End Time (10 page)

A half-dozen scientists and technicians down at Escape Velocity at the Van Horn lab facility had failed to come to work. One, Bhakti Singh, had simply vanished. Operations at the lab had slowly ground to a halt over the last week or so. Now the powers at corporate HQ were just finding out.

Lattimore didn't run a slack ship, but he didn't make his creative guys punch time clocks. If one of the designers hid under the covers for a week with a flashlight and a scratch pad so be it. Billy picked up the file photos of Bhakti Singh and his second-in-command, Wen Chen. The two indispensable men in charge of the space fabric unit and an even more important project: the manufacture of Aerogel.

This miracle material was going to let the fragile paper airplane of a spaceship blast through the wall of gravity and fall like an angel through the fire of Earth's atmosphere again. Aerogel could support thousands of times its own weight and was a thousand times less dense than glass. It felt like Styrofoam and could act as a thermal insulator. They made space shuttle tiles out of the translucent stuff; harder than steel and lighter than air—people called it frozen smoke.

And
very
expensive to manufacture. Bhakti Singh and Wen Chen were working on a more affordable manufacturing process. “We can't afford to lose those guys to MIT or Caltech,” Lattimore remarked.

“I don't think we did,” Billy told him. “I sent some e-mails, left some phone messages. Hardly anybody answers. And when they do pick up the phone, they mumble some crap—or just hang up. So I tried the sheriff's office at the courthouse an hour ago. There's been some problems down at Van Horn. Kids gone missing, wives walking out on their husbands. Weird stuff.” He paused. “And something else.”

Lattimore's eyes flashed at him. Bad news coming.

Billy gave it to him straight. “Apparently there was a fire at Wen Chen's place twelve days ago. Wen and Amy Chen may be dead. I say
may
because I can't get a coherent story out of anybody. But I think they're dead.”

That caught Lattimore by surprise; he shook an ash off his cigar and missed the ashtray. A soft rumble came up his throat, part concern, part disbelief. In a few heartbeats Lattimore came to grips with the idea of losing one of his best designers and not knowing. “You mean, Wen Chen may have been dead over a week and nobody from Van Horn told us? Not even the local authorities?”

“That's what I'm telling you.”

Lattimore let that sink in. Then dryly:

“Have we thought about sending flowers, condolences? A private eye?”

“Good grief, Clem—I haven't even been able to find anyone to send flowers to except the local sheriff. For all we know the subdivision is a ghost town. I was headed out for a look-see tonight. I'm taking your plane to Dallas. But I want to go the last lap by car … loaded up and prepared. I should get there sometime tomorrow.”

Lattimore stared at his burning cigar; then with an edge in his voice, “Well, we can do it faster than that. What's the number of that sheriff's office?”

Billy snorted. “Go ahead and call,
Mr. Hughes.
As of twenty minutes ago, nobody's answering that phone either.”

Lattimore sat back in his chair. Stared at the ceiling for a moment, then back at the cigar between his fingers; this time he actually hit the ashtray. At last he grumbled, “Well, don't you go off on a walkabout and forget to come back.”

Billy Shadow turned his back on the desk and muttered, “No, that's your specialty. I'll be in touch.”

 

6

Peenemünde & Mittelbau-Dora

Lattimore watched his Number Two go back through the library toward the stainless steel elevator doors. If anybody could find out what the hell was going on down in Van Horn, Billy could. Whatever there was to find out about Escape Velocity's missing employees, about Amy and Wen Chen dead or alive, Billy was the man to do it. The Indian tracker who never got lost.

Yeah, getting lost—that's my specialty
. He stared at the ceiling. How could a guy like himself, who'd made so much money, built such incredible, vibrant engines of commerce, wander off into terra incognito and come back without a scratch? Dumb luck?

He stared at the map spread out on the desk before him. A copy of a map, and not very large. Called the Piri Reis map, after the sixteenth-century Turkish admiral and cartographer with the full name of Hadji Muhiddin Piri Ibn Hadji Mehmed who had made copies of copies of older maps, charting the Mediterranean to the Indies. This was a copy of the famous one, inked on gazelle skin. In 1927, some historians had found the Piri version in the Topkapi Palace Museum, dated around 1513, but even that one was a copy of an older map.

The map showed the Atlantic coast of Africa, the Atlantic coast of South America, and—there at the bottom, real terra incognito—some thought the coastline of Antarctica. A coastline buried under thousands of years of ice and snow—a coastline not mapped till the 1950s with Air Force radar. Like a palimpsest. A coastline first seen before man crawled out of the trees, then covered for an eternity, only to be seen with piercing modern technological eyes. One of “history's mysteries,” they called it. The map was an affront to science, to the accepted march of history. Just as Lattimore's life was an affront to the accepted notions of fate, chance, and outcome.

People talked about a “blessed” life, and Lattimore's surely was.

All the power and ease that money brought, without the curse of manic celebrity.

But it hadn't quite started out that way. Not on that critical day as a boy of nine. Lattimore remembered taking his bag of green plastic soldiers up into the treehouse. Usually he took them over to the stream that flowed near the back porch; there among the roots and stones he could play Omaha Beach, setting the little things among the nooks and crannies of the stream's bank, making them climb the cliffs of Pointe du Hoc to knock out the German gun emplacements.

But this time he ascended to the treehouse. The treehouse was his special place, and Pop had taken a lot of care and trouble building it: all enclosed, with pine wainscoting, and even shelves for his toys and bunks for sleeping. A fireman's pole for quick exits, screens in the windows, and even a skylight so you could stare at the sky through the quietly fluttering leaves of an oak tree in summer.

The day he decided to go up into the treehouse instead of squatting by the brook, he heard his father pushing the lawnmower across the grass below and his mother's soft voice coming out from the open kitchen window. The little toy soldiers fell from the bag, but didn't seem to want to arrange themselves for battle.

The sun burned down the skylight, and he heard the wind in the leaves. A hornet buzzed against the screen outside. He must have fallen asleep, because when he woke the sun was in a corner of the treehouse and no sound other than the rustle of leaves. He packed his bag of soldiers, clamped it in his mouth, and slid down the fire pole.

And then he noticed things were very wrong. His father's lawn mower sat in the middle of the lawn, mid-cut. Pop never stopped in the middle of anything. The house stared at him, no noise from the kitchen. Inside, the oven was on and the scent of a roast filled the room. On the stovetop a low flame burned under a pot of water, but it was bubbling fast. He turned it off.

“Mom?” No answer. “Dad?”

Again, just silence. His father's pipe sat in the ashtray, his mother's knitting, needles stuck through a ball of yarn, in her chair; their cat, Briseis, sat next to the yarn ball and tricked the thread.

No Mom. No Pop.

Before the day was out, the Pennsylvania State Police had come to the house, Reverend Franks had come and gone, and his regular nanny, Simone, was staying in the guest room. Neighbors came and went, food was brought, and the house seemed full all the time. They even organized searches in the local Bucks County woods. But to no avail.

The next night it rained.

Around midnight his parents appeared on the front porch. Wet, clothes torn, half-naked and shivering—they walked in out of nowhere. Simone meant to keep him in his room while she made cocoa in the kitchen, but he sneaked to the top of the stairs and looked down. Mom and Pop had found some dry clothes; they sat on the couch, a little distance apart as though afraid to touch. His father's brand-new land camera—the Polaroid Big Swinger 3000—lay on the coffee table in big broken plastic pieces. His father really loved that camera, one of the first to buy it when it came out. A few creased color snapshots dotted with rainwater were all he managed to save. He fingered the Polaroids for a moment but didn't pick them up.

Instead Pop rubbed the numbered tattoo on his forearm and stared dolefully at the Polaroids on the table. The blue numbers of that tattoo always seemed to bother him. And the photos bothered him. Clem quietly heard his father say to Mom, “Yes, I know. I know we have to call everyone. I'll do it in a minute.” A pause as his mother asked another question and his father answered, “No, I don't know what to say just yet. Maybe the truth.”

Again, a pause as his mother objected, “No one will believe us.”

“Would you?” his father countered.

“What about the Polaroids?” his mother asked.

“No one will understand them.”

“No, that's not what I mean,” his mother said. “What are we going to
do
with them?”

Another pause, until his father said, “Keep them somewhere safe.”

In the end there was some kind of inquiry, and Clem remembered the quiet town courtroom, the judge leaning down from the bench asking him questions. The man in the black robes had a long horse-face and seemed to speak through his nose. Did his father ever beat him? Was his mother ever bruised or scared? Was
he
scared when they didn't come home? But boy Clem really never had time to think about it. The police were there; Simone was there; the neighbors stopped in. And he quietly answered as he could.

Then more papers were presented, some X-rays they took of him, showing him a healthy boy of nine inside and out—and the gavel came down, bang. And that was the end of it. Sort of.

Mother never spoke of it again. Father didn't either. Only some months later, Pop took him aside, telling him simply, “I'm sorry Clem. What happened this summer. It won't happen again. I promise.” And Clem believed them. Why not? They'd never lied to him before. But he saw something troubling his parents, an undercurrent of suppressed dread, as though they'd seen something no person was really supposed to see. Those creased and spotted pictures from Pop's Big Swinger 3000 …

But the weird story had gotten around; too late for Clem to hide behind anonymity. One of the kids in the school playground cornered him at the beginning of the school year demanding, “Is your dad My Favorite Martian?” The kid's nickname was Pimple Face, because he had three big moles on his cheek, and Clem kept staring at the three dots wondering what to say.

He sensed Pimple Face had stumbled across the secret of his parents' shame. Fortunately the local paper never ran the story of his parents' disappearance, so all Clem did that day in the schoolyard was shrug and say, “I don't know. Maybe.”

After that, the kids left him alone, afraid whatever happened to him might happen to them. But the question nagged him the rest of his boyhood, all the way into adult life.

Were
they Martians?

*   *   *

Something similar happened that day Billy Shadow found him lost in the desert. Only this time a lifetime had passed, a life of work and struggle, of success and failure, and success again—and this time he wasn't a kid. He'd gone out to Sonora to hike with some friends, nothing special, just folks from the office—going for a walk in the pretty desert instead of golfing that afternoon. They marked their route on a map—up here, down there, picnic by the river, hike out again—left their SUVs in the state park parking lot, and off they marched. The wives and kids in a big noisy group like hundreds of others every day.

They paused for a rest in the Madrona Canyon at the river, and it flowed noisily as the kids paddled about. The adults unpacked their knapsacks and called the kids out of the water for lunch, warning them,
You can't go in for an hour after you eat
. Only to be met with noisy complaints of,
Oh Mom, c'mon,
even as the little bodies shivered with beach towels round their shoulders. Full on chicken salad and pickles, Lattimore pushed his rucksack back against a red stone and closed his eyes.

And when he opened his eyes again, the kids were gone. The river was gone, Sonora Park was gone. And even he, gone somewhere else.

Nighttime surrounded him. A new landscape presented itself. A deep green rolling sward of grassland stretched to the horizon. A moor? The air moist, clouds scudded across the dark sky, lit underneath by a quarter moon. The air was neither cold nor hot; he felt heat come up from the ground, as though releasing the day's soaking sun. A savannah? Africa? A cloud passed before the moon, the land went dark and the stars studded out of the heavens. And suddenly he felt cold all over. For clearly above his head he saw Alpha 1 Cru, then Beta Cru, and finally Gamma Cru, with the two other unnamed stars that made up the constellation commonly called the Southern Cross.

He wasn't in the Northern Hemisphere at all. But far, far south.

Australia? Somehow the land didn't look right for that. Much too lush.

The undulating, soft ground stretching in every direction was nothing like he'd ever seen from down under. Then it dawned on him. This was Antarctica. Without the snow and ice. But Antarctica all the same. At one point the place had been covered in green, but when? Thousands and thousands of years ago.

“What do you want from me?” he asked the sky. “Why am I here?” But none of the stars spoke back. Then he felt something hit his face.