She read the bland article again, then stared out her apartment window at a tree, carefully enclosed in a little wrought-iron fence, growing where a section of city sidewalk had been meticulously removed to accommodate it.

2035

All at once the Grab machinery went crazy.

Ravi was on duty. He and Pete had been talked to by McAllister, a talk that left both of them near tears. She wasn’t angry, she was disappointed. Angry would have been better. Not even Ravi’s sighting of the not-cat outside had deterred McAllister from her disappointment. Pete wasn’t sure that McAllister even believed Ravi. Pete wasn’t sure he did, either. When McAllister was finished with them, Pete and Ravi avoided each other for a week—until Ravi was restored to puffed-up triumph by his amazing Grab.

“I was all ready,” he later told everyone, although Pete had his doubts about that—why even bother to repeat it over and over unless it wasn’t true? And Ravi had a history of falling asleep during Grab-room duty. But whether he had leaped onto the platform at first brightening, or had just barely caught the Grab before it went away, it was irrefutable that Ravi had gone. He had gone close-mouthed both because of McAllister’s scolding and because he was embarrassed by the lack of the teeth that Pete had knocked out, but he returned smiling wide. His shout had reached both the children’s room and the farm. Pete, on crop duty with Darlene, had run toward the Grab room, along with everyone else.

Ravi stood on the platform behind the biggest pile of stuff that Pete had ever seen. It almost hid Ravi; it spilled off the edges of the platform; it clanked and clattered as it fell. Pete couldn’t even identify half of it. How could even Ravi, the strongest of them all, load all this in ten minutes? And onto what?

McAllister, running clumsily behind the bulk of her pregnancy, stopped in the doorway. She went still and white.

“Look what I got!” Ravi shouted. “Look!”

“What is it all?” Caity said. She held a child in each arm. “How did you bring it all?”

“The Grab stayed open for more than ten minutes—for twenty-two minutes! It was a store Grab and I got this big rolling thing—see, it’s under all this—and just piled things on. There only was this kind of stuff, so that’s what I took. But look how much of it!” Ravi practically swelled with pride. Bloated, Pete thought. Like when someone was diseased in their belly.

Why couldn’t Pete have been the one to bring back the big haul? Whatever it was.

McAllister finally spoke. “Twenty-two minutes?”

“I timed it,” Ravi said proudly.

Caity repeated, “What is it all? What’s that thing with the skinny metal spikes coming out of it?”

“A rake,” McAllister said. Then it seemed that once she started talking, she couldn’t stop. “A rake, several hoes, bags of seed and fertilizer, trowels, flower seeds, hoses, flower pots, wind chimes—wind chimes!”

Pete had never seen McAllister like this—wild-eyed, hysterical—not even when he and Ravi had gotten trapped in the funeral slot. Fear pricked him. But the next moment she had recovered herself.

“You were in a garden store, Ravi. And you did well. Let’s get this stuff off the rolling cart so we can get the cart down off the platform. Caity, take Karim and Tina back to the children’s room, and on your way get Darlene to help Jenna with the children. She’ll have to do it because we need you here. Tommy, go wake up Eduardo. Terrell, you and Ravi and Pete start moving this stuff. We need that platform clear right away.”

“Why?” Pete said.

“I don’t know yet. Let’s just do it.”

Caity ran down the corridor with the kids. Pete leaped forward to help unload the platform. If McAllister was ordering Darlene to help with the children, then something important was going on.

They got all the stuff off the platform, including the long, heavy rolling cart. Immediately Terrell jumped on it and Ravi pushed him out the room and down the corridor. Terrell laughed delightedly. “I want a ride, too!” Caity cried, running after the cart.

The platform glowed.

Pete gaped at it. It never brightened again so soon after a Grab—never!

McAllister said, in a voice somehow not her own, “Go.” She handed Pete the wrister that Ravi had turned over to her.

Pete hopped onto the platform, the laughter from the corridor still ringing in his ears.

JUNE 2014

Julie continued to read the papers obsessively: "STARVATION REACHES CRITICAL POINT IN SOMALIA." "OVERPOPULATION BIGGEST THREAT TO PLANET." But nothing more was mentioned about the mutated bacteria, not anywhere in the world. Nor could she find anything on-line. If the story about K. planticola was being repressed, several countries must be cooperating in doing that, by every means available. The completeness of the suppression was almost as scary as the microbial mutation.

Almost.

Several times she picked up the phone to call Fanshaw’s office. Each time she laid it down again. If there was a cover-up going on, if there really were scientists and covert organizations and high officials in several countries working to keep this from the public, then Julie did not want to call any attention to herself. Fanshaw had probably, given his narcissism, erased any trace of help from anybody else in crafting the article he never got to publish. He would, of course, have preserved her nondisclosure agreement, and Julie could only hope he had it in a safe, secret place. But he had also written her a check “For professional services,” and she had cashed it.

She Googled him. Until two weeks ago he had been all over the Net. Then his posts on Facebook ceased, as did his blog.

“You seem preoccupied,” Linda said. They sat under an awning in her back yard, drinking cold lemonade and watching Linda’s three kids splash in the pool. Alicia lay asleep in her infant seat. The beach-cottage-in-August scheme had been dropped; Linda and Ted were taking the children to visit their grandmother in Winnipeg, where it was twenty-five degrees cooler.

“I’m sorry,” Julie said.

“Everything all right? The consulting?”

“Going better than I’d dared hope. And I’m making a lot more money than I was teaching.”

“Well, I can see that Alicia’s all right. So… Ju, is it Gordon? I know he called the night Alicia was born. You were on the floor with Jake, I burst in, and Gordon’s voice was coming from your answering machine.”

Linda had never mentioned this before. It had been two days before Julie even listened to Gordon’s message: “We’ve had another kidnapping. A three-year-old boy taken from his bed in southern Vermont.”

She said to Linda, “He called about the work project. You know I can’t discuss it with you.”

“I know. Spook stuff. But that wasn’t all he said. At the end his voice changed completely when he said, ‘Are you all right?’ Have you seen him since? Do you miss him? Is that why you seem so… not here?”

Julie put her hand, cold from the lemonade glass, over her friend’s. “No, I haven’t seen him. And no, I don’t miss him. Sometimes I feel guilty about that, like it proves I’m a shallow person.”

Linda grinned. “You’re not that. Still waters, brackish but deep.”

“Thanks. I think.” And then, before she knew she was going to say it, “Linda, did you ever read James Lovelock?”

“No. Who’s he?”

“It doesn’t matter. Do you believe… do you think there are things about the universe that we can’t explain? Things that lie so far beyond science they’re something else entirely?”

“I lapsed from Catholicism when I was fourteen,” Linda said, “and never saw any reason to unlapse. Ju, have you suddenly got religion?”

“No, no, nothing like that. It’s not anything, really. Just the heat.”