The Orion Plan (10 page)

The manager stepped backward. He raised his cell phone and punched a few keys. “I'm calling 911 right now,” he warned. “You better get the fuck out of here.”

Joe glared at him. He looked at the counter between them and seriously considered climbing over it. But who was he kidding? His chest ached every time he took a breath. He was in no condition to get into a fight. And even if he could, the cops would come to the shop and arrest him. They'd cart him off to either the jail on Rikers Island or the nuthouse at Bellevue.

No, he couldn't win. He had to figure out another way.

He turned away from the counter and glanced at the computer's blank screen.
So close and yet so far.
Then he picked up the ten dollar bill from the floor and left the shop.

He walked several blocks uptown, then wandered aimlessly across the darkened neighborhood. His stomach churned with disappointment. He lowered his head and stared at the sidewalk, avoiding eye contact with everyone. Most of all, he avoided looked to the north, toward the tall apartment buildings in Riverdale. The last thing he wanted to see now was the building where his daughter lived.

After fifteen minutes he found himself on the corner of Broadway and 215th Street. His instincts had led him to the right place again. Just down the block was Duarte's, a bodega that sold cigarettes, lottery tickets, beer, and malt liquor. He walked into the place, and the guy behind the counter nodded at him. Joe was a loyal customer, maybe the most loyal one they had. He opened the refrigerated case at the back of the store and pulled out four forty-ounce bottles of Olde English 800. About a year ago he'd settled on Olde English as his preferred brand. It cost only $2.49 per bottle, including tax, making it a cheap and efficient way to get drunk. And the stuff was sold all over the neighborhood, at every hour of the night.

At the counter Joe handed over his ten dollar bill and got four pennies in change. He felt a twinge of regret as he shoved the coins into his pocket. He'd just spent the money he was supposed to invest in his future. Now he would drink his forties until he was drunk, and sometime after midnight he'd pass out and sleep it off. Then he'd wake up tomorrow morning with his head throbbing and his mouth as dry as dust, and the whole cycle would start again. He wouldn't be any closer to changing his life.

But he had no choice. He simply couldn't function without a drink. He made a promise to himself that he'd return to the public library as soon as he woke up the next day. He'd get the information he needed and collect his reward. It could all wait till tomorrow. Everything was still good.

He slipped the four bottles under his Yankees jacket and zipped it up. Feeling better now, he cradled the forties against his chest and headed back to Inwood Hill Park.

*   *   *

Joe passed out again on the same hillside, about thirty yards from the clearing where the satellite had landed. He chose this spot because it was neither too close nor too far. He was close enough to keep an eye on the clearing and yet far enough to be out of range of the sphere's metallic roots. To give himself an extra margin of safety he lay down on one of the thick slabs of rock jutting from the mud. Although it was uncomfortable, he felt better knowing there was three feet of hard stone between himself and the ground.

He slept restlessly for the first hour. When he closed his eyes he pictured Dorothy limping away from the clearing. Then he saw the teenagers standing around him, shouting in Spanish and pointing their screwdrivers. The asshole from the copy shop stood with them and called the cops on his cell phone. Soon a police cruiser drove up the hillside, its blue lights flashing, but the cops inside the car also had screwdrivers in their hands and green bandannas around their heads. Startled, Joe woke up for a moment and rolled onto his side, the rock slab pressing mercilessly against his cracked ribs. But he'd drunk so much Olde English that he couldn't stay conscious for very long. Within seconds he passed out again.

Luckily, his next dream was less jarring. He pictured his daughter Annabelle sitting on the beige sofa in their old apartment in Riverdale. She was just five years old in this dream, a curly-haired moppet in pink pajamas, sitting beside her mother. Their right hands were hooked together for a game of thumb war. They started the game by reciting the traditional opening lines, “One, two, three, four, I declare thumb war,” Karen's voice chanting in unison with Annabelle's, “Five, six, seven, eight, you drool and I'm great.” Then their thumbs swept back and forth, darting and feinting, Karen's large thumb bent like a fleshy
7
, Annabelle's tiny thumb wriggling like a worm. They looked so beautiful together, laughing and playing. That was their happiest time, Joe thought, their very best year. Before Annabelle started kindergarten and Karen started cheating and Joe started drinking.

The intrusion of this thought changed the tone of Joe's dream. Karen stopped laughing and faded away. Annabelle vanished too, except for her right thumb, which detached from her hand and grew unnaturally long, even longer than the sofa. It also changed color, turning dark brown, then black. It became a thin black snake, but with Annabelle's blue eyes. The snake stared at Joe for a second, watching him curiously. Then it lunged forward and sank its fangs into the crook of his neck. His right arm went numb and a bolt of pain tore across his chest. It was
real
pain, too intense to be part of a dream.

He woke up again and saw a long thin tentacle on the rock slab. It was shiny and black, made of the same metallic stuff as the satellite. It stretched across the slab, one end rising out of the muddy ground and climbing over the edge of the rock, the other end tapering to a needlelike tip just a couple of feet from Joe. As he watched in horror the tentacle pulled away from him, its tip retreating until it slid over the edge of the rock slab and disappeared into the mud.

Joe sat up, panting. The pain in his chest was already ebbing and his right arm was coming back to life, but his terror grew stronger. He raised his left hand to the side of his neck, to the place where the snake had bitten him.

He felt blood on his fingers. And a tiny puncture wound.

 

SEVEN

Sarah was frustrated.

She sat in the kitchen of the restaurant the Air Force was using as its command post. She'd found a relatively quiet spot, far from the dining room where the colonels and captains were working, and propped her MacBook on a stainless-steel counter. For the past four hours she'd plotted interplanetary trajectories using a NASA program on her laptop. She was trying to figure out how the Ikon, the huge Russian spacecraft launched three years ago, could have accelerated to 80,000 miles per hour while putting itself on a collision course with Earth. Unfortunately, she hadn't made much progress.

A dot at the center of her laptop's screen represented the sun. The orbits of the planets were concentric circles around it. The trajectory of the Ikon was a red arc that started from Earth and ended at the spacecraft's last reported position, on the other side of the sun. That's where the craft was when the Russians said they lost contact with it. Last but not least, a blue line represented the final approach of 2016X, the mystery object that had fired the probe at New York. Sarah had tried to connect the red trajectory with the blue one, but all her attempts had failed. The Ikon simply hadn't had enough time to make the necessary maneuvers across the solar system.

She looked at her watch: 1:32
A.M.
Aside from a brief nap she'd taken during the flight to New York, she'd been going nonstop for almost twenty-four hours, and she was dead tired. She wondered if she should join the Air Force officers in the dining room and give General Hanson a progress report. He might find it useful to know that the underlying assumption of their search effort—that Object 2016X was a Russian military spacecraft—seemed highly unlikely.

In the end, though, Sarah decided to stay put. She continued staring at her laptop's screen and thinking. So far, Hanson's search teams had found no trace of 2016X. Neither the soldiers on the riverbanks nor the specialists in the Coast Guard boats had detected any suspicious debris. Of course, the search was only nine hours old and there was a lot of territory to cover. But Sarah also wondered if the Air Force radar experts had drawn the wrong boundaries for the impact zone. All their estimates were based on the assumption that 2016X had been a conventional spacecraft. And Sarah was starting to question this assumption.

She wanted to try something else. She scrolled through the software on her laptop until she found Earth View, another NASA program. Sarah hesitated for a moment before opening it. To be honest, she was afraid to go down this road. She'd done it before, twenty years ago, and it had ended in disaster. She'd promised herself that she'd never do anything that stupid again. But how could she ignore her suspicions? How could she call herself a scientist if she automatically rejected this hypothesis?

She overcame her fear and clicked on the Earth View icon. A moment later an image of the globe appeared on the laptop's screen. It was a composite image pieced together from the most recent satellite photos of the Earth. Sarah adjusted the settings so that the program showed what North America had looked like from space as 2016X approached it at 4:00
A.M.
eastern daylight time. The oceans and the deserts were dark, but the eastern United States was a constellation of glowing cities, with the brightest clusters along the coast. If you were approaching the planet's night side and looking for the most interesting destination, New York City would certainly qualify.

Sarah shut her laptop and left it on the counter. Her heart was racing. She needed to go outside. As she rushed out of the kitchen she pulled a crumpled pack of Marlboros from the back pocket of her jeans. It was her secret vice, but now she didn't care who saw it. She showed the pack to the soldier who guarded the restaurant's front door and after a few seconds of hesitation he let her pass. “Just stay within twenty yards of this post, ma'am,” he warned. “Don't go near the perimeter.”

She realized what he meant as soon as she stepped outside. A hundred feet away a line of soldiers stood shoulder to shoulder, blocking the western end of Dyckman Street. Their obvious purpose was to stop any civilians from approaching the restaurant and marina. Just in case they needed help, at least thirty New York police officers stood on the other side of the line. Beyond the police were half a dozen news vans from the local television stations.

Because this was a classified operation, General Hanson had tried to disguise his unit's activities by making up a cover story. He'd told the news media that the soldiers were “conducting a routine training exercise related to national-security readiness.” But the story hadn't fooled anyone. Despite the late hour, the TV people were doing live reports and pointing their cameras at the soldiers. The Air Force had brought in searchlights to illuminate the area, making it almost as bright as day, and the noise from the crowd gave the place a carnival atmosphere.

The temperature had dropped a few degrees since sunset, but the air still felt like warm cotton. Sarah ventured around the corner of the restaurant and headed for the marina. She walked down the pier and stopped at a railing that overlooked the Hudson River. Her hands were trembling but she managed to shake a cigarette out of the Marlboro pack and pull her Zippo from her pocket. It was a customized lighter with her name engraved on the brushed chrome. She flicked it open, lit her cigarette, and took a long drag.

To the west, the Coast Guard patrol boats cruised up and down the dark river, aiming their sonar at the Hudson's muddy bottom. To the east, the wooded heights of Inwood Hill Park loomed over the city. The soldiers hadn't cordoned off that section of the park because it wasn't part of the impact zone drawn by General Hanson and his staff. But Sarah didn't trust their judgment. Their mission was to prepare for a specific threat—a surprise attack from Russia or China or North Korea—so they naturally saw everything in those terms. Back in graduate school, Sarah had learned the name for this tendency: confirmation bias. The soldiers saw 2016X as a Russian weapon because that's what they expected to see.

She took another drag on her cigarette and gazed at Inwood Hill. She couldn't trust her own judgment either, because she also suffered from confirmation bias. That's what got her into trouble twenty years ago, a fervent belief that had swayed her thinking and muddied her scientific objectivity. And despite all the damage it had caused, she still clung to this belief. She hadn't learned a damn thing from her mistakes.

*   *   *

Sarah had been a different person back then: more outgoing and fun-loving, less wary and introspective. After getting her Ph.D. from Cornell at the precocious age of twenty-six, she landed a plum job at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston. Better still, she returned to Texas with the man she loved, a fellow researcher she'd met at Cornell. He'd also landed a job at NASA, and they got engaged a month after they started working there.

It was 1996 and NASA was laying the groundwork for the planetary rovers it would send to Mars over the next fifteen years—Sojourner, Spirit, Opportunity, and Curiosity. To determine which scientific instruments to put on the rovers, the agency assigned Sarah to study the best evidence of Martian geology it had: meteorites that had traveled from the Red Planet to Earth. Every million years or so, an asteroid hits Mars with such force that the explosive impact blasts rocks off the Martian surface and hurls them into space. After orbiting the sun for eons, some of the rocks get sucked in by Earth's gravity and land intact on the surface. Sarah's boss gave her one of these meteorites to study, a rock that had been ejected from Mars fifteen million years ago. Her task was to slice the meteorite into sections and use a powerful microscope to observe its crystalline structure.