“You son of a … Keep me advised. You’re storing up acorns for the winter. You got a lot in the hollow tree already. Keep putting them in there and be happy with that.”
Murkowsky rang off, turned to Douglas and gave him the news.
Ten minutes after Johnny Murkowsky heard the news, the White House received a call from the four-star air force general in charge of Space Command. The call was patched through to P. J. O’Reilly, who was in a way relieved. That saucer hovering over the lawn had gotten billions of people all over the world in a real uproar, and now the suspense was about over.
They were coming!
He hurried off to tell the president.
The president took it well, O’Reilly thought. Then he changed his mind. The color drained from the president’s face. He began perspiring profusely. This wasn’t merely the Roswell saucer parked over the White House lawn, a sculpture with no visible means of support that couldn’t hurt anybody. This was it!
Aliens were coming to earth!
O’Reilly managed to suppress a smile at the president’s discomfiture.
“Should we do a press release?” O’Reilly asked, digging the needle in a little deeper.
The president made a gesture that could mean anything, O’Reilly knew. When His Royal Arrogance didn’t want to deal with something, he often waved vaguely at O’Reilly, a signal for him to handle it.
P. J. O’Reilly decided to take the gesture as an assignment. He was up to the tasks he saw before him. The Secret Service and Homeland Security were in crisis mode over the crowds. If they were told the aliens were two days away, perhaps the crowds would go home to eat, sleep and do an alcohol refill. Maybe we can get a breathing space, O’Reilly thought. He turned and trotted out of the room.
The president melted down into a panic attack. His gut tried to tie itself into a knot. He grabbed the Rolaids bottle and dumped some into his hand, how many he didn’t know, stuffed them into his mouth. Chewed them up and swallowed them, then chased them with some good bourbon whiskey from the bottom drawer of his desk.
This was it! He was going to have to meet the aliens! Stand straight and tall as the first human sacrifice on the altar of intergalactic peace. Maybe the aliens were green froglike creatures that speared their victims with long, sticky tongues and gobbled them down; or small blobs of odiferous bacterial slime that oozed along consuming everything in their path; or giant dung-eating beetles with mandibles that had won the evolutionary battles on some postatomic-war world …
The president felt his heart galloping. The leader of the free world had another drink and tried to light a cigarette; he had to forgo the cancer stick because his hand was shaking too badly to work the lighter. He wiped his forehead with a coat sleeve and sent for Petty Officer Hennessey.
Jim Bob Spicer, the famous evangelist, was running down. He didn’t have any more juice left in him, he thought, until an aide handed him the White House press release. The aliens were two days out. In two days — Oh, my God!
Two days!
Galvanized, Jim Bob straightened his tie, ran his fingers through his mop of gray hair and stepped in front of the cameras to preach.
“And behold, I looked and saw a Lamb standing before the elders, and on the Lamb were the wounds that had caused his death … As I watched, the Lamb broke the first seal and began to unroll the scroll … When the fourth seal was broken I beheld a pale horse, and its rider’s name was Death…”
In Lafayette Park a television network had set up a table with the White House behind it as a backdrop. Here the pretty people were interviewing scientists, politicians and dingbats, in whatever order they could be corralled. Life was the topic, not Death.
“With the medical knowledge we will gain from the aliens,” Senator Blohardt promised, “the people of earth will enter a new era, one remarkably free of the diseases that have plagued our species since the dawn of time. The aliens are crossing the vast reaches of interstellar space using technology we can only dream about. They couldn’t do it without good health. The secrets of long, healthy life will be their greatest gift to us.”
Several other politicians echoed that sentiment. They were talking to the White House, advising the president. They would make sure any necessary legislation sailed through the Congress. They wanted good health for their constituents, and they wanted the political credit for getting it for them.
After they got rid of the politicians for a while, the talking heads interviewed a scientist, a thoughtful one. “When you cross a scientific tipping point,” the scientist said, “a great many new technologies flow from that, almost automatically. Think about how the understanding and harnessing of electrical energy has revolutionized the lives of everyone on this planet. Even people living in mud huts in Africa have cell phones. The arrival of aliens will be an even bigger event.”
The arrival. The Arrival. Bigger.
Bigger than the World Series. Bigger than the Super Bowl. Bigger than the inauguration of a new president. Bigger than the end of a world war. Bigger than everything.
“It’ll be as big as the Second Coming,” one congresswoman from California said, quite seriously, to the tens of millions of people in the television audience, even though she was known for her oft-stated opinion that all religion was drivel. No one remarked on that incongruity.
The president, in his private family room in the White House, nibbled Rolaids while he waited for Petty Officer Hennessey, who was apparently stuck in the crowd outside. He flipped the channel back to Jim Bob Spicer. The famous evangelist was still going over the gory details of the Arrival with his audience. According to Spicer, it was going to be a real mess.
The president listened a bit longer, then turned off Spicer and poured himself another rather large tot of bourbon. He felt self-pity flooding through him again. Why me? Of all the billions of people on this round rock, why me?
Adam Solo dropped through the saucer’s hatch and walked over to Egg Cantrell. The sun was well up, the day was streaming on, and Rip and Charley were trying to get their clothes on before they got out of their sleeping bag.
The crack of a rifle split the morning, flat and loud. Solo spun and hit the ground.
Egg turned him over. Solo had been shot through the body. He was coughing blood. The entry hole was in his chest — apparently the bullet had missed his heart — and he had a large exit hole in his back. The back of his shirt was being quickly soaked with blood.
“Rip!”
The young man came running, just as a young Australian man, perhaps twenty years of age, came charging up with a rifle. An old Winchester Model 94, Rip noticed.
“I got him! Damn, I got him. A million dollars dead or alive, the Internet said. And I got him!”
The Aussie had his eyes on Solo, had his rifle pointed at him, ready to shoot him again. Rip let go with a roundhouse right to the chin that lifted the man off his feet and dropped him in the dirt, out cold. Rip grabbed the rifle and began pounding it against the nearest landing-gear leg. The stock splintered; Rip kept swinging, again and again; the barrel and magazine tube separated. He threw the rifle away and kicked the supine Aussie.
“Solo’s hit bad and bleeding,” Egg said. “Let’s get him in the saucer and get the hell out of here.”
Stuff a rag in the bullet hole to slow the bleeding.
Rip and Charley helped Egg lift Solo up through the saucer’s hatch.