Red Lightning Read Online Free Page B

might tell you. You can see Manhattan Island and Hawaii with a pair of good binoculars and a steady hand; I know, I've done it.
    You could have seen this scratch with your bare eyes.
    Big .
    I wasn't getting any sound. I looked around and saw several people cupping their ears, like you do when you're listening intently to your stereo. Were they not hearing anything, like I was, or just concentrating, blocking out external sounds? I smacked the side of the left wing of the set and heard static, and that irritated the sore spot on my temple, under the wing, where the little vibrator with the bio-battery (guaranteed for twenty years!) had been implanted at the store when I bought the set. Simple as an ear-piercing, they told me. For some reason I'd had a bad reaction on that side – "I swear, Ray, this is the first time this has ever happened!" – and I'd had to wear a little donut-shaped pad over there until a few days before. One more smack...
    Hah! Now it was working. No moving parts, and about the highest tech of all high tech until they figure out how to implant the whole stereo-computer display right into your head and eyeballs, and yet a good whack fixes it sure as it fixes a balky washing machine. One of life's mysteries.
    "We have calls in to the Lunar Observatory, but the system seems to be overloaded at this time," the female announcer's voice was saying. "The image you are seeing is live, from the Armstrong Observatory in the Sea of Tranquility." As she spoke that relativistic lie, the camera began a zoom in toward the white line, giving me a view that was somewhere between three and twenty minutes old.
    We call it live. But I couldn't interact with anyone on Earth concerning whatever it was I was seeing until – I ticked up another small window, this one showing the current Earth-Mars lagtime – almost thirty minutes.
    The streak was still there, like a scratch on the imaginary window that floated in my field of vision just above the warning track. Then it was gone.
    "This is tape of the event," the announcer was saying. I couldn't tell any difference from what we'd been seeing before. The Earth hadn't rotated, the cloud patterns were identical. Of course, it takes at least an hour to see much change in either of those things. Then, suddenly, there it was again. One moment a clear shot of the Atlantic Ocean, northern spring, with South America just about centered in the southern hemisphere, North America off to the northwest quadrant, the lights of Europe and western Africa speckling the eastern limb of the globe. The day/night terminator slanted down from Hudson Bay to Maine to the bulge of Brazil; it would be getting dark in the West Indies and the Eastern Seaboard of the United States soon. The next moment, the streak appeared fully formed. I centered a cursor over the spot where the streak began, and my stereo informed me it was about twenty-five degrees north latitude, sixty degrees west longitude, just above that little curve of flyspecks called the Leeward and Windward Islands.
    It just didn't add up. What could make a thing like that?
    Then they shifted back to the live picture, and the camera pulled back. And pulled back some more, and more, until we were getting the widest angle shot we could get from the moon with that lens with the Earth still centered, and I heard people gasp. I might even have been one of them. The streak just kept going, right to the edge of the picture. Maybe five or six Earth diameters, bright and white and perfectly straight. Lenses changed again, and now the Earth was a blue marble... and still the streak extended to the edge of the picture. Each Earth diameter was about eight thousand miles. I ticked up a ruler and positioned it over the streak. The part I could see was over almost a quarter of a million miles long. If the Earth was a clock, the streak was a hand pointing between one and two.
    "Is it fading a little?" somebody asked.
    "No, it's getting bigger," said somebody