Isle of Man

CHAPTER 2

A Flood of Surprises



The lake is quiet when I wake.

The cold air smells of coming snow.

I sit up and swirl in empty space under a starless sky that gives no light. I can’t seem to get my bearings until I spot the orange glow of the distant burned down fire on the bluff. I feel around in the dark and find my father’s pipe and stuff it in my pocket before heading up to the shelter.

The fire is mostly embers, one small flame fighting to stay alive atop the heap of glowing coals. Inside, Jimmy is curled on his side, sleeping, with his arm around Junior, also asleep. I think Hannah must be sleeping too, until she opens her eyes and lifts her finger to her lips, signaling for me to be quiet as I duck inside and scoot next to her and sit down.

“How’d it go?” I whisper.

Hannah grins and holds up an empty syringe. Relief surges through me. The idea of living a long time without Jimmy was just too much to bear, but so was the thought of dying decades sooner than I had to. It’s funny to think that when I was a kid down in Holocene II, thirty-five seemed impossibly old. Now ninety seems to be a cruelly short life. I guess it’s silly to think anything could ever outgrow our rising expectations, even life expectancy.

Producing the remaining unused syringe, Hannah signals for me to roll up my sleeve. It occurs to me that it’s her father’s shirt I’m wearing, which seems fitting in some strange way. She clamps the syringe in her teeth and grabs Jimmy’s canteen and pours water into a small circular impression dug in the dirt and lined with rawhide. Then she grabs a stick and rolls a hot rock forth from the coals, guiding it to the hole. Steam erupts as the rock rolls into the water. She tears a small piece of cloth from the hemline of her dress, dips the cloth into the boiling water, and pulls it out steaming into the air.

“Did Jimmy teach you that?” I ask, trying to be quiet.

“Shh ... ,” she says, nodding.

She cleans the inside of my left arm with the hot cloth, scrubbing until my skin is red. Then she removes the thin sash from the waist of her dress and wraps it around my upper arm, looping it once before pulling it tight. I watch as the veins in my arm swell. Removing the syringe from her teeth, she uncaps it and holds it up, depressing the plunger until just a tiny drop of serum appears on the needle’s tip. It looks like a drop of black oil in the low light of the coals. Then she turns to me and smiles, waiting for my approval.

I look from the syringe in her hand to the veins snaking down my arm. What is it that runs through them anyway? It seems strange to pump something inside of me, some foreign thing born in a lab long before I was born. My dad used to say nothing comes free without a price following along later. And usually a heavy one. I wonder what he’d say about the serum? I remember Mr. Zales drawing my blood sample the night before my test. I remember sitting at our kitchen table and talking with my dad about his pipe and about our ancestors, with whom he couldn’t wait to be reunited in Eden. But Eden was just a lie. A fairytale told to keep us trapped underground, slaving away until we walked willingly up to our slaughter. We were the ignorant working at the hands of the wise. And what separated us below from those like Radcliffe here above, even more than the five miles of bedrock over our heads, was the knowledge that comes with age. They never let any of us get old enough to question things. They killed us when we turned 35. I don’t know what my dad would say about the serum, but I do know that it’s time for me to become a man.

I nod, and Hannah thrusts the needle into my vein. She holds it steady and depresses the plunger and the dark serum disappears into my arm. It’s surprisingly painless.

Several hours later, I wake with Hannah in my arms. The fire is nothing but smoldering ash, and Jimmy is gone. Gray light filtering into the shelter announces the new day, and I ease myself away from Hannah, careful not to wake her, and scoot to the entrance and look down on the lake.

The boat is beached right where we left it, but there’s no sign of Jimmy anywhere. I stand and stretch, stepping away from the shelter to piss. The morning air bites my cheeks, and my hot breath floats away from me in little clouds that hang in the stagnant air. An eagle screeches somewhere in the distance. I turn back and stir the coals and add some wood to the fire so Hannah won’t be cold. Then I swig from the canteen and head down to the lake to inspect the boat.

It’s a four-seat, enclosed cabin design, probably Radcliffe’s backup boat for bad weather. The carbon-fiber skin looks like a solar-cell impregnated material we engineer down in Holocene II for highflying drones. Light and strong. I’m guessing the solar cells charge a liquid metal battery and that the battery runs an electric engine powering a jet drive. Other than a few dents, it looks to have weathered the wave with little damage.

I wade into the freezing water and am instantly awake. I manage to pop the cabin latches with no trouble, and the lid unseals and lifts easily on hydraulic hinges. I hoist myself up, slide into the cabin, and sink down into the pilot’s chair. The instruments are simple—steering wheel, compass, speedometer, and a throttle lever. An LED battery indicator reads full. I press the start button, and jets hum to life. Then the boat violently rocks, and Jimmy is sitting next to me in the passenger seat.

“Let’s see what she can do,” he says, pulling the lid down and latching it.

“Where’s Junior?”

“He’s got a rabbit holed up, and he won’t quit it. Stubborn little fella.”

“Takes after you,” I say, smiling.

I pull the throttle back and bang my head on the wheel as we jet backward off the beach. When I manage to neutral the throttle, we’re floating fifty feet from shore. The engines make almost no sound. Jimmy nods, obviously impressed by the boat’s power. Movement catches my eye, and I look through the windshield as Hannah appears on the hillside, her wild mane of red hair framing her sleepy face. She lifts a hand to us and then disappears again into the shelter.

I turn the wheel left and push the throttle forward, and the boat whips around, its nose lifting until all we can see through the windshield is gray sky. Then the water returns to our view as we plane level and take off like a rocket across the lake. The speed feels awesome. We cut through the glassy water like an arrow cuts through the air. And it sure feels much more like flying than traveling in a boat. When I glance over at Jimmy, he’s grinning so big all I see are teeth.

Then I notice the dam across the lake, and I remember the giant monolith of stone crashing into the water and raising the wave that toppled Dr. Radcliffe’s boat like a toy. My palms sweat on the wheel to think about it. I cut left, away from the dam, and cruise us toward the shoreline to survey the wave’s damage. Everywhere we look the banks are stripped clean. And the closer to shore we get, trees and floating debris make our progress slow. It feels like some apocalyptic water tour.

When we finally get back to the peninsula, I slow the boat and run it onto the shore before killing the engines.

There’s a moment of silence where I feel Jimmy staring at me. “Ya wanna go back down there, don’t ya?” he asks.

“I do and I don’t.”

“I know what ya mean,” he says.

“But I think we’ll need to if I’m going to find a way to free my people.”

“Well, ya can count me in.”

“Thanks, Jimmy.”

I look down and notice a handle beneath my seat. I pull it open, exposing a drawer filled with emergency supplies: food rations, thermal blankets, bottles of water. Jimmy opens the drawer beneath his seat and finds a first aid kit and a few flares, which he appears to be fascinated by. I grab the foil blankets and some food rations, and we head up toward the shelter.

Almost immediately we hear Hannah’s scream and take off running. Jimmy is slowed some by his old thigh wound from the cove, and I actually outpace him up the hill. As I approach the shelter, I notice a trail of blood leading toward the door, and my heart jumps. I drop the supplies and clench my fists.

I see Hannah first, cowering in the back of the shelter with a look of horror on her face. Then I see Junior sitting in front of her with a dead rabbit hanging from his mouth. It takes several heart-pounding seconds for everything to sink in, then I laugh uncontrollably with relief. Jimmy races up beside me and looks in, and then he laughs, too.

“It isn’t funny,” Hannah says, looking as if she might cry.

“He’s just showin’ off his catch,” Jimmy says, stepping in and rubbing Junior’s ears and reassuring him he did good.

I turn back and collect my dropped supplies. Hannah’s mood improves when I hand her the rations. She bites into a meal bar, spits the wrapper, and chews with her eyes closed, making little moaning sounds. Then she heads down to the lake with her breakfast—I’m guessing to freshen up. I collect more wood while Jimmy field-dresses the rabbit. Thirty minutes later, we’re all sitting side by side at the edge of the bluff, looking over the lake with one of the foil blankets spread over our laps. I can feel the fire’s warmth on my back and hear the hiss of sizzling rabbit juice as it drips into the flames behind us. None of us wants to say what we’re thinking, but we’re all looking across the lake at the dam.

“Think it’s still flooded?” I ask, after a long silence.

“I dunno,” Jimmy says, twisting around to turn the rabbit.

“You’d think the water would drain away pretty quickly,” Hannah says. “At least I hope so.”

“It sure would be nice to know, though,” I say.

“You think there are bodies?” she asks.

“I’m sure,” I reply. “Can’t imagine where they’d go.”

“If that’s the case,” Jimmy says, “we better be gettin’ down there sooner than not. ’Fore they get too ripe.”

“Gross,” Hannah says, but then quickly adds, “although it sure would be nice to have supplies.”

“And shelter,” I say, reaching out and catching a single falling snowflake in my palm.

After a while, Hannah turns to me and asks: “What should we do about ... well, you know?”

“Holocene II?”

“Yes,” she says.

“We need to free them, of course.”

“Have you thought it through?” she asks.

“Thought it through? What’s to think through?”

“Well, how they’ll react might be one example, ” she says.

“I’m sure they’ll be happy to be free.”

She cocks an eyebrow at me.

“Would you have been?”

Her question catches me off guard, and I stop to consider it. I don’t know what I would have felt if we had suddenly been told that everything we thought was true was really lies and that the world had been up here all along. I mean, it was a huge shock for me, and I learned it the hard way—piece by piece, over an extended period of time.

I’m still thinking about Hannah’s question when Jimmy says: “I vote for tomorrow mornin’.”

“Tomorrow morning what?” I ask.

“Headin’ over,” he says. “I vote we go at first light.”

Hannah tosses a twig off the bluff.

“Works for me.”

“Tomorrow morning it is then,” I announce, glad to have finally decided on something. “Is that rabbit ready?”

“Jus’ about.”

Hannah scrunches up her face.

“Hand me another bar.”

By the time Hannah and I wake the next morning, Jimmy is already up, tending the fire. He hands us each a makeshift bowl of hot tea, fashioned from the plastic upturned ends of the first aid kit that we found on the boat.

“Not bad,” Hannah says, sampling her steaming tea.

I sip mine and taste the bite of pine.

“Why pine needles?”

“Vitamin C,” Jimmy says.

Outside the shelter, the lake sits like a steely gray abyss opened in a world of white. Everything surrounding the lake is covered with snow. The trees, the shoreline, the mountain peaks. The foundation of the old lake house has disappeared so beneath a thick blanket of white, I doubt even a trained archeologist would notice it had ever been inhabited at all. The boat rests on the shore, its roofline coated with snow. I notice Jimmy’s tracks leading down and back and Junior’s tracks crisscrossing his and heading off in every direction.

“Not a bad day to get out of here,” I say.

“I used to love snow,” Hannah sighs. She says it in almost a whisper, the bowl of tea forgotten in her hand. “My mom and I would sit in the living room and watch it come down out the window. ‘Blowing like a banshee today,’ she’d always say when it was a blizzard. Then she’d spend all afternoon fussing over her exotic plants. Covering them against a freeze.”

“What about your dad?” I ask. “Did he like the snow?”

“He was always off working somewhere,” she says. “And when he wasn’t, he seemed to hardly notice what was going on around him. He’d rather read about the world than live in it.”

Seeing the pain in her eyes, I lay my hand on her arm and say: “I’m sorry. I know how hard it is to lose your parents.”

“I know you know,” she says. “But you know what else? My dad really did turn into a monster. I couldn’t believe he shot Gloria like that. Oh! It makes me sick.”

“Well, we’ve got a chance to make it right.”

“I hope so,” is all she says.

We stack the unburned wood in a far corner of the shelter, just in case we need to return, cover the fire with dirt, load up our few possessions, and head down together to the boat. The only sound as we leave is our cold breath and the crunch of our feet in the snow.

Jimmy scrambles onto the bow of the boat and clears the snow off the lid. Then he opens it and reaches down a hand for Hannah. I climb up next and sink into the pilot’s seat. Jimmy puts his fingers in his mouth and whistles, loud and clear in the cold, quiet morning. Twenty seconds later, Junior bounds onto the bow of the boat, leaps into the rear seat next to Hannah, and shakes the entire cabin wet before lying his head on Hannah’s lap. Jimmy and I laugh.

“Why are you so friendly when you’re wet?” Hannah asks, wiping her face with one hand and scratching behind Junior’s wet ear with the other.

Jimmy pulls down the lid and latches it. I back us gently from the shore and turn the boat so Hannah can get a last look out the window before we leave. She presses her hand against the glass, as if waving goodbye to her childhood home. I wait until she looks at me and nods, then I drop the throttle and steer us toward the dam.

Once again I’m surprised by the size of the lake and how long it actually takes us to cross it. It’s a quiet trip, other than an occasional whimper from Junior, still hunkered down in the back with his head on Hannah’s lap. As we approach the locks, I ease off the throttle, half hoping the mitre gates won’t open. But the giant steel doors part, and a black hole appears in the dam. I take a deep breath and notch the throttle forward.

“Wait!” Hannah says.

I jerk the throttle back, reversing away from the entrance. We sit there, rocking gently on our own wake, feeling small and insignificant floating beneath the towering dam.

“I just thought of something,” Hannah says. “What if the Foundation is still flooded, and the locks take us down? Won’t a wall of water bury us when the lower gates open?”

I stop to consider this. I remember Dr. Radcliffe telling us about the step locks on the downside of the Foundation cavern that lead out to the Pacific Ocean. I’m guessing that’s how they drain away the water and lower the locks.

“I don’t think so,” I say, not sounding very reassuring even to myself. “I doubt the locks will bring us any lower than the water level of the Foundation bay.”

“But are you sure?”

“No.”

Hannah falls back into her seat.

“Oh, sweet mother of Earth. Just go. If we die, we die.”

I turn to Jimmy.

“What do you say, Jimmy?”

“Whatever,” he says. “I’m jus’ along for the ride.”

The shadowed locks wait in front of us, the white snow-covered world waits behind. I guide the boat through the doors and bring it to rest in the center of the locks. The doors grind shut behind us, sealing out the light, and all is quiet and black. Junior whimpers. Hannah shushes him, calming his nerves by humming a quiet song. I remember her father singing the same tune while Jimmy and I were stowaways in his boat heading down to burn Eden. A minute later, the LED lights pop on, and the boat begins to lower as the water level drops.

“So this is where we went?” Jimmy mumbles nervously from the shadows next to me.

“That’s right,” I say, “you never saw this part, did you? We were hidden in the bow of Radcliffe’s boat.”

“So it was you two who sabotaged Eden,” Hannah says.

“We had to do something,” I shoot back.

“I know it,” she replies. “I was just saying.”

We continue our slow drop in the shadowy locks until the lower gates appear dimly on the inside wall. Then we stop. The gates are only exposed at half the height I remember them. I feel myself tense, bracing for a wall of water. The gates slowly part, exposing the flooded tunnel, the water level much closer to the LED ceiling lights, but definitely passable in our small boat. The three of us collectively sigh.

I guide the boat into the tunnel, staying in the center to avoid hitting the ceiling where it slopes down at the edges. Small bits of floating debris litter the path and it feels like we’ve been shrunken down and are traveling through a subterranean sewer drain. When we reach the end of the tunnel, we idle into the pitch-black cavern bay. I guess the lights here went out with the flood. I stop the boat, and we float a few meters from the mouth of the tunnel in absolute blackness.

“Are there any lights on this thing?” Hannah asks.

I feel around blindly on the dash. “Shouldn’t you know?” I ask, frustrated because I can’t find anything.

Jimmy lifts open the lid, and the cool cavern air swooshes in. Junior whimpers again. Then I hear a crack and am blinded by a bright phosphorous flash as Jimmy strikes one of the flares lit. My eyes adjust, and the flare fades to a constant burn, casting a glow around our boat that is eerily similar to the red light that used to pulse up from Eden. Jimmy stands and holds the flare high while I idle the boat farther into the cavern.

All around us is the floating wreckage of the Foundation. Overturned crates marked from various levels of Holocene II. Metal canisters half-submerged. A white lab coat. No. A dead scientist wearing a white lab coat. He’s face down in the water, his bloated hands floating like two gray balloons at the ends of outstretched arms. I lean over and look back. Our wake lifts his left hand as if he were waving to us as we pass.

When we approach where the docks should be, they’re either gone or underwater, and as we cruise onto what would have been the shore, the rooflines of the submerged buildings come into view. We pass the galvanized walls of the sintering plant and the munitions warehouse, then the scientists’ living quarters with some of the scaffolding still in place. There are objects resting on top of the buildings, making it clear that the water was much higher, probably as high as the cavern ceiling, and that it is just now draining away.

I look back and see Hannah frozen in a wide-eyed trance and Junior sitting on the seat next to her, scanning the black water. The flare hisses in Jimmy’s hand beside me as if it were the sound itself chasing away just a halo’s worth of the darkness that swallows everything behind us as we pass.

We come at last to Eden, its domed roof singed by the fire to a bluish black, but largely still intact. I circle the structure, marveling at how large it is. It’s hard to imagine the generations of Holocene II retirees that were slaughtered here: their brains enslaved, their bodies cast off like refuse. Somewhere in there still are my father and my mother, or at least the burnt remains of the chemicals that made up their brains—brains that met and loved one another enough to create me.

I ease the boat alongside Eden’s sloping roofline. Jimmy jumps off and secures a line to a vertical vent protruding from the roof. It takes some coaxing to get Junior to leave the boat, but when we’re all safely on the roof, Jimmy leads us up the dome with his flare. Eden’s dome is the tallest structure in the Foundation cavern, and from its apex the flare casts a faint red glow onto the murky waters below, though the edges of the cavern are still hidden in shadow. We sit on the crest and take in the dim and dreary view.

“What are we going to do?” Hannah asks. Her words echo back to us above the sound of the hissing torch.

“I don’t know,” I say. “You think it’s still draining?”

“Maybe,” Hannah says. “I hope so.”

“Do you hear that?” Jimmy asks.

“Hear what?”

“That banging,” he says. “There. Listen.”

I strain to listen, but all I hear is the hissing of the torch.

“I don’t hear anything,” I say.

“Shh,” Hannah says. “I think I hear it.”

“Where?”

Hannah points.

“Out there.”

As my eyes follow her finger, the sound comes into my head; it is a kind of metal clanging coming from beneath the water in intervals of three—clang, clang, clang.

“What do you think it is?” I ask.

“Definitely human,” Hannah says.

“How do ya know that?” Jimmy asks.

“Duh,” Hannah replies. “Only our brains can make sound patterns like that.”

“Ever heard a bird sing?” he asks, sarcastically.

“Stop it, you two. Let’s just go out there and see.”

When we return to the boat, the tie-line is strained, and the hull is partially beached on a newly exposed portion of roof, answering our question about whether or not the water is still draining. We untie and shove free and motor by flare-light to investigate the source of the sound.

“I can’t hear it anymore,” Hannah says, hanging her head overboard to listen.

I kill the jets and let us coast in silence.

“There,” she says, pointing. “To the left.”

I restart the jets and idle to where she pointed, reversing us to a standstill and killing the jets again. The sound is definitely louder and coming from somewhere near us, but there’s nothing to see but black water.

Jimmy hands me the flare and strips off his shirt.

“What are you doing?” I ask him.

“I’m goin’ down.”

“What?” Hannah asks. “In the water? You have no idea what’s down there ...”

“That’s why I’m goin’.”

“But it’s black as hell. You won’t be able to see a thing.”

“Thought ya didn’t believe in hell,” Jimmy says, smirking at Hannah as he steps out of his animal-skin kilt. “And besides, there ain’t nothin’ wrong with my ears or my hands, so I can listen and feel around. Seein’ ain’t all there is.”

I hold the torch out to Jimmy.

“Take this down.”

“In the water?” he asks.

“It’ll burn fine. They don’t need oxygen.”

“Ya sure?”

I nod, reaching over to grab a fresh flare from beneath the seat, just in case. Hannah holds the lit flare for Jimmy as he clamps his knife between his teeth and lowers himself into the water. He dunks his head to wet his hair, then comes back up and takes the flare from her. Junior joins Hannah at the edge of the boat and whines.

“Ahh,” Jimmy says, through his clenched teeth. “How cute. You’s worried about me.”

“So what?” Hannah says, lifting her chin. “At least I’m adult enough to admit it.”

“I was talkin’ to Junior here,” Jimmy says, trying to control a giggle. “But I’m glad you’s worried too.”

Hannah huffs, “Well, I knew that, and I was only ...” She stops short when she notices Jimmy is gone.

As the flare descends underwater in Jimmy’s hand, a cold and silent darkness swallows the boat. We watch the ball of red light move away from us, diving deeper beneath the surface, abbreviated by the elongated shadows of Jimmy’s kicking legs. Then a larger shadow appears in the deep—something long and cylindrical. The boat tilts as the three of us lean over its side and watch. None of us dares to breathe, not even Junior, as if it might somehow help if we all hold our breath along with Jimmy. The light of Jimmy’s flare moves around to the far side of the shadow, and the backlit silhouette of a submarine fades into view. Then the flare goes out, and all is black.

There is a moment of absolute silence, so still and quiet that I can hear the distant dripping of water somewhere in the faraway darkness. Then several things happen almost at once. The boat rocks, followed by a splash as something, or someone, falls into the water. I pull the cap and light the flare in my hand, the glare momentarily blinding me. And just as my vision returns, the submarine rockets from the water nose first, clearing the surface by several meters, and splashes down just five or so meters away. It sends a wall of spray into the boat, knocking me backwards onto the floor.

When I clamber to my feet, waving the flare in front of me like a weapon, the first thing I do is look for Hannah. She’s picking herself up from the backseat, also stunned and soaking wet, but she looks unharmed. I rush to the edge and hold the flare up and look out, ready to dive in after Jimmy, but I see him treading water a few feet away with Junior paddling beside him. Behind them floats the surfaced submarine, its protruding sail emblazoned with the inverted valknut that makes up the Foundation crest. I reach out a hand and haul Jimmy up into the boat, and he turns back and heaves Junior aboard.

“What the hell happened?” I ask.

“It’s some kind of a boat,” Jimmy says.

“I can see that. You all right, Hannah?”

“I’m fine,” she says. “Is Jimmy okay?”

“I’m all right,” he says.

“Well, what happened?”

Jimmy fills us in excitedly: “This boat thing here was tied up to the docks down there and floatin’ hard against the lines. I heard the tappin’ from inside, thought there must be somebody in there. I was figurin’ how to free her when my flare gave out. I already had a hand on the front line, so I jus’ cut it.”

“You sure freed it all right.”

“Yeah, I wouldn’t of done it neither if I’d seen that,” he says, pointing to the valknut.

“The Foundation logo?” Hannah asks.

Jimmy shakes his head.

“I dunno what you all call it, but that’s the sign of the Park Service.”

Hannah opens her mouth to respond, but I cut her off.

“You did the right thing, Jimmy. We don’t know who’s in there, no matter what the symbol’s for.”

The screech of grating metal turns all our heads to the submarine. The three of us stand together in the dark, watching, the flare held high in my hand, with Junior crouching at Jimmy’s feet. A small door opens in the sail. Several seconds pass as we stare at the black opening. Then a man steps out into the flare’s light. He’s wearing white coveralls streaked with grease. And he’s very old and very small. His long, white hair is frizzed out by humidity, giving him the appearance of someone being electrified. He’s holding an enormous wrench.

I don’t know why, but I shout: “Freeze right there, Mister! Don’t you dare move.”

He mumbles something unintelligible and then disappears inside the submarine again. We look at one another, confused and slightly panicked. I start the jets and bring us alongside the submarine. Jimmy jumps onto its deck and ties us off to a cleat still tied with the thick line that he cut. We scramble onto the submarine’s deck and head for its door, stopping as we realize there’s only room enough for one person to descend at a time.

“I’ll go first,” I say.

Jimmy pushes me aside.

“No, I’ll go.”

“These people worked for my father,” Hannah says. “If one of us has to go first, it should be me.”

Just then Junior pushes past us and leans over the edge of the ladder, his bushy tail waving in the air for one moment before he disappears down into the black. Guess that answers that. I step onto the ladder next, but Hannah grabs my arm and takes the flare from my hand.

“This can’t go down there.”

“Well, you stay out here and hold it then.”

“No way. I’m going down.” She hands the flare to Jimmy.

“Jimmy, give me your knife,” I say. “If we’re not back in ten minutes, come after us.”

With Jimmy’s knife in my teeth, I descend the short ladder into the dark submarine. I can hear Hannah climbing down after me. She places her hand on my shoulder and we creep along the narrow passageway. I begin to feel claustrophobic in the dark space, but soon a doorway comes into view, its hatch ajar and a triangle of yellow light slanting across passageway ahead. When we arrive at the doorway, I stand back and grip the knife in my hand. Hannah gets a hold of the heavy door and looks to me for a signal. When I nod, she pulls open the door, and I step into the room, leading with Jimmy’s knife.

“Shazbit and sheetle stick!”

The little old man sits in a control seat, mumbling strange obscenities as he fusses with nobs and levers. Junior is spread out on the floor at his feet, watching him intently.

“Hello.” I don’t mean to whisper it, but I do.

“You confounded fudderwacker!” The strange man slams the panel with his fist.

Hannah pushes past me and steps toward him.

She says: “You’ll respond this instant, rude sir.”

Her commanding tone seems to get his attention, and he stretches out his arms and brings them together and interlaces his fingers behind his head, leaning back and turning to face us. He looks like some mad, frazzled scientist either surrendering or perhaps on vacation in repose.

I step up beside Hannah.

“Who are you?”

He flashes us a strange and unsettling smile.

“That’s an interesting question, young man. It could be answered in many ways. Who is anyone? Is anyone anyone? If a particle can be in two places at one time, couldn’t a person? Or even a fox?”

“How about your name then?” I ask.

“Benjamin,” he says. “Professor Benjamin Beckenbauer. But everyone just calls me ‘Moody’.” He slurs the word Moody while releasing his hands and holding them up, as if in some gesture of acceptance of a nickname which he hates. Then he spins around and returns his attention to the control panel in front of him, speaking over his shoulder to us. “Now, I’m not sure what you’re getting into, you two here and that other I saw on the boat, or what you have to do with this fragnabbled flood, but I have no time for shenanigans, or they’ll have me on the shock table again for sure. And if you see Dr. Radcliffe, please do tell him I’m working as quickly as I can.”

“Dr. Radcliffe is dead,” I say.

His hands freeze, and his head turns. He stares down for a moment, as if just now noticing Junior on the floor. Then he slowly swivels around to face us again.

“I’m sorry,” he says, “but would you mind repeating that?”

I cast Hannah an apologetic glance.

“What I meant to say is that Dr. Radcliffe passed away.”

He leaps from the chair, throws his hands in the air, and jogs a small circle around the room, surprisingly nimble as his spindly legs lift high off the floor in the manner of someone marching.

“He’s dead,” he chants. “He’s dead. The old boy is finally dead.” He stops abruptly and turns to face us. “How do I know you’re not lying? Wait. You’re his daughter, aren’t you? You look just like your mother. Yes, yes, you do. You wouldn’t lie. Let me hear you say it. Tell me your father is dead.”

“He’s telling the truth,” Hannah says. “He’s dead. And I am his daughter, so perhaps you could appear a little less happy about it. Now tell us who you are and what you’re doing.”

He nods, seeming to calm down as he digests the news. “I’m sorry for my outburst,” he says, straightening up and standing formally before us. “They call me Moody because my moods are a tad bit unpredictable. At least I think that’s how it started. Anyway, it doesn’t matter now. Moody it is. I’m a professor of theoretical physics, but for the last several hundred years they’ve had me in charge of maintenance for our fleet. It’s quite beyond me as to why, really, except that no one else wanted the job. But I digress. May I assume, young lady, that you are in charge now? Professor Moody here, at your service. Although I’d like to officially tender my request for a new assignment, preferably one more fitting to my profession.”

Junior gets up off the floor and trots past us. I turn and see Jimmy standing behind us in the doorway.

“You guys all right?” he asks.

“Well, well,” the professor mumbles. “If it isn’t Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego.”

“Who?” Hannah asks.

He waves her question off.

“Just some old story.”

After introducing ourselves, we circle up on the floor and discuss our situation, passing a water bottle and a welcome bag of algaecrisps produced from a cabinet by the professor. He shifts between manic rants, which he quickly apologizes for, and depressing claims that we’d all be much better off if we’d drowned along with the others. And although it’s clear that he is slightly unstable, he proves very willing to submit, especially looking to Hannah for reassurance when answering questions.

We tell him all about the wave and about Dr. Radcliffe’s apocalyptic doomsday plans, including flooding the Foundation, which happened, and flooding Holocene II, which didn’t. He listens and nods and seems surprised by none of it. He says the water should drain back to level in time, and that we need only wait. And he seems little concerned about the lack of power, insisting that the flow of electricity from Holocene II where it’s generated is constant, and that the batteries are capable of powering the Foundation for many years, even if there were an interruption. I ask why not use the dam for hydro power locally, which seems to impress the professor. He explains that it was used as such once, but that the turbines proved too costly in time and materials to maintain when the rail tubes between the Foundation and Holocene II proved to be a perfect transmission line for the power collected by us there from the Earth’s magnetic fields. When we begin debating the advantages of Magnetohydrodynamics over geothermal power generation, Hannah and Jimmy begin to moan with boredom until we move on to discussing our more immediate plans. That’s when I ask the professor how to stop the drones.

“Stop them?” he asks. “Why?”

“Because that’s what we intend to do,” I answer.

He scratches his chin, lost for a moment in thought. Then he turns to Hannah.

“Do you agree with this? Are you officially abandoning our mission statement?”

“I certainly think it’s time to review it,” Hannah replies.

He furrows his brow and nods.

“Well, then, I never was a big fan of old Radcliffe’s radical ideas. I’m happy to leave the politicking to you three.”

“But you did go along with Dr. Radcliffe’s plans,” I say. “You sure didn’t protest if you maintained the fleet of drones.”

He nods.

“I did, I did. But you might have, too. He could be very persuasive, Robert could. Especially if you were here to see the destruction and horror mankind leveled on itself.”

“Still, how do we know we can trust you?”

“Kid,” he says, sighing. “I’m really, really old, and now I’m dying. I don’t care two hoots what you do.”

“Okay. Then tell us how we stop the drones?”

“That’s no easy task,” he says. “We’ll need to wait for the power to come back on and reboot the system. Then we’ll see what we can do.”

“But you’ll help us?”

“Keep me off the shock table, and I’ll help you.”

“Shock table?” I ask.

“Yes,” he says, shaking his head and shivering at the very thought. “They claimed that it helped with my moods.”