He was smiling—an unbridled, rapturous smile, even bigger than the one he’d been wearing when we first met. I half expected to see an animated bluebird alight on one of his shoulders before he broke into song. My eyes went to the gash on his forehead, which my mother had bandaged, and I wondered if his uncharacteristically upbeat mood was somehow due to his head injury. After a few seconds he managed to force the smile down—but his mouth snapped back into a goofy grin a second later. He shrugged, as if to say I just can’t hide how I feel inside.
That was when I finally noticed that the wallpaper in my mother’s bedroom was visible behind him, and I suddenly understood—and immediately wished I could pull and somehow yank the knowledge back out of my brain. No wonder my parents hadn’t answered their phones earlier. They’d been too busy boning each other like teenagers.
“Zack!” my father said, way too brightly. “How are you doing, Son?”
I wanted to reach through the phone and strangle him—then I stopped to wonder why. It’s not like it was their first time, right? And hey, the world was probably about to end. Half the people on the planet were probably going at it right now, just like everyone up on the goddamn moon! Everyone was jumping at their last chance to jump one another. And if anyone deserved a moment of happiness, it was my father, who had just risked his life for the zillionth time to prevent the extinction of the human race.
If I’d still been my old Bruce Banner self, I would have Hulked right the fuck out on him, then and there. But I didn’t. I smiled back at him.
“Hey, Dad. I’m on hold with all five members of the Armistice Council,” I said. “I just told them everything—to the best of my ability, anyway.”
He laughed, assuming I was making a joke. But then his smile abruptly vanished.
“Wait,” he said. “Are you being serious with me right now?”
“As a heart attack,” I said, tapping at the menu on my phone. “I just added you to the conference call.”
His eyes widened when he saw the names of the other people on the call.
“But—how did you get in touch with them?”
“You aren’t the only one with a few tricks up his sleeve, Dad,” I said. “I’ll explain later, if we have time.”
My father’s face changed—he looked as if he was trying not to panic now.
“What did you tell them?” he asked. “I mean, how did they react?”
I noticed that Diehl was staring over my shoulder, holding up his laptop so that Cruz could eavesdrop, too.
“Holy shit!” he whispered. “Is that your dad?”
I nodded. I was about to introduce my father to my two best friends when the Armistice Council took us off hold. They all seemed a bit surprised to see that my father had joined us—but not nearly as shocked as he was when he saw who was on the call. “Who is this gentleman, Lieutenant?” Dr. Shostak asked.
“This is my father, General Lightman,” I said. “The officer I was just telling you about.”
My father was still staring into his QComm’s camera, dumbfounded. “Well, first of all,” Dr. Tyson said, “we would like to commend you both for your service, and for being brave enough to bring this information before the Armistice Council.”
“You’re welcome?” I said uncertainly.
“We’ve only had a limited time to consider the evidence,” Dr. Tarter said carefully. “But we believe there’s a strong possibility your theory about the Europans is correct.”
“You do?” my father and I both asked in unison, making the scientist smile.
“This council has access to classified information about the Europans that adds further credence to your theory, gentlemen,” Dr. Shostak said.
“The official story is that when NASA’s Envoy probe landed on Europa to investigate the swastika-shaped anomaly on the moon’s surface, it attempted to make contact with the extraterrestrials who created it by burrowing down through the moon’s surface ice with a melt probe to reach the subsurface ocean below. But that cryobot’s mission wasn’t to make contact with the Europans—its mission was to destroy them.”
“I knew it!” my father said. “President Nixon ordered NASA to strap a nuke onto that probe, didn’t he?”
Everyone but Hawking nodded grimly.
Shostak continued, “Nixon didn’t believe the swastika could be anything but a threat. He and a few advisors decided that we had no choice but to take preemptive action.”
“So it was us,” my father said. “We attacked them first. And then they came here to attack us. That’s how it started. And both sides have been slowly escalating the conflict between ever since, for forty-two years—”
“Until a few days ago,” I said. “When we escalated things to the breaking point by launching a doomsday weapon at them.”
Dr. Tarter nodded. “In light of everything you’ve told us, it’s entirely possible that our use of the Icebreaker was what prompted them to finally deploy their armada and invade after waiting so long.”
I shook my head. “This whole time, it’s been us. We’re the ones who’ve upped the stakes every time.”
My father nodded. “And now there’s nowhere else for things to escalate. We’ve reached the endgame—the point of mutually assured destruction. If we attempt to destroy them, they’ll destroy us.”