by Dean Koontz
Indeed, the music that currently encouraged his problem solving was the result of a conversation at a cocktail party. When Kirby said that he thought more deeply and more clearly when listening to music but that he could abide only instrumentals because singers distracted him with lyrics, the somewhat ditzy but always amusing girlfriend of a colleague suggested that he listen to songs sung in languages that he didn’t know, for then the voice would be just another instrument. He liked Italian operas, but because he spoke Italian, he now enjoyed them as performed by opera companies singing, of all things, Chinese translations. The ditzy redhead with pendant earrings like cascades of Christmas tinsel—and with a small tattoo of a leaping gazelle on the back of her right hand—had solved this little problem for Kirby, which would never have happened if he hadn’t enjoyed listening to even the most unlikely people.
His apartment didn’t offer a million-dollar view of the city. The living-room windows faced the courtyard, which was good enough for Kirby, who spent more time looking inward than outward. Because he liked storms, the draperies were drawn all the way open. The thunder, the rattling of the rain on the windows, and the whistling of the wind comprised a symphony that didn’t compete with the opera on the music system. The room was illuminated only by the pleasantly eerie glow of the aquarium, and something about the quality of the light reminded him of scenes in certain sumptuously designed black-and-white movies such as Sunset Boulevard and Citizen Kane. The flares of lightning were to him no more threatening than the twinkles cast off by a rotating mirrored chandelier in a ballroom, and they added to the ambiance that was so conducive to profound consideration of his current work.
Each throb of lightning, which sometimes came in bursts of three or four or five, shuddered the patterns of the tall French windows across the furniture and walls, grids of narrow shadows and bright squares. Not lost in thought, for thought always led him somewhere, Kirby noticed when a particularly brilliant trio of flashes projected the pane-and-muntin window patterns with a curious difference: a dark curve drooping across the top of one window, as if it had a swagged valance.
When he turned in his chair to determine what could have caused that convex arc of darkness, he saw what appeared to be a curve of pale, wet bunting on the outside of the window, as though someone must have hung a flag or holiday decorations—Christmas was less than four weeks away—from a third-floor window ledge, which was against the homeowners’-association rules.
Kirby put down his teacup and got up from the armchair. By the lambent easy light of the aquarium, he crossed the sparsely furnished living room.
By the time he reached the window, the swag of cloth or whatever it was had either lifted out of sight or been blown away. He pressed the right side of his face against the glass, peering up toward the third floor. He could see an object that wasn’t an architectural detail, something shapeless and pale draped over part of the pediment above the window, but the rising glow of the landscape lights in the courtyard was not bright enough to allow him to identify the thing. It seemed to billow slightly but did not flap vigorously as a flag or decorative bunting ought to have done in the wind, perhaps because it was heavy with rainwater.
The storm flared once, twice, and Kirby got a better but brief view of the thing, which now seemed to be three small, pale sacks, each half the size of a five-pound bag of flour, worked together by a length of rope or a rubber cord. The bags were smooth and bellied, apparently full of something, clustered together and overhung by a flap of loose cloth or perhaps vinyl, which was the part that had blown down over the window but that now billowed higher. He couldn’t tell what the item was or from what it had been suspended, but it certainly didn’t belong up there. When lightning flashed once again, he thought he saw something twitching, two segmented lengths of a stiffer material than the other parts of the assemblage, but instead of clarifying the nature of the object, the frantic stutter of light only made it more mysterious.
Kirby considered cranking open the casement window and sticking his head out in the rain to have a closer look. Before he did that, however, he needed to fetch a flashlight from a utility drawer in the laundry room.
When he stepped out of the living room into the brighter dining area, he glanced at his watch and realized that the day had gotten away from him. He had an appointment for drinks and dinner with one of the institute’s most brilliant scientists, Von Norquist, whose mind flung off new ideas in as bright profusion as a grinding wheel spat sparks from the blade of a knife. If he didn’t hurry, he would be late. Whatever had blown onto the pediment or fallen onto it from the third floor was not raising a clatter, and he saw no risk that it was hard enough or heavy enough to swing down and smash a window. Further exploration could wait for morning light.
In the master-bedroom closet, he added a tie to his shirt and slipped into a sport coat.
In the living room once more, he switched off the Chinese opera but left on the aquarium light.
Lightning imprinted the unobstructed pattern of panes and muntins on the room, with no curious swag of shadow across the top.
23
Apartment 3-H
Anything could happen at any time.
Fielding Udell possessed the wisdom to recognize the perpetual instability of the cosmos, the planet, the continent, the city, and the moment. He was industrious enough to research the dreadful truth of the world and to analyze and archive it with the dedication of a monk in the Dark Ages hand-copying books to keep the works of the past alive.
On this Thursday evening, he remained at his computer, at which he’d first sat at eight o’clock in the morning and from which he’d risen only twice for bathroom visits and once to accept a delivery from Salvatino’s Pizzeria, an order of pasta Bolognese and a salad for lunch, a traditional submarine sandwich and a bag of chips for dinner. He was aware of the inclement weather, but he gave it little attention. December storms didn’t have the potential to produce the Mother of All Tornadoes. That cataclysm would come sooner than later, decimating thousands of square miles, but not this evening.
Perhaps Fielding Udell’s most important personal qualities were his cunning and foresight. He was sufficiently clever and prudent to conceal his identity during his researches. By backlooping from his computer through the telephone exchange of a city half a continent away, and from there sidelooping through a university in Kyoto, Japan, and from there finally costuming himself by pursuing all data searches through the Internet link of the public library in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, and by taking numerous other precautions, he could build his Case for Prosecution with little risk that his trail could be followed to the Pendleton.
If they knew about his project, the Ruling Elite would have him murdered or worse. Fielding didn’t know for sure what could be worse than death, but his ever-growing understanding of the true nature of the world suggested many possibilities.
He daily kept an eye out for news from Oshkosh, something like a boiler explosion at the main-branch library that, of course, would be the Ruling Elite terminating the innocent librarians in whose name Fielding had been conducting his investigation.
He didn’t want to think about those worse-than-death fates. He wasn’t a negative person. He thought of himself as an optimist: in spite of all the horror and evil in the world, still an optimist. He believed that he could defeat the scheming bastards one day, whoever they were, whatever their motivations might be, regardless of the unknown but surely hideous source from which they derived their immense power.
The Ruling Elite included none of the people who served in high public office or any of the rich CEOs running big businesses and big banks. They were mere tools with which the true masters of the world effected their ruthless will. Fielding wasn’t sure if the titans of industry and the politicians were unaware of being manipulated like so many marionettes or if they willingly served their faceless masters. He would eventually know the truth. He would triumphantly unmask the secret emperors of this tortured world and bring
them to justice one way or another.
Now he took a break from the computer and went to the kitchen to pour a glass of homemade cola. He had reason to believe that off-the-shelf soft drinks were one of the media in which the Ruling Elite dispensed the drug—if it was anything as simple as a drug—that made the masses susceptible to the illusions and deceptions that passed for reality these days. To be sure that he could not be brainwashed, Fielding brewed his own soda; though it was not carbonated and though it tasted more like molasses and licorice than like cola, he liked it well enough. The important thing wasn’t the quality of his cola but that he could have both cola and freedom.
He had purchased and combined two apartments, giving him lots of space for worktables and filing cabinets where he assembled his damning files and stored them. He didn’t trust keeping his voluminous archives only in digital form, where they might be hacked and sucked to oblivion in mere moments.
His kitchen boasted every culinary tool and convenience, but he never cooked. He ordered takeout from numerous restaurants, cycling through them at random so that no pattern was established that might allow an assassin to predict his behavior and poison his pizza or his kung pao chicken.
As he poured a glass of cola from the jug, he heard tapping at the French panes and assumed that the rain must be mixed with sleet. He didn’t glance at the window because he had no interest whatsoever in ordinary weather, only in the superstorms that one day would scour cities off the face of the earth, the storms that might already be occurring in some parts of the world but were not reported by order of the Ruling Elite.
For twenty years, he had been passionately engaged in his quest for truth, since he graduated from the university when he was twenty-one. This was not just his vocation and avocation. This was his life, and not just his life but his meaning.
Fielding Udell was a trust-fund baby, an heir to wealth. When he had received his inheritance, he felt unrighteous, criminal, even depraved. Without working for it, he had all that he would need for the rest of his life, while so many had so little.
Guilt had pressed so heavily on him that he almost gave all his money away, considered taking a vow of poverty and becoming a monk, considered taking any job he could find with his university degree and settling into an ordinary middle-class life of small pleasures and humble expectations. But he had no religious faith, which made being a monk seem pointless, and to his surprise, his degree in sociology with an emphasis on gender studies opened no doors for him, zero, nada.
Although eaten by guilt, he kept his money. It was his curse, his albatross.
Fortunately, at the melancholy depths of this moral quandary, when he was still a tender twenty-one, he happened to see a TV report about the mysterious deaths of uncounted frogs all over the world and heard that leading scientists predicted the extinction of the species within six to ten years. Alarmed by the specter of a frogless world and by all that ominous development might portend, Fielding began researching the subject—and found his calling.
First he had discovered from the news that not only all frogs were headed for extinction, but also bees. Bees were dying not from the usual mites or diseases, but colony collapse disorder was taking them in large numbers for reasons no one could explain, though the consensus was that pollution or some other human-caused affliction must be the villain. Without bees to pollinate flowering plants, the world’s food supply would fall drastically. Indeed, some scientists had confidently predicted mass starvation by 2000.
How little he had understood then. How foolish he had been.
Now he carried his glass of cola back to his computer, through a series of rooms that were all given to his work. The tapping at the windows followed him and became louder, a rapping, as if the sleet were mixed with small hailstones. Rain, sleet, and hail perhaps concerned those who were not as enlightened as Fielding Udell, but those were such minor phenomena that he couldn’t be bothered to care about them even to the extent of going to the windows for a look at the storm.
In 2000, just as millions should have been starving because of the extinction of bees, Y2K loomed. The consensus was that all the world’s computers would go haywire at the turn of the millennium, causing a collapse of the banking system, the unstoppable launch of computer-controlled nuclear missiles, and the end of civilization.
When Fielding had looked to the past, to see if there had been as many threats to human existence then as there were in his own time, he found a seemingly endless number of menaces so alarming that he obtained through his physician enough sleeping pills with which to commit suicide if one day he woke to discover he was living in a Mad Max world of few resources and marauding gangs of psychopaths. The consensus had been that overpopulation and industrialization would lead to mass starvation, a die-off in the billions, the consumption of all the world’s oil and natural gas by 1970, the death of all the oceans by 1980, and therefore a steady depletion of oxygen until the planet’s air couldn’t sustain life. In the 1960s, the scientific consensus was, according to the media, that an ice age was imminent, sure to bury most of North America under hundreds of feet of glaciers within a few decades. Not only was the world forced to endure that threat, but now the prospect of global warming, of killing ourselves with the very CO2 we exhaled every minute of our lives, had also brought human beings around 180 degrees to the opposite precipice and a new threat of extinction.
At first, as he researched all these impending catastrophes, Fielding had despaired. After he had worked so hard for his sociology degree, he had failed to find employment; and now, if ever he found a job, the world would not survive long enough for him to make his mark in his chosen—or any—profession.
Bummer.
Then he had a thought, an insight, a kind of theory that gave him hope. Many of these scientific consensuses seemed to have proved wrong over the years, which suggested that perhaps others would not be borne out, either. This thought soon led to the consideration that perhaps the ruling elite—he didn’t yet capitalize the term in his mind—manufactured crises in order to control the masses with fear and thereby increase their power.
He was preoccupied with this theory for a while, but then this girl he hoped to bed told him that he was a conspiracy theorist, “a super-nutty fruitcake,” and that he was as likely to see her naked as he was to prove that Elvis Presley was not dead and was living in Sweden after gender-change surgery. For a week, Fielding misconstrued her sarcasm as a hot tip, but the Elvis-in-Sweden rumor proved to have no substance, at least none that he could find. When he fully realized the cruel nature of the girl’s rejection, he was saddened, but not for long.
As Fielding had continued to research threats against humanity, civilization, and the planet, he eventually had a major breakthrough that made his controlling-the-masses-with-fear theory seem childish. These days, even if alone, he sometimes blushed when he thought about how naive he had been to believe the truth was anything that simple. The truth was more terrible, far darker. Scientists dealt with facts, right? A consensus of scientists implied a lot of very smart people agreeing on the provable facts, right? Therefore, the facts must in fact be the facts. If the consensus was that there would be an ice age displacing millions of people by 1990, then there must be an ice age well under way here in 2011. The clever Ruling Elite were not manufacturing crises, after all; they were instead trying to conceal a fearsome slew of genuine crises from the public, to prevent panic, the collapse of civilization, and the loss of their power.
Now, as he returned to his computer, settled in his chair, and sipped his refreshing homemade cola, a curious slithering sound arose overhead and quickly grew loud enough to be annoying, as if Fielding lived under a serpentarium. He assumed the wind had found a way into the Pendleton’s attic, where it was chasing its own tail among the posts and rafters, and after a while it grew silent.
Exerting totalitarian control of the worldwide media, the Ruling Elite never grew silent but aggressively told lies 24/7 to hide one terrifying
truth after another from the gullible public. The heroic scientists, even though funded by rich government grants that should have co-opted them, bravely dared to speak truth to power, warning of the oncoming cataclysms, only to be made to look foolish when the cataclysms didn’t happen—except that they did happen but were covered up by the Ruling Elite.
Fielding had tumbled to this chilling reality when, watching a TV-news report that was supposedly live from Canada, he glimpsed what appeared to be a palm tree, maybe two, in the background of one shot. He realized at once that the report didn’t come from Canada, that they were faking Canada, shooting Georgia or someplace for Canada, the way that movie directors sometimes shot day for night. They goofed. And Fielding Udell nailed them. They would have no reason to shoot Georgia for Canada unless Canada was buried under hundreds of feet of advancing ice that would one day likewise crush and claim most of the United States.
Initially, it seemed that the global-warming threat didn’t comport with the reality of an ongoing ice age, but once he began to apply his new theory, he found that it answered every question. Clearly, both groups of scientists were right, and both an ice age and an age of deadly global warming were occurring simultaneously, the former descending on the world from the north pole while the latter burned northward from the south pole. Eventually, humanity would be restricted to the equator, pressed in a climate vise, one jaw of which was killing cold, the other searing heat. The Ruling Elite concealed this opposing-threats situation by faking news from South America, creating an elaborate fantasy of what was happening down there and selling it as news in order to conceal that millions of people in that part of the world had already perished in droughts, famines, heat waves, wildfires, and numerous incidents of spontaneous human combustion.