Mercury Rests (2 page)

“OK,” said Mercury, trying to be patient. “But what is this place? A basement? A bomb shelter?”

“It used to be a sort of train station,” Ernie said. “A long time ago. So, I don’t mean to be inhospitable, but where did you come from?”

“Er,” Mercury started. “It’s difficult to explain. There was a sort of science experiment that went wrong. I got, well, imploded, and I ended up here.”

Ernie nodded sympathetically, as if that explanation made perfect sense. Or at least as much sense as anything else in his experience. Ernie gave the impression of somebody who had pretty much given up making sense of things.

“This may sound like a stupid question,” Mercury went on, “but do you know what plane this is?”

Ernie nodded and smiled.

Mercury frowned. “Well?”

“Oh, I’m sorry!” replied Ernie. “I was just agreeing that it was a stupid question. We’re not in a plane. I thought I mentioned this was a train station.”

“Yes,” replied Mercury, trying to remain patient. “But where
is
this train station?”

Ernie looked confused. He gestured with his hands and spoke slowly. “It’s...
right...here
.”

Mercury bit his lip in frustration. Is Ernie really this dense, or is he screwing with me?

He began again: “OK, how about this: how do I get topside?”

Ernie smiled and pointed. “Stairs that way. But there’s nothing up there.”

“What do you mean, nothing? There has to be
something
up there.”

Ernie nodded. “No, not really.”

Mercury sighed. “I have to hand it to you,” he said. “You’ve got a gift for making a guy not want to ask any more questions.”

He pulled another card from his pocket, squinting to read it in the dim light. “Six of diamonds,” he said to Ernie. “Got anything you want to say about that?”

Ernie shook his head.

“OK, then,” said Mercury, holding the card in his fingers. A flame appeared.

Ernie smiled the way one might smile at a cat trying to bat at a bird fluttering on the other side of a window.

Mercury shook his head and walked alone into the darkness.

Soon he found a staircase leading up. A dim gray light filtered down from somewhere above. He trudged up the steps.

He found himself on what must have been at one time a busy city street. The concrete sidewalk was badly cracked and littered with debris. An eerie horizon of dilapidated skyscrapers lay in the distance. The sky was a dark gray, and the cold air hung close, completely motionless. Beyond the skyscrapers an oppressive gray fog hung in the distance. Mercury shivered.

“Whatcha doin’?” barked a voice from behind him, causing him to drop the flaming card again.

Mercury spun around. “Damn it, Ernie. Stop doing that! I’m having a moment here.”

“Sorry,” replied Ernie. “There’s nothing out here, you know.”

“What do you mean, nothing?” Mercury said irritably. “This isn’t
nothing
.”

“Hmm,” said Ernie doubtfully. Then something seemed to dawn on him. “Oh, wait, here’s something!” Ernie took off on a sort of slow, loping run. He moved more quickly than Mercury
would have thought, given his apparent age. Mercury followed him dutifully.

Ernie climbed a pile of rubble that seemed to be the remains of a collapsed brick building. “Check it out!” he said excitedly, pointing to something in the distance.

Mercury came up behind him and looked in the direction Ernie was pointing. Something was sticking up out of the ground in the distance. At first it looked to Mercury like a man holding an apple above his head. Then he realized what it was.

“Holy shit,” he said. “It’s the Statue of Liberty!”

“Oh,” said Ernie, scratching his head. “Is that what you call it? We just call it the Big Apple Guy. You know, because of the big apple he’s holding. Anyway, that’s about all there is to see around here. Unless you like rubble. We have lots of rubble.”

“It’s not an apple,” Mercury said. “It’s a torch. And technically it’s a she. She’s pretty badly corroded.” A light went on in Mercury’s head. “Wait a second, this is
Earth
!”

Ernie gave him an odd look. “Well, of course it’s Earth. Where did you think we were?”

Mercury shook his head in disbelief. If this really was New York, then many centuries had passed since he left. Somehow by setting off the anti-bomb hundreds of thousands of miles away from Earth, Mercury had opened a portal to the distant future. His heart sank as he realized that he would probably never be able to return to his own time. He had assumed that he would be transported by the anti-bomb to some backwater plane and that it might take some doing to get back, but this was something entirely unexpected. Not even the angels could make time run backward.

He turned to face Ernie. “I suppose next you’re going to tell me that Earth is ruled by monkeys?”

“Monkeys!” exclaimed Ernie, shaking his head. “Of course not. I mean, I understand there were a few rough years a while back.”

Mercury’s brow furrowed. “Wait, are you saying that Earth
was
ruled by monkeys at one point?”

“Only very briefly,” said Ernie. “It didn’t really work out either time.”

“
Either time
?” repeated Mercury incredulously.

Ernie nodded. “It was during the second term that we realized monkeys probably weren’t the best choice. I say ‘we,’ although of course I wasn’t around. This was many years ago. Our records aren’t very good, but as I recall, it went Republicans, Democrats, Democrats, Republicans, monkeys, Democrats, Republicans, monkeys.”

“Hmm,” Mercury replied thoughtfully. He was starting to see the appeal of the monkeys.

“So,” Mercury continued. “What year is it?”

Ernie seemed to cringe slightly at the question. “Maybe we should go back underground.”

“Underground? Why?”

“It’s not really safe out here. The fog drives people a little crazy.”

Mercury wondered what might qualify as “crazy” in Ernie’s estimation. As if in response, there was a shout in the distance. It sounded like “Hwaaaaaah!”

“What the hell is that?” Mercury asked. But when he turned back to Ernie, he saw that the old hobo was retreating back down the steps into the darkness. He heard the shout again.

“Hwaaaaaah!”

Mercury shrugged and walked toward the sound. After a few hundred feet, he rounded a pile of rubble to encounter a surprising
sight: two men were playing Ping-Pong on a table set up in the middle of the street. They were engaged in an intense volley and appeared oblivious to his approach. The man on his left was sinewy and compact, with a stern expression on his face. His age was difficult to determine; at first glance he could have passed for thirty, but his sunken eyes and the lines worn in his face hinted at many more years. The man on the right was gray-haired and more sturdily built, but not much taller. His age too was difficult to determine. He had a bemused look on his face, as if he knew something that his opponent didn’t. There was something familiar about him, but Mercury couldn’t at first place where he had seen him before.

“Hwaaaaaah!” the gray-haired man howled, the ball caroming wildly off his paddle toward Mercury. Mercury caught the ball and smiled apologetically. The smile froze as he realized who the gray-haired man was.

“Any chance we can get our ball back?” asked the man amicably.

Mercury stood dumbly, staring at the man, still holding the ball in his right hand.
It can’t be
, he thought.
It’s impossible
.

“Seriously, the ball? We only have the one.”

“Y-you’re...” Mercury stammered. “You’re
Job
. From the
Bible
.”

“I am,” said Job. “Say, I remember you. Aren’t you an angel or something?”

Mercury nodded. “Mercury,” he managed to say.

“I should punch you right in the nose for what you did to me,” said Job.

Mercury nodded again.

Job laughed. “I’m joking,” he said. “No hard feelings. You were just doing your job. So, ball?”

“Huh?” replied Mercury smartly.

“The ball, genius,” growled the other man.

“Oh!” exclaimed Mercury, and tossed the ball to Job. “I’m sorry, I’m afraid I don’t...”

“Name’s Cain,” said the other man. “I was in Genesis.”

Mercury frowned. “Phil Collins Genesis or Peter Gabriel Genesis?”

“The first book of the Bible?” Cain explained impatiently. “I murdered my brother Abel and was cursed by God to wander the Earth?”

“Oh, thank God,” said Mercury. “I thought maybe you had something to do with ‘Abacab.’ ”

President of the United States Travis R. Babcock leaned slightly into the camera and smiled.

Actually, to say that he smiled vastly understates the effort that Travis was exerting. This wasn’t just any smile. It was a smile that was perfectly calibrated to simultaneously reassure and disarm its recipients. It was, to be precise, Smile Number Fourteen, consisting of equal parts grim determination and youthful optimism. Smile Number Fourteen was tough to pull off, and Travis was a little out of practice. There hadn’t been much call for Smile Number Fourteen for the first three years of his presidency. Privatizing Medicare had required mostly Smile Six (acknowledgment of sacrifice in the service of the greater good), and eliminating the capital gains tax had been a Smile Eleven job (faith in the ability of the American entrepreneurial spirit to overcome basic algebra). But for the sudden, unexpected implosion of a third of the moon, only Smile Fourteen would do. Travis pushed his lower lip forward while simultaneously furrowing his brow slightly and letting the right corner of his mouth curl upward three eighths of an inch.

Nailed it
, thought Travis.

“My fellow Americans,” he began. “Yesterday at four twenty-nine p.m. Eastern Time, Earth’s moon came under attack. While
I cannot at present give you any details regarding the exact nature of the attack or the identity of the perpetrators, I can assure you that the full resources of the United States government are being used to address the situation.

“Our top priority is to deal with the aftermath of the attack, both here in the United States and abroad. FEMA has been dispatched to assist areas that have been hardest hit by earthquakes, tornadoes, flash floods, and hurricanes, and the National Guard is working closely with governors to maintain order. The State Department is actively coordinating efforts with the International Red Cross and other relief agencies in Brazil, China, Pakistan, and many other countries that have been hit by natural—that is, by disasters. Obviously, our resources are strained to their limits, but I am confident that our brave men and women will rise to the challenge.

“While relief work is ongoing, we are also working hard to determine the exact nature of the attack and identify the individuals responsible. As I said, because the investigation is in progress, I cannot provide any details, but our intelligence agencies are working in concert with the best minds at NASA to determine the exact means of attack and find whoever committed this heinous act.

“Make no mistake: we will find the folks who took a chunk out of the moon, and we will bring them to justice.” Travis glanced at his watch, as if checking whether the time for justice had arrived. “I’ll take a few questions,” he said.

The room erupted in a flurry of shouts and waving hands.

“Deborah,” he said, pointing his chin at a reporter near the front of the room.

“Mr. President,” she said, “six weeks ago, you pledged that you would find the individuals responsible for the Anaheim Event and
bring them to justice. My question has two parts: First, has any progress been made in that matter? And second, is Black Monday related to the tragic event in Anaheim?”

Monday, October 29, 2012.
Black Monday
. That’s what they were calling it. It was an absurdly understated name for the day that a third of the moon simply disappeared from the universe, crumbling into oblivion and leaving behind an unstable clump of rock that seemed to be settling into a sort of grotesque mockery of a crescent. But what else could you call it? It was either ironic or fortuitous that the event had occurred on a Monday; Travis imagined there’d have been some serious hand-wringing about the name at the TV networks if the moon had collapsed on a Tuesday. There was no precedent for a Black Tuesday.

Black Monday
is one of those terms that gets dusted off for reuse by journalists every few years to describe a Monday that has, for whatever reason, gone even worse than usual. The first Black Monday occurred in Dublin, Ireland, in 1209 AD, when a group of five hundred recently arrived settlers from Bristol were massacred by the Gaelic O’Byrne clan.

The next Black Monday was on April 14, 1360, during the Hundred Years’ War, when the army of Edward III panicked after being struck by hailstorms and lightning, causing significant losses. In retrospect, Edward probably should have taken this as a sign that his men weren’t quite up to the task of conquering France.

Black Mondays were particularly popular in the late 1800s, with Black Mondays occurring in 1865, 1886, and 1894—caused by sandstorms, riots, and a bank crisis, respectively.

The most significant Black Monday to date occurred with the Wall Street Crash on October 28, 1929. It was echoed by another Black Monday some fifty-eight years later, on October 19, 1987—
the largest one-day percentage decline in recorded stock market history.

This latest Black Monday eclipsed all the previous Black Mondays combined. Stock market crashes, riots, and hailstorms were just the
aftershocks
of this cataclysm. And on top of the practical consequences, there was something profoundly upsetting about looking up at the night sky and seeing what looked eerily like a partially constructed Death Star. “That’s no moon,” Travis remembered thinking as he took in the grim sight from the night before. “That’s a
space station
.”

“Well, Deborah,” Travis replied with a practiced fatherly concern, “if you’re asking whether the people who destroyed Anaheim Stadium are responsible for the attack on the moon, I can’t give you a definitive answer. I will say, however, that this latest attack demonstrates the urgent need for America to act swiftly and decisively against its enemies.”