In The Falling Light (34 page)

“Amen,” they repeated. Amos John nodded at
Cortez, smiling at Dinah and her little brother as they all went
back to watching the sky.

Another hour later a pinprick of light
separated from the
Glory
and moved away, then slowly began
to grow brighter. The group sighed and many began to weep, men and
women alike, embracing one another as the Supplement descended
towards Mars. Soon the men were shrugging into their parkas,
pulling on gloves and goggles and masks, hugging their wives and
children again before pushing out into the cold.

The wind hit them hard, icy and full of
blowing grit, and they bent against it as they piled into the
crawlers and drove in a line towards the receiving field.
Headlights cut thin beams through the dust while above them, the
Supplement lander flared blue as it burned through the atmosphere.
The cube fell quickly, and then rockets fired a dazzling white,
slowing its descent. The lander, the size of a small building,
thumped onto the field amid a burst of smoke and white fire, the
roar of its rockets reverberating through the cabs of the crawlers
as they arrived. The rockets shut down and the wind tore the smoke
away. Floodlights at each corner of the lander snapped on, creating
pools of light.

The crawlers approached and spread out,
stopping in a line as the men climbed down to the pavement, heads
tucked. The powered lifts and loaders were now petrified relics in
a forgotten garage, so the men would have to unload by hand and
pack the goods into their vehicles. They huddled together for a
moment, then approached as a group. The square outline of a big
cargo door was set in one side, and it was Cortez who opened a
small panel beside it, exposing a keypad. He removed a glove and
tapped in a numerical sequence, the same code used since the drops
began, and memorized by every person on the planet once they were
old enough to speak or understand.

“Praise God,” Amos John yelled over the
wind, his voice muffled behind a dust mask. The men nodded. A
moment later there was a hiss, and the men stepped back as the door
lowered itself into a ramp, revealing darkness within. Boots
thudded on the ramp as the group walked up and in, relieved to be
out of the wind. They stopped and waited.

Lights flickered for a moment, slow to
ignite, but then they started snapping on in rows along the ceiling
of the high cargo bay, where the full, strapped down pallets waited
for them in orderly rows.

It was empty.

Wall to wall, the smooth floor was bare. Not
a box, not a bin, not a barrel.

The croppers started cursing, and Elson
wailed. Amos John fell to his knees, clasping his hands and crying,
demanding to know why the Lord had forsaken them. Cortez could only
stare. After long minutes, he turned and walked back down the ramp,
starting his crawler. The lone bar of the fuel gauge glowed at him
from the dashboard. He drove back to Levi’s and collected his
children without speaking, ignoring the panicked questions from the
women, helping Dinah into the crawler and then handing Isaiah to
her.

Cortez drove into the night, back to his
farm, back to his dead corn. His daughter coughed, and he wondered
which of them would be the first to go into the ground. He told
himself to remember to leave a shovel by the door for Dinah, in
case it was him. Above, the speaker softly played
What a Friend
we have in Jesus.

Walter followed the rules.

He’d been doing it his entire life, careful
to stay within the lines, keeping a low profile and staying out of
trouble. It didn’t make him particularly happy – that wasn’t a
state he experienced often – but it avoided a lot of hell, and he
supposed that was a sort of happiness all by itself. Rules. The
pillars of structure and civilized life which kept the world
stable. And it was his unshakeable belief in that rigidity which
attracted him to his current field.

Recently, Walter had come to a startling
realization. He’d decided that of the millions of rules which
existed, in the end, only ten really mattered at all. Several he
had known and accepted all along, and others he had discovered only
within the past few weeks. A few came up just today.

So Walter followed the rules. His rules, and
though he kept them numbered in his head, it was only to satisfy
his need for structure, not to place them in any particular order.
They were all equally important, and equally true.

1) The U.S. Mail Is Still Reliable.
The internet was amazing indeed, and there was no denying its
ability to instantaneously reach millions. But for a physical
delivery, the U.S. Mail was the ticket. A dependable organization,
they could still get your letters or packages anywhere in the world
within days. And really, Walter thought, there was nothing like
personal correspondence you could touch and feel to get your
message across.

2) Four Day Weekends Breed
Carelessness.
The protocol said no one was ever to be alone in
the work space. With a four day Christmas weekend about to start,
however, people were anxious to leave and had in fact been slipping
out early all day. By three o’clock, only Tom Jenkins and Amanda
Carroll remained with him, and they were in a hurry.

“Walter,” Tom said, “wrap it up and let’s
get out of here.”

“Yes, come on Walter, we’ll all walk out
together.” Amanda had her coat on, her purse over her shoulder.

Walter waved at them from behind his
computer screen. “You two go on ahead. I’m running a program, and
it’s going to take at least a couple more hours.”

Tom and Amanda exchanged looks. They knew
the protocol, but they also knew they had people waiting for them.
“Please?” said Amanda. “We’ve all been working so hard.
You’ve
been working so hard. Can’t it wait until we’re back
on Tuesday?”

“Yeah, c’mon sport,” said Tom. Walter
despised being called ‘Sport.’ “We can’t go without you, and our
families are waiting. You don’t want to be the reason they’re
disappointed, do you?”

Walter peered from behind his screen. “I
don’t want to hold either one of you up, but it’s only three, and
like I said, I have this program.” He gestured at his screen, which
they couldn’t see from across the room, and which currently
displayed a screen saver of cartoon chickens laying eggs which
hatched into dinosaurs, which promptly ate the chickens.

Tom shot Amanda an annoyed look, and she
sighed and rolled her eyes.

“Listen, as soon as it’s done running, I’ll
shut down the lights and make sure the place is secured on my way
out. I won’t tell anyone, it’ll be my Christmas gift to you.”

They exchanged another look, then smiles,
and in that moment all the detailed training on security procedures
went out the window. They thanked Walter – Amanda blew him a kiss –
and wished him a Merry Christmas as they hustled out the door. When
it banged shut, Walter smiled towards it. “Fuck you very much.”

That was over two hours ago.

3) Psychological Screening Is An
Imperfect Science.
It was all about belief, he’d decided. Not
believing in your own answers – only an idiot would believe the
bold-faced lies necessarily told during psychological screening.
No, where belief came in was in the tester’s belief in the accuracy
of the tests, and the effectiveness of their Q&A model. They
believed it couldn’t be beaten, so they weren’t prepared for
someone to do just that.

Not only could Walter defeat their tests, he
was an ace at out-foxing polygraph as well. Belief. His was
stronger. What it really came down to was their
desire
to
believe, not in the actual screening, but in the idea that it would
protect them from having that one highly motivated individual slip
inside and…do the unthinkable.

Walter wasn’t sure if his next rule stood by
itself, or was an extension of number three. He decided it was
certainly in the same theme, but deserved its own number.

4) Top Secret Security Clearances Are
Given Too Easily.
A solid work ethic with no disciplinary
actions, no criminal record, a perception of being stable and a
moderate level of patriotism; all easy enough to achieve or fake.
Presto, access granted to all manner of dark knowledge and
dangerous toys. It was foolishness, and another example of people
putting their heads in the sand out of a desire to not believe. To
be sure, there were some who
did
believe in monsters. They
were the ones who created the screening and testing procedures, and
designed the multi-layered security precautions. Sadly, these
guardians were delusional as well, not about the idea that it could
happen, but in their faith in their clever protective systems. The
security they dreamed up was Walter’s friend, because once a person
was past the impressive defenses, no one really worried about him
anymore.

5) One Man Can Make A Difference.
Despite all evidence to the contrary – a pervasive attitude that
teamwork could overcome any obstacle, that no man is an island, and
the belief that individuality, while admirable, was not to be taken
seriously – Walter knew different. Was the loner rejected and often
reviled? No argument. And when that same loner was bright but
lacking in social skills, people tended to avoid contact, and their
behavior isolated the individual. A perfect combination, and for
Walter it created both time and space to think, to dream, and to
engage in his pursuit, a project which would change the world. What
greater achievement for a man?

6) Picking On Co-Workers Is Bad.
Walter was awkward. He wasn’t attractive, and simply couldn’t see
the point in all the effort it took to master social niceties and
develop relationships. All that energy was better spent on work,
and so he lived an isolated existence with his computers. He was a
nerd and a geek, had been told so most of his life, and he was okay
with that. The fact was this facility was filled with them. So why
then should Robert Rawley (“Uh, it’s Bobby, bro.”) single him out
for torment? Robert was good-looking and friendly, and said things
like, “Let’s do some softball and get our drink on,” or, “You look
great, Karen, but you’d look even better on my boat. What are you
doing this weekend?” But for Walter, Robert was school all over
again; the mocking, being the butt of jokes, the juvenile
pranks.

His intellectual brain – and dear God was
that a big part of him – told him that Robert Rawley was just
acting out his insecurities, and that he felt threatened by the
depth of Walter’s mind, by his frighteningly brilliant grasp of
complex theories about which he spoke so casually. The
inner-intellectual said Robert was forever fighting against the
idea that at his core, he would never be anything more than a
well-educated jock, and once his college days had ended, his best
days were then behind him.

Walter’s more primitive, emotional brain,
however, was still the clumsy little boy who got tripped on the bus
and shoved to the floor in school hallways, a wedgie target for the
Robert Rawleys of the world, sentenced to eat lunch every day with
only his hurt feelings for company. It was this part of Walter
which made sure Robert Rawley was on the mailing list.

7) People Are Easily Distracted.
Walter’s position gave him access to The Vault, but not unlimited
access. Although he was entrusted with the codes, he was still
required to have written authorization to go inside, and had to be
accompanied at all times. This was true for each of the carefully
chosen few who were granted such access. The Army corporal on duty
near the big, pressurized door and armed with an intimidating black
automatic was the human back-up to The Vault’s complex,
computerized security system, and he knew the rules. Not Walter’s
rules, but his own set of orders by which he lived.

But he was young, and he was bored.

Walter had approached him carrying his iPad.
“Scott, I found a You Tube video of two women having sex in a JC
Penney fitting room.” The kid grinned and came out from behind his
desk. While he was engrossed in the video, Walter slit his throat
with a carpet knife he bought at Home Depot, then accessed The
Vault and removed what he wanted.

8) Calligraphy Is A Lost Art.
Children who spend a lot of time alone – especially bright ones –
master obscure skills which most of the world has forgotten. Walter
had many of these skills, including chess, trivia, bird
identification and juggling. The one he was using for this project
was calligraphy, something he had started teaching himself in
junior high with a book from the library, and still did to this day
as a means to amuse himself. He knew how to use the old-fashioned
fountain pen, but he had discovered that the craft stores carried a
selection of fine, chisel-edged markers in a variety of sizes,
which looked just as nice but were less messy than the jars of
ink.

He had done the original letter in Old
English script, and when he was done it looked like something a
medieval sheriff might have nailed to a castle door. The text was
simple, and not personalized for the recipient, just a few
paragraphs covering Walter’s views on justice and equality. From
the original he had made five hundred copies, the few remaining
sitting in a Staples box on the desk beside him, next to a
scattering of pre-addressed business envelopes. He had let the
printer make the peel-and-stick address labels, and putting them on
along with the stamps had been the most time consuming and boring
part of the process.

Walter lifted a letter from the box and gave
it a single spritz with the cut glass atomizer on the desk, the
fancy kind with the tube and the little squeeze ball. Beside it was
an empty glass vial with a red label on it, a tiny bit of clear
liquid still pooled around the open mouth. The atomizer had been
his mother’s, used for her many perfumes over the years, and was
one of her few remaining possessions he still had. It worked
nicely, puffing out a tiny mist which settled invisibly on the
paper. As he folded it neatly into thirds and stuffed another
envelope, he was struck by how similar this was to some lonely girl
in the forties sending a love letter to her G.I. fiancé in Europe,
adding a touch of fragrance to give him a hint of home.