Nightfall

  * * * * * * *

  Six weeks later, Mike cursed as he dropped the soldering laser on the floor for the third time in a single afternoon. It was a tool which hadn’t existed in the past, and he was still trying to learn how to use it properly. He’d already burned his fingers more times than he could count.

  He stuck his wounded thumb in his mouth and let it rest there while he picked up the laser with his other hand. There was no one else around to see him; he’d given strict orders that he wasn’t to be disturbed for any reason unless he himself came out to ask for something.

  By dint of hard work and a little luck, his staff (it still seemed unreal that he, Mike McGrath, should have such a luxury), had managed to acquire all the electronics components he needed to rebuild the tachometer, although in order to do so they’d had to rob several of them from obscure sources. Many of the parts were long obsolete and practically impossible to find anymore.

  Well, they’d managed to acquire all the components he could remember needing, at least. Losing his research notes had been a serious blow, and even though he’d worked with Dr. Garza’s books long enough to give him a general familiarity with how the thing was done, he certainly didn’t remember everything. No one could have.

  He wearily ran his fingers through his hair and put his face in his hands to rest and think for a few minutes. After a while, he remembered one more thing he’d forgotten. He pushed the intercom button.

  “Yes, sir?” came the tinny voice of his secretary.

  “Margaret, tell Amos to come in here, please,” he said.

  “Yes, sir, Dr. McGrath,” she replied, and Mike took no further notice of the matter. Margaret was unfailingly efficient about such things.

  Indeed, it was only a few minutes later when there came a knock on the lab door, and without waiting for an invitation Amos poked his head inside. He was Mike’s general aide and lab assistant, nineteen years old, a brilliant student with a double major in chemistry and physics, and a bit too much of an eager beaver for his own good.

  “You called, boss?” he asked.

  “Yes, I need you to go to the library and find me some information, as soon as possible,” Mike told him.

  “Sure thing, boss. What do you need?” he asked, grabbing a pencil and a note pad from one of the lab tables.

  “I need you to find me a place where I can get some khamrabaevite. It’s a type of mineral that usually comes from carbonaceous chondrite asteroids. But I need to know exactly which asteroid it did come from, because the precise proportion of elements varies from rock to rock and it matters,” he explained patiently. Amos scribbled busily on the paper for a few seconds, and then looked up.

  “Is that all, boss?” he asked. Mike hated the way Amos called him ‘boss’; it made him feel like a mafia kingpin. But he’d long since learned to put up with it.

  “Yeah, that’s all for now. If I think of anything else I’ll let you know,” he said, and waved a hand dismissively. Amos shut the door and left him alone again with his thoughts.

  Ever since he’d agreed to Lieutenant Bartow’s arrangement, Mike had found himself increasingly conflicted about what he was doing. Yes, everything the man had said about extremist groups was certainly true, and no doubt the tachometer would help fight them and save lives. He couldn’t deny all that.

  But on the other hand, he couldn’t help noticing that fear of the Defense Forces ran wide and deep. There were certain things one simply didn’t talk about, not even with best friends. There were certain topics only a fool would joke about, certain places and certain websites that everyone knew better than to visit even out of curiosity. People who ignored the unspoken rules had a way of dying in tragic accidents, or sometimes simply disappearing without explanation, never to be heard from again. And anyone who questioned such things was apt to follow them very quickly. Mike wasn’t at all sure he wanted to help tighten the screws on people any more than they already were. The government might have good intentions (or it might not, for that matter), but everybody knew where good intentions led.

  However bad the extremist cells might be, was a slow and steady descent into near slavery really all that much better? Mike struggled with that question almost daily, and honestly couldn’t decide which was worse. Slogans and cheap lines were easy to repeat, but in real life the decision was far from simple. Sometimes he feared the world was doomed in one way or another no matter what anybody did or didn’t do.

  It would most likely take at least an hour or so for Amos to finish his assignment and bring the information back to the lab, so Mike took the opportunity to lay his head down on the lab bench and take a much-needed nap. He’d been surviving on very little sleep the past few weeks.

  It seemed like only the blink of an eye before he woke to the sound of Amos knocking on the lab door. He glanced at the clock and saw that nearly two hours had passed, so he sat up and stretched, rubbing the sleep out of his eyes so he’d look slightly more respectable.

  He barely had time to finish composing himself before Amos came in and put down a sheaf of papers on the lab bench in front of him.

  “What did you find?” Mike asked, glancing at the papers without making any effort to pick them up.

  “Well, I didn’t find too many places to get something like that, boss,” he began apologetically, as if he thought it was his own fault that nature hadn’t seen fit to produce a khamrabaevite deposit right underneath the city park.

  “I don’t need but one, Amos, as long as it’s the right kind. What did you find?” Mike asked.

  “Most of the suppliers didn’t specify in their catalogs where it came from, so I had to call a few of them and ask. Three of them can get us pieces of an asteroid in Uzbekistan, and then there’s one company that works with a place in Mexico. The others I contacted couldn’t tell me without doing some research first, so I don’t know about them,” Amos replied promptly.

  “Is that all?” Mike asked skeptically.

  “Yes, sir. That’s all I could find,” Amos replied.

  Mike thought about this for a few minutes. It sounded somewhat promising; Dr. Garza had used part of an asteroid from Mexico when he built the original tachometer.

  “Where exactly is the Mexican one?” Mike asked.

  “Um. . . just a second,” Amos said, riffling through papers.

  “Looks like it comes from Chihuahua. It landed near a little town called Pueblito de Allende in February of 1969,” Amos said.

  “Excellent! How much of it can you get?” Mike asked. He couldn’t believe his luck; that was the very same rock Dr. Garza had used. He wouldn’t even have to do any comparative analysis to make sure it was suitable.

  “They’ve got 4.8 kilos for sale, sir,” Amos said.

  “That’s all?” Mike asked, disappointed. That was barely enough to be worth messing with.

  “I’m afraid so, sir,” Amos said.

  “Well. . . go ahead and order what they’ve got, then. We might be able to extract enough khamrabaevite from that. I guess it’s better than nothing, anyway,” Mike said.

  “Absolutely, sir,” the boy replied, sounding crestfallen.

  “All right then, good job,” he said. It wouldn’t hurt to be kind to Amos for once; the whole nasty situation wasn’t his fault.

  A few minutes after Amos left, Mike decided he’d had enough for one day. He closed and locked the lab, and left the University without saying a word to anybody. He was supposed to be teaching a class at two o’clock, but he knew well enough that the students wouldn’t object to getting a day off when he didn’t show up. He wasn’t in the mood for dealing with any of that today.

  He quietly drove home, putting his thumbprint up for a scan at the entrance gate absentmindedly and then parking in his assigned spot. Luke Bartow had been as good as his word, and Mike now made an obscenely large amount of money; enough to move into a gated subdivision in Clearwater Beach where the houses cost more per month than
most people made in a year. His place had five bedrooms, no less, and everything from the rugs to the light fixtures practically screamed luxury. It wasn’t that he needed so much space or cared about appearances, but he did want a house right on the beach, and that was the smallest one he’d been able to find.

  He often wondered if he’d made a deal with the devil to get it.

  He sighed and thumbed his way inside the empty house, troubled at heart and unsure what to do about it, or even if anything could be done at all. He fixed some noodles which he ate almost without tasting them, and then put the bowl in the dishwasher. The house seemed oppressively quiet and still when he finished, so he went to the computer and keyed Annabelle’s number. It wasn’t the time of day when she usually went walking, so she ought to be home with the baby if nothing else had come up. He hoped so; he needed some cheering up.

  “Hello,” she said, and he couldn’t help smiling at the sound of her voice.

  “Hello, sugar baby. You’re not busy, are you?” he asked, and she laughed.

  “I’m never too busy to talk to you, Mikey. But no, I’m just sitting at home with Chris, that’s all. He’s sleeping, so I was trying to clean things up a little bit while I had time,” she said.

  “Mind if I come over for a while?” he asked.

  “Not at all, if you don’t mind helping babysit,” she said.

  “You know I don’t mind,” he said.

  “Then I’ll see you in a little bit, okay?” she said.

  “Sure thing. Love you, sugar baby,” he said, and she laughed.

  “Love you too, sugar daddy,” she said, and that was all. It was a private joke between them to call each other those names, since they both loved caramel candy. It would have seemed obscure to the point of weirdness for most people since those brands hadn’t existed in decades, but Mike supposed no one else ever had to hear their little pet names anyway.

  He changed into jeans and a t-shirt, then put on his tennis shoes and his Florida Gators baseball cap before leaving the complex on foot.

  One of the minor consolations of being suddenly rich was that he’d been able to give Philip and Joan enough money to buy a decent house for a change. Maybe not right on the beach, no; that was beyond even Mike’s means, but three blocks from the Gulf wasn’t so bad. He’d wanted them to find a place in Clearwater Beach so they’d all be close together, so Joan had picked a house on Papaya Street, and together they’d gone and paid cash for it.

  He half-jogged, half-walked down the road for a mile or so, till he reached the house. Then he went up and knocked on the door.

  It was warm outside for December, and Annabelle answered the door wearing a flowery dress which was daringly short for her; it was practically mid-calf.

  “Wow, you’re really taking a walk on the wild side today, aren’t you?” he commented, staring at her legs. He could have sworn she reddened slightly.

  “Well. . . it was hot today, and everybody keeps telling me it’s really not immodest to wear things like this, so I decided maybe it’d be okay. Does it look bad?” she asked, sounding embarrassed.

  “No, not at all. It looks beautiful on you, I promise,” he said, giving her a hug and a kiss.

  And it really did; Annabelle was a beautiful girl to begin with, and the outfit set off her figure and her long brown hair in a way that thoroughly bedazzled him and would have turned heads almost anywhere.

  He often thought he was the luckiest man in the world.