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  ‘‘So it’s politics now?’’ His voice grew sullen. ‘‘We’re going to be slow-boiled in our own atmosphere all because they want to play politics?’’

  ‘‘He also mentioned resources.’’

  ‘‘Five hundred million at most. Particle accelerators have really come down in price.’’

  ‘‘And he questions your motives.’’

  ‘‘My motives?’’

  ‘‘It’s your life’s work. You lost it all. He thinks you’re exploiting the situation to get a second chance.’’

  ‘‘That’s ridiculous.’’

  ‘‘Unless you can guarantee a concrete return—’’

  ‘‘We’re dealing with what we think are hyperdimensional beings who operate on a completely different plane than we do. How can I guarantee anything?’’

  ‘‘His exact words were ‘concrete strategic and political return.’ And then he told me that if Renate’s second ‘send’ doesn’t yield a strategic and political return, they may have no choice but to attack the towers.’’

  Cam shook his head. ‘‘And this time the Builders might not choose to ignore us. This time they might wipe us out completely.’’

  The storm came in a series of stronger waves over the next hour. Cam was embroiled with his own inner storm. He hardly noticed when the CenCon told him it had no choice but to switch to his independent generator—the utility grid was down, and most of eastern Texas was blacked out.

  At one point, hailstones the size of eggs slammed into the windows, but the special hurricane glass held, even as the whole house shook under their onslaught. Blunt called them again to make sure they were okay, suggested that it was too late to airlift them out, and that they should hunker down and stay put. ‘‘Delilah’s wreaking havoc over the entire southeastern United States. Nothing can move anywhere. It’s going to be bad.’’

  ‘‘Don’t worry, we’ll be fine. Cam says this house has been here for over a hundred years.’’

  Sometime around midnight, they heard a loud crash outside, like a bunker-buster bomb.

  ‘‘The old barn?’’ said Lesha, her voice strained.

  ‘‘Maybe you’ll feel more comfortable in the cellar.’’

  They moved downstairs.

  They sat on garden chairs and fecklessly played chess as a way to keep their minds off the biggest and most destructive blizzard the world had ever seen. Roosevelt kept whimpering in the corner.

  The noise around the house doubled in decibels over the next three minutes, going from something they could bear to something that was intolerable, the wind so strong that Cam now heard a weird creaking from above, then three loud crashes in a row. Thirty seconds later water trickled under the cellar door. The door rattled in its jamb. With the rain coming into the basement, he knew the house, or at least part of it, had to be gone. Roosevelt leaped to his feet, hurried to the stairs, and barked at the door.

  They gave up on chess. They moved the table against the cellar wall and shored it up on either side with the washing machine and dryer. They crawled underneath. He put his arm around her.

  It got ferociously cold, and in a matter of ten minutes the water on the steps glazed over into a thin sheet of feathery ice.

  The lights went out. Cam felt his way to the emergency cabinet, retrieved candles, matches, a flash-light, and blankets. They made a nest as the storm raged above what was left of his house.

  For the next several hours, Cam forgot about a strategic and political return because he feared the hurricane would pull the floor away and suck them into the maelstrom. He had a lot he wanted to say to Lesha, how he was a new man because of her, but it was like miners’ blasting outside, and the explosive weather made it too hard to talk.

  At three o’clock in the morning the storm lessened. He tried 911 but got nothing. The calm thickened above them.

  ‘‘The eye?’’ she said.

  ‘‘I think so. Let’s go up and have a look.’’

  They climbed the stairs with care because the risers were covered with ice.

  When Cam reached the top, he pushed the door open. At first it wouldn’t give. He put his shoulder to it. He shone the flashlight out the crack and discovered accumulated snow blocking it. Flakes meandered by his flashlight. He pushed a little harder.

  Lesha came upstairs behind him. ‘‘Is it bad?’’

  ‘‘My house is gone. And we’re buried in snow.’’

  He lifted his leg and stepped into the snow. The snow was wet and heavy. Only parts of his house were left standing. His kitchen counter was there. So was the island. But the rest of the house looked like a gigantic game of pick-up sticks. He fought to control his distress. Shining the flashlight farther afield he saw that the old barn and Quonset were gone. As for trucks, his was still upright, coated in a half meter of snow, but Lesha’s had been blown on its side.

  ‘‘Look!’’ said Lesha.

  She pointed straight up. He saw stars. But also a hypnotic shimmering gold band. He stared for several seconds—and quickly came to the realization that this was the Builder-created hydrogen spill from the sun, the so-called Bleed.

  When the winds came again—this time from the reverse direction—they weren’t as strong or as noisy. Cam and Lesha were back downstairs, dozing under the blankets. While he dozed, his mind sorted out his plan for the Builders. By the time the winds finally stopped, and the two of them were again climbing the stairs to check things, his ideas coalesced. He had to talk to the Builders in some way, that’s all there was to it, and he was becoming more and more convinced that it had to be through a demonstration, even though Blunt had initially given them a no-go on that plan. He had to figure out a way around Orbops intransigence. For wouldn’t it be marvelous to hear that music again, and be touched by the infinite wisdom of the Builders once more? Wouldn’t it be wonderful to understand those mystical and sweetly emotional mathematical symbols? And wouldn’t it be a godsend to at last comprehend the true nature of the universe? He felt this was what was at stake, nothing less.

  He pushed the door open. Snowflakes fell. Behind the snowflakes he saw the sun. Sunshine and snow-flakes. At the same time. The new world order. His truck was buried. He tried 911 and discovered cell phone service was still dead.

  But he was hardly even thinking of that.

  ‘‘I always knew there had to be a simpler explanation. And a more intuitive one.’’

  ‘‘An explanation for what?’’ she asked.

  ‘‘For the universe. And I think the Builders were trying to give it to me before we got them mad.’’

  ‘‘They were going to tell you the meaning of the universe?’’

  ‘‘Yes. All my life I’ve been devising these complex equations to explain it.’’

  ‘‘Hyperdimensionality?’’

  ‘‘That’s certainly part of it. But I think what the Builders want to tell me goes beyond even that. They want to give me the answer to the question everybody asks.’’

  ‘‘Which is?’’

  ‘‘Simple, really. Why are we here, and what does it mean?’’

  18

  Pittman and his Orbops team investigated the scene of the Princeton Team disappearance thoroughly. As they waited for the Builders to respond to the expanded message, Pittman had to ask himself why these particular disappearances bothered him so much when during the days of the PRNC War he had dealt with MIAs all the time.

  The crater bedrock had hundreds of runnels in it now, blasted into the Moon by the flywheel sparks coming off the vortex immediately after the disappearance, parallel to each other, each ten centimeters wide, some straight, some curved, a gray-brown mural, beautiful in an alien way, like artwork, but daunting in its implications. Was this the only response they were going to get, these runnels, and could they actually mean something in the way of a communication?

  Confirmation of death for at least one of the Princeton Team members came when they found a human mandible in a runnel; a check of dental records showed it belong
ed to Silke Forbes. Of the others, no remains were found. Missing in action. There was no worse fate for a soldier, as far as Pittman was concerned. And it was further provocation. He believed a definitive second attack was now warranted, and he only hoped that Blunt would agree, and agree soon.

  Yet Blunt continued to tell Moonstone to hold off on a second offensive. Nothing would have given Pittman greater pleasure than to use his fifty-three new hard-vac assault vehicles that Defense Secretary Congdon had recently sent, and attack the Moon towers—it was generally agreed that the Moon towers would be their next target. Additionally, he had a nuclear warhead now orbiting the Moon, and could call down a strike whenever he wanted. So to have to wait, especially when he had all his elements in place, was frustrating for Pittman.

  In a transmission around noon the same day, General Blunt explained it this way. ‘‘Communication is all about exchange. It’s about coinage and the use of proper currency.’’ Blunt, dim blue in the oblong of Pittman’s waferscreen, smiled sadly. ‘‘Some in our think tank believe the disappearance of Dr. Tennant and her team was just an effort by Alpha Vehicle to communicate with us again. Like the Worldwide Crash.’’

  ‘‘In other words, you’re considering her possible death inadvertent,’’ said Pittman, and was deeply dissatisfied with this.

  ‘‘Just be patient, Tim. You have to give the diplomats time to come to what to us are obvious conclusions.’’

  So the afternoon passed as they waited for an additional Builder response over and above the runnels. All the soldiers on the Moon tried to keep themselves busy with pointless polishing, exercise drills, and weapons cleaning. The Moon, with its perpetual grayness, and its eternally black sky, bred in them a stupefying ennui, occasionally mitigated by the quiet terror they all felt in the presence of that unblinking silver eye in Crater Cavalet.

  Late in the afternoon, to alleviate boredom, Pittman found himself following the fly. This common blue housefly had made its appearance on the Moon seven days ago, along with the new hard-vac vehicles, and had immediately become a celebrity of sorts, the only example of wildlife anywhere in Gettysburg. It was now an endless source of speculation to many of the men because it was one of the few things in Gettysburg that reminded them of Earth. As Pittman followed the creature down corridor 4 to the exercise room, he recalled the endless arguments the men had had about the insect. They debated about its mode of arrival, whether it was immune to all the extra rads the men were being exposed to on a daily basis because of increased solar radiation from the Bleed; whether its flight patterns had changed because of the weaker gravity. They argued about whether it would lay eggs. How long it could survive in a vacuum if it should be caught in one of the air locks during decompression. How it was getting its food.

  Whether they should kill it. Or let it live.

  This last debate was perhaps the most hotly contested. As the small creature entered the exercise area and landed on a treadmill control panel, Pittman recalled how the fly had finally become a symbol. Was this what the Builders saw when they looked at human beings? An animal so stupid and inconsequential it was no better than a housefly, and deserved to be killed?

  With no overt or readily understandable reply from the Builders, think-tank personnel on Earth did indeed begin to believe that the new runnels engraved on Cavalet’s stone floor might constitute the only response they were going to get. Blunt ordered Pittman and his men to photograph, measure, and map the entire area. They spent a good part of the evening doing this. The pictures and other data were then transmitted to scientists everywhere. Pending a conclusion about the runnels, Pittman was ordered to stand by for a potential attack against the Moon towers.

  This contingency of course elated Pittman, and he felt himself going into scorpion mode.

  But before he got an okay on the attack, he received other disturbing news just before midnight, and he broke this news to his men in an emergency briefing.

  ‘‘Another three local stars have gone into their red giant phases.’’ He looked around at his soldiers. ‘‘So if there was ever any doubt about the Builder agenda, that doubt is now put to rest. Also, three new naked-eye supernovae in the Milky Way have appeared, all in the same vicinity. The scientists tell me a supernova is the kind of end-stage sequence a larger star—much larger than the Earth’s sun—will have. What’s strange about it is that naked-eye supernovae appear on average once every four hundred years. To have three appear at the same time, all in the same vicinity, suggests outside manipulation. So we have to assume that the Builders are firing up these bigger stars as well. Of course, we have to ask ourselves, why are they doing this? The scientists tell me that maybe the Builders are doing something on a galactic scale, and that whatever it is doesn’t include us. Fine. We don’t have to be included. But we wouldn’t be soldiers if we didn’t try to stop it.’’

  Blunt gave the order to attack and destroy the Moon towers at four o’clock that morning.

  Pittman was glad the order came when it did, because the increased radiation from the sun’s Builder-instigated hydrogen Bleed was starting to disrupt their communications from Earth. In fact, Earth had to try repeatedly with the logistics transmissions that followed, and even then not everything got through. It seemed that because of the sun’s increased radiation—radiation that was slowly withering the Earth’s magnetosphere—Moonstone was finding itself trapped behind an ever-thickening wall of radio silence, and because of this difficulty, they didn’t get under way until a little past noon.

  Pittman, Haydn, and Newlove, now commanding Moonstone 32, reached Tower 48 within two hours and prepared to attack. The Moon had phased so that the sun had reached the horizon and was ready to sink any time. The Earth was in the east.

  From a distance, Tower 48 looked like a high-rise building made out of reflective glass. With the sun shining low from the west, it glowed with diamondlike intensity. It rested on a slope. It didn’t follow normal architectural load theory but was built level to the gradient of the slope, so that it rose at an angle, like the Leaning Tower of Pisa, a strange sight because such a tower built on such an angle would ordinarily collapse immediately. This one stayed aloft, like a rectangular helium balloon, another indication that the Builders employed far-fringe physics that had nothing to do with Newtonian principles.

  The three soldiers dug in.

  And eventually, when all the other vehicles were in place, Pittman once again gave the only order that mattered: ‘‘Fire at will.’’

  The ordnance arced through the air. But as with Alpha Vehicle, the tower simply absorbed the shots, like throwing pebbles into the ocean again.

  Reports of the same disappointing result came from the other vehicles.

  Then they got a Mayday from vehicle 52, some shouting, some yelling, then radio silence.

  About the same time, Haydn reported a temperature rise inside Moonstone 32, from twenty to thirty degrees Celsius—then just as quickly to sixty.

  Pittman didn’t stop to think about it; he depressurized Moonstone 32 quickly, climbed out, and jumped to the ground as the vehicle’s armor started to glow. Haydn got out too. Newlove tried, but the heat inside reached the conflagration point, and the soldier burst into flames, the oxygen from his pressure suit feeding the fire so that he was burned alive, his screams so loud Pittman turned down his radio, even as he recoiled in horror from the sight.

  Moonstone 32 turned orange, then white, and finally got so hot it melted—melted till all that was left was a puddle of steel, plastic, and other space-age materials, hardening quickly on the Moon’s surface into the equivalent of a giant Rorschach ink blot.

  Haydn was about to bounce over to Newlove in an effort to help him, but Pittman grabbed him by the shoulder and yanked him back. He voiced his guess about what was going on, and it came out as a terse military command. ‘‘Take cover.’’

  The two men ran toward a crater about the size of a car, their movements hampered by lunar gravity, yet also counterbalanced b
y their armor’s weight. With Newlove incinerated, Pittman became apprehensively aware of the temperature readouts coming from the tiny screen in the upper left corner of his visor. Fortunately, temperature remained stable at twenty-two degrees Celsius. He continued to run.

  The ground gave underneath his feet with a crunch, and the closer he got to the small crater, the more the surface became pitted with ejecta. He jumped, rising a meter off the ground, and sank feet first into the crater, then scrambled around.

  He saw Haydn loping toward him with the curious slow-motion movements the Moon’s gravity forced. Through his radio, Pittman heard several Maydays; he had to assume similar emergencies were happening with other Moonstone teams all over the combat theater, and that they were indeed at last under attack. At the same time he was assessing the situation as calmly as he could. He heard his own breathing. He heard Haydn’s breathing. And a few screams. Some gagging. Some prayers.

  Despite this, he continued to assess. Having held a dozen Moonstones in reserve at Gettysburg for possible rescue operations, he now tried to contact the installation, but radiation from the agitated sun blocked his signal, and he couldn’t get through. And if everyone else was under attack, and all Moonstones were being destroyed, that might mean they would have to get to Gettysburg by foot. Which wasn’t a good thing, because further compounding the danger was limited personal life support. He watched Haydn running. Haydn jumped into the crater next to him and turned around. The problem continued to nag at Pittman. Their suits had only so much air. Which meant they had only so much time to get back to Gettysburg before their air ran out.

  He surveyed Tower 48. Any further attacks for the moment now seemed suspended.

  ‘‘Looks like they’ve stopped, sir,’’ said Haydn.