STATE SCIENTISTS INVESTIGATING
PRESIDENT LOSES ELECTION BY
LARGEST MARGIN EVER
“MY TWIN SONS WERE FATHERED BY THE OBJECT,” CLAIMS SENATOR’S DAUGHTER,
RESISTS DNA TESTING
Polls Show 46% of Americans Believe Her Jim Cowell, contemptuous of the senator’s daughter, was forced to acknowledge that he had waited a lifetime for his own irrational belief to be justified. Which it never had.
“Just a little farther, Dad,” Barbara said. “You okay?”
Cowell nodded in his wheelchair, and slowed it to match Barbara’s pace. She wheezed a little these days; losing weight wouldn’t hurt her. He had learned over the years not to mention this. Ahead, the last checkpoint materialized out of the fog. A bored soldier leaned out of the low window, his face lit by the glow of a holoscreen. “Yes?”
“We have authorization to approach the object,” Cowell said. He could never think of it as anything else, despite all the names the tabloid press had hung on it over the last decades. The Alien Invader. The Space Fizzle. Silent Alien Cal.
“Approach for retina scan,” the soldier said. Cowell wheeled his chair to the checker, leaned in close.
“Okay, you’re cleared. Ma’am?…Okay. Proceed.” The soldier stuck his head back in the window, and the screen made one of the elaborate noises that accompanied the latest hologame.
Barbara muttered, “As if he knew the value of what he’s guarding!”
“He knows,” Cowell said. He didn’t really want to talk to Barbara. Much as he loved her, he really would have preferred to come to this place alone. Or with Sharon, if Sharon had still been alive. But Barbara had been afraid he might have some sort of final attack alone there by the object, and of course he might have. He was pretty close to the end, and they both knew it. Getting here from Detroit was taking everything Cowell had left.
He wheeled down the paved path. On either side, autumn stubble glinted with frost. They were almost on the object before it materialized out of the fog.
Barbara began to babble. “Oh, it looks so different from pictures, even holos, so much smaller but shinier, too, you never told me it was so shiny, Dad, I guess whatever it’s made of doesn’t rust. But, no, of course the air isn’t getting close enough to rust it, is it, there’s that shield to prevent oxidation, and they never found out whatthat is composed of, either, did they, although I remember reading this speculative article that-”
Cowell shut her out as best he could. He brought his chair close enough to touch the shield. Still nothing: no tingle, no humming, no moving. Nothing at all.
That first time rushed back to him, in sharp sensory detail. The fatigue, the strain, the rustle of corn husks in the unseen wind. Hans Kleinschmidt’s Styrofoam cup of coffee warm in Cowell’s hand. Ann Pettie’s cryIt’s landing here! Run! Cowell’s own strange personal feeling of inevitability:Of course. They wouldn’t let me miss this.
Well, theyhad. They’d let the whole world miss whatever the hell the object was supposed to be, or do, or represent. Hans was long dead. Ann was institutionalized with Alzheimer’s.“Hello, ship.” And the rest of his life-of many people’s lives-devoted to trying to figure out the Space Super Fizzle.
That long frustration, Cowell thought, had showed him one thing, anyway. There was no mystery behind the mystery, no unseen Plan, no alien messiah for humanity. There was only this blank object sitting in a field, stared at by a shrill middle-aged woman and a dying man. What you see is what you get. He, James Everett Cowell, had been a fool to ever hope for anything else.
“Dad, why are you smiling like that? Don’t, please!”
“It’s nothing, Barbara.”
“But you looked-”
“Isaid, ‘It’s nothing.’”
Suddenly he was very tired. It was cold out here, under the gray sky. Snow was in the air.
“Honey, let’s go back now.”
They did, Barbara walking close by Cowell’s chair. He didn’t look back at the object, silent on the fallow ground.
Transmission: There is nothing here yet.
Current probability of occurrence: 67%.
The girl, dressed in home-dyed blue cotton pants and a wolf pelt bandeau, said suddenly, “Tam-what’sthat? ”
Tam Wilkinson stopped walking, although his goat herd did not. The animals moved slowly forward, pulling at whatever tough grass they could find on the parched ground. Three-legged Himmie hobbled close to the herd leader; blind Jimmie turned his head in the direction of Himmie’s bawl. “What’s what?” the boy said.
“Over there, to the north…no,there.”
The boy shaded his eyes against the summer sun, hot under the thin clouds. He and Juli would have to find noon shade for the goats soon. Tam’s eyes weren’t strong, but by squinting and peering, he caught the glint of sunlight on something dull silvery. “I don’t know.”
“Let’s go see.”
Tam looked bleakly at Juli. They had married only a few months ago, in the spring. She was so pretty, hardly any deformity at all. The doctor from St. Paul had issued her a fertility certificate at only fourteen.
But she was impulsive. Tam, three years older, came from a family unbroken since the Collapse. They hadn’t accomplished that by impulsive behavior.
“No, Juli. We have to find shade for the goats.”
“It couldbe shade. O, or even a machine with some good metal on it!”
“This whole area was stripped long ago.”
“Maybe they missed something.”
Tam considered. She could be right; since their marriage, he and Juli had brought the goats pretty far beyond their usual range. Not many people had ventured into the Great Northern Waste for pasturage.
The whole area had been too hard hit at the Collapse, leaving the soil too contaminated and the standing water even worse. But the summer had been unusually rainy, creating the running water that was so much safer than ponds or lakes, and anyway Tam and Juli had delighted in being alone. Maybe therewas a forgotten machine with usable parts still sitting way out here, from before the Collapse. What a great thing to bring home from his honeymoon! “Please,” Juli said, nibbling his ear, and Tam gave in. She was so pretty. In Tam’s entire family, no women were as pretty, nor as nearly whole, as Juli. His sister Nan was loose-brained, Calie had only one arm, Jen was blind, and Suze could not walk. Only Jen was fertile, even though the Wilkinson farm was near neither lake nor city. The farm still sat in the path of the west winds coming from Grand Forks.
When there had been a Grand Forks.
Tam and Juli walked slowly, herding the goats, toward the glinting metal. The sun glared pitilessly by the time they reached the object, but the thing, whatever it was, stood beside a stand of scrawny trees in a little dell. Tam drove the goats into the shade. His practiced eye saw that once there had been water here, but no longer. They would have to move on by early afternoon.
When the goats were settled, the lovers walked hand-in-hand toward the object. “O,” Juli said, “it’s an egg! A metal egg!” Suddenly she clutched Tam’s arm. “Is it…do you think it’s a polluter?”
Tam felt growing excitement. “No-I know what this is! Gran told me, before she died!”
“It’s not a polluter?”
“No, it…well, actually, nobody knows exactly what it’s made of. But it’s safe, dear love. It’s a miracle.”
“A what?” Juli said.
“A miracle.” He tried not to sound superior; Juli was sensitive about her lack of education. Tam was teaching her to read and write. “A gift directly from God. A long time ago-a few hundred years, I think, anyway before the Collapse-this egg fell out of the sky. No one could figure out why. Then one day a beautiful princess touched it, and she got pregnant and bore twin sons.”
