Priscilla Lo-saran awoke in her very favorite place in the world — Brian Lo-saran’s arms.
She still used the name Priscilla Ka-mentha whenever dancing or skating, as everyone in those places already knew her by that name. But she was very happy to at least symbolically submit herself to Brian’s dominance by changing her legal name to his — especially since almost every other aspect of their lives was, and would probably continue to be, dominated by her work.
“Good morning, beautiful,” he said softly.
“Mmm. This is my favorite time of day, because you usually do to me, again, the same thing you did to me last night.”
“Bad
news!”
“What?”
“It’s Monday, and we woke up late. It’s almost seven o’clock. So unless you want a quickie . . .”
Priscilla chuckled. “If we do that, then I won’t let you out of bed for at least an hour!”
Brian pretended to pout for a second. “But I have to cook breakfast and lunch for . . . how many are we down to?”
“Hmm. Malcolm’s still recovering from his last surgery . . . John got reassigned last month to somewhere on the other side of the world . . . and
NEBADOR Book Nine: A Cry for Help 360
another scientist got bored and quit . . . so that makes ten, eleven if both George and Lisa can come.”
“I’ll make enough for twelve.”
“Everyone
loves getting home-made stuff, instead of packaged pastries and delivered pizzas.”
“The least I can do. I can’t find a job, and you guys are trusting me with the biggest secret in the world, so secret the president doesn’t even want to talk about it.”
Priscilla laughed. “Well, we did publish a book about it that sold more than a million hardcovers, and I think we’ve passed three mil on the paperback, the book no one over twenty knows about, but everyone under twenty has.”
Brian smiled, then gave her a quick kiss. “Okay, I’m up before Susan beats me into the bathroom.”
While savoring her scrambled eggs with cheese and crumbled bacon, Priscilla listened to the chatter among the team members — the people who used to be official members of the top-secret Department of Defense P-Seventeen team. Often she glanced up to see the love of her life working happily in Susan’s kitchen.
Priscilla didn’t care that Brian couldn’t find a job, and knew he felt much better about himself after Susan asked him to take care of all the cooking and yard work. It allowed Susan to schedule more clients, and it kept Priscilla from feeling guilty when she had to disappear for days at a time to work at the safe house.
But she also knew it was a serious ego-challenge for Brian. Both his new wife, only sixteen, and the psychologist they shared a house with, made more money than either of them needed. Priscilla hoped with all her heart that he wouldn’t let the situation threaten their relationship. So far, he seemed to be coping, and she planned to continue to do everything she could to keep him happy.
Brian walked through the living room collecting empty plates from everyone. Priscilla looked up and their eyes met for a moment, taking them both back to their years of dating, always with a body guard not far away and
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an early curfew at his orphanage. They smiled at each other and he returned to the kitchen.
“Good morning, everyone,” Priscilla said from her seat in front of the fireplace. “Let me see . . . it’s the fourth of October, session . . . I forget.”
“Sixty-five,” retired Colonel Sarah Ma-soran said, glancing up from her note pad.
Priscilla smiled. “This is the second time we’ve worked our way through the one and two-digit numbers . . .”
Everyone remembered with fondness their first year at the top-secret military facility in the green hills west of the city.
“How’s Malcolm?” Priscilla asked.
“Not good,” retired Two-star General Samuel Bo-seklin answered. “He hates not being able to come to our meetings, says it’s the only important thing in his life, since his wife passed away.”
“We share with him every detail when we visit,” Sarah added, “even what Brian cooked that day, and he really appreciates it.”
“The three of us are planning a visit as soon as he’s out of recovery,” Susan mentioned.
Sarah nodded and smiled.
“Okay,” Priscilla began, sitting up straighter and getting serious. “We have a publishing report from Betty, a space probe report from Chris, and my crystal-ball routine.”
Everyone
chuckled.
“Betty?”
Doctor of Chemistry Betty Ko-silma cleared her throat. “Harold says the eleventh printing of the hardcover is moving very slowly, but the little paperback is still a hot item. It will never show up on the Best Seller list because so many copies are given away free, not sold.”
“I think that’s best right now,” Priscilla slipped in, “as we’ve talked about.”
Many nodded agreement.
“The translations are doing well,” the chemist went on, “with all but one in their second printings.”
“Thank you,” Priscilla said. “I get the feeling that our little book is sort of
. . . in God’s hands now.”
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Chuckles filled the room again, and Doctor of Physics Chris Po-selem grinned at the sixteen-year-old team leader.
She grinned back. “Chris, you ready?”
He ruffled his wild hair. “I’ve learned a little patience in the last nine years!”
Several people laughed, recalling the many times he nearly bubbled over with time-travel theories.
“As all of us have been watching closely, especially Susan . . .” He made eye contact with the psychologist. “. . . most people seem to be recovering from the nation-wide depression of last summer when we learned the probe was unable to transmit back any pictures. That’s another point for Priscilla, of course. What are you up to?”
“Something like a hundred and fifteen, I think.”
“Hundred and seventeen,” Sarah corrected with a smile.
Doctor Po-selem nodded. “Finger pointing has tapered off, and most scientists are getting down to business with the basic telemetry we’re receiving. That data verifies that the probe is on course, seems to be undamaged in all other ways, and even tells us how many pictures are in its memory, waiting to be transmitted back — two hundred and twenty-six.”
Several people moaned with sympathy for the crippled machine and the disappointed scientists.
“It’s now approaching the last planet in the solar system, Ko-meriana.”
“What can we expect from that fly-by?” General George Ba-kerga, commander of the safe-house program, inquired.
“Unless the image transmitter suddenly starts working, we’ll just get some gravity and magnetic flux measurements, one last verification of position and course, and then that’s it. All those pictures, including dozens more it will take of Ko-meriana, will just sit in the probe’s memory until it completely runs out of power in ten or fifteen years, somewhere far out beyond the edge of the solar system . . .”
Ten o’clock was passing as everyone took a break, then got settled for the main presentation.
“A while back,” Priscilla began, “someone put on the list that I talk about
NEBADOR Book Nine: A Cry for Help 363
the darkest, ugliest part of the collapse that I lived through. I don’t remember who, it might have been John before he was reassigned.”
“I think it was him,” Sarah said.
Priscilla nodded. “I’ve been pondering it, but I guess I was also avoiding it, not because I dislike talking about bad stuff, just because it was hard to know how to approach the topic. Well, I guess I’m ready, and can’t think of any more excuses . . .”
Her listeners smiled at her.
“Of course, the darkest, ugliest time for any person or family was when their water or food supply failed, or their loved ones died. You all understand that, so there’s no point in approaching the question from that angle.”
Nods assured her that they understood.
“And that happened to people, families, and whole communities at so many different times — from 3715, to who-knows-when after I was gone —
that it’s almost meaningless to even talk about the average. So I decided to approach the question from a completely different angle. I decided to imagine that I was on a flying saucer in orbit, looking down, completely unaffected by events below. I decided that I shouldn’t be paying attention to individual suffering, as much as I might want to. I should be paying attention to the civilization as a whole. What was its darkest, ugliest moment?
“And I don’t mean darkest as in no electricity for lights. I mean darkest morally, ethically, as God and the angels would see it and judge it.”
Several people nodded.
“After I got clear in my mind what I was after, the answer was obvious. It wasn’t the time period when most people were dying. It was the five or so years before then, when our so-called leaders and role models — or as John would say, the power and money people — were doing everything they could to keep the coal, oil, and gas flowing so a few of them could go on living the way they were used to. It became known as the Brown Years because it included repealing or ignoring all pollution laws. Also, most forms of legal, social, and medical protection for ordinary citizens disappeared when governments handed almost all their powers to private corporations . . .”