Connie Willis - Fire Watch

At 9:04 she found her scientists where they had been before, on the tennis courts around the other side of the building. They were setting up their equipment, most of which was short, fat, and the same faded khaki as the missile in the park. They were all talking animatedly at each other and nodding at the sky.

At 9:05 the clouds around the sun began to be pushed away in a ragged circle and the sun’s disc began to shine very thinly through. Meg made Laynie put her special glasses on. At 9:17 the sun came out and everybody cheered. Meg walked Laynie back around to the front of the school where Rich had the telescope set up. Rich looked frantic, which meant he was hopeful. He and Paulos were wearing eye patches made of kleenex and masking tape. It began to get dark in the west, a purple-blue darkness like a summer rainstorm. Meg looked through the telescope at the last sliver of the sun, still shining too bright to look at in the now completely blue eastern half of the sky.

At 9:24 Paulos said, “She’s a-coming.” Meg picked Laynie up and started edging away from the men in the direction of the tennis courts. It began to get very dark. Laynie clung to Meg’s neck and squeezed her eyes shut under the mylar glasses. Shadows rippled suddenly over Meg like a shudder. She looked up.

And was caught by the eclipse. There was a flash, like the captured light from a diamond, and then it was there, suspended in the sky The sky was not totally dark. Reflection from the snow. The science teacher had explained it yesterday in the auditorium. He had not explained how beautiful it would be. The sky was a dawn blue with pink shining from the retreating clouds like a coming sunrise. In the center of the fragile blue the sun flared out on all sides from behind the moon.

Meg pried Laynie’s arms loose from around her neck and took her glasses off her. “This is it, Laynie honey,” she whispered. “Look at the clips.”

Laynie turned around shyly, as if she were being introduced to someone. “Oh,” she said in a tiny voice, and stuck her finger in her mouth. Her other hand she kept tight around Meg’s neck.

“Twenty-nine, twenty-eight…” One of the redheaded boys was counting backwards. It could not possibly have been two minutes already. A fine line of light appeared at one side of the bluish circle. “Thar she goes!” somebody said. Meg shoved Laynie’s glasses back on her and looked down at the snow. The sun flared back into blindingness and there was a tremendous roar of applause.

The redheaded boys pounded Meg on the back. “Boy, was that ever neat!” they kept saying. “Boy, are we ever glad we listened to you.”

Rich grinned at her. “You’ve set women’s lib back a hundred years,” he said, and squeezed her hand.

“Quite a show,” Paulos said, rocking back contentedly on his heels, “quite a show.”

“Oh,” Meg said, and took off through the forest of tripods with Laynie still in her arms. They were already gone, the four of them carrying their equipment down the hill. There was probably time to catch them before they made it to the park. I didn’t want to catch them, Meg thought. I just wanted to see what they thought of it, if it was worth it, coming all this way She could see them gesturing. Their gestures had taken on grandiose proportions. Meg decided it must have been.

“Laynie had to go to the bathroom,” Meg explained when they got back. The air had turned chilly. Meg put Laynie’s hood up.

“Ten-degree drop of temperature during the eclipse,” Paulos said. “It looks like it’s turning bad again, too.” He got into the car. The even layer of clouds was pushing steadily back over the sun.

Meg settled Laynie in the back seat and then helped Rich get the camera tripod maneuvered into the trunk. “You’re not going to tell me, are you?” Rich said.

Meg looked at him. “Tell you what?”

He slammed the trunk shut. Meg got into the back seat with Laynie. Rich started the car.

“I sure would like to know what you did back there,” Paulos said. “That was some weather predicting!”

“Um,” Meg said. She was straining to see the park as they passed the side street she and Laynie had walked up.

“Rocket,” Laynie said. “Rocket. Tana. Clips.”

“What, honey?” Rich asked.

Emergency situations demand emergency measures. Meg popped a Lifesaver into Laynie’s mouth.

There’s been a lot of research on twins lately, especially twins who were raised separately. They meet for the first time at age thirty and find that they both smoke Marlboros, drive Rabbits, are married to girls named Jennifer, and are computer technicians. You see them on TV. Donahue asks them a question and they both start to answer at the same time, in the same words. They stop, both of them lean backward, put their hands on their knees, reach for a Marlboro. The audience laughs.

Doesn’t this strike terror into any hearts besides mine? What if Donahue asked them, “Do you believe in free will?” What would they answer? “Yes, of course?” At the same time? And then would they lean backward, put their hands on their knees, and reach for a Marlboro?

We are near the spiraldown. I cannot see the mooring lights, and there are no landmarks on Paylay; but I remember how the lights of Jewell’s abbey looked from here, a thin disjointed string of Christmas tree lights, red and green and gold. Closer in you can see the red line under the buildings, and you think you are seeing the heat of Paylay, but it is only the reflection of the lights off the ground and the metalpaper undersides of Jewell’s and the gaming house.

“You kin’t see the heat,” Jewell said on our way in from the down, “but you’ll feel it. Your shoes all right?”

My shoes were fine, but they were clumsy to walk in. I would have fallen over in them at home, but here the heavier gravity almost clamped them to the ground. They had six-inch plastic soles cut into a latticework as fragile-looking as the mooring tower, but they were sturdier than they looked, and they were not letting any heat get through. I wasn’t feeling anything at all, and halfway to Jewell’s I knelt and felt the sooty ground. It felt warm, but not as hot as I had thought it would be, walking on a star.

“Leave your hand there a minute,” Jewell said, and I did, and then jerked my soot-covered hand up and put it in my mouth.

“Gits hot fast, din’t it?” she said. “A tapper kidd fall down out here or kimm out with no shoes on and die inside of an hour of heatstroke. That’s why I thought I bitter come out and wilcome you to Paylay. That’s what they call this tapped-out star. You’re sipposed to be able to pick up minny laying on the ground. You kin’t. You have to drill a tap and build a comprissor around it and hope to Gid you don’t blow yoursilf up while you’re doing it.”

What she did not say, in the high squeaky voice we both had from the helium in the air, was that she had waited over two hours for me by the down’s plastic mooring tower and that the bottoms of her feet were frying in the towering shoes. The plastic is not a very good insulator. Open metal ribs would work far better to dissipate the heat that wells up through the thin crust of Paylay; but they can’t allow any more metal here than is absolutely necessary, not with the hydrogen and oxygen ready to explode at the slightest spark.

The downpilot should have taken any potential fire-starters and metal I had away from me before he let me off the spiraldown, but Jewell had interrupted him before he could ask me what I had. “Doubletap it, will you?” she said. “I want to git back before the nixt shift. You were an hour late.”

“Sorry, Jewell,” the pilot said. “We hit thirty percent almost a kilometer up and had to go into a Fermat.” He looked down again at the piece of paper in his hand. “The following items are contraband. Unlawful possession can result in expulsion from Paylay. Do you have any sonic fires, electromags, matches—”