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CHAPTER SIXTEEN:

What There Is to Do

Howard’s Landing was a big marina down Pacific Coast Highway from Seal Beach in Huntington Harbor, behind a very new-looking beige shopping mall, and the low sun was silhouetting the buildings and palm trees on the peninsula by the time Vickery was able to wrestle and coax the haunted car off the highway into the parking lot, and, finally and with much jerky backing and filling, into a parking space.

Vickery switched off the engine at last, evoking a faint wail from the radio speaker. He sat back and exhaled, flexing his hands.

Plowman shifted in the back seat, fumbling for the door lever. “What, did she die?”

“It’s a ghost,” Santiago pointed out.

“As soon as Castine and I step out,” Vickery said, “we’ll be trackable, though the Naval Intelligence guys are probably way north of us right now.”

“Maybe they gave up,” said Castine, “after a couple of hours of getting no response from the bloody rags.”

“They know we’re in one of Galvan’s evasion cars,” said Vickery, opening his door and stepping out onto the asphalt. “And they know we’ve got to get out of it sometime.”

The others climbed out of the car. Castine stretched, then hugged herself, gripping her elbows.

The evening breeze from the west was cold, smelling of the open ocean, and he found that he wanted to get Castine back inland, away from the edge of the sea, as quickly as possible. Light-rings in the sea tonight, Galvan had said through the old woman’s ghost; and a woman enclosed in water. He remembered too Castine’s description of the spontaneous echo-vision she had had yesterday at Cole’s—for a second I had the sensation of being on a boat, at night. The sky was dark, but I got the impression that there was light from below, as if the ocean were glowing . . .

And when she had driven away from the chess club temple, she had said, reluctantly, that they should look at Notchett’s boat, but had specified, While the sun is still up. And the sun was now going down.

He slammed the door and squinted at his companions. “Search the damn boat for whatever it might have been that Notchett thought could restrain the angels, and then let’s get the hell away.” Turning to Plowman, he asked, “Where’s this boat?”

The old man led them around the north side of the shopping mall and across an empty lot to a walkway that overlooked ranks of boats in slips along several long docks stretching out into the harbor channel. The far shore was five-hundred yards away, and lights were on in some of the windows over there.

Plowman had hopped down onto the dock and was striding along it, past gleaming white hulls and chrome bow railings. Vickery, Castine and Santiago trotted along behind him.

“Ahoy, Fishmeal!” came a call from one of the boats, and Vickery saw a tanned young man stand up to wave from a high bridge.

“Sammy,” Plowman acknowledge with a nod, not slowing down. When the four of them had walked a few yards further, Plowman looked over his shoulder at Vickery. “After I did that flywheel for Frankie, some of the other boat people hired me for repairs.”

“Handy.”

Castine was looking back, toward where the sun had now disappeared behind the low buildings on the far side of Pacific Coast Highway.

“Here we are,” said Plowman, stepping past one of the white shore-power pedestals that studded the long dock. He walked out along a narrow finger pier between two boats, running his palm along the hull on the left.

Vickery leaned back to look at the boat, glad to see no yellow police tape or official warning signs. The boat was a cabin cruiser about thirty feet long, and the bow and stern angles were short, so that the overall length was only a few feet more than the waterline length. The sheer line swept back from the cabin roof in a shallowly descending curve that became the edge of the cockpit coaming. Like most of the boats in the marina, it was moored bow-in, so a four-step ladder had been set up across the water gap and over the high cockpit gunwale.

Plowman climbed up first, then turned around and went down another set of steps to the cockpit deck. Vickery followed, and stepped out onto a black rubber mat laid over the broad wooden deck, which was shifting slightly with the new weight. Low padded benches were installed along both long sides, with several circular life-preservers hung above them. At the cabin bulkhead, under a blue tarpaulin awning, was the dash panel and wheel of the topside helm and a door to belowdecks.

Soon Castine and Santiago were standing on the deck too, leaning on the chest-high gunwale, and Vickery took a step toward the door in the bulkhead—then halted, his hand darting to the .45 in his jacket pocket, for the door swung open.

A middle-aged man with implausibly dark hair was peering angrily out at them, and it wasn’t until Vickery saw Rayette Yoneda behind him that he recognized the now clean-shaven face of the alleged GRU agent, Tacitus.

“Pierce!” said Tacitus. “Tell me you didn’t step on that mat.”

“Tacitus?” said Plowman. “Huh. Losing the beard was smart, but stay gray.” He glanced back at the mat on the deck, then turned to Tacitus with a shrug and a nod.

“We,” said Tacitus, “had the wit to jump past it.”

Santiago looked quickly toward the ladder.

Castine crouched and flipped the mat over. A flat white plastic box was connected by wires to one corner. She looked up. “A transmitter?”

“It’s not a box of Tic Tacs,” said Yoneda, blinking as she stepped up onto the deck. “Welcome aboard, and now we’ve all got to get out of here.”

Castine waved toward the mat. “ONI?”

“GRU,” said Tacitus, “It’s a standard trick. If your Office of Naval Intelligence had known about Frankie’s boat they would have cordoned it off.” He looked down at the mat and made a sour face. “We’re fortunate that my onetime comrades weren’t sure who might come aboard.”

Vickery blinked at him, and Castine explained, “No bomb today.”

“Your comrades?” said Plowman, stepping back to squint at Tacitus with one eye and then the other. “GRU?”

“It’s all right,” said Tacitus. “It seems I’m a defector.”

Yoneda took his arm. “Come on, your onetime comrades will be back here any time now, thanks to our heavy-footed friends. We’ve got to get you to Agent Finehouse, and safety. We’ve wasted the whole day.”

“Was it entirely a waste?” said Tacitus, letting her guide him across the mat toward the ladder. “I spoke to an old friend’s ghost, and I believe you spoke, briefly, to—someone?”

Yoneda looked away and yanked harder on his arm. “Shut up and come along.”

“Old friend’s ghost,” said Plowman. He hurried forward and stepped between them and the ladder. “What old friend’s ghost? Hah? Was it Frankie?” When neither Yoneda nor Tacitus denied it, he demanded, “Where, what did he say?”

Yoneda took a step back, blinking and shivering in the cold wind. In a strained voice she said, “Oh, I’m in a mood to mess you up, grandpa, if you don’t get out of our way.”

Plowman didn’t move.

After a tense moment her shoulders sagged. “Well it was just gibberish,” she said breathlessly, “nonsense about rings in the sea—now will you please—let us by!”

But Tacitus spoke up. “Yes, it was Frankie’s ghost. In one of the freeway-side gypsy nests off the 10, four or five hours ago. He said—” He closed his eyes, nodded, then opened them and stared out over the ranked masts as he recited, “’It’s the rings, the shining rings in the sea at night, that’s how you can approach them. Out past the jetties, in the open ocean . . . you can’t know where they’ll be, you just watch . . . hope, or fear, that they’ll appear . . .’”

Tacitus lowered his eyes and rubbed his forehead. “At that point the ghost became agitated. More agitated! It said, ‘But when it was there, at last, on the deck of the cockpit, I ran to the controls and gunned away, out of the ring. You think you’d have had the guts to stay?’”

“That was it,” agreed Yoneda. “Now come on, we’ve got to get out of here.”

“Oh . . . shit,” said Castine.

When everyone paused to look at her, she said, “We’ve got to get out of here, all right—but that way.” She pointed past the stern toward the open harbor, then looked across the deck at Plowman. “You can get this running, can’t you? Hotwire it?”

“You go your way,” said Yoneda, “and we’ll go ours. Will you come on?” she added, tugging again at Tacitus’s arm. “Ive got to get Finehouse to square me with the Highway Patrol.”

“Wait,” he told her.

“I could hotwire it,” Plowman said to Castine. “Why would I?” He shook his head and squinted at Tacitus. “A GRU defector?”

“Ingrid,” said Vickery, “we’ll be safe in the car, and we can be out of here as soon as we get Frankie’s charts or logs or notes—”

“All gone,” interrupted Yoneda. “Tacitus and I were looking around, and there’s not a scrap of paper aboard. The GRU got whatever there might have been.”

“So let’s get the hell back to the car,” said Vickery.

“No,” insisted Castine. She turned a haggard look on Vickery. “You heard what he said—the rings in the sea are how you approach the things, but it sounds like Notchett got scared when one showed up, and he ran. Dammit, Herbert, do you think I want to go out on the ocean, tonight? This is the last night to—do anything.”

“Herbert?” muttered Plowman.

“Tomorrow night,” Castine went on, “the aliens are going to exit our four-dimensional universe, and take away all our energy to do it. The gelid, endothermic cost. But,” she said with a wave to the west, “they’ll be out there tonight. There were UAPs over the ocean this morning, and—how did Galvan’s aphorism go? Spaceships by day, light rings at night, right? Wheels in the sea, Galvan said. Crop circles in the sea.” Her voice had grown fainter as she spoke, so that the last sentence was almost a whisper, and she seemed to be blinking back tears. But, “Dammit,” she went on strongly, “they’ll be out there tonight—and the three of us,” she said with a wave that took in herself and Vickery and Tacitus, “we affect them.”

“Affect,” began Vickery, “but how—”

Castine spoke over him: “Notchett named this boat the Ouranos, and in his poem he said Ouranos restrains them!”

“How?” persisted Vickery, “with none of his charts or logs or notes?”

“With a passenger, passengers! If we could communicate—even just let them know somehow—that we’re alive, sentient!—maybe they’d—”

Yoneda started to speak, but Tacitus interrupted her. “What do you mean?” he asked Castine. “Exit . . . take away all our energy . . .?”

Castine took a deep breath and let it out, then pushed her disordered hair back. “Well,” she said, “if you picture our world, our universe, as a two-dimensional plane, like the surface of a pool—” She waved at Vickery. “You can take it from there, Sebastian.”

“I knew you were Sebastian Vickery!” muttered Yoneda.

Vickery wanted very much to get Castine, and himself, too, off the boat and back into the concealment car; but he quickly explained how the lines of iambic pentameter that Notchett had added to the Hesiod translation seemed to describe an extra-dimensional diversion of the force-carrying particles that maintained the structures of protons and neutrons.

“And the force instantly re-establishes itself,” he said in conclusion, “by confiscating energy from the surroundings. It’s an endothermic reaction. Ingrid and I went back to the riverbed last night after you two left, and everything was frozen—there was a column of spinning snow, and I think it was frozen methane or nitrogen.”

“Lately at the crop circles in England,” added Castine, “after a few minutes it gets cold enough sometimes for metal to just shatter. And all along there have been variances in electromagnetism at the sites, and reports of gravity failures.”

“As of last night,” said Tacitus, “we can report a gravity failure ourselves!” He moved away from Yoneda. “EM and gravity are propagated by virtual photons and gravitons. Having no mass and spreading widely, they might have been easier to divert, at first, than gluons.” He nodded sadly. “This is consistent with certain reports from Georgia and Azerbaijan in the 1980s. And today all day there has been something like thunder.” To Castine he added, “Of course we have to go.”

For a few moments none of them spoke, and sighing of the wind from the sea and the intermittent slap of water against the hull were the only sounds.

“Okay, dammit,” said Plowman finally. He clenched his fists, then spread his fingers. “I gotta check over the engines first, okay? Everybody off the Russki mat.” The others shuffled to the starboard gunwale and he pulled the mat to one side, exposing two flush-set deck hatches. He lifted the bigger one, and Vickery saw only darkness below the open rectangle.

Tacitus said, “No, I must go along with them,” and when Vickery looked to the side he saw the man pull his arm free of Yoneda’s hand. “How could I walk away from a possible meeting with. . .” He finished by waving vaguely at the sky.

“Tacitus,” Plowman said, “I bet your commie pals didn’t bother to take Frankie’s flashlight and toolkit.” He pointed to the door in the bulkhead. “In the drawer, below the main helm.” To Santiago he said, “Kid, you can sit here and hand me tools.”

Tacitus nodded and hurried below.

Santiago thrust his hands in his pockets and rocked around on one heel to face the ladder; then he turned back to Plowman and pulled his hands free. “Okay.”

When Tacitus returned with the items, Plowman took the flashlight and lowered himself into the engine compartment, while Santiago sat down on the deck and opened the toolbox. Peering over Santiago’s shoulder, Vickery could see the flashlight beam on one of the blue-painted engines down there as Plowman checked the oil dipstick.

“Crescent wrench,” came the old man’s muffled voice, and Santiago handed one down to him.

Vickery stepped back. Yoneda was standing at the top of the ladder, looking toward shore. Tacitus stood near her, alternately casting anxious glances at the shore and the open deck hatch. Castine was leaning on the gunwale and looking out past the stern at the harbor water. Vickery crossed the deck and stood beside her.

“There’s no really good reason to do this,” he said.

“It’s what there is to do. We both know I’m going to be aboard.”

“Why, because of that flash you had at Cole’s, yesterday? That was destiny or something? No, there’s nothing—”

Castine interrupted, “It’d be a good idea to get Santiago ashore, at least. But we’re going out.” She looked past him and raised her voice: “Santiago! It’s time you went ashore. Wait in the car till we get back.”

The boy shook his head. “I gotta see the spacemen. But you better buy me a bike if mine’s stolen.”

“Don’t argue with me,” Castine began, but Vickery caught her arm.

“He won’t budge,” he said. To Santiago he called, “We’ll all chip in for it.”

Plowman climbed laboriously up out of the engine compartment and lowered the hatch back in place. “Got oil, batteries look okay, sea strainers got no fish in ’em, engine seacocks are open.” He got to his feet and limped across the deck to the helm, wiping his hands on his shirt. He crouched, grunting, opened a panel and tugged some wires down from behind the dash panel.

“Will it start?” asked Santiago, who had picked up the tool box and followed him.

“Got no excuse not to, that I can see,” Plowman said, pulling a couple of wires free and twisting their ends together, “but we just want power first.” He leaned back to see the dash panel, then reached up to push a button on it. “Gotta blow out all the gassy air down there first.”

“Do that after we’re clear!” said Yoneda, striding forward. “The GRU assassins might be arriving in the lot out front right now!—thanks to these clumsy—” She kicked the mat and didn’t finish her sentence.

“They might be close,” ventured Castine.

“If there’s fuel fumes anywhere down there,” said Plowman stolidly, “and I start the engine, we’ll be arriving in the parking lot. From overhead.”

At last he reached up to switch off the blower, and touched a loose wire to the ignition housing; the deck shook as the engines started up.

Plowman got to his feet, in stages. “Somebody toss that mat onto the dock and bring the ladder aboard. Bill—Sebastian, whoever you are—get out there and cast off the lines.” He looked at Yoneda. “You sure you don’t want to get off?”

“Stay with the mat beacon?” She waved toward the harbor and shook her head. “Let’s go, floor it.”


Four miles out past the the long stone jetties that enclosed Anaheim Harbor, Plowman throttled down and shifted to neutral and let the Ouranos rock in the low waves. The still-glowing western sky silhouetted the cliffs of San Pedro, and clouds like fragments of eroded marble shone pink in the west but ash-gray in the darkening sky over the mainland. Seal Beach and Sunset Beach were lines of bright pinpricks in the boat’s wake, and the permanently moored ocean liner Queen Mary was a brighter spot across the water to the northwest. To the west, the black ocean extened to infinity.

The wind was from out there, and very cold; Plowman soon went below to operate the boat from the wheelhouse helm in the main cabin, and the others joined him. Now he swiveled the captain’s chair around to face aft.

Vickery and Castine sat on a bench just forward of a sink on the starboard side, and across from them, separated by a formica-topped table bolted to the deck, Yoneda and Tacitus perched on swing-down seats against the port bulkhead. Santiago sat on the top step with the cabin door at his back. A single overhead light threw a chiaroscuro lemon glow onto the six faces. The heater, after some delay, was producing a draft of warm air that smelled of scorched dust.

Plowman nodded toward some wires that stuck out from a hole in the port bulkhead just below the wooden ceiling. “They took the radio and any GPS stuff, and Frankie’s compass points every which way but north. I really don’t want to get out so far that I can’t see the shore lights.”

“But can’t you steer by the stars?” said Castine. “According to Galvan, the UAPs were seen way out past Catalina.”

“I’m a fair mechanic, but I’m no mariner. Anyway, in the car you said you three got ’em to make a crop circle in the L.A. River, right? Because the three of you were together, and you have an effect on ’em? Well—you’re together here. Funny it didn’t happen back at the marina, in fact.”

Vickery thought the old man was trying to conceal relief that nothing seemed likely to happen; and realized that he was doing the same.

“It’s not night yet,” Castine pointed out. “Spaceships by day, light rings at night.”

Yoneda shifted on the wooden bench. “What are you going to do,” she asked, “if something shows up?”

“Well—dammit, try to communicate,” said Castine, a bit defiantly. “At least make obviously deliberate gestures, two, three, five, seven, primary numbers.”

“That’s as far as you’ll get with two hands,” said Yoneda.

“So you can help take it to nineteen.” She turned toward Tacitus. “According to you, they assume what they comprehend as our physical shape, and they take that grotesque form—big hands, lips, tongue—because they’ve begun to comprehend human brains, and our brains have more nerves connected to those parts.” She looked around at the others. “They’ve begun to comprehend human brains!” she repeated. “Communication, at least recognition, might be possible.”

“But they only appear for a few seconds,” said Tacitus. “What can you do?”

“Speak, maybe,” said Castine desperately. “I didn’t notice their ears, either time I saw one, but I bet we’ve got a lot of nerve endings in our ears. And maybe they last longer, when they’re made of sea water instead of dirt and wheat chaff.”

“Sure,” said Yoneda. “Surface tension and all.”

“We should have stopped somewhere for sandwiches,” Vickery began, getting to his feet—

—When the bow was suddenly a glaring triangle through the windshield and the porthole rings shone white, and a racket like a stuttering electric drill started up outside.

Santiago had leaped away from the the cockpit deck door, and Castine got up from the bench and pulled the door open—and Vickery was right behind her when she crouched out onto the open cockpit deck, which was brightly illuminated from overhead.

Squinting upward, Vickery saw a brightly shining white sphere expanding in size against the contrastingly black sky, high above the boat. But it wasn’t expanding, it was descending, and fast—thinking it might be about to crash into the boat, Vickery was bracing himself to throw Castine and then himself overboard, when the thing swept down and extinguished itself in the sea a hundred feet astern. The staccato noise stopped abruptly.

There was no splash, but a burst of oven-hot air swept across the cockpit deck, and then Vickery’s shoes were scuffing ineffectually at the deck and he grabbed the edge of the cabin roof as it began to sink past his right shoulder.

In the sudden darkness, Castine was a darker silhouette dotted with spots of fire; she was extending one arm toward him, and he made sure to catch her wrist firmly with his left hand, for her feet were rising away behind her.

The cabin roof was smoking under his right palm, and Vickery felt points of sharp pain in his scalp and chest. He and Castine were rotating upward on the fulcrum of his right hand, which was locked onto the edge of the scorching roof. Gritting his teeth as he clung to the smoldering wood and Castine’s wrist, he was aware that the black horizon was both tilting and sinking.

Then the boat was dropped bow foremost into the sea, and Vickery and Castine tumbled forward across the cabin roof and plunged deep into churning, icy salt water. Vickery was still holding Castine’s wrist, and with his free hand he clung to one of the bow railing stanchions.

After five long seconds the bow deck was pressing upward under him and the weight of sea water sluiced away to the sides. Castine was sprawled on top of him at the forward end of the short bow deck, both of them wedged against the bow railing.

Castine rolled off him and sat up, coughing and spitting; she pushed her sopping hair away from her face and blinked around wildly at the dark empty ocean. There was no light behind the windshield, but someone inside the boat pounded against the glass. Vickery waved, then pressed his hand against the wet glass and swept it back and forth in a more visible wave.

Notchett’s boat didn’t have even the narrowest side deck, so Vickery and Castine clambered back over the wet cabin roof and dropped down to the cockpit deck. The boat was still pitching back and forth, and they both wound up sitting and sliding down the deck to the transom, along with a lot of foaming salt water. At least, Vickery thought dazedly, the patches of fire everywhere got extinguished.

The bulkhead door banged open behind them, and Vickery heard Yoneda call, “Whoa!” He looked around and saw her leaning out of the doorway. “You two nearly had to swim home.”

Vickery helped Castine up, and the two of them leaned on the transom, shivering, as Yoneda walked across the rocking deck toward them. Water was sloshing around her ankles and she held her arms out to the sides for balance.

“Plowman lost a tooth,” Yoneda called, “and Tacitus has a sprained shoulder or something. That kid just rolled like a monkey.” She looked up from her feet, past Vickery, and her face emptied of all expression.

Vickery quickly shifted around to look aft; and then he just stared.

Glowing white lines like the spokes of an enormous wheel stretched across the dark face of the sea, rapidly but silently rotating under the surface. Castine stood beside him, and their faces were alternately in shadow and then whitely underlit as the shining lines moved past under them.

Vickery took a quick look back. Yoneda and Santiago were right behind them, and Tacitus was standing in the bulkhead doorway, gripping one side of it.

The sight of Tacitus reminded Vickery of last night in the riverbed. “Get back belowdecks!” he shouted, pulling Castine away from the transom. Santiago turned and slipped, and Yoneda jumped over him and fell herself, both of them sliding halfway to the forward bulkhead. Vickery and Castine separated and moved carefully around them on the rocking deck, gripping the gunwales. They had made their way to the bulkhead, Vickery bumping into the canopied helm, when Castine shouted hoarsely.

Vickery looked at her, then quickly looked in the direction she was pointing.

A figure was standing back at the transom end of the deck now, glowing internally and then dimming as the light spokes moved past in the water behind it, and it seemed to be made of smoky glass: about seven feet tall, with thin legs and torso supporing a slowly bobbing, elongated head, and spindly arms that extended to the sides over the high gunwales.

Yoneda and Santiago had glanced back and then scurried forward and knocked Tacitus aside as they crowded in through the door. Vickery waved at Castine to follow them, but now she was staring wide-eyed at something above and behind him in the vast oceanic night.


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