"Dad?" Eric started to cry. "When are you coming home?"
"I don't know," I said. "I hope by tomorrow."
"Okay. Promise?"
"I promise."
I could hear him sniffling, and then through the phone a long snarff sound as he wiped his nose on his shirt. I told him he could call me later if he wanted to. He seemed better, and said okay, and then said good-bye.
I hung up, and entered the storage building.
The interior was divided into two large storage rooms, with shelves on all four walls, and freestanding shelves in the middle of the rooms. Concrete walls, concrete floor. There was another door in the second room, and a corrugated rollup door for truck deliveries. Hot sunlight came in through wood-frame windows. The air-conditioning rumbled noisily but, as Mae had said, the rooms were still hot. I closed the door behind me, and looked at the seal. It was just ordinary weather stripping. The shed was definitely not airtight. I walked along the shelves, stacked with bins of spare parts for the fabrication machinery, and the labs. The second room had more mundane items: cleaning supplies, toilet paper, bars of soap, boxes of cereal, and a couple of refrigerators filled with food. I turned to Mae. "Where are the isotopes?"
"Over here." She led me around a set of shelves, to a steel lid set in the concrete floor. The lid was about three feet in diameter. It looked like a buried garbage can, except for the glowing LED and keypad in the center. Mae dropped to one knee, and punched in a code quickly. The lid lifted with a hiss.
I saw a ladder that led down into a circular steel chamber. The isotopes were stored in metal containers of different sizes. Apparently Mae could tell which they were just by looking, because she said, "We have Selenium-172. Shall we use that?"
"Sure."
Mae started to climb down into the chamber.
"Will you fucking cut it out?" In a corner of the room, David Brooks jumped back from Charley Davenport. Charley was holding a big spray bottle of Windex cleaner. He was testing the squeeze trigger mechanism, and in the process spraying streaks of water on David. It didn't look accidental. "Give me that damn thing," David said, snatching the bottle away. "I think it might work," Charley said blandly. "But we'd need a remote mechanism." From the first room, Rosie said, "Would this work?" She held up a shiny cylinder, with wires dangling from it. "Isn't this a solenoid relay?"
"Yes," David said. "But I doubt it can exert enough force to squeeze this bottle. Has it got a rating? We need something bigger."
"And don't forget, you also need a remote controller," Charley said. "Unless you want to stand there and spray the fucker yourself."
Mae came up from below, carrying a heavy metal tube. She walked to the sink, and reached for a bottle of straw-colored liquid. She pulled on heavy rubber-coated gloves, and started to mix the isotope into the liquid. A radiation counter over the sink was chattering. Over the headset, Ricky said, "Aren't you guys forgetting something? Even if you have a remote, how are you going to get the cloud to come to it? Because I don't think the swarm will just come over and stand there while you hose it down."
"We'll find something to attract them," I said.
"Like what?"
"They were attracted to the rabbit."
"We don't have any rabbits."
Charley said, "You know, Ricky, you are a very negative person."
"I'm just telling you the facts."
"Thank you for sharing," Charley said.
Like Mae, Charley was seeing it, too: Ricky had dragged his feet every step of the way. It was as if Ricky wanted to keep the swarms alive. Which made no sense at all. But that's how he was behaving.
I would have said something to Charley about Ricky, but over our headsets everybody heard everything. The downside of modern communications: everybody can listen in. "Hey guys?" It was Bobby Lembeck. "How's it coming?"
"We're getting there. Why?"
"The wind's dropping."
"What is it now?" I said.
"Fifteen knots. Down from eighteen."
"That's still strong," I said. "We're okay."
"I know. I'm just telling you."
From the next room, Rosie said, "What's thermite?" In her hand she held a plastic tray filled with thumb-sized metal tubes.
"Careful with that," David said. "It must be left over from construction. I guess they did thermite welding."
"But what is it?"
"Thermite is aluminum and iron oxide," David said. "It burns very hot-three thousand degrees-and so bright you can't look directly at it. And it'll melt steel for welding."
"How much of that have we got?" I said to Rosie. "Because we can use it tonight."
"There's four boxes back there." She plucked one tube from the box. "So how do you set 'em off?"
"Be careful, Rosie. That's a magnesium wrapper. Any decent heat source will ignite it."
"Even matches?"
"If you want to lose your hand. Better use road flares, something with a fuse."
"I'll see," she said, and she disappeared around the corner.
The radiation counter was still clicking. I turned to the sink. Mae had capped the isotope tube. She was now pouring the straw-colored liquid into a Windex bottle. "Hey, guys?" It was Bobby Lembeck again. "I'm picking up some instability. Wind's fluctuating at twelve knots."
"Okay," I said. "We don't need to hear every little change, Bobby."
"I'm seeing some instability, is all."
"I think we're okay for the moment, Bobby."
Mae was going to be another few minutes, in any case. I went over to a computer workstation and turned it on. The screen glowed; there was a menu of options. Aloud, I said, "Ricky, can I put up the swarm code on this monitor?"
"The code?" Ricky said. He sounded alarmed. "What do you want the code for?"
"I want to see what you guys have done."
"Why?"
"Ricky, for Christ's sake, can I see it or not?"
"Sure, of course you can. All the code revisions are in the directory slash code. It's passworded."
I was typing. I found the directory. But I wasn't being allowed to enter it. "And the password is?"
"It's l-a-n-g-t-o-n, all lowercase."
"Okay."
I entered the password. I was now in the directory, looking at a list of program modifications, each with file size and date. The document sizes were large, which meant that these were all programs for other aspects of the swarm mechanism. Because the code for the particles themselves would be small-just a few lines, maybe eight, ten kilobytes, no more. "Ricky."
"Yes, Jack."
"Where's the particle code?"
"Isn't it there?"
"God damn it, Ricky. Stop screwing around."
"Hey, Jack, I'm not responsible for the archiving-"
"Ricky, these are workfiles, not archives," I said. "Tell me where."
A brief pause. "There should be a subdirectory slash C-D-N. It's kept there."
I scrolled down. "I see it."
Within this directory, I found a list of files, all very small. The modification dates started about six weeks ago. There was nothing new from the last two weeks. "Ricky. You haven't changed the code for two weeks?"
"Yeah, about that."
I clicked on the most recent document. "You got high-level summaries?" When these guys had worked for me, I always insisted that they write natural language summaries of the program structure. It was faster to review than documentation within the code itself. And they often solved logic problems when they had to write it out briefly. "Should be there," Ricky said.