The phone rang.
“What time is it?” Minelli asked. Edward glanced at his watch.
“Seven-thirty.”
On the second ring, the phone was silent.
They stared at it apprehensively. “Bernice must have answered it in the back bedroom,” Minelli said.
A few minutes later, Stella came out, followed by her mother, both unselfconsciously attired in flannel pajamas and flower-print robes. Bernice smiled at them. “Breakfast, gentlemen? It’s going to be a long day.”
“That was CBS,” Stella said. “They keep sniffing.”
“We can only fool them so long,” Bernice said.
Edward looked across the quiet, frosty field. A pickup truck parked just off the highway held two men in brown coats and cowboy hats — locals sworn to keep “snoops” from setting up cameras and interfering with the Morgan family’s privacy. Even at a hundred yards’ distance, they looked formidable.
Stella shook her head. “I don’t know what to say. We didn’t do anything important. I didn’t, anyway. You found the rock.”
Edward shrugged. “What’s to say about that?”
Reslaw, dressed in jeans and a blue-and-white-striped long-sleeved shirt, walked out of the hallway, past the entrance alcove and the baby grand piano in an adjacent corner. “Somebody ask about breakfast?”
“Coming up,” Mrs. Morgan said.
“You know,” Edward said, “it was probably a bad idea to come here. For you two. We all need our rest, but your mother has been through a lot.”
Bernice Morgan walked stiffly into the kitchen. “It was exhilarating, really,” she said. “I haven’t had a fight like that in years.”
“Besides, she got to talk to the President,” Stella said, grinning.
“Makes me ashamed to be a Democrat,” she said. “Mike and the boys are keeping a watch. I just have to make sure they don’t get too zealous. You stay as long as you want.”
“Please stay,” Stella said, looking at Edward. “I have to talk. To all of you. I’m still confused. We should help each other out.”
“What about the fireworks?” Minelli asked. “Maybe there’s something on the news now.”
He stretched and swung his legs off the lounger, then stood and walked across the linoleum floor and wide Navajo rugs to the living room, a few steps from the marble-top pedestal table in the open dining area. He sat in front of the television. Slowly, as if it might be hot, he turned it on, then backed up, licking his lips. Edward watched him with concern.
“Just cartoons,” Minelli said quietly. Without changing channels, he lay back to watch, as if he had forgotten his original purpose. Edward walked over and changed channels for him, looking for news. On the twenty-four-hour News Network, an announcer was finishing a story on conflict between the Dominican Republic and Haiti.
“Nothing,” Minelli said pessimistically. “Maybe I was seeing things.”
Then, “Astronomers in France and California have offered varied explanations for last night’s unprecedented meteor activity in the solar system’s asteroid belt. Seen throughout the Western Hemisphere, clearly visible to the naked eye in areas with clear skies, bright explosions flashed throughout the ecliptic, the plane occupied by the Earth’s orbit and the orbits of most of the sun’s planets. Speaking from his phone in Los Angeles, presidential task force advisor Harold Feinman said it might take days to analyze data and learn what had actually happened deep in space, beyond the orbit of Mars. When asked if there was any connection between the meteor activity and the alleged spacecraft and aliens on Earth, Feinman declined to comment.”
“Smart man to admit he’s an idiot,” Minelli said. “Asteroids. Jesus.”
Edward flipped past other channels, but found nothing more.
“What do you think, Ed?” Minelli asked, slouching back in the corner of the broad L-shaped couch. “What the hell did I see? More end-of-the-world shit?”
“I don’t know any more than they do,” Edward said. He entered the kitchen. “Do you have a doctor in town? A psychiatrist?” he asked Bernice.
“Nobody worth the name,” she answered, her voice as low as his. “Your friend’s still not doing too well, is he?”
“The government got rid of us in a real hurry. He should be in a hospital somewhere, resting, cooling down.”
“That can be arranged,” she said. “Did he actually see something?”
“I guess so,” Edward said. “I wish I’d seen it.”
“Day of the Triffids, that’s what it was,” Minelli said enthusiastically. “Remember? We’ll all go blind any minute now. Break out the pruning shears!”
Stella stood by the stove, methodically cracking eggs into a pan one by one. “Momma,” she said, “where’s the pepper mill?” She brushed past Edward, tears in her eyes.
34
Walt Samshow stepped from the cab on Powell Street under the shadow of the St. Francis Hotel awning and turned around briefly to look across at long, silent lines of hundreds of marchers parading around Union Square, a cable car grumbling by covered with swaying tourists, spastic traffic of cars and more cabs, civilized mayhem: San Francisco, other than the marchers, not terribly different from his memories of it in 1984, the last time he had been downtown.
In the spacious, elegant lobby of the St. Francis, with its polished black stone and dark lustrous woods, Sam-show began hearing the rumors practically the moment he set his luggage down by the front desk.
The convention of the American Geophysical Society was in full swing. Kemp and Sand had gone ahead, and apparently big things had happened since their arrival Thursday. Now it was Saturday and he had a lot to catch up on.
As he checked in, two professorial young men passed by, engaged in earnest conversation. He caught only three words: “The Kemp object—”
The bellhop carted his luggage over thick carpet to the elevator. Samshow followed, unwinding his arms and stretching his fingers. Two other conventioneers — an older man and a young woman — stood near the elevators, discussing supersonic shock waves and how they might be transmitted through mantle and crust.
Reporters and camera crews from three local television stations and as many national news networks were in the lobby when Samshow returned from his room to check in at the convention desk. He avoided them deftly by walking around several pillars.
With his badge and bag of pamphlets and program guides came a note from Sand:
Kemp and I will meet you in Oz at 5:30. Drinks on Kemp.
D.S.
Oz, Samshow learned from a desk clerk, was the bar and disco at the top of the “new” tower of the St. Francis. He looked at his frayed sports coat and his worn-out running shoes, decided he was easily ten years behind the times and thousands of dollars short in refurbishing his wardrobe, and sighed as he entered the elevator.
The trip from Honolulu to La Jolla had been arranged by the Scripps Institution of Oceanography. He had paid for that by lecturing the night before at UCSD. It never ceased to dismay him, after twenty-five years, how popular he was. His huge, expensive book on oceanography had become a standard text, and hundreds of students were only too pleased to listen to, and shake hands with, the modern Sverdrup.
On his own tab, he had taken a flight out of Lindbergh Field to San Francisco. Not yet did he have a clear idea what they were all doing here; there was still much work to be done on the Glomar Discoverer, beginning with the collation of billions of bits of data from their passages over the Ramapo Deep.
He suspected much of that data would be pushed aside indefinitely now. Sand’s gravimeter anomaly would be the key element. Somehow, that saddened him.