“What is?”
“The pull of this place — it’s spreading. The guys from ORTUS felt it yesterday at Al-Hillah, these guys felt it today in Baghdad.” She looked up and scanned the horizon all around, thinking of the whole world that lay beyond it. “We should get ready for more people,” she said. “Lots more.”
58
It was early afternoon by the time Franklin and Shepherd finally eased onto I-26, going northwest into a flurry of fine snow that drifted out of a light fog. The traffic was solid heading into Charleston, a three-lane parking lot, inching its way into the city. The outbound lanes were almost empty.
Franklin drove. Shepherd sat in the passenger seat, studying a series of maps he’d borrowed from the highway patrolman who’d “loaned” them his Dodge Durango with about as much grace as someone handing over a personal credit card, pointing to a mall and saying, “Knock yourself out.” For the first twenty minutes or so the only sound was the rumbling of thick wheels on blacktop, and the occasional rustle of paper as Shepherd unfolded the maps one by one and studied them. They were topographical maps showing the border region between South Carolina and North Carolina, with the Smoky Mountains rising up in the west. His finger traced each winding track, searching for a road he had traveled only once before, nearly twenty years previously.
“Find what you were looking for?” Franklin asked from the driver’s seat.
Shepherd stared out at the whiteness, the road disappearing into the fog within fifty yards either way so that it felt like they were moving but not going anywhere. “Hard to tell from these maps,” he said. “Guess I need to be there and see what looks familiar.”
“You won’t be seeing much if this fog doesn’t lift. The snow will make everything look different too.”
Shepherd wondered if this was all a waste of time. “We could always turn around and head back, follow one of our many other leads,” he said.
Franklin chuckled. “Man, you sure got cynical awful quick — normally takes a couple of years in a field office to wear the shine off a new agent.”
Shepherd said nothing. He kept thinking about the photograph of the dead woman and imagining how he would have felt if it had been his Melisa lying there instead. He could almost feel the pull of the laptop in the footwell behind his seat, taunting him with the knowledge it contained. It was the danger that came with allowing something to become the single pulse of your life: it drove you, gave you focus and purpose, but it could also derail you the moment it was no longer there. Melisa had been the light that lured him out of the darkness. He closed his eyes, and found himself back in the women’s shelter attached to the place where he had washed up. Melisa was doing her thing, helping some poor woman who was not much more than a kid herself deliver a baby. The woman was Chinese and when the baby was finally born, wriggling and mewling into the world, Melisa whispered something to him: “Do you see them?”
She often did that, asked a question that made you ask one back.
“See what?”
“The threads. The Chinese believe that when a baby is born, invisible red threads shoot out and find their way to all the people they will connect with in their life. And no matter how tangled up they get as they grow, those threads never break, so they will always end up finding their way to the people they were destined to meet.”
He imagined those threads now, connecting him to Melisa, twisting through the air and pulsing like veins.
“That thing you said back there,” Franklin’s voice rumbled like the tires, low and serious. “The thing about something heading toward earth, you think that’s a possibility?”
Shepherd opened his eyes and realized he must have been dozing. They were in flat country now, hardly any buildings, hardly any sign of life apart from the odd car heading in the other direction toward Charleston. “Statistically speaking it’s possible.”
“So how come other telescopes haven’t seen it?”
“Hubble can see farther than anything else on earth.”
“Okay, but presumably anything far enough out that only Hubble could see would take millions of years to get here.”
“Not necessarily. There are a lot of theoretical objects in space, physics-defying things that we can imagine but have not been able to find or measure. One of them is known as a dark star. It has huge mass and travels at or near the speed of light. If one of these things was coming straight at us then the light from it would only just outrun the object. We wouldn’t know anything about it beforehand, not until it was about to hit because the object would arrive at almost the same time as the light, like it had just appeared as if from out of nowhere.”
Franklin stared ahead at the road. “Okay, say, for argument’s sake, one of these dark stars is heading our way, would that explain all this stuff that’s going on: the ships, the soldiers, the people heading home?”
“It’s possible. We can see the effect the moon has on the sea, and humans are sixty percent water, our brains are nearer seventy-five percent, so it stands to reason the moon must have some effect on us too.”
“That’s for sure. If you ever work a midnight shift at a hospital or a police precinct during a full moon you’ll know it’s true. Everyone goes nuts.”
“And the moon is only one tiny object. Imagine what effect a massive star would have on us all. We’re all related to each other on an atomic level — you, me, the car, the stars — we’re all made of the same stuff.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean the atomic building blocks that make up you and me are the same ones that burn at the heart of stars, and all of it came from the same place. Around fourteen billion years ago the universe was born. It started out as something called the point of singularity, smaller than a subatomic particle, incredibly dense and incredibly hot. Every single thing that is now in the universe exploded out from it and began to cool as it expanded, forming the protons, neutrons and electrons that, over time, became atoms and eventually elements. The first element was hydrogen. Most of the atoms in the human body are hydrogen. These elements then started to coalesce into huge clouds that slowly condensed to form stars and galaxies. Then heavier elements began to be synthesized inside stars and in supernovae when they died. One of these was carbon, the essential building block of all organic life forms. And this process is still happening throughout the still-expanding universe. Things are born. Things get torn apart. And the elements of those dead things become something else. Nothing lasts forever, but nothing ever entirely disappears either. It just becomes something else.”
The sound of the tires rumbled through the silence that followed. Outside, the white, frozen countryside continued to slip by. The interstate was practically empty now. From time to time a building or a sign would loom out of the fog, giving variation to the otherwise flat white landscape, but most of the time they might just as well have been driving along in a huge hamster wheel — always moving but getting nowhere. It was a fair visual representation of the limbo Shepherd was feeling, halfway between something and nothing, with no real concept of either. Maybe the world had already ended and this was purgatory, driving through the fog forever with Franklin at the wheel, never knowing what had happened or whether they could have done anything to stop it.
A ticking sound punctuated the silence as Franklin hit the indicators and started to ease off the highway onto a side road. “Just taking a little shortcut,” he said. “We need some gas and a bite. There’s a town up here.”
Shepherd looked down at the map, following the line of the road they had just taken until it stopped at a dot of a town called St. Matthews. “We could have gotten gas and food on the interstate. This is going out of our way.”