Moonbane

There had been times at sunset when I’d seen weather balloons pass overhead from Kramer Air Force Base, a good hundred and fifty miles to the west. But I just had a gut feeling that what we were witnessing had nothing to do with them.

There were hundreds of them now—then thousands. The sky was turned from night nearly today, and now I heard a distinct, air-splitting scream as one passed so low overhead that it looked more like a landing aircraft than a celestial object. There was still nothing visible but a huge glowing orange head followed by a long tail, but I swear I even felt its heat. It vanished in the west, but I saw a flash of light over the dip of the horizon and heard a vague, thumping explosion.

Richie and I looked at one another.

“What’s happening, Dad?”

I wished I could tell him; I wish at this moment, as I write this, that I’d known then and could have done something to prevent what happened afterward. But all I did was look at him and say, “I don’t know.”

Like good amateur astronomers, we tried to count the fireballs. But there were just too many. I saw six huge ones go over at once, with a backdrop of higher monsters, thirty, forty, eighty, a hundred. It looked as though there were layers of them. For a scary moment I thought of a World War II film with squadrons of B-29 bombers flying in formation to their targets, opening their bomb-bay doors, dropping their deadly cargo—

“Maybe we’d better go in,” I suggested.

“Are you kidding?”

“Richie,” I persisted, but I dropped my thoughts as something truly terrifying came at us.

For a moment I thought the sun had risen. It came from the direction of the rising Moon, a huge, waxing ball of light that grew and grew, brightening to almost painful intensity. I heard a rumble, like distant thunder rolling much too fast, and then a roar as the thing flashed straight at us. I shouted, pushing my son down, but it was a futile gesture—if the fireball was going to hit us, it would have by then. There was a crash behind us, a thudding boom, and then, mercifully, silence. I looked up from the ground and saw, off at the far end of our field, a thin plume of smoke and a glow like dying embers on the ground.

Richie pushed himself to his feet and stood staring at the crash site. “A meteorite!” he shouted. “Dad, we’ve got a meteorite!”

He made a move toward it, but I held his arm. “I think we’d better take it easy.”

“Why?” he said. And at that moment I had to ask myself the same question. What was bothering me? Something was trying to fight its way into my thoughts, some indistinct memory of standing out here on other nights and having the same unsettling feeling I had now. Wasn’t this just a freak meteor shower? What else could it be? For no rational reason I looked at the Moon, and as I did so a tiny voice, a voice that had perhaps been planted in the back of my mind a long time ago, said—

Run.

“Richie,” I said slowly, “let’s go in the house.”

He had already started to walk toward the far field. He stopped and looked at me, his face momentarily flushed by the light of a passing fireball. The lines of fire were still passing overhead, though by now there were not as many as there had been. I heard a high-pitched whistle and saw another one streak low overhead, landing somewhere beyond our property.

“I said let’s go in.”

He looked evenly at me, and I knew instantly that we had reached one of those bridges that all fathers and sons have to cross. William Faulkner wrote about it in The Bear, in which a father and son’s roughhousing abruptly became a battle for supremacy. It’s the Oedipus thing, of course, but since I don’t believe in Freudian psychology (one of my best friends in college, a psychology major, said that the only reason Freud invented psychoanalysis was because he needed it himself so badly), it must be something else. I prefer to call it growing up. Every father knows that sooner or later his son or daughter will stop thinking that he knows everything, and that maybe there are a few things they know better themselves.

“Dad, you’re not scared, are you?”

“Richie, I just have a feeling…”

He stood with his hands stuffed into the pockets of his parka, staring at me in the darkness.

“Son,” I began sternly.

And then I did the stupidest thing of my life.

“All right,” I said, “what the heck.”

We crossed the unplowed field together. Though this was a farm, I only rented the house, and nothing had been planted on the tired soil of the place for ten or fifteen years. We had to make our way carefully through old furrows hardened by many winters.

Richie looked up at me, and suddenly he smiled. Overhead, I noticed that the fireballs had become truly sporadic, one and then another streaking silently. Behind them, I once more saw a wan, unhearty trail of one of the Geminids.

I smiled back at my son, but it was a faint one.

“I think it fell over this way,” Richie said. He was pushing enthusiastically on. I saw a thinning plume of steam up ahead.

“There,” Richie said. I lost him for a moment, behind a clump of tall bush, but then I came around and he was there, standing before a hissing pile of what looked at first like charcoal briquettes. When I got closer I saw what really was there: a circular pit four feet wide, a foot deep. A single glowing piece of rock sat in the center. I smelled ozone, and something else—a faint, familiar smell that at first I couldn’t identify.

“Don’t touch it,” I said, as Richie reached out a hand. “It might be hot.”

He pulled his hand back. “Maybe I should get a stick,” he said and immediately went searching for one.

This left me alone with the thing. That feeling deep down inside began to act up again. But having rationalized it away once, it was easier this time to suppress it. Here was my twelve-year-old son, my boy, looking for a stick so he could poke at a rock from space, and his father, a former teacher, a published poet, a respected man, wanted to cower like a child and hide.

If only that’s what I’d done; if only I’d dragged Richie into the house, dragged my wife from bed and locked the three of us in the cellar, bolting and barricading the door behind us…

Richie returned with a long straight bough, the victim of a summer lightning strike on one of the oaks that bordered the field. He stood over the meteor for a moment, and then edged the stick toward it. “I wonder how heavy it is,” he said, to himself as well as to me. The stick bent when it touched the roughly pyramidal mass, but the meteorite moved a bit.

Richie stepped in closer, one booted foot slipping down into the crater. He had both hands on the stick, pushing the rock toward the other side of the hole, trying to flip it over.

Suddenly I took him by the shoulder and yanked him back.

The same odd look of defiance he had shown before crossing his face. But then he saw what I meant, and his expression changed.

“Oh,” he said, stepping out of the hole and next to me.

The meteorite was moving on its own. Or, rather, the pointed end of the pyramid was. Tiny fissures had formed on the cooling stone, a network of cracks that resembled the pattern on the surface of a hatching egg.

That grip of prescience took hold of me again. Once more—fatefully this time—the look of wonder on my son’s face shamed me into doing nothing about it.

“What is it, Dad?”

“I don’t know.” One side of the pyramid had flaked away, a portion perhaps six or eight inches long. Now something that couldn’t quite get out was pushing at the neighboring face of the rock, working it till it, too, began to drop away. That smell I had detected earlier, which I still couldn’t place, was stronger.

Overhead, a last large meteor passed by, disappearing like a flare in the west. The sky was empty, except for the Moon, which had risen full and stood balanced over the eastern horizon, and the scattering of bright stars it wasn’t able to drown. The Geminid meteors were completely engulfed by the gray-white light of Luna.

I didn’t rebuke him, because again I repeated the same exclamation. A tiny limb, a paw it looked like, had pushed out from the fractured rock in the crater. It was quickly followed by the rest of the body, which fell to the ground and formed into a tight, nearly fetal shape. As we watched, a membrane, thin and yellowing, nearly