horizon reminded him of the brown sky he had seen on Mars when he had been a visiting professor there years ago. God, it looked…
He heard a lone gunshot from the direction of Home-stead’s main gate. They all froze. Christmas Day on the Eastern Front was over.
“Kids, go inside,” he said.
“Dad, I want to stay out here,” called Morgan.
“Morgan, don’t argue with Daddy,” said Louise.
With a sharpness he didn’t mean, he said, “All right, Morgan. Out of the puddle. You’re ten years old.
You shouldn’t be playing in puddles.”
“But, Daddy, it’s fun.”
“Morgan, right now.”
She got out of the puddle and came toward the barracks.
He turned to Louise. “What are we going to do with that kid?”
He and Louise got the girls inside.
He heard a few more gunshots from the opposite side of the base, but it wasn’t amounting to much. He glanced around the barracks and felt cramped, at odds with his family.
Once they were settled inside, he lifted his cell and tried his sister-in-law, Glenda.
It took him a while, but he finally got through.
“Where are you?” he asked.
“Just west of Charlotte.”
“You should have been at Marblehill by now. Lenny called me an hour ago. He was expecting you a couple days ago. What happened?”
“It’s tougher than you think.” Then a pause. “I see light. Are we going to be okay?”
“We launched forty-eight hours ago. The Moon is going to launch on Tuesday.”
“The Moon is?” She sounded suddenly breathless. “So you’ve been talking to Gerry?”
He glanced at Louise. “Not directly.”
“But they’re helping you?”
“Luke Langstrom’s in charge now. I don’t know how that came about. But he’s been…cooperative.”
“You mean Gerry’s not running things anymore?”
“I don’t think so.” He sighed. That was the thing with Gerry. He always thought he was going places, but he never was. “I don’t think he’s officially
“Where do you want me to begin?”
“Are you okay?
“We ran into a landslide west of Dunstan, and had to turn around. We had to detour along 74. Plus we have Buzz Fulton following us.”
She told him of her unnerving encounter with Buzz Fulton up on the mountain.
“Have you seen him since the landslide?”
“No. But he knows we’re on our way to Marblehill.” Glenda told Neil about Jake’s note. “Then we got taken prisoner in Charlotte. This…gang, or…I don’t know—they were all in National Guard uniforms.
They held us for a few days, and tried to find out where we were going, but I didn’t tell them. They weren’t all that bad, really. I gave them a story about Hanna’s asthma. I said I was trying to get to this clinic in Spartanburg. Then this morning, when they saw light in the sky, the good ones decided to let us go.”
“Did they give you a charge for your car? Because, with that detour…”
“You’re kidding, aren’t you? They took all our food. And our rifle. But we still have a handgun. We managed to hide it from them.”
“How many rounds left?”
“Twenty-seven.”
“Without an extra charge, you may have to walk part of the way. You realize that, don’t you?”
“I’ve been thinking of nothing else.”
“I’ll phone Lenny and let him know you might be coming on foot. Do you have a flashlight?”
“Yes.”
“And is the battery good?”
“So far. But we’ve used it a lot.”
“Try to conserve it,” he advised. “When you get near the gate, flash it three times. These airmen…they’ve got the place stocked to the gills with military weapons, and they’ve got orders to keep intruders out.”
“So, three times,” she said. “Hang on, hang on…there’s something on the road ahead. Let me give you to Hanna for a sec.”
He heard the phone shift hands.
“Uncle Neil?”
“Hi, sweetie. How are you doing?”
“Can we go swimming at Marblehill?”
“You can do anything you like. Is Jake doing okay?”
“He’s sleeping. We got captured by these National Guard guys.”
“Your mom was saying.”
“But they let us go.”
“Were you scared?”
“For a while I was. But then I saw that they weren’t really so bad. One of them had a guitar.”
“Is that right?”
“But he wouldn’t let me try it. He said it belonged to his dad.”
“Oh.”
“Okay…okay…here’s my mom. She wants to talk to you again.”
He heard the phone shift hands a second time.
“Is everybody doing okay down there?” asked Glenda.
“Colonel Bard had to reduce our rations.”
“You sound a little on edge, Neil.”
“Glenda, the reason I called… and this is strictly hush-hush, and I don’t know whether you want to tell the kids or not. But the reason I called is to tell you that the United States and its allies are going to move against the TMS any day now. And early this morning I was informed by the assistant secretary of defense that if the TMS becomes unviable, the Tarsalans have vowed to take control of those planetside areas offered in the last U.N. counterproposal. That includes the Chattahoochee National Forest. So you have to be careful of your approach.”
She was silent for several seconds. “So… when you say take control…”
“It’s going to be hostile.”
Again, a pause. “Do you think they’ll get anywhere near Marblehill?”
“If they do, they’re going to get a lot more than they bargained for.”
The next day, perforations developed in the shroud’s brown freckling, and unimpeded sunlight reached the Earth’s surface. The mood at Homestead was buoyant. Neil couldn’t have been happier. All morning and into the afternoon he didn’t hear a single gunshot. The cease-fire lasted all night, and when morning came there was an actual dawn, diffuse and brown, with a light so fragile and amber that it reminded him of atmospheric varnish.
All that day, peace reigned. He spent much of the afternoon looking at his book. It was an art book, with full-color plates, and its title was
and as a study in sunlight, it had a great emotional impact on Neil in his current strained circumstances.
