Captain Midnight, you are one magnificent lunkhead, Farley thought.
Nobody on earth in 1943 could take a photograph from outer space.
The welling panic threatened once again.
Tomorrow, Farley told himself, the commander’s scientists will tell me more about how we got here and how we can get back. They’ll have equations and gold-plated words. They’ll have ingenious theories and speculations, clever solutions that will work as long as their hypotheses are true.
I’m a pilot, Farley told the dark above him. Show me the route that gets my men back home. Show me the map that shows the way to 1943.
TWENTY-ONE
Wennda led Farley along the strip of savannah bordering the rectangular ocean. She pointed out features and functions, explaining their role in the web of the Dome’s ecology, as they headed toward the artificial cliffs built into the tiny rain forest. She had been worried that Farley would sense her nervousness, but he nodded mutely at her compulsive monologue. He seemed preoccupied, and he looked tired and distracted, as if he had not slept well.
Wennda hadn’t slept all that well since discovering these strange men, either.
Someone checking a water condenser in the savannah waved to her. She squinted and saw that it was Ingra, pregnant out to here. She waved back. Ingra dropped her hand and continued to look. Staring at Farley, of course.
Lang and Grobe and several others had made it clear that they thought Farley and his crew were a danger in themselves. In this frail and tightly managed world, strangers burdened an infrastructure already operating near its limits—and these particular strangers were heavily armed soldiers of uncertain origin.
Wennda understood their apprehension but she didn’t share it. She had spent more time with the crew than anyone else had, except possibly Yone, who seemed to have found a kinship of outsiders with them. They were loud and rude and blunt, but they were highly trained and highly skilled, disciplined when need arose, and admirable fighters. There was a kind of benign arrogance about them that managed to be charming and off-putting at the same time. If you were on their side they would help you, simple as that.
There was also something very alive about them. They were spontaneous, emotional, sentimental. They told stupid jokes and played childish gags. They laughed in the face of danger—literally laughed—even though they seemed perfectly aware of the stakes. Her own people seemed so deadly dull beside them.
She knew that her father’s cautious approval of Farley and his crew masked an eagerness to be rid of them. She couldn’t really blame him. Even if they were not dangerous themselves, they had certainly brought danger with them. The captured bomber had upset a long-running stalemate, and now costly and potentially disastrous action had to be taken. Wennda had been surprised when her father had assigned her to oversee the crew’s integration, and was even more surprised that he had not caused some wedge to be driven between his daughter and the leader of these disrupting strangers. Perhaps he was less concerned because he knew they would be leaving soon.
Wennda felt a stab of unreasoning panic at the thought of Farley leaving. In a few hours he would be meeting her father and his team to put the final touches on the plan for recovering the aircraft and attempting to return to wherever they had come from. If the plan succeeded she would never see him again. Of course, if the mission did not succeed there was a good chance she would never see him again, either. Which was why she intended to be on the mission.
Meantime Wennda was convinced that the crew themselves weren’t going to harm her city or her people. This morning two of them were back in the Ag fields, spraying liquid detergent as a disinfectant against crop mold. At Fabrication, one of them was re-coiling an ancient copper-wire motor while another brought new kinds of food to scan into the bioprinters. Dr. Manday was sampling DNA from the wounded soldier for cloning tissue cultures, blood plasma, organ budding, white-cell bacterial resistance, and other organics that would help their fragile population. And it was looking possible to get the eleven o’clock sun back.
Wennda looked up at the familiar facsimile sky. But not today, please, she pleaded silently.
Farley looked up at the Dome when she did. “Gosh,” he said, “another nice day. Can you believe it?”
She sensed he was poking fun, but she wasn’t sure exactly how. She felt that a lot around him. “It’s a day,” she said noncommittally.
“Don’t you ever miss bad weather?”
“I can’t miss it if I’ve never experienced it.”
“Then you don’t know what you’re missing.” He squinted up. “A good rainstorm’s terrific if you don’t have to fly through it.”
“We have rain. Temperature differences between the top and bottom of the Dome create evaporation and circulation, and pressure differences move warm wet air from the rain forest to the more arid side. So precipitation spreads where it’s needed.”
Farley made a face. “That’s not rain. That’s, I don’t know. Mist. Drizzle. You need a toad-strangler sometimes. Thunder. Lightning. The wrath of God.”
“I’ve seen lightning outside,” she said. “It’s very dangerous.”
“It’s good to be reminded that someone else is running the show.”
Wennda frowned. “But we are running the … show.” She gestured expansively.
He gave a little smile. “This show,” he said, and held thumb and forefinger close together.
And that was what disturbed Wennda’s sleep. Not Farley’s crew, not their weaponry, not some danger that followed their arrival here. Farley himself.
All her life she had been restless—physically contained, mentally constrained. Her reason told her that the Dome was all there was. Her nature wanted more. Farley came from more. From somewhere unimaginably large, strange, free. Wennda glimpsed that wider world in his every move, in the texture of his speech. When she viewed her world through his eyes it was unfamiliar, enigmatic, clever. Yet it also became very small and rundown. Farley’s very character seemed larger than what she had known, and it spoke to that restless imp in her that yearned for more. At first she hadn’t listened. Now it was all she could hear.
The air grew humid as they left the savannah behind and entered the miniature rain forest. Three-fourths of the Dome’s plant life lived here, breathing out oxygen, filtering water. A little recirculating river ran through it, feeding into the strip of marshland and eventually the tiny ocean. The city’s only trees stood tall here. Lush greenery spread everywhere.
They came to the base of the russet-colored cliffs amid the teeming forest.
“This is nice,” said Farley. “We should have a picnic.”
“All right,” said Wennda. “What’s a picnic?”
He grinned. “It’s a fancy word for sitting on the grass and eating lunch.”
“I’m afraid there isn’t much grass. Is it still a picnic if you eat in a tree?”
He laughed. She liked seeing the worry lift from his face. “I don’t know another word for that, so sure, why not?”
“I used to come here at night sometimes,” Wennda told him. “I’d run through the bushes and lie down in the grass and listen to the river.”
He glanced around. “I can see why you’d like that. It’s as close to feeling like you’re outside as you can get in this bell jar.”
“Outside’s not a bit like this.”
He nodded and looked sad. “Then that makes this place even more special,” he said.