Hawkins leaned over and looked at the ground. "I think someone's been here in a truck." He reached down and cleared some freshly fallen snow away with his bare hand. "There are tire tracks frozen into the dirt on the side of the road here."
Tuskin examined the marks. "A four-by-four military vehicle. It had to be Sergot."
Hawkins looked around. "Where did he go? The old reactor?"
Tuskin shook his head. "He could have headed anywhere. Those tracks are several days old. He could be on the outskirts of Moscow or he could be sitting by the reactor building with the bomb armed, just waiting for the right moment to push the button. One thing's for sure-if he drove here, he's received a fatal exposure, so he has nothing to lose."
Tuskin rubbed his chin. "Let's check out the reactor building. Maybe we'll spot him there. If not, then there are many targets within a few days' ride of here that he could head for to take out his revenge. We will have to make an educated guess."
They tromped up the ramp into the skimmer and halted in amazement at the black-robed figure seated inside. The figure rose and gestured for them to come on board. "The trail is cold here and there's not much time." It was the same metallic voice the Speaker had used.
"Do you know where the other bomb is?" Tuskin asked.
"He is headed for Kapustin Yar."
"Shit!" Tuskin exploded. "We must stop him!"
"What's at Kapustin Yar?" Hawkins asked as the door slid up behind them.
Tuskin staggered over to the bench and sat down, ignoring the black-robed figure. "I should have guessed. Sergot would not waste his life in a futile gesture. He would go for the one target that would have the greatest effect."
"What's at Kapustin Yar?" Hawkins repeated, disturbed by how upset Tuskin was.
"It's a storage facility for weapons. Nuclear weapons. It's also where the SS-27's are stored."
Hawkins frowned. "SS-27's? I thought your latest version of the strategic missile was the 24."
Tuskin nodded weakly. "That's what almost everyone thinks. The 27 is not just a missile, though-it's what you would call a doomsday weapon. The final threat. I was involved in the security testing of the storage facility for the missiles at Kapustin Yar-as was Sergot. We were briefed on what was inside and it scared even me.
"The 27's are designed to be radioactively dirty. They took old booster rockets from the space program and put a guidance system on board. Then they put a relatively small-yield nuclear explosive in the payload area and then surrounded it with nuclear waste. We have much more nuclear waste than anyone in the West even begins to fear. All those warheads we had to disarm when the Cold War ended and the West would not help us dispose of the plutonium-the waste had to go somewhere.
"When the SS-27 warhead blows, the waste is spread, along with the fallout from the bomb itself, making the long-term effects devastating. There are only twenty of the SS-27's, but that was estimated to be enough to completely blanket Europe with such a high level of radiation as to make the continent unlivable for generations."
"Jesus Christ!" Hawkins exploded. "That's just goddamn great. So we're dealing with much more than one explosion here." He turned to the Speaker. "If you knew where the other bomb was all this time, why didn't you tell us?"
The Speaker didn't move and the mechanical voice was emotionless. "We could not interfere. You had to change things."
"Then why are you here now?" Hawkins demanded.
"Because we are running out of time. We can no longer control events as we thought we could. There are too many variables. Good luck."
"What are you talking about? Control what events? What's going on?" Hawkins asked as Tuskin made his way to the cockpit.
In reply a black portal appeared and the Speaker stepped through and disappeared, leaving Hawkins staring at empty space as the portal collapsed.
"Who are you?" Fran asked, shivering in the cold night air.
"My name isn't important," Pencak replied.
"But you're not Pencak?"
"For your purposes I am. I assumed her identity in 1954 when she died in a car crash. Ever since I have lived her life."
Fran asked the question that was troubling her the most. "Why? Why are you doing all this? Why did you pretend to be aliens?"
"In a way we are aliens," Pencak said. "The future we come from is very different from what you know." She paused briefly in thought. "But there really was an overriding reason why we have acted this way, and you of all people should understand it. We have statistical projection in our time-much improved over what you use. We reversed the process, looking for the critical node that we could go back to.
"When we asked our computers how to accomplish our goal, the favored solution-the only feasible solution-was to present the people of the past with an external threat-something that the various countries and powers-that-be could bond together against."
"What was your goal?" Batson asked.
"To change our history," Pencak replied.
"But why us? Why now?" Batson asked.
Pencak looked at some glowing numbers on the end of her cane. "Because in my past, in thirty-two minutes, a nuclear bomb is exploded near a secret weapons facility twelve hundred miles southeast of Moscow. The fallout from that explosion blankets most of Europe and eventually makes its way around the world, drastically affecting life on the planet. Economic and political chaos follows and the world drifts into what some have called World War III but is more appropriately called the Chaos." She pointed at herself. "I am one of the relatively healthy people from my time. You saw some of the others just before we left."
"Why didn't you just stop the bomb yourself?" Fran asked. "Why did you even allow the first one at Vredefort Dome to go off if you knew about it and could go back in time and stop it?"
"If you could go back in time, what action would you take to stop World War I?" Pencak asked. "Would you go back a few minutes prior to Archduke Ferdinand's assassination and kill the assassin?" She didn't wait for an answer. "But you would not know if you were successful until the time of the assassination and if you were wrong, then what? Maybe there was a plot of several conspirators that no one knew about and if you stopped the first assassin, there was another killer waiting down the street who would step forward and do the job.
"And even then, if you had stopped the archduke from being killed, would that necessarily have stopped the war? Or just delayed it, with the potential for even more disastrous results? There were many factors that led to that war, just as with any other war. The assassination was just the spark. Stopping that spark would just have allowed another spark, a potentially more dangerous spark, to ignite the conflict. The same was true for us when we looked back.
"As far as one of us coming back and trying to tell you that we came from the future-would you have believed us any more than you believed the alien theory, even when presented with insurmountable evidence? And even if you believed, would you have changed? You know as well as I do that people change only when they are forced to. We had to force you, and even now we are not sure how well we have succeeded. That is why you two must be the only ones who know the truth. The governments must still believe in the alien threat."
Pencak leaned on her cane. "We had several goals, all of which we needed to accomplish concurrently. We needed to allow the first bomb to go off to focus attention on the problem. You can recover from that explosion. In fact, it should be the spur for greater controls on nuclear weapons.