"I'm not exactly sure. He knows a lot about Renie and !Xabbu and the French woman—he even knew something about that old man Singh. Sellars says he's dead."
"Why he say a thing like that?" Joseph felt a thrill of superstitious fear. It had been so strange holding the empty line, waiting for the voice out of nowhere—the voice that never came. "This man Sellars really tell you he is dead?"
Jeremiah stared, then gave a snort of exasperation. "He said Singh was dead. Singh. The old man that helped Renie and the others. Now will you shut up and listen to what I've written here? There are men trying to break into this place. A folding bed crammed in the elevator door is not truly a long-term solution."
Joseph waved his hand. That was one thing about these homosexual men—like women, they always got so stressed up about things. "Talk, then. I will listen."
Jeremiah snorted again, then looked at the notes he had scribbled in old-fashioned pencil on the concrete pillar. "Sellars says that we can't just block the elevator—that they could come down the shaft. We have to seal off this entire section of the base. He says that the plans show how to do that. But we also have to prepare for a long siege, so we have to bring everything we need down to this place. Joseph, that means you have to haul as much food and water as you can down from the kitchen. We don't know how long we have until they manage to get through the outer doors, so we have to be ready to seal the. thing up as quickly as possible. If we get it ready, then have more time, we'll bring down more food and water."
"What, you want me just to haul those plastic water things like a day laborer? Who is going to look for the guns—Del Ray? You should see him with a pistol in his hand. He is more dangerous to us than to those bad men."
Joseph closed his eyes for a moment. Del Ray said something nasty under his breath. "It's hard to believe there were moments I actually almost missed your company," Jeremiah said. "First, there are no guns, just like there aren't any office supplies. Almost anything small enough to be carried away was taken when they closed this place down. They only left food and water because they thought they might use it someday as a bomb shelter or something. Second, even if we had guns, we couldn't stop these people. You said yourself they were armored like a Special Operations team. Sellars says the best thing for us to do is to seal this off and wait them out."
Long Joseph wasn't sure whether he was sorry or not that he wouldn't be shooting it out with the Boer hitmen. "So what is he going to be doing?" he asked, cocking a thumb at Del Ray.
"Depends. Mr. Chiume, do you know anything about computer systems, electronics?"
Del Ray shook his head. "My degree was political science. I know how to use a pad, but that's about it."
Jeremiah sighed. "I was afraid of that. Sellars said there are lots of patches to be made so that he can help us more. I guess I'll just have to muddle through them myself, if I can figure out his instructions. God, I hope he calls back soon."
"Patches?"
"This is a very old-fashioned system here, twenty, thirty years old or more. I don't know what exactly he plans to do, but he said it was important." He tried to smile. He looked very gray and drawn. "Well, then, Mr. Chiume, I suppose you will have generator duty."
"Call me Del Ray, please. What am I supposed to do?"
"If we're going to be locked down here in the lab, we need the generator, because those men up there will certainly be trying to turn off the main power. We have to have power just to get air in and out of here, not to mention keeping the tanks running." He gestured toward the huge shapes on the floor a level beneath them, tangled in their cables like stones overgrown with clinging vines. "Sellars said we're lucky they have a hydrogen-storage generator down here, not a reactor, because the military would have taken the hot material out of a reactor and we'd have nothing except the main power source."
"I still do not understand," grumbled Long Joseph, his mind full of the unattractive picture of himself carrying dozens of heavy plastic water jugs and food canisters down from the upper level. "What does he know of my Renie? How would she know someone from America, him get all involved with this, with us?"
Del Ray shrugged and answered for Jeremiah. "What are any of us doing here in this strange place? Why did a bunch of thugs come to my door and threaten to kill me because my ex-girlfriend was talking to a French researcher? It's a strange world and it's getting stranger."
"That is the first thing you say all day that makes sense," declared Joseph.
Joseph felt sweaty and irritable, but what was more disturbing was how the empty, echoing halls of the Wasp's Nest base made the sweat turn cold on his skin. Joseph did not like to think of himself as the type to be shivering with fear—although it had happened to him more than once in his life—but neither could he pretend that everything was going to be okay either.
Not going to talk your way out of this one, man, he told himself as he trundled the handtruck into the elevator. Before pushing the down button he cocked an ear, wondering if they would be able to hear when the thugs outside finally broke the code on the massive front door, or whether it would simply swing open silently, allowing the killers to walk in like cats coming through a window by night. All was quiet now; he could not even hear the sounds of Jeremiah and Del Ray two floors below. Only his own labored breathing gave the place life, made it something other than a hole surrounded by stone, as uninhabited as an empty seashell.
The elevator door clunked open. Groaning quietly, Joseph levered the cart into position and began to drag the water supplies along the landing. He could see Jeremiah's feet sticking out from beneath the console, surrounded by various components and cables, and he was reminded briefly of Elephant's storage-bin version of a mad scientist's lab. "It's not a secret anymore," the fat man had said about the military base, and he had been right. Not that Joseph was ever planning to look him up and congratulate him on his accuracy.
"This is all the water," he shouted to Jeremiah's feet. "I am going to bring down the food next. Don't know why—it is nothing but packaged rubbish. Want to kill ourselves after a few more weeks just from eating that."
Jeremiah slid out from under the console wearing a frown on which Joseph could have opened a beer bottle, if he had been lucky enough to have one. "Yes, it's a great shame. Which is why I'm certain that while you were out trotting around southern Africa, and I was cooped up here watching over your helpless daughter, you bought a few treats for me, yes? Some expensive candy bars, perhaps? A dozen koeksisters from the bakery? Something to compensate for leaving me hanging, stuck with nothing but the food you so accurately describe as rubbish?"
Joseph, from long experience with his daughter and others, recognized an argument he was not going to win; he hurried on with the cart to the spot where he had begun his pyramid of water jugs. On the way back, with Jeremiah safely under the console once more and Del Ray nowhere in sight, he paused to look down onto the laboratory floor. The silent shapes of the v-tanks, dusty, dead objects on a museum shelf, abruptly brought tears to the corner of his eyes. Surprised, he rubbed them away.
But one thing, he silently told the nearest pod. One thing is, they are never going to get you unless they go through me first. Somehow I get you back out into the sun again. He was surprised to hear himself making a speech in his own head, but even more surprised to realize what he was saying was true. "You hear me, girl?" he whispered. "Not unless they go through me."