Contact Us (35 page)

The front had “You’re Invited!” in an informal font. He opened it and the three of them read it.

Sir Cronkite requests the pleasure of your company for a short joyride in the sphere

on June the eighth

at ten o’clock in the morning.

Please stand alone by the Fort Washington Lighthouse.

Casual attire

Thank you for not bringing weapons.

Sir Cronkite’s Sphere is a non-smoking environment.

* * *

June 6, 2019

Jake sank into the deep cushions of the couch in the Oval Office and sighed. “I guess you guys know, since I requested this meeting without Charli, what I want to talk about.” He looked at Hallstrom and Guccio, both of whom appeared more serious than usual.

Guccio said, “You want to be a suicide bomber.”

“Right, but you know it’s not going to work,” Jake said.

“Correct. It’s hard to imagine that Cronkite would be that stupid. He’s got to know that we’ll try to hit him.” Hallstrom stood up, paced over to the windows, and looked out.

“Well, there are two reasons to think he could be that stupid.” Jake rolled his shoulders.

“The slip-up at Meet the Press.” Hallstrom continued gazing out the window.

“Right, when he unintentionally admitted to culling us. It was dumb.”

“Yes.” Guccio tapped his pen against his nose. “But that was more of a slip of the tongue thing than an intelligence issue. He has had plenty of time to think about this meeting.”

“Agreed. But the second thing is that the guy’s a little off.” Jake whirled his finger next to his ear.

“A little?” said the president, walking back and sitting on the couch again.

“Plus,” Jake said, “he’s got this weird fixation on me.”

Guccio stopped tapping. “So you’re saying love is blind.”

“Pretty much.”

“Maybe he wants you to die but at our hands,” Hallstrom said.

“That could be. But let me tell you why I called this meeting.” Jake paused. “I don’t want you to feel bad about this. No one knows, of course, but since Mary died …”

Hallstrom started to speak, but Jake held up his hand. He continued, “Since Mary died, I’ve wished I was dead. Were dead. Whatever. Almost all the time. I’ve spent some time with a gun in my mouth. Something kept me from doing it, but I would have welcomed the chance to die.”

“Until recently.” Guccio said.

Jake frowned and said nothing.

“Until Sophia and Charli.” Hallstrom said.

Jake nodded. “It sucks, doesn’t it? I was all ready to die, eager even, and now, when I want to live …”

The three of them sat silently.

“If it makes you feel any better, you’ll have Sophia to carry on.” Hallstrom said.

“What do you mean? She’s my goddaughter, not my daughter.”

Hallstrom and Guccio looked at each other. Hallstrom spoke, his voice gentle. “Jake, Sophia is your daughter.”

“No, she’s my
god
daughter, not my daughter, she’s my …” Jake froze. Mary had just died. Renata was in the midst of her divorce. She was comforting him. One thing lead to another. Just that one time. He stood up. He was shaking. He paced around the room. “You had us tested? Why?”

“Charli noticed the resemblance. You’ve never seen it?”

Jake shook his head.

Hallstrom continued. “It’s not your looks. It’s your mannerisms. The way you look when you’re frustrated, for example. Don’t be angry. We thought it would be good to know, if it ever came to this … this situation.”

“Does Charli know?”

“She suspects. She brought it up, as I said, but she doesn’t know the results of the tests. She doesn’t even know that we ran them.”

“Well.” Jake looked at both of them, a sad smile on his face. “Life’s full of surprises, isn’t it?”

* * *

June 8, 2019

In the White House Situation Room, Charli chewed her lip and looked at the feeds from Fort Washington Park. Jake appeared in six different views on four different monitors. The quality and number of video feeds made the Super Bowl seem like it was shot with a handheld super-8 film camera. Jake himself was wired with multiple mics, including one that was surgically implanted in the back of his left earlobe. He’d drawn the line at a rectal microphone, suggesting that the technicians shove it up their own asses.

He also had an earpiece that let his controllers talk to him.

He looks lonely
. Everyone within three miles had been evacuated, except for some soldiers manning ground-to-ground weapons across the Potomac.

“How many planes do we have there right now?” Charli looked to Guccio.

“Well, it depends on how you define ‘there.’ Overhead we have six drones ranging in altitude from a few thousand feet to five miles. Then we have seven fighters flying in a racetrack pattern, such that there is one almost directly overhead at any given second. In addition, we have tankers—”

“Okay, okay, I get the idea,” Charli said.

“Also, on the ground—”

“Shut up, Gordon. I get the idea.”

Charli looked at Jake on the screen. True, she’d called off their relationship, but the prospect of losing him, never seeing him again, brought her true feelings to the surface. When they’d said their goodbyes last night, Jake knew how she really felt. He knew all along.

A satisfactory outcome, from her point of view, was impossible, wasn’t it? For Cronkite to be killed and Jake spared … she couldn’t imagine that. She had suggested that if Cronkite came out of the sphere, a remotely controlled gun could target him exclusively, or if a door into the sphere opened, that automatic weapons fire could be directed into it, but that was a non-starter. Jake’s life was disposable when balanced against a world taken over by an alien dictator. That was reasonable.

Of course, from her perspective, the best that could be hoped for was that Cronkite would survive and protect Jake. She may have been the only person in the world rooting for Cronkite. No, take that back. There were those in the Cronkite religion, and some who felt that a world run by a benevolent and all-powerful dictator would be preferable to the constant wars and political squabbles that had existed for millions of years. Maybe even terrorism would cease.

Jake and Cronkite both surviving was probably the most likely scenario.
Cronkite knows we’ll hit him with everything we have. He must have the technology to protect himself.

The day was crisp and clear, with whitecaps on the Potomac and on Piscataway Creek. If it hadn’t been spring, people would have called it football weather.

Jake looked around. He seemed oddly calm. “I guess today is a good day to die.” His voice was clear—as if he were in the room.

Ten o’clock came and went, with no sign of the sphere. Jake turned to the closest camera and said, “I guess he got stuck in traffic.”

On the word “traffic,” the sphere appeared behind him. There was no vapor trail this time. Perhaps it flew so fast that it just seemed to materialize.

The sphere sunk into the ground somehow, or deformed itself such that it appeared to be half-submerged. It resembled a geodesic dome house.

Jake’s mic caught the old movie-type woo-woo sound. Jake stood waiting. A hole the size of a fist appeared and slowly increased in size. Military planners hoped that Cronkite would come out, but having an open door into the craft might be enough.

Charli held her breath as the hole increased in size like the iris of an eye. It was now the size of a child. Why did it open so slowly? The plan was to attack when the entry was large enough for Jake to walk through it. Charli squinted. Was that Cronkite inside? When the door was six feet high, it happened.

All the screens flashed white, and an enormous fireball billowed from center of the park. The monitors for the ground-based cameras went black. The drone views showed a black cloud rising into a mushroom shape. There was no sound. The public was used to such videos, from air strikes in Iraq and Afghanistan, but this one was much more dramatic.

No one in the situation room spoke, and Charli heard cheering from the hall. Guccio broke the silence. “Did Cronkite really let that happen? He had to know what we were going to do.”

The question hung in the air for a moment then Hallstrom replied “His mind doesn’t always work right. We know he has this weird concept of how important Jake is … the number one problem-solver and all that. Maybe he thought Jake was that important to the world. Charli, I’m sorry.”

Charli said nothing and looked down, holding back tears.
You don’t know what you’ve got ‘til it’s gone.

Hallstrom continued, “Maybe he thought we’d really want Jake to learn from him. Or something.”

“Do you think it’s possible he—they—escaped?” Charli looked around the room. No one said anything. “Maybe when they review the video …”

Hallstrom sat down next to Charli and put an arm around her shoulder. “You know that we had to—”

“I don’t want to hear it.” She pushed his arm off her shoulder, stood up and walked out of the room. Trying to keep her mind blank, she walked to the family room, where Sophia and Boondoggle were playing, watched over by Valeria. They’d kept Sophia away from any coverage, of course. Charli looked at Valeria and shook her head.

Sophia ran to her. “Charli, Charli,
mira
(watch).” She put a tennis ball on the floor, covered it with her body and then giggled uncontrollably as Boondoggle dug his nose into Sophia’s sides, trying to get to the ball.

CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

Arms, check. Legs, check. Head, ow. Shoulder, ow.

Except for the “ow” parts, Jake’s return to consciousness wasn’t that different from his usual experience of waking in the morning. His habit was to lie in bed without moving or opening his eyes until he’d spent a little time remembering what day it was and thinking about his plans for the morning.

I’m in the sphere. I didn’t die.
He put the sequence of events together. The door to the sphere opened. Flares from missiles appeared in the sky. Something was streaking across the river. The sphere must have sucked him in, none too gently considering his loss of consciousness and the pain in his head. Now he was lying on a comfortable couch of some sort—like a hospital bed with the head and knee sections raised. So where was Cronkite?
He might be standing over me right now. Or next to me.
The alien was only four feet high.

The plan: take in as much information as possible before revealing that he had regained consciousness.

Gravity? Normal.

Smell. Most people paid little attention to their sense of smell. He liked to challenge himself to figuring out the ingredients in a dish by smell alone. He tuned into the current smells: a faint vinegar odor and a fainter animal odor. Like being in a vet’s office.

Sound. His own breathing sounds. Any others? No. If Cronkite made respiration sounds, then he wasn’t right next to him. But there were occasional activity noises. Like someone shifting in a chair, flipping a switch. Wait. Some chewing noises.
Chewing?

Time to open his eyes. He slitted his left eye open without making any other movements. Interesting. Cronkite was directly above him, on what seemed like the ceiling of the sphere, only twenty feet away. From Cronkite’s perspective, Jake probably seemed to be on the ceiling.

His last view of Cronkite, in Charli’s bedroom, had been from the side. Now he was getting a top-down view. The impression of a large, furry ladybug was even stronger from this angle. He counted six darks spots of different sizes. There was no symmetry apart from two matched spots near the top.

The place was the size of a typical living room. The walls were all smooth. A bit like suede. There was, of course, no distinction between wall, floor, or ceiling: just one continuous, spherical surface. The lighting was dim, with no apparent source.

“Morning, Bozo. See anything you like?” Cronkite’s voice made him jump. A screen morphed up out of the section of the “floor” in front of Jake’s couch, looking like a sixty-inch flatscreen TV from Costco.

The concept was clear. Just as an iPad had a general-purpose visual surface that changed based on the needs of the application, the interior of the sphere changed in three dimensions based on the occupants’ current needs. That’s why Jake was reclining in a human-styled couch, and Cronkite was clinging on to what looked like a section of slimy railroad track. If you needed a viewscreen one would pop up from the floor. A stool, a couch, a rolltop desk, no problem.

The now-familiar talking head of Walter Cronkite appeared on the screen. “See how things work?” Actual-Cronkite gestured with one of his appendages, and image-on-the-screen-Cronkite did the same with a human hand.

A monitor in front of actual-Cronkite morphed up at the same time, and displayed another ladybug-with-legs alien.
Was Cronkite communicating with a comrade? Jake waved his hand around. The alien on the monitor did something similar. Ah, of course. A two-way universal translator with body language included.