Everything Matters! by Jr. Ron Currie

Author:Jr. Ron Currie [Ron Currie, Jr.]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Penguin Group (USA), Inc.
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Junior

Work on the Alcubierre drive is coming along at a pace that surprises everyone. We’ve shaved about two years with the help of some tasty little morsels of extraterrestrial technology, previously kept under heavy wraps at the U.S. South Pole research station, and I’m hoping that when the prototype is tested next week and negotiations for production contracts begin with the Big Four—Boeing, McDonnell Douglas, Lockheed, and Grumman—I’ll be allowed to leave for the first time since returning from Bulgaria. This was the arrangement I made with Sawyer, and though I’ve got nowhere to go I still intend to see that he honors it.

I’m in the lecture room off the biosphere lab, and my cell phone buzzes in my pocket. I answer and find an oddly subdued Sawyer on the other end. Absent is the usual snide tone. He makes no jokes, pokes no fun.

“We’ve picked up a telephone conversation that you probably ought to hear,” he says.

“Can it wait?” I ask. “I’m stuck at Langley. The oxygen level in the biosphere has been dropping again.”

“I would recommend you come right now. I can send a helicopter.”

“Not to mention there’s a problem with the flowering plants failing to produce at rates sufficient to sustain the caloric output of our guys inside. It looks like the two issues are related. Not surprisingly.”

“Junior.”

“Really though, whether or not the biosphere thing works out is sort of moot now that we’re finally breaking through with propulsion.”

“Junior, listen,” Sawyer says. “You need to come back to Meade and hear this phone call. It’s to do with your father.”

This stops me cold. “Can’t you just patch it through or something?” I ask. “You guys can do that, right? I’ve seen it in the movies.” It’s a weak attempt at levity in my sudden fear, and it comes out lame.

“Not a good idea,” Sawyer says.

There’s silence on the line for several moments. “This has got you rattled, huh?” I say finally.

“Yes,” Sawyer says. “Oddly enough.”

“Then I guess you’d better send that helicopter.”

Forty-five minutes later I’m in Sawyer’s subterranean office, deep below the giant obsidian cube of NSA headquarters. He has me put on a headset attached to a computer terminal.

“We picked this up a couple hours ago,” he says, punching several buttons on the keyboard. There’s the garbled sound of a connection being formed over a landline, then the lazy electronic purr of the ring-through. After four rings the call is answered, and I hear my brother’s voice asking hello.

When my mother says hello back to him, I’m as shocked as I’ve ever been in my life. Imagine—my mother using the phone. And not just answering it, but dialing out, initiating a call. Clearly a lot has changed in my absence.

“Where are you, Rodney? Are you in Chicago?”

“Hi Ma, no, we’re . . . hold on a minute.” There’s a brief, muffled conversation on Rodney’s end, and then he comes back on. “Kansas City. Interleague,” he says. “So we get to have a DH.”

“I don’t know what that means, babe,” my mother says.

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