Rogers agreed. The two returned to their LearFan Special and the plane’s counterrotating props began to spin again, with eerie softness. Rogers returned to his truck and drove away from the airport as the plane whined into the blackness and silence of the overcast night.
Around the bogus cinder cone, for a distance of several hundred yards, soldiers patrolled well-lighted squares of the desert in Jeeps and on foot. Beyond the patrols and the fences, a mile from the object of their interest, the civilians gathered in trucks and vans and motor homes. Even this late, almost into the morning, campfires burned in the middle of wide circles of mesmerized watchers. Raucous laughter in one area was countered by gospel singing in another. Rogers, maneuvering his truck down the fenced approach corridor to the site, wondered if they would ever sleep.
39
Two o’clock in the morning, the phone beside their bed rang, and Arthur came awake immediately, leaning forward to pick up the receiver. It was Ithaca Feinman. She was calling from a hospital in Los Angeles.
“He’s going fast,” she said softly.
“So soon?”
“I know. He says he’s fighting, but…”
“I’ll leave…” He looked at his watch. “This morning. I can be down there by eight or nine, maybe earlier.”
“He says he’s sorry, but he wants you here,” Ithaca said.
“I’m on my way.”
He hung up and wandered into the living room to look for Francine, who said she had not been asleep, but had been sitting on the living room couch with Gauge’s head in her lap, worrying about something, she wasn’t sure what.
“Harry’s going, or at least Ithaca thinks so.”
“Oh, God,” Francine said. “You’re flying down there?”
“Yes.”
She swallowed hard. “Go see him. Say…Say goodbye for me if he’s really…Oh, Arthur.” Her voice was a trembling whisper. “This is an awful time, isn’t it?”
He was nearly in tears. “We’ll make it through,” he said.
As Francine folded some shirts and pants for him, he slipped his toiletries into a suitcase and called the airport to book a flight for six-thirty. For a few seconds, dithering in the yellow light of the bedside lamp, he tried to gather his wits, remember if he had left anything behind, if there was anybody else he should notify.
Francine drove him to the airport. “Come back soon,” she said, then, realizing the double implication, she shook her head. “Our love to Ithaca and Harry. I’ll miss you.”
They hugged, and she drove off to get Marty ready for school.
At this hour, the airport was almost deserted. Arthur sat in the sterile black and gray waiting area near his gate, reading a discarded newspaper. He glanced at his watch, and then looked up to see a thin, nervous-looking woman, hardly more than a girl, standing a few feet away, staring at him. “I hope you don’t mind,” she said.
“Beg pardon?”
“I followed you from your house. You’re Arthur Gordon, aren’t you?”
Arthur narrowed his eyes, puzzled. He didn’t answer.
“I know you are. I’ve been watching your house. I know that sounds terrible, but I have. There’s something I have to give you. It’s very important.” She opened the shopping bag and took out a cardboard box large enough to hold a baseball. “Please don’t be alarmed. It’s not a bomb or anything. I showed it to the airport security people. They think it’s a toy, a Japanese toy for my cousin. But it’s for you.” She held out the box.
Arthur looked her over carefully, then said,
“Open it for me, please.” He seemed to be operating on some automatic program, cautious and calm at once. He hadn’t given much thought to assassination attempts before, but he could be a likely target for Forge of Godders or anybody tipped over the edge by the news of the last few weeks.
“All right.” She opened the box and removed an ovoid object, steel or silver, brightly polished. She held it out to him. “Please. It’s important.”
With some reluctance — it did resemble a toy more than anything sinister — he took the object. Quickly, it unfolded its legs, gripped his palm, and before he could react, nipped him on the fleshy part of the thumb. He stood up and tried to fling it away, swearing, but it would not let go. Warmth spread quickly up his arm and he sat down again, face pale, lips drawn back. The young woman retreated, shaking her head and crying. “It’s important,” she said. “It really is.”
“All right,” Arthur said, more calm on the exterior than deep in his mind. The spider crawled into his suit coat, cut through the fabric of his shirt, and nipped him again on the abdomen.
The woman walked off quickly. He paid her little attention.
By boarding time, he was beginning to receive information, slowly at first. On the aircraft, as he pretended to nap, the information became more detailed, and his fear subsided.
40
Hicks had stayed in Washington, hoping with a kind of desperate hope that there was still something he could do. The White House did not summon him. Beyond the occasional television interviews, fewer and fewer since the fiasco on Freefire, he was woefully unoccupied. His book had sold in a fresh spurt the past few weeks, but he had refused to discuss it with anybody. His publishers had given up on him.
He took long, cold walks in the snow, ranging a mile or more from the hotel in the gray midafternoons. The government was still paying his expenses; he was still ostensibly part of the task force, although nobody on the task force had talked with him since the President’s speech. Even after the extensive reports of explosions in the asteroids, he had been approached only by the press.
When he was not out walking, he sat in his room, dressed in an oatmeal-colored suit, his overcoat and rubbers laid out on the bed and the floor, staring at his image in the mirror above the desk. His eye tracked down slowly to the computer on the desktop, then to the blank television screen. He had never felt so useless, so between, in his life.
The phone rang, He stood and picked up the receiver. “Hello.”
“Is this Mr. Trevor Hicks?” a young male voice asked.
“Yes.”
“My name is Reuben Bordes. You don’t know me, but I’ve got a reason to see you.”
“Why? Who are you, Mr. Bordes?”
“I’m just a kid, actually, but my reason is good. I mean, I’m not dumb or crazy. I’m in the bus station right now.” The youth chuckled. “I went to a lot of trouble to find you. I went to the library and learned your publisher, and I called them, but they couldn’t give your address…you know.”
“Yes.”
“So I called them back a couple of days later, I couldn’t think of anything else to do, and said I was with the local television station, and we wanted to interview you. They wouldn’t give me your address even then. So I figured you might be staying in hotels, and I started calling hotels. I’ve been doing that all day. I think I got lucky.”
“Why do you need to talk to me?”
“I’m not a nut, Mr. Hicks. But I’ve had some odd things happen to me in the last week. I’ve got some information. I know somebody…well, who wants to get in touch with you,”
The lines in Hicks’s face deepened. “I don’t think it’s worth the bother, do you?” He started to put the phone down.
“Mr. Hicks, wait. Please listen and don’t hang up just yet. This is important. I’d have to come out to the hotel and find you if you hung up.”
Oh, Christ, Hicks thought.
“I’m being told something now, something important.” The youth didn’t speak for a few seconds. “All right. I got it now. The asteroids. There’s a battle, there was a battle going on out there. There’s this place called Europa, it’s a moon but not our own, isn’t it? That wasn’t a battle. We have friends coming. They needed the…what was it, water under the ice in Europa? For power. And the rock way under the water and ice. To make more…things. Not like the machines in Australia and Death Valley. Do you understand?”