“There’s no protected place to land,” Elizabeth said, raising her voice above the noise, “so they want to do a rooftop evac, like they do with flood victims.”
Mercy stepped up next to Jesse. “Do they have a litter?”
“A Stokes basket, yeah,” Elizabeth said.
“Tell them to send it down first. I don’t want my father dropping a security team on us.”
Elizabeth relayed the request and listened to the answer. “They say they’ll lower the basket for casualties as soon as you’re safely on board.”
“Not acceptable. There’s no way I’m going aboard before Phoebe. If I see anything but a basket coming out of that helicopter, I’ll be out the front door and running.”
Jesse’s respect for the woman went up another notch. Mercy looked as skinny and insubstantial as the women whose pictures appeared in glossy twenty-first-century magazines, but she possessed considerable grit.
The airship was almost directly overhead now. Its metallic underside glittered balefully, and it broadcast a false daylight that turned the lawn a phosphorescent green. “No, he’s right here,” Elizabeth said, and handed the radio to Jesse.
Jesse accepted it reluctantly. The next voice he heard was August Kemp’s. “Elizabeth says you’re injured. Is that true?”
“My right arm, but I can still use it.”
“And my daughter is there with you?”
“Yes.”
“Listen carefully. Don’t speak, just listen. I don’t want you to hurt her, but I want you to take her into custody. Right now. Handcuff her if necessary.”
Jesse pretended to think about it. Neither Mercy nor Elizabeth had been able to hear the exchange, but both eyed him warily. He let a few more seconds slip by. Then he said, “I won’t do it.”
He waited another long minute, but Kemp said nothing further. He gave the radio to Elizabeth. She pressed its buttons, without result. Then a man wearing a helmet and orange-colored overalls appeared in the side door of the airship, swinging out a metal-frame bed—Elizabeth had called it a Stokes basket—on a system of ropes and pulleys. Jesse hurried into the house, calling out to Theo and Aunt Abbie to help him carry Phoebe up the stairs.
18
Aboard the airship there was a City physician, a solemn black man, who examined Phoebe without speaking. She had been sweating and moaning when Jesse carried her up the stairs, but the doctor administered a drug and plugged a bag of fluid into her arm, and soon enough her eyes closed and her face became peaceful.
Jesse would have thanked the man, but the roar of the helicopter was as oppressive on the inside as it had seemed from the outside. Meaningful communication was almost impossible for anyone not wearing a headset, and Jesse had not been given one, so he sat wordlessly on a bench in the cramped interior as the doors were sealed and the airship hurtled higher into the air. Through the small window at his shoulder he was able to see the whole of San Francisco below him, brightest where it was burning, and all the moonlit land and the sea that enclosed it, until vertigo made him turn away and close his eyes.
When he felt well enough to look again, there was nothing but a plain of cloud, as wide as the world and flowing like an ethereal river. Mercy had bandaged his wounded arm for him, and he cradled it against his body to minimize the pain. After a time the clouds opened to reveal misty hilltops, moon-shadowed valleys, moon-blue rivers, a perspective that belonged by right to God himself; and it made him feel lonesome and fragile to be suspended over this abyss of air by nothing more than burning vapors and whirling steel.
It wasn’t a prolonged journey. A helicopter couldn’t fly all the way from San Francisco to Illinois without refueling, apparently. The airship gradually lost altitude until it was hovering over a patch of pavement somewhere in the western desert: a landing strip marked with yellow lights, a horizon of dry hills under a firmament of fierce, bright stars.
* * *
Mercy Kemp’s clothes were bloody from the first-aid work she’d done—the entire cabin of the helicopter reeked of blood and hot metal and spent gunpowder—and she had exchanged fewer than ten words with her father since the rescue. Instead she had elected to sit with Theo and let herself drift in and out of sleep.
She was still shaking off her fatigue when she stepped onto the landing pad and was surrounded by a phalanx of security people in City uniforms who separated her from Theo and the others. Theo began to object, loudly, and Jesse Cullum looked ready to attempt a rescue if she needed it, but her father stepped out in front of the procession and said, “I want to have a word with my daughter in private. There’s a fixed-wing aircraft being fueled, and in a few minutes we’ll all be on it, all of us, so calm the fuck down. Nobody’s being left behind.”
So he said. But Mercy was inclined to believe him. Abandoning employees and runners wasn’t his style, especially when he knew she’d carry the story back home. “It’s all right,” she called back to Theo.
She followed her father to a windowless room in a concrete-box building, where she sat in an office chair while he received a verbal report from the station’s radio operator. The news was all bad. Pitched battles between railroad workers and federal troops had turned Baltimore into an inferno. There was rioting in Charleston, for reasons as yet unclear. In the South, dozens of black towns and neighborhoods had been burned by hooded vigilantes. The coal miners of Schuylkill County were on strike; Pinkerton men hired as strikebreakers had killed fourteen men and three women in the town of Shenandoah. Documents seized at certain banks had substantiated charges of counterfeiting and financial fraud against the City. John D. Rockefeller and Jay Gould—prominent men who had been dining with her father and bragging about it only a few months ago—had publically called for the arrest and trial of August Kemp.
Which obviously wasn’t going to happen, at least not in this slice of Hilbert space. As soon as they were alone in the room, Mercy said, “This is worse than last time, isn’t it?”
Her father stared at her. His eyes looked sunken, as if he hadn’t slept for days. “I’m not prepared to discuss that with you.”
Not that he had ever been a heavy sleeper. As a child Mercy had often heard him moving around their Long Island house after midnight, a comforting sound once she learned to recognize it. Five bells, all’s well, Daddy’s making his rounds. She was a light sleeper herself. As a teenager she had occasionally played the game of being awake when he was awake and moving from room to room without revealing her presence—watching TV in the basement while he plodded around the kitchen; fixing a snack in the kitchen when he was at work in his study. On rare occasions, important people visited; when that happened, and especially when conversation continued into the small hours, Mercy had amused herself by pretending to be a spy, eavesdropping from the top of the stairs or the nook behind the basement door.
Mercy’s mother had been wholly uninterested in August Kemp’s business affairs, but Mercy had been ardently curious about them, if only because business was never discussed in her presence. She knew her father was a wealthy man and that he owned many hotels and resorts and other properties around the world; she knew he had been married more than once, and she had met, if not especially liked, most of her step-siblings. And she knew he had friends in high places, including the high places of national politics. (A Democratic Speaker of the House had once spent the night in the guest bedroom. He turned out to be an obese and hilariously flatulent but otherwise perfectly ordinary man: The most interesting thing about him had been his job description.) It was during a late-night conversation between her father and two solemn-looking men in business suits that Mercy had first heard him mention the visitors from Hilbert space.