Asimov's Science Fiction: April/May 2014 Read online

  Quarles made a two-fingered gesture that brought up a menu. After some manipulation, the image shifted so the view was at floor level, from one of the front corners. Again Quarles constructed a box and again he made it huge.

  "His butt's not on the floor. Is it?"

  Quarles stepped back. "What, you think he's floating?"

  Lt. Col. Oblonski had said a man with mental powers could float. He could phase through a wall. He could summon rain. Though Jimmy's own abilities defied standard scientific descriptions, even he felt such scenarios were not credible.

  "No. Look. He's pushing with his... I guess his calves? His ankles? The sides of his feet are touching, but nothing else is."

  "What's that mean?"

  "It means walking to the toilet isn't his only exercise."

  10. From the Sky

  Never a coffee drinker, Jimmy witnessed with some envy the obvious pleasure it provided to the other patrons of the cafe. He had stayed overnight in an upstairs room overlooking the sinkhole—he was pretty sure he heard a cat fall in at one point, pretty much the only sound after businesses closed along the impassable street—and now was seated at the scene of yesterday's interview, wondering whether he could discern a next step.

  After her rescue, stunned and soaked, the teacher had sat on the sidewalk with other people until the EMTs arrived. "It's possible I exaggerated," she conceded. "Maybe the door was already off before he got to it. There was a wrenching metal sound. You know the sound. Grrronnnk. And then this tremendous SNAP! like something breaking. And, zoop!, he pulled me up out of there. When you encounter something unexpected, your mind tries to construct a meaningful narrative—even if the narrative seems crazy."

  He knew what she meant. He had paid for her dessert.

  Inch-thick bread for the two slices of French toast soaked up the syrup quickly. He poured more and observed a man at another table, jaw sunk below his shirt collar, delicately sip his coffee, plump thumb and index finger pincering the mug's handle. The man peered with great intensity at the television mounted high in the diner's front corner. Jimmy cut another chunk with his fork's edge.

  "That's weird." The man sipping coffee had spoken. Jimmy followed his attention to the television. He saw heavy fog—evidently the end of a weather report—followed by the image of a human-high white boulder. The reporter called it a "hailstone."

  "Very weird," the other man said.

  "What was that about?"

  Without turning his head, the man said, "Those folks got hailstones the size of cars".

  "And fog?"

  "Those were clouds. The weather woman said the clouds came down to the ground. And then they turned to water. That's as crazy as what happened here!"

  Someone had left the morning's newspaper on the counter. Ferrisburg, Maryland, had had a spectacularly unstable day. Lives were lost. But a rescuer no one knew had moved among them. And, reportedly, he had not been alone.

  Jimmy rushed through his breakfast, regretting at the last bite that he hadn't asked for coffee after all. He felt himself moving toward a precipice from which he might never return to recover what was, in haste, set aside.

  Back by the bathrooms, duffel between his feet, he used the payphone. He hadn't brought the phone number of Bekka's friends, but perhaps she had headed home.

  An overly subdued version of her voice said, "I'm not here. Please leave a message."

  "I'm not coming back yet," he said. "I found out... there's another..." He could not formulate an explanation. "I'm sorry. Please don't give up on me. Not yet, anyway."

  He had re-parked his car last night in a proper parking spot, under an electrical wire that ran between buildings. Birds had, evidently, spent their morning above his car roof. Berries must have been for breakfast.

  He pulled the slender atlas from under the passenger seat. Ferrisburg was so close to the Pennsylvania border, he didn't have to flip pages. Two hours, and he'd be there.

  Jimmy slowed to exit as the highway curled between the rooftops of Ferrisburg, a city of red brick and narrow streets. Fresh black stripes on the Jersey barriers showed where cars had veered in the sudden obscurity, and taillight and plastic bumper bits littered the pavement. Jimmy took the exit marked and dipped toward town.

  The breadth of the disturbance came immediately into view, with detour signs routing traffic from the ramp around a four-story building whose façade had collapsed. Bricks lay across a street marked off with yellow police tape. He saw other damaged buildings and cars, though he judged that some of the debris had been removed. Where the traffic turned back toward the town's uninspiring, sooty midsection, a narrow boulevard with banks on two corners, Potomac Edison trucks lined the curbs. Jimmy pulled into a combination gas station and supermarket.

  He immediately felt unwell when he opened the car door. Dense with humidity, the sky rendered the sun futile, bearable to look at. He undid one more button on his shirt, the same shirt he'd worn to dinner two nights ago. It clung to his back.

  Rather than heading directly toward the scene where yesterday's chaos seemed to have been concentrated, he entered the gas station's shop. A cardboard sheet took the place of one large window.

  The damp young man behind the counter said hello and scratched at his spotty brown beard. The store was cool enough, but the clerk's forehead dripped, and dark stains swelled on his T-shirt.

  "That happen yesterday?" Jimmy asked.

  "I's standing right here." The man leaned across the counter and aimed one arm.

  "A hailstone the size of my head bounced off the hood of a car and came crashing right in." With his hand, he traced the projectile's trajectory.

  "Wow."

  "Someone coulda been killed. I heard someone was, downtown."

  A mother with two pre-schoolers approached the counter, pausing to see whether Jimmy was finished talking. The girl looked to be a year older than the boy; the two held hands, swung their arms in unison, and stared at the backs of their mother's legs.

  "You go ahead," said Jimmy.

  He thought to collect some provisions, and saw peanuts behind him on a rack. At the far end of the store, he took a tall can of iced tea from the cooler. When the mother and children left, the opening door chimed.

  Jimmy set his purchases on the counter. "I wonder if you can help me out. I'm following up on reports of... strangers who came to the rescue during all the action yesterday."

  "You a reporter?"

  He hesitated. "I'm not. I'm just interested in events like this." He put on a look of sincere disappointment. "I can't go into it," he said, hoping the elusive answer suggested significance.

  The young man said, " 'kay," and typed at the register.

  "Did you see any of these unfamiliar people? Especially an old man, a very old man. He might have been with a group, helping out?"

  "No one I didn't know came through here." He stopped typing. "That'll be four forty-seven." Jimmy thumbed through his wad of loose bills for a five. "My uncle's restaurant took a beating. A car plowed right into it. I don't get not at least slowing down when you can't see the hood of your own car. And those hail... boulders or whatever, it's like they went after that block in particular. Pretty bad deal."

  Reasoning that any connection would at least lead him to a person with a story to tell, Jimmy got directions to the uncle's restaurant. He left the car behind and set off in the shimmery heat, his dark arms instantly slick.

  A man and a woman stood outside the building in question, a brick building with two entrances on the street, one of which had been left doorless and demolished. He could see a bar beyond the ragged hole. The couple, both with close-cropped white hair, both of the same height and roundly built, stood in the paltry shade alongside bulging white trash bags piled against the wall.

  "We're closed," the man said, making the woman cackle with laughter and slap his pale arm. He remained straight-faced. "Try back at dinner." She stomped her foot this time to accompany her laughter.

  "Sorry,
honey," she said to Jimmy.

  "You've got a good attitude."

  "I," said the man, "have no attitude at all."

  "Pff!" objected the woman. "All you got is attitude."

  "Building inspectors are checking to see if we can even go back in," the man told Jimmy. "It didn't fall on us while we were hauling out this lot." He indicated the trash bags.

  "Only so much can go wrong all at once," said the woman, and set her mouth in a line. Neither questioned Jimmy's curiosity about the previous day's events. As it turned out, they had seen the man himself.

  "We all saw 'im," said the man.

  "Who's 'all'?"

  He waved a hand about vaguely. "All of us standing here when the clouds all a sudden turned to water. And there were two other fellas with 'im. One guy had these funny eyeglasses. So thick you could see from twenty yards away that it made his eyes huge."

  "The other one was missing a ear."

  The man turned with exaggerated slowness and regarded the woman. "Where do you get this stuff?"

  "I'm telling you. You weren't standing where I was standing."

  "I was practically wearing your blouse."

  Face squinted shut in a silent paroxysm of laughter, the woman slugged her companion's shoulder.

  A tremendously large beetle emerged from among the trash bags, but when it reached the sunlit portion of the sidewalk, it veered back toward the wall.

  "Other people helped," said the man. "We helped. We helped the man who drove into our front door. That was quite a surprise!"

  The woman threw her hands up at the recollection. "Jee-miny Christmas!"

  "What else can you tell me about this group of people?"

  The man said, "One of them, not the older gentleman, was carrying a machine. Ran off with it."

  "What sort of machine?"

  "I'nt know. Some boxy thing."

  "How would you describe the older man?" Jimmy had left his book in the car.

  "Tall," said the woman, who was peering inside the building now at the sounds of a discussion among the unseen inspectors. "Maybe a Northern accent."

  "I'd say he was a Latin... Latino fellow."

  The woman turned back. "I thought he looked like Father Michael up at the church. What is he, Lebanese?"

  "I could sorta see that."

  The woman gave this a satisfied and considered series of nods, her eyes looking about as if she were comparing visible evidence.

  "So they just drove off?"

  "Um," said the man, and he and the woman looked sideways at each other.

  "Go 'head," she said.

  "It did look like a car, but it went straight up. Like on the end of a bungee line."

  "That's a good description," said the woman.

  "I saw it go up from that alley just there. Makes you think about where flying saucers come from. Are you investigating that? Maybe you don't know what all strange things have transpired here. We're kind of famous for another hailstorm. What, eighty or so years ago?"

  "My granpap used to talk about it."

  "It was record-sized hail. The size of a fist."

  "So much for that record."

  The man said, "If you're investigating this, you should talk to BL. I saw BL talking to that older fellow."

  "BL?"

  "Bob Law. Always gone by BL."

  The woman, still looking through the blasted entrance, nodded. "His folks called him BL."

  "I seen him walk around the corner with the old guy. Was there for a minute."

  "Do you think BL would talk to me?"

  "Oh, sure. He down the street at the ga -rage."

  Leaving them, Jimmy wondered if he and Bekka would grow to look like each other; then it struck him that the couple might have been brother and sister.

  As Jimmy entered the glass-fronted office, the man at the shabby desk behind the counter tore open four packs of sugar at once, then commenced emptying their contents into his short cup of what appeared to be coffee. His black hair ranged about his head like weeds and hung in his face, and he did not look fully awake.

  BL did not acknowledge Jimmy's arrival. "Excuse me."

  The man plunged his index finger into the cup and stirred. "Be right with you." His deep voice seemed reluctantly tugged from his chest.

  "I'm not here for business. I was talking to those folks who own the restaurant that was damaged." "The Stookeys. That's Stookey's Restr'nt."

  "Sure. Anyway. They said you might know the elderly man who showed up in town during yesterday's events."

  "Hm." He finally withdrew his neglected finger and sucked it. "I'm not sure who you mean."

  "There was a man, an old man, tall, dark-complected. He had companions."

  "I don't think I can help you." Furtively, from behind strands of hair, BL met his eyes.

  "Perhaps," Jimmy said, and steadied his voice. "Perhaps you picked up some idea about where he was going."

  BL took a longer pause this time, yet repeated, "I don't think I can help you."

  "That's not the same as saying you don't know anything."

  "That, my friend, is an accurate statement. Why are you so interested in this... old man?"

  "I knew him—That's about all I can say. I spent some time around him. Recently."

  "And what did you call him?"

  "Beg pardon?"

  "By what name," and he paused to sip his coffee, "did you refer to him?"

  "We didn't have exactly one name."

  "I'm talking 'bout you." He set the coffee down with what appeared to be precision, as if the cup had a place to which it must be returned. That done, he settled his hands in his lap and gave Jimmy his full attention. "What'd you call him?"

  "Methusaleh."

  "Methusaleh."

  "I really can't explain further." Jimmy heard himself echoing the other man's resistance.

  The hair over BL's eyes twitched when he blinked. "I'm afraid you're wasting your time," he said at last. "Or I'm wasting yours, is another way of seeing it."

  At the loose-fitting door, Jimmy spun the knob, then said, over his shoulder, "What should I have called him?"

  Car door open to let out the heat, Jimmy sat with one foot on the blacktop, pointlessly contemplating the piece of cardboard that crookedly sealed the shop window. BL appeared beside him as if winking into existence at that moment.

  "Studdard, Georgia," he said. Jimmy gripped the steering wheel in surprise. "Sorry." BL appeared amused. He blinked against his hair. "I'm letting you know something I believe you ought to know."

  "What are you—wait, what did you say?"

  "Studdard, Georgia. Unless the Old Man is mistaken. Any clue could be misread." Jimmy didn't move. "Well, that's it," BL said, and as he turned to go, he parted with what might have been a salute. Keys, a grape cluster's-worth of them, jangled from a belt loop. He had, somehow, approached Jimmy without them making a sound.

  11. Prison Walls

  Weston stood with her fist at her lips, one arm propping the other, to watch a series of proofs play out on the wall-sized screen. Leaning against the door, glowering, Covey moved his massive jaw from side to side ruminatively. Quarles had helped Jimmy assemble video clips that moved both at Methusaleh's pace and an accelerated pace that made his motions more clear.

  Weston said "I'll be damned" early on, then held her silence.

  "So," said Jimmy when the presentation was complete, not sure whether he needed to say anything more.

  Weston spoke across her fist. "Why did no one notice this before?"

  Jimmy hesitated.

  "He got sloppy," Covey said. "He's old."

  "There goes your depression theory," Weston said to Jimmy, lowering her hand.

  "Yes, ma'am."

  "And there goes any notion that this man's not still a threat," Covey said, pushing away from the door. Jimmy noticed him adjust his protective vest, the man obviously thinking that force might be needed, that anything was possible.

  "He's stayed fit all this
time," Weston said. "And he's stayed sharp. With what aim in mind? Escape? Overpowering the guards? Is there anything else we've missed?"

  She kept her head moving to include all three of them in her questioning. "Coded messages? To whom? Is there any possibility he's palmed anything? A utensil or a container from the MREs? Something from his bedding?"

  "We could take it all away," Covey said.

  "I'm not comfortable with that. That's not a path we're going down."

  Quarles said, "Pardon me, ma'am, but he walks through the scanner on the way to the yard, and we search the room during his showers."

  "I want body cavity searches," she said. Covey nodded. "We can do that."

  "I'm adding a fourth man to the security detail when he goes outside. Two dogs at all times, not just randomly. Keep them close to him. I also want some increased checks on our perimeter. And not a word about any change in front of him. Let him think he's got us fooled."

  "Won't the extra security indicate something?" Jimmy said.

  Weston, hands on hips, looked at the floor. "Yeah, probably. And we have to assume he's caught sight of you, so he knows something's different. But I can't maintain the status quo." She said to Jimmy, "Good work. Does this alter your approach, Lieutenant?"

  "Actually, this is helpful," said Jimmy. "It's... informative." He now had more words with which to approach the old man waiting at the passageway's end. Yes, what he had learned fit with the existing notions: powerful, in control, hidden. He was all of those, in ways they had not fully understood. The true mistake, Jimmy realized, was to see him constrained, managed, confined... in prison. He had never been imprisoned.

  Methusaleh lay on the floor, arms at his side. Jimmy used the computer to track down something he had read in high school. Enough of the phrasing came to him to enable a quick search. From Thoreau's essay "On Civil Disobedience," he read:

  ... as I stood considering the walls of solid stone, two or three feet thick, the door of wood and iron, a foot thick, and the iron grating which strained the light, I could not help being struck with the foolishness of that institution which treated me as if I were mere flesh and blood and bones, to be locked up. I wondered that it should have concluded at length that this was the best use it could put me to, and had never thought to avail itself of my services in some way.