’s main engine fired, and the craft pulled away into a curve that would take it to the waiting Osiris.
FURTHER READING
The scientific ideas in this book are based largely on the work of Immanuel Velikovsky (1895-1979). Many readers of the hardback have asked where they might learn more on this background, or catastrophist views in general. The following sources would provide some good starting material.
(1) Immanuel Velikovsky’s three major works:
Worlds in Collision, 1950
The book that started the whole controversy, identifying the comet of the Exodus as Venus, originating from Jupiter.
Ages in Chaos, 1952
Reexamining ancient history in the light of catastrophic events.
Earth in Upheaval, 1955
The evidence written into the Earth’s geological and biological records.
All available from Buccaneer Books, POB 168, Cutchogue, NY 11935
(2) Carl Sagan and Immanuel Velikovsky, by Charles Ginenthal, 1995
Over 400 pages presenting findings from space missions and other sources that are consistent with Velikovsky’s claims, while contradicting the experts who vilified him. Available from:
New Falcon Publications
1739 East Broadway
Tempe, AZ 85282
Tel: 602-708-1409
(3) Velikovsky and Establishment Science
A comprehensive rejoinder to the publication Scientists Confront Velikovsky, which followed the 1974 AAAS conference. What really went on, earning Velikovsky a standing ovation that the media didn’t mention. 144pp. Available from:
Lewis Greenberg
226 Richmond C
Deerfield Beach, FL 33442
(4) The Velikovkian
A journal dedicated to studies of the evidence for global catastrophes in human times, along with such related issues as the ancient historic record, evolution and extinction, the dynamics of the Solar System, methods of chronology and dating. Normally 4 issues per year of typically 100-120 pp. each, with occasional special-topic issues. Editor-in-Chief: Charles Ginenthal.
Some titles from recent issues include:
“Comparing Magnetic Fields: Neptune and Uranus,” by Charles Ginenthal
“Velikovsky’s ‘The Dark Age of Greece,’ ” by Clark Whelton
“Puzzles of Prehistory,” by Roger W. Wescott
“Revisiting Venus’s Heat,” by George R. Talbott
“The Emerging Revision of Ancient History: Recent Research,” by Martin Sieff
“The Origin of Craters on the Moon and Large Lunar Boulders,” by Charles Ginenthal
“Thales: The First Astronomer,” by William Mullen
“Ocean Sediments, Circimpolar Muck, Erratics, Buried Forests, and Loess as Evidence of Global Floods,” by Charles Ginenthal
“Phobos and Deimos,” by Lynn R. Rose
“Shattering the Myths of Darwinism,” by Richard Milton
“The Relevance of the Velikovsky Scenario to the Homeric Question,” by Hugo Meynell
Send inquiries to:
Charles Ginenthal
Ivy Press
65-35 108th St.
Forest Hill, NY 11375
Tel: 718-897-2403
(5) Aeon
A journal of myth, science, and ancient history, frequently exploring theories of different early Solar System configurations.
Information at: http://www.ames.net/AEON/
or from:
Ev Cochrane
601 Hayward
Ames, IA 50014
e-mail ev.cochrane@ames.net
(6) Society For Interdisciplinary Studies
Biannual catastrophist journal providing articles and papers on a wide range of related topics, books sources and reviews, and digest of Internet coverage.
Send inquiries to:
The Membership Secretary
Society for Interdisciplinary Studies
10 Witley Green
Darley Heights
Stopsle, Beds LU2 8TR
U.K.
Web: http://www.knowledge.co.uk/xxx/cat/sis
E-mail: SIS@knowledge.co.uk
James P. Hogan is a science fiction writer in the grand tradition, combining informed and accurate speculation from the cutting edge of science and technology with suspenseful storytelling and living, breathing characters.
Born in London in 1941, he worked as an aeronautical engineer specializing in electronics and digital systems, and for several major computer firms including DEC, before turning to writing full-time in 1979. His first novel was greeted by Isaac Asimov with the rave, “Pure science fiction . . . Arthur Clarke, move over!” and his subsequent work quickly consolidated his reputation as a major SF author.
He has written over a dozen novels, including Paths to Otherwhere and Bug Park (both Baen), the New York Times bestsellers The Proteus Operation and Endgame Enigma (both available from Baen), the “Giants” series (Del Rey), and the Prometheus Award Winner The Multiplex Man (now in a new Baen edition). Hogan currently splits his time between residences in Ireland and Florida.