AS GERRY AND IAN RODE THE TRAIN out to the Alleyne-Parma Observatory to take their first look at the perforated phytosphere, Gerry held his fone tightly to his ear, even though he had just ended his call to Glenda. Miracle of miracles, they had at last gotten through to each other.
He took the fone away and looked at it, then put it in his pocket.
He went over his conversation with Glenda carefully, even as Ian gave him an apprehensive glance. That desperation in her voice. He had never heard her like that before. That bit about the stew, and how they were cooking it on a fire out back because Hanna wouldn’t eat it cold. And how Buzz Fulton had driven by a few times. Good old Buzz. He had shared more than a few drinks with Buzz. And the Cedarvale asthma medicine making Hanna high all the time. And Jake learning how to use a pistol. It was all so … unsettling.
A snippet of the conversation came full-blown to his mind.
“I’m working on a plan,” she had said.
“What kind of plan?”
“I’m going to disperse the food in the woods out back. And we’re going to run watches. Me and Jake. Hanna’s too stoned from the medicine. If anybody gets too close to the house, that’s it, Gerry, I’m not asking any questions.”
In the shrillness of this last statement, Gerry had heard his wife’s true anxiety, her tone a revelation, her sentiment a measure of just how bad things had gotten. He stared at the bleak lunar landscape as they passed a spur line that led to an oxygen production facility—three great white spheres on the otherwise gray horizon. He understood—with chill finality—the jeopardy his wife and family faced. Armed men might come to the house and take their food away. Possibly kill them. And Glenda and Jake were going to fight them with a rifle and a pistol, no questions asked. He had to find a way to beat the phytosphere and beat it fast.
He glanced at Ian.
“So?” said Ian.
“She’s not doing too good.” And he had to struggle to keep his emotions controlled.
“But she’s keeping it together, right?”
He thought of her plan. “In a manner of speaking.”
“Because I always knew she was a strong woman. Right from the moment I met her.”
“The neighbor got murdered.”
“Really? What happened?”
“He had a food stash. Some guys came to his house, killed him, and took it. He had an extra stash buried out behind his shed. That’s what Glenda and my kids are living on right now.”
Ian lifted his chin. “She’ll get through.”
Gerry swallowed against the growing lump in his throat. If he talked too much about this, he might lose it. He decided to change the subject.
“I was in the mayor’s office this morning for an update.” He bolstered his voice with a businesslike tone. “Neil’s toxin not only seems to be working, but the U.S. military and its allies have destroyed fully seventy-five percent of the Tarsalan killer satellites.”
Ian raised his brow. “So maybe ships will start getting through again. Maybe you’ll go home soon, buddy.”
Gerry felt himself getting shaky again because Ian was suggesting home. “They’re telling us to stay put. I think the military’s got something planned, Ian. Over and above the toxin thing. Something big.”
Ian shook his head. “You mean something stupid.”
They reached the observatory a short while later.
For Ian, it was an occasion to take a nip from his flask and light up a joint.
Gerry, on the other hand, went directly to Heaven’s Eye.
Rather than look at Earth on the monitors, he studied it through the telescope’s actual lens.
The terminator curved along the Earth’s meridian like a black fingernail, the planet in gibbous phase, looking like a partially closed green eye. At first he didn’t see any imperfections in the uniformly emerald pall, but soon, as the Earth rotated, he discerned an ill-defined black pupil. The muck of the phytosphere was a beryl pudding, and invisible fingers tore it apart. The ragged edges around the pupil had the whiteness of a plant that could no longer produce chlorophyll.
“Do you want a hit off this?” asked Ian.
“Take a look at this. See what you think.”
Gerry moved out of the way.
Holding the joint—a merry little smokable in pink paper—between his thumb and middle fingers, Ian leaned down and looked through the eyepiece. Gerry, meanwhile, considered what he had seen. He had to admit, it looked as if Neil was having some success.
Ian lifted his head. “Looks like it’s doing something.”
Gerry’s eyes narrowed. “Yeah.”
“You think it will work?”
“I hope so.”
“But?”
Gerry shrugged. “Maybe he’s got it.”
“But?”
It was indeed a piece of work that such a colossal structure could be dismantled this way, and he felt nothing but keen admiration for his brother.
“We’ll just have to wait.”
“Wait for what?” asked Ian.
“Seems like a slow process.”
“And?”
“The Tarsalans could respond.”
“Respond how?”
“With a neutralizer, or antidote, or some such other molecular or nanogenic agent. If you’re going to fight the Tarsalans, you have to be smarter, stronger, and sooner than they are.”
“Sooner?”
“You have to hit them all at once, like Stephanie says.”
Three technicians delivered infrared equipment to the Alleyne-Parma Observatory the following day.
Gerry was surprised, and also relieved. He had thought for sure that he wouldn’t get any of this new equipment until Neil’s toxin attempt had unequivocally failed. That he should see the equipment so soon made him think his arguments had, after all, carried weight, and that even the rhetorically minded Ira Levinson had at last seen reason.
The apparatus, in its entirety, was a boxy unit about the size of a refrigerator, and reminded Gerry of a giant multilens camera. One of the lenses stuck out further than the others, protruding from the white casing about six inches, while the other two lenses remained recessed into the instrument, covered with special optical filters made of blue glass.
The technicians took the whole afternoon to install the unit, and to download software into the accompanying computer.
When they were done, they gave Gerry a rundown, and by the time they left he was fairly adept at imaging, enhancing, and analyzing the infrared views of Earth.
The mayor came a few hours later. “How’s it working?” asked Hulke.
“You pulled some strings.”
“It was more than strings, Ger.”
“Malcolm … thanks.”
“Just do something with it. Give Ira a bone or something.”
“I’ve been studying the new images for the last few hours.”
“And so, like, your brother’s thing … is it working?”
Gerry shrugged. “As far as it goes, I guess. But the evidence is inconclusive yet.”
“Even in the new images? Does this … does it help get a better look at what your brother’s toxin is doing? Because I had to use that … that line of reasoning with Ira, even though I didn’t know what the hell I was talking about. Otherwise you would have been waiting forever.”
Gerry sighed. So. Here it was again. The hidden agenda. The new apparatus wasn’t meant to further his own research, but to confirm his brother’s. What else was new?
He glumly told the mayor the truth. “I’m not sure.”
The mayor gestured at the infrared views of Earth on the monitors. “How many blooms show deterioration?”
Gerry glanced at the monitor. “I count … five. And it looks as if they’ve just seeded another, so that makes six. It’s just that, you know …” He motioned at the screen. “It seems the phytosphere is catching on, getting an idea of what’s happening … like I said it would.”
“Gerry, please don’t say that.”
Gerry shook his head. “I’m just not sure yet. The hydrogen sulfide seems to be working in some blooms, and not in others. Omicron bloom, for instance. It’s hardly made a dent.”
The mayor’s smooth face flushed. “That’s not, like, the best news I’ve heard all day. Any way I can put a positive spin on it for Ira?”
He raised his brow, frustrated that the mayor should be looking at it this way. “I wouldn’t say it’s a complete bust, Malcolm. But the temperature relationships are complex.” The mayor’s face sank at this notion. “And I haven’t quite figured them out.” Hulke’s face sank further, as if Gerry’s inability to figure things out was just another breach in the confidence the mayor had placed in him.
“So there are … temperature relationships.” The mayor didn’t seem to like this at all. “Okay. Not what I was expecting, but if you could explain without getting too technical … so I have something to take back to Ira.”
Gerry collected his thoughts. “We should be getting an extremely cold infrared signature on the dead plant tissue, well into the darkest blues.”
“But?” The mayor’s pale eyes had now gone wide.
“Well … we have had a lot of blue, and all that tissue is disintegrating, but the disintegration in each bloom only reaches a certain point before it seizes up. It never gets beyond this green boundary here.” Gerry pointed. “The green indicates that the plant material has actually grown inert. Not dead, just inert. There’s no growth activity. It’s like an oak tree in winter. It’s still alive, but nothing’s happening.”
“So does that mean your brother’s failed?”
Gerry shrugged. “There’s been no regrowth in the affected areas. I wouldn’t call that failure, but I wouldn’t call it success either. Maybe what we’re going to get is a shroud with a lot of holes in it. Which is better than a shroud with no holes at all.”
“But if the U.S. keeps peppering the phytosphere with this hydrogen sulfide, and keeps starving the xenophyta … surely we’ll get rid of it once and for all.”
“I don’t know. This freeze-up action happens faster each time. It might reach a point where the seeding will stall the minute it hits the phytosphere.”
“But generally speaking, your brother’s had at least some initial success.”
“Given what I’m seeing here, I would say yes.”
The mayor stared at the images on the monitors. “And what about … you know … your own research? Ira was asking about it.”
“He was?”
“He hasn’t entirely dismissed you, Gerry.”
Gerry’s eyebrows twitched upward. “That’s just the shot in the arm I was looking for, Malcolm.”
“He wanted to know about the … uh … anomalous band.”
Hearing this, Gerry had to rethink his opinion of Ira. He motioned at the monitors. “You can see the band a lot better using infrared.” He pointed. “It runs all the way from the north pole to the south pole. On the infrared scale, it fluctuates into yellow, even into orange near the equator, and that means it’s generating a lot of heat. Heat means stress.”
“Stress?”
“Whenever things are under great pressure, or great stress, they heat up. This heat band from north to south indicates that the phytosphere comes under global cyclical stress. I’m still trying to understand it.”
“But it has nothing to do with your brother’s poison?”
“No. It was there before my brother used the hydrogen sulfide. I’m working on some models to explain it. It’s definitely not weather, like I first thought.”
“And as for the hydrogen sulfide thing? Come on, Gerry. Let’s try to be positive. Give me some good old Moon-spirited attitude.”
Gerry shook his head. “Malcolm, science isn’t a matter of positive or negative attitude. It’s simply a matter of … careful observation. You don’t want to cloud things up with any kind of attitude.”
They brought Gerry a cot and he stayed at the observatory around the clock. All the good food was gone, and he ate emergency rations, what the Moon had on hand in case of war, famine, or political unrest on Earth: mostly soup packs, rice cakes, and a dozen different pill supplements.
Members of the committee drifted in and out to watch the monitors, and Gerry could tell from the tightness at the corners of their eyes that they were anxious, still rooting for his brother, but nervous because it seemed to be taking so long.
Mitch Bennett came in and made a show of checking over the equipment, but his eyes kept drifting to the monitors, his small lips pursing, his brow settling. He seemed angry at the shroud. He finally left after saying in a sullen tone, “It’s like watching a piece of cheese ripen.”
The mayor came and went in various states of sobriety—and it wasn’t funny, because Gerry knew what it was like to be a drunk—always smelling of booze, for the most part holding it together but then slipping up with a slurred word or two, running off to the observatory washroom for a quick nip, joking about what they were going to do when all the booze ran out, and finally staring at the main monitor as if it were an oracle.
“Do you think you’re going to need a second Smallmouth still?” asked the mayor.
“Why? Is Ira changing his mind?”
“I’ll talk to Ira. He’s not … above fear.”
When the mayor left, Gerry spoke to Glenda again, because that was one great thing about Neil’s attempt: With the holes in the phytosphere, the lines of communication were open again.
“It seems to be stalling,” she told him. “At least from what I can see in Old Hill.”
“Any sign of Maynard?”
“No. But Buzz drove by again.”
“I had some good times with Buzz. Except for Marblehill. Marblehill was a disaster.”
“I wish he’d stop driving by. He came by last night. I heard his truck a mile away.”
Ian came in a number of times and, surprisingly, he took only a few nips from his flask.
Gerry commented on it.
Ian motioned at the monitors. “All this … makes a man think. I always told myself I’d sober up by the end of it all. I’m cutting back as much as I can.”
Stephanie came to visit him.
The minute she saw the monitors she said, “It’s not working.” And it was funny because Stephanie, nothing more than a showgirl, seemed to cut through the crap better than anybody else. “We’ve got to come up with something different fast.”
He studied the monitors and realized Stephanie was right.
Each new seeding brought no more than a pinprick of deterioration, tiny points of stasis where the hydrogen sulfide was trying to gain a meager toehold. It was as if the phytosphere was now putting up its best guard against the attack.
He was with Stephanie when he first noticed a change around the existing holes. In infrared terms, it was manifested as a rim of yellow forming along the edges of the green, like the finger of God reaching out and breathing a new spring into the dormant foliage, yellow being an indicator of warmth, and therefore, of life.
His shoulders sank.
He showed Stephanie, and together they followed the growth for the next hour. He remembered the weeds in his Old Hill backyard, particularly the dandelions in spring; of how quickly his too-big lawn had been covered with a galaxy of ragged yellow stars, and how dozens of other green miscreants, genus unknown, had sprouted up between the patio stones and along the edges of the house. The phytosphere seemed vicious in its will to live. The yellow rims at the edges of the various holes seemed to pulsate as if with golden blood, and the holes themselves grew noticeably smaller. He took measurements, and electronically conveyed them to the mayor’s office, Mitch’s office, and even Ira’s office.
The measurements spoke for themselves.
Attitude had nothing to do with it.