I shook my head. She poked the peas at Mr. Ryan.
He grunted and kept watching TV. Yeah, TV. The dust in the atmosphere was screwing up holo signals, but the land lines from Cablevision days were still buried in place. So if you had an old cathode-ray-tube television box—and what the Ryans didn’t have only the Smithsonian did—you could still watch news.
TV’s like a holo, only flat. You get used to it.
The anchorman asked a professor, “Ganymede?”
The professor wagged a pointer at a studio holo, hanging over the desk between them, of a slow-rotating rock. “Jupiter’s largest moon. Bigger than our moon yet with less gravity than Earth. The only other place in the solar system with liquid water. Of course, Ganymede’s is in a layer far below its surface. This image was taken by the Galileo Probe thirty-seven years ago, in two thousand. Ganymede looks hard edged. It had no surrounding halo back then. No atmosphere but wisps of released ozone and oxygen.” He spun his chair and pointed at the twin to the image alongside the first. The twin had blurred edges. “This telescopic image is a week old. Voila ! Atmosphere!”
“And that means, Doctor?”
“These aliens have set up a forward base on Ganymede. They’ve generated an atmosphere for an entire world.”
“And what does that tell us?” The anchorman knit his brow.
“They covet a world with water and an atmosphere. Which is why these Projectiles are being fired at us instead of nuclear warheads. Precisely large enough to slowly strangle us but clean and small enough to allow Earth to escape true ‘Nuclear Winter.’”
“They don’t want permanendy damaged goods?”
The TV professor nodded.
Mr. Ryan waved his fork. “So fly the Marines up there! They’ll permanently damage some goods!”
Mr. Ryan was very upset about his trees. But the human race couldn’t fly a gerbil to Jupiter. We hadn’t had the hardware or the will to send a person as far as our own moon since the 1970s, much less attack some super-race that could air-condition a whole planet.
“Walter, two wrongs don’t make a right.” Mrs. Ryan tweezed individual peas into Tupperware like pearls.
Mr. Ryan clamped his jaw as he’d done it for a lifetime.
The anchorman faced the screen. “When we return. Military unpreparedness. Worse than Pearl Harbor?”
Mr. Ryan clicked off the TV box. “I’ll just read the paper.”
They were actually publishing daily news on paper again. The Greens didn’t bitch since the trees were already dying.
Mr. Ryan turned to me. “What branch did you pick?”
“The Queen of Battle.” It sounded so cool.
“Christ on a crutch! Not In fantry?”
Uh-oh. “The sergeant recommended it.”
“I was in sales. You always push the shit first. Besides, if we ever win this war, it’ll be the rocket jocks that do it.”
Actually, I’d thought of that. The United Nations Space Force was already up and running. But you had to be a math brain like Metzger to get in. My verbal test scores were so high that I had to sit through weekly counseling about the tragedy of underachievement. However, I C-minus’d precalc and took the Computer-Repair-Shop low road junior year. Even though it split up Metzger and me for the first time since third grade.
Mr. Ryan shook his head. “Infantry. You better spend next month getting in shape.”
I spent next month dropping Prozac to forget Mom, drinking up my signing bonus on a fake ID, sleeping and downloading porn. The rest of the time I wasted.
The day before I shipped out I went down to the recruiting office to pick up my travel allowance. A guy in Space Force cadet uniform was coming out. Khaki jumpsuit, high boots, royal blue neck scarf. Even through the gloom, that looked wick.
“Wander!”
It was Metzger. His face reddened. “I heard you, uh, signed up after…”
Metzger was sort of my best friend, but we hadn’t spoken since I got suspended after my monstrous homeroom assault
“It’s okay.” I shrugged. What could he say? It wasn’t his fault that he still had parents and a life. I don’t know if I’d have called him up if the situation had been reversed. Mom would have said adolescent males form dysfunctional friendships and told me to forget about it
I said, “So check you out! I thought only delinquents with a court order could enlist without graduating.”
“If you score high enough and your parents consent, you take ROTC while you finish high school. After graduation…” He put his hands together and swooped them toward the sky.
Already the military was shooting missiles up from Earth, swatting away some Projectiles. But within months Interceptors, really updated space shuttles, would patrol space between here and the moon. It was going to be a holofantasy come true. Metzger succeeded at everything.
But on hologames he was the best anybody had ever seen. They said game reflexes were success predictors for an Interceptor pilot.
“So whadya get, Wander? Rotary-Wing Flight School?” Metzger acted like an adult, sometimes. Tactful. We both knew I couldn’t do rocket-science math. Helicopter gun ships were the next-sexiest thing.
I flipped his blue braided shoulder cord with a finger. “Flight school’s for pussies.”
“So? What, then?”
Two girls walked by. The blonde looked Metzger up and down and whispered behind her hand to her friend.
He grinned.
Girls always looked at Metzger like that. Now he was Luke Skywalker, too. I rolled my eyes, then squinted at the gray sun. “Infantry.”
“Infantry.” He blinked. “That’s good. Really” He looked off at bare trees. “So. When do you go?”
“Tomorrow morning.”
“I guess you’ve been getting in shape.”
“Naturally.”
“We gotta get drunk tonight.”
In next morning’s darkness I slouched, hungover, in the airport lounge and watched the transport parked outside the window. It squatted on its landing gear, its floodlit paint as gray as every dawn had been since the war began.
I’d never seen a propeller plane except in a museum. But jet engines sucked in so much Projectile-impact dust they chewed up their own insides. Two jumbo jets had crashed, so the commercial fleet got grounded and became parked aluminum scrap. Airports these days were all military.
The dust ate propellers, too, but they’d rigged filters for prop planes so the old, mothballed crates could operate. Filter bags hung under the four engine nacelles like udders.
I rubbed my throbbing temples. Metzger and I had bought beer, driven out to the country, kidnapped a goat, and let it loose in the school cafeteria. Metzger’s idea, as always. Roguish daring was another trait prized in fighter pilots.
I turned to the guy beside me, who looked as hungover as I felt. “You think that old cow’s safe to fly?”
Big and black, he sprawled, like the other fifty of us enlistees, across a departure-lounge chair.
He scowled. “Cow? A Hercules? The C-130 was an outstanding ship in her day!”
Another gung ho letter-and-number spouter. These recruits actually wanted to enlist. I was the only sane one.
“Saddle up, ladies!” The corporal from the plane was more fanatic than the recruits. We fifty stood, stretched, groaned, and drooled. If milling around could win a war, we were going to kick ass.
We boarded and took off. The Hercules’ saving grace, besides not crashing, was that it was as loud as riding in a trash barrel rolling across cobblestones. None of the gung ho crowd disturbed my misery. We landed twice to change filter bags, then hit the runway—not a figure of speech—for the last time around noon, local time, wherever local was.
