End Time (52 page)

That would be nice. Go back to the chuckling stream, the bluebird, the wise old cricket for company. Sit down for a Japanese tea ceremony and have a cup of
cha
. Heaven on Earth. The Taker went inside his skull and drifted out the back of his head like a passing thought.

No such luck.

Lattimore stepped into a dingy room overlooking the Whiteside Meat-packing Plant “Recycling” section. No Webster Chargrove, PhD; the grim office empty. Cautiously, Lattimore crept out the open door, into a dingier hall. Easy fellah, one step at a time. Was he really standing in the underground
π
r
2
complex? Or had he become some kind of apparition, a mind glider, lacking true substance?

Now that he thought about it, his other mind glides were partly physical. In Antarctica he'd felt the green grass under his feet. Inside the container ship he'd turned off simmering stew on a stove; then climbed into the Tea House trailer. In Alaska he'd chased a cafeteria tray into the stream and lost a shoe.

He cautiously followed hallways and doorways toward the operational center. The floors became progressively cleaner, then metallic and tubular. He halted before a biologically sealed transparent hazmat airlock. Four men in white lab coats stood at a railing; Lattimore glimpsed a gantry overlooking a surgery theater. The warning lights went from red to blue for entry, and the transparent door opened with a
whoosh
. One of the observers said, “They need me in blood pharming,” and turned from the rail. He walked right by Lattimore as though the CEO of the aerospace company didn't exist. So that answered that. On
this
mind glide the Takers didn't want his presence known, letting him hide in plain sight. And luckily too—if anyone caught him in this human Habitrail they'd lock him in a steel room and throw away the key.

Lattimore took the man's spot at the viewing glass, completely ignored. Through an adjoining glass wall a battery of technicians stared at large consoles like some kind of electronic jury. The specimen on the table had grown too long for his khakis, the pale blue Oxford shirt, tie, jacket, a white lab coat. The seams of his lab coat popped in places, making the figure look pathetic and comical at the same time. Its head and shoulders covered with a large swathe of blue sterilized surgery fabric. The remains on the operating table completely the wrong shape. Too long, too skinny and the head not right.

A lecture was already in progress. Beside the specimen on the table, the clean, shaven face of the professor looked up, addressing the observers on the gantry. His white halo of hair a luminescent ring about his skull; his lips moved like a large white guppy speaking up from a lily pond.

“The Wild Three comet-derived glycine seems to have produced an unpredictable side effect in one of our colleagues. As you can see, two digits lost on the hands.”

The professor lifted the dead wrist of the body on the table, the skin purplish gray; a shrunken stub where the pinkie and ring finger had melted away, leaving a utilitarian three prongs: two pincers and an opposing thumb, all three digits extremely long.

“Similar toe loss on the feet and loss of genitalia. The epidermis—the skin itself—is extremely receptive to white light, yellow to red on the spectrum. But at the same time the skin has more in common with asbestos than our porous body covering, allowing the creature to work in the presence of intense heat. Moreover, the epidermis does not breathe; in fact we do not believe the organism breathes at all. This specimen, which we are calling Model-A, was designed to operate, that is
work,
in the dark, at great depths and pressures. Underwater, for instance. But as it developed here at sea level its cell structure erupted. A form of decompression sickness, cellular rupture, similar to the bends.

“We speculate this model to be malformed, missing its twin capabilities: those being the ability to work under intense pressure per square inch, and operate where there is little to no pressure. That is to say in a vacuum. Correctly formed it could function both under great PSI and under virtually none. This mutation lacks the ability to work in space.”

He paused for a breath. “What we're looking at is what might have been a standard model. Had it formed correctly it has no natural biological drawbacks and nearly indestructible DNA. This creature photosynthesizes at the extreme end of the short-wave light band: ultraviolet light, X-rays. All it needs is a drop of moisture, a grain of nitrous-rich fertilizer, and starlight does the rest. Heats itself with bioluminescence like a firefly. Work anywhere. Do anything. Live forever.”

He flicked a corner of the sterile gauze covering the head. No hair, but some extra tissue about the size of a grapefruit had erupted out of the bald skull as if blown out like a balloon.

“He seems to have wanted to grow a bigger brain. Naturally, the decompression permanently crippled the emerging organism before it could evolve; technically dead, though there appear to be traces of continued cell replication, and little or no decomposition. The brain matter itself seems to be more mineral than animal or vegetable. Carbon-based, naturally.”

All that made sense to Lattimore. If you wanted to colonize or groom a planet, you'd have to work underwater, work in orbit, work in extreme places. Even coming back after eons, across the gulf of a galaxy, the herdsmen of the stars would need an indigenous, “native” herdsman, preadapted to the planet. What they couldn't bring from space, they'd have to breed right here.

“And there were in the same country shepherds abiding in the field, keeping watch over their flock by night.”

Only there was something good and pastoral about human shepherds in the Bible—and absolutely nothing benevolent about this creature. The creature had moved beyond such minor concerns as good or evil, a life force grown in a petri dish with no morality involved. Manipulated molecules, genes, and DNA for ends that not even the creature understood.

For a brief second, the uncovered sterile gauze on Model-A slipped to reveal more of his old human clothes—the white laboratory coat, split at the shoulders, a breast pocket, a pocket protector with glasses and pens. And underneath the breast pocket the subject's name embroidered onto the lab coat. Personalized. The letters were pretty small, but Lattimore could just make them out. Bright, embroidered letters in blue thread, spelling out a name:

Chargrove.

The narrow, methodical face of the professor continued the analysis. “There's been some lively discussion as to what effect, if any, this unanticipated malformation may have on our present efforts to alleviate the spread of various diseases. Some bright minds around here speculate that the introduction of the Chen-L alleles will accelerate the mutation. What a few of our resident comics call the young lady's ‘God particles.'”

He paused and harrumphed, clearly putting God and unintended consequences in their proper place, being somewhere at the back of the class, if not on the short bus.

“I'm of the opinion that the introduction of the Chen girl biochemistry will only enhance our broad-spectrum inoculation efforts. Since none of the other test subjects have undergone this evolution, or malformation, it is safe to say we possess some kind of natural protein suppressor in the human body, or combination of antigens that our young colleague may have been lacking. Hence, only Chargrove's biochemistry,
his biomolecules,
were open to the change. Him and only him. This can't be the first comet dust to hit our planet. Most of us must have this genetic blocker. Otherwise we'd all be walking around with big heads and three fingers.”

One of the white-coated scientists nearby chuckled. Lattimore recalled his paranoid hallucination from the floor of the Sioux Falls Health Center: a kind of premonition—the long-fingered doctors gliding back and forth.…

“In any case, we'll find out soon enough whether this is merely an anomaly or part of a larger evolutionary change. Our special locator team has traced the female from Indianapolis Methodist Hospital to New York and expects to secure the Chen-L specimen within twenty-four hours. We anticipate initial blood pharming within forty-eight hours. And then inoculation via our latest generation of Skeeters, which will home into designated individuals' alleles, our Noah's Children.” He took a breath. Clearly, the thought of choosing who was to live and who to die made this cerebral monster practically glow with joy. Not merely playing God, but being Him.

“Of course it won't be a mass inoculation—only fifty or sixty thousand within the first week. But within following weeks we expect to make our ultimate choices, designate our final Celestials at no more than three million in the continental United States: sufficient population to regenerate society. Not only will you have to be stung, but you will have to be stung by one of ours. We anticipate that within three generations the country will have returned to Second World War population levels. About 130 million people, more than enough to ensure dominance—”

Lattimore started to feel faint. The creature on the table slowly sat up, the sterile gauze falling from its elongated body, and the late Webster Chargrove, PhD, pointed to the viewing area with his gray three fingers, addressing him without spoken words.
They mean just the elite
,
the connected, the selected, a Noah's Ark of the anointed. I'll put in a good word for Lattimore Aerospace. They'll need satellites before too long.

He could feel a Taker hovering nearby, getting ready for a mind glide. A haze of starbursts and sparklers lit up his brain. Clem Lattimore felt the Taker sweeping him away. Bye-bye American Pi. The Big
They
always got away with it. Deciding who got into the club and who didn't. Sorry, you're not on the list.

Lattimore woke up on the concrete floor of the health center loading area.

No hallucinations, no gray alien doctors tending sick patients on pus-soaked foam mattresses. His lower arm and elbow had gone to sleep against the large cardboard box of plasma bags. The pins and needles of returning circulation frizzled into his forearm. He shook it a bit to help the blood along, then examined his skin. Hemorrhagic smallpox worked fast, so if there weren't lesions on him by now, he probably wouldn't contract it.

No lesions. But he'd woken in the land of the dead.

Wherever he looked—the delivery bay, out onto the street in broad daylight—nothing moved. He stumbled outside and found his car in the lot. The only other movement he saw on his way to the aerospace building was a white Good Humor Ice Cream truck. The Good Humor Ice Cream truck cruised along a side street, chimes echoing. Yet no children came running out to greet it, and the white truck turned a corner, vanishing from sight.

Lattimore pulled up to the empty aerospace building and went through the bronze glass doors. Nobody manned the reception desk. A terrifying sense of quiet descended on him. Drop a pin you'd jump out of your shoes. He became almost teary when the voice-recognition system inside the elevator let him back in his apartment with a
“Welcome Home, Clem.”

He sank gratefully into the leather couch in the library and stared at the decanter of bourbon on the shelf, but couldn't muster the energy to pour one. He set Jasper's laptop on the glass coffee table, wondering idly if he still should wipe its memory clean with a magnet. But since the Men in Black weren't knocking down his door he let the machine boot up. Jasper had left it open for him, no encryption, and no password.

Immediately, dozens of windows flashed at him like an e-mail bomb, a massive stream of data scrolling at Lattimore from the laptop screen. But this data was coming from HAARP. His late CTO seemed to have latched on to the High Frequency Active Auroral Research Program's real-time command consoles, the actual Operations Center data stream—no mere satellite flyby. You'd think for security reasons, the HAARP control room would be closed-circuit, but you'd be wrong—there'd always be some Air Force general or federal appointee who'd require access from somewhere other than Gakona, Alaska.

The info jumping out of the screen was what the technicians saw when they revved up their heavenly tuning fork: every panel on every monitor in that faraway facility. Huge amounts of data. Naturally, Lattimore couldn't read most of it. He vaguely began to grasp the various power and frequency modulations in the arrays: wattage and voltage and a hundred other ways to measure it. Other data streams were dedicated to areas of ionization, latitude, longitude, and altitude. Another satellite data feed showed upper-atmospheric weather conditions, temperature, wind direction, velocity, and barometric readings.

Then by dumb luck, he found a master model—a visual representation of the data, a real-time computer graphics image; a map of the Earth in high def in 360 degrees like the ultimate Google Earth app. You could see the jet streams moving, sucking moisture from the oceans and sending it down in rain across the globe. Up from the oceans and down to the ground. A superimposed touch button read
GENERAL WINTER,
a model projection of cause and effect. A countdown clock below the touch button unwound the hours and minutes until launch. Lattimore clicked on the touch button and watched the screen change.

Now the picture zoomed northward; the rectangular HAARP antenna array in Gakona, Alaska, began to blink. A stream of excited electrons leapt to the sky, pushing against the ionosphere. A vast air blister in the atmosphere rose up over the dome of the Artic. The altitude counter read:
86.3745
MILES/139.006
KILOMETERS
. The blister tugged everything on its stratospheric plane toward it. Moving jet streams glided across the sky as the huge bubble drew them out of their natural paths. Moisture was drawn to more northern latitudes, and snow began to form. A lot of snow. Then the snow began to swirl and gather in huge purple storms.