End Time (29 page)

Billy turned away and gazed out the window into the milky void. You couldn't see twenty feet; the snow pushing and prodding the air. Every so often a gust struck the side of the Humvee with a thump. Billy's breath steamed up the window, but something caught his eye and he wiped away the moisture.

Some local fauna was sitting in a low drift of snow. A pygmy rabbit, sitting still as a stone, ears up. Its little nose twitched, the whiskers flitting back and forth. Billy understood. The rabbit wasn't concerned about the pack of noisy vehicles, the flashing lights, the throbbing engines. He'd seen them before, the convoy a familiar distraction; the rolling tires, the marching men combing the ground—nothing new in any of that.

Billy's heightened Skin Walker senses came to him in a rush like the moments in Van Horn on the nighttime street, full of creatures you didn't see.… He felt inside the animal's nose and whiskers and sharp ears, filtering out the wind and the snow. Back on the rez, old Granny Sparrow was smiling at him. And he knew what the rabbit knew—something else was out there. And he knew just where.

“Hey!” the hard voice of the Specialist driver broke his concentration. “You all right?” Everyone in the vehicle stared at him, like he'd been talking to himself; yeah, Billy'd been muttering rabbit talk.
New … Something new, new thing. New, new over there, new thing …

Billy snapped out of it. “I know where it is.” He pulled the hood over his head and unlatched the side door. “Just get on the radio and tell them to follow you. And you follow me.”

The
Stardust
reentry pod sat sixty yards off, through the shifting storm of snow. The satellite payload had wedged itself in between a couple of large boulders, its reentry parachute a mess of flapping tatters. As Billy trudged in closer the vehicle crawled slowly after him; gently, a recollection of Wen Chen's crackpot file flitted into his head. HAARP—the High Frequency Active Auroral Research Program. Didn't that high-altitude stuff include cloud seeding and weather control? You'd think the Air Force would arrange for clear skies if they could.

He spotted more rabbits: about ten sitting on their haunches in a wide rough semicircle, twitching their noses at the silver thing. As he thumped past the little animals, they abandoned their vigil and scattered in all directions. The recovery vehicles rumbled up, and the rabbits had vanished without a trace. The roughly pyramidal pod looked scraped and dented where the wind had dragged it along the ground by its chute—but otherwise intact.

Young Webster Galen Chargrove, PhD from
π
r
2
, was the second member of the crew to get out of the vehicle and hit the ground. He stood staring at the pod, his short, sandy hair blowing against the grain. And then as if to punctuate this moment, the wind measurably slackened. The snow, instead of going sideways, began to fall straight down in gentle, sparse flakes. Above their heads a window opened in the sky—somewhere up there the early-morning sun was shining. A tear of blue, getting wider and wider.

The AP Gal joined them, staring at the thing. She turned to Billy plaintively: “Got any more of that—?” but didn't finish her sentence. Instead she took a deep pull of fresh air, then put one hand on the Humvee and bent her head, retching a little. She wiped her mouth on her sleeve. “Got any more of that ginger?”

In those few seconds the recovery vehicles had deployed and the men in full hazmat suits were cordoning off the area with flares; Billy, Chargrove, and the newswoman retreated twenty paces, giving them room. The minicrane on the flatbed truck was already lowering a hook; the soldiers snapped huge bungee cords around the craft.

In five minutes the whole shebang was ready to roll again. But a great unease came over Billy: the fleeing rabbits, the newswoman's sudden convulsion as if there was something wrong with this place. As if the capsule itself contained some kind of contaminant. Then the curious appearance and sudden abatement of the storm—as if the weather gods wanted to make sure young master Chargrove, PhD, was on hand no matter what. That the brainiac didn't miss a thing.

The young man's face was ruddy with the wind, his eyes glistening, enjoying the greatest moment of his life. And Billy wondered again what the hell this guy from
π
r
2
, that whole weird outfit, wanted with dust from comet tails. Likeable or not—it felt all wrong. Even with breakfast, his stomach roiled, and he reached for another piece of sugared ginger.

*   *   *

Their time in the quarantine hangar stretched into hours; the
Stardust
pod wasn't a pop-top. Behind layers of inner and outer glass walls the men in hazmat suits carefully took their precious cargo apart. From their spot in a viewing booth the visitors could watch their progress. Some had even wandered back to the hospitality waiting room for a nap on the couches. But not Billy, not the AP Gal, and not the eager-beaver PhD from
π
r
2
. Somewhere in the third hour the satellite pod was ready to release the Aerogel dust collector grid.

It had done its job all right: collected its precious dust, collapsed into itself like an accordion, and now ready to give up its secrets. One of the technicians inside the quarantined glass wall detached a small section of the collector like a fragment of honeycomb and placed it in young Chargrove's airtight traveling container. He looked to the sealed viewing area and gave a big thumbs-up.

Webster Galen Chargrove, PhD, beamed with delight. An innocent, wholesome grin, and Billy nodded with a slip of a wry smile.
Attaboy.
The young fellow's attitude was infectious, but still, part of the man's Injun mind was going
and yet and yet.…

“How come the public relations officer called you guys ‘termites'?” Billy suddenly asked.

A laugh caught in young Chargrove's throat, as though Billy had hit on some sort of inside joke from Pi R Squared. Staring down into the quarantine hangar, the young brainiac explained offhand, “Oh, typical government research op. Part of the facility is underground. Y'know, like an ant colony.” He paused for a moment, wondering if he'd let slip too much. Then, as if to bury the issue, “Seems like your Aerogel grid did okay.”

 

15

The Stuka Crew

A yellow Toyota 4Runner pulling a Kendon dual-rail trailer with a used Harley strapped on came out of the Rocky Mountains. The rising sun blasted over the Great Plains and into the narrow chute of roadway. Cheryl and Bhakti had returned Herman's MINI Cooper in plenty of time, got some sleep, and went car-shopping—paying cash. The 2001 yellow Toyota 4Runner was an all-purpose, drive-till-the-wheels-fall-off vehicle, the yellow color easy for Cheryl to spot in traffic if she was riding her motorcycle. And the used Harley Sportster was in damn good shape even with 15,000 miles. Cheryl had no intention of giving up a motorcycle and with it her independence. They got off easy, under ten thousand dollars for the whole rig.

Bhakti found a safe place for Janet's ashes on the rear seat, the Nambe metal urn in a black canvas miniduffle with the zipper open. He wanted the zipper open so Janet could see where they were going, so she wouldn't feel left out. Closing the thick black zipper over the urn felt too much like closing it over her face, too much like a final good-bye.

When Bhakti put the duffle in the back, he almost sat beside his daughter. Instead, he petted the urn once, saying, “Rest here now.” Then silently got in the passenger's seat. Janet's ashes would ride with them with the zipper open for over a thousand miles—as long as Cheryl and Bhakti were together.

The two had spent the night in Eureka, Nevada, and headed out early in the morning, skirting the edge of the Schell Creek Range and the Oquirrh—beyond that rip of mountains lay the Great Salt Lake and Utah. You couldn't drive through; you had to go around. Then head down to Salt Lake City. Somewhere over the Bonneville Flats a gray-and-white storm seemed to be breaking apart, some of the clouds sucking into the peaks and vanishing, others moving east toward the big city.

They had decided to take the long route from Los Angeles, avoiding the well-used Interstate 15, going up the length of California instead, through central Nevada and over the High Sierras, entering Utah from the north. A ten-hour drive on big roads turned into twenty hours on smaller ones. The yellow SUV dragging the Kendon trailer with Cheryl's hog slowed them too. Tricky mountain driving, steep curvy roads—they crawled under a cloudless strip of American sky.

Worse still, paranoia required several stops to look over their shoulder in the event of a tail from LA, cooling their heels in roadhouses and motels to see if they were being followed. When they reached Eureka, Nevada, they veered off track and hid out on an empty road near an Indian reservation aptly named Duckwater. Cheryl stared out the dusty glass windshield of the SUV at a carpet of burnt hills. Wherever the ducks in the water hung out, it wasn't here.

Inside the SUV Cheryl and Bhakti's road trip fluctuated between the sharp edge of obsession and a shotgun marriage. Sharing close quarters day in and day out proved to be a battle of give and take, with the take part taking advantage. How the odd couple settled on a motel for the night, which diner or fast food joint to pick, which station on the radio, the best possible route—every little thing could be a source of niggling spats. And now finally they'd arrived at the stage in their relationship where people who'd been together too long were reduced to name calling, the ex-motorcycle cop branding her pal a “gorp.”

When he hung his jacket up in the motel closet: “You're such a gorp.”

When he ordered cottage cheese and canned peaches for the third time in a day: “What a gorp.”

Only to hear him mutter back, “Shiva princess,” turning a deaf ear into a fine art.

The last three and a half hours in the car hadn't been much fun; Cheryl was getting pimples on her fanny as she hit the accelerator or rode the brakes and the mountains shrank behind them. Bhakti began fiddling with the radio soon as a strong signal came in.

Being Utah, every other station, AM and FM, broadcast brimstone and Bible thumping, not to mention a medley of “your favorite hymns” and “holiday easy listening”—he let the tuner rest on a German version of “Silent Night”—in
July,
for Chrissakes. And to make it even more annoying, Bhakti was singing along in Punjabi. Yes, you could actually do that to “Stille Nacht”—German was bad enough, but Punjabi positively mind-breaking. The word he repeated was
Waheguru … Waheguru …
A damned near-perfect syllable match to Siiiiii-uh-lent Night, Hooooo-uh-leee-Night.

Wa-hah-gooo-rooo …

Cheryl figured the word was a prayer from back home in “Inja”; but what it meant she couldn't guess. As long as one lost soul out there was praying, or singing through the thin air, this crazy brown man was more than happy to pray along. Christian songs, Buddhist songs, Jewish songs, even bad C&W—anything would do. And it drove her nuts.

Wa-hahhhh—

“You are such a freaking gorp!”

Bhakti left off his prayer, and stuck her a hard look with his dark eyes.

“What is gorp?” He shut off “Silent Night.” “Don't be a gorp. Gorp, gorp, gorp. What is gorp, Shiva princess? I looked it up last night. It stands for trail mix. Granola, oats, raisins, and peanuts. Are you calling me trail mix?”

She straightened herself, gripping the wheel for another slow turn in the SUV, and wriggled her fanny to relieve her rump. Then told him, matter-of-factly, “My mother told me a gorp is someone with teeth in their ass who eats the buttons off car seats, so I shouldn't squirm around while we were driving.”

Bhakti let this sink in. He glanced at the leather bucket seats in their SUV. No buttons. He gave her a long, dubious look. “Yes, well that explains a lot about you. Buttons on car seats went out with high-buttoned shoes.”

Bhakti went back to the radio. “Perhaps we can find something more appropriate for a true gorp.” He zipped along the stations, finally finding a bit of classical music from an NPR station. The music, bright and comic: Franz Liszt's “Hungarian Rhapsody Number 2 in C-Sharp Minor”—yes Cheryl had heard it before, not that she actually knew the title.

Bhakti helped her out. “Also known to many as the ‘Bugs Bunny Symphony.'”

“Yes! Yes!” Cheryl cried. “On the piano with his tux and tails flapping. ‘Look, Ma, no hands!' Bugs playing with his feet!”

Cheryl smiled for another two miles without shifting her fanny once. When the piece died, the announcer droned on about a fundraiser and Bhakti lowered the volume. “When you have kids you remember these things.”

And that stopped her cold. Kids, yeah.

“What does
Waheguru
mean?” she asked him.

“Wondrous Teacher,” he replied. “But it signifies more than that. Also known as Vahe
guru
. The
V
reminds us of Vishnu.
Guru
you know as ‘teacher' or ‘wise man,' but is actually two words:
gu,
meaning ‘darkness,' and
ru
, meaning ‘light.' We go from darkness to light. In English you might say ‘the wondrous destroyer of darkness.'”

Cheryl finally understood. “It's a prayer? So you were praying? Praying for Lila Chen? That she's all right? That she's alive?”

He nodded silently. Then at last, “And for us.”

Bhakti went back to the radio tuner again, finding that dopey Hail Mary station. He snagged on to the conclusion of an Emergency Alert System test: “
This concludes this test of the Emergency Braincast System.”
With the final three-beep tone, Cheryl glanced at the radio, wondering whether she really heard the peculiar twist on the prerecorded message. Broadcast? Braincast? She looked to Bhakti, but he showed no reaction. Maybe he hadn't heard.