"We need something to divert their attention," Ruth said. "A fire; anything to keep them occupied."
Chase nodded, but he was thinking of their other problem. Stealing the pickup would be easy compared with getting Dan out. He looked at his watch. "Whatever we decide it'll have to be quick," he said. "Baz wants us off the settlement by sundown, which gives us four hours. We'll have to start making preparations right now. How soon could you be ready to leave?" he asked Nick.
Nick surveyed the room and sighed. "Well, there's not a lot we can take with us. About two hours, I'd say, to get our personal stuff and supplies for the trip together. Jen?" His wife nodded her agreement.
"Have you got a gun?"
"Two rifles. Jo's a crack shot. Better than me."
"Four weapons," Chase said. He kneaded the bruise on his ribs. "If they're unprepared for us that might be enough."
"How are you going to do it?" Ruth asked, her eyes liquid and dark beneath the swathe of white bandage. "We can't start a gunfight with Cheryl in the middle of it, and she's in no shape to be moved quickly."
"Cheryl won't be there and neither will you." Chase stared into space, thinking it through. "The three of us will leave in the jeep before sundown, exactly as Baz wants us to do. That should relax him and set his mind at rest--if that's conceivable. We'll find a quiet spot somewhere off the road where you and Cheryl can wait in the jeep while I double-back on foot. Then Nick and I will get Dan out, take the pickup, and rendezvous with Jen and Jo down by the lake." He looked at the others.
After a moment's silence Nick said, "The first part sounds simple-- the three of you leaving in the jeep. It's the rest of it that worries me. Baz has Dan under guard night and day, and there's probably someone watching the pickup too. If shooting starts we're outnumbered twenty to one."
Chase gave a wan smile. "Baz already made that point and I haven't forgotten it. As Ruth says, we need some kind of a diversion to draw them away from the council hall. Do you know which room they're holding Dan in?"
"He was in the library stock room," Jen said, "if they haven't moved him."
"Let's hope they haven't. Has it got windows?"
Jen nodded. "I used to help out in the library. It's a corner room with two windows."
"How many doors?"
"Just one. I'll draw you a plan." She clenched both fists.
"What is it?"
"Next door to the stock room there's a small kitchen with a trapdoor into the loft. If you could get into the loft from outside you could get in without being seen. Maybe they're not even guarding the stock room, just the main door."
"Can we get into the loft from outside?" Chase asked Nick.
"I don't know. There's an outhouse, a kind of lean-to shed at one end, so we can get onto the roof quite easily."
"Okay, that's a possibility we'll have to keep in mind." Chase paced up and down the small room.
Jo appeared at the door and said apprehensively, "Ruth, Cheryl's having trouble breathing and there's that stuff on her lips. Can you come?"
Chase turned anxiously, but Ruth held her hand up, moving quickly to the door. "It's all right, I'll see to her. You've got enough to be thinking about." She followed Jo out.
"Would a fire do it, do you think?" Jen asked, hugging her knees and looking from Chase to her husband and back again.
"It might," Chase said, racking his brains. "But it would have to be something that threatened Baz personally, his house, his drugs--"
Nick thumped his palm. "Christ, Gav, that's it! The dispensary! If that went up, they'd beat the flames out with their bare hands!"
"That would do it all right," Chase agreed, "but we'd be hurting everyone else in the community, too, destroying drugs that innocent people need." He tugged fretfully at his beard. "No, we can't do that, Nick. It could cause their death."
"It's life or death for us, too," Nick said. "Every man for himself."
Chase looked away, his face drawn and tight. "That's why the world's in a fucking awful mess right now. The biggest grab the most. What's yours is mine and what's mine's me own. Old Lancashire saying."
"I remember you and your bloody conscience at Halley Bay," Nick said, shaking his head wryly. "While the rest of us were wallowing in lurid sex fantasies, you were worrying about the dissolution of carbon dioxide in seawater. How about some coffee?" he said to Jen.
"Yes, all right. Do you want something to eat?"
"Not for me. Gav?"
Chase shook his head. Jen went through to the kitchen and Nick took a bottle and glasses from a cupboard. "Genuine and original Oregon brandy," he said, pouring out four measures. "Made from apple cores and caribou droppings. This stuff puts hair on your chest and everywhere else as well."
Jen returned and while they were drinking the coffee and brandy
Chase told them about the marine trials. "Up to the time of leaving the Tomb they seemed to be going well. I'm hoping Frank Hanamura's final report will be waiting for me when I get back."
"What if the trials aren't successful?" Jen asked.
"There are other methods we've been working on, but the problem with those is that it could take another twenty years to develop them sufficiently. Microorganisms with a high oxygen yield, seeding the deserts to make them net oxygen producers, and so on. But I'm not sure we've got twenty years--or even ten, the way things are going."
"Not even ten?" Jen said numbly.
"There's a negative feedback operating now, which means that adverse climatic conditions reinforce themselves to produce even more adverse conditions, and they in turn tighten the spiral. The climatic deterioration is happening a lot faster than anyone predicted. And there could be other factors we've overlooked or simply know nothing about, in which case we might already be too late to do anything about them."
"Because you don't know what they are?" Jen said.
"That's right. Like a man backing away from a rattlesnake and walking deeper into a quicksand he doesn't know is there. He's going to die anyway, and not much consolation to know it won't be by snake venom."
Ruth and Jo came in and helped themselves to coffee. Chase felt uncomfortable in the girl's presence, as if he bore some of the responsibility for what had happened to her. Rationally he knew this to be nonsense, and yet by association he felt that Dan's act had somehow soiled him and made him party to the guilt He searched Ruth's face anxiously. "Is she all right?"
"I've given her another injection. It should ease her breathing, but it won't help her overall condition. There's nothing more I can do till we get her back to Desert Range. Have you decided what you're going to do?"
"I don't know, have we?" Nick said to Chase.
Chase told them about Nick's idea for setting fire to the dispensary, which he didn't agree with, and Jo spoke up. "There's no need for that. Baz and most of the others will be over at Tom Brannigan's place watching blue movies on video. They do that every Friday night."
"Is today Friday?" Chase said. He hadn't the faintest notion.
"They'll leave two or three guys at the council hall," Jo said, "but if you time it for about eleven, they'll either be drugged or asleep or both. It's the ones on the road we'll have to watch out for."
"Are they posted there all through the night?"
Jo nodded. "Since they set up a refugee camp near Alturas we've had to watch the road all the time. We've always had immigrants from the south, but these are crazies; they'd loot the settlement and wipe it off the map if we didn't keep them out." She added grudgingly, "I guess that's one thing we have to be grateful to Baz for."
Chase smiled at Jo, finding her an attractive and spirited girl. He liked her. "Well, let's just hope Baz and his friends are too busy watching dirty movies and getting stoned to bother about us." He said to Nick, "I'll need to know a trail that will bring me back here, avoiding the road. You be ready to move by eleven. We'll get Dan out, take the pickup, load it up with your stuff, and get out fast, roadblock or no roadblock. If they want a fight we'll give them one. We're leaving tonight. All of us."