The Coming

In November

Alarming hair growth had continued in young white males since August, when a musical mime group, the Epileptics, had been briefly popular. What caught on was not their semirandom twitching, now admired and imitated only by the very young, but their odd facial hair: each of them had a braided rope of beard growing from one cheek, and were otherwise clean-shaven. Of course it would take years to achieve a really long rope, but many adherents had managed four to six inches. They dyed it odd colors and some waxed it with a heavy pomade, so it lolled from the cheek like a spare penis, much to the delight of their parents.

Two movies inspired by the Coming appeared. Second Coming was aimed at the Christian audience, and succeeded; To Serve Man, blatantly stolen from a century-old “first contact” story, did not do quite as well, once the joke of the title became common knowledge.

Europe treaded further down the path to open war. Every member present in the German parliament died on 17 November, victims of a swift bioagent that turned their bones to jelly. No one claimed responsibility for the massacre. The next day the Eiffel Tower came down, four people freighted with high explosives sacrificing themselves simultaneously, at the monument’s four corners.

No one took credit for that, either. Official denials were discounted by most German and French citizens, as was the sober assertion that a third party was likely responsible for both atrocities; someone who would benefit from the two countries destroying one another.

Both armies massed along the border, doing maneuvers.

Insect restaurants opened all over California, Oregon, and Washington State. One chain, Eat More Bugs, was openly xenophobic, relating bugs with the Coming—cows and pigs and chickens are your relatives; eat something alien.

Most of the survival stores were failing. People who stocked up on water and bullets and nitrogen-preserved beans only went to the store once. So it was one month of huge profits followed by bankruptcy. Some of them hung on grimly, hoping for bad news. But there was no news from space; just the unchanging signal.

Norman told Aurora a version of the truth that did not include Pepe or weapons of incredible ferocity. The police investigation of the murder/arson did not publicly acknowledge that the bodies had been burned beyond even molecular recognition. The station scuttlebutt was that Willy Joe had arranged the arson to make it look as if he had died, a cover for disappearing out of sight. That was consistent with Rabin’s fantastic testimony and the absolute lack of organic residue: the “men” who were holding him hostage were just convincing dummy robots, loaded with something like thermite. It would have been an expensive masquerade, but well within Willy Joe’s budget, or at least the budget of his bosses.

Rabin had one more clandestine meeting with Norm, where they discussed the unlikelihood of that explanation. Of course, Rabin had gone along with it during the investigation, because it turned the spotlight away from him: Willy Joe had only picked up a cop so he would have an unimpeachable witness to his dramatic “demise.”

Norm and Rabin stropped Occam’s razor and concluded it must have been some clandestine military device that had fallen into the hands of an enemy of Willy Joe’s. Norm was still thinking privately about gamma-ray bursters, but he left well enough alone there.

(An aspect of it that no one else was privy to was that the chief of police had a cousin in Washington who was high up in U.S. Army weapons research. He said there was nothing in the arsenal, or even on the drawing boards, that would do what Rabin had described. So it must have been fake.)