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  ‘‘As a matter of fact, I was hoping you would ask me that.’’

  ‘‘Why? Do you have an idea?’’

  ‘‘Yes. A big one. One that just might reverse the flow of hydrogen from our sun after all.’’

  22

  In Moonstone 47, Hawker and Callison stared at Pittman as he recounted Haydn’s death, the edited version, how Haydn had willingly overdosed himself with morphine so he could give his air to Pittman. He couldn’t understand why neither of them seemed to believe him. Hawker was an older man, ruggedly handsome, dark, but with a chin perhaps too small for the rest of his face. Callison was much younger, eighteen or nineteen, a fresh grunt with a round face—so young he had an oily complexion with a few pimples.

  ‘‘I’ll make sure he gets all the posthumous honors. I’m proud of him. And the whole Marine Corps can be proud of him too.’’

  No, they didn’t believe him at all, he could see it in their eyes.

  They started back for Gettysburg. He explained to them how he had exercised the nuclear option, and Hawker grimly said, ‘‘We saw the flashes, sir.’’

  The silence inside the Moonstone after that was like granite. He could tell that both Hawker and Callison were scared. He would have expected it from Callison, but not from Hawker, who revealed after some questioning that he had seen action in Mongolia during the PRNC War. ‘‘Mostly up in the mountains. With a cyber-enhanced unit. I was good at it. Those units are nothing like the armor we’re wearing up here, sir. You have to be careful because you’re vulnerable in certain circumstances. I miss it.’’ All this was said softly, as if Hawker was remembering comrades fallen in the Khangai Range.

  Talking about the PRNC War brought all his present political grievances to mind. ‘‘You know what I hate about the PRNC? I hate how they have to be consulted about every move we make up here. At least with all this radio interference, we didn’t have to legitimately ask them permission to use the nuclear option. You know what I think? I think we should have finished them off when we had the chance. Unconditional surrender is what we should have asked for. Or at least we should have sufficiently armed the democratic south so they could move in and take over. Po Pin-Yen sticks in my craw.’’

  As the Moonstone hummed over the lunar surface, disturbing sediment that had remained unmolested for millions of years, Pittman climbed into the bubble and spotted Earth. His throat tightened. Had one of those sparks indeed been Philadelphia, where his ex-wife and children lived? And was he to blame? He felt momentarily dizzy, and had the odd sense that there was somebody inside his head now, that there was somebody watching him, maybe the big silver eye.

  ‘‘Have you had any communications from any other units?’’

  Callison said, ‘‘No, sir. All this haywire radiation from the sun has made communication difficult.’’

  The radiation monitor hissed with greater intensity when they got within three kilometers of Gettysburg. As they entered the east arm of Shenandoah Valley, the Earth’s light illuminated the lunar surface with a blue glow. The vibrations of the wheel-and-track system became crunchier, as if they were driving over peanut brittle—and ducking down to look out the big front windows, Pittman saw that the surface had been melted into black glass. Half of Bunker Hill was blown away. The radiation monitor hissed more persistently.

  Callison murmured into the radio again and again, ‘‘Gettysburg, do you read . . . do you read?’’ His voice was soft, fretful, even as the tension thickened inside the hard-vac vehicle.

  Pittman finally put his hand on Callison’s shoulder and said, ‘‘It’s all right, son. You can stop now.’’

  They rounded the southern end of the blasted Bunker Hill and found a black crater. Gettysburg was no more. He was horrified. The nausea rose in his throat. Yet it was a tableau of destruction that inspired him as well. For this was war. Action, reaction. Offensive, counteroffensive. The deadly mathematics of the thing resonated in his soul.

  At ground zero, the dirt had been swept away, and the sides of the crater looked like black asphalt, with no sediment anywhere. Recessed into the side of the crater to the north was a bas-relief of Gettysburg’s deeper structures, like a cross-sectional diagram. The only thing left intact was part of the tower, some of its platform balancing on a single support, like a house burned to the ground and the second-floor bathtub still supported by the drainpipe.

  Yes. Perfect. War was all about existence and nonexistence. Deadly mathematics. He thought of the yin-yang symbol he had back in his desert home, carved from stone, a gift from the Democratic Republic of Canton at the end of the war with the north. Though he knew that yin and yang symbolized the passive and active forces in the universe, it now also seemed such a perfect summation of everything he was going through right now, and he didn’t know why he hadn’t seen it before. Existence. Nonexistence. Yin. Yang. He heard Haydn’s voice in his head. ‘‘It’s more than just three-card monte, sir.’’ The voice sounded real, loud. He turned around to see if Haydn was actually there. And in turning a strange thing happened. He saw a brief impression of purple bands floating through the universe. Real but illusive. A hallucination? No. He didn’t hallucinate. He wasn’t that kind of man. He also had a sense of them now. The Builders. Trying to understand him. And in trying to understand him, recognizing something of themselves.

  ‘‘You’re not the only ones who can wage war,’’ he murmured.

  Hawker swung round. ‘‘Sir?’’

  ‘‘Pull up to the SMCP access lock. We’ll assess the damage from there.’’

  The Inter-Lunar Rescue-Vehicle Pennsylvania, the spacecraft Bruxner had called from Earth before communications had completely disappeared, established Moon orbit ten hours later. Contact with the craft was so sketchy by this time, even despite its relative nearness, they had only a small radiation-free envelope in which to establish pickup coordinates. No news of Earth, because the radio clouded over too often. By this time, Pittman, Hawker, and Callison had determined that they were the only ones left alive.

  Pittman generally wasn’t a superstitious man, but he was made nervous by the ILRV’s name, Pennsylvania.Sheila, Becky, and Tom were in Pennsylvania. So were Haydn’s parents. As he recalled the position of that particular spark midway along the Delaware River, he grew more convinced than ever that it had to be Philadelphia.

  They headed west toward Crater Cavalet as they waited for the Pennsylvania’s descent. Like a good soldier, Pittman wanted to assess not only the damage to Gettysburg, but damage to the enemy as well.

  All the scarring his magnificent Moonstones had ripped into the area around Cavalet had been cleared away as if with a sandblaster. Moonstone 47 crunched over the dirt. The crater’s rim was badly degraded, with small crenellations everywhere. It reminded Pittman of a Sumerian ruin he had once seen during the Euphrates phase of the PRNC War, one that was five thousand years old and so badly worn it was no more than a mound. The crater’s rim couldn’t have been more than thirty meters high now. The sediment along the slopes had fused into black glass. The radiation monitor chattered into the red, but as they were being protected by the Moonstone’s magnetized armor, they continued on.

  The hard-vac vehicle hit the slope with a minimum of bounce in its shock absorbers. It climbed. In thirty seconds it was at the top.

  When he saw the thing, unscathed and peaceful at the bottom of the crater, it was as if sharp fingernails clawed his heart. The nuclear blast had blown away all the dirt around Alpha Vehicle, and a lot from underneath, but, from a tactical standpoint, the silver sphere was in the exact same position, and remained undamaged. Checking his biomonitor, he saw his respirations increasing. His right fist, seemingly with a mind of its own, punched the nearest thing it could find, the diagnostic console calibrating oxygen flow to the fuel-burning unit, and the screen went pop, flashed, then stabilized. The awful sterling-tinted eye, bristling with its antigravity, wrapped in mystery, unwilling to talk to them, too good to talk to them, was infuriating in its
tranquility.

  It was treating him like a nuisance. Like a child. Like he wasn’t important. Like it didn’t respect him.

  Like it didn’t honor him.

  But then he got the sense that it was staring at him in a completely different way. It wasn’t just its general, omniscient, wide-angle stare, but a focused scrutiny, something that was meant only for him. At first he was daunted, but then fascinated.

  ‘‘Drive closer.’’

  ‘‘Sir, the radiation is really bad,’’ said Callison.

  ‘‘I don’t give a damn. The thing’s calling to me. It wants to tell me something.’’

  So Callison reluctantly drove the hard-vac vehicle down the inside slope of Crater Cavalet. The runnels were now gone, blasted into oblivion. The computer pinged softly, a danger signal, warning them the radiation was close to breaching their magnetized armor.

  ‘‘Maybe we should turn around,’’ said Hawker.

  ‘‘Do you hear it?’’ said Pittman.

  ‘‘Hear what, sir?’’

  ‘‘That music.’’

  Callison and Hawker looked at each other. ‘‘We don’t hear anything, sir,’’ said Callison.

  ‘‘Stop. I’m getting out.’’

  ‘‘Getting out?’’ said Hawker. ‘‘Sir, your body armor doesn’t have near the same magnetized field the Moonstone does. You’re going to be putting yourself at risk.’’

  ‘‘I’ll be okay for a few minutes. It wants to talk to me. It’s the old game, Hawker. Like three-card monte.’’

  ‘‘It’s communicating with you, sir?’’

  Pittman felt suddenly privileged. ‘‘I think it is, Hawker. I really think it is.’’

  So Callison stopped the Moonstone, and after some extra air lock precautions, Pittman stepped out onto the surface and walked toward his silver nemesis, his suit pinging warnings all the way. His anger disappeared as he got closer to Alpha Vehicle. He thought it might reach out to him, the way it had to Dr. Conrad that first time, that it might draw him in and show him the wonders of the universe. But he remained on the outside. Inside, outside. The antonyms occurred to him spontaneously, like the frenzied thoughts of an obsessed man. He felt saddened that it wouldn’t let him in. And the music he was hearing wasn’t anything like the music in Gettysburg after the blue wave of the Worldwide Crash. For it sounded as if it was being played in reverse, still the two-to-one motif, but backward, haunting, chilling, music for the end of the world.

  Then he stumbled on something.

  And looking down he saw carved into the blast-blackened grabboid basalt the yin-yang symbol, the same thing he had been thinking of just moments ago, and realized that he had at last become as privileged as Dr. Conrad, that they had finally entered his mind, even if they were trying to tell him something entirely different.

  Corporals Allen and Sihem, unexpected personnel aboard the Pennsylvania, arrested him the moment he boarded. Sihem explained that his and Allen’s presence had been ordered, when, just before they took off, Greenhow had detected nuclear events on the Moon. ‘‘You had no presidential authorization to employ the nuclear option.’’

  They read him a list of charges, but by this time he’d been awake nearly twenty-two hours, and was too preoccupied with how he had failed to defeat Alpha Vehicle to really listen to the litany of rubbish they had brought with them. Also too preoccupied with what Alpha Vehicle was trying to tell him. He had never taken the yin-yang symbol seriously before. To him, it was just so much Eastern hocus-pocus. But obviously they had plucked it from his mind for a reason. They wouldn’t have gone to all the trouble of scratching it in the Moon’s surface otherwise. He thought of the stone representation he had back in his desert home. Know your enemy. He was definitely going to have to do some research.

  Sihem was a short man, didn’t look like a Marine at all, had dark hair, an olive complexion, and Sephardic features. Allen was clearly an armed escort, built like a tank, with an expression as hard as a Minnesota lake in January.

  Pittman tried to get information about possible nuclear events in America, but Sihem said he would be debriefed by the proper authorities once they were safely within the skin of Earth’s atmosphere.

  By this time, they orbited the Moon. Through the special polarized glass, the sun looked strange, with its great hydrogen band spinning away like a stream of golden confetti. He wanted to tell Sihem that things would have been different if his unilateral decision to launch had resulted in a victory. But who was Sihem? It would be like arguing with a Wal-Mart clerk about the price of detergent. So he sat there. And closed his eyes. And slept. Had never lost his Marine habit of sleeping anywhere at any time— one never knew when one was going to get the chance again.

  But he slept with a troubled conscience.

  At the end of ten hours the radio woke him.

  ‘‘Control, copy for reentry.’’

  The pilot, a man named Finbow, went through braking burns, telemetry, and angle of descent. They skidded across the atmosphere. The nose cone flared, reminding Pittman of the bonfires he had enjoyed with Sheila and the kids when they had vacationed on Cape Cod. The sky went from black to blue, and after so many weeks of the Moon’s haunting darkness, it was like lifting the lid on a coffin. Everything was blue. Some puffy clouds floated by in the distance.

  Control finally used some bandwidth for nonessential items, and he got his Orbops debriefing from, of all people, Brian Goldvogel, who seemed to love every minute of it.

  ‘‘In response to your unauthorized attack, Tim, the Builders detonated a prime-number sequence of nuclear explosions along the Pacific equator, misinterpreting your launch as an attempt to communicate. The military junta in the PRNC mistook the Builder response for a preemptive strike by the U.S., and responded with strikes against New York, Boston, Washington, Atlanta, Chicago, and Philadelphia.’’ A piece of his soul crumbled at the mention of Philadelphia. ‘‘The U.S. then took out Beijing, Shanghai, and Tianjin as well as a half dozen PRNC launch facilities. The only good thing that came of it was that internal factions loyal to the Democratic Republic of Canton overthrew Po Pin-Yen’s ruling junta.’’

  That Po Pin-Yen had at last been deposed was indeed the only bright spot in all this, and his heart rejoiced for a few moments.

  They landed at Peterson Air Force Base, not far from where he lived. Corporal Allen helped him out of his seat, cuffed his hands behind his back, and accompanied him to the hatch. When the hatch opened, the heat struck him with nightmarish force. The light was so blinding he had to squint.

  As he walked down the stairs, his legs unsure in the strong Earth gravity after so many weeks on the Moon, he felt consumed by the need to get to Philadelphia as soon as possible. A compulsion, the impetus of which he felt coming from outside himself. As if the Builders were going to insist that he witness his own handiwork. He didn’t want to believe that Sheila, Tom, and Becky might be dead as a direct result of his own unilateral decision to launch.

  Allen was now joined by a second guard, this one in a military police uniform, the name Roadman stenciled above the breast pocket, a man half Pittman’s age wearing government-issue sunglasses, a special kind meant to block out intense radiation—that’s how bad the sun was getting. Roadman looked like a human fly because his glasses were so big.

  If only Pittman could convince his superiors to let him go to Philadelphia immediately. He would make sure his kids and ex-wife were all right, then gladly spend whatever time in the stockade they required.

  They led him across the tarmac and he looked out at the desert. He saw the low hills near his house, two gentle ones and then one that was more a mesa, shimmering in the ripple effect of the heat. Sweat drenched him in seconds.

  Other military police led Hawker and Callison away to a different vehicle. Hawker glanced over his shoulder as he walked away. And it was as if Hawker was the only one old enough and wise enough to understand the true situation: that sometimes decisions had to be made down-chain when t
he links up-chain had been severed by unforeseeable circumstances. Down-chain, up-chain. Dark whispers rustled through Pittman’s mind. As Hawker reached the big black vehicle that was going to take him away, he saluted Pittman.

  Only it wasn’t just Hawker standing there anymore. There was another man. Standing in hard-vac armor. His armor had been penetrated by what looked like weapons fire, and green StopGap had bubbled out to fix the leak. The man held his helmet in his arm. Haydn. Pale. Blond. Some blood down the front of his suit. Dead. Alive. Inadvertent. But intentional.

  And Pittman knew the purple bands were somewhere up there judging him for it.

  23

  The Secret Service didn’t take Cam and Lesha to Washington this time because Washington was gone.

  They took them to Camp David in a military helicopter instead. The Builders were gone again—it seemed as if his Navasota episode had been brought on as a side effect of the nuclear exchange, the communicative efforts of the fusion events in the Pacific spilling into his own consciousness, then ebbing away as the Builders at last decided to dismiss this particular round of diplomatic dialogue as short-lived and bizarre. As such, it was important he convince the president of his plan, because he felt it was the only way they could reestablish communication with the hyperdimensional beings.

  As they came down on the retreat’s front lawn, the grass was brown, and the surrounding conifers as dry as talc. Inspecting the trees, Cam saw that the effects of the bloating sun had defoliated the uppermost branches so that each tree’s peak was ragged, bare, and skeletal. The helicopter landed. Everything outside was light-blasted. Even through his dark polarized sunglasses, the entire Camp David grounds were awash in radiant whiteness. The effect was bizarre, like standing inside a giant lightbulb. He knew that despite the military helicopter’s thick steel armor, radiation that customarily fell outside the boundaries of what was previously the norm must be getting through. So bright in fact were the grounds that he at first didn’t see five tanks stationed at strategic points around the installation, not until he was standing outside on the lawn.