Forrest held up a finger, banishing the thought. “You never talked me into anything I didn’t wanna do. Monica knows that. She’s no more angry with you than she is me. Who she’s really pissed at is him.” He pointed up at the ceiling.
Ulrich looked at his boots. “Wanna cash it in?” he said suddenly. “We can give the silo to the trio and go to Montana. Erin will agree to it, Taylor too probably. Hell, those women were all thick as thieves at one time… and they miss Monica.”
Forrest smiled wanly at his friend, knowing the offer was genuine. “Even if Monica wanted the company—which she doesn’t—there’s no way I’m letting any of your wives die if I don’t have to. One’s enough.” He crushed out the cigarette in the sink. “I’m gonna go bring the rest of that shit in. I picked up some new office chairs too, by the way, since that request seems to have gone in one ear and out the other.”
“Yeah, I don’t have enough shit to buy without having to worry about your creature comforts.”
“And there’s a lot of assembly required,” Forrest added with a chuckle, “so get the Dynamic Duo to put ’em together in the morning.” He took Laddie outside with him, and the moment he was gone, Danzig reappeared in the kitchen doorway with Oscar Vasquez. Marcus Kane was asleep in the silo below.
“Is he okay?” Danzig asked.
Ulrich tipped his beer and looked at them. “You know who’s gonna have to police up all that dog shit, don’t you? He sure as hell isn’t gonna do it.”
Vasquez grinned. “And that dog’s shit is gonna be biiig, vato.”
Danzig laughed, both of them cracking up at the look appearing on Ulrich’s face.
“Since you two dickheads are up,” he said, dropping his feet to the floor, “we just got some new office chairs that need—”
Both Danzig and Vasquez vanished instantly.
“That’s what I thought!” he called after them, taking another swig and muttering to himself. “Just what we need, the lingering odor of dog shit in those tunnels.”
Seven
Harold Shipman came down the hall outside of his office at the Gemini Observatory in Hawaii to find Ester Thorn seated in a chair against the wall, her hand propped on her cane, overnight bag on the floor beside her. “Ester?” he said. “My God, what a surprise! How have you been?”
Ester took his hand and used her cane to push herself to her feet. “I’ve been well enough,” she said grimly, tired from her long flight over the Pacific. “But I’m afraid I come as a harbinger of bad things to come, Harold. May we talk privately?”
“Yes, of course,” Shipman said, puzzled but amused to see that Ester had barely changed since the last time he’d seen her nearly ten years before, when she was his senior at the observatory. “You should’ve called, Ester. I could have made arrangements.”
“There’s time enough for arrangements,” she muttered, watching him put his key into the door.
Shipman took up her bag and allowed her to precede him into the cluttered office that had once been hers, inviting her to sit across from him in one of the two chairs before his desk.
“So what in the world brings you all this way?” he asked.
“Thor’s Hammer,” she said, her old gray eyes unblinking as she allowed the silence to gather.
Shipman did not immediately respond, although he knew exactly what Ester meant, remembering well her vehement assertions that the industrialized governments of the world ignored the dangers of near Earth objects at the peril of all humankind. “Yes,” he said. “Well, it’s still out there somewhere, we all know that, but I’m afraid with all of the cutbacks and—”
“Would you like to see it, Harold?”
He went slack in the jaw. “Excuse me?”
“It’s coming out of Ursa Minor,” she said, referring to the northernmost constellation, often referred to as the Little Dipper.
Shipman turned in his chair, grabbing a chart of the heavens from a nearby table piled high with charts and texts. “Who’s spotted it?”
“A young astronomer from Mesa Station. Martin Chittenden. Ever heard of him?”
“I recognize the name,” he said, flipping through the chart. “I think I may have read something of his a while back in Astronomy Today. Something on deep space asteroids. Lots of conjecture. If I remember correctly, he thinks we’re not paying enough attention to empty space.”
“Turns out we haven’t been,” she said, her expression tightening along with the grip on her cane.
“Ester, what’s going on? Are you telling me we’re actually going to be hit?”
“We’ve got about eighty days to impact.”
“Eighty days? How big is it?”
“Three point two kilometers.”
“My God!”
“And it’s coming at us so fast it’ll make your eyeballs roll.”
“But that just can’t be,” he said, scanning the same chart he’d seen thousands of times. “There’s nothing out there, Ester. You know that.”
“It’s coming from the Great Beyond, and it’s maybe as old as the Earth.”
He turned the chart on the desk for her to see. “Show me where.”
She used the tip of her cane to indicate the northernmost star in the sky. “The brightness of Polaris has probably helped to keep it hidden all these years. Like the Red Baron coming out of the sun.”
“Thor’s Hammer,” he muttered. “I take it you’ve seen this creature for yourself?”
She shook her head.
“Well, then how do you know it’s even—”
“The night he came to ask for my help in taking it public, he was abducted from my front lawn by two federal agents. They shot the boy in the back with a Taser gun, Harold.”
“They’re trying to keep it a secret, for Christ’s sake? It’ll never work!”
“That’s not stopping the cowardly bastards from trying.”
“Well, we sure as hell won’t stand for that,” Shipman said. “Not if this fellow knows what the devil he’s talking about. I’ll turn the dome tonight and we’ll just have a look for ourselves. Though it could take weeks to come up with an orbital model that will prove our case.”
“All we need are preliminary estimates,” Ester said. “And those we can come up with in a few days, enough to get everyone on Earth with a telescope looking toward Polaris. Getting word out isn’t going to be the problem. The problem will be in prepping these islands.”
“Prepping the Hawaiians? For tsunamis? Where does Chittenden think it will hit?”
“North America. He’s seems fairly certain of that. So it’s not so much a tsunami of water I’m worried about. Once word gets out that the mainland is under the gun…”
“People will flock here by the thousands. We’ll be overrun,” Shipman concluded.
“That’s right. So I think we need to get the governor’s ear as quickly as possible. Do you know anyone in the local government?”
“I play golf with the mayor of Honolulu.”
“Perfect. I think it’s important that the Islands prepare to quarantine themselves. That might take some convincing at first, but once the insanity begins…” She shrugged. “Desperate times seem to precipitate their own desperate measures.”
“This explains a few things,” he muttered, sitting back in his chair and taking his pipe from a side drawer. “NASA’s been cutting funding across the board and suggesting all sorts of odd things for everyone to look at out there. Even the GLAST telescope has been kept aimed in almost the opposite direction over the past five months or so.”
“During my flight I was wondering about that new satellite program that was fast-tracked out of nowhere. The timing is too close. It has to be related. I’m even doubting they’re satellites.”