four minutes remained. Bloch held the phone steady. Nothing about the boy was genuinely scared. Racing toward the sun, the starship was shifting its trajectory. Odds were that it would hit the earth’s night side. But it was only a solar sail, thin and weak, and there was no way to measure the hazard. Mostly what the boy felt was a rare joyous thrill. If he got lucky with the stop lights, he could run across the intersection at the bottom of the hill, reaching home just in time to watch the impact on television.
But he didn’t take a step. Thunder or a low-flying jet suddenly struck from behind. The world shook, and then the roar ended with a wrenching explosion that bled into a screeching tangle of lesser noises. Brakes screamed and tires slid across asphalt, and Bloch felt something big hammering furiously at the ground. A giant truck must have lost control, tumbling down the middle of Pender. What else could it be? Fast-moving traffic struggled to brake and steer sideways. Bloch heard cars colliding, and the runaway truck or city bus kept rolling downhill. Turning toward the racket, toward the west, he couldn’t see Pender or the traffic behind the little houses, but the mayhem, the catastrophe, rolled past him, and then a final crash made one tall oak shake, the massive trunk wobbling and the weakest brown leaves falling, followed by a few more collisions of little vehicles ending with an abrupt wealth of silence.
The side street bent into Pender. Bloch sprinted to the corner. Westbound traffic was barely rolling up the long gentle hill, and nobody was moving east. The sidewalk and one lane were blocked by a house-sized ball of what looked like black metal. Some piece of Bloch’s brain expected a truck and he was thinking this was a damn peculiar truck. He had to laugh. An old man stood on the adjacent lawn, eyes big and busy. Bloch approached, and the man heard the laughter and saw the big boy. The man was trembling. He needed a good breath before he could say, “I saw it.” Then he lifted a shaking arm, adding, “I saw it fall,” as he slapped the air with a flattened hand, mimicking the intruder’s bounce as it rolled down the long hill, smacking into the oak tree with the last of its momentum.
Bloch said, “Wow.”
“This is my yard,” the old man whispered, as if nothing were more important. Then the arm dropped and his hands grabbed one another. “What is it, you think? A spaceship?”
“An ugly spaceship,” Bloch said. He walked quickly around the object, looking for wires or portholes. But nothing showed in the lumpy black hull. Back uphill were strings of cars crushed by the impacts and from colliding with each other. A Buick pointed east, its roof missing. Now the old man was staring at the wreckage, shaking even worse than before. When he saw Bloch returning, he said, “I wouldn’t look. Get away.”
Bloch didn’t stop. An old woman had been driving the Buick when the spaceship came bouncing up behind her. One elegant hand was resting neatly in her lap, a big diamond shining on the ring finger, and her head was missing, and Bloch studied the ripped-apart neck, surprised by the blood and sorry for her but always curious, watchful and impressed.
People were emerging from houses and the wrecked cars and from cars pulling over to help. There was a lot of yelling and quick talking. One woman screamed, “Oh God, someone’s alive here.” Between a flipped pickup and the Buick was an old Odyssey, squashed and shredded. The van’s driver was clothes mixed with meat. Every seat had its kid strapped in, but only one of them was conscious. The little girl in back looked out at Bloch, smiled and said something, and he smiled back. The late-day air stank of gasoline. Bloch swung his left arm, shattering the rear window with the elbow, and then he reached in and undid the girl’s belt and brought her out. What looked like a brother was taking what looked like a big nap beside her. The side of his face was bloody. Bloch undid that belt and pulled him out too and carried both to the curb while other adults stood around the van, talking about the three older kids still trapped.
Then the screaming woman noticed gasoline running in the street, flowing toward the hot spaceship. Louder than ever, she told the world, “Oh God, it’s going to blow up.”
People started to run away, holding their heads down, and still other people came forward, fighting with the wreckage, fighting with jammed doors and their own panic, trying to reach the unconscious and dead children.
One man looked at Bloch, eyes shining when he said, “Come on and help us.”
But there was a lot of gasoline. The pickup must have had a reserve tank, and it had gotten past the van and the Buick. Bloch was thinking about the spaceship, how it was probably full of electricity and alien fires. That was the immediate danger, he realized. Trotting up ahead, he peeled off his coat and both shirts, and after wadding them up into one tight knot, he threw them into the stinking little river, temporarily stopping the flow.
The screaming woman stood in the old man’s yard. She was kind of pretty and kind of old. Staring at his bare chest, she asked, “What are you doing?”
“Helping,” he said.
She had never heard anything so odd. That’s what she said with her wrinkled, doubtful face.
Once more, Bloch’s phone made the Matt noise. His brother’s final message had arrived. “Everythings quiet here everybodys outside and I bet you wish you could see this big bastard filling the sky, B, its weird no stars but the this glow, and pretty you know???you would love this”
And then some final words:
“Good luck and love Matt.”
Tar and nanofibers had been worn as camouflage, and an impoverished stream of comet detritus served as cover. A machine grown for one great purpose had spent forty million years doing nothing. But the inevitable will find ways to happen, and the vagaries of orbital dynamics gave this machine extraordinary importance. Every gram of fuel was expended, nothing left to make course corrections. The goal was a small lake that would make quite a lot possible, but the trajectory was sloppy, and it missed the target by miles, rolling to a halt on a tilted strip of solid hydrocarbons littered with mindless machinery and liquid hydrocarbons and cellulose and sacks of living water.
Eyes were spawned, gazing in every direction.
Several strategies were fashioned and one was selected, and only then did the machine begin growing a body and the perfect face.
Brandishing a garden hose, the old man warned Bloch to get away from the damn gas. But an even older man mentioned that the spaceship was probably hot and maybe it wasn’t a good idea throwing cold water near it. The hose was grudgingly put away. But the gasoline pond was spilling past the cotton and polyester dam. Bloch considered asking people for their shirts. He imagined sitting in the street, using his butt to slow things down. Then a third fellow arrived, armed with a big yellow bucket of cat litter, and that hero used litter to build a second defensive barrier.
All the while, the intruder waschanging. Its rounded shape held steady but the hull was a shinier, prettier black. Putting his face close, Bloch felt the heat left over from slamming into the atmosphere; nevertheless, he could hold his face close and peer inside the glassy crust, watching tiny dark shapes scurry here to there and back again.
“Neat,” he said.
Bystanders started to shout at the shirtless boy, telling him to be careful and not burn himself. They said that he should find clothes before he caught a cold. But Bloch was comfortable, except where his elbow was sore from busting out the van window. He held the arm up to the radiant heat and watched the ship’s hull reworking itself. Car radios were blaring, competing voices reporting the same news: a giant interstellar craft was striking the earth’s night side. Reports of power outages and minor impacts were coming in. Europe and Russia might be getting the worst of it, though there wasn’t any news from the Middle East. Then suddenly most of the stations shifted to the same feed, and one man was talking. He sounded like a scientist lecturing to a class. The “extraordinary probe” had been spread across millions of square miles, and except for little knots and knobs, it was more delicate than any spiderweb, and just as harmless. “The big world should be fine,” he said.
On Pender Boulevard, cars were jammed up for blocks and sirens were descending. Fire trucks and paramedics found too much to do. The dead and living children had been pulled out of the van, and the screaming woman stood in the middle of the carnage, steering the first helpers to them. Meanwhile the cat litter man and hose man were staring at the spaceship.
“It came a long ways,” said the litter man.
“Probably,” said the hose man.
Bloch joined them.
