The Coming (4 page)

"And I took the liberty of volunteering you."

"Oh, muchas gracias. I had so much time on my hands."

"If you'd rather not—" Washington said.

He raised one hand. "Kidding. Look, I don't have half the story: Lisa Marie had the news on and recognized your voice; she punched 'record' and woke me up. Or tried to. I was up at the dome till past three,"

"What on earth for?"

"Don't ask. Don't get me started. Be nice if somebody besides me could make the goddamned bolometer work. So you got some LGMs?"

Washington looked at Bell. "'Little Green Men.' I don't know what else it could be. Open to suggestions."

"Could it be a long-delayed hack? That occurred to me on the way over. Some eighty-year-old probe with a practical joke encoded."

"Nice try. You haven't seen the spectrum, though. Eighty years ago there wasn't that much energy on the whole planet."

"And it's actually English?" She nodded slowly. "Holy Chihuahua. What's it doing now?"

"Carrier wave. It's a 21-cm. signal blue-shifted to 12.3 cm."

"Yeah, okay. How fast is that?"

"Call it 0.99
c
. Decelerating."

"Oh, yeah—Lisa Marie said you said it would just take three months? To slow down and get here? Fifty goddamned gees?" Rory nodded.

"What if it didn't slow down?" Washington asked. "What if it hit us going that fast?"

"Terminado," Pepe said. "If it's any size."

"Let me see." Rory turned to address the wall. "How much kinetic energy is there in an object massing one metric tonne, going 0.99
c
?"

"Four-point-four-three X 10
²¹
joules," it answered immediately. "Over a million megatons."

"Crack this planet like an egg," Pepe said. He was amused by Washington's avid expression. "I think she's got a lead for her story," he said to Rory.

"I'm not the one you have to worry about," Washington said. "By noon you're going to have stringers from every tabloid in the country down here. If I were you I'd have some secretary send them all to the Public Information Office."

"Do we have one?" Pepe asked.

"Yeah, some kid runs it," Washington said. "I talked to him, Pierce, Price, something." She took a Rolodex card out of her breast pocket and asked it, "Name and office number, Chief, University of Florida Public Information Office." It gave her "Donate Pricci, 14-308."

Rory wrote it down. "Good idea," she said. "God knows when we'll get any science done around here. You straight newspeople are going to be bad enough."

"We try," Washington said. "But wait until you meet the science editor from
Dayshot.
He's also the astrology columnist."

"Maybe we better put the secretary down by the elevator," Pepe said. "The front door. Maybe with a couple of fullbacks."

Washington checked her watch. "I better get down to the station. See what local talent can cover; how many people I'll have to bring in.
Try
to bring in."

She squeezed past Norman, coming through the door. He put the white box with the spinach pie in the cooler under the coffee machine. "Buenos, Pepe. Program looked good, hon."

Rory looked momentarily confused. "Oh, the early one. We just did another."

"I don't know about that million megatons," Pepe said. "That'll be on every front page in the world tomorrow morning."

"What million megatons?" Norman said.

Rory gestured at the wall. "I asked it how much kinetic energy the thing had."

"If it were to hit us without slowing down," Pepe said.

"Save Germany and France some trouble." He tossed the folded-up newspaper sections onto the table by the coffee machine. "Comics and world."

"From the sublime to the ridiculous," Pepe said.

The phone chimed and Rory picked it up. "Buenos … why, Mr. Mayor. Such an honor."

"Mr. Mayor, right." Cameron Southeby lived across the street from Rory and Norman; they'd been neighbors for nine years. "So what can I do to help you? What can you do to help me?"

Rory told him that the situation wasn't clear yet; there might be a lot of reporters—if she could figure out some way to send them over, she would.

"Do that. We eat 'em alive." He swiveled around and looked out the glass wall over the city, two hundred feet below. "City of Trees" was becoming an embarrassment. "City of High-Rise Parking Lots" wouldn't help real-estate values, though. "Seriously … keep me in mind, Rory. You know our university liaison, June Clearwater?" She didn't, but read him off the Public Information name that Washington had given her.

Pricci the Prick, Southeby thought, remembering his grandstanding over a little assembly permit. "I'll get them in touch with each other," he said. It was his day for Italians. He fingered the card that said
WJC 9:30
—Willy Joe Capra, one of his favorite people. He touched the envelope in his side pocket.

Rory told him not to get his hopes up about this having any far-reaching effect on the city. It might turn out to be a seven-day wonder; it still could be some subtly arranged hoax.

"But you said on cube that you were sure it
wasn't
a hoax." Southeby's vision of his town becoming the focus of the world's attention evaporated, replaced by a nightmare of worldwide derision.

Rory told him to pick up his shorts; all she meant was that just because
she
was sure there was no hoax didn't mean there couldn't be someone smarter than her behind it, second-guessing her suspicions. The straightforward explanation was still the most probable, but…

"Oh … okay. Well, you must have a million things to do. I'll let you go. Mañana."

Norman watched his wife's expressions with amusement as she finally extricated herself from their blowhard neighbor. "He's trying to find a money angle?"

"Good old Cam."

"I'm going through the market on the way home. What you want for dinner?"

"Whatever. Something I can reheat. No telling how late I'll be."

"Keep it in mind." He picked up his helmet.

"Don't forget your sunblock."

"You kidding?" Actually, he had forgotten, but he kept a tube in his bike bag. "Give me a call when you start home. I'll hot it up."

"You do that." Her husband spoke in accents of cool New England, but he used southern expressions he'd picked up from her cornball uncle, whom she loathed.

It was a ten-minute pedal down shady back roads to the Farmers' Market in the middle of town. Halfway there, he started sweating in spite of the shade, and stopped to put on the sunblock.

They'd been doing this for about ten years, using the space between the federal building and City Hall as an open-air market two days a week. It was a "free" space, as Norman knew, with a catch: you had to put down a five-hundred-dollar deposit, which would be refunded at closing time, or more likely a week later. That kept marginal farmers at home.

He locked his bike and walked past the seafood display, expensive fish, shrimp, squid, and eels attractive on beds of shaved ice. Save it for last. The place was pretty crowded, as he knew it would be at this hour, city workers killing time before going to the office at nine. The crowd was bright and young and chatty—lots of new students, this time of year. He liked to drift through, eavesdropping.

He had two cloth bags, and as he wandered from one end of the market to the other—from fish to coffees—he checked out prices and planned what he was going to buy where, on his way back. Rory thought the market business was a silly affectation, the city manufacturing nostalgia for a simpler time that had never existed in the first place, and although Norman couldn't disagree, it was still a high point of his week. Prices were cheaper in the supermarket, but the produce was suspiciously uniform there, and the crowds were just crowds.

"Dr. Bell!" Lots of warm brown skin and a little tight white cloth: Luanne somebody, a student from three or four years ago.

"I saw the news this morning—isn't that just …
total?"

"It's something," Norman admitted. "So where have you been? Haven't seen you around."

"Oh, I went to Texas for a master course, keyboard. No work there, surprise. So what do you make of it?"

"I don't know any more than you do; just what was on cube. Aurora does think it's real." He studied her. She was radiating sexual signals, but they communicated display rather than availability, just as he remembered from before. He wondered how much of it was deliberate, like the carefully bedraggled hair and the makeup so subtle it was almost invisible, and how much was just in her nature. She liked being looked at; glowed in his attention. Any man's attention.

"When I left a few minutes ago, she was talking to the mayor. Fishing for an angle to bring fame and fortune to Gainesville. Or to Cameron Southeby."

"
That
zero is mayor? I should've stayed in Texas."

"You know him?"

"Knew him." She touched his arm and whispered, "When he was police commissioner," raised one eyebrow, and walked on.

He watched her go. Interesting walk: "She moves in circles / and those circles move." What illegal thing might she have been involved in? He had no doubt that Cam was on the take, but Luanne had seemed so prim and shy as a student. Oh, well. Probably a leather-underwear-and-handcuffs prostitute on the side. Some of the quietest people had bizarre private lives. He had met one or two, pursuing his own private life.

Suppose this thing does turn out to be creatures from another planet, landing on the White House lawn on New Year's Day. How would that change things? Would the Europeans lay down their arms in celebration of the universality of life? Sure.

It would all boil down to what they brought along with them. The threat of absolute destruction might indeed unify humanity against the common enemy, but what good would unity do against an enemy who could crack the planet like an egg?

Maybe they would bring the truth, and the truth would make us free. As it had so effectively in the past.

He wished he were older. At sixty it was hard to have a sense of humor about dying. Maybe in another thirty years.

He studied the various coffees and invested in a moderately expensive blend: an ounce of Blue Mountain with three ounces of French roast. It made more difference to Rory than to him. She had perhaps one cup a day at home, and liked to savor it. He drank it constantly, fuel for music, but not the real stuff. Coffee-est or MH Black Gold. One good cup of real in the morning and then twenty cups of anything black and strong.

He turned around and paused, looking at the thirty or so stands, remembering which ones had what. He checked his list; crossed out coffee, added green peas and smoked ham. Make a nice soup and let it cook all day. Bread and salad, already on the list.

His day for young women. "Good morning, Sara."

"Buenos, Maestro." She was the bartender and co-owner of Hermanos Mendoza—the Brothers Mendoza, who had gone north in a hurry twenty years before, leaving behind a stack of unpaid bills and their name.

Sara always touched her neck when she said hello to you. She had been in a terrible fire a few years back, and even after they rebuilt her face she'd had to talk through a machine in her throat for a while. She still wore long sleeves and high necklines. Her face looked sculpted, less mobile than you would expect.

She shifted a large bag of onions so some of the weight was on her hip. "So how's the music business?"

"Lento, as we say. Slow. You want to buy a song?" Actually, he realized, one was forming in his mind. The first few notes of a mock-bombastic overture. A greeting for the aliens.

"If I could afford a song from you, I wouldn't be tending bar."

"There you go." He sang to the tune of the last century's "The Teddy Bears' Picnic": "If I could afford a tune from you / I wouldn't be tending bar."

"Wow. You just make that up?"

He smiled. "Trade secret."

"You take care." She shifted the big bag of onions onto her shoulder and walked away. Completely different from Luanne, her walk was stiff and mannish. It was probably from the fire; months of immobility and then walking in braces. Brave girl, Norman thought.