2
“She loves me yeah, yeah, yeah,
She loves me yeah, yeah, yearrrrrrrrrrrrrrr ,,,,,”
I flung the pillow with all my weight behind it, and the ancient clock radio tumbled to the floor crackling and sparking as if it were inhabited by a ghost. Love the Beatles, but not at six o’clock in the morning, and a Saturday one at that.
I dragged myself into the shower, scraped a three-day growth off my face, never once managing to focus either eye, the result of ingesting way too much good stuff the evening before.
Getting dressed was a monster battle, my pants and belt fought me to the very end, until I realized I was trying to get into my jeans back-the-front.
Once I sorted out my treacherous clothing, I slumped on the bed, trying to remember why I had set the alarm in the first place.
Oh! Yes! I was the Duty Officer for the weekend, being punished again for having made a professional mistake the week before. I had tried to have my boss killed.
Well, not really, I had only set out to scare the crap out of her, self-centered little bit… , well, she didn’t necessarily talk highly of me either. Something to do with unrequited love, I suspect, as in she didn’t get any, and I was clearly recognized as the stud of choice in the office!
A loud buzzing assaulted my ears, and I tried to focus on the general direction it seemed to be coming from.
Then an even louder beeping started, and I slowly came to realize it was my phone, and it wanted me badly!
Scrabbling around in the blankets, the little box of magic finally popped up, wrapped in the folds of dubious material that looked suspiciously like my underwear.
“Hello?”
“Jonathon, where are you?”
“Here.”
“Well, not to put too finer point on it, you need to get in here as fast as you can.”
“OK, on my way.” Well, the words registered, but my befuddled Mind was still trying to process the outcome of the fight with my pants, so getting anywhere may well turn out to be beyond my present capacity.
Small doable bits. Little steps. I distinctly remember someone telling me that somewhere; eat the elephant one bite at a time.
I looked down at my feet, and immediately wished I hadn’t, my head started to spin, and a loud buzzing noise started to ring in my ears, and I almost fell over. Socks were out, open toe sandals were the only option under the circumstances. Then my phone lit up again, with a sense of purpose that was literally frightening to witness in my tender condition. I slid my finger over the “unlock” icon, and a face swam into view.
“Yes?”
“Jonathon, I have a car outside your apartment, get in it now!” the witch Queen barked, and as the screen blanked out, I realized that something must be going on in a big way for her to actually be in the office on a weekend, and then actually make a call to me personally.
I found my sandals, forced my feet into them.
Found the door, and wrestled with the lock.
Found the elevator, pushed both buttons, waited an eternity for the door to open, then let it carry me forty-five floors down to the lobby.
The sudden change in air pressure made my ears pop, and a massive headache started to form behind my eyes.
Focused on the huge glass doors at the edge of the pavement, I sucked in as much air as I could find, then walked with as much pride as I could muster under the circumstances past the concierge, head up, shoulders straight, gut sucked in, only to be foiled by the ridiculous handles on the bloody doors!
A short fight later I was outside, looking into a black hole posing as the back seat of the limo. I fell in, the driver closed the door, and I’m glad to say I managed to sleep right up to the end.
Just as well I did, because when I got out of the elevator and stutter-stepped to my office, around me all Hell was breaking loose. People believed to have been sitting dead for years in their chairs and offices were flying around the place clutching electronic pads and small computers, yelling at each other. The big board, the one unifying technology in a place with more bells and whistles that a NASA control room was flashing data and images so fast I could actually read them in my diminished state.
It’s amazing just how fast fear can sober you up, and I distinctly remember the transition from fog to clarity, it was like an atomic explosion behind my eyes, creating a heat wave through my frontal cortex.
“Faa………..out!” I yelled, ET is here!”
Wait a minute, if those numbers were to be trusted, and that was the business I was in, the impossible had happened.
A mass one-sixth the size of the moon had decelerated from what looked like five hundred times the speed of light to zero in less than one hundred thousand kilometers.
With no flare or infrared signature.
No change in the Doppler shift.
None.
With no detectable mass.
Zero energy output – at least what we could detect.
There goes E=MC2 and possibly F = M A.
A bubble of nothing from somewhere was now in a geostationary orbit over the equator, and the only way we could see it was by the light it occluded from the star fields!
And it had been completely undetected until it had passed the rings of Saturn, occluding the light from that massive wonder.
European astronomers saw it first, thought their very elaborate and expensive equipment had developed Alzheimer’s.
The Hubble had tracked its impossible entry into Earth orbit, albeit only the last few thousand kilometers, and then only by mathematical calculations done back on earth from the real-time images sent by the telescope. The numbers were Mind bending in their complexity and inference.
Science as we knew it was dead.
I had a rare insight into the future.
Was God dead too?
l)