“You know I love you like a brother, Ellis, but you’ve always lacked the conviction of your beliefs.”
Ellis shifted his attention off the lab and back squarely on Warren. “What the hell is that supposed to mean?”
Warren had his straight-shooter face on. The tough-love train was heading Ellis’s way and looking to pick up a passenger. “If you really wanted to be an astronaut, you could have, but you settled for a mid-level white-bread job. And when Peggy got pregnant, you should have told her Hasta la vista,bitch. But you’ve always been weak. Let’s face it, Ellis, if you were a lifeboat captain with too many passengers, they’d all die because you couldn’t make the tough decisions. It’s nothing to be ashamed of. It’s just the way you are. A lot of people are that way.”
Ellis felt like Warren was telling him he shouldn’t be ashamed to come out of the closet. Not that there’s anything wrong with being compassionate.
“What’s going on in the lab, Warren?”
“The future.”
“Haven’t we both had more than our fair share off that plate?”
“You can’t understand—not yet. But you would if you had spent that winter with me. You see, when I crawled out, I knew I had been spared for a reason. Course, I didn’t know what that was at the time, but Moses didn’t know why he survived being exiled to the desert either. God had a purpose for me.”
“What’s in the lab, Warren?”
“It wasn’t until I met Pol, Dex, and Hig that I began to understand I had been saved from cancer and a killing winter for a reason. So I could fix the world—so I could be the new Savior—kind of a second coming of Warren Eckard. We really are like Jesus and John the Baptist. I’m doing the heavy lifting at first to pave the way—to prepare the people—for you to use that brain of yours and guide them. I can’t do that as well as you. You got all the education. My gut tells me what’s right, but I can’t explain the hows and whys like you can.”
“How are you preparing the people?” Ellis began walking back toward the lab.
“It took a year, Ellis, and the hard work of everyone here, mostly Pol and Dex, but especially Hal.”
“I never met Hal. Who’s that?”
“Oh, you met him,” Warren told Ellis as he stepped on the porch. “You killed him.”
Inside, the white walls were lined with black shelves filled with bottles of various sizes and colors—wooden floor, wooden tables, wooden chairs, everything battered and beaten, but sturdy as a carpenter’s shop. Big windows would have let plenty of light in if not for the heavy curtains. As it was, oil lamps illuminated the long tables that were crowded with contraptions of brass, glass, and wire. At the far end stood a church-style organ with a sailfish fin of pipes and ivory keys. In front of it, three people were gathered, working on the contents of a large white-plastic crate that rode on its own set of wheels. Ellis had no idea who they were, not just because they had their backs to him, but because they were dressed up like astronauts—no, not astronauts. They weren’t wearing helmets—more like hoods.
“I wouldn’t go any closer,” Warren warned. “Already too close, I would imagine. Dex says the radiation level could be toxic. The baldies are more resistant than we are.”
“Radiation?” Trying to solve the puzzle, Ellis turned his head back and forth between Warren and the crate.
“You have no idea how hard it was to find enriched plutonium in this day and age,” Warren lamented with the same tone he used to complain about the traffic on the Southfield Freeway. “They don’t have a pattern for that, you know.”
When Ellis’s sight finally settled on the white-polymer crate with its convenience wheels and old-fashioned, black-and-yellow radiation symbol, a single thought repeated in his head: That can’t be what I think it is. Ellis had little trouble comprehending interdimensional portals that let people step from one planet to another, Makers that created cups of coffee from gravel, and imitation sunlight miles underground, but his mind refused to accept what he knew was right in front of him.
“What’s going on, Warren?” Ellis asked, his voice pleading for his friend to explain it all away. Hoping he would say, It’s just a joke, buddy—a gag. You should see the look on your face. That big plastic case over there with the reinforced clamps and the US military stamp—that’s just a giant espresso maker. We’re all gonna have lattes!
“I don’t plan to make the same mistake President Truman did,” Warren said. “You know, Patton told everyone we should have rolled our tanks right on into Russia at the end of World War II. He was right. Same with China. Instead, we waited—and what happened? The Ruskies got the bomb, and China ended up buying our asses.”
“What’s in the goddamn box, Warren?”
“It’s a present—a little housewarming gift for Hollow World.” Warren laughed. “Literally. Shame Hal won’t see the bang. Hal was the physicist—or whatever they call it now. Hal’s plan, really. The trick was to place the bombs in the right places.”
Ellis noticed the lids for two other plastic crates on the floor under the table. Both had the same bumblebee-colored warnings, but their associated crates were missing.
“Three H-bombs aren’t going to erase that honeycomb they got down there, but if put in the right spots…”
“Subduction Zone 540,” Ellis said to himself. Words were spilling out on their own accord as his brain locked up, freezing like a deer in headlights.
That can’t be what I think it is.
“Exactly. Subduction Zone 540. Then the whole place will collapse like an old lady stripped of her walker.”
“You used me?” Ellis glared at him. “This whole publicity tour to gain sympathy was just a way of—” Ellis looked back at the plastic crate. “Did you take that from the museum in Jerusalem?”
“The war museum—yeah. Pol said your name would open all the doors, and it did. Everyone was falling over themselves to give you anything, even a backstage tour of the weapons of mass destruction. We thought news traveled fast in our day. A week of promotion and you’re the David Cassidy of the forty-third century. All Pol needed was the coords, and all he needed to get those was to be there.”
“Then, what? You just went back and ported them out? Ported them here?”
“Yep. Slick, huh?” Warren chuckled. “No security at all. The place is a joke. Considered taking a tank, but the thing wouldn’t start, and the portals are too small.”
“I opened the door for you.” Ellis found even his new lungs didn’t work so well when he was drowning in stupidity and humiliation.
“Might have been able to get in there without you, just would have taken longer. The Geomancy Institute was the ball-buster. Those bastards take their work seriously. And they’re smart too. We tried getting inside by talking to one, but that geomancer noticed something—got all antsy. Luckily the poor slob just blurted out his suspicions. Hal was the one who knew the most about geology and stuff. The only one who could hope to pass for a real geomancer, and I had conditioned Hal, like I did the rest of them—like I have Rob reeducating Yal. I call it desensitivity training. They’re never gonna be real men. Don’t have the killing mentality—the advantage of the Y chromosome, as Dex puts it. Hal took care of Geo-24, but by the sound of things, our bald Einstein did a pretty piss-poor job of killing you and Pax—not that I wanted him to.” Warren held up a hand, warding off a rebuttal. “Hal was acting on his own with that.”
Ellis was fitting the puzzle pieces in place, and a picture was finally taking shape. Warren in a bar beating up strangers; Warren’s wife being so clumsy she fell down flights of stairs; Warren’s desire to play quarterback—to be in charge—when his real talent was as a fullback.
The trio in hazard suits at the far side of the room had ignored them, but then one turned. It could have been anyone’s eyes peering out of that shielded hood, even Pax.