David Palmer - Emergence

Adam began scathing retort; Kim placed hand over mouth. “But even if he had heard it before,” she said gently, “doesn’t it strike you as unlikely that he would pick just that moment to say it?”

Opened mouth to reply; then closed thoughtfully. Kim asks hard questions! “That’s kind of difficult to explain, I’ll admit,” I began. “But I’m sure…”

“This is silly,” interrupted Lisa, hands on hips, expression radiating undisguised impatience with stupid grown-ups. “ Every body knows Terry knows what Candy thinks. And if Candy thought about it, she’d know what Terry thinks, too.”

Palpable silence descended, broken, finally, by Terry’s comment: “How ’bout that.”

Adam now staring at Lisa: “ ‘Too’…?”

Lisa snickered; suddenly lost interest.

“ ‘Too’… ?” repeated Adam. Glanced at Kim, whose expression showed sudden disapproval of new conversational direction. “You don’t suppose…”

“No, I don’t,” she responded firmly. Tone suggested wisdom of dropping subject.

But Adam on scent now; not deflected by subtlety: “She is a double-hominem child.” Paused dramatically; then continued in hushed tones: “Who knows what talents might be lurking behind those huge, fathomless black eyes…

Lisa glanced up, sighed, returned attention to book. Kim snorted inelegantly.

“That’s dumb,” observed Terry — as I opened mouth to say that very thing.

Well, trail’s end: Treasure hunt fun while lasted. Nothing left for short term but fall back to Plan A: Resume address-by-address examination of AA homes, work settings.

Between Kim, Adam, self, have dreamed up bunches of alternative approaches for locating AA headquarters in long run: For instance, Adam and Kim putting heads together over trailer’s electronic wall innards; plan to hoodwink some innocent component into serving as band-searching beacon. Device to dial endlessly up, down spectrum, pausing briefly to spout message beseeching reply on specific wavelength, to which, of course, receiver tuned, with relay-actuated recorder poised in case nobody listening when response comes in. Are confident of success. Lack only couple more transistors, chips, whatnots.

But immediate options exhausted.

Have decided, following discussion, to follow AA trail up West Coast, loop over northern end of Rockies, touch base throughout Midwest, finally concluding initial search back home…

Shucks, by this time, after posting all those leaflets, lovely little town, surrounding area, probably completely repopulated — with AAs themselves, likely as not, having stumbled across advertisements. On arrival will surely find thriving, industrious, cheerful little farming community — all wondering what’s keeping me…

Here we are in Fresno — what’s left of it — and here we seem to be stuck. Despite distance from San Andreas Fault, earthquake must have been humdinger: Roads — even open country! — impassable north and west. Terrain broken, fissured, stepped, generally messed up something awful. Unless backtrack, loop all the way around Rockies, seems to be no way to get from here to San Francisco, Sacramento, etc., next AA addresses.

Kim keeps looking around, Giving Thanks lived no closer to epicenter — ride was quite rough enough 300 miles away in Riverside. Assuming managed to survive immediate tectonic violence (slim odds, judging by conditions hereabouts), unlikely would have had place to live. Not much left standing.

We poked up every road on USGS map, even set out across open country, cutting fences as necessary — got nowhere. Repeatedly. Every road and/or off-road compass bearing blocked by fault damage. Major displacements involved, too: Haven’t found passage for even van alone, never mind with trailer. Rock shelves just 50, 100 feet high; bottomless fissures gape 100 yards wide or more — both running miles across terrain, usually intersecting with others to form impassable barriers, culs-de-sac.

Adam started grumbling about finding bulldozer, making own road; quit when couldn’t find one sufficiently intact to operate.

All of which finally led (“O bliss!”) to scouting by air. Just returned from second survey flight. News to west, north, all gloom: Simply no way through. Devastation astonishing. Would be difficult even afoot. Tomorrow will head east; perhaps find logging/fire road around mess through Sierra Nevadas.

This is Kim reporting: Candy is missing. She was close to eighty miles out, having traced a series of apparently usable fire trails well into Sequoia National Park, when she reported that her engine had lost power and she was losing altitude. She triangulated her location for us as well as she could by taking compass bearings on landmarks in the few moments before intervening mountains cut off her signal. Adam managed to get a bearing on her, as well, during that time, using the RDF processor incorporated into that amazing electronics wall of his, so we have a fairly good fix on her location.

However, if the coordinates are correct, she went down in an area that is both rugged and heavily forested with mature sequoias.

Jason was a Civil Air Patrol volunteer and participated in many high-country air searches. I have seen the CAP’s film on recommended techniques for ditching in trees. The theory is that if you land in the treetops in a full stall, impacting at about a forty-five-degree nose-up attitude, you touch down at the slowest possible speed, and present as broad an area as possible to the foliage, so that kinetic energy is used up in smashing through the branches on the way down. It is not uncommon for trees’ resistance alone to stop the descent, the ship ending up trapped in the branches. This is preferable to falling all the way to the unyielding ground, which entails a substantial impact even after deducting the retarding effects of the foliage. But either way, chances for surviving such a landing are better than one might expect.

Unfortunately, the film dealt with normal forest conditions, with trees between fifty to eighty feet tall. A mature stand of sequoias ranges between two and three hundred feet in height. Sequoias generally resemble enormously outsized pines: Trunks are massively thick, as much as forty feet in diameter, and lower halves are usually bare of branches. Top halves are sparse Christmas-tree parodies, with gnarled limbs immensely thick for their length, and little secondary and tertiary branching.

The structure of a sequoia forest offers little hope for a successful treetop ditching: There is nothing resembling the approximately level “roof” of an ordinary forest; a stand of sequoias is a sea of huge, upward-jutting cones. And as bigger trees crowd out lesser neighbors by blocking their sunlight, victors in the competition are usually less closely spaced than normal trees. Foliage generally overlaps, obscuring the sky from the ground and vice versa, but only down in the mid and lower reaches; and the branches which accomplish this are far too thick to break and absorb energy from impact with so light and fragile an object as a falling ultralight, except out at the very tips.

If Candy manages to locate a relatively closely-spaced stand of sequoias and achieves a letter-perfect pancake landing in the upper-middle branches, and if they slow and trap her plane without undue damage — and they might, as light as it is for its size — she has a chance.

Of course, that will strand her at least a hundred feet above the ground, at whatever point the branches cease. Her survival kit includes many things; but rope is heavy, and when dealing with ultralights, compromises must be made. So even if she is uninjured, getting down will be a challenge.

If she did not succeed in remaining in the treetops, however, I see no likelihood that she could have survived the passage through the branches, or the final free-fall to the ground. Repeated collisions with those huge, unyielding limbs on the way down would have demolished her miniature airplane like a balsa model. What remained would have plunged the last hundred feet like a stone.