Читать книгу Heroes of Earth - Martin Berman-Gorvine - Страница 7

CHAPTER 2

While Arnold sneaked out the emergency exit in hopes of avoiding the bullies who had chased him into the library earlier in the day, Alison had to run her own gauntlet walking home from school. She didn’t have to worry about the likes of Matt Walters or Jared Nichols lying in wait—they were the ones who should be worrying about her, if they laid a hand on her kid brother again—but she did have to worry about running into Barry Freed. The balding old hippie was tall and stringy and smelly, and somehow he was always in her path even if she took the long way home, around the trailer park.

Home was already in sight when he stepped out suddenly from the alley between the Value-Mart and the Church of Christ. Alison stifled a scream. It wouldn’t do to let Barry know she was afraid of him, especially if the rumors were true and he really was an old pervert.

“It’s all a lie, you know,” he said, his wandering, cloudy right eye seeming to linger where it shouldn’t, on her chest, before rolling up to the blank gray sky.

I’m annoyed, not afraid, Alison told herself, and tried to make her voice show it. “Can we talk about this some other time? I have to get home, Mr. Freed.”

His good eye focused on her face and began to tear up. “That’s what they want. For you to go home and do your homework like a good little girl, be an obedient cog in their machine.”

Alison had inherited her father’s sharp tongue. “A cog can’t be obedient, Mr. Freed. It’s just a piece of metal.”

“And you might as well be just a piece of metal, if you do what they want all the time.”‘

“Who are they, Mr. Freed?”

Alison regretted asking the question immediately, but it was too late. The old hippie leaned in and breathed sour breath in her face. The stink his clothes gave off showed why all the kids in town called him Barry Peed. “They, them. The President, the FBI, the CIA. J. Edgar Hoover—”

“Is dead, Mr. Freed. A long time ago.”

“That’s what they want you to think.” There was no point arguing with him. Not when he still called the High Satrap “the president,” which hadn’t been his official title in, like, forty years. Dad said that poor Mr. Freed was delusional, which meant there was no talking him out of the crazy stuff he believed in. On the other hand, plenty of people believed crazy stuff, and nobody thought any worse of them as long as they didn’t go to the bathroom in their clothes.

He tilted his head back, and Alison clapped her hands over her ears a moment too late—he had already started his infamous imitation of the most famous moment in history. “That’s one small step for a man, one giant step for—what in God’s name is that?” Alison unblocked her ears and tried to edge around Mr. Freed, who was talking in his normal cracked voice. “I mean, does that even sound plausible to you? The government goes to all that trouble and expense to put a man on the moon, and the High Ones choose that very moment to show up and announce their presence to the world?”

“You’re spitting, Mr. Freed. And you’re not making any sense.” Not that that ever stopped him. “They’ve explained a million times how that was the best way they could be sure of reaching everyone at the same time, since, like, a billion people were watching the moon landing on TV, and what better way to show everyone they were friendly than picking up all three Apollo astronauts and putting them down on the South Lawn of the White House an hour later—”

“Ha!” They were starting to attract an audience. Alison hoped the cops would show up soon. When Mr. Freed got too worked up, a sheriff’s deputy usually came to get him and let him sleep it off in a nice warm cell. But no cops were in sight.

“Tell it like it is, Barry!” someone yelled, just to rile him up.

Alison ground her teeth. That was just mean. It was really no better than that rotten Matt picking on Arnold just because he was a brainiac and had a hard time making friends.

“You bet I’ll tell it like it is!” The old hippie had jumped up on the Birches’ white picket fence, which teetered dangerously beneath his weight. “There ARE no High Ones! It’s all a lie! There’s no such thing as big blue starfish, or little green men, either! They faked the moon landing just to make people think there could be aliens, so they’d have an excuse to crush the Movement. Then they got everyone hooked on their mind-control devices, which they have the chutzpah to claim are ‘neural readers’ that are an educational gift from the imaginary aliens!”

That hit a little too close to home. Alison seized the chance to slink away. Her house was just the other side of Maddox Boulevard, the main road to the beaches on Assateague Island. In bleak autumn weather like this, of course, no one was heading out that way, and all the ice cream shops and tourist traps that gave the town a holiday feel in the summer were closed. A lot of the lifelong islanders, the “from-heres,” depended on beachgoers for their living but also resented all the noise and crowding they brought. Alison didn’t mind the summer crowds at all. When all those people came down from Baltimore and Washington, Chincoteague almost felt like home—her real home back in Pikesville.

Dad had fixed up their new house so it looked a lot like the old one, painted white with green trim. With the money he made at the fusion plant, he could have afforded instead to tear it down and replace it with a new house and a swimming pool in the backyard. But he wanted to keep it, because it was “historic,” meaning it was over a hundred years old, with a living room ceiling that bulged downward in the middle as if it was about to collapse, though Dad’s engineer buddy Bruce Nomura claimed there was no danger. This would have been more reassuring if Mr. Nomura had been a structural engineer instead of an expert on the High Ones’ nuclear fusion technology. If it was so safe, Alison wondered why it was so noisy. Sometimes she’d lie awake at night wondering if there were ghosts making all those creaks and groans, even though at seventeen she was much too old to believe in such things. Would I be happier if it was a burglar? she sometimes wondered, by daylight.

Alison let herself in with her key. Dad wouldn’t be home for another two hours at least, and it would be dark by then. She set a snack out for Arnold, who was doubtless daydreaming on his way home. Her little brother liked peanut butter sandwiches on whole wheat with sliced banana instead of jelly. She thought that was gross, but it reminded him of when Mom used to make them for him, back before she started spending the whole day in bed with her migraines. Then she tiptoed upstairs to peek into the master bedroom. Sure enough, Mom was lying in bed with the shades pulled and a damp washcloth over her eyes. Good, she’s asleep, Alison thought, but as she turned to go that familiar cranky voice started up.

“You’re not going to watch tri-vee before getting your homework done, are you, Allie?”

“Of course not, Mom.”

The graying head turned from side to side but the eyes never opened. Since they’d moved to Chincoteague Mom hadn’t found a hairdresser who could get her color right, or so she said, but Alison thought that since she’d gotten so much sicker over the past year she just didn’t care what she looked like anymore. And she looked like hell, with her face wrinkling up and her hair going wild as weeds in an untended garden. The darkness she craved could only hide so much, and then there was her B.O. Allie didn’t know how Dad could stand it. Basically it sucked having a mother with NINA—Network-Induced Neuronal Atrophy, a disease that struck fewer than one in a million n-net users. It was getting hard to remember what Mom had been like before, when she used to play her guitar and make Dad go out dancing with her. She’d taught Alison to play a little, but the guitar had sat untouched in a corner of the master bedroom ever since they’d moved to Chincoteague. Even if she’d been any good at it, Alison wouldn’t have felt right playing it when Mom couldn’t.

Since Mom was lying still, the rumpled bedsheets barely rising and falling over her chest, Alison thought she must have fallen back asleep. So she tiptoed out of the room, shutting the door behind her, and back downstairs to the kitchen, where she took some string cheese and diet soda out of the fridge. She ate her snack in front of the tri-vee stage, with the sound turned most of the way down. It wasn’t as if she made a mess or anything. She’d get her homework done; she always did even though it was so much harder for her than for everyone else since she couldn’t use the n-readers. So she hardly felt guilty at all about disobeying Mom. Anyway, it was practically a social commandment to keep up with “The Spacefarers.” Even if the plots were sort of dumb, Donny Schmitz as the captain’s son Brad was cute.

The show assembled itself in crisp 3-D above the half-meter-square, slightly raised black panel of the stage. Today’s episode involved a water mining run the UNSS Intrepid was making out to Ganymede, the biggest of Jupiter’s moons. It should’ve been an easy, two-week cruise, but the saboteur Izzy Goldstein, Captain Adams’ nemesis, was plotting to sprinkle arsenic on the pure ice, and Brad and his girlfriend Janey were going to have to stop him. No one in Alison’s class of seniors had honey-blond hair and perfect skin like Janey, played by Taylor Fields, though Sydney Birch came close. Alison couldn’t claim to be the homecoming queen’s friend, or even in an outer orbit, like Jupiter around the sun. Though she felt as big and fat as Jupiter, lately. Dad liked to say she was zaftig, an old Yiddish word that meant plump and cuddly. Thanks a lot, Dad.

The station logo came on just as the camera was zooming in for a close-up of Donny and Taylor smooching, their life-size faces floating a couple centimeters above the tri-vee stage. “We interrupt this broadcast to bring you an urgent news update.” Alison groaned and reached for the remote, but was distracted by Arnold’s thumping arrival. He threw his book-bag in the corner and slouched toward the kitchen for his snack. With his face turned away, Alison couldn’t tell whether he’d been beaten up again.

“How was school?” she asked. He grunted something. She got up to follow him, did a double-take. “Where’d you get that plant?”

“It’s a spider plant.”

“Who gave it to you?” The noise of the tri-vee covered his mumbled response. They were saying something about a “terrorist bomb outrage” at the Capitol Building in Washington. Same old junk, but Alison made a mental note to set the clock ten minutes early in the morning, for the extra hassle they were bound to have getting to school.

“Sorry, what?”

“I said, the new librarian gave it to me!”

“Keep your voice down, idiot, Mom’s sleeping. What new librarian?”

“Her name is Gloria. She said you should come see her. Can I go now?”

“Well, you don’t have to be all sarcastic,” Alison said to his back as he plodded upstairs. It was no use. Why can’t I just have a normal kid brother? It’s not enough that we’re “come-heres” and Jews, he has to be the little weird kid!

Alison sighed and went back to the living room, turning off the tri-vee just as they were saying how many people had been killed and that the Patriotic Front and the Human Defense League were “issuing competing claims of responsibility.” Tri-vee time might be ruined, but she really should use the extra time to get a start on her history term project. Being in the All-Planetary class wasn’t as much fun as it had been back in Pikesville, not with the teacher, Miss Burbage, just expecting everyone to spout back at her whatever she told them.

Maybe I’ve bitten off more than I can chew. Alison gnawed on the eraser end of her pencil as she thought this, a bad habit she’d had as long as she could remember. The pencil had been new that morning, but the metal collar that held the eraser already looked like a shiny wad of used chewing gum. What possessed me to write about “How the High Ones ended the Cold War”? It’ll take me forever.

Alison wondered if she could trust Arnold to put the tilapia fillets in the oven for dinner if she went to the town library to do some research. He slouched past where she sat at the dining room table with her books and her notes, and grunted when she asked him to get dinner started.

“Can’t you keep it down? Mom has a really bad migraine,” she said as he started banging around in the kitchen cabinets. “What are you doing up there anyway? The baking pans are down below.”

“I need a plate to catch the water.”

“The water?”

“For my plant. I have to water it or it’ll shrivel up and die. Like I wish you would do.”

“So witty. Listen, turd-breath, you think your friendly librarian would still be at the school?” The high school was two blocks closer than the town library. Alison figured she could run there in five minutes, spend a quarter hour or so talking to the librarian and checking out books, and still be back in time to make sure Arnold didn’t completely wreck supper.

“Search me. She was still there when I left. That’s when she gave me the plant.”

“You better take good care of that plant. Remember what happened with Peeps?” She’d had to take over the care and feeding of the hamster Arnold got for his eighth birthday. It wasn’t that he didn’t care about the poor little beast, it was just that he was always too busy daydreaming. Well, this time it was his problem. Alison grabbed her book-bag, took out the binder and textbooks and headed out the door.

The sun was already low over the marshes to the west as she walked. A seagull soared overhead, cawing. When they first moved out here in the dead of winter last year, Alison thought living at the beach year-round sounded cool. But now most of the magic had worn off. She still missed her friends and the fun she used to have in Baltimore. It was true that the Wallops Island Interplanetary Base and the fusion plant drew people from all over the world to live and work in the area, but it still felt like a hick town to her. And Arnold was having a really rough time of it—not that things had ever been easy for him, even back home in Pikesville.

The high school was deserted as dusk closed in, but Alison saw a light was still on in the library, which had a separate emergency door. She frowned a little when she pushed and found it open—with all the yelling they did about security, how could they just leave an outside door unlocked?

“Hello?” she called as she walked in. An orange cat that had been sleeping on the counter mewed and jumped down, padding back among the dimly lit shelves. Seeing no one else around, Alison decided to follow the cat. The books weren’t organized on any system she could see, and the selection seemed really strange for a school library. Plus, there didn’t seem to be anything on recent history. She was just making her mind up to come back when the librarian was on duty when she saw a flickering shadow out of the corner of her eye.

“Hello?” she called. Between the shelves she saw a gap in the back wall that looked just wide enough to squeeze through.

This is stupid. There’s nobody here. I need to get back home. But light was spilling out of the gap, and curiosity won out. This was the building’s outer wall, so how could there be a corridor leading further back? Because that’s what Alison saw, once she stepped in. A blank corridor, with gray cinderblock walls, a hard-surfaced floor painted a dark red, and a ceiling made of the same kind of acoustic tiles you saw in every classroom. There were no light fixtures that she could see, but the hallway was well lit. It had the familiar, slightly sour smell of school stairwells. There was nothing remarkable about it, except that she should be standing in the middle of Hallie Whealton Smith Drive. And she noticed as she walked that she didn’t cast a shadow.

“Hello?” she called again. Her voice sounded oddly flat, as if she was walking outside. There were no doors in the walls, and when she looked over her shoulder she couldn’t see where she had entered. Spinning back around she couldn’t see an end to the corridor ahead of her, either. She gulped, said a bad word and began to run back the way she had come, but the corridor seemed to stretch on ahead of her endlessly and changelessly, like the exercises in drawing the “vanishing point” her old art teacher Mrs. Blum had made the class do. And then she tripped and went sprawling. The fall on the hard floor should have broken her nose, or at least bloodied it, but she landed squarely atop something warm and furry, which squealed in protest. Then things got really weird.