Asimov's Science Fiction (14 page)

In my entire office bay there was only one other guy. We never talked. He knew nothing about me and I knew nothing about him. He didn't know I was dying, for instance, or that a stroke killed my mother when I was fifteen years old, killed her dead right before my eyes. I had to pass his desk on the way to the bathroom. He was always working, intently focused on some project, his shirt sleeves rolled to his elbows. He never looked up when I walked by. He might as well have been set dressing in somebody else's play. I had come to a place in my life where this point of view did not strike me as irrational.

A window in the corner of my monitor was linked to a Harvard physics page about "flop transitions." The material was pretty dense but I stuck with it, as I imagine God-inclined people will stick with even the dullest parts of the Bible.

I was forty-six years old and dying; but then, I'd been dying ever since Quillayute. By centimeters, and painfully.

In the sudden whiteout my instruments lost touch with reality. The altimeter froze. The artificial horizon flipped like a dead man's eyeball. A windy hiss came through my headset, like what you get when you hold a sea shell against your ear.

The compass attached to the top of the instrument panel stopped pointing to magnetic north. It bobbled and swung and dipped like it didn't know
what
to point at. This was not an electronic device but a simple magnetic compass, so basic and straightforward in principle that its origins date back to China in the second century B.C. And yet the compass in my little Cessna was now, inexplicably, broken.

The engine strained and whined, and I strained with it. The hard plastic yoke was slippery with my sweat. White vapor erased the Olympic Mountains, the sky, the terrain below, stranding me in a void without reference points. I couldn't even tell which direction was up and which was down. My inner ear told me I was banking right. Probably that wasn't true. Inexperienced pilots can easily become disoriented if you steal their VFR conditions. I panicked, depressed the left rudder pedal, and banked left while still climbing. The Cessna stalled and rolled over.

My instructor, Jim Brodie, had taught me how to recover from something like this, relying on instruments alone. But my instruments weren't working, and my panicked yanking and wrenching at the flight controls made things a lot worse. In a normal nose-up stall, an airplane will recover by itself, if you simply let
go
of the controls. It's counterintuitive, something a mature pilot knows to do. But that wasn't me. I wasn't mature. And besides, it wasn't a simple nose-up stall. I was simply SOL—another useful acronym, applicable not only to aviation.

Shit Out of Luck.

And then, suddenly, I dropped clear of the white cloud. Sunlight flooded the windows. Shadows swept around the cabin as the airplane tumbled. My instruments resumed functioning. I corrected the stall, established level flight, with altitude to spare. I was shaking—and I laughed, a kind of hysterical bark, like someone on a rollercoaster after the first serious dip, the one where you were
certain
the car was going to jump the tracks.

A couple of thousand feet below, the Quillayute airfield lay clear in the midst of the world's only temperate rainforest. It had been my lunch-stop destination, but thanks to crappy navigation I almost missed it altogether. Quillayute was an old Navy project, thrown together in the 1930s and used during World War II as a northern blimp patrol base as well as for fixed-wing operations. Supposedly it was deserted, practically a ghost airport. That had appealed to me when I was plotting this cross-country flight.

But as I set up my approach, I was struck by the number of airplanes parked all around the field, in no orderly fashion. A lot of them seemed to have halted randomly and been abandoned by their pilots. One was parked on the south end of the runway, a tail-dragger, its front wheels in the grass, back wheel still on the tarmac. I glided right over it, my prop feathered. The tail dragger had no forward window. It reminded me of the plane Charles Lindbergh flew across the Atlantic. How long ago were airplanes like that in general use?

I touched down for a bumpy landing. Weeds grew out of cracks in the neglected tarmac. My hands were still shaking, and my feet on the rudder pedals felt blocky and uncoordinated. I knew damn well I had almost been killed, and my body knew it as much as my mind did.

I steered my trainer onto the ramp and shut off the engine. In the absence of the racket it was
so
quiet. I climbed out and stared at the sky, which was perfectly clear, perfectly blue, except for that one puffy white popcorn cloud. Even from the ground it looked unnaturally flat, a cloud painted on blue canvas. But I'd flown into something big, all engulfing.

A couple of World War II-era wooden hangars stood on the south side of the field, one of them falling apart. Daylight showed through wide gaps in the boards. Between the collapsing hangar and a rusted-out fuel island was a thing that looked like a big metal insect, a beetle or something. It stood about five feet off the ground on four articulated struts. From the air I'd taken it for a liquid storage unit. But from this close it looked alien and out of place. The hairs prickled up on the back of my neck.

There was nobody in sight, but there
were
all those airplanes parked every which way. Some of them looked old enough to be vintage antiques. Others looked like designs straight out of a
Popular Mechanics
"Future of Aviation" issue. One I hardly even recognized as an airplane. Its long, elegant wings were folded close to the fuselage, like the wings of a bird, and the wing tips swept up. A forward blister must have been where the pilot sat, but it appeared to be made of mirror glass.

A Piper Cub with its left door hanging open dated back to at least the early 40s. In 1982, it was possible but unlikely that somebody would still be flying it around. A Beechcraft Bonanza with the distinctive V tail hunkered nearby on the ramp. It looked old, but not
that
old, maybe late 1950s. I peered through the windows, shading out my reflection by cupping my hands around my eyes. There were coloring books and crayons on the back seat. Bobbsey Twins. Buster Brown. The titles sounded vaguely familiar. As a sixteen-year-old I was solidly, myopically, entrenched in 1982. But I knew no self-respecting modern kid would be caught dead coloring in the Bobbsey Twins.

The airport windsock hung limp, the red fabric frayed, weathered to pale pink. Not a breath of air moved it. The silence pressed against my eardrums. I felt a strong urge to climb back into my Cessna and get out of there. My brown-bag lunch lay in the right-seat foot well, where it had tumbled when the trainer stalled. I pulled myself in and started to reach for it.

Far away and faint, someone screamed.

I froze. After a moment I backed out of the plane, still listening, my breath shallow and my heart beating heavily. The cry had been so faint and distant that I wasn't even sure I really heard it. I stepped out from under the wing. I'd heard it, all right. I just wanted to pretend that I hadn't. It had come from the forest, a girl's brief cry, suddenly cut off. I looked in that direction, straining to see something—and I did. In fact, it was weird that I hadn't noticed it before. A pair of heavy wheels had left parallel tracks in the grass beyond the end of the runway. Those tracks ran right into the wall of the rainforest. The big olive drab tail section of some kind of military plane stuck out of the trees. It was the paint job that made it less noticeable, I guess. It was
supposed
to blend in.

I walked toward it, my feet swishing in the high grass between the wheel tracks. It was a World War II bomber, a B-17. The pilot had crashed into the trees, and the rainforest canopy had folded over it like a lid. The starboard wing was ripped half off the fuselage. When I got close enough I picked up the sharp smell of high-test fuel.

I leaned inside the open hatch. The fifty-caliber machine gun swivels were tied down and the plane was empty, like all the others. An odd sound drew me out of the hatch. It came from behind me, from back toward the runway. It sounded like a
sonar
ping—at least, the way sonar pings sounded in the war movies I'd watched. A single hard ping, rippling out, and then the oppressive silence again.

The runway, hangars, and jackstraw scatter of abandoned airplanes all looked the same—but
something
had changed, and I couldn't figure out what. I looked up, half expecting to see a Corsair or a P-51, or maybe even a flying saucer banking out of the clear sky. But there was nothing except that one cloud, still hanging motionless above the field. The
cloud
was different, but you'd expect it to be. Clouds are nothing but tiny droplets of water vapor. They're so inherently unstable that a sky of scattered cumulous never looks the same for long, letting kids play endless games of seethe-dragon. This cloud, though, wasn't pulling apart or reshaping—it was shrinking. Shrinking while keeping the shape it had started with. The popcorn shape, the vaguely Mickey Mouse shape. Clouds didn't behave that way.

I sensed someone behind me and turned around fast. A little girl, maybe eight years old, started to duck behind a tree but stopped when she knew I'd seen her. She was wearing a yellow blouse, pleated skirt, and two-tone shoes. Immediately, I associated her with the Beechcraft. Her blouse was dirty and one of the sleeves was torn. Her blond hair was done in a sloppy ponytail, a half untied green ribbon straggling at the knot. A long red scratch crossed her left cheek. I said, "Hello."

"You should hide," she said. Very serious.

"Hide from what?"

"Them."

"Did you scream a little while ago?"

"That was my sister, Tammy. She stepped in a hole and hurt her ankle. Now she can't run."

"What's your name?"

"Amanda."

"Where are your parents?"

"The things got them. You need to hide now."

I took a careful, non-threatening step in her direction, and tried to make my voice as friendly as possible. "How did—"

Another one of those weird, hard-sounding sonar pings went off behind me, the echo rippling out. I looked towards the runway, and when I turned back to the little girl, she was gone.

"Hey. Hey, kid!"

Her yellow shirt flashed. She'd already covered quite a distance. I started after her, jogging fifty yards into the forest. Under the trees, the shade was dense, the quiet even more oppressive. I stopped when I saw the mail. Dozens of envelopes, letters with stamps on them and hand-written addresses, lay scattered around my feet. Above me a wooden-framed biplane hung in the branches, the sun passing amber through the torn fabric wings. A big hole gaped in the side of the plane. Painted in black letters along the fuselage were the words: US MAIL 246.

I picked up one of the envelopes and turned it in my fingers. The paper was thick and heavy compared to a modern business envelope. The return address was the US Department of Defense. Absently, I folded the envelope and shoved it in the back pocket of my jeans.

You better hide,
the little girl had said. Hide from what?
The things.

"Hey, kid, come on out!"

Nothing.

I left the forest and headed toward the hangars, thinking there might be a phone or something. I doubted I'd get anyone on the Cessna's radio, at least not while it was on the ground. When I reached the fuel island I stopped dead.

The beetle-looking liquid storage tank was in a different position.

The front struts were now planted forward, the smooth silver body leaning slightly down. I stared at it, as at an optical illusion. My stomach moved queasily.

Someone came running toward me, then, out of the forest on the other side of the runway. He wore a brown leather jacket, white scarf, tan pants that ballooned at the hips, and boots. When he got closer I saw it wasn't a "he" at all, but a woman with blonde hair cropped shorter than my own. She reached me, panting for breath.

"Kid, if you don't come with me right now, you're a goner. We've got about one minute to skedaddle."

"Who are you?"

"Did you hear what I said about one minute?" She grabbed my hand and started pulling. Her fear and urgency communicated through me like electric current. I started stumbling along and then we were running together, flat out, across the run way and into the trees. A third sonar ping sounded, the echo rippling in sick wavelets right through my body.
"Down."
The woman yanked me to my knees, and when I stayed like that she shoved me forward onto my elbows. I started to complain and she shushed me. Then the terrible stuff began.

I was raised Catholic. My mother's faith pulled my family along, pulled us to church every Sunday, to CCD classes, to confession. She kept us, my big brother, my dad and me, on the path. Dad was our anchor in worldly affairs, the affairs of bills and mortgages and oil changes. Mom was in charge of God. And when my mother died, Dad did his best to hold us together and carry on. Sometimes his holding-together looked like a man clinging to a ledge by his fingertips. But he never let go. He never fell. Once, a couple of weeks after her death, Dad came home with a bottle of gin in a brown paper bag. He had quit drinking a few years before. Weekends and holidays had become less tense. His quitting had been like the lifting away of a shadow.

The sight of the gin bottle frightened me.

He never opened it. In bed one night, I heard him crying. Frightened, I slipped down the hall to the kitchen. He was sitting at the table, that bottle of gin in front of him, and my mother's rosary in his fist. He didn't see me, and I was too scared to approach him. A little while later he came in and sat on my bed. I pretended to be asleep. He wasn't crying anymore. After a few minutes he stood up, kissed my forehead, and went away, leaving the hall light on, the way I liked it. I never saw the gin bottle again.

Dad tried to pull my brother and me along, the way Mom had. But for me, once Mom was gone, my faith also departed. I needed something to believe in, but it wasn't going to be God. For a while I maintained the rituals of Mom's faith, the routine appointments with God. Religion is full of rituals. But so is science. Both are seeking the truth, driven by similar impulses; both want
answers.
In the Catholic church, for instance, there is the ritual of transubstantiation. The priest dons his robes, speaks the Latin words, retrieves wafers from the Tabernacle. At the same point in every service, he invites the congregation to approach the altar and receive the blood and body of Christ. Because of the repeatability of the ritual, and the belief of all involved, it works every time. Of course, you couldn't demonstrate any such thing in a lab. But that's the difference between religion and science. For a priest it's enough to believe in the answer. For a scientist, it's enough to believe in the method of obtaining the answer.