Fall or, Dodge in Hell. Neal Stephenson

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       10

      A few years earlier, Corvallis had been in a moderately serious car accident in stop-and-go traffic. He’d slowed down. The car behind him hadn’t—its driver was texting—and had rearended him hard enough to total Corvallis’s vehicle. Looking back on it later, the weird thing about it was how long it had taken for his brain to assemble anything like a correct picture of events. The first thing that had happened, as far as Corvallis’s mind-body system was concerned, was that his car’s headrest had struck him in the back of the skull hard enough that he could feel the little rivets in its frame. Then a bunch of other stuff had happened and he had been distracted for a while, but it wasn’t until maybe an hour later that he’d noticed his head hurting and reached up to find a bump on the back of his skull.

      This was kind of like that. Reading the time stamp on Maeve’s message and her words my wifi just went down were the blow to the base of his skull, but it was a while before he really focused on it.

      It was easy to find Maeve’s last name (Braden) and look up her address. She lived right in the middle of Moab, just a few blocks away from the offices of Canyonland Adventures. Whether she’d sent that text from her home or from the office, she’d probably been within a few hundred yards of ground zero.

      He spent a while aimlessly clicking through Maeve’s various social media activities. On Lyke and other social media platforms, she had registered using variant spellings of her first name (Mab, Mabh, Madbh) and her last (Bradan, O Bradain). Apparently both names were Gaelic and so the spelling was all over the place. This was a common subterfuge used by people who didn’t want to sign up for social media accounts under their real names, but who understood that the fake name had to be convincing enough to pass an elementary screen by an algorithm somewhere; “Mickey Mouse” or “X Y” would be rejected, but “Mabh O Bradain” was fine. “Mab” was only one letter different from “Moab” and he wondered if Maeve had used it for that reason, as a sort of pun on her adopted home.

      She was Australian, living in the States because of some family complications only murkily hinted at on social media. She was a double amputee—one of those people who suffered from a congenital malformation of the lower legs that made it necessary to remove them, below the knee, during childhood. She had been pursuing rowing and paddling sports for much of her twenty-nine years. Verna, her older sister in Adelaide, had stage 3 melanoma; Maeve had a lot to say about the importance of sun protection for outdoorsy people.

      He had been clicking on links for a while without reading them. He had gone down a rat hole and found himself reading a page on modern high-tech prosthetic legs. He knew a couple of other people who used them, and had once invested in a startup that was trying to make better ones. So as random as it might have seemed, it felt like a point of connection between him and Maeve.

      The jet was over the Bitterroots, aimed south-southwest. Corvallis pulled up a map and zoomed it to the point where he could see San Jose in the bottom left, Moab in the bottom right, and Missoula up top.

      He unbuckled his seat belt and walked forward past the little galley, where Bonnie was making coffee. She had kicked off her high-heeled pumps and switched to her sensible in-flight footwear. She looked up at him, moderately startled; the toilet was in the back, he had no particular reason for being up at this end of the plane.

      Procedures on private jets were pretty relaxed. Cockpit doors weren’t armored, and frequently were left open so that curious passengers could look out the front. At the moment, this one was closed. Corvallis hesitated before knocking on it. He was hesitating because he was about to make a decision he couldn’t unmake, and he knew that everyone was going to be disconcerted by it, and he wasn’t good at that kind of thing—at the mere fact of making himself the center of attention. So before knocking he had to engage in a bit of mental prep that had become a habit in the last few years. He was visualizing Richard Forthrast, hale and healthy, standing exactly where Corvallis was standing right now, confidently knocking on the door. Hell, Dodge wouldn’t even knock, he would just open it. He would greet Frank and Lenny, the pilot and copilot, and he would say what he had to say.

      Bonnie was giving him an odd look.

      He smiled and nodded at her, then rapped on the door. Then he opened it.

      “Frank and Lenny,” he said. “According to my map, Moab is approximately the same distance from where we are now as San Jose. Therefore, we ought to have enough fuel on board to fly to Moab. I would like to file a new flight plan and go to Moab.”

      They looked at him like he was crazy. As he’d known they would. But the reality of it wasn’t as bad as he’d feared. It never was. The anticipation was always worse.

      “Moab, where the bomb went off?” asked Frank, who was the alpha pilot.

      “Yes. That Moab.”

      “I think that’s shut down,” said Lenny, the beta pilot. “I mean, the FAA won’t let us near there.”

      “Do you know that for a fact, Lenny, or is it just a reasonable surmise based on news and social media stuff?”

      Lenny looked to Frank.

      “Well, we haven’t actually contacted the FAA, if that’s what you mean,” Frank said.

      “I would like you to change course for Moab, and file the flight plan, and see what happens,” Corvallis said. “If the FAA won’t allow us to land there, maybe we can fly past it en route to somewhere farther away, and look down at it. All I really need is to see the town from above.”

      Frank and Lenny looked at each other. Frank nodded.

      “I’ll get on it, boss,” said Lenny.

      “Okay. Let me know how it goes. I’m really interested to hear any particulars about how the FAA behaves when you run this by them.”

      Corvallis got back to his laptop, and its live Miasmic news feeds, in time to see a big military chopper lifting off from the roof of that casino in Las Vegas. Dangling СКАЧАТЬ