work that way.”
“But it asked for water, which is mostly hydrogen,” Bloch said. “Hydrogen is what makes the sun burn.”
“Ah,” the little man said. “You and your high school teacher are experts in thermonuclear technologies, are you?”
“Who is? You?”
The man flung up both hands, wiping the air between them. “I was invited here to help. I am attempting to learn what happened last night and what it is occurring now. What do you imagine? That some cadre of specialists sits in a warehousewaiting for aliens to come here and be studied? You think my colleagues and I have spent two minutes in our lives preparing for this kind of event?”
“I don’t really—”
“Listen to me,” the head professor insisted.
But then the ground rose. It was the same sensation that struck half a dozen times during Bloch’s walk back to the zoo, only this event felt larger and there wasn’t any matching sense of dropping afterwards. The room remained elevated, and everyone was silent. Then an old professor turned to a young woman, asking, “Did Kevin ever get that accelerograph?”
“I don’t know.”
“Well, see if you can find either one. We need to get that machine working and calibrated.”
The girl was pretty and very serious, very tense. Probably a graduate student, Bloch decided. She hurried past, glancing at the big boy and the college sweatshirt that was too small. Then she was gone and he was alone in the room with a couple dozen tired adults who kept talking quietly and urgently among themselves.
The head physicist was lecturing the bald man from Homeland. The bald man was flanked by two younger men who kept flipping through pages on matching clipboards, reading in the dim light. An Army officer was delivering orders to a couple soldiers. Bloch couldn’t be sure of ranks or units. He had a bunch of questions to ask Matt. For a thousand reasons, he wished he could call his brother. But there were no phones; even the Army was working with old-fashioned tools. The officer wrote on a piece of paper and tore it off the pad, handing it to one scared grunt, sending him and those important words off to “The Site.”
Mr. Rightly had moved out of the way. He looked useless and exhausted and sorry, but at least he had a stool to perch on.
“What do we know?” Bloch asked him.
Something was funny in those words.
Laughing along with his teacher, Bloch asked, “Do you still think our spaceship is different from the big probe?”
As if sharing a secret, Mr. Rightly leaned close. “It came from a different part of the sky, and it was alone. And its effects, big as they are, don’t compare with what’s happening on the other side of the world.”
The professors were huddled up, talking and pointing at the ground.
“What is happening on the other side?”
Mr. Rightly asked him to lean over, and then he whispered. “The colonel was talking to the Homeland person. I heard him say that the hardened military channels didn’t quit working right away. Twenty minutes after the big impact, from Europe, from Asia, came reports of bright lights and large motions, from the ground and the water. And then the wind started to blow hard, and all those voices fell silent.”
Bloch felt sad for his brother, but he couldn’t help but say, “Wow.”
“There is a working assumption,” Mr. Rightly said. “The Earth’s night side has been lost, but the invasion hasn’t begun here. Homeland and the military are trying not to lose this side too.”
Thinking about the alien and the dead kids, Bloch said, “You were right, sir. We shouldn’t have trusted it.”
Mr. Rightly shrugged and said nothing.
Some kind of meeting had been called in the back of the room. There was a lot of passion and no direction. Then the Homeland man whispered to an assistant who wrote hard on the clipboard, and the colonel found new orders and sent his last soldier off on another errand.
“What’s the alien doing now?” Bloch asked.
“Who knows,” Mr. Rightly said.
“Is the radiation keeping us away?”
“No, it’s not…” The glasses needed another shove. “Our friend vanished. After you and I left, it apparently punched through the bottom of the pond. I haven’t been to the Site myself. But the concrete is shattered and there’s a slick new hole reaching down who-knows-how-far. That’s the problem. And that’s why they’re so worried about these little quakes, or whatever they are. What is our green-eyed mystery doing below us?”
Bloch looked at the other faces and then at the important floor. Then a neat, odd thought struck him: the monster was never just the creature itself. It was also the way that the creature lurked about, refusing to be seen. It was the unknown wrapped heavy and thick around it, and there was the vivid electric fear that made the air glow. Real life was normal and silly. Nothing happening today was normal or silly.
He started to laugh, enjoying the moment, the possibilities.
Half of the room stared at him, everybody wondering what was wrong with that towering child.
“They’re bringing in equipment, trying to dangle a cable down into the hole,” Mr. Rightly said.
“What, with a camera at the end?”
“Cameras don’t seem to be working. Electronics come and go. So no, they’ll send down a volunteer.”
“I’d go,” Bloch said.
“And I know you mean that,” Mr. Rightly said.
“Tell them I would.”
“First of all: I won’t. And second, my word here is useless. With this crew, I have zero credibility.”
The physicist and colonel were having an important conversation, fingers poking imaginary objects in the air.
“I’m hungry,” Bloch said.
“There’s MREs somewhere,” said Mr. Rightly.
“I guess I’ll go look for them,” the boy lied. Then he walked out into a hallway that proved wonderfully empty.
Every zoo exists somewhere between the perfect and the cheap. Every cage wants to be impregnable and eternal, but invisibility counts for something too. The prisoner’s little piece of the sky had always been steel mesh reaching down to a concrete wall sculpted to resemble stone, and people would walk past all day, every day, and people would stand behind armored glass, reading about Amur leopards when they weren’t looking at him.
Sometimes he paced the concrete ground, but not this morning. Everything felt different and wrong this morning. He was lying beside a dead decorative tree, marshaling his energies. Then the monster came along. It was huge and loud and very clumsy, and he kept perfectly still as the monster made a sloppy turn on the path, its long trailing arm tearing through the steel portion of the sky. Then the monster stopped and a man climbed off and looked at the damage, and then he ran to the glass, staring into the gloomy cage. But he never saw any leopards. He breathed with relief and climbed back on the monster and rode it away, and the leopard rose and looked at the hole ripped in the sky. Then with a lovely unconscious motion, he was somewhere he had never been, and the world was transformed.
Cranes and generators were rumbling beside the penguin pond. Temporary lights had been nailed to trees, and inside those brilliant cones were moving bodies and purposeful chaos, grown men shouting for this to be done and not that, and goddamn this and that, and who the hell was in charge? Bloch was going to walk past the pond’s backside. His plan, such as it was, was to act as if he belonged here. If somebody stopped him, he would claim that he was heading for the vending machines at the maintenance shed—a good story since it happened to be true. Or maybe he would invent some errand given to him by the little physicist. There were a lot of lies waiting inside the confusion, and he was looking forward to telling stories to soldiers holding guns. “Don’t you believe me?” he would ask them, smiling all the while. “Well maybe you should shoot me. Go on, I dare you.”
The daydream ended when he saw the graduate student. He recognized her tight jeans and the blond hair worn in a ponytail. She was standing on the path ahead of him, hands at her side, eyes fixed on the little hill behind
