“I’m afraid to try.”
But she did anyway, found herself sore and scraped but otherwise okay.
She managed to sit up. “I just jumped out of a moving truck.…”
“Yeah.”
They looked down the stretch of straightaway into which the road had settled. The garbage truck and SUVs shrank in the growing distance, their lights becoming mere specks on the dark horizon, when the garbage truck suddenly twisted round and skidded sideways down the road.
Sparks and smoke erupted beneath its big tires, the SUVs powerless to do anything but surge on. Then the garbage truck was twirling, a giant clock hand spinning in sped-up motion along the center of the road.
The screech of tires echoed in the night air, the first SUV slamming into the truck broadside by its nose and sent rolling, tumbling, across the road. The second SUV rammed it dead center, halting the truck’s spin and driving it forward until it toppled over. The contents of its hold coughed into the air in a ribbon of stray refuse and bags, seeming to float down in slow motion, as the SUV pitched over it and spun in the air.
It came down on its side directly in the path of the other SUV, still spinning wildly. The crunching impact showered steel and rubber into the air just ahead of the flame burst that left Alex and Sam covering their eyes, even before the garbage truck erupted in a curtain of fire.
“Raiff … Do you think he…,” Sam began, leaving it at that.
“I don’t know,” Alex managed. “I don’t know.”
66
WAR
“JANUS DIDN’T EXIST THEN,” the woman in the top right reminded him. “But we do now. Please speak plainly, Doctor.”
“Suffice it to say,” said Donati, “that our experiments were figuratively based on leaving bumps in the night. Until something bumped back.”
At that point, the principals of Janus had requested a complete report on what exactly had transpired in Laboratory Z, leaving Donati utterly perplexed. Didn’t these people understand the gravity of what was unfolding? Is this how they or their counterparts in the Near-Earth Object office would react if informed that a potential planet-killing asteroid was on a collision course with Earth?
A bad metaphor, really, considering that this threat was potentially just as bad and far more immediate than that one.
Donati, though, had no choice other than to succumb to the bureaucracy, the Janus board not seeing any harm in putting off action for the few hours it would take to consider his full report on Laboratory Z before reconvening. He knew this was a stall tactic as much as anything, since there was really no action they could take if what he suspected turned out to be true.
Indeed, what action, exactly, could the Earth take against a possible alien invasion?
No copies remained of his original report, but Donati was able to re-create the most salient facts from a memory that had never relinquished its hold on them. He kept it short and sweet, not wanting to burden the Janus board with too much technical or scientific jargon. And when they finally reconvened three hours after the initial call concluded, Donati sensed a different attitude and approach from the four voices, which had now been joined by a fifth in the center. More somber and inquisitive, while less confrontational, all the participants’ comments and questions laced with something as clear as it was undeniable:
Fear. Of facing an actual threat, at least within the realm of statistical probability, for the first time.
“I think you need to better explain whatever it was that bumped back,” said the fifth member of the Janus board, his voice grid dancing in the center of Donati’s screen.
“I would if I could, sir,” Donati told him. “But I’ve got to back up a bit more first. Laboratory Z was dedicated to finding more expeditious ways of exploring the universe.”
“And by ‘expeditious,’” Center interjected, “you mean—”
“Practical, given the limitations of space travel eighteen years ago as well as now. By the time Laboratory Z became operational, the logistics of mounting even a Mars mission were incredibly daunting. If travel to a planet within our own solar system was deemed infeasible, what did that say about the prospects of traveling light-years to reach new and potentially habitable worlds? My question is rhetorical because the answer was and is obvious. Working in conjunction with officials and scientists at both Goddard and JPL, Laboratory Z’s purpose was to explore alternative means of space travel.”