Rolling Thunder (21 page)

“That’s what I don’t understand,” said an irritating voice just behind me. Believe it or not, Cosmo was back. “You guys are eating up a lot of our tax dollars out here, and when I ask questions, all I get is ‘We don’t know.’ I’m afraid that’s not enough for me. Why doesn’t somebody just go up and chip off some big pieces? Better yet, drill a hole in the sucker, a mile deep, and
see
what’s inside.”

Though I couldn’t see much in the dark room, a certain heat seemed to permeate the area as Captain Stone struggled to keep her diplomatic mask in place. She knew a bad story from this guy could do her and the whole enterprise a lot of harm.

“As I’m sure you know, Mr. Wills, there are many who advocate doing just that. Never mind the danger, I’m sure we could find some volunteers for such an expedition. I would even go myself if I could convince myself that it was only a big rock out there. But what if they
are
alive? What if somebody is living in there? What would happen to them if we drilled? Maybe nothing, maybe disaster. Or what if the rocks themselves are alive? I’d think a lot more than twice before I stuck a pin in a creature that big.”

I would, too, but I kept quiet. I love to listen in on a good argument. Cosmo made an impolite sound with his lips. Asshole.

“You probably know I believe that those stones out there are just that. Big stones. Junk jewelry of the gods. I did a show on it.”

“I must not have caught that one.”

Cosmo was oblivious to the sarcasm.

“It makes no sense that, if they’re intelligent, they wouldn’t have contacted us after all these years out here. What are we, anyway, chopped liver?”

I didn’t get that reference at all, but for some reason I piped up.

“They’re slow,” I said.

It was like he couldn’t believe I’d spoken, like one of the chairs had suddenly contradicted him. I, a lowly lieutenant, and he the big celebrity. Maybe he thought I was stupid. Well, maybe I was, to challenge a guy whose business was words, and whose technique was to ambush his guests, switch off their mikes when they tried to talk, and turn them into something like chopped liver.

“What does slow have to do with anything?”

“They’re slow and we’re small,” I said. “Their songs, for all the time we’ve been listening to them, are still very short, by our standards. I’m wondering if they live on a different time scale than we do.”

“You’re saying you think they communicate with this ELF stuff?” he scoffed. I’ll hand it to him, I don’t think I’ve ever heard anybody scoff quite as well. But it was his profession.

“I don’t know. Maybe. Maybe a year to us is like a second to them.” Before he could scoff further, I hurried on. “Look, if those things
are
alive and intelligent, we’re smaller than a louse studying a blue whale. Why would the whale notice us?”

“I’m not a louse,” he said. “Human beings aren’t lice.”

Oh, my, have I ever been presented with a better straight line? But I let it lie.

“Say it’s a flea and an elephant,” I plowed on. “Maybe the elephant is aware of the flea, and maybe he isn’t. But if the flea bites, he might
become
aware, and I don’t think that would be to the flea’s advantage.”

“I agree,” Monet said. “Let’s don’t annoy them.”

Cosmo scoffed again.

“Bullshit. I say we bring in a medium artillery piece and send an experimental round into the side of that thing, see what happens. I say—”

But we never got to his next pearl of wisdom, because right then a horn started sounding and everybody started moving.

“Brace yourselves,” Captain Stone said. “We’re about to get a bit of rock and roll.”

The lights came up and the floor began to move. Oh, my! I imagine it would have been scary enough in Martian gravity, but here, where you weighed so little, you could get thrown pretty high in the air. I grabbed on to a handrail by the windows and hung on.

While the room was shuddering side to side and up and down, I noticed with a sort of dreamy detachment some things I’d seen before but not actually taken in. For instance, all the tables were bolted to the floor, and there were benches instead of chairs, and they were also bolted down. Better to have them as something to hang on to instead of letting them become deadly flying objects.

I heard glassware rattling and looked at the bar. I saw all the bottles were secured behind a rail, like on a ship at sea. All in all there wasn’t a lot that wasn’t tied down in some way, other than us.

Still, you can’t tie down everything. A jar of olives came bouncing toward me, was fielded by a table, and smacked out into center field. Ice fountained up from behind the bar from a cabinet that hadn’t been secured properly. The bartender was scrambling to lock it down. A small amp and a mike stand bounced off the low bandstand and lodged under a bench.

The biggest part of the debris was Cosmo Wills. Naturally he had not bothered to read the stuff we were all given when we arrived at Taliesen, and had been utterly baffled when the quake started. Instead of grabbing something, he had tried to run, overdid it, and flew into the air. I saw the ceiling swat him. His head went through an acoustical tile up there, and then he tore loose and somehow managed to squirm around in the air so that he hit the floor with his head, too. He put his hands out to protect himself, which only meant that he was shoving off the floor with his arms instead of his legs when he hit, and bounced high again, and this is almost impossible to believe, but he managed to turn around in the air
again,
and hit his head into a light fixture. He held on to something this time, and hung there, howling, for the rest of the quake.

Which was a fine place for him, in my opinion. Does that make me a bad person?

IT SEEMED HE’D
got his head jammed up into some wiring. It was sort of fun getting him back down.

He hung on to the acoustic tile cross bracing, kicking his feet at first, but he finally realized that wasn’t making it any better. So he started shouting about how sorry we were all going to be that we’d ever been born, how he was going to sue everybody at the base for everything they owned, he was going to take the Navy apart with his bare hands. But with his head stuck up there in the sound baffles, we couldn’t hear him too well.

The chief systems engineer was brought in to assess the problem. He took his time. It seemed to take even more time to find a ladder. In fact, nobody seemed to be in a big hurry about anything, and the only problem most of us were having was trying not to bust a gut laughing. Tina was doubled over, both hands over her mouth as she desperately tried to stifle her hysterical giggle, which was all too identifiable.

“I don’t think he can hear you,” I whispered to her. “Let it out.”

This only made matters worse for her, as I’d intended. She grew so red in the face I began to worry about her. She took a deep breath, tried to steady herself, and finally collapsed in a giggling fit again.

“Can he sue the Navy?” I asked Captain Stone.

“We’re lawsuit-proof, as an institution,” she said, with satisfaction. “It’s in the constitution. It’s possible to sue individual officers for dereliction of duty, things like that, but he signed a release. He probably doesn’t remember it.”

I felt better. I knew that if he
could
sue, he
would
sue.

They called in more engineers. It began to seem like it was the most difficult problem they’d ever encountered. Every now and then one would have to turn away to stifle a laugh. Oh, but they were careful. Nothing they did could be seen as deliberate procrastination, nothing worse than excess caution, and who could complain about that? Nobody but Cosmo, and he did enough complaining for the whole planet.

I noticed that Slomo wasn’t laughing, but he had a small smile on his face. Then I noticed something else, and sidled over to him.

“Are you getting all this?” I whispered.

“Every second of it,” he said, pointing to the camera he held at his hip. “Even better, I got the whole thing, him bouncing around, banging his head. Screaming and whimpering like a child.”

“I don’t think he’ll want to use it.”

“He won’t even see it. But this chip goes into my most secure file, and someday he might get a look. Call it job security. Or maybe, if I’m pissed off enough, a way to get a little respect. I might ask him to imagine how he’d like to see this on download, available to the whole world.”

“My lips are sealed,” I assured him, and spent the next ten minutes enjoying myself, imagining that footage on the news.

AND I LIED,
I told Tina about it. And I think she told Aldric. Oops!

After they got Cosmo out of the ceiling, hardly the worse for wear except for a knot on his forehead and a broken nose that had bled freely—when he saw it he shrieked, and almost passed out—Captain Stone called up a detailed simulation of Grumpy’s south face on a wallscreen. She indicated a vertical area that was about a mile wide and was represented in a different color.

“About a hundred feet,” she said. “Not too bad of a shake for that amount of movement.”

“That wasn’t a bad shake?” I asked.

“Moderate. And now TECP-40 is a hundred feet taller.” She seemed to take a certain satisfaction in that. I guess it made sense. There was so little they knew about these things that it was good to have a nice, solid fact you could measure.

“It grows faster and more often than any of them,” she said. “That’s why we call him Grumpy.”

If that was a moderate one, I hoped to be back home before the old Grumpster got really temperamental.

11

AS IF GOD
wanted to be sure we experienced the full spectrum of oddness in and around Taliesen, our bus broke down on the way home. Worse, it wasn’t even the bus that would take us back to Clarke but the one ferrying us from our rockin’ appearance at Forward back to Taliesen Main. Of course it sent Cosmo ballistic once again. I thought about killing him. Then I thought about putting a round from my sidearm into his left knee, then his right one, then watching him bleed. Can’t prosecute me for my thoughts.

He was a real sight, with a big bandage over his nose, one eye black, his forehead still a bit swollen.

“What a fuckin’ zoo!” he was shouting. “I’m going to find out who’s responsible for this fucking mess, and I’m going to hang him out to dry. Driver, what the fuck are you doing down there?”

He was leaning over the hatch the driver had opened. No steam was coming out of it or anything dramatic like that, but I heard a clanking noise. The good old sledgehammer cure?

I thought about planting my boot in his butt, but the gravity was so low he’d have no trouble recovering before he fell in. That’s when Senator Wu Zheng Han walked over to him and tapped him on the shoulder.

Cosmo straightened … and Senator Wu pinched Cosmo’s broken nose between his thumb and finger, and squeezed. The sound that came out of Cosmo was halfway between a honk and an oink.

“Curb your tongue, sir,” he said, reasonably. He gave another pinch—we heard another honk/oink—and let him go. Cosmo stood there, stunned.

“You have done nothing but whine and complain for this entire trip. I have tolerated it, but I will not countenance language like that around my daughter.”

I looked at Monet, who rolled her eyes. I happened to know his daughter used language a lot stronger than that … but not around her father. And who cared what the excuse was? It was high time somebody put this asshole in his place. I only regretted I hadn’t had the courage to do it myself. But the amazing thing was that the man to do it was the senator, who had been quiet as a mouse for most of the trip.

“Where the fuck do you get off—
honk!”

“I take no pleasure in your public humiliation, sir,” the senator went on. “But since the offense was a highly public one, you left me no choice. I am a man of peace, but will fight if provoked. If you demand satisfaction for this insult, I will meet with your representatives as soon as we return to Mars.”

Things got very quiet. Dueling had first been proposed as a way to settle public insults in the Republic only about five years ago, and won by a narrow margin. Not with guns or swords or anything deadly, and not willy-nilly, people calling each other out just for meanness, or for some imagined insult. It had to be approved by a board of your peers, and it was closely monitored. In fact, there were so many rules and regulations and handicaps (no three-hundred-pound bruiser against a ninety-eight-pound woman) that there were only two or three duels every week. But the hassle of going through the process even to get turned down before it came to actual fisticuffs was enough to keep most people at least a teeny bit more polite.

Of course, when the blood did start to fly, it was great spectator sport. Ratings were usually high, and they’d be through the roof for a fight between a senator and Cosmo.

I could see Cosmo doing the math. Senator Wu was a tad shorter, and maybe fifteen years older. But he was known to be a practitioner of some martial art or another. So there was that. Cosmo would not relish getting his butt whipped in public. But he was also just smart enough to realize that, if it came before the board, he had no friends here. I sure as hell knew how I would testify. There was a very good chance he could be made to look like the aggressor, and a fool, which was worse, and the senator a man just offering a reasonable response to provocation.