Under the Dome

'No, but I didn't think I'd ever live to see a man on Mars, either, but the Russians say they're going to send a crew of four in 2020.'

'Oh, I get it,' Julia said.'The Martians got wind of it, and they're pissed.'

'If so, they retaliated on the wrong country,' Cox said… and Barbie saw something in his eyes.

'How sure are you, Jim?' he asked softly.

'I beg pardon?'

'That the Dome was put in place by extraterrestrials.'

Julia took two steps forward. Her face was pale, her eyes blazing. 'Tell us what you know, goddammit!'

Cox raised his hand. 'Stop. We don't know anything. There is a theory, however. Yes. Marty, come over here.'

One of the older gentlemen who had been running tests approached the Dome. He was holding his gas mask by the strap.

'Your analysis?' Cox asked, and when he saw the older gentleman's hesitation: 'Speak freely.'

'Well…' Marty shrugged. 'Trace minerals. Soil and airborne pollutants. Otherwise, nothing. According to spectrographic analysis, that thing isn't there.'

'What about the HY-908?' And, to Barbie and the women: 'The iacid.'

'It's gone,' Marty said. 'The thing that isn't there ate it up.'

'Is that possible, according to what you know?'

'No. But the Dome isn't possible, according to what we know,'

'And does that lead you to believe that the Dome may be the creation of some life-form with more advanced knowledge of physics, chemistry, biology, whatever?' When Marty hesitated again, Cox repeated what he'd said earlier. "Speak freely'

it's one possibility. It's also possible that some earthly supervillain set it up. A real-world Lex Luthor. Or it could be the work of a renegade country, like North Korea.'

'Who hasn't taken credit for it?' Barbie asked skeptically.

'I lean toward extraterrestrial,' Marty said. He knocked on the Dome without wincing; he'd already gotten his little shock from it. 'So do most of the scientists working on this right now—if we can be said to be working when we're not actually doing anything. It's the Sherlock Rule: When you eliminate the impossible, the answer, no matter how improbable, is what remains.'

'Has anyone or anything landed in a flying saucer and demanded to be taken to our leader?'Julia asked.

'No,' Cox said.

'Would you know if something had?'Barbie asked, and thought: Are we having this discussion? Or am I dreaming it?

'Not necessarily,' Cox said, after a brief hesitation.

it could still be meteorological,' Marty said. 'Hell, even biological—a living thing. There's a school of thought that this thing is actually some kind of E. coli hybrid.'

'Colonel Cox,'Julia said quietly,'are we something's experiment? Because that's what I feel like.'

Lissa Jamieson, meanwhile, was looking back toward the nice houses of the Eastchester burblet. Most of the lights there were out, either because the people who lived there had no generators or were saving them.

'That was a gunshot,' she said. 'I'm sure that was a gunshot.'

FEELING IT

1

Other than town politics, Big Jim Rennie had only one vice, and that was high school girls' basketball—Lady Wildcats basketball, to be exact. He'd had season tickets ever since 1998, and attended at least a dozen games a year. In 2004, the year the Lady Wildcats won the State Class D championship, he attended all of them. And although the autographs people noticed when they "were invited into his home study were inevitably those of Tiger Woods, Dale Earnhardt, and Bill 'Spaceman' Lee, the one of which he was proudest—the one he treasured—was Hanna Compton's, the little sophomore point guard who had led the Lady Wildcats to that one and only gold ball.

When you're a season ticket holder, you get to know the other season ticket holders around you, and their reasons for being fans of the game. Many are relatives of the girls who play (and often the sparkplugs of the Booster Club, putting on bake sales and raising money for the increasingly expensive 'away' games). Others are basketball purists, who will tell you—with some justification—that the girls' games are just better.Young female players are invested in a team ethic that the boys (who love to run and gun, dunk, and shoot from way downtown) rarely match. The pace is slower, allowing you to see inside the game and enjoy every pick-and-roll or give-and-go. Fans of the girls' game relish the very low scores that boys' basketball fans sneer at, claiming that the girls' game puts a premium on defense and foul shooting, which are the very definition of old-school hoops.

There are also guys who just like to watch long-legged teenage girls run around in short pants.

Big Jim shared all these reasons for enjoying the sport, but his passion sprang from another source entirely, one he never vocalized when discussing the games with his fellow fans. It would not have been politic to do so.

The girls took the sport personally, and that made them better haters.