What Went Wrong With Arlow?

Somehow wastewater treatment revenue was simultaneously up a hundred grand on average and the city's deficit grew three hundred and fifty in that same time. Arlow's charity bingo donations had something to do with that too.

"Help me understand this," Arlow sat down leisurely and put his feet up on the Mayor's desk, "you sold our town park to the neighboring town and slipped in a provision to hire a new garbage truck driver for servicing it?" He lit a cigarette and waited. He hadn't been surprised by the bizarre sale, but he was surprised Brett thought he could get away with it without Arlow knowing.

"Arlow, I wasn't gonna bother you for little things, you understand," he almost wiped sweat off his forehead, "it was fair market value." When Arlow said nothing, he did wipe himself dry with a handkerchief. "We were at the end of the fiscal year, you know, had to balance out obligations. And I figured you were full up on jobs."

"Maybe," Arlow said and squinted. But he was here to find out how a garbage man managed to afford a sixty grand car restoration some time ago. "Maybe I noticed we've been getting a lot more garbage trucks lately than seems right."

Brett sighed in relief. "Well, yeah, waste business is picking up," he explained, "we're picking up overflow from Pickens, Emelle, Kemper. They're bringing the stuff to us." Arlow stared at him, suppressing a surprise. "I figured it wasn't cutting into your contract seeing how it's coming from the outside." That part was true, Arlow thought, but the magnitude of what he was hearing blew his mind.

"And Emitt is driving these new trucks for you?" he asked.

"Well, yeah, he expanded into a half dozen trucks, hired his own men, then those hired their own." Arlow didn't know that. In fact, it caught him off guard. He rudely tapped ashes on the carpeted floor and realized an entire fleet somehow snuck up on him.

...

"What in God's name is that," Colonel Taylor asked in astonishment as the hangar door opened and he stared at a grille of a massive vehicle. It was so tall, the cab doors were only reachable by a gangway. It had a mounted stepladder leading to it in front of the vehicle, its grille guard doubling as a handrail.

"That's a Western Star 6900," Carly answered with something resembling love in her voice as she found the light switches, "twin steer."

"And we're taking... this eighteen... is this even an 18 wheeler?" he asked in confusion, looking at the huge bed truck because it was bigger and had more wheels than ones he'd seen on the road, "I thought we were taking an SUV." It looked like a freight truck's daddy.

Carly rolled her eyes at the question, "unless you think you can fit 12,000 gallons of liquid helium and nitrogen in a Hyundai,... yeah, we're taking this truck."

She looked at his bags with some amusement, deciding not to expand on the difference between a tractor and a truck. He was so eager to get his mission started and didn't realize how long it would take just to get ready. The truck hadn't even been geared yet. There were dual cryostats to fit, reserve tanks, tons of control gear. Tons of metal. Lead shielding. Generators. Welding. Bolting down. It would take weeks just to rent a crane to move the gravitometer.

"You're going to have to downsize. The cab's not that big," she told him.

"You can drive this thing?" he asked in surprise, still not convinced she wasn't pulling his leg.

She scoffed in reply, "it's how I got my Ph.D."

Taylor knew the instrumentation capabilities well enough, but had never lain eyes on any of the equipment before, and that was his fault. He needed to adjust the fuel budget and fast.

Carly hesitated for a moment then pointed at a metal badge over his ribbon bars, "Also, where we're going, you may want to lose the jacket with that ice cream cone thing and those other doodads. At the very least, it won't be comfortable spending so much time in it." She smirked, "And at the most, we probably don't want to draw attention to ourselves, do we?"

Taylor sounded surprised, then wounded, "Ice... cream cone...?",... and then appalled in the same sentence, "...it's a parachute."

"Oh."

...

First day out on the road, Taylor knew Carly would be trouble. She insisted they go to a bar after dinner and she got plastered on the very first night. The next morning, to his amazement, she got up with a bounce and got truckin' without a whine. If anything, she looked recharged in the morning. And this pattern kept repeating itself.

He was annoyed. They only took one reading the first day, and then she sped off rest of the way, in some kind of a hurry. He didn't think she took this assignment very seriously. They weren't making progress.

To her credit, she made driving this massive truck look easy. His job was easier by comparison, deal with cashiers and pay for fuel and boarding. Despite the long wheelbase, she slipped into crowded motel lots easily enough and tended to back into places more often than not. He had to admit, he was impressed with her thoroughness; she'd even stenciled a "REFRIGERANT VENTING IS NORMAL" line over the back so they don't get unduly harassed by people freaking out.

Sometime on the third night over dinner, she told him right before running off to the bathroom, "look, I'm a straight shooter and I don't have time for bullshit. There are three things I like, hard facts, hard liquor, and hard cocks. You decide if you want to fuck right now or not, it doesn't matter to me. It'd make time pass a lot quicker and it'd be a lot less work for me to get off regularly."

Taylor admired her directness as she walked off. He was sure she didn't even check to see whether he was married, and was even more sure it didn't matter to her.

...

The wild animal noises coming through the walls echoed Taylor's 'no' and to his annoyance, she was good at her word. Confusingly, it kind of made him feel abandoned, which was weird because he was the one who said no to her. She accepted the answer without any kind of drama. It's not that she wasn't attractive, but he had to focus and keep his eye on the ball.

As the days turned into weeks, she showed no sign of changing up her pattern. He followed her to bars most of the time to keep an eye on her and make sure she didn't get in trouble, but he couldn't stop her from flirting outrageously with him and others. He didn't care, but he didn't want this mission to be disrupted by an incident. He could probably get other drivers, plenty of 88-mikes out there but he couldn't find someone qualified to run the instrumentation.

"Yes?" he called out when someone knocked on his motel door.

"Wanna finish me off?" Carly halfway-offered and halfway-asked.

Taylor said nothing and covered his face with a pillow. This mission was going to last forever, he thought glumly. But he himself had to see it through.

...

Arlow sat alone parked in the sheriff's cruiser and watched the road. That camouflage made him simultaneously visible and invisible this blatantly tucked away near the clearcutting. As garbage trucks went by, he marked down the time, direction and their plate numbers. The day went by slowly but he couldn't trust the grim task to anyone else.

By noon, he was on page 3 of his clipboard and starting to feel some form of anxiety. When night came and the data entry didn't slow down, that anxiety became full-blown. He was caught unprepared, it was like test anxieties of yore and he was about to get an F.

This was his fucking county and someone was moving in on his operation. He started to cross out any repeating trucks and when he saw none, the scale of the operation hit him. This was way beyond Emitt's expansion. He angrily tossed his piss jug out the window and drove off knowing deep in his heart that the gloves were off.

...

On week three, Taylor's head blew up when Carly flashed another passing trucker at 75 mph. He started chewing her out right there and then in the cab. But then Carly blew a fuse herself and interrupted him with a cuss that would have made a sailor blush. He went speechless, his fingers frozen in rigor of the verbal assault. She somehow had his undivided attention because he wasn't used to anyone taking that tone with him.

Carly continued, "pretend I'm not a total fucking retard for two minutes, alright,..."

Taylor fumed but she caught him off guard and he needed to give her a moment before his Come-To-Jesus speech. She sounded more suspicious and ready than he gave her credit for. "I never...," he started denying his lack of faith in her contributions unconvincingly.

"Let me finish, " she told him firmly, "...and don't even think to slut shame me in your head, you don't have the right to. Wasn't my choice to be here. What I do on my private time is my fucking business."

"I wasn't..."

"Let me finish!" she screamed at him this time.

"Despite all my diversions that you don't approve of, we've made progress. We're weeks ahead of the game. We took off through these middle of nowhere roads because we can make a bigger grid out of it faster that way, in less time. We don't have immediate results, but we can plot our gradients faster when we crisscross due east from the northern extant. Alright?"

He swallowed his pride, "alright, that's fair, and I didn't know that's how it could be done."

"So that's the tradeoff, immediate delay for faster results. Again, pretend I'm not a total fucking retard for one more minute."

Taylor just looked away and sneered in disgust.

"Decades ago, the department of defense astrophysics division funds an absolute gravitometer prototype, the kind that's normally housed in a shed on a plot of land, but they stipulate to make it mobile, yet peculiarly heavy with all that lead shielding, and to my inconvenience, build it vertically. Conveniently, I did get my doctorate out of updating that, so I'm thankful. But do you know how many times I almost fell off that fucking gen 1 unit during its development? Anyhow, I have 30 seconds left, don't roll your fucking eyes at me."

She kept going, "now, who the fuck would build this thing vertically but the Navy so it can go aboard a fucking submarine mounted next to their bizarrely specced vertical reactors and hunt down other submarines?"

Taylor froze, all blood drained from his face. Carly kept going.

"Yeah, ten seconds. That useful idiot senator didn't know any better, but Kaufmann sure as shit did know what this thing we're hauling was built for. Don't think he bought your acting-stupid routine either. Now, if you haven't noticed, this is a fucking 8x8 industrial truck meant for transporting oil drills, and not a fucking submarine floating in water somewhere."

Carly asked, "What the fuck are we looking for out here?"

...

Arlow crept through the vine-choked trees toward the warehouse at the new clearcutting. This particular midnight was the time to get bold and face the insurgents; the time for thinking was long over. As he approached the center, he bitched to himself about being unprepared. The construction was so new, it didn't get updated on satellite maps so he was walking blind into something. But that's how it used to be, he reasoned, you didn't get to always know everything ahead of time. Sometimes you just faced it.

The endless line of dump trucks curved beyond a dip ahead, and Arlow wondered why it dipped to begin with. It should've been a stepped mound. And there was no smell. That spooked Arlow more than anything. The pungent all-encompassing smell of a waste landfill just wasn't around.

The dump trucks were doing their thing about right, he saw, but what happened afterwards wasn't right. He positioned himself best he could and then waited and watched. Within an hour, the trucks got routed elsewhere, and a bulldozer appeared and started pushing the refuse downward. Again, he was surprised. Down to what? Landfills were mounds, not holes.

For an hour he watched a bulldozer push mountains of refuse downhill and fumed over there being a downhill to begin with. The county's lowest point wasn't this particular clearcutting, Arlow was sure of that.

Arlow started crawling on the ground toward a slump in the hill. Whatever was over that hill, he wanted to see. He needed to see it, and he wanted to be unseen doing it. As he approached that very location, he started getting a funny color in his vision.

He thought it was some kind of a light blinding him, in some funny way almost like a blacklight, but he saw nothing that might've cast it. Just everything seemed fucked all of a sudden. In this dark, he couldn't tell for sure, but none of the colors seemed right. He looked down at his hands, and the skin was the wrong color for sure. His body was freaking out at that, but he steeled himself. He peeked over and saw several bulldozers pushing garbage into a chasm of nothingness. He couldn't even see the border on the other side of the hole.

That scared him enough to back up and pretend he hadn't seen it, chalk it up to an ocular migraine or something, maybe his head would start hurting soon and confirm his theory. He started walking toward the giant warehouse and closer he got to it, his vision got better. As he looked through the windows, he saw something that scared the shit out of him. It looked like a line of bodies on the ground, all perpendicular to the wall. The glass was too fuzzy for him to tell for sure, but, maybe that's what he saw. His resolve turned to vengeance, and he quietly stepped through a side door to inspect it.

Armed people patrolling there looked foreign. Arlow knew something about that. They were white, but off-white, in a manner of speaking. The subtle cultural signs were there, ever present in their Adam's apples, the shoes, and the colors they wore. There were plenty of obstructions in the warehouse to navigate around, so he felt comfortable about getting closer to what he thought were bodies.

He got close but was about to run off out of sheer paranoia when he recognized a body. It was Emitt's. He ran toward him to check whether he was alive, and Arlow could tell there was no helping him before ever getting there. He'd been dead for awhile.

Someone pacing back and forth heard his boot clack, rounded a corner noisily and turned to Arlow with a raised weapon.

"Welcome to America, motherfucker," Arlow said angrily and opened up with both barrels of a shotgun.

Arlow was a hard man. He'd come to this place fully aware he might take someone's life. And yet, what he'd seen made him drop to his knees in despair. "Jesus, almighty, save us," he rasped.

...

"This goes no further than this table," Taylor told Carly after they'd ordered. She entertained him by keeping her mouth shut for once.

"No. You're not an idiot, and I never thought that. That GOCE-1 thing? That was a child's toy. We have several constellations of orbiting gradio..." he hesitated going into details and walked it back some, "...interferometers up there."

Carly nodded, she thought he'd pretended to sound stupid that day because it sounded rehearsed then.

"You obviously know this part already. About 60 years ago the Soviets diverted river Nile to the Aswan dam. Place was so big, the filled body of water had surface curvature. Gravity anomalies were observed locally, few centimeters worth of bouncing. Even so, we felt it globally. It impacted the Earth's orbit. It was measurable remotely, even with the crude technology of the day, decades before laser interferometry. We were watching even back then."

"Now, back to our newer orbiting instruments. October of last year? They all wobbled. All of them, all at once."

"Wobbled?"

"Yeah. On both sides of the planet, at the same time. From various distances. They're on fixed but eccentric helical orbits so they can skim the oceans."

Carly snorted, "well, of course they'd all measure it happening at the same time." She was dismissive because when you synchronized relativistic timestamps of such an event from all the sensors at their known positions, they would all agree. How did this guy not know that?

"No, I meant, it all happened in the same local time frame."

Carly's jaw almost started dropping. If true, that meant something massive appeared on the planet. Not moved. And unlike a stone thrown in a pond, the rippling gravity waves hit all sensors at once instead of spreading out toward them as the distance increased. The hairs on Carly's arms started rising.

"You're not bullshitting, are you," she remarked and more to the point, she believed him.

Taylor motioned a no with his head and took a sip of water. "We thought it was a hack, faulty data. No way something like that could happen,..." he licked his dry lips, "...but then we deorbited a few of the terns at random and physically checked write-once drives. They matched the telemetry exactly. That data was physically tamper-proof, it couldn't be faked."

"Terns?"

"Forget you heard that name."

Carly stared blankly.

"It's the same thing that fucked up all your experiments, except we were watching in real-time," he explained, "and unlike you we didn't bother troubleshooting the equipment, we just slagged it all and pulled clean replacements out of storage, but the experience tracked."

Carly felt resentfully bitter over their budget because she and her colleagues had to count pennies by comparison.

"So we're just guessing here, putting two and two together. Maybe it was an underground explosion, but not conventional or nuclear: all the atmospheric monitors showed clean and none of our muon detector arrays went off. They're sensitive enough to count how many people've had a dental examination in the past week from a hundred miles away, and that's exactly how they're calibrated by way of backtracking medical billing. Maybe it was a message, that all our birds got pinged somehow by hostile satellites all at the same time without us noticing or understanding how they snuck up on us. Plausible but highly unlikely. But then your shit got fucked up too."

Carly thought that he was a little too loose-lipped for his own good, but it didn't sound like a force of habit. He was doing it to level with her, not feed her lines of bullshit. She decided to try harder.

"Whatever happened is a new effect. Maybe new physics.... because of the...," he sighed in frustration, "... the weird time thing, we couldn't triangulate shit. Our gra.... instruments don't operate over land, they monitor water displacement for obvious reasons, so we have a major blindspot in our own back yard."

"Okay. I'm convinced. Fuck the logbook, we'll speed up," Carly said and then finally bothered asking, "Who are you with, anyway?" Up until this point it didn't matter to her.

He grinned, "Lets just say I work for an ice cream shop you've never heard of before. Anyhow, we think something is here. And we think we'll find it, somewhere near where our crisscross route you picked will eventually mark an X. And we're pretty sure we're not the only ones looking for it."

...

Carly changed, took things more seriously, was more respectful of personal boundaries. They now skipped motel rests and Taylor even took short turns driving when they were sure of an easy stretch of the road he felt he could handle. Luckily the truck was an automatic, so they had that going for them, but every time traffic picked up, he had to wake her from a nap. To his amazement, she never complained once, just took over and did what was needed. One night they were bushed so they pulled into an industrial lot to crash a few hours. Taylor'd just fallen asleep when Carly shook him awake.

"What?"

"There was a noise under the truck," she whispered to him.

"Are you sure?"

Carly nodded and pointed to the passenger side.

Taylor slowly checked mirrors and thought the perimeter was clear. He waited a minute to make sure his night vision was as good as it would get and then pulled a flashlight and a service pistol out of his backpack. He then pointed at the cab light and Carly understood. He didn't want it to blind him when he opened the door. She was tired and couldn't remember if it could even be shut off, so she covered it up with her jacket and waited holding it up. Neither of them had remembered the bulb had burned out.