CHAPTER 11
Dawn’s early light. At midsummer in Southern California it was a strong light. Diedre Porter opened her eyes and squinted at sunlight slipping between the closed louvers of her Venetian blinds and painting slanted white stripes on the blue bedroom wall. Day had come whether Diedre was ready or not. Her calico cat Lupe suckled a collar point of her nightshirt and kneaded her breast with tiny claws like on many another morning, purring loudly with a soothing lotus-like effect. Lupe had helped keep Diedre tangled in her sheets much later than she otherwise might have stayed. Lupe and a handful of tranquilizers last night.
Remembering the events of the previous day, Diedre suddenly sat up with a gasp, sending Lupe sprawling across the bedspread. Lupe stood and mewed plaintively but Diedre ignored her, clasping her forehead in both hands and trying to clear her mind. Had yesterday been real? She looked at the clock radio on the night table. The digital time display was black. The power really was out.
Adrenaline was in full flow again, like it had been all day yesterday as the blue light beam lanced down from the moon and black smoke rose into the sky. She went to the window and bent a louver down. Outside, beyond the yellow flowers and green leaves of a hibiscus bush, the stucco houses and palm trees of her neighborhood looked peaceful. The red tile roofs, the greenery in the back yards looked the same as two days ago. That was reassuring.
But not so reassuring was the pall over the horizon. A sickly yellow trace of smoke hung against the desert mountains. Nearer, about a mile away, blue-gray wisps of smoke blew up from the valley where JPL lay, or where it had lain peacefully until yesterday morning. She let the blind snap shut, shuddering at the thought of JPL in flames. She slipped into her sweats outfit and went to the kitchen and lifted the phone from its receiver on the wall. Still dead. She tried punching the buttons on the microwave. Nothing. What had she expected?
She went into the bathroom and turned on the tap. Mercifully, the water was still running. A splash of cool water on her face cleared her mind and helped her calm down. She dried her face with a towel and glanced at her reflection in the mirror. Her eyelids were pink and puffy from too little sleep, but her hazel eyes showed none of the terror she had expected to see. Maybe after yesterday she was immune to terror.
In the kitchen she got some orange juice out of the still-cold refrigerator and took a banana from the fruit bowl. She sat down at the table reliving the events she had witnessed the day before.
She had been up by 5:30 am as usual, listening to a radio news show and doing her morning stretches when the President came on and announced that the world was under attack, that he expected the attack to spread to the U.S in a matter of hours, and that he was declaring martial law and urging citizens to stay in their homes. Terror-stricken by his terse words and unconvinced by his promises to overcome any challenge, she had stayed home from JPL and remained as calm as she could. But she had listened with growing horror to news reports on radio and TV confirming the attack. By six, there had been precious little to see on TV except worried local newscasters discussing the loss of their satellite links. They had promised a live broadcast from a press conference at JPL, where authorities were preparing to explain the source of the attack, and Diedre had sat on the edge of her couch for hours expecting to watch Lloyd confess his cover-up of Phaeon Crater. But no live report came from JPL or anywhere else. Instead, the TV went dark and the radio went dead and the power went out. In the silence that followed, she had heard the first explosions. She had gone to the kitchen window and seen the crescent moon rising in the east, and watched the blue beam in breathless terror as it sliced down to the earth. When black clouds of smoke began to billow from the direction of JPL she had begun to cry. She had curled up with Lupe on the couch most of the day, uncertain what the ghastly blue light would do next. Would it be content to destroy TV, radio and JPL or would her own home be a target? At one point, she heard the next-door neighbor calling after one of her kids and poked her head out the back door to talk. But there had been little to say. Mrs. Thurber was a devout Mormon, convinced the Day of Judgment was at hand. She had taken her children back inside to pray joyously for the sound of Gabriel’s trumpet and the advent of Christ.
In the evening the beam had continued its deadly work. Flashes of light filled the sky until twilight faded into darkness and the moon set and the beam went with it. Diedre had climbed into bed with Lupe and after hours of tossing and turning, and quite a few Prozac, had fallen into a drugged sleep from which she had just awakened.
Sleep had not been a great refuge for her lately, anyway. Over the last three years, she had scarcely gotten a night’s rest because of the awful secret she was forced to keep about Phaeon. She and Frank had been placed under virtual house arrest. Military people had stopped by to check on her constantly, saying they were looking after her wellbeing but really just letting her know they still had an eye on her. Lately the enforced silence had been driving her crazy. She had grown moody and isolated from her friends. Her first reaction this morning, wondering whether the situation was real or imagined, was a symptom that had begun to worry her. Constantly suppressing the truth about Clem’s discovery was more than she could live with. She had gotten good at telling the fabricated story of Clem’s crash, but she knew very well Clem was still silently circling the moon.
Living with lies and sleeplessness had taken its toll. She had lost her ability to concentrate and errors in her computer codes had gotten her demoted. She was an entry-level data specialist again and having a hard time with that. On rare occasions when she bumped into Lloyd, she could tell by his haggard look he was not much better off. Maybe he regretted instigating all this but she couldn’t forgive him. Every day had brought another opportunity for Diedre to blurt out the truth. Somebody would ask when a replacement mission was scheduled. Somebody else wanted to look at Clem’s last data before she crashed. Lloyd always looked nervous when Diedre made weak, diversionary replies. He would watch her closely, as if thinking, Is this the day she blows it?
But that day hadn’t come and Diedre blamed herself for the horror of this day—blamed herself and Lloyd and Frank and that skulking Major MacIlvain, who had vanished from JPL soon after their enforced silence began. But suppose she had shouted the truth to the world? Maybe someone would have listened. Maybe things would never have gotten to this point.
Or maybe she’d be dead. She remembered the nervous way the major had fingered his pistol that night and recalled the last time she had seen him at the lab. He had pulled her aside in the hallway.
“Remember, you are a top priority security subject,” he had hissed. “Don’t think you can get outside our grasp. Just play along for a while and things will work out fine.”
She hadn’t believed him about things working out but she hadn’t known what else to do. Go to the media? She would wind up labeled an Area Fifty-One crackpot, discredited by the government and Lloyd too, her career over and her life ruined. Or worse.
But such thoughts were pointless this morning. Despite her terror at Phaeon’s attack, Diedre felt a strange new exhilaration. At last she could tell the truth! Mixed with horror she felt an intoxicating joy. A lead weight had been lifted from her soul. The world might be coming to an end but somehow, she didn’t quite know how, she had just been reborn.
She heard a knock at the front door and after shaking off a wave of irrational fear, got up from the table to answer it. She looked through the peephole and shouted with delight.
“Frank!”
She opened the door and threw herself into his big arms. “Oh God,” she cried, “am I glad to see you.”
He bear-hugged her. “How’re you doing, Diedre?”
“Just fine now, Frank. Come on in.” She led him straight back to the kitchen and offered him food, a sure-to-please tactic with Frank. He was like a puppy dog. Feed him and he’d follow you anywhere. This morning he seemed to have quite a healthy appetite, rifling her cupboards and refrigerator for cereal, milk, bread, butter and ja
m.
“I slept on a couch in the lab basement last night,” he said between crunches of cereal.
“I thought the lab was gone,” said Diedre. “I heard explosions.”
Frank took a bite of bread and continued with a cheek full. “JPL’s been hit all right, but our building’s okay. I thought I’d walk over and see what you’re up to.”
Diedre smiled. Frank’s wrinkled Clementine T shirt, smudged blue jeans, matted beard, fingerprinted glasses and tousled hair made him look like he’d slept in a gutter rather than on a couch. He munched another spoonful of cereal. “I wish I knew what’s going on up there at Phaeon.”
“Yeah,” she nodded. “Me too. I wish there was something we could do.”
As she watched him shovel in another spoonful, an idea came to mind.
“Hey, Clem is still up there, right?”
“As far as I know.”
“Then we ought to try and get another look into Phaeon. Maybe we’d see something we could pass on to the military.”
Frank stopped crunching. “That might just be possible.”
“Then again, with the power out…”
“Not a problem.” He shoveled in another bite and pointed his spoon at her. “I’ve already got the power back on in our lab. Found a portable generator in the Physical Plant building. There’s plenty of gasoline in the campus security cars. Power’s no problem. We just need a plan.”
“We can write a command sequence,” Diedre said with her newfound enthusiasm doubling. “And we can uplink it to Clem if she’s still listening. I wonder if we can get through to her via Goldstone?”
“Nope. Phone line’s dead as a doornail. Don’t know if Goldstone is even there anymore. We’ll have to come up with something else, but no sweat, right? We’ve solved tougher problems than this. Now get yourself some breakfast. You look pale. Got to eat to keep your strength up.”
She got a bowl and joined him while he ate a second serving of cereal. After that she dealt with a couple things before leaving for the lab. She got a bag of dry cat food out of the cupboard and overfilled Lupe’s bowl in the corner of the kitchen floor, then filled Lupe’s water bowl to the brim, smiling at the way Lupe managed to purr while engulfing bites of cat chow.
“That’s enough food and water to last you a while, Kitten Face. I’ll leave the kitchen window open so you can get in and out. Be a good girl, okay?” Lupe replied with a half-purr, half-meow while crunching another bite of food.
A minute later, walking with Frank along the curved sidewalks of her neighborhood, Diedre was surprised at how quiet and serene everything was. This was still the same tidy suburban development she had known for years. Birds twittered in the bushes and the morning sun was already hot, alternating with the cool shade of fan palms. As she and Frank went in the direction of JPL, nobody was out other than them, but that was understandable. There was no rush of commuters this morning. People were obeying the President’s call to stay in their homes and wait for further information. Of course, Diedre didn’t really expect any further information to come.
After walking a mile through quiet suburbia they came to the Jet Propulsion Laboratories campus, a small city of beige and gray highrise buildings nestled against the San Gabriel Mountains. The approach road was a curved arc of pavement flanked by sidewalks and barred by a guard kiosk in the center of the roadway. On an average morning the front gates bustled with arriving workers and delivery vehicles, but this morning the kiosk was empty and the campus seemed deserted. None of the buildings had been attacked but a set of radio transmitter towers on the mountainside had been struck by the beam and were melted wrecks. The hillside itself had been swept by fire and was now an ashen gray forest of charred brush skeletons. The moon was still below the horizon and the sky from which the beam had emanated was clear and quiet this morning. But what was once a bustling community of scientists was now a ghost town.
Approaching the main entrance, they passed the scene of a great holocaust on the street outside the campus. A line of TV communication vans parked in front of the Von Karman Auditorium was now a row of blackened metal wrecks. Although the auditorium was intact, the pavement in front of it was blackened, and charred shapes lay scattered on the street. Diedre gasped, realizing the shapes were human bodies. Several dozen people had been burned black by the death ray. They had already begun to bloat and ooze dark liquid onto the pavement. Diedre shuddered to think who those unrecognizable forms might have been yesterday.
Beyond the wreckage, the main entry kiosk stood empty. Passing the gate on the way to their lab building, they crossed a stretch of campus lawn landscaped intermittently with trees and bushes. Diedre looked around her in astonishment.
“After all the explosions I heard, I thought the place would be in ruins.”
“Not much damage at all,” Frank replied. “Just the power and the radio transmitters on the hill and the TV vans. That’s all they were after.”
Diedre sighed. “I guess the sounds of explosions yesterday made things seem worse than they were.”
“Yeah,” said Frank. “Those vans blowing up made quite a racket.”
Diedre noticed a disheveled man in wrinkled slacks and an untucked white shirt shoveling dirt on what had been a bed of star jasmine. Both the man and the job he was doing were out of place.
“Who’s that?” she asked.
“Don’t you recognize him?” Frank responded. “It’s Lloyd.”
Approaching Lloyd, Diedre saw that his pile of dirt was grave-sized. Lloyd’s back was to them and his flip-top hair blew in the breeze.
“Lloyd!” she helloed. “It’s Frank and Diedre.”
Lloyd turned as they walked up to him but said nothing. A day’s growth of stubble covered his chin and cheeks and his pants and shirt were splotched with dirt and ash. He gazed at them dully with red-rimmed eyes. He sat down on a stone bench beside the dirt pile. The corners of his mouth turned down bitterly, he gestured at their surroundings.
“She liked it here under the eucalyptus trees. You can almost see the whole campus.”
“She? Who?” Diedre asked.
Lloyd said nothing, staring at the dirt.
Frank explained softly, “Linda, his wife. TV news reporter, remember? She died in the vans with the rest of them. Lloyd left her there and came back to the lab to get a DVD of images of Phaeon for his presentation. He’d finally decided to tell people everything we knew. But while he was in the lab all hell broke loose.”
Lloyd hunched over with his face in his hands.
“Hey, Lloyd,” Frank said cautiously. “Diedre and I want to try reactivating Clem.”
Lloyd sat like a statue with his eyes fixed on the grave.
Diedre tried to sound chipper. “Whaddya think, Lloyd? We’ll find a way to get Clem up and running, just the three of us. Just like the night we—” she almost said, “—sent her down to look at Phaeon,” but stopped, remembering Lloyd’s uncontrite expression as he sided with Major MacIlvain. It was a hated memory but now his grief and his dirt-smeared hands made her feel like forgiving. He had paid a terrible price for his complicity.
Staring at the dirt, he doubled a grimy fist and hissed through clenched teeth, “I want to smash them, make them hurt like this.”
Diedre put a hand on his shoulder. “If we get a look at what they’re doing up there, then maybe somebody can.”
They coaxed Lloyd to leave the grave with the shovel stuck in at one end as a marker and come across the campus to their own building, which Diedre was heartened to see untouched by the beam. They went to a basement entry door leading down to the Clementine Operations Center, but Frank paused to look at the sky above the mountains. “Guess what will be rising any minute now.”
Diedre followed his gaze through the smoke hanging over the craggy eastern horizon. One horn of the crescent moon was poking up into the sky. Goosebumps rose on her arms.
“We’d better take cover,” she said, but Frank was in no hurry. He scratched in hi
s long frizzy brown hair. “I have a hunch they won’t shoot at us. They’re just after communications.”
“Just the same, I’ll feel safer inside.” A small gasoline powered generator purred beside the entrance and Diedre followed the orange power cable that snaked through the door, down the stairs and along the central corridor. Frank, adept at ad-hoc wiring, had tied it into the sub-basement’s power grid, so when Diedre reached the Operations Center its fluorescent lights flickered a cool white greeting.
As Frank and Lloyd followed her in, Diedre realized that Frank Johnston and Lloyd Andersen were probably the best co-conspirators she could hope for. Frank’s ability to work anything electrical made it a foregone conclusion that they could jury-rig communications from earth to Clementine. And Lloyd knew as much about the overall workings of JPL as anybody.
She went to her old seat at the ACE’s computer terminal, sat down and keyed in a command to retrieve the most recent Clementine entries. The screen began reeling off a stream of data.
She smiled. “Looks like we’ve got a complete log of Clem’s activity up until we put her on standby, with updates from her every six months since.”
Frank and Lloyd hemmed her in the way they had on that night three years ago. Somehow it felt more comfortable this time. “How’s her orbit?” Frank asked.
“According to the last update she’s still 55 kilometers up, orbiting directly over the poles. She’s been real quiet, waiting for her next command sequence.”
Frank pointed to a line of code. “Looks like she still has the primary mission data on board.”
“Super,” said Diedre. “That means she’s got a complete 3-D map of Phaeon Crater in her memory.”
“How about fuel?” asked Frank.
A few more keyboard entries brought the fuel data up. Clem’s main fuel tank was down to twelve percent.
“Pretty low,” Frank acknowledged. “But we can get one last big burn and take her right down over their heads.”
“Oh-oh,” Diedre pointed to another line. “Thruster number four is almost out of propellant. That’s not good for attitude control.”
Frank shrugged. “You’ll just have to come up with a command sequence that conserves use of thruster four, Diedre. You’ll find a way.”
She chuckled. “Hey, why should these commands be any less hair-raising than the others we’ve sent?”
Lloyd, who had stood by like a zombie, stirred and said hoarsely, “You really think Clem’s still okay? She probably got blasted a long time ago.”
“But she hasn’t been transmitting,” Frank countered. “That’s the key. They don’t know she’s there. I’ll bet she’s just fine. All we’ve gotta do is get one signal up to her. Just a quick command string before Phaeon gets a fix on our position.”
“And if they do get a fix on our position?” Lloyd rasped.
Diedre’s heart began to race. “We could get ourselves killed.”
Frank shrugged. “We could do that without trying anything, seems to me.”
“Yeah,” Lloyd agreed. “So let’s try something.” His voice was brittle. Diedre took a good look at him. He was grim-faced, staring at the screen with his jaws working and his fists doubled. Something in his eyes was scary… hollow… dead.