And it wasn’t until he was sure, really 100 percent sure, that he was not going to escape, that they had captured him and were not being nice to him at all, that he understood that the bogeyman had been under the bed this time.
And he began to scream.
16.3. Seventy-Thirty Jill Talcott
The landing field at the spaceport was enormous—as long as three or four of the City’s blocks. In the center sat the dome, looking like the round head of a giant emerging from the earth. And at the edge of the landing field, next to the red glass wall that marked the southern border of the City, was the spaceship.
It had taken them longer to get here than Jill had anticipated. In fact, they’d gotten so hot and tired the night before that they’d camped out in one of the buildings with power on the east–west artery. There were any number of empty rooms to be had, but Nate had wanted them to “stick together” in case “the aliens showed up.”
So Nate had slept on the floor next to Jill’s narrow bed. She could fit in the alien beds, if she turned on her side. Barely. She’d awakened at one point and lay listening to him breathing for a long time, thinking, This is what it’s like not to be alone in the night.
It wasn’t bad. But she didn’t want to come to depend on it.
Nate made a beeline for the spacecraft. It was shaped in the same functional aerodynamic manner as the air cars, but it was huge, larger than a zeppelin, and a deep rusty brown from stem to stern. As they drew closer, Jill realized this was not paint but dust from the red desert sand.
She wasn’t all that interested in the thing. The sun was hot, and she couldn’t shake a sense of lassitude no matter how often they rested. She yawned, watching Nate walk excitedly up and down its length, then crouch underneath it so he could touch the landing gear. The belly of the ship formed a cavelike roof over his head. He rubbed at the dust—it had been baked into a hard glaze.
“They haven’t moved this thing in ages,” he said, disappointed.
Jill bit back a plea for him to come out from there. She didn’t like seeing him poised under the giant machine like a bug under a giant’s foot.
“Wow!” Nate reached up as high as he could to touch the side of the craft.
“Let’s go inside,” Jill said. A fingernail found its way into her mouth to be chewed. She looked around, feeling exposed on this vast open field, to the rays of the sun, if nothing else.
“Inside the ship?” Nate sounded excited.
“Inside the building, Nate, the spaceport.”
“But, Jill…” He backed up to get a better look, tennis shoes shuffling on the landing field. “This is, like, a spaceship.”
“Yeah, maybe later, Dr. Who. Come on.”
Up close, the round dome was like the shell of some thick-plated insect. There was an alcove into which the main doors were set, and the depth of this alcove—a good ten feet—was the actual width of the spaceport walls. The doors were metal and heavy and had long vertical handles. There were no windows at all.
Nate looked at Jill, eyebrow cocked, and tugged on a handle. The door gave easily—it had been made for a light touch. With a throaty suction noise it opened. Inside was a heavy rubber seal two feet thick.
Nate whistled. “Interesting. I don’t suppose that’s for air-conditioning, do you?”
Jill shook her head. She felt a tingling excitement in her belly, but she wasn’t ready to discuss the idea she’d had on the rooftop with Nate. Not yet.
The power appeared to be out in the building, but as they stepped inside the lights came on. There was the sound of machinery kicking in.
“Could be worse,” Jill said. “Power could be off completely.”
Nate said nothing, but he looked worried.
The spaceport was nothing like an airport back home. There were no gates, no chairs for waiting relations, no boards announcing departures and arrivals—and certainly there were no travelers. The halls were not all that large, either, as though the building never had been intended to accommodate crowds.
“Next flight to Milwaukee, ten minutes,” Nate mocked with a staticky voice spoken through his hand. He looked at Jill with a fake astonished expression: Did you hear that? Let’s go! She rolled her eyes.
They followed the hallway to the center of the building. There the corridor opened up into a gigantic empty hangar. There was a fifty-foot-wide ledge all around the cavernous dock, and this ledge ended abruptly in a plummeting drop. The space was large enough to accommodate several dozen ships the size of the one on the landing field, but there were no ships at all.
“Where are they?” Nate sounded seriously bummed.
Jill didn’t answer. Things were looking worse all the time. The spaceport appeared to be completely defunct.
“Shit, Jill, this place is a tomb.”
“There ought to be aliens here. The City isn’t completely uninhabited.”
“I guess when your world is dying it’s not a big priority to explore space,” he answered bitterly.
“We don’t know that their world is dying. Besides, they still have to get around this planet.”
“Who says? What if this city is all there is?”
Jill tapped a shoulder blade with her fingers, frowning in thought.
“There’s still that ship outside,” Nate said, with as much doubt as hope. “It might be operational.”
“The control room’s over there. Come on. Let’s see what they’ve got.”
The control room powered up when they walked in the door, the screens going from black to green readouts in seconds. Nate’s mood perked up a bit at the sight of all those computers. He pulled two of the narrow chairs over to a table and sat in both of them. There was no keyboard. He passed his fingers over the screen experimentally. The alien text shifted under his touch.
“I’m working an alien computer,” he said to her in a voice that a boy might use while displaying a prizewinning toad to his mother.
“Yes, I see that, Nate,” Jill answered, smiling.
Jill watched him work for a few minutes, then pulled up two chairs of her own. It was time to come clean about what she’d been thinking, but it felt so momentous to say it out loud that a sudden awkwardness gripped her.
“Nate… you know those seals we saw just now, on the spaceport door?”
He glanced at her. “Yeah.”
“What did they remind you of?”
He stopped messing with the screen and turned to look at her, waiting.
“Like the rubber curtain we had in our lab, Nate! It’s insulation. Wave technology.”
He didn’t look surprised. “Yeah?”
“Well… we have to find out! We have to find out if they’re using wave technology. Because if they are…” She drummed her fingers on the table. It was so important that she explain it well. She made herself take a breath and slow down. “Nate, what if Copernicus had had the opportunity to be rocketed three hundred years into the future, to see the full implications of his ideas?”
Nate lifted an eyebrow, but his face was still guarded. “That would be very cool. Assuming he could understand it.”
“Well, that’s exactly what we’ve been given! We have a chance to see what the one-minus-one can really do—if it’s really as important as we think and how and in what ways it can be used. Think of the possibilities! Kobinski’s manuscript—I mean, the manuscript is nothing. We’re being offered a look at the future—our future! We can move our research forward by several hundred years—maybe even more!”