Phytosphere

` posturing of her hands, as if the monitors were the prize behind Door Number 3.

He didn’t get it. “I’m sorry?”

“Turn on the accelerated infrared footage.”

He did as she said. “It’s on.”

“Take a close look and tell me what you see.”

He saw the same thing he always saw, the stress band from north to south. “Okay…Okay, what am I missing?”

He was afraid she was going to disappoint him with something that had absolutely no relevance.

“You’re sure you won’t be upset? I know the male ego is…”

He looked more closely at the screens. “Steph, if you can offer some fresh perspective…something I’ve been missing….”

“Look closely at the archival screen, Gerry. Tell me what you see. You won’t get mad because a showgirl figured this out, will you?”

“Of course not.”

“Just take a look and see if you can puzzle it out.”

“What am I supposed to see?” he said.

“Isn’t it obvious?”

“On the archival screen?”

“Yes, that screen.”

“I see the same thing I always see. The stress band.”

“Speed it up some more,” she said.

He sped the whole thing up, splicing three weeks into a four-minute segment.

“So?” said Stephanie.

He bowed. “Master, I admit my profound ignorance.”

“Gerry, you’re a goddamned ocean scientist.”

It was one of those sublime moments of humiliation, when a girl of twenty-two who had no scientific background and just went around feeling her way through life, not analyzing it, could outguess him in the overall pattern of a natural phenomenon. Despite the humiliation, he could have kissed her.

“I see tides.”

“Exactly.”

“It’s gravity.”

“Yes!”

The more he looked at the patterns, the more it became clear to him—he was seeing tides. Tides in the actual phytosphere itself, with the tidal pattern affected by the underlying weather systems, so that the stress band wasn’t a precise thing, but more a ragged line stretching from north to south poles. No wonder he had been confused. Moon tides. And with this realization, the dominoes fell into place—why the flagella behaved one way when they were in orbit around the Earth, and why, when in the lab, with no cohesive center of gravity, they fell apart. Gravity, acting as an anchor, triggered the flagella to cling. Take that gravity away, and the trigger was gone.

“Do you want to have sex now?” said Stephanie. “You’ve kind of got this glow about you. I’m sure your wife would understand.”

“Stephanie, we just had something better than sex. We had a meeting of the minds.”

She looked doubtful. “If you say so.”

“And you might have saved Earth.”

Her voice became giddy. “Really?”

“Yes.”

He had a sudden vision of a solution so vast, so unexpected, yet so simple, so predicated on the basic laws of physics, that he wondered if Kafis, in the twin-brained complexity of his mind, would suspect such a blunt and obvious attempt.

But first he had to prove his theory.

And for that, he had to get Ira back on board.

Not for a second Smallmouth.

No, he had much bigger plans now.

27

She drove through the night, and what a night— the night, the one that would never end. The rain came down hard, blurring the windshield. She hunched over the steering wheel so strenuously that her shoulders ached. Hers was the only car on Route 64, and Georgia was still hundreds of miles away. She knew the mountains were coming soon, and was afraid to go into them because, what with all this rain and no grass or other plants holding anything in place, she was worried about washouts.

The emptiness of the highway frightened her. She and her children were targets because they had food in the car. She didn’t want to stop, was afraid to stop, but sensed Jake growing antsy in the back.

She looked ahead and saw a town. “What’d you say this town was?” she asked Hanna.

Hanna turned on the flashlight and looked at the map again. “Dunstan.”

“Jake, do you have to go for a pee?”

“Yeah.”

“Okay, we’ll stop here.”

She eased her foot on the brake and pulled over to the shoulder. Jake got out, walked to the ditch, and peed. The air coming through the open door was damp, and it made her skin sticky.

Lightning flashed and she saw the outlines of the town, its downtown section like an overgrown prop for a train set, none of its lights burning, the buildings looking carved out of cardboard, lifeless, without any soul.

She glanced in her rearview mirror and saw headlights, and knew it was probably nothing, just another hapless traveler driving from nowhere to nowhere, but couldn’t help feeling paranoid, especially when they had food in the car and everybody was fighting for what little remained.

She leaned over the backseat. “Jake, honey, are you nearly done? There’s a car coming.”

Jake zipped up and got back in the vehicle. She put it in gear, hoping that the person behind wouldn’t see her parking lights. She wished there was some way to turn them off, but they stayed on all the time.

She ventured into town. The lone traffic light, as dead as everything else, was dark like the dark windows around her, and swayed in the wind. Lightning flashed again. Her plan was to keep going, travel west along 64, but at the last second she swung left onto the town’s secondary road, Vine Street. She wanted to hide from whoever was behind them. Her blood drummed past her ears. She looked around for someplace to hide, and in the next lightning flash saw a church; and, no, she wasn’t religious, but the church seemed like a beacon, and all the knee– jerk responses she’d been taught in Sunday school came back: how a church, any church, was a sanctuary, and how the good Lord would protect. She swerved into the small lot in front.

Only thing was, the church was still fairly close to Main Street, and she didn’t feel safe sitting in the car like this. It might be better if she and the kids…

“Kids, get out. We’ll go up to the church porch until this guy passes.”

“Mom, why are you so worried?” asked Hanna.

“Because we’ve got food. Do you want a repeat of Cedarvale?”

They all got out of the car, climbed the broken concrete steps to the church lawn, hurried up the walk to the church porch, and huddled under its roof. Glenda got on her knees behind the railing. She wondered how her world could have changed so much, so that she would feel the need to hide from anybody who happened along the highway. She felt vulnerable, and miserable, and as if she still had far to go before she reached Marblehill.

She listened for the car and thought she heard it coming through the rain, the tires ripping against the wet