looked peeved. Was he wondering why Gerry hadn’t devised his own three-pronged approach? “I asked them for a full scientific report but they… they more or less flipped me the finger. If that’s the way they’re going to play it—by the way, what about… like, a report from you, Ger?”
Gerry shook his head, momentarily distressed by how baffling he found all the
The mayor paused, and he could see it in the mayor’s eyes: Hulke thought that maybe—just maybe—Dr. Gerald Thorndike, formerly of the NCSU, might have something. “Why? Is there a big difference?”
“A
But you take the xenophyta out of the phytosphere and put them in the lab and the flagella grow limp.
The xenophyta still congregate in colonies, but they don’t bind with their flagella. So far I’ve yet to discover any electrical or chemical stimuli inside the xenophyta that can account for the flagella becoming paralyzed like that. They seem to need the entire phytosphere to bind, and I can’t figure it out.”
Outside, the sky turned purple and now had orange stars. A waiter came by with a tray of smokables but everybody had had enough.
Gerry looked around at the group. In Stephanie’s eyes he saw a burgeoning idolatry. In Malcolm Hulke he saw apprehension, as if the mayor were blaming him for coming up with yet more obstacles. Ian Hamilton wasn’t even paying attention anymore, and was instead focusing on Stephanie, gazing at her as if she were the most beautiful creature on the Moon.
Luke Langstrom was the only one who looked fascinated by the problem. “So do you have any theories about it?”
Gerry’s brow rose. “Only that there’s got to be some trigger that’s turning these flagella on and off, depending on where they are.”
Later, as they strolled around Lake Mobius, Stephanie took his arm.
“Maybe I can sit in at some of your sessions,” she said.
“If you’d like.”
“Because I’ve been thinking about the shroud. The phytosphere. Whatever you want to call it.”
“You have?”
“An outside opinion might help. Are there any showgirls on your committee?”
“No.”
“Then don’t you think you should have one?”
He gave her a smile. “I think maybe we should.” To make things perfectly clear, he added, “I’ve got my wife down there. And the more people working on the problem, the better.”
She paused. “I don’t know many scientists.”
“Perhaps you should count yourself lucky.”
“You don’t seem like a scientist.”
He looked away. “No. And sometimes I don’t feel like one, either.”
“Except I can tell you’re the most brilliant man on the Moon right now.”
“And how can you tell that?”
She tightened her grip on his arm. “It’s just something I can tell. This way I have. Ask Ian. He knows. I can tell you have a different way of looking at things than other people.”
“And is that a curse or a blessing?”
She stopped and peered at him more closely. “In your case, I think it’s a blessing.”
He couldn’t say why, but Ian seemed to be made extremely uncomfortable by Stephanie’s friendliness toward him.
A short while later, as Gerry got into a more protracted conversation with Dr. Langstrom about the xenophyta and the flagella, he watched Ian pull Stephanie aside and separate her from the rest of the group. The two lagged behind. He glanced back. Stephanie looked so small next to Ian, her Ossimaxed bones slender; an impossible creature, growing up in this weak gravity as an entirely different species of human, moving with the grace of Peter Pan in Neverland. Tonight, she wore magenta contact lenses, and she reminded him of a cute blue lab mouse. He sensed a mild distress in her, and understood that Ian was a problem for her.
Neil and Dr. Langstrom strolled to a bench, where they sat. Dr. Langstrom suggested that he rather liked “being in the thick of it” again, and Gerry at first couldn’t decide whether this was an appropriate remark or not, considering Earth’s peril, and formed a new notion of the Martian professor—that within his grandfatherly exterior there lurked an immense ego, and that his interest in the xenophyta and flagella wasn’t necessarily about the phytosphere, but more about Dr. Luke Langstrom showing Dr. Gerald Thorndike how smart he could be.
In any case, his true concern was for Ian and Stephanie, as they seemed to be having a real row back by the lake. He couldn’t help wondering if they might be lovers, and if he had inadvertantly been the cause of their quarrel. As the recipient of Stephanie’s overt friendliness, he had to consider the possibility that he might have precipitated a jealous tantrum in Ian. Ian gripped her by the arm, and she tried to pull away.
But he had a tight hold on her. When she looked up at him, he thought she might have been angry, but instead she looked perplexed, as if Ian’s words were now puzzling her greatly. At last he let her go. The others had drifted on ahead. Dr. Langstrom was still talking about the phytosphere and possible ways to destroy it, none of them sounding the least bit plausible to Gerry. Stephanie became subdued, said a few quiet words to Ian, then turned around and walked back up Pisces Road. Ian watched her go, then came toward Gerry.
As his old friend closed the distance, Gerry excused himself—rather abruptly, if Dr. Langstrom’s surprise was any indication—and joined the god of good times.
“Everything all right?” he asked.
Ian looked at him for several moments, apparently fighting to contain a strong emotion. “She’s tired, that’s all. She gets moody if she has too much excitement.”
10
In the third week of July, Glenda stepped out her back door into the darkness and turned on her flashlight. The beam cut through the gloom and fell in an amorphous circle on the trees at the end of the yard. Nearly half the leaves had fallen; the other half hung limply from their branches.
Her watch said five p.m., and it should have been light, but it was dark, and the darkness was doing something to her. She didn’t feel like Glenda Thorndike anymore. Glenda Thorndike was always bold as brass. But now she felt…perpetually unsettled.
Where the hell was Leigh? She swung her flashlight toward her neighbor’s house. She shook her head.
Was he hiding? Dead? Or had he just gone somewhere, maybe to his folks’ place?
She proceeded across the patio onto the grass. The grass smelled funky and was slippery underfoot. It had rotted, like lettuce in a fridge. She walked to the toolshed and got the spade. With the spade in one hand and the flashlight in the other, she proceeded to the rear of the lot.
The woods looked like something out of a horror movie. Her heart pulsed with fear. She was afraid of bears. They got a few down from Jordan Lake every so often. With the forest dead, would the bears be hungry and come down into Old Hill looking for something to eat? Would a hungry bear consider her fair game?
“Live a day at a time,” she murmured into the dark.
She shone her flashlight at a maple tree. After three weeks without light, the wilted leaves hung like sleeping bats, their green cellulose as pliant as limp balloons, the tree giving up the ghost as it eased into sapless purgatory. One maple might not look so strange—but they were all like that.
She stopped halfway to the woods. Did she want to go in there to get the toy box? She never went into the
