David Palmer - Emergence

Adam replaced Terry on his stand. The bird was hunched, head down, plumage fluffed — the very picture of abject misery.

Adam stood silently, gazing back and forth between the bird and my trembling daughter. “ Dammitall!” he exploded, turning away, “I’d give my left arm to find out what’s going on! I hate not knowing!”

I “shushed” him and tried to calm Lisa. I rocked her gently, the way I did when she was little, and stroked her hair.

Finally her eyes cleared; she noticed me. “That was mean !” she whimpered.

“What happened, baby?” I murmured, glaring a warning over her shoulder at Adam, who, hearing her response, had already wheeled around, ready to administer the third degree. “Who was mean?” I continued. “Who? What did he do?”

I might as well have saved my breath. Lisa pulled away slightly and met my gaze. She opened her mouth to reply, then hesitated. She pulled at her lower lip with her teeth. Finally she shook her head in perplexity. “I dunno, Mommy.” She sniffled. “But he was mean !” she added emphatically.

“What did he do that was mean?” prodded Adam, despite my warning frown. “If you know he was mean, you must know what he did.”

But she didn’t. At least she was unable to explain it to either of our satisfactions. Or, I suspect, her own.

And suddenly it was happening again: Terry was growling softly, blood-chillingly; he crouched, bill wide, pinpoint pupils staring into space. Lisa withdrew again, her expression going blank, her entire body tensing, muscles gathering.

“Lisa…” I began.

She cut me off: “ Shh-h-h-h! Quiet, Mommy; he’ll hear you. We have to be careful not to warn him…”

“Oh, Kyril…! ” wailed Terry.

“Warn who? ” demanded Adam in exasperation.

“Shh-h-h-h!” was the only reply. Beneath my hands she coiled perceptibly, then started abruptly…

“Haiee-AHH!” shrieked Terry, flapping violently, this time without quite losing his grip.

Lisa brightened. “All right!” she gloated. She pulled away from me and shook herself. Her sweet baby face wore a positively savage expression. “All right …!” she repeated with grim satisfaction.

Terry subsided; so did Lisa — into tears.

“…have to warn them!” muttered the bird. “…but how? How? HOW…? ”

Adam exhaled a sigh of repressed wrath and stalked off to the kitchen to make breakfast. It was a noisy process: Pans, dishes, and utensils paid the price for his frustration.

And all the while Terry continued to mutter intermittently in a sotto voce undertone, only portions of which were intelligible:

“…never hear me way around here even if I could fix it!”

“…idea was it, anyway, to put short-range sets in EMUs?”

“…isn’t even a mirror in here…!”

Apart from the running commentary, breakfast was a quiet affair. Adam ate in stony silence. Lisa moped, dripped tears, and sniffled by turns, and only ate because I threatened reprisals against her stuffed Pooh-Bear.

Both were too preoccupied to recognize the development of a genuinely terrifying omen: Terry didn’t want his scrambled eggs…! Not since the dawn of time, according to Candy, has he ever rejected scrambled eggs — not even during the terrible three days, two years ago, when he almost died of pneumonia!

That’s when I started to get a cold feeling in my stomach.

But it was as we were cleaning up the dishes that the Last Straw landed: “Of course!” Terry whispered excitedly.

Adam’s eyes met mine: Who ever heard of a bird whispering?

“I can send it down in the damned bomb…! All I have to do is retarget the computer. I can do that — I think … What were those coordinates? Remember-remember- remember — I remember ! 34 degrees 44 minutes north, 120 degrees 35 minutes west. Damn — that’s almost twenty miles from the launch site; sure hope somebody’s watching. Please, please, somebody — be watching… !”

Adam looked suddenly thoughtful. Seizing a pencil, he scribbled on the countertop.

“I give up,” I said; “what’re you doing, and why?”

By way of answer he went to the electronics wall and pulled open the map drawer. He rustled through the contents for a few seconds; then pulled out a USGS section map. He labored briefly with dividers and parallel rule. “There…!” he grunted under his breath. “I would have bet money on it.”

He turned to me. “Look here!” he said, in mounting excitement. “Just look where those coordinates lie.”

I glanced at the map; Adam had drawn an X on it. I glanced up. “What coordinates?”

“Didn’t you hear Terry? That was longitude and latitude he quoted. And look where they cross — Vandenberg Air Force Base!”

My confusion must have been apparent.

“Don’t you get it?” he demanded. “They’ve never landed a shuttle at Vandenberg Air Force Base; they have their own three-mile strip right there at the launch complex, almost 20 miles away — Terry couldn’t have heard those figures on television.”

“Well, he had to get them from somewhere.”

Adam eyed me cautiously. “I think he got them from Candy.”

“Well…” Whatever reply I might have planned was swept away by Terry’s next interruption:

“Oh…!” he exclaimed. “Of course! How did anyone so stupid manage to live eleven whole years — I can ride down, too…! ”

Adam stood silent, head down, thinking; his expression was almost a prayer. Then he straightened, eyes hard. He took a deep breath, faced me, and said, “That’s Candy . Terry is relaying her thoughts — don’t ask me how, don’t ask me from where. But he is. And she’s going to try to get to Vandenberg and it’s important and she’s afraid. I’m going to be there to meet her. I’m leaving right now. I know it’s crazy. Are you with me?”

I, too, hesitated, thinking hard. I reviewed the events of the past several weeks: the innumerable occasions on which Terry clearly anticipated Candy’s next statement and beat her to it or said it in chorus with her; his recent incredibly scholarly eloquence, coupled with Lisa’s related behavior.

The evidence in toto was substantial and convincing. But for our (and Candy’s) ostrichlike reluctance to face facts, we would have accepted the obvious conclusion some time ago: Candy and Terry, and Lisa too, are in communication — call it ESP or whatever — and we have been eavesdropping on Candy’s mental processes, wherever she is and whatever she might be doing.

“If we’re wrong,” I cautioned, “we’ll have lost several days’ searching up here.”

Adam nodded tensely. “I know. But we’ve covered at least a ten-mile radius so far. If she were here, we’d have found her by now.”

I sighed. “I think so, too.”

“Right; let’s go.” Adam was getting into almost as intense a state as the day Candy went down. He swept through the trailer like a whirlwind, gathering various tools, equipment, foodstuffs, and the like. When I asked why, he replied that the trailer would slow us down — he didn’t know what the problem might be, but Candy was frightened; he was not going to be late.

Adam often talks about his pre-Armageddon ambition to compete professionally in Grand Prix and Nascar, and describes his efforts (uniformly illegal) to acquire the high-speed motoring skills necessary for such a career. The stories tended to begin with “It was the loneliest summer of my life,” and I dismissed the bulk of them as exaggeration, wishful thinking, and tall tales spun to entertain us.