It spoke French.
“Quarante-cinq minutes.” And a continuous metallic beeping, as of a time clock, once per second. Dex looked at Linneth. “Quarante-quatre minutes,” the radio shrilled. He said, “What is this?”
“They’re counting down the time.”
There was another burst of speech, indecipherable with static, but Dex heard the word detonation. He said, “How long?”
She took his hand. “Forty-four minutes.” Quarante-trois minutes. “Forty-three.”
Clifford recognized the man who came through the FIRE EXIT door. This was the Proctor the others had called Delafleur. An important man. Lukas Thibault drew a sharp breath at the sight of him.
Delafleur wore an overcoat nearly long enough to touch his ankles, and he reached into the depths of that garment and took out a gun—one of the long-barreled pistols the Proctors sometimes carried; a revolver, not an automatic weapon like the one Luke once showed him. The handle was polished wood inlaid with pearl. None of these refinements seemed to matter to Delafleur, who was sweating and breathing through his mouth.
Luke said, “Patron! Let me out of here, for God’s sake!”
Delafleur looked startled, as if he had forgotten about his prisoners. Maybe he had. “Shut up,” he said.
There was the sound of more gunfire outside the building, but was it growing more distant? Clifford thought it might be.
Delafleur stalked down the length of this basement room between the stockade cages and the wall with his long coat swinging behind him. He carried the pistol loosely in his left hand. In his right hand was a pocket watch, attached by a silver chain to his blue vest. His eyes kept traveling to the watch, as if he couldn’t resist looking at it—but he plainly didn’t like what he saw.
He pulled a wooden crate under one of the high, tiny windows, and stood on the crate in a vain attempt to look outside. But the window was too high and louvered shut. Anyway, Clifford thought, it opened at ground level. There wouldn’t be much of a view.
Delafleur seemed to arrive at the same conclusion. He sat down on the crate and fixed a baleful stare at the door where he had come in.
Luke said, “Please, Patron! Let me out!”
Delafleur turned in that direction. In a prim voice he said, “If you speak again, I’ll kill you.”
He sounded like he meant it. Luke fell silent, though if Clifford listened carefully he could hear his labored breathing.
Luke had often been silent in the last few hours. But never for very long. Would Delafleur really shoot him if he made a sound? Clifford was sure of it. The Proctor looked too frightened to make idle threats.
And if he shot Luke, would he then shoot Clifford? It was possible. Once shooting started, who could tell what might happen?
But he didn’t want to think about that. If he thought about it, the cage began to seem much smaller—as tight as a rope around his neck—and Clifford worried that he might make a sound, that the terror might leap uncontrollably from his throat.
Time passed. Delafleur looked at his watch as if he were hypnotized by it. At the sound of each fading gunshot he cocked his head.
“They’re going away,” Delafleur said once—to himself.
More fidgeting with the watch. But the Proctor seemed to regain a degree of composure as the seconds ticked past. Finally he stood up and adjusted his vest. Without looking at the cells, he began to walk toward the FIRE EXIT.
Lukas Thibault panicked. Clifford heard the soldier throw himself against the bars of his cage. “FUCK YOU!” he screamed. “DON’T YOU LEAVE ME HERE! GODDAMN YOU!”
And that was the wrong thing to say, because Clifford saw Delafleur hesitate and turn back.
The Proctor shifted the long-barreled pistol into his right hand.
Clifford cowered in the corner of his cell, as far away from the Proctor as he could force himself—which was not very far. He had ceased thinking coherently as soon as Delafleur turned back from the door.
Delafleur walked past him with a steely expression, around the L-bend to where Luke was. Both men were out of Clifford’s sight now. But he could hear them.
Lukas Thibault had stopped shouting. Now his voice was low and feverish and hoarse with panic. “Bastard! I’ll kill you, you bastard!” But it was the other way around, Clifford thought.
Delafleur’s pistol sounded like a cannon in this stony basement room.
Lukas Thibault gave a choked scream. Clifford heard him fall against the cold floor. It was the terrible muted sound of bones and soft tissue striking concrete. A limp, dead sound.
Now the Proctor came back within the compass of Clifford’s sight. Delafleur was pale and grim. The pistol in his hand trailed wafts of blue smoke. His eyes roamed a moment before they fixed on Clifford.
Clifford felt the pressure of that gaze, as dangerous as the gun itself. The eyes as deadly as the weapon. He couldn’t look away.
But then there was another sound, and Delafleur’s eyes widened and he jerked his head toward the door.
FIRE EXIT opened. Dex Graham stepped into the room.
Dex fired a handgun at the Proctor and missed. Now the Proctor’s weapon came sweeping up and Clifford had time to cover his ears before the batteringly loud bang. No telling where that bullet went.
Dex fired a second time and the Proctor sat down on the floor. The pistol dropped from his hand. He slumped against the bars of the cage, moaning.
Dex came striding forward. Linneth Stone came through the door behind him. She picked up the weapon the Proctor had dropped.
Dex found a length of copper piping and used it to pry the lock from the door of Clifford’s cell. The lock burst and the door rattled open and Clifford ran to the schoolteacher without thinking.
He noticed Dex Graham’s eyes, how strangely calm they seemed.
Linneth took the boy to the stairway. Dex lingered a moment longer.
He looked at Delafleur, who was still alive. The bullet had shattered his hip. He was paralyzed below the waist. The wound was bleeding freely into the silk-lined folds of his long winter coat.
“I can’t move,” the Proctor said.
Dex turned to leave.
Delafleur said, “You don’t have time. It’s hopeless.”
“I know,” Dex said.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
Some of the cinder-block walls of the high-energy laboratory had melted to slag and most of the roof was gone. A sky of blue sheet lightning illuminated a maze of corridors.
Howard walked through the rubble. During the brief intervals when his vision cleared he saw structural rods protruding from concrete forms, broken electrical cables as thick as his arm, ceramic insulators scattered like strange pottery all around him.
When his vision was not clear he saw these things through endlessly multiplied prisms, as if a snow of faceted crystal had filled the air.
He moved toward the heart of the building. He felt its heat like sunlight on his face.
Stern’s last coherent scientific writings had leaned toward the idea of chaotic inflation: a cosmological scenario in which quantum fluctuation, in the primordial void gives birth to universes in endless profusion. Not a single creation but infinite creations. And no universe accessible to any other, except perhaps through quantum tunnels known as wormholes.
In this schema, a universe might even contain a universe. If you could somehow compress an ounce of matter inside the orbit of an electron, it would blossom into a new avenue of time and space—someone else’s Big Bang; someone else’s quarks and leptons and stars and skies.