#
The saucers lift off to-the-second on-time. The crowd, which has grown, sighs
collectively as the saucers disappear over the haze, then a fine mist of solvent
rains down on our heads. It's as salty as sea-water, and the bat-house trembles
as it begins to melt. Streams of salty water course down its sides.
The top of the building comes into view, the saucers chasing it down as it
dissolves, spraying a steady blast of solvent.
I tense as the building's top reaches what I estimate to be 150. My calves bunch
and my breath catches in my chest. I feel like I'm drowning, and the building's
top crawls downwards, and my feet are sloshing to the ankles in dissolved foam,
that runs off into the sewers.
I stay tense until the building's top is far beneath what _must_ be 125, then I
exhale in a whoof of air. My head spins, and I brace my hands against my thighs.
I'm not looking up when it happens, as a result.
The first sign is when the great tide of green, scummy, plant-stinking water
courses down over us, soaking us to the skin, blinding me and sending me reeling
in reverie. Did I see hunks of dead, petrified coral crashing around me, or did
I imagine it?
A brief second later the building's top emits a bolt of lightning that broke
even Tesla's record for man-made lightning, recorded at nearly a kilometer in
length. A clap of thunder accompanies it, louder than any sound I have ever
heard, and it its wake I am perfectly deaf, submerged in silence.
The finger of lightning crawls through space like a broken-back rattler, and my
hair rises from my shoulders. In the presence of so much current, I should be
petrified, but it is magnificent. The finger seeks and seeks, then contacts one
of the saucers and literally blasts it out of the sky. It plummets in
slow-motion, and as it does, the building's top descends even further, and I
_swear_ I see the chair falling from the building's edge, and the man strapped
inside it had not aged a day in all the lifetimes gone by.
#
Chet's comm died somewhere in the lightning strike, but the emergency crews that
took him away and looked in his ears and poked him in the chest and gave him
pills take him back to the Royal York in a saucer, bridging the distance in a
few minutes, touching down on Front Street. The Royal York's doorman doesn't bat
an eye as he gets the door for him.
The elevator ride is fine. He is still wrapped in the silence of his deafness,
but it's a comforting, _centering_ silence.
Once Chet is back in his room, he fires up the vid and starts writing a letter
to The Amazing Robotron.
--
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<dc:description>A science-fiction short story by Cory Doctorow about aliens
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