19
“A fire, I think, would be nice. No?”
Dan nodded through his shivers. He was under a blanket and atop a leather armchair inside Dr. Terry Shae’s dimly lit study, the front room of a modest cabin nestled at the base of the island’s observatory. Shae had given him a fresh set of clothes to change into and had popped a box of Bagel Bites in the oven. Three Cheese, objectively the worst Bagel Bite flavor, but Dan was in no position to complain. His mouth watered as the smell wafted over the hardwood and up the paneled walls. Rain slapped against the window as if it wanted in too, and who could blame it. Dan sipped his bourbon, his phone charging on a table nearby. Sure was cozy in here.
Shae stood from the fire, and Dan scooted closer to it.
“Who thought to equip a cabin in the Bahamas with a fireplace?” Shae said, clapping his hands together to remove the dirt. “Never thought I would find occasion to use this thing. Funny, funny.”
He sat in a thin wooden rocking chair across from Dan, crossed his squat legs, and packed a pipe with tobacco.
“Thank you again,” Dan said. “Really.”
Shae waved that off as smoke billowed from his lips. “What were you doing out there?” He nodded toward the window. “In this?”
“I got lost.” That wasn’t a total fabrication.
Shae received Dan’s response with a rise of his brow. It was clear there was no use lying to him, there was a certainty to his expression that collected in his irises, saw through nonsense like X-ray vision.
“I was heading to the airstrip,” Dan admitted. “I have a friend there that I need to check on.”
“Alan Ferris.”
“You know Alan?”
“They certainly talk about him a lot.”
Shae pulled himself from the chair and walked to a bookshelf near the fireplace. He clicked on a small radio. Static at first, but then a muffled voice, Rico Flores’s voice, and it said, “Need team Charlie at Building C. Reports of activity on second floor, southeast corner room. Keep an eye out for the missing pistol. Still at hangar, over.”
Then, after a second: “Roger.”
Shae switched it off. “No, I would not recommend visiting the airstrip tonight. Along with Mr. Flores, that brute of a man, Mrs. Collins is there.”
“Why? Is Alan okay?”
“Inspecting the plane, I believe. From what I gather, your friend has almost completed the repairs. And ahead of schedule, sounds like.”
Dan felt as though his heart has been stabbed with a frozen knife. “Holy shit.”
“Holy shit, indeed.” The oven dinged. “Oh. The Bagel Bites.”
Dan shook off the blanket and followed Shae into the small kitchen. There was a table in there, past the cabinets, with one lonely chair and an ashtray at its center.
“Did they say when they’re taking off?” he asked. “It’s really important that I know that.”
“You have a seat reserved, Mister…?”
“Foster. Dan Foster.”
Shae nodded with a smile, pulled the tray from the oven, and shook its contents loose before placing it on the counter. “Thought that was you.”
How’d this guy know everything?
Shae plated a few of the bagels, offered the plate to Dan. He chuckled. “Your code name is ‘Shitlicker.’”
Shitlicker? That’s the best they could do?
Shae hummed as he walked back to the study, back to his chair, placed his pipe on the table and his plate of trans fats on his lap. Dan sat again too and thoughtlessly stuffed a bagel into his mouth. Fuck. Hot! Hot, hot, hot. He inhaled sharply, waved at his mouth, tried to cool it down. He was going to freeze to death with a burn on the roof of his mouth.
“You should let them cool,” Shae said.
Dan smirked. Ya think? He put the plate down. “My fiancée has a seat on that plane,” he said, his tongue resting against the burn.
“Does she?”
“Yes. Did they say when it was leaving?”
“Just that it was almost complete, I am afraid.”
Dan peered out the window, at the vegetation turned sideways past the porch lights, at the flashes of lightning.
“Again, I would advise against that,” Shae said, reading Dan’s mind. “Even if the plane was ready to fly, it would be suicide in this weather.”
Dan shook away the impulse, stuffed another Bagel Bite in his mouth. Jesus, still really hot. What the hell was wrong with him? “How do you know so much?” Dan asked, though with his mouth full it sounded more like, “’Ow you knof so muff?”
Shae blew on a Bagel Bite, looked deeply into its molten yellow center. “If the past few days have taught me anything, Mr. Foster, it is in fact how little I know.”
“I mean about the resort, the plane, me, and my friends. How come I haven’t seen you at Sunrise Yoga? Or on work assignments?” Dan paused. “How the hell do you have Bagel Bites ?”
“Mrs. Collins and her men certainly paid me a visit, if that is what you are asking.”
“And then left you alone.”
Shae shrugged, took a pull from his pipe. “Mr. Sheridan helped there. They determined my work too important to disrupt.”
Must be nice, Dan thought. “And how’s that work going, Doc? You find the sun yet? You’d really help me out of a couple of jams if you found the sun.”
Shae chuckled. “No, I am afraid not.”
Dan waited for more. There must be more. He leaned forward, elbows against his knees, opened his hands to Shae. Shae just ate another Bagel Bite.
“That’s it? One week alone with frozen dinners and a big-ass telescope, and you’ve got nothing ?”
“I know that the sun no longer exists.”
“That much I gathered.”
“But I still see Mars.” Shae pointed to a spot on the ceiling. Dan would have to trust that’s where Mars was. Shae pointed to another spot, then another. “I still see Mercury and Ceres and the rings of Saturn and Hyperion. And they are all precisely where they should be, Mr. Foster, as though our sun was still here, as though its gravitational pull still existed.” He ran a hand through what remained of his hair. There was a glint in his eye, the same one he’d had onstage that first day. Leave it to an egghead to be fascinated by all of this. “None of it makes any sense.”
“Maybe…maybe it just extinguished, Doc. But, like, the core of the sun is still there. The rock part. And that still has the gravitational pull.”
Dan was caught off guard by Shae’s brief unhinged laughter. This guy was just having a grand time, wasn’t he? “There is no rock part. The sun is made of gas and plasma.”
“Okay. Right.” Dan knew that. “So—when you point your big fucking telescope at the part of the sky where the sun’s supposed to be, what do you see?”
“Nothing.”
“Nothing?”
“Nothing.”
“Do you see stars and things that would’ve been, like, previously blocked by the sun? But that are visible now it’s gone?”
“No. I see nothing. I see black.”
“A black hole then.”
“No.” Shae ate another Bagel Bite, nearly swallowed it whole. “A black hole is different. This is just…black.”
Dan fell deeper into the armchair. If Dr. Shae didn’t know what the hell was going on, what hope was there for the rest of them?
Shae said, “I have studied space for over forty-five years, Mr. Foster. Undergraduate at Purdue. Master’s from UCLA. Doctorate in astronomy from Northwestern. I worked for my father’s aeronautics firm for more than thirty years, and now I provide data to the Space Telescope Science Institute. There is an asteroid named after me.”
“Oh, yeah?” Badass.
“829 Shae.” He puffed the pipe, lost himself in the smoke as though it were space dust. “All that time. All that knowledge . Decades of research—but there are still many things I wish I knew.”
Dan was stress eating now, two Bagel Bites at a time until his plate was clear, and then he eyed Shae’s. Shae said, “Oh, go on,” and handed it to him.
“You sure?” Dan said, already tearing through them. “It’s just, the food back at the resort, man. You wouldn’t—it’s disgusting.”
Shae nodded. “Well, it is hard to match the smooth cheese and subtle tomato notes of the humble Bagel Bite.”
“You said it.” Dan licked his fingers, tasting a tinge of guilt when imagining Mara’s grumbling stomach. Then he perked up. “You got anything sweet?”
Shae stood. “Ice cream?”
“Fuck yeah, ice cream.” This guy was living like a king!
After a moment, Shae returned with two bowls of rocky road. Once it hit Dan’s tongue, he closed his eyes and looked to the heavens. It was the best thing he’d ever had.
“Good, right?”
“Dude.”
Shae laughed. “I always keep rocky road in the freezer when I can get it. It was my father’s favorite.”
“You said your dad owned an aeronautics firm? So you grew up rich as shit, then, right?” Dan felt talkative under the influence of ice cream and Bagel Bites and bourbon and warmth.
Shae laughed again, waved his spoon in the air. “It sounds more impressive than it was. ShaeTech, he named it. Our bread and butter were ballutes.”
“Ballutes?”
Dan recognized Shae’s trivializing tone as the one he used when describing his job at Marvel Maids. “Ever see something released from an aircraft at a high velocity with a little parachute attached? A bomb or supplies?”
“Sure.”
“That little parachute is a ballute.”
“Huh.”
“Captivating, I know. But there was also a small research division of ShaeTech.” He took a mouthful of rocky road. “I led that. The company bought this island, built the telescope. This location has incredible astronomical benefits, you know. Over the years, ShaeTech fell on hard times. The research team dwindled until I was the only one left. Knowledge isn’t as lucrative as it should be.” He stirred his spoon in his bowl. “Before the company went under, my father gifted the island to me. Then a few years ago, I sold most of it to Mr. Sheridan, who built the resort you and your friends are enjoying. On and on, you know how things go.”
What type of “small research division” purchases an island ? “What were you researching?”
“Exoplanets.” Shae’s tiny eyes filled with wonder at the sound of the word on his tongue.
“Exoplanets,” Dan repeated.
“Planets outside our solar system. Planets similar to ours—planets that could potentially support life. Potentially even human life in the future.”
“Find any?”
“Oh, yes, we have discovered thousands.”
“Find life on any of ’em?”
“You would have heard.”
“So we’re alone,” Dan said.
“Of course not. What would ever give you that idea?”
Dan churned the question in his head for a second, considered whether he cared enough to dig any deeper.
“There were graves out there,” he said. “In the woods.”
Shae paused, the spoon still in his mouth, rocky road just hitting the back of his throat. The wonder in his eyes dissipated. Dan could sense his sadness, feel it enter the room as if it’d pulled up a chair and scooped some ice cream for itself.
“I was wondering if you saw those,” he said.
“Smacked my head on half of them.”
Shae sighed. “Robert’s buried out there. Jane too. Mr. Houser. That man was so big they had to construct a custom casket for him.”
“Who were they? Why are they buried here ?”
“They wished to be. Felt so strongly about the island, about the research we had done together. That’s the misery of growing old, Mr. Foster. It’s not the creaky knees or the hangovers or the”—he shook his belly—“the way your body betrays you. It’s slowly watching everyone you love die.” He blinked. “Though I suppose that will not be a concern much longer.”
Dan had two thoughts. First, Shae wasn’t that old. No older than Dan’s father, but he talked like he was days away from keeling over. Well, he was days away from keeling over—they all were—but not from old age. Second, how could anyone love a job so much that they’d request to be buried there? If Dan was buried under his cubicle at Marvel Maids, he’d haunt the ever-living shit out of that place.
Actually, wait a minute, there was a third thought now, and it barreled over the others and knocked against the front of his skull.
“Easy to speak of misery from your warm cabin filled with nonperishables and overstuffed footrests,” Dan said, placing his feet firmly on the ground in protest. “You’re worried about people dying? Do you have any idea what’s going on just down the hill?”
Shae was unstirred. “I have some notion.”
“Six people dead. That I know of. One shot right in front of me, Doc. Bled to death in my fiancée’s arms. Others are starving, forced to work all day with little to eat. They don’t have access to medicine, to plumbing, to the spa packages they paid for…and you’re up here burning the roof of your mouth on Bagel Bites!”
“That was you.”
Dan paced. “And guests are looking to me for help because they’re stupid—really they just need a leader—but I’ve fallen in with the autocracy because I want to provide my fiancée with just the slightest chance at living. Then I come up with an idea that maybe walks the tightrope between both, and immediately after I pitch it, I start backtracking because I’m scared of everything. Fuck me, right? I’m a terrible guy. That’s what you’re saying. Wow, Doc, give it to me straight. You don’t pull any punches, do you? I sold these people down the river for my own interests, and I can’t even commit to making it right. I get it.”
Shae blinked at Dan.
He placed his bowl of ice cream on the table beside him and slowly puffed his pipe. “Have you ever heard of the Gaia hypothesis, Mr. Foster?”
“Of course,” Dan said, returning to his seat, and then, “No,” because of course he hadn’t.
“It is the theory that all of life on Earth actually exists as a single living organism. That Earth itself is alive and capable of regulating the environment for its own well-being, similar to how a dog regulates its body temperature through panting or we regulate ours through sweat.”
“Okay.”
“Much of the scientific community rejects the idea. Too teleological, too neat. A plant releases oxygen into the air not because other species on Earth need oxygen to survive, they say, but simply because that is what plants must do in order to survive themselves . The benefits to other organisms are simply good luck, or evolutionary in nature.”
“Okay…”
“But the Gaia hypothesis makes compelling arguments about the peculiar feedback loops that keep our planet in balance. Our oceans should be far too salty to support life due to river runoff. But the cracks in the ocean floors act as filters. If Earth’s oxygen values were to reach 30 percent, every flash of lightning would result in devastating fires, dooming us all. What keeps that oxygen in check? The biological production of methane by bacteria! On and on, countless examples of Earth regulating itself like the thermostat in your home.”
“Why are you telling me this?”
“Ethically, I do not agree with the actions of Building A. As a scientist, though, and researcher, I am fascinated by life’s response to such devastating stimuli. And Tizoc is only a small sample. Imagine this happening throughout the world, Mr. Foster, species dividing back into tribes, purging each other to consolidate Earth’s resources, thus lessening humanity’s demand on a planet that can suddenly support so little life! Is this not the Gaia hypothesis playing out in real time?”
He was practically giddy, kneading his hands and trembling like a boy at a pet store. Dan didn’t understand a lot of what was just said, and the speed at which he said it, but he knew he didn’t like it.
“This isn’t a science experiment. People are dying, Doc.”
Shae shook out of it, composed himself. “Of course. Of course. I know that. One glass of bourbon and some time with my pipe, and science gets the better of me. Happens most evenings, but rarely do I have an audience. It’s just…” His voice trailed off, up in smoke with the tobacco.
“It’s just what?”
“Perhaps I’ve been pointing my telescope in the wrong direction.”
A loose beam of light flashed past the southern window, and Dan shot Shae a panicked look. He snatched his phone. Shae jumped up, rushed to the radio, and turned the dial. The voice was muffled, but someone whispered on the other end, “Approaching observatory now. Will report back, over.”
“Quickly!” Shae said, waving Dan toward a closet door just past a coatrack. Dan opened it. It wasn’t a closet at all, but a small room with a ladder inside. “Up! Up! Keep quiet and do not touch anything. Understand?”
Dan opened his mouth to say yes, he did understand, but Shae slammed the door in his face. Dan turned and ascended the ladder as the front door of the cabin burst open.