If Tomorrow Comes

PROLOGUE

Judith Ryan shoved her way to the front of the crowd, moving people with her elbows, her cane, and her age. It took her twenty minutes to get from the car to the cordon; the crowd was vast and Judith, eighty-five, was slow. When she reached the cordon, she was still five hundred yards from the spaceship, gleaming and silent on its little hill in the autumn Pennsylvania countryside.

“Step back, ma’am,” the soldier said. He wore riot gear and a gun. “You can’t go any far—I said to step back!”

“Please,” Judith quavered, “my grandson—”

The soldier glanced quickly around, looking for a child that might have slipped under the cordon. Nothing. “Step back, ma’am.”

“You don’t understand! He’s on the ship! I have to talk to someone and warn them!”

The soldier scowled. Nothing like this had been covered in his briefing. He fell back on clear orders and native skepticism. “Uh-huh. Makes no difference. You can’t—Ma’am!”

Judith ducked under the cordon, even though the motion made her left knee buckle. She jabbed her cane into the grass to right herself. The soldier grabbed her. People nearby raised cell phones and cameras.

“My grandson! I have to warn somebody!”

More phones were raised. An officer strode across the area inside the cordon. “What’s the problem here?”

Desperation wrinkled deeper the lines on Judith’s face. “I have to tell someone! He’s aboard the ship—I only just learned! I found something, a… but he isn’t—”

“Her grandson,” the first soldier said.

The officer glanced back over his shoulder and then at his watch. Then Judith knew. The ship was doing what the car radio said it might: lifting hours earlier than announced, perhaps to foil any last-minute attacks.

“Ahhhhhh,” went the crowd, while news cams and crews scrambled to catch up.

The silver egg, dazzling in the sunlight, rose silently and without fire into the blue sky. The alien technology that had built her, only beginning to be understood on Earth, was of no interest to Judith. No one had listened to her. And even if they had listened, all she could offer was her unsubstantiated word, her heart-deep knowledge, the emblem she had found buried in the garden while mulching her roses. Nobody would heed any of that.

The officer, his face kind, said, “Ma’am, everybody aboard the Friendship got the most thorough physical and mental checkups possible. Your grandson will be fine.”

Judith stared at him. He didn’t understand. It was not her grandson she feared for.

Too late. Way too late.