Нэнси Кресс - The End Is Nigh

Arnold nodded. He hawked a loogie, turned and spat so it wouldn’t hit any of his boys.

“Yah, I figured,” he said. “Let’s get back inside da cabin. Dress warm, get your guns, and make sure you have as much ammo as you can carry.”

The five men turned away from the green lights and walked back to the cabin, their feet crunching in the snow. Bernie slid his phone into his pocket, cutting off even that small light.

They walked into the cabin and silently went about their business, Arnold’s calming influence somehow stopping any of them from freaking out. They all had families to get back to, yet without saying a word they all knew that wasn’t going to happen right away. It felt like at least one of them should go crazy, scream about how he had leave, right now , and the others would have to wrestle him to the ground, but that didn’t happen. They all knew they had to wait until morning, at the very least—going out at night was to fear death from the cold just as much as fearing anything the aliens might do.

Still, George wasn’t completely free of crazy. As he put on a second sweater, then a third, he kept one eye on his Remington 700 rifle, and couldn’t help one thought from repeating in his head over and over:

Maybe it’s good we didn’t shoot at any deer—we might need all these bullets .

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

New York Times bestselling novelist Scott Sigler is the author of the Infected trilogy ( Infected, Contagious, and Pandemic ), Ancestor, and Nocturnal , hardcover thrillers from Crown Publishing; and the co-founder of Empty Set Entertainment, which publishes his Galactic Football League series ( The Rookie, The Starter, The All-Pro and The MVP ). Before he was published, Scott built a large online following by giving away his self-recorded audiobooks as free, serialized podcasts. His loyal fans, who named themselves “Junkies,” have downloaded over eight million individual episodes of his stories and interact daily with Scott and each other in the social media space.

The party on my thirtieth birthday more or less opened the door to the end of the world. It was supposed to be a surprise, but my husband Warren, and a few other family members took to smirking and grinning during the preceding days. I was maybe two steps into the living room when the lights came on. They were all there. Uncle Harry and Aunt May with Liz, our eight-year-old daughter. Jack Camden and his wife, whose name I couldn’t remember, and probably twenty other relatives, colleagues, and friends. They burst into a rendition of “Happy Birthday,” and applauded. My sister Ellen brought me a lime daiquiri, my favorite, and when the singing stopped I was led to the coffee table, which was piled high with presents.

We were essentially party people, always looking for something to celebrate. Tom Akins, the physics department chairman and my mentor, played his accordion, accompanied by Freeman and my brother Bill on guitars. They filled the house with music and everybody danced. We passed out drinks, ate through three and a half cakes, played some games and talked about how good life was.

Tom was a cosmologist who was devoting his life to trying to solve the riddle of cosmic inflation, the incredible, and incomprehensible, rate of expansion that occurred at the very beginning of the Big Bang. He’d won some awards, and had been a good guide for me when I was coming up through the program. Toward the end of the evening, he took me aside to pass on some news. “Maryam,” he said, “I’ve told you about Dan Martin? He’s been doing some groundbreaking work on space-time curvature. He’ll be receiving the Carnegie Award this year.”

Martin had gotten his doctorate only three years earlier. “Beautiful,” I said, trying not to sound jealous. “When did you find out?”

“He called me this morning.” He laughed. “He says some of his friends are making references to Martin’s Theorem.”

“Well, I’m glad to hear it.”

He must have picked up something in my tone. “Don’t worry, Maryam. Your time will come.”

It was a happy night. But I guess some part of Dan Martin lingered. When it was over, and everyone was saying goodbye and retrieving their cars from around the neighborhood, my husband hesitated as we left the house and started down the walkway. “What’s wrong?” he asked.

“What do you mean? Why do you say that?”

“Something’s bothering you. It’s been there for most of the evening.”

I took a deep breath and faced it. “I’m thirty .”

His eyebrows rose the way they usually did when politicians were talking. “Maryam, you still look great. I don’t think you’ll have anything to worry about for a long time.”

“That’s not what I mean, love. You know what they say about physicists and thirty?”

“No. What do they say?”

“That if you’re going to leave a mark, you have to get moving early. After you hit thirty your brain begins to freeze.” I tried to turn it into a joke, but he didn’t smile.

“Come on. You don’t believe that.”

I’m not sure whether I did. But it ended there. We got into the car and went home.

Despite the alcohol, I didn’t sleep well that night. There’s not a physicist on the planet who doesn’t want to leave his or her name in the history of the field. To do something that grants immortality. Predict the Higgs Boson. Devise the Pauli Exclusion Principle.

Schwarzschild pinned his name to a radius. Heisenberg to uncertainty. Doppler has a shift, and Hawking has radiation. Schrodinger scored with a cat . And what, in the end, would Maryam Gibson have?

I’d been working on dark energy since the beginning of my career. My thesis had been an attempt to account for it. Get to the heart of dark energy and you can explain why the universe continues to expand at an increasing rate. If I could succeed, make some sort of progress, it was easy to imagine, that at some future date, people would be talking about the Gibson Hypothesis. Or maybe Gibson Energy. I especially liked that one.

At one time it hadn’t seemed too much to ask. Dark energy constituted 68% of the total mass-energy of the universe. Seventeen times the amount of ordinary matter. I’d been convinced that I could figure it out. It was just waiting there for someone to explain it.

But that night, with the partying done, I lay in the fading moonlight that came through the curtains, and I knew it wouldn’t be me.

I needed a different track, but my career demanded I stay with the hunt for dark energy. There was no way I could leave that. But maybe, I thought, I could use my spare time to accomplish something that didn’t require an Einstein. Mark Twain had commented once that he’d come in on Halley’s Comet, and that he expected to go out with it as well. Which he did.

Find one of the things and you got to name it. Gibson’s Comet wasn’t exactly what I’d hoped for. But I could live with it. And it might be obtainable.

Warren and I spent a couple of hours most evenings watching TV. I enjoyed being with him, and had always arranged things to ensure we got some time together. But I was going to have to give that up for a while. “I’m going comet-hunting,” I said.

“Whatever you like, babe,” he said. “But you’re not going to give up on the dark energy thing, are you?”

“No. This would just be something I’d be looking at in my spare time.”