Clouds loft over the great eastern range. They descend, crossing a very rough field of lichen-splotched boulders. Mosses fill cracks, mosses and then tiny shrubs. Cloud shadows rush over them. Jim wanders off parallel to Tashi so he can find his own route. For a long time they navigate the immensity of broken granite, each in his own world of thought and movement. Already it seems like they have been doing this for a long time. Nothing but this, for as long as the rock has rested here.
Late in the afternoon they come to the next lake, already deep in the shadow of the spur ridge circling it. Its smooth surface reflects the rock like a blue mirror.
“Whoah. Beautiful.”
Tashi’s eyes are narrowed.
“Uh-oh. We can’t camp here—there’s people over there!”
“Where?”
Tashi points. Jim sees two tiny red dots, all the way on the other side of the lake. Slightly larger dot of an orange tent. “So what? We’ll never hear them, they won’t bother us.”
Tashi stares at Jim as if he has just proposed eating shit. “No way! Come on, let’s follow the exit stream down toward Dragon Lake. There’s bound to be a good campsite before that, and if not it’s a fine lake.”
Wearily Jim humps his pack and follows Tashi down the crease in the rib that holds the lake in, where water gurgles over flat yellow granite and carves a ravine in the slope falling off into a big basin.
They hike until sunset. The sky is still light, but the ground and the air around them are dim and shadowed. Alpine flowers gleam hallucinogenically from the black moss on the stream’s flat banks. Gnarled junipers contort out of cracks in the rock. Each bend in the little stream reveals a miniature work of landscaping that makes Jim shake his head: above the velvet blue sky, below the dark rock world, with the stream a sky-colored band of lightness cutting through it. He’s tired, footsore, he stumbles from time to time; but Tash is walking slowly, and it seems a shame to stop and end this endless display of mountain grandeur.
Finally Tash finds a flat sandy dip in a granite bench beside the stream, and he declares it camp. They drop their packs.
Four or five junipers.
To the west they can see a long way;
A fin of granite, poking up out of shadows.
“Fin Dome,” Tashi says.
To the east the great crest of the ridge they crossed is glowing,
Vibrant apricot in the late sunset light.
Each rock picked out, illuminated.
Each moment, long and quiet.
The stream’s small voice talks on and on.
Light blue water in the massy shadows.
Two tiny figures, walking aimlessly:
“Whoah. Whoah. Whoah.”
Slowly the light leaks out of the air.
And you have always lived here.
“How about dinner?” says Tashi. And he sits by his pack.
“Sure. Are we going to build a fire? There’s dead wood under these junipers.”
“Let’s just use the stove. There really isn’t enough wood in the Sierras to justify making fires, at least at this altitude.”
They cook Japanese noodles over a small gas stove. Somehow Jim manages to knock the pot over when cooking his, and when he grabs the pot to save his noodles from spilling, he burns the palm and fingers of his left hand. “Ah!” Sucks on them. “Oh well.”
Tashi has brought a tent along, but it’s such a fine night they decide to forgo it, and they lay their sleeping bags on groundpads spread in the sandy patches. They get in the bags and—ah!—lie down.
The moon, hidden by the ridge to the east, still lights the wild array of peaks surrounding them, providing a monochrome sense of distance, and an infinity of shadows. The stream is noisy. Stars are dumped all across the sky; Jim has never seen so many, didn’t know so many existed. They outnumber the satellites and mirrors by a good deal.
Soon Tashi is asleep, breathing peacefully.
But Jim can’t sleep.
He abandons the attempt, sits up with his bag pulled around his shoulders, and… watches. For a moment his past life, his life below, occurs to him; but his mind shies away from it. Up here his mind refuses to enter the mad realm of OC. He can’t think of it.
Rocks. The dark masses of the junipers, black needles spiking against the stars. Moonlight on steep serrated slopes, revealing their shapes. Ah, Jim—Jim doesn’t know what to think. His body is aching, stinging, and throbbing in a dozen places. All that seems part of mountains, one component of the scene. His senses hum, he’s almost dizzy with the attempt to really take it in all at once: the music of falling water and wind in pine needles, the vast and amazingly complex vision of the stippled white granite in the foreground, the moonlit peaks at every distance.… He doesn’t know what to think. There’s no way he can take it all in, he only shivers at the attempt. There’s too much.
But he has all night; he can watch, and listen, and watch some more.… He realizes with a flush in his nerve endings, with a strange, physical rapture, that this will be the longest night of his life. Each moment, long and quiet, spent discovering a world he never knew existed—a home. He had thought it a lost dream; but this is California too, just as real as the rock underneath his sore butt. He raps the granite with scraped knuckles. Soon the moon will rise over the range.
78
Stewart Lemon is visited by Donald Hereford, out from New York early on the morning after Jim’s rampage. Hereford steps out of the helicopter that has brought him over from John Wayne, and walks out from under the spinning blades without even the suggestion of a stoop or a run. He looks over at the physical plant that he and Lemon inspected together not more than two weeks before.
“What happened?” he says to Lemon.
Lemon clears his throat. “An assault was made, I guess, but something went wrong with it. No one knows why. They got the sign at the entrance to the parking garage. And—and we caught a pair in a boat offshore, but they didn’t have anything on them, so…”
Feeling silly, Lemon walks Hereford from the helipad around the physical plant to the car entrance to the complex. There six round metal poles stick out of two hardened puddles of blue plastic. They’re the signs that used to announce LAGUNA SPACE RESEARCH to the cars passing by. Ludicrous.
Two FBI analysts are at work at the site, and they pause to speak briefly with Hereford and Lemon. “Appears it was a couple of the Mosquitoes that they’ve been using around here. Made by Harris, and carrying a load of Styx-ninety.”
Hereford makes a tkh sound with tongue and roof of mouth, kneels to touch the deformed plastic. He leads Lemon away from the FBI agents, around the building and out in the open ground near the helipad.
“So.” His mouth is a tight, grim line. “That’s that.”
“Maybe they’ll try again?”
Brusque shake of the head.
Lemon feels his fear as a kind of tingling in his fingers.
“Couldn’t we somehow… stimulate another attack?”
Hereford stares. “Stimulate? Or simulate?” He laughs shortly. “No. The point is, we’ve been warned. So now it’s our responsibility to see it doesn’t happen again. If it does, it will look like we let it. So.”
Lemon swallows. “So what happens now?”
“It’s already happening. I’ve given instructions for the Ball Lightning program to be moved to our Florida plant and given to a new team. The Air Force is going to descend on us next month no matter what we do, but hopefully we can indicate to them that we have already acknowledged the problem in the production schedule and taken steps to rectify it.”