Alexis Lather - The Vigilant Ones

Illustration by Randy Asplund-Faith

ROBOT SEEKS ICE CUBE ON THE MOON, proclaimed the headline in the local section of the Houston Chronicle.

“Ice cube?!” Jan Kostryzinski exclaimed, incredulous. What the lunar rover had been designed to retrieve was more like a giant straw full of Moon-dirt Slurpee. Headline writers could never resist an inaccurate but catchy turn of phrase. Jan took a savage bite of her burrito and checked her watch. She’d leave the house by 6:45; her office was only fifteen minutes away. The signal from the Moon would arrive at 7:13 P.M.

Jan’s burrito had been in the freezer until she hastily microwaved it. Unpalatable cold spots lurked inside the wrapped tortilla. Twining around Jan’s ankles, Nutmeg meowed.

“Cool it, Nutty, you’ll get your supper. That’s why I came home for mine.” Bracing herself in case the contents turned out to be as inaccurate as the headline, Jan read the article.

The Chron’s science writer had interviewed Jan yesterday in her office at the Planetary Science Institute. Evidently he’d taken good notes. Her name was spelled correctly, with y, i, and i in the right order. The article gave a simplified but adequate background for the project for which Jan was Principal Investigator. It continued, In the current frugal budgetary climate, NASA deems it more important to send humans to Mars to look for life than to the Moon to look for ice. Jan mentally added a footnote: “frugal” meant “dirt cheap or no dice on the ice.” The task of sampling ice on the Moon falls to a robotic rover named Cocytus.

The sidebar sketch made Cocytus look cute, like a bug on six wheels with a bristle extending from its rump. The bristle was its communications antenna. The rover’s name came from Dante’s Inferno where it meant the ninth and coldest circle of hell. That had turned out to be ironically appropriate, because the machine had made life hellish for controllers and scientists as it malfunctioned its way across the lunar surface after exiting the lander. The newspaper article translated the sorry situation into “scientists and engineers have had to overcome a series of mechanical difficulties.”

To Jan’s dismay, the article left out the best part of the project: how confirming ice on the Moon might catalyze the establishment of a lunar base. Jan deplored the priority given to a manned mission to Mars, which absorbed a vast fraction of space exploration money, leaving lunar concerns to dangle on a brittle shoestring of funding. Finding life on Mars or anywhere else in the Universe was a long shot. The surest and best ambition would be to go put life there.

With another meow, Nutmeg leaped into Jan’s lap just as her attention was riveted by a headline under the Cocytus article. CLEAR LAKE BURGLARIES TURN VIOLENT.

In the last few months several homes in the Clear Lake area had been thoroughly burglarized—news to Jan; she’d been preoccupied with Cocytus. Yesterday, a homeowner had been shot from behind when he interrupted one such crime, less than three miles from Jan’s house. Ruffling Nutmeg’s thick fur, she scanned the downcolumn details with morbid interest.

The burglars were experts, not the typical young punks. They hadn’t given the cops much to work with: no fingerprints, no witnesses, no clues except a tentative connection to a dark van, and no tell-tale mayhem, until now. “They’re getting violent because they’ve had so much success that now they feel totally in control,” said a police detective. “They think they know what to expect , that they can handle anything that interferes with carrying out the crime.”

Jan hadn’t been quoted on the Cocytus project. But the paper had given the cop a five-line direct quote. And the burglary article was twice as long as the coverage of Cocytus, which, when she examined the last paragraph, lacked closure. The editors had cut the article.

Sensationalistic journalism! Jan flung the paper down. It was going to be a stressful night for her, and the Chronicle hadn’t helped.

Jan snatched half a tin of Tender Veal Bits out of the refrigerator, dumped the cat food into a saucer, put it in the microwave and keyed in eleven seconds. Nutmeg preferred having the chill taken off. Jan stalked to the back door and gave the knob a sharp turn to make sure it was locked.

The door opened. So it had been unlocked all day. She’d absentmindedly left it that way a few times before—she’d thought her neighborhood was safe. Unnerved, Jan stepped out into a mild but breezy early night.

Jan’s back yard had a high fence and little for an intruder to hide behind just several thin trees and one large shrub near the patio. The yard was empty and quiet. The shrub rippled in the breeze. Its dense wind-stroked greenery reminded Jan of Nutmeg’s ruffled fur—an extraordinary impression that made her take a second look at the shrub.

Jan didn’t know what it was, except not a ligustrum. Everybody had ligustrums, and ligustrums had glossy pointed leaves. Short needles cloaked Jan’s shrub so thickly that it wasn’t possible to see the branches inside of it. Needles probably made it a member of the cedar-pine-whatever family. Jan felt a twig’s tip. It had the bristly-soft texture of a test tube brush. The shrub wasn’t prickly to brush against, but Nutty, who freely sharpened her claws on all other wood in the house and yard, always avoided the shrub, circling wide around it when slinking along the side of the house.

OK, it’s a whatever shrub, Jan thought with a mental shrug. At least it liked it here. It had come up on its own soon after she bought this house, and had grown taller than she in only six years. She fertilized it at erratic intervals. Everything Jan tried harder to cultivate fared much worse. Jan was a soil chemist with a brown thumb. The situation escaped ludicrous irony only because the soils she had chosen to study were the barren grains and dusts on the face of the Moon.

The microwave pinged. Nutmeg instantly let out a shrill feed-me meow. Jan secured the back door, regretting that she’d never gotten around to getting a better dead-bolt lock for it. Leaving Nutmeg purring over her food bowl, Jan started the short drive to work.

Nervous tension tightened Jan’s shoulder muscles and made the burrito sit heavily in her stomach. Tonight was the night for Cocytus to get its sample or die trying. As cranky as the robot had turned out to be, it was doubtful that the mission controllers could keep it going much longer on the frigid floor of Aitken Crater. She was strung-out, Jan admitted to herself, in a state of mind where even ordinary things, such as the shrub in her yard, could strike her with strangeness.

The few stars bright enough to be visible past the street lights twinkled in the night sky, long-traveled light falling through a clear but turbulent layer of air over this part of the Earth. When Jan stopped her car at Bay Area Boulevard to wait for a break in traffic, she noticed clouds massed on the western horizon. Lightning simmered in the clouds. The newspaper had said something about an approaching Pacific cool front that was expected to collide with warm, moist Gulf air tonight. So it had. Tumultuous warfare of weather filled the western end of the sky, just below the crescent Moon.

Storms threatening to engulf the Moon. Primitive people, including Jan’s ancestors in central Europe, would have taken it for some kind of bad omen, maybe a sign of impending natural disaster or war, Jan reflected. But the Moon circled two hundred forty thousand miles beyond the vicissitudes of Earth’s weather, untouched by weather or war. Or crime. A blue van turned off Bay Area. She noticed how dark it looked in sodium-vapor lighting.