Humans

X

Pami!

I found it, didn’t I? The center of the scheme, the very cockroach nest of that servile fog, the cluster of god’s dunces all in one place. And what a crew!

We have kept him under observation, that blanched tool, that truckling toady. My winged allies, my fellow spirits of the air, they have viewed him unseen as he has to’d-and-fro’d on his lickspittle rounds. And why has he now caused a minor traffic incident to occur to an automobile on a side road in New York State? A blown-out tire, not very artfully arranged; but he is not an artist, is he, that bumble-fingered marplot? No, no, but no; truth doesn’t need artistry, does it? (Thus the immemorial motto of the ham-handed.)

I had kept not far from Susan Carrigan, which is to say, I had been keeping not far from murderous boredom. But when the word came that heaven’s stooge had made this upstate incursion into the quotidian, I fled from her — gratefully — and observed the two in the disabled car. They could give me aesthetic pleasure on their own, of course — what fortitude, in the face of what sorrow! hah! — but what did he want with them? Then the second car arrived, and there was Pami!

Oh, HA HA HA! I’ve got them now! I can destroy them at any instant, any instant at all. And once I discover Susan Carrigan’s role in Armageddon, I shall destroy them. Not as lingeringly as they deserve, I’m afraid, but I’ll do my best. I’ll give them as much attention as I can spare.

But not yet. Susan Carrigan is somehow central, but is not present with this gallery of the agonized. Why not? What is her role? Until I understand her function, I will not understand that vaporous firefly’s plot. I have to learn what he’s scheming before I can be sure the scheme has been as permanently doused and trampled as a cookfire in dry timber country.

I told you you could trust me. I told you I would save you.

31

Frank carried Grigor into the house, seating him in a soft armchair in the living room, where his view ranged from the TV set on the left to the picture window and Wilton Road on the right. Kwan made his own way into the house, and collapsed onto the sofa, breathing with his mouth open.

Maria Elena took Pami to the kitchen to help put together some sort of dinner for everybody, but Pami knew nothing about kitchens and preparing food; it was embarrassing for them both. So Pami soon left and went back to the living room.

By the time Frank returned from the ground-floor half-bath, where he’d been washing the tire-changing grime off his hands, Pami and Grigor were deep in medical conversation and Kwan seemed to be asleep, so he went off to the kitchen, where he found a beer in the refrigerator, then sat at the kitchen table and watched Maria Elena work.

He had about forty thousand left, out of the East St. Louis money; almost a third gone already, on nothing at all. But it was an easy way to live, not nervous, not hustling all the time, not just barely scraping along. Frank hadn’t broken into a house or a store for almost a month now, and he didn’t miss the experience a bit.

Mary Ann Kelleny’s advice came back to him: don’t do constant little hits all the time, exposing yourself to risk over and over, but do it all at once, in one big major haul. The five-million-dollar hit. Well, fifty-seven grand wasn’t exactly five million, but it showed the principle was sound.

Sitting there at the kitchen table, watching Maria Elena at her domestic work, Frank felt as though he was at some sort of watershed moment of his life. Already he could see that this was the place to turn himself back into a loner; Maria Elena would be happy to take Pami and Kwan off his hands. She liked worrying about fucked-up sick people, you could see that. Then from here, alone, Frank could maybe drive on up to Boston, hole in somewhere, try to think about that five-million-dollar hit.

People pulled jobs like that in the movies all the time, right? So what did they do, what kind of thing? Break into Fort Knox. Steal The Love Boat and hold it for ransom. All these make-believe capers pulled by platoons of good buddies, as well-drilled as the Green Berets.

Is that what the five-mil hit is supposed to look like? Then forget it, because it isn’t realistic. Unless there’s five million dollars lying in a room somewhere that one man can get into and grab and get out again, there’s no such thing as the five-mil hit. No such thing.

So what was realistic? If a man got tired of exposing himself to the risks a hundred times a year for shit-poor returns, what could he do instead? Where was there even a fifty-seven-grand hit, three or four times a year? (Without any weak-hearted old man in it, please.) Money isn’t cash any more, not usually, it’s electronic impulses between banks, it’s charge cards and pieces of paper and phone calls.

Frank would leave all that stuff to another generation to figure out how to loot; what he needed was tangibles. Money, or for second best, jewelry. And the greater the concentration of money or jewelry into one place, the tighter the security.

Maria Elena broke into Frank’s thoughts when she put a bowl of carrots onto the table and said, “Excuse me. Would you do these carrots?”

Frank looked at them, overflowing the bowl, their long green fernlike tops still on, the carrots themselves large and thick and hairy. He had no idea what she wanted from him. “Do?”

She put a wooden chopping block on the table in front of him, with a small sharp knife and a scraper. “Cut the ends off each one,” she said, “and scrape the skin off.”

“Well, I’ll try it,” Frank said.

She was amused by him, but in a low-key way, as though she hadn’t known she could be amused by anything. Moving back over toward the sink, she said, “Have you never had a wife to ask you to do these things?”

“Never,” Frank told her. “And in diners they pretty much do it themselves.”

“It is very easy to learn,” she assured him.

“I’ll give it a whack,” Frank said, and did just that, decapitating one of the carrots. The knife was good and sharp. He nicked off the narrow end of the carrot, feeling pretty much on top of this job, and then had a hell of a time getting the scraper to work. It kept turning around on him, rubbing along the hairy skin of the carrot without accomplishing anything. “Bugs Bunny eats it with the hair still on,” he pointed out, but she ignored him.

Once he got the hang of the scraper, Frank finished off the carrots with no trouble at all, and then Maria Elena gave him a bowl of potatoes to work the scraper magic on. “I gotta have another beer if it’s gonna go on like this,” he complained, and she brought him one.

Weird place to be. In the living room, Pami and Grigor had turned on the TV, and the sounds of music and voices came from there. The warm kitchen was beginning to smell very good. Frank sat at the table, sipping his beer and peeling the potatoes. The five-million-dollar hit, he thought. Where’s the five-million-dollar hit?

The dining room table seated twelve; plenty of room to spread out. They ate roast lamb and two kinds of sausage and boiled potatoes and three kinds of vegetables and a salad.

All except Kwan, that is. Since he couldn’t swallow any solid food, Maria Elena had made for him various drinks in the Cuisinart, giving him also a mixture of honey and warm water (known long ago as melicrate) to help soothe his throat between sips of the other liquids.

Since Kwan was sitting with the others, at their insistence, but couldn’t eat, Maria Elena gave him a pen and yellow pad and pushed him to let them all know who and what he was. His despair was such (he was trying to figure out how to die without interference from all these unlikely do-gooders) that she had to press a lot, but finally he gave in and wrote as few words as possible, sketching his brief history.

That’s how Frank learned he wasn’t a Jap after all, but was a Chinese named Li Kwan. And Grigor, who was reading Kwan’s notes aloud, suddenly recognized Kwan when Tiananmen Square was mentioned: “I saw your photo. With the, the...” Frustrated, Grigor held his cupped hand in front of his mouth.

“Bullhorn,” Kwan wrote, and finished his biography, and went away to sit in the living room, where they couldn’t question him any more.

They did come in with him later on, but not to pester him. There was a general desire to watch the eleven o’clock news. Maria Elena closed the sliding drapes over the living room’s picture window and the possible eyes of neighbors, they all found places to sit, and the sound-bites of news started: little digestible chunks of events. A chunk from Russia, a chunk from Washington, a chunk from Alaska, a chunk from Berlin.

The first chunk after the first commercial break was about the strike and demonstration at the Green Meadow III Nuclear Power Plant. Pickets and police surged in a confused scrum, and a yellow school bus with some difficulty made the turn and drove through the gate. Within its windows could be seen embarrassed-looking middle-aged men and women. Then the neutral, the lobotomized, the castrated off-camera voice told the viewers that the plant was being kept on active status by managers and supervisors, who kept a skeleton staff in the mostly automated plant twenty-four hours a day. The disputed research continued, safely. Dutchess and Columbia county citizens were assured that power outages would not occur.

“Outage,” Grigor said. “What a word that is.”

“They are very good, officials,” Maria Elena said, “at finding the words that put the people to sleep.”

“The people want to sleep,” Grigor said, and Kwan nodded emphatically at him.

“I don’t care about that stuff,” Frank said, unconsciously confirming Grigor’s point. “I just wanna make it through my life.”

Pami said, “So do I.”

Repeating what he’d said to Maria Elena the other day, Grigor nodded at the television set, which was now showing an anti-racist demonstration in Brooklyn at which four pickpockets had been arrested, and said, “I’d like to get into that plant, for just one day.”

Frank looked at him. “Why?”

“I’d play a joke,” Grigor answered, with the same cold smile as when he’d said the same thing to Maria Elena.

“Big deal,” Frank said, not really getting it. Nodding at the television set, as Grigor had, he said, “Easy to get in there, if that’s what you want.”

Grigor shook his head. “How could it be easy? They have such security. You saw it just now for yourself. Fences, and guards, and television monitors. And there must be other things as well.”

Frank grinned; they were on his subject now. “Grigor,” he said, “getting into places is what I do. That isn’t security there, that’s Swiss cheese.”

Maria Elena said, “It doesn’t seem that way to me.”

“There’s a dozen ways in,” Frank said. “You saw the school bus?”

They’d all seen the school bus.

“On day number one,” Frank explained, “you follow the school bus around. It’s picking up all those managers and whatever they are at their houses, bringing them in. You take the night shift, midnight or whenever, and you follow it around. Day number two, you go to the last house on the route and you wait. When the school bus comes by, you climb aboard, you show everybody your MAC-11s, you—”

Maria Elena said, “I’m sorry, your what?”

“It’s a gun,” Frank told her. “Not my kinda thing, I don’t use guns, but this is just a for-instance. So, for instance, you get on the bus, you show these guns, you say everybody just sit nice and quiet. You get to that plant there, the security guards wave you right through the gate. They protect your route into the place.” Frank grinned. “My kinda security,” he said. But then he shook his head and said to Grigor, “But what’s the point? You’re inside. You can play your joke, whatever that’s supposed to mean. But what’s in it for the rest of us? There’s nothing in there.”

“Plutonium,” Grigor said.

“Yeah? What’ll a fence give me for that?”

“Nothing, I’m afraid.” Then Grigor smiled and said, “And I must admit, even with a gun in my hand, I doubt I’d be very intimidating to all the people on that school bus.”

“So there you are,” Frank said. “Now, you find me a jewelry store where you wanna do a joke, could be we’re in business.”

Exhaustion settled on Grigor and Pami and Kwan after the news. Grigor would sleep on the living room sofa, as originally planned, with Kwan on the living room floor on a pallet made of cushions from the armchairs. Pami would sleep upstairs on the sofa in the den/sewing room. Maria Elena would sleep in her own bed, and Frank in the next room in Jack’s bed.

But not yet. Neither Maria Elena nor Frank was tired yet; for different reasons, both felt keyed up, needed more time to unwind and relax. They went into the kitchen, closing the swing door, and did the cleanup together while Maria Elena told him about her background in Brazil, and he gave her a capsule summary of his own useless and repetitive life. He also gave her a more full account of the East St. Louis heist and the change it had made in his life. “Now I can’t let myself get caught. No more little hits, little risks, three to five inside and back out again. This time, I go in, I’m done for.”

“So you must reform,” she said, as a kind of joke. She wasn’t sure why she was taking his biography with such moral neutrality, but somehow it seemed to her that he was more a good man who did bad things than a bad man. He’d never, for instance, poisoned any children.

Frank was amazed at the things he was telling this woman, and finally said so: “I never shoot my mouth off like this. I don’t know what’s with me tonight, I just put my life in your hands and I don’t even know you. One phone call, and you could blow me away.”

“Why would I do that?”

“I dunno,” Frank said. “Why do people do any of the shitty things they do?”

They had finished the kitchen work and were just standing there, she with her arms folded and her back against the sink, he leaning slouched against the refrigerator. Maria Elena said, “I would not do anything to hurt you, Frank.”

He shrugged and grinned, in a joke’s-on-me way: “I guess I must believe that,” he said.

She unfolded her arms and spread them, saying, “You are the first person to talk to me in five years.”

His grin widened. “Longer than that for me. Listen, you want to dance?”

Surprised, she said, “There isn’t any music.”

“You don’t hear the music?”

She lifted her face, and at last returned his grin with her own rueful smile. “Now I do,” she said.

He stepped away from the refrigerator, and she came into his arms. He was a miserable dancer, and knew it, so he just led them in a little slow-paced circular shuffle around the kitchen table. She felt heftier, more solid, than he’d guessed; but he liked that. She wasn’t a girl, she was a woman. Her hair smelled clean, her throat was soft and musky. Holding her, moving in that slow jailhouse shuffle, he cleared his throat, geared up his courage, suffered a couple of false starts, and finally murmured, “Could we uh, uh...”

“Yes, Frank,” she said, and patted his shoulder, and kissed the side of his neck.

32

In the morning, Kwan was weaker. He remained on the pallet on the living room floor, sitting up twice to force down small portions of purees Maria Elena had made for him. He was having trouble now even swallowing the melicrate (rhymes with consecrate, desecrate, execrate), and spent much of the day asleep.

But in the intervals when he was awake, Kwan burned with a new kind of desire. He had gone through the despair, and out the other side. He still wanted to die, he still wanted to throw away this failed self, but now, somehow, somehow, he wanted the world to know. The governments, the bureaucrats, the uncaring, unnoticing people who made it possible; he wanted them all to know.

Grigor also stayed mostly in the living room, seated on the sofa where he’d slept, looking out at the empty suburban road once Maria Elena had opened the drapes. He and Maria Elena were supposed to leave by ten-thirty, to get him back to the hospital before lunch, but when she came to tell him it was time, he admitted, awkward and hesitant, that he didn’t want to go. “There’s nothing for me there,” he said, speaking softly, because Kwan was asleep again across the room. “Not any more. There’s nothing they can do for me. I want to be... somewhere. Maria Elena? May I stay?”

“I don’t think the hospital will let you,” she said carefully, sitting down beside him.

“If you don’t want me—”

“Grigor, of course, I want you!”

“It would only be for a few days.”

He was trying so hard not to plead, to retain his dignity. She saw that and responded to it. “I could call the hospital, ask if it’s—”

“No,” Grigor said. Slyness did not come naturally to him, the expression sat oddly on his face. “Maria Elena, they don’t know where you live. They don’t even know what state you live in.”

“But if you just disappear, they’ll call the police, they’ll worry...”

“Then let me telephone.”

“Yes, that’s a good idea,” she said, thinking the doctors would talk sense into him. She wouldn’t at all mind having Grigor here, but what about his medicines? What about the entire hospital routine? Would he survive on his own, and for how long?

“Let me do it in private,” he said. “There is a telephone in the kitchen?”

“Yes.”

He walked there, with some help from Maria Elena, who saw to it he was more or less secure on the tall stool near the wall phone before she left the room, pulling the swing door closed.

In the front hall were Frank and Pami, getting ready to go out. At first, Maria Elena thought they intended to leave permanently, and something very like panic touched her, making her arms shiver with nervousness. “Frank?” she said, her voice trembling. “Are you going away?”

He grinned at her. “I’m not that easy to get rid of. Pami and me’re gonna go get some groceries. We kinda used everything up last night, didn’t we?”

It was true. The unexpected addition of three new people, and Grigor as well, had left Maria Elena with very little food in the house. “Oh, that’s fine,” she said, with a sudden rush of relief, knowing he didn’t after all mean to go away, at least not now, not yet. “I’ll make a list,” she offered. “I’d go with you, but Grigor...”

“No, that’s okay,” Frank told her, “we can handle it. And that’s good, you make a list. And tell us how to get to the store.”

She did all that, and he kissed her goodbye without awkwardness in front of Pami, and they left. Maria Elena stood in the living room near the sleeping Kwan and watched out the window as Frank and Pami got into his Toyota and drove away.

How extraordinary to have this house full of strangers all at once. To go from the loneliness of life with Jack — without Jack, really — to absolute solitude, and then all at once to this. In place of Jack’s aloof perfection, these imperfect people, sick, criminal, dying. But how much more alive to be among these dying than to be with Jack.

I don’t ever want them to go away, she thought, though she knew that death would be taking some of them very soon, no matter what.

Faintly she heard Grigor’s voice calling, and hurried out to the kitchen, half afraid he’d fallen, hurt himself, was in some sort of crisis she wouldn’t be able to handle. But he was still perched on the stool, leaning on the counter. He held out the phone, saying, “They want to talk to you. I told them I refuse to go back for at least a week.”

As she was taking the phone, he put his hand over the mouthpiece and whispered, “Don’t give them your address or phone number or anything.”

“All right.” Into the phone she said, “Hello?”

It was Dr. Fitch, one of the staff she’d gotten to know; an older man, calm and professional, with an orange and gray beard. He said, “Mrs. Auston?”

“Yes, Dr. Fitch, hello.”

“Are you a party to this, then?”

“Well, I guess I am.”

“Is Grigor right there?”

“Yes, he is.”

“All right, then,” said his professional voice. “You needn’t say anything, I’ll talk. Except that we could keep him physically much more comfortable than you possibly can, Grigor’s right about the hospital not being able to do him any good any more. Mrs. Auston, there’s no particular reason why he isn’t dead already. He may last a week, he may last a month. If he stays with you, the likelihood is he’ll die with you. Will you be able to handle that?”

“I think so,” she said, holding tight to the phone.

“I want you to write down some phone numbers,” he said. “If you need help, any time, for anything, call.”

“Thank you, I will.”

She wrote down on the pad by the phone the telephone numbers he gave her, and the over-the-counter medicines that might be symptomatic help if Grigor began to break apart in this way or in that way. He then urged her to urge Grigor to rethink this idea, saying, “He might go as long as two days without serious difficulty, but certainly no longer. Very soon it will become extremely uncomfortable there for both of you.”

“I understand.”

Grigor sat smiling with closed lips as she finished her phone conversation, then said, “We will pretend you told me everything he said you should tell me.”

“Good.”

“This afternoon,” he said, “we will go for a ride. You will show me things.”

“I’d like to,” Maria Elena said.

“And if there’s a tomorrow,” he said, with that compressed little smile, “we will do something else.”

When Frank came back with groceries, he was bouncing and fidgety with some kind of excitement. Grigor was back in the living room by then, seated on the sofa, watching Maria Elena help Kwan down a small amount of broth. Frank appeared in the doorway holding full plastic bags in both hands. “Grigor,” he said. “When we get this stuff put away, I want to talk to you.”

“I’ll stay right here,” Grigor promised.

Frank and Pami put the groceries away, and then returned to the living room, where Kwan was still sitting up, trying to drink. Frank sat on the sofa beside Grigor. He kept snapping his fingers while he talked, apparently unconsciously. He said, “Pami and I were talking in the car. Did I tell you about the five-million-dollar hit?”

When Grigor said no, Frank told him — and Maria Elena and Kwan — the lady lawyer’s advice. “She didn’t know it, but she was right,” he said. “The only way I’m gonna get out from under my own history is with the one big solid hit, and then quit. I’ve been going crazy trying to figure out what that hit is, and now I got it.”

Clearly, Grigor had no idea what Frank was talking about. Polite, nothing more, he said, “And it’s something you want to talk to me about?”

“You bet it is. You really want to get into that nuclear plant, like you said last night? No fooling?”

“No fooling,” Grigor said, sitting up, becoming more alert.

“And you studied that stuff,” Frank pressed him. “How to run them and all that.”

“I have read about them,” Grigor said. “No one person can run such a place, but I do know how it’s done. Some of the mathematics I wouldn’t be able to do, that’s all.”

Kwan clapped his hands to get their attention, and when they looked at him he grinned weakly and pointed at himself. Frank said, “You’re a math guy?”

Kwan nodded.

“And you want to be in on this?”

Kwan nodded, and waved an imaginary flag.

Grigor translated: “For propaganda, like me.”

“I don’t care what people’s reasons are,” Frank said, and asked Kwan, “You could definitely help Grigor, if he needed it?”

Again Kwan nodded.

Grigor said, “Frank, I don’t understand what your reasons are. You want to invade that plant?”

“You bet,” Frank told him. “All I have to figure out is how to pick up the money.”

“What money, Frank?”

“The money they’ll pay us,” Frank said, “to give them back their nuclear power plant, undamaged. You do your joke, whatever you want, just so I can do my thing.”

Pami, twisted mouth and scrawny voice, eyes full of leftover anger, said, “Frank and me, we gonna kidnap the plant.”

“Hold it hostage,” Frank said. “For a five-mil ransom.”

Maria Elena had been sitting near Kwan. Now she stood up, looking and sounding scared, saying, “Frank, are you sure? That’s so public, so dangerous. What if you’re caught?”

“If I’m caught stealing a toothpick,” Frank told her, “I’m still in forever. What difference does it make? I can’t do anything that’s more dangerous or less dangerous.”

Maria Elena, terrified of the whole idea, floundered for something to reply, and could only come up with, “What if they won’t pay?”

“They’ll pay,” Frank said, with calm assurance. “Just to be sure we don’t accidentally hit the wrong switch. Or on purpose. This is the one, Maria, this is the only five—”

The doorbell rang. Grigor clutched the sofa arm: “They agreed! They said I could stay!”

Maria Elena left the living room, and the others sat silent, listening. They heard the door open, heard Maria Elena’s question, heard a heavy dark-timbred male voice say, “I’m looking for Pami Njoroge. Saw her at the shopping mall, wanted to say hello, missed her there. Saw the car out front here, didn’t want to leave town without I say hello to my old friend Pami.”

He’d been approaching all through this speech, and now he appeared in the living room doorway: a big-boned, hard-looking black man with a cold smile and mean red-rimmed eyes. He glanced once, without interest, at the group in the room, then smiled more broadly and more meanly: “Hello, Pami.”

They all saw the frightened look that came and went on Pami’s face. They all heard the fatalism in her voice: “Hello, Rush,” she said.

Ananayel

So Brother Rush is back.

Well, no matter. The process is under way now; he can’t stop it. That strange quintet will get into Green Meadow III, I can count on Frank to make that happen. Each will go in for a different reason, but the reasons will unite them just long enough for my purposes.

Once inside the plant, the five will make their demands, and the demands will not be met. It won’t be out of bravery or foolhardiness that officialdom will refuse to meet their conditions, but out of muddle and mess and ego and incompetence. Responsibility will be diluted among various private corporations, public and semi-public regulating authorities, even congressional committees. Those who are afraid to act will be counterbalanced by those who are afraid they will not get credit for whatever actions turn out to be successful. Publicity-hogging, buck-passing, all the common discourtesies of public life, will conspire to keep Frank from getting his money. And the usual spinelessness of the happy media will keep the various propaganda efforts from getting out of the plant and into the world’s consciousness.

Gradually, but sooner rather than later, Frank and the others will begin to realize the enormity of what they’ve done and the hopelessness of their position.

And then my task will be finished.

33

No one knew exactly what to make of Pami’s “friend,” Brother Rush. Clearly, he wasn’t her friend at all, but she seemed to feel powerless to deny him. There was at all times something cold and sly and insinuating about him, but the menace never quite broke the surface, never entirely solidified into anything you could call him on.

Frank felt the frustration of this the most, and took Pami aside to make her tell him what was going on: “What’s with this guy? He your pimp? What do we want him around for?”

“I don’t want him around,” Pami said, “but Rush — he gets what he wants. But he won’t bother nobody.”

“He bothers me.”

At which point, Rush came strolling into the room and said, “Hey, what’s happnin,” and that was the end of that.

That he would be staying for dinner was understood, somehow, though he never asked and no one invited him and in fact no one wanted him. But a sixth place was set at the table, Rush took his seat at the far side of Pami, and as the meal progressed he alternated between extravagant praise of what Maria Elena had accomplished in the kitchen and questions that confused them all.

He was pumping them, that was clear, or at least he was trying to, but about what? His questions were hard to answer because they were full of assumptions that weren’t true. He said, “You just waitin here for somebody else gonna show up?”

Frank said, “Like who?”

“I dunno,” Rush told him, shrugging as though it didn’t matter, trying to make that mean secret face look casual and innocent. “Somebody to tell you what to do next, where y’all gonna go from here.”

Grigor smiled at Rush with closed lips, and said, “No one tells us where to go. We know where we are going. Some of us do. We are absolutely free.”

“You know where you’re going?” Rush looked interested. “Where’s that, Grigor?” (He couldn’t quite seem to get his mouth to twist the name all the way around to Grigor.)

This time Grigor permitted his lips to open when he smiled. “To the grave, brother,” he said.

Rush looked merely interested: “You got what Pami got?”

“This,” Maria Elena said firmly, “is not a thing to talk about at dinner.”

“You’re right, Maria,” Rush said. “I love this sauce. You got some special spices in here, don’tcha?”

But soon he was at it again, saying, “Do you all have some special doctor you’re gonna go see?”

Frank put down his fork. “Rush,” he said, letting the exasperation show, “do I look like I need a doctor?”

“No, you don’t,” Rush agreed. “You truly don’t.” And he grew quiet again, if thoughtful.

The next time he spoke, it was something new; neither irrelevant questions nor extravagant praise. Lifting his head, sniffing the air, almost like a cat, he said, “You got somebody hangin around outside. This the guy you been waitin on?”

“Goddammit, Rush,” Frank said, “I don’t know what the hell is the matter with you, what Pami said to you or what—”

“I didn’t say nothing to him!” Pami cried. “This is some idea all his own!”

“Whatever it is,” Frank said. “Whatever gave you this wild hair up your ass, Brother Rush, let me tell you once and for all. We aren’t waiting for anybody. We weren’t waiting for you—”

“Absolutely,” Grigor said.

“—and we aren’t waiting for anybody else.”

Rush nodded through this, smiling gently, and when Frank was finished he said, “Then you won’t care if I go out and see to this fella outside.”

“Be my guest,” Frank said. “If you think there’s somebody out there.”

“Oh, somebody’s there all right,” Rush said.

Maria Elena, looking toward the curtained windows, said, “But who?”

“That’s what I’ll find out,” Rush told her, and got to his feet. “Satisfy all our curiosity.” Dropping his napkin beside his plate, smiling around at them all, he turned away and left the dining room. For a big man, he could move very silently.

Ananayel

They are in the air like bats, these creatures of the night, the lesser servants of Lucifer. He was the first schismatic, of course, Lucifer, that onetime angel and captain of angels, my former brother. Pride was his besetting sin, and darkness his punishment. He had been very nearly as immortal as God Himself, and remained so. It was not by a foreshortening of his life, his sensations, his awareness, that he was penalized, but instead by a near-eternity of darkness, a permanent exclusion from the Light. Yes, that’s right; from the Light.

An odd judgment, when you stop to think of it. Lucifer was punished by being given his own kingdom, his own minions, his own realm and rule; and fall for the sin of pride. Pride. So an angel can be proud. An angel can sin. An angel has free will.

We angels obey because we choose to obey. And so do his creatures. They love their louche lord, their Prince of the Powers of the Air, they love the work they do for him, and now they swarm in the night air around me like moths, reporting my movements to that nameless demon, their immediate master, who struggles so hard to keep me from accomplishing the fulfillment of God’s design. I take him, that demon, to be some minor baron in the Prince of Darkness’s vassalage, some puffed-up satrap, arrogant beglerbeg of the middle mists, powerful, but not, deo volente, so powerful as I.

(I would not be able to stand up to Lucifer himself, and I know it, but so does he, and so does He. The Prince of Darkness, even before the Fall, was a power and a might second only to God, which is what led him to his pride and his destruction in the first place. But if Lucifer were to confront me, it would no longer be me he was confronting. I would at once be retired, so that God Himself could take my place; and in every direct encounter between those two Masters it is Lucifer who has lost, it is he who has retired from the battle in shame and pain and degradation, forked tail between cloven-hoofed legs. Like the limited wars on other people’s territories that the so-called Great Powers have indulged themselves in over the last half-century of Earth’s little history, it is only through proxies that my Master and His Opponent can contend. Lucifer will surely try to cheat, will cast about for advantage, but he will not try to overwhelm me; that would bring into play a truly Great Power.)

No, it is only that nameless hospodar that I have to contend with, only he who has taken up arms against me. His master believes, or at least hopes, that this deputy devil will be enough to thwart me in doing God’s work. But it is my firm belief that, with God’s help, and in His gleaming Light, I will be enabled to perform His work, obey His commands, accomplish His desires, amen.

And for now, it is time to separate that avatar of the demon, Brother Rush (a name rich in association), from my quintet. Leaving Andy Harbinger seated quietly beside Susan Carrigan in Quad Theater #3 on West 13th Street, watching Night Fall (a film noir of current popularity), I made my way to Stockbridge and assumed corporate form in the darkness of a church parking lot not far from Maria Elena Auston’s house.

The shape I had chosen to take was that of the man who had helped Kwan escape the police in Hong Kong, and who later rode the plane with Pami; an early version of Andy Harbinger, really. Two of my five people already have reason to trust me. It would be preferable to have their confidence, while I am ridding them of Rush. As Brad Wilson of U.S. Naval Intelligence, as the documents in my wallet testified, I would already have the presumption of authority, so it should be possible to perform the extraction of Rush from the group without the necessity of doing anything gaudy. Or at least I certainly hoped so.

I walked the two and a half blocks of curving suburban street — an early sign of sophistication in humans, I have noticed, is a distaste for straight lines — and as I approached the Auston house I saw that the drapes were open at the large dining room window, presenting my quintet at meal as though Hogarth had done a cover for some supermarket family magazine.

But where was Rush? The others sat and ate and talked and brooded — Kwan occasionally took tiny painful sips from a glass of pale orange liquid — and a partially eaten meal waited at a sixth place, but Rush was not to be seen.

I sought him with my mind, but couldn’t find him. He had to be present, because of that meal in front of that empty chair. Had his rustling claque in the air above my head warned him of my presence?

I didn’t want to declare myself to the others until I had fixed the position of Rush. I partially crossed the lawn, to its darkest segment, away from the light-spill out that dining room window and also clear of streetlamp illumination, and there I stood and watched, and waited.

Why were they so cheerful? By now, bitterness and sorrow should have made those five much more silent and introspective. It must be their companionship that was raising their spirits, but unfortunately I couldn’t give them a properly disheartening solitude; they had to work together. Would they do the right thing when the time came? Yes, they would, they would, there was no real question. I would turn the screw until they did do what I wanted. Of their own free will, of course.

I was careless, I admit it. My attention had become too fixed on my five operatives, and insufficiently on my current metempsychosis, Brad Wilson of U.S. Naval Intelligence, and on the whereabouts of Rush! Before I knew it, the attack was well under way.

Damn him! I tried to take a step, to see another portion of the dining room, but my feet wouldn’t move. Only then did I realize what he was up to. The Brad Wilson toes had become roots, digging down through his shoes into the soil of the lawn, burrowing down and down, clutching at rocks, entwining with the roots of other trees, luxuriating in the groundwater—

Other trees! Already the flesh of my ankles and shins was bark, already an irresistible pull drew my arms upward, already my joints were stiffening. In alarm, I tried to flee this body, but the chittering of the thousand thousand tiny counter-cherubs all around my leafing head imprisoned me. They couldn’t hold me in, not by themselves, but with the power of Rush as well I might be defeated.

Defeated! This corporeal form was merely a temporary shape, but it was the permanent me, made up of my own atoms. (We do not inhabit and possess Earthly creatures, as the fiends do, as Rush was doing now, but make our shapes from ourselves.) If the demon and its million squeaking parasites could hold me, the essence of me, inside this terrestrial vessel until they completed the transformation, until they turned me into a vegetable, with a vegetable’s brain, I would never break free, never be Ananayel again, never have power to be anything but what they would have made me: an inexplicable tree on a suburban lawn.

Failure was possible. And if I failed, what? There was no doubt, not the slightest doubt, that I would be abandoned to the effects of my failure. I would be encased here, lost here, shut up mindless inside this woody crypt for as long as it took Him to send another effectuator, a worthier deputy, to succeed where I had faltered, and at last to end this world.

And then? I would end with it, of course.

But now, now, what of now? Soon, in that theater in New York City, Night Fall would come to its expected end — the girl is innocent, it’s obvious — and Susan would rise, but what would happen to Andy Harbinger? There isn’t enough animation in him to get him on his feet and out of the theater, much less to take him through the complications of the rest of the evening. There would be confusion, then shock, then an ambulance. To the hospital Andy Harbinger’s apparently living corpus would be taken, and I had not bothered to be meticulous about that corpus. It doesn’t contain everything a human body would be expected to contain. Here and there, I did short circuits, took the easy way out. And now? Expose that body to emergency room staff? Confine myself to a severely abbreviated life span as a tree? Fail my God?

I still had teeth. I ground them as I forced this head to turn on its stiffening neck. Where was Rush? Where was Rush?

At the curb was parked Frank’s Toyota. Its exterior left-side mirror was angled so that I could just get a glimpse into it. Among other things reflected in that mirror was not Rush but a Buick parked on a driveway down the block, on the other side of the street. Narrowing my focus, peering through the Toyota’s exterior mirror into that Buick, into the interior rearview mirror of the Buick, my view included the plate-glass living room window of the house next door to the Auston house. The room behind that window was dark; the window was not a perfect mirror, but it would do, and in it was reflected the Toyota again. And from that angle, in the driver’s window of the Toyota, very dimly, very darkly, hunched low in shrubbery around the side of the Auston house, there was Rush! Gibbering with glee.

My arms were almost vertical. My legs had been joined into one trunk, encased in bark. My sight was dimming, but I focused it, I focused it, and then I opened my eyes. The Toyota and Buick mirrors, the plate-glass window, the driver’s window of the Toyota, all cracked with sounds like pistol shots. But as they went, the beam of my fury reached Rush where he hid, sliced into him like a harpoon, yanked him into the air, and flung him to the ground at my feet.

How they howled, that skyful of gnats! How their faint cries rose into the night, crackling like static electricity across the surface of high thin cloud layers. How they fled, fading into wisps of gas. And how their master squirmed inside his borrowed husk, trying to escape the agonized body of Rush.

Oh, no, not this time. I couldn’t kill him, I knew that, not unless I was fast enough or lucky enough to convert all his matter to energy at once, which would be just about impossible, but I could give him a memory so searing he would never dare to confront me again. Pain so violent that the very thought of me, eons from now, would make him curl up like a shrimp. He was Rush now, he would feel what Rush felt, and he would stay Rush until I had taught him his lesson.

I boiled the blood within his veins. I turned his eyebrows to needles and embedded them in his eyes. I knotted his intestines, placed a living ferret in his stomach, turned his tongue into a piranha with its tail still attached to his pharynx.

He squirmed, that devil, he snarled, he shrieked in a range inaudible to any ear on Earth. He tried everything, tried to counterattack, to resist, to fight off the plagues I put upon him, strangling the ferret with his own guts, burning the piranha as it ate his mouth, but always and ever distracted by the pain I kept on inflicting and by the new horrors I thrust into his mouth and his nose and his ass and his eyes. Humans escape such torment by fainting or dying, but neither avenue was available to him. And he knew better than to beg for mercy. Mercy? To a foul fiend?

He first tried to escape as a worm, out Rush’s ear, but I charred that worm to ash and less than ash, and he barely got back inside before I did for him completely. Feel my punishment, demon!

Then he tried, frantically, repeatedly, to kill Rush, to end the onslaught by robbing me of the field of play, but I resuscitated the body every time, and every time I blessed it with more plagues, more stabs, more clenchings, twistings, rippings, rendings.

Then I stopped. It cowered, still in the burning center of all the anguish of the Brother Rush persona, afraid to make another run for it, while I undid the damage it had done, severing the roots beyond my feet, reverting back to flesh, sap to blood, fiber to sinew.

When I could move I did so, stepping away from that thing that shivered and keened on the lawn. I looked into the dining room, where my five remained as before, and they had noticed nothing of the events outside. Good.

I directed my attention back to the former Rush. He would never be Rush again. He would never trouble me again. “I’m finished with you,” I told him. “You may go.”

At once, the body ceased to tremble, and grew slack. After a brief interval, a cockroach crept cautiously from its dead nostril. I broke one of the creature’s legs, just as a reminder, but otherwise left it alone, and it hobbled away through the grass.

So there was no need for Brad Wilson here after all, no need to look in on my people. Rush was dealt with. I permitted Brad to discorporate, then carried the body of Brother Rush back with me to New York, leaving it in a neighborhood where it wouldn’t excite particular comment, and made it back to Andy Harbinger just before the end of the movie.

“That was really good,” Susan said, as we shuffled out of the theater with the rest of the audience.

“Yes, it was.”

X

Oh, no, no, no, no more, no more...

No more, no more, no more...

Hate hate hate hate hate hate—

No more!

No, no, not even thoughts, can’t— Brain doesn’t work, can’t think, can’t stop running, can’t stop—

No more, no more...

Have to do it. Have to do it! But—

No more, no more...

But—

I must.

34

By the end of the newscast at eleven-thirty, it seemed pretty clear that Rush wouldn’t be coming back, but no one wanted to go to bed just yet, in case something happened after all. Had Rush seen the police, and were they after him, and had he fled! Something like that, probably, which meant he still might come back when the coast was clear. In any event, everybody felt wide awake.

And besides, there was a program about to come on that interested at least two of the people in the house. Both Grigor and Maria Elena wanted to watch Nightline, on which Ted Koppel’s guests would be a Dr. Marlon Philpott, the physicist who was conducting the experiments at Green Meadow III Nuclear Power Plant that had caused all the demonstrations and more recently the strike by better than two-thirds of the plant’s workers, and in opposition to him another physicist, Dr. Robert Delantero.

“Our program might be considered somewhat strange tonight,” Ted Koppel told his audience, with his small smile, “because the matter is strange. Our subject is a peculiar kind of thing known to physicists as strange matter. Some scientists, like Unitronic Laboratories’ Dr. Marlon Philpott, believe that strange matter, once harnessed in the laboratory, can become the cleanest, safest, and cheapest power source in the history of the world. Other physicists of equal standing in the scientific world, such as Harvard’s Dr. Robert Delantero, believe that strange matter, if found, and if carelessly handled, could be more destructive than anything we’ve ever imagined. Still other scientists believe that no such thing as strange matter exists at all. Dr. Philpott, have you ever seen strange matter? And could you describe it?”

Dr. Philpott was a heavy man with a spade goatee and dark-rimmed glasses. He looked more like a restaurant critic than a scientist, as though he’d be more interested in the ingredients of a French sauce than the contents of a Leyden jar. His manner was avuncular in a heavily condescending way. He said, “If we ever got enough strange matter together to see it, Ted, a chunk that big, why, we’d be in business right now. But I can describe it, all right, because we know it’s there. It has to be there, the math says so.”

“And what does this math say strange matter is?”

“A different way of combining the building blocks of matter,” Dr. Philpott told him, forgetting to call him “Ted.” “As we now know, the basic building block of matter is the quark.”

“Not the atom.”

“No, Ted, the atom is composed of protons and neutrons. If you imagine protons and neutrons as little bags, what each bag contains is quarks, two up quarks and one down quark in each proton, two down and one up in each neutron. These bags are surrounded by a cloud of electrons, and the whole package goes to make up one atom.”

“And what would be the difference in strange matter? Would there be such a thing as a strange atom?”

“That’s precisely what we’re looking for, Ted. And the difference would be, no bags. A strange atom consists of a cloud of electrons around a large collection of up quarks, down quarks, and some new quarks, known as strange quarks.”

“I’m not surprised. Dr. Delantero, you agree these strange quarks, strange atoms, strange matter, exist?”

“I’m afraid they exist,” Dr. Delantero snapped. He was a bony no-nonsense nearly bald man wearing a bright red bow tie. “The essential question,” he said, staring sternly into the camera, “is which kind of matter is the most stable. There’s every reason to believe that we are the more strange matter, and that matter composed of atoms containing strange quarks is more stable than the matter we know. If that’s true, and if Dr. Philpott does manage to isolate strange matter, then God help us all.”

“You’ll have to forgive me, Dr. Delantero, but I’m afraid I didn’t follow that. Dr. Philpott seems to think strange matter would make a fine energy source, safer and cheaper than conventional nuclear power. You don’t think the stuff is safe at all, but I just can’t seem to understand why.”

Dr. Philpott horned in to say, “You’re right not to understand, Ted, because it’s nonsense. He’s taking a worst-case-possible scenario and acting as though it’s the only possible case.”

“Yes, Doctor,” Koppel said, “but let’s just let Dr. Delantero try to clear this up. Dr. Delantero, assuming that you and Dr. Philpott are both right, and that strange matter does exist, or can be made to exist, why does he think it’s safe and you think it’s unsafe?”

Dr. Delantero looked more and more like a hanging judge. He said, “I can only presume Dr. Philpott turns a blind eye to the dangers here because he and Unitronic Laboratories see profit in it. That’s why he’s—”

“Profit for all mankind.”

“Yes, Dr. Philpott, but let’s give Dr. Delantero a chance.”

“They threw his lab out of Grayling University,” Dr. Delantero suddenly shouted, “because he kept blowing things up! So some idiot decided he’d be better off at a nuclear plant!”

“That’s the most outrageous, most outrageous—” Dr. Philpott now looked like a restaurant critic who’d been served a bad shrimp; he was so offended he could barely speak.

Which gave his host an opportunity to say, “That is a question I’d been meaning to get to, thank you, Doctor. Dr. Philpott, would you like to reply to this rumor about explosions?”

“I certainly would.” Dr. Philpott smoothed his shirt front with a shaking hand, stopped hyperventilating, and said, “Clearly, no one has been blowing up strange matter because we haven’t found it yet. Nor, since my move to Green Meadow, not because I was thrown out of Grayling, I’m still tenured at Grayling, Dr. Delantero, thank you very much, but because the facilities at Green Meadow are better suited to my researchers, there has not been one incident, nor shall there be. Some very minor explosive incidents, causing no damage whatsoever, did take place in the early stages, when we were experimenting with various receptacles, pieces of equipment, gaseous elements for storage, but not one since, and I defy Dr. Delantero to dispute that.”

Dr. Delantero too had grown somewhat calmer by now. “All I’m saying,” he replied, “is that we’re babies with a loaded gun in this situation, and we shouldn’t be taking the risks Dr. Philpott is taking up there at Green Meadow. The people out on strike are the sensible ones.”

Koppel said, “As I understand it, and I freely admit I don’t understand the entire matter all that well, but as I understand it, there are two distinct theories as to the effect of strange matter when it comes into contact with regular matter, and that’s what the dispute is all about. Dr. Philpott, if I had a drop of strange matter here, and I spilled it onto the floor, what would happen?”

“Nothing. It would lie there, and slowly evaporate away into harmless alpha particles. But if we put it into a reactor, and fed it— The point with strange matter is, it’s so much more dense than regular matter, it’s the closest thing we can create on this planet to a black hole. A chunk the size of a BB would weigh more than five million tons. The energy in that dense mass—”

“Yes, thank you, Dr. Philpott, but we’re running low on time here, and I’d like to ask the same question of Dr. Delantero. You subscribe to a different theory, and at this point there’s no way to prove which theory is correct, but in the scientific world both theories are equally plausible, is that so?”

“It is.”

“And each theory has its scientifically respectable supporters?”

“That is correct.”

“So Dr. Philpott has just as much chance to be right as you have.”

“He does. But so do I, and that’s why we shouldn’t take the risk.”

“And what do you see happening, if I spill that drop of strange matter on the carpet?”

Dr. Delantero squared his bony shoulders. “As Dr. Philpott said, strange matter is much more dense than normal matter. It is also likely to be more stable. That drop of yours would eat its way through the floor, through the ground—”

“Oh, really, there isn’t the slightest—”

“Dr. Philpott, you’ll have your chance. Dr. Delantero?”

“Combining with the matter around it,” Dr. Delantero said, “this extremely heavy, extremely dense drop of matter would burn its way to the molten center of the Earth, where it would get hot, and really go to work.”

“An explosion, you mean?”

“No, I do not. I mean that the one drop would, in a very short period of time, convert this entire planet, and everything on it, every tree, every person, the very atmosphere around us, into strange matter.”

“And what effect would that have?”

“The Earth would become,” Dr. Delantero said, “a featureless, smooth, glittering ball of incredible density, the same weight as it is now, but measuring less than a mile in diameter.”

With his small smile, Koppel said, “And you and I would be part of that featureless ball.”

“We would.”

To the camera, Koppel said, “As you can see, the difference of opinion is quite marked here, and the scientific stakes extremely high. On the one side, cheap safe fuel; on the other, the end of everything. Is Dr. Philpott actually close to resolving these opposed theories, and what safeguards is he employing to avoid the finish Dr. Delantero so vividly described. What would Dr. Delantero like science to do about the question of strange matter, if anything? We’ll get into all that, when we return.”

During the commercials, Frank looked over at Grigor and grinned: “Is that the joke you wanna pull? Drop the drop?”

“It has already been dropped, on me,” Grigor said. He didn’t sound amused.

Ananayel

I have rationalized Andy Harbinger. The close call at the Quad Cinema convinced me to take the time, to do this part without shortcuts. So Andy is now a complete human being, with all the usual and necessary parts, if in somewhat better condition than most.

And while I was at it, I gave him everything else a human being such as Andy Harbinger would have; which is to say, a job and a past. The sociology professorship — untenured assistant professor, actually — at Columbia has become real. Andy’s co-members of the faculty have memories of him, mostly pleasant, extending back several years. His birth certificate will be found in the Bureau of Vital Statistics in Oak Park, Illinois. His school records, employment records, even dental and health records, are all in place. For the remainder of the time that life shall exist on Earth, Andy Harbinger is for me now fully functional, fully operative; what we might call my destination resort.

Oh, and yes, Dr. Delantero has described the end rather accurately. He will turn out — though the knowledge would not be likely to please him — to have been right about what will happen when that drop of strange matter is spilled on the floor at Green Meadow III Nuclear Power Plant. Or at least to be right when it counts.

After all, the universe is His creation. He can still tinker with it if He wishes, so long as He doesn’t thereby change what is already known to be true. (Well, He can, naturally, and sometimes does, but those instances are called miracles. We’re not considering a miracle here. In fact, miracles have been strictly enjoined in this case; deniability, you know.)

But there is still much of the real universe that is not known to human beings, not charted, not yet proved, and in that vast terra incognita God can do as He wills, with no miracle involved. Human science, for instance, has reached the point with strange matter where two theories have been proposed, of more or less equal probability. The spilled drop of strange matter might result in Dr. Philpott’s infinitesimal speck lying on the floor, quickly dissipated. Equally, it might result in Dr. Delantero’s destruction of the planet by conversion of its entire mass to strange matter.

To prove either of those theories true would not, in Earth terms, constitute a miracle. Either theory could join the web of the already known without in any way rupturing the fabric of observed reality. Therefore, although I do not know which of those theories has been correct up till now, I know for certain which of them is correct as of this moment.

That is, after all, why I am here. To transmute the entire Earth, and everything on it, to a ball bearing.

35

In the end, it was easier to steal an empty school bus than try to board one of those carrying the Green Meadow cadre. The buses didn’t pick up the supervisors and managers at home, to begin with, but only brought them from a well-guarded parking lot four miles away. Also, each bus carried its own armed private security guard. But the buses had been leased from a transportation company that serviced some of the public and most of the private schools in that part of New York State, and its large parking lot, usually at least half full of buses not at that moment in use, was barely guarded at all.

By this time, the demonstrations had been going on for months and the strike for weeks, and everybody was into the daily routine of it. There was a known role to be played by everyone who showed up at the plant gates: demonstrators, strikers, working cadre, police, private security force, media crews, and the large yellow buses saying things like Istanfayle Consolidated School District on their sides but always with the same company name — Kelly Transit, in green script within an outlined shamrock — on the door. Most of the drivers were women, most of the guards riding shotgun wore rent-a-cop dark blue uniforms. Sometimes the buses were nearly empty when they drove into the plant; they were never completely full.

“Are you sure you want to do this?” Grigor asked.

“Of course, I am,” Frank said. “It was my idea.”

“But I have nothing to lose,” Grigor pointed out. “If you are caught—”

“That’s not gonna happen,” Frank assured him. “Win or lose, they don’t lay a hand on me. That’s a little promise I made myself.”

“But why? Why do you want to do it?”

“For money.” Frank grinned. “I’m a simple guy, money’s enough for me. You do your speeches, you warn the world, you get everybody’s attention, that’s all okay by me. But when they get their atom factory back is after I get mine. Or you’ll see a joke.”

Frank was the pro, he was the one who knew how to do all this stuff. He drove down into New York and rented a cop uniform from a theatrical costume supplier. Up in New Hampshire, he bought three pistols in three pawnshops; two of them would probably blow your hand off if you tried to fire them, but that was okay. They were just for show The third one would have to be able to shoot, but not at anybody; just to attract attention.

Back in Stockbridge, he rooted through the worn old clothing Jack Auston had left behind and outfitted himself with old grease-stained dark green chinos and a dark red plaid shirt. He bought a clipboard and some standard inventory forms from a local stationer, skipped shaving one day, and went down to Kelly Transit. Walking into the big parking area, he strolled over to the dispatcher’s window, consulted his clipboard, and said, “I’m here to pick up number 271.”

It was four-thirty in the afternoon, and the dispatcher was almost at the end of his workday. More important, in half an hour there would be a shift change at Green Meadow; if things went well, Kelly Transit’s bus number 271 would be the first to arrive with the replacement staff.

The dispatcher looked up from his crossword puzzle, frowned at Frank, and said, “Who says?”

“Hyatt Garage,” Frank said, as though he didn’t care what happened next, one way or the other.

“I’m not sure it’s in.”

It was; Frank had noted the number of the bus he wanted as he’d walked across the yard. But he shrugged and said, “That’s okay, pal, I’ll go back to the garage.” And turned away.

“Hold it, hold it, I didn’t say it wasn’t here.”

Frank stopped and looked at the guy. “Make up your mind, okay? I wanna go home tonight.”

“We all do,” the dispatcher said, and made a big show of looking at his dispatch sheets before he said, “Yeah, it’s in. It’ll be around here somewhere. Hold on.”

Frank held on. The dispatcher reached around behind himself, took a set of keys from the many rows of hooks on the wall, finally got up from his stool, and came thumping around and out the door. “Let’s see,” he said, peering at the tag with the keys, then squinting out at his yard full of buses. “Should be right around here.”

Frank didn’t help, but still the dispatcher took only three minutes to find the bus standing in front of him. 271 was painted on the rear emergency door and like an eyebrow above the left side of the windshield. Messenger of God Parish School was painted on both sides, in block black letters, beneath the rows of windows.

“Looks like that might be it,” the dispatcher said.

“If you say so.”

The dispatcher had Frank sign a form — “George Washington,” he scrawled — then gave him the keys, and Frank drove on out of there.

Maria Elena said, “Then this will do it.” Do what? Accomplish what? She didn’t care. She refused to even look at such questions. She had her answer: “Then this will do it.”

She knew what she knew, and that was enough. She knew that movement was life, and stillness was death, and she’d been dead too long. She knew that a group with a goal was life and a solitary person without a goal was death, and she’d been dead too long. She knew that a singer was alive, and a person without a song (without, now, even the records and memories of the songs that had been) was dead, and that she’d been dead too long. She knew that death would come anyway, to all of them, some sooner than others, and that it was wrong for her to be dead before she was dead. That Frank made her feel alive, and Frank wanted to do this, and to do something was better, infinitely better, than the nothing she had been doing for so long.

Maria Elena drove the bus, wearing a chauffeur’s cap and lightly-tinted sunglasses, to help avoid accidental identification from any of her former acquaintances among the demonstrators milling as usual outside the gate. (As though there would be an “afterward” in which such things would matter.) Frank stood in the first step of the stairwell with the rent-a-cop uniform on, brazenly visible through the windshield. Kwan sat in the second row on the right, in suit and white shirt and tie; about a quarter of the scientific staff at Green Meadow was Oriental, so his presence added verisimilitude. Grigor, two rows behind Kwan, in open-necked plaid shirt, looked like the kind of unworldly blue-sky research guy who wouldn’t know a necktie if he were hanged by one. Pami, seated on the other side, was got up in black sweater, one string of pearls, and horn-rimmed glasses, her usually explosive hair imprisoned in a neat bun; it was hard to say what image she projected, exactly, but it was at least respectable.

In any event, they didn’t have to project any image at all for very long. The school buses never stopped when they made the turn to go through the just-opened gate into the plant grounds; it would make too tempting a target for the strikers and demonstrators. The state troopers and private security guards simply saw what they expected to see — a yellow school bus from Kelly Transit with a woman driver and a blue-uniformed guard and some egghead types aboard — at the time they expected to see it, and waved it on through.

The land within the perimeter fence had been carefully recontoured, to present to the public eye along the public road nothing but a gentle upslope in a parklike setting of specimen trees and well-pruned shrubs on a neatly mowed lawn, with taller trees, most of them firs of one kind or another, forming a dense year-round backdrop. The two-lane asphalt road meandered up this easy incline, and when it crested the ridge and started down the far side, the quintet in the bus could see what was really here, in among the trees.

Straight ahead was the dome-topped containment building, a featureless, windowless concrete box. Within the concrete would be a steel inner shell, and within that the reactor, with its core, control rods, steam generator, pressurizer, coolant pump, drain tank, valves, and sump. This was the heart of the power plant, the dangerous living essence of the thing, the part the quintet in the bus had to control if they were going to accomplish anything; if they were, in fact, to avoid being dragged right back off the property again, in handcuffs.

To the left of the containment building was its concrete baby brother, the auxiliary building, with its emergency core-cooling system pump, sump pump, borated-water storage tank, and radioactive-waste storage tank. A bit farther away on that side was the administrative building, brick and stone, three stories high, oddly matter-of-fact amid all the grotesqueries of nuclear architecture. It had the air of a faculty office building on a midwestern college campus.

To the right of the containment building was the turbine building, reassuringly like such structures from power plants of an earlier day. It held the turbine, generator, condenser, transformer, and all the other elements needed to turn the power emanating from the containment building into usable electricity. In the shadow of the turbine building was another smaller windowless concrete structure, containing Dr. Philpott’s controversial laboratory. And behind them all, looming over them, were the twin cooling towers, salt and pepper shakers, huge concave edifices of pale gray concrete, like minimalist graven images of Baal.

But in front of the containment building, attached to it or thrust from it, was the squat structure of the control section. Here was where the servants of the machine fed it and cooled it and guided it through its life of bridled violence. And here was where the five people in the bus had to take command, or lose.

Maria Elena halted the bus in front of the control section. She pushed the long lever that opened the door. Frank looked back at his string, his four confederates. Jesus H. Christ, what a crew. Nodding, he said, “What have we got to lose?” and stepped down from the bus.

It was as good a battle cry as any.

36

“Professor! My God, look at this!”

Dr. Marlon Philpott, more rumpled yet somehow more serious in his laboratory than he had been on Nightline, turned reluctantly from the holding ring, in which, in the heavy swirl of liquid deuterium, something had been happening. Or about to happen. He squinted testily at Chang, jittering up and down over there in the doorway to the lounge: “What is it?”

“Something’s happening on TV!”

Dr. Philpott was fairly sure he’d made a fool of himself, or been made a fool of, which amounted to the same thing, on that damn program, and so wasn’t feeling particularly cordial about television at the moment. The damned Unitronic directors, with their worship of the great god Public Relations... “Something is happening in the deuterium,” he said sternly, “something infinitely more important than television.”

“No, no.” Chang was really very disturbed, bobbing up and down over there as though he had to go to the bathroom. “It’s something happening here, at the facility.”

The demonstrators, the strikers: Philpott paid as little attention to those Luddites as possible. He was about to say so when Cindy, attracted by Chang’s agitation, left her place at the auxiliary control console and crossed the lab toward the lounge, brushing blond hair out of her eyes in an unconscious habitual gesture as she did so, saying, “Chang? What is it?”

“I’m just not sure,” the boy told her, his smooth face expressing alarm by becoming even more round than usual behind his round light-reflecting spectacles. “They say it’s been taken over.”

Cindy shook her head, blond hair falling into her eyes again. “What’s been taken over?”

“Us! The facility!”

Philpott, wanting nothing but to return his attention to what either was or was not beginning to come into existence in the liquid deuterium, spread his hands and said, “Taken over? By whom? I don’t seem to see them.”

“Not here, Professor. The control section!”

“Oh, my gosh!” Cindy said, and ran past Chang into the lounge.

The fact was, as Philpott well knew, graduate student assistants are vital to any coherent program of accomplishment in the scientific world. And graduate student assistants are the cheapest possible source of slave labor in the otherwise civilized world today. So it was necessary to let them have their heads every once in a while, to allow them their own little pursuits, their own enthusiasms, their own overreactions.

Moving at a measured tread, a condescending smile already on his lips, Philpott entered the lounge, turned to the television set, and saw on its screen what was clearly an even more turbulent scene than normal these days at the gates of Green Meadow. Vast groups of people milled about in the background, like battle scenes in Shakespeare films, while somebody’s daughter, dressed approximately like a grown-up and looking very much like an older Cindy, jabbered into a microphone in the foreground.

“Well,” Philpott said. “Reaching some sort of critical mass out there, are they?”

“No, wait, Professor,” Chang said. “Listen.”

Philpott didn’t want to listen, but he did, and when he understood what he was hearing he even more emphatically didn’t want to listen. Not to this:

“Who the terrorists are and what their demands will be no one seems to know as yet. What is certain now is that they do include at least one expert in the operation of this type of plant. At their insistence, all plant personnel except the hostages have been evacuated, leaving the terrorists in charge of the reactor controls. The reactor is producing at its lowest possible rate. At this point, no electricity is being furnished by Green Meadow III. The slack is being taken up by other electric utilities in the Northeast and Canadian grids, and consumers are assured—”

“My God!” Philpott cried, at last accepting the unbelievable. “They’re in here!”

“Yes, Professor!”

Philpott looked quickly around. “But they obviously don’t know about us yet. They must not ever know. Quick, lock and bolt the doors. Switch over to our emergency generator, we don’t want them to see us using power.”

Chang and Cindy exchanged a glance. It was Cindy who dared the question: “Professor Philpott? You aren’t going to go on, are you?”

“Of course, I am. We’re in the middle of— Shut down? Surrender to these mindless thugs?”

“But—” Chang floundered, almond eyes frightened behind those false-looking glasses. “The experiment, the risk...”

“There is no risk,” Philpott snapped. “We’ve been autonomous in here anyway, absolutely self-contained. Do you want to be a hostage to these people, a bargaining chip in their absurd quarrel with authority, whatever that might be? I don’t particularly relish the thought of being held for exchange of some political prisoner in someplace like Northern Ireland or Lebanon.”

So. That part of the reality of the situation hadn’t occurred to either of the young people. They stared at him, both frightened, both at a loss. Fortunately, he was not at a loss, nor was he frightened, though he was certainly concerned. “We’re safer here than anywhere else,” he told them. “We’ll do nothing to attract the attention of those cretins out there. We’ll stay within the lab building, locked in, until the authorities straighten out this mess. And as long as we’re in here, there is absolutely no reason not to go on with the experiment. Agreed?”

They were both reluctant to answer, but he needed that answer. He bore his sternest gaze first on Chang, the more malleable of the two, and Chang fidgeted, awkward and uncomfortable, but unable to argue back. “Yes, Professor,” he finally said, low and mumbled. “Agreed.”

“Cindy?”

Another hesitation, but her agreement was inevitable: “I... suppose so. I suppose it’s the only thing we can do.”

“Of course, it is.” He turned his glare toward the daughter on the TV screen, nattering on now about terrorist “assurances.” He muttered, as though at her, as though it were her fault, “I will not be interrupted.” Then he looked through the doorway toward the experiment in progress: “Now, of all times.”

37

It was Frank’s pistol, fired once, the bullet thudding into a wooden desk, that had focused the attention of the eight staffers in the control section, but it was Grigor who turned them from panic and disintegration into a cooperative and useful team. “I was at Chernobyl,” he told them, once Frank had assembled them and they stood frightened and demoralized in a little cluster in the middle of the main control room. “I was a fireman there.”

He told them what had happened to him, and in their own technical jargon he told them why Chernobyl had gone wrong. “I don’t want to do to anyone else what was done to me,” he told them, “I assure you of that. I am not here to cause a meltdown. With your help, we will do no harm at all. We are here only to force public awareness. That is all we want.”

“And the money,” Frank reminded him. “For the cause.” Because they’d finally argued their way to an agreement that Frank’s crass commercial motives would best be hidden within the social concerns of the others. The five million dollars — Frank’s number, one he refused to change — would be for their Committee for the Environment. (The committee wasn’t real, but the damn money better be.)

“Yes, the money,” Grigor agreed, “but we’ll get to that.” And he went on explaining things, in his thin and non-threatening voice, seated at a desk facing them all, as though at his ease, successfully so far hiding from them the extreme weakness that had made it almost impossible for him to walk this far from the bus. (Kwan and Pami were also seated, necessarily, at the fringes of the group, leaving only Frank and Maria Elena to stand and wave guns around. But they were enough.)

Once the staffers began to engage Grigor in dialogue, Frank knew it was going to be all right. These weren’t tough guys, no more than Frank himself. They were five women and three men, all of them technicians, none of them death-defying jocks. Because they were managers and supervisors, they were older than the workers who would normally have been on duty here. They would do what they were told.

And what they were told to do was simple. Do not shut down the reactor, but close down its output to the lowest possible minimum. Then make the phone call; the first phone call.

That was a job for the senior technician, a woman of about sixty, who might have looked a lot like Maria Elena in her younger days. She was the one who dialed the offices in the administrative building and delivered the message Frank gave her:

X

Now what? A nuclear plant? These five misfits have blundered themselves into a nuclear plant? For what? How much damage could they do in there? I have come to save the world, only to find that truckling toady is content to destroy New York State? (It is true there are those who believe that New York — or at least the city of the same name, no relation — is the world, but surely the loathsome He is not among them.)

And what of Susan Carrigan? What is her part in the scheme, where does she fit, what is her job? He’s driving me mad with that grimalkin, that heifer, that fur-farm. The other five are terrorizing the populace at Green Meadow, and she’s in the arms of that smoky simulacrum, playing at love. Love! That’s supposed to be my territory, you shameless bastard!

Shall I just kill her, and see what happens? Slowly, with boils and pus and scum from every pore? Or immediately, with a lightning stroke?

Come to me, my spies of the middle air, my northern apples of the twilight ether, extenders of my brain, my strength, my knowledge. What do they want? What do we know? What is his advantage, that bland mortician, that poisoned milk, that sterile tool?

Stable matter? Stable matter! Stab at Mater, what a vicious idea! So is that what the experiment in that plant is all about, the search for what the instable humans call strange matter (as though they weren’t sufficiently strange themselves).

By Unholy Lucifer, he means to stabilize the Earth!

No, no, no. I have to get in there. I have to stop this, and at once.

And that’s a pearl, that was my planet? No.

Ananayel

So he knows.

Well, he would, wouldn’t he? And my little lesson in Connecticut didn’t take, did it? But of course, I should have realized that; intimidation is a cumbersome tool, as likely to stiffen resolve as to break spirit. Oddly enough, violence never is the answer. Things done in violence have to be done over again.

But what else is there, with as fallen and shameless a creature as this nameless slave of the Unholy? Reason? Persuasion? Argument? Emotional appeal? Bribery? He’s an extension of his miserable master, nothing else, with no more free will than a moon.

All right, we’ll stop him. Again.

In order to accomplish anything, this fetid fiend will have to take a corporeal form, which in his case, of course, means possessing a human’s body rather than, as in mine, creating a pleasing person out of air. And his first idea — they’re so predictable, so obvious, these tools of Satan — will be to take over one of the hostages in the plant, one of the staff members kept inside to run the machinery. But that’s easily dealt with. I have my own assistants when necessary, my cherubim, swifter than thought, darting through space and time with arrowed precision. (How unthinking of human artists to portray them as fat!)

I have called upon them, these lean servants of the Lord. They hover now over the hostages, protecting, observing, prepared to alert me at the slightest hint of incursion. Until the end, each hostage shall have one of these, these, oh, let’s call them guardian angels.

So he can’t suddenly, all at once, be there, inside the plant. He’ll have to start from the other side of the fence, take over some poor human somewhere out in the world, and try to scheme some way to move it through the maze of officialdom ringing the site. Impossible? I’m not sure; that diseased cur does seem to have a low cunning.

Outside, of course, his choice of host is wide. I can’t give everyone a guardian angel. We’ll simply have to keep a diligent watch.

38

These were the times that tried Joshua Hardwick’s soul. To be public information director for a nuclear power plant less than a hundred miles from a major population center like New York City was no bed of roses even when things were going well. When the plant was under occupation by terrorists — nobody even knew for sure which terrorists, just to put the icing on the cake — the PID’s life became, in a word, hell.

There were even times these days when he found himself thinking nostalgically of the advertising racket, that’s how bad it was. (At least in the ad game, you could drink at lunch. And CNN wasn’t training its cameras on you every time you blew your nose. And... Nah. There’s no parenthesis big enough.)

Lately, Joshua hated to get out of bed in the morning, hated that first pre-breakfast phone call to the command post outside the Green Meadow gate — “Still there. No change.” — hated sitting in his Honda for the twenty-minute bucolic (and so what?) drive from his once-happy home in Connecticut to his once-cushy job. He hated the job, the reporters, the cops, the questions, the answers, and the fact that there actually weren’t any answers, not really.

Possibly most of all — apart from the terrorists who were ultimately responsible for this mess — Joshua hated his bosses, and God knows there were enough of them for the hate to spread around. Green Meadow was a quasi-governmental, quasi-private corporation, run by three federal and two New York State agencies, plus a consortium of private companies led by Unitronic Laboratories, itself a subsidiary of Anglo Dutch Oil. Every one of those entities had its representatives here for the crisis, and the task of each and every one of those representatives, it had early become clear, was to see to it that some other entity got the blame when things ended badly.

That was kind of depressing already, knowing they all expected it to end badly. And that, rather than any of them trying to do something to change that gloomy prediction, they were all spending their time trying to scramble out of the way of falling debris. Expected falling debris.

Which meant they all wanted the ear — and the voice, and the heart, and the mind, and the soul — of the public information director. They all wanted to believe he was on their side, would present their waffling and cowardice in the best light while screwing everybody else. (The idea that everybody else should be screwed was as important to these businessmen and government officials as the idea that they themselves should be spared.)

As usual this morning Joshua had to show his two separate IDs — one wasn’t enough for these people, because they were very serious — at the police barrier half a mile down the road from the plant entrance, and as usual it was a state trooper he never remembered seeing before, and who felt the same about him. Sitting at the wheel of his Honda with controlled impatience during the trooper’s long slow inspection of his face, Joshua felt a sudden startling clench in his stomach, a sudden urgent need to throw up. “Oh, my God,” he said. “I can’t— You’ll have to—”

Startled, the trooper backed away, hand whipping to his sidearm as Joshua came boiling out of the car, right hand clamped over mouth. Joshua managed two steps toward the far verge, all his muscles and joints lashing him with sudden excruciating pain, before he dropped to his knees and burst breakfast all over the westbound lane and slightly on his own trousers.

“Jesus Christ, fella!” the trooper cried, no longer suspicious — nobody can fake that much vomit — “What’s the matter with you?”

“I dun... I dunno.” Kneeling there, head sagging, Joshua gasped, lungs searing with pain at every breath. He dropped back to sit on his heels, arms hanging at his sides, and felt the pain strike at him everywhere, as though a whole bag of cats at once were trying to claw their way out of his body.

“I’ll call somebody,” the trooper decided.

“Wai—” Joshua said, vaguely lifting an arm. “Wait.”

Because the pain, as quickly as it had come over him, was now lessening, fading away. He was able to take deeper and deeper breaths, he could feel his strength steadily return, and he lifted a shaking hand to wipe his sweat-beaded and cold-feeling brow “What a hell of a thing,” he said, his voice trembling. And now that the first attack was over, what he mostly felt was scared. What was this? Cancer? Leukemia? An early sign?

Oh, Christ, don’t tell me I got something at the goddamn plant.

“Wait there,” the trooper said, which Joshua was more than willing to do, sitting back on his heels in front of his breakfast like an extremely oddball worshipper, and the trooper went away to his impressive official Plymouth Fury II on the other side of the road, returning a minute later with a roll of paper towels and a Diet Pepsi. “Here you go,” he said. “Try it, anyway”

Grateful, Joshua wiped his face and neck with the paper towels, then took a long swig of Diet Pepsi to clean out his mouth. It landed in his stomach without incident, seeming content to stay there, and Joshua struggled to his feet, the trooper giving him a hand. “Thanks,” Joshua said. “Boy, I don’t know what that was.”

“You better check with your doctor,” the trooper told him.

“I will.”

“You’re looking awfully red-eyed.”

Terrific; a vampire for CNN. “I don’t know,” Joshua said, leaning one hand on the top of the Honda. “Maybe I ought to go home, call in. Maybe you could call in for me, the Press Office.”

“Sure,” said the trooper.

But then Joshua felt a stiffening of the spine — he actually felt it, a surge of toughness through his body — and he stood up straighter, taking his hand off the Honda as he said, “No, never mind, I’m all right now.”

“You sure?”

“Positive.”

Joshua got back behind the wheel, and glanced at himself in the rearview mirror, and by God his eyes were red-rimmed, as though he’d spent all last night in mad debauch. One of the secretaries would have Murine, Visine, one of those eyedrop things. He couldn’t face a news camera like this; he could barely face a print reporter like this.

So why don’t I go home? he asked himself, even as his body, following its own agenda, started the car, shifted into gear, and waved “so long” to the trooper, who called, “Take care now.”

The last half mile between police barrier and plant entrance was the most peaceful ride in the world. There were no houses or farms along here, nothing but regrowth woods (containing shreds of stone wall, the faint pencil marks of failed settlements) and overgrown fields, not yet reclaimed by forest. The road was reasonably smooth and reasonably straight, and he was alone on it, his Honda a magic carpet through a world called Serenity. If only all of driving could be like this.

(The local newspaper’s main news angle on the terrorist takeover at the nuclear plant was the fact of this road’s being closed to normal traffic. They were editorially outraged, and brought out all the usual heart-tuggers: school buses diverted onto dangerous truck-ravaged highways, senior citizens facing an extra thirty agonized minutes to reach their life-giving medicines, all of that. They came as close as they dared to claiming that local dairy farmers’ milk was curdling on its so-much-longer way to market, but if they followed that particular line much further the dairy farmers would surely rise up as one and burn the newspaper offices to the ground, so they were showing — some — restraint.)

Fortunately, the local weekly paper was not that high on the list of Joshua’s media problems. He was distantly polite to their chubby girl reporter, gave her the same handouts he gave everybody else, and let it go at that. And enjoyed the half mile of sequestered road. It was one of the few things in his life these days he could enjoy at all.

By the time he got to the command post — a series of trailers scattered like a Canadian mining town all over the road in the vicinity of the main gate — Joshua’s recent illness was completely gone, except for the red eyes. He left the Honda in its assigned space, walked to the Press Office trailer, and a steno there did have eyedrops for him. She paused in her endless work at the copying machine to root through her big horse-feeder-bag purse and find the little bottle, which he took to the men’s room and used on both eyes, to no effect. The red fringe was just there, in his eyes, as though behind them his brain were on fire.

Out again in the bullpen, after returning the eyedrops with thanks, Joshua was about to look at the thick stack of message memos already making a leaning tower on his desk when the new Anglo Dutch press rep introduced herself. “Hi, Karen Levine,” she said. She was thin, early thirties, ash-blond hair, clear level eyes, no-nonsense manner, hard bony handclasp. “I want you to know, from the get-go,” she said, “you’re the guy in charge. I’m just here to help out if I can, if any questions come up involving Anglo Dutch.”

“Thanks, Karen,” Joshua said, with his brightest and falsest smile, knowing he would have no more than two weeks of this one. “I appreciate all the help I can get,” he told her, as he told them all. “Glad to have you aboard.”

The fact was, Anglo Dutch had learned from Exxon’s experience with the Valdez. Never keep your information officer around long enough to establish any kind of personal rapport with the media; that way indiscretions and uncomfortable leakage lie. Every two weeks, whip into the slot another trim slim thirty-four-year-old, bland and smooth and bright, male or female (makes no difference), who will give the company line a nearly human face; but before that face becomes completely human get it out of there, and start with a new one.

It had worked for Exxon in Alaska, and it was working for Anglo Dutch at Green Meadow, and why not? Everybody likes to talk with a handsome person; so what if they aren’t saying anything?

Something about the encounter with A-D’s latest clone left Joshua too disheartened to look at his message mountain. “I’m going to walk the perimeter, Grace,” he told his secretary, a fiftyish civil service employee in whom the milk of human kindness had curdled long before the closing of any local roads.

She gave him a disapproving look. “What should I say to callers?”

“Hello,” Joshua suggested, and left the trailer.

The primary official presence was centered here at what had been the main gate back when ingress and egress were possibilities at Green Meadow, but guards of one sort or another, mostly state troopers and national guardsmen, were spotted all around the rim of what the more military among them persisted in calling “the facility”; as though anything about this were easy.

The citizen soldiers of the National Guard — mostly not the accountants and supermarket managers of song and story, but unskilled laborers who were grateful for the extra money they got being guardsmen (but not thrilled at having been called to active duty) — were positioned back in the woods, in pairs and trios, within sight of every inch offense. Idiots of various kinds kept trying to climb that fence — younger reporters, thrill-seekers, wannabe heroes, drunks (after dark), and jerks generally — so it had to be watched. There was no point having a group of nervous terrorists destroy themselves and several hundred thousand worthier people simply because two dumb kids, for instance, were playing dare-ya.

Still, Joshua thought, as he walked away from the command post along the fence, it would be nice to get in there. Interesting. And almost his job, really, to know what was going on. Not that he would try to be a hero, rescue anybody or stop anything that was going on at the plant, nothing like that. Just observe.

Not far along the road from the command post the fence angled away into the woods, and Joshua strolled along with it. There was almost a path bordering the fence on the outside, the result of heavy traffic a few years ago by the construction crews that had built the thing. The path was now somewhat overgrown, with tree branches intruding into the space every twenty feet or so.

Joshua made his slow way along this path, ducking leafy limbs as necessary, and every time he looked around there were at least two olive-drab-uniformed guardsmen in sight, rifles slung on backs. They paid no particular attention to Joshua, apart from marking his presence; the highly visible laminated ID clipped to his jacket lapel was bona fide enough, so long as he didn’t do anything stupid like try to climb the fence.

A rock. On the ground, just to the left of the path; the fence was to his right. Joshua picked it up, and it was just hand size. His fist closed halfway around it, fingers splayed over the cool and fairly smooth rounded surface. It felt good in the hand, it felt good swinging at the end of his arm as he walked. Comforting; his pet rock.

He was a good twenty minutes from the road, maybe a third of the way around the outer boundary of the plant, when he saw, just ahead, partway up a clear slope, seated on the trunk of a fallen tree, a single guardsman; a young guy, maybe twenty-two, pale pimply skin and pale scraggly moustache tucked away beneath the helmet. Joshua veered away from the fence toward this person, who continued to sit there, watching him approach. Joshua noticed the guardsman’s eyes take in the flapping laminated ID.

When he got close enough, Joshua grinned and said, “Hi. How you doin?”

“Fine,” said the guardsman.

“I thought you guys were supposed to work in pairs,” Joshua said. “Where’s your partner?”

Gesturing over his shoulder, the guardsman said, “Way down by that stream back there, taking a crap. He’s one of your self-conscious dudes.”

“Well, that’s fine,” Joshua said, and smashed the kid in the face with the rock.

The kid went backward off the tree trunk and Joshua went after him, raising the rock high, bringing it down twice more before the kid stopped moving. Then it was the work of a moment to yank the rifle off the limp body, roll it over, peel off its wool jacket.

Leaving the rock behind, carrying the rifle and the jacket, Joshua moved quickly but without undue haste toward the fence. He tossed the rifle over, then swarmed up the chain-link, fingers and toes sure and fast. At the top were three spirals of razor wire. Joshua flipped the guardsman’s uniform jacket over these, then scrambled rapidly upward — the sharp razor wire sliced right through the wool cloth and into his knees and forearms, but he hardly noticed — and launched himself over the top and into the air. His stomach dropped first, and then he did, landing on all fours, jolted but unhurt.

(There were also electronic sensors in the fence, that would now tell the security people back at the command post — and whoever might be looking at the right instrument panel in the plant’s control section as well — that it had been breached, but Joshua hardly cared. He was in; it was already done.)

Hands and knees smarted from the fall, and the razor cuts on his limbs stung, but he ignored all that. Leaping lightly to his feet, he picked up the rifle, held it at a loose port arms angled across his chest, and started to walk.

The land inside the fence was manicured, but cleverly, to give the illusion of unspoiled woodland glade. Joshua strode as though through a park, quickly out of sight of the fence, moving steadily up the gradual slope.

(Deep down inside, repressed, hardly noticeable, Joshua felt absolute terror. What am I doing? What have I done? What’s happening to me? But these adrenaline flutters of fear were almost completely overpowered, like a weak radio signal buried beneath a more powerful one, overpowered by glorious feelings of pride and pleasure in his own quick sure competence, the skill and swiftness and determination with which he moved. But why? What am I doing? Why? Ah, but the why didn’t matter; the dexterity, the adroitness, was all.)

His red-rimmed eyes surveyed the scene with satisfaction. What a beautiful world. Where else in the universe are there such greens? He strode up the gradual hill, feeling the young strength in his body, delighting in it, but before he reached the crest, from where he would surely be able to see the plant’s buildings, a man stepped out from behind a quince bush ahead of him and said, “That’s as far as you go.”

“I don’t think so,” Joshua said, and swung the rifle down to fire from the hip, quickly, effortlessly, as though with the deftness of long practice, only to hear the click of emptiness.

The damn guardsmen! They patrol with unloaded weapons? What kind of stupidity is this? The Boy Scouts are better prepared!

(Who is that man? Why do I hate him so? Why am I so afraid? Why am I not afraid? How can I stop these arms, these legs, this brain? Oh, please, please, please, how can I stop?)

The man in Joshua’s path was large and burly, with heavy shoulders and a narrow waist. He wore lace-up woodsman’s boots, thick dark corduroy trousers, a dark flannel shirt. He seemed to be unarmed.

(How did he get in here, inside the fence? Is he one of the terrorists? What’s happening? Why do I hate him? Oh, please, please, let me drop to my knees in front of him and beg for mercy. Heal me. Cure me. Save me.)

Joshua stepped quickly forward, reversing the rifle, grabbing it two-handed by the barrel, swinging it back and then around, fast and hard and vicious, aimed at the man’s head. But the man ducked below the swing, his left hand coming up, fingers snapping like a bear trap onto the rifle butt, yanking it away as he crouched low, knees bent, and pivoted all the way around in a tight low circle, like a stunt dancer on ice.

The rifle was torn from Joshua’s grip, the front sight gouging flesh from both palms, and now the man had it and was straightening, his jaw set, expression grim. Without a second’s hesitation, Joshua spun to his right and ran, leaping over rocks and roots like a deer, ducking below tree branches, swiveling this way and that through the shrubbery like the finest running back in football history.

Was the creature following? Joshua didn’t waste time looking back. He ran and ran, angling to his left, uphill, toward the plant.

A clearer section, the grass longer than the groundsmen normally kept it, the crest of the ridge just ahead. Joshua dashed toward that height, and a sudden blow in the middle of his back, a hard powerful hit as though from a battering ram, drove him forward and down, to skid painfully on the grassy ground, and lie there for an instant, breathless, stunned.

Many aches and pains crowded his body, demanding attention, but he had no time. Not for the racked wheezing of his lungs, not for the cuts and bruises, not for the grinding ache in his back as though bones had been broken, not for the sting of tears in his red-rimmed eyes. He rolled over, struggling upward, and saw it, the man, loping this way up the grade.

(What did he hit me with? What is he doing? What am I doing? Oh, let me out of this!)

“You won’t stop me!” Joshua cried, his voice harsh and hoarse and rasping in his strained throat. “You can stop this thing, but you won’t stop me!”

“A thousand times I’ll stop you,” the man said, coming to a stop, standing over Joshua, staring down at him with hate and contempt. “And a thousand times I’ll give you a little lesson.”

The worst pain of his life seared through Joshua, burning him, cauterizing him, arching his back, twisting his fingers into claws. He tried to scream, but something was scrambling up his esophagus, through his throat, across his trembling tongue, out past his stretched and grimacing lips. And out his straining ears, out his flaring nostrils, out his staring eyes.

Joshua dropped back onto the ground like a rag doll abandoned in mid-play. He was waking from a nightmare; or into a nightmare. His head lolled to the right, his bleary unfocused eyes saw the rabbit bounding away through the grass, saw it leap high and suddenly burst into flame, saw it fall to earth a charred lump, a smoking coal.

He forced his neck muscles to work, he turned his head till he stared upward. The man still stood there, huge and dark against the morning sky, head turning back and forth, looking for something more, something more.

“Help.” His voice was a croak, it was scarcely a voice at all. “Help me.”

The man looked down, as though surprised to see him there. “Yes, of course,” he said, with great gentleness, and came down to one knee. He leaned forward, eyes soothing, arm outstretched. His large warm comforting hand moved downward over Joshua’s face, and Joshua Hardwick exhaled his last breath.

39

Susan awoke again this morning in Andy’s arms, and again this morning it was the most blissful possible way she could imagine to come awake. Especially this morning. Of all times, this morning.

This was the day after her FBI interview. Identification of only two of the band of insane terrorists who had taken over the Green Meadow Nuclear Power Plant upstate had so far been made, but one of them was Grigor! Susan hadn’t been able to believe it at first — not humorous, sensible, calm, inoffensive Grigor — and even when she’d come to accept it she hadn’t realized what it meant for her. She hadn’t thought about the fact that she was, after all, the person who had brought Grigor to the United States.

Yesterday morning, she and Andy had been eating their minimal breakfasts together — coffee, orange juice, English muffins — and watching a special report on Today about the siege at the nuclear plant, when the doorbell rang. Well, no; Andy had been watching the report, with that intense interest he sometimes displayed and which she found so impressive, as though he were some incredibly vast energy system harnessed just for her, and she had been ignoring the television set to gaze around instead in quiet satisfaction at how pleasant and appropriate Andy’s possessions looked in her apartment — they’d been living together less than a week, and she was not at all used to it yet — and that was when the doorbell rang.

They frowned at one another, in surprise; nobody ever rang the bell this early in the morning. She said, half whispered, “Who could it be?”

“I’ll bet you,” Andy said, nodding at the TV set, “it has something to do with Grigor.”

So she was already half-prepared when she asked who it was through the intercom and the nasally distorted voice said, “FBI, Miss Carrigan.”

Two of them came up, one white and one black, both male, both about thirty-five, both smooth and affectless, as though they’d perfected their characterizations by watching fictional FBI men on television. They showed identification, and asked both Susan and Andy to do the same, the black one copying down their driver’s license numbers into a small notebook while the white one verified Andy’s guess that the subject of their visit was Grigor Basmyonov.

Susan briefly described how she’d happened to meet Grigor, and how she’d happened to describe his case to her doctor cousin, and at first they seemed satisfied, but then they asked her if she could come down to the FBI office to make a statement. “But I have a job,” she protested, feeling the first flutters of panic. “I should be leaving right now”

“That’s all right,” the black one said. “Any time today. How about four o’clock?”

So that was agreed, and they told her which office to go to in the building, which they said was at 26 Federal Plaza, an address that meant nothing at all to Susan (nor would it have to any other New Yorker). It turned out to be one of those made-up addresses, and to actually be a building on Broadway, downtown, between Thomas and Worth streets.

After they left, Susan said, “You don’t think they think I’m one of them, do you? Andy?”

“Of course not,” Andy assured her. “They just want to know everything they can find out about Grigor, that’s all. Maybe something you tell them can help them negotiate with him.”

“Poor Grigor,” Susan said, thinking again how she’d abandoned him since meeting Andy. “And poor me.”

“It won’t be bad,” he said, stroking her arm, encouraging her. “You’ll just tell them the truth, and that’ll be the end of it.”

“I’ll hate every second I’m down there.”

“I’ll be with you in spirit,” he said, and grinned. “If that helps.”

“It does,” she told him.

And it did.

At work, Susan explained the situation — her co-workers already knew about her connection with the doomed Russian fire fighter, but hadn’t made the link with the terrorist in the nuclear plant — and at four o’clock she kept her appointment.

Those two hours with the FBI agents — not the original pair but three new ones, two of them women, but all with that same impersonality — were grueling and frightening and bewildering, and left her with a terrible case of the shakes. It soon became obvious they didn’t actually suspect her of anything, didn’t believe she was part of some vast conspiracy to bring Grigor Basmyonov to America just so he could run a hijacked nuclear power plant, but they couldn’t help their manner, which kept signaling Susan that she was guilty, she was in their power, her only hope was to confess all and throw herself on their nonexistent mercy.

They asked a million questions, many of them repetitive, and when at last they were finished she was as drained and limp as vegetables that have been used for soup stock. She left 26 Federal Plaza like a shell-shock victim, and there was Andy! Waiting for her, on the sidewalk, on the real world’s Broadway.

“How long have you been here?” she asked, delighted and unbelieving and warmed and restored by the sight of him.

He shrugged it off. “Not long.” But he must have been there for a long time, to be sure he hadn’t already missed her.

She let it go, accepting the gesture for the loving kindness it was, and let him lead her through a restorative evening of a good dinner out, a movie — a comedy this time, called Mysterious Ways — and lovely love back in the apartment.

The word “love” had not passed between them yet. Susan was afraid to say it, afraid it might scare him away, and maybe he too was uncertain how to move the relationship to a deeper level. But that was all right, they had time. All the time in the world.

Waking this morning when the radio alarm started playing its golden oldies — “All things must pass a-way” — finding herself still in his arms, she smiled as she snuggled closer to his chest, their combined warmth in her nose like the aroma of the nest: home. Her eyes closed again. She floated with him in warm space.

He stirred. Sleepily, he mumbled, “Time to get up.”

Oh, well; yes. Moving around, freeing herself from the covers, she rose up onto one elbow and smiled at his grizzly face. His eyes were still half-closed. “Still here, I see,” she said.

His smile was as lazy as she felt. “I don’t disappear that easily,” he said, and tousled her hair.

Ananayel

“I don’t disappear that easily,” I said, and tousled her hair.

But I do, don’t I? Or I will. Or she will, in fact. I’ll still be around, but she’ll disappear very easily indeed.

Per our agreement, she got up first, since she takes longer in the bathroom, and I lay a bit longer in bed, brooding. (Already we are working out these fine points of cohabitation.) But what am I going to do with her, what am I going to do with Susan? It’s absurd, I know it’s absurd, but I want to go on pleasing her, watching her reactions. I have never felt so enjoyably at service before.

I even want to go on inhabiting this body, which, for all its oafish awkwardness, has been serving me well. And the fact is, the way the humans have structured their civilizations, their bodies aren’t even that much of a liability. Chairs, automobiles, restaurants; they have worked out fairly ingenious and even enjoyable ways of overcoming their limitations.

But what am I do to about Susan? I’ve thought and thought, and there’s simply no way to take her with me, to pluck her off the Earth before it transmogrifies. How would I do it? Where and how would she live? In a bubble of air and soil from her former planet? First she would lose her mind — I mean, immediately she would lose her mind — and then she would pine and die.

Susan is of this place. More, she is of this place and time. There would be no life for her in the deep spaces of the real, alone, the last of her kind, with no companion but an amorphism she’s expected to call Andy. If I’m going to think about this, I at least have to think realistically.

But I don’t want to lose her. I don’t want to stop knowing her, that’s the long and the short of it. I don’t want to stop being Andy, and I don’t want to stop being in love with Susan. (We haven’t said the word, humans are often wary of that word, but we both know.)

I have choice, I know that, I have free will, but on what could I bend that will? Where is the alternative? If Susan stays on this Earth, she will be snuffed at the same instant as every other creature, every plant, every molecule of air. But where could she go instead? Nowhere. So where is the choice?

40

“I’m sorry, Congressman,” Reed Stockton said, “but I just can’t go along with it.”

Congressman Stephen Schlurn leaned forward, his reddened eyes burning into Reed’s. “Do you know who you’re talking to, young man?”

Yes, he did, Reed Stockton knew exactly who he was talking to, worse luck. A hell of a way to start a new job; first day, first morning, and he has to stand up and say no to a hotshot congressman, in fact the congressman in whose district Green Meadow III Nuclear Power Plant festered, and who had a sudden urge to be a... a what? A hero? A media star?

A headache and a jerk, in Reed Stockton’s opinion. “I know who you are, sir,” he said, being both firm and respectful, “and I have to tell you, it wouldn’t matter if you were the president, I’d still have to say the same thing.”

The congressman shook his head, showing how exasperated he’d been made by Reed’s stupidity. “It’s not as though,” he said, “I’m talking about going in there alone. I want you with me, that’s the whole point.”

“Congressman,” Reed said, “I have to tell you this is my first day as PID, and I’m not really prepared to put my job on the line on any one person’s say-so. My predecessor, a fellow named Hardwick—”

“I heard about him,” Schlurn said. Hardwick’s shocking bewildering finish was being downplayed in public as much as possible, but of course, Congressman Schlurn would have his sources, he would know all about it. “Went crazy, didn’t he?”

“Yes, sir. Killed a national guardsman with a rock, went over the fence with the man’s rifle, and apparently killed himself inside. The helicopters have seen what’s almost certainly his body.”

“I fail to understand,” Schlurn said, “what that garish adventure has to do with you and me. I want us, representing the people and the media, to walk openly and boldly straight through that main gate and down to the plant and talk to these people, one on one. All these telephone negotiations aren’t doing a damn thing, and I don’t care if you only got the job ten minutes ago, you still have to know I’m right about that.”

Give me strength, Lord, Reed Stockton prayed, and he meant it. He was a religious person, raised a Methodist by devout parents, married to a devout girl himself, the two of them raising their first child — with more to come, God willing — the same way. When troubled or harassed, Reed prayed for help, for guidance, for strength, and it seemed to him his prayers were always answered.

And they would be again this time. Knowing that God was giving him eloquence, Reed said, “Sir, you may be absolutely right about everything you say. You’re an intelligent man, and a very persuasive man, and I wouldn’t doubt for a second that if you could get into a face-to-face discussion with the unfortunate people sitting in at the plant right now you would very eloquently—”

“Sitting in?” Schlurn stared at him with revulsion. “Did you say sitting in?”

“Yes, sir, Congressman Schlurn, I did.” Reed permitted himself a small pleased smile. “And frankly, sir, I’m proud of it. That was my idea.”

“Your idea.”

“Yes, sir. When I took over this morning, there was a briefing session with General Bloodmore and the other people in charge, and I made that suggestion and they accepted it at once. And thanked me, sir.”

“Sitting in,” repeated Schlurn.

“It’s a much less emotive word than anything else that has been used,” Reed explained. “Talking about hostages, and terrorists, and invasions, and captures, and threats and all that, it simply serves to escalate the danger quotient. Sir, I was a poli-sci major at Cal Tech, with a minor in communications history, and I like to think that I understand what words do in public discourse. I think of that as my specialty. And to say that what we have to deal with here is a sit-in suggests the possibility for reason and discussion on both sides of the issue. It suggests a situation that isn’t really dangerous.”

“But,” Schlurn said, “it is really dangerous.”

“Sir, we don’t want to emphasize that with the folk outside. Particularly those within one hundred and twenty-five miles of the plant. Which includes, as you know, New York City.”

Schlurn considered. He and Reed were standing on opposite sides of Reed’s desk — formerly poor Hardwick’s desk — in the Press Office trailer, surrounded by activity they’d both been ignoring: secretaries typing, telephoning, making copies. Now Schlurn, with those painful-looking red eyes as though he hadn’t slept for a week — dreaming up this insane scheme, no doubt — looked around the trailer, looked back at Reed, and in a new low voice, calmer than before, said, “I’m not going to persuade you, am I?”

“To let you on-site, sir? And to go with you? No, sir, you aren’t.”

“The idea of yourself becoming a media figure has no appeal to you.”

Reed smiled thinly. He used the media, he didn’t subscribe to it. “No, sir,” he said.

“No, I can see that. Is there a men’s room?”

“Of course, sir.”

Reed, magnanimous in victory, was solicitous in pointing the way, and beamed at the congressman’s back as Schlurn stumped off.

Eloquence, that’s all it ever took. Eloquence and calm. Reed, pleased and relieved at having survived his first crisis in the new job, sat at the desk and went back to sorting through the vast collection of messages left unreturned by poor Hardwick, who hadn’t survived his last crisis at all, whatever it had been.

Five minutes later the congressman was back, looking better than before, calmer and more in control of himself. Even his eyes were clearer. He said, “Reed, I want to thank you.”

Reed jumped to his feet, scattering message memos. “Yes, sir!”

“That was a dumb idea I had,” Schlurn said. “I woke up with it this morning, and it just seemed great, and I couldn’t get it out of my head all day. What I needed was a calm rational person to look at me and say you’re crazy, and I’m grateful to you for doing it.”

“Oh, Congressman,” Reed stammered, “I never meant to suggest, uh, suggest...”

“Don’t worry about it, Reed, you were right,” Schlurn told him, and grinned in a friendly reassuring way, and slowly shook his head. “I don’t know what got into me,” he said.

X

How do I get in there? How?

With all the temporal and heavenly powers both blocking my way, with them all united against me, guards and angels and fences and force fields all opposed to my will, how do I get my hands on that miserable quintet, those hopeless pawns? How?

HOW? HOOOOOOWWWW!!!

And how much time have I left, to get there?

41

Frank didn’t want any chummy relationships developing between his group and the hostages, the eight staff members kept here to run the plant under the eye of Grigor, but what could he do? Human beings interact. It’s easier to be friendly, or at least courteous, than impersonal and aloof.

So it wasn’t long before Grigor was saying, “Rosie, would you bring me that printout, please?” or “Mark, it’s time to check the pressure gauges,” or even, “Fran, I’m thirsty, could you get me a glass of water? Thank you.”

Frank wasted a little breath arguing against this fraternization at first, but gave up when he saw he wasn’t getting anywhere. And in any case it was easier for him, too, to address the hostages by name, to say “please” and “thank you,” to act as though this was just some kind of stupid boat ride they were all taking together, instead of what it was.

So they knew the hostages’ first names, and after a while even some of their backgrounds and personal lives. And the hostages knew Grigor’s and Kwan’s names, because the whole world knew their names. Early in the negotiations with the people outside, Grigor had announced both of their names and histories, to demonstrate the seriousness and capability of the people who’d taken over, and to start to get their stories out. And to show, as well, that they believed they had nothing to lose.

The hostages — and the world — didn’t know Frank’s name, or Maria Elena’s, because on that he insisted, firmly believing they were going to pull this caper off somehow And they didn’t know Pami’s name because they didn’t need to know it. Pami had gone all boneless and weak the minute they’d established control of this place, as though that’s all she’d been holding herself together for, and she spent most of her time now either asleep in the dayroom or slumped in a chair, glowering at the world around her with sunken eyes. There was no making human contact with Pami, not by the hostages and not even by her companions.

Frank had expected Grigor also to have collapsed by now, to be of little more than symbolic use once they’d got themselves inside the plant, but that emaciated body seemed to find sustenance and fresh vigor here in the control section. Dealing with the plant and the hostages, negotiating with the thickheaded officials outside, it all gave him a wiry energy that made him move as though he were plugged into his own electric source.

Kwan was the one losing vigor, particularly after the television announced he was simply a common crook after all, and not a revolutionary, not a hero of Tiananmen Square. This was two days after Grigor had given the names to the media. Apparently there was no way for them to smear the hero fireman of Chernobyl, but the Chinese government was happy to announce that Li Kwan was no more than a garden-variety criminal, lying about his past in an effort to gain political sanctuary. And the American State Department, for reasons of its own — no doubt solid hardheaded realistic mature reasons — was happy to announce it had studied the documents the Chinese government had provided as “proof” and to pronounce them genuine.

“That’s all right, Kwan,” Frank said, trying to cheer him up, “the lie comes apart, don’t worry about it. You already had a lotta ink, right? A lotta stuff in the newspapers about who you really are.”

Kwan shrugged, silent little face bitter, not caring.

“You’ll get your story out,” Frank told him, and then made a mistake. “You’ll have plenty of time after this is all over,” he said.

Kwan looked at him, with painted-on eyes. Frank cleared his throat, and blinked, and patted Kwan on the shoulder, and left him there.

Despite the weirdness of the situation, despite its unprecedented craziness, life soon settled into a kind of routine, which was something else Frank didn’t want or need. What he wanted and needed was steady forward movement, negotiation and then planning out the final details of the endgame and then doing it and home free. Stasis was his enemy. Being stuck here in stalemate could only help the people outside, who didn’t have this fragile cat’s cradle to hold together.

Meanwhile, nothing was getting accomplished. Their grip on the plant was secure, but somehow that didn’t mean as much as it should. The propaganda effect, for Grigor and Kwan, was just about nonexistent, buried within the media’s overriding interest in the caper. Maria Elena’s more general ecologic point couldn’t seem to get made at all. And Frank wasn’t getting his money.

The way that part was supposed to work, at the final moment Frank was to split off from the rest of them. The others all had their propaganda objectives, so were willing to let themselves be captured to accomplish their agenda. So, assuming the goddamn stumble-minded officials finally did come around to agree on the five-mil ransom, Grigor would tell them to put it in suitcases in a car just outside the gate, and that a member of the group would go out and drive the car away.

The story was, if the driver wasn’t arrested or followed, and if he was permitted to get clear away, he would telephone the plant six hours later and tell his partners still inside that everything was okay. No phone call, the partners would destroy the plant. (In reality, Frank would just clear out, and then the others would surrender. He’d like to take Maria along, if she’d go, but that didn’t seem likely.)

First, though, the morons outside had to get the idea into their thick heads that they had to come up with the five mil. Had to come up with it, or they could kiss their goddamn nuclear power plant goodbye.

And time was getting short.

Pami did the most sleeping, and even when she was awake she was listless and cranky, like a colicky child. Frank slept the least, driven by nervous energy, but they all, invaders and hostages alike, took their turns on the sofas in the dayroom, covered by the thin cotton blankets normally kept in a supply closet in case an emergency ever arose in which staffers would have to remain at the plant for an extended period of time. (Societal breakdown outside the perimeter had been the emergency the planners had been thinking of, not the standoff that now existed.)

The only television set was also in the dayroom. They kept it on all the time, to see how the world was perceiving their situation, but turned the volume low, since there were always sleepers in the room. It was the afternoon of the fifth day of the siege that Dr. Philpott was first mentioned on that set.

Frank and two female staffers were watching at the moment, sitting close to the set in order to hear it, with Maria Elena and Pami and two other staffers asleep across the room, and Grigor and Kwan and the remaining four staff members out in the main control room. “To this point, nothing has been heard of the situation of Dr. Marlon Philpott, the eminent scientist whose controversial experiments with anti-gravity led to the strike at Green Meadow, which in turn—”

Frank looked away from the set. The two women watching the program with him looked scared. You could see them praying he wouldn’t ask any questions. But their prayers were not to be answered.

Dr. Philpott stared at the TV set in the lounge. “Anti-gravity? What the hell are they talking about?”

“Professor,” Cindy said, sounding frightened and looking wide-eyed as she brushed the hair out of her eyes, “they told. They weren’t supposed to tell.”

And, of course, that was true. The level of lay ignorance demonstrated by that anti-gravity reference had distracted him from the even more egregious error in that announcement: they weren’t supposed to tell.

The media knew he was hidden in here, of course. He was the closest thing to a celebrity connected with Green Meadow, so naturally the media would have sought him out at the very beginning of the crisis, for statements and comments and interviews and all that, and God knows the authorities had initially wanted him out of here. But he’d convinced them, finally, after a number of phone calls — fortunately, the phones in here didn’t have to go through any switching system that the terrorists would see — that both he and the lab were safer, that the whole plant would be safer, if he stayed right here. (He didn’t tell them he was continuing his experiment, merely that he was “safeguarding” it; a white lie, that’s all, a venial sin of omission.)

But the media wasn’t supposed to tell. As one of the officials he’d talked to on the phone had said, there would be a “news blackout” on the whereabouts of the eminent Dr. Marlon Philpott until this emergency was over. (And why were all scientists “eminent,” anyway?)

But, as ever in human affairs, there’s always someone who didn’t get the message, some temporary assistant subeditor in precisely the wrong place at the wrong time. “All we can hope,” Philpott said, “is that the terrorists are too busy to watch television.” And he went back into the lab to see how Chang and the infinitely minute speck of something in the deuterium was coming along.

“This raises the ante,” Frank said. “I’ll go in that lab there and get him and bring him here and put him on the phone with those assholes, and maybe we’ll start to get somewhere.”

“I should come with you,” Grigor said. “We’re not sure what’s happening in that lab.”

“I must come, too,” Maria Elena said. “I want to see this laboratory. I want to see what this man is doing.”

“You don’t leave me in here with these people,” Pami said. She’d had trouble waking up just now, and was more irritable than ever.

“Well, somebody’s gotta keep an eye on the store,” Frank said.

“You know,” Grigor told him, “most of this is automated, it’s merely a matter of watching the gauges. We could lock the staff in the day room while we’re gone, five or ten minutes. We would bring Philpott here, and let them out again.”

“But who looks at the gauges?”

“Kwan.”

Frank looked over at Kwan, huddled in a chair in the corner, lost in his own helpless despairing rage. “We’ll see,” Frank said, and went over to him. “Kwan? You get the idea?”

Kwan looked at him without response.

Frank said, “We’ll lock these people up, go over and get the mad scientist, and bring him back. You sit at the controls there, keep an eye on things. If it looks like something’s gonna blow, you fix it, right?”

Kwan’s head lifted slightly. A faint gleam came into those dead eyes.

Frank touched his shoulder, feeling its bony hardness, tense as a bridge cable. “You don’t wreck it, okay? Not yet. I tell you what: if the time comes to say screw it, let er rip, you’ll be the guy to do it. Okay?”

A faint smile touched those gray lips.

Frank grinned at him. “You’d like to blow the whole thing, wouldn’t you? China and everybody.”

With those eyes, and that smile, on that fleshless face, Kwan looked like a death’s head.

No one was in the lounge to watch the television set three minutes later, when a scared-looking newsreader tried to shut the barn door, now that the horse was out and off and running. “From his vacation home in East Hampton, Long Island, the eminent scientist Dr. Marlon Philpott today broke his silence on...”

In the lab, Dr. Philpott broke a long tense silence to whisper, “It’s there.” He sounded as though he’d seen God. “Chang? Cindy? It’s in there.”

It was. This time it was. The radiation monitor showed definite gamma ray activity in the holding ring. Somewhere within the swirling deuterium something now existed that hadn’t been there before. It had been trying to be born for some time, for weeks, as high-speed streams of heavy ions had been directed into collision courses inside the holding ring. But to get a specific result out of these collisions was as chancy and difficult as getting a specific result out of any collision; like smashing two Hondas together and coming out with one Cadillac. Or like throwing a deck of cards into the air and having them land, all face-up, in exact sequence by suit and number.

Well, this time they had it. And they would keep it. While Philpott and Cindy watched, barely breathing, Chang operated the switching circuit that would transfer the — thing — from the holding ring to the storage bottle. “Gamma radiation has stopped in the holding ring,” Chang announced.

“Then it’s in the bottle.”

Chang looked stricken. “There’s no gamma activity from the bottle!”

“Strange matter,” Philpott reminded him, “only gives off radiation while it’s being fed, that’s one of the reasons it’s so safe. Shoot deuterium across the center of the bottle.”

“A reaction!” Chang’s round face beamed with delight.

“So it’s real,” Philpott said, as though he still hadn’t really believed it, not even one minute ago. His mouth was dry. Knowing that something was real was in no way the same thing as experiencing it; the difference between being out in a blizzard and looking at a snowscape on a Christmas card.

Held poised in the storage bottle was a piece of strange matter, known as an S-drop. The storage bottle itself was a simple glass vacuum jug on a table, containing one positive and one negative hemispherical electrode, with the S-drop suspended by electric current between them. Facing the bottle, a video camera was lined up with an ordinary bare light bulb on the other side, the S-drop centered midway between the two. The camera informed the computer at which Chang sat, and the computer directed the power supply in maintaining the equilibrium of the S-drop. To make the S-drop fall — to the terror of alarmists such as Dr. Delantero — all one had to do was wave a hand in front of the video camera. Dr. Philpott would do it himself, simply to prove Dr. Delantero wrong in the presence of these two graduate student witnesses, but it would ruin the experiment, and who knew how long it would be before he could produce another such beneficial collision?

Chang broke into the self-satisfaction of Philpott’s thoughts, saying, “Professor, it’s getting larger and a whole lot heavier.”

“What? Are you still feeding it?”

“Well, yes, sir.”

“Turn it off,” Philpott told him. “Turn off the deuterium. If that drop gets much larger, I won’t be able to use it. In fact, we won’t be able to hold it.”

Leaning close to the bottle, vision hampered by the guidance light to his left, Philpott peered into the center of that enclosed airless space. Could he see it, actually see it? A speck? Or was that wishful thinking?

Once Frank had convinced the staffers he really would shoot the locks off the lab doors, no matter how much that might startle Dr. Philpott or louse up his experiments, it seemed they had keys to that building after all. “I’ll tell him you fought like hell,” he promised, as he locked them into the dayroom.

Then it turned out Grigor couldn’t walk, not more than a dozen steps. “I’m sorry, Frank,” he said, with a shamed smile. “I think I hid this from the staff people—”

“You hid it from us all.”

“But I cannot possibly walk from here to another building.”

“No problem,” Frank said. “I’ll carry you.”

He did, and Maria Elena damn near had to carry Pami, too. She was also a lot weaker than anybody had known, staggering like a crackhead forced to walk in the middle of the high. Maria Elena took her arm and helped her steer a straight line.

It was the first they’d been outside since they’d taken over the plant, the first they’d seen the outside. It was a bright day, but not sunny, with very high white clouds and low humidity, so that the whole world had a look of flat clarity. The air wasn’t really cold, but there was still a touch of oncoming winter in its crispness, a sharp sensation in the nose, too faint to be called a smell. The deciduous trees and shrubs were far along in their seasonal color display, so that the conifers looked an even darker green.

The concrete paths curving between the buildings were clean and neat and empty, as though these four were the last people on Earth, the slope-shouldered man carrying the feather-light bundle of the second man, the sturdily built woman leading the skinny little black girl who tottered and reeled as though about to fall at every step. The four made their slow and uneven way along the paths toward the lab, moving as though to the tinny sound of a toy piano that only they could hear.

The lab beyond the turbine building was the smallest of the structures within the plant perimeter. A separate windowless concrete-block rectangle two stories high, it had entrances on three sides. The main front entrance, a pair of black metal doors that faced a neat curving concrete path flanked by low tasteful plantings, had been dead-bolted on the inside, in addition to the locks, so they couldn’t get in that way.

“Wait,” Frank told his group, and walked around to the left, to the single door, also black metal, that opened onto a path directly to the nearby turbine building. This too had been bolted on the inside.

“They’re beginning to piss me off,” Frank informed the others, as he walked by on his way to the right side entrance, another pair of black metal doors, this one on a higher level, opening onto a loading dock over a blacktop driveway. A dozen black plastic trash cans were lined up on the loading dock, along the wall beside the doors. This was where deliveries were made and unwanted materials taken out, and the construction of the loading dock and doors had made dead bolts impractical here. Frank opened the two locks, and then the right-hand door. “More like it,” he said, and went back to get the others.

Seated on a lab stool, leaning on a metal table, Philpott was dictating, and Cindy was taking it down in her private shorthand:

“The S-drop is stable. It is not, as many of my fellow scientists feared or hoped, or at least theorized, quasistable. It has not decayed into a different form. The radiation monitor shows gamma ray activity where we know the S-drop to be. It stops when we stop feeding the drop, and begins again when the drop is fed. At this point, its mass is still below the lowest limits of human vision, but when the current disturbance here at the facility has come to an end, it is my intention to feed the drop further, until it is large enough to be seen by the naked eye. To make it any larger than that, however—”

“Professor.”

There was something so strange in Chang’s voice that Philpott didn’t even think to protest at the interruption. He looked over at the boy, and saw him staring toward the corridor door. Pretending the fear he felt was only irritation, Philpott swiveled around on the stool.

42

The four people who stepped into the lab room were not at all what Philpott had expected the invaders of the plant to be. Of the four, only the man waving the pistol with such easy familiarity looked at all like Philpott’s idea of a terrorist. And only the rather exotic-looking woman had anything of the manner of a fanatic. The other man and woman were both very obviously sick; horribly sick, both of them.

Yes, of course. The man would be the Russian, the spokesman for the group, the fireman who’d been poisoned at Chernobyl. Could the black woman also have been there? That seemed so unlikely, and yet she was clearly as sick as the Russian. In fact, there was such an air of hopelessness and dejection and desperation about this entire quartet that Philpott’s first immediate reaction was pity.

A reaction that didn’t last. Quasistable, it immediately decayed into irritation and outrage. “I suppose we must obey your orders now,” he said, speaking to the man with the pistol, the obvious leader. “But I would ask you please not to disturb anything in this room. You can gain nothing by it, and I could lose a great deal.”

“I saw you on television,” the man said.

Of course. If this is fame, Philpott thought, I’d prefer to do without it. “I have been on television,” he agreed.

“You’re gonna be on television again,” the man said, with a faint tough-guy smile that didn’t fool Philpott for a second. “When you explain how you yourself, all by yourself, made the breakthrough that got us all out of this place and let everybody get back to normal.”

Philpott’s smile now was pitying; but sardonically and deliberately so. “Is that what you think?” he said. “That I will make any difference?”

“Sure you will.” The man gestured with the pistol. “They want their power plant back, but they don’t think we’re serious about that. They’ll want you back even more, and you can talk. You can let them know we really are serious.”

Philpott had only a few seconds to decide how to handle this. Go along with them, keep quiet, agree to their fantasies? Or disabuse them of the notion they would ever under any circumstances successfully complete whatever childish scheme they were acting out here?

Marlon Philpott was, first and foremost, a scientist, a rational man. His strong tendency would have been to come down on the side of reality versus fantasy in any case, but this time there was an even more cogent reason to be realistic from the outset with these people: their fantasies were keeping a lot of men and women from getting on with their normal lives. Including, now, himself.

If this unfortunate incident were to end without bloodshed, it seemed to Philpott, it would only happen after the invaders had accepted the hopelessness of their position. Therefore, he said, “I’m sorry, but you know, it really won’t work. I’ll do what you say, of course — you have the gun — but please, when it fails, don’t put the blame on me.”

There was such calm conviction in his words that they had no choice but to hear them, to at least think about what he was saying. The Russian, who had crossed to sit on the nearest stool while Philpott was speaking, and who leaned his back now wearily — weakly — against the wall, said, “Why must we fail?”

He sounds reasonable, Philpott thought, surprised and saddened by the realization. With unexpected empathy, he suddenly saw the route — like tracking a molecule through its invisible journey — whereby an ordinary small-town fireman could be transformed by something like Chernobyl not merely into a person subsumed by his terminal illness but into this person, blundering into this totally untenable position in one last doomed effort to make his life have meant something.

Concentration on his specialty had made Philpott narrow and cold in his dealings with other human beings, but he was an intelligent man, and he was capable of sympathetic and emotional responses to other individuals when his attention had been caught. At this moment, his attention was caught.

Basmyonov, Philpott suddenly remembered, glad to have retained the name from the television reports. “Mr. Basmyonov,” he said, with passable Russian inflection, the accent on the penultimate syllable, “the world is a rather well organized place, all in all. The damage you can do here is, at its worst, infinitesimal in comparison with the planet, with all the hundreds of nuclear power plants producing electricity around the globe, with the thousands of power plants of other types. In human terms, more people are being conceived at this moment than you and this plant could possibly kill. I’m sorry, I don’t mean to make light of your situation, but what you people are doing is a very small blip on the screen. They can afford to outwait you. Stall, talk, negotiate, never come to any conclusion. And meantime, your food is running low. It certainly is in here. We’ve eaten just about every bit of junk food we had in the lounge.”

The thin black woman slid slowly down the wall behind her and sat on the floor, head lolling, like a doll left behind when the family moved. The other woman stooped as though to help her, but there was nothing to be done, so she straightened again. The black woman’s eyes were glazed, mouth slack. She seemed to take no interest in anything that was being said.

The Russian said, “But why isn’t it easier for them to negotiate?”

It was the exotic-looking woman who answered before Philpott could, turning her attention away from the woman seated on the floor. “Authority,” she said, with such disgust it was as though the word were a dead mouse she had found on her tongue. “Their authority must be unquestioned. They must be permitted to do what they want with their world. In Brazil, they killed entire valleys, killed the people, the trees, the waters, the ground, and no one was permitted to question their right to do so.”

So that’s your bugbear, Philpott thought, and said, “I wouldn’t phrase it quite the same way, but yes, that’s essentially it. All of this was thought out, worked out, in the capitals of the world, years ago. I was on some of the preliminary working panels myself, and I know the decisions, and I know the thinking behind it. No nation can afford to give in even once to nuclear blackmail. It can never be seen to be a paying proposition, or it will proliferate, and the carnage would be unbelievable.”

The man with the gun said, scornfully, “They’d let us wreck this place?”

“If you’re that mindless, yes. Listen, there are five billion human beings on this Earth. How many do you think you could kill with this plant? I mean, if every circumstance went exactly your way. Thirty thousand? This lady mentioned dead valleys in Brazil. How many more dead valleys could the human race create, and still survive on the planet? Hundreds.” To the Russian, he said, “Your nation has managed to destroy an entire sea, the Aral. A huge inland salt sea, mismanaged to a brackish puddle the size of this room. The salt floats in the air. Infants are dying there, because there’s salt in their mothers’ milk and they can’t eat. A vast expanse of your own nation destroyed, with everybody and everything on it, but the Soviet Union goes on. The planet goes on. The human race goes on.”

The Russian said, “We’re too unimportant, you mean.”

“All of us are,” Philpott agreed. “You, I, the negotiators, all of us.”

The man with the gun said, “What if we start shooting hostages?”

Philpott frowned at him. “I don’t think you will,” he said, “but you might. If you do, communication will stop. They would write us all off, and just wait.”

“For us to wreck the plant.” That false scorn was there again, the man trying to convince himself of his potency; but of course, failing.

Philpott said, “I’ll tell you what I think is happening out there right now. I believe the area in front of the gate is full of fire trucks and other emergency equipment. I believe there are hundreds, perhaps even more than a thousand, people in radiation suits, poised and ready. The instant you give any indication that you are damaging the plant, they will pour in here to contain that damage as best they can. As the weather reports on television have been telling us, civilization has been getting a lucky break and you an unlucky one—”

“Civilization,” the exotic woman spat, and her scorn was no affectation.

Philpott looked at her. “I can see civilization has harmed you,” he said. “It does that. I can’t feel your pain, of course, but I still believe human civilization is worth the price we pay.”

“The price you pay, or the price I pay?”

Philpott spread his hands. “We all make that decision for ourselves.” Turning back to the armed man, he said, “What I was saying about the weather. There are neither high winds nor rain anywhere in the forecast, and those are the two weather modes that would spread radiation and destruction the farthest. Given the current weather, and given the emergency teams no doubt waiting outside the perimeter, there’s a very good chance they can contain the damage to this immediate area only.”

“You’ll die,” the armed man pointed out, “along with the rest of us.”

Philpott sighed. “I know that. But what am I to do? It frightens me, naturally, and it saddens me, just when I’ve—” He glanced toward the storage bottle with its invisible S-drop. His triumph; too late?

Suddenly he realized he shouldn’t draw their attention to it. “That’s why I hope,” he said, more loudly, looking at the armed man, “I can convince you to give this up. So far, I believe you’ve harmed no one. Two of your partners here are in desperate need of hospitalization, and—”

The thin black woman on the floor roused herself, from what had seemed like a drugged sleep, to say, “No hospital help me. Nothing help me. I’m dead meat.”

Philpott pushed forward, concentrating on the armed man. “If you’re willing, I could try to negotiate your surrender, terms, lawyers—”

The armed man pointed the gun at Philpott, but not as a threat. It was as though he were pointing a finger. He said, “I’m not going back. I already promised myself that.”

The exotic woman wrapped her arms around herself. She looked cold, and utterly bitter. “It’s no good,” she said. “Nothing ever works. They always win. You can’t fight them. It’s their world.”

“I’m not going back,” the armed man repeated.

Philpott wasn’t sure exactly what he meant — back to a madhouse? — but he could see that this was no bluff or braggadocio. He said, “I’m sure we could negotiate some sort of press conference as part of the surrender. You could get your story out, we could at least make sure of that much.”

The exotic woman said, “That’s what they told Li Kwan.”

“That’s what I’m remembering, too,” the armed man said. He looked meaner, colder. He’s made a decision, Philpott realized, and I’m not going to like it.

The Russian suddenly said, “Is that the experiment you were talking about on television?”

He saw me look that way, Philpott thought. The Russian was pointing directly at the storage bottle on the table on the other side of the room. Philpott’s mouth was very dry, his palms wet. He said, “We’re still trying to find the particle.”

“Are you?” The Russian kept peering at the storage bottle. “Then what is the camera looking at?”

“Nothing.”

“Then why is that light bulb on?”

Philpott had no immediate answer, which was wrong. The hesitation gave the game away, even though Chang tried to salvage the situation by blurting out, “We were testing it when you came in.”

“You weren’t.”

The armed man said, “Grigor? What’s up?”

The Russian looked at him, and pointed a bony finger toward the storage bottle. “That’s the thing they were talking about on television. Him, and the other scientist. The thing that, if it fell down, either nothing would happen or the world would come to an end. The whole world.”

The armed man smiled for the first time, a faint smile but an honest one. He said to Philpott, “You’re the guy says it’s safe.”

All at once, Philpott understood the dangerous depths they were in. The back of his neck felt cold, as though some wind from eternity were blowing on him. Choosing his words with great care, he said, “I say I believe it is safe. No one yet knows. Dr. Delantero, some others, they might possibly be correct, after all. Nothing is proved yet. I would be, of course, extremely cautious with the material until we had tested it a thousand different ways. I would bring Dr. Delantero himself here to—”

The Russian said, “We could test the theory for you, Doctor.” To the armed man, he said, “We just go knock that table over.”

Philpott could hardly breathe. He hadn’t known it was possible to be this afraid. In a choked hoarse voice he said, “Man, why would you do that?”

The Russian’s eyes were sunk into his head, as though his brain looked directly out from the center of his skull. He said, “I’m leaving very soon, Doctor. I don’t mind the idea of taking everybody with me. I like that idea. The best joke I ever thought of.” He turned that fleshless head. “Pami? Should we bring them all with us when we go?”

“Yes!” You wouldn’t have guessed the woman could speak so forcefully, or that she could rise up so powerfully, onto one knee, one foot on the floor, before she had to reach out and clutch at the other woman’s leg for support.

The Russian shrugged. “And we know how Kwan votes.”

They couldn’t all feel that way. But the exotic woman, holding to the black woman’s wrist with one hand, took the armed man’s free hand with her other and said, “There’s nothing for us here, nothing anywhere. We can’t win. Why should it be their world?”

“I’m not going back, that’s all I know” The armed man showed that chilling smile to Philpott again. “It’s a crapshoot, right? Fifty-fifty. Either nothing happens, and we’ll figure out what to do next, or our troubles are over. Even money, right?”

“Please,” Philpott whispered. “Please don’t.”

“Fuck you,” the armed man said, “and the horse you rode in on.” He freed his hand from the woman’s, and walked toward the storage bottle.

Please. But Philpott couldn’t even speak any more. What have I done?

The armed man approached the table. He reached out for the storage bottle, and the phone rang.

Everybody stopped. The armed man looked over his shoulder at the Russian. The phone rang a second time. “The last phone call in history,” the armed man said. “Should we answer it?”

“I will,” Cindy said, stumbling in her hurry as she ran to the desk where the phone sat. They all watched her pick up the receiver. “Yes?” A little pause, and she looked around. “Is somebody here named Frank?”

The armed man frowned, thunderously. “Who knows my name? What’s going on? Who is it?”

Cindy held the phone out to him. “She says her name is Mary Ann Kelleny.”

Ananayel

I just couldn’t. When the moment came, when the time came, I couldn’t. I saw my future, the high far calm reaches of my future, the long ages of emptiness, the occasional Call, the endless time remembering, and I could not. I could not obey.

It is not only Susan. It is the whole existence of which she is a part, the existence that makes it possible for two humans to be so selflessly bound together, to elevate their mutual caring so far beyond their petty selves, for each of them to attain such an intensity of altruism toward one other person that all of eternity does exist in the space of one shared thought.

He should have sent someone with more experience of the humans, someone who had already grown as bored with them as He. I tried to remain aloof, but I could not. What at first seemed to me human squalor has become human vibrancy. The cumbersomeness I first thought of as pathetically comic, I now see as endearing; and with what ingenuity they struggle to overcome their physical helplessness. And the violence of their emotions, once repugnant to me, is now elixir to my pallid soul.

Pallid no more. We all have free will, but we all must be prepared to take the consequences when we exercise it. I know what my consequence shall be: ejection. Like Lucifer before me — but at a much more frivolous level of rebellion — I shall be cast out. But not to join that greatest of dissenters in his dark sphere. No; the punishment for my defection will be suited to my crime. Do I love the humans so much? Then I will become one of them.

But first, I must save them.

43

Frank took the phone from the little blonde girl as though it was hot. Two seconds ago, he’d been ready to risk everything on one throw of the dice — if he got snuffed, that was okay; and if he was still around after he dumped over the professor’s experiment he’d probably be so happy to be alive he might even stand the joint for one more tour — and now he was scared. Now he was scared; not before.

Into the phone, cautiously, as though the damn thing might bite him, he said, “Who’s this?”

“Hello, Frank. Not doing too well, huh?”

It was her voice, all right, he remembered it clearly, and it evoked the picture of her the first time he’d ever seen her, getting out of her car after the blowout, standing there shaking with after-the-event jitters. The lady Nebraska lawyer, maybe thirty-five, tall and slender, with straight brown hair. The one that put the five-million-dollar-job idea in his head in the first place.

He said, “How in Christ’s name did you know I was here?”

“Frank,” she said, “I blame myself. When I said all that to you about the one big job, I didn’t expect you to do anything like this.”

“Am I blown?” he demanded. “Do they have a make on me out there?” Not that it really mattered any more; he just wanted to know.

Surprisingly, she said, “No. I’m the only one who knows it’s you, Frank, and I want to—”

“How?”

“Oh, come on, Frank, what difference does it make? I know you people must be about ready to give up in there—”

Frank looked over at the experiment on the table, and grinned a little. “You could say that.”

“You don’t have to,” she said. “Will you trust me, Frank?”

Why should he? On the other hand, why should he not? She’d treated him decently back in Nebraska, when he changed the tire for her, even tried to give him three hundred dollars to keep him from a life of crime. And if she was really the only one on the outside who knew a guy named Frank Hillfen was among the hijackers, then maybe she was trustworthy as far as he was concerned.

But, still. Why should she be reliable? What was in it for her? Frank said, “That depends. You want me to walk out there and give myself up?”

“No! That’s the last thing I want you to do, Frank. Well, the next to the last thing.”

“So what do you want?”

“I want you to convince Maria Elena to go on living, that’s the first thing.”

Frank was astonished all over again. “You know about her? How?”

“Frank,” she said, sounding hurried and impatient, “I’m not going to answer any of those questions, so just stop asking them. I want you to convince her to live, Frank. Then you can leave Grigor in charge—”

“Leave?”

“The others are going to die anyway,” she said, brisk and callous. “You and Maria Elena can live.”

“In jail,” he said bitterly.

“No. Listen to me, Frank. If you go outside and pass around the right cooling tower on the outside — not between the towers — you’re going to see a radio mast on a mountain way ahead of you. If you walk straight toward that, when you come to the perimeter fence you’ll find a small hole at the base of it, dug by animals.”

“The fence is wired. They’ll know when we go through.”

“The switches are in the control section,” she said. “Grigor can turn off the rear security area twenty minutes after you leave, then turn it back on ten minutes later. You’ll have plenty of time to get through. Then you keep walking straight, and when you get to the county road there’ll be a car parked there. No keys in it, but you can jump-start a car, can’t you, Frank?”

“I don’t get this,” Frank said. His mind was swimming; this was James Bond time. How did she know all this stuff, if nobody else knew any of it? The only thing certain was that she wouldn’t answer that question.

“I’m trying to make it up to you, Frank,” Mary Ann Kelleny was saying, “for steering you wrong in the first place. Now, listen. If you can convince Maria Elena to come with you, then when you get clear away you’ll find out that something happened two days ago that will see to it you never have to work again. You did like retirement, didn’t you, Frank?”

Frank couldn’t help it; his mouth twisted with sardonic disbelief: “Another five-mil hit?”

“Oh, you don’t need that much, Frank,” she said, as though they were just kidding around here together. “You do want to retire, don’t you? With Maria Elena.”

Frank looked over again at the funny-looking glass jug on the table; the professor’s experiment. There’s something truly weird going on here, he thought. Truly weird. His voice barely audible, he said, “You know a lot of stuff, don’t you, Ms. Kelleny? You know what’s happening here.”

“Some,” she said.

“And that thing’s loaded, isn’t it? It really is loaded.”

There was a little silence. Then, “Don’t bump into anything, Frank,” Mary Ann Kelleny said. “on your way out.” And she hung up.

44

The half of the telephone conversation that Grigor could hear made no sense. All he knew was, the exertion of the last hour had worn him down to only the smallest spark of self. But at the same time, this delay was taking from his resolve.

The idea of ending it with everybody else; how’s that for the ultimate joke? No longer would I be an object of pity, of study, of embarrassment, of condescension. We’re all in the same boat together, and the boat’s at the bottom of the ocean. Yes, that was a good way to think of it: the ultimate joke on the human race.

But the phone call, the delay, the incomprehensibility of what Frank was saying, all served to confuse the issue in Grigor’s mind. He found himself remembering Boris Boris, that aggressive comic bear, the only other man in the world who was entitled, the man who had appreciated and nurtured Grigor’s small talent, given him something to think about beyond his own imminent end. What would Boris Boris think of Grigor Basmyonov’s last joke?

“Not funny, Grigor. You owe me some good jokes, or what the hell are you doing in my office?”

The doctors at the Bone Disease Research Clinic in Moscow; the doctors at the hospital just a few miles from here. Is this the way to settle their bills?

That’s the problem with getting rid of everybody: there’s nobody left.

What a group we are, he thought. Not one of us has any close living relative, nor anyone who deeply loves us. (A rueful thought of Susan crossed his mind.) And then we had this perfect meeting with the scientist, the coldly rational man who explained to us our own futility and shameful inadequacy, so that even we could see it.

A momentum was there, a readiness to do it, to risk the destruction of everything simply because we ourselves had already been destroyed. And who could blame us afterward? (Another joke.)

The phone call has broken that momentum. I am not the man I was three minutes ago. My revulsion from the human race does not include revulsion from certain humans. Boris Boris. Susan.

I don’t think I can go through with it.

But what about Frank? Grigor watched him, trying to make sense of the phone call, and when it finished and Frank hung up the receiver and turned around, Grigor saw from his face that he too had changed. But in what direction?

Frank looked at the scientist. “It isn’t fifty-fifty,” he said.

The scientist’s face was softer, more pliable, than when they’d first invaded his domain. His emotions now were more readily decoded there. And at this moment, Grigor saw, the scientist was torn, wasn’t sure what to do. He strongly wanted to defend his beliefs, but not if doing so would lead to violence or destruction. And he’d lost some of his earlier assurance in his own theories. He stammered a little, under Frank’s steady look, and then said, “Whatever the odds, I beg you not to do it.”

So it really is the end of the world, Grigor thought, looking again at that bottle in the bright light. That’s what’s in there. It contains nothing that we can see, but it’s a nothing that could make nothing of us all.

Frank was saying, “Maria, why don’t we live to fight another day?”

Maria Elena responded with a haughty, angry look, stepping away from him, putting her hand on the crouched Pami’s shoulder. “You want to live? In this world?”

“It’s the only one we’ve got.”

“We don’t have it! They have it!”

“Maria,” Frank said, “I think we just got a chance to pull ourselves out of this.”

Grigor, pressing his palms onto his thighs to give himself the strength to speak, said, “I don’t have a chance, you know. Neither does Pami.”

Frank turned to him. His eyes looked very sure. He said, “Grigor, I could die twenty times, it wouldn’t change what’s gonna happen to you. You know that.”

Grigor’s eyes half closed as he considered, as he tried to find his place in this. He said, “But I am better testimony if I am here, in this plant. Alive or dead. There’s no point in my making an escape.”

“You’re right about that,” Frank agreed. “But staying behind, you could help Maria and me get clear.”

Maria Elena said, “Frank? You’ve really changed your mind?”

He reached out for her hand, but she wouldn’t let him have it yet. He said, “That thing over there, that’s not suicide, that’s killing everything forever, ending the whole story. Maria? You don’t want to kill everybody.”

“BUT I DO!”

The voice was Pami’s, a terrible amplified crow-squawk. She lunged forward, away from Maria Elena’s hand. She couldn’t walk, but she could scramble on all fours, as quick as a crippled cat, scuttling toward the experiment on the table.

The Chinese kid, the lab assistant, launched himself at her, grabbing her arm and shoulder, pulling her back. Her head snapped around, teeth flashing.

Grigor stretched out a useless hand: “She has AIDS!”

The Chinese boy recoiled from that snarling, biting mouth. Pami lunged again for the table, but this time she’d pushed her body too far. Her torso arched, her bones jutted out against her clothes, and her mouth stretched wide as she curved impossibly backward. She managed one short scream, blocked by a gush of blood, and dropped to the floor, a thrown-away rag. A red halo of corrupt blood circled her head.

X

HAAA HA HA HA HA!

HA HAAAAAAAAAA! Oh, HA HA HA HA HA HA HA!

Come into my arms! Come into my arms! Come into my arms! I have saved you, my darlings, come into my arms, let us dance!

How we’ll dance.

45

They walked through the parkland, silent at first, separate at first, just happening to walk more or less together in the same direction. They went for five minutes up the long gradual slope, past ornamental shrubs, specimen trees, small neat groves. A slight breeze rustled through leaves and pine needles above their heads. Birdsong established territory, called like to like, praised insects and worms.

They reached the top of a long ridge, and started down the other side, just as gradual, just as neatly cared for. After a minute, Maria Elena stopped and looked back and said, “You can’t see it any more.”

Frank turned and it was true; the slope blocked all view of the plant. “Good,” he said. “Ugly thing anyway.”

Turning in a slow circle, Maria Elena said, “You can’t see anything from here, except that radio tower. Nothing else human. No buildings, nothing.”

“Pretty good,” Frank agreed. The air smelled sweet, like fresh corn you bring home from a farmstand.

“It’s like the beginning of the world,” Maria Elena said.

Suddenly remembering, Frank said, “Listen, Maria, it’ll be the end of the world for us if we don’t get to that fence pretty soon.”

“Yes, of course.”

She reached out her hand, and he took it, and they started walking again, picking up the pace. Soon, Maria Elena began to sing, in a clear strong voice, to the rhythm of their walking, the melody rising up into the trees, spreading out over the shaggy park all around them.

“Nice,” Frank said, as she smiled at him and went on singing. He didn’t understand the words, they were in some foreign language, but he understood the song.

Ahead, the fence.

Andy Harbinger

The car was not there when Frank and Maria Elena reached the county road. My powers had been removed from me by then. But I’d already distracted the national guardsmen, so they made their escape anyway, in the five hours before Grigor collapsed in the control section and Philpott phoned for assistance.

Frank’s and Maria Elena’s fingerprints were not found among those brought up by the police technicians in the control section and the lab. The various witnesses’ descriptions of the two missing terrorists were so confused, with so many uncertainties and contradictions, as to be useless. When Kwan died in the hospital the day after the siege ended, and Grigor followed two days later, neither having given a statement, the last link to the missing terrorists was broken.

At home in Stockbridge, once she and Frank had made their way there, Maria Elena found on her answering machine a message from the local police. Fearing the worst, and with Frank already packing, she telephoned and was told that her husband, John, had been fatally shot two days before by a distraught woman named Kate Monroe, with whom he had apparently at one time had a relationship, but which he had recently ended. (I didn’t do that; it was Kate’s idea.) John’s two-hundred-thousand-dollar insurance policy paid double indemnity; not the five-mil hit, but enough to keep Frank out of trouble.

Frank did spend one long frustrating day trying to find Mary Ann Kelleny’s business card, which seemed to have disappeared from his wallet. (While he was talking to her on the phone, in fact.) Then he tried to find a lawyer named Mary Ann Kelleny through Omaha directory assistance. Then he gave it up. (You must understand, by then I had neither the time nor the inclination to try to cover my tracks. I simply had to get the job undone, and fast.)

Susan and I hurtle through our days. It doesn’t seem to her that time literally flies, but I know it does.

Ah, but how I’m enjoying this brief life! And how bittersweet that paradox: the more you enjoy it, the faster it’s gone.

I don’t know what’s happening otherwise; I mean with His plan. I might as well have always been human; except for the trailing tendrils of my scheme as it unraveled, I have no access at all, no link to that other sphere except my memories.

I wonder sometimes if my defection might have piqued His interest, might have made Him a little less bored with this particular Lego set, so that He will decide to keep it around a little longer. If not, there is undoubtedly another of my former fellows afoot in the land right now, gathering his people, planning his strategy. One chosen more carefully, one less sentimental and susceptible than I.

Is that messenger, that effectuator, unlikely to find another group who can stand in for us all — us all! — and who can be brought to believe that the end of everyone is the best solution to their own problems? Are there no disaffected people in this world!

And will the new holy one not find another catalyst, something perhaps to reduce the globe not to a ball bearing but to a burned-out clinker, endlessly revolving around the sun? Are there not yet great destructive forces to be found?

I don’t know. I cannot say for sure what will happen, or what might happen, or when. I only know this: He doesn’t give up easily.