NINE

 

 

Berkeley, California

July10, 2015.

 

I stood in front of the television, my mouth open, staring.

“Over a hundred square miles,” the CNN announcer said, “of Northern Idaho has been evacuated. The gray cloud causing the deaths has slowly settled over the Moscow, Idaho, area. No reason for the cloud has been uncovered, but the theory that a small mountain to the north of Moscow has erupted is not true. We will keep you updated as more information comes in.”

“Dad? Mom?” Carol put her arm around me, holding me while crying. I couldn’t cry. I was too much in shock.

I just kept staring at the television, not really believing what I knew must have happened.

The day we found the buried spaceship Carol and I and Dad had sat inside the control room in the alien chairs. Just as Grandpa and the men before him, we decided that the world wasn’t ready for this discovery. We decided that Grandpa and the old Wheelbarrow Association had been right. This ship needed to stay secret for a while. Or at the very least bring outsiders in slowly.

Dad had taken charge and within a week had brought in a trusted friend who was a professor of physics at Cal Tech. Then over the next few years the Wheelbarrow Association, as we called ourselves, gained more and more members as Dad put together a private research team made up of some of the best scientists in the nation to study the ship.

They made slow headway, filing patents on what they did figure out how to work, and being careful to document every step they took.

Carol and I were married the following year and both of us kept going to school and working around the ship in the summers. After a few years we even came to feel comfortable with knowing there was an alien ship buried under Moscow Mountain. It became a part of our lives. I took a job at the University of California, Berkeley, doing research in electrical engineering, mostly along lines we were uncovering in the ship. Carol finished her doctorate in geology and was teaching across the bay.

We spent the summers in Moscow.

Life for all of us was good. Settled. Until the research team decided to start one of the ship’s power systems. For years nothing that crazy had been suggested. That summer I spent time on the ship arguing against trying to power anything up. I argued that the systems the aliens were using were not completely understood yet. I argued that there was a real reason this ship was here that we didn’t understand and that reason might have to do with a malfunction in the power systems. We didn’t know what might happen.

But Dad and his team said it was right to try, all safety precautions would be taken, and everything would be done by the book.

Dad and his friends didn’t say what book.

I helped with the early stages, hoping against hope that I could talk them out of trying anything. But all the research and all the exacting detailed studies went so smoothly that eventually, when school started, Carol and I went back to California.

Every night I talked to Dad and some of the other scientists. And three times that fall I went back up to try to stop the testing. But I had no luck. From what Dad told me on the phone the night before they were all killed, everything still seemed just fine. Powering up the smallest power system seemed to be progressing as planned and he was excited about finally getting into some of the data banks on the ship. I was supposed to call him and be on the phone when the test started in case they needed me for anything.

But, of course, something went wrong. Terribly wrong.

Carol and I were eating breakfast when we heard the news of what they were calling an explosion in Northern Idaho during the night. I had been expecting a call from Dad about the test being postponed for one reason or another. I was sure there would be small problems that would stop the power-up for a few more weeks. But I guess I was wrong.

At first the news sources thought that Moscow Mountain had blown itself apart in a volcanic eruption sometime around three in the morning. But Moscow Mountain was still there and could be photographed from a distance. And there had been no seismic activity that night to show an explosion.

Carol and I knew what had happened. The ship had gone through a meltdown of some sort or another. The test Dad and the rest had wanted to try had not been scheduled to start until later in the morning. Dad was still in bed, at home, with Mom, when the accident occurred.

After staring at the news reports for most of the morning, I finally stood and went to the phone.

Carol moved up beside me and touched my shoulder lightly as I dialed the phone to finally tell the world about the alien spaceship in the Lost Wheelbarrow Mine.

Of course, at that point it was way too late.