“Have you been crying, Daddy?” Marty asked.
Arthur said nothing, simply staring between them.
“We’re a team, aren’t we, honey?” Francine said, hugging him and gesturing for Marty to come. The boy was not of an age to be enthusiastic about physical affection, but he came and Arthur knelt, one arm around Francine’s waist, one arm wrapped around his son.
“We sure are,” he said.
What he received, in the way of messages, was a peculiar shorthand unlike anything he had ever experienced before. The flow of information came as truncated visuals, bits of spoken conversations (sometimes delivered by separate and identifiable voices, sometimes monotoned or not auditory at all), and as often as not, simply as memories. He could not remember receiving the memories, but they were there, and they informed his planning and action.
By that evening, as he lay in bed again beside his wife, as yet more rain pattered gently on the roof and windows, he knew that;
Lehrman, McClennan, and Rotterjack had formed a delegation to inform the President of the destruction of the Furnace bogey. (Lehrman was one of the Possessed.)
The President had listened to the information, delivered largely by Rotterjack, and had said nothing, simply shaking his head and gesturing for them to leave.
He saw:
A Soviet vacationer from Samarkand (Arthur did not know whether male or female) watching a conifer forest burn in the Zerafshan Mountains, sending thick white walls of smoke over the craggy alpine ridges.
Large sections of New York (Queens and the Bronx), Chicago, and New Orleans on fire, with no sign of the blazes being brought under control. Much of Tokyo had been leveled by four major fires in the past week. Half of Beijing had been consumed by fire following an apparently natural earthquake.
Lying awake, not knowing whether Francine was asleep or simply lying still, Arthur received these memories that were not his, and made decisions about his family’s immediate future.
Wherever he went, they would go with him; their unity was far more important than any home or security. In approximately a month, they would remove Marty from school and travel together.
He would soon be called to Seattle. From there, he would work his way down the Pacific coast to San Francisco, performing his duties along the way. Apparently, most of his work would consist of gathering records of culture — documents, music, films, whatever was on a list that would be fed to him a section at a time. The decisions as to what should go on this list were being made by others on the network. And who does the choosing?
He had again the nightmare thought:
The Possessed are simply being used. There are no saviors. There are only plunderers, and they use us as slaves to loot the Earth of all they can carry away.
How many were Possessed now?
Ten thousand.
A round number, growing larger each day.
And room on the arks for as few as two thousand.
If he was chosen, he decided, and Marty and Francine were not, he would stay. He would refuse. Won’t I? And that was the worst nightmare thought of all. Arthur could not be sure that when the time came, given the opportunity denied to his wife and son, he would not leave them.
I can stay. I will stay.
“Are they talking to you?” Francine rolled over in the dark and faced him. He smiled at her and pulled her close.
“No,” he said. “Not right now.”
“Where are the spiders?”
“In their box.” He had taken a wooden box and given the spiders a home on the upper shelf of the office closet. Neither of the spiders had moved for days.
“What kind of people do they need?”
“I have no idea,” Arthur answered.
“Do you remember that night, when Grant and Danielle and Becky were visiting, and Chris Riley called…To tell you about Europa?”
He nodded.
“I was really afraid then. I don’t know why. I knew it was far away.”
Arthur saw Europa boiling, great chunks of ice flashing into linear rays of steam, other chunks lifting away, and beneath it all, a spreading, perfectly smooth sphere of light, as white and pearly as parachute silk and bright as the sun, pushing the ice and steam out into space…
“What really happened to Europa?” she asked.
“I think our friends…our…friends, ate it,” he said. “Turned it into more of their own spacecraft.” And the huge chunks of ice, sent inward to Mars and Venus? No images or memories explained them.
“Then I shouldn’t have been afraid.”
“Oh, yes,” Arthur said. “You were right to be afraid. You knew before I did.”
She nodded in agreement, “I did, didn’t I? What does that make me? Psychic?”
She was talking just to be talking. He knew that, and he didn’t mind; her words soothed him.
“A woman,” he said.
“How quaint.”
He grinned against her hair and kissed her.
“It’s funny, but in all of this, I’ve been thinking of you and Marty, and…my book. The Huns and Mongols and Scythians and Indo-Europeans…All those people and my book. I’ll never get it finished.”
“Don’t be so sure,” he said, but it hurt him to say it.
“Do you think these probes are like the hordes? Migrating, ravaging, pushed on by famine or overpopulation?”
“No,” he said. “It’s a big galaxy. We’ve seen nothing like that.” But would we know where and how to look?
“Why are they doing it, then?” she asked.
“You listened to Harry’s tape.”
“I’m not sure I understood it.”
“You understand it as well as I do,” Arthur said, squeezing her shoulders.
Long dark shape, a single needle, pointing at Europa’s heart, the rocky core, wrapping long collecting fields around the ice and steam, gathering it in, paring away the hydrogen atoms from the oxygen, fusing them. Piercing the core…
And again, no more.
“Have you decided yet?” Francine asked softly.
“Decided what?”
“Marty asked this morning…”
“I thought I’d made that clear.”
“I just need to be told again.”
“Yes. We’re staying together. I’m taking you both with me, wherever I go.”
“Good,” she said.
Francine finally slept, but Arthur did not. He was haunted by his “memory” — Lehrman’s, actually — of the expression on the President’s face.
Do you believe in God?
I believe in punishment.
The Los Angeles Electronic Times, unsigned editorial in the Opinion Track, January 10, 1997:
The news of the Death Valley anomaly’s destruction has spread around the world like a shock wave. At first, we have exulted — a blow struck against the enemy. But the bullets still rumble through the Earth’s interior. The anomaly in Australia is still intact. Rumors of a Russian anomaly are rampant. The Earth is still besieged. The opinion of a well-known science fiction writer, expressed on a late night talk show, has rapidly become public dogma; that these “bullets” are superdense capsules of neutron matter and antimatter, destined to meet at the Earth’s center and destroy us all .We have no way of knowing the truth of this. It seems clear, however, that there is little we can do, and however irrationally, our hope fades fast.
50
Walt Samshow took his sandwich out on the starboard wing of the bridge of the Glomar Discoverer and stared down at the bow wave and the sullen blue-black ocean as he ate. They had left Pearl Harbor the morning of the day before, zigzagging across the ocean in search of atmospheric oxygen concentrations above the Molokai Fracture.