“I think we did screw up,” Mr. Rightly said.
The body had stopped being gray. And a moment later that cute seal face and those eyes were smoothed away. Then the alien was larger, growing like a happy sponge, and out from its center came a blue glow, dim at first, but quickly filling the concrete basin and the air above—a blue light shining into the scared faces, and Bloch’s face too.
Leaning farther out, Bloch felt the heat rising up from water that was already most of the way to boiling.
The woman ran away and then shouted, “Run.”
The driver jumped into his truck and drove off.
Only two people were left at the water’s edge. Mr. Rightly tugged on Bloch’s arm. “Son,” he said. “We need to get somewhere safe.”
“Where’s that?” Bloch asked.
His teacher offered a grim little laugh, saying, “Maybe Mars. How about that?”
THE LEOPARD
Any long stasis means damage. Time introduces creeps and tiny flaws into systems shriveled down near the margins of what nature permits. But the partial fueling allowed repairs to begin. Systems woke and took stock of the situation. Possibilities were free to emerge, each offering itself to the greatest good, yet the situation was dire. The universe permitted quite a lot of magic, but even magic had strict limits and the enemy was vast and endowed with enough luck to have already won a thousand advantages before the battle had begun.
Horrific circumstances demanded aggressive measures; this was the fundamental lesson of the moment.
The sanctity of an entire world at stake, and from this moment on, nothing would be pretty.
“Did you feel that?”
Bloch was stretched out on the big couch. He remembered closing his eyes, listening to the AM static on his old boom box. But the radio was silent and his mother spoke, and opening his eyes, he believed that only a minute or two had passed. “What? Feel what?”
“The ground,” she said. Mom was standing in the dark, fighting for the best words. “It was like an earthquake… but not really… never mind…”
A second shiver passed beneath their house. There was no hard shock, no threat to bring buildings down. It was a buoyant motion, as if the world was an enormous water bed and someone very large was squirming under distant covers.
She said, “Simon.”
Nobody else called him Simon. Even Dad used the nickname invented by a teasing brother. At least that’s what Bloch had been told; he didn’t remember his father at all.
“How do you feel, Simon?”
Bloch sat up. It was cold in the house and silent in that way that comes only when the power was out.
She touched his forehead.
“I’m fine, Mom.”
“Are you nauseous?”
“No.”
“Radiation sickness,” she said. “It won’t happen right away.”
“I’m fine, Mom. What time is it?”
“Not quite six,” she said. Then she checked her watch to make sure. “And we are going to the doctor this morning, if not the hospital.”
“Yeah, except nothing happened,” he said, just like he did twenty times last night. “We backed away when the glow started. Then the police came, and some guy from Homeland, and Mr. Rightly found me that old sweatshirt—”
“I was so scared,” she interrupted, talking to the wall. “I got home and you weren’t here. You should have been home already. And the phones weren’t working, and then everything went dark.”
“I had to walk home from the zoo,” he said again. “Mr. Rightly couldn’t give me a ride if he wanted, because he was parked over by the crash site.”
“The crash site,” she repeated.
He knew not to talk.
“You shouldn’t have been there at all,” she said. “Something drops from the sky, and you run straight for it.”
The luckiest moment in his life, he knew.
“Simon,” she said. “Why do you take such chances?”
The woman was a widow and her other son was a soldier stationed in a distant, hostile country, and even the most normal day gave her reasons to be nervous. But now aliens were raining down on their heads, and there was no word happening in the larger world. Touching the cool forehead once again, she said, “I’m not like you, Simon.”
“I know that, Mom.”
“I don’t like adventure,” she said. “I’m just waiting for the lights to come on.”
But neither of them really expected that to happen. So he changed the subject, telling her, “I’m hungry.”
“Of course you are.” Thankful for a normal task, she hurried into the kitchen. “How about cereal before our milk goes bad?”
Bloch stood and pulled on yesterday’s pants and the hooded Cornell sweatshirt borrowed from the zoo’s lost-and-found. “Yeah, cereal sounds good,” he said.
“What kind?” she asked from inside the darkened refrigerator.
“Surprise me,” he said. Then after slipping on his shoes, he crept out the back door.
Mr. Rightly looked as if he hadn’t moved in twelve hours. He was standing in the classroom where Bloch left him, and he hadn’t slept. Glasses that needed a good scrubbing obscured red worried eyes. A voice worked over by sandpaper said, “That was fast.”
“What was fast?” Bloch asked.
“They just sent a car for you. I told them you were probably at home.”
“Except I walked here on my own,” the boy said.
“Oh.” Mr. Rightly broke into a long weak laugh. “Anyway, they’re gathering up witnesses, seeing what everybody remembers.”
It was still night outside. The classroom was lit by battery-powered lamps. “They” were the Homeland people in suits and professors in khaki, with a handful of soldiers occupying a back corner. The classroom was the operation’s headquarters. Noticing Bloch’s arrival, several people came forward, offering hands and names. The boy pretended to listen. Then a short Indian fellow pulled him aside, asking, “Did you yourself speak to the entity?”
“I heard it talk.”
“And did it touch you?”
Bloch nearly said, “Yes.” But then he thought again, asking, “Who are you?”
“I told you. I am head of the physics department at the university, here at the request of Homeland Security.”
“Was it fusion?”
“Pardon?”
“The creature, the machine,” Bloch said. “It turned bright blue and the pond was boiling. So we assumed some kind of reactor was supplying the power.”
The head professor dismissed him with a wave. “Fusion is not as easy as that, young man. Reactors do not
