Jim finds himself flying down the riverbed, crouched over so far that he’s in danger of smacking his nose with his knees, and leading Arthur by a good distance. They reach Arthur’s car, which he parked in the rivermouth beach parking lot; they jump in and track out of there, toward Newport Beach. The commando suits are stripped off in a panic hurry. They track into traffic, Arthur gets in the slow lane and tosses the suits out the window when they pass over Balboa Marina. Off the bridge and into the water. At that point they become two citizens out on the road, nothing to connect them to the buildings full of weapons-become-slag back on the old oil field.

They both smell strongly of sweat, it’s like the spa’s weight room in Arthur’s car. The towels Arthur brought along are damp before they’re through drying off, and they struggle back into street clothes still sticky and hot. Jim’s hands shake, he can hardly button the buttons on his shirt. He feels a little sick.

Arthur laughs. “Well, that’s that. Intelligence estimates we got about ninety million dollars of space weaponry. They’ll find the missile stands, but that won’t tell them anything.” Suffused with energy that is still welling up in him, he sticks his head out the window, shouts “Keep—the sky—clean!”

Jim laughs wildly, and the fight-or-flight adrenaline of their run downriver courses through him—one of the most powerful drugs he’s ever felt. The best stimulant in the world. “That was great. Great. I actually—did something.”

He stops, thinks about that. “I’ve actually done something. You know”—he hesitates, it sounds silly—“I feel like this is the first time in my life that I’ve actually done something.”

Arthur nods, stares at him with raptor intensity. “I know just what you mean when you say that. And that’s what resistance can do for you. You feel you’re in a system so big and so well entrenched that nothing at all could bring it down. Certainly nothing you can do individually will make the slightest bit of difference. But if you hold to that conviction and do nothing, then it’s self-fulfilling—you create the very condition you perceive.

“But take that very first step!” He laughs wildly. “Take that first step, perform an act of resistance of even the smallest kind, and suddenly your perception changes. Reality changes. You see it can be done. It might take time, but—” He laughs again. “Yeah! You bet it can be done! Let’s go celebrate your first act.” He hits the dashboard, hard. “Here’s to resistance!”

“To resistance.”

Chapter 21

21

They lived here for over seven thousand years, and the only sign they left behind were some piles of shells around the shores of Newport Bay.

This is all we know of them, or think we know: