“This is stupid,” Ava said. “We been here a really long time.”
“You only came with us once before,” Jason said, “but we’ve been here lots, waiting. So you can wait, too.”
“It ain’t my fault if Devil Stubbins needed me for more fucking tests!”
“Don’t use bad words,” Colin said.
“Will if I want to.”
“Luke doesn’t like it,” Jason said.
Ava looked from Colin to Luke. It was true that Luke didn’t like any kind of fighting or cursing. And it was also true that Ava liked Luke best, even though he was slow and Jason was their leader. Ava was always kind to Luke. Colin didn’t understand that but at least it was something good. He went back to watching the mouse hole.
And then he heard it. “Shhhh! She’s coming!”
All four children froze. Luke and Ava turned just their heads, their bodies still, in the direction of the noise. Jason followed their gaze. He couldn’t hear what Colin heard, the high screeeeee, but in another minute they all saw her.
The mommy mouse staggered from a bunch of dead leaves toward the hole. She fell down, got up, fell down again. Her brown fur—no long stripe on her back, she was just a regular mouse—was all weird, standing up in patches. She was really skinny. All at once her body started to shake hard as she kept making that awful noise: Screeeeeeeeee! And then she gave a huge shake and lay still.
Nobody spoke until Jason said, “I think she’d dead.”
Ava said, “I don’t see no blood.”
“Maybe she died of sickness,” Jason said.
Colin didn’t like that, because of Ms. Blake. What if she died, too? He stared at the dead mouse.
Luke burst into tears. “Without their mom, the baby mice will die!”
“No, they won’t,” Ava said. “We’ll take care of them. Don’t you cry, Luke.”
“We don’t know how to take care of baby mice,” Jason said.
Then Colin had an inspiration. “We’ll take them all to Grandma! She used to have mice at her work, she told me. She’ll know how to take care of the babies, and maybe she can even fix the mommy mouse!”
Jason stared at the corpse. “I don’t think so. It’s pretty dead.”
“Well, let’s bring it anyway.”
Luke said, “We haven’t got a box.”
“That’s okay,” Ava said. “We got clothes.” She pulled off her parka. It was pink, but the mommy mouse was a girl so that was okay.
“Don’t touch the mice!” Jason said. “Pick them up with clothes!”
Carefully, Ava scooped up the dead mouse with her parka.
Colin said, “We got to get the babies.” He started digging dirt away from the hole.
The babies were deeper than Colin thought, but they got them out. There were six, but two were already dead. Jason put the live ones in his parka and Colin put the dead two into his pockets, lifting them with brown leaves. Luke took off his parka and made Ava wear it. The baby mice kept on crying for their mother.
Colin really, really hoped that Grandma would know what to do.
It took Marianne almost a week to find Stubbins. First he was “off-site” at one of his companies. Then she’d “just missed him” at the mess. There was a warm cup of coffee in his office but no Stubbins. Finally she ran him to ground on the bridge of the Venture, where she was not supposed to be but Judy told the duty guard it was urgent that they see Mr. Stubbins stat. The guard knew that Judy was a scientist, and she’d put on her most intimidating look. They went aboard.
So this was the twin of the ship that had taken Noah away to the stars. Marianne was surprised all over again at how small it was. She’d always imagined the Deneb mother ship to be even larger than an aircraft carrier, but the Venture wouldn’t have filled a football field. A quarter of the interior was taken up by the shuttle bay, another quarter by storage. The drive machinery was encased in some sort of field that involved both quantum entanglement and dark energy. There may or may not have been an unknown version of wormholes connected to the star drive. That anybody would ride in this ship was an act of insane courage.
The rest of the Venture was divided into a small bridge at the bow and, behind it, a large living area. This contained partly unfinished seats, sleeping cubicles, kitchen, bathrooms, communications systems, none of which were specified in the plans. The basic machinery was Deneb but the fittings would be Terran. Marianne picked her way among crates, tools, and workmen listening to loud rock as they riveted.
Over the din Judy yelled, “You asked once if I’d go? In a New York minute. But my frustrations aren’t the point today, are they? Good luck, Marianne.” She left, running her hand lovingly along a gleaming curved bulkhead. All the beauty and grace the campsite lacked was embodied here, at least potentially, in the alien ship that humans were trying to make their own.
The door to the bridge stood open. Beyond it, Stubbins loomed large, listening intently to two engineers. If he was surprised to see Marianne, he didn’t show it.
She listened to the rest of the engineers’ report, unable to follow most of it. When they left, Stubbins followed. Marianne said, “A word, please, Jonah.”
“Not now. I gotta—”
“It’s about Carl Tyson and his son Paul.”
Stubbins stopped, looked at her.
Marianne said, “You might want to close the door.”
He did. Marianne told him what Tim had said about Paul and the gunman in Manhattan, making the connections sound more definite than Tim had actually found. She finished with, “I don’t expect you to admit any of this. What I want to know, right now, is why you so badly wanted me here at the Venture site. Why you paid for apartments, bodyguard, the kids’ school, Ryan’s treatment, all of it. Why you brought me here.”
He said, “Your insider’s view as a force shaping public opinion about—”
“Bullshit. Two dozen people could have written those articles, and if we changed even one person’s mind in this polarized political atmosphere, I’ve yet to hear about it. It was Colin you wanted, wasn’t it? Not me. The research on your new drug under hush-hush development in Colorado, the one to help the generation born with hyper-hearing issues—you wanted to run fMRIs and other tests on Colin’s brain, to find out what is different about him that he can handle the auditory bombardment. How did you even find out he could? The testing company I first took him to, right? You were collecting that sort of data.”
Stubbins said nothing, watching her.
“But then you found Ava. She’s better at that than even Colin is, and you can get agreement from her mother for pretty much anything, including things that I might balk at. Just offer to marry Belinda.”
“Marianne,” Stubbins said, and now his voice had gone avuncular, “maybe it’s good that we’re having this conversation. If you are really unhappy here, maybe it’s better if you and the boys go.”
She hadn’t expected that, hadn’t been thinking far enough ahead. Where would they go? A laboratory job might be impossible to find, given her notoriety. Perhaps her old college would take her back. Most universities were, for various reasons, pro-Deneb. Even if she couldn’t get tenure-track again, or at least not right away, maybe she could negotiate a year-to-year contract until something opened up.
“Maybe that is best,” she said to Stubbins. “But I need a few weeks to make arrangements. At least. Can I stay here that long?”
“Of course. Stay as long as you like.” He waved his hand magnanimously, a cheap fake-regal gesture, and she thought how much she disliked him. Then he made one of his chameleon changes of personality. “Marianne—don’t judge me too harshly. If I can bring this drug to market, the one that suppresses the neural firings that respond to hyper- and subsonic sounds, I can help a lot of families. And I want to. As much as I want to launch the Venture.”