Monica sat next to him, blowing the steam away from her mug. “Bad?” she asked.
Owen grimaced. “I’m afraid so. They’re doing their best to make it sound like we’re making progress, but the plain fact of the matter is that the Brazilians are going to take Mexico City within the week.”
She shook her head. “How long do you think it will be before the President makes up her mind to do something?”
Owen smiled bleakly. “She’s already taken too long. Did you see the political cartoon yesterday of her fiddling while Rome burned?”
“Yes, but I didn’t think it was funny.”
“It wasn’t meant to be. That idiot woman just can’t seem to get it through her thick skull that pacifism only works if everyone else is also a pacifist. All it takes is one bully to spoil the party.” He grunted. “If she doesn’t declare war pretty soon, the Texans are liable to do it for her. They’re getting just a bit worried over there.”
“Can you blame them?”
He shook his head. “Nope.” He gestured for the computer to flip to the next item. After reading for a few seconds, he began to mutter angrily under his breath.
Monica glanced his way, but knew better than to interrupt when he had that intent look on his face.
When he finished the article, he sat back slowly in his chair, eyes staring into the distance. “Well, well, well… now that is interesting!”
“What happened?”
“I went back out last night, right?”
Monica nodded. “You were awful quiet when you came in so I didn’t ask what it was about.”
“I know this sounds crazy, but they did a routine blast at a quarry and, lo and behold, there was a plane in the rock.”
“In the rock?” his wife asked, frowning in disbelief.
“I saw this with my own eyes.”
“Owen, the last I heard, two objects couldn’t occupy the same space at the same time. What happened to the rock?”
He shrugged. “Beats me. I’m just telling you what I saw. Not only was it a plane, but it was a big plane. A commercial jet.”
Monica looked as though she was beginning to fear for her husband’s sanity, but held her silence.
“Now, setting aside questions of how the plane actually came to be there, complete with passengers—”
“What did the passengers have to say?”
“Urn… nothing. They were all dead. I didn’t go inside, but they told me that it looked like the aftermath of a bad crash. Messy.”
She shuddered. “Excuse me for asking. I think I’ll just keep a respectful silence from here on out.”
“As if that wasn’t bad enough, I, personally, was assured by the executive director of the airport that no planes were missing. Now I see here,” he gestured at the news projected before him, “that somebody named Lisa Entwhistle has come forward, saying that a plane was due in late yesterday afternoon, but never arrived.”
“But—”
“The article quotes her as saying that the executive director and the Navy, the Navy mind you, were trying to hold people incommunicado at the airport. She slipped out before they got organized.”
“Owen, are you sure that you know what you’re saying?”
He snorted. “Hell, woman, I’ll personally guarantee you that I don’t know what I’m saying. None of this makes a damn bit of sense.”
“But… the Navy? If a plane is missing, wouldn’t it make more sense if the Air Force were involved?” She sipped at her coffee and sighed in resignation. “All right. What does the Navy have to say? Surely someone has gotten around to asking them.”
“Yesterday the Navy was denying that anything had happened. Today the Navy is mum. Totally. They won’t even say ‘no comment.’ ”
Monica threw up her hands in exasperation. “Finally! Something that makes sense. Something, somewhere went wrong and they’ve started a cover-up. That much I can understand.”
Jennifer Holmes lived alone in a small tunnel deep in Crisium. The woman who had invented the Holmes Door was more comfortable with a life of solitude than with the celebrity to which she was entitled.
While actually very attractive, she was self-conscious about her right hand, which had no fingers, the result of a cogenital deformity. The rounded palm was both the source of her greatest strength and her greatest weakness.
Her early interest in mathematics had been inspired by the very fact that she could not count to ten on her fingers as other children could. Her ability to convert mentally from base seven, five fingers and two palms, to base ten, had led to other challenges. Numbers were pure and clean—and they did not tease her about her deformity.
Her insecurity about her appearance had caused her no end of difficulty in maintaining personal relationships with men. All of her liaisons had been with other mathematicians, men with no more personality than the pencils they used to solve equations. She didn’t dislike men, she simply didn’t understand them.
Since she had virtually no social life, Jenny spent most of her spare time reading. Books provided her, at least in her imagination, with the social contacts she lacked in real life. She had two large bookshelves filled with old-fashioned paper books. Anything else she wanted could be read off the terminal set into the wall.
She made at least a cursory attempt to keep up with the news, even though she regarded it more as an intrusion than as something actually worthwhile. The local Lunar news was mildly interesting. Anything beamed up from Earth she usually ignored, as it seemed less and less relevant as time went by. It had been years since she had lived on Earth and she had no intention of going back.
The news was muttering in the background as she prodded the contents of her refrigerator, trying to decide what to fix for dinner. She held up a plate of leftovers from the weekend and examined it. It needed to be eaten soon or it would go bad.
The voice behind her said something about a plane missing in South Carolina. Mentally, she shrugged. It was a sad thing when planes went down. So many lives lost at once…
Still holding the leftovers, she eyed a small plastic basket of strawberries. Dessert?
“…Less than an hour later, a jet was discovered encased in the rock of a rock quarry not far away from the point where the plane left the radar screens…”
Jenny frowned. Encased in rock? That didn’t make sense. She glanced back over her shoulder at the pictures being projected over her table. Aluminum skin protruding from a rough rock wall. Well, it looked like a jet. People were lifting what appeared to be… were body bags on ropes out of a hole cut in the top of the fuselage.
Without conscious volition, Jenny slowly turned to face the image.
“So far, over seventy positive identifications have been made in what must count as the most inexplicable air disaster in history. This is Donald Sayers for NewsNet—”
Jenny placed the plate of leftovers on the counter next to the refrigerator without looking, then said, “Computer?”
“Yes, Jenny?”
“Run a search back on that last thing. The one about the plane.”
A barely perceptible pause ensued. “I’ve found four items related to that story.”
Jenny slid into the one seat at the table. “Give them to me in chronological order.”
Ten minutes later she sat back. What was bizarre and mysterious to those on Earth was horribly clear to her.