She felt Jimmy’s clasp on her waist and started to say something—and then there was a horrible stab of pain that forced the breath out of her. She gritted her teeth against screaming. “No, Jimmy! No! That’s the wrong place!”
He withdrew obediently and she turned around, holding onto his penis, trying not to panic at the string of bloody mucus. “Let’s wash this off and—”
He picked her up like a large doll and threw her onto the bed.
It was a good thing she’d left the glass doors open; the gardeners heard her screams. Bad thing that she’d locked the door. By the time they had beaten it open, Jimmy was standing at the end of the bed, naked and unaroused, staring placidly at Dutch, who had crawled to the far corner of the large bed, cowering and whimpering and bleeding.
They knew better than to call the police. The one who spoke the best English called Mr. Berry at his law office while the others helped Jimmy dress and led him down to the pool. The Mexican cook and one of the male nurses tended to Dutch.
Mr. Berry showed up in ten minutes, bearing his most potent weapon, the checkbook. He listened to Dutch while she quieted her sobbing and haltingly described what had happened.
He was extremely sympathetic. Of course she was the victim here, but the law was complicated. Jimmy was, after all, a minor, and an unscrupulous lawyer might claim that she had seduced him.
She looked him in the eye, resolute through tears of pain. “I did start to seduce him. But then he raped me, two places. Should I go to the police?”
Mr. Berry asked the others to leave the room. In a half hour, an ambulance from a private hospital rolled up quietly to the service entrance, and Dutch was carried out over the gravel in Jimmy’s old wheelchair.
The doctor who examined her had never seen a broken pubic bone before. He accepted her story about a bucking horse out of control, but suggested that during her confinement she might want to be examined for pregnancy, just in case.
9
Apia, Samoa, 2019
CNN runs a news special on 14 December 2019.
The camera pans along gentle surf, to rest on the artifact. It closes in during voice-over introduction:
MALLORY (VO)
Over the past several weeks, what began as a mystery has become an enigma. It started when a private marine research organization, Poseidon Projects, claimed salvage rights for an unclaimed wreck deep in the Tonga Trench a few hundred miles from this Samoan island.
With the help of Poseidon Projects, famous for having raised the Titanic, Atlantis used acres of floats to bring the “wreck” to within a few fathoms of the surface. They towed it with tugs to a holding location…
Archive footage of towing and parking the artifact.
MALLORY (VO, CONT.)
just offshore of Independent Samoa, where they had secured a ninety-nine-year lease on a piece of undeveloped land, which was being turned into a small research center…
Archive footage of the shrouded artifact being pulled toward shore.
MALLORY (VO, CONT.)
built solely to investigate this thing, which was obviously not the wreck of a ship.
Archive underwater footage: the shroud flaps teasingly, to show the bright metal surface of the thing. A montage of scenes while Poseidon engineers attach the towing collar to the artifact, and start dragging it in.
MALLORY (VO, CONT.)
That cable is powered by this machine… capable of moving thousands of tons.
But when this heavy thing—more massive than a Nautilus submarine, but smaller than a delivery van—when it came to the shoreline and dug into the sand…
Archive footage of the cable accident.
MALLORY (VO, CONT.)
it had met its match. One man was almost killed when the cable broke.
They had to find a way to move it the last hundred yards, to the concrete pad that would become the floor of their laboratory.
Screen fades to a live image of the thing with its rocket attached.
MALLORY (VO, CONT.)
This is a self-contained Chinese booster rocket, normally used in the Glorious Wonder series, to carry up to a ton into low Earth orbit. It’s not going quite so far today.
Interior view: an improvised bunker a couple of hundred yards from the thing. You can see the artifact through a thick window. Mallory is sitting with two men, drinking coffee at a table made of a plank on stacked boxes.
MALLORY
We’re going to watch this with Jack Halliburton and Russell Sutton, joint directors of Atlantis Associates.
I suppose this is going to be the shortest rocket trip in history.
JACK
There were some last century that only got an inch off the pad.
RUSS
This one’s reliable as a Ford truck, though. Except…
MALLORY
What could go wrong?
JACK
We’re not worried about the rocket. Just its attachment to the artifact.
RUSS
It’s the irresistible force versus the immovable object.
JACK
We know the thing’s mass; we know the properties of the sand it’s resting on. The rocket generates plenty enough thrust to do the job.
RUSS
The only problem is the attachment between the rocket and the artifact. If the collar that connects them breaks… we’ll need another approach.
MALLORY
And the rocket goes screaming into the center of town there?
Telephoto zoom from the rocket’s POV: straight into Aggie Grey’s.
JACK
No, there’s an automatic shutoff if the rocket suddenly feels no resistance. It might go fifty or a hundred feet.
MALLORY
But if it doesn’t work?
JACK
Glorious Wonder carries a lot of insurance.
RUSS
A lot of people in Apia are off visiting relatives in the country. I think I would be, too.
A loud whistle blows.
JACK
That’s the ten-minute warning. You might want your cameraman out of there.
Mallory stands up and looks through the glass.
MALLORY
They’re gone. Just the camera attached to the booster.
RUSS
I hope it doesn’t give you anything too interesting.
MALLORY
Have to agree, for once… So this has to be some artifact from outer space.
RUSS
Well, you know as much about that as we do. It could possibly be the result of some natural process we’ve never encountered before.
JACK
Though its density makes that unlikely. Or inexplicable.
MALLORY
It’s very ancient.
RUSS
The coral it was embedded in was old before there were any primates resembling humans.
MALLORY
So you don’t think much of the “lost weapon” theory?
JACK
Bullshit.
RUSS
You do have to wonder how it got there, if it’s an old Soviet or American device. If we’d just found it lying someplace, sure, that would be the first assumption. But it was below million-year-old coral.
MALLORY
So maybe they hid it there?
RUSS
You’d have to ask why. I’d want to hide it in my own country.
MALLORY
Have the Russians or Americans contacted you?
JACK
Sure.
RUSS
We don’t want to talk about that. Yet.
Screen changes to an aerial view with countdown superimposed. A 360-degree pan shows all the military helicopters watching. At ten seconds, it zooms in on the artifact. A laconic voice offscreen counts down.
VOICE (OFF)
Ten.
JACK
(rising)
About time.
The three of them move to the window to watch. A split screen adds an aerial view. The voice counts down to zero.
The Chinese rocket ignites, its exhaust churning billows of steam in the sea behind it. For long seconds, as the noise increases to a banshee scream, it doesn’t move. Then the artifact lurches and moves slowly, then faster, up the guide rails toward the metal cradle that will be its resting place. A camera by the cradle shows it fall into place with a jarring crash, just as the rocket goes silent.