“I am so terrified” she whispered. “It’s like being high.” They walked together toward the edge. “I pity all those folks who stayed home. I really do.”
The two couples stood alone on the terrace, looking down into the valley. Not much had changed; there was no visible damage, not at first glance, anyway. Then Minelli pointed to a thick column of smoke. “Look.”
The Ahwanee was on fire. Nearly the entire hotel was ablaze.
“I love that old place,” Betsy said. Inez moaned and wrung her hands.
“How much longer, do you think?” Inez asked, her expression that of someone about to sneeze, or shriek. She did neither.
“It seems real close,” he said. Betsy raised her arms with a moan and he hugged her tightly, almost squeezing the breath out of her.
“Hold me, dammit,” Inez demanded. Minelli blinked at her, then followed Edward’s example.
Ten minutes after the meeting, Arthur and Clara had assigned the members of their group to the new quarters along the curved hallway. Two of the younger children were crying inconsolably and all were emotionally exhausted; Arthur stood in the confines of the cabin he and Francine and Marty would share, pondering the common sanitation facilities accessible through the first doorway on the right of the sealed hatch where they had met with the robot. A few had already used the lavatory; some had gone in there to be sick. Clara was one of the latter. She came to the Gordons’ cabin and leaned against the edge of the hatch, rubbing her eyes with one hand. “All settled, I think,” she said. “What’s next?”
Francine had said little for the entire time they had been aboard. She sat on the bed, clutching her box of disks and papers with one hand. Marty held her other hand firmly. She stared at Clara with a vacancy that worried Arthur.
Choose four witnesses. The restatement of the command in their minds was polite but unequivocal. It is the Law.
Clara jerked and stood upright. “You heard that?” she asked.
He nodded. Francine turned to look at Arthur. “They want us to choose four witnesses,” he told her.
“Witnesses to what?” Her voice was small, distant.
“The end,” he said.
“Not the children,” Francine said firmly. Arthur briefly conferred with the voice. Two must be younger, to pass on the memories.
“They want two children,” he said. Francine clenched her fists.
“I don’t want Martin to experience that,” she said. “It’s bad enough if we have to.”
“They want kids for what?” Marty asked, looking between them, wide-eyed.
“It’s the Law. Their law,” Arthur said. “They need some of us to watch the Earth when it’s destroyed, and two of them must be kids.”
Marty thought that over for a moment. “All the other kids are younger than me,” he said, “except one. That girl. I don’t know her name.”
Francine turned Marty to face her and gripped his arms. “Do you know what’s going to happen?” she asked.
“The Earth is going to blow up,” Marty said. “They want us to see it so we know what it’s like.”
“Do you know who they are?” Francine asked.
“The people that talk to Dad,” Marty said.
“He understands pretty well,” Arthur said.
“I’ll say,” Clara agreed.
Francine gave her an angry glance, then focused again on Marty. “Do you want to see?” she asked.
Marty shook his head no. “It would give me nightmares,” he said.
“Then it’s decided,” Francine said. “He—”
“But Mom, if I don’t see, I won’t know.”
“Know what?”
“How mad I’m supposed to be.”
Francine searched her son’s face slowly, and then let him go, wrapping her arms around herself. “Only four?” she asked softly.
“At least four,” he said. “All who wish to see.”
“Marty,” Francine said, “we’ll share nightmares, okay?”
“Okay.”
“You’re a very brave boy,” Clara said.
“Are you going to watch?” Arthur asked Francine.
She nodded slowly. “If you and Marty watch, I can’t chicken out, can I?”
How much longer? he asked.
There will be a gathering in the common viewing cabin in an hour and ten minutes.
He sat on the narrow lower bed beside Francine and Marty. “We’ll be leaving the Earth soon,” he said. “In a few minutes, probably.”
“Can we feel it when we take off, Dad?” Marty asked.
“No,” he said. “We won’t feel it.”
Grant had followed the Gordons’ station wagon to the bay, and waited a hundred yards away, engine idling, as they parked and walked to the pier. Then he had parked his BMW beside the wagon, slung a pair of binoculars around his neck, and followed at a discreet distance, feeling like a fool, asking himself — as Danielle had asked when he left — why he didn’t simply confront them and demand answers.
He knew he wouldn’t do that. First, he could not really believe that Arthur would be part of a government escape into space. Grant couldn’t believe such an escape was contemplated, or even possible. Nobody could travel far enough away to survive the Earth’s destruction — not if such destruction was as spectacular as what he had seen in the movies. And even if they could — traveling out beyond the moon, for example — he didn’t think they would be able to live very long in space.
But he was curious. He believed as firmly as Danielle that the Gordons were up to something. In the curious kind of floating emotional state he now experienced, tracking the Gordons offered a possibility for diversion.
He was otherwise powerless. He could not save his family. He felt what billions of others — all who knew and believed — were feeling now, a deep terror surmounted by helplessness, resulting in a dopey calmness, not unlike what his grandparents must have felt as they were led to the death pits in Auschwitz.
This, of course, was vaster and more final than the Holocaust. Nondiscriminatory. Thinking such thoughts pressed him up against a wall of ignorance; he had never been particularly imaginative, and he could not conceive the means or motives behind what he nevertheless knew was coming.
He stood on the concrete seawall and watched them board the fishing boat. The boat, covered with people, sailed out to the north.
Then he sat on the concrete and rock, buttoning his coat and slipping on a cap to keep away the chill of the breezes off the bay.
Grant had no clear plans, or clear idea what he was doing. If he waited, perhaps an answer would come.
Hours passed. He doubled his legs up on the rock and pressed his knees against his chest, chin on the new denim of his pants. The afternoon passed very slowly, but he stuck with his vigil.
The ground trembled slightly and the water level of the bay rose a foot against the seawall, and then fell until the rocks at the base of the wall were exposed — a drop of perhaps four or five feet. He expected — almost welcomed the possibility — that the water would rise again drastically and drown him.
It did not rise again.
Like a robot, he stood and walked through the unlocked gate to the end of the pier, where he leaned his elbows against the wood rail, staring north. He could barely see Alcatraz beyond the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge. The water just south of Alcatraz appeared rougher than usual, almost white.
A dark gray shape sat in the middle of the whiteness. For a moment, Grant thought a ship had overturned in the bay and was floating hull-up. But the gray bulk was rising higher in the water, not sinking. He lifted his binoculars and focused on the shape.