“So why come at all?”
“Find out what’s happening.” The boy gave Howard a thoughtful stare. “Why are you here?”
“Same reason.”
“You walked from town?” Howard nodded. “Long walk.”
“Yup.”
“First time?”
“Yes,” Howard said. “At least, since the tanks came.”
“It’s quiet today.”
“Isn’t it always?”
“No,” the boy said. “Sometimes there are more soldiers or more Proctors.”
Howard was instantly curious, but he didn’t want to intimidate the boy. He ordered his thoughts. “Clifford, can you tell me what they do here? This might be important.”
Clifford frowned. He balled up his sandwich wrapper and tossed it into the dark of the woods. “It’s hard to tell. You can’t see much without binoculars. Sometimes they take pictures. A couple of times I saw them sending soldiers in.”
“What—into the lab?”
“Into one of the buildings.”
“Show me which one.”
They crept to the edge of the escarpment. The boy pointed to a tall structure at the near perimeter of the parking lot: the administration building.
Howard remembered Chief Haldane and his firefighters on the first Saturday after the transition. They had ventured a few yards into that radius and had come out babbling about monsters and angels… and sick, Howard remembered, perhaps sicker than they knew. Haldane had died this September, of symptoms that sounded like a runaway leukemia. “I’m surprised they can go in there.”
“They wore special clothes,” Clifford said, “like diving suits, with helmets. They went in and they came out.”
“Carrying anything?”
“Boxes, filing cabinets. Books. Sometimes bodies.”
Bodies, Howard thought. The installation wasn’t as empty as it seemed. Of course not. People had died here… died in their beds, most of them, neatly out of sight.
“They’re really well preserved,” the boy added.
“What?”
“The bodies.”
“Clifford—from this distance, how can you tell?” The boy was silent for a time. Some nerve had been touched, some delicate truth. The boy avoided Howard’s eyes when he finally spoke:
“My mom has a friend. A soldier. Who comes over. That’s how we get bread for sandwiches. Chocolate bars sometimes.” Clifford shrugged uncomfortably. “He’s not a bad guy.”
“I see.” Howard kept his voice carefully neutral. “But he talks sometimes?”
The boy nodded. “At breakfast mostly. He brags.”
“He’s been here?”
“He was on duty when they brought out a body. He said it was like it only just died. It hadn’t decomposed.” Another shrug. “If he’s telling the truth.”
“Clifford, this could be the most important part yet. Do you remember anything else he said? Anything about what they’re looking for here, or what they found?”
The boy settled on a granite shelf away from the lip of the escarpment. “He didn’t say too much. I don’t think he’s supposed to. He said people come out of there, even the ones in suits, talking about the weird things they’ve seen. They can’t stay inside too long or go too far. It makes them sick. Some of the first people who went in, died.”
Howard thought again of Chief Haldane’s leukemia.
“And at night,” the boy continued, “everybody leaves. Nobody stays out here at night. It gets strange.”
“Strange how?”
The boy shrugged. “That’s all I remember. Luke doesn’t really talk that much. Mostly he complains about the Proctors. He hates them. Most of the soldiers do. It’s the Proctors who keep bringing people out here; the soldiers just follow orders. Luke says the soldiers have to take all these risks because the Proctors decided this place is important.” The boy paused, seemed to hold the thought a moment. “But it is important, isn’t it? That’s why you’re here.”
“Yes,” Howard said. “That’s why I’m here.”
The boy turned away. He looked small against the blue sweep of the sky. A wind came up the escarpment.
The boy said, “So much has happened. No one knows where we really are—where the whole town is. It just seems like such a long way back home.” He turned to Howard, frowning fiercely. “1 don’t know what happened out here, but it’s hard to believe anybody could fix something like that.”
Howard looked at the forest beyond the ruined buildings, at the Ojibway land blending seamlessly into ancient white pine wilderness. The hills rolled to a horizon lost in autumn haze. It would be so easy to walk into that vastness. Die or find a new life. Leave.
“Maybe it can be fixed,” he said. “I mean to try.”
He learned what he could from Clifford, and when the boy took his bike and cycled away Howard sketched a crude map of the compound, estimating distances and the rough circumference of the dome of light.
He crossed the highway before dark and spent another night in the woods nearer to town; nothing disturbed his sleep.
He left his camping gear wrapped in the tent fly and buried under a mound of leaves—he might find his way back here someday—and hiked home through town. He stank of his own sweat and he was desperately thirsty, but he made it back to his basement before curfew without arousing suspicion.
Howard had brought very few possessions into this new world. They were all contained in his single canvas shoulder bag, stashed behind the water heater in the Cantwell house. He brought the bag out and opened it. There was not much inside. Some notebooks, journal extracts he had planned to read, his birth certificate, his lab credentials … and this.
Howard took it out of the bag and examined it under a light. A single sheet of canary-yellow paper torn from a note pad. On the paper was written, Stern. And a telephone number.
CHAPTER SIX
Milos Fabrikant was the eldest of the battalion of scientists assigned to the work of constructing a nucleic bomb.
Each day, weather permitting, he bicycled from his home—a dreary bunker full of dreary male physicists—to his place of work, an office in one of five enormous buildings occupying a bleak, flat hinterland of northern Laurentia.
Each day, he was drawn to the same observation: everything here was too large. The landscape, the sky, the works of man. Indeed, here was the largest structure the human race had ever created, a huge box-shaped building full of air-evacuated calutrons—he cycled past it on a plain of smooth, black asphalt, under a sky threatening rain.
In the year since the work began in earnest, Fabrikant had ceased to be impressed by this hubris of man and nature. He would be seventy years old before the next Ascension Day, and what pleased him—one of his few private pleasures—was something much simpler: his continuing ability to make this daily two-mile bicycle trip. Riding, he felt like an athlete. He had colleagues as young as forty (that pig Moberly, the materials engineer, for instance) who would be exhausted by half the journey. Rattling through a grim dream of war on his old blue bicycle, Fabrikant felt as if he might live forever.
He was a physicist, but the great physicists, the legend went, do all their best work in their twenties. Maybe so, Fabrikant thought. His real work here was in administration, not theory. He was an administrator, nevertheless, who understood the project in every detail, who grasped the work in all its splendid, terrible beauty.
He had been involved in nucleic science for years. He remembered the primitive laboratories at the Universite de Terrebonne, before the war made everything urgent, where he and the physicist Pariseau had packed an aluminum sphere with powdered uranium metal and heavy water and lowered it into a swimming pool—the pool at the old gymnasium; a new one had lately been built to replace it. What they had created was a primitive nucleic pile: neutron multiplication above unity for the first time in a laboratory. But the aluminum sphere had leaked, and when the pool was drained the uranium caught fire. There was an explosion—chemical, thank God, not nucleic. The old gymnasium burned to the ground. Fabrikant had feared he would lose his tenure; but the paper he wrote won him a scholastic prize, and the university collected handsomely, he was told, from the insurance.