If that was even remotely possible. Ethan inspected the micrographs. Cyberneticists had estimated that just one of these tiny cells was capable of faster and subtler calculations than even the massive transistorized computers operated by insurance companies or the Internal Revenue Service. The Society’s physicists thought the processing must operate at a deep, fundamental level of reality—the “quantum” level, a term Ethan didn’t entirely understand. But a more immediate question was vexing him. “Why haven’t I seen these micrographs before?”
“Why should you have?”
“Well, the Society—”
“Ethan, this isn’t the work of the Society. Wyndham is an independent researcher. I underwrote his work myself.”
“Nevertheless, I would have liked to have seen them.”
“I chose to limit the exposure of this information.”
“Why?”
“In order to protect it. Isn’t that obvious? For years we assumed the precautions the Society took were good enough to hide our work from the hypercolony. But the events of 2007 proved that theory disastrously wrong. We have no secrets and probably never did. The only conclusion I can draw is that the Society itself has been corrupted and infiltrated.”
“So you set up another circler of researchers.”
“More than one, and I’ve put up firewalls between them. If one
circle is compromised, the others remain secure. And where the Correspondence Society was basically a club for frustrated scholars, my people are better motivated.”
“Why, what motivates them?”
“Anger,” Beck said. “Fear.”
Beck repeated his promise that he would take Ethan and Nerissa to rendezvous with Leo (and presumably with Cassie and Thomas). But he refused to say anything more specific, except that it would be “a long trip.” Nerissa continued to press, which made for a sullen evening meal, after which she and Ethan retired to the upstairs bedroom.
The room was as spare as every other room in this barely-inhabited house. A single bed, muslin curtains over the window, a layer of undisturbed dust on the uncarpeted parquet floor. “He’s insane,” Nerissa said.
“He’s been right in the past.”
“I notice that’s not a denial.”
“If he’s paranoid, is that so hard to understand? Given the life he’s led?”
“A ridiculously privileged life. Heir to millions.”
True, but the whole story, at least as Ethan understood it, was more complex. Yes, Beck’s parents had been wealthy. Beck’s father had immigrated from Poland in the 1960s with a degree in engineering, some experience at the Nagórski plant in Starachowice, and an ambition to work with aircraft. Within a few years he had generated three modestly profitable patents and owned a small manufacturing facility in Portland that supplied parts to Boeing. He had married an American woman who died of pancreatic cancer after giving birth to their only child, Werner, and he had never remarried.
Beck’s father had been frugal by nature and had raised his son that way. When he died at the age of fifty-seven, he left Werner Beck a staggeringly diverse portfolio of investments, sole ownership of a successful company that was about to go public, and a work ethic only slightly less demanding than the disciplines practiced by Tibetan monks.
The fortune hadn’t diverted Beck from his academic career, which he had conducted with the same Spartan intensity. When Beck discovered the Correspondence Society he had immediately diverted some of his wealth to the support of clandestine research. And if Beck felt his generosity entitled him to a certain amount of deference, a little centrality in an otherwise decentralized organization, who could say he was wrong?
In 1990 Beck had married a former student who gave birth to one child, Leo, and who had little to do with the Society. She died in a car accident when Leo was very young. Her death must have been traumatic for Werner, but that was pure surmise on Ethan’s part: Beck had never spoken about his feelings and had seemed reluctant even to mention the loss. But it was after the death of his wife that Beck severed all contact with conventional academia and began to devote himself exclusively to the Society’s business.
“And the only reason you know any of this,” Nerissa said, “is that Beck told you. He could have been lying.”
“Why would he lie?” The money was real, Ethan thought. The work was real.
“He may not be clinically paranoid, but he’s almost certainly narcissistic. He needs to feel special, like he’s fulfilling some grandiose destiny. On bad days, he probably suspects his own inadequacy.”
“And you’re making that diagnosis based on what exactly?”
“Jesus, Ethan, think about it! He wants us to think he’s fighting a clandestine war, that he has a cadre of secret soldiers, that he’s figured out the hypercolony’s weaknesses…”
“Maybe it’s true.”
“It doesn’t feel true. It doesn’t even feel likely. What are you saying, you think he’s completely sane?”
“No. But I’m not sure any of us rises to that standard.” There was nothing left to do but sleep. Ethan turned down the bed, stripped to his underwear and lay down. Nerissa curled up beside him and adjusted the blankets. Within minutes her breathing steadied into a gentle burr.
They had grown accustomed to sharing a bed during the drive to Joplin. Given the circumstances, that hardly represented an erotic opportunity. It was, however, a small reminder that they had never been officially divorced. Separated and effectively divorced, divorced in all but name; nevertheless, he was lying here next to his legally-ordained wife, feeling a different uneasiness than he would have felt with a stranger. He couldn’t suppress all the memories she provoked. She had changed in seven years. But she smelled the same, and he found himself imagining she tasted the same—her mouth, her skin… not a wise thought.
He rolled away from her, toward the window. Nerissa had opened the curtains before she turned in, a habit of hers. She used to say that a view of the sky made her feel less confined. Apparently that was still true. But all Ethan could see was blackness and a few pale stars. Of course his old enemy was up there, too, ethereal and tirelessly observant, as enigmatic and as perversely fascinating as ever. Did he hate the hypercolony the way Beck claimed to? Of course he did. It had taken away everything that mattered to him. It was relentlessly, tirelessly lethal.
The difference was that he knew it didn’t hate him in return. He didn’t believe the hypercolony was capable of that or any other emotion. It had the magnificently indifferent lethality of a poisonous mushroom or a venomous insect.
He hated it, but he respected it. Maybe even admired it.
Would he help Beck exterminate it, if that was possible? Yes. And in the unlikely event they succeeded, he would rejoice. But unlike Beck, unlike Nerissa, he would also grieve for the passing of an extraordinary living thing.
And maybe that made him an unlikely soldier. And maybe Beck had known that about him all along.
19
ON THE ROAD
THEY SET OUT IN A TWO-VEHICLE CONVOY, Eugene Dowd driving the white van and Leo at the wheel of the repainted Ford. Cassie and Thomas chose to ride with Leo, while Beth, to no one’s surprise, elected to ride in the van with Dowd.
Cassie watched the way Leo drove. He was careful to keep the van in sight as they followed the long road from Salina through Great Bend and Dodge City and across the northwestern tip of Texas, out into the dry lands under a flat December sky. If Dowd stopped for gasoline or a bathroom break, Leo would pull in behind him. If Dowd crept too far ahead, Leo would accelerate until the van was back within a comfortable distance. He was as grimly vigilant as a hunting animal.