It’s only a few more minutes.”
Mel saw it all now. This was the very essence of the engine that had protected him, and the Ark, for years, an engine that ran on flesh and blood and false hope.
It seemed a long time before the hiss of gas stopped. A man in a pale blue NBC suit approached now, and a trooper came along the line of the soldiers, handing out more suits.
Mel took his numbly. “What now?” he asked Don.
“Cleanup,” Don said. He put his weapon on the ground and began pushing his legs into the suit trousers. “Just a precaution. The gas has been pumped away.”
“I can’t.”
“You must. It’s your duty. One job we can’t delegate to the eye-dees. Come on, man, help me zip up this damn thing.”
That was how it went for the rest of the day for Mel, until his watch ended at around eight p.m.
Don walked him back to the tent city, and helped him find his bunk, his stuff. Mel’s mind seemed to have shut down. The other bunks around his were full of sleeping troopers, men and women, most still clothed, their boots on the ground under their bunks. Officers moved silently between the rows, offering quiet words when a soldier stirred.
Mel drank some water, but found he didn’t want to eat.
“That’s fine,” Don said. “Just sleep. That’s what you need above all. Sleep.” He had a flask, a plastic cup. He poured a golden fluid out of the flask. “Drink this.”
Mel took a sip. It was strong, flavorful, and as he swallowed a mouthful he felt a kick at the back of his head. “Wow.”
“Alma’s finest.” Don grinned. “And there’s something in it, a powder from the medics. It will help you sleep.”
“I don’t want to sleep. It’s too early. Eight o’clock-”
“It’s an order,” Don said gently. “Go ahead, finish this, lie down. Go right to sleep now and the memories won’t get a chance to form, and it won’t feel so bad in the morning. You know, the guilt.”
Mel hesitated. But he was too exhausted to argue. He sat on his bunk and pulled off his heavy boots. His feet stank, after sweating all day inside the layers of socks. He rolled onto his bunk and pulled his blanket over him. “Where did we learn these procedures? Maybe this is how the Nazis enabled their death squads to function.”
“I wouldn’t know,” Don said grimly. “If not, I guess we had to figure it out for ourselves.”
“Holle-the Ark. I don’t want to miss seeing that.”
“I’ll wake you.” Don glanced at the roof of the tent. “Holle and Kelly will never know how lucky they are, to have ascended from all this.”
“Don’t forget to wake me,” Mel whispered.
“I promise. Sleep now.”
When Don did wake Mel, in the small hours, it was to the sounds of shouting, and a stink of burning.
55
Even inside the Buckskin Street compound there was chaos, with troops and civilians running everywhere.
Patrick Groundwater checked his watch as he ran, his coat flapping around him. He’d meant to be at Mission Control by now. The warp bubble fire up was only minutes away-or rather, off in the orbit of far Jupiter, it had or had not already happened, his only daughter was on her way to the stars, or not. And the news of that terrific event was limping its way at mere light speed across the solar system, with no regard for the anxious beating of a human heart. He looked up, but the sky was full of broken cloud, and pillars of smoke rose up to obscure it even more. If the eclipsed moon was risen, he couldn’t see it.
He was fifty-nine years old. He couldn’t run any faster. Damn, damn.
By the time he reached Mission Control the smell of burning was looming close, the crackle of gunfire closing in. He found troops ringing the building. Even in the urgency of the moment he had to show an ID and submit his retina to a laser-flash test. As he fumbled for his papers a great beating, as of huge wings, descended on him from above. He ducked, and some of the soldiers around him flinched and raised their weapons. It was a Chinook, maybe the last one flying anywhere in the world, its dual rotors roaring over the battered township, and playing its lights down in dusty beams to assist the ground operations.
When at last Patrick got inside the Mission Control building, Gordo Alonzo was making a speech. He was standing on a table at the front of the room, before the rows of consoles with their glowing screens. At his back a map of the solar system glimmered, the dark swoop of the Ark’s orbit like a loose signature. Thandie Jones stood beside him, enigmatic.
Alonzo was saying, “In the generations to come, in the long centuries that will unfold on Earth II, what we have achieved together in this place, and in Gunnison and Denver, will always be remembered. You will be remembered. You know, Alma, the town, was named for the daughter of the guy who ran the grocery store when the town was incorporated in 1873. But I’m told that ‘alma’ is also the word for ‘soul.’ in Spanish. And that’s what you have been here-the soul of the grandest mission in human history…”
Patrick scanned the room. The technicians still manned their stations, and data chattered in scrolls of numbers and in graphic forms across the screens. But, short of a catastrophic failure, there was nothing more these people could do to influence the Ark’s fate, its stupendous flight across twenty-one light-years to the planet of a star in the constellation of the river. The ship had either gone, or it had not. He checked his watch again. There was still no confirmation.
Edward Kenzie came bustling up to him. Even now he wore a suit and tie, though his shirt hung out of his pants and his hair was mussed. “Patrick. Thank God you’re here.”
“You can’t stop Gordo Alonzo making speeches.”
“At least he’s keeping these people calm. After all, if there has been some disaster up there, we need to keep the technicians in their seats as long as we can.”
“And how long is that?”
“Take a look,” Kenzie said grimly. He offered Patrick a handheld.
The screen showed a map of the area, of the military assets in green, the deployment of hostiles in angry red. The outer cordon had been broken to the north and south along Highway 9, and to the west from up Buckskin Gulch. Elements of the mob coming in from all three directions were already closing on the bright green triangle that marked the Buckskin Street compound, and the glowing yellow jewel of Mission Control itself.
“Shit,” Patrick said. “This looks organized.”
“Precisely. Abider agitators, that’s what I’m told. Weapons caches and radios. I heard the military saying it was a mistake to time the launch to that lunar eclipse. They were right.”
Gordo had finished his speech. Seventy-three years old, he jumped down off his table with an almost arrogant athleticism, and the controllers applauded. But a rattle of gunfire, clearly audible through the walls of the building, drowned them out. Tailed by Thandie Jones, Gordo came striding up to Patrick and Edward. “You guys see a Chinook hovering outside? That’s our ride out of here.”
Patrick felt oddly betrayed. “But the project isn’t over-we don’t even know about the warp bubble-”
Kenzie said, “You know, Gordo, I always thought you’d be the last man to leave the bridge.”
“That’s the fucking Navy,” Gordo said. “And anyhow we did all we could. We kept the lamps burning in Alma, Colorado, we didn’t let those kids go off into the dark alone. But our job’s done now.”
“And he really does have his orders,” Thandie Jones said. Here she was at the end of it all, Patrick thought, as she had been at the very beginning, when she had spoken to the IPCC as another, earlier disaster unfolded around New York, back in the days when Holle the interstellar astronaut hadn’t even been conceived. “President Peery has ordered that the continuity of the nation should be preserved. According to the Presidential Succession Act the line runs through the Vice President to the Speaker of the House of Representatives, the President Pro Tem of the Senate, and then selected members of the Cabinet-”
