End Time (28 page)

A triple line of cars were parked in the visitors' lot, and he pulled over at the rear of the herd. Rain streamed across his windshield as the wipers died. Jesus. July in the desert; it felt like 45°F outside. He could see his breath.

No good going out unprepared. His face was freezing. In the back of the van he dug out his boots, a fuzzy pullover, and a roughneck jacket from the footlocker. Found a pair of binoculars and threw them around his neck. When he opened the minivan sliding door, a spray of rain sliced across the opening. He went back for a pair of mittens and a watch cap, then slammed the minivan door shut and sprinted across the lot to the overhang of the public relations building. Man, they'd better have some coffee.

Another more thorough security check with four more soldiers greeted him. He slapped his rain jacket and binocs on the rubber conveyor belt, then handed over the ID all over again.

Thumbprint scan, retinal scan, voice scan, full-body X-ray. Off with the boots.

The young men in uniform were pleasant, thorough, and polite to a fault. But underneath it all, a dead seriousness that couldn't be ignored. On the other side of the security hurdle all his possessions were handed back to him. And the last guard said, “Please make yourself comfortable. There'll be a briefing in about an hour. You haven't missed anything.”

The hospitality room looked a lot like an airport departure lounge: lined with couches and chairs linked by the arms; men's and women's restrooms off to one side. A buffet table stood against one wall. To Billy's eternal joy, the Army was providing breakfast: fresh fruit, muffins, eggs, bacon, pancakes, sausage, butter, yogurt, Smart Balance, a pyramid of Kellogg's variety packs, three kinds of juice—the works. A mess detail in whites was bringing out the steam trays, the scent of every good thing in the morning filling the room. Coffee!

And naturally, he wasn't alone. A dozen guys from various aspects of the
Stardust
mission, mostly manufacturing types—the Jet Propulsion Lab at the California Institute of Technology, Hewlett-Packard, Microsoft, SunSystems, Boeing, General Dynamics. Billy knew the kind. And a gal from the Associated Press who looked thoroughly distraught, like she'd been waiting all night for a date that never showed up. Her sensible flats and Spanx control hose were soaked through and through. That's who Billy decided to plop his butt next to. She didn't seem impressed with the breakfast. Or even the smell from Billy's loaded plate. In fact she looked a little nauseous. She'd been up for a while.

Before digging in, Billy looked at her and said, “I have an extra pair of boots and some rain gear in my van. A union suit, some good Carhartts, and thick socks. Might be a tad big, but you won't get cold. I'll fetch them, if you want them.”

She looked at him for a moment like
The Man from Planet X
pitching her
Plan 9 from Outer Space.
Then thought it through, picked his ID tag off his chest, and examined his pedigree. Nodded to herself. “Oh yeah, the Aerogel dust collector grid. They think it worked. Your boss Lattimore should be happy.”

The ID chain came back to his chest, and Billy went to work on the scrambled eggs and bacon. The AP Gal looked down at her sodden shoes, then acquiesced. “If you bring 'em, I'll put 'em on. You'll be a half hour with security, and they'll probably send someone with you.”

“That's fine.” Billy was starting to think about seconds on the order of flapjacks—but that risked making him sleepy. More coffee…? No, better get the gear first. “I'll be right back.”

“Before you go there's something you better see. C'mon.”

He dropped his plate on a discard pile at the end of the buffet table and followed her to the front of the hospitality area; there was an open hanging observation deck, again like an airport. They climbed the steel steps and came out on a wide gantry in front of a bank of windows overhung with a wide awning to keep the weather off. Full dawn had come, still raining, still gray. Billy looked out across the lower buildings of the proving ground; a long flat road led into the desert.

A quarter mile out, various recovery vehicles idled in a long line: a fire truck, a troop transport, a tractor trailer hauling a small flatbed crane—all waiting at the edge of rain-drenched visibility. You could see their super-bright LEDs, lightbars and bubble lights flashing under a canopy of mist, fired-up red and blue and yellow sparklers, as though aching to go. Yet there was something creepy about the silently flashing light show as Billy and the AP Gal watched from behind the thick glass—no noise, no sirens. Of course, the whole shebang was a quarter mile out—but still … weird.

A half-dozen trucks stalled on the road. Waiting.

And you could see why. Beyond the gray pall of rain there was another storm. Something out of those History Channel extreme weather computer graphics—hypercanes or some such. Only this was white. The gray rain ended just beyond the recovery vehicles; directly in front of them a wall of white swept across the road. You could see the whirling whiteness extending to the horizon. A snowstorm, a blizzard really—standing off the end of the blacktop and the vehicles, whirling its ice and snow like a merry-go-round while the battery of recovery vehicles stood helplessly flashing their lights at its frozen edge.

The sound of doors opening below, and a gust of heavy wind, made him turn from the window on the gantry to look down at the entrance. A newcomer had arrived and was laying his gear on the security conveyor belt.
Not the first, not the last
—good call, soldier. The newcomer wasn't a hardware technician, or a software engineer; the guy wasn't a jet-propulsion geek or even one of the suits from some federal alphabet agency. But he was some kind of book-learning nerd. Looked young—no more than twenty-five. Grad student, science student, pre-med—the utilitarian no-frills clothes, pocket protector, smartphone clipped to his belt in a holster. The young man took off his Clark Kent glasses, wiped the mist from his specs, and pushed a mat of sandy hair from his forehead, exclaiming so just about everybody in the room could hear, “Whew! I thought I wouldn't make it!”

A few heads turned to look at him, dismissed him, and turned away. There was something likeable and wholesome about the fellow—eagerness and the sense that he felt special about being included. His gear was a couple of transport cases of some sort, bright yellow, the airtight locking kind. He left them by a stand of waiting room seats and bolted up the metal stairs to the gantry. Then gripped the railing and stared out with hungry eyes at the wall of white in front of the recovery vehicles. “Wow,” he said. Then he slapped out his phone. “I have to tell my sister, Beatrice, about this. It was 85 degrees in Ohio yesterday! And she was afraid it'd be hotter here!”

But in a moment he deflated when his useful electronic trinket failed to pick up any signal bars. For a few comic seconds he waved it over his head in one direction or another as people do, hoping for a sweet spot. Sorry, no luck, kiddo. The two adults stared at the young man like a puppy they weren't sure whether to pet, make sit, or take out for a piddle. Incredibly harmless and, so far, mildly amusing at 6:06 a.m.

“They can't even read the beacon on the thing that came down,” the AP Gal told their new arrival. “No satellite signal. A million acres. They haven't a clue where it is.”

Billy let the weather situation sink in for a moment; there wouldn't be Wi-Fi access in this part of the base; communications were strictly controlled. In all probability even weather satellite image feed might be blanked out in spots if necessary, no one on the outside knowing of this anomaly. Not something the military would want getting around:
Uh yeah, we lost a satellite in a snowbank in July.
No way, Jose.

Their own private little storm.

“I'm going to trot out and get you that gear,” Billy told the AP Gal. “Who knows? They might take us with them when they decide to roll.”

The young grad in the Clark Kent glasses forgot about the dead phone, about trying to call his sis in Ohio, and blurted, “Gee, do you think they will? Really?”

Again the two adults stared at the young man. Billy paused before descending the stairs, then plucked the Dugway Proving Ground ID tag from the fellow's narrow chest to read it, much the same way the AP Gal had done to him but a trifle more gravely. Not much to read on it. A name, a very white Anglo-Saxon name:
WEBSTER GALEN CHARGROVE,
PHD.
Then the symbol
π
r
2
and underneath,
HILLSBORO, OH.
No speckled bar code. No description.

And that was disturbing.

What kind of hush-hush government outfit called itself Pi R Squared? What kind of private outfit wouldn't use a speckled bar code? As if young squire Chargrove didn't possess enough recent history to merit a coded background—or worse, that the symbol alone was supposed to tell you all you needed to know. That made it scary. Billy tried to remember if he'd heard of Hillsboro, Ohio, in some other context. Military research and development? Some civilian facility? And so who was this Boy Scout, their junior science dork? But nothing rang a bell. And that frightened him too.
π
r
2
.

Maybe Lattimore knew. Or even Jasper. But he didn't want to ask this kid and betray his own ignorance. Billy let the young brainiac's ID tag drop back to his chest.

“They've promised us a segment of the dust collector grid,” the young man explained with a hint of anticipation bordering on delight. “
A comet's DNA
. That is, if the grid's not damaged. If it's intact. Uncorrupted. It's made with Aerogel; do you know what that is?”

Billy almost laughed, but held the corners of his mouth in place.

“Yeah,” he said to young squire Chargrove in a friendly way. Then to the AP Gal, “See if you can find a butterfly net in case he decides to flutter off the gantry.”

Billy smiled inside. Inadvertently this kid had told him something valuable about his job and his outfit. Whatever Pi R Squared had going on in Hillsboro, they were messing with amino acids, proteins, the building blocks of life. A comet's tail might have swept up all kinds of interesting stuff on its trip across the solar system. Galactic spores that travelled eons across the vast emptiness? Bacteria in suspended animation? Viral threads in cosmic hibernation? God's fairy dust?
Comet DNA.

Pi R Squared—reengineering the dandelion puffs of life from outer space.

ET phone home? No, ET was calling collect.

*   *   *

Before another hour passed, the public relations officer came in for the briefing: a major, Billy's old rank, but younger, about thirty-five, dressed in battle-dress uniform, and like so many in the military giving off an aura of resilience and energy. He spoke in easy sentences—a strange combination of optimism and reserve. So he made only a very brief briefing: “Now that everyone's here the low-pressure anomaly seems to be breaking up. I guess it was waiting for you termites from Pi R Squared,” he said, throwing a long look and a thin smile at young Chargrove, PhD. “We're getting some kind of signal from the probe, and you're welcome to join us in the recovery. Transportation is outside.” The message was clear:
Snow or no snow, this is the U.S. Army. Let's go get a spaceship.
“When the satellite is in the quarantine hangar you can break up into your technical groups for preliminary assessment.”

The recovery team left in a troop, a squad of soldiers riding in a covered personnel carrier, followed by the fire trucks, the flatbed with the crane, and pulling up the rear, three Humvees packed with the visitors. The convoy left without air cover; this was no weather for helicopters.

Billy, the AP Gal, and young Webster Galen Chargrove, PhD, jostled about in the Humvee, knocking elbows and knees. The AP Gal, in Billy's extra boots and overalls, looked like a very dour Farmer John. Cold air and flecks of snow blew in the cracked windows. The vehicles traveled like a line of circus elephants, trunk to tail, crawling through a sea of white and gray; the flashing lights from the lead trucks stabbed the thick air.

Minutes crawled by, then an hour. Billy had no conception of distance or speed—maybe ten mph across gravelly terrain. The snow cover hid potholes and bumps. Periodically a tire hit a rut and threw the occupants against each other, a lot like being in the hold of a boat in rough seas. Both the AP Gal and Chargrove, PhD, looked like they needed a Dramamine: empty stomach, black coffee, no breakfast—green in the face.

Billy fished some magic out of his roughneck jacket—a tin filled with candied ginger—and offered it to the green AP Gal. She shook her head, and the young professor was too nauseous to even give it a look. Billy rattled the tin in front of them. “Come on, come on,” he insisted. “A couple of pieces and you won't woof inside the nice Humvee.”

Reluctantly, their shaky fingers reached for the tin. “That's why they gave us breakfast,” Billy tut-tutted at the poor things. “An army travels on its stomach. Isn't that right, Specialist?” he addressed the uniformed man at the wheel. The soldier's eyes never left the white whirl in front of them, but from the driver's seat came the reply, “That's affirm.”

For the last ten minutes they seemed to be going in wide circles, the specialist driver tugging gently at the wheel. Suddenly the vehicle ground to a halt. The whole convoy had stopped. The snowstorm around them didn't seem to be letting up. So much for optimistic weather forecasts from public relations officers. The inclement weather just wasn't ready to let them in. Some squawks came across the radio. Every third word blanked out, transmission trouble. Still, Billy could make out the gist of it.

“Looks like we're having a little trouble nailing it down. We may have driven by it a couple of times already. They're thinking about sending out a patrol on foot,” he explained to his companions. Neither of them replied or seemed to mind, mostly grateful to be sitting still.