End Time (21 page)

But if nothing showed, then logically—what? Maybe instead of following footsteps he could blaze a new trail, strike a new path. Do what Escape Velocity Scientists Singh and Chen
would have done
. If they'd been here.

Precisely what, then? Billy knew the answer.

Scoot up to Utah to monitor the Wild 3
Stardust
satellite recovery; check to see the Lattimore Aerogel dust collector performed to specifications. The two missing scientists would have been there come hell or high water, would have crawled over glass to be there when the military recovered their cosmic bird. Who knows, maybe Professor Bhakti Singh might yet make an appearance.

Clem would want someone present. Billy would need special permission for access to the military's touchdown area, as he wasn't one of the designers—provided he arrived on time. But was it worth a try? Or was Billy just plodding toward a mirage?

Yes, worth a try.

But before Billy could even compose an e-mail or phone home to Lattimore Aerospace, a text message from Boss Clem pinged through his BlackBerry:
Proceed W3 Dug Recov ID TBS. Confirm Frozen Smoke Unit Success.

From twelve hundred miles away—almost as if reading his mind.

In plain English:
Proceed to the Dugway Proving Ground Wild 3 recovery site, clearance identification to be supplied. Confirm the Aerogel unit in the satellite performed to specifications.
So that answered that question. Him and the Boss were on the same wavelength.

Yet something nagged him: Grandma Sparrow's knowing eyes. On impulse he hit speed dial. A cricket's voice answered at the other end:

“Hello?”

“Hi, Grandma. It's me, Billy. Did I wake you?”

A pause, the tingle of delight in her voice. “Oh, silly man! You know I hardly sleep; I was just thinking about you. How's that cut on your cheek?” Billy's heart skipped a beat.

So she knew exactly what happened.

He suppressed the urge to laugh.
Good call, Grandma
. Did she have the Skin Walking thing too and just never told him? He could see her in the well-kept trailer back on the rez at the Formica kitchen table surrounded by faux wood paneling, talking on the old-fashioned princess wall phone. An American flag hung on the trailer wall over her headboard. A feathered Sioux war bonnet hung nearby. The real thing; Granny could have sold it to a museum and moved into a house, but she never did.

Photos of long-dead relatives faded in their frames, even his parents' wedding. The TV on but with the sound off. In the background late-night radio: “Coast to Coast” with George Noory. People across the country trying to explain things they'd seen in the sky or in the woods behind their house. Strange lights, black helicopters, time loss. Billy smiled.

“Nothing serious. I'm okay.”

Her smile came right back at him, seeming to flow into his head. “So you have it now, don't you?”

Billy knew the answer even as he asked, “What's that, Grandma?”

“The Walking Way. The Skin Thing.” She shifted the phone and turned the radio down, her voice serious. “You're going to really like it, Billy Howahkan.”

That gave him pause.

“I hope so, Grandma. You've always had it, haven't you? The Walking Way. Can you tell me what you see?”

A low chuckle; again he knew the answer before she spoke it. He wasn't getting off that easy. “The question is, Billy, what do
you
see?”

He let the question hang. Then Grandma Sparrow said, “I have your old tin wolf whistle here. Thought about sending it overseas in case you wanted to call me, but was afraid the APO might lose it. You want me to send it to you now?”

Billy laughed. “I could have used it there, Grandma. But I'm glad you kept it. I'll let you know.”

The radio came up a notch; the signal she was gonna say bye-bye. “You take care, Billy Howahkan. You call me when you need to.”

The line went
click,
and he stared into the silence for a long time. What had she said? What do
you
see? He opened the small refrigerator and took out the Zero Degree tote. He stared at the evidence bag: a bit of hair, the mess of burnt flesh, an ear, an earring. He unzipped the freezer bag and sniffed the contents and inhaled deeply.

What
could
he see?

The biting odor of burnt wood, burnt plastic. More now … an image-scent formed in his mind, much clearer than actually seeing a person; something like traces of sweat—a residual aura. The impression in the air a person left behind on all they touched. Like a bloodhound on a trail, he inhaled again. The wispy aura seemed to sneak away into the night, leaving a trail. He cleared his mind and inhaled once more.

There was something else in Utah besides the Wild 3 touchdown that needed a look-see. The Chen girl was there. But
where
exactly?

The scent
changed—
now he smelled malted milks, and chocolate shakes. He shook his head—other scents much, much stronger. Hamburgers, cheeseburgers, and sounds even—the sharp crackle of fries boiling in a hot vat of oil, clean dishes coming out of a steaming dishwasher, the confused odor of people. Strangers. No.
Patrons
in a diner …
Hey Mickey, eggs easy no potatoes—

A diner. Salt Lake City. Not that far from the Wild 3 recovery site. The bearded face of that Sikh scientist flitted into his mind: Professor Bhakti Singh, the lost employee from Escape Velocity. In Utah? Already? Or on his way? To witness the Wild 3 recovery—or for something else?

Smell the bag again, smell deeper. There was an aura from the ear and the earring, bright like a flame.… One of the girls
was alive.
And Professor Singh was chasing her; too late for his daughter, he was hunting Lila Chen.

Billy Shadow shoved the evidence bag back in the refrigerator, climbed into the driver's seat of the Dodge, turned the key, and slammed it in gear. No friggin' time to waste. He promised himself a hospital visit, first chance. Maybe Lubbock Hospital. Only 100 miles. Better safe than sorry, right? That's what they always said. Hell with them. Granny was right. No rabies, not now, not ever—

The last thing he saw driving out of town: that big mother-grabber of all ocelots; the good kitty that made him a seer, not the bad kitty that stole little girls. The ocelot padded silently out of the dark and calmly sat on the sidewalk by a streetlamp. The big cat picked up its paw and began to lick it, then groomed its soft ears, rubbing its paw-pads over its head. He slowed the car, powered down the window.

The big cat blinked at him with knowing eyes, then stared at him as if pleased. He hit the accelerator. “I get it. Next stop, Utah. I'm on my way.”

 

11

In the Event of an Emergency

Lattimore sat at a desk in the lead-lined subbasement of the Aerospace building in Sioux Falls and worked a terminal. Jasper the IT chief worked his own console: one of those double screens where the mouse could run from one to the other. The men had six screens they could use if necessary; a troop of stand-alone servers and power towers stood at attention for fifty feet on three sides. The lighting in the safe room was ambient, now nighttime, a dusky gray; when dawn came the lights in the ceiling would brighten—this way anyone spending long periods deep underground could feel the world outside.

Lattimore had received one text message from Billy Shadow:

Van Horn Ghost Town. R&D Abandoned, ordered new security at lab gates. Arrange Clearance ID Wild 3 touchdown. Look-see Surviving Chen Girl. All roads lead to Utah.

Ghost
town … now confirmed. Wen Chen, Bhakti Singh, the whole Aerogel research team
poof!
Gone. Not to mention the locals, and local law enforcement missing in action—not good. For a moment Lattimore played with the idea of alerting some bureaucratic federal alphabet agency: The FBI? The Missing Persons' Bureau? And then just as quickly shoved it aside. What would he tell them? I've lost an R&D Unit at Escape Velocity? Next thing the
Wall Street Journal
picks it up and Lattimore Industries' stock price tanks.

Right now, Lattimore owned a brief moment to nail down things on his own; maybe a week at most.

Better to let Billy Shadow run down leads in the outside world; his Number Two was a one-man early warning system. Billy would know when to send up a flare.

And better to let his corporate IT chief explore every digital back alley in cyberspace. From where Lattimore sat, the latter was already deep in the process. Eyes glued to his screens, Jasper didn't make eye contact but remarked, “You're taking this awfully calmly, Clem.”

“Well, it feels too early to panic,” Lattimore replied quietly. “We don't know what we don't know.” He paused in silence for a moment. “So let's find out something.”

Jasper clicked a few keys on the keyboard, and chuckled. “True, why panic now? We have all Sunday afternoon.”

*   *   *

Jasper used one side of the large workstation, his half of the screens, and quietly ran a diagnostic on the firewalled cache, RAM, and hard drives of the R&D hangar from his throwaway laptop. This could take some time; a sophisticated virus lay in wait, kept its head down.

Jasper knew the deal. Most complex enterprises had abandoned any notion of true data security for some time. Hookworms riddled their bowels, latent psychoses their higher brain functions. If Department of Homeland Security mysteriously lost a few hundred million dollars every month, well—that was just the cost of doing business. American Express treated their computer fraud losses as a company secret. But Lattimore Industries deserved better. Clem Lattimore always wanted better.

The infinite combinations of 0-1-0-1-1-0 a game of hide-and-seek, long ago surrendered to the keystroke demon. And so, Jasper wasn't having much initial luck.

It didn't really seem to trouble him, though; programmers are naturally patient men. Jasper glanced at his boss through a pair of thick granny glasses, then stroked a graying goatee.
No update, Boss, sorry. So far, nada.

For his part Lattimore had been clicking through Chen's research files. Now he dwelled on photos of the massive stone blocks of Puma Punku—Puma Mountain, high in the Bolivian Andes.

Massive in size, made of the densest granite, cut and shaped to millimeter tolerance. They fit together like pieces from a Lego set, that tight, that close. The Puma Punku walls once rose fifty feet on the top of a mountain. These granite blocks were the hardest on Earth, and nothing but diamond-tipped tools could cut the edges and grooves. Did men wearing antelope skin and feathered headdress use diamond-tipped drills and diamond-dust wet saws eight thousand years ago? The Andean stones were another of those quirky anomalies, like the Piri Reis map. Appearing like magic in the wrong time and place and carved by invisible hands.

A queer artifact or a secret message?

Maybe the artifact
was
the message.

Not meant to stand for all eternity but still, stand a long, long time—telling the story of itself in fallen ruin.

Only this wasn't one of those drowsy summer afternoons in Bucks County with cicadas buzzing in the trees—this afternoon lasted ten thousand years, an expanse hard to see from our ant-view of the cosmos.
“Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they neither toil nor spin, yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these.”

And then it struck Lattimore in a flash of possibility that once seen he could never shake. The lilies of the field; Earth that lush blue planet, just one lily—while thousands of other earths flowered across the galaxy.
Perhaps
the visitors who helped Man carve those stones were more like farmers, sowing and reaping; coming once or twice a cosmic season. Like herdsmen who tended their cattle in the fields, letting them graze the long summer months before gathering them in for the winter. Herdsmen of the stars …

Jasper cleared his throat, bringing Lattimore back to the lead-lined subbasement. The man stared into his monitor, his interest suddenly aroused.

“I may have found something.” Jasper sat back in his chair, stroking that goatee again.

“Diagnostic or Tassology?”

“Tassology.”

Like many keystroke masters, Jasper could run more than one application at once. He'd run a half-dozen diagnostic programs looking for early signs of hard-drive influenza and at the same time run his own keyword bot grabber. A program much like the infamous Web Bot project, running a massive search engine across the universe of the Internet with an army of spiders, the little wanderers who flew across the Internet at the speed of light, analyzing words, patterns of words, confluences of thoughts and ideas. The Web Bot engineers claimed to have predicted 9/11. Hurricane Katrina.

Jasper had created his own prophetic data-mining search engine, an artificial Nostradamus—part Ouija board, part
I Ching
—and named it Tassology, after the practice and craft of reading tea leaves. Darting back and forth between Lattimore Escape Velocity data, company files, and roving across the greater www, Tassology had found something.