Nine minutes. He crawled down the horizontal tunnel again and saw the plug was still in place. To make sure it was solid, and not just an illusion, he jumped the three yards and landed his feet squarely on the flat grayness, flexing his knees to break the shock, slamming his elbows and lower arms against the chimney wall. Solid. He stomped on it several times. Nothing. Grimacing from his bruised heels, he braced himself and climbed out of the well, returning to the antechamber.
He refused to allow himself to get closer than six feet from the monkey.
Another way out.
Not likely.
Tit for tat.
“What are you doing, learning more about us, setting up another experiment? Will I or won’t I?” He stood on the edge of the antechamber, waving his torch beam across the semiglossy cathedral facets. “I can’t make sense out of any of this. Why did you come here? Why can’t you just go away, leave me with my wife and family?”
That was enough talking, and a fine sentiment to end all the words he had ever spoken. No more words, he vowed. He broke the vow immediately. Breaking small vows helped him keep to the big one.
“So why don’t we talk? I’m not going to push that switch. I won’t be around to tell anybody. Talk to me, show me what you’re all about.”
Five minutes.
“I hear you might have gone clear across this galaxy, gone from star to star. You’re part of a planet-eating machine. That’s what the newspapers are saying. Lots of people speculating. Aren’t you curious what we’d think, what I’d think if I knew the truth? So talk to me.” Give me something to hang on to. Some reason. “I’m not touching that switch! That bomb is going to go off.”
What if it didn’t?
What if he had to spend the next few weeks in here, dying of thirst, all for nothing, because the aliens had found some way to deactivate the weapon? What if they kept him there to starve just as punishment for trying?
Three minutes.
“I’m a dead man,” he said, and realized the truth of that. He was a dead soldier already. There was no escape, no way out between his convictions and his duty. That thought calmed him considerably, and he sat on the lip of the antechamber, as he had sat once before, legs dangling out over the darkness. “So where’s your light?” he asked. “Show me your little red light.”
He wouldn’t even know when it had happened. He wouldn’t hear anything, see anything.
One minute.
Frozen men become warm again
And rabbits drug themselves in the wolfs jaws
God gives us ways out
I’m still thinking
But it doesn’t hurt now.
I know how very small and inconsequential
I
From six miles away, Senator Gilmonn put on the smoky gray glasses the lieutenant gave to him and looked across the desert at the distant black hump that was the bogey. The cultists had scattered all across the desert floor, most out of the area, farther away than his small group, but some hiding behind piles of rock and other cinder cones. He had no idea how many of the diehards would survive.
“He’s not out of there,” the lieutenant said, removing a pair of radio headphones. Observers in the mountains had not seen Rogers leave the bogey.
“I wonder what happened?” Gilmonn asked. “Did he plant the…it?”
Beams of brilliant red light shot up from the false cinder cone, and the desert floor was illuminated by a small sun. Huge black fragments twisted upward in silhouette against the fireball, disintegrating, the smaller fragments falling back in smoking arcs. The sound was a palpable wall, more solid and painful than loud, and a violent blast of dusty wind progressed visibly over the scrub and sand and rock. When it hit, they had a hard time staying on their feet.
The dust cleared momentarily and they saw a tall, lean pillar of cloud rising, a fascinating ugly yellow-green, shot through with pastel pinks and purples and reds.
The lieutenant was weeping. “My god, he didn’t get out. Dear Jesus. What a blast! Like a goddamned pipe bomb.”
Senator Gilmonn, too stunned to react, decided he simply did not understand. The lieutenant understood, and his face was shiny with tears.
Fragments of rock and glass and metal fell for ten miles around for the next ten minutes. At six miles, none of the fragments exceeded half an inch in diameter.
They took refuge in the trucks and waited out the shower, and then drove away from the site to the decontamination center in Shoshone.
49
The network between the Possessed was beginning to knit and connect. Arthur could feel its progress. This both excited and saddened him; the time he was spending with Francine and Marty might be coming to a close.
If she could not accept what had happened, he would have to continue without them.
Arthur did not know quite how she was taking his revelation, until, in the morning, he overheard her talking to Marty in the kitchen. He had just finished a thorough check of the family station wagon and was wiping his hands on a paper towel before passing through the swinging door.
“Dad’s going to have a lot of work to do soon,” Francine said. Arthur paused behind the door, crumpled towel in one hand, his jaw working.
“Can he stay with us?” Marty asked.
He could not see them, but he could tell that Francine was by the sink, facing the center of the kitchen, where the boy stood. “What he’s doing is important,” she said, not answering Marty’s question. She didn’t know the answer.
“He’s not working for the President now. He told me.”
“Right,” Francine said.
“I wish he could stay home.”
“So do I.”
“Is he going someplace without us?”
“I don’t understand what you’re asking, Marty.”
“Is he going to leave us here when the Earth blows up?”
Arthur closed his eyes. The towel was a tight ball in his fist.
“He’s not leaving us anywhere. He’s just…working.”
“Why work when everything’s going to stop?”
“Everybody has to work. We don’t know everything’s going to stop. Besides, he’s working so that maybe it won’t…stop.” The catch in her voice made him raise his head to keep the tears from dropping down his cheek.
“Mr. Perkins says there isn’t much we can do.”
“Mr. Perkins should stick to arithmetic,” Francine said sharply.
“Is Dad ascared?”
“Afraid.”
“Yeah, but is he?”
“No more than I am,” she said.
“What can he do to stop things?”
“Time for us to take you to school now. Where’s your father?”
”Mo-ommm! Can he?”
“He’s working with…some people. They think maybe they can do something.”
“I’ll tell Mr. Perkins.”
“Don’t tell Mr. Perkins anything, Marty. Please.”
Arthur stepped back a few feet to make a noise, came through the door, and dropped the thoroughly wadded towel into the trash bag under the sink. Marty stared at him with wide eyes, lips pressed together and sucked inward.
“Everybody ready?”
They nodded.