Arlow drove down Highway 13 with the windows rolled down.
It was a beautiful sunny day. The radio barely overcame noise of the wind when he noticed a traffic buildup ahead. Dozens of garbage trucks of all colors awaited their turn on the side of the road.
As he passed them up, he realized two things. One, this road had way too many damned garbage trucks on it. Two, Arlow wanted a chicken sandwich.
As he unwrapped the gas station sandwich sometime later, he thought about the garbage trucks. There was a new clearcutting nearby, so maybe they were expanding the dump. But he was sure the two-lane road didn't have the capacity for that much traffic. Was that construction even approved, he wondered? He should've heard about it by now, he decided grimly. He'd have to look into this.
Heck, lately there were just too many new things for him to look into.
...
"Buzz off," Carly snapped at whomever tried to talk to her. She knew him by sight but was by design terrible with names. Carly got to play with very expensive building-sized toys, which is all she ever cared for.
Price for being interrupted today, she thought, might've been fair because it consisted of the young man climbing a very tall ladder to reach her and risk breaking his neck.
"Doctor Kaufmann is waiting for you," the young man repeated himself.
She remembered dismissing a calendar alert earlier and wondering if it had anything to do with the unsteady geek trembling on the ladder.
That particular name she recognized because the name was attached to someone who financed all her toys. She raised her eyebrow a millimeter and got lost in herself.
With practiced efficiency Carly climbed down the ladder and headed toward the conference room. Somewhere in the middle of the corridor she wondered where the heck whoever interrupted her had disappeared to. One moment he was there, the next he wasn't. How long ago was that? Did they leave at the same time? No, she must have waited awhile and lost track of time again. She must refocus now. Something about a meeting. Dr. Kaufmann.
...
"Now, how does a garbage man get to afford something like that?" Arlow mused.
Sheriff Curtis stood by a fence at Arlow's Bingo Lodge, pretending to direct traffic. His presence there was merely ceremonial. Just another hot summer evening filling up with folks of all ages on the grassy lot, noise level inside the open warehouse rising.
Arlow owned the only open establishment in the county after others got "investigated" by the sheriff's office. A restored orange Plymouth had pulled up, freshly waxed and detailed, tires gleaming in the sun. The driver waved at them as he parked.
"Won the lottery?" the sheriff guessed. Arlow answered with a raised eyebrow.
"Some rich old aunt from far away done and croaked, left him money?" Sheriff's second guess was even more unbelievable.
Arlow shook his head, "doubt anyone in his whole family ever even left the county. Heck, don't know, maybe one of them got as far as Sumter for the doctors. And sure as hell no one here had any money to leave him."
Staring at the shiny orange car, he shook his head stubbornly, "one thing's sure, something ain't right here," he thought out loud. Emitt held a small county contract but was always short on steady laborers and long on breakdowns. Arlow was more than happy to provide them with alternate haulers.
"How much you think one of those Barracudas runs for?" the sheriff asked.
"Suppose I should find out," Arlow muttered angrily because Arlow hated not knowing things. Someone was dipping into a gravy bowl that didn't belong to them, and that meant a competitor. The kind you didn't want to have.
...
Carly walked into a dramatic question being asked by a suit, "What does this mean? Are we going to drift off into the sun?" Until that moment, Carly thought that was the most absurd question she'd ever heard in her life.
But then the next one made it the second. The empty-headed man sitting on his left chimed in, "Senator Moss, pardon me but I think that means the opposite, that we'll fly away into space."
"My God, how much time do we have?" the angry man continued, "why haven't you called anyone earlier? Allen said there's a major leak and the Earth is somehow losing matter and fast, this stuff is going, gone, never to return, and how is this not an emergency? Allen doesn't normally panic. He said it was a big amount. What are we doing about it? Why is everyone so calm? He said fast, gone!"
Few scientists exchanged indiscreet looks of disgust. The guy sitting on his right looked down at his papers and pretended not to know him. He wore a uniform with a fruit salad of medals and some kind of a metal eagle above it.
It was a tense moment, a quiet moment. The kind where no one dared call someone important an idiot to their face. Carly looked around and suddenly realized she was the only one standing in a crowded room. Shit, and the suit-to-researcher ratio was ugly, she thought and quickly sat along the wall.
Dr. Kaufmann replied gently, "Senator, the planet loses some fifty thousand tons of mass per year normally through radiation. That's normal. The big number your science advisor took upon himself to characterize as dangerous is over a span of four, maybe five hundred million years."
Carly locked eyes with Dr. Kaufmann curiously. Dangerous? What danger?
The senator replied, "... I don't understand. What do you mean million years?" No one'd told him that and he felt embarrassed that he didn't check. Shit. He had to play it off now, he couldn't lose face.
Dr. Kaufmann pointed at the bank of suits and introduced Carly, "As I briefly touched on earlier, Dr. Kaplan is in charge of our newest and biggest gravimeter modernization project, going on her seventh year now." He turned to her, "Dr. Kaplan, would you please describe orbital effects of removing a million tons of mass off the planet every year for a century."
The senator again inserted himself in the conversation, "Now do you mean that in metric tons or short tons?" As if he could grasp the difference at this scale, Carly thought, these fucking people really liked to hear themselves talk.
Everyone in the room turned to her and stared expectantly, some hoping to see a freakout. She was quiet for a moment and tuned everyone out of the room except for Doctor Kaufmann. Rest of them became a blur, a noise. They were shadowed silhouettes projected on a cave wall. She focused on the mental fire making the shadows dance. She sighed, this didn't need any computation.
"The moon will bounce an inch or so and our aphelion will increase by a kilometer or a thousand kilometers. Maybe a million? Something like that?" she wondered out loud and shrugged lazily.
"Jesus Christ," the senator swore angrily. He turned red and pointed at her, "she's not sure if it's a mile or a million miles?! How in the hell can she be this imprecise and you're all still this calm?"
Carly stood up and walked around the room looking for an object, which ended up being a stapler. She picked it up and brought it over to the senator.
"Please lift that stapler a few inches above the table."
The senator did so, imposing his will over her by overshooting by a foot, looking at it as if it was some kind of a trick stapler.
"What you've demonstrated is the ability to overpower the entire planet's worth of gravitational pull with use of your bare hand."
