The Miraculous Plot of Leiter & Lott (19 page)

He heard an explosion dimly, in the nearer distance, but did not look for its source. His gaze remained transfixed above him, up into the tight funnel of light, as he waited for the end. Or the beginning.

Soon there were other explosions, and then other people who stood behind him. He did not look at them, either. He could not look away.

"What is it?" someone asked.

"The
Burj
Khalifa
spire," another said, "it's gone!"

"No, no. I mean, what is
that?"

Etherton's
voice replied with incredulity, one hand now gripping his shoulder: "It's called a supernova."

Hearing the words, David felt a tear trace his cheek. And for the first time, he remembered peering up as a child at the stars, and being told by his best friend's father that they would appear the same when he was old, and that his children's children would see the same pattern, too, which would never change until the Catalina mountains had been leveled by rain. The memory of their faces seemed so real that another tear fell.

"I can't tell what star it is, though," Doug said, "can you?"

He shook his head, once.

"I just can't believe it," Doug continued, ignoring the others, who moved about in a panic in his periphery. "It's in the Milky Way, though, I'm sure of it. Almost too bright to look at!" Laughter at his own observation. "You know. . .we're being bombarded right now with neutrinos. Gamma rays too. Of course there's nothing we can do. . . no way to escape. They go right through the Earth. . . right through, like it was nothing. . . Like we're nothing." A beat, a distant shout, the shriek of a siren, as he rambled on. "It can't be within a hundred-fifty light years, or it'd be burning off our ozone layer right now. Can't be Betelgeuse or Gamma
Velorum
or Eta
Carinae
, either. You think it's a Type two? Has to be. Do you know the odds of us seeing this, though?
Astronomical
, my friend!" Doug laughed again, giddily this time. "I've gotta call the mountain. . . they need to get ready. . . they need to know. . . you reckon they've even heard yet? How long has it been like this, do you think?"

"Not long," David replied.

"What?
How do you know that?"

"I was watching the very star when it exploded."

David listened to the words as he spoke them. It was a simple statement, but one that he now realized had never before been uttered by anyone alive. Hearing it, Doug had no reply. He was speechless. Of course in 1987, as they both knew, a massive star had exploded in a companion galaxy--the Large
Magellanic
Cloud. But no one had actually seen it explode since it was too far away, and not visible to the naked eye. In four hundred years there had been no recorded supernova within the Milky Way, even much farther away, that could be seen through the dust lanes of the spiral arms. Even with four hundred billion suns, not one had been observed like this from Earth.

David took a breath, and finally looked into
Etherton's
face, to see the expression mirrored there. Like he'd just won the Nobel Prize and the Powerball lotto at the same moment. But it was better than that. He remembered another face.

Behind them another man came to stand, but without the same expression. The man David recognized as Gregg Swann seemed angry by comparison.

"What the devil is that?" Swann demanded, holding up one hand against the glare. "What is it you're. . .is that a
flare?"

Etherton audibly chuckled. But when he spoke, his words were measured. "You've been upstaged," he replied. "So have the terrorists, whoever they are."

"What?"

Drawing his cell phone, Doug left them.

Swann turned on David. "What does he mean?"

David studied the man, feeling an odd sense of pity, now. "Did you know," he concluded, "that a million Earths would fit into the sun, but if the sun was shrunk to the size of a pea, then, on that scale, the other side of just our own galaxy would be as far away as the moon?"

"No, I didn't know that. Answer my question!"

He nodded. "Okay, then. I'll put it another way. There's billions of galaxies that we can detect. Yet for you and Victor
Seacrest
the universe is flat, and no thicker than the silver coating on the back of a sheet of glass."

"You read about what all this is doing to the stock market?"

David turned toward the businessman seated next to him. Balding, in his mid-fifties, the short, stout man's pinstripe tie was loosened at the neck to resemble a noose. He folded his New York Times to highlight the referenced article, then handed it over. David took it, then punched on his overhead cabin light to read.

MARKET REELS ON DUBAI ATTACK

"Four hundred points isn't bad, considering, I suppose," the man said. "I wonder if Abu Dhabi will be bailing the city out this time, though. And how much more the Dow can fall before we're all broke."

"I don't follow the market anymore," David said, and turned the paper back to read the front page headlines. Below the fold, it read:

HOME GROWN TERRORISTS LINKED TO UAE ATTACKS

AP) Arrests are being made at a warehouse outside Riyadh, Saudi Arabia in connection with an investigation correlating the Dubai attacks with both a revolutionary arm of al-Qaeda and a rogue U.S. Army general court-martialed only weeks before his scheduled retirement. Gen. Richard N. Maynard, accused of aiding and abetting private defense contractors in Iraq in 2006, served one year probation on a Presidentially-commuted 20 year sentence after it was learned that he knew
Sonoflo
Dynamics had overcharged the Pentagon, bilking taxpayers of millions. Maynard is now admitting that he provided an al-Qaeda linked American terrorist group known as Reprisal with classified documents, allowing a breach of security leading to the theft and acquisition of military drone aircraft from a depot in the Green Zone outside Bagdad in late 2007. It now appears that Reprisal, in an unprecedented alliance with al-Qaeda and silent partner
Sonoflo
Dynamics Corp, hatched a plot to attack Dubai in presumed retaliation for 9/11, each with their own motives. On the one hand, al-Qaeda, which launched the attacks under camouflage from the Empty Quarter, had long been in moral opposition to decadent Dubai and its own alliances with "the great Satan," despite the kickbacks it enjoys. It would also gain the support of outraged moderate Arabs by linking the attack to American terrorism. For Reprisal's part, it could claim responsibility, and achieve worldwide recognition as a force to be reckoned with, while at the same time recruiting radicals within the West in opposition to Arab oil wealth. For its part,
Sonoflo
Corp, hired to develop additional prototype UAVs using military schematics, was paid with $6.8 million in laundered al Qaeda money, and was also promised a consulting contract in the rebuild by al Qaeda friendly members of Dubai's administration.

"Yours a pleasure trip?" the businessman asked, interrupting his read.

"That was the plan," David replied, looking up and thinking
man plans, God laughs
.

"Sorry to hear it. Where you headed now?"

"Back to Tucson."

"Arizona, eh. Similar weather, I suppose, minus the falling debris. Hope you weren't in one of those buildings that got hit."

David nodded. "Actually, I was."

"Really. Which one?"

"Swann Tower."

"Oh yeah, I heard about that guy. Gregg Swann. Family got killed, didn't they? One paranoid SOB, they say."

"One of two, if truth be told." David turned the paper over. Above the front page fold, just below the masthead, the headline was:

SUPERNOVA RADIATION FEARS DEEMED UNJUSTIFIED

Seeing where he looked, David's companion noted, "That's what they say, too. But if you ask me, we won't be living as long as we thought we would."

"We never do," David said.

A hand was thrust toward him. "Name's Brice
Wexman
, insurance adjuster from Omaha. Flew out here to deliver a double indemnity check, of all things. Company wanted me to ask a few extra questions. What is it you do, there in Tucson, Mister. . ."

David shook the hand, dutifully. It was damp and cold, the thick wrist knotted with hair like electrical filament. "I'm retired."

A look of surprise. "Gees, guess I'm in the wrong line of work. How old are you?"

"Old enough."

A nod and then a half smile as
Wexman
turned back to face the seat in front of him. "I know
that
feeling, anyway."

After a moment of guilt David admitted, "I was an engineer. What I am now is a changed man."

"Because of what happened in Dubai?"

He nodded. "And the rest of the universe."

Wexman
blew out a breath. "Yeah, what's the odds of that. But you know what they say. Things like this happen in threes, if at all."

"I
was
number three, Brice," David confessed.

The adjuster adjusted his seat back a bit to assess him better. "Don't think you're alone in that. Freaked out my wife, too. She even called my boss, who won't tell me what she said. I got an idea, though. Oh yeah. Too bad there's no web cam in our kitchen, where she usually talks on the phone. That's my hobby, by the way. They call me
Wexman
, the web cam man. I track at least two dozen cams with this special program I got, cycles through 'em ten seconds at a time. A beach in Rio, sidewalk cafe in Paris. Somebody's even got one set up in the slums of Jakarta. Day or night, doesn't matter. There's always something to watch. Get to see what it's like to live in those places, too. Like having these alternate lives. ‘Cause you only get one shot, don't you. Me? Mine's in Omaha, which never seemed fair. Knowing I could drop dead there, a total unknown, any second. And from a hundred different things. Know what I mean?"

"Yes," David replied, "I believe I do."

“Not that I'm weird or anything, mind you. At least not as weird as my neighbor. He watches TV all day, and doesn't even have cable. Old guy's seen the fourth season of the Rockford Files about fifty times. Refuses to join some DVD club, either. Says by the time he reaches the end of the disks he's forgotten the beginning. Although they seem vaguely familiar.” Brice paused, shaking his head. “Nope, life ain't fair."

"Nothing ever is."

"Or ever will be, most likely," Brice conjectured.

"You're right. Or ever
was."

At La Guardia, with a dead cell, he placed a call through to Etherton from a pay phone. When the connection engaged, intervening static and a muted tone made it sound distant, like a link to the space shuttle. "Doug?" he asked, uncertain of the respondent's identity amid the crepitation.

"David? Been trying to reach you. There's about two dozen reporters asking us if we know who saw Rho
Cassiopeiae
blow first. Some amateur in Kazan, east of Moscow, is claiming he was watching through his eight inch reflector when it blew. Three other amateurs are making the same claim. You want in on this?"

"No," David told him. "How are you doing there?"

A muffled sneeze. "I'm okay. Gonna stay until
Nasheed's
funeral, in any event."

"Sorry I couldn't stay for it."
I can't be here, I can't--

"You didn't know him.”

“I knew enough.”

“Yeah? Well, just don't be a stranger yourself, okay? We just witnessed history together, didn't we? We were there, in the middle of it. Ground zero, and right after all these towers just sprouted up like bean stalks in a fairy tale.
People'll
be talking about this for a hundred years! Of course we won't be around then. Or maybe we will. . . I'm thinking about answering a message I just got from some guy at Time magazine."

"I'd rather you didn't mention me, though," David said.

"Really?" A detectable sigh. "Okay, have it your way.” A static pause. “Hey, you know, I been thinking about it. The light from that explosion? Figure it left the yellow hyper-giant over eleven and a half thousand years ago. Already it was one of the most intrinsically bright stars visible to the naked eye. Granted, pretty dim, as seen from our little rock, compared to a lot of much closer stars. But
you
. . . you were looking right at it when it blew. That's hard to imagine. What was that like? How did that
feel
?"

"It was a little like seeing God's fingerprint being made,” he replied.
Among other things.

“Yeah?” Etherton said. “Well, you know I'm not religious. I mean blind. Still, I wish I'd been up there with you to see that, all the same. Instead, look at me, I was singing along with Swann's cocky song. Lucky for us, that tune never made the hit parade. Time magazine would be calling me for a different reason, if it had!"

"We both had a hand writing the lyrics, though, Doug."

"Maybe so, but you stood up to them, in the end. And then, what you saw dwarfs anything that happened here on the ground."

"From our perspective, anyway. Not from Innes or
Cashman's
."